The saddest thing about finishing my degree is realising how out of practice I am with writing stuff down. I found a couple of notebooks with little story bits and lists and journal entries all scrawled down in my handwriting alongside opticians appts etc.; I remember at the time thinking how awful they were, how pretentious, how I could be so bad at something I spent so many torturous hours thinking up and dreaming about and pretending I was good at. Turns out the fact that I used to pretend I was good at it meant I actually almost was – I guess it was a fulfilment of the ‘fake it ’til you make it’ mantra. I was so very nearly on the cusp of Something so many times, and reading it back made me irritated with the Lucy of the past (not even very long ago in the past – I only stopped writing convulsively and habitually when studying engulfed my entire personality in January) for not pushing through and actually finishing what I’d started (always and forever a problem). Instead I concentrated on pictures, on pictures of nude, Victorian women as Andromeda, as early porn ‘stars’, as imaginary myth-women of unnatural, disproportionate beauty. On pictures of death, of Death, of bones smiling on the windows of Mexican panaderias, of altars covered in marigolds and fruit and tequila and icons of the Virgin and female skeletons in wide-brimmed hats to remind us that we all die, even if we are good Catholics (but also that it doesn’t really matter when we do). And my spare time was also pictures, of pin up women, and tattoos, and zombies, and blood, and flowers, and birds, and of myself (naturally…). Things I felt were far removed from my degree, but really aren’t at all.
So in balance – and in response to the peer pressure of my more literate, dedicated, and ultimately more interesting friends – I’m going to try to record all of the thoughts in my head again and carry on back down that road of self-invention. Someone needs to uphold the terrible use of punctuation in personal blogs after all. Titling my posts, however, is for another day 
Yay! It’s all about the blogging.