Optimism

Not something I generally deal in but if the blooms can push on through, despite the rain and the sleet and the ear-biting cold, well, maybe I should give it a crack?

It's been a bumpy couple of weeks but I feel like things are slowly on the up. LB and I celebrated our one year anniversary nearly two weeks ago and went for a mouth-watering Spanish meal on Great Portland Street to mark the occasion. LB broke the no presents rule but it's hard to feign fury when presented with sparkling baubles so I somewhat promptly forgave him. And fell just a little bit more in love with him when I read his card. Thanks to a dash of creativity with his gin and tonic, LB penned me a poem, inspired by our very first dinner date. It was lovely and thoughtful and hilarious and at points, it even rhymed. Spoilt I am.

And the Oscar goes to...

I often wonder about the almost rans, particularly at an ego-fest like the Oscars. There are no Oscar de la Renta gowns (and thankfully no Ryan Seacrest) when it comes to post-graduate study results but the psychology is all there... The gracious pre-defeat talk - it's all about the experience, I've learned so much, such and such deserves the accolade more. All of which is total bullshit because underneath all that pre-emptive protective self-deprecating bollocks lies naked fear. Fear of failure, humiliation, disappointment - and beneath all of that, perilously protected from the winds of defeat, lies a small, pathetic, naked flame of hope.

Or maybe that's just me.

I discovered some time ago that being a perfectionist means regularly smacking your forehead on the bar you raised too high. So I wanted to be brilliant, so I'm not exactly and cruelly the world continues spinning unperturbed on its axis. The problem is, I didn't exactly fail - I just failed myself. A final grade of 70 for my MA - a distinction no less - but 68 for my dissertation (and blood and sweat and tears and the last wrung vestiges of my intellect). Not a bad mark I suppose and I should focus on the final grade - but because I'm two marks short of a distinction for my dissertation I don't get my MA with Distinction. It's like being nominated for the Best Actresss Award and then not being invited to the Vanity Fair after party.

Or maybe that's just me.

Disappointment is a bitter pill to swallow and right now I'm kind of choking on it. But at least I'm accessorising my gloomy mood with the weather. It's 4 degrees here and has just started to hail. It's too cold even for snow, which let me tell you, is cold.

When I'm not sitting on the radiator heating my bones I've been finishing off my visa application, which is now out of my hands, and looking for casual work. I'm starting to nanny again this afternoon for my favourite Australian family in Barnes and have an interview tomorrow for a casual job as a retail whore. Fingers loosely crossed I suppose.

I need to go and turn the heating up. My chattering teeth are starting to make my fillings hurt.

Hot water bottle days

This:


Feels like FOREVER ago.

It was three weeks. Getting snuggly with my hot water bottle (and yes I mean literally my hot water bottle, it's not some new pet name for LB) the last week has flown by, for a week of stagnating days of not much, very little and occasionally something. It is MISERABLY cold here at the moment and I am so beyond bored of the interpretative dance that is getting into and out of jeans over thermal tights and socks each day. I miss dresses and havianas and sunglasses. I even miss the round-the-clock application of sunscreen. It is cold and it is grey and lately, it is wet. A winning trifecta of meteorological crapness if ever there was one.

Not much has been happening of late. My MA results come out next week (cue viciously vivid dreams where I wander square down the middle of the road towards would-be academic glory. In the one dream where I did emerge scholastically triumphant I also won an Oscar so I'm not sure how likely that outcome is....) But yes, results next week and I can only hope the exacting ratio of tears : caffeine consumption : all night brain frying sessions that I worked so hard on pays off in the way I hope. Which is Oscars glory all the way baby.

The job hunting continues with all the zest of a hunter turned vegetarian. A little well-timed research has revealed that while still on my student visa I'm technically not allowed to work full-time nor freelance in any capacity. So here's to seven weeks of bar work and temping and plenty of time to find The Job I'm Meant To Have. It's a rather well-established fact that I don't cope well with rejection so it's been quite demoralising to send applications off out into the universe only to hear, well, zero in reply. Fatalism 101. Which is better than Pessimism 101 I suppose but the whole merry-go-round still rather sucks.

