09.12.12- Poetry, Parties and Please Refrain

This is how attractive I feel today

Well what a weekend. On Friday I had a swollen tonsils and a dry cough, so to cure it I went for a run in the freezing cold rain for over an hour and came home with hands the colour of Parma Violets and shuddered like a crack addict in a washing machine for the rest of the day. Now I am coughing up a lung and wanting to snot everywhere, which makes me feel extremely sexy. I will not however let this stop me going to the English Society Christmas Dinner on Wednesday as I have a lovely new purple dress, the ticket cost £25 and I’m sitting on the Dead Poets’ table with a lot of wine and a poetry lecturer and I plan to get merrier than Father Christmas on Prozac.

                On the Friday afternoon, I went to my lecture. I sat in the lecture theatre looking super-keen with my glasses on and books out before anyone else had arrived.

                Nobody else did arrive. So that was that and I went to get a JC’s coffee alone and feeling like a knob. In the evening, I was very very excited to go and see Gillian Clarke and Carol Ann Duffy read out their poetry at the Dylan Thomas Centre. What you have to understand that to me, a poetry whore, this is the literary equivalent of going to see Beyonce and Shakira. Gillian Clarke and Carol Ann Duffy neither look nor act anything like Beyonce and Shakira but to me they are far more exciting. My nose ran disgustingly throughout the entire performance, I was sniffing like a Dyson on overdrive and I nearly cried at a poem (because actually, I do have a soul, no matter what my past lovers will tell you) but I loved every damn minute of it. The bottle of merlot clinking in my handbag ready for the party I was going to afterwards, I would have happily cracked it open, propped my feet on the old bloke’s balding head in front of me and sat there glugging it as my favourite ladies read out their work for the rest of the night.

Beyonce and Shakira?

                But sadly it had to come to an end and I queued up with the other poetry sluts who wanted their books signed so they could go home and get off to some metaphors and the rest of the stuff we like to do. As I approached the table to get it signed, my head was filled with questions I wanted to ask them. Intellectual, deep questions. Yet when I got to the table and stood before them with their books under my arm, the only question left in my head was “Do you like mince pies?” and all that came out of my mouth was “Ngggaaaaargh.”

Well done Bridget fucking Jones.

Eventually I left with my name written in their hand on the front of my books (I now guard those books like Gollum with The One Ring To Rule Them All), jumped into the car with the lovely James Crofts and headed over to my wonderful friend Lucy’s house for a party. With the knowledge that I’d have to get up for a shift at 6.30am, I only planned on having one glass of mulled wine and going home after an hour.

Two and a half hours later, I’d smoked half a packet of cigarettes, slurped up most of a bottle of merlot through a straw and was dancing horribly to Flor Rida with Roisin. Miraculously, my throat didn’t hurt at all.

"S'alright, I'll just have one."

And then Saturday morning came. I got up on time for work. I’d downed nearly 2 litres of water before bed so didn’t have a hangover. But my throat and chest felt horrific. To Sainsbury’s I went. They announced Santa’s arrival over the tannoy and I held back from jumping at the perfect opportunity to re-enact my favourite scene from Elf where Will Ferrell in tights screams “SANTAAAAA! I KNOW HIM!” Instead I punched the air, said “yesssss” as some bloke in a Santa outfit walked past to sit in a shed and carried on serving people cigarettes and lottery tickets.

Saturday evening I went to go and see my bestest best friends Will and Matt perform at Please Refrain’s first gig with my other talented buddies Rhianedd and Chris. I felt really proud of them. Really, really proud. They’ve come so far in a year and they did fantastically. However, I had to leave by 10.15pm as I was sweating like Augustus Gloop in a Thornton’s queue and had to drive home and go to bed. But I did so feeling the sense of pride Mufasa must have felt when he looked down at Simba, except I’m not dead or made of stars and I’ve never fallen off a cliff into a stampede of wildebeest, which makes me feel better when I’m having a bad day.

And then there was today. It was nothing spectacular. I wrote up my review of Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke for The Siren (go online and read the magazine, it’s good and I say so: www.thesirenswansea.com) and took my red lace dress back to the shop as size 8 is too big and it looks like I’m having a fight with a scarlet potato sack. I have lost weight again as I’m stressed over what to do next year and should probably eat a big pie, but as it goes I don’t like pie very much; especially not pork pies because they taste of pigs’ cold bum. I shall also be going to see the wonderful James Beynon, which is always the highlight of my day because he is one of my best friends in the world, one of the only people in the world who understands me and who I can tell anything to, and is genuinely the wittiest person I know.

