Saturday 14 April 2012

Some things.

Here are some things that have happened today:

  • At work, a woman came in and bought a pair of shoes. She was about 45 and was with her friend who was about the same age. After paying for the shoes, she left, went for lunch with her friend, came back drunk as hell and bought another pair of shoes. She said to me, "I know it's naughty but...Yolo!" and I swear to God, I nearly died, there and then. Sometimes I hate the Great British Public.

  • The Grand National happened. I got thoroughly confused as I didn't realise there was MORE THAN ONE RACE. But now I know... I won the pub sweepstake, nice one. I'm not the biggest fan of racing because yeah, it's horribly cruel, but I'm not going to sit and preach cos I'm having a chicken curry for my dinner tonight and I'm currently wearing a leather belt and shoes and make up which was probably tested on animals. I might not be a saint but at least I'm not a hypocrite. 

  • I watched that 'Hole Reunion' video. Eric Erlandson has nothing on Micko Larkin (soz but I just love Micko, loads) but Melissa Auf der Maur is a FABULOUS human being. I'm a huge fan of Hole, I'm not so keen on Courtney Love as a person (she chats shit and has the worst wardrobe in music) but people who hate Hole because they like Nirvana and 'Courtney killed Kurt' need a reality check, it's pathetic, boring and everyone's heard it a thousand times before. Hate them if you hate their music, their songs, whatever, but Kurt Cobain killed himself 18 years ago, leave his memory and his ex wife alone. If you like Kurt, listen to his music, if you don't like Courtney, don't listen to hers. Having said that, the whole Dave-fucked-Frances thing is LAUGHABLE. Shut your massive online gob, Love.

  • I heard the crowds were shit at Coachella, and I'm not surprised. It's cos I wasn't there. Party don't start...

Thursday 12 April 2012

"You Should Date An Illiterate Girl" by Charles Warnke

I've just read this and thought I'd share it because in a very short space of time, it made me laugh, made me cry, made me hate myself and made me incredibly grateful.

"Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.
Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.
Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, goddamnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.
Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the cafĂ©, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you."


Easter and other things.

I haven't posted here in ages. Mostly because I've had a quiet few weeks and I've been focusing so much on dull things like essays and work and University applications that I've really had no time to do anything or think about anything. Easter was a welcome break.

Last Monday a few of us did the pub quiz at the New Inn near school. Liv got alarmingly drunk (a recurring theme, apparently) and thank God I was driving or I'd probably have ended up doing shots of Cherry Sourz too. I took Hannah and Sean home and listened to Japanese Voyeurs for the first time in ages, which took me back to last June when exams were over and I drove everybody everywhere, just for the sake of it. I have £10 in my purse right now and it makes me feel a little bit sick to think about how much petrol I wasted on random trips to Beckwithshaw and Darley - fuck my friends for living in the middle of nowhere. Oh, and we didn't win the quiz, but Liv managed to persuade the elderly gentleman on the winning team to buy her a glass of wine in exchange for an answer. (The answer was Faye from Steps. I can't remember the question.)

Thursday brought with it the hideous prospect of Karaoke Night, where I usually drink for two because Beth's too busy singing to drink, but for some reason I felt it was appropriate to join her, along with Tom and Kyle, for a painful rendition of Pulp's Common People. We did the quiz again on Monday, and after we lost (again) conversation turned to Uni and 'The Future' and other scary things. I mentioned New York again, the ultimate pipedream. I have an Aunt who lives there and she says I can stay whenever I like, but it's never that easy, is it? Beth and I went home and we watched Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (I've been working my way through his films this Easter, and so far have managed Manhattan (again), Annie Hall (again), Sleeper, Bananas, Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex, Love & Death (which is my favourite, I think) and now Vicky Cristina Barcelona) and it was a really welcome antidote to scaremongering films about going abroad, like Taken with Liam Neeson. I'm looking forward to a week in Munich even more now, first Southside Festival with The Cure, New Order and Beirut, and then three days in a little village outside Munich, where my five cousins live with their dog, a St Bernard called Shakira. (I haven't told Beth about Shakira yet. I want to see her face when I introduce her.)

I had some weird thoughts about stuff the other day. Beth and I were talking about how people use different things as coping mechanisms (and we are a bit worried that we usually turn to gin) and how people might think it's awful that in a stressful situation I'll have a drink or try and sleep it out, but then I thought about how sad it is that other people use other people as emotional crutches. But then how will they cope when they don't have anybody? It made me really sad, when I thought about it, that there are people who depend solely upon other people. If you give a little piece of yourself to all your friends and family, then what have you got left? It reminded me that being a little reserved when it comes to emotional things can't always be a bad thing, regardless of what people might tell you.

Also tonight I watched Wife Swap and it made me incredibly grateful that I come from a really, really normal background. My parents can drive me mental sometimes but if I had to live with any of the people I've just watched for an hour on DMAX, I'd definitely have shoved my head in a gas oven by now.

This has been a little disjointed. Sorry.