Whoever said face your fears was a silly, silly person.

I’m facing a fear at the moment – that fear being my stomach churning fear of meeting new people. Added to that this evening I am going to have to face another fear of mine, that of walking into a venue (bar, restaurant, club etc) where I don’t know any body there. Plus there’s the time honoured fear of making an absolute fool of myself.

Oh, crap.

I can sure talk the talk. I guess it’s time to see if I can walk the walk…

(And my gleeful cryptiveness will be explained tomorrow. Or possibly throughout the evening if you keep an eye on Twitter).

My job rules.

So I’m stressed out from here to next month, am underpaid, occasionally under appreciated, and generally run off my pretty Miss Moneypenny heels.

But just occasionally something makes it all worth while. Like today when I got a free half hour acupressure session.

Bliss.

Which emails are important to you?

About a year ago now, Apple Mail upped and died on me. Something corrupted and my entire mail database went *poof* Not *poof* in a pretty fairy dust and sudden treats kind of way. *poof* in a “those lights in the sky are really a cloud of meteors on a direct collision course with your small town” kind of way.

Much nashing of teeth and hair pulling later, I’d got Thunderbird up and running with (most) of my emails restored to me. I thought no more of it and next time I look around, it’s a year later, Thunderbird is starting to run like it’s stuck in treacle, and I never was totally happy with some of the ways it did things anyway. Time to change back to Mail?

Which is a brilliant idea in theory, but right now I’m right back to the “nashing/wailing” point of software installation.

I’ve got Mail up and running again.
I’ve got all my myriad of email accounts set up (eight accounts never seemed like so many till I had to configure the pop & smtp servers for all of them!).
And…

Zip.

A few random emails have downloaded, but not the majority. We’re talking emails from December 2006 that are coming through, but nothing from then on. I’ve tried to forward some of the more ‘important’ emails to myself and… a few get through, but others aren’t. There’s no fricking rhyme nor reason!

But the real point of this post, other than to rant of course, is to ask – which are the important emails? I have a habit of never throwing anything away if I can help it, so my Thunderbird folders were stretching at the seams. It’s quite disconcerting to fire up Mail and be faced with pristine folders. Or rather, a virgin inbox with NO folders because I want to start my filing system from scratch. I know there’s some important emails locked away in Thunderbird that I’m going to want to reference again but… I can’t decide which ones to manually forward to myself.

Pretty much everyone on the planet knows that I am abysmal at email. Abysmal doesn’t even cover it really. Perhaps a scorched earth approach is what I need? A blank canvas upon which important emails will be clearly visible? Plus, thanks to the glory of Gmail, it’s all stored online anyway, so none of it’s really LOST lost.

But there are emails which I’ve kept because they mean a lot to me. It might just have been a quick two liner but… I’m a sentimental old fool I know.

Grrr.

They are just bits and bytes but not to have them at my fingertips to scroll through at my leisure is very discombobulating. A letter – now, I can see a reason you get attached to a letter and treasure it, but an email?

Please don’t be upset or offended if I don’t accept you as a contact on Flickr.

This is not because I don’t like you. I am sure you are a lovely person. I just have no interest in viewing your pictures constantly in my RSS reader.

Let me explain Flickr contacts and how I use them

When you add someone as a contact on Flickr and you are subscribed to your “Flickr Contacts” rss feed, then whenever they add pictures, you get to see them real easily in the RSS reader of your choice. This is great, till you get flooded with pictures of a total strangers cat. Cute for like one picture maybe (if it’s a cute cat), but more than that? The only thing worse is looking at a total strangers baby pictures…

So to avoid this overload, I make a point of being strict with my contacts, limiting them to two and a half groups:

1) To keep track of what’s happening in the life of my friends. It’s hard to define exactly the people I class as “friends”, but they are mainly the people I have a genuine relationship with (either offline or online). Kind of a nebulous definition I know, but now isn’t the time for a whole debate on what constitutes a relationship in this Web 2.0 age.

2) To keep track of the truly gorgeous pictures some of my favourite photographers take and post on Flickr. If I favourite an image I tend to have a browse through the rest of that persons photostream. If I like what I see, I add that person as a contact.

2.5) To stalk keep an eye on people who, whilst I wouldn’t describe as classic “friends”, I have a slightly obsessive desire to follow their life. Or I read their blog and know that, like myself, their online life is spread over many diverse sites (a personal website, a business website, Flickr, Twitter, 9rules, Facebook…) and if I want to get the bigger picture I need to be following them in multiple places.

And that’s it. I don’t demand reciprocity when I mark you as a contact. I totally accept that not everyone wants to be subjected to *my* cat pictures. But by the same token, if someone adds me as a contact I firstly do a name check to see if I know them. Then I’ll browse their photostream to see what they’ve uploaded lately. Then I’ll judge their stalk-worthyness. If none of my, admittedly arbitrary, categories are checked, then I don’t add the person back.

Simple as that.

Until the day Flickr adds a “send this person a message explaining why you’ve failed to add them as a contact” option, I’m going to have to explain myself here. As I have done.

