Thursday, September 28, 2006

Extra Hot Rant

By bitingmylip

I was in Starbucks today and the girl in front of me asked for her coffee “extra hot.”

What a ridiculous request. What a waste of time and life. Am I wrong? I mean, who asks that? “Please can you make my drink so boiling hot it burns the roof of my mouth, Mr you’re-so-much-less-than-me-because-you-work-in-a-coffee-shop, you see, I don’t trust that you won’t serve me cold or lukewarm coffee so I am asking you to heat it up to boiling and then reheat it because, let’s face it, that’s what extra hot is: hotter than boiling. So come on, give it to me boiling, Mr.”

She even stood at the coffee serving bit and watched the girl pouring her coffee out, reminding her as she stood there that she wanted it extra hot. IDIOT.

I couldn’t help hoping she’d spill some of it on herself.

Do you know what else annoys me excessively for no real reason? People at traffic crossings. Why, in the name of God, do some people just STAND there WITHOUT PUSHING THE BUTTON. What is the point of that? OK so the traffic might clear before the green man appears and you might be able to make a run for it but still, who does it harm to press the button while you wait and maybe speed up everyone else’s lives a tad? These people are almost, but not quite, as annoying as the people who come up behind me at traffic crossings and PRESS THE BUTTON WHEN I’VE ALREADY PRESSED IT. Am I standing here for the good of my health, idiots? I am not one of those stupid not-pressing-the-button fools, I am waiting to cross the road, so I pressed the button myself when I came and stood here five minutes before you. So don’t march up to it when you can see it’s already been pressed and hold your finger down on it for ages as if that will speed up the appearance of the green man or, even worse, press it repeatedly, four or five times, because THAT is SURE to make crossing the road happen quicker for us all. Just LEAVE it because it has ALREADY BEEN PRESSED.

Wow, I am one grumpy young woman.

Please, please, add your own annoyances to this rant. Honestly, it will make you feel better. Now I am going for a cup of extra hot tea to calm myself down.

Tuesday, September 26, 2006

How Did I Get Here?

by bitingmylip

When I wake up in the morning I give myself a few minutes to focus.

If I don’t recognise the room I’m in, I close my eyes and breathe in ten breaths. Then I open my eyes and look to my right. I always sleep on the right side of the bed. If I sleep on the left side of the bed I have to do everything twice. So if I look to my right and there is someone there it means I have slept on the wrong side of the bed so I have to close my eyes again and breathe in twenty breaths and then do everything the wrong way round. But it is very rare that I sleep on the left side of the bed. No matter who I am with.

If I am in a room I don’t recognise and I am sleeping on the right side of the bed I will look to my right and if there is a dressing table there, I will count the amount of items on top of the table. If there are not many items on the table I will count them twice. If there is no dressing table I will just look at the wall and count ten breaths.

Then I will look up at the ceiling again and try and remember how I got there. If I don’t remember after I have taken twenty breaths I will look to my left. If the person sleeping there is facing me I will usually remember him. If I don’t I will turn my back to him and count ten breaths. Sometimes if they are awake and see me looking they will say something but I can’t reply till I have counted ten breaths. After ten breaths I will turn and face him again.

If he has his back to me when I turn to the left, I will not always recognise him. Then I will look up at the ceiling and count twenty breaths. Then I will turn to my left again and pat him on his back until he turns around.

If he turns round and I don’t recognise him I will close my eyes and breathe as many breaths as I can before he says anything. I try to count ten breaths but sometimes they say something and I have to open my eyes.

Usually I recognise them. But if I do not know them at all and I still do not know where I am I count as many breaths as I can and then I make my face go blank and complain of my hangover until he says something that gives away where we were the night before. Then I will smile and ask for a glass of water. I always smile. Even if I do not think I meant to wake up in his room I will smile. Even if he is aggressive and rude I will smile.

If I wake up and I do recognise the room I am in, I only have to count ten breaths while facing the ceiling. If I am in my own room I will get up out of the right side of the bed and fetch a glass of water. There are six items on top of my dressing table in the morning: an alarm clock, a glass, my watch, a scented candle, a photograph, and the sleep mist that I spray on my pillow. When I put my watch on to wear in the day I move the items around to hide the space where the watch was so there are only five items visible but it doesn’t look like there is something missing.

Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Leipzig and the man in the S&M pants.

