bee feast

Yes, yes, I've already booked my seat on the 19.58 service to Hell. But Satan will understand.

From: Lucie Notanotherone [unintentionalhilarity@gmail.com]
To: Bee

Dear Bee,

I have only just discovered that there is a market for online proofreading. Judging by your website you are vert successful as an online proofreader, and with the right help I believe I could be too. I would be extremely greatful if you were to help me begin. Thank you.

Lucie


From: Bee
To: Lucie

Hi Lucie,

Thanks for getting in touch. Proofreading can be very hard if you don’t have the ‘knack’ but there are lots of courses available which will help you decide if it is right for you. Qualifications are not so important as the ability to achieve results for clients.

You should be aware that work is sporadic for proofreaders and it is a very competitive field. I would advise you start out by looking for mistakes in your own correspondence – it’s a good test of your eye for errors. You need to develop one of these if you want to attempt to compete with established proofers.

Sorry I can’t be of more help – you could try contacting other proofreaders but they are generally busy trying to get work, so don’t be disappointed if you don’t hear back.

Good luck!

Best regards,

Bee

Ah, internet, we've had an uneasy alliance. You have frustrated me, failed to satisfy me, bored me rigid. But! today I am inclined to whisper rude things in your giant ear, you wonder of the modern age, you.

1) Found it! Shield stuff. And on Slate, too. Praise the Lawd. (Actually there's only the briefest mention of the real-life events in there but it's a start, and I'll turn my attention to that nerdery later.)

2) Via the er, perpetually blue-in-the-face Mark Morford, also on Slate; classic catnip for snickering lefties.

3) And, last night, I went to this and from thence here and then here which led to me discovering someone clever and funny with the same name as me.

Admittedly this is not difficult. I have one of those cute ubiquitous names. At the First Magazine I used to get called someone else's name all the fucking time, thanks to people getting muddled up by a Radio 1 DJ who had my last name (only not quite) and my colleague's first name and worked in more or less the same field, and an underwear model with the same name as that DJ and another damn DJ with almost my name. This always resulted in the same wrongness which irritated me greatly and far too often. People would hesitantly shout it across a room and I knew they meant me but I would turn my unsuitably-cropped head and ignore them. Humph.

Anyway, I've 'been' an interviewee on some raving pro-gun 'satire' site (note: this still pisses me off but good), an accounting instructor, a trembling little teen goth girl and even a racing greyhound in Dorset. Without getting too Dave Gorman about it, I'd love to find as many Bees as there are. I did find a few relatives in Wyoming under my old name. There aren't many of them. In fact I only found them because one of them had died and got mentioned in local paper. Apparently all the other remaining Oldnames are in France. Don't know what they're doing there. The name is not remotely French. Nor is it at all Italian - probably eastern-European or something - but I still harbour the stubborn fantasy that Italy is where the American side of my family originated. There's definitely some organised crime genes in there.

Thassa nica donut.

So, it's a nice way to get slightly sucked into what I refuse to refer to as the 'blogosphere', finding a namesake. Reclusive and future-jeopardisingly-picky as I am, I see no reason to be any more promiscuous with my friendship online than I am in real life. However, having made at least two - three - actual real friends via the net in the last couple of years, I should perhaps think about blurring the boundaries a bit. Are you reading this? Are you a really nice person beneath that sardonic and aloof facade? Not an idiot? Interested in Stuff? It's notoriousbee at gmail dot com. Come on. I have no fear. Well, not much.

Did you see that anti-gun-control site, though? Using cigarette-control as a heh, heh, metaphor. Every time my mind wanders back to the question of whether or not I'd be eligible for a dual passport, it's things like that which stop me. It'd have to be San Francisco. They have dog parks there and only a residual terror of large dogs due to the incident with the Presa Canarios and the perverted lawyers and their adoptive neo-Nazi son-slash-sex-toy. (I bet you clicked on that one.) There aren't many children there now either. Hmmm.

