Hullo. I'm in London.

Saturday rocked. Loads of cool folks (mostly Barbeloids, but one or two non-imaginary people came too) hit the Princess Louise for bevvy and the sort of conversations you always end up having with that crowd. It was a riot. Hope everyone's vision has returned. Everyone I was begging to come and see me in the PL on Sat.-- I wasn't just drunk, I really, really do want you to come and share in my Spainy good fortune.

This is my last day as a non-living-in-Barca-type chick. Tomorrow, barring anything apocalyptically crappy happening, the Bearded One and myself will be flying out. We should be in the capital of Catalunya before 7:00. I'm still having the mild-to-moderate wiggins, but once actually there the wiggins situation should stabilize.

See ya. (Wouldn't wanna be ya.)

So farewell then...

So much for the forced fast. I just looove cybercafes.

Okayyy. The removal guys turned up today, finally. Yes, I know I shouldn't make too much fuss but I've been stuck in-bloody-doors with no telly, no vids, no DVDs, no 'puter and ridiculously few books, jumping up and running to the door every five minutes because the flat upstairs is being renovated and there is much building overhead and I keep thinking the hammering is someone at the door. There's the tax to be sorted out at the other end, there's my own bank to be convinced that I am who I say I am and that I'm going to be living where I say I'm going to be living. And then there's the cleaning. Oh yes. There's the cleaning. How am I supposed to cope with all this without my Blake's 7 videos, eh? Eh?

Anyway all the stuff is on its way to fresh woods and pastures new*; it only remains for me to scrub the gaff down, phone the leccy people, cut off the telephone, etc. Roll on Saturday.

*No, I haven't got the quote wrong. That is how the quote is s'posed to go. It's everyone else that gets it wrong. So there.

Later than you think.

This will prolly be my last entry for a while; I've got to pack up the 'puter tomorrow coz the removal guys come on Tues. so my internet access is going to be a bit erratic. Which might be a good thing; I've been hanging on the news sites a bit too much. Staring at it all day won't make The War go away, and the desire to gouge my own brain out with a fucking spatula gets more overwhelming with every fresh story.

I'm all packed (at last). Going to be living out of a suitcase for the net couple of weeks. The move proper happens Saturday week. I'm sort of... panicking, really. I'm over the moon to be going to Barcelona, natch, but every so often I find myself thinking stuff like "Oh no! I don't know how to order a pizza in Spanish!"

So I'm not going to be around much for a couple of weeks. And after I get I may well be too busy loafing around on the beach and drinking horxata to bother my pretty bald head about you sorry creatures. Nyahhh.

New "Get Your War On". Don't say I never give you nuffink.

Body of Evidence

Here's the thing. I'm looking up this word, right? This one word. A word that means "A body of work". I know it looks sort of like "over", but it's a bit French.

So I type "Ouver" and that looks wrong.
So I type "Ovuer" and that looks wrong.
So I type "Ouveur" and that looks wrong.
So I type "Ouver" and that looks wrong.
So I type "Ouevuer" and that looks wrong.
So I type "Oeuver" and that looks wrong.

So then I type it into Google and the best I get is "over". Gee. Thanks.

So then I fire up a dictionary site, and I thrash my way through a dozen misspellings till I get to oeuvre.

The next time someone asks me what some bloody word means or how to spell some bloody word, I'm going to hit them over the head. Not hard, you understand, but repeatedly. This is how you learn stuff, morons. You look it up until you get bored. Really fucking bored. Then just when you know it and you use it and you start to feel okay, someone else comes along and relives their middle-class guilt by using it to whack you over the head.

Gosh, it feels so good to share.

Couldn't face it.

Couldn't make it to any of the protests. Well done, Bush. Let's hope the Iraqis like Saddam II, and we don't have to repeat all this in ten years time.

Yes.
Let's.

Because it wouldn't at all be completely at odds with history for that to happen.

At all.
Ever.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Bush: tomorrow is decision day for UN

Nothing to say, really. I'm beyond hope, and I've no-one to pray to. But I wish...

"I'm not perky."

I know I should be all happyhappyjoyjoy about the whole moving to Spain deal, and for the most part I am all happyhappyjoyjoy. It's all celebrations here, I promise. And yet, and yet...

I'm still gonna be in minimum-wageville. Sure, at least I get to be broke somewhere hot but I hate the fact that I'm just not going anywhere workwise. It's going to take a while to get my Spanish up to snuff, and my degree will probably take another 4 years or so to complete. And I hate that I have to make so many ethical compromises at work.

