Office Encounters

I feel slightly ridiculous.

As a trade off for being allowed to work at home, I arranged with my boss, who is incidentally based on the other side of the world, to come up to London every two weeks to spend some quality time bonding with the design department (currently me, a freelancer who is leaving in a month and my junior) and to generally do some wholesome face showing to the rest of the company (this wasn’t my idea) which seems to constitute substantially more conversation than I ever made with anyone when I was here on a permanent basis.

I have until recently been able to seamlessly blend this at breakneck speed with a reasonably important client meeting. However this time the reasonably important client meeting materialised and was quickly abolished but I still had a train ticket and a design department to bond with. And what was more frustrating is that I'd booked a two day visit, worried that someone would notice that of late my visits to work had been as brief as a crotchless thong.

Yesterday I spent the majority of the day attempting to make chit chat with my work colleagues and struggling to unzip some assets (it was a lot more complicated than it sounds). Everyone wanted to know how I was doing, and the same questions are asked as they were two weeks ago.

My answers lacking in any substance (I have an inability to give a concise or appropriate response, which is magnified once fuelled by alcohol, so a verbal 'out of office' response such as 'I'm fine', 'things are great' and 'isn't London hot?' is usually adopted for when an outpouring is inappropriate), I attempted to stimulate the conversation by individually tailoring similar questions in return ('how is your wife/house/divorce/personal ailment').

I am utterly terrible at making small talk and either start thinking of a reason to leave the conversation as soon as a person attempts to engage in conversation with me. I have a terrible habit of bombarding people with questions, occasionally highly awkward and deeply personal, usually before they have finished the answer to the previous one.

To enter the final stages of the painful crucifixion of a conversation and to not have avoided such awkwardness by a. voicing that I need the toilet, b. offering to make a cup of tea or c. edging backwards out of the room until I can no longer physically partake in any discussion is considered by my brain as the ultimate in faux pas. On the telephone, my inability to observe a momentary silence with respect like a mature adult, my habit increases to an embarrassing degree.

Today, having dealt with several rounds of small talk (having not wished to express any particular personal problem with work colleagues, nor indulge in asking such questions) and concluding with some imaginative exits, I actually managed to get something done. I conducted said design bonding which involved discussing all the things we hadn't done from the minutes from the last session, and actioning them for next week. I viewed the finally unzipped assets. In a fit of verbal generosity on my brain's part, I walked into town with my junior to buy lunch and actually had a few things to say that weren't offensive or related to the weather. I ate a hummus and carrot sandwich. I drunk coffee.

And then I realised I was sat in an office. In London. On my own.

I have been sat in the office, due to my usual office being full, on my own for at least two hours now. I have moved around a few objects in Photoshop and made a slice or two in ImageReady but it doesn't exactly constitute the sort of level of productivity that I exude in Cornwall. I have spent the majority of my time in the office this afternoon writing this blog.

I will be sat here, on my own, for the rest of the afternoon, until five PM when I will depart to get my train home. I am not, I quickly noticed after about five minutes of being sat on my own, and has continued to be apparent, bonding with anyone. People actually talk to me more when I’m at home, albeit on Skype.

I think my boss, who is currently probably deep in sleep in his beautiful far away home, is laughing at me.

I might go and see if anyone in the next office wants a cuppa.

Intelligence by Osmosis

In an effort to be more intelligent, or perhaps at least seem more intelligent by using complicated words that I don't quite understand the meaning of appropriately rather than wherever I think they sound at their most elegant (or, more probably, have simply plucked them at random from the ramshackle dictionary that I have compiled in my brain which has assembled itself over time in no particular order of alphabet or subject, having mistook them from some other word I may or may not have committed to memory and which will probably, in turn, be discovered in yet another misuse), I have started listening to Radio 4.

I don't work well in silence unless I am writing.

As a web designer rarely gets the opportunity to write unless they are writing their blog (which I readily exploited work time to do before leaving London and now, where no-one can accidentally see the tell tale browser window or, on my more cunning of occasions, an innocent looking text file which can be mistaken for overly complicated lines of badly written PHP by an innocent passer by, if they are particularly slow of mind or swift of legs, and which I feel so insanely guilty about the mere thought of doing in the same work time now I work alone and no eyes apart from rather aging and mostly agitated cats will glance at) I spend most of my time searching for noises that are less irritating than the clicking of keyboards.

Considering I loathe silence so much when I am creating rollovers and the like, it may seem slightly peculiar that I choose to work alone in Cornwall where the only background noises are made by grumpy felines or the milk/postman (who may be one and the same, I've never seen to be able to tell).

