A tiny squishy cactus

Brilliant news has been flooding in to my lug holes over the last 24 hours. In no particular order they run along these lines -

1. I am a semi-finalist in the 2010 Funny Women Award Competition. This is sincerely epic.

2. The lack of alcohol in my system seems to make my hip less cantankerous - is this due to less drunken mishappery or because the alcohol affects the joints? We don't know. We are not doctors. Nor are we multiple personalities so I should have just used I.

3. I have amazingly supportive friends from all areas of life.

I had a realisation yesterday that I'm very pleased with the way I've handled friends and social responsibility over the years. I don't mean like I've handled them well in that I can grope and innapropriately touch well. Although I can. Fondle champion - that's me! When I got the good news re FWA yesterday I immediately sent out the obligatory text to my nearest and dearest asking if they could come and support and sharing the good news...what was really nice, was that replies came back from all stratas of my life so far. twas kind of like drilling down through different types of rock and finding a person from each level. I'm not going to take lots of rocks to the show though. Sedimentary in the first row would probably laugh significantly less than my giggling hordes.

There were positive responses from old school friends, college people, university friends, old workmates, current workmates and people I just know because I drink too much and this leads to a loose tongue. It was a really awesome feeling that I've kind of gathered all these awesome people up like a ball of selotape gathering dust under a sofa. Pretty cool. The thing is I really like all these people, and it made all the effort it takes to hold on to good friends totally worth it. They
may not feel the same at all but I care not - the point is that my phone beeps regularly and this means I am popular. I think. Or that I don't know how to switch off my alarm...

Ok. Gushing done. But it was a cool feeling and I urge people to take a peek through their phone book and remind themselves how cool all the people they've collected are. It's a bit like having top trumps or football stickers of your favourite things. It's funny because it was only yesterday I was looking at Facebook and looked at the number '737' as the quota of friends I've gathered and honestly wondered if I could 737 people I'd ever met - let alone ones that had bothered to electronically tag themselves (as a friend, not a criminal). Facebook is weird.

My friends really make me happy. I'm a complete people person. People are what make my world go round. I was making a list of things that make me happy and it's pretty much just people. I divide my day up into which radio presenter I'm listening to because I like their personalities, I then listen to stand-up rather than music because it's more interesting and then I spend my evenings socialising because I'm not thrilled about alone time.

I'm terrible if I've been on my own for too long - I get horrendously bored and this either results in me getting verbal diarrhoea as soon as I see someone I do know or I end up thinking too much and this can be very dangerous. Thinking too much for me is a regular and destructive passtime as it results in massive over inflating of issues.

For example -

"I really enjoyed the Edinburgh festival...can't wait until next year...mustn't wish my life away...I'm already 23...by next year I'll be 24...and I haven't even been to Asia yet...what with global warming I might have already left it too late for Asia...plus with the IBS I'd probably get ill if I went...so even if the world survives long enough for me to go to Asia I would poop a lot...probably better to not go...so there is very little point in anything as it'll all end one day...no point even looking forward to Edinburgh next year...might as well just eat pringles on the sofa until I'm sick...but I wouldn't be sick, I would get stomach ache...because I have IBS...which means I can't go to Asia...and the polar bears are dying...and I'm not going to still be alive this time next year..."

And it's a terrible cycle of melodrama. Terrible.

So I keep people around to talk to. Keep them in jars. Not really. But I probably would if I could.