Chicken Soup; Tidy Home, Tidy Mind; Man Up.

Woke up hideously early in the morning; read for a while, then tidied the kitchen until it gleamed. Sadly we don’t own a mop or a broom so shoes are still de rigeur, and there’s no recycling or glass bins yet so there are bottles, boxes and assorted plastic items in a heap by the back door, mixed in with pegs and shopping bags. But it’s not unhygienic, and it’s not impossible to work in, and that’s something.

Now I’m going to tidy my room and it’s going to be beautiful. Not a wire or a greying pair of knickers drying over a drawer handle to be seen, promise. There will be a box of things to go home, and space for a load of new things to come up. Then I’m going to fill in a few more forms, and I’m going to go to the post, and I’m going to go into town, and I’m going to buy a finally-I-got-my-loan treat for under a tenner (I’m thinking new knickers, always fun), and I’m going to get on a train and listen to something mellow and knit. Then I’m going to get off the train and have a wonderful weekend.

You see, I’ve decided that the best way to be OK is to make myself be OK. I am pretty and worthwhile and I can do the washing up, see? I am intelligent and interesting and I can break hearts if I want to. I can impress parents, sometimes. I can befriend random strangers at pubs and parties and on buses. I can knit. I am going to garden things. I go to lectures and I read books and I live and I’m trying to get a job. And the people in my life are there because they want to be, and because I want them to be, because if they didn’t want to be, they wouldn’t be. That is how the world works.

The doctor prescribed me a book.

Some Fucker Turned Up With No Legs!

I saw the film on Tuesday; don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it.

I thought it was going to be like The Notebook, and it was. But I really hoped that it would be more like High Fidelity or something. Reading the book the soundtrack could have been amazing, all this fantastic edgy 90s music, punk and grunge and rock and Iggy Pop and The Doors and all sorts. They’re referred to constantly in the book itself, aren’t they? That and some beautiful Lieder and string quartets and some seriously powerful classical music, rather than the insipid gushy violins and piano score that the film got instead. And there are all these scenes in dodgy bars, and drugs and alcohol and Henry, in the book, can be something of a twat. And Clare’s family are so much more complicated than the happy Republican front they present. There are so many threads in the book which were completely left out, I felt, until all that was left was the actual love story which in some ways is almost the least interesting aspect of the book, despite being to the reader, of course, the most important. All that stuff with Henry’s ex-girlfriend, Ingrid, that could have been interesting.

Furthermore the actual characterisation of Henry and Clare in the film is so much more shallow than in the book. They could have been far more interesting in the film without changing too much but Henry is Mr Perfect, St Boyfriend, and Clare is so utterly pathetic. There is nothing more to her in the film than ‘I am pretty, I love you, and I want a baby *stricken look*’. In fact, the reason the book was so good was that all the characters were believably flawed and the film just lost all that character and spark and it turned into yet another weepy love story. I was hoping to see more of Gomez and Charisse, too, they were brilliant characters in the book.

Anyway, like I say, I enjoyed it, and it made me cry, as it should have done, at all the right moments. I also love that last scene with Clare as an old woman and I was sad to see that missing; the ending of the film, I thought, was a bit flat. And why change the school trip from a gallery to a zoo, really? And Henry’s hypothermia – I swear it was more serious in the book.

It was good, yes, but it honestly didn’t in any way match up to the book, which I’m going to have to re-read now so that I’m not stuck forever thinking of Henry as the positively eggy Eric Bana, or Clare as feline, dippy, shallow Rachel McAdams.

I Am A Twenty-Something Girl Living In The Noughties…

…of course I think I’m fat. Pretty much the whole world is geared towards making me feel fat, towards assuming that I already am or at least feel fat, and towards helping me feel more insecure about whether or not I am fat.

I know I’ve ranted about this one before but it still really annoys me, and talking to P last night I realised I am being completely illogical about all of this, so I think it’s worth reiterating. It starts with the Disney Princesses and other childhood heroines – beautiful and slim and elegant in long floaty dresses, and you could never attain such beauty, of course. Then you get a bit older and you start to read magazines aimed at pre-teen girls and I promise, promise, promise you there are diet tips and exercise fads and things in there marketed directly at twelve-year-olds; you’re already being shown ‘fashion to flatter all figures’, but meanwhile school is doing its best to put you off getting exercise at all ever because for crying out loud you’re twelve years old, your hands and feet are huge and where the hell did those thighs come from and you’re incredibly aware of your body and you’re expected to wear slimy white really short shorts? Hell no. And meanwhile over in the centre of the gym the Dance Set are gyrating around chairs with impeccable hair and make-up and not an ounce of fat on them except for the fact that at age twelve they already have perfectly perky, round, grown-up boobs (or perhaps they’ve already mastered the art of bra-shopping, something which takes the rest of us about a decade, but never mind).