Oh, and that Woman, who is now "convinced that liberalism is a mental disorder" - wouldn't want to share a continent with her either. I'm going to stop talking about her, because otherwise it'll start to look like I'm looking to start some kind of beef, which would imply that I'm into the idea of the blogosphere and that would never do.

Bless Sensible, providing me with new music. I now have more Magnetic Fields stuff than anyone could possibly need, including one lovely track which plays over the end of a particularly stunning Shield episode. Music makes such a difference to things. It's odd to feel now that I've said everything I ever wanted to say about it. I don't think I actually have, but I did get a bit sick of the sound of my own voice on the subject. Most of the nausea was probably to do with the surrounding nonsense, admittedly. I was fed up of what I was bouncing my opinions off, what they were used for. Every writer has to get used to the idea of being a lowly space-filler for hire, and I didn't mind in all honesty, but there has to be a hint of an inkling of a spark of something More. That was what eventually went.

A really great writer who I admired a lot replied to a slightly lost little email of mine with a big rant about how I had to keep going, that I had "a duty to the righteous" to carry on. It was brilliant, but the trouble was that all this righteousness and duty and fire and ire was all contained in places like writers' emails to each other. There was no place for it in the frightened little encampments of the mags.

I suppose there was a bit of "if a velvet-swagged gold-embossed opinion of magnificently disproportionate value to the thing it's an opinion of falls in the woods, does it make a sound?", like thoughts only existed if you put them down and published them after tossing them about in an office or a pub. It's true that to really write and really get something out you need to mix with your own breed of colourful brainy mutt, chew on the same bones, growl eloquently at each other. I do miss it to an extent. But then I ran with the old grumpy enclosed lot rather than my own new naive happy lot, and all that bitter lamenting may be great and righteous but it runs you down in the end.

I remembered today my lift encounter at the Last Mag with a particular oik of a web hack, with whom I'd had a massive online fight at the Website some months previously. He had accused me of, heh, heh, being on my period. I accused him of going bald. It degenerated into some ridiculous drawn-out exchange, which each of us was copying our colleagues and bosses on, wherein he would take me to task at great length and I ended up quoting all of his argument in my reply and then saying something about baldness. There's no reasoning with some people.

And furthermore, nyer nyer nyer nyer, and you said this and that just shows how truly tragic and worthless you are and if only I could get away with calling you a silly bitch, but I'm too middle-class for that and think that I'm somehow above it although at least that would be an honest representation of my feelings. You cannot write and you do not know what you are wittering on about. My contempt for you knows no bounds, etc etc.

Baldy.

Nyer nyer nyer rant rant rant smarm smarm smarm.

Bald.

Hur hur hur. Still, I'd been quite stung by him - I'm pathetically porous and must take on every little prick that steps up to me even at intellectual knee-level. Intellect is a healthy horse, but emotion is a big mad ox and you cannot stop her once she decides to steam off somewhere.

So I went to the first editorial meeting at the Last Mag, and met a studenty bloke at the door. He was fumbling with the door wondering if he'd been buzzed in or not, so I pushed it and held it open for him. He seemed excessively nervous. I asked which floor he wanted at the lift. Fifth floor. Ah, I said, so you're here for the Last Mag meeting? Mmm. We got into the small lift and turned to face the closing doors. I'm Bee. What's your name?

"Mumblemurfle."

"Sorry?"

". . .Simon Scrofula."

"Simon Scrofula??"

The doors hissed shut.

I might even have rubbed my hands and said "Well, well, well". Such a rush to be towering over this deeply uncomfortable creature who had only felt able to attack me from a safe distance. I acknowledged the pettiness of this about, ooh, an hour later but in the meantime I revelled in his squirming like. . .there's no comparison of what that's like.

