I'm Not Dead Yet.

I was told by Kathryn (who else?) that if I was thinking of letting this blog quietly end, I should notify my loyal readers. However, I am not sure that I want to do that quite yet. I’m quite fond of my little corner of the internet and am not convinced that I want to leave it behind forever.

The reason I was even considering it is because I find it increasingly hard to know what to write. I feel like all of the things that I used to worry about are all things that I’ve sort of dealt with. It’s weird; I’m kind of older and wiser and, as a result, less convinced of my own inherent interestingness (totally a word) to others. Romantic comedies always end when the heroine achieves some sort of resolution. They are rarely just about her finding romantic resolution; she often has to get out of her crappy job and solve all the other relationships in her life. That’s why they’re often derided because it is implied that the woman is unable to sort herself out without the help of a man. Which is unfortunate really. My opinion is that these things just happen together sometimes. I know that when I was feeling fairly flyaway and uncontrolled, I found those books reassuring and hoped it would happen to me. Funnily enough, it has. Not in a way that would have provided the same sort of catharsis as a book or a film plot, and I certainly got up to fewer hijinks and barely fell over at all. My boyfriend is not the reason it all happened or the reason why I’ve made the big changes but if I hadn’t made changes, I doubt I would have asked him out.

So if I feel that, to a certain extent, I have reached the end of the story, should I end the blog? I am certainly feeling all resolutiony. I’m packing up things at work and getting rid of my worldly possessions to charity shops, eBay and my Mum’s loft. I’ve finally moved out of the overweight bit of the BMI scale and into “healthy.” I appreciate that the BMI is flawed but I am still happy about it. I have quit all Coca Cola products and now work out almost every day. I am finally going off to do the thing that I’ve always wanted to do.

I am terrified but really happy/excited/anxious/practical/prepared/flying-by-the-seat-of-my-pants depending on which moment of the day it happens to be. In some ways: Totally prepared. In other ways: Really not sure what I’m preparing for. Is “Naked Day” merely a terrifying rumour? Will I like anyone I’m living with? Will I ever finish any of the books on my reading list given that I have not even finished the one that I’ve started? To what extent will they rip into my breathing (very likely, I’m a mouth breather), my voice (I have a soft “s”, which is a corrected lisp from when I was a child), my posture (my head juts forward and as a result means I have a tense neck, which may strangle vocal cords) and movement (very, very poor flexibility and balance)? All of those things that I’ve tried to work on but really struggled with will suddenly be held under a microscope.  Maybe they’ll teach me how to work on them properly, which is what I hope will happen, or maybe they’ll shake their heads sadly and tell me I will never make it.

Happily, I have received a number of bits of information to help me prepare for the first week. I am almost registered, I have an IT account, a student number and somewhere to live. It is not in halls. I thought that living in halls would be the absolute worst idea in the world. They would all drive me mad and think I was weird and just no. On so many levels. I can’t really plan for anything else and will just have to take it as it comes. As a control freak who pretends very hard to be cool, I am struggling with this but it really is all I can do. It is an adventure and a new chapter, and I hope that I have time (my schedule will be punishing) to update my blog and, in essence, bring you chaps along with me.

Living Like A Monk

We've just had an austerity chat in the office. I'm still very much a learner in the austerity stakes. While the money pressures of living alone have curbed my ability to spend money on things I don't need, I do still have a tendency to splash out. I still shop in Waitrose, for example. I know I should stop but I can't quite bring myself to. I bloody love Waitrose. I also had to buy some clothes at the beginning of March in order to wear something colourful for my dazzling television debut. Apart from that, though, I've done alright. I've definitely turned the volume down on the bit of my brain that expects Things as a matter of course. I struggle a bit with social spending but life is about to change significantly...

