One With Everything On It;

'Cause this post is going to be a little bit like one of those pizzas. I figured I was going to do a post for each of the “toppings”, but then I got lazy and decided to do this for reasons threefold; 1) I am a woman, and women multitask; 2) none of the “toppings” could really make a satisfying “pizza” on their own; 3) I am about to embark on a mega-tight schedule set by the mother who will decapitate me if I do not stick to it, so this is like my farewell. When I come back (if I come back) I may vividly resemble a yeti. I’m just warning you.

Alright, onto the “pizza”. First topping is;

Philosophy; I had my Knowledge & the World resit on Monday, and I came out wanting to get on the bus instead of flinging myself under it, so I’m taking that as a good sign. I didn’t start studying until the week before and even then I didn’t study much because, firstly, my lazy-ass-self-deprecating ethos was “I didn’t get it the first time around. How am I supposed to get it seven months later?” and also because I was hoping that the theory of osmosis would kick in during the exam. To make me feel better, my dad spun me a yarn about me going back in time to kill Descartes. It was rather cathartic. I don’t have anything against the guy, it’s just that my brain is incapable of absorbing his philosophy. Anyway, I’m not picking philosophy as an elective in second year (uni seems to have turned me into one of those “path of least resistance” types) and this makes me kind of sad, because, I did end up loving it. I learned a lot about arguing and rhetoric, about historical beliefs and perceptions, about logic and how I don’t have any, about the origins of politics, and I got panoramic views of controversial issues like abortion, infanticide, euthanasia and animal rights. Maybe that sounds totally grim, but I found it really interesting. I’m going to miss the gorgeous Sir Charles Wilson building all the lectures were held in and the security man I made friends with who always listened to pop music on his crackly radio. I’m going to miss my seat! I’m going to miss the lecturers; Platchias the Greek cowboy and how we always ran into one another, the Pepsi Addict who never missed a chance to slag off Russell Brand, the Jack Whitehall lookalike who wore clothes you needed sunglasses to look at. I’m going to miss my second semester tutor who took a shine to me and called me Rosie Posie and who sat and worked out one night exactly the grade I had to get in my exam to pass the course. I’m going to miss that whole tutorial group, how I was the only one who was there every week and how I had my own seat that everyone respected and how we were like a weird family who had debates about retributive robot rape and polar bears eating their cubs (they goddamn well do, Dave!). I’m going to miss the malevolent glint in my tutor’s eye as he put the two Daves in one team with the full expectation that the world would implode and be swallowed in white. I’m going to miss the whole cast of characters; my friend Dave with the sapphire eyes, Nickelback Guy (who was actually more into Metallica, so he’d probably hit me for that), The Other Chick who it transpires works with Meejin and remembers the polar bears, Big Fat Johnny and our Whiteboard of Punishment, Dreadlocks and our discussions about my essay and his dreadlocks, Andrew Pretty Boy and his poser beanie and how he always held the door open and how we almost got run over on Great Western Road. I’m very much going to miss standing outside the old crumbly stone building on a Friday, inhaling smoke and God knows what else, standing talking to the guys and stamping the cold away. I’m going to miss non-coffee. I am going to miss being one of the guys and always arriving totally breathless because I had to run from the top of the hill and down and up and along. And I’m going to miss the fact they all appreciated my hat. I will even look back fondly on the final comment my first semester John Lennon tutor wrote at the bottom of my F-yielding Descartes essay: “This reads more like a blog post”. I didn’t have to learn that it was possible for me to fail—I already knew that. I learned a ton of other cool stuff. But it’s been kind of a lesson to other people in my life that I can and do fail, sometimes, and that’s okay!

Boy, this old bird sure does ramble on a bit, doesn’t she?

Seagulls in Suburbia; It all started a few months ago on an overcast Sunday when the mother, the father and the me were coming home from the weekly Tesco shopping trip and looked up in alarm at the loud squawking to see two seagulls atop our roof...going at it. Fast-forward to now, and there are a nest of them in our chimney. We are the talk of the neighbourhood. We have even become a bit of a tourist attraction. Some people dislike our gulls because they make a hell of a noise in the morning/at night/when strangers walk past, but the residents of our four-in-a-block have become just as protective of the gulls as the gull parents are of their chicks. Which is very. I for one like the sound of seagulls because I love the sea and when I close my eyes at night I can imagine I’m there and I can almost hear the waves whispering against the shore. During my gap year I took it upon myself to learn some enlightenment, so on my father’s recommendation, I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and it’s now one of my favourite books. It’s just so beautiful and simple and inspiring. It has gems like this: “You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.” So, as soon as I learned there were three adorable little fuzzy seagull chicks living on our roof, I knew I had to name them accordingly. I watched their behaviour for a while, documenting their tentative progress in photographs, and decided that the boldest one should be named Jonathan. The other two are named Jonah and Joanna. I know this all makes me sound completely and utterly bonkers, but I don’t care. The seagull parents have long since accepted me as One of Them, and they no longer dive bomb me on my comings and goings. They are better than guard dogs. And it is rather funny watching women with prams and bands of small children run in terror down the street. Reminiscent of The Birds, I guess. Which is possibly another reason I so enjoy the seagulls being here. However, our neighbour across the street who is currently building the Great Wall of China in his front garden and has been doing so for the past ten years, does not like the seagulls so much and tolerates them through a tight grin, and has tried to conspire a plan with my father to climb up onto the roof and smash the eggs should the gulls return next year. I dare say he will be pecked to death before ever reaching the nest. The baby gulls have now begun to fly and soon they’ll be off and this is all timing in rather well with my ascendency into adulthood! Which leads me to the next topic...

Of Penny Whistles & Moon Pies;

So I’m back from North Berwick and I am in fact in a jollier mood! However, I have quite a bit to diary about, so I’m just going to rattle through it all.

Saturday, 29 May 11;

A certain someone came over to help sort out my head. There was a letter and Tegan & Sara and a giant pink elephant in the room. A few hours before I discovered that my copy of The Nutcracker Prince misspelt the word ‘holiday’ in its tagline. The strange indie movie my life has become recently played on and everything that could be sorted in a couple of hours was sorted and even after that I still felt like crap on toast. The remainder of the evening passed by in a languid void of The Simpsons and then toward night I panicked and begged for metaphysical tea even though I knew I’d regret it later and that didn’t pacify me one iota and I couldn’t sleep and so I got up and went into the living room and sat for half an hour watching some crime drama with my mother and then I told her everything. All of it, from beginning to end. The whole nine yards. Totally didn’t expect that when I woke up that morning. Didn’t really ever expect it. There was just too much to tell, and it was all so inextricable, and the longer I didn’t tell her the more I couldn’t tell her. And I couldn’t tell her before anyway when there was still so much to know. But by that point I guess I knew enough and I was laying in bed with this horrible realization pressing down on me, like, No matter how many little surface problems you try to fix, you’re never going to fix the real one underneath. As long as you keep thinking of it like a jigsaw, as a hundred separate components that can be solved with logic and rationality, you are going to keep feeling like crap on toast. And I do not care to feel like crap on toast. So I told her and it took a while and she didn’t get mad or react in the way I’d feared at all; she listened and she tried to understand, which was all I could ask of her. And then it was four o’clock and the birds were waking up and I finally fell asleep. In the morning she bought me Coke and a Galaxy caramel.




North BerwHick;
Do not be alarmed, I do know how to spell, I have not completely lost my mind. It’s just that when Meejin and I were a little tipsy we resumed our conversation about Family Guy, or, more precisely, cool wHip, and got into the habit of over-pronouncing the letter h or confabulating it altogether. It’s fun. So when we decided we were going to North Berwick, it was an easy target. Now, originally we were supposed to be going to Durness, but public transport doesn’t exist in the highlands, so Meejin then came up with her childhood playground of North Berwick, which is actually in the south east. Rather confusing. (It was between there and Barcelona, and we opted for the former. Clearly we need our heads examined.) Anyway, by serendipity my father had just been down there, staying in his rich friend and his wife’s holiday house—a couple who feel so guilty about having the place that they practically force friends and well-wishers to stay there for free. Within a phone call and a couple of emails it was all set up and the only catch appeared to be the fact we would have to bring our own bedding. Au contraire.


