Baby went to Amsterdam...

I have this damn Peter Bjorn and John song stuck in my mind. Get it out, get it out, get it out! Also, I am all hopped up on cold and flu medication and leftover seritonin-blaster pasta. It was the nicest feeling to wake up groggy and phlegmatic this morning - okay, afternoon - only to find several messages on my phone from other editors telling me that they are fucking off work until the next batch of articles come in on Monday and that I should consider doing the same. So I am. Hooray!

I should probably clarify that while I love my job, a lot of it involves staring at computers and trying to decide between swatches and choosing fonts and rectifying kerning* and peering very keenly at a faulty monitor for hours on end, and while yes, I am sitting at a computer right now thanks for pointing that out, I have the option of moaning on the couch and napping and popping more pills and hacking into tissues and making cups of tea and trudging to the newagent in my pyjamas for tampons and liquorice, none of which I can really get away with at work, especially not the pyjamas.

Was that entire paragraph really one run-on sentence? IT'S THE DRUGS, PEOPLE.

Being drudgey and sick, while certainly not pleasant, is nice in that is gives me time to catch up on reading (magazines) and watching trashy TV. And playing with the duckling. Oh my God, what if this is the avian flu? Except that I am pretty sure it's not. Anyway, what I am also doing when my eyes are feeling up to it is reading through the archives of other people's blogs, and it's actually rather comforting to see that some of my favourite web writers got off to a similarly slow, self-conscious start.

Hopefully, this means that in time, my "readership" (ha! ha!) will grow beyond half a dozen people, and I'll attain some level of web popularity, then a cult following, all of which will be in direct corrollary to a magically vast improvement in my writing skillz and culminate in some sort of weekly Green Guide column and a name-drop in the Sunday Life** next time they do a "kids these days and their technology!!" puff piece. Or not. Anyway, the point (as if there is one!) is that I've decided to stick with this thing for at least a year, and see what happens. The only one of those things that I'm actually hoping will occur is that my writing skills will improve - it's a fairly good discipline, blog-writing, even if the results are fairly banal. Of course, a few comments now and then wouldn't hurt, but really, it would be nicer to be able to look back in a year or so and shake my head indulgently at all those clumsy metaphors and run-on sentences and whatnot.

So anyway. I just had to hang the washing out. What was I saying? God, I'm so scattery... scattery, jittery, higgledy-piggledy. Baby went to Amsterdaaaaaaaaaaam... Sorry. I probably shouldn't be allowed to write when I'm full of pseudoephedrine. A few of the chemists around here have a sign up in their windows with the words 'Pseudo Watch', which cracks me up every time and that's when I'm not even high on Codral. Pseudo-burglars, look out! Your pseudo-crime has been detected by the elite memebers of the pseudo-watch! Quick, someone call the pesudo-cops!!

And, being as how there's no graceful way to exit this rambling behemoth of a post... I'm done.




*A lot of font-related jargon sounds pleasingly dirty. Just one more reason that I love this job.
** I'm not italicising Green Guide or Sunday Life as they are sections, not banner publications. Is this correct or should I have put single inverted commas around them a la poems and chapters? Tear strips off me, copy editors of the internet!