Amanda Blog and Kiss

After writing to me about how ridiculous it was that Gwenyth Paltrow was trying to convince her to buy $550 cashmere leggings via the medium of her blog Goop, my cousin ended her email with “I’ve been a blog stalker lately.  You should write everyday. ”

So this is for her:

Tina, I will write more, I promise.

I’ve neglected my blog somewhat lately, and I considered just shutting it all down, closing up the blog shop, and forgetting about the whole thing.  Mostly because blogs feel like something of a dinosaur these days.

But then I realized that, since the days of my geocities blog WAY BACK WHEN (R.I.P.), it’s not that blogs are a dinosaur.  It’s that they’ve evolved.  They’re a lizard now, if that makes sense in the metaphor that I am trying to make here.

And I’m not evolving with them, I guess.   Because I’m not trying to make money with my blog, and not trying to find any sort of niche here.  I’m not claiming to be an expert on anything, and it seems that’s all that everyone else is doing: blogging for money or fame (ha!) or self-professed expertise, and not just blogging for the sake of the words.

No one blogs for the words anymore!

I guess on this blog, I am the niche.  That is what this blog is about, it’s about me.  ME!

I AM THE NICHE!

Take that you slimey lizard blogs.

Oh hey, speaking of words!

The Amsterdam Writers Group is meeting tomorrow (Tuesday 7 August).

This fiction blog is amazing.  She should focus on a longer work, seriously.  I’d be first in line to buy it.

aaaaaand

I asked for a quote today for a neon sign that I can hang in my room.  Similar to this one.  Except mine would say ” float on” after my all-time favorite pick-me-up song by Modest Mouse.

*

Words Elsewhere:

Hotel V:  A Nudist Troll Tries to Book at Hotel V (Ha!)

Hotel V: What to do in Amsterdam in August (So much!  It is going to be a great month.)

I have a few exciting things going on!

Well, exciting if you’re a word nerd like me…

First of all, the second issue of The Stone is now out!  You can download it here.  My story this time is very different than the first, if you happened to read the premiere issue, which by the way is available for free until 19 May if you are interested!

The connecting factor in my two stories is, I guess, Amsterdam.  What can I say?  The city, she inspires me.  She is my muse.

The Stone is made for Kindle, but you can also download a free Kindle app for your smartphone or laptop.

Speaking of writing, I formed the Amsterdam Writer’s Group on meetup.org, so if you are Amsterdam-based (or neaby enough) and also like to bust some prose now and then, please feel free to join.  The first meetup was last night, more to come shortly!

And the last thing that is getting me all hot under the collar is concerning The Colours of Amsterdam, but that announcement will be made shortly.

*

Words Elsewhere:

Hotel V: What to do in Amsterdam in May (so very, very much…and so much diversity!)

Not many of my friends here in Amsterdam read my blog.

I know this, because they tell me so.

“I don’t read your blog,” they might say.

Or if they are being less direct, they say, “I haven’t ever read your blog…yet.”  And I know to take that with a silent, “…and I probably never will.”

This is ok in my books, for two reasons.

Number One Reason is that I don’t necessarily blog for my friends, they are not my target audience.  I blog for a faceless mass that I don’t know and maybe will never meet, and this makes blogging easier.  In this way, I can be more free with what I want to say.

Imagine trying to spill out your deepest thoughts (or ok…sometimes just a pretty vapid thought) and having the knowledge that all of your friends and family will read it.

Go-Go-Gadget-Self-Censorship!

I mean, that’s pretty much what facebook is for, right?

And if I ever do have a blog post that I want to share with friends and family specifically, I will post it on facebook and let people choose to read or not, no biggie if they don’t.

And if they ever do click on the link and then tell me, “Hey, I read your blog post on such-and-such-a-nonsense,” well then I am flattered.  Because I know they are in the minority, and I’m happy they took the time out to read and I’m hoping they brushed away some of the cobwebs around here on their way out.

Number Two Reason that it’s ok that my friends don’t read my blog is because, just as online, in real life I am a blabber.

