My good intentions

Oh dear. Not a good start to my blog writing days. Hopefully this year will be different. Started a new blog elsewhere as 2007 kicked off and the site turned out to be cr*p. So going back here where there appears to be some sense of community which I should really try and get into. But, so they don't go to waist am going to upload my blogs from this year. Yippee.

It says a lot that I registered to write this blog on January 1st this year and yet this is my first entry. That there is a real bound printed diary for 2004 with not one single entry in it with the same sorry title written in hopeful scrawl on the inside cover is not just indicative; it's pathetic. The diary of my good intentions. Oh please. Like that was ever going to happen.

But just in the nick of time, here I am typing away, as the empty months of 2005 draw to a thankful close.

I'm not sure what happened to my diary writing days. They vanished. Left me. Like an exasperated lover. Not that I was ever that faithful. Months could go by without an entry. My first entry came when I was seventeen. I'd passed my driving test and had an argument with my soon to dip-into-the-abyss-of-madness sister. It was not a happy time. The boredom of A-Levels, the boredom of pretending to myself and to my friends (and to the poor girls themselves) that I was attracted to the opposite sex. All dutifully detailed in nauseating self-obsessiveness and even more nauseating spelling. Adventurous holidays, degree results, first boyfriends, first jobs, first flats seeing me well into my mid-twenties and then... nada, caput.

It could be that this was the time that my own writing took off, when I went part-time to write the masterpiece that would send my name like a kite on coke off into the stratosphere of the young published, (those that didn't have to wait until they were old) and see me leaving the land of my birth for the more literary friendly, beat generation New York with my apartment over looking central park and Jack Kerouac following me like a ghost as I walked under the shadows of the vast skyscrapers with a box of donuts under my arm.

That both novels were rejected by more agents and publishers than they were actually sent to perhaps understandably excuses my inability to look within again and return to writing about the subject I thought I knew best; me.

And, of course, in the middle of this process of pretending that I could write publishable things, I fell in love. Yuck. How distasteful. Stupidly in love. And with someone, who, had I not been in love with, I would never have touched with a barge pole. I fell in love with a philandering, ungenerous, arrogant Pug of man who dumped me just because I turned into a needy, clingy obsessive. I mean, how unfair was that!?

If I sound like I'm skidding into the puddle of melodramatic self-pity, perhaps I am. But if I'm going to publish this to the big wide blogging world I sort of need to explain why I got into the state whereby I needed to put into place some good intentions before it became a matter of life and death.

We're talking the usual stuff. Weekly alcohol consumption putting me up there in the Princess Margaret and George Best league. Cigarette intake resembling a more fag dedicated Bridge Jones despite a black smoker's tongue that the doctor said two years ago was a worrying sign. And of course, general lack of will power, decisiveness and usual sense of rudderlessness in a sea of murky currents.

Redundancy wasn't so hot either. I didn't really feel like picking myself up and starting all over again, especially as, yes ok nearly three years later, I was still pining over Pug man.

But things aren't so bad. I AM lucky. I AM. But I just want, or think I want, to change. I am 34 years of age. My lovely boyfriend (not Pug man) of whom I am very fond is about to move in. But I don't seem to be coping with connection sexually. I have taken a week off to write but it's 1.30pm and this is as far as I've got, having done two loads of washing, listened to the radio and nearly finished the book I'm reading. My career away from masterpiece writing is sort of spitting off and I can even say I enjoy my job - but as ever there's always something wrong and I hate the organisation with a passion but don't seem to be able to get out. And there's the usual stuff; need to finish decorating the room I started late 2004; need to get back in contact with him and her who I've neglected as if they were the most meagre of acquaintances. Need to stop comfort eating. The list goes on.

I want to be in control more than I am which should not be hard.

It's all about first steps. This is a first step. I don't actually feel ready for it though: embarking on my good intentions. I feel like running away.