I'm about to defy the popular belief that it's "impossible to sum yourself up in one of these things."

My name is Jenny. People often mistake me for a dead body because I'm quite tall and thin with really white skin and dark hair. I realise being tall and thin aren't requisites for dead people, but the state of being so invests the possessor with an air of gauntness and malnutrition, traits which are only too common among the deceased.

Come to think of it, having dark hair isn't necessarily associated with corpses either.

None of this matters. All that matters is that I look like I'm dead.

~*~

As far as trivialities such as personality are concerned, here's an exciting and comprehensive summary.

I suffer from mild social anxiety, which can be a bit of a pain when it comes to meeting people and convincing them I'm not a total mong. I also have cripplingly low self-esteem and a houseplant called Evelyn. I'm lazy and feel something more intense than general reluctance at the prospect of chores such as dish-washing or essay-writing. I analyse everything to death and am subject to an odd sort of selective perfectionism, valuing accuracy and self-instituted rules to an extent which baffles most people, and yet being disgustingly untidy.

I'm very very very competitive (something to do with a profound longing to prove myself worthy), but usually choose to avoid competition since losing sends me into a wild delirium of grief, self-loathing, and barely repressed aggression. This state can last for days and is spent slowly destroying those around me with my incessant lamentations and bawlings. It culminates in a long period of quiet mourning, during which I try, and fail, to heal. My defeat continues long after everyone else has forgotten about it, borne much as the grizzled war veteran bears the loss of his legs and wife, in silent agony and with rising bitterness. It's not just a game. It's never just a game.

~*~

Phil_Boggild is my chap.

Just to clear up some confusion, my username isn't pronounced "kisshugkiss Jenny kisshugkiss." It's pronounced "ZOX Jenny ZOX." Needed to straighten that out.

Seeking, unsuccessfully, full time employment. I've rashly enrolled on an ECDL course at a rather terrible local college in a desperate bid to improve my employability. I'm the youngest person in the class by about thirty years. Also, I recently spotted in the college's prospectus that one of the courses they offer is Introduction to Tarot Reading. So I'm not feeling too great about that.

I work part time at this local family-run insurance company in the Accounts and Claims departments. I make sure credit card payments are correct and create banking sheets for cheques and record transactions to the ledgers and stuff like that. Admin, basically. I quite like it.

I used to work for a very elderly lady artist. She is rheumatoid, bedridden and mostly blind. I basically just typed stuff up, tried to decipher her baffling notes, researched boring dead people, and sorted through endless cardboard boxes of junk. Sometimes I got hungry and had to eat the crumbs I could scrape out from between the floorboards. It reminded me of my years as a Russian peasant in Turkmenistan, so I spent much of my time weeping, overwhelmed by horrific and vivid flashbacks. This made it difficult to get much work done, and the lady artist was not frugal with her beating-stick. "Akylsyz topbak!" she'd scream at me. "Bikar gacgak!" Every curse from that twisted Slavic mouth made part of my soul shrivel and die. There's not much left now.

Comparing, concealing, avoiding, repressing, over-thinking, objectifying, repelling, rationalising, pretending, worrying, yearning, making origami lilies out of paper napkins.

I'm agile, like a goat.

I used to be a very good vegetarian, then I wasn't, and now I am again. But it's so difficult. I can't even eat my favourite cheese, parmesan.

So, yeah, loads of cool stuff.

That I don't talk much. Or at all. Unless I know somebody else there, which is unlikely because I don't really know that many people.

Not gonna lie, I do not have a refined taste when it comes to reading material. My favourite genre is fantasy. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin, Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin, things of that sort. I find all classics desperately boring, which is not to say I don't appreciate how finely written they are. The only non-fiction I ever read are those cosmology books for people who are too stupid to understand anything about cosmology. FILMS, yeah, the same. The Lord of the Rings, Mononoke-hime, The Matrix, etc. I also like horror films, for some reason. I do not like films containing any sort of extreme, sadistic violence. They just distress me. My favourite band is K's Choice. Now, onto the infinitely more important topic of food.

Food is one of the few things I have a genuine enthusiasm for, although there isn't much joy in eating now that I'm a fucking vegetarian. I can't really justify eating meat though. I still love going out to restaurants. Please take me out. My favourite meal ever is spaghetti with tomato sauce and lots and lots of cheddar, and I also really like veggie burgers, moussaka, berries, mango, veggie hot dogs, Cadbury's Fruit & Nut, Crunch Corners, crumpets, stew, pasta dishes in general, lovely salmon (just because I can't eat it doesn't mean I don't love it), most things really. I've developed a slightly unhealthy and expensive obsession with almond croissants. Tea can pull me from the very bowels of despair and take me to a place of endless rainbows and beautiful shimmering lights. If Earl Grey was a person, I would have sex with him.

UPDATE

Duh. Earl Grey WAS a person. Specifically, he was a Catholic with a huge forehead. Huge. Huge.

When I was younger, there was a small section of uneven plaster on the wall next to my bed. It looked as if a tiny, bespectacled, long-nosed creature peered out into my room from its cosy niche. I called it Goggly. At night, Goggly would watch over me and whisper comforts in my ear. When faced with a moral dilemma, I'd ask myself, "What would Goggly do?" I knew that Goggly would never send me awry. One day I came home from school to find that my grandmother had replastered my entire room. Goggly, and Goggly's niche, were lost under smooth, cold gypsum. It was the worst day of my life.

Goggly is the single thing I cannot do without, but do without I must. My descent into madness has been slow, but I think people are definitely starting to notice.

How... pointless... everything... is. How promisingly the word 'chthonian' begins, with all those unlikely consonants bundled together... and how disappointingly it ends; '-onian'. What an anticlimax. In that first infinitesimal moment, you're all, "Could this be the best word ever...?" and then no. It has tricked you.

Oh, and because we're broke, how to shamelessly promote my mother, Catherine Howe:

• Her official website
  
  
• Her Facebook page
  
  
• Her and Vo Fletcher's MySpace page
  
  
• Her MySpace page
  
  
• Her Wikipedia page
  
  
• Her IMDb page

They're all really good. I swear. She won an Ivor Novello Award and everything.

Floating through outer space, searching for the Meaning of Life. I've a hunch it's to be found somewhere around TN J0924-2201, but I can't honestly be sure. I fear this is a doomed mission.

C. S. Lewis and Jeremy Paxman went to my sixth form, Malvern College (check the link, it's pretty). That's not private, but it's pretty cool.

Solipsism has been preying on my mind since early childhood, like some horrible soul-consuming fungus. It's difficult for me to have faith in any sort of inherent GOODNESS, or anything at all really. I'm very short sighted. I mean, my eyes are. -6.

I like virgins the best. Hot ones.

You want to send me a photo of your penis for my penis collection. This isn't a joke.

You have something interesting/funny/thoughtful to say to me. Don't bother if you want to tell me "OMG I have social anxiety too!" or "You sound a lot like me, actually."

I don't respond much anyway.