This is new to me.  I would class myself as a Born Again Shy Person.  For years and years I was shy, and for more years and years I told people, “I’m a shy person,” until one day someone replied with, “No, you’re not.”

“I am,” I insisted, “I’m shy.” But then another person said it, and then another person.

“No, I wouldn’t call you shy at all.  You’re very much not shy,” they said.

And that’s when I realized that I wasn’t shy anymore.  It just took someone else to point it out for me. Now I am trying out this new “I’m-not-a-shy-person” thing, trying to get rid of the label of myself that I carried for so long.

So, like a baby learning how to walk, I’m stretching those talky-talky muscles at every opportunity.

“Blah blah blah,” I say to my friends. “Blah blah blah blabber blabber,” not stopping to take a breath or ask, “And how was your day?”

(Those friends that told me that I wasn’t shy have created a monster.)

And so the less my friends read my blog, well the more I will have to tell them in person.  Lucky them!

I am also of the opinion that the most loathsome question one can ask is, “Did you see what I wrote on my blog?”  It’s right up there with the even more irksome, “Did you see what I posted on my facebook?”  And so I try not to ever ask either, and automatically assume the answer would be a negative on both counts.

So who, you might ask, actually reads this blog?

Well.  I happen to know from behind-the-scenes that the number one commenter on my blog goes by the name of “YoMama”, so put your sleuth hat on and figure that one out.  I always know when “YoMama” is checking up on me, because after weeks and weeks of silence, in one hour I will get a comment on every post that I have written in the past month.

“Oop,” I’ll say, as I watch the messages roll in (One comment- ping! Two comments- ping! Three, Four comments- ping-ping!) “Mom’s checking up on me.”

I’ve asked her in the past to comment less on my blog. It sounds rude, but it has to do with that censorship thing again. “Look, read it as much as you like,” I whined to her on Skype chat, “But the less I know that you are reading, the better I will write.”

She relented. “Okay,” she sighed, “You big meanie.” Then she gave me shifty eyes.

Sure enough, a month later: Ping! Ping! Ping-Ping!

It is all to no avail.  You can just as easily ask the sun to call it a day early as you can ask a mother to change her motherly ways.

And the funny part…and for god’s sake don’t tell her this…but the funny part is that it’s nice to know, when those comments do come rolling in, that someone’s actually out there paying attention.

Six years ago he wrote me an email: “We would if we were waves. . .(can you finish this thought with me?)”

I replied with:
”
We would if we were waves
travel away from eachother
to crash against opposite shores
you the northeast us coast
me the northwest european
and, bumping up the shore
we would run back down to the sea
and towards eachother again
to meet somewhere in the middle
of the deep and distant sea
my friend
”

Six years later and we are no longer friends, haven’t been in touch in years, don’t think we ever will again. Not through any falling out, but I suppose just a verge in our paths that have taken us in two completely separate directions.

Our waves, it seems, have disappeared somewhere in the depths of the Atlantic when we weren’t paying attention.

I never thought I would look back on the path and not see him there behind me, or just ahead, but there you have it, there it is: No longer friends.

It happens.

*

There is a lot of effort in keeping friends when you are physically separated from them by an ocean, I have since learned in these twelve years abroad. Even some friends that I left behind in Belgium, just one country over (no ocean) have faded into oblivion.

So it’s no surprise that high school friends would also fade into the past, especially since I don’t return to New Jersey often enough to cultivate these friendships, to feed them with new memories made and old memories remembered. The last time I was there (October of 2010) I came home to Amsterdam with a feeling of wanting to wash it all off of me, to jump into the shower and scrub away New Jersey and everyone that I knew there*, watching it twirl around and around the shower floor with the soap bubbles and get sucked down the drain.

Several things happened that made me feel this way, but the main thing was the awkwardness with which I was received there in my own home town. I was a stranger, no one seemed to know what to make of me. By that point I was ten years gone, and there was no way to account for those ten years in a way which would make sense to everyone. How can you explain in a five minute conversation at the local bar where you have gone and lived and what you have seen in ten years outside of New Jersey? Especially when (for the most part) the person you are speaking with has remained there the whole time?

