Who is the Crazy Lady?

For future reference, the Crazy Lady is an aspect of my personality that I have the habit of referring to in the third person. As in, "it wasn't me, it was the crazy lady"/"Oh no! What did the Crazy Lady do?" Miss Anne Throp'ist has asked me to stop doing this, as she finds it disturbing.

There is something intoxicating about letting go completely and letting your unihibited side completely take over. I'm sure everyone has a Crazy Lady or a Crazy Lad.

My Crazy Lady often appears when I combine alcohol with uneasiness. Uneasiness because I am stressed out and/or in the presence of someone I find immensely attractive. Woe betide those who are around when both of these factors are in play. I usually don't know she's appeared and wreaked havoc until I suddenly wake up in a long-suffering pal's bed the next morning, having lost the entire previous evening after that third glass of wine, and am soon confronted with cringeworthy tales of her antics.

The Crazy Lady is extremely forward. In normal mode, I tend to be quite straightforward and confident anyway, the Crazy Lady possibly takes these qualities to the point of obnoxiousness. I've been informed that she's very emphatic and repetitive, with the memory of a goldfish. She has drowned many a hapless acquaintaince with profuse praise, alternated with the telling of the same initally funny and interesting anecdote over and over again. This extreme forwardness also obviously translates into shameless flirting. I can barely make eye contact with any of the barmen in my regular haunts anymore. That is, of course, until I've had a few glasses of the old vino...

The Crazy Lady loves dancing, but is probably more passionate and flamboyant rather than rhythmic. She especially adores twirling, resulting in extremely sore legs, battered ankles and bruised toes for me to endure for the next few days. She never seems to feel any pain, unfortunately I always do!

If I repress the Crazy Lady for too long... she is everything that she always is, but at at a rather frightening intensity. It's best to let her come out now and then, in short bursts, within fairly harmless environments. Such as a slightly cheesy club with rock music and rather timid indie boys, rather than say, the evil Spanish bar and its unavoidable lecherous men. I believe the Spanish bar has more sleazy men per square metre than anywhere else in London.

This year, due to work, academic and voluntary commitments, I've had to keep her fairly wrapped up, and I have been paying the price of this repression for the past few weeks. The combination of the relief of handing in my last pieces of coursework and the shock of finding out some fairly devastating family news caused her to run on the rampage rather relentlessly, night after night. It would be tedious to go into detail about this particular set of crimes, as they became a nightly rerun and her standards seemed to drop alarmingly. Bleurgh. Thank god there are hardly any pictures!

This weekend I've frankly had no energy for her to feed off of and have decided to shut her down infallibly for at least three weeks, by completely depriving her of alcohol. There's an added motivation to this, besides wishing to be more energetic and less bruised all over. I've got something very exciting to look forward to on 20th June -- an interview with the Guardian, for a one year traineeship. It's something I want more than anything else I've wanted in recent times. It may sound mystical but I believe that if I sacrifice something I really enjoy (ie alcohol) until the interview, it increases my chances of getting it. The fate gods will look kindly upon my foregoing of the Crazy Lady's lifeblood. I guess there's a practical side -- less Crazy Lady means more time to focus on things beneficial to nabbing the internship, such as reading all the broadsheets, reading more fiction and writing articles... we'll see.

So goodbye for now dear Crazy Lady! Hopefully won't see you again until after the 20th!