my cultural principles are stupid.

Tags

cool, hotness, men, sherlock, tv, wonky logic

I hate a lot of things on principle. A LOT of things. Some of them are reasonable, sensible things to hate, like racism, and sexism, and people who insist on trying to read as they’re walking along the train station platform and who just get right in your way. Some of them aren’t so reasonable, like trousers that are too short, and mushrooms, and my inexplicable addiction to the Daily Mail website which makes NO SENSE TO ME in any way. And I’m fine with all of that. I quite enjoy hating things. It’s why I write for hecklerspray.

What’s turning out to be more problematic than the hatred though, is my tendency to avoid things on principle. Things that everyone says are absolutely brilliant. My logic runs thus; if most people think it’s great, and most people are idiots, then it’s probably not that great at all. It’s why I refused to watch Star Wars until my uni housemate forced me to. It’s why I took ages to get myself on twitter. And recently, it was why I refused to watch Sherlock.

The Sherlock obstinacy was perhaps the most irrational yet. I like Stephen Moffat. I like Mark Gattiss. I like sitting down, and I like watching TV. And people whose opinions I actually like and respect kept telling me that it was really really good, and all of twitter pretty much exploded when the last episode aired.

And on top of all those excellent reasons, I kept being told that I would really, really fancy Benedict Cumberbatch after watching it. Which really should’ve convinced me instantly. One of my greatest joys in life is sitting on my sofa letching on people on the TV. I love being an armchair pervert. It’s what I do. And here was a show that would provide me with ample opportunity to say sexually inappropriate things on twitter and to be met with agreement, rather than horror.

But I would not watch it. Absolutely, definitely not. There was no way I was going to watch it. Instead, I was going to sit there with my stupid televisual hangover from a time when I was a red-haired teenager who was intent on being “independent” and “different” and I was just going to watch yet more ER.

Then I realised this was really, really stupid.

I am not fifteen any more. I am not a rebel. I am not “subversive” or “different”, and refusing to watch a TV show I was probably going to enjoy was not in any way a Fuck You to the man. It was just the action of a slightly deluded young woman who was trying to pretend that she’s not the traditional, quite boring person that she really is.

So I went and I bought the box set. And I loved it. And the next time I try and be all defiant and interesting, I’ll remind myself of this fact.

Or I’ll just carry around a picture of Benedict Cumberbatch looking dashing in a coat. That should work too.

hostels v hotels, or, how i became unbelievably old

Tags

growing up, hostels, hotels, relationships, relaxation, travel

I used to really, really love me some hostels. Not always – when I went to Prague at 19 I was terrified of staying in a hostel as I had no idea how they worked – but eventually, I came to love them.

It was three months spent bumming around South America that did it for me; I didn’t care that I occasionally had to put up with some supremely obnoxious snoring, because I was paying £3 a night. And that was BRILLIANT.

So for years, I was a huge fan of everything hostelling had to offer. I had an ongoing argument with a colleague who only ever stayed in Proper Hotels, including when he went round the world aged 21. I told him he was missing out, that hostels were a great way to meet people, and to find out about good things to do, and to accidentally get your teetotal friend so wasted that she has to go to bed because she’s too drunk to read her own watch. And they were filthy cheap, so you then had more money with which to go to museums and Places Of Historical Interest, so it was a good thing all round.

And I still stand by everything I used to say to him. I do. I had a succession of brilliant arguments which should’ve beaten him to a pulp. It’s just I’ve now switched allegiances and am on his hotel side. Which makes me feel DISGUSTINGLY old.

The switch very slowly crept up on me. It started about two and a half years ago, around the same time I got together with my Farthing Wood Friend. Which is absolutely no coincidence; the switch from going on holiday with friends to going on holiday with a boyfriend meant that staying in an 8-bed dorm no longer held quite the same appeal.

So we started off with private rooms in hostels, because that way I could convince myself that I wasn’t quite SO disgustingly old and dull. Except that I was. And I am. The hostel that we booked ourselves into for our first trip together to Madrid wasn’t really a hostel at all; it was a cheap hotel. There was no bar. There was no interaction with other guests. There was no itinerary of Crazy Fun Things that we should be doing.

