Tyrion slaps Joffrey for 10 minutes
By the 2 minute mark I was in tears of joy. By the 10th minute I’d had multiple orgasms.
Even though she follows 58,677 people I’m still counting this as a win.
Arch-Shaped Pox
I used to have the most perfectly sculptured eyebrows. I would sit in front of the mirror with my tweezers every night and make sure that not a single hair was out of place. I wanted to be the prettiest little boy in the world, and the thought of stepping out of the house with an unkempt brow disgusted me. The pride I had in those eyebrows and the immense superiority I felt over all the other dudes with their unwieldy and/or mono brows gave me an enormous kick. Yet in recent years I have not been so vigilant with my eyebrows, I have grown lazy and complacent, allowing their shape to deteriorate and for strays to settle and grow strong. Whereas previously I would have fought against the hypocritical social norms that allows men to be slovenly, I have now, much to my shame, taken advantage of that unfortunate custom and allowed my eyebrows to become disheveled.
Part of the problem is the lack of an appropriate mirror. Previously when I had a full length mirror I could sit cross-legged in front of it and pluck away without any stress on the rest of my body. But nowadays in my room I only have a small mirror mounted to the wall that requires me to stand in front of it to see my face. Tending to one’s eyebrows is a task that needs both stability and a relaxed posture. It takes concentration, calmness and precision, and I am unable to achieve these things in the standing position. After removing only a few hairs I get antsy and uncomfortable, I just don’t feel as dedicated to the job when I am standing. I feel as though I am in between endeavours, or on my way out the door.
Yet upon taking a good hard look in the mirror this evening it has become clear to me that I need to find a way of applying far greater time and effort to my eyebrows. Their untamed growth is a blemish on both my face and my reputation. I have allowed them too much freedom to grow fat and wild, and diminish my sexual appeal. However, I will not succumb to their persistence. I have the motivation and pluck to shape the restoration of my beautiful brows.
After almost 6 months of both quitting and getting fired several times, my boss and I were finally victorious last Friday when my job ceased (how two people with the same goal could be so ineffectual was kind of ridiculous).
So, goodbye soul crushing office job, hello State Library! I am now officially unemployed a writer!
My bank account has given me a week to become successful.
I’ll never be the sharp and sophisticated woman I desire to be if I keep spilling liquids on unfortunate areas of my skirt :(
My Beautiful Bald Twisted Fantasy
At the beginning of 2010 I started going to a salon to get my body waxed. I was sick of the mess of doing it myself and I saw going public and getting a professional to do the job for me was a greater statement. Women makes such an effort with their bodies and men (for the most part) do not, and I find this completely offensive. Heterosexuality is a fucking scam weighted far too heavily in favour of men and I felt the need to do my small part to try and rectify it.
At places such as a waxing salon there is the inevitable small talk that comes during the process. You need to provide an overview of your life, what you do, relationship status, family, friends etc etc. I have no problem with this. Even though I am very much a loner, I converse with people all day for my job, and it’s something that I am reasonably good at.
The beginning of 2010 was a period of bold new adventures for me. As well as starting to get myself professionally waxed, I also was the constant and close companion of a girl with whom I became completely smitten. We’d been introduced by a mutual friend in the December and had an immediate connection. To me, this connection was so pronounced that I became absolutely convinced that we were perfect for each other, and that a relationship between us was inevitable.
During a waxing appointment around this time the woman performing the job asked me, in our small talk, whether I was seeing someone. Usually this sort of question receives the swift reply of “No”, stated in a tone that suggests one should move on, as this area of my life is constant and unlikely to change. However, on this occasion, I lied. I told her that I had actually just started seeing someone and that it was going quite well. I thought that claiming that this girl and I were together wasn’t too big of an issue. By the time my next appointment came around her and I would be joyfully committed to each other and I would no longer be lying. It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t telling the truth, I was just telling the truth in advance.
However, the inevitable relationship never eventuated and after around 8 months I had become so absolutely consumed, confused, overwhelmed, paranoid and mentally and physically damaged by the situation that it was no longer sustainable. I ended that friendship for both my health and her freedom.
What would have been the sensible thing to do here was, when I next went to get waxed, inform the woman that our relationship had unfortunately not worked out and redirect our small talk back to reality. But of course, this is not what has happened, and for the past two and a half years I have kept up the fantasy that this girl and I are together and everything is wonderful. Every few months when I return to get waxed, I go in armed things we have been doing and plans we are making. It has allowed me to pretend I was a real adult by describing things that I notice couples doing, like going down the coast for the weekend together, or sitting in cafés drinking coffee.
