As an addendum to the below, went out for drinks last Friday with old work colleague who I haven't seen since that night, we frequented the same hostelries, and what do you know, ran into same old school-friend again. And beer is evil, again.

And now, fun for all the family, a discourse on office gender politics...

Now I've worked in a lot of different places, from public sector offices to corporate offices, from shops to film sets (and by the way, this last week I kept up my unbroken record of having been offered a permanent job at every temp job I've done, go me!), and it's been interesting to see how they differ in gender make-ups, and how the genders are treated. Swooping in for a few weeks at a time gives you the position of observer to a certain extent, as many of the women that are in whatever workplace have been there for years and most have become inured to the status quo, or just keep on keeping on. They would be the ones like those in the large company where I worked for a year that was 80% female and had no females on the executive board, but they just didn't give a damn and kept on doing their jobs as bloody well as they could. And they have my greatest respect.

The corporate offices I've worked in have always had 100% female low-level administrators/secretaries, but, to their credit, above those positions, it's been as near 50/50 as you could hope.

Currently, I'm working in telecoms, and you have to swing a bloody large cat before you hit a female in my office. Now I like most of the men I work with, they are kind and intelligent men, but I've already had 3+ comments on my weight (of the well-meaning complimentary sort), as well as sundry assumptions about my skills with computers, cars* etc. The need to comment on various items of clothing, and my hair, is also apparent. I don't know how it came up, but in my second conversation with the MD there, I felt the need to mention quite how unbalanced the office was with regards to gender. There wasn't much of a reply.

The other day a colleague directed "Oh, one of you ladies must have a needle and thread in your bag" to me and my fellow temp. He got a whipped head and gobsmacked look from myself, with a forced genial "while I am the kind of person to have that in my bag, I'm also just as likely to have a penknife". A few minutes later I was outside having a cigarette with fellow temp and another guy, who said "But you know he was only having a joke." Me: "Well, yeah, I'm not that dense, but you know I'm still going to react to that."

While I don't feel the need to detail all of my past experiences, and jobs that I love, along with the fact that I'm far more comfortable in a pair of paint-covered jeans, balancing on ladders at midnight, the fact that I am sitting in an office and choose to do the female office-wear of skirt etc in a certain style should not take that away from me. It's a struggle not to blurt out about my yen for power tools, just to counterbalance it. Because I shouldn't have to.

I've appreciated the pragmatist approach to gender in the film industry: I and the female art director spent the first few days on one job hearing "Are you.. girls... alright with that?" which didn't come accompanied with any offer to help. Which was fine. Because people realised very quickly that if we couldn't shift stuff, we would have been absolutely useless at the job. I'm the first person to admit my lack of strength, and to ask for male help if available, but if that isn't an option, you just have to crack on with it.

Another film job employed a small jockey-sized lad mostly because he could fit into small spaces. It's a practical thought: there were females there that they'd send on similar missions, but in my case, I'd get my torso up into a bloody small hole, and then not be able to get back out because of the bosom. Thank God that the TV programme '999' does not exist any more, otherwise we would have been treated to a BBC evening's viewing of a paramedic cutting my bust out of a 2-foot floor of polystyrene. There was also my hideous lack of coordination at risk, as evidenced by some poor soul getting me to risk my poor acrobatic skills while flinging myself many a time towards finely-made set pieces. You could feel the impending doom, but then, that could happen to any gender.

*Now I happen to not know the arse-end of a piston, but that's not the point.

Beer is evil. Went out for drinks after work to celebrate my last day at work. Drank a fair amount of beer, then moved to a different pub where I ran into an old schoolfriend. Spent a long time arguing about films with him (which is how we spent the entirety of our sixth form free periods) and then fell off of a stool. Claaaasssy. Stopped drinking beer, but then it somehow got to 1am (I'd been out since 5pm).

I am now hungover. I don't get hangovers, so I'm not used to the eyelids permanently at half-mast and the pounding head. Bah.

So I should really get back to this writing thing. I've been recently forcing myself to paint again, and it's rewarding to see that I can still bodge away quite merrily and get a reasonable result.