Plus ordering a cup of tea makes me feel sophisticated. Or fucking old. In any case, I wish I had a cat to carry in my handbag along with my extra-strength Beechams.

Santa, you’d better bring me a Persian this year, you bastard; I can’t be fucked with socks.

James and I are the most happy-go-lucky people you could possibly wish to meet 

06.12.12- Appointments, Applications and An Interesting Proposal

This is apparently what running in the rain looks like. It doesn't. It's shit.

                This morning as I write this and reflect on yesterday’s events the Swansea weather is peppering my window with fat drops of salty rain, which annoys me no end. I want to continue my training this morning, and whilst some people hold the opinion that running in the rain is “refreshing”, I beg to differ and find it similar to how I imagine it would feel to be pissed on by a lot of really cold people. There is nothing “refreshing” about hands purpled with cold, hair plastered across your forehead like a dead spider and running shorts so saturated they cling to your arse with all the grace of a giant wedgie. This means my only other option this morning is the gym, which is fine after a long day to de-stress in the evening, but admittedly fucking boring and full of posers which is never the most inspiring start to a brand new day.

                Yesterday got off to a brilliant start. I got up bright and early, jumped in the car and drove to Morriston Hospital like a good girl ready to attend my appointment on time. Walked down the grim corridors, which always remind me delightfully of something from Silent Hill so that I always at the back of my mind half-expect a zombie nurse to fall out of a cleaning closet and eat me. Sat in the waiting room. They’d taken away the piles of People’s Friend and Ideal Homes. Gutted.

Is it cos I'm mad?

                “…you’re here to see Liz, yes?” The receptionist appeared in the doorway. I was the only person in the waiting room. Just me and a picture of Van Gogh’s Starry Night which always seems to be up in whichever hospital you go to that deals with psychology. I don’t know why this is. I’m not mad and I’ve never wanted to send my ear to anyone.

                “…yeah…ten o’clock.” It was five-past.

                “Liz always holds her appointments in Singleton Hospital on a Thursday.”

                Nat, you twat.

                So I drove home and wondered at what time it would be acceptable to start drinking vodka. On a more positive note, I have some cracking Christmas songs on my iPod and screeched Band Aid most of the way to Penllergaer roundabout.

                The rest of the day was spent reading Charles Dickens in bed because it was cold. And I mean cold. The sort of cold where you fear your nipples will start talking to you. At 12.30 I started walking to Uni, had a weird dizzy spell and went back home, thus rendering my day all the more of a failure in respect to getting places on time. My blood sugar levels were ridiculously high. This made me angry and tired and thirsty so I wrapped myself in my duvet, pretended to be an earthworm and fell asleep and didn’t dream of anything exciting, like tunnelling in mounds of compost, which I take it worms must dream of.

An interviewee lovin' the Corpus Christi nightlife

                The evening was much more productive, even if I was still in bed (alone. Single. With my cup of tea. YESSSSS). I applied for both full-time and part-time places for an MA in Creative Writing in Swansea. I even started filling out a form for Oxford before remembering that time I went for interviews and decided the place was dull, one of the lecturers was a sneering old bag who wrote books on Plath therefore I wasn’t allowed to admit to liking Ariel and everybody dressed the same and read a lot of papers. I don’t mind a cheeky flick through The Guardian but I don’t see newspaper-reading as an intense activity which absolutely requires me to read also The Independent, The Financial Times, The Telegraph and Some Other Political Newspaper That Probably Has a Lot of Pictures of Fat Politicians I Generally Don’t Give a Shit About. Of course not all Oxford students are like this at all, but I remember that a few of the interviewees were so over-keen to impress, they felt the need to turn themselves into dull, guffawing, pompous idiots. "Ah but Shakespeare was a playwright not a poet primarily, was he not? Harharhar."  Plus Oxford has no sea. At least in Swansea, when I’m pissed off I can walk dramatically against the wind along the promenade and pretend I’m in a film. In Oxford I would have to hang out of a window and pretend something dark is happening at Hogwarts.

                Applications took 3 hours. THREE HOURS. The forms kept self-deleting. I needed to throw together a poetry and fiction portfolio, which I did, but the application refused to believe I had lived in Britain all my life and kept arguing with me, which I found very rude. You don’t argue with someone you’ve only just met like that. Especially if you have no face or soul, because you’re a computer application.

