Realistically, there is very little difference between me and Dita Von Teese. Sure, yeah, her hair is darker than mine, but besides that: SOUL SISTERS.
Did you know, I can't listen to this song without imagining I am watching the penultimate scene in an eighties movie set somewhere urban? Maybe Tom Cruise is in it? It's a montage? There's probably driving and rain involved?
I'm not saying this is a movie I've seen, just that I have a very very shallow imagination here by the way.
I don't know 'bout you, but personally I find a quick google image search for Joseph Gordon Levitt cheers me up no end. Feel free to sub in your own dapper chappy if Joe's winsome charms don't float your boat (BUT SERIOUSLY, WHATS WRONG WITH YOU).
"Do you remember the time we had to pretend we were having a party in your house so you could get that fella you fancied up to your house after the pub, so we grabbed Olga and said "Come on, Party!" and we brought him and you were mad at me because twenty minutes after getting home I said I was going to the loo and just went to bed and you were left pretending this was a preplanned party all on your own. Did you ever kiss that guy? He was tanned and was just back from travelling? He fell asleep on your couch and you and Olga drank vodka? Who was that guy?"
No. Literally, nothing. I remember none of this memory of Marie's from approximately six - seven years ago; not the guy, not the night, not the party. I do recall randomly hooking people under my arm to bring them to impromptu parties (I still do this!) and I definitely recall Marie sloping off to go to "the bathroom" at parties and being found curled up in a bed asleep half an hour later. This maneuver is called "doing a Marie on it" for this very reason.
I just rejoined Bebo in an attempt to feverishly dig up photos for a friend's Hen Party and Hey! Guess what! Bebo's still around, first of all. Second of all:
Bebo added those buttons for YOU so YOU could fully empathise with a friend's posting. As long as you wanted to empathise along the lines of "Cool!", "Funny!", "Sorry!", "OMG!" [which is how I want to empathise with everyone who has evidenced activity on Bebo inside the past three years] or "Agree" [What?]. No "FFS" button yet added but watch this space. Bebo has proven itself to be a constant innovator in the past so it can only be a matter of time.
Sometimes, when I'm feeling a little bit lonely but also melodic (not too lonely, just a nice measure for poignancy), I'll listen to Heart of Gold like ten times in a row, sometimes more. I don't even particularly adore Neil Young or anything, just Heart of Gold.
It's commenters are obviously the WORST and a few of it's heavier posts have a tendancy to drift to 1500- 2000 words*, but increasingly I'm enjoying the Awl. Especially for pieces like this which passes a soberly critical eye over fanfiction derived from Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter novels while floating a few interesting comments about the the darker Romance fiction publications and where their writers come from. That was a disgustingly long and incomprehensible sentence, wasn't it? I'm hope you got out early on.
* And obviously I would never ever consider withdrawing my devotion to my all time favourite love, thehairpin.com
Hey yall. You interested in the upcoming Irish Stability Treaty Referendum? Course you are! EVERYONE is going on about it. Your search "Irish Stability Treaty" brings you to the IIEA treaty subpage with a host of interviews, charts, explanations and updates. Great! Hey guys, can I tweet this? Can I tweet this while referencing my source? Hey, there's a twitter button! Yay!
Let's click it, fire this social web up!
Uh, wait a second, this isn't a twitter account. Hmmmm. Maybe I'll just click on one of these and it'll bring me to the twitter account...
Oh right, it just links to the IIEA blog. Okay, hmmm. Maybe I'll just click on this ole' tweet button here and see if it gets me to the IIEA twitter account:
Cool.The preset tweet is 20 characters over. TOO BORED, MOVING ON.
8.45 pm: Discover Weduary.com existed
8.46 pm: "This might be useful for Roisin, or for other friends who are getting married soon. Lets find out more..."
8.47 pm: Begin planning imaginary wedding to Mark Ruffalo.
8.49 pm: Stop planning imaginary wedding to Mark Ruffalo because just planning it is getting me too excited to type.
Our weduary site is available at http://weduary.com/LucyRuffalo. Please give Mark and I the time and space we need to plan our nuptials before ya'll start piling on about the absence of any percievable content on our weduary site: Mark is not pulling his weight in the planning stages WHATSOEVER.
"So the real problem with the ebook as it stands is that it denies us
many of these temporal aspects, which produces a kind of cognitive
dissonance. And there’s a social layer that forms around this, another
timeline of reading reviews and discussing with friends, that the ebook
could actually exploit better than the physical book, if we work on it
some more. We really need to look at how we address this temporal mode
with ebooks."
This is the best song/poem/thing in the world, ever.
No, it actually is. I have it playing in the background while writing this and I am already crying by the time she mentions his muley cow. Ack. Gillian Welsh kills me.
As a well-read, college-educated, reasonably comfortable white female in the south-east of Ireland, my opinion on things is OBVIOUSLY so so niche and thus is frequently sought on various matters. I read non-fiction books! Alot of the time those NF books are NOT about the Mitfords or Jane Austen and are about actual stuff that happened in the last fifteen years! I -sometimes, seriously, it is so painful though- read novels that AREN'T set pre-1950 and involve actual contemporary issues! [Gender & race politics during the post-WW2 era is kinda contemporary, right? Yeah? God, I so have my finger on the pulse of the average fiction reader. I'm so glad I work in the industry that I'm in. I would sooo hate to be out of touch of the typical fiction reader haha that would be a deathnell haha wait what?]
