For a few weeks back there I was working days that were 12, 16, even 20 hours long. I'd go to work until my eyeballs fell out, bus home, pass out, wake 5 or 6 hours later with my to-do list already rolling around in my head, and head straight back to work. Things have eased off since then, but I am totally unsurprised to have received a call today to say I will need to work all day--and probably all night--tomorrow (Sunday) to help fix something that someone else broke, in time for Monday morning. Joy!

All this stuff has taken something of a toll on my physical person, with a re-emergence of the disturbing symptoms of anxiety that I had during my final year at university. (And, I mean, not that getting divorced and moving 5 times, one of them across-country, could have had anything to do with it, either.) The doctor had some helpful suggestions, including exercise, vitamins, and an anti-anxiety medication that I can take until things stop being so crazy.

A couple of weeks ago I had a blast at PAX (Penny Arcade Expo), the biggest consumer-oriented video games convention in the country. Our booth was huge, and very prominent, and I worked my ass off helping to set it up, then worked a couple of mornings on the show floor. A bunch of people from my office spoke on a panel about the process that we went through westernising the game, and people queued up from before the start of the previous panel to see it. On the last day, I got to hang out and enjoy the convention, dress up in costume, and see Wil Wheaton's panel.

I've been pretty homesick for Austin on and off, but I think that with the last couple of weeks I've started to find my feet a bit better. I've met several people who I think are going to be really good friends--and thanks to the Law of Conservation of Staci/eys, one is called Stacey. For a while there, I was desperate to get back to Austin, plotting ways to make my stay as long as I could. I'm still looking forward to my trip big time, but I know I'll be happy to come back, too. While I still miss everyone there, I think it's much healthier if I'm not always wishing to be somewhere else, you know?

I am kinda dreading the winter, though. As autumn begins to set in (and it isn't really full-on autumn yet, because the grey days are alternating with the sunny days), I just know there's going to come a point where that's it, we're done with sunshine until April. Don't know if I can really handle that.

One thing I was certain of was that I wanted to live with someone(s). I've never really lived on my own for any length of time, but from the taste I had of it earlier this year and in the first three weeks of being in Seattle, I know that while I *can* do it, it's not my ideal way to live. So my real task was not to find a place so much as a roommate who I could get along with. I hit Craigslist and Roommates.com.

I soon noticed that finding a house mate online combines the worst aspects of job hunting and online dating; you work up your 'sales pitch' and send it out to dozens of people, then more often than not get no reply, and when you do, you have to meet the roomies in an awkward blind-dateish scenario, asking the getting-to-know-you questions and trying to figure out whether you're even remotely compatible. If anything, there's more at stake than a date, because there's pressure to make a decision about the living situation ASAP, while with dating you can just agree to one more date, with no further commitment than that.

I'd narrowed my search to a few neighbourhoods of Seattle. I knew I wanted to live somewhere close to downtown, and with easy bus access (and I'm still wowing over the fact that I can live here without a vehicle). But most importantly, it had to be somewhere with lots of stuff going on, with cool shops and restaurants in walking distance, where it's not too loud and sketchy but I won't feel like I'm disturbing people if I have folks over and we get giggly on the back porch. Somewhere, in essence, where there are younger single people and couples, and maybe some families. If you can invite your neighbours over for the party rather than disturbing them, that's a bonus. On the other hand, I have done the student thing and am over it.

Sounds kinda like a tall order, right? Actually, there a few parts of Seattle that fit the bill--Fremont, Eastlake, maybe Wallingford is a little familyish, but it has the right vibe. And, most of all, Capitol Hill, which is apparently the self-consciously bohemian/'weird' part of Seattle. Coming from a city whose slogan is "Keep Austin Weird", it was a no-brainer to put Capitol Hill at the top of my list. I mean, I don't buy into the hipper-than-thou aspects, but there is certainly a good concentration of fun people and fun stuff to do.

Just as a slight digression, when I told one of the HR folks at work where I was house-hunting, she laughed and said, "You've found your people, eh?" I swear I had spent 10 minutes in my life talking to her before this. Just goes to show that either 1. I live up to the Capitol Hill cliche, or b. Capitol Hill lives up to the me cliche.

Before finding the right place, I sent dozens of emails to different people with mixed success. Two of the times I actually viewed a place, I was shown around by the landlord. I began to see this as a warning sign, at least as far as my requirements went, because it meant that the house had basically a revolving door of temporary residents, often grad students who spent all their time studying or at work, and who never had anything to do with each other. If I were going to live like that, I might as well have the place to myself and not have to deal with other people's mess. Seriously, all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of house sharing. Maybe it's a little cheaper, but honestly I could have got a studio for the same amount.

