my feet ache!!!

I have lost count of the number of Susan Boyle albums I have sold to gleeful Grannies. I have lost count of the number of times I've been asked "where are the men's toilets?" I haven't lost track of how much I hate Susan Boyle's voice, or how mundane Michael Buble is, or how if I ever meet some lamer called "Pitbull" I'm going to kick him in the teeth.

I don't feel very Christmas-y at all, which is a shame. My feet hurt, my ears are sort of ringing, and my tongue is kinda sore from biting - you can't talk back in retail. If I could, I would have told the arse who yelled at me today because I wouldn't sell him an iPod because we don't stock them to learn some sodding manners.

On the plus side, Emma and I have done lots of dancing.

And I have two new pairs of black shoes that aren't boring, are mostly comfortable and good for work or whatever I end up doing.

And we close at 6pm tomorrow, which is the earliest in about 3 weeks!!!!!


Merry Christmas All


Ugh. Not very updatey or interesting. Wait till after the Boxing Day sales

yikes.

nobody i work with has a sense of humour.
this makes things very awkward, sometimes. (often)

yesterday a customer threw 2 dvds at my head.
and three people (all irish) told me that australians don't queue as well as the british.

if one more person tells me to "think of the money"
i will shove the money somewhere that they'll never forget.

christmas cheer?
sod it all.

-

(i was going to do proper haiku, but am exhausted. consider these post modern haikus)

help!

If you were me, and you had a choice between two subjects - one being "Creative Writing" and the other being "Slavery & Freedom: US History 1750-1890", which would you pick???

I'm sort of nervous about creative writing, but I'm not sure I could handle doing three history subjects (the other two subjects i'm enrolled in are History of Sexuality and History Of Europe: Revolutions). So any and all advice is welcome. (Please don't remind me that I'm supposed to be doing 4 subjects)

I have a long rant about public transport and the evils of teenage girls, but I have the Venusian Death Cold, as well as 40 hours of rostered work this week. If I have to hear the Glee soundtrack one more time, I may expire. In a fiery ball of fire.

Also, how the hell did it get to be the fifteenth of December??





**Having just tried to enroll, I was told that I haven't met the requirements to do Europe or Creative Writing. If I have to do any more Level 1 courses, I will seriously consider giving up and joining the circus. Honestly, UNSW, I have three Level 1 English HDs.

reflection of the television

It feels like I've been terribly busy the past two weeks, even though I haven't. The parents fled to Paris last Monday leaving me in charge of the three barbarians, mostly with the instruction "eat some bedamned vegetables!!"

So far, only the puppy has shown any interest in eating any of the eighteen kgs of beans my mother bought. I may have to make bean cupcakes in order to trick them into eating the wretched things.

Speaking of the puppy, Lottie takes up all my free time - I have to get up at an unholy Adult hour of 6am to fed her and be subjected to the morning acrobatics. Then I sleep on the lounge floor while she chews my hair. Then we run around the garden. Then I go to work or hide in my room. Then we repeat. Sometimes we go swimming. Tuesday we went to the vet and she behaved like she was being tortured, stole the ear-checking-contraption and carried on in a wholly embarrassing manner. Today she met my friend Libby's terrier, Buffy who is half Lottie's size. She wet herself in fear, sooked for half an hour and then chased Buffy for two hours. She slept for the rest of the afternoon.

Napping in front of the cricket is possibly her favourite time to nap - I wholeheartedly agree. Cricket was designed for napping, and the commencement of the season has my napping seasons bouncing in glee. I have a lot of sleep to catch up on, after the wretched year I've had at university.

The results are out by the way. Are you sitting down? You might be quite surprised - I managed distinctions for my two history subjects (honestly, I'm surprised my American History tutor knew who I was to give me my tut mark) and, get this, you'll never believe it - I PASSED MEDIA STUDIES!!! I KNOW!!! I have never been so happy about a simple pass mark, ever. I wept with joy, tiredness, shock and then hayfever. I am headed for second year next year. Now all you have to do is worship the timetabling gods for me, so that they smile on me and let me do the subjects I want.
I don't think I've ever been so excited to start school - but I expect this will change by March 1, 2010, when I have to go through all that stupid O Week/Week Zero rubbish again.

---

I'm terribly sorry, but I think Australian politics has become more of a spectacle than the West Indies cricket team. Tony Abbott as Opposition Leader??????????? Kristina Kenelly as Premier of NSW?????? I must have drunk too much whisky. I always think strange things are happening when I drink whisky. Like, really??? It doesnt make any sense. The only thing possibly more reviled in Australian Politics apart from Abbott is the NSW Labor Party. Its disgusting, all of it. I don't care how good the economy is, or if you personally don't believe in climate change. We have the chance to do something good, that will pay for itself eventually. You can't have it both ways. Australia suddenly feels like a fucking scary place to live, full of liars and religious nuts with their fingers on the triggers and purse strings.

New Zealand is suddenly looking very nice.

gasp

Lottie keeps eating Christmas Beetles. Does this bode negatively for Christmas??? She sort of tortures them before she eats them, clever little puppy.

x

I really want to tell everyone how special Hospice by The Antlers and Forget the Night Ahead by The Twilight Sad are. Like, shout it from rooftops and let off fireworks.

