Or maybe not

I am just one of millions of overworrying anxious idiots. I'm at peace with the parade of minor-league holy-shits in my head. Or more than I was ten years ago, anyway. But then there is the Big Background Stuff.

My current BBS worry is:

Possibly, I am a loser.

I put this to my mother. She said:

Okay. So?

Which was a fucking good point. She is known for those.

But since that is the right way to be thinking about it, let's not. Saying that you're a loser, much less saying why, is precisely the kind of onanistic hairpat-baiting neurotic crap that makes you a loser in the first place. But we losers like to pretend that if you say it, you have to show some (loserish) balls by justifying your fervent loser dogma. The thing is that I have this habit of doing something until I might have to stop proving that I have the potential to be good at it and just goddamn get the hell on with being good at it, and then I bail. Dilettante, right. Pronounced loser.

So of course I'm involved with a doctor with all the saving lives and insane shifts and no sleep and forced on-demand justification of every freaking move you make and having to stand up gracefully and willingly under constant public critique without yelling stick it bitches what the hell would you know? Which I'm mentioning to make clear that the obvious fact that doctors get automatic not-a-loser passes is not an empty bit of hero worship, dickwad surgical consultant or three notwithstanding.

It's so textbook I could puke all over my shoes. If I had any shoes, which I don't, because of the whole enforced-exile-one-suitcase-life-in-storage painfest, so what I have is my North Face snow boots, a pair of Birk Arizonas and the black high heeled boots with the ankle buckles that Pluvialis calls my Stormtrooper boots which are in the collection because they happened to be in the first box of clothes that she and my friend Shiny Hair opened.

My kingdom for some chucks.

Seriously.

Most every aspect of the sociocultural trade in [giant scare quote] Advice on Love and Sex [giant scare quote] is repellent, dredged like sticky turkish delight with arsenic instead of powdered sugar and just as poisonous, laced with the vicious metaphorical opacity of the language of hunting, subterfuge, camouflage, entrapment, espionage, political double-speak; everything silently, brutally, casually pinned to The Obvious Truth that no two people coming at one another with candour and a smile could ever end up in bed. Or in love. Or whatever.

This is a filthy lie, natch, with all sorts of stupendously shit gender and heteronormative consequences, but I am going to break every moral guideline in Xtin's List of Shit Not To Mess With (OK no I don't really have that list. But I should) by saying that there is one bit of the excruciating vernacular which I endorse, even though it will all become illegal under hate-speech legislation when I become Queen.

The Bit is:

He's just not that into you.

... where 'he', of course, is 'whomsoever you have your eye on right now'. This line is typically directed at women for the assclown gender and heteronormative reasons aforealluded. Also, like most of the Advice out there, along with the rest of its tasty toxicity, it is often invoked as a part of Some Theory of precisely how certain men or women do, will or ought to behave based on what happened when we were Cro-Magnon, which day of the week you call and whether or not he/she matches whatever story Advisor is peddling about the Right Kind of man and/or woman.

Forget this whackaloon baggage. The Bit works for the most idiosyncratic of views about what you want and what people are like, and in a pleasingly democratic manner. Pleasing for the neutral observer, that is. For the rest of us participant observers it sucks rocks, but, people: write that shit down. Because I'm over it, for real. I am over watching smart, superbly desirable people let themselves be pissed on from great heights by charismatic narcissistic sadists addicted to their role as star of the movie of their own lives. I am tired of all the emotional wastage poured into the yawning pit of people who suddenly (but consistently, because that's their fucking schtick right there) appear so that Someone Who's Patiently Waiting can be their fucktoy/manly chest/motherly shoulder/drama audience/arm-candy/literary-academic-high-cultural ego-boost.

No but no but there was this time when you made pasta together/had hot monkey sex/watched DVDs until 3AM! Uh huh. Sure. Are you waiting around for something else? You know what I'm talking about. Hot sex that you haven't had? A romantic smooch instead of the hot sex you always have? Holding hands walking down the street? A shared tub of popcorn at the movies? Telephone calls and text messages and quirky newsy emails that, you know, ask about you? Wild partying with slightly seedy making out in dark corners? Dinner with friends? Out in public for once? Not out in public for once?