It was a massive relief.

Because it turns out that actually, I don’t really care about going out on giant nights out whilst on holiday any more. I actually would rather go to a nice museum without suffering from the ill-effects of sleep-deprivation and disco leg. And I don’t want to be kept awake by snoring, or to have to sleep in a bunk bed so small that I can’t sit up without braining myself on the slats of the bed above. I work five days a week and I want to actually have some rest when I go on holiday. I want a nice quiet sleep, and a comfortable bed, and tea and coffee making facilities.

But most of all, I really do not want to be the weird creepy old person hanging around the hostel bar trying to befriend the 18 year olds. And while I may still be just about young enough to not quite be that person now, it’s not long until I am. So it’s important I start going to hotels. Very, very important.

the word ‘should’ can sod right off

Tags

depression, exercise, insecurity, recovery, wonky logic, work

I’ve quite obviously failed to write any kind of blog for the past however long it is. It’s been a lot longer than I intended to ever leave it between updates, that’s all I know. But there’s one terribly simple reason for this; I have decided to stop living my life by the power of the word “should”. And in blogging terms, this has meant that the sentence “I should write a blog” has lost all guilt-inducing potential.

The logic behind abandoning the word “should” was simple; that damn thing has ruled my life for a really long time. For years now, I’ve been obsessed with what I should be doing, rather than what I actually wanted to be doing.

I spent my entire early twenties convinced I should be out and socialising and dancing and meeting people all the time, when quite often I just wanted to put my pyjamas on and have a quiet night in. I’ve spent my entire career obsessed with what move I should be making, rather than what job I actually wanted to do next. A few years ago I decided I should buy a flat, because it made more financial sense than renting. Even though I didn’t actually want to own a flat at all. Thankfully I got terrified and ran away from that one, but still. The principle was stupid.

So yes, the last decade has been dominated by my fixating on what I should weigh, and look like, and act like, and be. And it’s been absolutely bloody exhausting. So the decision to abandon the word should was actually incredibly simple.

Admittedly, it was helped along by the Great Nervous Collapse of 2011. I fell apart so thoroughly that I couldn’t even remember how to function on a basic level, let alone how to torture myself with the word “should”. And once I started functioning again, it was just too much effort to start comparing everything to some fictional ideal again. So I just didn’t do it.

And so far, it’s been working very well for me. Once I’d stopped telling myself that I really should go to the gym and admitted that I just hated the place, I actually started exercising for enjoyment’s sake. I stopped obsessing about how much I should be sleeping and my snoozing improved. I abandoned all ideas of how much of my novel I should write each week, and now I’m at almost 70,000 words.

And once I’d given up on the idea that I should work in PR because that was what I’d always thought I wanted to do, I realised that I actually preferred working in internal communications. So I applied for and got a new job back doing all the internal communications stuff that I enjoy. Maybe at some point in the future I’ll decide to go back to PR. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll decide to give up corporate life altogther and fashion a new career as a zumba instructor. I’ll make it up at the time.

i have definite issues with hats

Tags

disorganisation, fashion, hair, hats, knitting

I have never quite got on with hats. I have a stupidly giant head so none of them ever fit me, and I spend far, far too long on my hair to then go about covering it with something. Especially something that looks a bit stupid. As all hats inevitably do when they’re perched precariously on my massive head.

Back when I was a student I had my “Hangover Hat” – a strange, grey corduroy bakerboy hat which I realise now was actually every bit as ugly as it sounds. But it was functional, and when I woke up way too late to have time to wash my hair before my 9 o’clock lecture it was much, much better to put an ugly hat on than to sit in a lecture theatre minging like mad. At least that way it was the hat that was minging, and not me. Which in my 18-year-old brain, was the slightly better option.

But the problem I found with Hangover Hat was that I could never take it off. If I did, I’d find that my previously a bit disgusting hair was now seriously disgusting. And that I had a great big red mark right across my forehead, because the hat was too small for my giant head and so had been squishing my skin. No matter how warm I got, or how squished my head felt, I had to keep the hat on, because the moment I took it off the guy I was trying to impress was sure to wander into the Arts building lounge and spot me looking rancid in the corner.

