it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah
Feb. 6th, 2006 01:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hathycolRight now, I'm tired. I have lectures tomorrow morning, I have no money, I'm struck with the terrible realisation that stuff like jobs and orchestras and choirs and lectures means I might get one night with Simon in the next six weeks and basically I really don't want to write up the weekend right now and especially not Sunday. Saturday night was beautiful. I want to preserve it for future writings and thinking, and I will, but not tonight.
Sorry. That sounds very wanky. I apologise. I think iy's because I always listen to David Grey when I'm in this mood, and because I've had a glass of wine and that was perhaps a mistake.
So.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
loneraven posted this meme, and it's fascinated. Hence my nicking it and posting it. I've thought about this a lot, actually and it's shamelessly sentimental in places.
Um, yes. My dad is called Simon. Fiance is also called Simon. It is confusing. Just guess from the context, yeah? My mum is called Julie, by the way.
1. Julie and Simon are driving to pick up the cat they chose to adopt from the RSPCA. They're laughing and joking, but Julie looks at a split-second different time and manages to swerve out of the way of the oncoming car which, if it had hit them, would have caused them to plough headlong into the side a wall and give Julie horrific injuries. They're shaken because it was a near miss, but it's gone in half an hour but they go and pick up the cat anyway. Julie and Simon are never quite aware of their own mortality, and continue happily child-free.
2. Colleen is two years old and her parents are thinking about having another child. Both New Zealand and Australia are calling out for trained psychiatric nurses with levels of payment and a comfort of lifestyle that aren't found in the UK. Simon decides to move out and take his family with him to New Zealand, and they live the ex-pat lifestyle.
Colleen quite likes the weird insects, and has a go at being an extra for Lord of the Rings.
3. "I know," says Colleen. "Really, it's late, and we should get a taxi home. Because, y'know, work tomorrow morning and we're going to the same place."
"That makes sense," agrees Simon, although both of them are swaying slightly from the vokda. They've been drinking it throughout the night, because neat vodka is one of the things they have in common and both of them are tentatively realising that there is Something There and are both vaguely encouraging it through sharing of things in common and deliberately talking to each other as much as possible with the easy rapport they've had since they day they met.
Besides, they're celebrating, and they've reached the level of inebriation to encourage as much as possible.
So they get the taxi, and suddenly Colleen turns to Simon. "Hey! I have wine in the fridge! And it's a short walk from mine to yours."
So they agree to go and drink wine. They're celebrating, after all, because they are very good results after all, and it is therefore a special occasion.
The wine is all that is promised, but turns out to have a cork rather than a screw-top. Neither of them can work a corkscrew with the vodka swishing around their systems. They finish the little vodka she has at Colleen's, sit and talk for a while, and then Simon goes home with perhaps only a few looks back. Colleen goes to work the next morning with a faint twinge of regret that she wasn't brave enough to say or do anything, and a bigger twinge of nausea from the vodka hangover.
A month later, she's in university. She gets drunk a lot, and takes every offer she gets at the Bop and goes to the LGBT as often as possible. She's quietly proud of her reputation as a woman-eater (and sometimes a man-eater because university is a time for new experiences), because really, she doesn't want a serious relationship just yet. She thinks about Simon in the vague way her subconcious always makes her do, and they strike up the same easy conversation every time they see each other at the holidays in training. They just don't move in the same social circles enough, though, and she doesn't want people to infer something, so she never makes the effort to see him in other situations unless she's asked. And, of course, she never is, because there's never a special occasion again. Colleen assumes that Simon just thinks of her as a sort of vague friend, and she's happy enough in her own way.
She never knows how happy it is possible for her to be.
4. Colleen takes after Julie. She has lovely straight hair that sorts itself out most mornings. (Simon never practices on Barbies to work out how to plait thick, unmanageable hair.) The other children are primary school identify her as one of their own, and Colleen quickly gets a group of friends that she stays with throughout primary school and high school. She goes to KGV college and does enough work to get by but only as much as her friends, who are her everything and she follows blindly. She decides against university and works in a fairly dull job in an office, living with her parents long enough to get a place of her own, but she spends quite a lot of money in Liverpool, enjoying shopping, and RnB music when she's out on the town. She works out that she likes girls at one point, but prefers to go with the flow and has a fairly nondescript bloke from accounts. She's happy enough, because there's not a lot in the world waiting for her. She has a strong Scouse accent.
