7 posts tagged “qotd”

How do you feel about your birthday?  Do you look forward to it and remind all your friends, or do you dread it and try to keep it a secret?

Thanks for remembering, Vox! Why, it's merely a fortnight (that's British for "two weeks") until I turn 28. I like shiny things, kittens and wine.

Also, Vox? The revamp? It makes you look like shit.

I realise it's nearly 1am but I am half-crazy with illness and my sleeping patterns are out of kilter. If I kept a diet blog, today's entry would read:

tea
17 mini breadsticks
naan bread
orange juice
approx. 3000 pints of water.

I wouldn't recommend it as a long-term weight-loss solution but in the short term, the pounds really do fall off. Side-effects include lying on the sofa moaning, forgetting to brush your teeth, and sitting about reading Love It!, Pick Me Up and Take A Break because you cannot concentrate on anything with big words.

The seventh season of "American Idol" premieres tonight.  Will you be watching, or are you over it?

No, but you know what I am getting excited about, Vox, you American-centric loser? THE RETURN OF MASTERCHEF GOES LARGE. Hang on - it's just called Masterchef now. It only needs to go by one name, much like Madonna or Shakira. John "Material Girl" Torode and Greg "Hips Don't Lie" Wallace are BACK and BIGGER THAN EVER.

Key phrases to learn this year are:

"This competition JUST GETS TOUGHER";

"If there'd been a Mars Bar to hand would you have thrown that in as well?" (this season's "your dish is too busy");

"It's good hearty British cuisine but it needs refinement";

"That tastes like a Jammy Dodger run over by a steamroller".

I might live-blog Thursday's quarter-final if my laptop hasn't gasped its dying breaths before then. BBC2, 8.30pm, Monday-Thursday. Ch-ch-ch-check it out.

Who was the first person to give you info -- correct or not -- on how to "make babies"? 
Submitted by Manon-It-All.

Judy Blume.

She educated us all in primary school and we passed her books surreptitiously around the playground, often buried inside other books or hidden in paper bags, like hard liquor. Occasionally, news would arrive that one of the older girls had bravely taken one of these filthy tomes out of the library and we would sit under the oak tree in the playground while she read aloud to us, occasionally breaking off to confer knowledgeably with her friends about particular sentences or characters.  We would listen and nod and raise our eyebrows at each other at the racier passages.

None of us had a clue what we were hearing. Without anyone to provide any context, we were left to make up our own sex education. We made it up with great enthusiasm.

Deenie, the story of a thirteen-year-old girl with scoliosis, was renowned among us as a particularly graphic tale. We barely dared whisper its name. It remains high on the "most banned books in America" list, mainly for this line:

"I touched my special place practically every night. It was the only way I could fall asleep and besides, it felt good."

Now, I assumed Deenie's special place was the bit just behind her knee. I used to stroke that and it did indeed feel good. I could identify with Deenie there. Thank god I wasn't alone in my perversion.

Forever was another of our favourites. The copy that was passed down the generations was battered, taped up and underlined to within an inch of its life. It was a Must Read because unmarried teenagers Katherine and Michael had SEX. Not just once, but loads and loads and loads. It was like Riders for 10-year-olds. What's more, no-one was punished or died for this moral transgression! We shook our heads at the shamelessness of it all, and committed certain passages to memory.

We trusted Judy Blume and what she taught us about the scary road of sexuality. I knew that when I went through hateful puberty and had to deal with the Special Time that I would hook a massive fuck-off pad into a huge belt (Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret). I knew that when I had sex for the first time it would be in a rock canyon with a boy called Wolf (Tiger Eyes). She let me down only once, by making up things called "erections" (Then Again, Maybe I Won't). There was no way a part of someone's body could move without them willing it to. Silly Judy! Still, those bits made me feel uneasy. Why would dependable Judy make up weird stuff like that? I skipped those chapters.

Thus when my mum got around to giving me - oh god - The Talk and a book called something like Holy Shit, What The Fuck Is Happening To My Body? (chapters included "Aargh, I'm Bleeding!" and "This Is The Start Of Your Lifelong Battle With Body Hair"), I knew most of it already. Oddly, this book persisted in perpetuating the myth about erections, but I rolled my eyes and skipped those chapters.

So thanks, Judy. You made me the woman I am today, and I salute you. And Deenie.

How have people mispronounced your name?  How is it supposed to sound? 
Submitted by Lorie.   

 

Claire.

My name sounds nothing like Claire.  It is commonly mispronounced due to its atypical spelling, but it took a special situation to end up as a Claire.

It started when I was 4, when a new neighbour moved in two doors down.  I was in the back garden, building an urban rockery out of tin cans, broken china and mud.  New neighbour leaned her head out of her upstairs window and called down to me:  "Hello!  I am your new neighbour Julie! What's your name?"  I answered and she responded with "well, hello there Claire, we've just moved in and blah blah rah rah blurrgh" - but my brain had gone into shock.  My name!  The very essence of me!  My identity!  Was wrong!