By itchingmyknee

I like Leipzig. It’s sort of a student-cum-retirement town in east Germany. It took us two days to actually see anyone working. These happened to be office-workers in the building opposite our hostel. Male office workers. We caught them peeking at us while changing one morning.

That was sort of a theme during the holiday, this sort of voyeurism. We were a group of four girls. Laughing, foreign, pretty, we’re usually a target for unwanted male attention. But this time things were different; people just stared.
We’re all different personality types. One will enjoy a chat and a flirt, while another will spurn even the most innocent advances. We are a curious mix, but we were all baffled by this lack of communication.

We went to watch a blues band, headed by the wonderful Stan the Man. A Scottish emigrant living in Prague. Folks there stared too. Some looked on with interest. But that was it. They stared, and sat nearby, but not a word was spoken. No chat up lines, no drinks sent.

Things became clearer when we took a trip out to a swimming lake in the suburbs. We took a dip in the freezing water, and sunbathed for a while. A German man, dressed in jeans and a shirt, wandered down the beach, spied us and parked himself a small distance away. He then began to strip off to reveal the most revolting pair of fishnet pants your imagination could conjure. They were so foul that I surreptitiously took a photograph for all the non-believers back home. You could see everything, and it was nothing you’d ever want to see. The man was middle-aged, maybe a little older, and he spent the next half an hour sitting in the sand and watching us, occasionally narrowing the distance by passing our group so we were separated from his aged flesh by a mere couple of feet. The most unnerving of his actions was that he played with himself constantly. He seemed to be aware of his shortcoming in that area (pardon the pun) and was trying to bolster his confidence by walking around with a semi.

The whole episode held a sort of gross fascination. Was this man the missing link? Did his behaviour expose something of the German attitude to courting? You lay your cards on the table, place yourself in an advantageous position, but keep your distance. It is only after a succession of small approaches from each side that contact would be made. Unfortunately for fishnet man, he was quite revolting. But as lessons in cultural studies go, he was certainly a memorable teacher.

Monday, September 18, 2006

How Not To Run In A Race

By bitingmylip

Run full tilt, like a child would.

Not upright, not jogging, not breathing steadily and calmly, not pacing yourself – but full on, lose-your-breath, gasp for air, arms wide, legs akimbo, no direction, running.

Run as if you are racing your shadow.

Run as if you can escape all the small, mundane details of life, as if you can outrun your thoughts.

Run in a line, run in a circle, run straight, run crooked, run across fields, run past people, run there and run back.

Run into something, head first, no thought of consequences.

Run away from something, not thinking about what you are leaving behind, not dwelling on anything past.

Abandon decorum, pelting it across a field, stepping in mud and snapping twigs and not caring, eyes wide open, mouth agape, laughter snatched by the wind.

Leap hedges, scramble over fences, stumbling and tripping and pulling yourself back up with knees bloodied and muddied and ornamented with blades of grass.

No looking back, eyes ahead, keep going, throat sore, breath rasping, sweat dripping, uninhibited, unrestrained, no finish line, no trophy, no number pinned to your back.

Joyous, panting, flushed, head first, blood pumping, heart racing, gasping gasping gasping, running till your feet give out, exhausted, collapsing, grinning.

Run.

Monday, September 11, 2006

Billy, The One-Legged Gangster

By itchingmyknee

Everyone laughed at Billy when he told them he was a gangster. They would take one look at his sad stump and NHS-issue crutch and dismiss him as a deluded cripple. But Billy was a gangster. And not only that, he was a damn good one. He was a product of Thatcherite economics; raised in the 80’s and endowed with a vicious streak that comes of being deprived of free milk during your formative years. He had lost his leg in a factory accident and used the compensation to start up his business. It was a cleaning business, of sorts. Namely, he cleaned up other people’s dirty work.
Billy had a weak spot. Girls. He would always tell them he was a gangster, a powerful mover in the upper echelons. They never believed him. Billy was weary of dressing too fancy. The taxman might start poking his nose in if word got round that little Billy was dripping in gold and sporting tailor-made suits from Saville Row. So he kept a low profile, and a wedge of red-backs in his back pocket. It was only the girls who hung around long enough to see this wad that ever deigned believe he was more than he seemed. Some of them pretended to be interested. Just long enough to wheedle a few G&Ts out of the besotted boy, but they were always off at the last orders. Tottering home to their boyfriends or Bridget Jones soundtracks and shuddering at the thought of Billy’s clammy hands travelling up their (thank the Lord we’ve still got them) pretty pins.

