Yay!
Anna’s dressed up, posh clothes on, heels very high (and i accordingly walk like a transvestite), painted an inch thick and oh by god but we’re going to party.

Party Party Party Party Party.

party.

Party Party Party.

Party Party.

Party.

woo!

Party Party.

‘WHAT DO WOMEN LOVE MORE THAN SHOES?’

said the long colourful advert along the side of the bus…

‘HANDBAGS! everything you need for christmas….’

This was when I started worrying.
I mean, I like to think of myself as a woman. The breasts help.
But this seemed to be yet another example of me simply not behaving like a ‘proper lady’

Shoes?
I don’t love shoes.
Shoes are the things that you put on your feet.
They’re Shoes.

And handbags?
Well, the word itself has so many connotations but to me, what is this handbag but a quintessence of dust, sorry, a place where you put your book and your fags?

I mean, I like that I have somewhere to put my book and my fags, but I wouldn’t go as far as to describe my relationship with the bag as ‘love’.

I ‘love’ jam on toast.
I ‘love’ many things.
Shoes and Handbags?

For three days in a row, I have had to pay 70p for each Snickers.

It goes a little something like this;

Put 35p in the chocolate machine, press number for snickers.
coily thing moves forward , snickers moves forward.
Snickers balances on edge of shelf.
Silence.

anna nudges machine with gammy shoulder in particularly ineffective way.
nothing happens.
Put 35p more in the machine.
coily thing moves forward, snickers drops off. Second snickers moves forward.

Second snickers balances on edge of shelf.
Anna swears at machine.
Anna kicks machine.
Man who looks like Father Christmas but is a fuckbunch grumpier behind reception desk looks as if he is about to shout at anna.
Anna runs away.

Five flights of stairs later, anna reaches desk, e-mails boyfriend.
Boyfriend, happening to work in same building, goes down three flights of stairs, shamelessly thumps machine, recieves snickers.

It’s a pretty good set up, I suppose.
For him.

But I feel like I’m spending half my weekly wage on snickers that I don’t get to eat, and no, no, I can’t press any of the more dependable buttons, because yes, I admit it, here comes the freaky revelation, I don’t like chocolate.

Not much.

I only eat snickers because it’s the only thing i know with enough sugar and carbohydrates to prop me up in a mid-afternoon sugar slump.

Anything else would just be, you know, chocolate, and, well, icky.

Anyway. It doesn’t matter now, because this morning I tried to phone home to warn of the bad traffic, put 20p into the phone box and, upon it not working, got £1.30 back, so that makes up for the snickers.

I think.

I’m not very good with money.

‘Busted beaten off by Jacko’

hahahahahaha

via michael. Not kiddy-fiddler jackson. Another one.

Blug.
kof.
Snurf.
F-tooo.
Meh.
kofkof.
fnurgle.
fleh.
nug.
kofkofkof.

and a small sad ‘woo’ like a sleeping platypus kicked, to boot.

My friend Bruce sent me this.
He sent it because he’s from Glasgow and I lived there.

It’s funny.

Although I’m guessing the further away you live from Glasgow, the less you’ll be able to figure out what it all means.

Glasgow Survival…

Oh, and you need sound. Sound which May not be worksafe…

Person behind anna on the bus: *Koff!* *Koff Koff!*

Person next to anna on the bus: *At-You!* Ah-ah-ah-at-you!*

Person in front of anna on the bus
*diddle dee dee diddle dee*
“Ello? yes. I ab on by way in dow. I ab not well. I dink I hab foo.”

Person behind anna: *KOFF!*

Person standing up next to anna *simultanious sneeze and fart action*

Person next to anna: *Snuuuuuuurf* *sniff, snuuuuuuuuuurf*

Person in front of anna: *ah-chi!* *choo!-choo!-Chooooo!* *etc!*

Person next to anna: *KoffKOFFetc!*

Person behind anna: *etc!*

Anna: kof.

I’d be safer going to work in a fucking ambulance.

In fact I think it possible that I already am.

I have a sore throat, and it hurts and this so unfair, because I had something wrong with me last week, and it’s not my turn. It’s your turn. Or his turn.

It’s not my turn.

And the first person to say that I brought this upon myself by pulling my toenail off gets a punch in the face.

No, worse than that, I’ll cough on you.

Bloggers Uk Inc are having their annual christmas works do this saturday.

All the details are here.

