Responsibility

As usual I'm having a crisis about what I want to do with my life and in this particular instance I'm worried that employers won't like me.

I need to start being realistic, I'm not going to be a journalist so my best bet is a marketing job somewhere. But as employers are obsessed with responsibility how exactly do I prove that I am responsible? I've held down a job, an internship and gone volunteering in Africa in a number of roles you could define as responsible but how do you prove it?

I sometimes feel like my CV is pretty wishy washy. Apart from my internship, everything seems to geared towards a career that will never happen and I have no proper experience running a society or anything so what exactly do I have to offer?

Looks like I'm doing a Masters then.

You Know You're A Ridiculous Person When....

...you start empathising with characters in the ridiculous tv shows you watch.

I realised that this summer when I realised I empathised with Blair Waldorf.

Blair Waldorf from Gossip Girl.

The same Blair Waldorf that runs around concocting absurd schemes to 'takedown' people if they attempt to ruin the life of her best friend Serena or herself, who gets a chauffer driven town car around Manhattan and allegedly attends Columbia University (one of the most pretigious universities in the world) but only ever seems to go shopping and look down on poor people.


Don't get me wrong, she's one of the best TV characters ever created but I would never normally identify her. Especially in the situation she'd got herself in. Her dilemma was the three different men who were in love with her. Her true love the billionaire (who she will ultimately go back to in the end because they always do and you know, its Chuck and Blair- if you watched GG you'd understand) wants her back but she instead longs for the stability the french prince/her fiancee(yes really) will provide but (as much she does love him) it is not the same love as she felt for the billionaire. And then there is this penniless writer (who was also the above mentioned best friend's first love and current step-brother, as well as been the adopted step-brother of the billionaire) who is in love with her also and she is completely obvious and doesn't return his feelings.

Still with me?

However, I do understand her dilemma about choosing between what you want and what you should want. Luckily for her its all being handed to her, I unfortunately don't have that option. But I think it is good that the producers made her choose the nice, safe prince (for now at least). Its more realistic (if you take out the prince part) because what you want isn't always the best option. Its destructive and more often than not it'll not work out and go up in smoke. He make take two years to tell you he loves you, he may destroy your preexisting relationship with your first boyfriend who happens to be his best friend (and this boyfriend also lost his virginity to your best friend at a wedding and later started dating her three years later after she ends her affair with his married cousin- I love this show) or maybe he'll trade you to his dastardly uncle for control of his hotel.

Or maybe these things only really happen in Gossip Girl.

Anyway the point is, choosing the safe option isn't always a bad thing. I remember back in the summer when Wendi Deng turned into a ninja in parliament in order to defend Rupert Murdoch from his not-quite pie in the face. I read a piece in the Independent Viewspaper about settling. It was very sarcastic but the essential point was: if Wendi Deng is settling who are we to judge her? I doubt she married Murdoch for his looks but he gives her stability and maybe she never wanted love. She's a bit too scary for love I think.

The point of this very, very long ramble is; what we think we know we don't. I'm not a cynic, I do believe in love I just don't understand it and I am starting to think all the energy, poems and love letters that go into it really can't be worth it. It always ends, whether its on his deathbed after 60 years, when he runs off with his secretary after 20 years or when he gets bored after 2 months. If it happens, it happens but maybe in certain cases your better off with comfort and stability.

Even if your prince is kinda a wuss.

Finally, what provoked this late night ramble? Downton Abbey o'course! I'm identifying with one of them at the moment (won't say which one- not the angry footman or the wet ladysmaid though) but its mainly because the preview next week featured a line by the excellent Maggie Smith (there should be a spin off where they exclusively follow her around all day) where she says 'I'm a women, I'll be as contrary as I like!'

I can't help but agree.

COPYWRITERS

I get paid to write stuff now, it’s almost like I'm a real journalist.

In other words, I've become one of the elite band of copywriters. It pays reasonably well given it’s around £15 per article and I can write one in around half an hour depending on the length and how much I concentrate.

It’s weird, I always saw copywriting as something 'grown up' journalists did to supplement their incomes while I had to stick to writing for free. It’s nice in a way, to be paid for something that may actually benefit me in the future. I always thought that the only way I'd be able to alleviate my poverty would be in a shop being verbally abused by stupid customers who don't understand how basic economics, business or common decency works.

Although I'd say it would be hard to make a living out of it, the jobs come in a bit sporadically and you have to be basically sitting refreshing your email to get them. However, with a bit of luck and perseverance you should be able to make a small income for yourself.

Maybe if I devoted myself to being a serious freelance journalist full time I could fashion a living out of it. There are so many good websites to write for out there and they make it is to work from home.

It probably won’t get me out of debt or be a significant contribution to the ‘save-for-the-future’ fund I started when I got my first job at sixteen that has been gradually depleting over the past few years.

