Shut your fucking wordhole!! It's Ear Time.

I was reading a new blog today, something I haven't done in a while, and the writer was talking about how he knows there is no god, as opposed to 'timid' atheists or rationalists, who merely disbelieve, or who know they don't know. I think based on his rather black and white definition, I was one of those timid ones, that amused me.

It was a very well written piece though, the law student in me liking the source-quoting, the 'close the gate' method of returning to his original point, and he even gave a half-hearted attempt to understand why people would have opinions contrary to his own.

Then the comments...

Now, I'm as open-minded as the next guy I hate the rest of the world as much as the next guy, and I always have something to say when people make massively broad statements such as 'I know there is no god'...even if I agree with 90% of what he said.

I was thinking that maybe I'd point out that his assertion that evolution was fact and not theory was erroneous, as the 'theory of evolution' is merely more plausible than sky-wizards and thus has greater scientific credence. I might also have pointed out that atheism isn't timid, it's more precise in scientific terms, science 'being aware' of the fact that it doesn't know the answer as opposed to religious fundies who accept creation theory as explaining a 'truth' how the world came about, and this writer being paradoxically as incorrect as them in proclaiming a universal truth about the creation of the universe.

(Yes, I do find it hard to fill the hours when I'm away from my girlfriend.)

I was considering how best to word this (I thought) rather eloquent riposte, when I scrolled down the comments page and saw that the nuts had got there first.

Anonymous wrote: YOU ATHEISTS ARE ALL MAD!!! If there's no God, HOW DOES THE SUN ORBIT THE EARTH??


I sat back, absolutely dumbfounded. No....no fucking way, this can't....please no...

Then I saw that it was sarcasm, and nearly wept with relief. Life was good again. It was a blogger linking to his online store of atheist t-shirts. I threw a crust of bread at the unconscious hooker on my floor and smiled as my fear dissipated.

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It got me thinking though...mind-thinking. Why is it nowadays that people will discourse on a topic about which they know nothing?

When did it become okay to just 'have a go'? When did the world become so arrogant as to believe that everyone is an expert on a topic and has a valid point to make?

Post your comment:
Anonymous says: I attended a one week crash course on the ethics of biochemistry so I can talk with exclusive domain about a topic that people have endlessly debated for sixty years.

Anonymous 2 says: No WAY man!! You're crasy, My bibel tutor told me that biochemistry is what makes hommosexualls and asians, don't mess with God's plan!!!

Anonymous 3 says: Yeah, I half-read an online article about stem-cell research on a right-wing newspaper's website. YOU PEOPLE ARE SICK!!

Anonymous 4 says: I went to an obscure liberal arts college that none of you could afford and we had a very productive coffee-and-humous round table discussion of the moral consequences of stem-cell research. We agreed it's necessary for scientific development. I took philosophy for a semester so I know what I'm talking about. Lol.

Anonymous 5 says: Whats stencil research???

God Lover says: Bless you all, I pity you.

Anonymous 6 says: You know who else used stem cell research? Hitler!!!!!

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I mean, when did it become the norm for people to fool themselves that they had an expert opinion on something they've overheard in a pub?

I used to watch a lot of medical dramas (before I pawned my TV to buy chloroform and a handkerchief) but I'd never assume I could perform a tracheotomy.

I COMPLETELY agree with the concept of freedom of speech by the way, please don't think I'm advocating some restriction on people's right to voice opinions. I just wish people didn't kid themselves into believing they were an expert on everything they've read, seen or heard.

It happened to me the other day, and I literally didn't know how to respond. My girlfriend is moving house soon, and she and her flatmates are looking at houses in Northwest London. In fact, one of the places they're considering is Maida Vale, about a mile from where I used to live and somewhere I used to go running. It's one of the most expensive parts of London for property and I mentioned this, along with the fact that the Tube gets really slow in the mornings.

"No it doesn't"

What?

"I've been on that line before, it's really quick."

I was trying to point out that the two lines which service the entire area get extremely clogged in the mornings, as opposed to the east of London where there are more rail lines. Also, I mentioned that one of the lines gets closed every third weekend, thus increasing the pressure.

No, no listening there.

Now, I had lived there, knew the area well and could offer some practical advice, but the Flatmate knew better because she had heard otherwise from a friend. So what's the point?

In the Law, there is a tight control on what constitutes an expert witness. It's true for the Irish, UK and US legal systems. Not just anyone can come and give expert evidence. The court will insist on scrutinising qualifications, looking a practical experience (for say a fire officer in an arson case) scholarly articles and a whole panoply of other factors to to determine whether a purported witness knows what the fuck they're talking about...I'd love something similar in Real Life, like those regulators that stop a moped using above 150cc, or those machines that won't let the car start without a clean breathalyser test.