Maybe patience is a virtue and the right person is worth waiting around for. Maybe that time you laughed a whole hell of a lot in the Tate Modern actually does justify the seemingly endless wait for the fabulous sex you just know you'd have. Or that crazy night with the twenty-five positions and mind-blowing orgasms really does mean that if you play your cards right, you can go out to the pub together sometime.

Or maybe you get into someone else. Or you're into the masochistic thrill of the constantly rejected emotionally anorexic. Or, if you're the historical me, you indulge in a self-flagellating orgy involving knowing that you should do the first thing and rejecting the idea that you're the second thing. Whatever floats your boat.

Bank run

Ladies and gentlemen, my first real-live run on a bank! I took this shot this morning of the bankbook-clutching queue outside Northern Rock, which ... actually, never mind the boring details. Suffice to say that this is category-A hysterical mob behaviour. Very sedate, neatly dressed, well-behaved and typically nicely-combed-silvery-haired-and-pensioned hysterical mob behaviour, but still. Just outside the frame there is a pair of bemused-looking cops watching to make sure that no-one did anything ... well, mobbish.

Quick! Start stashing all your cash in the mattress! That'll improve the economy and show those American subprime defaulters what-for!

Northern Rock shareholders, come over for a drink. I feel for you.

Random bullets of surprise

(1) So, since the middle of the year when I had the Mane of Insanity™ cut into a more manageable shoulder-length 'do, I've been gingerly stepping toward my long-planned abandonment of Long Hair. Yesterday I got it cut and I was thinking about other things and then I spent the evening at a party in London, and this morning I got up and saw myself in the mirror and ... wa-hey! I have short hair! Flippy, shoulder-clearing short hair! Gads. The relief. I feel my codependency lapsing a little, but possibly only because I think my hair currently approves of me. If it could speak it would say "Yes, very nice. Edgy, yet age-appropriate. Also, your My Giant Mane of Hair is Me syndrome was getting on my nerves. And in conclusion, the Sebastian Evocatív Crafty styling paste is the bomb. No, don't tell me what it costs, I care only for funky broken-up lines and touchability."

(2) At aforementioned party, I injured my ear. Seriously. I slammed it accidentally into a high-mounted wrought-iron bannister in the Cheshire Cheese. This is currently runner-up in my hall of fame All Time Stupidest Injuries. The Stupid Injury is distinguished not only by the neuronally-challenged circumstances under which it was sustained, but also by how mind-bendingly regularly the injury reminds you of same. The record is currently held by the burn incident involving the keyboard-essential pad of my third left finger, my ceramic hair straighteners and the phone ringing at an inopportune moment. My pinnae are not used for typing, for which we are thankful, but they do perform crucial duties related to propping up hair when placed with stereotypical push-behind-the-ear movement deployed by one million Method actresses trying to convey nerves or concentration. New Flippy Do™ requires intensive repetition of same. Slight microexcruciate every time. But worse, mental YouTube ... 14th century stone steps. Lulu wedge heels. Careful negotiation of first step ... slam!

Cringe.

comma, The

My frame of mind at the moment doesn't really deserve the friendly, boxy appellation "frame". That would be something you could hang on the wall, maybe in the bathroom or the dark part of the hall, or in a pinch you could stack it in the attic next to the other crap in dubious taste. Because it's handy and oblongish and flat, you see. Which is not the current state of my mental. Another thing which is friendly and boxy is grammar and syntax. No wonder we understand one another. Sustained prose, however, is another matter altogether, so while I spool up something to say later, six observations:

(1) Many odd juxtapositions work brilliantly and make, like bringing something out of solution, a very particular kind of satisfaction unique to the combination of things that ought not to go together---an unexpected scent of bread in a library; Gill Sans with overwrought gothic drop-caps. However, my 1792 edition of Hume's History of England (13 vols.) sitting next to my collection of Ravilious' interwar period Persephone dinnerware is not one of these.

