Sinéad

Daddy is confusing me again (or should that be frustrating me? Pissing me off? Making me want to bludgeon him with a heavy object?), with all this soap opera drama that makes up his life - he got the police called on him by A the other day because he pretended to not be in and therefore had to hide behind a curtain like a little girl when she was trying to drop Dominique off. He apparently woke up near midnight to lights flashing and the sounds of people trying to get through the door, so - through his fantastic, coherent, non-nutterish skills of deduction - he immediately assumed someone was attempting to burgle him and went to face them with a kitchen knife. Sometimes I seriously suspect that daddy is just looking for an excuse to play the part of a soft-core psychopath in his everyday life. Turned out they were policemen called out because - get this - 'his family were worried about him'. Yeah, certainly, I'm sure the wife cosying up with her lover in her new house every night after leaving her husband without actually telling him, is worried about said husband. I'm sure she prays for his health every night before bed, as well. God, she's a spiteful, lying bitch.

Though, if there's anyone in this world I'd want to take a knife to myself, it'd be A. The whole little chapter of daddy keeping Dominique and Antoinette out of the house also caused some old stories to be dredged up that I had seemingly forgotten under the wave of shitty things Antoinette did pretty consistently throughout my childhood. So, daddy just had to bring up on the phone this startling parallel between daddy locking A out and something stupidly cruel she'd done when I was younger that I had managed to forget about (daddy was away from home for a day and she locked me and Siobhan out of the house, even while she was quite obviously home). Seriously, how can you hate someone more and more when they don't even figure in your everyday life? Except, I guess A remains a pretty looming spectre and all that because daddy is a tit and doesn't seem to understand the concept of CLOSURE. No, he just has to keep dragging it all out. He has what I refer to as 'Sylvia Plath Syndrome' - you know, emo types that generally enjoy reading confessional poetry and stewing in their own misery (not that daddy would ever read poetry and I personally quite love confessional poetry) but basically I mean people who subconsciously are satisfied by playing the victim. Daddy definitely likes being the victim.
He can't garner much sympathy though when he's actually getting his come-uppance. We're talking here about a woman the entire family despises and has warned him against - it was always hilarious going to

Ireland, seeing her smarm it up with the relatives, while knowing they all bitch about her behind her back. This is a woman who would have been DEPORTED WITHIN THE MONTH if daddy hadn't married her and yet he didn't consider this suspicious? Though, listening to daddy you would think his entire decision-making process of the time highly logical and his marriage to A completely golden - he always comes up with the bullshit excuse of 'wanting me and Siobhan to have a mother'. Firstly, there shouldn't be any killing-offs of mothers that actually exist and one whom I saw quite regularly, even very recently after the divorce. You don't just replace a mother in a child's life by happening to have someone of the feminine persuasion within your house. Especially when it's clear from the outset that your children don't much like said woman (I mean, c'mon, Siobhan descended into a CHILDHOOD FIT OF HYSTERICS when he told us they were marrying; not to mention the actual registry office photographs, which show Siobhan looking sullen and miserable and daddy has very inappropriately laughed about over the years). Plus, she didn't much like us either - a fact finally verified by daddy snooping through the old diaries she's left behind in the house.

I always considered Antoinette to be a pretty hard-minded individual. She's always been a class A bitch and horribly money-hungry, so while I didn't like her I could still see her as a strong enough character with high aspirations and ambitions, which you should respect in a woman. Now, however, after flicking through that diary from the period before she met daddy and just after marrying him, she's turned into someone else completely. Funny how you can live with someone for most of your life and then not know them at all (even though it has to be said I never TRIED to know her because she never really wanted to know me). I mean, seriously, she is completely PATHETIC in these diaries - a real whimpering, love-drunk, love-hungry, sack of shit. She falls in love at the drop of a hat with all these shady-sounding bastards, going on about how wonderful and fantastic and IN LOVE she is, and then the next diary entry relates how they've left her or they don't pay enough attention to her or they haven't quite managed to fulfil the whole Prince Charming role. There's a whole string of these guys and daddy's the only idiot who doesn't come to see what a waste of space she is.