But what I hate even more than silence is office background noise. Noise of keyboards, of one-half of phone conversations, of munching, chewing, coughing, the inhaling and exhaling of cold ridden employees who sound like they're not so much at death's door but are in his living room having a nice cup of tea (death is, of course, a man. A woman would not turn up at such inappropriate occasions and would at least have the decency to ask whether it was a good time to interrupt).

I am the same when I attempt to sleep. I don't know if I have hyper sensitive hearing or perhaps my ears are just incredibly highly strung, but I find it incredibly difficult to sleep with anything more distracting than the sound of myself breathing (and trust me even that can cause me to lose my temper). This can be incredibly impractical and frustrating and I regularly have to sleep with earplugs (much to the annoyance of my boyfriend who regularly finds them under pillows, in bedding and generally in most places that aren't in my ears). Festivals are fun. At Glastonbury I practiced becoming so exhausted that my ears gave up their persistent perkiness and that seemed to work, until someone started up the usual round of yelling something along the line of 'Bollocks' or fell into my tent or perhaps both.

My problem, in my defence, is that something within me loves listening. I want to know what people are talking about, what lyrics are referring to (regardless of the fact that I am singing completely different ones than the songwriter), what the sounds are being omitted by. My ears are nosey. They want to know things that are none of their bloody business.

So most of the time my iTunes works in overdrive to satisfy my fastidious requirements. I want sounds, yes, but I want the right sounds that will hover over the silence or irritating background noises but not actually penetrate too far into the part of my brain that I believe is associated with creating websites (we don't talk much: I make the tea, it chooses accessible fonts and occasionally a colour that may even be web-safe).

I have experimented with the radio before, with varying results.

First there was XFM. Until I realised that they had approximately 10 songs assigned to their playlist for any given day/week/month. And then I persevered with it for about another year and a half, just to make sure. By then I had exhausted any love that hadn't been there in the first place.

Then, when I moved home to Cornwall, before I went to New Zealand, I thought I'd dabble in a bit of Radio One. Not only do they suffer from the same problems as XFM, they have larger budgets to be able to create incredibly irritating jingles and fund Sara Cox. In fact I have just checked Radio 1's online playlist and, in the 60 songs that they select most of their songs from (as they openly admit to) one of them is Evanescence and another is The Magic Numbers. That I have a chance of hearing one of them in my day is enough to reduce me almost to tears or violent rage. The possibility of two, and the website clearly gives me the impression that it is a very real possibility, is terrifying.

Since my return, I have exhausted my iTunes (or at least the 10% that I actually ever listen to, and the tunes that accidentally come on after the songs that I have chosen to play, Ben Harper to Bentley Rhythm Ace being a mix that I had never intended but am getting increasingly used to) and have exercised the wonder that is Pandora where my radio stations include 'Wailing Women', a particularly miserable compilation of some of the very best of the world's distraught ladies.

But I was longing to hear people talking, people arguing, people debating.

Yes I am aware that if I had stayed in an office in London I would have been welcomed with all that on a daily basis. But I wanted to be able to turn it off as and when I felt like it, and choose which argument I intentionally overheard.

My sister came over at the weekend and told me she'd been 'getting into' Women's Hour on Radio 4 now she was doing a lot of driving in her new job. I made some unflattering noises about Radio 4 but she insisted that it was really interesting.

I am a bit of a late starter when it comes to awareness of general knowledge, literature, culture and generally what is going on in the rest of the world. I only started reading the paper on a daily basis in London, and that was only because the Metro was free and it was preferable to staring to an embarrassing degree at the person opposite me (a problematic habit of mine is in order to overhear conversations correctly, and try as I might its the only thing my ears want to do, is that I have to look at the person talking). It was the same with books. While my sister has been absorbing literature since she was in nappies, my bedtime reading until I was in my teens was Asterix. And I still have the annuals in my room, just in case I can't sleep. As I got older, I chose Dilbert as an alternative, but it wasn't exactly Thomas Hardy. Textbooks on a new media degree course were rarely acknowledged unless it was to pad out a bibliography with something other than several possibly less than reputable URLs (author unknown). Only when I moved to London did I manage to begin to absorb books a little more like an old dog than litmus but it was a definite improvement.

But my sister had struck a chord. And so yesterday, when I couldn't find any tunes that quite calmed the beast that was my agitated restless web designer, I investigated the Radio 4 website.

Usually when I have to download something in order for something else to function on a website, I navigate away within seconds, not wanting to spend any longer on the internet than physically possible. But even with the discouraging command to download Real Player, I pursued, to my surprise.