It's been an emotionally draining few days with family dramas on the home front and frozen ears on the head front and a shocking dose of insomnia to bring the whole thing together. Poor LB - between the whiny demoralising self-pity about the lack of job and now the ceaseless flow of tears over old emotional wounds freshly picked it's a wonder he's still sane. Never mind sticking with me. The magnitude of my thank you will know no bounds once I am happily through my Beige Period (with thanks to Picasso). Until then, my hot water bottle needs refilling.

Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaah.

It's rather difficult to find interesting and/or charming things to write about when one's day is defined by some combination of the following:

- Over-sleeping for lack of anywhere to be/anything to do

- Applying for unpaid internships

- Applying for may-as-well-be unpaid jobs in the arts

- Struggling into and out of thermal tights, jeans, two pairs of socks, boots, three jumpers, a scarf, a pair of mittens, a woolly hat and a coat. Just to walk to the shops for Diet Coke.

- Midday TV re-runs of that under-rated 90s classic Models Inc.

- Eating

- Pondering the pay off... spiritually rich versus literally poor?

- Wondering how on earth to spend the other four days of the working week


The jetlag has now passed. My fondness for late night snuggles with the hot water bottle continues unabated and the days slowly tick by as I trawl for jobs, inspiration and anything that might stay my increasingly tenuous hold on the old self-esteem.

There are a few leads yet to be exhausted and some slow burn projects to keep me reasonably occupied but mostly I just fret. And try to stay to stay out of the cold.

And so it begins

Hello two thousand and ten. We meet at last. Gulp. You, me, unemployment and a fucking big freeze that has London and I frozen through to our very tippy toes. Where oh where is this year going to take us I can only begin to wonder...

LB and I returned to London yesterday after a glorious three weeks in Sydney. Swimming and stone fruits and family and frozen margaritas on Bondi Beach and friends and barbeques and more swimming. And sun. Lots and lots of sun. It was terrible.

Jetlag notwithstanding, today has been reasonably productive with an extensive but thus far fruitless job hunt, a vat of hot homemade soup and a resolution to see 2010 the year of making friends.

Truth: I am freaking out/panicking/anxious/worrying excessively about what this year has in store. The last time I was without job prospects I was, well, come to think of it, I've never been short of a possible something somewhere and job hunting is so 2009 for someone rapidly approaching 30 and still struggling to describe herself professionally in 25 words or less. I say professionally because undoubtedly there are 25,000 words to describe me otherwise, with "neurotic" and "punishing to be around" currently in contention for the top spots...

My horoscope (ever a reliable indicator of success) informs me that January will be the start of tremendous professional accomplishments and a highly memorable year. Does anyone know if you can sue the planets if they get it wrong?

Anyhoo, me, my jetlag and my hot water bottle are off to bed. It's snowing outside and a balmy 1 degree. Fantastic.

Let the year begin....

Ice cubes as toes and other such treats

If I close my eyes I could well imagine that the scorching heat on my back is the sun and not from the cranked up radiator I'm leaning against with all my body weight and will (caveat obviously of when would I ever lie in the sun to the point of scorching but you know, whatever...) It is FUCKING freezing here and well, snowing. Yes, that's right. Snowing. I didn't order snow, certainly not with two sleeps to go before flying back to Sydney. If it comes to it I will shovel snow from the runway personally to ensure we depart this godforsaken icebox on Friday.

It's been a lovely couple of weeks, mitigated by hellish trips to central London for Christmas shopping.....

Mumma knows best

It's been a funny few days - misery has been digging my company big time but I've been trying not to let doomed job prospects and a rising tide of panic about what on earth I'm going to do next year overwhelm me every day. I've also been trying not to passively aggressively punish LB for having a job and a life and friends and oh well, everything that I don't have in London. I don't know what I did to deserve such a patient, supportive, understanding man. Survive all those stupid other boys maybe?...

All I want for Christmas is a job

Holy shit it is December already. Again. Head fuck of huge proportions. 17 more sleeps and then it is home, home, home baby. Hello Bondi.