I’m not calling myself better than anyone just for the fact of having lived elsewhere, of course that’s not what I mean. In fact it surprised me was how jealous I felt of everyone that was still there, cultivating these friendships that they had had for two sometimes three decades by that point, and here was me in Amsterdam, fighting time after time to make friends only to have them leave a year later (the plight of the expat).

It all left me so sad. So I got on the plane to Amsterdam, and I decided that I wouldn’t be back in New Jersey any time soon. I took that mental shower and watched everything and everyone I knew in New Jersey get washed away, and with it that friend from the email above, simply because he was from that life that I didn’t care to be reminded of anymore (and, it seemed, no longer had the choice of belonging to anyway).

*

* This doesn’t include the family that I have in New Jersey, the only people that I would gladly return to the state for.

*

The whole point of this post was to quote some of the funny email exchanges I had with this friend, because for a long time he was my cheerleader from afar, boosting my spirit when it sagged and pushing me onwards when I lagged behind or doubted myself.

But when I started digging for those emails, it got too overwhelming.  I only realized then that we weren’t friends anymore, hadn’t been for awhile.  The end of a friendship, however natural and organic, is never a nice place to revisit.

I have new cheerleaders now, and new people that I stand on the sidelines and cheer for.  With these new friends (most made within the past 6 years), there is no need to explain where we have been for the past ten years.  With no history to begin with, we can start in the Now, right here at this place where we are standing together.

And that, to me, feels like looking in the right direction.

***

Words Elsewhere:

Fiets Mania: BeDazzled Fiets

Sitting on the train on my way to the airport in Amsterdam to meet my friends before our weekend in Edinburgh a few days ago, my head started spinning with so many thoughts. I grabbed the notebook that I always carry with me, but only ever use when I am travelling. Inside is filled with random pieces of thoughts that I want to develop into ideas which will eventually/hopefully/probably-never turn into projects (“Rome story idea”, “epic TV drama”, “improv comedy course?”). Also interspersed throughout are quasi- and somewhat vague motivational phrases: “Time to Live the Life!” (ed note: what life?), “I have finally begun to SEE again!” (ed note: see what?).

This time, however, overcome with too many ideas and too little train journey time, I only flipped through the pages and marveled at all of these ideas that I am not developing. I wonder how great it would be if your main purpose in life is to focus on your ideas and make them happen, to undertake projects with the only outcome being the satisfaction of seeing your idea completed in full. My ideas are almost never completed in full. Who has the time/money/space?

At any rate, I realized that this is always when my mind races: when I am bags-packed-and-ready, on a train or tram or plane, heading towards a destination that might be new or revisited. It is that very small and specific time- the inbetween- that is really it for me. That is when my brain relaxes between the planning for the trip and the unknown expectation of what is to come, and I have no dog to cuddle, no dinner to prepare, no hotel work to think about, no husband to attend to (for lack of a better word that doesn’t sound as negative as “nag”). In that small window of relaxation, my brain clicks on and it is rapid-fire. This is the only time I really ever use that notebook.

On the subject of Edinburgh itself, there is not much to say: good food, good friends, beautiful city. I spent most of the time as I do in any foreign city, which is thinking “What would it be like to live here?” I also discovered the awe-inspiring new twist on the gin & tonic, which is to use Hendrick’s gin (which is apparently infused with cucumbers) and served not with a slice of lemon but with slices of cucumber.

I kid you not when I say this blew my mind. And I thought the Spaniards had a good gin thing going!

Hendricks Gin & Tonic with cucumber: Life will never be the same again.

At this very moment I am back in Amsterdam and sitting in a bar writing this blog post (not surprisingly also sipping on a gin and tonic, sans concombre). All of the above made me think of a quote, but I couldn’t quite get the wording right. Was it “Half of the adventure is in the journey”? Or “The journey is half of the fun”? Something like that, you know the saying, and you get what I mean. But I went online to find it, and instead immediately found this one which felt more appropriate:

“For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.”