So I started, still a little sceptically, with a documentary on JM Barrie. That passed amiably, so I tried Just A Minute and at one time laughed so hard tea nearly came out of my nose (I am not a total Radio 4 virgin, this had broken that years ago). And then a satire of some sort.

None of which I could recall to any significant degree today. But I tried again, wondering what wonders I could uncover in the exciting depths of the Listen Again category.
Today I have listened to harrowing personal accounts and devastating scientific reports. I couldn't tell you who by or what on, but perhaps, just perhaps, in time I will start to absorb the odd fact here and there in order to keep me with just mildly wet-wrinkled toes during dinner party conversations.

This is not to say that I frequent dinner parties very often. In fact, I can't remember the last time I did attend one. But I'd like to at least not be laughed at by my family when I try and pronounce the name of the Liberal Democrat leader (aha! I remember! There was a whole interview with him on Radio 4 this morning! I can't remember his name but I remember distinctly that it sounded a bit like an ailment. That's it. Sir Menzies Campbell (I've just looked it up). Would it be ignorant to admit here that I actually thought Sir Menzies wasn't Sir Menzies at all but in fact was some sort of exotic name in the area of SeMenzes? Yes, I think it probably would. This is why I am a web designer and not a political journalist. But perhaps he's missing out on a market of the less intelligent 20 somethings. Or perhaps that's why he's chosen the not particularly flattering nickname of Ming. I should at least be able to remember that).

So I've learnt something today at least. And that was alongside trying to make my ActionScript not read like it had been written by someone on copious amounts of hallucinogens (I am beginning to wonder whether soya has the same effects).

So I'm not exactly oozing intelligence just yet, but as they say Rome wasn't built in a day and I've an awful lot of house keeping to do in order to Spring-clean away the knowledge that I really don't have any use for any longer in order to make room for the onset of such general knowledge, however heart breaking it may be to discard (but no I'm not ready to give my intimate knowledge of specialist Lego bricks up just yet).

The List

Stuck in traffic on the M5 en route to a wedding on Friday afternoon, my friend and I decided to kill time by discussing which celebrities, if the unlikely occasion were to arise, we’d sleep with (their interest in us/attraction to us/consent obviously not being taken into consideration).

He went first with the not-very-original-but-universally-acceptable Kiera Knightly (let’s face it, having a unique choice of celebrity doesn’t exactly give you better odds on a. meeting them or b. sleeping with them), at which point I realised that his motive for accompanying me on our recent visit to see Pirates of the Caribbean 2 was not because he’d enjoyed Johnny Depp’s impression of Keith Richards so much so the first time around he was going back for seconds (unlike me, although to be honest I would have returned if Johnny Depp had been a motionless mute – although preferably at least semi naked). I then told him repeatedly that while, yes, I agreed that she was attractive, she looked uncannily like a horse and had big eyebrows.

After that insult, it was my turn to make my confession.

So I told him one of mine. He proceeded to tell me just how wrong he thought I was (as have several people since).

For a person who can barely remember the lines to row-row-row your boat, I can remember pretty much every line from Ghostbusters. I can remember all the incidental music. I can remember the songs. I can remember pretty much the whole film, if I had an hour and a half to sit there and go through it in my head. My sister and I watched it recently with her increasingly frustrated boyfriend who didn’t really understand why we had to talk over the whole film doing what I abhor in anyone else and saying the lines ever so slightly before the character does, and announcing all the swearing that wasn’t in our heavily massacred 6 year old friendly version. It was one of my defining childhood films. I knew where the ad breaks were and the disturbing top of the pops parody from a comedy Christmas special that was on prior to the film.

And I remember Bill Murray.

It couldn’t have been anyone else. Rick Moranis, even for me, even as a six year old, wasn’t going to be considered as the favourite. Harold Ramis was a geek and got fat. Dan Aykroyd was Dan Aykroyd. And nobody can remember Winston Zeddmore (I had to look up his name. Ernie Hudson. I’d forget that if I didn’t have Amazon open in a browser window).

But Bill Murray was cocky, self-assured and a coward all in one, a womaniser and a git. And I loved him.

Then came Lost In Translation. And my 6 year old platonic love affair happened all over again, except to a twenty-something woman, not dissimilar to Scarlet Johansson (only with regards to the fact that she is also twenty-something and a woman. That is unfortunately where any similarity ends), and perhaps not as platonically as it once had been. Bill Murray had joined the ranks of the likes of Harrison Ford (also, I have found out, a little wrong) and Justin Timberlake (yes, young boys and old men. No in between). He was on The List.