So, when daddy goes on about how shitty a childhood I had and how he regrets me having to experience it and saying he only wanted me to have this ever-elusive mother figure, I just get annoyed. Because he's always been like that - cowardly and selfish. Always pinning things on me and Siobhan (like allowing me and Vaughnsy to overhear a conversation in which he claimed that his life had been fucked up by having us - because we were the blip, the rough spot, in this Happy Families card set he was creating with A and D [I really despise that card set, the one that was lying around the house when I was little and it had these families all perfectly defined, so there was the husband and the wife and the son and the daughter, so bloody perfect it made you want to hurl something]). Because everything about his marriage to A was selfish - it wasn't about mothers and founding this lovely little nuclear structure in which to rear us. It was because he didn't have the balls to be a single father or the cuckolded husband. He just had to find himself the rebound-wife to enervate his paltry little male pride. Plus - what do you know? - he gets himself a young thing in her 20s to role-play this mother part. Yeah, a woman in her 20s, the absolute perfect candidate to be a mother to two children from a previous marriage.

So, when he phones and moans about the same damn things, I get angrier and angrier and angrier and angrier and angrier. Because, she got all the worth and power by leaving in, when he should have got rid of her all those years ago. And he keeps moaning like a bitch, like she's worth moaning over, and sometimes I wish he would go through with all his crazy, full-of-hot-air notions of offing her and her stupid adulterous lover and just stab the cow already. Otherwise, he should just shut the fuck up and move on already.

She's worthless. You don't bemoan the loss of someone worth nothing. Though, the funny, really stupidly, horribly funny thing about all this - the thing that would make me be a bit in awe of A for her balls - is that SHE'S LEFT HIM WITH NOTHING. His entire life is crumbling apart - he's like a ghost in his own home, this big house with five bedrooms and four bathrooms and loads of useless junk that everyone has grown out of and he's still there, the only one left. He's in debt up to his eyeballs, barely has enough money to buy himself food so he's basically living off rice and pasta; he fills his nights with going through the phonebook, even going so far as to contact his ex-wife's mother and sister until they actually ignore his calls because of their frequency, and he sleeps in his office when this big house and the whole emptiness and loneliness of it all becomes too much for him. Because that's his life. That's what A has left him with.

But what's even funnier is Antoinette is driving around in luxury 4x4s, has just got out her third mortgage on a lovely cottage in one of those twee Cambridgeshire villages that's like something out of a bloody Victorian novel, is sending her daughter to some obscenely-priced private school called The Leys in Cambridge, and generally seems to be floating about life.
You like to think life is built up on these rules, that it's like we're all in some classic fairytale where being a good person and abiding by stupid, altruistic norms will get us somewhere in life, get us rewarded in the long-run, and then we can look on at the real shits in life, who seem to be doing so well, and know that something bad's coming for them. But the fact of the matter is, Antoinette will continue to float blissfully along, despite all the possible rage and hate I can accumulate within myself being directed towards her, and daddy will be the one facing possible redundancy when he's already snowed under by debt.

Sometimes I really think I could cry in frustration.

But, in less ranty terms - I have this odd rash on my side, just diagonal of my right boob. It's very annoying and mama has made up this home-made oil concoction to rub on it, so I smell eternally of olive oil and lavender at the moment. It's a bit headache-inducing within close quarters. Also, it's manically itchy and mama made it worse by having all these horror stories about something nefarious called shingles, so I spent quite a few hours researching rashes and generally disgusting myself over rash commentary and detailed photographs. I don't recommend looking up rashes on the net unless you want to frighten yourself.
And, mama has booked the tickets for random, evening-time, zoo-going where mojitos and cider can be had, even though the idea of mixing alcohol and possibly dangerous animals seems a bit foolhardy. And, I have finished Durarara and loved every moment of it (how could I not love an anime that revolves around a headless, female biker who happens to be straight out of a Celtic myth?!), so I look forward to its release on the UK market next year when I can add it to my hoard. So, with that done, I've moved on to Mushi-shi and Mononoke (which has a very bizarre style, like one of those surreal, druggy sketches you'd get off Words & Pictures occasionally) in between watching Serial Experiments Lain (which you need to take a rest from every now and then because of its general oddness and subtle creepiness) and Phantom of the Requiem (which I started watching ages ago and really should get back to).

The problem with watching weird anime, though, is it makes me want to write weird things - I was researching butterfly-pinning the other day because I had the greatest urge to write something about a crazy, sick bastard that 'mounts' butterflies as a hobby. Because there has to be something wrong with you if you enjoy killing bugs and then sticking their corpses in a glass case to stare at - it reminds me of going to the Rothschild’s Museum in Tring a few years back, which has the biggest collection of stuffed animals in the country, and the whole place smelt odd and there was this really eerie silence. Because a place with that many dead eyes in it has to be eerie.

But, yeah, in researching the 'mounting' of butterflies, I came across this horrible article that very dryly and clinically spoke of pinching the insects thorax to kill it before delicately placing a needle through it. I don't know about anyone else, but I like to see my pretty butterflies fluttering about there in the wild, not gruesomely pinned up for God knows how long. Plus, with butterfly populations being quite drastically endangered in this country, people shouldn't be going around squeezing the poor things to death and sticking them in glass boxes.