Because really, what's the fucking point of asking a question if you're not going to listen? Why does that whole fucking world close their ears until it's their time to speak and what the fuck has happened to our generation for us to believe that everything we read, see, hear or hear-from-a-friend-who-heard-it-from-some-bloke-who-overheard-it-down-the-fucking-pub?

So in future, if anyone asks me a question, I'm going to be really 100% accurate in my answer, or just not answer. Because when the entire world is so eager to talk, and no-one will listen to anything which is contrary to what they think they know, why fucking bother?

*end rant*

From Anger at the Febrile State of a Saturday Evening to Nostalgia.

I'm sitting in the living room in my PJs at 01:07 with Spark listening to the radio. I had a bath about two hours ago and my hair's still fluffy. I just had a lovely cup of tea, and my stomach is warm.

All over London now, women in high heels and low cut black dresses are drinking too many vodka-based drinks and dancing to poorly produced music in wannabe nightclubs, more similar to germ-infested Thai sweatshops than bars. They drink as if they're afraid of something and then go home to vomit or fuck strangers, or claw the eyes out of other girls or pass out in doorways.

Men, or boys, in clothes-with-other-people's-names-on-them dance badly to poorly produced music and talk to each other based on arbitary and ill-defined social rules about how much they can drink or what person's name is on their boxers, the waistband of which everyone in the bar can see, or which celebrity they wouldn't have sex with or which gaudy piece-of-shit platinum and diamond-soaked timepiece they would like to buy. They drink as if they have something to prove, and then go home to vomit, to fuck strangers or to get into an argument to the point where there's almost, but not quite, a fist fight.

They are tired. They act like they've got more money than they actually do. They hate all but maybe 20 of the people in the club. They take thousands upon thousands of photos and they will wake up tomorrow and convince themselves that they had a really good night, despite the hangover, the cut lip, the STD, the Facebook photos and the broken relationships.


It's one of those evenings where I realise that the fact that I'm a boring shite is okay. I've been really down recently, and part of that probably has something to do with the fact that I, more often than not, am one of the faceless 'They' to whom I refer. We have all been conned into believing that the only way to live is to spend our money and hard earned free time gravitating towards alcohol, with an accompaniment of shite wannabe-music.

I've just realised the irony of the word 'wannabe'. It's officially a word, as it's in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it shall nonetheless always be a wannabe word in most people's estimation. 'Nonetheless' is good, as are most threesomes of any sort.

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Spark is surprising me tonight. After having known him for almost five years, we've never sat and listened to hip-hop together. I don't mind rap, but I wouldn't be a fan of the newer stuff, and Spark's always hit me as an Acoustic man, but here we are, listening to Jay-Z while S bobs his head and I type. We are breaking ground on new territories in our friendship it seems.

Now he has put on the main song from Civilisation 4, Baba Yetu. This reminds me of that time we both lived in Virginia for a year. Mark sings along and does that thing he does where he sings a song in a different key or adds an impromptu harmony

I tell Mark that I've started writing about him when I had initially intended to have a wee rant about how culture dictates us to go and act like guffawing wankers in shitty nightclubs, "getting the cans into us" as S says. He tells me that my blog has gone downhill in terms of content if I'm using him as subject matter.

We listen to YoYo Ma playing Ecstacy of Gold from his Ennio Morricone album. It's simply beautiful and as the vibrations (from the bitchin' Bose bass amp that S bought last summer) creep across the floor and make the phlegm in my chest vibrate, the hair on my arm rises up and I've suddenly got goose-pimples. This really reminds me of the time we lived in Virginia. It was absolutely the best time of my life.

One of the guys in our apartment in the US had a huge computer screen and ran linux. He was a very good fellow, a scientist turned law-student, who was interested in Goethe, talked to a stuffed mascot of Nietzsche (whom we all called Saddam) had a copy of Milton's Paradise Lost (with the original Gustav Doré wood engravings) and played the cello. His name is John.

My happiest memory of the flat is sitting on a Saturday night, with a Dominos pizza the size of a cartwheel (a thin-crust pepperoni with green peppers) and a bottle of Coke, playing Civ 4 for hours on end and listening to Yo Yo Ma. The pizzas were always cut into a grid of squares instead of the traditional wedges, and we would eat it as if it were fine finger food at a champagne reception. It was great. People always talk about their perfect year, that was mine, a beautiful year.

