2004-07-15..3:44 p.m.

You know I often acquire a sort of Southern belle/Dollywood intonation in my email greetings. Or a rather strict Victorian formality. I know not why.

Speaking of rather strict formality (were we?), guess what?! Thomas de Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater, for sale at Borders! Normally not go near the corporate megalith, but my flatmate (whose birthday this is in aid of) doesn't care about exploitation of immigrant worker's (when it suits), nor advocate supporting small business,' and while I do on both accounts I haven't the money to go down to Foyles, which is no reason AT ALL! I hang my head in shame, and will enter Borders most sheepishly. Perhaps wearing a false moustache and dark glasses in case anyone I know sees me. I suppose we all must suck on huge throbbing veiny corporate cock at some stage, but I don�t like it. Maybe I�ll slap on a rainbow-coloured clown wig to complete the disguise.

Hey and guess what again!?! More with the on time today! Needlessly so! Because the office is empty! Everyone is at a staff conference! In York! And yet I was on time! For despite the fact I am the first in, and thus really have no one to notice my absence, and despite the fact there�s no one in the office today because of said staff conference, I�m dutiful like that. (Give it up for run-on sentences! Whoo!) (did you even get all that? Jesus, I�m so wordy sometimes.)(Maybe I need more coffee.)(Maybe I need less coffee.)(Maybe I need to shut up and get on with it�)

Um, where was I? (I�m rather thinking I ought to just scrap this and start again, but I�m feeling very non-edit today, so you�ll have to deal with the mental skimming I�m afraid.)(give it up for parenthetical qualifiers! Whoo!)

Most irritatingly, invitations for things that involve drinking and grass stains keep cropping up and I keep having to say, Sorry, but no. I�m due to go to the Truck Festival, not this weekend coming but the following one; and am working this weekend in the evenings, which essentially negates any chance of day-time drunken behaviour (I�ve found most punters don�t find the drunken antics of door staff all that appealing). Actually, and even worse than the turning down of invites, I may have to skip my longed-for Truck as I�ve no tent. But then Chikinki! The Black Madonna�s! Chantelle Pike! What a bind to be in. Do I go, have a music good time on a press pass and get to interview a bunch of fantastic people, but have to sleep on a patch of churned up sodden grass, have to eat cold beans out of a tin, which I opened with a muddy branch because I�ve forgotten all forms of cutlery and cooking utensils, and be generally miffed at my own incompetence? Or do I stay at home, find something to do in London (humph), and spend the entire weekend looking wistfully at my programme, saying softly to myself, �I could be talking to them right now. I could be watching that,� and sighing a lot? It�s the age old question, and I�d be hard pressed to say from which I would benefit more.

Right. I�m not really sure how to broach *this*. It�s a little out of character, both the not knowing of how to bring *this* up, and the *this* itself. Here goes:

I appear to be slowly (slowly, slyly)(like a very small caterpillar moving across a patch of potentially bird-ridden grass, venomous spur* at the ready, because I�m cautious like that) turning from shameless hedonism, and not towards the pursuit of flagrant profligacy either. It seems I�m becoming a two-man woman. That�s right. The call for applications has been revoked, people are coming in for second interviews, I�m on the verge of being made an honest woman (snort, o how I laff) by a kind and gentle man. Before you get all, �No! You can�t! I live for my vicarious intake of freshly laid boys and a hefty cleaning bill through you, you can�t take that away! You can�t!� on my ass, fear not.

You need not read between the lines to know I resist what�s good for me at all costs, so I�m still working out one last venture (innocent drinks on a capital d Date). But considering recent events (going out with someone-not-Boy and thinking the whole time, You�re just not Boy. Sigh), I think I may have reached *that point*. In a weird way, I kind of feel a bit guilty by all of this. Like I�m saying betraying the Via La Sexual Revolucion! Postmodern Womyn in me, by getting beatifically swept along like a Scary Stepford Wife. (because you know those Stepford Wives went NUTS over polygamy.)(I roll my eyes at myself.)

Not only all that. This Boy who makes me feel squinky if I go a day without talking to, this Boy who�s sleeping face makes me smile and get all wistful-like, he�s not even who you may think (if indeed you think anything about this at all). Nope. It�s not the MC. It�s not even R. I REFUSE to divulge more than that because I am a superstitious girl and fear the jinxing. I don�t really know what happened either. We just kept spending more and more time together and I became more and more dripping with goo around the arteries everytime I saw him. And not in a collapsed-aorta-need-bypass-NOW kind of way, either (by which I mean I�m not feeling suffocated or claustrophobic by this), but in a giggling giddy Wow-that�s-kind-of-my-man kind of way. It�s decidedly worrying, thus the decision to (for the time being, or at least until it really starts to feel capital w Wrong) remain with the separate part-time-Boyfriend/ part-time-Lover combination. Heinous selfish whore? Maybe so, but gradually downsizing. Who knows, by this time September, I may in a capital r Relationship. Or maybe even back to being capital s Single and rejecting male genitalia altogether. Who can tell.

*Here are two things with which venomous caterpillar spurs are apparently tenuously connected. I did not know.

****meep