We went into the meeting room, me grinning like a bastard, him receding further into himself from his initial awkwardness, hands in pockets, shuffling and shrinking. We both had to stand because all the seats were taken by hungry, idealistic fools. The air was full of journalistic zeal and snotty unapologetic cool - for many of them it was the last gasp of it, the final flip to try and grab back their own essential writerly nature by way of this new and unashamedly wordy outlet. I'd already decided it would be my own last go, and if this thing that seemed like what I'd always wanted didn't work, then I would find something else to do with myself. It did seem like we'd be safe, but alas, it went to hell in the most hilarious handcart within months and then wheezed to a bland and predictable demise not long after, taking quite a few people's livelihoods and a shitload of, well, dreams with it. I'd extricated myself before that, though, and so had my friends who had either bailed out or got needlessly sacked.

This was what used to matter everything to me. It's like another universe now. I realised that if quality niche writing is what matters the most to you, you will get - not even chewed up and spat out, just dissolved in bile. So I sloped off, and try as I might, I can't regret it.

Still got to have a bit of bile, though, just like you need at least some fat in your diet. Heh heh. Bless my clients for providing me with the spur to somma dat good shit. Shoesize was back on the phone today wondering where his edit/appraisal was. I got on with it and quickly realised that he'd taken hardly any of my advice from before. He has convinced me that writing talent is innate, genetic; nothing anyone could teach him, even if he were prepared to listen, would make the essential difference that would make his work work. It's terrible, the consistency of the self-arguments:

Good writer

My stuff is shit. It's always been shit. Shitty fucking shit. And there's nothing I can do. Don't look at it. It's too shit. It's like the Medusa of shit. If you look at it you'll turn to shit. Shit with snakes for hair. Shit looks good compared to this. Go to a public toilet and read the shit rather than this. Shit shit shittery. I need a drink. No, alone, alone, I must be alone. Don't touch me. Don't come near me. I'm so shit. Ohhhhhhhhhh.

Bad writer

So, is this just great, quite great, rather great, or entirely great?

But hey, it's not my job to point out the massive overshadowing problem, only the little dinky flaws within it. I just shovel that there manure. Garnish it with the odd sprig of fresh parsley. I would very much like to be an editor proper, I think I'd be firm but fair. Only some latent yes-I-was-bullied-at-school-you-fucking-berk Hitler complex might come to the fore and make me into some kind of. . .no, I can't, the thought is too arousing.

One disadvantage of working at home - I have no reason to prettify myself. Doesn't seem worth it just to feel slightly better when I catch sight of myself in the mirror, but perhaps it is. Small goods. Make an effort for yourself. At least I can be bothered to get dressed. That really is the bottom line.

That and y'know, washing. Even if the dog would love me more if I didn't.

I must get a camera. No poignant minutiae will be safe!

Simon Scrofula vanished from the editorial meeting and was not seen in the pub afterwards, nor were his musings published in the Last Mag. He was last known to be. . .oh, who cares.

K, who prefers to remain enigmatic for now.

(It lives! And I am Queen. Thank you.)

Next door's cat Sage, staring K in the face.  

Raining.

K is free of his two ticks - found another one on his ear - but apparently not of his desire to strangle himself with his own lead. Idiot. Ticks are sinister. They latch onto animals, usually around the head, and then just suck blood for as long as they can until they are completely full. This takes weeks on end. Their bodies just keep expanding. Like little insectoid balloons. K's were pathetically small but they had still swelled at an impressive rate. The nurse had a special gadget to twist them out complete with burrowed-in head. They looked quite petulant, on their backs on the table, tiny legs flailing in the air. Amazing creatures, though, you have to admire their bio-engineering.

The Pagan's dog ran away yesterday not once but twice. The first time she was picked up by someone from the kennels who happened to be passing; second time she came back of her own accord, smelling of "rotten fish". Sheesh.

There's no work. What work there is is so dull I can hardly muster the energy to do it. And I'm all achy and in need of some proper exercise. And more sun, for fucksakes, this country is so stingy with it. I mean, not even warmth, just light.

Grumble.

More Shield.