The closest Billy had ever come to a relationship was just after the accident. He met a girl called Lavinia over the internet, who had a fetish for amputation. She made him wear strap on leg and would masturbate while pretending to saw it off. She left him for a man with no arms or legs. Billy still saw her in chat-rooms sometimes, and she would resignedly talk dirty to him while he relieved himself. Billy knew it was because she felt guilty. Because she had shattered what remained of his self-confidence.

One day he decided to try that preserve of kooks and freaks, the lonely hearts column. He wrote, “One-legged gangster looking for laughs and lots of sex with like-minded sexpot.” He got three replies. He met the first, Elaine from Tonbridge, for drinks on a Wednesday night. She was no sexpot, she was obese and had more facial hair than he did. He shagged her anyway, but threw up afterwards and couldn’t even look up from the toilet bowl and she thundered, weeping, into the night. The second was a transsexual from Margate. She was very sweet, but decided that Billy simply wouldn’t fit in with her Burlesque crowd. But she bought all the drinks, and treated Billy to a rendition of “You’re The One That I Want” from Grease. The third was the most promising. Her name was Castor, and she was Portuguese. He husband had lost his leg while fighting in some war or another, but had selfishly died the previous year. Castor was looking for someone to make that same short dent in the bed, and to wear her husbands collection of one-legged pyjamas and single shoes.
Billy knew she would do when they met for coffee, and he forgot to pull out his £50 stack. He took her for dinner too, and asked her what she did. She told him she was a cleaner but also worked part-time in a laundrette. As the faint smell of fabric conditioner and industrial bleach wafted over the table, Billy knew by the tingle in his stump that he had found love. He said, “Castor, sugar. Be my honey bee.” And she replied, “Sweet.”

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Monday Monday

By bitingmylip

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Monday mornings are crap. You’re beginning another week, you’re tired, maybe hungover, the alarm goes off… it’s not pleasant. Few people enjoy Monday mornings, and as a result, few of us are at our sparkling best. I am not my best at 7.15am any day of the week but I tell the following tale so people will know that there is someone out there who is worse at Mondays than they are… read it and decide which chick lit heroine I am turning into. Answers on a postcard please.

So on Sunday, after a particularly heavy Saturday night, one of my flatmates broke the handle on our bathroom door. As in the whole screw that attaches it to the door snapped off and now there is no way of opening it from the inside, although it can still be opened from the outside. Very annoying.

Well, this Monday I got out of bed, got my towel, walked blearily to the bathroom… and promptly forgot about the dead door knob. So I shut the door. And locked myself in.

AAAHHH. After panicking for about 10 minutes because NONE OF MY FLATMATES were in the house (It is really not on that they have all suddenly got boyfriends at the same time…) and I did not have my phone or any way of opening the door I opened the window and shouted into our large (but empty) communal garden something like “Help!! Someone please!” before the nice man downstairs popped his head out of the window. I think I woke him up – thank god he is a drummer and doesn’t have a proper job, else where would I be?

When I told him my dilemma he came out onto the balcony beneath our bathroom. When I said there was no way of him getting into the house to let me out he just replied, “don’t panic,” and, as I was busy panicking, he went back into his flat before returning with some pliers and a ball of string. Then he attached the pliers to the string and threw the string up to me so I could winch up the pliers. What a genius. And the pliers worked, so I got out. The entire debacle probably only took 20 minutes, but it felt like hours as I envisioned spending the entire day in the bathroom with no reading material or food. Still, at least I would have had water and a toilet.

As if this wasn’t a bad enough start to a Monday morning, when I eventually left the house, the kindly neighbour opened his window to call out to me. I thought he was going to ask if I had recovered from my ordeal but no, his exact words were, “Pull your skirt down a bit, love,” said in a loud stage whisper.

Yes that is correct, my skirt was tucked into my knickers. How em-bloody-barassing. I turned extremely red and mumbled some thanks before confessing that I must be turning into some Bridget Jones-alike.

Which I truly think I am. Please help me.

More tea, Vicar?

By itchingmyknee

The art of making a great cup of tea is not something that can be taught. Schools might try in the future, when new government directives dictate that youngsters ought to be taught this valuable skill, as they will probably spend the first few years of employment making it. But like most government initiatives, it won’t work.

