How to make faux pas and embarrass people

(for I myself, am unembarrassable. Don't test me! it's just. true.)


SO I have let this blog fall into disrepute and stagnancy, and as Daniel Craig aka James Bond says, my hobby is RESURRECTION.

FOR SOME REASON this scene was one that really stayed with me...

ANYWAY as such I have elected to blog the week remaining until I go to South Africa to wedding-crash the wedding of someone I have never met! I am not what you would call ‘good in social situations’ of the awkward variety or otherwise but I am trying to HEAL AND GROW, HEAL AND GROW after my previously unfortunate wedding experiences, so I have drawn up a list of guidelines to help.

1- DO NOT get so drunk you have to be dragged like a sack of potatoes back to the hotel before the couple even do their first dance

(This happened)

2- DO NOT get bored and assign self a catering role and begin drunkenly serving people drinks.

(This also happened)

3- Five drinks is the POINT OF NO RETURN after which dancing is Not Allowed. Especially not of a ‘sexy’ variety. But even more especially not of ANY variety whatsoever.

4- Create a list of interesting and non-controversial ‘talking points’, and stick to these when spoken to by any unknown mystery-shoppers.

This is a task I can do on the 11 HOURS FLIGHT from Paris to Capetown.

Oh yeah, did I mention that i have to do an ELEVEN HOUR FLIGHT and I as a nervous flyer at the best of times I am absolutely shiteing it.

What doesn’t help also is that I am flying with Air France, and when I googled ‘Air France’ to get to their website half the things that came up are about the 2009 plane crash disaster, in which – from what I gather from my extensive and manic googling- the pilots became airless and delirious, and kept trying to pull up the nose of the plane up and up until it got to air which was too thin, and the wings sliced through it like butter and it FELL OUT OF THE SKY.

welp.

I wish they gave out cats on planes. Cats that I could accidentally hurt with my overzealous panicky love.

anywho this week I have been mostly panicking and googling plane crashes in the manner of Rain Man. This, we call: mission preparation for South Africa!

I have also made a helpful to-do list and then done none of the stuff on it.

See.

If I make it onto (and off) that plane alive and not as a small capsule of human-residue I will be MOST, MOST surprised.
Surprised and hungry.

*Dreamz*

{this is an old post i never finished !}

So i've been cutting triangles out of black shiny fabric for about ten years now. (i will explain later)
but since I begun this creepy production line of (post *weep*) teen angst I have done two things,


1- read a list by a mother of young children about all the things she used to be able to do before evil foeti (plural of foetuses?) bullies their way into and out of her womb,
things like: eating food that is warm because you didn't have to cut up and blow on everyone else's dinner, then argue with them about why they had to eat it, before you could get a bite of yours,
things like: going to the toilet alone without 6 tiny hands beating at the door trying to get in and harass and plague you.
and I realised that not only has this piece confirmed all my suspicions about the rest of Life As We Know It, it has made me see that it is WORSE! worse than I ever dreamed of.
and I dream dark. 
once I dreamed that a friend of mine was trying to talk me round into having a threesome with his wife and (80s) Ronald Ray-Gun.
And I was in fact persuaded. I was seduced by the reek of presidential powerfulness. The flap of the stars and stripes, the smell of the seats on Airforce One... the roundness of the seal on the floor in the oval office.
Like a giant boob.

Anyway. 

2- After I read this grim inventory of sadness and terror I put on Young Adult, 

"an American dark comedy film directed by Jason Reitman"
In which a 'psychotic promqueen' young adult fiction writer returns to her home town to try to rekindle a romance with her high school ex, who is now happily married with a baby.

The protagonist is played by Charlize Theron, and so far all we've seen her do is get wasted, sleep in her clothes, wake up and chug diet coke, and plot to ruin people's lives.
She's moved from her hick-town to the big city and lives what I presume we're supposed to think is some traj existence of loneliness where she lives by herself with a tiny dog, watches the Kardashians and Kendra 24/7 and stays in hotels alone.

But what it really got me thinking was: 
(I'm not going to have kids. this much is a given. my mum actually already explained that she 'wouldn't wish it on anyone' so-)  
I best think up some fun shit to do in the meantime!
like ruin peoples' lives, steal from hotels etc... while all my supposed friends are busy crashing round their semi with kids hanging from each nipple, treading on lego bricks and trying to work out where they left their brain and youth.

Things I can do with the money and selfishness that I shall not allow anyone to steal from me!

1- Stay in hotels alone, reject room service in favour of sneaking in outside food from takeaways and fast food places. Eat it in bed and get grease on the sheets.


