in the space of a week, i got 3087 comments in my moderation queue. not because i am suddenly dooce, but because i am being spammed like crazy by people wanting to promote THE most hideous-sounding pronograhpie.

if you left a non-pronograhpic comment, i appreciate it, but i didn’t get to read it i’m afraid. in fact, i may have to shut down comments for a bit ’til the spam storm blows over.

i’m still on twitter if you’d like a chat or a debate though - we had a doozy earlier this week about breastfeeding!

and happy new year, by the way. i’m easing into this one, feeling very fragile after a rough 08 and trying to be kind to myself. i hope you are, too (kind to yourselves, not feeling fragile). here’s to a nice-ish 09.

here’s a picture of my best day of 2008, which i am calling diane and lamb, for obvious reasons:

baaa humbug!

last night i was accused of being a sore loser.

so sue me. after watching strictly come dancing for fourteen saturday and sunday nights, plus spin-off show it takes two every monday-friday, i want the best dancer to win. not the dancer who looks the most smug, can’t stop talking about getting married (people do it all the time, SHUT UP), or wanted to be fred astaire when he was little. the best.

you know, the one who can really, really dance?

all series, rachel was my favourite dancer (because she was THE BEST), followed by lisa. followed by austin. there was one minute when i liked tom better than austin, and that’s the week tom did a foxtrot to dolly parton’s here you come again, a marvellous song and a very well choregraphed routine, that allowed him to slip into the semi-final.

where he was rubbish.

he danced an argentine tango that had no traditional (or difficult) steps in it at all (compare his with rachel’s, which made me tingle) and did a bad job of his jive. the public voted for him in their droves (why?) but if the beeb hadn’t mucked up the voting system, he would have been in the dance-off with the far superior lisa, and would have never made the final.

in fact, he’s just gone and won the whole goddamn thing.

despite lisa scoring a perfect 80/80 for her first two dances, including a foxtrot that i thought was the best of all three competitor’s foxtrots (her cha cha was never a 40 dance, but whatever), she was out first. she came back and danced a weird balletic showdance, in which brendan tried to lift her around and she lost her balance a lot [best to pretend this didn’t happen]. i can’t imagine why brendan didn’t choreograph a ballroom-based routine instead, playing on lisa’s strengths, rather than trying to emulate the professional showdance from last week, which was balletic and gymnastic and presumably takes a lot of control and years of practice. anyway, they were out.

rachel only managed a near-perfect 79/80 (craig said he liked her rumba better this time round, but wouldn’t be budged from his mark of 9 for some reason) but was still simply superb.
tom, on the other hand, didn’t get a perfect score all evening. his foxtrot was worse than last time, as he got over-excited and stumbled and it just wasn’t as smooth. his salsa was good, but designed to convey one message: not “it’s partytime!” but “it’s look at me time!” i don’t care to remember what he got for it, but it wasn’t 40 or even 39, i’ll tell you that for certain.

so, of course he had to go on to the next round instead of lisa. of course! great british public… what the hell were you thinking?

when things got down to the final two,  both couples danced a viennese waltz (the judges all said rachel’s was better) and a showdance. rachel’s, to the theme from flashdance, was fabby. it had great steps, really good lifts, was technically brilliant and full of fun - she and vincent did a great job. tom’s showdance, i have to admit, was also very good. camilla was a genius to choreograph a quickstep-based routine (to if my friends could see me now from sweet charity) which played to tom’s strengths (performing, pretending to tap dance, looking unbearably smug and self-satisfied). the lifts looked a touch ungainly to me, but this being a comedy routine of sorts meant that they could pretend it was supposed to be like that. it was fast, full of life and it kills me to say it, but probably the best show dance of the evening.

but tom still didn’t deserve to win! he was not the most consistent dancer of the series, he was not the most likeable, and he was not the best. in fact, of the last four dancers, the worst one won.
and from now on, he will always be named as a winner of strictly come dancing. he will be listed in the pantheon of strictly winners. when it takes two returns next year, he will be called “reigning champion tom chambers”.

and i will be forced to stick my fingers in my ears, sing “lalalalala not listening,” or shout “RACHEL WAS ROBBED!” at the television.

who are you calling a sore loser?!

2. after many weeks of thinking the world was out to get me, everyone was awful and hated me, i’d never get work again and i was worthless as a human being, i finally realised i was having a depressive interlude. (no, the constant crying and ever-present anxiety didn’t give it away earlier. shut up.) i have never given up on work before, even when i’ve had to work four days running until 2AM (twice) just to get things done.

but when i felt like i’d literally rather die than conduct another interview, i postponed the feature i should have been working on (indefinitely), told my regular bosses i was ill, and took an unprecented few weeks away from it all.

lordy, was that a relief. i’m being open about it too, which is another relief.

but that didn’t solve everything. a few days later, i got bell’s palsy. half my face was frozen. i couldn’t close my right eye, talk properly, smile on my right side, etc etc. the answer was a week of steroids which made me insomniac and full of rage, plus anti-virals the size of horse pills.

i then developed neuropathic pain so bad i couldn’t do anything but sleep and watch TV (but mostly sleep). i finally got medication for that, which i’m still taking as the pain still hasn’t gone (though it has improved a lot, thankfully). i’ve also had some kind of cold for over a month plus my tablets make me drowsy and i’m still feeling delicate psychologically. (this is not a request for advice on that front btw - my brain can’t tolerate anti-depressants at all so if there’s one thing i know about, it’s therapy in all its guises).

