Sex!

Or to be more accurate, gender!

I check my website emails about once every 10 days.   I don’t need to check them more than that anymore because I use this blog for different shit now.

Surprisingly, more and more emails I receive are addressing me as a male.   In rather subtle ways, like, “hey dude” and, “how’s your penis?”

I am, in fact, a woman.  I thought everybody who read this blog knew that, given that my rampant femininity screams from every velveteen verb.

Proof:

Im a woman! A bizarrely red-faced woman!

Though sometimes youd wonder.

(Busy day).

Anyway, that’s an intensely self obsessed blog entry right there (like the rest) but I thought I’d clear that up.  It means I cannot advise on certain things because I’m not affected by them, and I wouldn’t give advice on anything I don’t have experience or knowledge of.

And it’s a good excuse as any to link you to this lovely lovely thing:

http://seawitchery.tumblr.com/post/4070384205/i-started-out-clicking-strategically-and-by-the

If you had nothing to do tonight, now you do! Enjoy!

And er, yeah!  Entries like these feel like bullshit.  But I have no balls.

The Happy Suicide

I’m quite stressed right now, as I’ve explained a few times.  

I’ve started having panic attacks again.  They’re disturbing my sleep, because I am afraid to go to sleep.   The thought of wilfully consigning myself to darkness makes me feel panicked in itself.  Taking my medication helps, in that it knocks me out,  but I’m scared of lying there in the dark waiting for it to take effect.  So I take it earlier, and this is partly, I think, what is leading to sleepwalking.  I’m not properly asleep or properly awake and I don’t fall asleep in the same way if I take it then stay awake and active.  My brain is still going and between those cracks from the panic.

Bastard.

What I Do In My Sleep

Firstly, this is one of my favourite poems.  If you don’t want to read about cake, pish and menstrual blood, read this instead.  It’s called The Lady’s Reward by Dorothy Parker.

So, I’m a sleepwalker.    I’ve sleepwalked since I was a child.  When I was around eight years old, I sleepwalked out of the house, down the street, barefooted but open-eyed, knocked on my neighbour’s door and demanded that he fix my bike.  I was gently guided home.  I don’t remember this.  It was, like so much of my life, recounted to me afterwards by my family.  I should have realised at eight that that was going to be the order of things.

In the past few years, there has been a resurgence of sleepwalking.  This is due, I think, to Seroquel.   With Seroquel I’ve had sleep paralysis too.  It’s like it switches off my body but my mind keeps tottering around.  The ghost rising from the corpse, looking down and saying, “Bloody hell!  Right, I’m off to have a sandwich”.

The combination of Seroquel and alcohol is a particularly potent one.

Without alcohol, my Seroquel sleepwalking is benign enough.  I eat.  I wake up, walk in a drugged haze to the kitchen, locate- with magical accuracy-whatever has the highest percentage of carbohydrates and then I eat them.  Recently I have woken up with white chocolate in my belly button.  Yesterday, I pilfered two bags of crisps.   Hooray for house warming left overs!  I have no recollection of this- I never do.  I leave a trail of crumbs which the ants march upon.   A few weeks ago I took a carrot cake and ate it on the toilet.  I realised that I had done so when it was missing from the fridge and there was a little ring of icing and walnut segments growing around the toilet bowl.

This is making me fat.  I try to compensate during the day by eating less, but fat I still am, and fatter I am becoming.  It is distressing, but I’m used to being fat.  I have always been, to some degree, rather fat.  But it isn’t hurting anybody, except for Robert when I sit on his knee.

Seroquel combined with alcohol- ah.  Recently it has led to two particularly hideous episodes/

So, this was about two years ago. It was a jolly night- two of my friends were staying with me and my boyfriend.

We had dinner and lovely amounts of alcohol. To bed! Lots of yawning. We put the inflatable mattress on the living room floor and bid them goodnight.

The next part of this was recounted to me by my boyfriend, who was watching from the door way, hiding his glorious morning erection with a pillow.