2- Go shopping drunk
Because in what situations is going shopping drunk not a good thing? No situations, that's which. Merits of drunk-shopping include, everything you try on looks incredz to your kindly beer-goggled eyes, living solely on drunk-snacks for the entire day, waking up and finding a bunch of surprise presents to yourself that you forgot you ever bought. happy hangover / Christmas!


3- Have breakfast bevvies.
Especially on Christmas, but especially also really on any day that you might feel like it'd be nice!

4- Buy expensive coffee. Buy an expensive cafetiere. Never work out how to use either, or the two in conjunction. Drink lots of instant coffee out of big, big mugs.


5- Have enough time in my 'life' that it seems entirely reasonable to spend whole evenings reading feminist blogs on tumblr, pointlessly following the seeds of twitter conversations to stalk totally non-famous band-members and actors I am obsessed with and writing snidey remarks about how much I hate One Direction / Cheryl Cole / whoever else is infecting my eyes and ears with their media presence that week.


Incidentally... I'm trying to work out, is it more embarrassing and traj to actually be One Direction: aka sham musicians, followed everywhere by girls in that unfortunate phase of life where everything is too big / too small / your teeth are trying to envelope your entire head and must be tamed into submission with intricate scaffoldings / (I've been there. and it's a dark, dark place)......

or to be the 'band' of 'real musicians' forced to stand behind them, with eyes dutifully averted, watching a bunch of adolescents cry at the 'cardigans' and 'hairdos' poncing about in front of you like the absolute sham that they are?
I honestly can't imagine that you would not feel immediately compelled to stab out your own eyes with plectrums...
but I guess it takes all sorts in the crazy 'music biz'
- ok, bunny ears fingers are getting tired now..... moving on,


6- Do a Stephen Fry:
Mark Corrigan: No, I'm not getting married.
Jeremy Usborne: You're overruling the coin?
Mark Corrigan: Well, the coin isn't actually the boss of me, Jeremy. And how I felt when it told me to marry makes me think I definetely shouldn't. So, text everyone, text everyone to tell them that.
Jeremy Usborne: A text?
Mark Corrigan: Yeah. Tell them... tell them I'm doing a Stephen Fry, we're in Brussels, I'm eating chips and mayonnaise, I'm on the edge. You found a blanket under the garage door and I'm wearing an overcoat and that no one should approach me, and I'll be back in a couple of weeks and everything's fine, maybe we'll have a wedding in a couple of weeks but I'm on the edge, stress that, everyone needs to be kind to me. Text that.
Jeremy Usborne: You want me to send all that, to everyone?
Mark Corrigan: I'll cover the cost.


aka: flee my emotions and problems instead of facing up to them! Smother my problems in mayonnaise and chips in Europe! Drown my emotions in a sea of wheat beer and reassure myself right up until getting back on the plane that everything will be fine and we'll start a new life here, with a husband called Jan or Franz and a renault with the steering wheel on the wrong side. Return to life refreshed and with new perspective plus protective sheath of mayonnaise induced cellulite. 


7- Become a spy

Brain Drain

my final exam is two weeks away, and my crack-heading has hit def con 1. 

or 4. 

whichever one is the worse one.

these are my symptoms:

1- i haven’t seen my housemates (beyond like literally seeing them as i glide past them along the hallway wall like Renton from trainspotting when he’s doing legally obligated cold turkey) in about a month.

2- eating cereal from the box with my hands has bypassed a delicious snack and begun to constitute 2/3 of my meals.

3- Having to take off my pajamas / wash / leave my cave of evil for any reason less important than a raging inferno about to kill us all disgruntles me

4- i have elected to start re-watching Secret Diary of a Call Girl in its entirety.

(current style inspirado)

5- 'Exercise' is that thing where all the coffee is gone, and I am forced to traverse the foreboding landscape of the stairs and go to the kitchen.

That patch of carpet will pretty much probably be gone soon. 

6- earlier i made out with a postage stamp what could only be described as an unnecessarily lusty manner. 

such is my starvation of ‘human contact’ 

(known to others as after-dark lovin’. but not me. because i am an emotionless cyborg).

13 fucking days. 

A bastard behind the eyes.

So I am currently on day 4 of feeling like a pig shat in my head.
I feel kind of like someone has hollowed out my skin, and replaced all my necessary items with snot and hatred, and then swung me round by the ankles into door frames and bannisters.

aka I have a cold. 

and for some reason this has made me into a sugar-crazed lunatic.