This discussion about the fabled List had recently cropped up at a party of my boyfriend’s sister’s where I discovered that a close friend of my boyfriend has the same person on his List as my boyfriend. The elf like ex Neighbour Natalie Imbruglia.

Before I started going out with my boyfriend I knew of this innocent crush/disturbing obsession. The day she married Daniel Johns was a sad day I recall, feeling that he had truly ‘lost’ her (although, I note, she still remains a firm favourite and in number one spot on his List). But she still manages to make consistent appearances in my life, in the most unlikely of places. The majority of mix CDs have at least one of her tracks on (and often some of the more questionable tunes make an appearance, bumping off more reputable tunes). She sneaked onto a recent rock mix CD in New Zealand, jammed in between the Foos and the Chilis. He suffered a torrent of teasing for this and refused to listen to the track as I had laughed so much through the first airplay that he had to skip it and sulked for quite some time.

Its not that I don’t like Natalie. Despite some of her tunes perhaps not being at the height of musical genius, one track from Counting Down The Days actually features church bells, I do listen to her albums with what some of my friends would perhaps comment on as being slightly concerning regularity all things considered, but occasionally I resent the frequency as to which she pops up in my day to day life.

Last year I got an email from my boyfriend which went something along the lines of ‘I’ve got two tickets to see Natalie Imbruglia, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to’. All in one keyboard breath. I went, to ensure he didn’t hang around the stage door afterwards as much as anything, and attempted to make sure he was fully aware of my presence throughout the entire gig by holding his hand to the point I was annoying myself. But to this day he’d be hard pushed to remember if I was there or not, but I’m damn sure he could describe accurately what she was wearing.

At least Natalie’s a looker. I don’t know if your List is in anyway supposed to relate to your real life relationships, but you don’t want your boyfriend to lust after a minger (I have refrained for asking him his opinion on mine, although he did buy me both Indiana Jones and Star Wars trilogies before leaving for New Zealand, in order to keep me quiet, which it did).

Another one of my boyfriend’s less generally desirable ‘celebrities’ is Michelle Ryan. Yes, that’s her, the one from Eastenders. There are hundreds of stunningly attractive celebrity women out there. Not in this lifetime would I have conceded Michelle Ryan as being one. Sure, she’s not unattractive. But surely, if you have your choice of all the women in the world (and, because this is purely theoretical, he does, and if he actually met either of these women he would not under any circumstances be sleeping with them, a fact I am unsure if he is aware of), Michelle Ryan wouldn’t be in the top two.

Ever since my confession, I have been the subject of much ridicule and have found out that while my choice may be slightly disturbing, several other Murrayites (for that is what we call ourselves, or we would if there was enough of us) have also crawled out of the woodwork to stand united with me, one of which was my sister.

After the ridicule subsided (for that day at least), my friend and I both called a truce by settling on Scarlett Johansson, who appeared to be a good all-rounder for both sexes and seemed like good middle ground between Bill and Kiera (on what terms, we didn’t enter into).

Things I have in common with Charlotte Church (but never knew)

On Saturday, I sung backing vocals for a friend's wedding.

I was extremely nervous about doing this because:
- I am terrible at singing backing vocals. Harmonising doesn't come naturally to me. In fact, most of the time it doesn't come at all.
- We weren't going to get a rehearsal.

I spent the week prior to this with the songs on repeat at work (thank god I work on my own) and in the car. I learnt the chords so that I would 'understand' that the harmonies were perfectly logical thirds or fifths and that they made sense, in order to try and instil some sort of musical theory into my brain or, if that failed, enforce some ignorant confidence. As usual, I failed.

I'm okay on the bits where the singer sings a line and the backing vocals repeat the line, preferably using the same notes or, at a push, an octave down/up (this in itself is treacherous ground for me as I have a budget range that doesn't extend much above or below the notes that I talk around). Oohs are also okay if there is one note per chord/bar and that note is the same note as the name of the chord, but these are usually advised with some assistance (I luckily had some from a friend of mine who was playing sax). But actual, proper, real life harmonies are another thing altogether.

I can't tell my left from my right. (bear with me). This gets even worse when I'm a little bit stressed or nervous. I have little to no understanding of which is which, other than when holding my left thumb with my index finger at 90 degrees they make an 'L' (which I have noted is a little disconcerting for my passengers when I'm driving, especially when it it involves either balancing my palms on the steering wheel or letting go altogether). But even that isn't a sure fire way of getting it right, especially if nerves are rattling around, as my brain loses the ability to judge which is an L.

The strange thing is, sometimes I get it right. Sometimes someone will say 'turn left' and I do. That is of course cause for much self-directioned praise and rejoicing.