You’re insecure and completely exaggeratedly aware of every last part of your body and yet you grow up and it becomes public property because the first thing anyone thinks about a girl, or says to a third party about a given girl, is almost certain to be some kind of comment on her looks or the way she physically presents herself or dresses, or some kind of veiled criticism of the same – ‘oh, it’s such a shame, she’s such a lovely person’ (I’m sure you can guess what it is that is the ’shame’ here).

And you’re growing up and changing and you’re not cute any more, you’re not the Daddy’s little girl you used to be, and so your parents will also feel that they have free rein, to comment on your figure, and suddenly on the one side you’ve got any well-meaning parent going ‘are you sure you should be eating that’ whenever you’re offered seconds or pudding or something, and on the other side you’ve got magazines and telly and newspapers and books and things, a whole industry based around making you infeasibly aware of all your slight imperfections, diets, regimes, products, throwing words in that you hadn’t even worried about before – ‘bingo wings’, ‘cellulite’, ‘orange peel’.

Every single page in any given magazine will say something about your figure – and will assume, because they’re aimed at a specific demographic, that you are dieting, that you want to diet, that you’re slightly overweight – and because the entire world, without even knowing who you are or of your existence, assumes you’re fat because you’re a woman, or at least that you think you’re fat, and because everyone else thinks you’re fat, you think you’re fat, because of course all your friends also think they’re fat, and if they think they’re fat, then you must be fat too because look how thin they all are, so-and-so has a far flatter belly than yours but then her thighs are gigantic, but then so-and-so has stick-thin legs but huge boobs, or whatever – and theyr’e not necessarily thinner or fatter than you they’re just different but suddenly you’re in competition with every woman you know.

And if you’re in the slightest bit insecure all of the above will trap you from the age of about twelve and you will think that just because your belly isn’t perfectly flat, or your arms perfectly toned, that your body isn’t fit to be seen in public, so you’ll cover up with leggings and cardigans and tops that ’skim over all those unsightly curves’ just like the magazines say.

So yes. I think I am fat. I think this because I have been told to think I am fat by every influence on my appearance since I was old enough to care. I first looked at my thighs and thought they were horribly fat when I was eight. And I’m not stuck up or obsessed with my appearance, I am an average, slightly geeky girl, who dressed in blues and sludge greys and browns until she was about fifteen, and has only really learned to enjoy clothes in the last couple of years.

And, furthermore, I am not fat. I’m not toned, because I don’t get enough exercise. But I wear clothes that are usually size 8-10, and since when has a UK 8-10 been fat on a 5′7″ girl?

And what is more, just to point this out, men do not get this kind of scrutiny, they really don’t. There is not the same media obsession with which male celebrities are fat or thin, toned or not, what they eat, how they exercise, and so on. Media aimed at men talks about computers, cars and girls, and not, as a rule, about buying shirts that ‘hide that beer belly’ or trousers that ‘flatter that post-Christmas silhouette’.

I am normal, thank you. I really don’t get how or why a whole huge facet of media and entertainment and bookselling and so on is actually based around cynically making money out of the not inconsiderable insecurities of half the bloody population. And if you’re going to do that to us women then damn well torture all the blokes with their imperfections as well, because this just isn’t fair. I am twenty years old, I’m probably about as pretty as I’ll ever be, and I would actually quite like to enjoy it while I can. As should all of you.

Sorry I Haven’t Been Around So Much Of Late

Here, have some news.

I am less angry than I was because it’s nobody’s fault.

My birthday was lovely – the meal out, with P and family and W, the weekend which followed (another dinner, P paid, cue much guilt), a great evening at P’s with probably too much wine and lots of wonderful people and a midnight birthday kiss and a great fun journey home and lots of lovely presents (new handbag! really shouldn’t be that exciting. And lots of books). Then an evening spent outside with wine and playing backgammon by candlelight with my parents and really wanting a cigarette not because I was stressed (for once – usually that’s a sure-fire trigger but at last it’s losing it’s power to make me want nicotine…) but because it would have been lovely just to have a cigarette in just exactly that chilled kind of environment. Never mind. I didn’t succumb.