-Robert Louis Stevenson

This better describes what I meant by all of the above, and does it concisely and more accurately, which I suppose is the mark of a great writer such as Robert Louis Stevenson.

And Stevenson, to bring this blog post neatly and coincidentally full circle, was born and raised in Edinburgh, and I passed his childhood home with my friends while in Edinburgh’s New Town last weekend.

Voilá.

You want to know something that sucks?

When you’re reading a book (which I do a lot now that I am off social media) and you realize that you really don’t like the writer’s writing (which I do a lot because I’m just so damn picky) and when you realize that you actually write like that yourself.  And you realize that you hate your own writing.  And then you think, “How did this writer become SO. DAMN. POPULAR?” We’re talking international bestsellers here.  There is no beauty in what they write, no poetry in the words, no new concepts with that they are doing on the page.  It’s everything you hate about your own writing when you are your own worst critic: it’s flat and it’s forced.

And then you realize: it’s their ideas.  They have amazing ideas that they simply spell out on paper.

And then you realize that that is the difference between them and you.

And you delete everything you just wrote.

A tradition here at AmandaBlog&Kiss. (Earlier versions here: 2006, 2007, 2009, 2010)

I present you with The 2011 Alphabet:

A- AmandaBlog&Kiss: This year I bought the domain for my blog and gave it a spiffy new makeover.  And then shortly thereafter completely fell out of tune with blogging.  My timing is always impeccable at best!  But as the year draws to a close I find myself drawn back to blogging more and more, so here I am again! ….and now the domain registration expires in less than 20 days.  Did I mention my timing is brilliant?  Because it is.  (Note to self: Let’s remember to update that, hey?)

B- Barcelona: A wonderful trip to Barcelona with friends this summer.  What a great city!  Even more great when you throw away all intentions of doing anything touristy, and just relax and spend some quality time with friends.  That’s what life is all about, right?

Barcelona Alley at Night

C- Camera: Probably one of the nicest birthday gifts I have ever received: my new Canon camera.  Dave knew that I regretted ever giving up photography, so for my birthday he surprised me with a new camera.  I totally wasn’t expecting it.  I’m having a lot of fun with it.  Am I good at it?  Nah.  But it’s a learning process, and I’m okay with that.

D- Driver’s License: I finally put one foot in front of the other and went down and took the exam for my Dutch driver’s license.  I passed!  …And since then I haven’t gotten into a car at all, except for maybe a taxi here and there.  But damnit I have that little piece of plastic, and that’s good enough for me.  And if anything, it’s made me a completely better cyclist.  True story.

E- Events:  I organize the events now for the hotel.  It was an unexpected but welcome turn of events (no pun intended) and I’m loving it!

F- Family: Family in Ireland, Family in Scotland, and Family that visited Amsterdam.  A lot of family time this year.  It was lovely, and something that cannot be underestimated when you are an expat who lives far from home.

Family Time in Amsterdam

G- Games: Mediamatic gave me a huge present this year wrapped in the shape of an exhibition on nostalgic arcade games and a three day conference on mobile gaming.  I went several times, and several times more, to play games that I used to love before video games became crap, such as Super Mario Brothers and Duck Hunt (video here).  Yes, this was a highlight of my year, you’d better believe it.

H- Hotel: I bore everyone to tears saying how much I love my job and the hotel where I work.  So I’ll skip this and just say: Best. Job. Ever.  (Damn I did it again didn’t I?  Sorry!)

I- Ireland: We made a last-minute trip to Ireland this year for family purposes, and while the aim of the trip wasn’t that great, hanging out with everyone was, as always.

J- John/The Colours of Amsterdam: The joint production with John of our new blog blew back some creativity in my life where it was sorely lacking, and from that spark many others followed.  Now if only John would contribute some more!  (HINT HINT JOHN.)