Hope this all makes sense 🙂

If I say it on the blog it must be true, therefore –

I hereby announce that I will no longer Facebook-stalk the objects of my (not-so)secret lusts and desires.

That way lies angst, heartache and criminal convictions.

Not to mention some very boring blog posts.

This resolution will come into effect as of one minute past midnight on the 9th of June 2007 (BST), which leaves me just enough time to have one last oggle of a few choice profiles 😉

And can I just say, why am I always drawn to a certain type of person? And why is that certain type of person always in return attracted to (and in most cases deeply in love with a representative of) a type other than me? The “tall, leggy, blonde, sickeningly nice and intelligent, beautiful and with about as much body fat as you’d find on a twigglet” type?

Life is hard on us short, sturdy, curvy brunettes, that’s all I’m saying.

When I opened up my emails at home this evening I was greeted with something I emailed myself from work today as a reminder:

Bring in the bat!

There’s an explanation but it almost doesn’t seem worth it. It’s no where near as funny as anything you could be imagining for yourselves right now.

I’ve had these questions sitting in my inbox from roro for a few weeks now. I’m not going to say exactly how many weeks because it’s embarrassing. I expect there’s therapy available for people like me who are chronic email-not-reply-to-people (and a better name as well) but till I avail myself of that help… You’re all screwed. Sorry.

Anyway, the deal was, still is in fact, that I answer truthfully any five questions that roro saw fit to throw at me. In return, I get to ask five questions of anyone who steps up to the plate in the comments and volunteers for the torture fun. They in turn get to ask five questions of their volunteers and… You get the picture.

So here are the questions that arrived and here, *gulp* are my answers. All of which are hand-on-heart, swear-on-the-life-of-my-imaginary-pet-guinea-pig, abso-positively true. Ish.

1. Who would you most like to catch you dancing in your underwear?
Wow. Straight in with the big ones. You have to keep in mind here, the sight of me in my underwear is one that really should be reserved only for my worst enemies. As for me dancing in my underwear… Heaven help us, some things just don’t bear thinking about! OK. Sorry. I should be being serious about this, shouldn’t I?
Underwear. Me. Dancing.
Shudder.
Er, if I could get over the embarrassment, I’d opt for the RLO. Reasoning? Well, he only sees me as the slightly kooky admin at work who refuses to do his filing. If ever a sight was going to get him to see (and hopefully adore) the real totally kooky me, it would be me dancing in my underwear.

Oh dear god please say that never, EVER happens. At least not before a first date.

2. What’s your favourite Sunday dinner (aside, of course, from the Roast)?
My Mum’s beef and macaroni pie, with her blackcurrant cheesecake for afters. Mmmmmmmmmmm. Or my Dad’s griddled salmon with roast peppers. Or… To be true, I don’t eat Sunday dinner much. I’m not that much of a foodie. Lately, my absolute favourite meal has been a couple of hot buttered muffins. Dear god, I don’t know what Waitrose put in their English Muffins, but they are as addictive as crack. *drool*

3. You’re single and on the prowl. Someone comes over to you who you might not usually notice or be attracted to. They whisper a magical phrase to you and you SWOON. What did they say?
I’ve been thinking about this a LOT and I don’t think there is a single magical phrase guaranteed to get me swooning. To be highly unoriginal, a compliment is always good. Or you going try going the really corny route – go so unbelievably corny that I’m just forced to laugh and re-evaulate you. For me though, I’m thinking it’s more HOW they say it than WHAT they say. With some accents you’d have me at ‘hello’. And no I’m not saying which accents. A girl has to have some secrets.

4. What was (or will be) your proudest moment?
Graduating from Liverpool.
There were times, many many times, I didn’t think I would make it. I came this close to not finishing. So to walk across that stage, shake the Dean’s hand, to not fall over on the steps (which was a big thing for me!), and to sit back in that chair knowing I’d done it – and to get a First as well? No moment in my life has made me feel prouder to be me. There might be one or two in the future that could beat it but… We’re talking the biggies here: kids (medical miracles permitting), finding that significant other, discovering the cure for cancer, going into space. Short of them, I don’t think there could be many moments in my life that could make me feel prouder.

5. What’s the worst book you ever read?
The Da Vinci Code. There are other books that I just never finished, but the Da Vinci Code has the dubious pleasure of the worst book I’ve ever been stupid enough to read from cover to cover. Twice. Yes, twice, because I just couldn’t believe it was really that bad. I mean, it had all that hype about it, right? But truthfully, it is the most god-awful book I have ever had the misfortune to pollute my brain with. And there’s this whole other story involving the Psychotic Stick of Blonde Candyfloss and a missing copy of the book which, upon it’s return I ended up throwing in the bin, but I’ll save that for another time. I don’t think my blood pressure could stand recounting it again.

It was just a bad book.

And those are my five questions answered *breathes a sigh of relief*.
Any volunteers to be interviewed in return? Just say so in the comments.

Oh, and if you were wondering why there was no Roast this week, I was too busy playing on the beach. For some reason frostbitten toes just seemed like more fun 😀