Category: Navel gazing

Red

On By Laura MorganIn Navel gazing2 Comments

(Please excuse this more than usually navel-gazing post, which I am really writing for my own benefit rather than because it’s interesting to anyone else.)

I was in my late teens when my first grey hair appeared. My mother’s generation all went grey quite early on – though you’d never know it from looking at her – so I was prepared for the same experience and I always consoled myself with the thought that grey hair is a lot easier to hide than wrinkles (which none of them have, even though they are all in their fifties and sixties).

So for the last five years or so I’ve been dyeing it, partly to hide the grey and partly because it’s fun, but a few months ago I realised I didn’t even really know how grey it was, and I decided to stop dyeing it and see how it looked when left to its own devices.

Well, it looks like it’s greying. It’s still mostly the original nothingy dark brown, but the grey is noticeable if you’re within a couple of feet. There are also coppery-coloured streaks which are the remnants of the last dye job, sometime last summer.

At least, that’s what I thought, but last night for the first time in ages I looked closely at my hair in a mirror, and I noticed that the coppery streaks  start at the roots. Somehow, at some point over the last decade, I have developed coppery streaks in my hitherto uniformly dark brown hair.

Red hair is a family trait on my father’s side, so it’s not odd that I should have it, but it seems odd that it should only appear now. Could it be a step on the way to grey? Might hairs grow coppery before they grow white? If so, I hope there is a halfway stage where I’m half white, half red. That would be brilliant.

I will watch closely and record any further developments here.

New year’s resolutions for 2010

On By Laura MorganIn Navel gazing1 Comment

I’ve just had a quick look at last year’s resolutions and I have kept all of them except the Guinness one, which was a boring one anyway. So in 2010 I’ll:

  1. Keep doing all of those things (not buying new books will be easier since I got as Christmas  presents all the books  published in 2009 which I wanted to read, so I can start with those)
  2. Get my boiler fixed: it’s been slightly, but not very, broken since I moved into this flat in March 2008.
  3. Go to the cinema more: there’s no excuse for not doing it, and it’s cheaper and more fun than most things.

I feel like there ought to be a harder one on there. Don’t you think? If you can think of a good one, let me know.

Happy new year!

Teen angst

On By Laura MorganIn Navel gazing1 Comment

My dad has found two of my diaries, from 1990 and 1991. Re-reading them was both disturbing – because I seem to have been hugely hung up on weight and dieting, whereas if you asked me now I’d have told you I didn’t give that kind of thing a second thought at thirteen – and fun, because – well, because it’s fun reading the diary of a teenage girl. Here’s a snippet:

Sunday 4 Feb, 1990

Another ultra mega cool day in Milton Keys [sic]. It is FAB here!!! I wanna stay and not go back to bloody fucking school.

Charmingly, I end each entry with three kisses. Perhaps I will start doing that here.

There are also a lot of entries which look like this (names changed to protect the innocent):

Friday 2 Feb, 1990

Now Debbie’s not talking to me because she thinks I’m back with Sarah again. What a hippo! (hypocrite). She’s always complaining cos Sarah says she can’t go round with Claire and now she says I can’t go round with Sarah if I want to be friends with her (not that I want to go round with Sarah anyway!)

How tiring it must have  been, being thirteen.

xxx

Edit: I should point out that the “Sarah” of the extract above is still one of my closest friends. In the diaries, we fall out FOR GOOD approximately once a week. I’m Facebook friends with “Debbie” but we never really had that much in common, and “Claire” turned out to be a total bitch after all. True story!

Fitness, fatness, and other f words

On By Laura MorganIn Books, Navel gazing

I’m in the middle of a six-week programme with a personal trainer at my workplace gym, but last week I read Lessons from the Fat-O-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce with Your Body by Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby, and I agreed so vehemently with most of what it says that, even though I am not and have never been on a diet (I like cheese too much ever to consider a world in which I couldn’t eat as much of it as I like), I found myself reluctant to go back to the gym, even though I enjoy it, because it felt like giving in to the body fascists.

Nuts, I know. And I did go back, yesterday, and enjoyed it as much as ever.  And I don’t think it’s any saner to deliberately gain or keep weight than it is to try and lose it (though having read the book, I don’t think it’s any madder, either).