The deep and dark irony about this is that far from living the idyllic life that I detail, the reality is that I have become absolutely petrified of this girl. Every time I leave my house I am in constant fear of bumping into her. I won’t go to places where she might be, and I use public transport that is less convenient for me in order avoid the risk being on the same tram, train or bus. The energy I consume by having to keep myself open-eyed and constantly on guard is immense and mentally draining.
So on Thursday I went for another waxing appointment, and once again engaged in the requisite small talk with the woman who tends to me. When she asked me how things were going with my girlfriend I again kept up the fantasy and told her how happy we are, and I even took things up a notch by discussing her integration into my family, stating how good she is with my sister’s kids, and then how we’d talked about having kids together in a few years.
While waxing doesn’t have a reputation was being the most comfortable of activities, I actually really enjoy it. I see it as penance and I always leave the salon feeling some sort of spiritual restoration, as well as feeling soft and sleek and more comfortable with myself. Despite having spent the time creating a fraudulent account of my life.
As I made my way back to the train station, in what was the Universe’s idea of either a sick joke or a slap in the face (or both), I noticed her walking towards me. She was with some guy who not only wasn’t me, but also looked like the kind of guy who didn’t go to any effort to bridge the aesthetic gender divide. Distressed, I panicked and tried to run across the road out of her sight, causing a motorist to slam on his breaks and blast me with his horn. If she didn’t notice me before, she would have then. I couldn’t bare to look around, I just continued on across the road and away from the situation as quickly as possible.
As I got on a train and attempted to analyse what had happened, I did feel that there was some sort of fate taking place. Deep in my sub-consciousness is a belief in fate, despite attempting to be a rational person it’s something I have been unable to shake since reading The Celestine Prophecy as a teenager. Previously I had believed that meeting her was fateful, and it sucked the life out of me. But then, another perspective on fate is merely reality, and it’s not always positive, romantic or a Hollywood Ending. Reality will always find a way of making itself known. Even if you rip it out by the roots, it will re-emerge. Over time it may come back slower and thinner, but true comfort will only come with acceptance.
"Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me … They want to control women. They want to control how we dress, they want to control how we act, they even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and bodies. Yes, it is hard to believe that even here at home, we have to stand up for women’s rights and reject efforts to marginalize any one of us…"
Hillary Clinton, at Women in the World summit (via think-progress)
I believe the way women’s bodies have played a significant part in the Republican primary debates is a symptom of the confusion about America’s position in the 21st Century. A national mythology that constantly enforces the idea of being “the greatest” can only be confusing to people when other societies begin to catch up.
When power is confused or threatened it always retreats to its most basic impulse, and that is control. And while women have made, and continue to make, great inroads into rectifying the gender power imbalance in the West, the fact that the rights of a woman over her own body are being debated by four rich men in the attempt to be the leader of the West’s most prominent society shows there is a long way to go.
There is a direct correlation between the economic success of a society and the way it treats its women. Attacking women may bring some sort of short-term mental comfort to the powerful, but it will only fuel a society’s decline.
(via think-progress)
Psychologist Dr Veronica Clarke does house calls, and so she came to my office to discuss my problems.
Ok Computer
Yesterday was a typical day at work. From the perspective of what I do every day, it didn’t seem like I’d come across anything extraordinary. Each day I interview people who make the internet. When I say “make” the internet, I literally mean *build* it, not the people who distribute the lols (although this is a very important function as well). So I speak to various types of programmers, designers, UXers, those who organise these people, and those create the new ideas and applications that we download to our laptops, phones and tablets everyday.
The first person I interviewed yesterday I knew was going to be good. When you’ve been doing this job for a while you can tell a lot about someone from how they present their CV. This guy knew how to organise information to make sure the most relevant details stood out, and he knew how to convey it in a clean and crisp manner. Despite being what is know as a “back-end” programmer, this guy had a very keen eye for design. But it wasn’t until I started talking to him that I realised just how extraordinary he was. When I began this job I would go into interviews with a list of questions, but now I just go in and have a conversation with people. I’ve learned how to direct a conversation in a way that I will get the information I need, but it also allows the interview to flow more naturally and for me to get a more personal sense of the person. As our conversation progressed, he revealed that he was born in a refugee camp in Kenya to Somali parents. He lived in the camp for 16 years before his family were granted asylum in Australia. While growing up he had got a glimpse of the technology used by UN personnel and NGO workers in the camps and was fascinated. Although he’d had some education in Kenya, when he arrived in Melbourne he had a lot of catching up to do for his age group. Within three years he had earned a place in a university to study Computer Science. After graduating from university, he has spent the last 6 years working for a web solutions firm, creating customised cloud-based software, and has risen to become the lead developer in a programming team of 5. Undoubtedly making his parents very proud.
