How the Grinch ate Christmas

Ah December....


you bastard.


Yes, for those of you who know me (and let's face it, that's all of you - I'm no famous blogger..er) you know that I hate Christmas. I know, I know, "but Lizzy," I hear you cry, "it's so joyous and wonderful and fun and there's presents and family and it's the BEST!"

I know. But I still hate it. And here are the reasons why.

Children, children everywhere and not a drop to drink.

I spend Christmas Evening and Day with 3 wonderful, excellent children that I love to death. These are my siblings. For them, Christmas starts at dawn. Dawn is not a time I like to experience. We do not get on. I do not function at dawn. But I have no choice, I will have stayed up till midnight wrapping presents and eating carrots (we leave them for the reindeer) only to be awoken around 4:45am by children. It's as though they have adrenalin pumping through their veins as they sleep so that by the time they wake up my parents and I have to pull them down from the ceiling so that they can unwrap their presents. Presents + adrenalin turn my usually nicely tempered, fun siblings into squabbling, selfish crazy people. In miniature. Actually one of them's kinda getting tall now. Beside the point. Moving on.

Present Phobia


I have one. I don't like unwrapping presents, and I don't like watching people unwrap presents I have bought for them. Merry Christmas! Urgh.


Toowoomba


My extended family live in Toowoomba. We often go there for Christmas. The last time I spent any amount of time in Toowoomba I got a tic on my neck. Also it has a lot of flowers. These two facts are all I know about it. I'm sure it has lots of great features but I really can't stand being there.

Expectation


"It's going to be lovely, we'll only stay a few hours, we'll eat food, exchange pleasantries and presents and get out of there" inevitably turns into "I didn't realise she would bring HIM and I can't believe we forgot the present for blah, and why did noone think to preorder the chicken - such and such spent so long in the kitchen I felt awful, urgh why is it so HOT?!"

Tee-total
I have a self-imposed alcohol ban for Christmas Day. I am far too candid as it is, the last thing I need to have is less inhibitions when surrounded by people I'm related to who don't necessarily know what I really think about politics, or how much time I really spend on the internet and how much I really don't want to be there. Particularly considering someone in my extended family once said "If I were your father I wouldn't allow you to do that (probably get a peircing or move in with a boyfriend or something else benign and boring) and I replied "lucky for both of us you're not then hey?" I was sober. Very sober.

Reviewing this list I'm considering revoking this ban.

*******

So, this year I decided to be positive. I've been compiling a mental list of all the things that are good about Christmas (keeping in mind that I see my family regularly so "seeing my family" doesn't really count). Here is the list.

1. Those delicious shortbread biscuits that come in tins
2. Stone fruit

I honestly can't think of anything else. My list of 2 things is comprised entirely of food. Om nom nom, Merry Christmas.

Spam - a true story

New Personal Message from Hotgirl3243

Subject: Brill vids dude

hi there,

hey there... your video today that you uploaded was totally awesome.

i wish you were like big on youtube with loads of subscribers so i could see you on the homepage lol

heres a good website if your looking to get some subscribers.

www.***********.com

one of my brothers used the website and they have over 500 subscribers from it withing 3 days.

hope you keep the videos coming and good luck

sarah

oh i forgot you can also do it each month or week to help get more subscribers. 

---------------------------------------------

Subject: Re: Brill vids dude

Dear Sarah,

Given that I have never uploaded a single video, and given that you have sent this message to a bunch of people, I suspect you are a spammer. There is a special place in internet hell for spammers. I hope you repent. Because in internet hell everyday is Monday and the download quota has just been capped. Oh and the lolcats aren't cute OR funny. It's terrible.

Sincerely,

Lizzyish

------------------------------------------------------------

I've found a new hobby.

Gen Y: a state of being

Ah yes, a young person with too much time on her hands starts a blog, it really is only a matter of time before she starts ranting about the whole Generation Y thing.  Gen Ys kinda arch up at the way we are depicted in the media etc, and it is often justified – we get a really bad wrap for our anti-social and ungrateful ways. However, I am not about to arch up* because I am, quite frankly, both anti-social and ungrateful.

But I am going to argue that Gen Y is not an age bracket, or even a generation at all – but a state of being. How many older people (men often) do you know who have an iPhone and know all the lingo and play video games etc etc etc? Like at least 4 right? If everyone knows at least 2 that’s actually quite a significant percentage of the population acting like Gen Y-ers who aren’t Gen Y-ers at all.

And, on the other hand, I know a bunch of well-dressed, well-spoken, organised, punctual, grateful, respectful and generally perfect humans who are 18-25 years old. Can we really call these people Gen Y? Sure, they were born in the 15 or so years after the Gen Xers all grew up, but they don’t fit any of the other defining characteristics. They fail at being Gen Y, which should technically make them win at life in the eyes of older people. It never seems to redeem them though; those poor fucks get lumped in with the rest of us despite their good personal hygiene and lack of twitter accounts.