From my previous hints, you may be aware that I have been gearing up for Significant Changes to take place in life and that. As of now, I know they're actually going to happen so I don't mind letting you in on my news. About a year ago, my Mum surprised me in the middle of a phone conversation by offering to send me to drama school. I stopped talking coherently for about ten minutes and just made noises to reassure her that I was still on the other end of the phone. It took me about three months to decide whether I was going to do it and a further six months to actually fill in and send five forms off for MA Acting courses. It should have been six but one of them got lost in the post and I was feeling the pinch and delayed sending off the £35 audition fee until the point where it was no longer an issue. Anyway, I've had four auditions so far, I've received one reserve offer from Glasgow, two full offers from Birmingham and Guildford, I'm waiting to receive a response to my audition a week ago back from Central and trying to decide whether I need to go to East 15 at all. Whatever I choose to do, I am set for next year.

Now, this is both terrifying and exhilarating. I expected that it would take me a couple of attempts to actually get a place. I was not expecting anywhere near this level of success and I am fair giddy about the Guildford offer as I loved it when I went there. What it tells me is that I offer something that people are interested in working with and that is so exciting. The main reason I want to go is to get some more training, work with people who love it all as much as I do and not have to spend every day staring, pointlessly, at a computer screen. But...

I don't know if it is going to work out. I don't know if I can cope with being an actor. That's the smaller voice in my head. The big clamouring, shouting voice is saying "you're never going to save up enough money to live on, you know". I've got a year now that will probably cost me £6000/£7000 just on living costs. And that will be on a strict budget. I spend more than that in half the time now. And then the smaller voice pipes up again saying that I'm going to be as poor as a church mouse, possibly for the rest of my working life if I choose to go down this road. The next few months will see the start of austerity times as I am moving back in with my Mum, hopefully will get a second job and will spend all the rest of my time flogging things on eBay and exercising. It's going to require a lot of discipline and frugality.

The thing is, what's the use of all the stuff? It is nice being able to buy things, it really is. But I don't have any dependants and I don't have to lead an extravagant lifestyle to spend time with lovely people. The truth is that I have started to realise that there is more to life than security. It is the fear that plagued me throughout my twenties and stopped me from doing anything more exciting with my life. If it gets too much, that'd be the point at which I say "well, I've tried it, I've proved something to myself and I've got some enviable educational administration skills to fall back on". But right now, in full possession of my own life and a determination to actually do something worthwhile with it, I will be jetting off into the sunset.

I'm not the person I was even a year ago. I wrote a post ages ago about my need to hide aspects of my personality away as though I was ensuring some sort of air of mystique in order to keep up the pretence that I am more interesting than I actually am. You know what, maybe I am interesting; no need to pretend. I have awards and trophies and I get offers from drama schools. And, in a moment of glorious closure, we revisited the short play for which I had received the "four... after a pint" comment from an audience member regarding my looks. This time we were performing as part of the All England Theatre Festival for which we receive adjudication. The adjudicator started discussing my performance and said "I don't know, she said she was a nine..." Imagine my heart plummeting as I waited for the end of the sentence "to me she was more like a ten". I nearly cried.

Introducing...

Hey world, it's been some time. I am slack. The reasons for this are twofold:

1) I have less to complain about
2) I am waiting for something which I am scared to talk about on the basis that if I do, it will not happen.

However, I would still like to touch base and say hello. Therefore, you will get an update based on the fact that I am actually happy, although I am fairly sure that I am far more entertaining when soul-gazing in a complain-y sort of way. And a fudge of not-quite news and abstract hints. Sound good? Excellent.

So, the happiness thing. What's that about, eh? Well, I'm going out with someone I really like. Really, really like. It didn't start off particularly hopefully: When he'd first come to live down South because of his sister, my friend Robin, I had found him somewhat odd. He seemed extremely serious and sensible, as well as bizarrely competitive. Then time passed and I got to know him a little better and he started to relax and stopped being quite so serious and uptight and I realised that messing with him was fun. I found that it was possible to distract him from being quite so sensible by sending him into a mild paddy. I didn't really think for a moment that I was flirting. I mean, he’s younger than me and I've done the younger man thing and, really, it would never work and even though I might find him a little bit attractive with his face and his height and his lovely old-fashioned nature and WHO IS THAT GIRL? Oh, it's fine, it's not his girlfriend, not that I would care anyway because obviously I didn't fancy him at all because it would never work and what was I even thinking, well, not about anything like that, don't be daft, that never even entered my mind… I was in denial, I freely admit it. It was never really that serious and even if I did entertain the notion, I had crushes on several people during that time. I mean; see a great number of my previous posts.

