The Daytime Shame Syndrome

A weekday off from work has a lot to be said for it, we all crave it, personally I'd kill for it, but when I finally have one, an interesting psychological occurrance takes place.

Since I was a kid (I'm obviously kidding, I was born like Athene, fully grown and ready to talk back to my parents), it's been imbedded in my upbringing that running loose in the daylight hours on weekdays is bad. Why, I never really understood, it may have something to do with too much enjoyment, empty shops with nobody in your way, no queues, no pervs trying to feel you up on a crowded bus, and thus, something oh so sweet is also oh so bad and forbidden.

So I went to school, I went to more school, and I started working, all in the daytime. In my job I have to work every other weekend, which means that I, every other week have a weekday off to compensate (like a boring tuesday night can really compensate for a moist, regrettable saturday night of not knowing where the hell you are). Thus leaving me free to roam around as I please for a whole day.

At first I was excited, woohoo, I'll go walking, go scare some kids or grannies at the park, but you quickly realise that you wake up nearly as late as they go to bed, and when you do get up, you're too afraid to go outside. What if you see someone you know on just a greeting basis, and they think you are unemployed or homeless, or slightly prostitutional, because let's face it, who else roams the streets on weekdays except freaks and mothers with their babies? And you certainly aren't pushing any carriage around, and whilst we're being honest, those love handles come from your chocolate babies. You can't go up to the person and say "hey, I've got a day off from work" because you don't know them that well, and if you did anyway, they'd think you were one of those freaks that talk to strangers on the bus.

Even your neighbours become your own worst enemies. What if they happen to peak out the window just as you're leaving or entering the house at an unreasonable, homeless person time? Naturally you've got the perfect excuse for why your neighbours are also at home at the time, they are either retired (at the age of 35?!), unfit for work (unless it's off the record) or a mom to be (that's surely just a love for chocolate cake that's starting to peak out at the belt line). All this makes you a prisoner in your own home, and let's face it, your place isn't exactly fun central.

You lie in, the extreme version, trot around in ugly clothes your partner would burn in a black ritual if he or she ever saw, over-eat, watch tv til your brain hurts from too much womanhood on display, and sometimes you might even try to take up a lost hobby that once was lost for a reason. You can't knit for fuck, and your paintings are that of a five year old crackhead...no, I take that back, THAT I would pay to see!

Shame creeps in just around dinnertime, boredness, panic at how little of your day off is left, the feeling of skiving, lying to your mum about having tummy aches to stay in because it's snow outside and you know your face will be buried in two feet of white pain before the first bell rings. You grow more and more sure that this day in particular must have been the best day ever at work, something extraordinary happened, everybody got a bonus or free chocolates, a palace in France, a night with Christian Bale (after anger management).

But they never did, and you long for your day off once again. For the shame, for the angst, for the isolation from the pain of public transport.

Coherence

Horoscope for Cancer

Feminism versus My Boyfriend

I only just got my first boyfriend. Aaaaw, teenage sweetheart love, you may think to yourself, but no, I'm 26, which I presume makes me insanely picky, or maybe just a freak. What can I say? I'm a big softy romantic freak in that case.

Suddenly having a boyfriend actually introduces changes into your life, and I am not talking about the obvious ones, like waking up to a smelly man every morning and having no say in who gets the biggest cupcake, but rather the traditional clichés you thought was only a remnant of male chauvinism. I have this old antique cabinet I got from my grandmother when she got so old she basically returned to a teenager status and was no longer allowed to live on her own, and for the last five years one of the lower cabinet doors has been completely fucked up, it probably lost a screw back in 1955 and has been hanging all crooked, like a depressed, self-cutting emo, every time it's been opened. Now, one of the first things my boyfriend did after noticing this, was smelling down the nearest hammer in my place, I swear to gods I didn't even know I had one, and going at it, like his life depended on it. Now the door actually shuts completely, no longer spilling out my scary personal stuff to strangers visiting, because let's face it, good things gets put on display, bad stuff is hid in cabinets and drawers.

I've also had this kitchen light that hasn't been working since I moved in here, basically because I stuffed a light tube up there once and no lights came on, so therefore it was deemed broken. I came to terms with being only a meere mortal and lived like a goth for a while, but along comes mr. manly man and pops the tube in place, voila, there is light. I vaguely remember throwing myself around his neck for a second before my strict equality of the sexes-upbringing whipped me back into a couldn't care less-throwing of one shoulder and a thank you.