I've been temping for local government for the past 4 months, otherwise known as the second longest temp job that I have held. Despite being quite low-paid, I have stuck around, I think, because I'm a nosy old bitch and the job is quite varied. I used to really hate telephone work, because no one ever told you how the phone worked for transferring calls and/or you never knew enough to be able to answer people's queries. This time round, I don't flinch when the phone rings despite the fair risk that there will be an angry/irritating/unintelligibly accented person on the other end. There have only been two phone calls that I have had the slight shakes after. Fortunately, one of them I twigged early on who it was with regards to his history (truly horrible horrible evil man), and so kind of expected how he was.

I will be finishing in 3 weeks time when I go to visit my brother and his family in America, which I think gives a good full stop to it. The manager is trying to get me to come back after I go to America, but I think I need to move on, mostly to get a higher paid temp job, and also because I can't stand the manager. The love went out of the job when my fellow temp left a couple of weeks ago. I don't have anyone to pick petty arguments with any more (I tried taking the piss out of one of the new permanent guys's West Country accent but he looked vaguely hurt, so I had to put the kibosh on that), or just to generally bitch with.

Many of the clients are really nice, but most of them don't realise that we're handcuffed by the lack of resources that we can give them. Go and complain to the government, not us.

After the Firefly and Arrested Development obsessions, I added Veronica Mars to my pile. After catching a couple of episodes of the second season on Living, I was curious enough to download the pilot, and then pretty much piled through 2 seasons worth via Youtube and other means within a couple of weeks. I don't care how much the show's creator disses Nancy Drew, it is rather akin to it and I loved Nancy Drew (some of those books were darker than you'd think) and well, shallow me likes the preeetty. One friend from the DangerousInterweb™ and his girlfriend got into it around the same time as me, and ordered the season 2 DVDs from Amazon.com at the same time. His somehow arrived at least a week before mine and I had to put up with taunting text messages for days. So not fair.

I finally managed to get the pictures off of my mobile phone. Rather unsurprisingly, the urge to take photos tends to arise late at night after a few beers.... The ancient department store's windows are a scary place at night:


A petition we can all get behind:


"We're in a door....to nowherrrree":


In interacting a bit more with old schoolfriends recently, I found out that one of them has just had a 4* review in The Times for his debut album. Well done, the boy. /big pimpin'

So, thanks to the hands of fate, I'm in possession of a Sky+ box, complete with all premium channels. So what have I been watching? Some classic American films? Classic British kitchen sink drama? Uh, no.

Mostly I can't stop watching celebrities playing poker. The TV poker thing is fairly hypnotic in itself, but stick in a Malcolm Jamal-Warner or a Lacey Chabert and I'm just stuck there. For like two hours a time. Celebrity Poker Showdown at least has people you've vaguely heard of, even if the repeats are a few years old, whereas the British Showbiz Poker appears to mostly involve journalists you've never heard of, and the World Poker Tour: Hollywood Home Game has some very annoying commentators who speak over what the players are saying like all of the time. It's very irritating. Even after all of these hours, I still can't work out quickly which hand is better than the other. My mathematical brain being better than my acting brain, I prefer it when they break it down into percentages of how likely a hand is to win. That would help me, because my poker face while even playing 'Cheat' is an absolute joke. I suck at cards.

Also, I've found Miami Ink and have fallen in love. Partly with Chris Nuñez, but mostly with the show. Goodness knows why.... I don't have any tattoos and am phobic of needles (really, very much so, and that's after having 50 gazillion blood tests during my pre-teen & early teen years). I know it's totally set up, and the editing is all over the place, but look, pretty pretty tattoos! And pretty pretty tattoo artists! Big old editorialised emotionally manipulative storylines! I'm an easy sell. And I'm still no closer to deciding on my hypothetical tattoo design. The closest I've ever got to getting a tattoo was during a day off of being a camp counsellor in New York state, when pretty much all of the rest of my group got various designs done. I was very fortunate: the place seemed very kosher, but all of the tattoos done, that day and on other counsellors' days off, started to peel and fade in a horribly uneven and dodgy fashion. They had to be fixed by the head counsellor's tattoo artist in New York City after camp. My complete inability to settle on a permanent design did indeed save me that day.

I was also able to catch up with the episodes of America's Next Top Model that fell by the wayside during the house move. Very good for getting to rewind very short clips to go "Look at that fake paparazzo! He's standing in the doorway of that temp job I'm going back to this week!"

