Skin Deep

I am obsessed with the way I look.

That doesn’t mean I spend hours gazing into the mirror thinking how fabulous I am, all evidence to the contrary. However – if I totalled up the amount of time I spent thinking about my hair, my face, my piercings, my tattoos, my weight, my clothes, my make-up, and donated that time to charity… well, I’m sure no Ethiopian children would ever feel ugly again.

I could probably write seven blogs on this topic, one for each of the above categories, but I suspect that an entire column dedicated to my face-related woes or how whenever I wear make-up it seems to end up dripping down my cheeks not three minutes later would probably start to bore people, and I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t know that you’re all dangling on my every word (ha ha). Hence, I need to try to condense all this image-angst into one chocolate covered bite-sized (oh! The calories!) chunk.

When I was a kid, I went through a phase of being a tom boy. This was during the phase of my live when I loved animals – all animals, any animals, even woodlice and worms and those weird looking cats with no hair – better than I loved my own family. I considered worrying about hair, rather than, say, the plight of starving Spanish donkeys or badly beaten racehorses, to be deeply infra dig and so tried to see how long I could go for without washing my hideous boy-ish mop, before my mother would forcibly hold me under the shower and scrub my head with a bar of soap.

I dressed entirely in jumble sale puffa jackets and hand-me-down jodhpurs that were about 6 sizes too big for me. The only item of clothing I had any passion for was the silk on my riding hat, which was red, black and shiny.

I looked horrific – I don’t know how my poor mother dealt with dragging me into public, especially as this greasy-haired, horse-poo-covered look was nicely topped off with lots of sanctimonious comments about vegetarianism and battery farming… seriously, I would have drowned myself in the lake had I had to bring me up, so can we all give my mum a round of applause – but I was happy. I’m sure there’s a homily in there somewhere, but I am choosing not to see it.

When did the obsession with how I looked begin? It started when I discovered the world of being a Goth. And rack my brains as I might, I can’t think what made me decide that smearing my face with white powder, dying my hair black, drawing spider webs coming out of my eyes, tying bandanas around the tops of my DM boots and wearing black, fringey skirts, a hat, an overcoat and a permanent scowl was a good idea. Other than logic and good sense, of course. Winky face.

Actually, thinking about it for another minute or so, I realise that it was, of course, the teenager’s best friend that made me decide the gothic life was for me… the pressure of wanting to fit in. Not that being a Goth was ever painful for me ­- once you got away from the exquisite pain of merely drawing breath that every Goth girl feels, of course. I never dressed that way against my will… but I’m sure it was a case of monkey see, monkey do. To be sure, I took the whole white face/black everything else further than the friends I had been trying to impress ever did, but then I’ve never really understood the meaning of the word moderation.

This was my first foray into the world of caring about what I looked like, and my god, did I embrace it with both arms. Years of fraught arguments with my parents over hair dye, make-up, piercings and tattoos were to follow. I imagine that my parents, looking at me dressed from head to toe in vast swathes of tent-like black, replete with the requisite fringes and mirrors, the black relieved only by the patchy white powder plastered on my face, longed to be able to argue with me about skirts that looked liked belts and a face daubed in too much blusher. Instead, I remember my father once looking me and saying, with a sigh that rattled the armchairs, ‘You’re such a pretty girl, Johanna. Why do you contrive to make yourself look so ugly?’

A whole new world accompanied this image change – a world full of gigs in smoky rooms, dancing with my arms tracing ethereal shapes in the sky, as if I was in a trance – a world punctuated by hours spent in murky second hand record shops, flicking through the Mission and Siouxsie sections for that elusive picture disc – a world of poetry and self harm and pints of snakebite and black. What came first, the music or the image? As Nick Hornby once nearly said, did I listen to gothic music because I was miserable, or was I miserable because I listened to gothic music?

I remained a Goth – secretly piercing my tongue the day before I started at uni, and dreaming about marrying Andrew Eldritch – until mid-way through my first year, when I suddenly became a brightly coloured, bubble-gum rave kid, dressing in children’s t-shirts, animal ears and little skirts, never dreaming of going out of the house without that most essential of items for a 20-year-old… a water pistol. To be sure, I still had the odd day where I would wear my long red velvet coat and my black PVC trousers with a pair of handcuffs attached to the belt loops, and stalk about pretending I was Dracula (and why not? I kinda miss those days, now I think about it), but mostly, I was reborn as a raver, and I put my Sisters of Mercy records away in favour of Josh Wink.

(Well, actually, I must make it clear that I’ve never owned more than a Josh Wink cassette single in my life, and was still mostly listening to Morrissey, the Cure and the Tindersticks on my own time, but when I went out, I was dancing to electronic music and finding that I sorta kinda liked it.)

What was the reason for this fashion about-face? There were three main trigger points, I think – events that all occurred within the same few months, which, now I think back on it, I wonder if they weren’t the best months of my life. The first two – true love, and the discovery of ecstasy – I won’t dwell on here. It was the hair dye that really did it.

I had been dying my hair black (like my soul) since I was 16, and I imagined I would keep it that way forever. After all, Morrissey had pretty much instructed me to do so (I wear black on the outside, cos black is how I feel on the inside - thanks for the fashion tips, Moz!) and I would never do anything without his say so. I only ever intended to dye some so-blonde-they-look-white streaks into my black barnet, something that Goths will dally with occasionally when they want to stand out from the murky crowd.

So my friend Amy bleached two streaks into my black hair, and I was entranced. To this day, some 14 years later, one of my clearest memories is of me sitting in the canteen at uni picking over, most likely, a cold-as-stone and hard-as-bullets jacket potato, the high point of the canteen’s cuisine, holding one of my new icy blonde streaks out in front of me and gazing at it in wonder. It was like the first hair that ever there was – it was SO stripped of colour, and it was soft, and babyish… I was in love.

Imagine, I thought to myself, how much better my look, my love affairs, my whole LIFE would be if all of my hair looked like this? I pushed the rest of my inedible potato aside, commandeered Amy, and went back to her room to finish what we had started.

The only slight issue was that we didn’t really have enough bleach powder. Or solution. And we didn’t suss either of those facts out until we were about a third of the way through the process. Fortunately, we lived in student halls for arty types, and every third person bleached their hair. Thus followed a night of hair raising hilarity, where we would run out of one ingredient or another every 15 minutes (approx.) and Amy would have to go and knock on more doors, begging more bleaching ingredients. Somehow, we sort of got the lot done (and I can’t stress the ‘sort of’ enough there), but of course some of the bleach, by that point, had been on my hair for about three hours (and Jesus, did that sting) and some for about three minutes, so the effect was, well, avante garde to say the very least. A bloody mess, to be more accurate. Some of it was white, some was orange, and some still a muddy black. I looked like a tiger with a hangover, who had been rolling in some mud. But I loved it!

I stayed blonde for around 14 years after that. Sometimes I had red streaks (which the rest of the world always seemed to think were pink, but I bought the dye, I knew they were red!), sometimes I had dreadlock extensions, sometimes I had braids – but always, I was blonde. You’ll be relieved to learn that I learnt to dye my hair properly at some point during that time and was no longer sporting the drunken muddy tiger look.