And there's this feeling... like it's all too good to be true, like something's going to go Horribly Wrong at the last moment. Like the universe is just dangling this in front of my face so it can jerk it away again and scream "APRIL FOOL!!!"

Oh, yeah: My arrival date for Barcelona? April the 1st.

Sometimes I worry about the poor quality of my writing on this weblog.

Even though it was always meant to be a disposable brain-dump rather than an advertisment for my journalistic prowess, I sometimes worry that people will get all confused between my blog persona and my writing persona and that I will be dismissed as a writer because I can't be bothered to spellcheck my blog entries.

So I was hugely relived to read this: Guardian Unlimited Sport | Special reports | India v New Zealand

Thanks, Mr. Coates. *thumbs up*

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Serbian PM shot dead

Fuck. I don't know what to say...

Crud.

Dagnabbit, I hate re-reading stuff I've written a few weeks after I've written it. All the crud floats to the surface, obscuring anything of worth: the typos, the poor sentence construction, the plot holes, all the bits and pieces you didn't notice when you were writing the damn thing leap up from the page and caper around before your eyes. They all hold hands and sing the You're Crap And You're Never Going To Published song. And all you can do is clean your glasses, pinch the bridge of your nose and get down to taking the little horrors out. One at a time you shoot them down, but they just keep on coming. Superfluous adjectives. Cliches. Unconvincing dialogue. Shoddy research. More cliches.

Maybe I could learn to love accountancy.

OooOooh, look-- the Bloggies are in.

I didn't win anything or get nominated, so obviously this is a huge conspiracy. Blah blah blah back in high school, blah blah popular kids, blah head cheerleader blah top jock blah blah, Royal Family of Blogdom, blah blah blah Heathers reference, blah blah blah Mafia blah, blah ignoring me because woman/epo/chaote/non-graduate/strike out word which do not apply blah blah and nothing at all to do with the fact that all I do here is gripe endlessly about my past, present or future jobs, I'm too tight to spring for an ads-free site and half my readers can't see my sidebar because of the clunky HTML.

Congrats to the winners.

brainsluice >Oh the nostalgia. Good old London Underground. *snff*

The human genome project welcomes your submissions.

velvetvandal has got hir rant on, re: rights which are compulsory, specifically the right to an education.

The paradox is an interesting one. The spirit of the law-- in the affluent West-- is indeed that you must excercise your right to an education. However, I'm here to tell you that this particular compulsory right is at present unenforceable.

Thing.

You know having a public weblog, yeah? You know that thing where there's this thing and you would really like to write about it but you really can't, because a) it's too personal even for the kind of person who has a public weblog and b) it's completely irrelevent to everyone else, so you can't even use the self-as-microcosm excuse?

I hate that.

Hands.

Hey up, you deep-as-a-puddle, know-nothing, self-obsessed jackasses, it's that time again! Yep-- the time when I remind you that I'm a chaos magickian on a cheapshit 8-week Reiki course, and I'm still more spiritual than you sorry lot. Sell all your worldy goods and go and live on a commune, quick.

So anyway, some interestingish stuff happened on Thursday night. (You got the usual rant'n'whine because I was tired and still processing.) We covered scanning, whereby the Reiki person moves their hands over the recumbent client and plays Spot The Manky Bit. In their aura. Stop laughing.

It was my go first. I was pretty zonked out, what with the hot room, the weapons-grade joss-sticks and the jingly new-age muzak that my teacher likes to put on (bless her heart). And the scanning took place with the client (in this case moi) lying on their back on a massage table. I'm prepered to accept the idea that this first bit was all a figment of my dozing brain. After the scanning, I recieved a Sekim Reiki healing, which was when things went a bit peculiar. A healing sesh starts with the healer placing their hands on your head, over the crown. They hold that for a while and them move down the body, chastely switiching from hands-on to hands in the 'aura' over your naughty bits to avoid embarassment and/or litigation. The woman I was working with had got as far as my shoulders when she took her hands away. I had my eyes closed, and I could feel the warmth of her hands over my face. I assumed that she'd gone into hands-off mode (either because her hands were chilly or because it seemed like the thing to do). This went on for a while, and then suddenly I felt another pair of hands on my knees. So I opened my eyes and my classmate was down the other end of the table, with her hands on my knees. Nobody else was near me. Yet I had been absolutely sure that someone had their hands over my face.