(2) Which is annoying me to an extent wildly disproportionate to its relative importance, which is surely microscopic bordering on negligible.

(3) My prose style is utterly fucked by trying to write my thesis. Are you hearing this stuff that is coming off my keys? What the hell was that last thing I said? Could I possibly sound any more pretentious, uncomfortable and over-sub-claused?

(4) The convention of alphabetically listing entries beginning "The" under the initial letter of the following word instead of under "T" has apparently died.

(5) I would be outraged.

(6) Except that I am a command-F whore who still has to sing the alphabet song under her breath in the library.

Bite me, 2

About an hour ago, I got an unsolicited message from a stranger on facebook. It's your basic bar pick-up line, adapted for the youtube age. It's premised on one of the group memberships I have listed in my super-super-restricted profile. As pick-ups go, it could be much thinner -- the group is an expression of a certain pretty arcane kind of fandom for a cultish but not overly well-known American author, so the fact that this guy likes this author and knows I do too is a much more sophisticated basis for e-chatting me up than most.

However.

His profile is unrestricted, and under Interests, he lists Women.

As a matter of gender-political hopelessness, this is not actually the most egregious thing on this guy's profile, which is precisely why I'm going to spin a little vitriol in its direction. Because really? It's not that unusual. And I'd like to have a moment of explaining, Gender Politics for Idiots style, why it makes me want to snap pencils. Or pencilnecks.

A side issue in this discussion that I'm not going to get into is that part of what's in play here is not just what people will say, but what they think it's acceptable to say. Your user profile on a social networking site is not just some things about you -- it's the things which you think are the things you'd want other people to know. If you're not trying to come off clever and witty and generally nonchalant about it, you're probably trying to come off ironic for not doing so. Part of what gets my knickers in a bunch is the remembrance that this is the context in which Mr E-Pickup lists Women as one of his interests. (Along with concrete and classic cars. Uh-huh. But I digress).

OK. Perhaps you're saying that you like having sex. If this is what is meant by having women as an interest, then it's a very lame euphemism and I take a fair amount of exception to the use of the word "women" as a euphemism for anything at all, much less your getting your end in. But actually, that's the milder and much less offensive reading of what I think is going on here. If I challenged you with this, your eyebrows are going to pucker with hurt consternation and you'll claim that sex has nothing to do with it -- it's women. They're so fascinating. So mysterious. So amazing and changeable and endlessly intuitive and passionate and gentle.

You might even add something like not like men at all. I don't even care about this idiotic and vacuous last part, which exercises a whole lot of other people. No-one has a clear idea of what ought reasonably to count as a difference between men and women and which ought to be vilified as a horrifying example of gender discrimination, and frankly I don't really think that discussion is going anywhere.

The point is that you're talking about 50% of the goddamn world population. Saying that you are interested in them has literally no meaning except as a function of your simplistic, unreconstructed, utterly, utterly uninterrogated vision of what counts as a woman. And, so help me, if you claim in response that you are interested in their very variety, realise that that only means something relative to fixing the notion of "them".

God, this makes me feel so, so lonely.

Pop quiz

What is this a logo for?

(a) A gynecological screening facility
(b) A gym

Did you answer (b)? Gold star!

Attention, tourists

Caution: Snarkage

I have long since stopped expecting you to appreciate -- or even behave as if you are aware -- that this is actually still a university, and it was not made a museum in 1862 for the delectation of future owners of 7.2MB Canon Ixias.

However.

The examinations here run for approximately three weeks between May 24 and June 15. Turning up at this time and being surprised that you are not allowed into the grounds within which students are functioning on Red Bull and beta-blockers and developing nervous disorders six ways from Sunday as a result of trying to perform well in one of the world's most intense undergraduate experiences is like turning up to Singapore during the monsoon season and being amazed that it rains in the tropics.

I'm not at all shocked that in your Look-At-Me-I'm-Having-An-EXPERIENCE! mindset the students pale against the squalling of your hungry little cameras. But, um, your travel planning? Dude. That is some A1 first-class cluelessness.

So, the attitude? You can all seriously bite me.

Snarkity snark

Xtin's Top Six Most Hated Conversational Gambits

1. Xtin! Haven't seen you for ages. What have you been doing? I mean, you know, other than writing up obviously?
   Moaning softly to myself, obviously.


2. So when do you think you'll be finished?
   NEVER! Never ever! In the shame and ignominy of complete intellectual uselessness I shall be cast into outer darkness where evil winged beasties will feast upon my soul for all eternity! All right? Are you HAPPY now?


3. Where are you from?
   Australia. Thank you for emphasising my otherness and status as an alien in my own home.


4. Yes, obviously I knew that you were from Australia. I meant where in Australia?
   I apologise for understanding your question to be so much less subtle and intriguing than it in fact was.


5. Why on earth would you come to live here? The weather is so dire.
   Forgot to factor that in to the life decision. Stupid me.


6. Do you miss Australia?
   Yes, I do. Being away from my brother rips my heart out every day. Thanks for reminding me. Oh wait, you meant the mythical 365 days of tropical sunshine and Neighbours.

Xtin's Six Top Alternatives

1. Xtin! Love the new hair!


2. So I was watching this episode of Battlestar Galactica ...


3. Coffee?


4. Ultimately, do you think that Buffy's more mature relationship was with Spike, or Angel?


5. There are blue tit fledglings on the lawn!


6. Ice in your scotch?

Curmudge-slinging

So today, apparently, Xtin is 75 years old and feelin' crotchety.

Today's pointless rant is about the handling of change. Not the kind of change that means different from the way things are, because of course I and all other little old ladies oppose that utterly. I mean the kind of change that you get when you provide a merchant with more cash than was required for the services and/or products that were rendered, and so he passes you back the difference.

Once upon a time, when I was a child, I remember when change was counted back. For you feckless youths who don't know what this means, the process was as follows. Suppose you hand over £5 for something that cost £1.25. The person handling the cash would utter the price of what you had bought and count back the amount to £5, beginning with the lowest denominated currency, thusly:

One pound twenty-five pence. [Hands the 5p] One pound thirty, [hands the 20p] one pound fifty, [hands the 50p] two pounds, [hands the £1s] three, four, five pounds. Thank you.

Well, naturally in the modern day and age this wonderful and transparent practice is impossible because the persons in control of the currency cannot count. However, I am no Luddite. I believe in the great advancements of science. Look at these handy light bulbs! So I am happy to believe that the computers which are telling then how much change they owe me can count. But this has led to the following travesty of handing back:

Three-twenty-five. Ten pounds. [reads the cash register output] Six pounds seventy-five change. [Collects the 75p from the till and puts in palm. Collects fiver from till. Tears off the receipt and sandwiches it with the fiver between thumb and forefinger.] Thank you.

At this point, the clerk places everything in your hand at once, in reverse order. Receipt on the bottom, then the note, and a precarious pile of coins on top of that. This is just the most idiotic and annoying practice I have ever had the misfortune to be on the receiving end of umpty-ump times a week. Don't even get me started on the uselessness of the slippery, thermal-paper receipts which infest my handbags and pockets. If you are lucky enough to get your hand back into the region of your bag without the coinage careering onto the floor/among the impulse-buy sugary snacks/rolling onto the counter from whence the clerk must catch them, there is no way of handling the pile one-handed short of stuffing it in a ball into your nearest receptacle. And why not? Why not, you ask? It is because the only way that a human being can effectively manage crispy flat paper and a bunch of tiny metallic objects is the way that the clerk did it in the first place: by holding the coinage in his palm and handling the paper money with his fingertips. And the only way I will get to do that too, insensitive pillocks, is for you to hand me the everloving damn change first, and THEN give me the paper money, and if you absolutely must, the godforsaken receipt.

That is all.