Along with the blonde hair came a lust for clothes and shoes which, while I don’t mean to boast, I have rarely seen equalled. Yeah, I loved clothes when I was a Goth, but the items my code allowed me to buy were pretty limited. Suddenly, the shops – all of them – were my oyster, and I gaily threw student loan after student loan away on t-shirts from Etam (irony, you see?), crazy coloured trousers, coats that looked like muppets, glitter and accessories. Oh, the accessories. Tiaras, earrings, chokers, toe rings, anklets, and of course, the all-important water pistols.

It was around this time that I started collecting the best accessories of all – tattoos. I had been getting pierced for some time now… I had my belly button done at Glastonbury, aged 17… my tongue, as mentioned earlier, the day before I started uni… a lip piercing came next, and then I start to lose count of which piercing happened in which order. Strange places in my ears I hadn’t previously heard of, even a nipple… but fun as piercings are, they’re not a patch on the thrill of fresh new ink.

My first tattoo was the standard mistake. I went to a terrible shop, and I got a terrible design. I’m not sure I can even bring myself to tell you, such a cliché that it was, but my lust for doing slightly stupid things in the name of fashion is equal only to my lust for spilling my guts on the internet, so don’t fret, dear reader, I’ll let you in on the secret. It was the rose from the front of the first Manic Street Preachers album, the rose that Richie had on his arm. Except that Richie’s was in glorious colour and mine, natch, was black – coloured tattoos, I felt, were vile. Oh, and on the album cover, the rose had a banner across it saying ‘Generation Terrorists.’ Mine said ‘dead flower.’ Which I thought was impossibly romantic, but which now makes me cringe. It was too low down, too dark, a total mess – but like my tiger coloured hair, I loved it none the less. It lasted about ten years, I think, before I got it covered up with a giant Hello Kitty with wings. I’m not sure if the move from the Manic Street Preachers to a cartoon cat made entirely to trick children and foolish women out of all of their money is a step up or a step down in life. I shall leave you to ponder.

I collected tattoos like stickers when I was at uni. This was partially because there was a tattoo shop in between my house and the bus stop, and I had a major crush on the tattoo artist who did most of my first pieces. This guy was much better than the hack who did my rose. I think this guy (his name was Steve) did another three or four for me, as well as a handful of piercings. I imagined that we were friends and that he gave me a discount, but I’m not sure that was ever really true.

I won’t tell you about all my tattoos or we’ll be here way too long and you’ll all wander off to watch TV. I’ll just take a moment to mention that my favourites are the butterfly on my foot that I got as a freebie when I was working in a tattoo shop in Tottenham, another (very different!) butterfly I got at a convention in Brighton, and the Madonna faces on the inside of my left arm. I have one tattoo which has A Meaning – duh, duh, duh! – which is the fairly crappy dragon on my stomach. I got that to reclaim my body after a break-up, at a point where I was reading lots of feminist literature and used phrases like ‘reclaim my body’ on a regular basis. I have plans for many more – the next will be my favourite quote of all time, a line from Leonard Conman’s masterpiece Anthem, I just haven’t worked out where to put it yet – but alas, I doubt my funds will ever stretch to encompass my dreams.

So, I have squandered time, money and effort on Things To Make Me Look Good to a ridiculous degree over the past couple of decades. Shoes, dresses, shoes, trousers, shoes, t-shirts, shoes, make-up… I am a slave to them all. Did I mention the shoes? Learning to walk in high heels, aged about 30, when I saw some heels with skulls and crossbones on and knew I couldn’t live without them, has been a revelation for both myself and my osteopath, who can probably retire on the extra cash I’m giving him due to the damage my shoes do my back. It’s actually dangerous for me to go into Irregular Choice, on Carnaby Street, a treasure trove of fairy tale shoes, ALL OF WHICH I want. I might plan to buy one sale pair, but will be lucky to leave without three full price sets. And then will probably go back to get the other two pairs I had ruled out within the next week. Those shoes are like cocaine to me.

My most recent fashion fun excursion is my ever changing hair. For years now, I have dreamt of having hair like Carrie Bradshaw’s, circa the end of series 2, long, curly, blonde… but no matter how long I tried to grow it for, it never looked like that, so, on a whim, about 8 months ago, I cut it all off and got some red and black extensions in a bit of fringey bit at the side. And I have discovered the joy that is short hair and had three more new styles since. Cos, well, you need to get short hair cut pretty often anyway, right? So if you’re gonna shell out the cash, you might as well get something new. And plus, with short hair, if it looks horrible, who cares? Wear a hat for three weeks, and when you take it off, it’s all ok again!

Short hair also gave me the confidence to return to my roots, do something I’ve been talking about for years – channel Amy Whininghouse and go Back to Black. I now have a black Mohawk, and not only do I love it, but I know my 15-year-old self would be proud. Will I start listening to the Fields of the Nephilim again soon and writing swoony letters to Wayne Hussey? Only time will tell.

I Can't Get No Sleep

Keen followers of my ever-scintillating Face Book status updates will know, firstly, that I suffer from insomnia, and secondly that I’ve been trying Paul McKenna’s I Can Make you Sleep method for about a month now.

‘I suffer from insomnia.’ Listen to that phrase. Isn’t it dramatic? Doesn’t it sound romantic and desperate and as though I am a skinny heroine in a Victorian novel, fraily and beautifully dying of consumption, giddy and gorgeous as I cough blood into my lace hankerchief? I say that I suffer from insomnia, but how true I really think that is varies from day to day. Sometimes I think it’s a perfectly legitimate thing to think, and at other times I think I’m over-egging the pudding, protesting too much, making a fuss about nothing, and that all that actually happens is I wake up to pee a couple of times a night.

Certainly, I usually have very little problem actually getting to sleep – quite the opposite in fact, oftentimes I have huge amounts of trouble staying awake. The following things make me fall asleep, at times instantly: watching TV; listening to the radio or a talking book; warm, comfy seats; being at the cinema; being at the theatre; being in a lecture; being in a meeting; sitting on the tube; trying to read a complicated paper in my office. Honestly, at those moments I think narcolepsy would be a more fitting diagnosis for me than insomnia. It is really, really annoying.

Throughout my psychology degree, I had lectures in the evenings, and I would regularly have to sit in between my two best friends, one of whom had a tiny baby and averaged an hour’s sleep a week or something crazy (so what my excuse was, god only knows), and get them to both poke me in the ribs, one on either side, as soon as my eyes started to nod. Which was ALL THE TIME. It really was an issue… it’s very hard taking notes when your head is constantly doing that irresistible, hypnotic, nodding, lolling thing and your eyes are being pulled down as heavily as Barry White falling down the stairs. I would still try to make notes, even as I was falling asleep, with the result that many of my notes from those days are totally incomprehensible and scrawl across the page at mad angles, and include words based around the dreams I was even starting to have, rather than the lectures I was trying to listen to.