                Finally, applications all sent (I will receive my answer in 9 days) and with fingers crossed that I get the place (though won’t know if I’ve got a scholarship until July, and it pretty much depends on that, even though there’s only one between over 100 applicants), I checked my University emails before bed. There were 273 unread messages due to some hilarious error the other day where everyone was added to a mailing list and pissed each other off, which was funny at the time but not at 1am when you’re searching for important emails and have just read somebody confess “LOLOL I LIKE TURTLES” the third time in a row.

                This is when I found an email from my lovey tutor, Nigel. He had written to ask me whether I wanted to take part in the London-based Arts and Sciences collaborative project called Cape Farewell and had nominated myself and a PhD student to work with him. The project is all about renewable energy and how it will be used in Swansea and includes a two-day workshop with the chance to work alongside engineers, artists and scientists to make this vision a reality. I thought this was a pretty cool idea and really appreciated being selected to do something so interesting and different.

                Plus everyone loves a bit of science and poetry. Eureka, innit.             

05.12.12- Masters, Marks and Meeting the Elderly

My 3 predominant thoughts for the day:

1) The education system makes me angry.
2) I must have an IQ superior to that of bag of Quavers.
3) If I get to 93 and my carer makes a shit cup of tea, I'm done with Earth.

Let's begin with my first thought. Britain's Current Education System. Because Britain's Current Education System does not care how hard you have worked academically all your life. It does not care if you once had pencils flung at your head for admitting that in Year 9, you could read books without pictures in it. Nor does it care that you're still working your bum off to get a First in your degree and are so passionate about your subject, you want to do an MA in it and write until your wrist dies of poetry overload (oi oi).

No. What Britain's Current Shitty Unfair Education System cares about is how much money rich Aunt Hilda is sending in her Christmas cards. A Masters costs money. Lots of money. And there used to be at least 3 scholarships available in Swansea for Creative Writing, on top of bursaries. But now due to massive cuts in spending all that is left is a mere one scholarship between 100+ applicants.
Excellent. I found out from my lovely tutor (he has a nice, Dumbledore-ish way which always makes me feel like I'm Harry Potter with a handbag) that combined with living costs, the damage for next year would be an estimated £8000.
I nearly swallowed a cat.
So this is it. I take my creative writing seriously every day. I push to get published in anthologies, I am constantly building my poetry portfolio, attending literary events and reading my work only to be told soz babe, you need money not passion. So if Half-Arsed Joe (I'm not giving him the surname "Bloggs" as I have no idea who Joe Bloggs is but he does a lot of average sort of things and thus he annoys me) waltzes in, says "meh, creative writing? Go on then, dunno what else to do, I fink I writ a story once," and hands over the cash that Mummy and Daddy have lavished on him, he gets to do an MA whereas the more passionate student whose part-time checkout work won't quite stretch to £8000 is told that it's tough.
Excellent. I mean, yeah I could try for this scholarship anyway. But realistically I'm now in a pickle for next year. Do I do the MA part-time and move home and take on more hours at Sainsbury's? Do I stay living out but get a full-time job? Visions of call centres and living on Spam leave me a little dismayed.
So naturally my solution to this sort of problem is to go to the gym, get some endorphins flowing and then get mindlessly drunk and come home alone to my imaginary cats (that's another thing. I like being single. I like having my cup of tea in bed. Alone. With no one pestering me by prodding me in the knee with a certain part of their body to "get me in the mood". Fuck off, I want my PG Tips, go home you're not staying).

The future of student pre-drinks?

On a more positive note, now that I've had a rant, I got my first assignment back for 3rd year today. 75 and a First, which I was extremely relieved about as Jasmine is a horrifically ruthless marker. It was a long whinge about my experiences with diabetes from my diagnosis aged 8 to the whole 'adolescent resentment' thing to my present day mild irritation/occasional spot of rage. This puts me in line for the First that I'm aiming for overall, but also I can really feel the pressure mounting for January's exams.
Particularly as I have read barely half the novels and have no thoughts on Great Expectations whatsoever except that Pip's a knob.

YAY exams

Finally, the latter part of my afternoon was spent doing my voluntary work. I visit old people who are lonely and don't get many visitors and so I try to brighten their day with my beautiful wonderful face. This generally only works because they are partially-sighted and don't know any better.
Today however I had a slight problem. Now I'm not a loud speaker unless I am angry or pissed, and neither states are appropriate for helping members of the community nor representing a charitable organisation. And I find it very hard to shout at people, because then I feel like I'm giving somebody a row and that makes me feel bad. But Mrs J is almost deaf and I am quiet, so this was going to be a wonderful and communicative afternoon.
I rang the doorbell. Outside it was fucking freezing. No reply. I tried the door. Locked. Rang again. No reply. Rang her house phone.
"Hello, it's Natalie, your volunteer. I'm here for your visit today."
"I'm sorry, I can't hear you."
And that was the end of the phone conversation. So I had to ring the office, get them to shout down the phone and stayed locked outside a bungalow on the doorstep for 15 minutes reading the Evening Post, dying of hypothermia and not getting paid for it.
Finally the door was opened and we had a chat, which was more me yelling and then feeling guilty.