So we trundle onto the train in the pishing rain at Singer’s station with our heavy bags and suitcases, have a minor tiff and dance with insanity at the ticket office, board the train to Edinburgh, note with horror the increasing disparity in opulence between the two cities evident everywhere, get freaked out by the shrunk-down size of the mall and are taunted by the Edinburgers’ accents, fall down some stairs in the act of doing everything to save half a poke of McDonald’s chips, board a final train that smells of onions and laugh at all the place names (Drem, Prestonpans), and eventually arrive in North Berwick where we get lost and the following conversation takes place;


“Where are you girls headed?”


“Fifteen, Beach Road, North Berwick.” (I really may as well have indulged in the joke we’d shared the whole time about the address and said “Fifteen, Yemen Road, Yemen.”)


*guy squints at us dubiously*


“...It doesn’t exist, does it?”


Thankfully, it did exist. With the help of the bizarrely friendly locals, we located our locale. (Just to explain the bizarre part; where we come from, if a stranger approaches you, you back away.) Kilmory House, with a Beware of the Dog sign, a dog my father had described as a ‘terry’ which apparently has a ‘snubbed nose’ and ‘thick, black curly fur’. What the fuck kind of dog is that?


Long story short, we had a great time. Highlights include; watching Meejin fall in love with Pretty in Pink, her watching me be horrified by Matchstick Men, the Turkish chip shop with the best pizza alive and the guy who looked like Luigi, our failed attempt to get to Bamburgh Castle via a train that doesn’t exist and how within five minutes the whole damn town knew us as The Girls Who Failed To Get To Bamburgh Castle, when BBC 2 mysteriously cut out and we were left with BBC 1 and ITV, when we watched The Scheme, when the tourist information board at the bottom of the Law said Did you know? the whale jaw bone that had been up there since 1709 blew down and was replaced by an IKEA replica whale jaw bone in 1935, when our shopping list consisted of Party Rings, Brillo pads and beer, the death seats and JD thinking faces, being on the beach at eleven-thirty at night with beer, my France hat, dancing to this, when Meejin read aloud the book of one-liner golfing jokes, arriving back in Glasgow and hearing some obscenity that we'd been starved of for five days and turning to each other and saying "Home sweet home".

La view.

Meejin & the first sunset.

Lol.

Another sunset.

Meejin's JD thinking face in her death seat cause they're where you ponder life, yeah?

Despite all of this festivity, there were downsides, such as Meejin stripping every time I turned around and contorting herself into disturbing positions, Meejin never shutting the bathroom door, waking up in the morning to find Meejin staring back at me like an axe murderer, and the biggest downside of all—the fact the house was haunted. Yep, h-a-u-n-t-e-d. That was the catch. Well, that and the fact nobody warned us.


In retrospect I suppose it’s only fair that in order to have the penthouse apartment in a Victorian mansion with seafront views for five days free, we would have to face death every night of our stay there. It was like The Shining meets The Blair Witch Project meets Paranormal Activity. Seriously scary. Our house was bipolar, it had a split personality, which kind of makes horror-movie sense when you take into account the fact the guy who gave us the house was called Dr. Hyde... By day it was known as Albert, and by night as Norman. Norman was evil. Norman made the fires of Mordor burn behind our heads in a chimney without a fireplace, he made the flimsy wooden door three flights of stairs away sound like it was being rammed from outside by an escaped lunatic, he made the attic with one of those pulley staircases creak right above our heads, he made K-dawg’s phone unusable and cut off Davidoff’s reception and he made Meejin ask Rosie, what would you do if that doorknob started to turn? I was nearest the door, so I would have got it first. He also made us unable to open the fire escape in our bedroom, and then not find the key until the last night, and then he made us get the key stuck in the door so we were royally trapped, and then he made us realize the next day on the way home that it was the key for the cupboard we’d found it in... Besides Norman there was also a malicious oven called Rick (or Rickle, affectionately) who liked making the first thing we done when we got to the house scrubbing inch-thick grease from God knows what animal off the pan, burning our dinner and not heating up pie and letting the butter run out the bottom of garlic bread, even though that is clearly impossible. We actually began to dread the sun setting, and watched its safe glow slowly fade from our death seats... There were also two real-life encounters, both on the last day. Around five o’clock Meejin and I were sitting out on the roof eating lunch and not looking particularly come hither by anyone’s standards (my slippers have no soles and Meejin was eating mushroom soup), when three guys across the street caught her eye because one resembled her boyfriend and I happened to look over my shoulder to investigate without much interest, and next thing we know they have disappeared round the back of our house and are knocking the door and sitting in our garden...waiting. I know that sounds like a nightmare that turns totally banal in reality, but if you’re a girl you’ll understand. I think. At any rate, I’ve had quite enough of sexual harassers this year thank you. And then later that night whilst we were watching Matchstick Men, an unearthly wailing rose up through the window from the dark street below, and it went on for two hours, and the words How could you do this to me?! were the only discernible ones amongst the Exorcist-esque screams. We thought at first some ass was just dumping his girlfriend in the street and she was taking it rather badly, but then it sounded like she was giving birth to a rhinoceros. Eventually the police showed up—one car, one van, no sirens—and after two hours of disembodied torch light bobbing about the golf course, she was coaxed from the shadows and brought to the road where she had several mental breakdowns in the foetal position until her husband dragged her into an embrace and into the ambulance and crazy was driven silently away. No signs were left. Cue the X-files theme music.


