If you haven't yet read or commented on yolandasfetsos 's post yesterday, you can still do so! Go forth and enter the AFTERLIFE Bag of Swag contest. And thank you to everyone who's given me a shout-out and/or bought a copy! ^_^ My dad keeps texting me to ask when he can retire and live off my millions, so if you haven't bought a copy yet, don't do it for me. Do it for him.

Anyway. Kyle and I went and saw Paranormal Activity last night, a film I would have enjoyed a lot more if the cinema hadn't been full of shrieking teenagers. Seriously. When did it become okay to sit and talk loudly throughout a film? If you want to do that, stay at home and do it, and leave those of us who actually want to watch the film in peace. Every time anything remotely creepy happened onscreen, we got a five minute chorus of screams, giggles, and OMFGdidyouseethatI'msoscared!!!?!!!s. Not amused. And, to be honest, it wasn't even that terrifying of a film. Don't me wrong - I liked it and there were some genuinely jumpy, creepy moments, but it didn't warrant the level of screaming idiocy we had inflicted on us.

Anyway. Tomorrow my guest blogger will be Jenn Moffatt, editor and founder of Drops of Crimson ezine. Hope you all stop by to join her!

Until I met this one. I gave up on Pride and Prejudice and Zombies last night after Lizzie threatened to gut Darcy and choke him with his own bowels one time too many. Look, I'm not squeamish, or prudish, nor do I lack a sense of humour, but this book just hit all the wrong notes for me.

Pride and Prejudice is an awesome book, so I figured adding zombies would make it even more awesome, but actually it made it a lot worse. Not only is not no longer a sweet, sharp, funny comedy of manners, it's also not a good zombie romp. I don't think Grahame-Smith gave a lot of genuine thought as to how a zombie plague would really affect Regency England (the country's overrun with zombies but Mrs Bennet's main concern is still who will marry her daughters? ORLY?), and the zombie portions are often bloodless and without humour. The goriest part of the book (as far as I read) was when Lizzie slaughters three ninjas in Lady Catherine's dojo, and all this scene did was highlight how little attention Grahame-Smith had paid to Lizzie's character in the original. Or any of the characters, in fact. Jane is apparently one of the deadliest zombie killers in the land, but she's still too shy to tell Bingley she loves him. Kitty and Lydia are supposedly equally skilled at killing zombies, but still more interested in balls and soldiers. And Caroline Bingley is more interested in drooling after Darcy than the zombies chomping on her waiting staff at the Netherfield ball, which is just stupid. All the truly funny material is Austen's.

And yeah, you can go on about pastiches and parodies and all that crap. And yeah, the book did hit the NYT bestseller list, so Grahame-Smith clearly knows more than me on how to write a book. I don't care. I've come to the conclusion that Pride and Prejudice is a good enough book on its own that it doesn't need this treatment. And zombies are a funny enough subject matter that they don't need to be crammed into Pride and Prejudice.

My make-up is a mess. I can't feel my legs. My hair is wet because even though it's June - JUNE - it's tipping it down outside. And I'm half an hour early to work.

None of these things make me happy.

And yet I am now committed to riding the damn bike home again this evening.

And all for the sake of saving £11 a week on a bus ticket. Will it be worth it?

I don't know. I just don't know.

I'm battling a virus that refuses to die. There's the whole Agentgate thing, which is stressful and upsetting. There's work colleagues who are driving me mad. And now the cleaners are ganging up on me because I ordered brown hand towels instead of white ones.

Who gives a fuck what colour the hand towels are?

Seriously?

You dry your hands, you throw them in the bin, end of. Whether they're white, brown, or cerulean blue with pictures of dolphins on seems utterly irrelevant to me.

They left me a pretty snippy note asking that I get them white ones instead, and asking if we'd changed suppliers. Well yes, when I spoke to them earlier in the week I did mention several times I'd ordered through a different company this month because the usual supplier couldn't get hold of some products.

 

I'm sick. I'm exhausted. I'm stressed to the out and I do not want to be arguing with people about fucking paper towels.

 Last time I was supposed to be on holiday from work, I ended up coming in anyway because certain people were panicking over who would do my share of the work. THIS time I plan for that not to happen. I have a fortnight off coming up and all I want to do is read, write and watch bad television, possibly while eating doritos. This requires much forward planning. Somehow, in the next week, I have to prepare 20 sets of papers for a committee meeting, comprising of seven proposals for new programmes, all of which have to be copied onto different coloured paper depending upon when they were submitted. I have to make up three weeks' worth of arrival packs for newcomers to the Institute, give my new boss a crash course on "what Naomi does at Reception," and give the new catering assistant a crash course on how to use the photocopier.

I need to show someone how to test the fire alarm, how to do inductions, where we keep travel adaptors, where we keep photocopy paper and where we keep stamps. I have to prepare three weeks' worth of seminar lists (which is impossible because we only get the information one week in advance). I have fully stock up the office with maps and leave a list of outstanding repair jobs on my desk because nobody has time to check the spreadsheet on the shared drive. I have to prepare three weeks' worth of door access cards so people can get into the building after hours (which is impossible because we only have a limited number of cards and certainly not three weeks' worth).

I have to do all this next week when we have a conference running. There will be 100 people arriving on Monday who will be here all week. I'm expected to be on Reception from 8.30 - 5.30 answering questions and doing inductions, processing incoming post, answering the phone, sending faxes, filing and generally doing all the other rubbish jobs that "nobody else has time to do."

So yeah, basically I'm going to spend my holiday rocking back and forth in a corner whilst tearing out my hair.