"You already have a job," he explained. "From now on, your life with your husband is your job." He corrected himself. "It's more than a job. It's a career. Your husband makes the money, and you create the life. And it's going to take effort. You'll rise each morning and exercise, not simply to look attractive but to build endurance. Most ladies prefer yoga. Then you will dress. You'll arrange your schedule and send e-mails. You'll attend a meeting for a charity in the morning, or perhaps visit an art dealer or make a studio visit. You'll have lunch, and then there are meetings with decorators, caterers, and stylists; you'll have your hair coloured twice a month and blow-dried three times a week. You'll do private tours of museums and read, I hope, three newspapers a day: The New York Times, The New York Post, and The Wall Street Journal. At the end of the day, you'll prepare for an evening out, which may include two or three cocktail parties and a dinner. Some will be black-tie charity events where you'll be expected to wear a gown and never the same dress twice. You'll need to have your hair and make-up done. You'll also plan vacations and weekend outings. You may purchase a country house, which you will also have to organise, staff, and decorate. You will meet the right people and court them in a manner both subtle and shameless. And then, my dear, there will be children. So," Billy concluded, "let's get busy."

- 'One Fifth Avenue' by Candace Bushnell

Being the wife of a rich man sounds so damn boring! Early mornings? Yoga? Endless trips to the hairdresser/stylist? Three newspapers a day? Dinners in restaurants? Mingling? No time for sex? No, thank you.

"The Dana Taylor Syndrome"

'So, how far does this little game go in that sordid mind of yours?'

He smiled a slow, sexy, dimpled smile. 'You really want to know?'

Not in the cold light of day she wouldn't. But she was currently in the realms of fantasyland. The thing was, could she live with the inevitable consequences of this one night when the sun came up again? Guilt, recrimination, regret?

Fine.

I've been watching the Pretty Woman lately. This what happens:

Edward: You all right?

Vivian: I'm fine.

Edward: Fine. That's good. Seven "fines" since we left. Could I have another word, please?

Vivian: Asshole! There's a word.

Edward: I think I liked "fine" better.

Always been a fan of the word "fine".

There are a lot of things i'm good at:

• Over commiting
• Not being able to get out of bed in the mornings
• Making an organised mess
• Reading ahead of situations
• Getting too comfy
• Not calling friends and family when I said I would
• Being too cold
• Not being in the mood
• Spilling my tea on me

The Mirror Has Two Faces

As I stood at the altar beside my sister and her husband-to-be, it struck me that this “ritual” called a wedding ceremony is really just the final scene of a fairytale.

Nobody ever tells you what happens after the ritual though.

Nobody ever tells you that Cinderella drove Prince Philip crazy with her obsessive need to clean the castle (because she missed her day job, right?).

Nobody ever tells you what happens after because...there is no after.

The be-all and end-all of romantic love was/is marriage. Marriage, that's right.

But it wasn't always like that...

Around the 12th century there was a notion called courtly love where love had nothing to do with marriage and nothing to do with sex. In most cases it was defined as a passionate relationship between a knight and a lady of the court who was already married; and so they could never consummate their love. They would have to rise above your ordinary (you know, going to the bathroom in front of each other kind of love) and find something more divine. They took sex out of the equation and what was left was a union of souls.

Now think of this: sex was always the fatal love potion.

Look at the literature: 'Lancelot and Guinevere', 'Tristan and Isolde' (for examples) - all consummation could lead to was madness, despair, or death!

Clinical experts, scholars, and my Aunt Esther are united in the belief that true love has spiritual dimensions while romantic love is nothing but a lie...an illusion...modern myth...a soulless manipulation.

Speaking of manipulation...

It's like going to the movies to see a romance film, when we see the lovers on screen kiss, the music swells, and we like it, right? So that makes you think when my date takes you home and kisses you goodnight, if I don't hear the philharmonic in my head, you dump him!

Now the question is: why do we buy it?

We buy it because whether it's a myth or a manipulation, let's face it: we all want to fall in love.

Why?

Because that experience makes us feel completely alive! Where every sense is heightened, every emotion magnified, where our everyday reality is shattered and flung into the heavens!

It may only last a moment, an hour, or an afternoon...but it doesn't diminish its value because we're left with memories that we treasure for the rest of our lives.

I read an article a while ago that says when we fall in love we hear Puccini in our heads. I love that. I think it's because his music fully expresses our longing for passion in our lives and romantic love. And while we listen to La Boheme or read 'Wuthering Heights' or watch 'Casa Blanca'...a little bit of that love lives in us too.