All this dramarama resulted in us getting absolutely no sleep the entire holiday. Okay, that’s a lie. But what we did get was precious little and turned us into vampires. One morning I woke up and said “High-five for being alive” and I was quite serious. Death was bloody everywhere, from the top of the Law with the guardian angel/murderer and the Wizard of Oz wind, to the roof verandas devoid of railings and offering a three-story drop onto a parquet brick driveway. I wasn’t this tired even when I came back from Australia, and that was a looong trip. Anyway, all in all, great holiday, if you can call it that. Best quotes; “Can I ask you an honest question? What would it have been like if you were wearing flip-flops?” and “Life’s short” “Short and shit”.






So now I’m back home and I’m going to the doctors and then hopefully to therapy and a happy ending! I’m a nut, it’s great. People seem to be saying this to me a lot; "...Rosie...what did you mean the other day when you said you were scared of what you might do if you were left alone?" Summer’s kicking in now and I have a few resolutions;


- Read all of these books (plus Sisterhood Everlasting, out on June 14th :D!) and review each of them to keep my brain’s analytical side exercised

- Get a job


- Learn to drive


- Finish writing the Extended Short Story and send it off to agents and then wait with bated breath for the inevitable rejection letters


- Put on at least four pounds and get my BMI out of the underweight category. Hello Dominos!


- Quit biting my lips


- Be happy!






Okay, I was totally going to end with that last one kind of fulfilled—especially because of the breaking news that I just found out I got a B in philosophy thanks to everyone’s praying to trees and gods and LSD apparently, and so I will get into second year uni and not become a bum—but I just made a silly mistake and then saw a spider crawl across my desk seven minutes after said silly mistake so that’s out the window!




Still, I went out on a limb last night and Suzy just text me out of the blue to meet up because we are becoming a pair of old women and I have Coke and friends and things can only get better right :)?

Woy Woy Bay, Australia, October 2009.



Happy June :)!

The Coke Diaries, Day 4;

No, not the 80's version of sherbet, not the stuff that dissolves your nose, not the stuff that Kathryn Merteuil stashes in her crucifix and affectionately dubs 'God'. No no. I am not that glam. I mean Coca-Cola, the great liquid molasses, rotting our insides since 1886 (or thereabouts; Wikipedia ain't very clear on the matter). The foremost Santa sponsor, keeping him awake and wired right through the busiest night of the year. Great with rum, terrible with Tia Maria. The astringent agent we use to clean our grotty coppers with, and the favoured antagonist of dentists' oral ghost stories. The stuff that went one step beyond its contemporaries and did a little dance with vanilla. The stuff that beats Pepsi, hands-down, every time. And the stuff I am, sadly, pathetically, regrettably, dependent on.