Hell. Handbasket.

Crap.

Not-so-deadly

I've been thinking about some maligned emotions. Of course, emotions generally are pretty maligned -- particularly any real breadth of emotions. We're apparently supposed to exist in a constant state of moderate satisfaction or vague annoyance. No big emotions, please. Big emotions aren't emotions, they're overemotional. Kindly stop overreacting. Pardon me? I'm reacting too much? Heaven forfend.

Which brings us neatly to those famous sins. The one that's been exercising me lately is that gleaming, metallic-flavoured behemoth, Envy.

I keep hoping that over time, life will gradually wear away my various and spectacularly robust kinds of cluelessness. Progress is slow. My skull apparently supports sanctuaries where it will always lurk. A few years back, however, while wondering in that diffuse sort of way about the diffuse sort of malaise I was labouring under, I managed to uncover the interesting fact that I was bored out of my mind. Gadzooks! So simple! I rubbed my clammy palms together, cackled like a sugar-hopped fiend, donned my supervillain alterego duds and set about un-borifying my life.

Success has its perils.

I have tracked the interesting people down. I live in a world of wall-to-wall smart people. And I have some friends. Friends who've written prize-winning books, who've thought thoughts, who've, you know, Done Things. Some have money. Some are famous. Some have written works which are on the syllabus at this very university. Some understand things of which only two or three people in the world have any sort of grasp. Some are the sort of people who are so brilliant, so charismatic, such human works of art that even when they are standing around minding their own business eating a sandwich and looking at the clouds, they attract others like them, so that you know people who know people who run countries and sell the movie rights and hang on the walls of the Tate and inform governments and are members of secret societies and good god knows what else. Some of these people are the same people. And they're such people. There are some assholes around here, and these people are not they, I assure you. They're so sweet, so warm and real and funny that seeing them is like discovering that out the back door of your house is a huge garden full of trees and flowers, bees and flashing-eyed wild creatures, that somehow you've never been able to get out into before.

Sometimes I'm so envious I can feel the oxygen in my lungs prickle up and turn to microscopic snowflakes of desire. I want what they have! The effortless brilliance, the casual irony of complete mastery, the mild-eyed matter-of-factness about the mosaic of genius and general stratospheria that has become the wallpaper of their world. I drink tea and coffee and talk about something-or-other and breathe gently through my frosted lungs and long to make the air hum as they do.

Deadly sin! If strength of feeling goes for anything, I should be eating my heart out over this. But I don't believe it for a second. My envy is big, but with little fangs. The kind that chew slippers or maybe old tennis balls in the garden. It bites fast, and holds on tight, but it doesn't want to tear out your jugular. OK, once in a very long while it wants to tear out your jugular.

Maybe if I was feeling happy-clappy I'd say that all this is just a kind of generous admiration for the wonderful and accomplished starlets I know and adore. But that would be a crock of shit, it really would. I want want want. I don't want to take it from them, but I still want it. Oh, how I want it. And how frightened I am that somehow the garden gate will be closed and I won't be allowed in any more!

But still. It's the last and sincerest word in flattery. Not that any of them will know that, because in the first place my snowflake-lungs are a secret. And in the second, even if they read this they'd never suppose that it was about themselves.

They're way too bloody unassuming. Bastards. Anyone would think they have insecurities and envy of their very own.

How beastly

Well, I've been hiding under a rock. Even from my blog. But who could resist Antichristmas as a return to ersatz-public life? So. Piece of cultural information. The emergency services number in the UK is 999. Bet you never really thought about what the emergency service number would be somewhere else, did you? I thought not. Me neither. Culture shock is the combined impact of ten thousand things like this. Plus, I have the added bonus of being Australian, the culture for which British people have a complex and rich stereotype. So my culture shock is actually the tasty chocolate crust of British culture, plus the creamy centre of what British people think Australian culture is, neither of which bear any relationship to me. But I was going somewhere with the 999 thing before my raging expat issues distracted me.

