Puddle people, pseudo penises and Pinterest (repinned)

I’ve talked about Pinterest before so forgive another musing. But really, the more I use it, the more I prowl around, the more – odd I find it.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I still find it hugely useful.  I keep mood boards for my novels there and they jumpstart my imagination if it’s on go-slow. I have what I hope are inspirational boards for readers of my non-fiction books – lately I’ve been pinning seasonal recipes and lifestyle type stuff on The Natural Year board and adding more information on living as chemical-free as possible on The Detox Plan.

It also occurred to me that, while my Kindle books can’t have pictures, I can supplement them with boards. So I have recently started boards for the four little spin-offs from Spirit of the Home – Spirit of the Bedroom, Spirit of the Kitchen, Spirit of the Living Room and Spirit of the Nursery.  I loved this series – small books with lovely design that aimed, not to discuss decoration so much as the mythology, spirituality and energy of each room.

It’s also proving an invaluable resource for research.  I have a couple of non-fiction book proposals going to Frankfurt and Pinterest is the perfect place to stick all my research, so I’ve got images, information (and all the originating websites) neatly filed in one place. 

I see a lot of authors, designers and so on using it pretty much the same way.  But a lot of other people just…pin.  Madly, wildly, obsessively.  And weirdly.  Whatever you care to think of, someone will have a board dedicated to it. ‘Women inexplicably partially submerged in water’.  Yup, serious.  ‘People with big pictures of people’.  Oh yeah. ‘Garden hoses.’ That one’s a work in progress. 

Odd things are huge, just huge, on Pinterest. Tattoos obviously come to mind (there is even a tattoo category), swiftly followed by nail art. There are endless boards dedicated to cupcakes and subdivisions of cupcakes – people even have boards dedicated to a particular colour theme in a particular type of cupcake for cupcake’s sake. 

And slowly, you realize that, well…you’re simply not that special, not that unusual.  Your weird little idiosyncrasies – the ones you thought were pretty awesomely oblique, if not entirely unique – are…run of the mill.  Damnit, half of Pinterest is obsessed with the same shit. It should be comforting, I suppose, that you’re not the only one who has a ‘thing’ about…nah, I’m not going to tell you now cos I feel…kinda ordinary. J

It seems that, within the Pinterest demographic (and let’s be honest, it strikes me it’s a relatively a narrow demographic) everyone pretty much wants to go to the same awesome places and wear the same cool things and decorate their houses in much the same way.  And, by hell, everyone wants to be inspired – pretty much every Pinner has a board for inspirational quotes (I’ve got a whole blog brewing on that) and if everyone were as fit as their fitness boards and as bendy as their yoga boards, we’d be a world of Olympians.

Of course Pinterest has its underbelly and I confess I lurk around there a bit when all the ombre and neon and clean minimalism and perfect sunsets get a bit much.  And then I leave my jaw hanging pretty much on the floor as I discover I still have a morbid fascination (legacy of childhood) for really weird things like puddle people and possess a very infantile amusement at things that look like penises.  And then I just hang my head in shame and…laugh helplessly. 

My life mapped in scars...

Scars interest me. Fate’s branding of the body.  Skin torn open, the wound exposing the flesh beneath; then closed but a fissure still remaining where the defences were breached.  A line.  Sometimes criss-crossed with stitches; sometimes knot.  Yes, scars interest me. They change a body forever; they mark it; shift it; alter it.  Tattoos?  Studs and bolts? Implants? Nah. Not so much. Because those alterations are man-made, voluntary, decided, chosen.  A tattoo says ‘This is me!’ but a scar says ‘This is what happened to me’. Scars are the mythic debris of archetypal wounds, rites of passage, life drawing on your skin. The gods scribbling. Yes, your choice maybe - but at a far deeper, unconscious level.  

When I was young I craved a ‘proper’ scar – one that zig-zagged down my face. Why? No idea. I thought it was romantic.  I had a strange idea of romance. *smile*  And there are scars and scars, of course, and some  make us shy away, as if we know the person who received them has been in a perilous place, one we fear we might visit by association. Foolish us...

My scars, however, are not seen by the world.  They are private wounds. Sometimes I look over my body and I examine them – to see if any have faded away, have integrated, been taken back inside.  And, for those that haven’t, I ride the memory-horse back to when they happened.  Can you map your life by scars?  Funny little snapshots of those moments when Fate (often combined with stupidity, has to be said) poked you in the…wherever…

Here are mine…

1.      It’s barely there now, the burn on my hand, my adult hand; that happened to my two-year old hand, pulling down a hot pan. Remembering my mother telling me of how guilty she had felt that she’d let it happen. A tiny link to her vast love, still here now she is gone.