But they keep taking my breath away, and then I get so light headed that anything I write is more rubbish than usual, and climbing the stairs to the roof is out of the question.

x

at work today i
-buggered up the registers so many times i nearly cried
-wished people merry christmas even though its not december yet
-had a great talk with a girl about how sucky pearl jam are
-had a weird talk with a hipster boy about Mick Jagger's version of Ned Kelly
-arranged our Doctor Who DVDs in proper order, because I was sick of them being too high up and not in proper chronological order.

x

Its too hot for coherence.

the great bathers quest

The last pair of bathers I owned were gleefully tossed into a dumpster in Reykjavik at 4 am one rainy September morning. I remember this because I was so sick of these bathers, I'd had them for 4 years. I then avoided buying a new pair until last Sunday. I'm not big on swimming, mostly in some sort of Freudian reaction to my mother, who adores swimming. She petitioned, campaigned, downright whined for about 7 years until we relented and said, yes, OK, you can have a pool. Stop pouting. When summer hits, my mother goes out and buys herself new swimsuits. Gleefully. I have never met a woman who loves swimwear shopping as much as my mum. She's a wonder.

Part of the reason I think most women (women that I know, anyway) hate swimwear shopping is because its just so revealing - and that's just in the change room. When I went bathers shopping on Sunday (the hottest day EVER. UGH), I tried on TWELVE pairs of swimmers. I had to remind myself that they're supposed to be tight.

I didn't go near any of the bikinis. They're dangerous. For several reasons

1. There's just not enough fabric to protect me from skin cancer. I am PALE. I am Snow Maddie. I am not about to put my skin in danger. In fact, if I go swimming during the hottest period of the day (11am-3pm) then I am in rash shirt and boardies and 9L of 30+ sunscreen. Having grown up with a cancer specialist for a father, I cannot impress upon people how dangerous over exposure is in the sun. I am the girl who got sunburned in the Cotswold's DURING A FIVE MINUTE BREAK IN A THUNDERSTORM.
   
2. There's just not enough fabric to protect me from over exposing myself. Look, I get that the human body is a wonderful thing, but unfortunately, I (like alot of other lovely ladies) have very poor self esteem, as I am not all that thin. I don't have limbs you can snap. Also, I am very flaily with my limbs - expressive is a nicer word, I guess. Put me in something that is held together with two knots and is roughly the size of a tea saucer and we might run into some problems. You might see more than you wanted. And then I would run away and never come back.
3. They're boring. Like, really. All the patterns are boring. This season.
4. Why should I pay the same price for a bikini as I do a one piece???? That's just stupid

So with all that in mind, I decided on a one piece - yes, I know, you can get tankinis, but I don't like the word tank. Or that my tummy tends to escape. I trekked into DJ's and moseyed around the swimwear section. And found 12 one pieces to try on. Out of the twelve I tried

ONE of them had a neckline that perhaps should have been called A BELLYBUTTON LINE.
ONE of them I couldn't work out how to get into for a good 10 minutes.
ONE of them had a very unflattering red flower that emerged from ones rear.
TWO of them had weird cutout bits that I hadn't noticed when they were on the hanger
THREE of them had this sort of skirt thing that in theory was great, but in reality made me look five (the pink one) or eighty (the blue and navy ones)
FOUR of them were too high cut in the thigh.

I was beginning to think that I would just go and make myself a pair of swimmers that looked like this
from here

And then I tried on the last one piece I had found. To be honest, when I saw these on the rack, I'd sort of decided that they'd be the ones. Cut nicely on the thigh, with a little retro look to them. They looked swish, as long as I didn't look at my pasty thighs or belly. They weren't in danger of falling off. They would do, if only to ensure that I could go into the pool in the 40 degree heat that was Sunday.

from here

Obviously I look nothing like the girl in the picture. Which is the problem with swimsuits, and most fashion. They only cater for the beautiful. The rest of us have to work hard, the rest of us try stupid diets, or worry that perhaps they can't go out in public. It's sad. I mean, good on the beautiful women that meet the grade, but speaking as someone who rarely meets the grade when it comes to clothing size (because I am petite, but I am chubby! Who knew!) it can be very demoralising. The lights in change rooms don't help, nor all the mirrors. What does help is that all my friends are lovely, and when we were splashing about in the pool, trying to recover from the disgusting 40degree heat, they told me my bathers were nice. And then splashed me.


x


It was disgusting yesterday. So I of course, made a sort of invented pecan pie. Which was awesome. Sometimes my desire to vist the Americas is purely food based. Except for Tex-Mex. Ew.

T-O-M (or, spelling mishaps)

There's a scene in one of my favourite movies, Being Julia where Julia (Annette Benning) asks young gentleman how to spell his name. He replies "T-O-M...Tom" and they're all terribly embarrassed by the faux pas, as you would be in 1930s London.

I suppose not knowing someones name means you're allowed to ask how to spell it. That doesn't really enrage me (surprised?) but what does irritate me is when people who have known me for years, or people who have no connection to me (doctors, stores, UNIVERSITY) spell my name wrong and act offended when I correct them. The attitude seems to be "what's in a name?"

Well. A lot. I'm a Madeleine. That's M-A-D-E-L-E-I-N-E. You can bring nominative determinism into if you like - MAD by name, mad by nature. The three E's are VERY VERY important. And so is there placement. I have been a Madeline. A Madelein. A Madeliene. Look, they're all perfectly acceptable. But they aren't me.

I can't quite work out why I get so annoyed about it. Does this happen to anyone else, or is it just my fault being beset by parents who like to over complicate things?

Sometimes, I wish they'd stuck with the name they had for me when I was in utereo.

They used to call me Og.

Even then, I'd probably be asked how many 'g's.




x



Gosh, what a wonderful day today was - found out that my health has drastically improved (!), found a decent translation of Notre Dame de Paris (!!), went to the KIT Christmas launch (!!!) where they gave me and Claudia 20 Cupcakes (!!!!) came home to a bouncing puppy (!!!!!), watched Being Julia (!!!!!!) and will go to sleep on CLEAN SHEETS (!!!!!!!!!) (sleeping on clean sheets = brilliance. pure brilliance)