Attempting Pollyanna

Well, Italy didn’t happen, due to snow. Bugger.

This was rather disappointing, given that we’d actually managed to do a fair bit of planning for this one, as opposed to our little jaunt to Spain, and actually most other holidays I’ve ever gone on. Add the fact that I’d been using the thought of the holiday to keep myself going over the past couple of weeks of essay hell, and am now hard pressed to find something similar to tide me over the next few months. Add the sharpening feeling that my time here is inexorably winding down and I haven’t done enough. Add the general malaise I’ve been feeling over the past month or two that I’m going through a “minging period” (my most recent haircut, which featured extreme fringe action, is now growing out, which means I no longer look like a quirky interesting person with a unique sense of style who cut my fringe that ridiculously short on purpose, I just look like someone who made a horrible mistake while running with scissors).

Add all this up and you have a rather depressed Michelle.

There are, however, Pollyanna moments in the gloom. Alec as SuperBoyfriend in aforementioned depression crisis. Loads of CDs arriving in the post, in bubble-wrapped packages. Schindler’s Ark (Thomas Keneally), which apart from being a great book in the pure literary sense, also unsurprisingly helps to put things in Michelle World back into perspective.

And, and, and, Justin Ruffles, as in way-funnier-than-me Justin Ruffles, thinks I rule! Or at least, he wrote it on his site, which I acknowledge can be a rather different thing. Apparently I have a “groovy urban boho life spent cruising bagel shops, watching films in Swahili and listening to music sung in ancient tribal click languages”.

This is, unfortunately, mostly wrong (well, maybe the bit about the cruising…) and should not be allowed to mislead people as to my coolness, or, as it were, ruleness. My closest contacts with Swahili have been watching The Gods Are Crazy about a million times when I was ten, and having an Irish boyfriend who mumbles. My most boho moments go no further than a preference for cider (oops, that’s “hobo”) and an occasional predilection for subtly incorporated tie-dye. While I’ll ‘fess up to a music collection I do think is fairly cool for the most part, I have just spent the last two hours watching the Michael Jackson interview on ITV, and writing an email about it to other members of the Michael Jackson mailing list I have been a member of since 1995.