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Guys, I found the perfect army surplus bag for my horticulture and photography combined. It has ALL OF THE INTERNAL POCKETS. Yes I’m still wearing that T-shirt. No I don’t wear my biker jacket when I’m gardening, I wear it when I’m going out for coffee with a friend. Like now. Does the bag make me look tiny? Yes. Yes it does. Teeny tiny, even. I am a teeny, tiny gardening photographer. :)
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Dorkitude in the rain.
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I knew you guys wouldn’t believe me.
I wasn’t just lounging around in that photo. Not shown was my notebook bulging with wonderful words. Over-fucking-flowing with brilliant sentences. Packed to the gills with paragraphs of heart-stopping beauty and crystalline insight. A story of such depth and complexity that OK I was slightly drunk and had written a couple of pages which I’m unable to read today because my handwriting got a little, um, inventive.
I love being a writer.
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I could tell you there’s some serious novelling going on here. But you wouldn’t believe me.
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First I was like Fuck you, universe, I hate you, I’m going to cry myself sick and ugh I hate you my life is over, but then I was all, Hey, you know what? Fuck you, universe, you’re pretty great, you magnificent bastard, imma sit here in my knickers and watch four episodes of The X-files (series 5) back to back and eat cream cheese out of the tub with a knife AND I WILL LICK THE KNIFE TOO because I am obvs such a dainty deer-like creature and, well, ok then let’s do this thing. And then I felt happy. The end.
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To Croatia tomorrow to finish the wolfish novel (which is going to be so great you guys, I love it fiercely, it is making me such a happy pup). It’s almost 11pm, I need to pack still and I haven’t eaten yet, so obviously I’m drinking red wine and taking photographs of myself as a moody gypsy.
Ovo je moj glup lice. Nemojte ga zaboraviti. Volim te.
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Feeling frolicsome and hot and giggly and delicious lounging about in the field, trying not to laugh the grass stalk out of my mouth, loving the braids in my hair wot you can’t see, the blue sky which you can, the serenading crickets, tee hee.
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People think because I’m tiny and have wee hands and a long neck that I’m probably dainty and bird-like, graceful like a cat. And oh I can be. But put £1600 of someone else’s Canon lens in my hands and guess what happens. That’s right. GRACEFUL AS A BABY RHINOCEROUS ON ROLLERSKATES. Wish me luck as I sally forth to shoot my first major show.
BABY RHINO SMASH!
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It’s about time for some of this layin’ about in fields malarky, don’tcha think?
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Me and Cindy Sherman. Cindy Sherman and I.
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Smile, dorks!
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Sometimes I dream of a world in which my hair doesn’t try to eat my face all the time. I would be able to see stuff if I had sensible straight hair! I wouldn’t walk into people in the street! I would pick up my own pint in the pub, not someone else’s! But it would be a cold, hard place, you guys. A cold, hard place without my curls to blinker me and keep me feeling warm and safe. They are magical curls and if you ever felt them their softness would make you happy. So I will grow my hair and learn to navigate using sonar. Like a dolphin. A curly-headed dolphin. Something like that.
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Hello babies.
So for my photography class assignment this week I had to produce a fuckton of self-portraits, literal and non-literal, no post-processing (ack!), with my amazing new/old Canon EOS 20D. I am loving doing this so much, learning so much. I feel so happy, so calm, so right, when I’m making photographs, it is just the best thing. Though it is weird spending so much time thinking about yourself and how to comunicate you through images, composing those images, taking them, looking at them, deciding what is right. My hour with my camera in the woods (top right) playing and messing about and setting up the self-timer and running away was the happiest I’ve been in ages. True story. I can’t wait to do landscape. More clouds! Whee! So I’ll put a few up here every week, my favourites, but if you want to look at them properly, and see the others, have a look on Flickr because the compression on Tumblr is shocking. Shocking, I tell you.
Some of these I really love, some of them I don’t, but I’m learning and loving it which is the whole point. I’m presenting the final 18 in class tomorrow (I’ll be calling them GPOYW because I love confounding people) so why don’t you come watch me stammer and blush and laugh and I’ll let you buy me a pint afterwards. If you can’t make it tomorrow there is always Flickr, if it do ya and thankee sai.
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It has been raining all day. My colleague’s office flooded and I spent the afternoon moving furniture and plugging in cables. I mopped a carpet. I’ve never mopped a carpet before.
Yesterday I was sick as a dog. Migraine thing. It was already too late to take painkillers by the time I got up at 7:00am, but still I sat on the kitchen floor whimpering and threw pills down my throat. It didn’t make any difference. So I dragged myself back to bed and spent long hours smelling sounds and hearing colours, shaking and sweating with the hurting. I wanted to cry, with pain, with frustration, but I knew that sobbing would make my head pound even more so just lay on my back as tears dripped slowly into my ears, hoping for death and cursing the fact that I wasn’t a snail.
I bet snails don’t get migraines. Trod on and squished yes, migraines no.
But I didn’t die. I’ve been dizzy and clumsy all day today, it’s actually pretty funny, and I didn’t die.
Because I didn’t die I went for a long walk in the rain through the woods this afternoon. The sky was furious but the raindrops were fat and slow and gentle. They felt lovely on my face, warm caresses, soft fingers on my cheeks, my eyelids. They found the angle of my jaw, crept down my neck. I caught them on my tongue. As I wandered along the path, dragging my feet through drifts of wet leaves, I surprised four black and white goats grazing next to the footpath. I shit you not. Goats. They come from the farm that borders the University land and sometimes get loose from their pen. I stopped to watch them but I must have squealed out loud in my delight because they took fright and bounced and skittered and slid up the muddy slope towards the safety of their field. One of them wore a bell. It made a sweet, deep sound. At the fence the goats stopped. They turned and looked at me. I told them that they should be ashamed of themselves, getting out like that, should get on back home and be quick about it. They ignored me. I guess I have something to learn about talking to goats. I said goodbye and they watched me until I was out of sight.
A long shower is good for when fireworks have been exploding in your brain and you’re finding it difficult to hold a pen or enunciate the word “shenanigans”. It’s good for emptying the mind. Which isn’t hard for me, there’s not much in there anyway. My skin felt happy listening to the water whisper against it. My hands felt happy with my wet hair snaking between my fingers. I felt happy with just that, the water and the warmth, the fact that I was alive. And that I am not, after all, a snail.