Plans, for parties and pub quizzes and such, long conversations in the middle of the night, train tickets, festival tickets, money, I think I may actually pass these exams. Ice-cream, chocolate. Some bad days, some good days, gawp all you like, you know where.

And I discovered the tool on the new post editor where you can schedule when an entry is to be published, which I wish I’d already known about, because now I can set it to slowly publish all my draft entries. Not that many of them are all that exciting, but it gets them out of the way, y’know?

And I’m reading the Sandman comics, because I am the most awful geek, and really enjoying them, so there. And if you get the chance get hold of Bad Science because it is a great book, but I may have said this already. I’ll put a link to Ben Goldacre’s blog (he wot wrote Bad Science) in my Aspirations and Inspirations blogroll. Enjoy.

The Red Gilt Pages Were Only The Start

I’ve finished Twilight now; and so here are my thoughts. In my previous post I said:

My other (massively patronising) theory is this: kids younger than me, who were introduced to the idea of reading and enjoying actual books through Harry Potter, will then have progressed on to these books. From Twilight, perhaps they’ll move onto adult real literature with ideas and themes they can really get their teeth into and learn to actually love reading.

Well, yes, on one hand. On the other, this book made me very angry, from my usual feminist-rant perspective. This book portrays an idealistic relationship between Edward and Bella in which they never more than kiss – and in which whenever they do kiss, he jumps back if she doesn’t stay completely stock still. Let me put that more plainly – the moment she starts to get really into the kiss, starts to exhibit any form of passion, he steps back. The way she tightens her hands round his back and clenches her fists in his hair is portrayed as strange, un-womanly, and wrong, rather than an unthinking expression of her sexuality and a perfectly natural response to a good kiss with the man she supposedly loves. And therefore she is supposed in her own mind as well as his, and for no particularly I-am-kissing-a-vampire-this-is-probably-dangerous reasons that I can think of or that are ever explained, she is supposed to stay still and not really respond in anyway, like a doll or a child or the perfect victorian woman.

Furthermore, it seems to me that the further into the book one gets, the more Bella relinquishes any power she may have had to Edward. He makes all the decisions, and everyone is surprised when Bella has an idea worth the mention. He is her protector, her stalker (in the name of furthering his cause of protecting her), he looks out for her, and with all his special vampirey powers they are in no way equal – there is nothing Bella can do that Edward can’t do better, it seems.

This book is the worst kind of wish-fulfilment story in many ways – Edward is the perfect hero, and Bella is the perfect damsel-in-distress – as Lucy Mangan says she is a “bloodless cipher”, weak, ordinary, although apparently more beautiful than she herself realises, and subordinate. It comes as no surprise that Stephanie Meyer is a Mormon. Bella spends the entire book sacrificing things and slowly fading away into the background – starting by taking on all the housework from her father, ending by wishing to still her own pulse so that Edward will not be tempted by it to do any more than kiss her and thus risk getting all hot under the collar and either biting or sleeping with her – entirely taking all responsibility for how Edward feels and acts onto herself in the ultimate act of self-sacrifice; and finally, begging Edward to turn her into a vampire because that would make it possible for her to stay with him forever. Of course the author doesn’t let this happen because then she would no longer be a seventeen-year-old girl, she’d be an ‘old one’ and there would be no reason from then on in why she couldn’t sleep with Edward, or rather, any reason to hold off from doing so indefinitely, and in the moral compass of this novel that would be indescribably bad.

In the defence of the novel, to me this was a reasonably entertaining read. Objectionable in many ways, but with the suspension of disbelief comes the suspension of one’s normal moral compass so that one can empathise with the characters at hand. However it is not a novel I would feel happy about handing over to impressionable teenage girls, who might not see all the millions of flaws in Edward and Bella’s anachronistic, imbalanced relationship, who might put it on a pedestal for themselves to aim at, thus longing after a damaging, emasculating relationship with what what Lucy Mangan not exaggeratedly calls a ‘proto-rapist’. Edward is a gentleman in the most damaging sense of the word. Bella is utterly spineless. If I had read this when I was younger and more impressionable god knows what I would have been looking for in a potential boyfriend but it certainly wouldn’t have been the partnership of equals I’ve otherwise always wanted. Quite honestly, in the wrong hands, I think this book could do some damage.

I’ve rambled on for quite long enough. What do you think? Am I as usual being a bit too mad about this?