I'm sitting in the kitchen now, it's 03:09, and I've been typing, listening to music and spotifying. I've collected the music we were listening to before Spark went to bed, and added a few more that'll help lull me off to (if not sleep) rest. Here it is, folks.

I just realised that I've been smiling for the past twenty minutes, even though I've been sitting on my own in the living room, typing my vague and innane thoughts and trying not to yawn. I might not go to bars or clubs for a while, they're starting to annoy me. Sitting with Spark tonight was really cool, perhaps that's something to do more.


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ps - we decided tonight that instead of 'poker night' or other man-things to maintain guy friendships, we're going to have a Pizza and Civ5 night when we're both lawyers.

PPS - this is the first post in almost a year, and almost 100 posts, with the tag 'PIZZA'. How the hell did that happen?

Happy-go-fucking-lucky McPositive and the Work/Life Skullfuck

Aloha,

So I've been a bit of a phantom-man around the old blogosphere, popping my head up to bitch and moan about work, or put some innane and useless video up. In short, my posts have gone seriously downhill in terms of quality this past while. There are a few reasons:

1) I have SERIOUS writer's block at the moment. There are a few things that I really want to start working on, drama and comedy, and I can't for the life of me get my thinking hat to stay on my head. I can't even string a sentence together that is not something that I am reading from a page, or as in this case, reporting back.

2) I am tired. I know, I know, I complain about insomnia all the time, but this is fucking ridicularse. It's like I've got a mild concussion or a case of fume-induced delirium. I kinda feel a bit stoned, but in a way that's not cool, or relaxed or appetite-exaggerating in the slightest. It's like a warm cosy feeling mixed with a little scratchy squirrel trying to burrow his way from behind my eyes. Grrr

3) I'm a depressive person. If you spend enough time with me you get to know that, even in spite of the buffoonery. I honestly can't really give a larger-than-small shit about the old cyber world when my own head is so firmly ensconsed up my own arse. I'm also pissed-off more easily these days, like when I want to momentarily shove a barbed-wire dildo up the arse of the smug Corporate type passively aggressively whacking his suitcase into me on the Tube for more space. It's like a little madness.

BUT, most of all...

4)

Work. I used to roll my eyes when people talked about a 'work/life balance' as being something elusive and vaguely whitewhalish. "Who the fuck do you think you are, Ahab?"

Well, keeping with the Moby Dick theme, the only recurring character who I'm honestly representing at the moment is Mr Starbucks. I'm a caffeine-fuelled automaton, obsessed with the next source of a Joey boost at my job.

(NB: As it turns out, I was massively wrong about the people I work with. Again, I've jumped before looking and my first impression (and an uncharacteristic judgmental mood) was completely out of whack. It turns out I just hate working, the people i do it with are actually lovely, it's not their fault I'm a lazy cunt.)

What I'm finding at the moment is a bit of a cliché. I'm like the female protagonist who can't balance her trendy media job, her angst-ridden (less pretty) friends and the relationship with her oh-so-hunky-but-in-revelation-a-bit-of-a-dick boyfriend in a shite RomCom. I need some serious balance. At the moment, I come in from work, eat, drink tea, eat some more and go to bed. Occasionally I might read for 20 mins or halfheartedly chat online to some buddies, or even play some useless flash game. When I do finally get to bed, the atheistic panic streak before I turn the light off of 'Wow, life is seriously short. I need more time!' that would gnaw at me during my more-stress-but-less-miserable unemployed Chest Shaving/Escalator Tumbling days seems to be absent. Crikey bejikey, maybe I've conformed.

("Like, oh no man, what a drag.")

ANYWAY, I had this plan about work. I was thinking I'd go on some really strong dose of anti-depressant (oooh, like, say a 60mg daily dose of Citalopram or something) and just coast through the next while in a bit of a coma. It seems that that might not work (I haven't implemented it anyway) because I have to talk to people a lot at work....but we'll see. And by 'we'll see' I mean, 'Of course I won't do that'.
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A part of me has been wondering about the whole blog idea. When I began, about 10 months ago, I was intending it to be a forum to write about the law and politics, and definitely not use words like 'skullfuck' or 'barbed-wire dildo' to express my thoughts. It's like everything in life, you start with good intentions but before you know it, out come the dildoes.

So, and not in a 'girlfriend test' way, I'm going to think for a while about why I actually have this blog, and whether I want to keep it. I'll keep blogging, and actually try a wee bit more, but I may soon come to the conclusion to shut down the treehouse for a while. We'll see.





HAHA, how ranty and self-obsessed. There have been good developments in my life too, for example...

Dah dah dah daaaaaaaaaaaah!

I've done more of my 101 things to do...
1) Quit smoking cigarettes (that was fucking HARD!)