But sometimes, and there is no rhyme or reason for this, I get it wrong.

That is the same for the attempt of a harmonic. I know around about where they are supposed to be, but that doesn't mean I'm going to get there.

Coupled with my crippling inability to learn lyrics I'm perhaps not the best choice for a vocalist (however I would make an extremely good Beastie Boy, as I tend to remember the last word of every line, especially when it rhymes, and can at least hit the same note that has been continued throughout the vocal lines of the rest of the line). I would perhaps even fair okay as a member of Greenday in the days of Dookie when all the harmonies were a fifth up and usually on the same note (things have got a bit complex since and I wouldn't like to put myself up for audition). But tackling the complex harmony of Suspicious Minds was something else.

We managed to squeeze in an extremely 'freestyle' rehearsal before the wedding, with my friend, the groom and singer, leaving barely enough time to get into his suit and down the aisle. This did nothing for my confidence and terrified me further, especially as the rest of the people I was playing with were music college graduates and were more familiar with improvisational performances. I need at least a gin and tonic or two and a few hours before I'm prepared to attempt karaoke, and then I usually need someone up there with me.

I managed to stay reasonably sober throughout the duration of the wedding breakfast, but my drinking had picked up a little in order to wrap my fears in cotton wool, or at least gaffa tape them firmly closed and suffocate them beneath several glasses of wine. And then we were on.

The first song we did, which if my hazy memory serves me correctly was Jumpin' Jack Flash, I launched into the chorus not in the harmony I'd lovingly attempted to learn in order to do my friend proud, but on the same harmony as he was singing. Suppressing my disappointment with my troublesome vocal chords, I instead sang the rest of the chorus, and subsequent choruses, with gusto if not with anything else intentional.

Things picked up. The crowd were amazing (and amazingly drunk) and we had a larger crowd than most small gigs I've been to recently, and certainly more enthusiastic (possibly because a pint of lemonade didn't cost three quid). The set, I can look back in the cold light of day and summarise, wasn't exactly musical genius but everyone played as amazingly as their alcohol addled limbs would allow and the band pulled the whole thing off. By the end of it arms and legs were flailing all over the shop, and I had discarded my previous worries and happily swapped them for bellowing random words, sometimes in time to the music, sometimes in tune, occasionally directed at the microphone.

Walking outside after the close of the set (and following an impromptu encore which involved repeating 20th Century Boy on which I managed to reach the dangerous heights of the top notes in the chorus with the help of my friend) a man walked passed and said to me 'There she is, voice of an angel'.

Bearing in mind that it was impossible to hear anything on stage even with my finger in my ear (its technical) I had previously asked whether I had severely buggered up any notes to my friends. They said no. That was enough for me. I'd got through it, and I hadn't forced my friend to permanently reject our friendship. To be honest, in all the bits where I was singing along too, so were the alcohol fuelled audience, and very loudly, for which I was very thankful. But I was aware that my performance would have most likely been rejected from the less severe of first auditions for X Factor.

I thought about this on the journey home and came up with a few possible solutions for his error. He could have mistook me for Ms Church, although I look as much like her as I do a man, as in not very, not insinuating that I do look an awful lot like her, just a hairier version. He could be tone deaf and my harmonising could have sounded actually like the voice of angels to him.

But I settled on possibly the most plausible of solutions when I remembered that I had in fact been drinking red wine from a wine bottle on stage towards the end of the night, had probably been swearing continuously throughout the day (the result of having to keep my blaspheming to a minimum whilst in church for 45 minutes), had managed to cover my silk dress in red wine (and then attempted to wash and dry said stain in the bathroom), been nurturing heavy eyes and flaking mascara and had been, for want of a better word, dancing with the assumption that I was someone's dad, making up for what I lacked in talent and rhythm with enthusiasm.

All that was left was to have a fight with someone called Gavin.

Cornish Crimestoppers

There are people I know in Cornwall who don't lock their doors, even when they're out.

Erring on the side of caution/being extremely paranoid/being a little more savvy with the criminal mind having witnessed several unsavoury events in several cities around the UK, I am slightly less relaxed. Until buying a new car, on visits home from London I religiously put on the steering lock, hid any valuables and checked all the door handles several times before being able to sleep easily despite everyone in my family thinking I was weird. Now I insist on double locking Rhonda (and checking all the door handles several times despite the seemingly reliable central locking).

However, recent 999 reports in our local paper, the 'Cornish Times', are reminding me that perhaps I should remember that crime isn't as rife as my car-locking habits (and key hiding - oh yes) would imply.

