OwwwwwWWWWWWW

EVERYTHING HURTS.

Curse you, Father, for giving me your cold!

In other news, today I did twenty sit-ups and now my stomach muscles don’t exist. I find a midriff composed entirely of jelly to be strangely hindering to my daily activities.

Ow.

People I Should Never Marry

1. David Tennant
Friction burns.

2. A politician
I’d turn into Lady Macbeth.

3. A mathematician
Goes against every moral fibre in my body.

4. Someone who HAS to be right, ALL the time.
Would end up dead, murdered by kitchen knife.

5. Someone allergic to cats, either medically or out of detestation.
What do you MEAN you don’t love my lickle babies because they clawed your favourite trousers to pieces?!

6. A physicist.
Fuck offfffff.

7. Someone with dyslexia.
“That’s not how you spell ‘September’/'financier’/'masticate’/'troglodyte’/'desideratum’ -” “I BLOODY KNOW.”

8. A Star Trek fan.
No I shall NOT straighten my hair and tell you that I’m an illogical woman who’s beginning to feel too much a part of that communications console. …Fuck.

9. A hardcore Catholic.
One child is too much. Fifteen are clearly associates of Satan.

10. Someone who watches “intellectual comedy” programmes and consequently believes they are intelligent.
Because you’re fucking not.

Also ALICE COOPER:

Pure unadulterated genius.

LEAR: O you, sir, you, come hither sir, who am I, sir?
OSWALD: My lady’s father.
LEAR: My lady’s father? My lord’s knave, you whoreson dog, you slave, you cur!
OSWALD: I am none of these, my lord, I beseech your pardon.
LEAR: Do you bandy looks with me, you rascal? [LEAR strikes him]
OSWALD: I’ll not be strucken, my lord.
KENT: [tripping him] Nor tripped neither, you base football player.
– King Lear, Act I, Scene iv, William Shakespeare.

…Either I am a huge geek or that passage is universally hysterically funny.
I think the former applies most. I laughed unnaturally hard whilst reading it. Carry on with your lives!
*merrily vacates the room*

What’s goin’ down.

TOFFPOX: Prudence! What kind of person drinks rum?
PRUDENCE: …A person who wants to get drunk?
TOFFPOX: No! Yes! I mean – what sort of rogue is usually associated with rum?
PRUDENCE: …Johnny Depp?
TOFFPOX: …Who?
PRUDENCE: Johnny Depp, the local barman.
TOFFPOX: (disdainfully) “Johnny Depp, the local barman”?
PRUDENCE: Yes – well, if you told me to say the first thing that comes into my head when you say “rum”, I would say “Johnny Depp”, because he’s the local barman, and serves alcohol, including rum, so, yes, he’s the sort of rogue that I would associate with –
TOFFPOX: No, no, Prudence, you’re missing my point –
PRUDENCE: Which is?
TOFFPOX: Pirates! Pirates drink rum!
PRUDENCE: …And?
TOFFPOX: We could dress up as pirates and run away to sea!

First night of Fairytale Shorts – ten minute fairytale adaptations/devised pieces performed by the uni’s drama society – went well. My short, “Scurvy Curs: A Delightful Tale of Whimsy”, about two ladies who seek adventure as a badly-disguised male pirate and a parrot named Nobstradamus, went down well. I am extremely pleased with the audience’s reaction to the whole thing. Pirates having an orgy to the tunes of “Love Shack”, a maid with a feather duster wound into a coathanger and worn as a headdress and the crew dancing around the stage to “Why Is The Rum Gone?” seem to go down well with people my age and older, which excites me. I’m glad I wasn’t just writing stuff that I thought was hysterically funny and alienated everybody else. AND they laughed a lot at my character, which I suspect is because of the highly nasal voice and the glasses perched on the end of my nose. I love Bluster. She’s insane.