Joke based on piece of cultural information:

Q: What do Australians dial in an emergency?
A: 666.

Uh-huh. Hilarious. You mean, you don't call Beelzebub when things go to hell?

So today, I got carded. Say what? Recall, dear reader, that the age of majority in this country as it applies to alcohol, purchase and consumption thereof, is eighteen. It had to have been at least conceivable, in the mind of the minion in the tasty Sainsbury's orange-fleece corporate wear, that I was seventeen years old. It is important to keep in mind, while I tell this story, that lately I have been feeling aged in the extreme. My eyebags are so big they cast their own shadows. My face holds up little placards which read "Gravity: Operating here for thirty-two years". So the right response to to the orange minion is surely, good heavens, how wonderful! How dewy, how fresh and carefree I must look today! I am not the crumpled kleenex of a human I thought I was!

Instead, I wanted to tear off her eyebrows with my teeth. Are you kidding me? I was making a newspaper cutting scrapbook project about the Challenger disaster before you were even born, sunshine! And now you won't let me have this cheap-ass bottle of New Zealand semillon blend which has too many damn food miles on it but I wasn't giving a rat's furry buttocks about that right now because I just want to get home so that I can keep trying to get this stupid degree, which by the way is my third? Fine! Go shove it up your multimillion dollar corporate conglomerate nickel-and-dimed ass!

If this is not evidence of the presence of the Beast, I don't know what is.

Why ...

... in the name of all that is holy, is every single pair of women's trainers at my local sports superstore resplendent in shades of pastel pink, blue, and silver? Is there a giant market of off-duty Barbie princesses who long to give their itty bitty princess tootsies with the silver-glitter pedicure a rest from the glass slippers, but still need something to match their eye-watering pink wonderland outfit?

The men's department is wall-to-wall Big Bad Coolness. Everything is designed to look like the kind of thing you'd wear if you were an urban superhero who needed to serve Justice, fast, down wet alleys, in the dark. I want these shoes.

WTF?

The current Nike Women advertisement, which makes my eyes slitty with resigned aggravation, involves women being very athletic in one way or another with a voiceover that explains how little kudos they get, and closes up with a defensive challenge to "try to tell them that they're not athletes".

The point of the advertisement is evidently supposed to be that the women involved clearly are very athletic, QED. Fie on this supposed end. The assumption is that that real athletes have stadiums of people cheering for them and earn bucketloads of cash, and notably are men, thus, most egregiously of all, women need to defend their status as athletes in the first place.

I'm not an athlete. But I'd swallow Nike's shrill equality message without choking so much if the damn shoes weren't telling me that I'm supposed to be a Barbie princess.

Bride of Frankenphilosophy

or: Jobsearch timewhine

Naturally, one tries to give one's sad little life some spice by seeing how one's research ties up to one's itty-bitty little life issues. This week's theme is: vagueness. For those of you who are interested, the canonical and brilliant text is Williamson's most unambiguously titled Vagueness.

The Ongoing Hellacious Jobsearch has given me a whole new appreciation of the problems arising from the vagueness of pretty much every single predicate of ordinary language. It's standardly noted in philosophical discussions about vagueness that the trouble is borderline cases -- we know perfectly well that a guy with 10,000 hairs isn't bald and a guy with 0 hairs is. They're what's called "clearly in" cases. It's some of the guys in between where you might get into a fight. Well lemmetellya, I've been conducting my very own bit of empirical research on the concept of the "clearly in".

Especially:

(a) specifications of time

We will notify you shortly. Oh? How shortly is that, exactly? OK. No-one knows. So much for that stupid question. Here's another. When are you certain that "shortly" has passed such that no-one is gonna notify you, sunshine, hasta la vista and thanks for all the fish? Is a week too long? Two? Even three? How about "immediately"? The same day? Tomorrow? By the end of the week?

Don't even get me started on after a reasonable interval.

(b) specifications of quality

The standard of applications is extremely high and only candidates of exceptional research merit will be considered for interview.