It is true that not much happens news wise in Cornwall. It can't be easy to find enough pieces to fill the column inches of the local rag (I would describe them as news stories but there must be some criteria to qualify as being of interest to the general public and I'm not sure they always make the grade).

One memorable headline from the CT read 'Seagull lands on man's head'. You can pretty much get the gist of the story, although there were pictures, quotes and a whole story spun around the event. And that was front page stuff. The centre spread this week was a colour special on tractor demonstrations (it’s amazing what they can do).

The crime 'half page' is wonderfully no exception.

A choice excerpt from last week's 999 round up, in between a story of a small grass fire and a 'combine harvester call out' reads as follows:

Scarecrow Stolen
A SCARECROW dressed in a blue gym slip, fishnet stockings and suspenders has been stolen from Landrake.
Police in Saltash are appealing for information about the theft which occurred between 7:30-9pm on Friday, August 4. The scarecrow, one of the entries in the Cornish Times scarecrow competition is described as having long, plaited straw hair, a white hat, white blouse, fishnet stockings and suspenders.

Ignoring the fact that, yes, this is one of the key incidents dealt with by local emergency services that week, what fascinates me is the detail attributed to the scarecrow's description. Either they were trying desperately to fill space (the articles surrounding this story highlighted that crime wasn't exactly rife that week), had Work Experience Boy as editor or thought it was incredibly important to highlight not once but twice that the scarecrow (for yes this is an abduction of a man made of straw) was wearing fishnet stockings and suspenders.

This week, I was happy to discover equally lame reports of criminal activity in the region (although I do note that those owners of the scarecrow must have been deeply distressed by their loss and I apologise if my making light of such events has caused undue offence).

In summary, stories of note include 'Stretcher needed', a distressing four paragraph story of how a woman fell over and broke her leg and, yep you guessed it, needed a stretcher, 'Gorse blaze', a paragraph on how a gorse blaze was extinguished with a hose (incidentally this fire was a massive 6ft by 5ft, which was obviously measured by one or more dispensable members of the fire crew who were not holding the hose itself), and 'Tank Ruptures' which seemed a little more dramatic than its predecessors but happily unravelled to be a story about a water tank rupturing in someone's roof causing a leak at around 1pm last Friday in Torpoint.

Had my boyfriend and I informed our local paper in London about the leak that we experienced from our water tank I somehow don't think it would have achieved the three paragraph status that this was elevated to. I would be surprised whether they even stayed on the phone to hear the whole distressing story, however traumatised, cold and unclean we were.

Perhaps I shouldn't have laid awake wondering if I had in fact double locked the car, and didn't have to get up in the middle of the night to check that my keys were in 'my secret hiding place'. It is possible that, yes, I am a little anal when it comes to security, but better safe than sorry. After all, theft clearly does occur in these south westerly backwaters, although admittedly mainly to cross dressing straw men.

The patter of tiny paws

While I was in New Zealand, my boyfriend and I indulged in a lot of fantasising about our future lives; the house we might have, the area we might live in, the children we might (eventually) decide are a good idea, the wedding we might have, the lives we might lead. This usually concluded with me ruining such indulgences by stroppily highlighting the fact that all of these things were well out of our reach for approximately two years, and not helped by the fact that many of my friends are in the process of doing some if not all of the above.

I had just about accepted the fact that, while I wasn’t particularly pleased about waiting what seemed to be a really long time to begin this future, there wasn’t an awful lot I could do about it.

Then I went to see my SP. And the puppies.

My boyfriend’s sister and her fiancée are currently in the process of choosing a puppy, as I had repeatedly told my boyfriend (even though he already knew). It was something I so desperately wanted, and my boyfriend had tempted me with the vision of getting one during my stay at home.

But I didn’t want that, that wasn’t part of the plan. I didn’t want a puppy to be mine. I wanted it to be ours. Not just to share in numerous vet bills, insurance, food and other miscellaneous and expensive pet related things, but because I wanted it to be part of our family, the three of us, a complete unit. I already had given up our flat and then later been forced to give up our car, only to be replaced with what is financially mine. There was nothing left, nothing physical to bind us. I didn’t want it to be my dog. I wanted it to be ours.

But something changed when I saw the puppies again and was flooded with how they made me feel (when they weren’t pissing on my bed/trying to violently abuse each other/eating plaster). When we left, all I could think about was that companionship, that place to aim this ridiculous excess of love that I have nothing to aim at in my boyfriend’s absence.

I tentatively broached the subject of perhaps getting a dog in the foreseeable future with my parents. Of course it wasn’t the most sensible idea I had come up with in a while, but it wasn’t the most ridiculous (most of those remain heavily sedated and are held beneath a large helping of common sense or the fear of being ridiculed if I were to release them).