I have the remainder of a Lindt chocolate bunny, which I managed to wrestle from the jaws of myself after I tried to devour the entire thing yesterday.

it is sitting on the kitchen counter. just looking at me.

And i am biding my time for now.

But I feel like if anyone tried to take that little nugget away from me I would bite straight through their tibia. 

and if you didn't watch the Animals of Farthing Wood when you were a child SHAME ON YOUR PARENTS. and that is probably the reason you are the way you are today.

unfortunate. 

Things I Learnt While at Home Visiting my Faminals.

1- my mother is a would-be murderess / potential merciful angel of death

. apparently she is just ironing out some kinks in the details with regards to not getting caught.

Comforting. wouldn't do to have a murderous beast in the family if on top of that she got locked away in prison as well. Who would do my ironing? 

2- When it comes to your siblings you are never too old to use farts as a weapon

3- the prices in Lidl are the last bastion of continuity in our ailing world. 

The 18p noodles remain 18p since I last went there when i was doing my undergrad.

We actually lived on the same road as a Lidl back then and i went in so much that the guy who worked on the counter decided this must be evidence that i was in love with him and gave me his number.

and by ‘so much’… i mean like it got to a stage where once a day was a restrained amount to be going. Mostly in pajamas. to buy popcorn and cloudy lemonade.

4- commuters are the absolute POND SCUM of the earth. 

I am hesitant to generalise this statement to include all of them, as my dad is actually a commuter and i love him very much (he gave me the gift of life i guess so fair play)

But i was almost knocked over multiple times trying to cross London Victoria station, by suit-wearing, briefcase brandishing fucking arsehole Smithers-Jones’ who apparently had a greater right than anyone else to barge their way onto the train first, so they could rush home to their awful wives they probably hate and have Marks and Sparks fish pie and socks-on, lights-off ‘intercourse’ before newsnight. URGH. 

5- I have purchased a knitted poncho. and i can confirm that it is literally impossible to be unhappy while wearing a poncho. 

Also the poncho has met with nothing but antipathy and hate since I bought it. But i am channelling David Crosby… and the sound of all the fucks not being given can be heard from miles around! 

Twitter vs. Facebook, a tangled love affair.

I recently got rid of my Facebook in an act of wild destructive hedonism.
Instead I am emptying my brain regularly onto twitter, and I must say, I feel like a whole new woman.




Here are my reasons for why twitter is like SO FETCH. and better than facebook.

1- with twitter it is less likely that traj people from your school can hunt you down and clog up your newsfeed and life with depressing pictures of
- the spawn they are incubating in their evil loins


- the car they just bought in an attempt to persuade themselves and the world that they are something other than a complete waste of skin

oh my god. help me take off my bra! 

- food they've recently eaten (usually accompanied by the words NOM NOM. #Killmenow)


- the parade of desperate local gomers and deviants they currently LUV4EVA XOXOX <3<3 along with pictures of them mashing their lips together while one cold dead eye stares down the camera like 'yeah, feast your eyes bitchez.'

2- But on the flipside, on those rare unfortunate days when crying and eating icecream straight from the tub is not enough and you feel like: 

... if only there was some kind of human alternative to the horses nosebag that you could attach to your hideous face that could serve the double whammy of hiding a few of your chins while leaving both arms free for wiping away tears / stabbing holes in celebrities perfect faces on the pages of trashy magazines (just me....?) 

- twitter has much less provision for privacy, so you have much easier access to the people you want to stalk to cheer yourself up and make you aware how much worse life could really be.  

3- Instead of just general losers from your town to stalk on Twitter you can stalk famuz people! 
This obviously makes for better stalking because drunken hot mess celebrities have more money to fuel their lunacy.
Case Study #1~ La Lohan
Sends demented public tweets to girlfriend? ex-girlfriend? does anybody care?

Which is fairly standard practise i guess. Show me the one of us who hasn't at some point sat with one eye closed (the only anti-drunk phone using technique to be seen sporting this spring) and their finger loomed over the send button on some ludicrous and experimentally-punctuated stream of consciousness which in our heads sounds like finger-snapping Real Talk worthy of Miss Jay,

But which in real life just sounds like the sound of your dignity quietly dripping away  like a melting icepop. 

Anyway, this aside Lindsay took neurotic unrequited-lover a step further, by moving out of rehab into the house next door to ex-girlfran Sam Ronson. 

 It's like a kind of poetic Shakespearean tragedy carcrash, a beautiful tableau of madness and horror. 

And exactly the kind of information we all need to reassure us that everything will be ok. 

Lindsay Lohan indulges in this kind of unbridled looning about once a month, and she is still an EPIC BOSS.

