Bad Meme-ories

When I wake up in the morning I do not prowl around the house looking for coffee to remedy some sort of psychotic rage that is unquenchable by any other drink.  Nor do I start counting down the hours till I can start pouring unchecked amounts of wine down my throat, whilst simultaneously hypnotically ingesting as much chocolate as possible.  It might be surprising to know that my husband doesn’t have to hide my credit card and live in constant fear that I’m going to spend the mortgage money on a rampant shopping and shoe habit. 

When I idly scroll through facebook to keep up to date with what my friends and family are up to and to inform myself of the local and international happenings within my grasp, I often find memes that evoke a ‘ffs’ and an eye-roll response.  Frequently I am bombarded with ridiculous memes, many of them that make woman look like drunken, chocolate gorging, out of control idiots.  Worse still, it’s mostly woman perpetuating this stereotype.  Clearly these are not my women.  Women that willingly, even proudly, label themselves as shallow, materialistic, laughing lushes!

Sure I like coffee, but I also like to KEEP THINGS IN PERSPECTIVE!  If I can’t have coffee in the morning I can still be a nice, level-headed, functioning human being.  Removing coffee from the morning is not like taking a battery out of a battery operated unit, humans still function.  If you are an arsehole in the morning and coffee is the cure then for goodness sake, make sure that you NEVER run out of coffee, and since your affliction mostly affects those that you are being an arsehole to, you should be kind enough to wake up first and drink your morning dose before anyone else has to bear the brunt of your crippling ailment.  Also remember, it’s you who has the problem – and it’s most likely all in your needy head.   

I like wine.  I don’t think about it all day, or rush in the door after work with shaking hands searching for the nearest bottle of wine and a massive glass.  I like to enjoy wine with friends on social occasions, and I don’t need to invent social occasions just to have an excuse to drink.   Such is my lack of drinking skills that I even have a pretty pitiful tolerance and am on my way to laughy, happy feelings after just a couple of glasses.  I don’t think of wine as a solution as soon as something goes wrong in my life like all the stupid fucking memes suggest.  Like ‘oops, I’ve just crashed my car – wine’ or a similarly stupid solution to a multitude of ordinary problems.  If you think that a wine dispenser on your fridge would be a great idea, or replumbing your house so that beer comes out of your taps instead of water, what you’ve actually got is a drinking problem which no amount of affirming memes are going to make ok.  Pull your socks up ffs!  Just act like a normal person, like me, who occasionally gets shit-faced and smokes cigarettes.

I am a fat, greedy pig.  I like chocolate, sure. But I am not a fuckin lunatic! Let me make it pretty clear, I can walk past chocolate without flinching, I can eat a piece and not need to eat the whole block.  You will not be able to bribe me with chocolate. If you do know a woman who seems hypnotically attracted to the charms of chocolate and loses all willpower and dignity around a bar of the brown stuff then steer clear – that bitch is quite obviously crazy.  Apparently some women think that they can hear chocolate talking to them – clearly they’ve found something in common with nutty chocolate. 

I don’t have many pairs of shoes.  I like shoes, and yeah I like shopping now and again.  Here’s how many times I go shopping a year – maybe five to ten times.  I don’t sneak out of the house with a credit card tucked in my back pocket hoping my husband won’t find out and I certainly don’t take him shopping with me. WHY THE HELL WOULD YOUTAKE YOUR HUSBAND/BOYFRIEND SHOPPING?!!!  On pay day I don’t start planning what things I’m going to buy myself or spend all the mortgage money on extravagant and unnecessary items.  I spend basically none of my time dreaming about shopping.  I feel like I’m suffocating just thinking of all the things I would have if I did have this shallow and materialistic ‘hobby’.

What I’m trying to say here is GET SOME BLOODY PERSPECTIVE!!!! You don’t NEED Coffee, Wine, Chocolate and Shopping to exist on earth and be a nice person. All you really need is shelter, water and food and if you don’t have one of those things then you truly have permission to get a bit wild and desperate.  I bet you won’t be wasting time updating facebook about it ‘lookout everybody, got no water, going batshit crazy #musthavewater’.