35) Get tickets to be in the audience for the radio recordings of what will be a TV comedy show (I'm claiming this as done because of the Twitter-based Sarah Millican tickets, that was an awesome night!)

Completed 7/101

So there, it's all relative I guess.
xx

What my work is like. (with a RANT!!)

I'm currently sitting at my desk for the first time in weeks. It's clean and tidy.

I realised today that I haven't really explained what I do since I started work. So here we go.

What I do at the office where I go to do work.

At the office where I go to do work the work could be described as a wee bit simples. I work for a construction recruitment firm as a 'database co-cordinator' in their offices in London Bridge.

"Finally," I hear you shout, "He's found a job where he can combine his love of construction with his love of data!", because as you all know, I know LOADS about construction. Yep...loooooooads.

I have NO IDEA what the company does or how they make money.

My particular role?

Well, people who are looking for jobs upload their CVs onto online job-boards (like Monster, Total Jobs, HookerListings etc) and type in key words that describe their skills (e.g. sales negotiating, business management, anilingus etc) and wait.

Then, I go through the boards looking for a certain job (eg, ass-licking sales negotiator) review the potential candidates CVs and then enter their details into the system. In other words I'm a professional copy-and-paste-er. Schweet.

There're some pretty cool characters in the place too. I mean 'cool' is a loose term as only a few of the people fit that CV description. 'People' might be a better word to use for the rest.

The People I Work With in the Office Where I Go to do Work (AKA) The Database Team (AKA) The Losers.

So there's my boss:

BigMan - he's, well a BIG man. A gargantuan man, a four-wheel man. He spends all his time talking about films, and we spent most of Wednesday quoting huge tracts of StarWars at each other. He's very Catholic, and has spent years dissecting spaghetti westerns to unravel the catholic thematic strands. He is a big guy with a big heart, and genuinely seems to care about his little loser minions.

CheekyGuy - He's a Cockney with a heart of gold, a real goldbrick with a disarmingly cheekiy demeanour. CG is one of my immediate colleagues, so he spends most of his time showing me the ropes. Think Michael Caine as Alfie. He's been with the office for about a year and will soon become a Consultant. This will Wraith him unfortunately.

Aspergers Guy - AG is the office junior and when he's not doing his odd wee involuntary things (thanks to his severe Aspergers) he likes to quote huge tracts of the films Heat, The Shawshank Redemption and Goodfellas. He also does the best impression of Peter Griffin I've ever seen. He spent five minutes on my first day doing a Morgan Freeman voice over Shawshank-style, making a joke about how the rest of the team would have me gang-raped "I wish I could tell you Conor put up a fight....". I'm sure you can imagine, I'm incredibly fond of him, he's a really great bloke.

Polish Tank Commander - PTC is one of the few girls in the office and we're all afraid of her. She has the same job title as me, but we all do what she says. I think I've managed to Blarney my way through her cold suspicion so that now only a vague distrust lingers. She's really nice though, just terrifying.

Prohibitively Mean Secretary - PMS is someone who I cannot like. She is a very pretty girl, and she spends all the time she can flirting, but she is very very mean. For example, she'll say things to lower your confidence when she can (ie, "so wow, you took a long time finding a job, didn't you?") and smile sweetly. However, when there's no-one to talk to she'll chat to anyone she can. She's VERY aware of how (meh) pretty she is, and backstabs everyone. She flirts with a guy til someone cooler comes along then completely ignores them. I don't like her much because she has no soul, she doesn't like me because I'm smarter than her (don't mean to sound arrogant, but she says some fucking stupid things) and I'm not attracted to her.

Lovely Secretary - LS is a wee tike of a thing with a wee mouse voice. She's a 21 ex-drama-student who is in charge of front-of-office stuff so we never see her apart from when we're going in and out, but she's nice, and gave me an orange on my first day. She's like Elmo.

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Most of the other people in the office are nice. Most of them are young guys, like me, but who work as recrutiment consultants. I can't fault them for the job they do because I know how hard it is for a 20-something young guy to find work and carve a place in the world. I like them individually because they are mostly very nice guys, and they made me feel really welcome. They are however, en masse, the biggest bunch of yuppies I've ever met.


They are...


The Consultants.

The phrase 'money motivated' is bandied around a lot, so are the words 'target' and 'success'. Some of them are unmitigated arseholes. They call each other 'son' and try to out-Alpha each other, like frat-boys drink Nattie Lite and thinking they're seasoned party monstes. When we go for drinks, they are mysoginistic and and leer at women. They attempt to chat-up girls by talking about 'earning potential' and the need to 'proactively kick-start your own success'.

