By Definition A Crush Must Hurt, And They Do...

ILX is down, so my random thoughts must go here.

They say every really great friendship starts with a crush. There's something romantic about the process, the massive rush of growing intimacy, staying up all night, just talking, hanging on their every word, stories and anecdotes triggering associations and stories of your own, until the conversation wraps around itself like a vine, following each others' thoughts and finishing each others' sentences.

And I get confused between the head and the heart - I always have.

When you're drunk, it's perfect, brain to brain seems like body to body should follow. But when you're sober, the insecurities kick in. ("It's the mind that is evil. Sometimes I think if I turned off my mind, then my heart and my soul could be free...") All the things I'm not. Pretty. Skinny. Cute. All the things I'm too much of. Too fat, too clever by half, too bonkers, too intense, too self destructive. I've spent half my life in the shadow of glamourous, beautiful, more attractive sisX0r, friends, bandmates - and who the hell would want me by comparison? And that kind of overcomes the rush of "OMIGODYOUARETHEMOSTAMAZINGBOYEVER" with "ooh, errr, if you're so great, why would you want to be with me?"

This is the best part of the crush, when it's still nothing but possibility, before the "Sorry, but I don't think about you *that* way" conversation, before it crystalises into disappointment or relief, settles down into friendship or blows up into Weirdness, when it's still that excruciating balance of joy and agony and a word, a look, a text message can make you feel like the world is a good place.

Oh yeah, we played a gig in there, too. I find gigs traumatic lately. I just do. Everything that goes wrong feeds the rising panic, and then the littlest thing can set me off. I flubbed words, forgot to even play an entire guitar solo on one song. And at the end of the set, the rest of the band pissed off, leaving me to clear up and take down everything. And the entire Kissing Time totally bumrushed the stage before I'd packed up my stuff, terrible etiquette, terrible vibes, I just felt rushed and harried and hurried and snarled at anyone who came near me until I'd gone outside and cried and kicked walls in the alley behind the Windmill for ten minutes. I hate getting offstage and feeling like that. You don't feel euphoric like a rock star, you just feel drained and awful.

Came back in, got drunk. Talked to people I haven't seen in ages, (Matt hew, Simon, Jane) which was actually lovely, though it's hard to do any kind of catchup at a gig because then the band comes on, or you have to do another bit of schmooze. And there were strops and urgent meetings in the Ladies' Room, conferences and confidences and suddenly, fiercely, I started to love my band again, realised exactly what it was I loved about us. We were the freaks at school, the fat chicks, the scholarship chicks, the ginger chicks, the weird chicks who hid in the library during recess. Those kinds of scars don't go away, but you overcome them by becoming FABULOUS, by forming your own gang.

So here are my glamourous band, looking like Russian Dolls, thanks to ACB: