378 pages, 16 videos, 71 photos

i have been away from the internets for a wee while.

working like a busy little bee - because i am going to motherflippin' AUSTRALIA for a month in september. qantas and their pricey fuel mean i currently have over a grand's worth of e-ticket sitting in my inbox atm. so i am squirreling my pennies away, obsessing over getting a bit fitter in time for me to go, and being amused by the prospect of maybe seeing adult men wearing shorts with knee-high socks.

i also turned 25. that can be a new blog entry all by itself, so i'll leave that for another time. quarter-life crisis much?

i say i have been away from the internet, but in my snatched spare minutes at work or home i have become completely obsessed with stumbleupon. i downloaded the firefox plugin only a couple of weeks ago and have entered the wild world of 'social bookmarking'. yes, it appears at first like one big favourites list, but OH, it's so much more than that.

for the uninformed - through rating sites you like and have discovered, tagging, recommendations of friends and other sources, you 'stumble' on pages which should be of interest to you. if it's not, give it the thumbs down. after about, say, 378 pages rated already, stumbleupon has a pretty well-rounded idea of your fondness for baking cupcakes, internet humour involving dinosaurs, slightly disturbing illustration, vintage photography, totally impractical architecture and design, and absolutely everything on passive-aggressive notes dot com.

if you, too, thought you had exhausted the joy of discovery online, add me as a friend and we can decrease our work productivity together.

hell-o-kitties

third cat in and i've decided perhaps my little cat experiment deserves its own distinct blog for all its tom(ha!)foolery. best to keep them separate, i think. the great cataloguing of glasgow's cats can be found at the imaginatively named hello kitties or via my profile.

catholicism: pure dead brilliant

yesterday i was walking back to work after unsuccessfully looking for my P45 in the flat i am house-sitting at the moment. why is it your P45s never want to be found? anyway, it's quite near celtic park and rather lovely. HEY JENNIFER! i drank all your energy drinks. sorry. you may want to remove that california roll i left behind your fridge.

i encountered a glasgow ned on the horizon. he was walking in quite an aggressive manner. you know that balls-too-big contentious swagger? he had a fine piece of flammable shellsuit on and bared alarmingly decayed teeth. i could tell he was looking at me so i just kept my eyes down and marched on.

when he got closer, he stopped and asked a very curious thing. he said:

"are yah catholic hen?"

hmm. whattodowhattodo, i was thinking. the way i saw it, i had one of two options, bearing in mind my location: say yes (get stabbed) or say no (and get stabbed). the "why on earth does it matter?" option didn't come across my mind at first, sorry. it's not every day you get asked who you pray to at night for your nintendo wii.

figuring surely violence wouldn't be carried out on little ole me in broad daylight, i said "uhhhh.. no.. uhmmmm".

obviously because i have the face of someone who needs saving, he thrust a wee plastic sleeve into my hand. in it was a small sheet of paper with a lovely pentecostal scene on the front, and the various, uh, mysteries of the holy rosary on the back. tucked in a wee pouch was a golden locket type-thing (later inspection revealed it is, indeed, flexible and has a pleasing 'give' when bitten - sort of like prop gold pirate booty) with ole JC on the front, and "pray for us" in a cursive script on the back. who we have to pray for - well, that's another mystery.

i foolishly said "i don't.. i don't have any money" (oh claire! how presumptive and rude!) to which he replied "have wan. you can keep it" and that was it. he was on his way. no preachy message, no explanation as to how to begin my devotional prayer duties, nothing. i have only a scarce knowledge of catholicism - my father's family are staunchly nae-craic free church of scotland islanders but i have always been a member of the church of meh - so i better get tae learning about these various mysteries, i think.

i found it curious because the previous week i spotted a plastic crucifix on the ground and picked it up. it's been in my jacket pocket ever since, and i get various bemused/alarmed looks whenever i'm digging for change and i bring it out accidentally.

now, if only i can arrange for some matzo ball soup to be dished out to me at partick station this passover..

at your cervix

too gynaecological for yah?

oh, blogger. i originally had my posts over at vox but it was starting to look a bit messy. i thought perhaps i would transfer them all over here but eh, fuckit. nahh. clean slate. i'll test drive this format out and see how it goes. duplication a-go-go! plus, i like how the default font is trebuchet ms. surely a good sign, right? uhm.

i never wanted to create a blog that publishes every time i scratch my ass. my life is pretty platitudinous. ooh, i love that word! and alliteration. i prefer writing things on random topics on occasion, little projects. mostly to keep me getting painfully bored. sometimes my brain thinks it is flatlining. i would almost call them bastardised essays if they were in any way academic (not so) my gay husband, stephen fry, has coined a term - 'blessay' - for his long musings, which i think is a great meeting of internet and ecclesiastical vocab, ha. i never create anything that can even sniff at his greatness though. do you think stephen fry writes about how tyra banks is batshit crazy? i think not. i seek to amuse myself. if that means talking about how bitch shits herself in public, so be it.

but i don't know. i can't promise i won't post a line of random gossip once in a while. so we'll see how it goes. in vox it was normally a stream of film, game, technology, cultural and gender shit with a dusting of my-real-life happenings. when i say dusting, i actually mean quite a generous portion on occasion. i'll try and keep that to a limit though, because hooh boy, i recently looked over a livejournal i had in 2001 and shit's embarassing. also a little website my friends and i had created in 1998 (!) that is trawl-able through that way back machine internet archive. oof, cringe. know this, kids: the internet remembers.