Ending it with Endings

Posted on May 4, 2013 | 1 Comment

One of my best friends recently described the ability to make people laugh as a cheap means of buying affection. Up until this moment I had always assumed that the way to my heart was through my stomach. (Strange expression as surely the way to my heart is through my taste buds? I have always maintained I’ll love you forever if you feed me pizza, but I won’t be feeling so warm and fuzzy if it’s burnt.) And yet I have plenty of friends who are unable to cook but none who are unable to make me laugh. Clearly I value the power of laughter above most things, including pizza. And I’m not alone. Laughter is unifying. Every person on earth is fluent in the language of laughter. Laughter is defusing, and strengthening. As J.K. Rowling’s boggarts prove beautifully, there are plenty of terrifying things in the world which are made less terrifying when we poke fun at them: spiders; exams; Kim Jung-un. The ability to make someone laugh shouldn’t be thought of as ‘cheap’ but as the most valuable thing of all. Laughter is the best medicine. Live, laugh, love.

Anyway, it made me realise why I haven’t properly posted on here for so long: because I wanted to make you – the internet – laugh and I wasn’t convinced that I could. (Sure, I might have made a half-hearted joke a few weeks ago about the death of the Iron Lady but all in all I thought it best to let her rust in peace.) I don’t feel that my world is a very funny place at the moment. Everywhere I turn, I am confronted with endings. The ending of university. The ending of relationships. The ending of eras.

Nobody likes endings. We might say things like ‘when one door closes another door opens’ but that is because we do like beginnings. Beginnings are fun! Endings? Not so much. What Alexander Graham Bell, credited inventor of the telephone, actually said was, “When one door closes another door opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the one which has opened for us”. If you ever get dumped over the phone, or fired over the phone, or receive any kind of bad news over the phone, you should admire the poetry of the man warning against obsessing over closed doors providing you with the method of communication via which the door was closed.

Anyway. What put me in this decidedly un-peachy mood is the D word. No, not Dissertation – although let’s be honest that isn’t helping. Death. The biggest ending of them all. The ultimate closed door. I’ve spent the last few months thinking that one of my favourite people is going to die, and I won’t lie to you folks, it hasn’t been pretty. I wish I could tell you that I handled it with dignity but I’ve never believed in god and have always worshipped another kind of spirit: vodka. Drunkenly dancing on tables soon led to drunkenly cleaning someone else’s kitchen and then to the murky depths of drunkenly having a panic attack and sobbing into an array of arms belonging to various un-judgemental friends.

Pretty depressing, right? You might be shifting nervously in your seat right about now, thinking that you only clicked on this link because sometimes I crack a few whimsical jokes and get a bit enthusiastic with alliteration. And now you’re reading about death?!  Hang on in there buddy; it’s about to get philosophical and awesome. Sort of.

I really thought about how world-shattering it would be if this particular person died. And I started to appreciate things more. The colour of the sky; the happy wag of Teddy’s tail; Boyfriend’s cooking.  I know this kind of reaction is generally reserved for when your own mortality is scrutinised, not that of someone else. But as Steve Jobs so eloquently said, “Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.” Remembering that everyone around you is also going to die apparently has the same effect. We should all get busy living, laughing, and loving while we can. Laughing at funerals should never be frowned upon; rather applauded, boggart style. And making the people around you happy should never be thought of as something so cheap and cold as buying affection.

And if that didn’t cheer you up, today whilst doing some last minute research for my (insert particularly inventive swear word here) Dissertation I read a description of a stereotypical prostitute according to eminent nineteenth-century criminologist Cesare Lombroso, that so closely matched my physical appearance it could have been based on me. And if that isn’t enough to make a girl smile, I’m not sure what is.

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Posted in Musing

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Dissertation Lamentation

Posted on April 22, 2013 | 1 Comment

Dear Dissertation,

You are causing me to have an existential crisis. So I wrote you a passive aggressive haiku. Because I’m doing an English Lit degree. And because that’s how mad you make me.

I don’t like research,
I really don’t like writing,
And I don’t like you.

Very little love,
From Gem.

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2013 Budget: A Brief Case of Insanity

Posted on March 21, 2013 | 2 Comments

Today’s headlines have largely been accompanied with an assortment of photos of George Osborne nervously holding his darling little red briefcase up to the cameras as though it were either the political equivalent of an Oscar, or an undetonated bomb. He looks about as scared as I would look if someone told me to make a plan for the future of our economy.