First you have to consider individual tastes. Do you like your tea strong or weak, dark or milky, sweet or sugar free? Increasingly there are a host of new options as well: soya, artificially sweet, organic, imported... There is also the age-old question of bag over strainer. Who would think that such a simple beverage could have so many possibilities? And this is Britain. Imagine you lived in China! They say that thousands of years ago when folks from the east and west first learned the art of brewing, they made tea in the Orient; westerners made beer. This is supposedly why the Eastern constitution is less adept at digesting alcohol. The beer guzzlers have had many generations to inure themselves to the poison that is alcohol, while they have not.

I like my tea strong, and quite dark. The colour of a manilla envelope. No sugar – I’m sweet enough already. Or so I like to tell people. Do I want to know how you take yours? So I can agonise over the teabag-squeezing, milk dropping, sugar grain counting to conjure your ideal brew? Not for all the tea in China.

Monday, September 04, 2006

The Infernal Hunger Chapter 3 - The Froglodytes

By itchingmyknee

As with all myths, there lies a grain of truth in the tale of the Froglodytes. It is said that the race was wiped out, but human genes are stronger than anyone had ever imagined. When the great mushroom cloud erupted into the sky, people gasped in amazement at its magnitude. And in the weeks that passed before salvage teams could examine the area, the survivors had crawled from the razed laboratory and secreted themselves in the brush.

These survivors, ruled by instincts foreign to those of man, eked out an existence in the depleted wilds, surviving on the meagre stock of vegetation that the earth could yield. Part amphibian, part human, they were able to breathe underwater and conceal themselves from man. As the generations passed, inbreeding strengthened the race, bringing clarity to the chaotic dichotomy of their minds. They evolved much like the cavemen of their namesake. They took up tools and set about cultivating the land. They used their dung to fertilise the barren ground while the humans burnt theirs for fuel. They supplemented their diet by shedding their skin weekly, and eating the slough. They lacked much of the leg-power of their anuran ancestors, but were able to run and swim with inhuman speed. Their large, bulging eyes were framed by long eyelashes, and their webbed feet and hands sported fragile nails. In a parody of long-forgotten human customs, the chief females of the tribe would grow their nails long as a symbol of their status. The female also secreted poison from glands at the back of her neck. Darts dipped in this venom were used to silence humans who glimpsed the unwary froglodyte, or freshly-hatched pollywog. The poison was not deadly, but affected the motor neurones. The victims would be unable to tell what they had seen and, incapacitated, would soon be eaten under the Oracle’s law.

The female froglodytes are larger than the males, and less mobile. The males are aggressive and sexually frenetic. Due to limited food supplies, most females spawn only once before the womb shuts down. The males continue to mate with the sterile females, and the lesser males who are rejected and unable to mate usually become mentally unstable and are cast out. Out of all the eggs laid, only a few survive. Some do not hatch at all, some are born with mutations and die quickly, while others are born insane and have to be executed.

To Be Continued...


Check out the previous chapters:


  • The Infernal Hunger Chapter 2 - Sylvia

  • The Infernal Hunger
  • Friday, September 01, 2006

    The Singleton's Prayer

    By bitingmylip

    Oh Lord won’t you give me
    Somebody new to love
    To want & hold & cherish
    And to do all of the above
    For me in return – I’m not too fussy
    If he’s tall or short or skinny
    (but please not completely ugly)
    I’d just like someone I like
    To like me just as much
    To love me like I’m perfect
    Somebody I can trust
    And if I’m wanting someone
    Who just doesn’t exist
    Please could you let me know
    And give me someone new to kiss.

    We All Thrive On The Bad Times...

    By itchingmyknee

    We all thrive on the bad times. You are never more resourceful than when you only have £2.00 in your pocket.

    I woke up this morning and began planning my rise to wealth from the depths of poverty, which was actually quite fun. I might get a second job. I could work every hour god sends in the manner of ambitious, driven, down-and-out heroine out of a Hollywood movie. I could sell all my worldly possessions and live like the hippies of bygone eras. I could be semi-nomadic and spurn the trappings of the society that requires me to have money in the first place. (‘semi’, because I know I’ll end up descending on my mother whenever I need a good meal, or a bath.)

    As the day has progressed, these extremes are all looking less attractive however. I don’t really need to get another job, or remove myself from society. I can make £2 stretch to payday with a mixture of ingenuity, begging and the sly manipulation of my feminine charms. I only need to get through another only three weeks…

    Easy.

    Not sure my feminine charms stretch that far though...

    Second job it is then.

    Sign up for my Notify List and get email when I update!

    email:
    powered by
NotifyList.com

    Powered by Blogger