The third place I saw was way further out of town than I thought it would be from the map. The neighbourhood was quiet...like, waaaaay quiet. Like, horror movie quiet. The two women who lived there were very sweet, but I felt like they were probably looking for someone a little less sociable and, I guess, LARGE, in the personality sense. I would have felt like I was disrupting their way of life, and besides, I didn't see a computer the whole time I was there. I do believe they were aliens.

I had spent hours trawling Craigslist and walking the streets of Seattle, with little to show for it but blisters on my feet and a knowledge of Seattle neighbourhoods that surprises people who find out how short a time I've been here.

Then, I met Lindsey. She has lived in this house at the edge of Capitol Hill for six years with one roommate after another, usually friends of hers who stayed for a year or two. Her latest roomie was someone from roommates.com, and before he moved in he neglected to mention such trivial quirks as, oh, that he doesn't like music in any form. Suffice to say that they did not get along, and she was trying to line someone up to move in at the end of his trial contract period. When she and I met, we had an instant rapport. We talked up a storm, telling each other our life stories. She offered me wine and we sat out in the back yard for several hours. She is of around my age, works for a high-tech company, loves sitting around chatting with friends and is happy for me to invite my friends over, parties on weekends, but never leaves the kitchen in a state...in a word, ideal. The kind of person who makes the house feel like a home.

I only left that night because I hadn't eaten dinner yet, and I told her on the spot that I was ready to sign the lease and move in, and she said that she felt exactly the same way. The next day I wrote back to everyone whose houses I'd agreed to see, and told them I'd found somewhere.

Thus it was that I found myself moving in last weekend. I had no furniture, and those who follow my Twitter/Facebook will know that I was fluey on Thursday and Friday and had to arrange finding and hauling a new bed frame and mattress while in a state of semi-recovery. Somehow, even though all those decisions were made while delirious, I now have the world's most awesome bed. Still, all my clothes are piled in (and on) suitcases on the floor, so believe me I am not that well organised yet. Ah well, Heath supervised the loading of my stuff into a truck last Sunday, and it is wending its way from Texas as we speak.

Today, I wandered round Capitol Hill looking for second-hand quirky furniture shops and finding only first-hand swanky furniture shops. Gentrification in action. And my feet have blisters again.

I spent most of the time since Thursday night flopping about on my bed feeling pathetic, sweating too much and making silly whimpering noises. It was too much to contemplate leaving the house for supplies, and in any case, it was all I could do to choke down my tea or Theraflu before it got cold. I did manage to read a book, however: Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters. I can't swear that what I read was what was actually on the page, but nevertheless it was a great story. Though written recently, it did Victorian gothic very well, and was full of fainting ladies and mysterious fevers. I think I began to overrelate.

At some point in the afternoon I had what was either the worst or the best idea ever, and decided to attempt a shower. I felt like I'd crawled off the bottom of a swamp, and I think I had the idea that I could make myself decent enough to run across the street for soup. I stood under the water for about 30 seconds before realising that it was too much effort to stay upright, and wouldn't it be better to run a bath instead? I lay in the tub as it filled with steaming water. Even though the rest of the day I'd been having trouble keeping cool, for some reason the heat and the steam were welcome now. When it was full, I lay there for a while enjoying it, feeling the heat drain the aches from my body and the steam clear the stuffiness from my head.

Then, suddenly, I didn't want to be in the hot water any more. The relaxed feeling had turned to shaking and lightheadedness. I stood up, let the hot water drain, and stuck my head outside the shower curtain so I could breathe air instead of steam. I still had to rinse, though, so I ran the shower lukewarm. Everything was shaking. Then, my vision started to contract. I turned off the water and lay down in the tub, I don't know for how long. I remember having my eyes open and everything being dark. My stomach was roiling, and I remember working very hard at not throwing up on myself.

Things come in flashes after that. The next clear memory is of lying on the bed, towels underneath me, being woken from a dead sleep by a phone call from my new roommate, Lindsey, checking whether I was still on for signing the lease tomorrow (today). I know I rambled at her a bit, but I don't think I was too scary.

But you know what? I felt soooooooo much better for being clean. I don't think I'd attempt that again, though, unless someone was around to help me out.

As usual, click through to read.