I used to tell myself that it was because the lectures were in the evenings and I was tired after a day of work, but as soon as I started my PhD and had lectures at 10am on Tuesday mornings, exactly the same thing happened to me, and I found myself fighting against sleep once again. I think it’s just as soon as I stop, as soon as I’m sitting and doing something passive, I just will fall asleep. And there doesn’t seem to be much I can do about it. It shouldn’t have surprised me really, I was constantly falling asleep at my desk when I was a sub-editor and waking to find myself still typing, but now about monkeys and zombies and ponies rather than the latest happenings in EastEnders.

So why am I always so tired? Well, this brings us back to the initial diagnosis. I have – or think I have – insomnia. As discussed, I (usually) fall asleep fine. Sometimes I have trouble with the falling asleep as well, but no more than anyone does, I don’t think. But I wake up. Sometimes at 5am. Sometimes at 4am. Sometimes at 3am. And then it often feels like I’m awake for the rest of the night from that point onwards. I know that that isn’t the case, as I continue to have crazy dreams (recent highlights include a tiger trying to get into my house and a panic over some escaped snakes), but I’m really fairly sure that any sleep I do get from that point is so light that it would only take someone whispering my name to wake me back up again.

What is it like, being awake, or half awake, at that time of night? It’s not like (or not normally like) I’m staring at the ceiling, counting down the slowly passing seconds until I can get up. It’s a lot more confusing than that. I’m often not quite sure if I am awake or asleep, if what I was just dreaming is real or in my head. But after a while I will realise I’m awake enough to be asking myself that question and then I wonder how long I’ve been that way for and if I can get back to sleep and what will happen if I don’t.

It’s not so bad when – as is the case at the moment, oh constant reader, for I am alone again, natura-diddly, as Ned Flanders once said – when I’m sleeping alone. I have a fairly fail-safe way of getting myself either back to sleep or at least not fretting about being awake, which is listening to audio books. I find that that occupies enough of my brain to stop me being sad or worrying, and so allows me to drift back off again. Of course, if I’m with a fella, I fret about waking him up, or I’m in his bed where there is no handy stereo from the dark ages and collection of story tapes, and then I’m left to lie awake for much longer.

Why is it, I wonder, that no-one’s mind naturally turns to summer and friends and DJing and crisps when one is lying awake at night? Why, instead, do we all start thinking about that stupid thing we accidentally said to a friend five years ago? Or the time we started telling a story and then realised no-one was actually listening? Or the fact that, no matter how promising every relationship starts out like, they all turn to shit in ever decreasing lengths of time? Or the fact that one day, we’ll doubtless be alone, penniless, miserable, doomed to die alone in a hovel and not be discovered until our cats have eaten half of our faces? (Or is all the above just me?) What is it in human nature that makes those things so much easier to ponder at 4am than anything happy?

I started having sleeping problems when I was about 19, I think, which is of course approximately 100 million years ago now, ho ho ho. The problems have got better and worse since then, and have been the worst they’ve ever been in the past six months. This may be partly because I’ve spent a lot of the past six months confined to my bedroom, treating my bed as my own personal cinema/café/sofa/beauty parlour/music auditorium, something Paul McKenna thinks is a very bad idea, and a habit which I am now having to break. Break being the operative word – it feels like I’m slowing breaking each of my own fingers with a hammer, one by one, trying to stop always being in my bed when there’s no good reason to be somewhere else, but apparently this is what I must do.

I long to be able to sleep through the night. I love sleep so much. I love dreaming and switching off from the world, I love being cosy and warm and safe. Being awake is so often tiring and painful and boring – being asleep is never any of those things. Being tired makes life so much harder. I’m prone to pessimism at the best of times, but everything seems so much bleaker when I’ve only had three decent hours of sleep a night for the past week. The slightest slight can push me over the brink; the biscuits running out can make me want to self harm.

I won't lie... I am not above sleeping pills. Nytol one a night work for me sometimes but seem to have stopped. Melatonin, which many people seem to think is the mutt's nuts, doesn't make a dent. What works really, really nicely is a temazepam. Or two. Or, for preference, three, taken in a big handful. If anyone wants to send me some, I shall give you some babies in return.

(Naturally, I'm only joking. Of course a benzo addiction would be worse than insomnia. Can't quite think why at the moment, but I'm sure there is a reason, right?)

So, for my birthday, perhaps because she was bored of my incessant moaning and crying, my best friend and DJ life partner bought me Paul McKenna’s I Can Make you Sleep book and CD. And so the great experiment has begun!

I won’t bore you with all the teeny tiny details, but the premise of the book essentially works like this… follow all these rules, and you will sleep. These are the rules:

Get up half an hour earlier every day,

Only go to bed when actually tired,

No TV in bed,

No TV an hour before bed,

Listen to the CD when going to sleep,

Bed is only for sleep, doing the rude dance and reading Macca’s book. (No other books. He reckons this is cos his book has hypnotic suggestions in it and is therefore ok, although other books aren’t, but I can’t help feeling that this is nothing but shameless self-promotion and hence I take no part in it and choose to read nothing at all in bed. Ha! That’ll show him! Sleep fascist!)

No eating three hours before bed,

Eat healthily,

No caffeine after 2pm,

No napping during the day,

And this, the worst... no alcohol.

There’s also a load of relaxation exercises and stuff in there… things like speaking to yourself in a nicer tone of voice rather than a fretful, nagging one while you can’t sleep. It’s all pretty common sense stuff, really.

So far, so simple, right? Well, no, actually… even the first one is a puzzler for me. Get up half an hour earlier every day… but I get up at different times most days! Saturdays I need to be at work by 9.30, so need to get up at 8. Sundays I can get up when I like. Mondays I try not to get up too early as I work til 1am. Tuesdays I don’t set an alarm as I won’t have got in til 2 and don’t need to be at work til 12.30. Wednesdays I have yoga at 7.45 so need to get up at 6.30. Thursdays and Fridays I aim to be at uni for 9 which means getting up around 7.30. How does one reconcile this??? I made the executive decision to get up at 6.30 every day, as I certainly didn’t want to get up earlier than I already was for yoga. Or at least, that’s what I said to myself, but now I think about it, I was really only doing that on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays as my late night shift on Mondays means that I just don’t think getting up at 6.30 on either Mondays or Tuesdays is sensible, and even I’m not psychotically morning-ish enough to want to get up at 6.30 on the weekends. I figure that just not lying around in bed trying to get back to sleep but instead accepting that once I’m awake, I’d better get up, is sensible enough for the other days.

Trying to time not eating for three hours before bed, not watching TV for an hour before bed and going to bed when tired so that the three coordinate can be something of a headache, especially when the times I get home from work/uni are just as random as the times I get up. I am still trying to do more reading than watching TV, but I’ve been slipping in recent weeks.

As I said earlier, I think the hardest thing, even harder than giving up drinking (which, admittedly, I only took up yesterday, I spent most of December drunk, but didn’t we all?) (we didn’t? Oh, crap) is to only use my bed for sleeping. My bed is my favourite place in the world to be. One of my biggest joys in life is lying in bed of a morning posting nonsense on the internet and listening to Shaun Keaveney. It’s just not the same shivering on the sofa. I had, in fact, all but decided that it wasn’t worth it and I’d rather keep sleeping badly and sitting on my bed during the day, but reverting to bed-sitting over the past week or so has also coincided with a huge, freshly baked batch of depression, straight from the over-dramatic emotion-oven (although which came first I really couldn’t say) so I am forced to admit that it probably is worth it after all.

So… does it work? This is doubtless the question on everyone’s lips! The answer so far would have to be that it does, partly, work. I became somewhat less disciplined over Christmas, but when I was doing it semi-properly at the beginning of December, I was sleeping semi-better, only waking up once in the night and on one momentous occasion (a Monday night/Tuesday morning) not waking up once for eight hours, which was the first time that had happened to me in years and years. And I can only blame myself for it not working entirely, as I was still drinking and not really doing the relaxation exercises properly.

However, it is a new year and time for us all to improve ourselves, and so now I’m going to really try to do it properly – not drinking, the NLP nonsense that makes me cringe a bit, the whole nine yards. It could even be that the key to my entire world o misery is tied up in my inability to sleep, and if I can cure these problems by doing what Paul McKenna tells me, that seems a small price to pay. I will report back. Try no to sit too close to the edges of your seats… it will hurt if you tumble off.

A Christmas poem

Some friends of mine recently put on a fabulous cabaret. Of course, I could not resist the chance to get on stage and show off for the masses, so, in the style of Phoebe and her great Christmas song (you all know it, right? 'Monica, Monica, have a happy chanuka' etc), I wrote this poem for my friends and read it out. Here it is for everyone to see. Enjoy. And happy, happy Christmas to my lovely friends!

For my friends at Christmas (Dec. 2010)

Why do I love Christmas so?

Because it gleams, and sheens and sparkles.

The tinsel glints, the polished snow,

The golden foil covered marvels.

Deep green, rich red of spiky holly –

Happy Christmas, Kaye and Olly!

Why does Christmas fill my heart?

Because it sounds like peals of laughter.

The bang of crackers ripped apart,

The promise of happy ever after.

Nostalgic songs set in cosy stables –

Happy Christmas, Elaine and Rachel!

Why does Christmas make me grin?

It feels like woolly hats and a bright pink nose,

Like tummies so full that it’s a sin,

Roaring fires warming frosty toes.

Tables that buckle beneath the posh nosh –

Happy Christmas, James and Rosch!

Why do I give Christmas props?

Because it tastes like roast potatoes

And gin, and wine, and chocolate drops

Like a contented, dreamy, full-up doze.

All of this washed down with a hot toddy –

Happy Christmas, Jen and Roddy!

Why do I think Christmas is fantastic?

Because it smells like sharp satsumas,

The addictive twang of brand new plastic,

Excitement that lingers like a thrilling rumour.

I think the scent of Christmas is something primal –

Happy Christmas, Len and Michael!

Why do I love Christmas so?

Is it the snowy moon shaped in a crescent?

Is it Santa’s red and ruddy glow?

Or could it just be all the presents?

No – the thing that’s best about Christmas, you’ll see –

Is celebrating it with BBB!

Fifteen Minutes of Fame

As that well-known beat combo the Dizzies Rascals once said, ‘everybody wants to be famous, nobody wants to be nameless’ – and I have always believed them. However, I’m now realising that this isn’t necessarily the case. Apparently, I want to be famous, but not everyone else does, as when I tell them about my fame-hungry exploits, many people look at me like I’ve suggested a David Cameron support rally. I wonder if it’s partly this unexplained urge for fame that makes me write this blog? I mean, I love writing it, and I think it’s good for me to do something at least somewhat creative with my spare time, but is it not mostly a form of showing off? Which is, after all, something that I so love to do. In fact, I love to show off more than I even realised.

My best friend and DJ life partner recently organised my surprise birthday party. The evening kicked off with a night at a karaoke bar. “Oh, no, no, no,” I protested, “I won’t sing, I can’t sing, I’d be mortified, I’d need 8,000 gins before I could even contemplate it.” Turns out, this wasn’t quite accurate. All I actually needed was about two seconds of watching another friend sing a Madonna song and I was joining in like the little limelight-hog I am. I then sang Queen and Britney and more Madonna and even attempted Steam by East 17. The rap defeated me. I’ll never make an ill-spittin MC, I am sad to tell you all. I must congratulate my DJ life partner – she knows me better than I know myself. I can never, ever resist the opportunity to show off. I fear talking to people I don’t know and get panicky at the thought of going to parties that aren’t made up entirely of my best friends… but put me in a dance class and I’ll sharpen my elbows with a penknife so I can better poke people in the eye to get them out of my way in my mad dash to the front of the formation.

Showing off is all very well and good, but we all know that nothing in this life counts for anything unless it’s on the television, and this is, I think, where my hunger for fame comes in. It’s all very closely tied in with my no longer-with-us (and not just cos it ended) obsession with Big Brother. For six or seven years (I lost interest the year of Brian and the twins, which one was that?) I love, love, LOVED that show. And I will still defend it to the death, despite the fact I went off it – although I do have an equally convincing bunch of arguments for why I stopped watching it, oh the confusion! – but perhaps in another blog some time, because defending Big Brother is something I can waffle on about for hours.

I applied to be on the show not once, not twice but three whole times. The third time was one of the open auditions, where 10,000 annoying screamy teenagers and some so-called eccentric (their word; I could think of others) adults stood in a cold warehouse brimming over with their own egos for hours on end before talking to a camera for thirty seconds and being told to go home. I actually got through to the second stage that time, but no further than that. And I know, really, that that’s a good thing – I’d be bored and horrified and tearful beyond belief in the Big Brother house, but I still wanted to do it. Why? I couldn’t really tell you. At least partly cos it looked like fun. But also, I guess, because I apparently want to be famous and don’t have enough genuine talents to do it any other way.

Having failed to get onto Big Brother proper, I applied myself to those smaller challenges within the same realm – Big Brother’s Little Brother and Big Brother’s Big Mouth. The DJ life partner and myself started out by answering an ad in Heat magazine to be in the audience for BBLB, mostly because we both had monster crushes on Dermot O’Leary (something that seems a bit unfeasible now) and wanted to stand close to him. As I remember, he waved at us, and I went home happy, probably figuring that was the closest to Big Brother fame I would get.

However, I had much more success with Big Brother’s Big Mouth. Once again, I answered an ad in Heat asking for fans of the show to come and speak their brains in the audience of Russell Brand’s companion series. A producer rang me and I had to do a quiz about Big Brother to show that I was a genuine fan and not some fame-crazed nutter who was just pretending in order to get on telly. You know, like one of the people we were all so avidly watching. I did very, very well in the quiz. I believe I got every obscure answer right. The only question I remember now (and this would have been around series 5, I think, so it harked back quite a way) was ‘who were the first people to kiss on Big Brother?’ The answer, fact fans, is Mel and Tom. Remember Tom, and his red shorts? I sure do.

As a result of the scholarly attention paid to my reading of the show (ahem) I was offered the chance to sit on the panel rather than in with the plebs and be given the title of ‘obsessive fan.’ I said no at first, believe it or not, cos I wanted to sit with my DJ life partner in with everyone else. But having spoken to her, I changed my mind and was on TV for all to see.