It was a bit like torture. And it definitely left me emotionally scarred. And so, for the past eight years, I have refused to wear hats. Under any circumstances.

It doesn’t matter if it’s really sunny; I’ll just stay in the shade, or burn my parting. Except for once, when I wore a stupid floppy hat, but I was in a dugout canoe in the middle of the Bolivian rainforest and figured it was alright to look a bit stupid there. And the only time I’ve caved to the cold and worn a hat is when I’ve been skiing. Because everyone looks stupid skiing. But other than that, I’ve been a hat-free zone.

Until Monday, when the combination of ridiculously cold weather, an unpleasant cold and a knitting abuse problem finally made me cave. My head was freezing, and I had a bag full of yarn sat at home just waiting to be fashioned into nice headgear.

So I went home, and I found my nicest, snuggliest baby alpaca yarn, and I knitted a nice little beanie. Well, I say little – the thing’s actually pretty huge because it had to fit my giant head. But it’s definitely snuggly. And because I knitted it big enough, it doesn’t trash my hair. Or hurt my head. Or even look that stupid. Probably.

And so it seems that finally, my weird hat aversion is over. Although that might just be because I needed an excuse to knit more stuff.

sod the gym

Tags

dance, exercise, fitness, games, insecurity, zumba

I hate the gym. Really, totally, madly, pathologically hate it. Every now and then I try and pretend I don’t, and decide that if I tell myself I like it enough times then that will come true. I should like it. I should do exercise. I should be more healthy.

It never works. Every time I last a couple of weeks and then my brain issues an almighty “SOD THAT” and I abandon gym yet again.

Back at the start of the month, I decided that it was time to finally admit defeat in my battle with the gym. I will always hate it. Always. I hate the sense of obligation. I hate the monotony. I hate the fact it costs me nearly £50 a month. I hate how it brings out all my insecurities about everything and makes me hate my body even more than I did before I started going. And none of that will ever, ever change.

So I broke up with the gym, which was nowhere near as hard as that episode of Friends led me to believe. I just rang them up and said “no more gym for me please”, and that was that.

And then I went and bought Zumba Fitness 2.

During all my time as a member of a gym I didn’t go to a zumba class even once. Partly because I hate anything that’s a “craze” on principle, and partly because I didn’t fancy making a complete dick of myself in front of a bunch of strangers.

But with Zumba Fitness I could make a complete dick of myself in the privacy of my own living room, which was infinitely preferable. And even though I’ve never really believed that workout computer games actually give you that much of a workout, I decided to try it anyway.

At first it didn’t seem like that great an idea. I couldn’t really keep up with the steps, and I nearly fell over a few hundred times, and I had horrible flashbacks to that time I went to a salsa club in Ecuador and drank too many pisco sours and span round too many times and was nearly sick on the dancefloor. But I got past all of that. Just about.

And now I am a little bit addicted.

I have often heard that the key to a successful exercise regime is finding something that suits you, and that fits into your routine. I have never really had a routine. I have never found exercise that suits me. So I have never really exercised. But with my new friend zumba I can get in from work and do as many – or as few – songs as I like, and then I can have a shower and feel all smug and get on with things.

And it does things that the gym never did; it gives me awards. And bonus content. And fun graphs. And a sense of achievement. And it means that my Farthing Wood Friend can’t just play WWE 12 all night, which is the greatest bonus of all.

So yes, it seems I’ve finally found the exercise that suits, and it’s one that doesn’t involve Fitness First at all.

i should’ve learnt to stop worrying. probably.

Tags

anxiety, ridiculous, school, uni, work, worrying

Over the years I’ve done some really good worrying. I bloody love a worry; whether it’s worrying about where to sit in assembly so I don’t fall over when I have to go up on stage and collect my Grade 4 violin certificate, or worrying about whether I’ll ever get a mortgage. I worry about everything. Always.

I can’t make a decision without having at least 15 spacks and writing a few hundred lists first. I have to know I have dealt with every possible outcome – including the one that ends in the nuclear apocalypse – before I feel I can make an informed choice. It’s just how I am.

I’m sure my therapist would try and tell me it’s linked with my anxiety disorder, but I choose not to listen to him. For a change.

