2004-11-03..12:48 p.m.

A List of Things (Let�s Hear It For Forced Cohesion)

1. I�m in the midst of a four day marathon headache. The most recent updates include a migraine that erupted last night � literally erupted! My head felt like an ant hill that had been flooded with that pink fluoride treatment my dentist forced on me as a child. Pink and sickly and gummed up with sticky ants that can only wave their sticky limbs heavily as they suffocate under the weight. Other developments reside primarily with me nearly bursting into tears when M came home at 2 in the morning after Freak Show at the Betsey and prompted a coughing fit that lasted twenty minutes (literally knackered myself coughing), and then again when P, Edie, etc. came home at four in the morning after going to White Heat and created an in-house battle between G-A-Y dance beats and the Election on BBC.

2. A couple of weeks ago M told me to �keep 1 Nov open� without telling me why. I didn�t pester him about it at all, because I like surprises, until Saturday night when the pressure of impending delights got the better of me. Contradiction in terms that I am, I didn�t really want him to tell me, but it was fun coming up with potentials like Learning How to Tame Badgers in Six Easy Steps course, or parasailing over downtown London, or a daytrip to Bombay. Sadly it was none of those things, but fucking awesomely it was instead One Flew Over the Cuckoo�s Nest with Christian Slater! He�s let himself go a bit, not the skinny rebel of the early nineties we grew to love and adore, but man Christian Slater�s a good actor! We decided that if we knew Christian Slater personally, he could never be Christian or the Slateman, it would have to be Christian Slater. As in, �Yeah, I�m just going out for a few drinks with Bob and Addie and Christian Slater.� But never �Chrissy might be joining us for a drink later,� or �Slater�s coming around 10.� It just couldn�t work like that.

I know a couple of people like that. Them who can never be whole without their last name as well (which leads to all kinds of patronymical debates, I know). M�s got his Daniel Patrick Quinn who could never be anything but; when I was in grade seven Sarah Beck moved into my class mid-November and I was convinced it was Sarah-Bec as in short for Sarah-Rebecca (she�s American, don�t they all have double-barrelled first names? As went my 12 year old logic). Even now �m still slightly ill at ease to refer to her as solely Sarah no matter how married-with-another-surname she is.

3. In any case, One Flew Over the Cuckoo�s Nest was excellent. It�s one of those stories I�ve learned through social osmosis and would be hard pressed to admit I�ve never seen the film version with Jack Nicholson much less that I�ve not read the book. It�s just that I�m not certain that I�ve seen the film start to finish, and if I have then it was years and years ago. And it�s just that I�m not certain that I�ve read the book, though if I have it was years and years ago. Stupid social osmosis. I hate not being sure. Regardless, Christmas reading will include Ken Kesey home for the hopeless.

4. In the past week I�ve managed to set things (excluding cigarettes) on fire twice. First, mere inches beneath the newly installed GAS HOB, a grease fire in the grill because SOMEONE forgot to remove a sheet of fat laden tinfoil. So I start making roasties and can�t figure out why the fire alarms keep going off and instead take out the batteries and chatter blithely away to Edie while sitting on the kitchen floor chain smoking and drinking red wine until we notice a strange flickering and what looks like smoke building around the oven door only to open it up and find an INFERNO blazing merrily away on the top rack. A bit of a girly panic later I decide I�d rather not be the one to blow my boyfriend�s new flat and in a mad rush of daring break loose the wet j-cloths and pitch the thing in the sink.

The second time bears even worse for any pretence I hold for being a reasonably intelligent cookie: my hair. I set my fringe alight attempting to light a fag off the gas burner. Has my newly acquired unintentional lopsidedness taught me a lesson? Has the fact it was the MIDDLE of my fringe that took the brunt of this accidental torching taken its toll and made me go out and buy a light, or maybe even sneak into a bar and swipe a pack of matches? NO! Cheapy Cheaperson is still braving the whims of a gas fire in a drafty house when she wants her ciggie. (Though I have started pushing my fringe back, thus only risking my cuffs to decorative charring)

5. Very neatly printed in sparkly ink, my name shone up at me from my desk when I arrived at work this morning. It was a thank you card from my fellow office bitch�s daughter Sanaa. My favourite book when I was a kid was The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch, not half because the story is so cool (she calls her betrothed a BUM!) or because the illustrations are wicked, but because even at the age of four I was a total feminist and liked anything in which women displayed strength of conviction and cunning.* Myra had taken last Thursday off and as I�m not in Friday I had left a brand new imported especially from Canada copy of it on her desk, wrapped in fuscia and electric blue paper and a card I�d constructed out of round neon Post-its; and I�d been sitting on tenterhooks to find out what she thought. Sanaa is one of those children I simultaneously long for and fear I�ll wind up with. Precocious and far too clever for her age, yet swimming in the supple shores of wistful imagination; but cool too, so you know if she says she likes something then it�s got to be good. And it turns out she�s rather taken with Princess Emily. So yay me! Hip to the 6(year olds)!

*When my Dad saw that The Paper Bag Princess was my chosen a gift for an impressionable he just laughed and launched into a grinning reverie of my long-standing grrliness: when I was about 20 months old my Dad would take me to this play group twice a week. I had an undying love for a pink four-wheel drive stroller and would make a pudgy-handed grab for it the second we arrived. In any case, one day this boy who was a full six months older than me decided to do a gender bender and tried to shove me off. Not having any of this I started to walk away until he latched his thieving little hands to the other end and pulled and pulled and I pulled and pulled and he pulled and pulled and I pushed right over him and carried on filling up the basket while he cried like the mean baby he was. My Dad still delights in telling that story to any new boyfriends, I think as much as a Aw, cute little baby Meepums! as a She�ll wipe the floor with you-esque warning.

6. It�s reading week and I�ve done virtually no reading, but for the first time in three months got my shit done in time for the PennyBlack deadline. I�ve only an interview to get through for the new publication I�m writing for and I�m done like dinner! Inordinate amounts to read though. I�m working the Betsey tonight, so with any luck I�ll have time to peruse the annuls of avant-garde theatre and work out a schedule for the weekend. (It�s all about the scheduling. I�m a stickler)(She says having just boasted getting her work in on time! For the first time in months! Go team!)

7. I�ve not spoken to my family in weeks because I�ve no landline to do it on. It sucks.

8. At last look Bush had Ohio. This either means that Kerry didn�t try hard enough or they�re lying. I�m hoping it�s the latter.

9. This has worn me out.

****meep