The last couple of weeks in Austin were non-stop: working by day, packing in odd moments, then rushing to social engagements so that I could see as many people as I could before I left. By the time I boarded my flight for Vegas, I already needed a rest. An illustrated description of the first part of my adventure follows in the extended entry...

Check me out on Last.fm if you want to know what adventures in music I am having.

The setup was, we were all meeting at the restaurant at 6:30 for Larry's birfday. I had to go over to the condo to drop off some stuff (I moved yesterday, remember), so I was around when the following went down.

At around 6, Larry started getting the idea of grilling some chicken that needed eating up. He started calling all the exact same people who were supposed to be meeting us for dinner, and even the fact that they all said, "Sorry, can't hang out until about 8 o'clock" didn't make him suspicious. I overheard this conversation in the kitchen (paraphrased):

Iskra: I thought we were going to go to Indian Palace.
Larry: Well, now we have all this chicken that needs eating.
Iskra: But don't you want to go out for your birthday?
Larry: Let's just grill this and save some money...what's up baby?
Iskra: I just really wanted you to go to the restaurant.

Meanwhile, Heath and I were casting anxious glances at each other, wondering how we were going to convince him to go to his own party. I was exhausted and brain dead from moving, otherwise I think I'd have come up with something. Anyway, I didn't, and the comedy continued.

When he failed to get any nibbles on the grilling plan, Larry decided the only thing that would satisfy him was to bake some raisin bread. We were trying to talk him out of this when there was a knock on the door.

(Unbeknownst to Larry, one of the guests had got the wrong time, and showed up at the restaurant early. When he called Iskra to find out what the deal was, she invited him over.)

Larry was thrilled to get this unexpected visit from his friend Tony, and immediately decided that he needed to be shown the scenes from Brimstone Orphans, which the condo peeps shot a few weeks ago and just finished tinkering with. Iskra cast a furrowed-eyebrow look in my direction, but we both shrugged and decided we'd just drag him out of the house when the scenes were done.

The scenes (awesome, by the way!) come and go...and a timer goes off in the kitchen.

OK, Lars, time to go! Surely that was your bread being ready?

No?

Oh, that timer was for the bread dough to rise...now you want to stay and bake it?

What does it take to get this guy to his own birthday party? At this point, I would have been giving up on the surprise concept, but Iskra soldiered on.

Heath and I went ahead to the restaurant to warn everyone. Fortunately, there was plenty of beer, and mango lassi, and we were kept amused by text updates from Iskra saying such things as, "10 more minutes on the freaking bread!"

Finally, at about 7:30, we saw them walking across the parking lot.

"Oh shit!" said Heath. "They're here!"

"Quick, hide!" I hissed.

Someone grabbed a napkin and put it over their head. Within seconds, all 8 of us at the table right next to the door had napkins over our heads, and we peeked out from under them as Lars 'n' Iskra entered the restaurant...and talked to the greeter...and turned in the opposite direction. Somehow, Larry had totally missed the table of 8 people--8 of his friends--all with napkins over their heads and attempting to stifle giggles. We were all laughing far too hard to shout, "SURPRISE!"

Right now, I'm staying with my friend Charles, who is moving to Scotland to live with Athena, and his lease is up on Monday. However, I am not ready to leave Austin (partly because the company took donkey's years to write my offer letter, and I only just got it last Wednesday) and will have to stay in town a couple of extra weeks. This means that I'm packing stuff up and moving it to ANOTHER friend's house while I pack my other stuff up and move it into storage.

Athena and Charles are getting married on June the 27th in Las Vegas (the suite where they're having their reception is VERY FLASH), so I've booked a flight there on the 25th, will attend their wedding, fly on to Seattle on the 28th, and start work in my new office on the 29th.

Meanwhile, I'll be living in temporary housing while I try and find some groovy Seattle roommates, then once I get somewhere to live, I'll have my stuff picked up from the storage unit and have it shipped up to me.

On top of all that, I have worked overtime for the past couple of weeks, completely overhauling our processes at work, delivering the moon on a stick at short notice, and generally kicking arse.

tl;dr version: I'm moving a lot, will be without most of my stuff for a month, and am getting to see Vegas for the first time. If you are in Austin and want to see me before I go, you know where to find me!

So it was some years after that before I seriously thought about it again. By that time, I'd moved on to thinking it would be a giraffe, maybe something stylised. I was thinking small and delicate, nothing too intense, to see if I liked tattoos, and then maybe I'd get more. Still, I couldn't really settle on a design. That's really the crucial part: picking something you know you will want to have on your skin for the rest of your life. I told myself that if I could stick with one idea for at least a year, I'd get it done.