Why Christmas Makes Me See Red!

Getting fired up over Christmas!  I feel triggered! 

‘Tis the season to be jolly fucked off I reckon, especially in my family where we have two birthdays in December as well (followed by two in fucking Jolly January).  I totally wish that I got as excited as a cherubic, naive, little child as the month of December inched ever closer with its giant sleigh of financial and time burdens in tow, but alas – those days are over for this Grinch bitch.

Here’s how Christmas could be great for me.  Someone, maybe a fairy godmother type ethereal being, turns up with a Christmas tree, switches on some Christmas music, decorates the house with the sights, sounds and smells of Christmas, wraps presents noisily and excitedly in a nearby room, offers me chocolates and creates a menu for Christmas Day that they are going to execute with zero help from me. 

They arrange for all my loved ones to come together in one giant, peaceful, happiness fest, and organise suitable accommodation so that we can all be together in a happy haze as though we’ve all just downed Christmas ecstasy pills with our rose champagne. Any mess would just magically disappear in the twinkling of a Christmas angel’s eye, as though it had never even been there.  The only evidence of Christmas approaching would be a gently rising excitement flushing over me, building up to the equivalent of a Christmas orgasm.

Enough with the childish fantasies! This is what really happens to me at Christmas.  I can sense Christmas Satan coming with his sleigh of evil elves.  The stores get viciously threatening by hanging their intimidating decorations up, it’s a warning –  Satan and his Christmas Mafia are coming – you better pay up.  Time speeds up so that people look like they’re moving in fast forward and yet I’m in that dream like state where I’m trying to run but nothing’s happening.  All around the warnings are whispered insidiously into my mind ‘Christmas is coming, Christmas is coming...’

I can’t focus properly, the Christmas mafia are after me and I still have two birthdays to take care of, and a work do to organise, and all these end of year school events to attend.   A lot of people start acting like evil elves and furiously shop, do their gardening, clean their houses and take care of their whole lives work as though the world is actually going to end on Christmas Day!  Some of the spiteful bastards see me just getting on with normal life and are determined to make sure I’m aware that Satan is coming, and they cleverly smile with their teeth and crinkly eyes as they deliver the blood curdling question “have you done your Christmas shopping yet?”  I play it cool and sinister and let them know – I’m doing mine at the last minute- that stops them in their seasonal stride.

Even though I’m lurking in the shadows of Christmas and not operating in the frenzied, fake, tinsel-fuelled hell that many people are, I’m still subjected to annoying issues as a result of things like the sudden need for everyone to drive into town and take all the parks.  How the fuck am I supposed to feel Christmassy when I can’t even get a park at the supermarket!!!

Despite the horrors of Xmas I still eventually have to force myself to create the sort of atmosphere mentioned above for the sake of my family’s enjoyment, and lifelong memories of joy that will sustain them throughout their lives.  So at the last minute I will conjure up a delightful menu of food, heartfelt gifts, Christmas lilies that make the house smell like Christmas smelled when I was a kid, and I will kick Christmas’s ass! I will sweat out my dreams in the kitchen and enjoy the sounds of my family enjoying themselves, and I will clean up even though I feel like shooting a gun at a line up of Santas.

And the Christmas joy for me is knowing that my Mum did all that for me and my siblings, and I loved it, that boxing day is the best day of the Christmas holidays now for me, and that I have three kids who are teenagers and eventually they will do all this, and I will enjoy a Christmas smorgasbord of delight at their houses in the near future and then I will be singing Christmas carols at the top of my awful voice.

Merry Fucking Christmas Everyone!

Stupid Market- Getting the Grosseries

Last week I was doing the dreaded grocery shopping on an average

That's right!