I have no idea how this anomaly came about, and it is a sad state of affairs that it has moved beyond the point of being an addiction, as it no longer delivers the same...hit? anymore, and has become rather more of a quotidian habit. A part of my daily routine, if you will. Like brushing my teeth, or popping the old medication down the hatch, or chowing down on a bowl of honey Cheerios & soya milk with a soup spoon. Except this habit is detrimental, not only to my health, but, as I have discovered, to my mental wellbeing!

Yes. Apparently I feel okay not drinking Coke if I have a stock of it in the house. Sublime, in fact. I can resist it for days and days and days, knowing it is there if I need it. Key phrase; if I need it. So, clearly, the Coke functions as some kind of substitutional comfort. Bad day? Straight for the Coke. Good day? Why not celebrate with a good old glass of Coke! Anticipating a bad day? Have some Coke! (And usually too many paracetamol, but we'll let that slide for now.) However, when there is no Coke in my immediate vicinity, I tend to get very...antsy. And fidgety. And darty-eyed. And I urgently desire its presence. I will spare you the unsavoury details of how far I have been known to go for the procurement of Coke, because quite frankly, it's humiliating. I mean, I couldn't be addicted to something cool like...stamps, could I? NO.

It has gotten to the point where I've had 27 empty cans stowed in the drawer under my bed (!). You should hear the noise I made emptying them into the recycle bin out back—like a goddamn monster truck rally. 

Anyway, I have inadvertently begun the rehabilitation process. During my weekly romp around Tesco the other Sunday, I rediscovered the magic of Volvic flavoured water. If someone says it's just as bad for you as Coke, as Meejin already so kindly has, I will punch you. THAT IS NOT THE POINT. However, a single one-point-five litre bottle was not enough to last me seven days, so on the most recent Sunday, whilst in said establishment once again, I took full advantage of the three-for-two-fifty special offer and filled the trolley with flavoured H2O. (At the checkout, my father quipped in front of the nice-looking checkout assistant that you can actually now get water out of the tap at home—for free!!! Really, Dad? Cheers for the wisdom.) I also surrendered to temptation and furtively snuck in a two litre bottle of the good stuff.

And for some strange reason, I did not open it. Not when I got home. Not for the whole of that day. Or the next. Or the next. Or, indeed, today.

At first I didn't realise I was detoxing myself, but last night I realised when I felt the premonition of what can only be the dreaded withdrawal symptoms, and my suspicions were confirmed this afternoon when I found myself in a state of turmoil over whether to open the bottle or not. I wanted some. I really did. But I also wanted to wait until after exams are finished next Friday to open it, as a kind of challenge to myself, as a reward, as a celebration, and because I find asceticism extremely fun. 

I deferred my dilemma to the mother, who has been in a paralysing state of indecision all day as well, on account of the lime green she picked for the living room walls being too lime green. (Is that even possible?!) And she said, for the sake of my exams and being calm during them, I should allow myself one glass.

"But don't you know that if I open the bottle now I'll have to consume the whole damn thing within three days or it will go flat?!" *pulls face like Munch's The Scream at this insufferable circumstance*

"What? That's crap. They say that about wine too, and it's complete crap."

"But we're not talking about WINE here, Mother; we are talking about COKE! It goes flat! It loses its fizz!" *goes quiet* "The fizz is the best part :(. AND I SHOULD KNOW; I'VE DONE SCIENTIFIC EXPERIMENTS!"

‘Scientific’ might be stretching it a bit far, but I have conducted experiments concerning temperature ratio and fizziness.

In the end I decided to have a tube of sherbet and endure it hour by hour. Mitigation is where it's at. Baby steps, Bob, baby steps. I came into my room and got distracted by the Jurassic Park trilogy making-of specials which I am watching in reverse for some reason, and then latterly by Philosophy revision, which totally spoke to ma soul, man. Cause like, Socrates was all "There are three parts of the soul; the part that seeks knowledge, the spirited part, and the part which desires. The spirited part is subordinate to the rational, and together they govern the desires." Hello, me! Smart guy, that Socrates, I’m telling you. He’s onta somethin’. And then somewhere along the line I guess I thought blogging about my woes might ameliorate the stress. So far, so good!

But you know what's ironic about all of this? Usually at this point I'd turn to Coke.

Oh well!

End of Day 4.