[digression: i asked some journalists on an online forum if anyone else had taken time off as a freelance for mental health reasons and was bombarded with yeses. which is sad, really, but helped me a lot. the person who told me that it was important to have a good mental attitude and that turning down work could make me feel worse? not so helpful.]

i’m now back at popgadget, plus taking an online essay-writing course (personal essays, not academic ones) and preparing for christmas. i’m trying not to stress out and i’m hoping that in 2009 i’ll get enough work so i don’t have to live on a street corner - whilst still having space to look after my health.

looking back, i was way too ambitious for this year. i made goals for myself that healthy people with ten years of journalism experience would have struggled to achieve. having missed out on so many years of living (or at least that’s how it feels), i’m impatient to do so much more. but pushing myself, planning and being as determined as hell simply hasn’t worked: i’ve ended up poorer, ill and depressed where i hoped for joy, energy and career success.

for 2009, i’d just like to feel better. and i promise to blog about it if i do.

comments closed due to spam 

1. the blog looks ugly

2. i haven’t been blogging on it

there are good reasons for both… well, there are reasons.

1. i’m shaking this site up!

i’m not sure if i want to be a traditional personal blogger anymore. it sometimes feels too revealing now i’m a full-time writer, plus there are things i can’t say anymore: a lot of what happens in my life is related to work, or people who read this blog, or things i don’t want people at work or who read this blog to know all about, so i end up censoring myself.

i also think writing here takes away from my other writing projects to some extent. (i have limited energy, so it seems silly to ignore projects i’m passionate about in order to ramble on about people who don’t flush toilets or my latest technological disaster).

in future, i want dianeshipley.com to be more website than blog: to show off some of the work i’ve slaved over, and to be a central place to integrate my twitter stream, my printed work, my online stuff, stuff others have written that i lurrrrrrrrrrrve (it’s not all about me! just mostly!) maybe some exclusive online content (but not as much as before) and… my other blog.

i’ve been working on a new site that i want to launch in the new year, which i feel really excited about - and i hope you will, too, although i know already that not all of you will want to read it (and that’s okay). (no, it’s nothing rude, just niche).

in order to do all that, i need to pretty things up here and learn how to get this site looking how i want, performing all the functions i want. and because i have no money i am keen to learn, i’m trying to figure out how to do all this myself. i slowly, sloooooowly piece things together when i have time/energy, which isn’t that often at the moment. which brings me neatly round to:

2. more on that tomorrow.

comments closed due to an overwhelming amount of spammage. 

pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.

constant headache, blurred vision on one side, can’t move my mouth or the right side of my face properly (edit: and have developed a metallic taste in my mouth)… i look and sound a bit like slyvester stallone (edit: or maybe milo ventimiglia!) but keris tells me george clooney had it once, and he seems to have snapped back into shape nicely, so that’s reassuring. it’s caused by an infection, which may be part of why i’ve felt so down lately (or might not, who the heck knows?) so obviously my body needs a rest.

and it’s going to get one - there’s not much else i can do, and after going to the doctors (the receptionist and her “kindness” need a post all of their own…) and then spending over an hour finding somewhere that stocked an eye patch (arrr!) because my eye needs to be forcibly closed at night or i’ll get a nasty infection and lose my sight (fun, and as i’m incredibly squeamish about eyes, not at all disconcerting)… i’m exhausted.

the doctor said it should improve in a couple of weeks, but could be longer (let’s hope not, shall we). at least i can cheer myself up by looking into a mirror and smiling - i look like i’m gurning, and that’s just good fun.

2. if you ask a waiter if they have vodka at the resturant, despite there being a prominent cocktails board nearby, he will not have the energy to speak but will look at you and slightly flex his head at your idiocy (caused not by gormlessness - for once! - but by not having glasses on).

3. if someone is sitting in your train seat, you do not have the right to sit in someone else’s train seat and say “there’s nothing we can do” to the rightful owners of the seat. (i nearly stood and screamed until they moved but it wasn’t my seat. someone was in my seat, but they gave up gracefully.)

4. if you want to go and interrogate someone you’ve never met before about whether the proportions in george stubbs’ paintings look a little bit off… er, don’t.

despite all that, i had a nice time looking at scrub and whistlejacket (or as my mum exclaimed when we found the gallery and saw the big ad hanging on the side: “whistlepocket!”) this weekend. there was delicious lasagne, and vodka, and hot chocolate and a very, very unintentionally funny announcer man on the train (who my mum said was a woman, so she needs her ears syringing out more than she thinks) who was in a bad mood after the signaller made an error (direct quote: “a MAJOR cock-up”) and kept passive-aggresively explaining after every stop why we were running late. i’m sure you have to be very stressed out to use the PA system to criticise your colleagues but it’s very entertaining for the rest of us.

because none of the instructions for making modifications to it (allegedly soooo easy and fabulous) make a lick of sense. i just want to send some posts from wordpress.org to a wordpress.com blog. and the only instructions i can find say things like:

To use it, download the zip and extract. (okay, done!)

1. Upload wp-xmlmigrate.php to wp-content/plugins/

(NO, because where the HELL is this? i’ve looked and looked and the closest i could find was wp-admin/plugins.php, and i don’t know what to do when i get there. i tried typing dianeshipley.com/wp-content/plugins.php but that just brought up my homepage.)

2. Upload wordpress.php to wp-admin/import/

(again NO, because where the HELL is this? how can i upload to somewhere that DOESN’T EXIST?)

3. Activate the plugin. (seems unlikely, somehow…)

can anyone help/translate before i throw my computer out of the window screaming “wordpress designers must die!”?