Apparently, stark bollock naked, I woke up from bed and wandered into the living room.  They woke up and watched me as I obliviously got down on all fours in the corner of the room and proceeded to piss myself. Apparently I craned my neck backwards to watch the extremely long, very noisy stream of wee as I did so.

As I got up and walked away from my damp patch, I stepped back over the mattress, onto the bloke friend’s head. He got a fantastic view of my vagina. I was at least in the right mind to say, “Sorry”, to which he quietly responded, “It’s okay”.

Robert guided me back to bed.  I didn’t believe him when he told me. I tried to bury into the pillow, into the mattress, into the centre of the earth with embarrassment.  But it was mostly an act- I felt an odd sort of pride that I had been so far gone, in such an animalistic act.  It was beyond the pale.  And my friends are at least odd enough to appreciate- well, my being odd enough.  And Robert, who is also odd, counts it amongst the sexiest things he’s ever seen.  Someone in such abandonment of conventions is sexy to him.  It’s not to me- I can just imagine my stretchmarked stomach in the dawn light and sagging breasts like some sort of cow.

The next thing is only repulsive if you think eating your own menstrual blood is disgusting.

A few months ago, Robert burst into the bedroom, waking me up from a (somewhat drugged due to insomnia) sleep.

“THERE’S A FUCKING MOUSE ON THE SOFA!” he bellowed. He is very phobic of such things. Great with spiders and cockroaches, but shits it when Mickey comes to visit.

I was in no state to even understand him so made a noise and turned around to sleep.

“Come and get the mouse”, he beseeched. “The cats are batting it around!”, but I slept on. I don’t like mice either anyway, especially not dead ones.

So, he posted on Facebook, like a wuss-“There’s a dead mouse on the sofa. I’m too scared to touch it. I will give you £allmymoney if you come and get rid of it for me”.

My fetching 4ft 10″ female friend happened to be in the area. She valiantly stepped up to the challenge.

About two hours later, somewhat more lucid, I awoke. My boyfriend came into the bedroom.

“What happened to the mouse?” I asked.

He glanced down sheepishly.

“Er…”

And then he explained that my friend had come, approached the chair with caution and then turned to him and said,

“Robert, it’s a used tampon”.

I neglected to tell him the tampon was there because in my sleepwalking state, I had sleepily wandered into the sitting room, pulled it out with the intention of flushing it away, then instead sat on the sofa, chewed on the end until it was frayed, then gone back to bed.

He needs his eyes tested.

Now- those things, tragic and unavoidable as they are, amuse me.  But my sleepeating is starting to fail in its amusement.  I have a lock on my door, but as Robert works night shifts, this means locking him out of the bedroom as I sleep.  It can’t be opened from the outside when it’s locked.  I would rather not do that for many reasons.  One, he needs to sleep, two, I enjoy sharing a bed with him and three, my panic attacks have returned and suddenly waking up, with my body being flung upright and my breath ragged and strangled is not a state to be in with a locked door.  The anxiety is making it worse, I think.  I don’t sleep eat all the time, but have been mad-anxious lately and it’s stepped up.

Fitting locks on the cupboards and fridge seems overkill, and besides, I can’t afford it (or indeed, want to spend money on more important things.  The cupboard doors are horizontal at the top, rather than vertical, so it would also involve drilling into fancy wooden worktops and I’d be out a deposit).  My now “oh-fuck” level of poverty may be the solution.  I can’t really afford food any more so soon there’ll be nothing more to eat.  Huzzah!

Do any of you have this problem?  How do you solve a problem like eating the crap out of anything not nailed down in your sleep?

Londoners, speak to me of any jobs

As I suspected, the job I had at my boyfriend’s place has fallen through, and so I am unemployed, can’t claim benefits and pretty much up the creek.

If you know of anything going, from writerly stuff to things you hear about that will sustain me until September, email me!  I am now desperate.   Thank you!

Ha, no job to start next week, no King’s- fuck this month, eh!  I’m great, me!