Looking like he may at any point need to open and then vomit into the briefcase. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

George looking like he may need to open and then vomit into the briefcase. Photograph: Matt Cardy/Getty Images

The photos of a bewildered-looking middle-aged man with an inexplicably red briefcase are the only thing the headlines seem to have in common though. An innocent (if ever so slightly melodramatic) customer of any newspaper stand today would be forgiven for simultaneously bursting into tears of pain and jumping for joy. The Guardian’s gloomy tagline of “more of the same” has probably spent all day nestled between The Daily Mail’s excitable sounding capital letters proclaiming that Osborne’s budget will help “HALF A MILLION families buy new homes” and The Independent’s miserable description of “The Drown Your Sorrows Budget”.

So should I be hopeful about the prospect of an apparently easier jump onto the housing ladder or so depressed that all I have left is the silver lining of the decreased price of beer? No, really. How should I feel? Seriously. I’m an English Literature student. I’m surrounded by people who love words and are terrified of numbers. Our weekly seminars involve a couple of peer-assessed presentations which are marked on ten different criteria, each with a score out of ten. I can add those numbers together as I mark, therefore knowing the final score by the time I reach the penultimate mark. I should not feel half as proud of this as I do. A large proportion of my fellow students either have to resort to counting on their fingers or whipping out the calculators on their phones. In a society where using a calculator to add ten measly numbers together to reach a final mark of less than 100 doesn’t have side-effects of mortification, humiliation, and the sudden urge to practise your mental arithmetic skills, how on earth can we be expected to use our votes wisely when voting based on the economy?

As far as I can tell, the short term problem with the economy in the form of the economic downturn is nothing compared to the long term economic problem that nobody seems to understand the economy: not the public; not the reporters; not the politicians; not even the economists.

And how can we vote based on anything other than the economy? It seems that when the economy is experiencing a trough rather than a peak all other issues are thrown out of the single glazed window straight into the non-recyclable rubbish. Concern about global warming is apparently at a twenty year low point. Do we really want to celebrate the scrapping of the rise in fuel duty when our consumption of fuel is such a huge problem? At what point can a recession not be enough anymore for us to disavow the fact that we’re destroying ourselves along with the planet. And why do people care more about beer than about bees?!

I don’t even like beer. And George increased the tax on wine and spirits, which I do like, and which is going to make my backup plan of environmental despair based bored-line alcoholism a lot more expensive.

It’s enough to make anyone add a cheeky asterisk to the phrase ‘budget cuts’.

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Roses are Red, Valentine’s Day is Blue…

Posted on February 15, 2013 | 2 Comments

Happy February 15th everyone! No longer must we be bombarded with adverts for gifts which crawl down to the bottom of the gender stereotype box to die. No longer must we be assaulted with the despair inducing juxtaposition of both underwear and chocolates on sale prices. No longer must we fear to be left alone in case we send ourselves flowers from a ‘secret admirer’ (who may or may not closely resemble Ryan Gosling or Mila Kunis).

I love jewellery, chocolate, flowers, underwear, and love. But I really do not like Valentine’s Day. Apart from thinking Valentine’s Day is the worst of all holidays for mindless capitalist consumerism, I have a nasty suspicion that dedicating one set day of the year to romance enables bad boyfriends, and for that matter bad girlfriends, to spend 364 days a year kicking romance in the groin.

Yesterday was the fourth Valentine’s Day I have spent with Boyfriend. Having spent four years with me, he knows me well enough to realise that just because I dislike designated romance doesn’t mean I want to miss out on the opportunity to have a nice dinner. This year however we decided to wait until the weekend to celebrate for a number of reasons which – tongue in cheek alert – basically boil down to me being an awesome friend and an even more awesome girlfriend. Boyfriend was out with his friends. My friends were out with their boyfriends. So last night was the first eve of February 14th that I have spent alone in quite some time. And surprise, surprise, I didn’t like it.

My initial plans to exercise and work on my dissertation were clearly the delusions of a mad woman. I chose carbohydrates. Lots of them. And Mad Men. Lots of it. I found myself slipping from a (don’t laugh too loudly) strong independent woman to more of a Bridget Jones type stock character, all because of the date on the calendar. Mainly I was just bored and depressed at yet another student night spent without vodka and dancing (god damn third year) but I was getting sympathy messages from various friends as though Boyfriend had not simply gone out without me on a Thursday night but broken up with me and in a particularly harsh fashion; via text maybe, or on a Post-it Note like something out of Sex and the City.

In many ways my evening would have been less miserable had I really been single, as from the constant stream of Instagram photos of sympathy gifts from concerned relatives of single Facebook and Twitter friends, I can only deduce that it is the singletons rather than the smug-marrieds who are the target market of all the Valentine’s Day merchandise. (Boyfriend bought me a packet of Mini Eggs, but I think technically they are more to do with Jesus than Cupid and so don’t really count as official Valentine’s Day produce.)

Right now I’m waiting for drunken Boyfriend to stumble home. Because sometimes love is more to do with being prepared to clean the remains of a Subway sandwich – fresh or partially digested – from the floor than buying someone two dozen red roses. Roses die. Clean carpets are forever.

So happy February 15th ladies and gentleman! Take off those suspender belts and forced smiles, buy a large amount of on-offer heart shaped sweets, and try to remember that love cannot be bought in handy portable boxes – even if they are filled with chocolate.

And if that isn’t cheering enough we can all look forward to Easter advertising now. Because nothing says “good job rising from the dead” like a toasted Hot Cross Bun or a Creme Egg.

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Posted in News-ing, Snacking

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The Hard Lives of Fashion Bloggers

Posted on January 25, 2013 | 2 Comments

Seeing as how I have a ten minute presentation, a 2000 word essay, a 3000 word essay, and an 8000 word dissertation to research and write, not to mention the terrifying task of getting myself a job for after I graduate, I thought it best that I give in to my inner ostrich and stick my head deep into the sandy safety of blogging. (Disclaimer: if any potential employer is reading this then you should know that the previous sentence is a joke firstly because ostriches don’t actually bury their heads in the sand and secondly because I work extremely hard and am very good at time management. So I’m hard working, organised and funny. And I know stuff about ostriches. Hire me.)

Not only have I been posting on here as often as I can between doing a (very difficult and clever) English Literature degree (hire me) and leaving the house every once in a while so I don’t go insane, but I have also fallen head-first straight through the sand of avoidance down into the rabbit hole world of fashion blogs.

It was really only a matter of time. Much like the person who liked both peanut butter and jam, as a blogger with a (totally healthy) shopping addiction, the sandwich of fashion and blogging was my destiny. I mean, I would be a great fashion blogger. I already blog, and I already buy a lot (ahem, I mean a totally healthy amount) of clothes. You may think that. But you would be wrong. Because my sandwich of passions would also have to include the environment, animals, politics, art, equality, and all things Tolkien – which might be tricky to work into a fashion blog. But mainly because being a fashion blogger is, from what I can tell, really freaking hard.

Firstly, you can’t just own the clothes. You have to wear them. You have to look good in them. And then you have to have photographic evidence of the above. That might not sound too difficult if you possess a camera and an abundance of self esteem. But these photos have to go on the internet. People are mean on the internet. You have to look good. Unless you are exceptionally naturally beautiful to the point where you neither need nor understand the concept of makeup it is highly unlikely that your everyday face is the face you wish to show the internet. (On a side note, isn’t it sad that we think our actual faces are a lesser version of our faces with foundation and eyeliner and mascara and blusher and god knows what else?) So you can’t just pull some nice clothes on, you have to do your face; which, unless you are a makeup artist, is a time-consuming process.

Skip forward an optimistic estimate of half an hour. Having improved your face, you realise that your everyday hair is probably unsuitable for the internet as well. At the very least you will need to wash it. Depending on your hair style drying, straightening, curling, and general styling will also be necessary. Unless you are a hairdresser or a greater woman than I, these things are also time-consuming, difficult and sometimes painful. (I once dropped my curling tongs and despite my normal lack of hand-eye coordination, managed to instinctually catch them. Big mistake.)

