Paris Hilton’s search for world domination

Last night, instead of doing yoga or the laundry or the dishes or trying to find the surface of my dining room table, I watched an episode of Paris Hilton’s search for a new way to make lots of young women and one gay man hate themselves while simultaneously feeling better than the two people who are made to hate themselves the most after losing (winning?) by being told that they will never be Paris Hilton’s bff which apparently will make them cry or curse excessively or maybe both because becoming Paris Hilton’s bff is, and always has been, their life goal.

Seriously, that’s the name of this show, no joke.

And I watched the whole episode.  During the episode, contestants jumped into a giant cupcake looking for prize eggs while paris threw buckets of chocolate sauce on them. One of the prizes was a lap dance from last year’s gay contestant who did not win, but does get to come back and be very, very fey at Paris’s command, clearly she no longer needs a tiny dog, she now has a gay at her beck and call. 

Is she planning to amass an army of gays who will slowly take over the world by performing uncomfortable lap dances for straight women and then helping to undermine the self-esteem of everyone under the age of 25 thus crippling the mental health of an entire generation?  What is the purpose of this? 

Perhaps if the youth of the world are made to feel sufficiently bad about themselves and that Paris is truly some sort of shining example of goodness and virtue they will all suddenly decide that yes, they will buy that CD because YES! that Stars Are Blind song IS actually very good (no, it’s not, I promise you, youth of the world, it really IS NOT) and then on her second CD (which according to something I read somewhere is meant to be inspired by Kylie Minogue) she will have lots of subliminal messages that will inform all these insecure young adults that Paris should be president and then they will all bug her to run for office and in November 2012 there will be the highest  ever voter turnout of young people ever and Paris Hilton will be our president.

That would be very bad.

Please, Youth of the World, don’t fall for Paris’s tricks.  Rather than aspiring to be her best friend, perhaps you should instead aspire to a career in teaching or medicine or veterinary science or street sweeping or politics or just about anything other than being friends with a socialite.  Also, in case you weren’t aware, being friends with a socialite does not pay well.  To be honest, I don’t think it pays at all.  There’s also very little room for advancement, Paris will always want you to walk at least ten paces behind her.  This will never change. 

And then when she has finally amassed her army of gays, she probably won’t need you anymore anyhow.  She’ll call you a hungry, hungry tiger who only wanted to ber her friend for the fame anyhow!  And you’ll be all like, “fame?  What fame?  I’ve just been holding your handbag for the last 6 months!”  And then you’ll get this horrible lap dance that will make you feel so uncomfortable that you just won’t care anymore so you’ll go home and listen to Stars are Blind on repeat for a few hours until the pain goes away and then you’ll go back to college (please, go back to college, get a sensible degree, do an internship, study abroad for a year, please) and eventually the pain and confusion will fade and you’ll realise that actually life without Paris (the person, not the city in France) is pretty good, better, really than life with her was. 

And you won’t vote for her in 2012 because you don’t want a country run by Mean Girls, and maybe in 2016 you’ll run for president and you’ll win because you survived the uncomfortable lap dance and came out of it with your self-esteem in tact and your self-respect rebuilt and everyone will be much amazed.  And in doing so you will have foiled the world’s greatest super villian and you will have saved us all.

Got all that, good, now go do it, and if you can skip the whole part about actually trying to be Paris Hilton’s new bff then, well done you!  You never needed her anyhow.

A simpler life

I keep thinking I want to simplify my existence.  You know, have less crap in my home, make more of my own food, grow things in my garden, sew, knit more, make jam.

Don’t ask me why or how I got this idea, but jam making has always seemed like the most domestic thing you can do to my mind.  10 years ago this would have put it solidly at the bottom of the list of things I wanted to spend my time doing.  But now, it just sounds nice.  Like meditative nice in a way that domestic chores can only truly be if they aren’t born out of necessity.  The choice to make jam is the thing.  I don’t need to do it as the only way to preserve fruit through the winter, like a pioneer would. 

But sitting here in my privileged city based world, with grocery stores around the corner I seem to have developed this desire to become more connected to the process of creating the things I consume.

All that said, I don’t know how practical this desire is.  The fact is I can barely muster the energy to look through my post when I come home from work.  My house gets cleaned on a quarterly basis (if it’s lucky).  And I just tend to sit in the middle of all this sloth talking about all the things I want to be doing without ever actually doing any of them (with the exception of some intermittent knitting).