COCKSWAIN: Do ye swear by the sword that ye really be a scurvy cur and yer true callin’ be to run through bluejackets and lobsters?
BLUSTER: Are you averse to killing naval officers of any sort?
TOFFPOX: No.
BLUSTER: No.
COCKSWAIN: And be ye true to the sweet trade until ye find yeself in Davy Jones’s locker?
BLUSTER: Will you be a pirate until you cop it?
TOFFPOX: …I suppose so.
BLUSTER: Yes.

Second and final night of the performance tonight. I had a nightmare that I was forced to rewrite the entire thing and everything fell apart on the night, and I’m glad that’s not the case. (I guess now that I’ve written that, half my cast is going to fall ill or break body parts. I hope not.)

In other, more academically-focused news, I got the same mark in both my first essays for this year: THREE MARKS short of a first. I started out on a trip of self-loathing once more, until my seminar tutor told me that actually, it’s really good at this stage, and next time I can work towards a first. I am very happy indeed. I got a couple of firsts last year, which don’t count towards my degree mark, but I hope to repeat the performance again. It’s very odd. I’m used to A*s in all my English pieces of work, so not getting a first kind of equated to getting a B. You won’t really appreciate this until you know that, consistently throughout my school life, I have been achieving among the highest marks in the year in everything to do with English. It was that one subject that I never ever really tried hard at but enjoyed and got high marks in anyway. Science and Maths? Bollocks to them.

I leave you with this most important moral message from my play:
BLUSTER: And disregarding the danger of STDs, they all lived happily ever after. Remember girls, you CAN do anything, but you WILL end up as a sexual object anyway!

I love the nightlife.

OK, so one..or two glasses of wine make me roaring drunk now, apparently. As in, so drunk I pretend cushions are beards, dance like a possessed creature to songs I can’t remember the lyrics to and generally…entertain? Be glad there are no photos from last night. BE GLAD.

I saw two foxes and five rabbits on the train journey home this morning. It was delightful and I think I just turned into Beatrix Potter, please excuse me.

I helped an elderly lady with her suitcase. I feel awful about feeling so good about this. Before you go thinking that I’m a nice person, please consider the following: would I be posting this if I did this sort of thing all the time, instead of doing it occasionally and believing myself to be a saint on those rare days? Exactly.

Less than a week until I get to move into my lovely new house and tension here is cranked up so high it physically hurts my neck muscles. No less than two people talk at each other at once. People raise their voices to be heard, prompting the others to do it too. Really fucking annoying rhetorical questions fly over the dinner plates and hit me in the throat so the food gets stuck and make me feel like there’s an acidic pool churning in my guts. Whenever more people come into the house I am bombarded with the same queries at least three times. I have to retreat upstairs and scratch at the wall to wind down. I’m stressed. I’m surprised my hair isn’t falling out in great long ropes of frizz.

I analysed my heart today. I’m not AS obsessed with David Tennant as I was this time last year. There is hope for me. I have downsized from two calendars to one.

My neck hurts.

I have nothing more interesting to say, except did you know that ‘Adiemus’ isn’t sung by Enya, but by Miriam Stockley?

Fact.

Word Vomit & A Train

Have some music whilst you read:

Actual content time!

I want to get back into writing again. I went through a period in my teens during which I churned out a plethora of what I affectionately term shit poetry. I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t written about faeces.

After realising I was awful at my “art” and so very,very angsty into the bargain I gave up almost entirely. Well, apart from creative writing assignments that would actually gain me marks (I got a first with one of my pieces last term – maybe I’ll stick it up here at some point). Now I’m aching to get back into it properly.

This realisation brings with it a filthy little revelation.

I enjoy lurking on ‘Worthy of Publishing’ and dredging up poorly-written, as-good-as-plotless pieces of fiction on purpose. It’s extremely therapeutic. I feel better about my abilities because of it.

So, now that you know I’m a dirty little schadenfreudette, let us proceed with the point of today’s enthralling tale. An alarmingly large number of these literary abominations begin with the following sentence. Bar my quotations marks, the average standard of grammar is included for realism and your entertainment:

“it was a cold dark night . suddenly i heard something outside my window”

And I got to thinking, ‘What would I write after that?’ And instead of quaintly terrible shadows on the walls and bumps in the night, this ridiculous piece of silliness came into being:

‘I leapt out of bed and charged at the window, seizing the large brass fireplace poker on the way. With a shriek like a hellbound demon, I wrenched open the window and jabbed the poker out into the thick evening gloom.