My vision of the future

But it was lovely. She told me all about her 5 grandkids and 11 great-grandchildren. She told me how today was a good day because the sunlight was beautiful and made her garden look pretty in the morning with the frost glittering on the lawns. She appreciates all the simple things in life, because now all she can do in contrast to her past social life is sit in her chair and wait for her next carer to bring her a cup of tea and a meal. And this is why I volunteer. Just one hour out of your day, and you can make a massive difference to someone else's. Humans are social creatures (yeah, I know, sometimes I beg to differ when I'm alone in bed with my tea but then it's true that my friends are definitely up there with my favourite things in life) and loneliness is a terrible thing. I wish more people would do this. Old people appreciate learning from the young and teaching the young. The generation difference always means there's so much you can learn from one another.
When I got up to leave, there were no better words she could have said to me than, "Thank you. I've had a lovely afternoon with you and really appreciate it."
If I've made someone smile, then this for me is counted as a success in my day.
And old people like cats and tea and grumbling about doctors. I visit another old lady who is diabetic and we have a fabulous time admitting guilty dark deeds to each other concerning our sins against diabetes ("NATALIE, SHH, DON'T TELL THE CARERS ABOUT MY SNICKERS."
"IT'S OKAY, I DRANK EIGHT SHOTS OF VODKA LAST NIGHT.").
So I guess I won't mind being old too much so long as I'm not in pain, have regular visitors, a minimum of six cats, a toyboy or two, regular viewings of Bargain Hunt/University Challenge and my carers have the ability to make me a decent cup of tea.
Because if the tea goes wrong, then sorry but I'm done.

Allow me to introduce myself...

...as The 22-Year-Old Crazy Cat Lady. Who has no cats. And chooses suede boots over slippers in public.
Why would I call myself the Crazy Cat Lady? Why am I proud of my nickname?
And what on earth is the point of this blog?

 Let me tell you. Sit closer. It's okay, you won't get covered in hair from the tabby, mainly because I don't have one. I started this blog because I wanted somewhere to post my random thoughts/rants/celebrations/hilarious/humiliating experiences from my everyday life. Keeping a diary  gets far too deep and serious and I find that sometimes it can make life seem more problematic than it actually is.

It's important I think to not take yourself or your life too seriously. Laugh as much as you can (excluding events such as funerals, witnessing serious injury or if you work in a GUM clinic; don't laugh then, as it is not appropriate). Go with the flow. (I've been reading books on Eastern philosophy and Taoism. Very refreshing and relaxing outlook on life if you can keep it in mind at all times). So rather than brood in my journal over men with nice arses and bad manners, personal worries and what a bitch so-and-so is because she stole my pencil, I'm going to keep a record of my thoughts publicly so that I have to sit back and take everything lightly because I want to entertain you and because I can't get caught up on specific people or anything too personal because people will be reading this. It will make me start looking for the fun things in my life, the positive things. And if something pisses me off, well I can just rant about it here.
 I want you to laugh with me (and at me) and the tangled ball of wool that make up my thoughts and my life. I want to kick about this ball of wool like a kitten, who does not care when exams are or whether I will get married one day or how many grams of sugar are in an Alpro Soya yogurt. The kitten does not give a shit for anything except wool, cat food and peeing on the rug.
As for the "Crazy Cat Lady" name, it's partly because people my age take relationships far too seriously. Too many times do we cry over bad endings and mean texts and cheating. Too many pages of diaries are filled with love woes. You know what? Sod it. If I just believe I will die alone in my nightie with 50 cats in an asbestos-filled flat then who cares whether I'll get a second date or whether he's the love of my life and will sing to me beneath a balcony (wait, I'm in Sandfields) or a fumble in the Oceana alleyway. (I have never had a fumble in the Oceana alleyway, just to clarify. I do have some standards).
Cat ladies care about nothing but cats. Whilst I do not have cats, I like the cat lady mentality. "Bailiffs are coming? Sod it, have the TV, I'll keep the cats. I can't afford food this week? Fine, I'll eat a kitten."
So yeah, this is my life, as it is, not taken too seriously.
Meow.

(...if I ever get asked on a date by an actual human after starting this blog, do shake my hand and congratulate me)