It’s a great book, by the way, and I don’t think you have to be fat or on a diet to get a lot from it. I like my round bottom very much, but I had started to feel a bit self-conscious about getting naked in the changing rooms in front of the skinny twentysomethings (and thirtysomethings, and fortysomethings) who are the biggest users of the gym. Yesterday, for the first time, I happily undressed without caring who was looking (not, of course, that anybody was). It may not be a gym bunny’s bottom, but it’s mine and if it weren’t round, all my clothes would fall off.

I am all about liking yourself the way you are, in any case. For a bit, I thought I wanted to get the gap between my two front teeth fixed, but this postcard, sent in to the always-wonderful PostSecret, convinced me otherwise:

birthmark

Search terms

On By Laura MorganIn Navel gazing

WordPress has a facility which tells me the search terms people have used to find this blog. I’ve just had a look at the list, and I am in roughly equal measure pleased, entertained and baffled by it. The top ten, edited to remove near-synonyms, looks like this:

  1. Fail
  2. Barack Obama’s mother
  3. London smell
  4. Scary playgrounds
  5. Zed Police Academy
  6. Ian Thorpe Aquatic Centre
  7. Palestra
  8. Margate
  9. Young Bono
  10. Earthquake ball

It’s good to know that I am the go-to person for each of these things. The “Fail” searches were all last year, but there were a lot of them. The people looking for “Barack Obama’s mother” are a steady trickle, and I hope, but doubt, that they find what they wanted here. Of course, I have skewed their results even further in my favour now with this post. Sorry.

Happy birthday to me

On By Laura MorganIn Navel gazing

Gladallover is one today.  In the last year I’ve made 197 posts, you’ve made 56 comments and there have been 6,375 page views, which averages out at just under seventeen and a half posts per day, though this average is fairly meaningless since in the first month of its life  there were 289 views and this month there have been 2,993.  Although it means very little in reality, I do find it gratifying when traffic goes up, so if you are reading this then thank you and do please come again.

As it enters its second year, I expect gladallover to become more mature and reflective and perhaps a little wiser, like an elderly maiden aunt who has seen it all already.

New year’s resolutions

On By Laura MorganIn Navel gazing

In order of priority:

  1. I will start doing a job I like, or at the very least I will begin some training that will equip me to do a job I like.
  2. I will resurrect last year’s resolution to read new books instead of re-reading old ones – by which I mean books which are new to me rather than newly bought, since last year’s other resolution was to stop buying brand new books, and that has worked out very well.  I have joined a library, bought books in charity shops and borrowed them from people with libraries more extensive than mine, and I’ve saved plenty of ££ and read things I wouldn’t otherwise have thought of.
  3. I will drink less wine and more Guinness (my doctor told me it was good for me).
  4. To counteract the effects of the Guinness, I will  go back to some form of organised exercise.  I’ll have a think about that one; it’s too cold to contemplate it today.
  5. I will make tea in the office rather than buying it from the café on the way to work.  The amount I spend on things I could make myself is unforgivable.

I think five is enough.  Happy new year!

Activity fail

On By Laura MorganIn Navel gazing

I’ve been at home alone all afternoon and evening, with grand plans to make inroads into the pile of DVDs I’ve amassed over the last few weeks.  They are all things I want to watch, and most of them are things which my regular viewing companion isn’t interested in, limiting the times I can watch them to those when he is, as today, otherwise engaged (at the pub).

So what have I done?  Nothing at all, of course.  I’ve had Alibi on for some of the day, without really paying it any attention, and I’ve got the Big Fat Quiz of the Year on right now but I’m barely watching it.  I’ve read half of two different Miss Marple books, both of which I have read before.  I’ve eaten four slices of toast.

So my question is:  how do I motivate myself to engage in activities which – and here’s the thing – I’m only supposed to be doing for fun in the first place?  Or maybe a better question is: if I can’t, does it matter?  Maybe eating toast and reading bits of books I’ve read before is a valuable way of spending time.  As valuable, anyway, as watching The Fox and the Hound or season 4 of Lost.  That’s probably the answer.

PS

On By Laura MorganIn Navel gazing

I do hope you appreciate my Christmas redesign.  If you look at the site through a feed reader (and I know via Bloglines that there’s at least one other person who does) then please take the time to click through so you too can appreciate my seasonal sparkle.  Of course, it’s nothing to do with me personally – it’s all thanks to WordPress and their ace design options.