Saturday morning.  Whilst I used to enjoy the experience of wandering along sizing up potential candidates of the food kind to gain entry to my trolley, these days I just want to make a quick in and out job of it.  So, I was charging through with list in hand, weaving in and out of all the other shopping zombies hoping that I wouldn’t get in anyone’s way and that they wouldn’t get in mine.

Still, I am a fascinated observer of people and their behaviour and there’re a few things that stand out to me while I’m rampaging like a mad woman through the food palace:

Some people get really aggressive.

It’s like they believe they’re the only person that finds food shopping to be annoying and everybody else is having a gay old time and trying to make them angrier.  I really want to say to these shunters and grunters ‘hey, you know we’re not having a party here either, we’re just managing our attitudes way better than you are arsehole’.

Mums and Dads with their kids look at me with contempt:

especially if I have a small trolley.  Their gaze and body language is like a loaded gun with a finger on the trigger.  I can’t blame them, they’re in the supermarket with children – there really isn’t anything much less enjoyable, or more stressful.  Anyway, as I freely saunter past looking relaxed, with my tiny trolley, I feel them shoot daggers into my back as if to scream ‘you don’t know what it’s like to have kids you bitch, wait till you end up like this’.  Jokes on them, I’ve been there done that, and that’s why I’m so free and happy now!

One thing I do find hard to understand is why anyone would do the groceries with their partner?! I mean it’s not like it’s a date, or an enjoyable outing of any kind.  Surely it would be about as enjoyable as cleaning the toilet together-yuck.  It seems like the couple’s grocery shopping thing might be all about insecurity and control.  The supermarket being such a great place to pick people up, I’m not so sure.

 I don’t think it’s all in my head though when I come round the corner with my trolley and straight into the path of an oncoming couple to find the woman glaring at me and the man nervously looking at his feet.  FFS! If you’ve got to keep your Man on such a tight lead while you bark and snarl off to the side you’ve got some serious problems.  If my husband was coming to the supermarket and wanted to run off with some chick doing her groceries then she’d be the one getting a shitty deal (I don’t mean he’s a dick head or a bad lover- he’s not) because she would have hooked herself an unfaithful man and I’d be free of one.

But last week, last week, oh my, this one took the cake!  So there I was marching around the supermarket and I’m in about the second aisle when I come across a forty to fifty year old couple with their trolley.  I hear him ask her ‘what are you after – Kremelta- or something?’ and she confirms that yes that’s what she’s after but that it’s probably not down this aisle.

 You see at the moment everybody is confused as fuck at the supermarket because they’ve done that super annoying strategy of changing everything around in order to make their customers disoriented, and keep people wandering around in there for longer.  In a situation like that a lot of people help each other out by asking and directing each other to the products they’re after.  So I made a mental note that that couple were looking for Kremelta so if I were to see it, I’d let them know.

I couldn’t remember what the woman looked like because the guy had been the one right in front of me.  He had a red cap on, jeans and a t-shirt and sports jacket.  He had the big, rounded, soft belly of a beer swilling rugby loving kiwi guy.  He also had a quite dated looking big bushy salt and pepper moustache.  

As I rounded the corner to the next aisle there he was right in front of me, and he had just found the kremelta.  I did what I thought was normal and smiled at him.

Just so you know.

Well, he looked at me with contempt and anger for my freely given smile, turned on his heel, made a beeline for his partner and planted a big sloppy kiss on her face- right in front of me.  As if that’s not kind of weird and creepy enough he then turned and looked straight at me while he was pinching her on the butt!  Well, I guess he showed me that I’ve got no chance with him!!!! What a shame, I was so looking forward to kissing a bloody Neanderthal at the supermarket. 

It strikes me that one could see all of this stupid market behaviour by watching a bunch of monkeys in the wild.  This is domestic animal jungle activity, I should have started scratching myself and pretended to eat fleas I'd just harvested off my body. Or perhaps a guttural monkey scream would have been enough, I'm bloody good at those!