The next thing that happened was that I tried to sort my brain out. I was tired of obsessing about people I couldn't have and doing the same thing over and over, living the same mistakes which just led to me still being alone. And the brain-sorting exercise helped, despite me thinking that my brain was possibly beyond help. I tried to be more open to life and tried to stop obsessing. This new mindset coincided with a play that I was in with an extremely nice, tall, young man and Kathryn, friend and mentalist. During the run up to the play, I had mentioned to Kathryn that I found said young man somewhat attractive. She then proceeded to make sure that we talked to each other and used an upcoming event to ensure that I had a reason to email and get his number. Despite all this, it wasn't until the morning after the last night party when he, and his delightful brother, made bacon sandwiches for two hungover women at his mansion after a night of chatting, crying and glass-breaking that I realised how sad I'd be at not seeing him every evening. I finally admitted it to myself; I really liked him.

Quick note: He doesn't actually own a mansion. This is a private joke that I just re-read and realised it sounded like I was won over by his riches and large house. I'm not that shallow, honest. Although with my track record, the fact that he has a job is a big win.

Then I asked him out. I make it sound like this was an easy thing to do. To be honest, it wasn't as difficult as I thought it might be. It took a while and there were a couple of occasions when I nearly gave up before I’d even begun, wailing "He couldn't be less interested if he tried" at Kathryn when she asked for updates. But eventually I got up the nerve to ask him for a coffee (I don't drink coffee but it’s the only beverage that doesn’t sound ridiculous when you ask someone out) and he said yes. We didn't stop talking for three hours at which point the previously mentioned delightful brother phoned to find out where on earth he was and he had to go. There was then a hilarious interlude where I realised I’d lost my purse the night before but that’s unrelated. When I’m drunk I am both idiotic and incredibly lucky.

 It is always a bit risky writing something (especially several paragraphs' worth) about anything like this as there is no guarantee that it will last. My relationship history is a pretty good indication of the impermanence of romantic entanglements.

And yet. Given that I write endlessly about the bad and sad stuff on here, it seemed only fair that I report on some of the good stuff too. It may be silly of me but I felt like you might like to hear it.

Since that first beverage, we have spent a lot of time together. A fair amount of that was due to the panto that we were both in at the end of the year. Let me tell you that being a lady in the early stages of getting together with someone and trying to be attractive while simultaneously having to be a male panto villian With A Beard is very, very confusing. It isn't something that I can imagine popping up very often in life but, rest assured: Confusing.

I feel like all the things I found odd about him before are all things that I admire about him now. He stops to help people when there's an accident (I didn't find this odd. This is amazing. Although there was one story from a social evening at Kathryn's when there'd been a car fire on the green outside her house and he just happened to have a fluorescent jacket and went and cordoned it off. Now, I don't know about you but there are very few people that I've ever met who carry a fluorescent jacket). He is fearless about talking to people. He loves science and maths and tries to explain these things to me. Sometimes he tells wonderful and beautiful stories and sometimes, through no fault of his, I glaze over. He calls it my TCP:IP face from when he tried to explain the internet. He is so clever and so good and sensible about things I'm daft about. It feels like a good thing and, even though it's early days, asking Thomas out for a coffee feels like one of my better decisions.

As to the other thing, the fudgey, not-quite-news thing. It is cracking on a-pace. Life is starting to happen to me and although I fear change (I'm uniformly waking at two or three in the morning in a mild panic), I am welcoming it in. I don't feel even slightly in control of my own life at the moment but I am making things happen. And as my extremely long blog post will attest to, that can occasionally be an extremely good thing.