And I'm sitting waiting for FX to repeat Season 3 of The Wire. They're currently showing Season 1, so fingers crossed, with enough time, it might turn up.

Sooo, Arrested Development. I’ve just had two months of intensive watching of seasons 1-3, in that rare heady ‘OMG I love this show’ onslaught kind of way.

Stage 1 (late 2003): I read on ye olde forums of the Fametracker that there is a new show called Arrested Development and it be the good. I assume that it’s still a regular kind of sitcom, but well enough recommended by people with similar tastes that I’ll give it a try once it reaches the UK. And well, I’ll give most comedies a try if they have a decent enough provenance.

Stage 2: Arrested Development lands on to BBC2’s schedules. I finally see it, kind of go “Eh, what the heck is with the staircar, why is the dad in prison, I don’t really understand, but bits are quite entertaining.” And “Lord, Tobias is annoying. And GOB ain’t half as funny as he thinks he is.”

Stage 3 (spanning approximately 2 years): Randomly manage to catch bits of seasons 1 and 2 when the following factors collide...
a)can be bothered
b)know what time it is on
or, c)still awake enough and bothered enough to set video recorder before its transmission time and sleeeep.

Stage 4: When I catch it, I like it, often amused by it, but still the ‘can be bothered’ factor prevents it from becoming a ‘must record’ show. Like it enough to put the season 1 DVDs on my birthday list. Finally get the DVDs the following Christmas.

Stage 5 (Jan 2006): Get round to watching season 1 DVDs. After approximately 3 episodes, get immediately obsessed. Appreciate the Tobias and the GOB far more. Knowing at this point the parlous state of the show and so hoping to spin out the wealth, as well as lacking monetary funds, I try to hold out a while before buying season 2 DVDs. I fold like a cheap hooker, while having my ‘Second-most Crap Week Ever In The Life of Me’, and order the season 2 DVDs from playusa.com. They arrive. They pretty with their slip-cover and separate case-thingies. Very, very, pretty (for some reason far nicer than the Region 2 versions, and, happily, cheaper).

Stage 6: Yet again try to hold out for the season 3 episodes. I succumb to watching episodes 1-9, minus ep 5, via various means, mostly because I know that I will get spoiled for the last 4 episodes either by accident or by my own stupidity (hello, person who has got spoiled for America’s Next Top Model every. single. season. And yes, that show is the biznitch so shut up).

Stage 7: Watch last four episodes the day after they air. Caught up in a ‘This Is The Bestest Thing Ever’ frenzy. My hand was over my mouth so many times, and I really will cry if there is not any more made. And, whoo, a set dressing gag. You don’t get that so often.

It’s a strange thing, the mourning. I’ve tried to rationalise the situation by going, “Eh, if it was a British programme, it’d be unlikely to have spawned even half the number of episodes in production”, but the difference is that those BBC/Channel4 shows set out to have maybe two to five series of 6-episode-runs, whereas because this is produced in the American set-up, the 22-episode season is expected and prepared for. You can see the money spent on the production of Arrested Development, which you’d be very unlikely to see on a British comedy. I’m a great believer in the theory that smaller funds for a show leads to a focussing of the mind towards imaginative writing, but while I find it difficult to imagine AD without that money and production values, they never mis-used that bang-for-your-buck. The money is always there on screen, well-used, and the writing never took that for granted.

I will be here, crouched in a fetal position under my desk, until I hear the final death knell for Arrested Development, because as beautiful the tie-ups in the final episode were, it still feels like there is more to come. For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on. And hell, I’ll be frightfully annoyed if that was the final curtain, because I want more.

I found out today that I’m not cut out to be a Top Gear presenter. I can’t exactly say that it came as a shock to me, despite once been in enough proximity to Richard Hammond in order to compare heights. Sorry Richard for being that loon shuffling towards you on a train at Waterloo. I just can’t drive other cars, i.e. other cars that are even vaguely fancy. I got used to my brother’s Audi A4 reasonably quickly, but this one is a bit of a jump too far. Having dug in my heels about not willing to do a 150-mile round-trip for 3 days for work in my currently delicate car, somehow the company secretary made some calls and got around the over-25 insurance policy for the pool cars. Hence I drove home a scarily large fancy Scenic.

