Secret Badassery

One morning recently I was going to wear a white t-shirt to do work experience in an office, but I decided that I am, in fact, an anarchist, so I wore a black t-shirt instead. My subtle rebellion against the establisment was ignored. I was not stopped at reception by a bouncer saying 'You can't come in here young lady, that black t-shirt is far too hardcore for the office environment.' Once again, my secret badassery is so stealthy that nobody has caught on to it yet.

Sometimes, if I am feeling particularly tired or grumpy, I consider putting on eyeliner, as if that would be a noticable statement against authority and would frighten people on the train. 'Imagine,' I sometimes think, 'If I wore nail varnish, that'll show everyone that I am wild and out of control.' I seem to have made up completely non-existent uniform regulations so that I can mentally rebel against the adult world without actually rebelling. If I listen to angry teenage-girl music while wearing boots I somehow assume that this is it, this is the revolution. I am the Mockingjay. 

In truth, I respect authority. I used to cry when I got told off in school, apart from when I was sent out of maths for laughing because that was ridiculous*. I obediently follow instructions. Sometimes I automatically refuse cups of tea because I feel like I don't want to waste time and resources, then I have to awkwardly backtrack and say that I actually would like a cup of tea, please, thank you, if it's not too much trouble. All my memories that involve actual bad behaviour are followed by even stronger memories of tearfully apologising. The toughest, most rebellious thing I have ever done was put glitter gel in my mum's facecream, when I was eight. I tried to say it wasn't me, I tried to blame it on my dad, or on my brother, who can't walk, and who in the unlikely event of gaining the use of his legs probably wouldn't think 'At last, I can make her go to work with glitter on her face, that'll show her.' Then I admitted it was me, cried, and was sent to my room. 

Basically: beware me. I may never have had a detention, I may have had a nightmare last night about being late for a lesson because I left my bag in another classroom, but I am a RECKLESS, UNTAMEABLE BADASS.** 

*I was forbidden from smiling for the rest of the lesson, as if it's illegal to actually enjoy maths. 

**Perhaps not. 

The Return of the Anne

After a two year hiatus, I have decided to re-start my old teenage blog.

This is for several reasons. Firstly, I can't remember why I stopped blogging. Perhaps the sad news story that I read on the 15th March 2012 was so harrowing that I suffered some kind of brain lapse, and subsequently repressed the memory that I ever had a blog. Perhaps I was overcome with university work. Perhaps I took a deliberate leave of absence from blogging to focus on my personal life. Maybe I just decided to tweet everything instead. I will never know.

Secondly, my parents found this blog one night in 2013. From the sound of it, they sat up for most of the night reading it. My dad then printed off my Christmas-related blog posts and stuck them on the labels of my Christmas presents. While I found their enthusiastic response encouraging, I was pretty embarrassed. They didn't create me and raise me to adulthood so they could Google me. Nonetheless, my dad seemed disappointed that I no longer had a blog, so maybe I'm restarting this as a desperate cry for further approval. Hi Dad? Dad? Are you reading this? Dad?

Thirdly, I think of things to blog about all the time. I enjoyed blogging. I miss blogging. When I tried to blog about my time in Indiana it eventually failed, because I was tweeting everything I blogged, I was extremely busy watching every season of Grey's Anatomy, and I got acclimatised into America so that it stopped being as much of a novelty. People stopped mispronouncing my name. They asked me the same questions ("Do you watch Sherlock?" "So do you, like, drink a lot of tea?") over and over again. Now I have new things to blog about. A lot has happened since March 2012. I am a real grown-up, even though I'm currently reading the most recent Percy Jackson book and I still can't drive.

So, to the hopefully at least one person who is actually reading this (Dad, turn off the computer and go to bed), expect more blog entries in the future.

News Story

Today I read a sad news story, which I thought I would share with anyone who reads this blog. I know this is cruel of me, because it was one of the most depressing articles I have ever read and this kind of needless tragedy makes the world seem like a harsh and devastating place.

So basically there was a teeny tiny baby bunny rabbit in Germany that was born with no ears. This is already a deeply emotional and heart-wrenching story. It gets worse. Here is a picture:

See? It's tiny and cute and also with a tragic deformity. As if that wasn't bad enough, it's now dead. I just heard the sound of your hearts breaking. I'm sorry, I wish it wasn't true. This rabbit was set for global fame, when a TV cameraman stepped backwards, onto the bunny, which died.

He (the bunny, not the cameraman) was only 17 days old. Imagine if you were 17 days old and born without ears and you couldn't even hear your imminent death coming before a cameraman trod on you. I might as well mention while I'm here that Father Christmas isn't real and one day everything will be dead. But hey, the weather was lovely in Kent today.

(To clarify, I do not google anything related to baby bunny rabbits, I was grabbed on the Guardian website by the headline 'German Celebrity Bunny Crushed To Death By Cameraman)

Two Born Every Episode

So at the recommendation of my friends who study Biomedicine and enjoy a good cry, I decided to check out the Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall documentary 'One Born Every Minute,' which is part horror film, part soap opera and part sitcom. In fact, I can't quite believe it's not a sitcom, sort of like 'The Thick of It' but with a maternity ward.