They strut around the office, spouting off maxims like Gordon Gecko's aborted love-child about how business is a metaphor for life struggle, and how only a cut-throat high-power win-all strategy will conquer.

Most think They are Esquire man-of-the-year business players, an ubermensch evolution of some Nietzschean wet-dream about tall Aryan farmhands with bayonets for penises, fucking and stabbing the lesser ranks before crushing their skulls under a relentless Panzer-track of progress and capitalism.


PMS likes this, of course she does. The phoney power-trip that permeates their side of the office turns her on as these young guys walk around stoned from the fumes of Their own bullshit. I wince as They strut past on their Blackberrys, shouting abuse down the phone, and I wipe the frost-layer of cold sweat off my thank-fucking-Zeus that I am a shit-munching pleb.

They are the maggots that spawned in the bloated corpse of Thatcher's 1980's red-braced, brandy-drinking, Porsche-driving apocalypse of regeneration. They represent the very worst that humanity has to offer, not individually, but as a group.

They are what is wrong.




My team, the ones mentioned above (except PMS) are not like that. We are the Betas...thank fuck. We will never be cool, never be sexy and never get a promotion. We are the bottom of the barrel.

Phew.

So, if you're reading this blog and I ever start talking about how money is simply the be-all and end-all, please send me anthrax in the post and tell me it's cocaine. If I become a consultant I'll probably become a coke-addled wanker. So send me powder and let it kill me.

Now it's Sunday night, and I'm just about to go to bed. I'm going to get back into training tomorrow morning I think, so I'm going to go for a run when I get up, it should be fun. Tomorrow I'm gonna work hard, come home and write.

I can't wait.
x


(have a nice week)

Oh no! (a rant of sorts)

Right, remember when I did my Alice in Wonderland tumble down the rabbit hole?

You do? Oh joy.

Well, apart from the group of beautiful women who saw me fall, a sax player (who was busking in the Station) was kind enough to stop mid-tune to laugh. He was playing one of the greatest tunes ever...




(yeah, so I might have cheapened my ire by using a video with a walrus, but the tune is still amazing, right?)


Unfortunately...


When dickheads are given 'Club Anthems for Idiots'




Literally everything about this video is wrong:
1) Good song destroyed
2) Using the same 8 notes on loop as a dance music hook and a fucking awful drum/bass rhythm
3) Smug cunt in an hotel smiling at his own ability to tie his fucking shoelaces without soiling himself.
4) Dancing sluts
5) Obligatory lesbian kissing
6) Autotune (non-ironic)
7) 'Crazy' party-scene and 'Whacky' hotel antics.

The original song is about the rat race in pre-Thatcherite London, written during a time where there was a huge gap developing between the lower and middle-classes. It chronicles several characters attempts to reach their desired lives, including the narrator, a busker at Baker Street Tube Station, and not be swallowed by the city. It's an indictment on the sort of selfish soulessness that led to the excesses of the 80's and the dark side of life in London. It's an excellent song from an excellent song-writer. It is not suitable for some smug plate of dead skin and his necrophilic euro-skanks!


Fuck sake, sorry Gerry Rafferty...


Rant over.

How to designate a Decade.

First of all, HAPPY NEW YEAR everyone!

As I've already said, 2009 was a horrible (almost) completely awful year, and I'm rather glad to see the end of it. To you all, I open my arms in beatific serenity and embrace you with an ocean of love as we leave the Noughties and enter....

Wait a minute, what are we gonna call the next Decade?

Some people have come up with suggestions

-the 'Tenties'
-the 'Juvies' (apparently you go to Juvie after you're 'noughtie')
-the Pubies/Zitties (stupid fuckers came up with this)
-the 'Teens'


Now, the 'Teens' is probably the best bet for what we'll call it, but where does that leave 2010-12? We can't call those years the 'Preteens' or the 'Mileys Cyruses' can we? That would be a bit odd.

I believe that I may have found a solution.

Right, so hopefully most of you will agree with me that the Noughties was a pile of shite. I mean:
-9/11
-All the crazy (some of them illegal *cough*Iraq*cough*) wars that followed and are still fucking the world royally up,
-The climate of fear (Thanks, Fox News, you fucking bits of dead skin)
-The dotcom busts,
-Tony Blair/George W. Bush (or Georny Blairsh)
-Windows Vista,
-US comedies (for the most part, they're awful)
-British reality TV and Film (for the most part, they're fucking awful: the Brits should stick to comedy and the Yanks to film...simple)
-Simon Cowell and his evil empire of no-talent mediocrity.
-The Recession (FTR - another ConnyBoy invention)

etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc ad nauseum

To call the next 10 years 'the Teens' would undermine the awful shittiness of the last 10. A teenager is a miserable, awkward mess, just like 2000-2009. The next 10 years is the chance we have to mature a bit, right?

