Look at how beautiful our merit certificates were in middle school. It was a glorious thing to get a merit. Even better if you got to take a mint from Mr Hardy’s office. Good times.

This is a picture of my life. Confusing, scary, sometimes beautiful. Or actually, the back of the original version of a zine. Same difference.

“I want to help everyone and go on cool picnics”

And here is a cute picture from the original copy. I am increasingly proud of my most simplistic drawings now. I guess they have character and they mean something to me and that’s what’s important to me regardless of detail or apparent skill. It’s about fun and it’s about being me and boy do I know how to be me! Scribbling and Tipp-Exing forever.

Check out the nice colours on the original copy. The brown paper is from an envelope which contained a letter from the job centre (that is a pointless fact that you may enjoy).

Here’s my Captain envelope.

Here’s a scan of the envelope I sent to Annie. Every envelope deserves to be embellished with a vampire prince.

I am sending Annie my “nice” zine and then I am going to Camden for some sort of adventure.

Thanks for smiling and doing other great things with your face

I woke up yesterday and immediately wrote some words. I think that’s a good thing to do. I forgot how good these pens were. Perfect for doing tiny things.

“What were you doing last night?” “Drawing on my face.”

Blood & maps

I bled from my nose a little bit. I don’t appreciate how the viscosity of blood makes it reluctant to fully exit the nostril, leaving it to cling there uncomfortably in a sort of puddle-blob against the skin. This has been a riveting episode of Important Anecdotes About Experiences That Various Areas Of My Face Have Had Today (4pm every Monday, ITV1).

A dried up daisy chain is not of much use (unless you just want to look at a crumpled up dead thing, I ain’t judgin’), but I have put some other things into a flower press to potentially glue into my diary later. On that note, I decided to start keeping this diary the other day, although it’s not particularly diary-like in that it doesn’t record all that much of my day as such, but more particular thoughts I was having at the time I sat down to write something (“wow that was a nice sandwich,” etc). One page is entirely taken up by a picture of Alex James I cut from an Evening Standard, so that might give you some idea of the amount of self-reflection and personal enlightenment to be found within (I’ll spell it out for you: not much, unless chocolate wrappers count as documents of enlightenment [um, they totally do actually]). Anyway it is FUN, because I like to waffle on, so it’s only logical that I like to waffle on in my own handwriting and have magazine cuttings and doodles dancing around my handwritten wafflings. Also, “waffle” is a fantastic word.

London A-Zs have always confused me a lot more than they’ve helped me, but I do appreciate the art of cartography, so I think I might just spend train journeys gazing lovingly into the jumbled masses of street names jostling for attention - if reading feels like too much of a concentrated effort. Road/place names can be pretty engrossing in any case. There’s a “Gore Rd” nearby, and every time I pass it I think about Martin Gore, and it’s always nice to be thinking about Martin Gore, so I’m appreciative of that.

I am going to open this map and just list place names:

• Meadowside
• Kitto Rd
• Dallinger Rd
• Drapers Rd (I’m imagining a road covered entirely in sheets and things)

That was fun. Roads are fun.

lilphotography:

Self portraits with bindweed and daisies

New scans/blog post.

Cakes, Pimms, and how to be interesting

I got this game (シナモンロール おはなししよつ！キラキラＤＥコレＣａｆｅ) in the post yesterday and it is the cutest. You have to collect cakes and things. It’s almost indistinguishable from my actual life, really.

As well as electronic cake delivery, I’ve been thinking about why some conversations dwindle into a slow and agonising trickle of words. Am I just incredibly boring/inept/nervous? Should I just accept that I’m not going to have marvellous adventures and in-jokes and brain-spilling sessions with every person I speak to? No, that can’t be right. I’m not going to accept that.

I googled “how to be interesting” and found this nice article that makes a good point:

You’ve got to find what’s interesting in everything, you’ve got to be good at noticing things, you’ve got to be good at listening. If you find people (and things) interesting, they’ll find you interesting.

So in conclusion: Fill yourself up like a big jug of Pimms. Investigate cool jazz, talk to strangers (people in London might seem like mechanical imitations of human beings, but they are usually quite soft and fleshy after all), wear flowers, offer everyone sweets, smile, write a love letter to a completely mundane thing. I also just said to a friend, “I saw some old Space Raiders wrappers. That made me very happy,” which I feel is pretty relevant.

Here are some things that I am currently finding interesting:

• sisifo: This is one of my favourite Tumblr blogs. Essentially, it collects art. There are so many clever concepts here, it’s a creativity goldmine.
• The Sweatbox: Leaked documentary about the disastrous development of Disney’s Kingdom Of The Sun, which eventually became The Emperor’s New Groove.
• Hilary Faye’s collage gifs
• Julian Barratt’s making of “Tanlines - All Of Me”
• My Green Crocodile: A very sweet Russian animation.
• Madonna - True Blue, because it’s just a lovely song.

lilshop:

nice zine

£2

This zine is about being besotted with tiny little things, visceral experiences. It is called “nice” because I’ve always liked the word nice. I remember being told in school that “nice” is no good in creative writing, it’s boring, and to a certain extent I agree, but it’s not as simple as that. This zine is about appreciating “nice” and how “nice” is sometimes the most succinct way to describe consuming passions.

A7, black and white, 6 pages.

I made a new word and picture thing.