Me and mama have only just discovered we have resident bats (common pipistrelles because I am geeky and happen to love knowing about strange-looking, fluffy things that fly) - well, next-door-neighbours to be exact, as they seem to live in our Irish neighbour's roof. Mama caught one creeping up the wall and disappearing under the guttering, so we spent about half an hour with our necks craned back, waiting for it to emerge. It did us a nice flight display for a while when it did, so we have been horribly unoriginal and dubbed it Pip the Pipistrelle Bat and intend on looking out for it in future. I wonder if Irish neighbour is aware he's living with bats? Though, as they're protected, he can't get rid of them (muhahaha) or anything - I'm just sad they're not my bats.

And, on the theme of strange-looking, fluffy things that fly, mama had two days off work, so we went down to Kent on Monday to visit the Hawk Conservancy Trust, which had lots of lovely raptors like owls and vultures (because vultures need love too) and falcons and eagles. Even a bald eagle, terribly patriotic and huge and apparently a very sulky individual. There were Secretary Birds too, which seem to be the drag queens of the bird world with reverse knee-caps. There were a lot of shows through the day: the Vulture feed in the morning (where a little French guy called Cedric spoke about them in a thick accent) and another general display with barn owls and falcons and other raptors, where you also got the chance to hold an owl. Well, I leapt at that opportunity, having a bit of a barn owl fetish, and it was wonderful - the way the bird shuffles onto your hand and you can feel its little feet gripping hold of you and everything. I was a little bit in bird heaven after that.

The best event, though, was in the afternoon, out over their wildflower meadow, where you had about half a dozen vultures doing laps over your head - so close you had to duck or have a collision! It was amazing, even if you were terrified you were about to have your face clawed off half the time - just to have them so close. Then they set loose the peregrine falcon, which zipped about like a mad thing and also almost snatched your scalp off. So, terror and excitement were pretty much the themes of the day.

The bald eagles also did a flight display for us, catching fish off ponds to demonstrate their hunting habits, and a score of black kites wheeled about catching food on the wing and tearing over our heads. The woodland owl talk was on after we all had the time to recover from the adrenaline with ice creams and tea, and the vultures got a look in again (I got the feeling the Trust was trying to give the visitors as many opportunities as possible to fall in love with them - though, as a staunch vulture-sympathiser, I don't understand how you can't love the poor birds <3). Also got the chance to hold a Tawny Owl, which happens to be Britain's most common owl, a really gorgeous bird with a kind of russet, auburn-y coloured plumage (so, as a fellow redhead, we just had to bond) and these huge, adorable, dark eyes. I was a lot less nervous with the Tawny than I had been with Barn Owl (guess jitters of first-time handling of an owl was the case before), so I really got to relax and appreciate how lovely it was.

We went back to Kent today - we haven't really explored the area as much as the rest of England (well, apart from school trips to Rocheter Castle and Canterbury), as mama hates the M25 and reaching Kent involves traversing quite a long stretch of it. I mean, seriously, we got caught in four traffic jams across two days, two of which involved stand-stills with the car engine turned off for about twenty minutes and everything. It made you understand the advice of 'don't leave dogs in hot cars', as it was BAKING and it stank of petrol and the air's been so heavy with humidity the past few days, so it was painful. I spent the entire time sheltering under a roadmap, hoping not to get sunburnt.

We visited Emmett's Garden, anyway, which isn't far from Chartwell, and did what I proclaimed to be the 'bench tour' - basically ambling about the flowerbeds and orchards and making sure to sit on any bench available, between eating National Trust cake, and dancing about the acer palmatums and acer japonicums (which almost happen to be my favourite trees - I have a bit of a fetish there, too, and this irrational need to photograph any I come across. Seriously, I should have a folder on my computer dedicated just to maples).

Mama's back to work tomorrow, so I plan to get back into my books, maybe order some more manga to satisfy my aesthetic shelving impulse and do some writing. I've had the incredible urge to write the past few days - one night I couldn't sleep because my brain was whirring too much and kept regurgitating up little snippets and turns of phrase I had to scribble down. All for this one piece, more a file of miscellaneous paragraphs loosely tied together than anything cohesive, tentatively dubbed 'Blue Highway', which seems to be the hybrid child of a Star Trek fanfic I read that was set in the Rocky Mountains (I really, really want to go there now and see the place) and the whole Supernatural conceit of 'life on the road', which makes me want to write about shitty motels and vile diner food and epic landscapes and existentialist shit. Writing's always an interesting experience after you've read a few books, as your style seems to have undergone a shift, whether subtle or dramatic, so it'll be good to see what's been added to the box of tricks after I finish 'House of Leaves'.