The Colours of Amsterdam

K- København: I got you this time, K, you tricky bastard.  A wonderful trip to Copenhagen with 2 friends to visit a friend that was studying there for the semester!  This was my first foray into Scandinavia, and it’s true what they say!  It’s a very clean place.

Three Girls on a Boat in Copenhagen

L- Lola: My lowest low of 2011, maybe of my entire life.  She’s almost always been the L when I do these posts.  I still miss her daily, and cry for her often.  I can’t get a respite from the guilt that came with her death, or the big hollow hole inside of me since she’s been gone.

Lola sleeping whereever the hell she wanted to. One of the many things I loved about her, and what I miss today.

I have to double up on M here, because I have two important ones:

M- Mylo:  I have spent the last half of this year with just one dog, and seeing how Mylo’s personality has changed as a result of going from a 2-dog to 1-dog household has been fascinating.  And he’s been an important part of the support that I needed after Lola died.  I guess having no other dog around to compete for my attention has given him one hundred percent access to me, and sometimes I feel that this has overwhelmed him.  I can’t help it, I just have a lot of cuddles to give, and now one dog less to receive them.

Mylo, will you be my new best friend?

M- Milan:  Twice.  Once with Angela where we yapped for 36 hours straight and never once got tired, and once to meet up with my cousin from New Jersey.  Both times were great, and I cried when I had to leave my cousin.  It was really special being with family in Italy, that’s all I’ll say.  …And I might have been a bit drunk.  And holy shit do you know about aperitivo?  This Milanese tradition should be spread worldwide!

Angela overlooking the Duomo as the sun set

I told my cousin to meet me on top of the Duomo. A happy and very high reunion!

N- Nederlands: I’m not sure if I’m learning the language, or just fooling myself, but twice a week I sit through a three hour class, so surely some of it must be seeping into my brain by osmosis, right?  My exam is in January, guess I’ll see then.

O- Overtoom: Still kicking it on the Mighty Mighty Overtoom, 6 years running.  Best street in the Dam.

P- Public Speaking at IDFA: I (temporarily) got over my fear of public speaking to read my diary in front of a theater full of people.  This felt like a conquest to me.

Q- Queen’s Day: The best Queen’s Day I’ve had in Amsterdam, mostly because I wasn’t trying to fight through crowds of drunks.  Instead we sat at the bottom of our stairs and had friends drop by to drink.  What stuff we didn’t sell in the rummage sale was taken away by the crowds after we left it there, and I am judging this Queen’s Day as the best by how a pair of my bikini bottoms are still wrapped around a bike’s handlebars in front of my house, nine months later.  How my bikini bottoms made it outside and around the handlebars is anyone’s guess, I really don’t know.  But it makes me laugh every morning to see they are still hanging there, waving like a flag.

R- Rome: This year we went to Rome and soaked in some heavy sun (blimey that’s a hot sun down south) and some ancient culture.  We also met up with our old flatmate Veronica, where we continued our tradition of jumping in front of some of the world’s best landmarks.

Coffee in Rome, because that's just what you do.

Jumping in Rome with Lake

S- Scotland: Met up with my parents in Edinburgh for a 5-day break.  It was nice to get back to Scotland, and even nicer to spend time with the old folks.  A lot of drinking was done.  A lot.

T- The Stone: I have an old friend to thank for getting me writing again, at least writing fiction, and I look forward to more editions of The Stone literary magazine.

U-  Uncategorizable: My 11/11/11 Party, aptly titled “The Return of the Hat”.  Everyone played along nicely with the theme.

11/11/11 AND hats! What better excuse to throw a party?

V- Valtifest: The festival that marks the end of the summer festivals, and for me it also marked one of the few times this year that I overdid it so badly that I was in tears the next day.  There’s just something about a party with a dress-up theme! Gets me every time. (See 11/11/11 Hat Party, above).  This year’s Valtifest theme was “All in the Family”.

We dressed, we went, we partied.