To my surprise, they were okay about it. Once we had talked about the idea in principle, they were actually quite excited about it, despite me gently (for fear of disturbing the practicality within them) reminding them that it was their house and puppies are messy, noisy, time consuming, attention demanding and not the most cat friendly of creatures.

So in a whirlwind my boyfriend and I embarked on the tricky decision of breeds.

I initially had romantic notions of an Akita, until we discovered they killed cats and other small animals and generally did not like other dogs. Then I explored the idea of a Siberian Husky. Also not the best choice if we didn’t want to impound it within a fence that extended not only nine foot in the air but also a fair way underground and weren’t prepared to subject ourselves for a good fifteen years with an escape artist.

We battered through the usual suggestions of medium sized dogs, all of which were discarded for either wanting to antagonise our cats, being terrible with children, being terrible with other dogs or simply quite ugly.

It was looking pretty bleak. My mum suggested gently that perhaps I was going to have to go for a dog that perhaps wasn’t quite as pretty as I would have liked.

Then my boyfriend asked me about our previous family dog, a Norwegian Elkhound.

Our dog was one of the most beautiful dogs I have ever seen, as all doting family members will always say about their departed pets. But ours really was. He was incredibly good natured, wonderful with children, happy sleeping but equally as happy going for W.A.L.Ks. He was a part of the family as any of us, and to my dad I think he was perhaps more so. To the disturbing point that he is currently in a box under his bed (albeit in ashes).

After I’d finished indulging in my reminisce, he said ‘well why don’t we get one of those?’.

Why indeed?

Why? Because our dog barked. Consistently and incredibly loudly. The Norwegian Elkhounds are bred for barking contests in Norway and I think he was attempting to compete, just from Cornwall. As a child and then a teenager it was very embarrassing and incredibly annoying to endure the consistent barking on car journeys. The barking would begin more or less as we left home and would be triggered by the car slowing down, speeding up, turning a corner, and generally any other movement that he noticed as being different from the last.

We forgave him, of course, as best we could, which was occasionally through gritted teeth.

But that was it. That was his only fault. He didn’t smell, he didn’t jump up, he didn’t bite, he endured my cat’s endless love, he adored his food like the rest of us. He was the perfect family dog.

So after many thoughts and learning that in fact our particular dog had ‘liked the sound of his own voice’ according to his breeder, last week we decided to contact a breeder of our own.

After initially choking on the rather offensive cost of an Elkhound puppy considering how small they are and how much mess they make, I submitted our name. The litter is to be born on the 20th of September and we should get it, all being well, when my boyfriend returns for a brief spell at the end of the year.

The thought of having a (noisy) part of our future in reach has been the most amazing feeling for us both. It is something else to focus on, not the wishing away of time, but what the time will involve in between.

It won’t be easy without him, but I have learnt a lot from my time with the puppies and, while I am sure I will make the same mistakes with mine as I did with them (it’s really not a good idea to accidentally allow them access to the food bag) at least I will remember shortly afterwards.

Design Dilemma

I have been back in the UK over two weeks now and I have just about carved out some semblance of boyfriendless normality to settle into for the next few months until his return, and have resumed a routine that doesn't include falling asleep at inappropriate times and getting up at 5:30 in the morning to 'have a tidy up'. Jet lag has all but been shaken out of my system after a long drawn out process that involved drinking copious amounts of alcohol to help me sleep and equally copious amounts of tea to keep me awake, according to what time the clocks were informing me it was. The last of these things to find their place again is my sadly neglected blog, which was attributed equally to an enormous workload and having WebTerror whenever I managed to achieve some sort of closure from my day's ActionScripting.

Unpredictably, work has actually been...well, I guess...enjoyable. I confessed last week to Yorkshire Lass that I felt guilty for enjoying my work and that I didn't feel that I was actually working as a result. She, quite rightly, told me I was stupid. But I have been bathing in my typical 10% Flash Games allocation for the year and have spent every day immersed joyfully in complicated multidimensional arrays that I pretend to understand, making fantastically irritating sound effects and creating amusing little animations which are usually connected in some way to the multidimensional arrays, a connection which I also pretend to understand.

This blissful ignorance in the real understanding behind a lot of my blind Designer Coding has been made even more enjoyable by the variety of variable names I have attributed to various movie clips and flags by making them look satisfactorily geeky by a creative use of capitals while also being clear enough that I actually remember what they’re doing such as objectIsMovingCorrectly = true and itemHasAlreadyDied = false (no abuse of those geeky variables $foo and $bar for The WebStress).