Finally got out in the garden - blazing afternoon - and had a hack at the rampant flora. Too many types of greenery to count or attempt to identify. Left the gorgeous honeysuckle which grows over the fence from the student house, right by my door. Every time I open it there's a waft of perfume into the house. Everything else - including the honeysuckle-and-God-knows-what explosion by the gate (also growing over the fence, as students' landlord can only be bothered to do the garden once a year) got choppered. I don't think my implements were really the right ones for the job, but this was never going to be Diarmuid Wotsit Does Wot He Gets Paid For.

I tackled the spectacular jungle of four-foot triffids at the bottom of the garden. They had these fat hollow stalks that looked so much like a natural source of water I felt thirsty looking at them, they were like bamboo. Those chunky pale green pipes and the massive wide leaves made this satisfying flapping swooshing sound as they got scythed, like shaking shopping bags. In the rainforest. With a machete. I was sad to stop. And I have to admit, the garden looks a bit bare and mean without that gang of intruders sprawling in the corner. Who classifies weeds, anyway? Does it just come down to aesthetics? I should ask a . . . man who knows his verdure.

My hands have been wobbling since I came in - in fact since I took a break in the middle. It's not even half done, and there's so much rubbish and crap (literally, crap). I'll have to enlist some help. I hate to do that and find myself doing it all the time. I'd love to be a proper independent person in a practical sense, but I'll have to settle for that tedious only-child emotional semi-independence for now. Yawn. Rufus Wainwright has a song about that. Exaggerated for comic effect, obviously.

K has what looks very much like a tick on his muzzle. It's like a little tenacious plant shoot growing out of the short fur near his nose. Doesn't seem to bother him but apparently it needs taking out by a vet. If I do it myself the head might get left behind and much nastiness ensue. K is the healthiest beast now living, the vet practically pays me to see him, so it's a mild worry. No reason for it to be living in my garden either, although that has been happily fornicating with itself and any drifting seeds since early spring so ticks are probably the least of the interesting new species in there. If that's what it is.

The emotional quirks may need more than tweezers. Sensible was round last night, great company as always - K has always liked him very much but last night he developed some obsession with his lower legs and shoes, which he pawed, mouthed and rolled on every opportunity he had and a few he didn't. Very odd. But funny. Very funny. I finally watched 'Lost In Translation' - I was prepared for the terrible racist crap but it was in manageable chunks rather than running as a thread to be drawn out (hey, it's almost as if they wanted you to discard those bits). The rest I thought was very sweet and pretty and touching. Sensible knows everything about films and filled me in on all the thinly-veiled bitchy stuff Sofia Coppola put in there about Spike Jonze and Cameron Diaz. This irritates me. She'd done enough to besmirch a lovely story, why slap more unnecessary-to-the-plot-such-as-it-was muck onto the fragile thing? Too toothy by far, that woman. No one needs that much in their jaw. She should donate some to the needy.

It's a shame, though, the knee-jerk antipathy I often find I have towards successful women. As if they're taking up a spot I could occupy. Like, how dare they. The trouble is that I fear there is still some slim quota of women required and places rarely open up. Anywhere. Terrible though to be ready to do a Beatrix Kiddo and whip out the eye of any female rival. I could never step on people in reality, but the thought is there and I don't like it. There was one girl at the First Magazine who was about my age and who turned up around the same time, and although we had completely different styles and methods, and although there was room for both of us, and although we had equal novelty value and although I made a great effort to be her pal in the first instance, God, I came to despise her. OK, so she was unfriendly and snotty and cold and it wasn't all me by any means, but it made me sad occasionally that we were almost pitting ourselves against each other. As if anyone else would have cared. As if it would have made any difference to anything.

I think she's still working in mags. She's much better suited to it than I was. I don't know if that's meant to be bitchy or not. After a while you can no longer tell.

Anyway, we had beer beer beer. I like beer. We drank beer and laughed at the dog and complained bitterly about Sofia's Jap-bashing. (I had to admit though to a certain streak of prejudice myself. Japanese culture is so Other and in many ways unpalatable to me. They really do sell schoolgirl knickers from vending machines, y'know, or they did. But regardless, no one deserves that kind of infantile jerkery as in the film, and it would have been screamingly superfluous even if it was less off-colour. I hate that American tendency to over-simplify, over-explain, over-illustrate in film. Give me mystery or give me death.) Yes, it was a pleasant evening unfettered by any of the customary friendshit and I shall miss him very much when he naffs off around the world next month.