W- Writing: I fell out of love a little with blogging this year, and immersed myself more into writing offline.  It’s an emotional process, which surprised me to find out.  You have to put yourself into the characters and feel what they are feeling in order to write about them, which doesn’t always translate into good writing, but is interesting to experience nonetheless.

X- Xpat’s Life for Me: As an expat, you simply learn to live with the fact that your other expat friends won’t always be there with you, that in most cases, one day they will move on and the tide that brought them to you will just as easily take them away.

Y- Yankee: More and more as each year passes, I feel a little less American, a little more country-less.  Although based in the Netherlands for the foreseeable future, I don’t feel very Dutch.  So where does this leave me?

Z- Zombie Geisha: This year’s Halloween costume had to fit into the Zombie Walk that I was going to, but I didn’t just want to be any old zombie.  So I stepped it up a notch and went as a geisha zombie.  I wore a kimono, carried a parasol, and had brain sushi on a plate.  It was definitely in my top three Halloween costumes to date.  Except when I had to take the makeup off and took half of my face skin with it.  OUCH!

Mmmmmm brain sushi!

Sooo, that’s a wrap!  See you all in the new year!  Roll on 2012…

*

Words Elsewhere:

Hotel V: 2011 Wrap-Up:  A Year in the Life of a Hotel

Fiets Mania: Neon Pink Fiets

I have another announcement!*  Everyone quiet down and listen!

An old friend of mine, David Schleicher (I wrote about our uber-sexy date here, see section “First Grade”), is launching a literary magazine called The Stone, and he asked me to contribute to the first edition.

I couldn’t have been more honored!  And so I furiously typed out a story, something new that I had rattling about in my head.  It was a story that was meant to be a “short” story but ended up at 14 pages.  It seems my fingers didn’t understand the “short” party of the story, it seems they didn’t want to stop typing.  I sent it off to him.

This is what I got in reply:

“I am so happy that we both grew up and  became storytellers!  I knew there was a reason I liked you so much when we were little.”

Aaawwww, doesn’t that just melt your heart?

You see the cute thing about all of this, is that decades ago when we were little, before the date that destroyed “us”, we would both write stories and illustrations, sometimes with eachother in starring roles (ah puppy love, ain’t it grand?).

I can assure you there wasn’t much by way of plot and even less of characterization, but damnit we were writers!  We were seven years old, and we were writers!

And it appears not much has changed.  As the years passed, David published his first novel, and we’re both now bloggers, so you see Words were always in our stars.

This makes me happy.  A happy full circle coming back around again, stars twinkling and all that.

What also makes me happy is that I got to flex my fiction fingers a bit while writing this story for the launch of The Stone.  This is something I have been furtively doing here and there, writing when I have spare moments, happily letting the stories write themselves- an interesting phenomenon when you see what the stories are capable of if simply left to their own devices.

The Stone is available on Amazon for the Kindle, but if you are Kindle-less you can also download the free Kindle app for your phone or tablet here.

And Oh Emm Gee, do you see that right there?  Amazon officially lists me as an ‘author’ now!  Sssssssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.  DON’T.  SAY. A. WOOOOORD.  If no one says otherwise then they’ll never know the difference!

That’s worth a celebration drink alone.

***

*I promise that I will not only post when I have “announcements”.  I hate it when bloggers do that.  No, no, no, I do solemnly swear that I will continue to post that inane boring stream-of-conscious blogarrhea that you all love so much just to fill the bloggy silences…

Yesterday I had a meeting with the upper management at the hotel.

They wanted to know more about me, my future plans, and how I thought I was doing at the hotel.

I pretty much answered, “…um, well…….dunno.” to every question.  Because I’m like a girl scout I’m so prepared for these things.  Inside I was screaming.

After the meeting I went back to the hotel and back to my desk.

“GGGGGAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH,” I said.  Out loud.  If I didn’t bruise so easily I might have slammed my face on the keyboard.  Instead I ignored the wary stare of the colleague sitting across from me and started working.

