Which is rather full of princesses

I'm playing a princess in April. Probably one of the best princesses; Imogen in Shakespeare's Cymbeline. She is just amazing. There are some cracking speeches, she's completely lovely but still gets to be angry and heartbroken, she dresses like a boy and is even a bit brutal to an unwanted suitor: "I care not for you, I hate you;/ which I had rather you felt than make't my boast". All of this is an awful lot of fun to do onstage. However...




The word 'beautiful' gets bandied about quite a lot. Now, people who know me fairly well might hear the warning bells implicit in that word being spoken in any close proximity to me. We don't have a good relationship. Of course, I'm quite happy to use it. Many is the time that word has passed my lips in a breathy exclamation of delight about any number of things - humans, animals, objects, songs, buildings, landscapes, ideas. I am perfectly happy to label these things as beautiful and it generally is something that has a fair emotional whack along with it. I have a real love of beauty, which occasionally hits me like a ton of bricks (oof, beauty) and it encompasses many forms. Which is why I struggle with it being applied to me.




Now, this isn't modesty, false or otherwise. I don't say things like this in order to get compliments. I am not fishing. Full disclosure time: I am fairly vain. I love looking at my face. It genuinely fascinates me. Actually, I am obsessive about faces in general. The photography books I own are all portraits. Part of the reason I love films so much is because of the film books my parents had and I used to gaze at the stills because of the frozen extremes of expression. "I Walked With a Zombie" was responsible for several nightmares growing up. I mean, this:

It's the eyes. Nothing else about this photo is that creepy. The woman on the left even looks slightly bored: "Blah blah voodoo zombies. I want a manicure..."

So don't get me wrong, I love my face. It is expressive and interesting and an absolutely brilliant storytelling tool. The problem is more that I am not beautiful. I have high standards when it comes to beauty and I do not meet them. The emotional whack that is my appreciation of beauty in other things is, when it comes to me, something far more punishing. It hurts me that I am not beautiful. Every time during the readthrough that someone mentions Imogen's beauty, I squirm. And it is A LOT. Seriously. She is so pretty that even when dressed as a boy, when she meets her separated-at-birth brothers for the first time, one of them chats her up: "Were you a woman, youth/I should woo hard". Also, yes, I concede that the plot is completely mental.



Therefore, I am in paroxysms of horror about people watching the play and assuming that because I play the part, that is who I believe myself to be. Much like when I had a hilarious part in a short play where my character thinks she's a 9 out of 10. I enjoyed the part a lot but when I sat in the audience to watch the rest of the plays, a fellow audience member turned to me and said "I'd say you were a four. After a pint". For some reason, perhaps because he'd had a few more than a pint or because my character was kind of a bitch or because we'd been having a conversation in his head prior to that, he felt that was an entirely appropriate thing to say to a complete stranger (if you're interested, my cutting response was to look shocked, say nothing, obsess about it through the rest of the evening, cry in the car on the way back home and then fail to sleep for a few nights. I know, I know. I am the coolest woman who ever lived. The best bit is that my Mum, who had been sitting next to me but had missed the vital exchange, saw him a couple of days later and told him the heck off (she's very polite). Again, I am not in the least bit cool but my Mum is awesome).



However, the upside is the determination that all of this gives me. I may not be beautiful but I am going to try as hard as humanly possible to give the impression that I am. The last time I felt like this because of a play (Closer, 2009), I lost two stone. I hate feeling perpetually hungry. I hate aching constantly because of exercise. But I love the thought of being onstage and doing this part well. And the thought that sustains me when I'm running against the wind on Southsea seafront or when I'm passing up on a meal of Waitrose's Macaroni Cheese followed by their Tarte au Chocolat?



I am a motherfucking princess.

Having a fire relit that you thought to be out

I've been reading again. This wasn't even a New Year's Resolution. I just started reading and I'm back to my old habits. I came in this afternoon, washed up then sat down and read a book cover to cover. Admittedly it was quite a small book but still. That makes my fifth book of the year so far. I blame Finchy. He bought me The Hunger Games for Christmas and on New Year's Day, I bought the second and third books in the trilogy, which I'd finished by January 3rd. Then I had a week's break, partly out of respect and partly for me to try and get them out of my head. I didn't stop thinking about it all for a while. I came to in the shower one day and realised I'd spent about half an hour trying to figure out how I was feeling about the fate of a particular character and how to correctly pronounce their name and how I felt about the fact that they were being played by Lenny Kravitz in the upcoming film adaptation (confused, primarily. I mean; Lenny Kravitz, where did that come from?) I urge you to read them, my obsessions do enjoy company. Also, the actress Kristen Bell had a Hunger Games-themed birthday party and it sounded awesome and I'd quite like one where people weren't just turning up and being confused. Anyway, stepping away from that particular crazy section in my head... actually no, back to crazy for a second: People may be put off by the whole it's-the-new-Twilight thing. Please don't be. It's really good. Despite the whole Team Peeta/Team Gale thing. Stupid other people. Any romance in The Hunger Games is kind of incidental to the fantastic set-up, brutal violence and often startling commentary on human nature, centred around a genuinely fascinating heroine.

Again, attempting to exit crazy for a moment, it feels really good to be reading again. I never really stopped, and I have read some good books in the last couple of years, but it feels like I'm myself again: Delving into fantasy and magic realism and normal fiction and occasional bits of actual educational reading material and plays and poems; scraping time together in my lunch hour and the walk to work and the precious hour of respite between getting in and going out and that half hour between going to bed and falling asleep. I'll have to put it on hold again in a bit when I starts a-line-learnin' again but I think I'll probably get far better at returning to it again. I've rediscovered the feeling that isn't just the promise of a good meal but also the appetite to consume it.

Running

the more i run the more i think that i could start and never stop the thud of my feet and the music's beat the shock of my breath that feeling of death that comes and goes the wind that flows and stops and blows the checking my knee and the feeling of glee as i pick up speed and run and run and fly then trip then on my way to keep up to keep on to keep on past where it's no longer fun but i still must run to be i want to be who i can see in my mind's eye the more i run the more i think that i could start and never stop

Right. That's it. I'm out of here.

The only interest I got from being on match.com were two men in their fifties. In the two months that I belonged, I had 300-odd men take a look at my profile. And the only two men that expressed any interest were twenty years my senior.

It's quite a sobering moment. The point at which you realise that this is just not going to work. The point when you have to leave a dating website because it has managed to dent your soul.

For eharmony it was the moment when they matched me (scientifically!) with someone who was wrong for me in every way. I had even seen him earlier on a different site and had to share the link with friends to show them the most perfect example of a bad profile that I'd ever seen. Hey, I never said I was a nice person.

Now, in all fairness, it has not been all bad. I have had some nice experiences with the dating sites thing. However, every time I sign up to a site I feel hopeful for a few days and then my hope turns to naught. It's like being rejected every day and what makes it worse is that I am simultaneously rejecting others and often for the same spurious reasons that they are rejecting me. It just isn't good enough and I'm sick of feeling that I'm constantly failing.

Not that I have anything approaching a plan. It is well documented that I struggle with this. But I feel that I'm doing myself a favour by just resisting the lure of the dating sites. They promise to make the search easier but, for me at least, they make it more constant and less gratifying. They don't make me feel particularly good about myself.

So, at least until the next time it feels like a good idea, I am through. I am hoping that this decision lasts for a bit longer than it has before.