Two things stand out to me about that first time on Big Mouth. The first was that, at the time, I only knew Russell Brand from Dancefloor Chart and thought he was intensely annoying. Oh, how quickly that changed when I met him and looked into his smouldering eyes and fell to pieces inside my little beating heart! It was only after deciding that he was devastatingly handsome that I found that he is also one of the most intelligent, funny and kind people on the planet – it seems unfair that he has all of those things! What’s left for the rest of us, I ask? Admittedly, I only know this from reading his books, watching him on TV and seeing his standup, but I don’t think he’s faking. He’s so genuine and so right about so much. Anyway, enough babbling about Russell, let’s get back to **ME!!**

The other thing about that day which was noteworthy and so incredibly funny was that one of the celebrity guests on the panel was Timmy Mallet (the other was obscure comedian Paul Foot). Bless Timmy Mallet. I swear to god, he was more excited than I was. If you look on his website you can, to this day, see pictures of me and him together on our way to the studio as he was taking photos of EVERYTHING, like this was the grandest day out he’d ever had. I can also exclusively reveal that his ring tone is ‘Itsy Witsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.’ No word of a lie.

I went back on Big Mouth once more as an obsessive fan, and I now have an imdb page as a result of these two ventures into the silver-plated screen, something an ex stumbled on accidentally some years ago. Oh yeah, suck it, losers! That second time one of the celebrity guests was former youth icon and current day BangFace TV presenter Normski, who said – and he was right – that my DJ life partner has magic powers. I forget now what she’d done to elicit this response.

Then, to my eternal sadness, they dropped the obsessive fan from the show’s format, but, undeterred, I was an audience member enough times that Russell and I got to be on saying hello terms. Well, I said hello, he asked me if I was a lesbian and said I had nice boobs, something I hope will be written on my gravestone (a wee joke). I could tell you my brilliant Russell Brand story, but it’s too off tangent and I have an idea for a future blog which it will better fit into, so I’ll stop wittering about Russell and move on.

My attempts to appear on the front of the Daily Mail (dressed in my mother’s bridal veil) have not been limited to Big Brother. Keen followers of my blog will know that if there’s one person I’m more obsessed with than Russell, it’s Shaun Keaveny, the marvelous and erudite presenter of the 6 Music breakfast show. I’ve been actually on his show twice now and had about a million texts read out. My most recent mention came when he had been joking about people fancying him and I sent him a love poem. It went ‘Shaun, Shaun, I know you love Lucy, but I fancy you and that is the truth, see, you fill up my mornings with music and jokes – run away with me and be my bloke!’ (Genius, I think we can all agree.) (NB – Lucy is his wife. She is a lucky lady.)

Sadly, Shaun didn’t read it out, but he did play about 3 seconds of ‘J’taime’ (is that what it’s called?) and dedicate it to me. I was happy all day long. (Well, for about five minutes anyway, which is roughly the same thing, right?)

Other highlights of me + fame include an actual live performance as a robin in the horse of the year’s Pony Club show when I was 11, something that involved staying backstage for a week at Olympia, meeting all the famous horses and nearly dying of excitement (although also fear – the posh Pony Club girls did not like me and my charity shop clothes, oh no, not one little bit), and a recent blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance DJing in an episode of Party Wars. It’s on Living, you must have seen it… right? No?

My most recent attempt at getting into your telly box (all the better to control your brain) would have, if it had succeeded, been my best effort yet. I nearly, nearly, oh-so-nearly got onto Come Dine With Me. I got down to the last 10, of which five would have been picked, but sadly, I am not mouthy enough. I made it through two phone interviews and a home visit from two producers before being turned down. And now for this blog’s second exclusive revelation – I can now tell you, blog fans, why the contestants on CDWM never seem to have prepared or know what they’re doing; it’s because you only find out you’re on the show five days before they start filming! I had to break all my superstitions and act as though I was going to get on – cleaning the house, practicing my menu etc – before I knew one way or the other, cos there was no way I was going to get caught on the hop if I DID get on.

I was disappointed not to make it, for sure. But a part of me was also pretty relieved as there is no way in hell I would have NOT got drunk and made a show of myself on at least one of the evenings, probably all five. I’m a great one for taking things personally and crying like a child, especially if there’s been a drop taken, and even I’m not crazy enough to think I’d want to be recognised by strangers as being ‘that blubbery Hello Kitty weirdo off Come Dine with Me.’

I am still no closer to knowing that it is that drives me to want to be on telly. Is it cos when I was a kid I thought for a while I might be an actor, or a show jumper – or both, for preference – and so be on your telly all the time? Is it cos I want to do new and fun things, and some of those things involve being on TV? Is it cos I love telly and think it somehow holds the answers to the mystery of life? Or is it just cos I’m a big, fat, self-obsessed show off who thinks that everyone is surely as fascinated by me as I am? You’ll have to wait until my biopic comes out to learn the answer to that one, I’m afraid.

My love affair with the internet

Of all the drugs I've ever taken (and you, oh constant reader, will realise that's a few, although not any more... six months and counting, she says, taking a big old swig of white wine), I think the internet is the most potent, the most appealing, the most unputdownable. It's the first thing I do in the morning, the last thing I do at night. If I were ever to tally up the amount of time I spend in my office working vs the amount of time I spend on the internet, I think I would be in for a very nasty surprise. I'll probably be doing my PhD for a year longer than I need to because of the internet. I hope to god I never get a real job (something that seems increasingly less likely I'll ever need to worry about, as the ConDems set about tearing the universities to shreds and then gnawing on the carcasses), because if I do, I'll be sacked for excessive internet use more quickly than a goth would rush to the dancefloor when "This Corrosion" came on.

From the moment I saw my first email, I was hooked. It seems hard to believe, now, that I somehow lived until I had started my first job without really having the internet. I first heard of the internet in my first year at university, as a wet-behind-the-ears 18 year old in a Morrissey t-shirt, and, at that point, I only got the vaguest grasp on what it was. I heard about it from this emo-looking third year who liked Sheep on Drugs and who I thought was the greatest thing since sliced forearms. In my first degree, a sorry affair called 'Creative Arts' which I went to for the writing but had to stick around on for the conceptual art wank, the third years had to do arty farty 'honours projects,' which the first years were obliged to help with. Obviously, I volunteered to help the skinny goth boy with the mohawk. He was going to make an installation that was somehow a representation of cyberspace. I had never heard of cyberspace before and really had no notion of what he was talking about, but nodded keenly with my tongue hanging out and drool dribbling oh-so-attractively down my chin anyway. Sadly, he dropped out and it never happened... but that was my first introduction to the internet.

By the time I was in the third year, the library had two or three (count em!) computers that were connected to the internet, and the then boyfriend showed me how to look up pictures of Hello Kitty, and so I passed a good few hours doing that, but then basically decided that was all the internet was really good for and that it was probably a passing fad, and went back to making compilation tapes, getting fivers out of cashpoints, making VHS copies of Dawson's Creek and doing all those other things that now age me so.