And so, of course, when it’s come to the actually Big Decisions in life, I’ve done some championship-standard worrying. First it was what GCSEs to do, then what A Levels. Then what uni course, and where to do it. Then which MA. Which modules. What title to give my essay. Where to live. Whether or not I should buy a house. These were VITALLY IMPORTANT decisions that could completely alter the course of my entire life. They required a much higher level of worry than normal.

And when I was doing my MA, I started having a really good worry about finding a job. I was looking at grad schemes, and general jobs, and stuff in the careers centre, and I was doing a very good freakout. I was expecting it to last at least until I graduated, and I was kind of looking forward to it. Because a good worry is actually really satisfying. 

But it didn’t last that long. Because what I wasn’t expecting was what actually happened; that I’d make what turned out to be the single most important decision of my early career without thinking about it at all.

It happened like this; I had put in an application for a marketing scheme with a rather large company mostly so that when my Dad asked if I’d done anything on the job hunt yet I could say yes. I’d done a couple of bits for the early selection rounds – and online test, and maybe a phone interview. And then I hadn’t given it that much more thought, because I was too busy worrying about everything else.

And then one Tuesday morning, my phone rang. I was hungover, and I’d lost my car keys, and I was late for a seminar, and I needed to get out of the front door and into my car and onto campus. I answered the phone to shut it up (I feel guilty about hanging up on people without even speaking to them first) and then tried to get the other person off the line as soon as I could.

And the easiest way to do that was to say yes, I was happy to be transferred from the marketing scheme to the business management one. That was fine. They could email me the details. Great.

If I’d actually stopped to think/worry about it, I probably wouldn’t have done that. I would’ve gone all “I want to be in comms and marketing”, and I would’ve said no. And so I would’ve had a different job. And lived in different flats, because I wouldn’t have met my old flatmate. And I wouldn’t have my Farthing Wood Friend, because we wouldn’t have worked at the same company. I probably wouldn’t have actually ended up in comms and marketing, because I would’ve got disheartened and panicked and worried and quit. And I definitely wouldn’t have had free broadband.

So it seems all that worrying was entirely pointless and also probably a little bit counterproductive after all. But I’ll still do it. Just because I can.

dresses are metaphors. still.

Tags

clothes, depression, frustration, knitting, recovery, sewing

Over the weekend, I made a dress. This dress. It was apparently “very easy”, but after I initially got a bit cocky about not managing to sew it to my machine, it turned out to be not as easy as hoped and I arsed it up repeatedly. Mostly at the zip; I sewed the zip to itself, and to the front of the dress, and to a chunk of material about two inches over from where the zip was meant to be, and finally, inevitably, to my machine.

I made repeated and intense use of my stitch-ripper. I swore. A lot. I got so flustered I forgot how to thread my machine up. I accidentally convinced said machine to eat the bobbin. I even had a little bit of a cry. I more than once considered abandoning the entire thing, and hacking it to pieces with the very same scissors with which I’d been trying to salvage it, and setting fire to it and doing a dance round its burning corpse.

But I didn’t. I had another cup of tea, and then I finished the thing. Because I have discovered something new. If you push through the horrible bit where you can’t do it and you want to stab yourself in the eye with your needles just to put yourself out of your misery, you eventually get to the point where you’ve cocked it up in every possible way and so the only thing left to do is to do it right. Which I did. Eventually.

So now I have a very nice teal jersey dress which I can wear with pride, and when people tell me that they like it I can be all smug and say “oh this? I just knocked it up on my machine one weekend. I’m a very skilled seamstress, don’t you know? Why thank you, you’re very kind. But it’s true, I AM terribly clever.”

And this kind of ridiculous, irritating, over-the-top smugness is actually a Very Good Thing. Back when I was in the pit of despair I made a conscious decision to try and stop focusing on the things I couldn’t do, and to try and look at the things I could do. My Farthing Wood Friend made me write all my little achievements down in a book each night, just to try and force my then-incredibly-addled brain to actually work in this way. And it kind of does now. A little bit. More than it used to anyway.

But when it comes to things like dressmaking and knitting, it’s actually far, far easier to be positive than it is about almost anything else. I have an actual tangible thing sitting there in my wardrobe, being the evidence of Things That I Can Do.