5. It's a long, hot, boring summer, and all Colleen has waiting to happen is Guide camp. She sleeps in most days and never looks at Channel Four. When an older girl, a Ranger, starts a conversation about Stargate on a lazy afternoon out canoeing, Colleen lies on the boards of the pier over the lake and lets the conversation drift over her without paying attention.
She's thirteen and she has no friends, but she reads her Dad's Discworld books and occasionally wishes she had more friends in this kind of stuff, but has no idea where to find them. She disappears into her own head a lot.
She's fifteen, with very good GCSE grades because she's never had anything to distract herself. She goes to Winstanley and gets very good A-Levels - politics, English Language, history and philosophy. She debated media, but it just seems like a daft subject, really. She's quiet a lot and enjoys reading more than anything else.
She's in a damn good university - maybe she's even in Oxbridge, making up with hard work at GCSE what she misses in intelligence for science subjects - and her parents are desperately proud, but Colleen doesn't really understand why. She doesn't think herself to be worth anything because she never learnt to. She has acquitances, but looks on at envy at all the people brave enough to wear the flared jeans and dye their hair mad colours and speak in a language she doesn't understand, something called elljay that sounds fun but she's not brave enough to ask about. She learnt a long time ago not to try and intrude on that sort of thing, though, because she knows that no one wants her butting into their groups.
Doing that meme upset me, strengely, but was fascinating to do. They are all the most 'tiny thing that could have gone one way or the other' type of thing. Also, I have a register at classes in, erk, eight hours time. I should go to bed and stop listening to David Grey. I should learn that it makes me cry, and judging by the way the lump in my throat won't go away I think it might set me off again.
Proper update tomorrow, honestly. Tomorrow wil be more positive. I have plans, involving joining the choir and doing better in terms of a work ethic and writing about the weekend. That is all positive. I am miserable right now. Sorry.
~Hathy_Col~
Sorry. That sounds very wanky. I apologise. I think iy's because I always listen to David Grey when I'm in this mood, and because I've had a glass of wine and that was perhaps a mistake.
So.
loneraven posted this meme, and it's fascinated. Hence my nicking it and posting it. I've thought about this a lot, actually and it's shamelessly sentimental in places.Um, yes. My dad is called Simon. Fiance is also called Simon. It is confusing. Just guess from the context, yeah? My mum is called Julie, by the way.
1. Julie and Simon are driving to pick up the cat they chose to adopt from the RSPCA. They're laughing and joking, but Julie looks at a split-second different time and manages to swerve out of the way of the oncoming car which, if it had hit them, would have caused them to plough headlong into the side a wall and give Julie horrific injuries. They're shaken because it was a near miss, but it's gone in half an hour but they go and pick up the cat anyway. Julie and Simon are never quite aware of their own mortality, and continue happily child-free.
2. Colleen is two years old and her parents are thinking about having another child. Both New Zealand and Australia are calling out for trained psychiatric nurses with levels of payment and a comfort of lifestyle that aren't found in the UK. Simon decides to move out and take his family with him to New Zealand, and they live the ex-pat lifestyle.
Colleen quite likes the weird insects, and has a go at being an extra for Lord of the Rings.
3. "I know," says Colleen. "Really, it's late, and we should get a taxi home. Because, y'know, work tomorrow morning and we're going to the same place."
"That makes sense," agrees Simon, although both of them are swaying slightly from the vokda. They've been drinking it throughout the night, because neat vodka is one of the things they have in common and both of them are tentatively realising that there is Something There and are both vaguely encouraging it through sharing of things in common and deliberately talking to each other as much as possible with the easy rapport they've had since they day they met.
Besides, they're celebrating, and they've reached the level of inebriation to encourage as much as possible.
So they get the taxi, and suddenly Colleen turns to Simon. "Hey! I have wine in the fridge! And it's a short walk from mine to yours."
So they agree to go and drink wine. They're celebrating, after all, because they are very good results after all, and it is therefore a special occasion.
The wine is all that is promised, but turns out to have a cork rather than a screw-top. Neither of them can work a corkscrew with the vodka swishing around their systems. They finish the little vodka she has at Colleen's, sit and talk for a while, and then Simon goes home with perhaps only a few looks back. Colleen goes to work the next morning with a faint twinge of regret that she wasn't brave enough to say or do anything, and a bigger twinge of nausea from the vodka hangover.