As I started to say before, it was when I got my First Proper Job, aged 21, I guess, that I suddenly got the point of the internet. Emails... oh, emails! That job, as with pretty much every job I've had since, was mostly characterised by being very very quiet and leaving me with Nothing To Do. (NB - a question - is everyone on earth just pretending to be busy at work, like, all the time? Or have I just got really unlucky? I know it must seem, if you've never done it, that being paid to do nothing is the ultimate dream, but it is a) soul detroying and b) makes the nano-seconds feel like millenia, in the way even the dullest physics lesson never did, so it's really not that great. And seriously... it seems to happen to me in EVERY JOB I EVER DO. I'd love to imagine that it's because I'm some kind of Rain Man style genius and that I just finish work super quickly, but this is not the case. I don't get it! Anyway, ahem, back to The Point...)

So I'm at this job with nothing to do, and, fortunately for me, I make a couple of friends. A friend called Lucy and a friend called Jenny. And we spend our time emailing each other on the very primitive internal email system (this is just how primitive - if you wanted to send an external email, you had to write something different at the beginning of the address, like pressing 9 for an outside line. Can you IMAGINE?). This email system used to warn you when something was coming - the top right hand of the screen would say something like 'collecting message number 1... 2... 3...' and so on and on, maybe even up to 7 or 8 if it was a really lucky day.

Never so quickly did a person take to the medium of spelling out every tiny, dull detail of their day in the dim-witted belief that others out there were reading and interested, rather than just skimming and responding with their own mealy minutae (surely the basis of all internet forums everywhere, no?) than I did. I was a woman possessed. The days when the email broke down - and they were all too frequent - were days when I genuinely felt I may as well have stayed in bed. The crushing disappointment when I saw I had a new email, dropped everything, rushed to greet it and discovered it was something actually do it with work is impossible to convey.

The joy of email continued to punctuate my life through my first and my second jobs. At some point during this time, I got my first internet-at-home... if you could call it that. My brother, who I lived with at the time, bought this contraption that somehow gave us the slowest, most basic black and white internet through the TV. Did anyone else ever have this? When I think back on it now, it seems like a remote control on a wire - impossible that such a thing was ever not laughed at, and yet it seemed like a revolution at the time. We both set up Talk 21 accounts, but mostly used the internet for reading Daniel Drennan's superbly funny wrap-ups of 90210 and then watching the show again with eyes that the scales were freshly fallen from.

(An aside - if you've ever watched any 90210, I beg you to visit this site and read some of what you find there... it's just the funniest thing you'll ever come across.

http://www.inquisitor.com/90210/)

I was excited enough by the internet already at this point, but when I got my third job and we all actually had the internet on our own computers, rather than having to go to the library to use it (job number one) or there being one computer in the office online that we had to share (job number two), I could not believe my luck. I was like a kid in a candy store - or at least, I would have been, if I had any ideas about where to look.

See, to me, the internet has always been about communication. MTV child that I am, I have neither the patience nor the interest for long pages of text that can teach me this or that (unless it's hilarious things about 90210, clearly). But there was, for me - and, let's face it, there still is - something intoxicating about writing something down, pressing send, and then (in theory) the whole world and her husband being able to see it and respond. So I mostly spent my time on the guestbook of the website of a club I went to a lot, responding to everything anyone said, no matter how trite or tiny. (Remember - all my jobs ever have filled up about 20% of the time I have to be in the office... I had a lot of time to kill back then.)

This got pretty old pretty quick, but there was nothing else for me to do. This was some time before I discovered Ebay... a very dangerous discovery when I did finally make it, as I would literally, whenever bored - and that happened A LOT, type 'hello kitty' into it and buy pretty much whatever I saw, being fooled on some primal level by those clever clogs in charge who tell you that you've WON. Not that you've purchased - you've WON! Aren't you clever? Haven't you done well? Let's slip that cash out your back pocket while you're not looking, check you OUT for beating all the competition!

Salvation soon became mine, though, when a friend of mine started a Yahoo group for the people posting on the previously mentioned club message board. All of a sudden, my working life had a purpose - talking to these mysterious people with made up names about anything and everything under the sun, and keenly waiting to see if they'd commented on the brilliance and beauty that I was spouting forth. Mostly about what sandwich I'd had that day.

An aside - sort of - on the topic of made-up names, or internet handles, or whatever you want to call them. My own - mangakitten - came about because when joining another Yahoo group about the TV show Once and Again all the names I originally wanted to use - variations on Hello Kitty, mostly - had been used up. Mangakitten felt very much like a poor cousin by the time I got to it. And yet, now, somehow, it seems like a persona I have created, like the bigger half of me, like a role that I play up to which I think was always there but somehow, by naming it, it's taken over. Johanna is shy and awkward and humdrum. Mangakitten is extrovert and confident and melodramatic. Johanna hangs around in the corners and looks at her feet. Mangakitten takes over and won't let anyone else get a word in edgeways. I'm not sure which, out of Johanna's ridiculous reticence or Mangakitten's brassy brashness, I loathe more.

So anyway, I finally got the internet proper at home, in my room (gasp!) around the time this Yahoo group came into existence, and very quickly, it seemed to become, along with shoes and American television, one of the driving forces in my life. And, I must say, with very good reason. I am blessed with many gorgeous, wonderful, clever, generous and amazing friends, and the ones that *haven't* come from the internet I can count on 4 fingers.

The Yahoo group became a PHBB (or whatever the hell it's called - I live my life on the internet, but its workings are a mystery to me and frankly, I like it that way, I don't want the magic to die) bulletin board, and I am the highest poster on there by some million miles and I love, love, LOVE it.

I had a brief dalliance with a different board when my home board pissed me off for a while - we all know what rows on the internet are like, how incredibly personal they seem and how ridiculous they really are - but I soon came home to roost. It's my happy place and I cannot imagine life without it.

For years, that board and email were enough to sustain me... but then, unbelievably, given how it now dominates everything, just three-ish years ago I heard the words 'Face Book' strung together for the first time.

Who remembers FaceBook back then? Remember how every time you wanted to post anything, you had to fill in one of those annoying 'what does this box say?' BrSO!&*CB with a line through it, and you couldn't read it properly half the time, so it would take approx 5.7 hours to post anything... your status had to start with 'is' (making it oh so much more of a challenge to get song lyrics in there, my favourite game ever)... you couldn't 'like' posts... uploading a photo took a week... and yet we all stuck with it, didn't we? And who among us can imagine a life without FaceAche now? I know I can't!

There are other things I quite like on the internet. Lolcats are very funny, although I loathe the way people talk as though they are lolcats... it's only funny when it's the CATS, goddamn it! I've recently been introduced to Hyperbole and a Half, which makes me sick with envy because it so puts my own blog to shame, and yet I still have to like it because it's so funny... I couldn't live without imdb to check that I'm right about knowing which obscure Yank TV show I know the minor character in the film I'm watching from... Wikipedia will of course be the most cited reference in my PhD... and yet it's the 'social networking' (yuck) sites that have my heart. Apart from Twitter. I can't get on with that, for some reason. Maybe one day. (NB - actually, I say 'for some reason,' but I do in fact know why. I'm not that interested in communicating with celebrities, or faux celebrities, or wannabe celebrities online. I'm only interested in talking to friends or potential friends. Given my lifelong thrall to celebrity, I have literally no idea why this is but... I just can't bring myself to care about what even the celebrities I like have to say about their lives in 25 words or less, or whatever it is, and all my friends that are on Twitter can express themselves more fully on FB or the aforementioned board. So yes. That's why.)