So, we're in a period of transition. Let's take a leaf out of the book of J.R.R Tolkien.

When Tolkien came up with the Hobbit for his children, he envisaged his hairy-footed little fellas as having a life-span as longer than us humans. The time that a Hobbit matures and comes into his own is called his Tweens. The Tweens were a time when the Hobbits could fuck about and slowly come to maturity, the time in between childhood and adulthood (see what he did there?)

Now, I know that a 'tweener' is synonymous with a preteen in the US, but we should take the word back!

So,, we've had the crazy immaturity of the Noughties, and now, as we're getting all redemptive and shit, I think we should call the next ten years...

Ahem...


THE TWEENS!

What do y'all reckon?


ps - a wee update on what I'm up to. I'm in my Granny's house in Chatham (in Kent) eating. She's a feeder. We're watching the first night of Celebrity Big Brother, it's going to be fucking awful. There's stupid, jesus-freak Stephen Baldwin, there's some vacuous slutty nonentity, Jordan's current piece-of-shit boyfriend, Stephanie Beachem, Lady Sovereign and thong-obsessed talent-vaccuum Sisqo. More top-notch celebs to come then o_O

My granny just said 'That Stephen Bolton's a bit of a odd'un'. Classic.


Happy New Years everyone.
xx

20-something bloggers BLOGSWAP!! Vittoria and I discuss Beyoncé

Greetings!!

Today, I am honoured to have a lady come to visit my blog, as part of the 20sb blogswap. In the run-up to this, Vittoria and I got waaaay too excited talking about Beyoncé (not in that way, pervs) and decided that we ought to both rant about how great and shit some of her songs can be. You can check out her jolly amazing blog here and see what a real blogger's stuff is like.
Without much further ado, it a great honour to present Vittoria!

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Hello all!!! My name is Vittoria, and I’m subbing for Conor today (I know, I’m sorry in advance). I’m from the States, currently living in our nation’s capital (YES WITH BARACK OBAMA ZOMG!) and as my blog is entitled, I am pretty much always drunk, and never a bride. With that, away we go!!

So.

I’m kind of a bad girl. Not like Fiona Apples “I’ve been a bad, bad girl…”. No no. Like I do a disservice to my gender, sometimes. Par example, I hate – HATE – shopping. I mean, srsly. I don’t like girly mags (even the ones from across the Atlantic – sorry!). I never EVER wear make-up, unless it seems utterly necessary (like when I was trying to entice my current Boy and I wore eyeliner all the fucking time because I knew he fucking liked it but joke’s on him cause I haven’t worn it since we started sleeping together MUAHAHAHAHAHA).

Point is.

I’m a shitty female. And emblematic of this lack of honor for my vajayjay is my utter lack of love for the one, the only Beyonce. I mean, don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed “Crazy in Love” and when “Naughty Girl” comes on, I always think “aw Lindsay Lohan, remember ‘Mean Girls’? Why did you go so far astray?!” But like, I mean, cmon. Her singing “At Last” at the inauguration of my bestie B. Obams? I don’t think so. I LOVED the song, the performance/performstress? Not so much.

Until.

Someone – some GLORIOUS person (I believe my sister Grace) – introduced me to “Single Ladies.” You know it. The one where she does the super fucking AWESOME dance with the two other super hot chicks and dudes are turned on cause of the moves and chicks are turned on because of the lyrics, and also, probably, the moves.

I mean, let’s be honest here.

It’s pretty fucking amazing, because it’s pretty much what ever girl wants to have happen in a post-break-up-period. Dude dumps girl, girl finds new dude, old dude gets pissed, girl gets to be like “look you fucking douche, you should have gotten me when you had me, too EFFING bad.”

Wondrous.

I danced at Zumba to this song, at BARS to this song (and usually I only jive to music of the Bon Jovi variety). I woke up to it, I got ready for the EVENING for it, I just couldn’t get enough of Beyonce!

And then she came out with another.

“If I were a boy” is of the same variety of “Single Ladies”, in that it’s SO EXACTLY WHAT GIRLS WOULD SAY. Except in this case, it’s what they WOULD have said.

When they were 15.

When I was 15, I was like “oh my GOD if only RS would just LET ME INSIDE HIS HEAD I know know KNOW I could teach him to love me forever!” and when aforementioned RS started dating someone else, I was like “GOD if only I were a FREAKING BOY I would NEVER hurt a girl like that EVER”.