So the final question is: why do people want to fall in love when it can have such short shelf life and be devastatingly painful?

It leads to the propagation of the species? Psychologically, we need to connect to somebody? Because we're culturally pre-conditioned? Good answers but much too intellectual for me.

I think it's because, as some of you already may know, while you have it...it feels fucking great!

House of Leaves

Ages and ages and ages and ages ago I read a Mark Z Danielewski book called 'The Whalestoe Letters', and then not so long ago I read 'House of Leaves' - brilliantly crazy book.

"Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer."

In this case he refers to love as passion.

Love is not about happiness but patience. Love isn't about feeling good a hundred percent of the time but enduring the bad feelings. People suffer through love because love is worth it.

I've never really understood what he meant but after a certain life experience(?) I do understand exactly his perspective.

A Haiku For Every Girl I've Ever Slept With...by Benedict Smith

1. The haiku form is an appropriate length to describe with fuck.
2. When I handcuffed you, it was insanely hot, I came in my jeans.
3. We used to have sex so we didn't have to talk. Now we do neither.
4. We had a threesome. You, me, and my depression. Depression fucks hard.
5. I shouted my love from the rooftops before almost jumping off.
6. You didn't like me but you did like my writing, I guess that's enough.
7. Entangled, twitching, we came down as cenotaphs numb with limbless minds.
8. Tried your fantasy and pretended to rape you. It felt a bit forced.
9. You learned of my pain and said you'd try to fix me. That wasn't your job.
10. You were very large but alcohol and codeine made you not so large.
11. You liked to be choked, you stuffed animals for fun, you were just my type.
12. Halfway through you sobbed, said you were touched as a child. I stopped and held you.
13. Thirteen is bad luck but three's a lucky number, fourteen would agree.
14. It wasn't awkward. It was just double the fun. That's arithmetic.
15. Puked everywhere and then fell into a bush. You still wanted me.
16. Our contrasting skin meant some passersby would stare and we just loved it.
17. You were a model who found me through my writing. Thank you, internet.
18. We made a sex tape. I hope I find it before my family does.
19. I whipped you too hard, inadvertently drew blood, quickly apologised.
20. Cars drove by as I fingered you at a bus stop (a romantic date).
21. It's strange to think it but before you miscarried, was I a father?
22. We both got naked online for our followers in different ways.
23. "You don't care", you said, so I pretended to cry, and then we had sex.
24. You liked taking charge and I went along with it out of laziness.
25. I tried to whip you, then I hit my testicles...it ruined the mood.
26. It took twenty five, twenty five, misconnections before I found you.

1920's

There's a discussion going on right now about how my life would be like in the 1920's.

It's bizarre how much a lot of people know about the 1920's, and how much they're fitting me into that time period!

Here are some of the opinions:

"The 1920's, the age of jazz, you'd fit in perfectly. I imagine you'd watch silent films like Don Juan in bed, selecting songs on jukeboxes in ice cream parlours, and sitting under trees reading the classics that would have just been published: Lady Chatterley's Lover, Siddhartha, and Women in Love."

"You'd be like one half of the twins from 'Something Dangerous'; beautiful, rich, with a French home and husband in Paris."

"You'd have loved life in the 1920's for all of the art! Surrealism, art deco, Pablo Picasso and Rene Magritte, and let's not forget the opening of the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan (which you'd have so gone to!).".

"If you had a past life in the 1920's, i'm pretty sure you'd be part of a cohort - for something gritty like being the survivors of a bus crash - and you'd be well and truly a part of the 'Lost Generation'."

"If you can picture yourself drinking noodle juice whilst playing mah-jong or doing crossword puzzles, then you'd fit right into the 1920's!"

"Nah, I can't see you getting excited over the Egyptomania that swept the world in the 1920's as the tomb of Tutankhamun was discovered."

"Are you even asking this question?! You'd totally fit right in to the 1920's and there's no doubt that you've had a past life in the roaring twenties. King George the fifth, Albert Einstein, Alexander Fleming, F Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, T S Eliot, Charlie Chaplin, Harry Houdini, Alfred Hitchcock, Buster Keaton, Pablo Picasso - you've heard of these, yes?"

"Early 1920's fashions would have suited you, not the horrible bob though. You'd have hated that fashion! I always thought you had a Norma Talmadge look about you."

"I could see you being a 1920's secretary or some sort of journalist reporting on the womens right to vote, not the average housewife. However, coincidently, contraception for women was invented in the 1920's so maybe you could have been a prostitute in a past life? They had a lot of those!"