I have two first-class degrees from a good (uh-oh) university, three respectable (Mammy! Get me gun!) publications, an almost-finished (Ha! Hahahahaha ...) PhD, a research proposal full of the usual BS and some pretty hot letters of recommendation. So, no kidding ... how many grains make a heap?

You know what? Forget it.

Terminally Boring High

There are many boring conversations in this world, but currently number one with a bullet on Xtin's All-Time List is The Trauma of High School. When this subject comes up, I want to reach for a handy icepick and pith myself.

Just for starters, isn't this a long time ago yet? Sure, I'm 32, which makes me about five years older than most of my grad school littermates, but that still puts them ten years from walking out the doors of the damn place. For the love of God, have we not had any experiences in our adult lives that we might discuss? But of course we have. Naturally no-one wants to discuss those, because they are far too real and intimate and personal. You might have had an experience that someone else hasn't had. You might actually have something idiosyncratic and interesting to say. Good heavens, much too risky. Let's whip up some totally ersatz intimacy instead. High School Horrors are a lovely shared narrative that everyone can settle into like a rerun of Welcome Back, Kotter. Even though of course, no-one here was in a remedial class. Which just makes it so much the easier. Wasn't it awful being the smartest one in school? Weren't you persecuted by the girls who talked about lipstick and INXS? The teachers never paid any attention to me because all the disruptive students were always painting on the walls/giving the Chess Club wedgies/passing notes containing their latest pregnancy test results/whatever ...

Which brings me to reason number two that these are the most boring conversations in the known universe -- they're not even a real discussion about trauma. (Frankly, I wouldn't really care even if they were, but that's just because I'm evil). Part of of the subtext is the conclusions that everyone can easily draw from the very fact that all of us had this experience -- we were all nerds, we were all persecuted for being the smartest in the class, blah de blah. So guess what? You're not special any more. This is one big group of hyper-smart people. And that makes you nervous and insecure, and this high school talk is a way of everyone discussing how they were once intellectually special under the fatally dull cover of how awful the whole experience was. Please. It's just sad.

Naturally, I don't intend that this prevent anyone from using the shared horrors of high school as a handy and evocative metaphor when discussing whatever else you'd like to talk about -- emphasis on whatever else.

I'll take Human Relations for two hundred, Alex ...

Stuff I Don't Get, Part Forty-Two

I don't get perfume commercials. The reason that I don't get perfume commercials has something to do with my love of commercials. Especially since the advent of "freeview" pseudo-cable in the UK, there really is nothing good on free-to-air television. Except the commercials. Certain of the advertising artists out there have truly mastered the art of the evocative. Bunnies lining their burrows for the John Lewis spring sale. Robins alighting over the crisp sheets waving in the wind, for the fabric softener you'll put on sheets that are never going to wave in the wind. An older couple smile goofily and disarmingly at one another over the picnic-bedecked bonnet of their car, in some mountains somewhere, for pensioners' car insurance for cars that never leave the garage. But you're there. In a second, you're in the mountains, you're feeling sheets dried in the breeze against your cheek, you're the Honda grooving in the carpark, you're the bunny whiffling its nose and you swear you smell just-mown hay. Wait. Did I say smell?

You'd think, wouldn't you, that this would make the matter of advertising a perfume, a smell, ferchrissakes, a walk in the park for these people. I mean, that's what smells do, right? They put one in mind of something. They conjure something. They evoke something.

Wait while I don my perfume-advertising-hack hat. Let me see ... I need to conjure something light, and floral. Tada! I conjure ... a chick in a clingy outfit with come-hither eyes! Genius! How about something darker, more patchouli-based? Don't blink. You'll miss it. Or, for your quel avant-garde unisex scents, a chick and a guy come-hithering together. Or really kick ass with lots of semi-naked chicks and guys!

I love fragrances. I'd buy twice as many if the advertisements worked with the associations that came with the smell instead of the ones that supposedly accompany the chick with the fan blowing her hair whom I'm supposed to want to be like. But hey. It's Christmas. And it could be worse.