I’ve been assured that there’s no karaoke, although confirmation has yet to come through about the arse-photocopying facilities of the venue.

Although nervous and generally terrified of such gatherings, I fully intend to patronise it, and be patronised by it - “Little red what? Sorry, never heard of you… how many hits do you get?… Ah….’ - and meet a whole bunch of people who are not only *real*, but also lovely.

At least there’ll be no danger of getting fired first thing on monday morning. Maybe.

Although if that photocopier company get back to me with their rental quotes….

No, like, reason, or anything. But I was wondering…
Do any Australians read this site at all?

Not for any particular reason, of course…

In which this little piggy went to market, this little piggy had a large heavy object dropped on him, this little piggy had roast beef and this little piggy went purple and then, you know, a bit flakey, and then, like fell off.

It went purple, and it fell off.

Just as your mother said it would if you played with it too much.

It was clear that I’d dropped something on my left toenail, it had a black triangle in the shape of something evil, or the corner of something heavy. And evil.

But my right toenail, well, that one was just gammy.
And purple.
Don’t know what had happened to it, it was just gammy, and purple.
And a bit, oh, you know, just euw.
You don’t want a purple extremity, do you?
Hang on. That’s not rude, is it? It sounds rude.
Anyway, it was purple, and then I noticed I could kind of pull it a bit too far away from my toe without too much trouble.

Hey, whoa there! You alright, honey?
Look, if you feel queasy, I’d stop reading if I were you. Now.
It gets worse.
Seriously.

Anyway, it fell off.
Yesterday.

Well, I say fell off, but i suppose… No, it did fall off.
It fell off while I happened to be holding it in a pair of pliers.

I didn’t pull it off, actually, no.
I was, by some coincidence, holding the pliers, the pliers were on the toenail, something may have inadverently moved one way or the other.
Anyway. Stop making that noise.

It fell off.
And now I have no big toenail on my right foot.
Tonight I may work on the left, to match. But I may not. No, I won’t.
The other, after all was the work of nature.
And a bit me.

One minute it was there, the next not.

I fell it off.

It has been pointed out to me several times recently, in a good way, that this blog is ‘ranty’, looking over the front page, I cannot disagree.

It is unbalanced. So.

- Last night I dreamt I had a hamster, it was very small, and kind of caramel coloured and white, with a little twitchy nose and fluffy fur.

I found it, and discovered that it had been abandoned in a car with the windows not even cracked so it could breathe, and it had escaped from the car in a exciting episode involving terrorists stealing the car and setting fire to it. The little hamster escaped just in time.

When I found the hamster it was sitting on a wall looking sad with its legs outstretched, twiddling its non-opposable thumbs.

You may wonder how I know what happened before I met the hamster. I know what happened before I met the hamster because the hamster wrote a poem about it and gave it to me.

The poem was rather too non-realist for my taste and used quite ridiculous extended metaphor, but I found myself able to work out what had happened and forgive the style, reasoning that it was, after all, written by a hamster.

Then I met Halle Berry, who was quite upset because her husband kept disappearing. Not wandering off, you understand, actually vanishing. So I took her along to a Hollywood celebrity peer support group I knew of for celebrities to whom wierd things kept happening. We took the hamster with us.

Halle and her husband were much helped by the peer support group, particularly be Ed Norton, who had a tree growing out of his head, and Angelina Jolie, whose leg fell off everytime she sneezed, and had to be stapled back on by her PA.

Then Michelle Perfifififer, who was shrinking while her arms grew, tried to have sex with my boyfriend.

I gave her the hamster and they got on very well.

The hamster, to my knowledge, never had a name.

There. That wasn’t ranty, was it?

In which anna makes up for the fact that her last post really has seemed to create a forum for intelligent debate by returning to rather more of a norm.

You know, I’m really enjoy the fact that people are discussing something on my site with care, deliberation, it’s incredible, i feel really really chuffed.

But what is it with the male/female imbalance of the comments box?
I mean, other girls have blogs and lots of girls comment…

I seem to get more people of the other sex that aren’t girls.
I’m a girl.
What’s with the lack of girl-on-girl action in my box?

In which anna copy and pastes a lengthy argument that she found interesting but thinks everyone else might not.

Me and Dave (from acerbia) had this long argument yesterday.

It may not be interesting, and I’m aware not many will agree with me, but i wanted to keep it somewhere.