I must admit I sort of worship my boyfriend in an unhealthy Waco-way after all this magic. I suddenly grasp the fantasy many women have about handymen and men in general wearing tool belts, it's like a sick prehistorical instict telling us "this is the way to things around the house actually working!". Sure, I could have managed to fix it myself, but to me it seems like such a pain in the arse to have to do, something so invisible that I can't brag about it to others. I can spend hours finding the right curtain for a room, but putting in a nail where it's needed is just excessive work. I'll be the first to say it; WOMEN!

Feminists never tell you this, but when you're sick or just really tired, the man will actually hoover the carpet for you, and go to the shop to get your candy for you...it's like some sweet, grown up surprise, like sex was when you were a teenager. We've been had!

Die, Speedy Gonzales!

Answer me this; What is wrong with people who ALWAYS, no matter how much time they have, sprint across a zebra crossing either as the green man is turning red, or in between cars as they are passing? They are SO busy they can't bloody wait one minute to not risk their lives playing car bumper tag. Where's the fire?! Where's the naked woman offering herself to them?! Is there a bomb somewhere I need to know about?!

On the positive side...there is a positive side to it. The immensely pleasurable feeling of actually having waited for the green man to lure you over the crossing, and then accidentally catching up with that guy who ran past you like he had a satanic cult meeting to reach. There he is, in all his unhurried glory, not busy at all, just window shopping like the speedy bastard he is. It takes all my inner strength to not give him a sideways knee kick as i pass, but I'm not speedy enough to get away alive.

Friends say I move like a snail, slow, majestic and covered in guck, but atleast I get to stop and eat the roses on the way.

The Menopause Witches of Eastwick

I attended my first official "grown up party" the other day, and I say it like that because I consider myself to be forever floating in an imaginary Peter Pan state, between a naughty child and a responsible adult with loads of money and fancy kitchen tiles. You might remember that special day you were allowed to upgrade your kiddie-table for the grown up-table at birthday parties, it felt sooo emancipating, like a huge rock in a greenhouse, right?

It doesn't work quite that way when you're 26 and end up at a party with 40 - 50 year olds, and yes, you can hold your liquor in a literary conversation, but when it comes to making wicker baskets you whimper like a child with no money in a candy shop. Instead you are left to study the other guests, and especially the middle-aged women.

There seems to be some sort of evil conspiracy going on in the world when it comes to middle-aged women. If you've ever been to an all-girls party for divorced women, you'll know what I'm talking about. When a young woman in her prime of life laughs, it is a beautiful and aesthetical thing, a light whisper of a chuckle, but when she hits her 40's, welcome the Balrog fire monster from Lord of the Rings! It's painful and scary to witness the hoarse gargle all those fairytales taught you to fear as a child, it's loud and shrieking and comes from the deep of the scary female sex, where all is hidden, but nothing revealed. Yet there you are, surrounded by chirping witches. Especially when the laughter happens in unison there will be chills down your back and through your marrow, it's like an over-dramatized replay of The Witches of Eastwick, only there are no ending credits, it just goes on and on. You try desperately to be unwitty and dull, but the nervous sweat on your upper lip makes them snarl for more. Dirty jokes fly across the table, they whip out their brooms and dance in a chilling noisy frenzy that could wake the dead...but only really wakes your dad...who fell asleep in the corner of the sofa.
Maybe it is a natural defence system evolution has given us women. When our husbands find younger wives, when our kids turn against us and choose all-green curtains instead of dotted ones, and we stumble in our own breasts getting out of bed.

Either way every woman in the world should be given a decibel measurer when hitting menopause. Evolution gave us loads of useless things, but we improve them all the time. Let's make it mandatory!

The Wee Dance

I know I've already covered the subject of uncool bodily fluids and the bad timing that usually follows them, but what can I say, it has a lot to be said for it.

Now, if you're a sad person like me, and you think having a good time with your friends is parading around a dark room with epileptic seizure inspiring light shows, sweaty people in skimpy clothing that try to touch you when you walk past, and ear shattering grenade-like sounds some people like to call "music", drinking highly over priced poisonous liquid colour additives in order to actually like the place enough to stay there the rest of the night, you will know what I'm talking about. If not, stop looking at me and keep reading your Bible, little boy.