Alternatively I could have really fucked that guy over by bursting in to tears and saying 'but you promised that you wouldn't kiss her anymore, you said that you were just waiting for the right time, I can't believe I made love to you in the toilets here just last week'! Yeah, I'd love to see the look on that dick heads face if I had unleashed that shit on him.

Maybe I’ll just get a supermarket t-shirt made that reads:

·         Hate shopping

·         Married

·         Got kids

·         Just want to get my groceries done

·         Not interested in your boyfriend

·         Smiles are free – no strings attached.

Then everybody can just calm the fuck down and do their bloody shopping!

Don't Lose Yourself into "Coupledom"

I'm a bit of a voyeur.  I like people watching, not that you'd notice since I spend very little time sitting still or being quiet- I'm no introvert!  But, I love people watching when given the opportunity, and I really think that even though I do engage in a lot of conversations(which I do really enjoy) my brain is really focused on human behaviour all the time- I just love it!  At the moment I'm noticing "Coupledom" and the "we" that people seem to transform into. I think it would be super amazing and highly unlikely that one could meet someone who thinks and feels exactly the same as them.  Why do so many people lose their identity in a relationship and become a 'we'?

My husband and 'I', 'We' disagree...

Have you ever watched a reality show where couples compete against each other?  This is the perfect place to see the 'we' in full effect.  Standing side by side and talking to the camera the couples say things like- "we really love neutral colours", "we are really competitive" or "we like reading" all the while glancing at each other with beaming smiles and nodding in agreement. 
Why are they doing this? Grouped together - the statement, the body language and the agreement seems like some sort of animalistic tribal dance of affirmation.  We're together, we like the same things, we're happy- see!  Is this affirmation for themselves or an outward sign for others- 'observe our indestructible force of togetherness, no one agrees more than we do, that's our intimate bond'! 

The thing is, before they were the 'we' they actually were individuals that obviously appealed to each other just as they were.  It's understanding that in the initial stages of togetherness they probably found all the things they had in common and spent a lot of time together, they probably spent less time doing individual things or fighting over topics they disagreed on while they were in the first flush of romance.  Is this what sets the scene  for the rest of the relationship?  Maybe the idea of truly being in-love and intimate is set down over this period and the idea of not agreeing or not spending all their time together now seems hostile and dangerous.  But without differences and individual pursuits what really is there to talk about?  How can your partner excite you if you have become carbon copies of each other.

My husband and I disagree on many topics, we are quite different, which is fine with me.  I like to know what 'I' think and not be scared to say it.  I don't think me having my own point of view makes my husband like me less either.  I also don't need him to agree with me.  It's not a problem at all for us to disagree and the bonus is that we get to explore all sides of a topic since we sometimes have different points of view.  In social situations I don't feel like I have to be a 'we' and choose one view point to defend as a couple, this is not tense or difficult, mostly it means in any social situation one of us agrees with someone else there at least.  It wasn't always like this though, I suspect we were a 'we' for a while there too, maybe it was immaturity... 

The most visual observance of the 'we' is at the mall or supermarket.  This is usually more a display of dutiful misery.  'We go shopping together because we are a 'we' so we do everything together even if it makes us miserable'. Why, oh why would you go shopping together?  Surely he is not interested in your recreational clothes shopping, and certainly not for more than thirty minutes!  I can't imagine how stressful it must be trying to shop while my husband wandered around after me absolutely bored to tears.  Leave your partner at home while you're shopping unless its a purchase that you both need to be present for, you can indulge your 'individual preferences' while you are alone. 
The supermarket shopping- hardly anyone enjoys this!!!!  Why double the misery by both going?  I have rarely seen a couple shopping and looking really happy together.  People hardly ever act kindly at the supermarket anyway and often the awkward people glancing can be a bit jungle like.  Did he just look at her??!!! Take a wide berth if you see a couple shopping together, they're probably so insecure that if you even glance their way you may be on the receiving end of an abusive tirade!

I think my main gripe with the 'we' is that it's just boring. Keep your relationship honest, alive and exciting and be an 'I'!