Lucrezia wants to move in with us permanently (the very thought is enough to knock decades off my life!) This is not because: a. Her mother can't stand it any more and has thrown her out; b. Lucrezia's finally noticed that her sister is always in a bad mood and reckons that even the Mad Cow's menopause is more enjoyable; or c. She's suddenly realised how wonderful I am compared to everyone else she knows. It's because there's a new law that means she's got to use a children's car seat till she either gets older or taller - and we don't have a car. (As an example of how SOME WOMEN are dominated by their men, the MC let Sigmund have the Mini so that her environmental footprint will get even smaller. There are definitely days when I wish she'd give me to him.) Buskin' Bob suggested that if Lucrezia found it so completely humiliating to have to ride in a car seat she could try walking or riding the bike he got her (second-hand, of course - my mother and her consort buy nothing that didn't belong to someone else first). Lucrezia said she'd rather be stretched.
Now you can buy attractively packaged packets of trash from the streets of New York. You wouldn't think there'd be a market for it (I mean it isn't as if everybody in the world doesn't have her own trash, is it?) but apparently it's been tres successful. I'm as much into image as the next girl, but if you ask me that's taking style over content too far. I don't know if this means I'm maturing or if Buskin' Bob's wearing me down.
Disha says that now there's something else to worry about: BDD!!! I said what's that? She said it stands for Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Apparently it means you're obsessed about your appearance. I said but we're all obsessed with our appearance. It's called being a teenage girl.
Marcus, being a major LORD OF THE RINGS fan (I reckon it's a guy thing - you know, like punching each other instead of talking etc), is all excited because Tolkien's son is completing a novel his dad never got round to finishing. I said I found it sort of depressing. Why doesn't the son write his own books? It's like instead of becoming an artist or a poet or whatever I took over teaching the MC's classes or analysing Sigmund's clients. Marcus said that's the trouble with having seriously famous parents - you can get stuck in the shadows. GLORY HALLELUJIAH!!!! I've finally found something my parents did right.
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: Why is it okay to slag off women who are really thin (they're either described as anorexic stick figures, bad role models or BOTH) but if you say anything about fat people everybody jumps on you like you're dissing Father Christmas. Now they don't even want skinny models on catwalks any more - they want Real Bodies. I know Sappho would go ballistic if she heard me say this, but as the owner of a Real Body I have to admit that I'm a lot more likely to buy something because I saw it on Kate Moss than because I saw it on me!
Made the mistake of getting a bus yesterday round the same time that school let out. There were all these children swarming everywhere (I really must be getting old, because I certainly don't remember SHOUTING like that when I was their age). And almost every child was wearing clothes with the same logo on them. So if you were a visitor from another planet you'd think that most of the kid's on the bus were named GAP!
Now someone's come out with WAR ON TERROR - THE BOARD GAME! Personally, I think they're on to something. It makes much more sense to decide the fate of the entire world with a board game instead of sending all our soldiers off to get blown up or shot (and blow up or shoot other people). That way the soldiers would get to use their skills and all, but nobody would die and it wouldn't cost billions of pounds. I may be a genius.
According to Nan, the new fave place for tourists is Bangkok. I said yeah, sex tourists. Nan said no. Nan said that since the coup it's Tank Tourists, too. People like to have their photos taken with them and the soldiers who man them. Personally, I don't see how anyone can get excited about seeing a tank or a soldier. I mean it's not like they're likely to die out like the polar bear, is it?
Was thinking about the Giant Rats I read about in the paper. Apparently they're like two feet long because they eat things like KFC and curries etc. Isn't it ironic that things that make us FAT make them TALL? It makes one wonder how much stock you can really put into testing drugs and additives and things like that on them. I mean, if they do drop dead or whatever it could mean that we wouldn't; and if they don't it could mean that they would.
The Mad Cow wanted to know where I got the idea that the world is fair. I said correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't we meant to be at the Pinnacle of Civilisation? One would think that at the Pinnacle of Civilisation we'd be able to make things fair. The MC said civiilsation's never been about making things fair. She said for every positive thing like indoor toilets and central heating there's another slew of things like the tyranny of The Roman Empire and the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, the Pogroms and the Holocaust. With that sort of track record, you'd think it would be the chimps who'd be denying that they're related to us and not the other way round.
Marcus says he doesn't want to be an artist who wins establishment prizes (which means if we don't break up permanently and do end up living together or whatever I'll STILL BE POOR). Marcus thinks it's more important to have integrity rather than fame and money (it'd be nice if one could have all three). Marcus wants to be an artist whose work has political context, like Banksy. I said you mean the guy that spray paints walls? He said that's the one. It's called Guerrilla Art. Apparently one of Banksy's latest stunts was to mess with copies of Paris Hilton's album cover in stores and swap her CDs for ones titled Why Am I Famous? (Answer: because she's phenomenally wealthy and is some sort of porn star.) I said when did he decide this? He said since he's been talking to my brother. Haven't I always said I should have been an only child?
Sometimes I wonder if all my intellectual questing and hard work etc. is really worth it. I mean, here I am embarking on my university career - facing at least THREE MORE YEARS of hard slog and poverty - and for what? According to the papers I'll be lucky to get a job when I graduate, and if I do get a job my wages will not only go to paying back my brother but to paying the taxman and paying off all the debt I got into going to uni. Plus (also according to the papers) I'll NEVER get married because men don't like smart women. Meanwhile, there's that ex-Playboy Bunny who married this billionaire old enough to be her grandfather and inherited millions after he died (which was tres quickly, so marrying someone that old was a v good idea really - if he'd been younger she might have had to live with him for years). Did she go to Uni? Did she sit up half the night trying to read Proust? Did she ever write a twenty-page paper on Jane Austen? NO SHE DID NOT. All she did was have big breasts. (And who knows, they may not even be hers - nobody else seems to have their own breasts any more, unless they're considered theirs because they paid for them.) It just doesn't seem fair!!!!!
The Prime Minister's always banging on about giving people More Choice (unless people make The Wrong Choice -- like opposing the war in Iraq - when the only choice is to do what he says), but if you ask me he's fighting another one of his losing battles. Pretty soon we're not going to have ANY choice. It's bad enough that the Amazon Jungle and the glaciers are disappearing, and that there are health warnings on toothpaste and that fish are toxic and cows can go mad and even crisps have sugar added to them, now you can't eat RICE because a lot of regular rice has been contaminated by GM rice. How can you mess up rice? I mean really. You don't make it in a factory, it grows in the ground! Buskin' Bob says we'd probably all be better off if man had stopped inventing after he came up with the wheel.
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Saturday 28th October 2006 