Tales and tales.

Eating today:

Sausage sandwich (vegetarian, pick off crusts) (350)
salad and carrot cake (93+292=380)
pesto and tortellini (400)
15g chocolate (75)
6 dates (60)
options hot chocolate (40)

Not good enough to lose weight like I want to. Weird, such a small looking amount of food.... I'm glad about the salad discovery though. So, totted up... 100, 175, 575, 955, 1300. Not so bad as I thought, actually. And I did a walk today as well, to University and back. I started to feel thinner today, but then I walked and my jeans felt tighter than they should do... these used to be huge jeans.

Tomorrow I will meet a final deadline with some work that is completely shit. And they will know it. And my friends will know it. Which I feel shamed for.

I just finished Salman Rushdie's Shame. It started slowly, but by the end I was devouring it akin to the manner of its eponymous heroine. I loved it, I love myths and mythology and folklore. Anthropology. Really, if we all construct our own lives, and if we all have our own tales, our lives are myths. Mine would be.... Icarus? I don't know.

There was once a little girl, given all she could wish for. Her parents loved her, and cherished her, and made her into the best they could, whittling her like a piece of wood with loving care. Ensuring she never became too greedy or too self consumed, until so old, and then they let her free. The perfect child, created to be perfect, was tested on the world to see if she truly was perfect, like a paper model, able to stand alone. And the perfect child blew back over and landed in a puddle, which dried and dampened with the contractual rays of the sun, greying and dirtying her bleached white shine until she became grey like everyone else.

That is none too happy a tale. That is not really my life. Whittling is a bad word for the description; they gave, they didn't take away. And I didn't fall in a puddle; no, I am not at the best university, I am not thin, she does not want me... but I have friends. I am acting, I am at a good university, I am financially independent, I am not morbidly obese, I am in full health. That is of consequence, that is important. I am not homeless... I am housed, thanks to my own financial management.

So

There was a girl who loved so much she could not bear to disappoint and pushed away the three she loved, one after the other, so that she would not disappoint them nor they her.
She settled for less. She tired easily of the first, wearing him thin, the second, she desired still after the culmination, the third, saw straight through her layers to within and despised her. So she despised herself.

That is not true. Or it is, yes, well. I don't know. It probably is.

Once upon a time a beautiful fairy was born who had the power to change into anything. And decided it was best to be just her.

I wish this was true.

I am no fairytale heroine
I cannot bend you to my whim
Nor sing mellifluous hymns
Or dance as stones on water skim

I, with visage undefined,
Figure so very misaligned
Attire that a jester shunned
Sleepless eyes a bed interred

Insomniac nights and wakeless days
Ridiculous fits of ludic brays
When comes my saviour to this house?
When I am ready, above all else.