It was super mature, I know.

The best and worst thing about “if I were a boy” is that it groups all boys under the male category. Boys, in all honesty, ARE shitty human beings to girls. And girls are pretty fucking dumb as well, but in different, equally-hurtful-to-female ways. MEN, however, are not. Men are wonderful creatures, who make you breakfast and watch Friends with you and don’t judge you when you’re on your eighth freak out of the day because you’re getting your period.

Well. SOME men.

The point is, that while Beyonce has TOTES got it right in “Single Ladies” – ie, if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it, motherfucker – she probably should have clarified “If I were a boy” by titling it “If I were that 16 year old boy who ripped your heart out and probably is a drunk frat 30-yr-old frat boy in the middle of nowheresville, America. Oh and he’s fat, too”. That conveys the same, some males are stupid sometimes idea that Single Ladies does, without fucking over all men everywhere.

Mmm. Fucking men.

Uh, what was I saying? Ah yes. In short? I suck at being female, but Beyonce can totally rock my world anytime she wants, and SO CAN EFFING CONOR!!! Thanks you guys for reading! And stop by the blog whenever you’re in the mood for drunken-slutastic-cursing. XOXO

Raise your voice…no wait, don’t. Please don’t.

Shut the fuck up!

 

You can imagine my surprise when I first saw mention of Swine Flu (or “Swit Swoo”, as Saatchi and Saatchi have already branded it, aimed at the 14-18 year old teenybopper market) in the papers. Being somewhat a collector of old timey turns of phrase and such, I half expected the only people to be able to say the word to be tweed-wearing, shotgun toting gentry-chaps.

Not the case.

 I’ve overheard at least a hundred different conversations with the words ‘swine flu’, all of which were based on a ridiculous number of assumptions and half-medical know-nothingness.

I know what you’re thinking; “Why have you spent your time listening to other people’s conversations and not investing in a totally-necessary facemask?”

 Well, there are two possible explanations:

One is that I have a search tool in my brain so as to limit and filter what I hear or see during the day (like on gmail, when you search for ‘malehood enhancer” in your spam and get 27,000 results, or when you search for “you’re adequately proportioned” and the computer breaks the “inanimate object’ rule of technology and laughs in your face.) The other possibility is that people in Ireland never tend to believe in keeping their fucking conversations private anymore.

It’s something that really pisses me off, and not in an “It’s mildly annoying” way. Whenever I hear it going on, it really fucks me off.

 I thought it was just a student thing, going into a small space like a bus or a luas in a group and having a ridiculously self-indulgent shout fest of a conversation amongst your mates, or walking five abreast down the pavement, so that nobody misses the groundbreaking work the group is doing in the field of conversation. Who the fuck has something so important to say that they need to raise their voice when talking about “Oh my God, Thundercats was amazing, Cheetara was, like, my first crush” or has to wave their hand like a railway platform sweetheart so that ‘the group’ will hear about that . Whilst the above sentence (about Thundercats) is true, and applicable to me, I don’t need to hear that off some smug Fuck in hipster clothing when I’m trying to get home. I also don’t need to laugh insanely as we all remember the theme tune. Yes, we all remember it, there’s no need to…oh, okay…yeah, let’s SING the thing shall we?

 

 I don’t mean to overreact, but what sort of animal needs to constantly drop pop culture references into all his conversations? Why don’t these people think that the polite rules of conversation apply to them?

(That's massively hypocritical of me, because I love pop-culture references. It's just I hate these people, so when they do it, it kills me.)

It’s not even just in small spaces that it bothers me. In Trinity, we’re ridiculously lucky to have a beautiful amount of grass and garden, right in the centre of Dublin. If it’s a nice day, there’s nothing better than to sit with a beer and a coffee, reading the paper or trying to teach yourself Company law from the Nutshells textbook. It can be almost blissful. Until the groups arrive.

 

Now, before I go off on my ‘groups’ rant, let me be straight. I’m not in favour of some horrible boarding school environment of silence before tea-time or anything, and I believe that everyone should have the right to say (almost) everything, but it really annoys me when a group of preening, self-satisfied (I suppose ‘happy’ is the word I’m looking for) rim-wits sit near me and start to shite on. They all seem to dress the same (fucking hipsters or Avoca posse) and act in a slightly kooky, ‘I’m so individual’ way. All of them.