Well, I had that idea. It's something I've wanted for several years now, but in true Jess style it's so over the top elaborate that it will cost a significant amount of money and take many installments to do. This is obviously a little daunting for someone whose only prior tattoo parlour experience is talking to one strange and offputting guy for about 5 minutes. I started wondering if it was my way of letting myself off the hook. Perhaps I should start smaller, with something really personally meaningful.

But then. Then, it came to me. Reading Phonogram, of course, it came to me. There is this one wordless panel that sums up the joy and the intensity of music. David Kohl walks into a nightclub. It's changed in the past decade but he can almost see through the veil of years to what it used to be. He plays a song on his walkman, one that will conjour the memory kingdom, and he dances with complete abandon.

It seemed to me that their intervening stuff was a deliberate move away from Richey's influence, in a "not-ready-to-deal-with-it" kind of way. His family refused to have him declared dead, even though they could have done so after seven years, until last autumn, nearly fourteen years after his disappearance. Perhaps the band had talked it over with the family, or perhaps something had changed, but I knew from the first moment I saw the artwork--the cover painting by Jenny Saville, the familiar typeface with the backwards Rs--that the remaining Manics were using this album to exorcise their Richey demons in some way.

Just the cover art alone made caused a visceral reaction in me; it felt like a gut-punch. But I had to know. I lapped up the promotional press, and learned that the songs had lyrics taken directly from a binder that Richey had given to the other band members before his disappearance, in what looks from the perspective of hindsight to be a parting gift.

I was nervous that the treatment would fail to do justice to the lyrics (let's face it, James's vocal style has mellowed over the years, and even Nicky-penned lines like "If you tolerate this, then your children will be next" sound pretty hollow when sung in a wistful rather than viciously angry way), or, worse, that examining Richey's pre-disappearance mindset in 1995 would be ghoulishly archaeological and distant, more like the contents of a canopic jar than a still-beating heart just ripped from its protesting owner's chest (which, to be clear, is a good thing, musically speaking). But overall, I was hopeful, and all the promotional press seemed to indicate good things.

So, the album.

These days, though, there are a lot more people reading who probably don't have the first idea about the Manics either as a band or as a totem of Jess. I never try and spread the Manics love to my friends, because--unlike practically any other band I like--it would be too painful if they didn't like them. It would feel like a personal rejection. And, let's face it; not everyone is going to love a band whose most chart-friendly hit from their first three albums has a verse that starts, "Life lies a slow suicide, orthodox dreams and symbolic myths." So when people ask what music I like, my answer is..."Oh, you know, stuff that is cinematic and dark and beautiful, and probably a bit indie. I love Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds...the Pixies, the Cure, Rasputina, Radiohead...and *ahem* manicstreetpreachers...oh, look, is that Bigfoot?" *runs away*.

It's been a slow road toward learning, not intellectually but viscerally, that people don't have to love what I love in order to love me. I have no problem with it the other way around, but I suppose it helps that there's very little music I absolutely refuse to listen to. I think that my teenage experiences of being rejected 'for my music'--and let's face it, that was really just something that the people who weren't going to like me anyway were USING AS AN EXCUSE, just like they didn't really hate me because my hair was frizzy--have left scars.

So it's time for me to stand up and say I fucking love the Manic Street Preachers. I didn't 'used to like them' as a teenager. They weren't a phase I went through. I own every single they released between 1991 and 1998, even after selling all my other CD singles. I have 10" picture discs and bootlegs. One of my favourite Manics songs is a b-side that was never released except on vinyl. I collected press clippings about Richey in a binder.

That comic I keep going on about, Phonogram, the reason I love it so much is not just because it speaks to my 17-year-old Britpop loving self, but because it knows, really knows, what was good about the Manics, and its most cathartic story thread is about them, about the strange and fragile psyches of people who really used to love the Manics a whole lot. Finally, the main character, in order to unlock the Britpop 'memory kingdom', dresses up like his former self, in full Richey Manic garb--tight jeans; eyeliner; a shirt spraypainted with the words "USE/LESS"--and dances with complete abandon.

It's so joyous and vivid that I want my first tattoo to be of that panel. And when people ask me about it, I'll tell them that it's because I love the Manic Street Preachers.

This is, rather, a story about my relationship with the Manic Street Preachers. It has a happy ending, insofar as it has an ending at all.