I Bowed To The Pressure

Yes, I bowed to the pressure, I did, I’m sorry, I’m a terrible person, how will you ever forgive me. Is that enough grovelling now? I bought Twilight, is what I did. I figured that if the entire female population of the Western world, bar literature students, is raving about this book, there must be a reason, yes?

It’s not actually too badly written. The plot is so far serious wish-fulfilment – the hero is beautiful, troubled, enigmatic, sarcastic, all the things a young girl could wish for in a man; and the heroine is a normal, average girl, of little self-esteem and in many ways if not all your average teenager, perfectly fitting in with and cold-reading exactly (as if that was a difficult thing to do) how it feels to be in school. So yes, wish fulfilment, and vampires. Personally I am (guiltily) enjoying it. What it does, it does well, and I know it’s not new or clever or interesting, doesn’t tell me any more about human nature or make me think in any way, but I’m enjoying it, so there.

I just thought I ought to see what all the fuss was about for myself before dissing it utterly. The red gilting on the page-edges is possibly a step too far, though…! My other (massively patronising) theory is this: kids younger than me, who were introduced to the idea of reading and enjoying actual books through Harry Potter, will then have progressed on to these books. From Twilight, perhaps they’ll move onto adult real literature with ideas and themes they can really get their teeth into and learn to actually love reading. I know this is hugely patronising, but for the sake of the book industry and because reading good things is good for you, I’ll patronise whoever I like: I think books like this are potentially A Good Thing if they have the effect of making people read because it’s enjoyable, so that people realise there is more to books than dissecting in tedious detail Shakespeare plays or Wide Sargasso Sea or Lord of the Flies. Not that those aren’t all good books – I personally love them, but I didn’t love studying them and I’m not alone, and it’s a shame that people are put off reading because they associate reading with the endless discussions of theme, context, gender roles, and so on, all of which is made into this utterly formulaic tedium by the nature of the curriculum we’re made to follow; rather than associating reading with enjoyment and pleasure and total involvement in the book in front of them, preferably accompanied by a cat, a comfy chair, and a cup of coffee.

I’ll let you know what I think when I finish the book, meanwhile, as to whether it is actually any good. And I’m sorry that in this entry my grammar was shot completely. Heaven knows why I’m still awake.

Good Morning, All!

I woke up today at 6.30. Which is great. I am now working, or rather, I am just about to be, but I have hours in hand, because my exam isn’t until half past four. The fact that I have to learn how to do a silly number of Clever Statistical Things before then is neither here nor there.

To be fair, to wake up this early, I had to go to bed at half past eight, although I actually lay down a while later, having curled up with a book for a while, before putting my earplugs in and wearing an eyemask so that I could pretend it wasn’t so surreally early. I needed the sleep. And I didn’t sleep terribly well, despite the sleeping pill I took. I woke up every few hours throughout the night and had a whole host of odd dreams and was aware of times like eleven, 1am, 3 and 4am, and even 5.30, but then I probably got more sleep than I have in a while, in small doses, and feel oddly refreshed.

And there is something lovely about being awake this early. It’s cold and silent and I am the only person in the whole world who is awake right now. I know that’s not really true, but within the cushioned environs of the student village, it feels that way. I am almost certainly the only person awake in my flat, and it’s just me and the woodpigeons. I doubt most other people will wake until gone ten unless they have exams, although I’m going to go and get A a cup of tea in a minute because he too needs to start waking before noon.

And hopefully this will give me enough hours of Being Awake that I will then be tired by about ten tonight and get back into a decent sleep cycle. One can only hope.

Meanwhile, I’d better get back to work. There’s a lot of work to do, after all.

And incidentally, yesterday’s exam went really well. I’m fairly certain, fingers crossed, of a pass, and I still feel that now so it can’t have been too bad. I found some of the notes I made in lectures for that module, whilst looking for my lecture notes on this one, and everything I saw I thought, ‘yes! I put that as my answer! I was right!’, which is a nice feeling. Lets hope. Another incidental – A wrote another poem that is at least ostensibly about me, but it is, he judges, good enough to keep of the internet in the hopes that it becomes published somewhere. I feel all musey and inspirational which is ironic because the poem features me, or someone like me, being a pretty bad role model….

Right. Work time. Hopefully I’ll be up similarly early tomorrow in which case I’ll probably post again, very jubilantly, about nothing in particular. Perhaps I’ll even go out for a run while it’s still cool – but not today. Today I have to work, I am caffeinated to the max, and raring to go.