However, it will probably allow me to buy more shoes and is there really any great reward than that?

Home Alone

I've got a confession to make: I've never seen Home Alone.

Shocking isn't it? That a child of the nineties, one who spent most of them in USA no less, could not have seen such a proverbial classic which remains one of the highest grossing films of all time.

However now the cold germs have really started to affect my brain I definitely think I'm hallucinating. I noticed food on the counters that I swear I did not put there. Curtains have been opened that I swear I did not open.

Now it could be the friendly poltergeist Bob, that I created back when we moved to the house in 1999 to scare my little sister (I was always such a nice, caring big sister)messing with my head or perhaps it is some comically inept burglars?

I am fairly out of it at the moment having no one to take care of me in my illness and have run out of painkillers (the shop is a forty minute round trip- I hate living in the suburbs) so my head is currently throbbing.

I have actually taken the day off writing (apart from this) as I doubt that much of what I am writing is coherent.

I don't like being alone when ill. I have never been the type to say 'Oh look at me, woe is me' when I'm ill but it would be nice if there was someone to cook me dinner (which I can't even do when I am healthy) and do my washing while I curl up in bed and will the headache to go away.

Blah

I feel blah.

My parents are away on holiday and I'm alone in my house and am currently struggling to spend more than half the day out of bed.

I don't feel ill as such, although I do have a sore throat, I just feel blah.

I'm tired, every part of my body aches, when I'm not asleep, I'm reading in bed or watching TV curled up in my duvet watching television.

I'm doing no work either, even though I am ridiculously bored. I have a list of articles to write and investigate as well as having to read the entire collected works of Virginia Woolf in the next three and a half weeks but I've managed to only write 250 word blog post about a bookshop closure that I'd read about on the Guardian.

I suppose I need a holiday after doing some much work experience this summer (7 weeks and counting, I've got another one on the way next week) but its miserable outside. It's raining and it doesn't change how bored I am.

I don't really like stopping, I've always liked being busy. I get bored too easily.

But maybe if I'm getting down, ill and blah when I do stop maybe I should down......

Nah, I'll sleep when I'm dead.

Kiss Me? No: Germany Bans Kissing

Germany has been questioning it's workplace decorum this week after The Knigge Society (why does everything official and German have to sound so comic?) called for a ban on kisses on the cheek in places of work as it can make greeting colleagues and business partners uncomfortable for many.

The society's Chairman, Hans-Michael Klein said he received many worried emails from workers who were uncomfortable with the practice and liken it to form a form of 'terroism'.

He said the practice was something that came in from France, where two kisses are common and Italy, where in some parts three is the norm and it "is not typical German behaviour".

Although I do have to say that the terrorism allegory is a tad extreme I do find my self agreeing with any legislation that may prevent people I don't know touching me even if its an over step into personal liberties.

It's not just kissing, I don't like it when people hug me when they don't know me, when they pat my arm, even when they sit next to me on the train. I don't like an aura of physically proximity to other people.

This may surprise some people as I'm normally quite a tactile person once you get to know me. I will always hug and kiss people I actually like and it means absolutely nothing in particular other than general affection.

But because I associate physical contact with friendliness and affection I don't want strangers anywhere near me.

They are not my friends, they do not know me, I don't know where they've been. So they can't spread their germs all over me.

I'm quite in favour of a 'social distance zone'.

Buses

I hate buses.

I really do. I've been doing work experience for the past two weeks and have had to get the bus for the first time really since I left Harrogate.

I've been nearly hit by them in Birmingham more times than I can count though admittedly this is partly my fault (and the fact that the temporary traffic lights on Bristol Road never seem to work) and have got lost in Edinburgh more than once over the past week or so simply because I don't know which bus stop to getting off at.

My woeful lacking in the navigation department has been well documented and I have always relied on trains (or the Tube when I'm in London) because of it. Despite the fact they're never there on time at least its simply, you get off when you see the sign for the station, there aren't five hundred stops with the identifying markers around them being a non descript electronics shop.

I just can't do it. Some people look at maps and see a logic grid depicting the world around them; a see a confusing haze of wavy lines varying in size and meaning absolutely nothing. I can picture streets in my head but I mark them with certain shops and they stand out isolated in my mind; I can't connect the dots.

And its because of this I hate buses, I find travel stressful at the best of times but trying to find the correct point to jump off a moving vehicle makes it all the worse.

I've mastered the 73 from outside Angel tube station in Islington and the 36 to Leeds from outside my doctor's in Harrogate, anything other than makes me feel stressed and slightly ill.

My fear of buses may also come from the fact that I nearly lost my teddy bear on a London bus when I was about two or three. It was pretty scaring.