 

OWN THE MADNESS. 


and if anyone tries to bring you down- move in next door to them immediately! 

Berlin

I just got back from Berlin!
I could do a shitty post about everything i did but it would just involve me becoming obsessed with everything I ate and not being able to remember much else,
(what else is there to life anyway??)
so instead have picture spam of the important events of my trip! 
live, uncensored and unphotoshopped.......

we started at 4am

'fierce' and like, depressed / disapproving is the same thing right??

TRUE SAY

FORSPRUNGDURCHTECHNIK the hairdryer version

the white mass is curd, which apparently = cheese....? filled with oil. OH MAMA. 

I developed lazer eyes (and chin) to cope with plane-fear

i also drew this little guy in my knuckle. Then i made him into a punk (he's going through a phase)

danke schon Berlin!! Until we meet again. 

The national express experience...

as the Divine Comedy put it, ‘take the National Express, when your life’s in a mess.’

as a frequent megabusser i was recently driven to the observation that whoever it was that said, ‘it’s not the arriving but the traveling that matters’ had obviously never had to spend time on the heinous blue bus of nightmares with some fat fucker pouting seductively on the side.

but actually:

the national express is actually nice. 

and I've been taking the megabus like a total shitmuncher all my life and being drooled on by people who smell like dorritos. that is messed up.

i decided to document my journey as i enjoyed its delights, so that the truth may be known:

13:02: the seats are shiny! and they have automated safety messages and its all lit from the floor by blue lights. most of all….. everything doesn’t stink of piss! c’est incroyable! Waynes World dance we’ve got 5000 dollars! we’ve got 5000 dollars!

13:11: THERE’S PLUG SOCKETS! with actual electricity coming out of them. good lord. you know when people say ‘this is the life’… i think this might be when they say it.

13:21: there is a noise periodically coming from the toilet that sounds like tiny machine gun fire. this is slightly impeding on my relaxation and enjoyment.

13:32: there will always be someone with a fucking awful ringtone that sounds like the Casualty themetune, ready to yabber away for more time than is humanly acceptable (if you are able to talk solidly for this amount of time you are, by definition, not somebody who should be listened to), laugh-snort like some kind of farm animal on ill-advised day release and generally happily ruin your day.

13:37: The drivers of my bus and another bus, going in the other direction (but also stuck in traffic and static on the outskirts of London) just had a shouted bus-drivery conversation over the dual carriageway barrier. Ace! i wanted them to high-five as well but they would have needed arms like a couple of stretch Armstrongs as we were like 5 metres apart..

15:13: phone woman is still fucking going. Hopefully that noise in the bathroom actually IS a tiny sniper, as she is sitting right across from it….

after this my phone battery hit ‘connect charger now!’ levels… so i had to stop documenting and conserve precious battery.juice for emergency Facebook stalking / emergency boredom-sexting (none occurred. disappointment!) / fastidious checking of the time every ten seconds to see if it was delegated snacking time yet.

and yes i do plan my snacking times. its kind of like playing good-cop bad-cop. but you get to be ALL the cops! keeps things spicy

we shall compare this experience as a specimen to a recently documented experience on the megabus:

First documenting:

Ohmygod. How do the most posh spazzyest posh spazz type people always manage to seek me out in life, like homing missiles in crap hollister clothes, and conduct their posh spazzy affairs so firmly within my earshot??

There's a guy two seats behind me who spent the first 10 minutes discussing his Actual gap yah (who does that in this day and age?? …surely some kind of offensive-cliche alarm should start going off in his brain..) and is now on the phone to his girlfriend, 

choice quote: “well yah your parents should be behind whatever you want to do, i mean they paid two grahhhnd for you to have braces so you could smile in photos…” I dont know what they’re talking about, but he keeps saying cringey / meaningless dawsons creek style cliches like, ‘you know i’ll do anything for you, you know that right?’ and generally being massively patronizing with his helpful ‘advice’.

Less hateful people might think this was cute. But those people probably shouldn’t look at my blog right now as its looking like for the next 4 hours its going to resemble the inside of my skull- i.e. A verbal massacreing of EVERYONE ON THIS BUS

Captain's log entry 2:

A text conversation

Me: I managed to use mind-bullets to keep the seat next to me free right until the driver started the engine. Then two FUCKING old guys came running on going ‘thank you thank you!’ and one of them has just parked his FAT ARSE next to me and is puffing and wheezing away right in my ear. thanks thanks so much….