I ran in to tell my mum that the new lady had made a potentially fatal error and that she, my mother, bringer of life and fixer of wrongness, would have to do something about it.  She frowned and shook her head.  No, it was too late - it was my fault for mumbling and now I would have to live with the consequences.  It would be too mortifying for this woman to learn she'd made a mistake. 

This was the first time I realised we lived in the suburbs, where embarrassment could kill.

So years passed, and Julie continued to call me Claire.  I adjusted to the situation.  She also invited me round and made me Coke floats and let me watch satellite tv so the trade-off was pretty good.  I adjusted to my Claire-ness. 

When I was eight, Julie had a daughter, Poppy.  She introduced me to the infant as Claire.  Suddenly, I panicked.  I imagined this spreading like a linguisitic malaise until I'd be forced to introduce myself to everyone as Claire.  Even I would forget my real name until perhaps one day a grandchild, researching Old People, would dig out my birth certificate and we would both peer with surprise at the four-letter, two-syllable name printed thereon.  (As a side note, something similar actually happened to my great-grandmother, who found on her ancient birth cert that her name was Christina, not Catherine.  I bet she had a hard of hearing neighbour too.)

I forget the crucial details of the day that Julie learnt my real name - perhaps a noisy friend screeched it as we played outside, maybe a letter for me went to the wrong address - but I do remember her face as she came to the front door and asked my mum if my name was really NotClaire.  My mum nodded silently as I sat on the stairs, pressing my face against the bannisters and squirming with the thrill of it all.  This was the most dramatic thing to happen in our cul-de-sac for years.  Julie attempted a laugh, blushed deeply, bit her lip, turned and walked away.  And moved her family out the very next day.

Not really.  But I don't remember being invited round for any more Coke floats.

What was the one toy you wanted as a kid that your parents never bought you?
Submitted by Princess of Darkness.

 

As a child, many toys were on the banned list:

Barbie / Sindy – anti-feminist messengers of hate;

Enid Blyton books – too middle-class;

Boggle – no reason given;

My Little Pony Dream Castle – too grotesque;

Another My Little Pony then – you have enough;

But all I want is another My Little Pony – NO;

Gnnaarrgh! – go to your room.

The one that grated most, however, was the ban on a Speak & Spell.  Reasons piled up for its absence – it was prohibitively expensive, I allegedly wouldn’t play with it enough (pah!) and I was already good at spelling.  The latter was precisely why I wanted one. Playing with my friend Clare’s Speak & Spell was like a massive ego boost:  ok, so I couldn’t tie my shoelaces, was subject to increasingly creative bullying at school and had a shit haircut but my God, I could correctly spell ten words in a row every damn time. 

But my parents said no, no, no, despite me pleading its omission was like a dark blight upon my melancholy soul. They pointed out how great my vocabulary was and bargained me down to a new dictionary.

Then Clare’s Speak & Spell broke. She replaced it with a Speak & Math and I wanted to die.

How did you meet your current, or most recent, significant other?

This question prompted me to:

sign up to OKCupid;

be matched with "NorthernGit" who enjoys the novels of "john la care";

get instant messaged by a 42-year-old man whose favourite film is Saw 3;

realise everyone on there is a web designer from Hounslow;

delete my profile.

What's the most obsessive-compulsive thing you do in a normal day?
Submitted by Nikki. 

I used to be very obsessive-compulsive about counting.  I would allocate a number to words and phrases based on the amount of letters and syllables they had.  It was a fairly complex system and occasionally involved drawing diagrams with different coloured pens.  Prime numbers and even numbers were safest and if I was feeling anxious, upset or just bored, I would search for these numbers in the names of people and objects around me.

My real name scores 15.  This isn't great.  Fox In The Snow scores 21, however, which is far more pleasing.  Ink Polaroids gets 19, which is heaven itself.  I should stop.

When I was on holiday in Switzerland in 1994, something clunked in my brain and I counted obsessively, for hours, until I had a headache and felt physically ill.  It was horrible to feel like I could not stop.  Everywhere I looked, there were words that needed to be categorised.  Doing it once often wasn't enough - if I forgot the number for "Migros" or "Montag - Freitag", it had to be redone.  It was a tiring, labourious and pointless process and I hated my brain for not letting me rest.

I grew out of it as my brain prioritised thinking about cheese / exams / boys / kittens over wondering "hey, what score does every single book on my bookshelf get?"  But even now on the tube, I sometimes find my attention drifting as I gaze at the ads and have to stop my fingers involuntarily flexing in a surreptitious attempt to work out what "DON'T EAT SMELLY FOOD" gets.  (It's 28.  Oh God.)

Erm...everyone else's answers are probably "avoid the cracks on the pavement" or "triple check I've turned the gas off", aren't they?  I've said too much.