half the world away

Don't accept anything less than big love. Massive, consuming, fast-paced, scary, wonderful, overwhelming, huge love. The kind of love that makes you want to put post-it notes with sweet nothings written on them all over his suitcase when he goes out of town for a night. The type of love that makes you suddenly understand why your mother has made you take your vitamins and fed you beautiful meals your whole life. Because long days and heavy eyelids don't matter when you've got big love. Nothing can keep you going like big love, because there's nothing in the world like it and once you find it? Oh my god you'll know.

Be-in.

Everyone should know how it feels to stand around in a muggy August hot kitchen, drinking wine too fast, talking too fast, changing songs too fast in the company of friend-love and love-love, wiping the smudged eyeliner out from under your eyes to see, so clearly, exactly where I am.

To be 23 and on my own was great. It was great, terrible fun. And it was what I needed, even when I didn't know that I did.

But to be 24. To be 24 and not on my own is more happiness and more sadness than I've ever known. And everyone should know how it feels to feel both.

Because when I'm wiping the playground sand off my best friend's shoulders as he runs off into the night, chasing something that even he can't say, I wish these moments of swing set park declaration huge, massive, overwhelming happiness for every living, breathing, thinking thing in the world. I watch the rest of them jump off picnic tables and let their feet take them where they're going. I know that just because I've been found...well, that doesn't mean that so many aren't still lost.

But the greatest thing about a love like this?

All it takes to heal the world inside my head is having him, at the end of the night, to rest it on.

I was born, lucky me.

On Monday my beautiful bike was at last freed from the evil winter imposed confines of my family's garage, meaning I can now go where I please, when I please, at the pace I please (confession: not only am I without car, I am also without license. At almost 24. I know, I know.)

So, yeah. It's really, really, really nice having my bike.

A part of me wishes I could be more eloquent about exactly how nice it is, but that would require me going in to a lengthy and likely boring explanation of my preternatural disdain for public transit/the fact that I walk everywhere and it therefore takes me forever to go anywhere that's not within my 5-block radius of living. Which I won't do, because the acquisition of my absolutely gorgeous and enviable green and yellow cruiser is, after all, merely a footnote to the rest of this post.

I've had no shortage recently of pleasant dates with dudes and whatnot, but last night while riding about town on said bike I came to a really startling and wonderful conclusion which is entirely beyond the messiness of my current dating situation, and it's one that I think worthy of sharing.

Quite simply: there can be no date more perfect than the one you take yourself on.

I did this last night, and feel a metric fuck-tonne better about life as a result. I didn't start out the evening with the intention of taking myself on the best date ever, but somewhere between my amazing and completely uninterrupted by other people/phone checking/book reading/etc. meal on the patio of one of my favourite restaurants and my glorious bike ride over to a fantastically under-the-radar thrift shop (that I never go to because it's just too fucking far without a bike) I noticed that I couldn't stop smiling.

Singing, even.

Yes, that's right. I was warbling along with Ray Davies in the bike lane.

"Victoooooria, Victoooooria, Victoria, Vic-toreeahh"

I most certainly looked like a moron (albeit a moron with really great hair), and I highly doubt my voice sounded even remotely pleasant. But singing along to The Kinks, cruising down College Street (which, I feel it's important to note, was not even close to being empty), it occurred to me that, in the midst of the veritable insanity that is my life, I'd forgotten just how nice being nice to myself feels.

Ah.

Stuff

A maelstrom of auditions that have entered my life this week. I don't believe I've yet mentioned that I'm an actress but yeah, I am (in addition to being a bored office worker, writer and semi-frequent generally debauched mess, of course); the benefit of this is not only the prospect of lots and lots of work that I enjoy coming down the pipeline soon, but also that there has been virtually no time for office boredom, wallowing in self-indulgent blog entries or going out every night and being a waster.

Although I was planning on a 'detox' of sorts from the drinking, drugging and dating anyways, the auditioning is most certainly making such plan easier to execute.

I feel not dead for the first time in ages. And my skin looks fucking fantastic.

Productivity has its benefits, no?

That being said, it's been seven days of a prim, proper and productive Lush, and I terribly miss certain things....Diet Coke, for one. And coffee. And substances. And my [party] friends.

How I'm even surviving being alive without the first two I've no idea; I suppose I have more willpower than I've previously given myself credit for. The other stuff...well, yeah. It's only been seven days, and for those of you who are far, far more well-behaved than I that might not seem like a very long time. I will elaborate no further than to say for me, it is. Very much so, it is.

Tonight brings some of my good behavior to an end, as I will be going out. I'm well aware that some people out there can, through what I assume to be some type of magic, voodoo or witchery of some sort, manage to abstain from drinking entirely when out at the various places I frequent, but I will never be an individual who can exert that kind of demi-god-like self-control over myself. So sue me, it's just the way it is (I also consider 'casual smoker' an oxymoron, in case you were wondering).

So yes, I will be going out and I WILL BE DRINKING. HOORAY!

I won't, however, be staying out all night.

Tomorrow morning brings yet another audition and a film shoot, meaning my usual hot mess Saturday self needs to be sans the mess part, for real. It's all kind of well-timed, considering I'm also in the middle of the Universe's curse that happens once a month to human beings unlucky enough to be born with vaginas. See, productivity really is bringing out a new responsible side of me!

