anyway, at the top of the month i took a train and then another train to a town in yorkshire called halifax, which is this tiny podunk place that has a great view of the hills but very little else going for it from what i could tell, and then i queued for an hour outside their regional theatre so i could watch the first promotional gig for florence + the machine’s new album and it was a solidly excellent gig that covered off a heap of excellent tracks and some new material but
then she came out for the encore and sang
shake it out and i almost cried in public i was
so overwhelmed.
that song came out in 2011 and it followed me around for four years, waiting for me to get my shit together. we sang it as a crowd, and my lungs were full and my chest was tight and we all of us screamed and sang and exalted in it.
and then we had to go home.
—
it was a weird night! i left the venue, made a pit stop at mcdonald’s for a drink, met this sweet hungarian girl at the bus stop and then escorted her back to mcdonald’s to get a bottle of water, went back to the bus station where this woman was absolutely smashed, sitting on the ground, beating the floor; helped another woman, a motherly type, to help the drunk woman get on a bus to bradford, then helped the motherly woman convince the coach driver to let the hungarian girl get on our coach even though her ticket was for the next one out.
it was mad. i got into london at 6am; walked from marble arch to bond street to catch a tube back to my flat, and crashed for five hours before heading out to south bank to spend the later afternoon / evening with my cousins in lieu of the birthday party i’d skipped in order to go to the gig in halifax.
on the monday i met up with a couple of them at regent’s park and made the most of the lovely weather.
—
that was three weeks ago.
—
the gdpr deadline finally passed on friday, and whilst we’re not compliant on all fronts, we have a plan in place to ensure that we will be. my boss handed me this task and then immediately set about rearranging my expectations which is a thing i wish he wouldn’t do. i wish i’d been able to get us into a better position because we’ve put off some stuff with good reason, but there’s other things we could have been better about and despite leading the change programme, i wasn’t allowed to sort them out.
it’s been kind of a frustrating month! it’s a four-day week leading us into june and i’m going to use it to test the accounting system we’ve been building, and catch up on the financial reports i was supposed to do last month. all my tasks got deprioritised, which i understand the reasoning behind, but considering i then wasn’t able to give my all to this change programme is really kind of irritating.
i figured it would be this way, but: this is the year i try to find my next job, i think. i want to see this accountancy service through to implementation, set up a backlog of improvements, and then find the next challenge.
—
my plan to walk everywhere went really well and then i blistered the hell out of my feet so i took a week off. i still did the half-trek to work on friday morning, and at pace, but that particular habit has become about taking in the morning at the end of the week. i don’t think it helps friday productivity at all, but it’s otherwise very centring.
—
here are some things i have watched recently:
- bron | broen 4x01 but nothing beyond that because i keep forgetting it’s airing on friday. i have two episodes geared up for today.
- the split which has been pleasantly easy viewing if not particularly groundbreaking. whatever; not everything has to be.
- killing eve WHICH HAS BEEN SO SATISFYING. i love everyone! sandra oh! jodie comer! fiona motherfucking shaw! get this in your eyeballs; hard rec; would and will watch again.
- an episode of steven universe that went exactly where i thought it was going right until it did a sudden right turn and holy shit the narrative pacing in this show is something else entirely. imagine sitting on that reveal for five years what the actual fuck.
- i love westworld so much. i’ve been a thandie newton fan for years, and i enjoy complex timey-wimey narratives, and i love stories about robots. i find the show very satisfying 90% of the time.
- i had about seven episodes of critical role to catch up on and i finally did it. i’m enjoying so much about campaign two, but - surprising to no-one - jester’s general everything is my favourite.
- john mulaney’s kid gorgeous at radio city had this weird quality of being hilariously funny but also oddly tone neutral where mulaney is definitely still very, very funny, but also actively, visibly performing his voice. this is not a criticism, just something that came up whilst i watched it.
still on my list: the second season of
the expanse;
the terror; a new season of
hap and leonard, which i knew would be a thing but also was completely unprepared for. amazing.
—
i sure did see a
star war on friday!
—
last weekend i met up with my older cousin brothers and a group of friends at the o2 arena, and we went to see trevor noah live. it was a great evening, and i had fun being out of the flat despite not really knowing people in that group.
the week before that, esther and i went to the almeida to see romola garai in
the writer which was this angry metatextual production that i have since decided i fucking loved. at the time it was a lot to process, but i couldn’t stop thinking about it which is the marker of...something. romola garai was fantastic.
i had to cross london to get to the play because i discovered that anis mojgani was doing a reading in whitechapel and i’d missed the opportunity to see him on previous occasions. who knew when he’d be back? he performed some of his classics, as well as work from his newer books, and this time i actually did cry, which is a thing i never do in public, mostly out of self preservation. but i was listening to him speak these intimate poems, and remembering where i had been when i had first read them, and i felt overfull. that’s how things get when i feel them deeply; i brim up with them. they sit in my chest. i didn’t want to leave, and i had to anyway, and it was a lot to take in on one night, both that reading and then the play.
—
it’s a three-day weekend, and this one has been about crochet and netflix, which sounds like every weekend, but is especially true this time around. i am determined to finish this blue thing! determined! but also i have run out of t-shirt yarn for my laundry basket project and whilst the whole point of that project was to use up that yarn, i don’t want to get into this cycle where i buy more jersey yarn and then it ends up in my stash. my stats is big enough. i do not need to add to it, holy shit.
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