And in the case of the new teal dress, it’s something I did despite it initially looking like I couldn’t do it at all. The dress is a product of persistence, and patience, and self-belief. It is a triumph over adversity. It is a thing of wonder, disguised as a slightly wonkily-sewn garment. It is an elaborate and pretentious metaphor for my entire life, but with some ruching round the neckline and double-stitched seams.

But about the right amount of swearing.

i shouldn’t have complained about my brother’s drums

Tags

books, music, noise, organisation, plans, writing

I grew up in a pretty noisy house. Evanses like their music. And they like it loud. And they like to play it as well as listen to it. I spent much of my teenage life attempting to concentrate on things whilst my brother played the drums. Or my dad played the saxophone. Or my mum deafened herself with Bowie.

It was only my sister who didn’t go out of the way to deafen herself or the rest of the family, but that might have more to do with her incredible skill at breaking electronic equipment than anything else. The girl has a weird force-field which causes everything electric to just give up and die. She probably would’ve been just as noisy in an analogue age.

And yes, I was myself a culprit in the Noise Wars of the Evans house. I spent much of the late 90s playing the Smashing Pumpkins as loud as I possibly could and flat refusing to ever, ever turn it down, even when I was alone in the house.

I became incredibly adept at concentrating on things whilst simultaneously destroying my hearing; on the few occasions when I actually did my homework, it was done with a very loud soundtrack of very angry rock music.

And of late it’s turned out that this teenage dedication to loud noises has actually come in really rather handy in my later life. I’ve been trying to work out how I can find the time in my life to work full-time, and go to evening class, and do too much knitting, and make nice dresses, and do some yoga, and waste time on twitter, and watch bad TV, and drag the boy round stately homes and write a novel. It’s taken dedication, and some very intricate timetabling.

And as part of this, I’ve ended up writing my novel in my lunchbreak. It’s a plan that works well; I get out of the office, and I get a break from the working world, and I have a finite amount of time in which to try and write as many words as I can. I’m currently averaging about 1,200 words per hour-long lunch break, and I’ve managed to get my wordcount up to 48,000.

And every single one of the last 18,000 words has been written in the basement seating area of the Wasabi in Paternoster Square. It may not seem like the best and most brilliant place to work, but this is where my incredible skill at ignoring loud noises has really come in handy. I don’t care that I’m sat right in front of the kitchen, and that I’m surrounded by men in suits talking loudly about just how bloody rich they are. I’ve long-since mastered the art of just ignoring all that crap.

So I can sit there, and I can type away, and I can pretty much always hit my target. And then I go back to the office all pleased with myself for being so bloody constructive with my time.

There’s only one problem with my genius plan; I like to eat the noodle-y soup pot thingies. Which aren’t the neatest of meals. So I seem to be accidentally coating my laptop with a nice layer of chicken broth. But it doesn’t seem to be doing it any harm, so I’ll carry on for now. Although maybe I should switch to sandwiches soon.

Wine lady 2 has gone into retirement

Tags

alcohol, depression, health, idiocy, recovery

Back at the end of September, I quit drinking. I didn’t really mean to; I just stopped leaving the house, and when you’re not going out and you don’t have a wine cellar it becomes rather tricky to get drunk. All we had in stock was a selection of out-of-date beers. And since I have spent the past 10 years trying and failing to force myself to like beer, I wasn’t about to drink that.

So even though I hadn’t intended to give up drinking, that ended up being what I did. It got to December and I realised I’d been sober for two months, and it hadn’t been that bad. Which was a surprise; I was a member of the “drink through it” school, so I expected life to be an absolute shitstorm without some wine to help me chill the fuck out. And yes, thanks to the miseries my life hadn’t exactly been all glitter and joy, but it hadn’t been any worse for not drinking. If anything, it had probably been better.

So I sat, and I had a think. I thought about wine, and I thought about vodka, and I thought about cider. I thought about what it would be like to go to a club sober. I thought about how I never go to clubs anymore.

And then I thought about my liver, and my skin, and my bank balance. And I thought about the drunken pit of despair, and the sinking sense of shame. I thought about hangovers, and world record-breaking vomit marathons.