Feeling a bit despondent at the moment. Tired, beyond bored with the fact that it is pitch dark by 4.30pm and so over the novelty of single digit temperatures - two is only a fun number when it comes dressed as a pair of shoes.

So, the countdown is on and the days are ticking over and I am distracting myself with exercise (if I have to be a freckly bi-atch I'm going to be a skinny freckly bi-atch...), making Christmas cards and cake and when I'm not doing any of that I'm looking for jobs. I applied for a freelance job last week, which I was summarily not invited to interview for today and have been disconsolate and miserable since. Methinks this job nonsense is not going to be easy.

Stinging from the impersonal rejection that is a group email, I went to work at the bar tonight only to have this loathsome piggy man get into the most irritating conversation with me about how contemporary art is bullshit and the art world is fucked. Damien Hirst this and Tracy Emin that and my god - piles of bricks in the Tate Modern (thank you Carl Andre) and blah blah blah tax payers money and crap sculptures made out of towel rails and referee whistles. I wanted to kill myself. Or him maybe. But defending the right of the insane and the arrogant and the obtusely brilliant to create crazy works of art was the last thing I felt like doing after being rejected by the very same art world I'd just applied to for a job. Arrogant tosser.

Art and I have made up though. My double date last week was just lovely. Instead of Turner the prize we ended up seeing Turner the painter at the Tate Britain. Nothing contemporary about it but it was a fascinating history lesson and an insight into the workings of The Establishment and it was rather fantastic to go from a show that focused heavily on the influence of the Royal Academy as the measure of artistic success to another show at the same Royal Academy. A show that featured, no less, a life-size working cannon that systematically shot 20kg 'pellets' of waxy red paint every 20 minutes against the walls of this very 'establishment'. Fucking genius.


I loved the Anish Kapoor exhibition. It was playful and provocative and all about texture and surface and the negotiation and perception of space. As for the cannon, it was terrifying and loud and violent and brutal in it's beauty. I still jump a little when I think about it. I also adored this sculpture in the courtyard:


Called Tall Tree and the Eye (2009) it was, despite its obvious density, the most beautiful, ephemeral sculpture - like bubbles floating towards an invisible surface. And god bless a fleeting blue sky against which to appreciate it....

The weather was pure misery over the weekend - when it wasn't bucketing down with rain it was bitingly cold and grey, grey, grey. Blurgh. Blurgh. Blurgh.


On Saturday, invigorated by my art reunion three days earlier, LB and I set off for another artistic encounter, this time in the dire backwoods of Elephant and Castle. Lured by the promise of a late lunch at Borough Market, we first went to see Roger Hiorns' installation Seizure, the work that got him nominated for this year's Turner Prize. Located in an abandoned, listed-for-demolition council estate flat, Hiorns sealed the flat before pumping 75,000L of hot copper sulfate solution into the apartment and leaving it to cool over several weeks. He then drained it and what remained was this strange and rather beautiful blue crystal 'cave':


As LB reflected afterwards, it doesn't make me think, but I like it. I think he's right. If I wanted to get all art pretentious I have no doubt I could comfortably come up with some sort of theory behind it's meaning but mostly, I just love that organisations like Artangel are facilitating encounters like this in alternative environments and reinvigorating ideas of art, space, reception and value. Hiorns' work sadly will be demolished when the building is, but I suspect that's part of it's 'meaning'.


Analysis thus complete, we then meandered in the direction of Borough, with hot chocolates to warm our frozen paws. Chorizo sandwiches and haloumi burgers on board, I then spent the afternoon wrapped up in the duvet having an epic nanna nap before dinner and cocktails and cheesy 80s music with a school friend and her boy. Was a solid Saturday really and I would have stayed in bed all day Sunday if I hadn't had to work in the evening. Am a proper bar wench this week (two undergraduate degrees, a pending Masters degrees and four considerable years of employment and all I foresee for the coming months is beers and temp work. Fabulous...) but at least it will help the time pass between now and my reunion with Bondi.