Him: An old weezer eh? Well i suggest you per-chase a packet of peanuts and offer the old coot some, then use your mind bullets, cause him to choke to death and PRESTO! None more weezing! Xxxx

Me: Ah he’s stopped now. Perhaps he’s not such a bad old coot. But either way. He TOOK MY SECOND SEAT. Which was rightfully mine due to the fact that i really wanted it!! 

i also tactically planned to sit right at the front so that most people walk past and down looking for an empty seat, then when they dont find one they cba to walk back down so they just impose on someone near the back. If i’d sat near the back i would probably still have 2 seats. THATS WHAT HURTS THE MOST.

the man proceeded to offer me Doritos and chocolate which in my state of derangement made me hate him more, due to the fact that his kind behaviour had confused me by making me feel like maybe i shouldn't hate him.

when all i really wanted to do was HATE THE FUCK OUT OF HIM til we could all get off and go home. 

moral of the story: stay away from the megabus. and if you do not heed this advice, at least have the decency to never take my second seat!!

Mutha of Prevention

I just got ambushed by the radio playing The Drugs Don't work. 

It has got to be one of the most intense songs ever written.

But I feel like it should come with some sort of: ‘switch off your radio now if you don’t want to find yourself doing uncontrollable and unjustified weeping’ style public warning notice…

They have restrictions on like seeing cocks on telly before the watershed (lovely, cheeky cocks, which are clearly just a natural part of growing up / just good old honest, British fun)

… but apparently playing a track that has the capacity to emotionally rip people apart at any time of the day is totes fine.   

Like just putting it on , after another track. just casually… like its the most normal thing in the world… seems like irresponsible broadcasting to me.

get on it Tipper Gore y’old killjoy!

edit: I just heard it on 6 music, on the Huey Morgan show, and he did actually introduce it with a warning that it was a very emotional track.
THANK YOU Huey, clearly SOMEONE has been reading my blog and taking heed of my evil bidding. 

It's hand in week

and clearly things are going well.

52 things

So. i have made a list of 52 new things I plan to do this year

Some aren’t necessarily entirely new… but they’re things i don’t do often / enough, and I want to do again. The plan is to do one a week, but it doesn’t really matter the frequency at which i do them, as long as i smash this shit by December 31st….

so here we go.

1- Be vegan for a week

2- Go to the cinema alone

3- Spend a day in Manchester

4- Write a letter (on paper) each day of the week, on the Monday post them. 

5- Go to a burlesque show

6- Make a friend online and meet up with them in real life

7- Learn to knit

8- write a summary of last year based on facebook stalking / diary and photos and keep forever!

9- go to cockpit

10- Tie-dye something!

11- Give blood

12- Visit Scotland

13- Watch a play

14- Use cash only for 1 week

15- Have a sleepover

16- Go to an old fashioned sweetshop and buy something i’ve never had

17- Get food from a drive-thru and go eat it somewhere with a view

18- Write to James Carville

19- Learn some basic HTML

20- Leave a photo and a letter in a library book and hide it back on the shelf

21- Babysit someone’s pet while they are away

22- Make red velvet cake

23- Make pottery

24- Wild swim

25- Take photobooth pictures with at least three different people

26- Ride on the back of a motorbike (or scooter. its fairly irrelevant, either way i will be crying/ picturing my own death within about ten seconds)

27- Buy someone flowers for no reason

28- Go on a zip wire

29- Go to a convention for something i may or may not be interested in

30- Celebrate Gram Parsons’ birthday 

31- Ride a horse

32- Go on a boat trip

33- Sleep in a yurt

34- Do a survival run

35- Cook an indian Dosa

36- Write a letter to myself to be opened in 10 years time

37- Get a tattoo designed. Most likely chicken out and don’t go through with it. (this is ok!)

38- Go on a coach tour or walking tour

39- Drive through the night. (and by drive i mean sit next to someone who is driving, perpetually and annoyingly flick songs on their ipod, feed them, and talk shit. I can’t drive!)

40- Go to a pub alone and stay for at least three drinks.

41- Eat the traditional food of another country… in that country! If possible order it in the relevent language. If not just point and smile a lot in an apologetic manner. 

42- Share a bottle of strong spirit with someone on a train journey

43- Eat vegetarian haggis

44- Go out for one night and actually alternate every drink with water. (see how much less unfortunate life could be…)

45- Embroider words onto a piece of clothing

46- Wait for someone outside their work with booze and cupcakes

47- Make a secret pact with someone

48- Document an entire day from start to finish in photographs

49- Leave someone a treasure trail and wait at the end

50- Go to a motown club night

51- Play in a childrens’ park at night

52- WEAR the sequin hotpants again

LETS GO!