Today however I set aside my game tinkering to sink my rather oversized canines (which I can only assume is down to a combination of having no front bite due to excessive thumb-sucking in my youth, and a distinct lack of meat-tearing from my diet, so all food breakage is done well in the realms of the back of my mouth but has left me rather paranoid about my vampire-esque smile) into something a little more visually challenging.

I have been given the web designers dream.

We all long for it to some degree, that portfolio piece that doesn’t sink into the realms of client pleasing half way through after they’ve asked you to add a big yellow flashing box over your lovingly developed header, that chance to make your mark on the client and, in my case, may allow my boss to entertain the notion that perhaps I am actually a good designer and, okay I’m not asking for a retraction of the description that I’m not ‘pixel perfect’ but maybe that I am a bit more capable than crap, that opportunity to develop a flagship for the company and not just make amends to designs previously conceived by far more talented designers, that taste of what its like to be an artist.

And I was given it. They asked me to do it. I offered to take work off of another far more talented designer (who at least I can smugly say doesn’t know how to achieve the heady heights of developing multidimensional arrays in Flash, and who probably will never have a need to) in order for them to have a stab. But no, they said I could do it (although I may have heard a falter in their voice at this point, I admittedly didn’t give them a particularly large gap of silence in order to convey any concerns).

So I started to design.

This is where things went not hopelessly terribly but not exactly right either.

At least I had a starting point. I wasn’t doing this completely blind; I was essentially reassembling and rehashing some pre-existing print assets, as with most projects. As a web designer I have spent the last five years telling people that, no, I didn’t create the characters/logo/colour scheme/style but that I did make the eyes blink/make the rollover using only W3C compliant CSS/chose that specific combination of predetermined colours/decide on the web safe font from the pitiful few we are permitted to use online, by which point the previously interested person has either wandered off, has completely forgotten that it is not generally considered polite to actually roll their eyes or look actively disappointed or started talking about something else.

But considering that I am not actually particularly any good at coming up with a unique style of my own when abandoned with a blank canvas and merely an idea to go on (hence why my portfolio is continually severely neglected or discarded half way through development), I don’t resent being more of an assembler than a designer. I would like to think that I generally have a good method of assembly, and am able to deftly move items around the screen into a pleasing layout that almost always isn’t totally discarded by the client instantly.

But there was one problem with this brief: I have to produce one design for display to the client by Thursday. And this time I can’t go for the usual WebStress technique of bombarding the client with so many half baked design ideas that they are so overwhelmed and overlook the fact that they’re not actually any good. They’ve told me that I actually have to make this bloody good. The words ‘wow factor’ were actually uttered. I have one shot to melt the client’s heart of ice, I have one go at making their eyes light up with the fires of expanding budgets. And I have to complete it by tomorrow afternoon.

I have the essence of guilt wrapping itself around my fingers as I write. I had that same essence curling around my thoughts as I tried to break the creative restrictions that involve everything being in various shades of blue and think outside the box. I wanted to think like another designer in order to do this project. I wanted to think like another designer I work with. But the doubt intertwined itself with the guilt until I had to make numerous cups of tea to try and drown their distraction with caffeine. However was there, I knew it was. It still is.

Maybe, it goes, maybe I’m not the right person for this job. Maybe I should hand it over, be the bigger person, be strong and say someone else would do it better.

But then there’s this other side, the competitive side to my character that I religiously deny exists. It’s true; I’m not in the least bit competitive at sports and happily admit defeat in any sort of quiz. But this is mainly because I know I am terrible at all sports and anything that involves any retention of factual based information. But when it comes to something I want to be good at, now that’s a different matter. I don’t want or need to be the best. I just don’t want to be average, not at something certainly that I do every day, not at something creative. I have accepted, if somewhat sporadically, that is exactly what I am as a singer, I hit all the right notes and often in the right order (although not always guaranteed and not if it is outside of the single octave that I am comfortable warbling within), but there’s not exactly much of a flare there. But I don’t sing every day. I am not paid to sing (which is probably just as well). I am paid to design, and I am paid to design well and that is what I desperately want to be able to do.

I have asked this other designer for some advice, once I have finished the initial mock up. I am unsure of how honest they will be or how much feedback they will give, but at least I will be able to vaguely satisfy the cantankerous side of my character that is protesting against my stubbornness to just try to see if I can do this, if I can achieve what they want me to.

I am not convinced though. One day maybe I’ll achieve that holy grail of criticism acceptance in a trade off for being a better designer. But tomorrow I shall probably just try and arrange the assets in a slightly different order than I might normally.