I think part of the reason why this programme has won BAFTAs is because it covers the full spectrum of human emotion. While watching it I alternate between covering my eyes, wincing, saying "Stop being a dick Steve" to a husband who keeps blowing up the rubber gloves and throwing them around the room, crying and getting annoyed at the woman who decides at the last minute that she doesn't want a baby after all and needs to go home and water the plants.

Then there's the receptionist who at one point says on the phone: "Gotta go, darling, we've got an ambulance in here. No, not an actual ambulance, that wouldn't fit through the door." Just now (I'm on episode three, not sure how much more I can take) I thought that the midwife was genuinely about to rip off a baby's head. Most of it, however, seems to be focused on the weird things people say under stress. The greatest moment of the show (and possibly of all television) so far was a woman complaining that childbirth was hurting a bit and the midwife responding with: "It's meant to hurt, you're at the ring of fire." The Ring of Fire???? This isn't that bit in 'Finding Nemo' where Nemo has to swim through the volcano in the fish tank.

Even better, in the next episode, based on the preview, there's a couple having a debate about whether it would be amoral to name a child 'God.'

People are so weird.

Things I Do Not Want To See On My News Feed

I fully understand that the son of family friends was trying to raise awareness of animal cruelty. I completely agree that it is wrong to be cruel to animals. This does not mean I am prepared, early on a Thursday morning while feeling a bit under the weather, to see a picture of an Alsatian with it's face blown off by a firework. It was horrific. When I scroll through Facebook I expect photos, people commenting on their lives, amusing Kent uni memes, but NOT THIS.

It was right underneath a photo that my crazy, frequently drunk Canadian friend from Sydney posted of her crotch (in shorts, steady on). I thought 'jeez, the stuff people put on Facebook' and then I saw the dog. Canadian friend, you can post as many gratuitous crotch shots as you like if it spares me from the sight of dead animals with blown up faces.

If I ever see anything resembling a dead human with a blown up face I will be deleting my facebook and renouncing the internet. I will become Amish and never look at or think about technology ever again. I mean it.

Poetry Seminars Continued

I've had a really good week, and then came the poetry seminar.

We were lulled into a false sense of security at first, re-writing 'Row Row Row Your Boat' in different poetic forms. I thought "this is ok, this is a bit like primary school." How wrong I was.

For next week we have to write sonnets. That's fine, no problem, I can learn how to write a sonnet. Then we were told we had to write love sonnets. I thought that I could probably do that at a stretch if I made it deliberately vague, fictitious and light-hearted (I mean, not only do we have to write it down on paper but we have to read it out loud to other humans.) Then it got worse.

It became, 'Love and/or Eroticism' which then became...sex poetry. Sex poetry. We are all terrified of having to write ANY poetry in the first place, let alone sex poetry. We have fourteen words we have to put in to our sex poems (one for each line of a sonnet) including 'fuck', 'thrust' and 'scratch.' I like, can't. A few people were planning on being mysteriously ill next week, but I feel the braver option is to write a poem, sticking to the rules of a sonnet and using the key words, about how much I don't want to write and read out a sex poem. So far all I have is:

'Fuck, I don't want to write a sex poem
I'm going to thrust over to another university'

It's a work-in-progress, admittedly. Sex poems were not mentioned in the course booklet. We were not forewarned of this at the open day. I feel this is quite a dramatic and sudden jump from 'Row Row Row Your Boat.'

Poetry (Don't worry, not actual poetry)

Narrative theory last term was pretty scary. We occasionally had to write stuff and read it aloud in front of other people. That is nothing compared to the sheer horror of this term's poetry module.

If there was a module called 'Nudity Theory and Practice,' in which a group of us went to a seminar room, took off all our clothes and talked about what we look like naked, it would be only slightly scarier than having to write poetry and show it to other people. Ok, I exaggerate, but there's a reason why if I write poetry it is funny and rhyming.

First of all we had to find our way to the seminar room, at five o'clock in the evening, in the dark, through a winding maze of corridors. The seminar room has three glass walls, so we are completely surrounded by darkness. We all just kind of sat there not looking each other in the eyes, as if it was Sex Addicts Anonymous (it felt worse than alcoholism) or as if we were all about to play a completely sober game of strip poker.

Then the seminar tutor asked us to raise our hands if we ever read poetry for fun, in our own time. It was literally just me and some guy called Nathan. Then we were asked if we were all scared shitless (not her exact words) about writing poetry for this course, and everyone raised their hands and giggled nervously.

The thing that I dread the most is if someone in the seminar had a traumatic childhood, writes a poem about it, reads it out, and then cries. I can see that happening. Particularly after I've just read out something jovial and Dr Seuss like, and the seminar tutor's like "Thanks for that Anne, and now on to Caroline*, with her poem about sexual abuse."

I suppose I'll see next week.



*There is no Caroline.