So anyhow, we swopped places so I was working on her. I was scanning away, going "Auras, yerright, pfftt" as I got further and further along without anything happening. Then suddenly my hand stopped, and was pulled over to the client's right. (My eyes were closed, so I couldn't see exactly which bit of her my hand was hovering over.) "There you are," said an inner voice that sounded exactly like mine, but wasn't. I opened my eyes and moved my hand up and down in the air over the spot where it had halted. The teacher came over. "Have you found something?" she said.

"Yeah," I said. "I mean, I think so."
"If you think you have, then you have," she told me. She put her own hand over the spot. "Yes," she said. "Now find where it starts."

I moved my hand up and down in the air, about a foot above the woman's right abdomen. And I swear, I felt, physically felt, where it stopped. I'm holding out my hand, palm down, in thin air, and here it's warm and here, a fraction of an inch upwards, it's not. It wasn't body-heat because my hand was too far away. It wasn't some trick of blood circulation or pressure on the nerves. It wasn't something to do with currents of air in the room. I thought of all that. It was a perceptible temprature difference that I can't explain in any ordinary way. Afterwards she told us that she'd been suffering from a viral infection which had originated at that exact point on her body.

I'm not a stranger to this kind of thing, of course, having been a ritual magickian (on and off) since forever, and on the grand scheme of things I guess it's not "VOOP! Lazarus! Come on dooowwwwwn!" or anything. But it was thought-provoking, nonetheless. I'm starting to wonder about some stuff. For instance, my teacher's always banging on about angels, how there are angels with us when we're healing and angels find her parking spaces and blah-blah-blah. And of course I'm all Yerright, angels, pfft. But now I'm thinking that maybe there are things around us while we're doing this stuff... which begs the question, who or what might they be and what are they after?

Fragments of ourselves, perhaps. Outer Entities. Fractal elves. Hell, maybe they just like cheap incence and whalesong tapes. Who knows.

Stop reading this blog.

To save you the effort of reading through the archives for the next three-and-a-half-hours, here's some helpful information:

No, I haven't stopped writing.
No, I haven't stopped writing about stuff that I know is going to piss some of you off.
No, I haven't started caring that I'm pissing you off.
No, I haven't stopped being an uppity bitch.
No, I haven't said anything about you (or you or you or you) specifically.
No, I'm not going to.
No, really.
No, really really.
No, you're really not that important.
No, sorry.
No, you're just not.
No, not even if you've threatened me with a Bowie knife. You can't fit a Bowie knife down a modem cable. We both know this.
No, threatening to not read my weblog anymore is not a bad scary thing.
No, threatening to tell your friends not to read my weblog anymore is not a bad scary thing.
No, you just wish I was talking about you.
No, you are not going to sue me.
No, God is not going to strike me down.
No, I don't know where you live, where your friends/family/partener/co-workers live, or where you work. Nor do I care. Any threat you may infer is therfore your own problem.
No, I still haven't stopped writing.

wherever you go, there you are.

Packing. Man, I just hate packing. It's not as bad this time as when I moved from London; at least I'm dealing with a humane amount of clobber, and there's far less chucking out that wants doing. I reckon I'll have the bulk of it done within a week.

Which is good, because I'm going to need the time and the space for some serious magick. See, travelling is all well and good but there's this eentsy problem: You carry all your old mental baggage with you, whether you realise it or not. How much you take away from all your new experiences depends to a large extent on how much you're prepared to leave behind. If all you do is import the same old obsessions and behavioural tics then you haven't really gone anywhere. All you've done is spend a lot of time and money to stand still. (Oh, and then you come home and bang on ad fucking nauseum for the next fifteen years about how those two months in Goa changed your life, preferably to someone who can't afford a day-trip to fucking Calais-- but I digress.)

I really can't afford that sort of dead weight anymore. There's this agglomeration of old crud that I'm just dying to excise from my personality.

There's the tendency to go into avoid mode when I'm anxious about something, rather than face up to it. Since one of the things that makes me anxious is meeting new people, this is a bad trait to carry to a new country. I'll be meeting a lot of new people and trying to get to grips with a new language and a new culture; locking myself in the flat won't be terribly helpful.

Then there's the whole job business. In the past, I've tended to accept unpleasant dead-end work situations because I'd convinced myself that there was no choice in the matter. This must cease forthwith.

Then there's the lack of motivation. Focus isn't the problem. Time isn't the problem. Ambition isn't the problem. Ability isn't the problem. The problem is that when faced with the necessity of actually doing some work, be it a piece of writing or an exercize in circuit design or whatever, I tend to panic. It's like: "I might not be able to complete this satisfactorily, so what's the point of even getting started. Blaah."