Fast forward an hour if your hair is as long as mine and if you are as useless with curling tongs as I am. Now that you’re wearing enough makeup to fool the good people of the internet into thinking that you don’t have pores, and have spent an hour making your hair look like you’ve stolen a L’Oreal model’s wig, you cannot simply photograph yourself in your bedroom. Oh no. You must go outside. There are two difficulties to this element of fashion blogging. Firstly, you have to go to a different beautiful or interesting location for every post, which is nice and all but only if you have decent means of transportation. Secondly, and I think more importantly, what you are wearing is likely to be extremely inappropriate for outdoors. For instance, I’m sure it has come to your attention, but right now it is winter in the Northern Hemisphere. It’s really freaking cold. I’m sat in my bedroom wearing three layers, a hat, a scarf, and a hot water bottle. You heard me: I’m wearing a hot water bottle (with a belt and a nonchalant smile). I even changed my hair from a centre to a side parting in an attempt to warm up my forehead. I look ridiculous. If I were to leave the house, I would probably prise myself away from my hot water bottle, but I would still look like a fatter version of myself attempting to drown in knitwear. If I put on a pretty dress and went outside I would soon turn a less-than-vogue shade of Tiffany blue.

Here I am with Teddy, wearing as few layers as possible in British winter.

Here I am with Teddy, wearing as few layers as possible in British winter.

For the sake of argument, let’s say that you manage to get outside in the freezing cold in your pretty dress and keep your hair from frizzing out of control and your makeup from steaming off your face in a cloud of your own breath. Now, you must look like you are not concerned about hypothermia and like you are either an ethereal fairy princess or really happy to be there. Again: tricky. I take my Urban Outfitters hat off to you, fashion bloggers of Britain, for smiling until your jaws ache despite the British weather.

And now that you have achieved all that, you take some photographs. Oh no wait, you need to drag a long-suffering friend along with you because you cannot take photographs of yourself skipping around in your pretty dress, trying not to look embarrassed, unless you have designed a tripod which locks onto your face like a missile thingy and swivels around ensuring that every photo is in focus. And speaking of focus, your long-suffering friend needs to be more than a human tripod: they must be good at taking photographs. And one of you preferably needs to be able to afford and use Photoshop.

So now you have some seriously lovely photos of yourself! The end! Oops, silly me: now that you’ve done all that, you need to write about your adventures to your cute location in your pretty dress. And presumably you need to lie about how cold and miserable you were and how much your feet hurt in those adorable but impractical shoe boots. You need to tell an apparently arbitrary precious little tale about your lovely day out whilst being as nice as pie and actually preferably mentioning pie, if not cake, and definitely tea.

And don’t get me wrong: some of you do this very well and pull off the whole cute and friendly thing effortlessly, to the point where it doesn’t seem like an act and I really do want to be your friend and come and eat cake with you. There are a select few fashion blogs which I love because of the bloggers as well as the clothes.

But sadly for many of you it’s unlikely that after a hard day fashion blogging you will feel like cracking a joke, or making a comment on women’s rights, or writing about the EU referendum, because all you will want to do is curl up in your bed in your onesie and check your toes for frostbite. There’s a slight risk that some of you might come across as being just a little bit vapid, which is ironic, because you’re so full of tea and cake. You have probably never heard of The Everywhereist. But my god, you look good.

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Posted in Shopping

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Not-a-virus or Norovirus

Posted on January 18, 2013 | 1 Comment

Eleven days ago I read Charlie Brooker’s article on The Guardian website about how to avoid catching norovirus. For those of you who haven’t seen it, the gist of his theory is that if you spend the Winter months pretending you’ve committed a murder and so must not leave your nasty murdering fingerprints anywhere, you’re neither going to end up being caught by the imaginary police or catch the very real virus he describes as “200 times more infectious than Daydream Believer by The Monkees” – although you will most likely welcome Spring with sore elbows and a lot less friends. I thought that line about Daydream Believer was pretty hilarious but I’ve tried to open doors with my elbows before and not been overly successful, so I forgot about Charlie’s words of sarcastic wisdom.

Three days ago I handed in 6600 words of university coursework which had been having a similar effect on my life as being on the run from the law: I hadn’t left the house in days; was scared to contact my loved ones; and found it hard to sleep at night. I celebrated my newfound freedom by sharing breadsticks and guacamole with Sam. (Yeah that’s right: I celebrated a massive deadline with guacamole, not alcohol. But it was a Monday night, okay? And I was tired. And guacamole is freaking delicious. On a totally unrelated side note, the further I get into third year less I act like a student: possibly as a way of lessening the shock of graduation; possibly because I’m slowly turning into my mother. Hi Mum.)