And then I realised I REALLY didn’t miss drink. At all.

Because it turns out that I am a rubbish drunk. I don’t know if it’s the miseries, or if it’s just that I have a really obnoxious true self which I manage to keep under control most of the time, but I’m shit when I’m drunk. I reach a good level, and then I go too far. I say stupid things. I fall over. I break my foot, or crack my head open, or start arguments with innocent people, or just make an utter tit of myself. And I could do without repeatedly launching such an onslaught on my own self-esteem. Because it’s hard not to think you’re a dick when you consistently act like one.

So for now, booze and I are not friends. We may be again, at some point in time when I am less mad. I like to think that one day I will be the person who can have a glass of wine with dinner and not end up in Infernos having an argument with a fishtank. But until then I’ll just go mad on the appletise. Because I’m that exciting.

i’m in danger of turning into a totally different Black Books character

Tags

depression, exercise, insecurity, recovery, relaxation, smoking, yoga

I’ve done a fair amount of yoga in my time. It started when I went to a class with my mum when I was about 13 and still freakishly flexible thanks to years of ballet. I was bendier than the rest of the class, and I was smug about it. And so began my belief that yoga was a good thing; it allowed you to feel superior to women who were at least twice your age.

The yoga appreciation carried on when I was in the sixth form and they tried to convince us to do something sporty or extra-curricular on Wednesday afternoons. I have no coordination, and at 16 I had very little enthusiasm for anything other than Camden market and the local pub, so spending an hour or two doing basic yoga on the balcony above the sports hall seemed the best option. And then there was my gap year where a Monday evening yoga class was one of the few times I could definitely escape the house for a cigarette. I smoked furiously on the way there, and on the way back. The actual class was mostly incidental.

So yes, I’ve been doing yoga for years. But I’ve never really believed in the whole “it’s relaxing and good for you” thing. In my experience, it’s mostly been good for sneaky cigarettes and avoiding lacrosse. Anyone who talks about it being relaxing, or an escape from modern life, or it soothing their troubled mind is generally quite lucky I don’t hit them. That kind of talk just makes me think of the episode of Black Books where Fran teams up with yoga-mad Jessica Hynes for no drinking no smoking no fun. Which even though I don’t drink or smoke these days really just doesn’t sound fun.

But I read in Sally Brampton’s Shoot the Damn Dog that it really helped her with depression, so I thought that maybe I should try it again. I am meant to be launching Operation Functional Human, after all.

The only problem was that I am terrified of my gym. Properly, seriously, stupidly terrified of it. It’s full of blonde sticks from Clapham who can run on the treadmill for hours at a time without ruining their perfect hair or getting even remotely out of breath. I tried one yoga class there once, and I ended up with my legs up the wall and my head at an odd angle, trying very hard not to have a panic attack. It was the antithesis of relaxing.

So I cancelled my stupid gym membership, and bought me a DVD instead. And the one I picked had a name which at first made me vomit into my own mouth – Yoga for Stress Relief – and which also featured the Dalai Sodding Lama. so I figured it’d be pretty Shiny Happy Yoga People and would irritate me massively and do absolutely sod all for my anxiety levels or to shift the stupid black fudge that is still knocking about a bit.

And I was annoyingly wrong. Because it turns out that what I’ve accidentally bought is a DVD of Lying Down Yoga. I LOVE lying down. It is one of my favourite pastimes, along with sitting and reclining. And in the three different “routines” I’ve done so far, lying down has taken up at least 50% of each. Lying down, and breathing, and putting my arms somewhere different. It’s fantastic. Especially since it turns out that breathing exercises work a lot better when you’re not filling your lungs with tar and therefore have some kind of lung capacity. I did 40 minutes of the DVD yesterday and was so relaxed I was practically in a coma by the end of it.

So maybe I was wrong about yoga being relaxing. Or maybe I was just trying the wrong type, or maybe I just wasn’t exhausted and world-wearied enough to give up being cynical for long enough to give it a try. Whatever it was, I realise now that I am in danger of no longer being a female Bernard Black, because I’m more likely to turn into Jessica Hynes’s zen goddess nightmare. So I’ll just have to try extra hard to be a bit ridiculous and make up for it.