So, dear reader – you might be asking yourself now, ‘shit, am I Gen Y or not?’ This seems like a pretty stupid thing to be asking yourself, given that you are currently reading a blog and probably simultaneously watching a Youtube video, illegally downloading songs and eating nutella from the jar. But anyway, there is a sure fire way to test your Gen Y status. I speak from absolute experience on this:

Ask yourself, have you ever been lying in bed at night in a location (probably a fabulous holiday location) with little reception and been so desperate for contact with the outside world (be it text, tweet or status) but too lazy to get up that you’ve sleepily held the phone high above your head, arm fully extended, and then DROPPED IT ON YOUR FACE? Well have you?

That is the moment dear friends, when you must concede that no matter how old or socially adequate you are, you do in fact belong to that technophilic, whiney, disrespectful cohort known as Gen Y. Welcome, we’re looking for people to start a social netball team.

*Except to say that it is almost predominantly members of Generation Y (and little old ladies) who consistently thank the driver when they get off the bus. I’m just sayin’…

Hello, we're here to talk to you about Jesus...

... turns out, he's not real and we've got to get round to everyone by Christmas before we all embarrass ourselves for another year.


Alas. If only that is what happened. What actually happened is that at precisely 5 minutes after I should have left the house for work, two people of the Jehovah's Witness persuasion knocked on my door. At first, I ignored the little timid knock in the hope that whoever it was would leave me alone. But then, of course, I had to leave. So, to the door went I to find two rather timid individuals retreating down my front steps. Boo, if only I'd waited another minute. They looked like rabbits caught in the headlights, kind of disappointed to see me - as if they too were secretly hoping we could avoid this whole awkward interchange. But no, of course, I went and opened the door didn't I?

Important contextual information:

I am an atheist - in the sense that I do not believe in a god of any kind
I am culturally insensitive, and have Tibetan prayer flags over my door (cut me some slack, I live in New Farm)
I was raised to be overly polite to Jehovah's Witnesses (I don't know why - dad always invites them in for coffee and everything)

So there I am, framed in my shitty New Farm doorway, wreathed in Tibetan prayer flags.

Me: "Hello"
JW: "Hi, I'm here to talk to you about Jesus"

Ok. That's not true. I think she said she was doing community work, and had a pamphlet for me about contentment, or happiness or something.

Me: "Thanks, but I already have my own belief system and I'd rather not read about yours"
JW: "No problem, thanks for your honesty"

AH. LIKE A DAGGER IN MY FACE. She totally knew I was lying! She stared into my heathen eyes and knew I was a  big fat liar.

And then of course I had to awkwardly leave the house, and awkwardly follow them up the street as they tried the next few houses. I wasn't stalking them or anything, I walk to work. Promise.


But now that I sit here, in blogging repose, it occurs to me that I wasn't lying. I do have a belief system. It is that religions are fine until you're on someone else's doorstep handing out pamphlets. I mean surely, if you can fit even just the key beliefs of your religion into a pamphlet then your religion needs to take a good hard look at itself? Maybe it's because I was raised a Catholic, but if I became religious I'd want a faith that covered all bases - with a friggen library of information on really specific issues: "what our religion thinks about having sex before marriage if it's with someone that you really like and is protected and you thought about it pretty hard before hand and you're not even drunk or anything - well you were when you hooked up but not now - and you really want to and your friends think they're nice.

I'm too arrogant to be religious: when things go my way I like to think it's because I'm AWESOME not because they were preordained, or because I'm blessed, or lucky, or full of good karma. In my opinion (and I'm being serious), religions take away from how awesome people are sometimes. And they certainly don't explain how shit people are some other times.


In conclusion, unless you've got a pamphlet on the ways I am awesome, I'm not interested. K. Thx. Bai,

Cynicism, and a public service announcement

Cynicism; it's not just for the old and crotchety.

I believe that everybody has a use-by date. Well, not so much a date as a capacity, a saturation point, a limit. And once they reach this point, they become cynical. It's different for everyone, but we will all get there some day. It's just more likely that old people have already got there. But us younguns shouldn't let them have all the fun.

I've just imagined an excellent scenario involving a small child who has already reached their cynicism breaking point. His name is Bobby, and he's a cynical mother fucker. 

Teacher: Look boys and girls, a rainbow! Isn't it beautiful?!

Class: oooooooo! 

Bobby: Fuck this.  

Sometimes it just takes one little thing to tip you over the edge. I reached my saturation point just recently and I will now, at the risk of also pushing you into the cynicism zone, tell you the tale.