It's the wonderfully entertaining cultural event that can only be properly enjoyed when it's happening to other people than yourself. It's the wee dance.

You'll see it at night clubs or bars with only one toilet per sex, lines and lines of women, sometimes men (but come on, there's never a line in the men's toilet, bastards), wiggeling, squeezing, stepping, riverdancing, throwing wild tics and tantrums, thrashing and whining, all to keep their lemons intact til that magic toilet door opens. Like fancy shamans from a different world they conjure up the demons of the force of the drunken wee wee relief, like samurai's with no skills or control what so ever, but a very pressing mission. The artform deserves its own music style, something like a cross between Rednex remixed with Enya, you just never know if it will take off in a frantic linedance or end in a mellow hymn to the waters of below.

If only it were a mating ritual, or something useful, but alas, it is an artform doomed to be forgotten with the shady guy in tweed by the bar, who asked you for a dance and a PayPal donation...

Christmas Aftermath

Shit Reborn

I don't get out much. That way I manage to avoid human contact and the problems that brings with it, but sometimes even I have to go out and get life's necessities, like useless plastic thingies that satisfy my materialistic ego, candy and pretty shiny things (because I’m a girl). That's when it happens. Not being built like a camel, I all of a sudden have to wee, right there in the torture of a shopping centre, like the rest of the worlds population, except royalty naturally.

In a wild panic I try to round up the nearest toilet, forcing my way through old people and children like a brute on caffeine, and when I finally find that lovely green sign with Lego people demonstrating that this is where joy is unleashed, there is also a tiny sign next to a coin slot telling me to "please spit up some coins, I only take these specific kinds of coins". I peek into my wallet, only sporting larger notes (because I’m so god damned rich, that’s why) and the phone number of that Tottenham fan I only liked because he fell off the bar trying to dance the Macarena, but doing so he looked like Batman folding out his steel wings. Eyeing me from a coin exchange window is a security guard, and I have a sudden urge for my clawing hands to have a close encounter with his collar.

Is it not enough that going shopping at a shopping centre is like being raped from behind by an elephant, both price- and space wise? Walking in a line from the sliding doors to the exit, listening to pan pipe music covering the great touchy feely movies of the 90’s, kids crying, housewives moaning at the lack of cheap pastel trinket shit, subservient men whimpering behind their mad, shopping wives, scratching at their collar, sweating behind a grandmother with her seven grandkids who wants to know whether the stiff price on the ugly, canary yellow sweater she's thinking of buying for her and her husbands anniversary has anything to do with the hurricane that trashed the cotton farms in Egypt, and when she may expect it to end. Being caught behind elderly people with their walkers of terror and mothers with their wide SUV-like twin strollers, never letting you pass unless you go all Gandalf on them, and that’s when the security guard comes and takes you away, and that way you will never get to the loo anyway. Come to think of it, they should really pay ME to come there to shop.

But there I am, doing my little full bladder dance whilst waiting for the security guard to give me back my change, knowing all too well why all shopping centres have café’s or Burger Blings on every corner selling jumbo sized drinking cups, making the customers into living urinary tracks financing the richie rich tool that owns the centre. Perhaps a tiny portion of it goes to the hard working immigrant cleaning the loo’s, which he spends buying knitting pins for his wife back in Gracklapkistan, that’s all great yeah, supporting the industrial development of third world countries, but we know most of that money goes to richie rich and the state, which means our loo money ends up in the pockets of our politicians, and there you have it my friends:

Shit turns to shit.

Women's Football and a long trip down Shame Lane

I was watching sports the other day, there’s nothing unusual in that, it’s what happened when my brain started functioning after the long cop-out break it usually takes when watching muscly men running around in circles. All of a sudden I realised that I wasn’t watching football anymore, I was watching WOMEN’S FOOTBALL!