And P.S. I don’t know if you’ve seen the NSPCC’s latest banner ad – sadly I have no way of linking to it – but it features a baby, Sam, lying on a mattress of some kind, and waving your mouse over the ad spins a mobile, and he laughs and giggles and kicks his feet in absolute delight. He’s a beautiful baby and it’s such a sweet ad, and it really tugs at my heartstrings and brings a lump to my throat. But right now I am too poor to be able to give money to the NSPCC on a regular basis and I feel incredibly guilty about that. I’m going to see if I can give a one-off donation.

Salt

I am going shopping again. And so should you be. There is decent poetry to be bought, and it is to be bought now, because Salt are in trouble.

Watch their Just One Book campaign, browse their shop, and also, according to A, entering this code: G3SRT453 – will save you money at the same time. I believe it’s a third off?

A put me on to this one, and you can read his blog here. Yes, A has started a blog. Exciting, no?

Written On The Body

This is the title of a book by Jeanette Winterson. I can’t say much about it, but narrated by the protagonist who remains nameless and even, up to a point, genderless, and without detail – we aren’t told much about them at all, but that’s almost exactly the point – and the love of their life, and all the stuff around that. It is, essentially, a book about love, and in that sense it reads almost more like a poem in parts. It is stunning and heartbreaking and I loved it, and M recommended to me and I can entirely see why this is her favourite book. Read it. A didn’t like it as much as I did, but either way, we would all recommend it. Definitely worth the read. That and the girl in the book is entirely beautiful.

An Unexpected Genius

The book in question being Allen Carr’s Easy Way To Stop Smoking. It works, and I’m going to try and precis it a bit in order to explain why it works.

We’ve all been told, ‘oh, you’ll get cancer, you’ll die young, it’ll be horrible, if it’s not cancer it’ll be emphysema, do you have any idea what you’re doing to your lungs?’, and you can say that to a smoker until you’re blue in the face. However much of an impact it has, however much it scares you, however much the person saying that to you cares about you, makes you cry, throw up, whatever, it almost certainly won’t stop you. My response was, internally at least, ‘look, if my quality of life decreases that much I’m going to kill myself anyway so I don’t have to go through the pain. I’m not scared of death, I’m just scared of pain’. Showing me pictures of the things I’m doing to my lungs and throat, of someone else’s yellow hands, moustache or teeth, of children blowing out smoke or a cigarette dripping with cholesterol aren’t going to stop me either for the same reasons. Scare tactics do not work. Remember that, everyone. Don’t give someone the lecture because you think they need to stop smoking, you’re honestly not going to change their mind any further than from ‘I like smoking, I’ll quit in a few years’ to ‘I like smoking, but I probably ought to try quitting soon’.

No, Allen Carr says, over and over again, that it tastes horrible, that you can feel your lungs constricting, it makes you dizzy, you hate the way you smell after you’ve had a cigarette, and it doesn’t actually make you feel any better. He points out that nicotine isn’t that addictive: you can smoke a hundred a day, feeling that you ‘need’ to light up the next from the one that preceded it, but you can sleep through the nights easily, so you don’t need that nicotine. It doesn’t relax you, or if it does, only because it satisfies your mild need for nicotine for a couple of seconds – it’s like wearing a tight pair of shoes in order to get the sense of relief you get from taking them off after a few hours. Why not just wear sensible shoes? Or in this case, not smoke. He points out that you only think you’re addicted, and you don’t actually get any pleasure from smoking.

You’re allowed to carry on smoking while you read his book, and he even advises that you do. Today I found out why. I had one, and the moment I breathed in the smoke I felt positively ill. It was horrible, and I felt no better, and I gave myself a headache. The second made me feel physically sick.

Basically all I’m saying is, remember this. It’s a good book and a good method and I can honestly see why it’s the only one to be this successful – over 90% of people who quit through the Easyway method never pick up another fag in their lives, whereas people who try Nicorette patches and gum or who quit through willpower alone, are pretty likely to just pick it up again.

Carr proves that you don’t need willpower. He makes you actively not want to smoke and find the whole experience pretty disgusting. And it’s odd that more people don’t believe him – that, say, the NHS don’t endorse and advertise his book and his clinics – because it’s so simple, so cheap, and almost magical. But to believe me you’d have to be a smoker, and try it yourself, because it sounds fantastical and against all logic – that by talking about hte minor evils of how bad it smells and how it’s boring and tastes foul and gives you a headache, you can make someone quit, but by telling them that actually, you are going to have to amputate their legs just doesn’t work.