This was the dilbert argument;

dave: re:apple eating, check out Dilbert.com
anna: i don’t like dilbert. he’s a minion of The Man…
dave: begrudgingly
anna:sent to keep the masses in their place. As a cartoon, he represents the unchangable nature of work and life
dave: certainly not, he’s the voice of dissent that goes unheeded
anna: he evil.
anna: eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil
dave:: you’re delusional. By projecting your own fears of a stable workplace onto cartoon characters you intensify your own inability to commit yourself to working for the man
anna:by displaying his constant impotency and lack of control over his work environment, decisions and, effectively, his life, dilbert sends the message that we - by identifying with him - are safe and should be
comfortable in our ineptitude. No one represents cowtowing to the man and to our prescribed place in society like dilbert
anna: he should be shot.
dave: I suppose you think Snoopy was a fascist
dave: Dilbert displays that despite the best efforts of the
individual, working within the system will inevitably wear you down and that only by preserving a sense of humor can you hope to survive it all. He displays hope. He should be commended.
anna: hope? HOPE? Hope - that you, yes you, can develop a sense of humour, as you’ll need to because you’re never going to see any of your hopes and dreams, live up to your aspirations, or get out from the rock that you’re meant to be under…
oh right, *that* kind of hope.

dave: Dilbert exists in a non-time and space dimension however. Sure you may have been reading him for years but the passage of time isn’t the same in comics. Garfield would be a little mound of dust on a grave if
comic time was real time. The X-Men would all be Ex-men
anna: that’s not an argument. The timeless nature of dilbert simply increases the
problem.

dave: you’re making out that Dilbert is a perpetual loser because he never progresses in time
anna: for dilbert, nothing ever moves on, not even time
dave: but people evolve into and out of liking Dilbert depending on their situation. When I was a kid I liked Peanuts even though I couldn’t understand it. I grew up faster than Linus and Sally and into Dilbert, where I can sympathise with the absurdities of the workplace with him. But when I move into some other part of the career-ladder, maybe as a writer, I won’t have that same empathy
anna: You’re Saying ‘I don’t like it because I don’t understand it’? It’s not dostoyevsky, dave, it’s dilbert.
dave: I’m saying that you dislike it because it shows you what’s to come
anna: no it doesn’t, it shows me the way things are and how people are so easily suckered into accepting and feeling comfortable with it. It makes me sad. he should be shot

dave: you’re basing your perception of reality on a comic strip
character. Dilbert is a parody extrapolated out of years of working
in a corporate structure, it is not a mirror image of reality
anna: look, i’m not basing my perception of reality on a cartoon
strip. If I was going to do that, i’d pick calvin and hobbes. I’m just saying that I’m rejecting the reality that dilbert enforces.
dave: because he works for “the man”
anna: i’m rejecting the fact that he is no longer a ‘parody’,
but a representative of how people expect to feel.

dave:: you think people can be told how to act by a comic strip?
anna: no, just thhat you are destined to live and die thwarted
dave: I think it shows that to succeed you need to focus your
efforts beyond a regular 9 to 5. Dilbert regularly cobbles together inventions of
stupendous creativity, but Dogbert markets them and steals the profits
anna: I may cry.
dave: Whyever would you do that? I thought you were doing a
particularly good job of arguing your side
anna: well, thank you ever so much.

I just feel sad that you feel so comfortable with the ugly truth of capitalism.
dave:I am at least aware of the truth, I just chose not to do anything about it. In that respect I am more Wally than Dilbert
anna: you’re more wally than anything, in that case, in my opinion.
anna: who’s wally?
dave: the one who was chewing ice cubes to annoy Alice
anna: I din look
dave: all this arguing and you didn’t even read the strip?!
anna:i seen it before!
dave: this is today’s strip, how can you have seen it before?
anna: well, i’ve seen dilbert before and he never changes. You said that
dave: No, I said he exists within a timeless limbo and doesn’t progress. I didn’t say its the same strip every day
anna: yeah, well, it is, pretty much.
dave: how would you support that argument?
anna: frame one: worker has poo life. frame two; hope glimmers. Frame three; hope fades, worker trapped.
dave: I have three strips in front of me from the desktop calendar, that format only applies to one of them
anna: well, that wasn’t a bad estimate then.
dave: that still leaves 2/3rds of Dilbert to be unaccountable for
anna: yes.
anna: well.
anna: i suppose, dave, i’ll just learn. When i finally understand that that is how my life is destined to be, and unavoidably so - then i’ll find it very funny.

anna: probably