I wonder what it is that makes it so much easier for me to spill my guts online than in person. (Not that I'm backwards about coming forwards in person either... I'm not really one for hiding my emotions, you'll be shocked to learn.) I guess it must be the anonymity. Maybe it's the fact that if you don't like the answer, you can just skim it and move on. Maybe it's the fact that I can talk for as long as I like and kid myself people are still listening. I'm really not quite sure. Whatever it is, though, I really can't imagine that even crack is as good as it still feels for me now to see that I've got 4 new emails or 6 new FB notifications or that 8 people have replied to a thread I started on my board. My love affair with the internet has lasted longer than any other love affair in my life. And I can't see it ever ending.

The Drug of the Nation

(Am I the only person to have noticed that the Disposable Heroes of HipHoprisy were better at naming things than they were at anything else? I mean, that name... it's the best name for a band in the history of bands, surely! And the song of theirs that everyone knows, and from which this blog title comes - Television, the Drug of the Nation - that sounds like the toppest of all top tunes! However, then the music... it's ok. Not very exciting. And yeah, I realise it's probably 20 years old now or something depressing like that, but even at the time I remember thinking it was a bit boring. In fact, I got all excited about the idea of hearing that tune again, a couple of years ago, as I thought it would have to be one of those things that I hadn't been that bothered about at the time, but realised I LOVED now, like Take That or... well, I can't think of another, hipper example right now, but maybe it will come to me. Instead, I still found myself fairly non-plussed. It's pretty good. But the name is so much better, and that's why I've nicked it to spout some of my own nonsense underneath.

It's just a bit worthy. Not as bad as (shudder) Arrested Development, the hippiest of hippie hop this world has ever seen (it makes me so sad that one of the worst hip hop acts in the history of hip hop shares its name with one of the best TV shows in the history of TV), nowhere near that bad. But still. They're no Public Enemy or Missy Elliot or Eric B and Rakim.

Shall I stop wittering and get on with it?)

So... TV. My relationship with television has been long and involved. It goes back deeper and longer than most of my real life relationships. I've been pals with Carrie Bradshaw for longer than I've been pals with my DJ life partner. I have only one friend I've known for longer than Rachel Green. (Or should that be Rachel Greene? It differs in different episodes, you know. Outraged? Yes, I was too!) It's only family that go back further with me than Dylan MacKay or Kelly Taylor.

This is probably a terrible thing to admit, but I care more about the people on my television than about many of the people I know in real life. I cry at their dramas and laugh at their joys on a much more frequent basis. Their thoughts inform my philosophies and their actions drive mine in almost every thread of everything I do. My morals are shaped by scriptwriters and executive producers, not religious tomes. My expectations of life are sketched out by glossy haired actors, not by opening my eyes to reality. My dreams are inhabited by fictional people more than the ones I spend my day to day life with. And I'm beginning to wonder if this is a problem.

some tv shows i have loved

Beverly Hills 90210 was probably the show that started my obsessive love of television. I would love to pretend that I'm now hard pressed to say why, but this is not the case. Who could not love Dylan MacKay's slanting eyebrows and recovering alcoholic posturing? Who didn't find themselves identifying with either Brenda or Kelly (or both) as they fought for Dylan's hand and watched their friendship dashed to death on the rocks of teenage angst? Kelly joined a cult! And got addicted to coke! Brenda got engaged! Then broke it off over a pre-nup! Brandon got a gambling problem! The actors playing Steve and Andrea were way too old! Donna Martin graduated! Now there was a TV show, and no mistake. Will you, blog fans, lose all respect for me if I tell you that the new 90210 is the only thing currently being made that I really care about? I fear you will. So pretend you didn't see that.

If I now talk about acclaimed indie hit My So-Called Life will I regain some street cred? Depends who you are, I guess. Jordan Catalano came straight out of the Dylan McKay school of heroes - brooding, moody, gorgeous... as tempting as siren songs for teenage girls. I wanted so desperately to have Rayanne Graff as my best friend, to be as beautiful-without-realising-it as Angela Chase, to be able to go to Ricky with my problems and have him smooth them all out. It is such a crime against television - no, art! - that that show got canned after one series and we will never find out if Rayanne and Angela made it up or not.

Moonlighting also deserves a special mention. I love Bruce Willis and always will, and it's in no small part because of David Addison, a role I think he has never bettered. I think Bruce's slick-talking, commitment shy, thinking woman's crumpet must have been the template for the equally swoonsome Larry, played to such perfection by Robert Downey Jnr in Ally McBeal, and if the two were to have a fist fight over me (hell, it's my blog, I'm allowed to daydream), I'm not honestly sure who I would want to win. But Moonlighting wasn't just great because of Bruce/David - this, for me, was the original will-they-won't-they story (repeated to great effect by Dean Cain and Terri Hatcher's Clark and Lois, by Daphne and Niles, by Ross and Rachel, ad infinitum)... and, since the original, also the best. Throw in all the crazy dream sequences and surreal plot twists, and this show should've won a Nobel prize.

(By the way, I know it might not seem like it right now, but I do love television for more reasons than just drooling over fit blokes playing cool characters. I love it for the sake of writing and drama and stories and, goddamn it, ART! Not just because of hot men! Or at least, I always thought I did... maybe I was wrong?)

If we're going down the route of older, surreal shows, I naturally have to mention Twin Peaks, which was a spectacular feast of strange characters (the Log Lady, anyone?), stranger plots, freaky music, scary villains (I still get a bit freaked out to this day if I see someone in the street who looks a bit like Bob... which happens more than you'd think... in fact, there's a photo of me on FB which I took myself where I think *I* look a bit like Bob, which is really quite unnerving!) and... yeah, yet more hot boys. Although the whole thing had a pretty disappointing ending, if I remember right.

Coming slightly more into the current day... did anyone apart from me, an ex-boyfriend of mine and my brother watch the tour de force that was Popular, the first show made by Ryan Murphy (him of Nip/Tuck and Glee fame)? If you didn't, I implore you... watch it. Watch it NOW! At first glance, this show seems a bit like 90210, which I realise may not interest many of you. But it's actually packed with such deliciously bizarre characters and strangely satirical plots that every episode is as naughty and as mouth-watering as a cracker laden with brie and topped with chutney, washed down with a glass of red. The social commentary is second only to the hairstyles in this series. And again - packed to the rafters with hotties, of the male and female variety.