I'm back into The Shield, and dammit, looking for the stuff about the true story it was originally based on I've just discovered lots of things about the third season I didn't really want to know. Just as well there is more to my life than television. Ooh but look, Glenn Close is the new Captain. Brilliant.

Dammit. I can't find it. Curse you, internet.

My entire head feels like it's going to implode and it's not even a hangover. What's going on? What?

There's still wine in the fridge. Needs finishing. I could take up drinking, y'know.

Christ Almighty.

This woman claims to be a 'reformed liberal'. Never ceases to sadden me how alcoholics grab hold of a buoyant Bible on which to float to shore in the sea of sauce, and then proceed to ascend through the ranks of the right spreading intolerance and misery as they go, like dishing out kicks from a sturdy ladder. Further into the clouds they go until some kind of new caste system is created, with the righteous at the top and all the other degenerates - who God loves, of course of course, but only in a strictly figurative sense and only with the right number of collected tokens if you want any actual comeback on this - squirming in their own filth far below.

I’ll no longer waste energy trying to figure out what’s wrong with George Bush, either. I’ve often said he’s not conservative enough for me.

These things give me a little glimpse into the wider world I often feel forced to shut out so that I'm not consumed by my own impotent anger. I'll wishy-wash and hand-wring till I die, thank you, unless of course it's true that middle age is when the narrow waist and the broad mind swap places.

I may never know why Blogger opts one day to place same-day posts in order of posting, and one day to place them in order of which one was there first.

Ah, the vagaries of whatever.

Anyone would think I actually had cause to complain. I do not. I have:

pizza and jumbo king prawns in the fridge

a summery top cut in very unusual and fetching way I thought I'd lost

the stomach to carry it off ("have you the stomach?" "I have not killed him yet sir, but when I do, I shall have the stomach and the liver too; and the floppily-doppilies in their horrid glue")

a giant repertoire of Blackadder quotes

a new idea about where another top I have lost might be

almost comfortable contact lenses

a Chuck Palahnuik book to start on

an imminent visit from the lovely, faithful Capt. Sensible

everything to look forward to

no inclination to stop listening to '1 Thing'

Everything else can be sorted.

How wonderfully simple it is to post pictures to your blog using something that seems to work and then just vanishes in a very helpful way. There's a shot of someone else's dog somewhere in this computer, and now it's been uploaded into something and resized and framed and all manner of lovely rational logical things which made perfect sense and gave me great satisfaction but how do I access it from here? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.

What else do I not know?

How much money I have

How my advertising actually works

If I can make it all work and bring in enough money

If the charity people got their edit back because they haven't said and I've got a version of Word that hardly anyone else has which is pointlessness incarnate because clients can't open what I send them

Whether I'll be able to raise the deposit for a new place because I never put one down on this one and so there isn't one to get back, and whether any landlord will agree that a huge dog's security value will outweigh a huge dog's potential to cause costly damage to his fucking anaglypta'd craphole of a property

When I'll find a driving instructor who will teach me in my own car

If I'll pass my test before losing my nerve

What this random collection of symptoms denotes

Why things that look so great on paper and even assume the form of things that are great actually just do not work and are as mysterious as radio waves or insoluble mathematical problems and in their secret not-workingness are just as boring and baffling as being read a load of insoluble mathematical problems which are the utter and absolute antithesis of the excitingness and lusciousness which they once represented

And why everything in time breaks down into the prosaic like decomposing food - the most luxurious of which makes the most hideous fungal mess (while the shit which is more preservative than nutrient just remains untouched by bacteria. . .well, it's logical, really)

What I'm doing in here when it's a flat perfect blue sky outside and doubtless hot as heck

Why I feel obliged to go outside and make myself uncomfortable just because it's sunny