I was sitting at McDonalds at Central station, calmly and quietly reading someone else's newspaper over their shoulder whilst less calmly but still quietly seething about missing my train by 4 seconds when I saw them. The bins. Have you ever noticed this? The bins at Maccas have the following words printed on their flaps (lol flaps): "Put Rubbish In Here". What?! Does McDonalds think so little of its customers that it must instruct them in how to use a rubbish receptacle?!  Does consuming their fatty food products render people incapable of basic brain function? My faith in humanity is gone.

On a completely unrelated note the following things have been deemed "the devil" by my grandma:

-Harry Potter

- Pokemom

-Windchimes

-Didgeridoos

- SOSE (yes, that geography/history/society subject you took in year 10. He's everywhere, people.)

I tell you this as a public service announcement, so that you can begin avoiding the devil in your daily life. Personally, I'm going to begin burning didgeridoos - better to be safe from evil than culturally sensitive.

Irony

Hello again.

Now, I don't usually take umbrage* with accepted sources of fact, but I feel the need to draw y'all's attention to The Everyday Oxford Dictionary's definition of irony.

Irony n. the expression of one's meaning by using words of the opposite meaning in order to make one's remarks forceful, e.g. that will please him (used of something that will not please him at all).

Now before I get into this, can we all please go back and have a giggle at Oxford's attempt at humour while still using the word "one" to refer to an individual? Good, brilliant. Anyway, sure the definition is fine, but to me the example given seems more appropriate to apply to the word "sarcasm". So I looked that up too:

Sarcasm n. 1. an ironical remark or taunt. 2. the use of such taunts

Shit thanks for that Oxford, that's so helpful. But wait, it gets better:

Sarcastic adj. using or showing sarcasm


SIGH. This just isn't good enough. But fear not, I have a solution. It is the following photo, which I will gladly send to the Oxford people so that they can change the entry to read thus:

Irony n. e.g.

It is important to note that this hydrant booster can be found at a significant educational facility. See Oxford? THAT's irony.

And while we're on the topic of graffiti, I took a photo of this too:

I walk past it everyday, and at first it made me sad. But then the more I thought about it the more I realised it's a badass way to guilt trip your ex. (I'm making the assumption here that the "baby" in question is not dead, but broke up with the graffiti artist. I'm making this assumption because death isn't funny. Let's not think about this too hard, yeah?). I hope that the ex lives in the house opposite and has to look at it everyday. And I hope they think, "damn - he/she was such a good graffiti artist, they had such potential, and I just threw them away like an old spray can, what was I thinking?!"



Right, that's all from me for this week. Thanks for reading, and thanks for not asking why I was looking up words in the dictionary.


L






*take umbrage - an excellent phrase that should be used more in daily conversation. Particularly because it pays homage to Professor Umbridge, who is evil and excellent and who looks a lot like an older version of my local member for parliament:

...I'm just sayin'

Welcome. Also, pants.

Hello and welcome to Hum Drum Plum. Here I will amusingly discuss, deconstruct and dig on stuff that I see, think about, feel, eat, hear and... smell? I don't know. I only just made it, I'll get there. The plan is to blog at least once a week. But who wants to read a welcome post? I don't even want to write one, so let's get straight to it.

The subject of my first ever blog is PANTS (caps, bold, italics, underline. This shit is important). 

Yes, pants. There's been a lot of talk lately about whether leggings/tights constitute an adequate substitute for pants. This is an important debate, one of the most important conversations of our time, and I'm about to weigh in with gusto*.

Perhaps people are getting confused. Ladies (and gents? It seems only a matter of time), tights are called tights because they are, in fact, tight. Too tight to be worn without something else covering your bum-bum. Top-tip: If the tubular items you are pulling onto your legs are not called pants, then THEY ARE NOT PANTS. I can see right up into your business. 

It was recently brought to my attention that girls might be wearing leggings-as-pants because they want their business to be seen.  I often see these ladies in the Valley - a thriving hub of alcohol, hormones and regret, not wearing pants and, sometimes, also attempting to pass off a shirt as a dress. Now, I'm not the kind of lady to go "out on the razzle" (My Nana, 1952), so maybe I don't get it - but you're not wearing enough clothes. How embarrassing, you left the house without pants. I've always thought that girls who are regularly out clubbing are kind of secretly hoping to find a boyfriend in the Valley. Why, I'm not sure. Ladies, extend your Vodka Cruiser-goggles beyond the corner of Ann and Brunswick! But, if you are looking in the Valley, and you aren't wearing pants, you're hunt can only result in one thing: sexy times with a less than gentleman. Now, sexy times are great and I would never dream of judging them (unless they aren't safe, in which case "unclean, unclean!"), but I believe the majority of these pantless ladies are actually looking for the elusive creature, Potentialis Boyfriendius. Despite what you're mums might've told you, nice boys are out there and I can tell you something about them. Something important, something life changing... they are looking for a lady WEARING PANTS. 

#Pant rant ends.

Welcome, thanks for reading.

*Gusto - just one of the words in my list of those that should be used more often.