If it’s the fucking hipsters, and they sit near you, they immediately involve themselves in the gruelling process of rolling dodgy cigarettes with clove or chocolate paper, all the while cunting about how, like, Beaudelaire, is so overrated or how, like, nobody really seems to GET the plays of Brecht. Yeah.  Rolling cigarettes, even for a novice like me, doesn’t take that long. It’s not origami, it’s a simple exercise in packing just enough tobacco so that the paper can be rolled, thus creating the cigarette. Also, if you are so desperate for chocolate…buy some chocolate. A smoke that tastes like Nesquik when you lick it is just creepy. The hipsters are all smug actory types, in their very expensive “I just threw this on” (during a controlled period of ‘throwing on’ between 6am and 8 am this morning, in front of a mirror) clothing, lamenting the fact that they’re, like, so cultured. If they had wanted to be actors so badly, they should have gone to drama school. What’s that? Didn’t get in? Oh, well…I suppose you could…maybe…spend the four years of your degree swanning around calling yourself an actor anyway? Does that sound good? Yeah? The hipsters pride themselves on being slightly subversive, with a sideways view on life and generally being quite an outsider. The effect is lost however, by the need to be liked and appreciated by everyone. These Outies have one saving grace…their ignorance. They simply don’t know that everyone feels like this, and they generally keep their screeching mutually-masturbatory conversations to themselves.

 

The other group is the middle-class “In Crowd” types. With their putrid smelling garlic-based ethnic food and wholegrain focaccia  n’ butterbean baguettettes (even smaller and more expensive than baguettes) they sit, cliquing away like a bunch of festering ticker-takers, and making everyone around them feel excluded and bitched out. This is a really common group in Trinity (and I mean that in every sense) because they’re quite insidious. They proclaim themselves the ‘popular’ people in the class and ensconce themselves in a little bubble: equal-parts self-glorifying and self-loathing. It’s quite the phenomenon. The individual members of “Team England” or “the Lawyers” or “The Bess Crew” or “The Medics” or even “The Theology Massive” are all usually quite nice, lovely people to individually chat to or have a coffee with. But en masse, they’re worse than Dresden. (y’know, in that you wish you weren’t there…they don’t carpet-bomb or create firestorms or kill tens of thousands of people or anything)

When these ‘Innies’ are about, you know it. It’s the fellas, they act like chivalric heralds and have to announce to the world, ‘HERE IS A GROUP OF ARSEHOLES’.

 

These male hangers-on invariably carry an American football or a hacky-sack with them, and feel the need to show how well they can throw/kick it at every sunny opportunity. They’re the same sort of arse-trout who collect every bottle of liquor they’ve ever drunk in a pyramid above their bed/in the kitchen/in the living room and they need everyone to know about their J1 in San Diego last summer. They wish they were American, but they’re not.

The girls are usually just happy to chat (well, screech, and make people feel kinda diabetic-y with their magnificent Sunny Delight skin) about the things that are important to them:

1)   How drunk they were/are/is/am (NB- learn grammar)

2)   The Great Night Clubs they go to,

3)   How mental their friend Dearbhail is,

4)   How amazing their boyfriends are.

They start all their sentences with “Eeeh” like a patronising tuning fork, and tell the most inane anecdotes ever. I mean, fuck me, but these people should be shot.

[Sample Girl Conversation]

“Eeoh my God, Dearbhail is sooooo mental, she was like really drunk yesterday and puked into some other girls handbag- on the dancefloor in Coppers- then shat herself in the taxi home whilst shouting ‘go back to Africa’ at the driver. He, like, wasn’t even from Africa!”  (NB- Yowsers, help me get this monocle off,  you enticing minxtress!)

 

[Sample Boy Conversation]

“Like, Damo bought this ridiculoso expensive Beamer at the weekend. He’s already got, like, three. He’s mental! I can’t believe he’s only seventeen. Look there’s Dearbhail, she’s so hot, I’m going to pound this beer then you throw long. I’ll run and catch it then tell her the story about winning that beer-pong tourney in SanDiego. I’m sooo going to ride her.”

 

Maybe I just need to get out of Dublin…

 

I know I didn’t really get around to explaining about why this connects to Swine Flu. I suppose it doesn’t. I suppose I’m just tired of other people’s conversations having such an effect on me. When the Pork Crisis hit a few months ago I heard this conversation (the names have been changed for anonymity)

Dearbhail: Did you see the whole pork crisis thing?

Clíodna: Yeah, it was, like, in the news and everything!

Dearbhail: I’ve been thinking about McDonalds though, are they going to close?

Clíodna: Why would they?

Dearbhail: If they can’t use pork, how will they make hamburgers?

 

…I know.

 

Anyway, another rant over. I suppose that when I move away I’ll miss all of these things I’m complaining about, but then again, I’ll most definitely not.