"I used Google to try and fing you the perfect 1920's life but then got side tracked by the phrase 'flapper', which you should add to your list of 20's slang. A flapper is a young, fun loving woman of the 20's who is usually associated with the film industry. I think you'd have just been like Clara Bow."

So, basically, in a past life in the ninety twenties, I could have been either of the two:

1) A rich young woman in her twenties who is beautiful and dressed like Norma Talmadge who likes doing the jive to jazz music, playing music on a jukebox, reading classical books, and visits the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

2) A middle class woman in her twenties who looks and dressed like Clara Bow and is resembled as a "flapper" and has a job as a journalist whilst moonlighting as a prostitute.

My day today:


Period: WAKE UP, ASSHOLE, YOU GOT CRAMPS.

Period: How bout an entire chocolate cake for breakfast?

Period: How's that back pain? Feeling better? Let's fix that.

Period: Find a cookie as big as a house and eat it.

Period: Where's your Tic Tac box filled with paracetamol?

Period: Got things to do? Don't care. Sleep.

Period: For dinner you're eating an entire 12 pack bag of crisps.

Period: Breeze blows by. Instantly horny.

Period: You didn't like those brand new pair of panties, right?

Period: Yell at a puppy.

Sliding Doors

Have you ever had one of those moments where something is just relevant to how you're feeling, a situation in your life, or even just your personality?

I watched 'Sliding Doors' last night.

Relevant to my life in that I feel like I am living two separate lives: one happy and one sad.

Maybe there is some truth to star-signs and all that jazz? It is said that a Gemini lives two lives at that same time that coincide with each other at random points. Same girl, different decisions.

The story goes a little something like this:

Both halves of the Gemini get fired.

One misses the train home, gets mugged, her boyfriend cheers her up, she works part time jobs as a sandwich delivery guy to support her boyfriend's novel-writing-career, gets pregnant, discovers her boyfriend is cheating on her and as she runs away she falls down a flight of stairs and ends up losing the baby.

At the same time...

The other half catches the train, meets a handsome stranger, discovers her boyfriend is cheating on her and leaves him, builds up a PR company, dates the handsome stranger and becomes pregnant but shortly after telling the stranger the good news she is ran over by a car and loses the baby.

In the hospital, the first half survives but the second half dies.

The cheating boyfriend is elated and the handsome stranger is heartbroken.

Their lives merge into one again.

The Gemini, in her hospital bed, tells her cheating boyfriend to leave. She is then discharged and takes an elevator to the ground floor where she meets the handsome stranger.

"A marriage ultimatum." Liberty said embarrassedly, knowing in advance how Carter would take it.
Carter raised his dark eyebrows, his eyes flicking over her searching for a sign, he didn't say anything, he just slumped back in his chair, the jacket to his suit falling open slightly, and he drummed his fingers on the table. Liberty thought she should say something else, that she should get up and leave, but when she made a move, he told her not to go in a rather playful voice. She'd found that Carter had pulled her closer to him as she sat back down, she could feel his warm breath on her neck as he casually spoke, not saying anything about what she had just told him, and gently caressing the back of her neck sending her mind into a cloudy mess.
Carter, she knew, was a powerful man, knew he had taken a fancy to her from the offset, knew he wouldn't have been able to refuse the deal she had offered him, although when the words had left her mouth she had had some doubt . His hand dropped to the small of her back caressing it by tracing small circles on her skin with his nimble fingers - why, oh, why, had she chosen to wear a backless dress? Carter felt her shiver ever so slightly, he smiled (more to himself than to her), women who appreciated the pleasures of simple touches were very rare.

Going to bury myself beneath the bubbles...

Do you guys ever have sad nights where you just kind of think about sad things and listen to sad music that reminds you of more sad things and nobody really knows how to react because there isn’t a main reason for your sadness and eventually you just give up and go to bed sad?

Or is that just me?