Two days ago Samantha sent me the following message: “I think I have norovirus.” Now, I’m going to give you all some friendship advice. Do not say to someone that you like, who you spent time with and shared food with the day before, that you think you have norovirus. By all means, contact them to say that you do not have norovirus. And by all means, if you know you have norovirus then do tell your friends because it’s only polite to give them a heads up to put their heads down a toilet. But never tell someone who you may have infected that you think you have norovirus. Because that, ladies and gentleman, is torture.

Yesterday I woke up and nervously considered whether I needed to be spontaneously and violently sick. Thankfully (especially for Boyfriend snoozing next to me, blissfully unaware) the answer was no. I did not feel especially healthy, but I couldn’t tell if it was a symptom of noro-fear or of norovirus itself. At one point I had an overwhelming urge to throw up into a hedge, but as it was Sam’s hedge and I wasn’t feeling particularly pleased with her, I’m not sure that it counts. By some miracle, I made it through the day without losing my stomach contents. I curled up into bed last night full of appreciation for the beauty of the world, the wonder of life, and the surprising strength of my immune system. And then my stomach started to hurt.

Today I woke up feeling as though my intestines were playing a game of cat’s cradle. I crawled out of bed for my morning lecture and dragged myself to uni, feeling all the while as though I was suffering from a severe hangover. I could now plot my symptoms on the timeline of Sam’s symptoms, and the future looked decidedly neither bright nor orange; rather, a sickly pale yellowy green feverish colour. My lovely friend Henry told me in no uncertain terms that if I was sick on him during the lecture he would punch me in the face, and couldn’t promise not to aim for my nose. To be clear, I used the adjectives ‘lovely’ and ‘friend’ with as much irony as possible there, but as he did let me in his car despite the way I was throwing the N word around with dramatic abandon I suppose I’ll have to forgive his lack of sympathy. My post-lecture study group perked me up, possibly because it was the first study group meeting for my module on J.R.R. Tolkien and I’m a bit of a fan girl, and possibly because my (much nicer) friend Fi took over and, in a soothing voice of the kind with which you might speak to a frightened horse, gave me firm instructions such as to sit down, eat food, drink water, listen to some Newton Faulkner, and stop saying the N word. I have spent the rest of the day repeating the mantra of “Notavirus! And definitely not a Norovirus!” in an increasingly hysterical manner and giggling to myself at how clever and funny I am. For dinner instead of doing the sensible thing and having soup, I ate an entire tray of cheese canapés. My logic was that they were unlikely to remain in my stomach for long anyway so the calories didn’t really count.

At this point, if I wake up tomorrow and – to put it politely – know for sure that I do have Norovirus, it will almost be a relief. If not, I’ve wasted a great deal of energy panicking about nothing.

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New Year’s Resolutions

Posted on January 7, 2013 | 2 Comments

The January Blues is a common condition which I firmly believe is caused by the sudden lack of Christmas, the weather, and a bunch of magazines with passive aggressive headlines about reinventing yourself. Apart from the issue of whether a reinvention is needed in the first place – which I will move onto in a minute, don’t panic – nobody has the energy to become a whole new person at this time of year anyway. We’re all too full of chocolate and wine. New Year’s resolutions are a brilliant way of evaluating your life and deciding what you want to change for the better, yet so often they are wasted on things which just make you unhappy, and which are accordingly abandoned before February.

So this year I have decided to resolve to do one thing only and it has absolutely nothing to do with losing weight. I resolve to enjoy life.

I resolve to remember that life is short. To remember that time is more precious than money. To cook more. To keep learning French. To exercise rather than shop as stress relief. To take more photographs and hang them on walls rather than just post them on the internet. To be happy with my body. To be happy with my mind. To not buy cheap vodka. To travel more. To not be ashamed by stopping to talk to a cat. To read a book that has no relevance to my degree. To spend more time outside. To reduce my carbon footprint. To paint more. To buy expensive moisturiser because after all I will wear it every day. To not be afraid of change. To smile more often than I frown. To graduate knowing that I tried as hard as I could without becomming a hermit. To eat more cheese. To learn how to knit. To finally watch Inception. To care less about the day to day activities of my fringe. To find a job that I love. To write to my MP.  To believe in myself. To tell the people I love that I love them. And to not be annoyed with Boyfriend if he turns the light off when I’m still in the bathroom.

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