What the fuck I'm doing in a wider sense

One thing I do know, which I thought would just annoy me for ages - the identity of the stunning dark-skinned-shocking-blonde-haired woman I kept trying not to stare at late on Saturday night. I could not place her at all. Finally I realised sometime on Sunday that I used to work with her. She was in sales while I wrote ridiculous functional web copy in the other room of the Company that has now gone bust as it was always destined to. I did manage to compliment her on her amazing waist-length hair once and was rewarded with dazzling smile. I didn't know what to do with myself around her. Women are extraordinary. And doubtless much more of a headfuck than the other. So it's probably just as well that in spite of having unerring gaydar for bisexual girls I'm too stuck in the usual patterns of acceptable behaviour to get at all embroiled. Whew.

I want a holiday. I'm so tired.

Blogging drunk? I never thought I'd see the day.

I've just been dragged by my unwashed hair into Town by the Brief. It was very bestial. Herds hiding predators, posing and sharking, bluster and big hand-gestures. I could deconstruct it to pieces because although I'm not so excruciatingly middle-clarse that I can't blend in and even get into it, I'm still very much one step out of the Saturday-night seethe. But bugger it.

We played pool and the Brief who was raised on pool tried to give me helpful tips, which was terrifically embarrassing when there was this horde of swaggering men waiting and shouting and grinning and waving by the table. I needed to protect myself. You know that zap of Girls-Aloud-induced inadequacy? It's worse when there's this menagerie strutting up and down in strappy shoes. You can't help but play up to it, compete, put on some new skin. You can't get away from that biological imperative, and that's what Saturday Night is, a big puddle of cells all out for reproduction.

Eek, deja vu. How irksome. Which reminds me, I had a naked dream last night. But I wasn't especially embarrassed. I was in a delicatessen, except I was dropping off olives rather than picking them up. I thought everyone else was being a bit backward in still having clothes. Then there was a huge multiple-car accident and I went to phone for help amongst the most crushingly unbothered people in existence, and I fell through the splintery rotten boards and dangled over the sea with one hand on some twisted wrought-iron fencing and said "help me" very politely, but no one did. Bastards.

So in the midst of drink and Sean Paul and Ice Cube and Amerie I left the Brief (or rather she left me) talking to some model and there was a bricklayer who was heartbreakingly nice and thought I was "a bit mad, but lovely". And I enjoyed frightening the hell out of a cocky 18-year-old who thought I was 20. He had great hair and silly friends who I seemed to collect - they stole my drink, I stole theirs, we wound each other up. It was gratifying in the same sort of stupid way as booze is to feel so absolutely Too Much for someone.

I read something the other day about this doctor - female - whose theory is that the female orgasm is just an evolutionary throwback which is going to eventually die out. I wonder if the same applies to the things that supposedly make you eligible, like gobbling intelligence and mental stability. I mean, these are the things that are supposed to make you attractive. Not being a raving fuck-up, even a socially-functioning one, must equate to some kind of gold seal of approval, like the certificates of excellence that the geishas get in 'My Uncle Oswald' (if you're expecting a link there then, mwwahuhruahar, you're having a larf. Later, people). But I'm not sure it's worth all that much. Bit like my degree. Where is it going to get me? I might not ever use it again.

That's very silly of me, and a rubbish analogy of which I am ashamed. I suppose I'm just wishing that tonight could be my life, and that I could be one of the birds and pick from the boys who smell of Hugo Boss. It would be So Much Simpler, but it is not to be, cherie.

Oh Christ, I'm full of vodka and various ghastly mixers, and I want some chips. Why can I not have chips? Why am I denied carbohydrate? Sulk. All this and an empty bed and continuing sense of blank. And I'm going to have to go and puke before I can sleep. Nuts.

On the way home, a modified Pug in an unwise position by the side of the road, a blonde and a brunette poking into the driver's window, bare legs and barely-clad arses sticking out. "Ge' ou', Ma'ee, and gimme fuckin' sa'isfaction."