The work day (and the aforementioned curse, for that matter) cannot end fast enough.

Happy Friday!

Better off as the fool than the owner of that kind of heart.

I may have been the kind of girl who wore her heart on her sleeve at some point in my life, but I can say with a good deal of certainty that I haven't been that type for quite some time. Somewhere along the line playing my cards close to my chest seemed like the logical thing to do, and it's since become dangerously easy to simply never show my cards to anyone at all.

I'm not saying that my guardedness is wise or clever or particularly well thought-out, but everything and everyone is based on such fucking externality anyways that really, what difference does it make? So long as my thighs don't touch and my roots have been touched up and my heavily braceleted wrists are thinner than the girls' sitting next to me, it doesn't. So long as I go out often enough (but not too much) and drink this and know the bar staff there and that club owner here and am always welcome in the booth, it doesn't. So long as there's a vague sense of knowing that I'm smarter than all of this, more than all of this and not trapped by all of this, it doesn't.

Or does it?

The fortress of anonymity that I've built and fiercely protect around Nightgowns & Cigarettes can be somewhat problematic for me; just because they don't know me doesn't stop me from wanting them to at times...but, mind you, not enough for me to confess to anything.

So what will it take for me to stop being so horribly scared? The mention in a recent issue of Eye Weekly certainly didn't do it. As we sat there on our stolen couch, the newspaper print of the thin pages staining our fingers as they flipped through, taking note of the photos of our friends and columns about the bars that we get free drinks in, surveying the events that we'll accept and decline the inevitable invites to and it was there, caught in my throat right there with the smoke, and for a brief, fleeting moment I wanted them to know. "You see the word Lush there, in bold on the fifth page's Letters section? Yeah, well, that's me."

It would have been so easy, and it wouldn't, couldn't come out. It absolutely couldn't come out. For them to see it and know, to attach the faces and names to every post would be the death of all of the honesty I have in me and reserve for here. It's why I carry my notebook with me everywhere I go and hide it if I'm sleeping, showering or if my purse is too small to fit it in. It's why I lock all of my old, finished notebooks in a desk to which only I have the key.

Not to be too morbid on a Friday afternoon or anything, but here it goes: I often wonder what'll happen to them if I die unexpectedly.

...yeah, too morbid. But one more reason to stay alive long enough to see my eventual death coming I guess.

Friday Fun.

This week did not start out on the best of notes to say the least. A Friday and Saturday of unbridled, dangerously enjoyable debauchery resulted in me showing up at my soul-sucking gray hell of a Major Depressive Episode-inducing cubicle on Monday morning without the following items (or, for that matter, a clue as to what in the fucking fuck I am doing with my life):

- iPhone. Lost somewhere between Saturday night's fourteen trillion overpriced cab rides and the creepiest after-hours I've ever had the pleasure of curling up on a couch and chain-smoking in at 4 a.m. A few very nice young Irishmen sporting mohawks - who may or may not have been involved in illegal activity - attempted to help me look for it in said after-hours, but it was not found and I woke up at some ungodly hour the next day bemoaning my existence as a result. Never before did I know how utterly lost and helpless I would feel without a fucking gadget. Eww, am I technologically dependent or what?

- Contact lenses. Somehow I managed to rip one in half while it was still in my eye, which I discovered around the same time that I began bemoaning my iPhone-less life on Sunday. This really smart move of mine left me with no choice but to place an order for a new pair, impatiently wait for them to arrive (a.k.a. bombard the bitchy optometrist's secretary with demanding phone calls every six hours), and wear my broken, horrendously ugly glasses in the interim, lest my blindness wind me up in the middle of an intersection or something equally life-threatening/dumb.

- My dignity. This one I'm not going to get into for obvious reasons. But yeah, it might have gone missing there for a couple of days, I won't deny it.

Alas. To paraphrase the hottest Beatle (Mr. George Harrison), all things must pass indeed, and that they have...

I got my eyes back, I bought a new iPhone, and I have been having a seriously excellent run of good hair days. Tonight brings about a massive and expertly planned (by me, obvi) birthday throwdown for my amazing roommate, and tomorrow the weather is apparently going to be conducive to going outdoors with, like, bare legs and stuff. And did I mention that I also acquired the sickest pair of red, polka-dotted, heart-shaped Lolita sunglasses courtesy of my other wonderful roommate? And that the really nice Australian girl who works at the hostel I live across the street from has offered my roommates and I an open invitation to the delicious free pancake breakfast they make every morning? I'm fairly certain she's a lesbian and I'm also fairly certain that she's attempting to convert my hetero ass, but regardless. Yes, yes and yes.

One more thing to be happy about on this beautiful day: Kasabian are back on form after that trainwreck that was 'Empire'. Having heard 'Underdog' and this one that follows (which is accompanied by the coolest music video I've seen in years...take note, Primal Scream), I expect 'West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum' will be my glorious soundtrack to my glorious Summer Oh-Nine.
Enjoy.

Kasabian - Vlad the Impaler from Kasabian on Vimeo.



P.S. Expect the Shame Sprial that is my life to continue upon its usual course as of early next week, but let happy be happy for now, aiight?