2.      A small scar on the underside of my heel.  Dancing wildly in our front room, aged seven.  Treading on a needle which snapped off inside my heel. ‘It’ll work its way out,’ said the doctor. It didn’t. Instead it buried itself deep and had to be dug out. My Achilles’ heel. 

3.      The rose scars on my inner thighs.  Only the faintest traces of one or two remain, slim silver scythes.  Seventeen and vaulting over the rose bushes at school when a rogue bramble caught me and I fell into the thorny heart of the rose.  Taken to the school nurse with blood pouring down my thighs to have 33 thorns plucked out of my flesh – the virgin deflowered. J 

4.      The deep puncture wound on my finger joint where a dog bit me during a school holiday stint as a kennel maid.  Artemis bitten by her hound (in the shape of a miniature poodle).  I nearly lost the joint… Lesson: never trust a small dog.

5.      The deep ‘tick’ on my left forearm.  Drunk (again) as a student in Manchester, having an argument with my friend Mike. I swung a punch: he swung the door. The one with the glass panel.  Lesson: don’t punch when drunk.  *puzzled* why did I punch with my left hand when I’m right-handed?

6.      The scars of conflict that pucker my belly.  Thin skin stretched beyond its endurance by the growing life within. No matter how taut my muscles, no matter how much I work out and stretch and tone, my stomach will always remain a battleground. I struggled with the idea of motherhood, shrank from pregnancy (my tarot card was always the High Priestess, never The Empress) and my body reflected my fear and reticence.  It’s the part of me I love the least; that still makes me wince to look at, to touch.  But it is what it is…the outward sign of an old battle, of my mind at war with my body.

7.      The long slash across my pubic bone.  Not a C…a line, an El. Where once again, I shied away from motherhood, couldn’t embrace the birthing. Fourteen hours of labour and we got into dangerous waters, my boy and I.  We were nearly lost, nearly ran away together back to the void.  So they cut me open and realised, too late, that ours had been the impossible battle.  A 12.8lb baby was never going to fit through that narrow bony gate. 

Sooo….can you map your life through scars? Or are there other ways?  Inner scars, you say?  Ah, those are something entirely different…

I'm fizzing (literally)

So, I’m sitting at my desk, typing furiously and there’s this fizzing sound. WTF? I snap my head from side to side, trying to locate it and then realise it’s coming from my own scalp. Shit! Had clean forgotten I was testing this new John Frieda hair foam. “30 minutes maximum” it said on the instruction sheet. How long have I been sitting here, not writing? An hour? Shit (again)! I start to race to the bathroom and nearly pitch onto my nose as I remember, all too painfully, that my ankle really is well and truly fecked.
Limp up the stairs to the bathroom, making loud ‘give me sympathy’ noises. ‘You in the loo?’ shouts Adrian. My response is unprintable.

There’s an awful lot of hair coming out but, hey, plenty more where that came from. As long as I don’t kill the whole lot again, I’m not too worried. I have a long history of generally playing fast and loose with my follicles. I don’t think I have sported my natural colour (actually a rather nice auburn as far as I can remember) since I was sixteen.
What can I say? I get bored. I’ve resisted tattoos (would be a slippery slope) and piercings (having encountered enough bolts and screws to build a house when I was an arts journalist and a sex columnist) but hair? Easy come, easy go. I once dyed it so much it turned into green slime.

Anyhow, given I can’t exercise I have to do something to keep myself out of trouble, so I decided to give Frieda a whirl. You know, it’s not bad. The foam bit was fun. Okay, so it looked like I’d thrown up in the sink and I’ve probably poisoned the entire neighbourhood with the remains, but my hair feels sort of soft and bouncy. The colour’s a bit brown though... a bit boring. Hmm, might have to try something different... what you reckon? White? Or buck the general trend and dye it grey?

Long time back, I promised to give you a laugh... well, here you go... a few of the many and various past looks of Jane Alexander...

Is this part of the Journey? Heck yeah! One needs to look one’s best when travelling, no?  ;)   Not to mention looking back and laughing one's socks off...

Anyone care to take up this particular challenge and go with it on your blog?  Double dare ya!