It’s been a bit of a heeby-jeeby shock. Mostly because I’m just happy when my car moves and having present a bitchin’ stereo that I can turn up so high that I can’t hear the brakes squealing or the radiator bubbling. And also that there’s only so much financial/embarassment damage I can do to my car because it’s only worth so much, and so having responsibility for something that isn’t mine is making me run to the window every half an hour just to see if it’s still there.

Like it’s a big enough jump from driving my golf cart Clio to driving my mum’s Fiesta, without being faced with keyless cars and a digital speedo and being sat about 50 miles off of the ground. I tried driving the Scenic round my office building, parked on the usual tilt down towards a crash barrier, and then when I had to reverse out, I had a bit of a ‘aaargh freakout’. Which frickin’ stupid person in Renault decided that it was a good idea to get rid of the handbrake? And institute something that apparently decides when you want to move and so takes off the hand-brake, rather than leaving you an opportunity to, uh, maybe get to the bite that you want to before reversing up a slope? Especially when one is used to driving a glorified motorised wheelchair (albeit with said bitchin’ stereo) for quite a while, which tends to helpfully telegraph the bite by sticking its ass up in the air violently. Thanks go out to my boss, who didn’t deride me for being a dithery nurdle who should take what she asked for, and nodded sympathy as we discussed exact foot position on the clutch.

Hoo boy, I’m getting old. I’m trying to remember quite how I did those 100-hour weeks last summer, because I feel like I’ve been battered over the head repeatedly just from going out two nights in a row. One day of getting up at 5.45am, a bit of driving up the M1 followed by my manager swinging us up to Yorkshire at 100mph, a crap drive home (meh bomb scare road closure in close proximity), and then a 10 minute fling into the house before flinging myself on to a train into London to go to the pub, seems to have done me in. I apologise for spending the following evening mostly yawning, moaning about aching limbs, moaning about being too old to spend a gig standing up, having not enough energy to properly avoid lobbed play texts, and not having enough self control to not get the giggles at the support support act. Good gig though. People (i.e. more than one) today asked me if I had a cold because of my deep voice. Which is always my symptom of beer and tiredness combined, though to be fair, it used to mainly occur about 11pm on a Friday night during my college days.

See, someone from the DangerousInterweb™ lent me the box-set of Firefly. Despite my usually quick descent into soporifia at the first sign of a slidey-spaceship-door (sci-fi ain’t my bag), somehow I fell head-over-heels in love with this thing. I’m having slight trouble justifying it to myself, because I know that it isn’t exactly Six Feet Under/Sopranos goodness, but dammit if I couldn’t watch any episode over and over again with a silly grin on my face. I know it’s a bad sign in the world of TV_Show_Obsessions when I start researching actors’ relative heights on IMDb. Also due to the canon of the TV_Show_Obsession, I start thinking that brown jumpsuits are a good fashion forward decision. Especially when worn tied at the waist. And oh how am I scared out of my life that I’ll catch one or more of the apparently major spoilers before Serenity hits cinemas.

So seeing a bit of my work in a big-ass movie in a big-ass screen was ridiculously exciting. My head near hit the Vue ceiling in glee every time I saw it, and I kept grinning all the way from a third through when I started to recognise things. But oh-so-depressing at the same time. While I’m intensely proud that I did that, and try to convince myself that it can happen again, it was fairly hideous to return to shuffling invoices on the Monday morning.

It’s slightly surreal that I own one of the ‘making of’ books for one of the preceding films, bought purely for the costume designs and gadget drawings. This book in fact led me towards doing the first costume paintings that made me believe realistically that it was not unreasonable to try to go and study such a thing as a profession. In terms of judgement, I hoped that I had a pragmatic idea of my abilities compared to long-held ambitions, and that work cemented my direction. Those first drawings were in the theme of this series. And so, while the pen-pushing is frustrating, if I could go back and tell my acrylic-painting 16-year-old self that I’d be working on the sequel/prequel to that film, that 16-year-old would have fell flat backwards. Which is useful to remember.

On an up note, I now have a proper ID pass for work. The kicky elastic pull-out thing makes me ridiculously happy. I'm an easy sell. Not being one to take fifty-million photos in order to get a flattering one (the old phizzog ain't magically going to get better on the 83rd go) I had to choose from gormless or half-shut-eyed drunk. I went for the drunk. I feel it is an appropriate expression of my attitude to my work.