Sheer Abandon

She was crying now, out of control, hurting dreadfully. 'Go away, why don't you? Just go away and-'
'But - but what for?' His voice was genuinely bemused. 'What would be the point of that? We love being together. And I really do love you, Jocasta. It's very unfortunate for you that I'm an immature commitment-phobe. But I am maturing. There has to be hope. And meanwhile, why can't we go on as we are? Or - is there someone else? Is that what you're trying to tell me?'
'Of course not.' she said, sniffing, reaching for the handkerchief he was holding out to her. 'I wish there was.' She managed a half smile.
'Well, I don't. And there's certainly no one else for me. Never could be. Not after you.' He reached out tentatively, stroked her cheek. 'Please, Jocasta, give me just a little more time. I'll try very hard to do some growing up. I do want to, I promise.'
'Well-', she hesitated. He leant forward and started to kiss her; tenderly at first, then harder, his mouth working on hers. Against her will, against all common sense, something stirred deep, deep within her, something dark and soft and treacherous. He pushed his hand under her t-shirt, began encircling one of her nipples with his thumb. She shivered in anticipation, then pulled back from him; his eyes on hers were very bright, very tender.
'I meant it,' he said, 'I do love you. I'm sorry if I don't make it plain enough. Now - shall we go and lie down and recover?'
But all through the sex which followed, lovely and healing as it was, Nick gentle and tender, waiting for her a long, long time as she softened, sweetened under him, coaxing her body skilfully in the way he knew best, into a mounting, brightening pleasure; even as she felt her climax gather and grow and then spread out into starry, piercing release, she felt still wary, still hurt; and as she lay beside him, his hand tangling in her hair, his eyes smiling into hers, she knew however much he said he loved her, it was not enough.

- Penny Vincenzi

I'm one fifth of the way into this one hundred and seventy page novel about three women: Clio (who is locked in an unhappy marriage to a self-obsessed, arrogant surgeon), Martha (who gave birth and abandoned a baby in a cleaning cupboard at an airport without telling anyone she was even pregnant), and Jocasta (who's in love with a charming journalist); they're bonded by a secret that was made some fifteen / twenty years before when they all randomly met whilst travelling Asia and Australia.

You know what I am? A fatalist. My mind automatically picks out the worst thing that could ever happen in a situation and then starts preparing for it to happen. Not such a bad thing, I hear you think. But it is...because preparing for it is as bad as expecting it to happen - it's like brain can't differentiate between the two. It's taxing on my will power.

Do you know like we were saying, about the Earth revolving? It's like when you're a kid, the first time they tell you that the world is turning and you just can't quite believe it cause everything looks like it's standing still? I can feel it, the turn of the earth. The ground beneath our feet is spinning at a thousand miles per hour. The entire planet is hurtling around the sun at sixty-seven miles per hour. And I can feel it. We're falling through space, you and me, clinging to the skin of this tiny little world. And if we let go... That's who I am.

I was talking to Rick today about something and bless his heart he was trying to reassure me that I had nothing to worry about. Well, I say talking but it was more like incoherent sentences, just some of my thoughts coming out all jumbled. Yeah...it's a mess in my head at the moment. I'm in the process of clearing things up but whenever I get close to everything being in it's box, something else comes up and I think about it and...it's a big mess again.

Point is... It makes  me do the mardy thing again and I can't help it and sometimes I don't even know i'm being like it and it's difficult for...people.

Do you know what it feels like to be angry at yourself all of the time, to feel like you're being constantly squeezed by a rope tied around your body?

Sometimes it eases off, you know? Usually when i'm settled and content I can forget about it; but it's always there, and the slightest thing triggers it off, the rope squeezes tighter around me and I feel suffocated.

When it happens, I try not to project it on anyone else. I just come across as mardy because nobody understands. I don't think anybody can understand.

Oh, the doctor came to see me today. Fucking arsehole is starting to get on my last nerve.

Because you know what? I don't "self harm", since people keep assuming the worse. I just throw things and punch things and IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. I threw a vase, it smashed all over the place, and I didn't realise there were shards of broken porcelain on the dresser when I banged my fist and arm on the top - that's how I ended up tearing my arm to shreds. I didn't physically pick up a knife or a piece of glass or whatever people use and cut my arm up.

Is everyone happy now?

Someone once told me: 


"Eliza, take all the time you need. Shit, its been two years since everything went crazy for me. It still hurts knowing I messed everything up. I can put up this front all I want, have all the fun I can. But when I hit that bed sometimes, it all comes back. And it sucks. Let's hope it doesn't damper who you are. Hopefully these negative feelings will subside, even if not completely."


I hope they do subside for the sake of my sanity. 


I feel like i've changed into a completely different person.

My seemingly endless cycle:

Scream, shout, yell, smash things up, runaway, hit, kick, punch, swear, curse, cry, sob, hurt yourself, keep your distance, hurt, ache, isolate yourself, shut down.

This morning?

Our private words.

Eggs, coffee, toast, forgiveness.

Peace within chaos.