Urgh, mama's also threatening me with a trip to nanny's this Saturday - a hell of cheap trifles, stomach upsets, family gossip and the habit of staring at the television with glassy eyes.

I have just bought (as in purchased, given money for, been an official consumer of) my first yaoi manga.

I feel kind of dirty now. Like I've done something completely socially unaccepted and need to go scrub myself thoroughly.

Oh well, it's not exactly an explicit one with giant, hairy members splashed across every page - 'Kawaii Akuma' by Hiro Madarame is actually pretty funny, though it does have sex scenes (where the naughty bits are prudently kept out of the shot, muhahaha).

Does this make me an actual fujoshi now? I mean, I can actually list my favourite yaoi mangaka now (Hiro Madarame, Akira Nozikazu, Masara Minase, Kano Shiuko, Setona Mizushiro, Hinako Takanaga, Ayano Yamane, Hyouta Fujiyama, Hidaka Shoko), so I must be in too deep.

When you hear screaming coming from your mother's bedroom, you know you should be worried.

Also - didn't you just love how random the shit you could kill people with was in Cluedo? And how Miss White always ended up being the killer? I blame the fact they made her a bitter-looking spinster.

I woke up the other day looking like I'd just had a miscarriage - blood all other the sheets, all over my hips, and feeling horribly sodden. But it was just my bloody (oh, didn't intend the bad pun there) period deciding to fuck my body up by deciding to be abnormally heavy. I was a little disturbed at first, seeing as it can't be NORMAL losing that amount of blood without there being something wrong, but no it was all down to a bad period. The rest of the day, though, was spent wilting over the sofa, as I felt weirdly anaemic and apparently was a bit vampire-pasty, according to mama, and my head was all evil and floaty. Trust me to get my period as soon as I reach home for the summer break.

This week has been typical of me and summer breaks - absolutely free of anything productive, crammed with lots of useless internet surfing (hell, I can't even remember how I spend the hours) and with mama dropping very unsubtle hints about getting a job (VERY unsubtle). Still, I'm off to Londinium later on to traipse round Urban Outfitters and Topshop on OC, and to collect Hayley from Victoria Station, as the Anime MCM Expo is tomorrow, where I fully intend on feeding the inner geek and wasting my money on ridiculous things like Mokona soft toys (I seem to have a fixation on these Mokona soft toys, which means I better buy one just to satisfy myself). Hopefully there'll be enough time in the day to get over to Piccadilly Circus and show Hayley the Japan Centre and then maybe hop over to China Town so she can see all the ridiculous Chinese supermarkets with their strange meats and packaged chicken feet.

Fuck. Just... fuck.

Grey's Anatomy can be lame and kind of boring for an entire season and then they bring out THAT. It was epic. Monstrously epic. Just went ahead and smacked me right in the face - the drama! The angst! The suspense! I think I almost had a heart attack about six times.

God, Grey's, I love you. I'm sorry for being so unfaithful for so long. You are officially back on the awesome spectrum.

(And that icon is so appropriate. Except shooter was crazy grieving guy instead of Dean.)

Also - discovered another creepy, cockroach-relative, bug-thing in the bathroom. Again the thing met its demise via period bin squashing. There must be a nest around somewhere - Hayley was saying at dinner that these things go around in swarms, after all, which greatly disturbs me. Makes me very happy to be going home for summer break on Saturday, where I will profit from mama's OCD cleanliness and shiny, shiny bathroom.

Well, that is that as they say - the deadline has been met, the work handed in and I am all essay-ed out. Leave the next bout of bullshitting to next year, as my bullshitting muscles now need a long rest for the working they got last night (this morning? Both?), say four or so months until third year trundles round (third year - now there's a terrifying thought).

I was such a loser, too, this morning - very first individual to squeeze their way past the library turnstiles when it opened at 8:30 (more like 8:40, the bastards), so I could print off some crap for my Pre-Raphaelite essay and was also the very first English-er to hand her essays in. Yeah, that's how eager I was to get rid of them: basically fired my way down to the Humanities building, raced up to the Lit department to find the room with the lights off and no one home for some essay collecting but luckily one of the secretary ladies told me they'd be round soon enough, so I went and waited in there like a boffin. So, that's right, I was the first student in the pile for the May 17th deadline. I should be proud of my geekery.

