2005-01-18..1:38 p.m.

I�ve just spent the past hour staring dully at other peoples� blogs wishing I had the energy to concentrate on actual work that so desperately needs doing and wondering if I�m dooring tonight rather than tomorrow.

I kind of wish it were tonight because even though I�m knackered and completely missed my appointment with the professor I hope to have supervise my thesis and his office hours and have had to grovel for the second time in a week* I am PISS POOR. I have a grand total of �1.54 in my pocket. Actually it's on the table in front of me. And also it's really �1.69. I just shook out my bag. In the process of shaking out my bag I nearly tore away completely the cover to Between the Acts (not Ginnie Woolf�s best work). Now I�m kind of wishing I could just shrivel up and get kicked along the sidewalk. Maybe chewed up by some passing animal and regurgitated in a negligent owner's shoe.

This is the second time in two days that I�ve stumbled blurrily into things and stared off blankly like this. Yesterday it was the sudden injection of physical activities outside the horizontal cha-cha. I love my new bike. I love it with a sad passion. It�s so pink! And speckly! And it has a bell! But it makes my ass feel like someone�s drilling holes into it. I spent much of yesterday hoping against hope that I wouldn�t be required to do things like �sit� or �walk� or �be awake�. I am telling you, the biking to work is exhausting and contrary to the effect I was hoping, it makes me starving. I�ve been eating almost as much as a normal person does. It�s mad.

Today on the other had has nothing to do with physical exertion and everything to do with deciding three squares of chocolate and an apple would be an adequate supper (after the constant gobfest of toast and stolen near-expiration date cheese during the day) to spend myself off towards the Drunken Grail. Drinks with some college chums, Leah and Lulu, and then successfully circumventing my usual asphyxiation over seeing M performing by plying myself with more booze and smoking too much. His whole family but for one brother and a couple of nieces and nephews showed up and took pictures from the front row and welcomed me like I were one of their own. Needless to say M was fucking fantastic! It was miles better than the last show, much more confident, but also smoother, more rounded and electrifying. There weren�t any glitches; there wasn�t a person in the crowd who didn�t scream along to the vocals; there wasn�t a single moment I didn�t look at him up there and nearly wet myself with how unbelievably foxy he is � as his own brother observed, wrenching me aside to yell into my ear, I�ve got one cool fucking boyfriend.

If M�s enormity on stage and my managing not to pass out with lust weren�t enough, Leah and Lulu and I have decided that we�re going to form a New Cross Noize Band called The Yellow Wallpaper. We will dress in vintage cocktail gowns, except for Lulu who will don a pencil moustache and go in drag. I will play banjo, Leah will take on drums and Lu will be the bassist, and we will shriek tracts of Derrida and Gertrude Stein while aggressively pounding our instruments. We�ve decided too to go by Stanlee Jane (me), Jarvis Francois (Lu) and Millie Mooney (Leah) and have accepted my friend Sarah�s offer of being our manager on condition she is allowed to work under Walter Fortiscue.

Being forward planners we have already agreed that our first EP will be released with small plastic figurines which will be flung about the stage and audience during our shows. We of course settled on dinosaurs to represent the fossilisation of patriarchy and giraffes because they are the most feminised of the great beasts.

*Aha! Not a faux footnote at all, not even nearly forgotten: the first grovel was to my editor because I am a bad little music journo who�s inability to maintain a semblance of responsibility, much less write a coherent music related sentence for the past three months sent her into a swirling depression. Basically everytime I thought about writing to apologise for completely disappearing and for the mounting backlog, I would crumple internally and start frothing and bubbling and generally behaving like something about to collapse.

I�ve got class in less than half an hour. I�m starving, I tired, I�ve not finished the text. It should be fab.

****meep