Is it very tired and passé of me to love Sex and the City? To be honest, I don't care if it is. I really can't understand why anyone doesn't like this show. People say it's girlie, and yeah, it's got shoes and smooching in it... but the characters, the writing, the wit, the tragedy, the relationships (between the women and their men) and, yes, the outfits... I think the final season is a near perfect example of television writing. And it seems no coincidence to me AT ALL that SATC was dreamed up behind Darren Star, one of the major players behind 90210. What a god that man must be! I dream of being Carrie, and I dream of this blog making that dream more of a possibility. I too, unlike most of my friends, would have picked Big over Aiden. Although I actually think Smith was the pick of the men on that show. Come on, boys... be confident enough in your masculinity to watch it without getting scared you'll be labelled a girl and I defy you not to end up loving it.

As I mentioned at the start of this blog, one of the worst hip hop acts in the world shares a name with what, objectively speaking, I believe I must call the best show in the world: Arrested Development. There is actually nothing else in the world like this series, and I don't just mean in the realms of TV. The characters are all so weird and so nasty but somehow still so appealing. The plotlines are so twisted and convoluted, and every time you think something is going to resolve with the chance of a happy ending, some new and yet still hilarious disaster strikes. It is so dark and so sweet all at once. Again, cut tragically short by the idiots who run American TV, although there keep being rumours of a film. I can't see it happening though, now that Michael Cera is the teen film sensation that he is. And actually, these days, Nurse Jackie is doing a very, very good job as a replacement in the weird/funny/oh-my-god-did-they-just-DO-that!! stakes.

So, objectively speaking, I know that Arrested Development is the best show ever made. But subjectively speaking... I know it's unoriginal... but I'm a Friends girl all the way. Friends is like the desktop wallpaper of my life. It's my comfort blanket, my cuddle trousers. I've probably seen every episode (and there are a lot of episodes) an average of 20 times, I'd guess. I can relate almost anything that happens, either to me or to someone I know, to an episode of Friends. I realise this is nothing to be proud of and yet, somehow, I still am. I watch it constantly and talk along to it, as if it's a Morrissey song that I'm singing all the words to.

(Two of my favourite Friends dialogues - please excuse the copying and pasting, it's late and I'm tired...

Rachel: See? Unisex.
Joey: Maybe *you* need sex. I just had sex a few days ago.
Rachel: No, Joey, U-N-I-sex.
Joey: I wouldn't say no to that.

Joey:		... it's a moo point ...
Rachel:		... you mean a moot point ...
Joey:		... no no, a moo point ... like a cows opinion, doesn't matter ... it's moo ...)

My life has recently been revolutionised by the new boxset which contains uncut footage and hence NEW JOKES!!! (One of my favourites being about Paul the Wine Guy from episode one - 'does he drink it, sell it, or just complain a lot?') This means more to my pitiful little life than I could ever hope to convey.

(These are my favourite TV shows. But I cannot finish this blog without also mentioning Teachers, Black Books, Frasier, Desperate Housewives, ER, Once and Again, Gilmore Girls and the L Word. Yeah, most of the TV I like is American. So sue me.)

I seem to have got a little sidetracked. The point of this blog wasn't to wax lyrical about all these television behemoths which have so filled my life with joy. The point is, in fact, the exact opposite.

Two recent things in my life - the last blog before this one, and a post made by a friend on the internet forum I spend all my time on when I'm not on FaceBook or propped up in front of Friends - have made me realise that the constant stream of television that is being fed into my brainbox whenever I'm alone is actually making me really quite miserable. To me, this is a revelation on a par with the splitting of the atom. And I'm doing a PhD... scary, isn't it? ;-) The thing is... I work what I consider to be quite hard most days, and so when I get home, I feel I have somehow earned the right to relax and do nothing else. So I turn the TV on and then forget to turn it off, even when I fall asleep, with the TV still on, some five or six hours later. And all the while, the fact that I only have the TV for company gradually making me feel more and more like a lonely loser with no friends and no future. It's as if someone has put a valve in my brain and is slowly leaking out all the hope and happiness I might have ever felt. Almost as if it is, after all, the opiate of the masses.

I do not intend to become one of those born-again anti-TV people that I always want to shoot on sight. I would hate to want to shoot myself. But I have turned over yet another new leaf (since my last one is now, five months on, still going so strong) and I now plan to only watch TV a little bit. (That's good and specific, eh?) And see if that will maybe make me a bit happier.

It seems to be working so far. I had quite the crappy day at work today, but instead of sobbing my heart out over the TV as I usually would, I have worked on some playlists for a wedding Twisted Kitten are playing at over the weekend and written this blog. And there's something that might be a smile playing around my heart.

Loneliness

There is a quote from Ally McBeal which some extensive research (well, five minutes on Google) won't reveal to me, but which, if I remember correctly, goes something like, 'I've tried my whole life to avoid being lonely. But when I think about it, the times when I've felt most lonely have been when I'm sitting right next to someone.' That's not quite right, she says it better. (And yes, I know she's not real, thank you very much.) I did think about going to get the DVDs to try to find it properly (I'm fairly sure it's the first one of a series - maybe series four - near the end of the episode, so it probably wouldn't take too long), but I suspect that way madness (in the form of lying on my bed doing nothing but watching Ally McBeal for the next 48 hours) lies. (Is that enough sets of brackets for an opening paragraph?) (No?) (Ok, we'll have some more.)

Loneliness is a funny old beast, isn't it? I always feel an affinity to that line from Ally, hence looking for it and thinking I would start this blog entry with it. And yet, now I think about it, I realise I'm almost the exact opposite to her. I spend a large portion of my life wishing I was on my own, away from all these rabbiting people ruffling up my view... and yet as soon as I am alone, I sink as fast into misery and loneliness as a lump of rock sinks into a murky pond.

I'm not quite sure what it is I'm looking for, or what exactly I think it is that's going to make me happy. A slap round the face is probably the most pertinent suggestion. I mean, really... what happened to the less boys, less whining I promised you all a while ago? Will I ever really stop moaning? Very likely not, I wouldn't hold your breath.

I had a weekend recently that was crammed full of people. People everywhere, falling out of doorways and tripping over each others' shoes. A quote from the fabulous Charlie Brooker occurs to me here, and this one I actually could find: "I don't get people. What's their appeal, precisely? They waddle around with their haircuts on, cluttering the pavement like gormless, farting skittles. They're awful." I spent a large portion of the weekend longing to be back at home and away from all the noise and clamour, and when I did get home, back to sanity and peace and quiet, what happened? I was so depressed for 24 hours I could scarcely get out of bed.

I'm not sure what I'm looking for. Is it to live on my own, with a high wire fence around my house, with only some guard dogs and all the Lost boxsets for company? Or is it to be married and have a house full of friends coming round at all hours of the day and night? I suppose I must grudgingly admit it's something in the middle, but where's the fun in that?

I think I should probably take some of my own advice and do some more 'flow' type things when I am on my own (see the DJing blog) rather than dying slow degree by slow degree in front of the television with my gameboy clutched in one hand and an endless stack of toast in the other. I should be doing things that will satisfy me, not things that will gratify me... taking more photos, writing more poetry, going swimming, practicing DJing, making clothes. But it's just so much effort. Can't I spend my life being miserable and finding new ways to articulate it on the internet instead? Oh, I can? Great... then everyone's a winner.