All this must and shall change, not just because it's uncomfortable and boring but because it's completely fucking pathetic. Fuck it. I know I can do better than this.

You think I like being this petty? You think I like being 29 years old and feeling like a pickled adolescent? Goddamn it, where's my maturity? There was supposed to be maturity! They promised! And yet here I am, still stuck in the bloody moebius-strip Bildungsroman that is my life.

Trouble is, knowing your problems and being able to solve them are two different things. I've made a lot of progress over the last few months but something tells me that to get further, Magick needs to happen. Big magick. Regulation-length sigils just aren't going to cut it.

Poets for the War

Words fail me. This sort of thing is exactly why I hate people.

(Via Venusberg.Munich-style.)

End of the line.

The flat's sorted. I've even seen a floor-plan.
The removal's sorted. They're coming for our stuff on the 25th.
The flight's booked. Heading for London on the 29th, and hanging around till the following Tuesday. Then it's on to Barcelona.

Holy modernist architecure, Batman-- this is really happening!

Doubt.

It had to happen. I've got an attack of self-doubt on. Every aspiring evil overlord gets them once in a while. They should make an anti-self-doubt inhaler like Ventolin only for, y'know, self-doubt.

It started as I was coming out of Spanish class. I'm liking Spanish, but although its mostly "New toy! New toy! WEEEEEEEEE!" there's a teensy pinch of "Argh. Learning. It's all hard and stuff, argh." And I was reflecting on how I'm going to be unable to dazzle, conversationally speaking, for quite some time after I move out there. This is not a new topic of reflection. In fact, I thought I had made my peace with the whole "Oh crap, I'm going to look utterly gormless for months" thang. However, after going three falls and a submission with some tricky transitive verbs it reared its ugly head.

Every so often, the stress of living with your unconscionably petty and confusing species gets too much for me and I find it hard to get out and be around you. You bother me. You get all shirty for no reason, you get drunk before noon and come and slur at me incomprehensibly, you try to talk to me about soap operas that I don't watch and then you get all hurt when I tell you I don't watch them. You make me all confused and headachey. Now I have to be all confused and headachey and foriegn. The prospect does not please. (Yes, I know I don't need transitive verbs to mop the goddamn floor. That's not the point.)

Maybe I won't seem gormless. Maybe I'll seem... mysterious. Enigmatic. Sphinxlike. Yeah! That's me-- Sphinxlike.


Anyhoo. You know what? Back in the day, when I was a teeny weeny homeschooled freak, I taught myself a fairly respectable chunk of Latin. Of course since my education at this point was a purely voluntary and unsupervised deal, I eventually got discouraged and dropped it. And forgot everything. Like you do. But now large chunks of it are coming back to me, hauled from deep within the scrapheap of my mind, to aid me in my hour of need and confusing verbyness. You'd have laughed at me, an eleven-year-old Latin learner. You would have mocked me, and quite possibly kicked sand in my face. "Geek!" you would have cried. "Nerd! Spanner!" But my oh-so-quaint home-ed Latin studies are bearing fruit in my Spanish night-class, years after I put aside my amo amat etc.

So who wins, eh? Who wins?

The Unstoppable Snot Machine

Huddo. I'b god a cod.

It was sort of okay the first day (Wednesday) because it kicked in about an hour before my last ever shift at the local shop finished, and I was able to go home and collapse and go "Blahh! Collapse! Sick! I win!" The next day was okay too, because No work + oozy viral thang = snuggly duvet action. Until aThursday morning, when I got bored. I missed Reiki. Can you belive I missed my Reiki class because I was too sick? And it was my turn to have a go of Seikim, too *sulks*.

Then I stocked up on Solpadine and Sudafed (over-the-counter speedballs, j0!) and it's been sort of nice. I've been sorting stuff out prepatory to packing it away, and working on a short peice with all aliens and things. Not together enough to do novel in an actual writing type way, but I've dreampt a few crrrrucial and very sexy scences and a large chunk of lingustic stuff. (My novel not only has bumpy mountains but a language. Oh yes.)

I'm fixing the officialy unfixable coat. It's going to work too. I'll tell you the trick of it sometime. (Oh, alright, I just got all my stuff together and sung the "We will fix it" song from Bagpuss. Yes, I did the voice.)

Dog thumbs.

No, really. "Dog thumbs." I just love incomprehensible search referrals.