But that isn’t all. When I mentioned to him that he had a very keen design eye for a back-end developer, he told me about his interest in design and how he follows many of the online “design gurus” through Twitter and other platforms, and then he started to tell me about this project that he is working on in his spare time. Obviously, having a keen interest in both the web and Africa he had noticed that the state of a lot of African sites wasn’t that good, that they just don’t have the money or time to invest in slick websites that are quick, look good and are easy to navigate. While discussing this on an online forum, he came in contact with a man in America who was also from an East African refugee background, and was also a developer. They recognised that nowadays, a website is a company’s primary point of contact, and if it doesn’t look good and work well, then it doesn’t matter how good your product or service is, you won’t attract people. So together they decided to rectify this problem by collaborating to create a website platform that was cheap, fast, good looking and able to be customised quickly and easily, allowing African businesses to make their primary point of contact an attractive one.
There’s a real stigma attached to people who come from a refugee background in the West, but for a lot of us our perspective is so misguided. Having grown up with an abundance of opportunities, we tend not even acknowledge them, letting many pass knowing that there will be ample more. But this man, and a I guarantee many more like him, could immediately recognise opportunity and not only make the most of it, but value it so much that he spends his spare time working towards creating opportunities for those from a similar background.
Later that morning I would interview an Indian User Experience (UX) professional (the people responsible for the initial visual architecture of a site, they exists at the intersection of design, psychology and ergonomics) and discuss the Bangalore Metro and the philosophy of public transport connections. And in the afternoon I Skyped with a Bangladeshi man in Saudi Arabia who is not only responsible for the Middle East’s premier restaurant directory but he was currently working on an app that would be a hospital guide to Saudi Arabia. The app would not only inform people the best medical centres for certain procedures, but also, most importantly for a country with a large population of foreign workers, where you can get medical attention in your mother tongue. The idea for this came when he needed to find a Bengali speaking doctor for his mother. When he has finished the app, you will be able to GPS your location and it bring up the locations and distances to medical centres and the languages spoken there.
It seemed like a pretty average day at work at the time, I speak to extraordinary people from a myriad of backgrounds everyday, and it wasn’t until I got home and was lying on my bed did I realise that what I do is pretty cool. I get to ask a huge variety of talented and creative people to tell me about their lives and what they do I am provided with some amazing information that is as good as any book. It’s a wonderful opportunity and, like the refugee programmer, I should appreciate and take full advantage of it.
Too Quick for Cupid
I recently signed up to one of those online dating websites. Now that I’ve given up going to bars and gigs, and I’m no longer “on the scene”, the opportunities to meet people are greatly diminished. Well, this isn’t entirely true, I mean, I meet new people everyday. In fact, I’m such a master of meeting and engaging with new people that they actually pay me to do it. However, as it’s not so ethical to have intercourse with people that I meet through my job, I have been led to embrace the world of online dating instead.
I’ve never understood dating. It always seemed like a absurd concept. I just want to be 3 years into a relationship already. The initial stages are just filled with the most retarded perspectives and approaches. I really have no time for them at all. However, one must play the game, and by joining this site I am attempting to do so.
When joining one of these sites you are expected to fill in a profile about yourself indicating your interests and personality traits with the hope of attracting someone who would find such things amusing. However, there also is a section where you indicate what type of person you are looking for. On this site I am subscribed to this section is titled “You should message me if….”
However, after much consideration, I decided to leave this section blank. People tend to put forward an image of themselves which will attract the most people, but if I were truly honest about the the criteria for messaging me then I would receive no messages at all.
You see, there’s one thing that keeps me from being able to find my true soulmate, and that is that there are very few people in this world who know how to cross a road properly. The day I find someone who realises you can’t get hit by a car if there is no car near you is the day I will be in love. Because I cannot wait to cross a road. I literally cannot just stand there like an arsehole at the lights and wait for the little man to turn green. It freaks me out. Getting from A to B in the quickest amount of time possible was the reason I was born, and I won’t be slowed down by anyone or anything. Certainly not by love. Because how could I possibly love someone who cannot assess the speed of a vehicle and the speed of their own legs and make an internal calculation about the two in order to judge their own safe passage across a road? That is a basic life skill in my book and it would be ridiculous for me to be coupled with someone who is unable to do it.
I would say that this is the defining characteristic of my being. I need to have a precise knowledge of everything that is going on around me and be able to make judgements accordingly. To be with someone who is not with me on this would be severely limiting. The only other option for me is to date someone small enough that I can pick them up and carry them across the road without having to break stride.
So although I have been receiving many messages on this site from girls who are impressed by my profile, I’ve yet to take any of this interest public. I know that if I were to meet someone for a dinner date, as we walked to the restaurant and stopped at the lights, she would notice me start to twitch and sweat. And I would say “I’ll meet you on the other side” and run across the road. But she would never meet me on the other side. I doubt she would even meet me half way. My desire to get to the destination as quickly as possible will spoil any chance of me getting there at all.