In some conspiratory way the TV station had thrown an allocation of sex quota in my face, and hence they lured me to get a dose of talent less oestrogen hormones in movement in between the real football. From being filled with manly men doing manly things on the field, my TV was taken over by skinny, square-shaped housewives and dykes running around like newborn calf’s, their hands swinging from side to side like transvestite homos on a breast prosthesis sale, something that didn’t really help their running around like drunken orientation runners without maps, missing the ball every chance they got. They weren’t that fast either. All of them could have been beaten by any old, drugged hag in an electrical wheelchair lacking electricity, but moving forward because of a slight slope in the field, and I started suspecting that the TV producers were really showing me a replay in slow motion.

It took me three minutes to remember where i put the remote control when panic finally struck me. What if someone caught me watching women’s footie? The rush of fear in my veins made my hands slippery with cold sweat, and dropping the remote, having to drop to my knees to pull it out from underneath the sofa, repositioning my finger to the correct button and actually pushing took too much time. I had no chance in hell to change the channel before my football crazed dad came walking into the room, and by then it was too late for any apologies. Whilst he broke down into an apoplectic seizure only broken up by slightly feminine whimps, I started to realise that I had disgraced my own flesh and blood, and there was no forgiveness for my sins.

Many women will call me a traitor, making fun of women’s football, but I’m a mere victim of my parents’ influence. I mean, I was raised believing that this is normal. The only real football is British Premier League for men, and as a woman, I can’t help but fall victim to the easy choice between watching manly men or sweaty women run around. My dad is a football fanatic who claims he was born on Boleyn Ground on the birthday of West Ham United’s former managers mothers aunt, and when he finally takes a dive, his ashes are to be spread over the field (West Ham supporters, you have been warned). All this has probably been like inspirational notes for “The Omen”, all signs leading to one thing: we’ve got a football fanatic on our hands.

From my childhood I have vivid memories of him filling his days with nostalgic football religious ceremonies whilst other people went to church. In the evenings he would play the supporter song over and over again, singing along with his husky, glass shattering whiskey grated voice. At parties, weddings and confirmations he wore his West Ham shirt with pride, and he actually married my mother in the middle of a football field. Personally I sort of fear the day he confesses that I was conceived on a football field too, although in some ways I already know it, but the pills make me forget. We’re all the same there, I like to think my parents only had sex three times, one for me and my two brothers, and preferably they were insanely drunk at the time, or better yet, my brothers were really the result of my mothers close relationship to that guy that shouts out the numbers at the local bingo. But I digress. My dad would read his private bible, the big book of football statistics and results in the Premier League, which sadly came out once a year, and we soon had to rebuild my parents bedroom to make room for them all...AFTER he threw my mother out, that is. The house was painted in appropriate colours of course, and the curtains in the living room were really shower curtains, because they were the only ones my mother could find that had bubbles on them.

Now I’ve always viewed my dad as slightly eccentric, maybe a tad footiepsychopathical, especially after that one time he removed my name from his will because I dropped the remote control during a West Ham match, hitting the floor made it change the channel just as West Ham scored (a rare occasion as we all know). Throwing him self over me in a wild panic to get the remote I caught a glimpse of his cold eyes, and knew that had I not been a girl, he would have skinned me alive. After that incident I’ve preferred to stay away at friends houses whenever West Ham play or there is some cup or league going on, making great effort to not wake the beast, until this unfortunate accident involving the women’s football came along.

For ages he refused to talk to me. He did once, when we were at a family dinner and I had tucked my skirt into my pantyhose coming out of the toilet, but he waited a couple of hours to point it out to me. At night I could hear him cry himself to sleep, playing his “I’m forever blowing bubbles”- record on repeat, or rewinding and replaying the video of the highlights from the 1966 world cup in between his manly sobs.

As time passes my dad’s disappointment will fade, but it will never disappear. He still hasn’t forgiven my older brother that one goal he let in as a keeper on the local junior team for seven year-olds. That’s actually my first memory from the football field, when my dad tried to strangle the referee and an armed football mum on the sideline, and later, he had a flashback to the olden days when he was a footballing menace, ran onto the field, shoved one of the seven year olds out of the way and gave the little keeper mental problems for life as he put his lights out with the ball when he couldn’t run out of the way fast enough on his tiny legs.

There may not be much you can do about people who see the face of Jesus in the grassy patterns of a football field, and at the age of 52 still scribbles “West Ham Rules” on loo walls in local bars, but I trust my mother to stop my dad when he tries to rename my younger brother Noble, but trust is a fragile bubble.