After awhile I sent an email to the three management staff that I had met with.  It said some things that I should have said in the meeting, basically more about me, how I thought I fit into the hotel, etc.

I hit the send button.

Then I thought, “GGGGGAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!“  Why throw that out there now?  Why not say everything at the meeting?  This now looks like a desperate attempt to save myself from drowning, etc, etc, ad nauseum.

Did you ever notice that you can sometimes be your own worst enemy?

That night I had a dream that one of those bosses said to me, “Not such a good idea, that email.”

Greeeeeaaaaat.

In other news, I think I have found my writing mojo again!  Twice this past week I have found myself in a bar hunched over a notebook, scribbling my thoughts down furiously before they disappeared forever.   Andrew and I have been kicking around an idea for a book for the past year, and I think it is finally ready to be written. We have the entire outline (minus a few holes), so all we need is the words now.

And the other is another story that I am working on on my own.  I don’t know if it’s possible to write two books at a time, but I’m sure I’ll find out shortly.

Now if I could only translate all of the words in my facebook status updates into words for these books, they might actually get written!

Amanda is “ready to write a book.”

He marked the page with a match

by Vera Pavlova (Translated by Steven Seymour)

+ + +

Oh!  Hello, internets.  Are you still here?  Has it really been six days since I last posted?  That’s not like me.

I’m trying to sum up what I’ve been doing in the last six days, and all I can land on is: scheming and socialising.

It was a brilliant six days with lots of friends and a few dark patches, but those few dark patches were enough to make me sit down and think, “Right.  WHERE TO.”

And so I’m off to London tomorrow.  I very nearly decided not to go to the Cringe night, but then Veronica came home the other day with a surprise- turns out the Cringe book is already out in the Netherlands (Waterstone’s)!  We had a little read through and it was quite funny and totally cringe-worthy and I thought, “Fuckit.  You’re only in a book once, right?” (Answer: HOPEFULLY NOT.)

So I booked my flights and let some London people know that I was coming, and off I go tomorrow morning.

If it weren’t for the shit storm raining down on me this year, I might have missed it.  But there’s nothing like stoopid drama and money woes to make me want to flee the country.

I am also cooking up a few more trips within the next month.  All of this will do absolutely NOTHING to help my money woes.  It also will do nothing to help any stoopid drama that pops up, but I’m banking on the old saying “Out of sight out of mind.”  That does work, right?  Fingers crossed.

Here are a few photos from my break at work yesterday when I popped around the corner to Waterstone’s to see for myself that, yes, the book is actually on the shelf (Gah!).

Shocking!

Embarrassing!

It's the Cringe book!

If anyone is reading this and happens to be in London tomorrow night, please come by to the Cringe night at the George Pub in The Strand!  6pm, yo.  Sure to be a good time.

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Four Years Ago: I was trying to find the ultimate balance: work, school and love.  Still am actually.  It didn’t help that back then I still smoked weed (Whaaaat?  I was new to Amsterdam- it was still novel back then!).  Any family who might be reading this (ahem and convalescing at home with a bad back) please ignore what you read on that post!

One Year Ago: My nerdy love of fonts burst through.  This is a love that cannot be tamed.

I’ve been sent a PDF version of the Cringe book and had a peek at what entries made it in.

I literally cringed when I saw them there in print, down for all the world to see.  (Oouf.  Too late now!)

I also noticed that several bloggers that I have read over the course of the last few years are also in there!

I’m honoured to be grouped into such an embarrassing oeuvre* with the likes of this blogger.  And this one.  And this one.  Not to mention the mastermind behind Cringe.

It nearly softens the blow of baring my teenage angst in public.

…Nearly.

That being said, I’ll be heading to London in a few weeks time for the London version of Cringe on the 29th of September, where people actually read outloud from their old diaries.  I know- total masochists, right?

See you there maybe?  No one can tag along with me on this trip so I’ll be the quiet one in the corner with the miserable face on.

* Clap your hands everyone, for that is the very first time that I have used the word oeuvre in a sentence.  …And I’m still not sure if it’s correct.