while I'm still macless (the cost of fixing it is the price of a new pc and the price of a new one is the price of four new pcs .... sigh. dear steve jobs. your computers are wonderful. make them cheaper. please. dear world, please give me €2000 etc.) and the holidays are still on (dear ministry of ed. your school holidays are too long. make them less than 11 weeks. please) and my brain is a fug of duh (dear brain.....etc.) I thought I'd put up a mini retrospective slide show of old stuff from more vitriolic-a days, about three or four years ago, which in blogyears is a heck of a lot and deserving of a retrospective if you ask me. Tracey Bloody Emin gets a retrospective, so do I.
1 I am in possession of two sweet little girls, an almost six-year-old and a three-and-half-and-a-bit-year-old. I didn't plan on having them, but the stork brought them and I can't give them back. They are pretty little things, one of them could even be described as dainty... the other couldn't...and they both love pink fairy wings and tutus and bloody barbie and all the crap and paraphernalia that go with them. They flutter round the house, the less elegant one is convinced she is already a prima ballerina and pirouettes a lot.
Thankfully, there is a darker side to my daughters. A side that their portuguese grandmother doesn't see and wouldn't like or understand. A side that gives me hope. They are foul minded, dirty mouthed little horrors and one day they are sure to be top bad girl bloggers (or whatever has taken over from blogging by then, since blogging will have become the standard tool for running countries and telling the fridge what to order for itself) like our Zed.
For they laugh their little heads off when they see an enormous bottom on a bicycle. Nasty, dirty guffaws of delight, especially if there is a bum crack poking out of the top of tight trousers on that bicycle.
Thankfully fannies and willies are just as funny as ever and we're not so damned pc in this house as to try to make fannies and willies or any other appendages unfunny. Farting and burping are, of course, better than any comedy anywhere.
Their greatest joy comes in the form of vomit and snot and lick. These substances are the best entertainment in the world; when one of them is sick, the other watches enthralled and then they have a post vomit debriefing.
The little one is inexplicably phobic about bogies, so she is easily wound up with a grolley on the end of a finger, running round the garden behind her. The other is extremely touchy about other people's spit, so the little one just has to lick her big sister's face (or I approach spitting on a tissue to clean a smut on her face) to get a great reaction. It is such fun to watch.
But now, the TRULY disgusting is happening ... the first teeth falling out. (Zed has threatened to send me three children's worth of baby teeth if I don't behave, because she knows how teeth make me feel)... and all I get all day long is "ooh, ooh, mummy, look, another one is wiggly! LOOK how it wiggles, isn't it great?" while I'm holding back the vom and gettng all shuddery. But they are hanging on with grim determination in that little mouth of hers.
And then....the other day, they crash into each other on the trampoline and the little one has bashed her teeth on her sister's head and her mouth fills with blood and SHE has a wiggly tooth, liable to fall out prematurely. So in between her screams I'm getting "hey, now I'VE got a wiggly tooth mummy, hooray!" and calculated little grins over my shoulder at her sister (it is right at this point that I get stung in the eyelid by a bastard wasp...what the hell have I done to him? I'm standing in the garden in my dressing gown having just got out of the bath and I'm hoping the prissy bastard neighbours aren't watching as I flail about with a child in one arm and everything probably hanging out).
And the big one, the nearly six-year-old, has a prolonged tantrum because her baby sister is now going to be "big" before her because she is bloodily losing a tooth FIRST.
Just thought I'd share that with you. Enjoy your breakfast.
2 Thank 'eavens for blogging... and apostrophes, where would I be without my apostrophes?
For without blogging, I couldn't be funny or try to be funny, or hone my funny skills.... for I live in Portugal.
YOU try being funny in a language other than your own.
And in a place where there are some people who will just never "get it".
And where men are rife. Men, in my experience, don't want the funny limelight stolen from them. So they don't laugh. That, or they are just humourless gits.
In a society that's still a bit squeamish, where ladies are supposed to be ladies and not foul mouthed crack whores be able to make quite fearfully ugly faces (look, I'm gorgeous from one side, with makeup, zits squeezed... but from the wrong angle on the wrong day with the wrong expression on my face I could put jabber the hut off his tea).
So, what the HELL am I trying to say?
That blogging has made it possible *sniff* for me and *aaich* millions of women like *sniccchhhffff* me to be *sob sob - gimme a tissue godammit, I'm doing my halle berry impression* funny again.
I thank you.
3 People fall into different camps.
This isn't a man/woman thing, honest... this is just a different people thing.
People just do stuff differently, treat life differently.
It's something I took a long time and an awful lot of housemates to come to terms with.
The way people do their day to day things, for me, defines them rather more that what they do for show to the outside world.
Which is one reason I always hated having to share my house with other people who didn't love me unconditionally.
I don't really want people who I don't love unconditionally to necessarily see the real filthy me.
But, back to my point. People. They do things. Differently. From each other.
They see things differently. And they regard others differently.
It's a kind of glass half-empty/half-full thing.
Imagine, the Venn diagram you could draw for all the different camps you fall into.
So, as I get older, I ask myself questions. Pertinent questions. Probing questions. Like...
Why the fuck can't everyone be like me?
(messy, and willing to go looking for soap in the middle of a bath, that is)
while I'm still macless (the cost of fixing it is the price of a new pc and the price of a new one is the price of four new pcs .... sigh. dear steve jobs. your computers are wonderful. make them cheaper. please. dear world, please give me €2000 etc.) and the holidays are still on (dear ministry of ed. your school holidays are too long. make them less than 11 weeks. please) and my brain is a fug of duh (dear brain.....etc.) I thought I'd put up a mini retrospective slide show of old stuff from more vitriolic-a days, about three or four years ago, which in blogyears is a heck of a lot and deserving of a retrospective if you ask me. Tracey Bloody Emin gets a retrospective, so do I.