Instead, I would really like to sleep. But I promised Hayley a trip for ice cream/cake (now I'm thinking Caffe Nero and CAFFEINE) and my word is my honour, yadda yadda yadda, so I'm trying to brainwash myself into THINKING I don't need to sleep. You are a machine, Sinead, a machine, do you hear me?!

Perk up, dammit!

Today was the final day of library hermit-hood for this semester - critical research is done, the deadline's Monday morning for my essays, so all I've got to do is sit down and write the bloody things. And read the book. Why do I do this to myself? I swear I'm a bit of a masochist. Or just plain deranged in that I seem to like putting myself through hell at the last minute. Like last Monday, when I was literally WRITING AN ESSAY FOUR HOURS BEFORE THE DEADLINE. I am ashamed of that essay. It doesn't even deserve to wipe someone's arse, let alone have a professor look it over.

I'm expecting another repeat of the Beowulf Incident.

I didn't sleep again last night because that seems to be the norm now with bat-me. Plus, I really wanted to watch the Supernatural season finale as soon as it was uploaded (which I honestly did not enjoy too much - not enough Castiel, simplistic solutions to apocalypic problems [I mean, c'mon, this is the devil we're talking about and Sam could over overpower him through over-sentimentalising a car?] and the whole Lisa plot seemed forced, probably because the writers have been shite at trying to maintain a stable, likeable female character through the series. Though, I did enjoy the 'Chuck = God' revelation and it made me wonder why I didn't see it coming). Also, Grey's Anatomy next week looks like it's set to be quite the excitement - seriously, what is it with the Grey's team? They can give you a pretty boring season and then just deliver so much awesomeness in the season finale! They have a CRAZY GUNMAN, for Christ's sake, you just know there's going to be some brilliant tension. I wonder if the gunman will end up being Owen because he's ginger and British and therefore evil.

But, yah, got no sleep, had breakfast, went to the library at half eight and froze my arse off while trying to sneakily enjoy my caramel flapjack (there's a T. S. Eliot critical book in the stacks somewhere with my flapjack crumbs forever imprinted on the pages), before running back home to curl up in bed and nap for a few hours before dinner. Me and Hayley ended up talking about Catholicism again, which we weirdly always seem to come back to - even though I'm no longer a practicing Catholic and Hayley's never grown up in a religious environment of any sort. I guess I just get a kick out of being around people who think Catholicism is exotic and alien, especially as I've grown up round Catholics all my life (here's blaming you, RC primary and secondary schools!). It gives me a new perspective on the religion, that I have all this knowledge regarding the faith that I take massively for granted.

Regarding anime, this week seems to have been a tad crazy for my purse - I haven't really been in the mood for it recently, what with being utterly sucked into the SpockxKirk fandom and chugging down fanfiction like it's my staple diet. But a comic yaoi, Junjou Romantica, got me back in the mood and then I got a bit obsessed with buying a Malaysian copy of it off ebay, which then led me to purchasing Macross Frontier off ebay too (because the USA licensors are stupid and won't hurry up and buy it!! Though, they have had the clever notion of grabbing Kuroshitsuji for Western audiences, even if it will take years for it to get across the pond *mutters*). Ebay is truly a dark, twisted hole of finance evil, leading me to obsessively refresh my paypal account every few hours. I bloody hate paypal now. Got caught up on finishing Kimi ni Todoke and Pandora Hearts as well, which I've been meaning to do for ages. Now I'm onto the second epi of Darker Than Black Gaiden, though I'm going to pop off for a shower in a mo and get back to it.

But if that wasn't enough, I then went ahead and bought the last two volumes of Romeo x Juliet, and Samurai X: Reflection! I think I must have some kind of compulse buying disease or something! A disease which isn't isolated to just anime but has been make me waste my loan on clothes all year (though I believe clothes are never a waste of money, seeing as they make you feel so good). It's a blessing and a curse to live on the Tube network, meaning I will probably spend much of my summer break clocking up the amount of clothing in my wardrobe...

You know, it's a pretty sad thing when a student's wall-planner is filled with more anime release dates than actual academic/social events.

Well, there you have it - Brown's out and Cameron's in. But, as much as I hate Cameron's smarmy mug, I know a LibDem/Lab pact would have fallen apart in only a matter of time. At least with the Tories people can't bitch about the PM not having been voted in. Though, all the "kingmaker" business regarding Clegg has been so ironic - the Lib Dems did miserably in the General Election (even though I voted for them *sad face*) and yet Clegg was the one to decide who would ultimately be in government. He must have been cracking up over all the wooing going on, how all the parties were trying to seduce him with AV reforms. So, if we're going to have to suffer through Cameron as PM, at least we'll have the Lib Dems to dilute the Conservative toffs a bit.