A month later, she's in university. She gets drunk a lot, and takes every offer she gets at the Bop and goes to the LGBT as often as possible. She's quietly proud of her reputation as a woman-eater (and sometimes a man-eater because university is a time for new experiences), because really, she doesn't want a serious relationship just yet. She thinks about Simon in the vague way her subconcious always makes her do, and they strike up the same easy conversation every time they see each other at the holidays in training. They just don't move in the same social circles enough, though, and she doesn't want people to infer something, so she never makes the effort to see him in other situations unless she's asked. And, of course, she never is, because there's never a special occasion again. Colleen assumes that Simon just thinks of her as a sort of vague friend, and she's happy enough in her own way.
She never knows how happy it is possible for her to be.
4. Colleen takes after Julie. She has lovely straight hair that sorts itself out most mornings. (Simon never practices on Barbies to work out how to plait thick, unmanageable hair.) The other children are primary school identify her as one of their own, and Colleen quickly gets a group of friends that she stays with throughout primary school and high school. She goes to KGV college and does enough work to get by but only as much as her friends, who are her everything and she follows blindly. She decides against university and works in a fairly dull job in an office, living with her parents long enough to get a place of her own, but she spends quite a lot of money in Liverpool, enjoying shopping, and RnB music when she's out on the town. She works out that she likes girls at one point, but prefers to go with the flow and has a fairly nondescript bloke from accounts. She's happy enough, because there's not a lot in the world waiting for her. She has a strong Scouse accent.
5. It's a long, hot, boring summer, and all Colleen has waiting to happen is Guide camp. She sleeps in most days and never looks at Channel Four. When an older girl, a Ranger, starts a conversation about Stargate on a lazy afternoon out canoeing, Colleen lies on the boards of the pier over the lake and lets the conversation drift over her without paying attention.
She's thirteen and she has no friends, but she reads her Dad's Discworld books and occasionally wishes she had more friends in this kind of stuff, but has no idea where to find them. She disappears into her own head a lot.
She's fifteen, with very good GCSE grades because she's never had anything to distract herself. She goes to Winstanley and gets very good A-Levels - politics, English Language, history and philosophy. She debated media, but it just seems like a daft subject, really. She's quiet a lot and enjoys reading more than anything else.
She's in a damn good university - maybe she's even in Oxbridge, making up with hard work at GCSE what she misses in intelligence for science subjects - and her parents are desperately proud, but Colleen doesn't really understand why. She doesn't think herself to be worth anything because she never learnt to. She has acquitances, but looks on at envy at all the people brave enough to wear the flared jeans and dye their hair mad colours and speak in a language she doesn't understand, something called elljay that sounds fun but she's not brave enough to ask about. She learnt a long time ago not to try and intrude on that sort of thing, though, because she knows that no one wants her butting into their groups.
Doing that meme upset me, strengely, but was fascinating to do. They are all the most 'tiny thing that could have gone one way or the other' type of thing. Also, I have a register at classes in, erk, eight hours time. I should go to bed and stop listening to David Grey. I should learn that it makes me cry, and judging by the way the lump in my throat won't go away I think it might set me off again.
Proper update tomorrow, honestly. Tomorrow wil be more positive. I have plans, involving joining the choir and doing better in terms of a work ethic and writing about the weekend. That is all positive. I am miserable right now. Sorry.
~Hathy_Col~
no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 01:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 01:48 am (UTC)It was really interesting to do, though, it really was.
And sad.
*cries stupidly*
Something I forgot:
Date: 2006-02-06 01:53 am (UTC)And I don't know whether to hate or love that an LJ meme can tap into such a source of emotional resonance; it doesn't seem right. Why can two am be so awful?
Re: Something I forgot:
Date: 2006-02-06 09:03 am (UTC)I loved it. I howled like a girl at the end because most of those options involve things that would have sucked. And I was all emotional, it was 2am (time of awfulness indeed) and David Grey was playing and frankly it was a trigger to the reflexes that normally only small kittens beig run over by cars can elicit.
(Apart from anything else, New Zealand really would have been like Guam.)
no subject
Date: 2006-02-06 01:13 pm (UTC)*hugs* If you ever find a work ethic, let me know where, I don't know where they come from...
no subject
Date: 2006-02-10 02:22 am (UTC)i think at the end of the day, it's very rare that one incident can set off such a chain of events. sure, experiences shapes who you become - but if you hadn't joined in one conversation, so what? there are enough of us out there to find one another. there will always be another chance.
but i love your line "she never knows how happy it is possible for her to be."
because to me, that's when i know i love someone.
xx
no subject
Date: 2006-02-10 01:36 pm (UTC)