So I’m not quite ready to start making jam yet.  First I need to get my home in order so it can be an appropriate place to make jam and bread and set aside the necessary space for other endeavours.

But how do I do that?  How do I get out of my current habits of poor housekeeping and negligent benevolence in the garden?  I keep hearing it’s all about making it a habit and staying on top of the little things, but seriously, about the only habit I’ve managed to develop since I was 18 was smoking, and I never even managed to get that up to a pack a day like any of the truly respectable chain smokers in my peer group.

How do other people manage to stay on top of this stuff?  And how do you get out from under it in the first place?

Answers

If you were reading a book and one of the lead characters had the same name as a character from The Dukes of Hazzard would that excite or upset you? 

I’m going to assume you’re totally into this, because I find I like the name Roscoe a lot.

If you were me and you managed to spill your coffee all the hell over the stairwell at work this morning, but still managed NOT to get any on your white sweater what would your ratio of pride:embarrassment be?  I’m thinking about 5:3 right now.

Pride won out for the rest of the day.  Sure I’ve still got a bruise on my arm, but my shirt remained unstained

What should I have for lunch?  Noodle soup from Itsu?  Salt beef sandwich from Pret?  Three packs of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups from the shop across the road?

Half a turkey sandwich, a small banoffee pie, and some fruit won out in the lunch contest.  Today though, salt beef might be the victor

How should I go about convincing Jeremy that we ought to get a kitten?  Oliver needs a henchman.

I keep sending him kitten pictures, he keeps ignoring him.  Jeremy has a heart made of stone!

Sicily?  Awesome, beautiful, both?  Should we tempt fate by trying to go back in October?  Will we get sick again?

This trip is looking more and more likely.  In the tentative stages we are talking about spending a week in the Aeolian Islands and then planning a couple long weekend trips to Paris and Vienna in August and November respectively, with Sicily in October.

Did my friend Sara B used to drink coffee through a straw back in 1994?  Have I made this up or is it in fact true?

I did not make this up.  Got confirmation from Heidi P.  we don’t rememebr WHY Sara B drank her coffee with a straw though.  Just that she did.

 

Questions

If you were reading a book and one of the lead characters had the same name as a character from The Dukes of Hazzard would that excite or upset you? 

If you were me and you managed to spill your coffee all the hell over the stairwell at work this morning, but still managed NOT to get any on your white sweater what would your ratio of pride:embarrassment be?  I’m thinking about 5:3 right now.

What should I have for lunch?  Noodle soup from Itsu?  Salt beef sandwich from Pret?  Three packs of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups from the shop across the road?

How should I go about convincing Jeremy that we ought to get a kitten?  Oliver needs a henchman.

Sicily?  Awesome, beautiful, both?  Should we tempt fate by trying to go back in October?  Will we get sick again?

Did my friend Sara B used to drink coffee through a straw back in 1994?  Have I made this up or is it in fact true?

Holy Cow!

This is really cool

The Plague

So last week I nearly died.  It was a really inconvenient week to nearly die.  We were short staffed at work on Monday and Tuesday, I was officially promoted on Thursday to a new position and was supposed to start training my replacement on Friday.

I made it in all day on Monday and half the day on both Tuesday and Thursday, but mostly spent the week coughing, holding my sore head, and telling Jeremy how close to death I was.  Seriously, I was like a heroine from a Victorian women’s novel, except in polka dotted pyjama bottoms and with much shorter hair. 

Happily I am now feeling considerably better and am back to the modern world here in the file factory.  I will beging transitioning into my new role at work this week (you thought I was going to say gender didn’t you?  You were all like, I always knew Carolyn wanted to be a dude!  But no, I tricked you!).  I don’t like to go too into detail about my job here but I can say that I’m moving up the middle management chain of command.  It’s only sort of exciting.  Hopefully, though, it will clear out some of the stuff I don’t like doing and give me time to develop the stuff I do like doing.  That’s vague, I know.  Sorry.  It’s all good stuff though, an that’s what’s important.

So yeah, not much exciting happening here.  I did watch Heathers for the 5 millionth time this weekend though, and that’s always a good time.  More on that later, I picked up some new stuff on this viewing that I hadn’t really considered before, like the one set of scenes that make Red Heather a sympathetic character!  Who knew?  Also, to discus later, Ferris Bueller’s sister Jeannie as unsung hero of the movie.