The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I pulled a 'sickie' at work today. I phoned the office and made up some story about why I couldn't come in. I didn't have a plausible excuse before I rang so I just mumbled something incoherent but it seemed to work. So now I have the whole day off! This means I can actually write some new material for the poetry reading I am giving tonight!

I loathe the place where I'm working, but I only have to work there four months in total, and one of those months has passed already. Yippee!

This morning I had two showers... It very nearly became three!

Travel fund: £700

Mood: more ebullient than for a long time.

I am happy and unhappy at the same time... That's better than just being unhappy, I guess.

I had a truly amazing night last Friday with my friend Anahita. I can't say too much about it, but the beach and the stars both played a part. It was the best night I've had since my sweetpea left me. The rest of the weekend was spent being idle, which is not always such a bad thing.

Work is making me very tired at the moment. I found it difficult to concentrate at my salsa class last night.

Travel fund currently stands at just over £400. It should increase more rapidly in the following weeks...

I recently made my first purchase from Amazon. I bought an excellent album by Ojos de Brujo entitled Bari, and two books: Poundemonium by Julian Rios (a sequel to his awesome Midsummer Night's Babel) and The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll by Alvaro Mutis. This last book will probably turn out to be one of my favourite works of fiction of all time, seven linked novellas featuring Maqroll el Gaviero and his friends (chief among them Abdul Bashur) and their unlikely escapades in a variety of locations around the world. The prose steams with atmosphere: jungles, ports, smugglers, brothels, all the things that used to intrigue me about old films set in South America.

Thanks to the encouragement of my friend Sarita I created my first oil painting last night. I found it an incredibly difficult thing to manage and the whole thing looked like it was going to be an ugly mess. But suddenly something went right and I'm delighted with the result. I didn't plan to paint anything in particular but it ended up looking like a whale. I'll try to take a photograph of it and post the image here if I can get my digital camera working again.

In the meantime I have been writing fiction and poetry in my spare time despite being utterly exhausted each day from work. I have to work all day tomorrow -- the first time I have ever worked on a Sunday. I'm not looking forward to it but at least I get paid double the standard rate for working unreasonable hours. My travel fund will benefit enormously from this -- and travelling is the only reason I have taken such a boring job. I must try to keep my mind focussed on that fact. Boring work will eventually equal Portugal and Brazil or India, Lebanon, South East Asia, wherever...

One of my current writing projects is entitled Feeble Poems for Special People and it consists of writing a poem for every person I've ever known, do know or will know. The rules are that I must have met them (so no internet friends). Naturally I don't expect this project to be ever completed. So far I have only written 7 poems in the sequence. The one I am most pleased about is for Monica Konggaard and it goes something (or exactly) like this: