Speaking of ‘Precious’

I have said before that my life, which people who aren’t me seem to think should be some sort of action-packed romp around the Continent, doesn’t exactly resemble the sort of thing that Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote about. Normally this is a point of some consternation for me. The other day, as I wept into my mid-afternoon martini about the sheer unglamorousness of being me, I recalled this quotation from Hemingway that is just So My Life. (That’s a slight exaggeration. It was a Pims and Lemonade.)

Several days later I have mustered enough get-up-and-go to locate the quotation. Which is written in a notebook. A notebook that is sitting on my desk. The desk where I spend copious amounts of time every day.

Not that I’m doing anything productive during the time I’m sitting at my desk. You see, I am a young procrastinator. I am full of ideas and inspiration and good intentions, I just happen to be terminally lazy. That notebook I mentioned with the quotation written in it? It’s basically full of sketches and outlines of a year’s worth of harebrained schemes. Of all these things I want to write about.

Do you know what I should be writing about right now? I should be writing inquiry letters and cover letters to potential employers about how awesome and motivated I am. I should be writing my dissertation on museum education for students with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. What am I actually writing? This blog. A review of Oreo cookies for no useful reason whatsoever. Instant messages. Because I will leave the things that I should be writing and should be doing until the last possible moment, until right before it’s too late to share them.

Which reminds me…the quotation:

You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafes.

-The Sun Also Rises

I really didn’t intend for this entry to sound so nihilistic and, well, precious. The stuff that needs to get done will get done. Eventually. In the meantime I have some drinking in cafes to attend to.

Lessons Learned Looking at Facebook Photos; Also Letters to Cool People

I have learned several lessons while looking through photos of myself on Facebook just now. This is an activity I partake in pretty much every time I friend new people, since I know it’s one of the first things they’ll be perusing on my profile. I certainly don’t read their agonizingly long lists of preferred books, movies and ice cream flavors…but 837 tagged photos of them taking body shots, showing off their orange tans, vomiting and/or grabbing their friends’ bosoms? Bring it on! Never mind that the photos tagged of me are mostly of me doing one of the following: a) sitting sedately in a bar with a pint glass in front of me b) smiling with a small gaggle of friends, usually in front of a monument of some sort, and with a minimum of bosom grabbing c) doing something dorky and Harry Potter related or d) humping a wall. I don’t know how that last one sneaks in there, but it always does. There are many photos of me humping walls. And doors. Basically anything flat and vertical.

In addition to this very important lesson (Lesson 1: I am Not Cool. Surprise!) I have learned a few others that, because I am so uncool (see Lesson 1), I feel compelled to share with you

Lesson 2: I look better with long hair. While I desperately want short hair and keep trying to convince myself it will look cute, the evidence is quite to the contrary. The shorter my hair is the more ridiculous it looks. Bobbing it will probably be a poor choice, especially in the summer. Especially in a country that has callously discontinued the one styling product that works for my hair. (I suspect this is because I am the only curly haired consumer in the entire United Kingdom. Damn you, genetics!)

Lesson 3: I have the correct items in my everyday wardrobe (read: items I wear out of the house on a regular basis) to make the following costumes:

• Spy
• Male History Professor
• Female Hippie History Professor
• Hippie
• 1920s Safari Person
• Lady Zookeeper
• Equestrian
• Random 1920s person (male)

The moral of the story is that this is a startling number of costume-y pieces for one, ostensibly normal wardrobe. Also, if I lived in the 1920s I probably would have been considered some sort of sexually deviant drag king. (Especially if I went around humping walls.) If loving tweed is wrong then I don’t want to be right!

Edited for clarity: I realize that there’s the possibility that orange, body-shot taking people from my past may find this blog via my Facebook profile and I want to make sure that, in this eventuality, they understand that I mean no offense. You see, we Uncool folks have our own form of social climbing to do, and the prize basically goes to the person who can be the most facetious and self-deprecating. I am not even in the running for this as I am too mediocre for even the heights of Uncoolness, so rest easy knowing I will never be lambasting your orangeness or my wall-humping in the pages of the New Yorker. Also, I do my fair share of drinking and vomiting, I just don’t capture these activities on film. Instead I say things like “Oh, get one of me in the Eskimo costume running from the taxidermied polar bear!” or “Oh look, people dressed up as Quidditch players! Let’s take a photo with them!” You see fair reader (fair=orange), I have my priorities straight.

I’m going to stop now because I think you get the point. No offense but unto myself, etc etc. I still laugh at your tans though.

Eew, the WordPress dashboard has an ugly new look.

Here is a glimpse into my exciting and glamorous life in Europe: I visit cool places, become even more extremely poor than I am now, and then return ‘home’ to my dorm room in Leicester. I never update about my travels because life aside from those travels is so mundanely boring. No one wants to hear about your Continental frolics unless you also have something exciting coming up in your schedule, as in “Last night Zelda and I dined at the Ritz, and tomorrow we will head off for a week in St Kitts.” Notice how my example contained zero references to the Continent, although I guess the Ritz is probably everywhere by now.

Let’s give it a try, shall we?

Last week I went inside a 5,000 year old tomb, and today I am sitting at my desk, listening to the hail outside, and updating my blog. Next I will either go read a book or watch the BBC. Yawn.

So that’s why I haven’t filled anyone in on my travels, which were to Prague and Ireland by the way. I loved Prague but frankly didn’t care for Dublin, though I don’t have anything especially pithy and disparaging to say about it. It was just ugly and expensive.

And the future? Until mid-June I will be completely unscheduled, lazing about and then banging out a dissertation at what is likely to be the 11th hour. I am going to take up Exercise, Drink, and Writing Things That Aren’t Blogs (But Are Unlikely to be My Dissertation Either). I’m mostly kidding about the drink. Then I’m home in NY for a week and a half before moving to London for my summer placement.

Past the end of August my life is basically a Mystery. I will be moving to wherever the jobs are, kind of like those tramps from the Great Depression. Yay recession! Hopefully I will be able to afford to travel on the inside of trains. And hopefully the work that awaits me will not be agricultural.

Bourgeois Blogging… now with more Respectability and Legitimacy! (TM)

Oh, look what I found on DailyKos while I was procrastinating writing my paper about the challenges to the authenticity and authority of museums posed by the Internet! (That’s not really the thesis or anything, just a Big Simplification. I am all “up with the Internet!” so such a paper would hardly be my style.)

Incidentally, I am currently writing the section about blogs.

Are Blogs Becoming Respectable and Legitimate?  I’m going to go ahead and be contrarian and posit no. Rest assured, Internet, there will always be at least one completely disrespectable and illegitimate blog out there. That is my pledge to you.

Hark Upon the Gale

He may have crushed my computer in a freak body-slam accident, but there’s no way that Nichol deserved this.

Freaking Lucius Malfoy and the school governors, pushing out the beloved Albus Dumbledore… (Isn’t it a shame that this is where my mind goes? Like, directly?)

Go Gene, Hark upon the Gale. 

Events that are current, or at least not hideously outdated just yet

I generally refrain from commenting about current events on any of my blogs for fear of sounding like the uninformed dunce that I, incidentally, am.

An uninformed dunce I may be, but I am also a huge fan of US Politics. I mean this in the most superficial, teenybopper-ish way possible. Every so often I get very excited or very impassioned, but I have the attention span of a gnat and very quickly move on to the next thing. The next thing might be my hair. It might be an amusing cartoon about talking squirrels. You just never know.

This morning I was still riding on a nice Iowa-caucus information high while looking for my next hit of politico-crack. Oh look! Edwards accuses Obama of once compromising with someone, the bastard. Surprise! Rudy Giuliani is invoking 9/11 again. What a shock to my poor nerves. It would seem that today is clearly a day to take a break from news about the Primaries, since nothing is going to happen until the debates tomorrow. I decided to venture off the beaten path of the (I admit it!) fairly biased election coverage I so prefer.

Lo and behold I found yet another way that I am already a criminal! I thought it might be important to share it with you, fellow denizens of life’s dark underbelly, so that you too can be on the lookout for The Man. He is coming, armed with Cease and Desist letters and an arrest warrant for your iPod.

While I was reading the article, which I had arrived at via a link, I noticed the list of “most read” stories in a sidebar. “Self, what kind of alarmist website am I reading?” I inquired. “Not only am I breaking the law by listening to music I have paid for, but apparently I too could be at risk from lightsaber wielding tots and people are accusing Britney of being a bad parent!”

It was Fox News, and here are today’s most frequently read headlines.

• Report: Hospitalized Britney Spears May Lose Visitation; Federline in Court
• 8-Month-Old Boy Mauled to Death by Family Dog in New York
• British Girl, 4, Accidentally Hangs Herself Imitating Cartoon Stunt
• Two British Women Die From Identical Infection After Giving Birth on Same Day at Same Hospital
• Oregon Family Finds Bullet on Boy’s Pillow, Hole in Bedroom Ceiling
• Boy, 11, Uses Toy Lightsaber to Defend Mom From Attacker
• Arizona Man Charged With Running Child-Prostitution Ring
• Pop Tarts: Penelope Cruz, Sister Engage in Lesbian Lip-Lock
• Person of Interest Named as Search for Missing Georgia Hiker Continues
• Hospital Launches Investigation After Man Discharged in Storm Found Dead in Snowbank
• Couple Gets Letter, $20 from Woman Claiming She Took Dog
• Kneeboarder Finds Lost Nose Ring Inside Fish Boyfriend Caught
• Severe Storms Bear Down on California; Could Trigger Slides, Flooding
• Model Sues Jewelry Company, Saying Ad Makes Her Look Lewd
• Report: Madeleine McCann’s Parents Named as Prime Suspects
• Swiss Tennis Star Hingis Banned for 2 Years After Testing Positive for Cocaine at Wimbledon

Tomorrow: a return to the sanity of a US Presidential election.

Always protect your banana!

My computer is malfunctioning and it takes me about 20 minutes to maneuver my mouse to the point where it can accurately click anything, but this was too good not to share. It was an ad in my Gmail inbox, because Google knows me and it knows what I like. So this ad was selected especially for me, as it were. That just makes it even better.

http://www.safebanana.com/

From the FAQs:

Q: Bananas are not all the same size and shape so how can the Banana Guard fit them all?”

A: The Banana Guard was specially designed to fit the majority of banana sizes. Highly curved bananas can be slightly straightened without harm to fit the Banana Guard. Curved, straight, big and small bananas will usually fit inside the Banana Guard keeping them safe at all times.

It’s pretty much as great as it sounds.

And I wonder why people find my blog with pornographic search terms.

Search Term Inversion

Given the two search-terms most commonly used to find this blog (why, God? Why?) I’d like to return the favor to teh internets by posting the two search terms I’d rather see:

1. suck my ponies
2. My Little Penis

I think Mattel should hop on that right away. There’s still time to market those for the Christmas rush!

Back to procrastinating on my 1,000 word essay that doesn’t count towards our grades…

Wherein I Commit Internet Blasphemy

Now I know that this is a positively dreadful thing to do, but I am updating this blog… to point you in the direction of my other blog.

It’s newer! It’s shinier! It’s…well, newer about covers it really.

I made it so I could expound, at great length, on every 12th century stone I will trod on, every storied Victorian-era pub I will imbibe in, and every bureaucratic roadblock I will run into while I earn my MA in England. That is to say, it might veer tragically towards the narrative. It’s also so my mom can keep track of me, and to save me from the social faux-pas that would surely accompany any mass-emailing attempts. I would probably accidentally leave off far too many people, and would (again accidentally) include people whose dearest wish was to never hear from me again. Besides, emailing is far too much like keeping in touch and we all know that’s something I hardy do.

So now it’s up to them/you. I shirk emotional maturity and social responsibility; I blog, fool!

Oh right, the link: Flying (By the Seat of My Pants)

Things That Are Happening in the World

Despite my giant hiatus, I promised that this blog wasn’t dead. It’s not, it just seems I have very little to say.

So I will link you to other people saying things. I bring you the first edition of Things That Are Happening in the World:

1. Somewhere in the world, I am vomiting a little in my mouth. This is why. One the giant scale of awful, Kiddie Prom is only about 5 slots below Kiddie Porn.
2. Somewhere in the world, someone is finding this journal by Google-ing the last two words in the item above.
3. A quick perusal of BBC news indicates at least 3 floods (and one “more probable than it once was” flood), massive fires in Greece, an impending plague of locusts and one cosmic nothingness. I’m not even going to attempt to count the bombings.
4. Somewhere in the world people are waiting for the Second Coming. Somewhere in the world, still others are scratching their heads at this.
5. Somewhere in the world, my 86 year old Nana just got a mobile phone!
6. Right here and right now, I am going to bed. Actually, first I’m going to read a fashion magazine and then I’m going to bed.

Sorry this was such a boring entry kids. Maybe its  best if I don’t update when I don’t have anything to say…