The Blue Wallpaper

*Post written last week but forgot to publish. Silly billy*

In my second year of uni, I studied a short story for one of my lit classes called 'The Yellow Wallpaper' by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The story is brilliantly disturbing, not only because of the content, but because the story emerged from the writer's own experience. The story is about a woman diagnosed with nervous depression and confined to a locked nursery in order to recuperate. She has no visitors and is forbidden from any form of mental stimulation. A series of journal entries documents her descent into madness and the last entry finds her creeping along the walls, completely obsessed with the wallpaper and the women she imagines are trapped behind it.

This sickness has turned me into the creeping lady.

Except the walls that I've been slinking about are not the buttercup-patterned walls of Gilman's story. They are instead the blue walls of facebook. By now, I know every picture, every photo comment and every updated status of all 254 of my facebook friends. I am going insane.

*List of Things Accomplished During my Confinement*

~Watched : The complete first season of The Tudors
Miss Potter
Marie Antoinette
Half of A Very Long Engagement
Amelie
Snippets of Virgin Suicides
Atonement
The Beginning of Thirteen (awful, awful!)

~Read: 'How I live Now' by Meg Rosoff
'Grace Notes' by Bernard McLaverty
All of Liesl Jobson's flash fiction again. Just because she's amazing.
Ron Jonson's columns for The Guardian
Annabel Crabb's columns for The Sydney Morning Herald
Various friend's blogs

~Talked extensively to my lovely mom
~Took far too many moody self-portraits with my camera which I then deleted in sheer embarassment
~Scrolled through all 150 text messages on my phone and whittled the list down to 63 of my favourite ones
~A variety of equally ridiculous leg exercises to prevent bed sores
~Updated my travel journal and blog
~Painted my nails and then smudged them so had to take the whole lot off and start again
~Counted the midge bites on my legs from walking through the Meadows
~Modelled my beret to see which poise was most becoming (I had it right the first time...silly billy)
~Straightened my hair
~Drew the tattoos that I pretend I will get someday...
~Composed an entire poem and then proceeded to fall asleep and forget the whole thing


And now I am back to creeping the walls...

*HaPpInEsS iS sPaRkLy RuBy SlIpPeRs*

Wednesday Night Fever

I think that we all knew that the whole ‘transferring eight weeks worth of notes’ thing was not going to work out. Sorry to disappoint, Alana. I just write way too much to be able to copy everything onto my blog.

Excuses over, I’m feeling slightly disillusioned with this travelling life right now. I’m sick with the flu, lying in a strange bed with wet towels over me to cool my skin. Every position that I lie in feels uncomfortable and my throat feels like it’s been walloped with a cricket bat. After lying in bed for two days in the same clothes and not being able to shower, I feel gross! And I have a lovely bruise on my thigh from attempting to stand up, losing my balance and cracking into my night stand. Basically, I just need someone to come look after me.

These are the details that you don’t think about when planning an overseas escapade. Planned on making a trip to London, for sure! Thought about fitting in France somewhere along the lines. Didn’t scribble down ‘sickness’ on my list of things to do though. Actually, there are quite a few things that I didn’t think would bother me while travelling. One of them is living out of a suitcase. I’m so tired of wearing the same clothes! It sounds so stupid but I’m a firm believer in variety being the spice of life. In fact, it’s probably my life statement and so you can understand my frustration in opening my suitcase every morning and going, “Should I wear the butterfly dress or the tartan skirt today”. Every day. It’s just crushing my artistic temperament. :-)

This sounds ridiculously frivolous. I really don’t worry about things like this. I normally have no worries resigning myself to only being able to afford the cheap and cheerful shampoos instead of the ones that make my hair smell like hot chocolate and marshmallows. It’s having all this time to think that is making me discontent. Lying in a bed for two days straight will do that to a person.

One of the things that I have realised in my fevered contemplations over the past couple of days is that some of my expectations for this trip have been stopping me from enjoying it as it’s been. Instead of loving the fact that I’m on this amazing adventure and living in one of the cities that I love most in the world, I’ve been agonising over things that are completely out of my control. No more. Starting tomorrow, I fully intend to squeeze every last indulgent pleasure that I can out of Edinburgh. I’ve made a lot of sacrifices to have this opportunity. I’ve worked two jobs for the past year, one of which I despised. I’m missing out on my graduation ceremony, a friend’s wedding and another friend’s twenty-first birthday gala to be here. I am now completely resigned to enjoying every last morsel of this trip.

Tomorrow I’m going to spend the day reading in the Meadows with a punnet of raspberries :-)