Also, I read the lifestyle sections of [certain] newspapers! And I have recently weaned myself off reading Roisin Ingle's IT's Saturday column for diuretic purposes! I'm so well-adjusted and alligned with the average 25- 40 demographic. Survey me! I'm, like, uber-intelligent and informed! I am! I did a module on 20th Century Irish Pol in college! Yes! Yeah, so I can't spell for toffee outside MS Word but heck, I have opinions and I am willing to share them. Here is one and it is bland *SPOILERALERT*
So. I have a terrificly bad habit of canonizing things/people/books/authors/directors/musicians as my own personal gospel and utilising theorems/philosophies/lyrics from such as my own personal bible. Do you do this? WHY WOULDN'T YOU? Itss pretty much how modern culture is presented to us. Like that Adele song? Well, here's seventeen-hundred articles why Adele is awesome and why you should worship her and ALSO panicbuy concert tickets at 8am because you're told to. See also: Lily Allen, Coldplay, Bruce Springsteen, Florence & The Machine, countless others that are sufficently marketed to us MOR people so we prebook and think its a gift. They seem so great, let's make them our religion. Yeah?
It's a shockin' bad habit of mine, anyway, even before the marketeers cottened on to it. I have previously gotten through quitting a job by repeating a poem in my brain like it's religious verse, my (final, successful) driving test by mumbling the good luck message of a friend like it was a mantra. I have frequently reminded myself of this poem whenever I feel lost and adrift and can't understand humanity (AKA hungover).
I'm entirely cognisant of the fact that my future biographer will make great haystacks out of my professed atheism alligned with my imperiative need to idolise individuals, writers, politicans, men, women etc; and correctly question my opposition to theism. Hey. Fine. Whatevs, future biographer: I havent done anything noteworthy yet so dunno why you exist.
I try real hard not to do it, because it's crazy and untenable and recently I have been super productive on the whole regarding-humans-I -meet-and-like-as-humans-not-as-prophets-on-how-I-should-live-my-life (look at me! 29 and still expecting to find a life mission from the next person I meet! Cult-leaders, seek me out!), but it's a slow progress. Everytime I hit a metaphorical roadblock, I start humming "Hard times; ain't gonna rule my mind, honey"; anytime human avarice or folly exasperates me I find myself stumbling to Austen for satirical succor; whenever I feel like the biggest fool in the room I just smoke a cigarette and think of this song. And all these things, they're so great, so awesome, so profound, so off my beat that they fix me. So, there's that. I'm not cured yet.
I frequently construct random lists of my favourite things in my head, while driving or working or whatever, to imply I am a discerning individual with taste and standards and not just an arbitrary sampler of books, movies, music, pop culture, opinions, ideologies, oh no no, of course not.
Top five Coen movies, top five ideal book to movie adaptations, top whatever comedic novels, possible actors for the modern day movie adaption of Jane Austen's Persuasion that I will make someday and it will be awesome. Top five teen fiction series which don't offend my feminazi sensabilities.
Optimum reading schedule of sections in Irish Times weekend. Top five actually awesome female writers that are being woefully undermarketted. Top three Sinead O'Connor songs for performing at impromptu karaoke sessions. Top 600 awesome CJ Gregg oneliners [twoliners? Lets not be priggish about this; many of CJ's best lines are rebuttals]. Top five Nicholas Sparks novels. No no wait that was actually a joke. Who actually reads more than one Nicholas Sparks novel without dying of saccharine poisoning.
Can you taste the sexy? My interior monologue is dripping in sex, drugs and rock and roll, dudes. Point is, these lists/catologues are predictably private, dumb and pointless and subject to the dull cull of my caprices from time to time but one remains, like an totemic tenat of my cultural leanings: John Williams' Stoner. Have you read it? Why the hell not?
First and most presiecnt: its brilliant. Briiiiiiliant. You'll buy it or pick it up in your local library and think: "fuck, this looks like heavy going" cos I've seen four differnt covers for it and all of them are terrible. Ha ha aha it ain't. Jokes on you, bucko. This shit is SOLIDLY great.
It kicks off as the tale of a farm boy, William Stoner, hardships and pennypinching-ness a plenty, who's sent to college in urban Missouri in the 1930s to study AgSci 'cos his Mid-West father, foresight included, realises he'll need some educashun to get the family farm through to the next generation. Our boy finds college a magical highway to learning, discourse and self-discovery and, changing his major to English, discovers all that symbolic shit that the moving from Ag Science to English for love of the subject entails. Pissed off at such a formalaic setup? THATS ONLY THE SETUP, PALS. The real shit happens now.
William Stoner is everyman, bitches. He loves literature of course, which some people might not (WHO ARE THESE ANIMALS) but otherwise he's just a typical young man who decides to follow a different career path than the one his family had set him. And oh jesus is it a sore lesson This is where you learn about breaking your parents' heart, fellas. Over the next thirty years he sits out a war, is promoted, recommended by all, expands, grows, learns and then is mollified and condemned by his department and college; all the while being the best guy you could never ever meet cos he's too sound. He marries unadvisedly - you'll be yelling at the page to stop him- and he has a daughter who he cherishes and is torn away from. And then there's one of the most tender, realistic love affairs ever to attempt a salty toast. Arrrrg.
It's brilliant, beautiful, sad and contemporaneous. Read it, you empty headed dolt.
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