The result was a cry of anguish, followed by a rustle of leaves and the dull sound of a body colliding with solid ground. Gingerly, I edged out onto my balcony. Squinting in the gloom, I peered over the stone ledge.

“What the HELL was that for, Juliet?” angrily demanded Romeo, nursing a black eye.’

…Yeahhhhhh, I need much practise before I start writing fiction for real. I have no shame in stating that I’d like to write as part of my career one day. However, I feel I use TOO MANY DAMNED COMMAS, and thus, I will continue to scribble and underline, to type and to delete, to save and save as, for the forseeable future.

Now, for the promised bit about the train: why are rail journeys undertaken on Sundays always at least an hour longer? It’s highly irritating. But worth it, for I will see friends again, and consume the fermented grape until my vision is poor and my personal space bubble is no more. Good, sweet times.

The only other really interesting thing I stumbled across today was this wonderful set of failed romances. I’m a sucker for such things.

Congratulations, you have attained the level of ‘Blue-Arsed Fly’

And if you’ve never heard that phrase before, you have missed out on a treat.

(I heard an English teacher say it once. Back when I thought ‘arse’ was a swear word, along with ‘git’, and thus the reaction was a total gasp of horror. Somebody put the lolocopter into gear.)

This is going to be such a word vomit-y post, hold onto to your hats. I’ve had this up on my screen all day, adding little bits to it. If the chronological order of anything doesn’t make sense, you now know why.

Hola to everyone who’s meandered over from Facebook, ja ja *waves*.

I hath pictures! Pictures of Italy, no less!I took around 500 photos in one week, so I’m filtering through and getting the fun/entertainingly informative ones out of the bunch, as opposed to 300+ of scenery, landscapes, waterscapes, elderly buildings and plants.

First children, let us conduct a study into Kristina’s Patented Pose of Complete and Utter Awkwardness:

I was taking this guy’s picture in Verona when he stepped down off that lamp post base and walked over to me. With my mother gleefully encouraging him, he led me away and made me get up on the base before covering my hand with whiteface and gold glitter as he kissed it. I went scarlet. People took photos.

Gondolas in Venice; all of them are slightly banana-shaped, as this keeps them moving forwards. Since the gondolieri only row on one side of the boat, if the boat was completely straight, it would go round in circles. All gondolas are painted black nowadays, to commemorate the black gondolas that carried plague victims to isolation islands such as Poveglia. (Google it, especially if you’re interested in paranormal activity. It’s supposed to be one of the most haunted places in the world.)

Dude was just sitting around, so I took a sneaky photo whilst passing under the bridge in the gondola.

Pillars marking the official entrance to the Piazza San Marco, or St. Mark’s Square. The winged lion is the sign of St. Mark, who wasn’t originally Venice’s patron saint – they nicked him from Alexandria, Egypt. People doomed to be executed were led between the pillars to the square, which is kind of why I took the photo in the first place. Locals won’t walk between the pillars as they believe it’ll give them bad luck.

9,000ft above sea level at the Pordoi Pass in the Dolomites.  Air was thin. Sun was bright. And, partially unrelated, I have lost 17lbs in weight since coming home from uni, and I think it shows fairly nicely in this picture.

The Scala Contarini del Bovolo in Venice – ‘Scala’ means staircase, Contarini was the name of the family who owned the house, and ‘bovolo’ means snail. The Snail Staircase was only a servants’ exit and entrance…I’d do all sorts of unsavoury things to have it attached to my house. Inspired by a certain Leaning Tower.

Unhappy lion pleases me immensely.

House on the Lago di Garda – if anyone has the means to buy this for me, please do.

You know what I really hate? On the lake, there are loads of ducks. LOADS of them. And people were taking photos of them, as if they’d never seen ducks before in their lives. What sort of person -

Oh yeah.