Continued

The night out was pleasent but also decidedly average. A fun night, but not much more fun than I've come to expect since coming to Warwick.
Which is perhaps an indicator of my good luck in regards to parties, and perhaps also an indicator of how I am coming to develope an entitlement complex.
The music selection was mediocre: no Busted, no S Club, nothing I particularly feel invokes the 90s, and they closed with Fix You by Coldplay- a song i like very much when i'm hurting, but less so when i'm dancing and drunk: it is something of a buzz-kill.

And, having thus established I really am incapable of going five seconds without critiscizing something (a sad day for my ego), I can go back to my old topic: my tie. My tie, that i wore nearly every day between the ages of 13 to 16, because i owned only one.

My upper school tie, that was, above everything else, a symbol of My New Start: i was there when we brought the tie at a uniform sale, i carried it home, as we walked the same route i would walk many times to school once it started, and dreamed of the future. My fantasys of upper school life were limited and cliqued, as all my fantasys tend to be: i saw myself walking to and from with three or four other girls, all of us carrying bags and blazers, in late-autumn sunlight, with a general air of euphoria surrounding us. There were others, but it is this fantasy which stands out the most vivdly in my memory, perahps because it, more than any other, encapsulated so perfectly what it was i wanted, and i am even more surprised because i did not mould the fantasy in the form of a day dream: it sprung, fully formed, into my mind, as if my brain had processed all my individual desires into a single image. Even now, it is full technicolour, as bright as that first day i imagined it, and it still haunts my imagination 6 years on: the longing i felt for it stills feels fresh in my mind.

In my fantasy, all the girls were dark haired: identicle and indistinguishable, we were clones of one another. I can happily say that this part of the dream no longer appeals to me: i have moved in the opposite direction. I admire my friends for their uniqueness: with my cherry-red hair, purple daisy-chain tattoo and piercings, i stand out a little from the crowd myself. I adore all that it unique, different, special: anything, in short, that is not the same.

But the fantasy is 6 years old: 6 years ago, blending in with the crowd was but a cherished dream, and I was accustomed to standing out, sick of being different and hated for my difference. I wanted friends who looked like me-....No, what i really wanted was to BE LIKE THEM, because i could see nothing good about myself. WHy would i choose friends who were like me when i did not like myself? Much better to change who i was- and, accordingly, in my fantasy, our hair is uniformly shiney and wavey, our shoes and bags are carbon copies, our features morph to match each others, and how happy i was that even in my own fantasy, i could not tell which girl i was meant to be. It didn't matter: all that mattered was that i was one of them.

In my dream, we talked and laughed: i had had enough of silence. In my dream, i am in the middle of the conversation: i had had enough of listening to the conversations of others, so often about me, and being unable to interupt to defend myself, i had had enough of being ignored.
In my dream, we were simply walking, but in my mind, i knew we were walking home from school, because it was the walk home from school that was the longest, the most boring, the walk on which i most often longed for distraction. The walk home from school had also been the settings for some of the most painful confrontations, the cruelest attacks, the ones that were hardest to forget, the ones that haunted me long after they were over.

In my dream, our shoes and clothes and bags were identicle and indistinguishable but also conspicous in that all were expensive. I did not know at the time, nor do i know now, where i expected i would acquire these new possesions: there was no money left. I had not been given any such items on my last 13 birthdays and christmases and had no reason to expect that some would magically appear on my 14th birthday.
All I knew was that i was tired of being The Girl Who Didn't Have.
The item varied, but no matter whether it was Nike trainers, cute earrings, a lunchbox, a playstation, a furby: I never had whatever it was, and what made it worse was that i wanted these things SOLELY because people laughed when i didn't have them. Now i have my own money, i find that online games bore me after half a second, i can never be botherd to put my lunch in anything more than foil, Nike trainers make you look like a bit of a douche and i constantly lose earrings, cute or not (and my best friend recently confided in me that her fchristmas-present furby genuinly terrified her when she recieved one as a child).... and so it is probably unlikely i felt very differently when i was 10 or 11 or 12.
Nevertheless: my ideal was the sort of clone-style friendship i now regard with deep suspicion, and general mockery, and i understand why completly.

Until i was about 16, all signs of individuality were met with negative reinforcement- threats, jokes, ostracization, name calling, occaisional acts of physical....violence and abuse are overly dramatic words, so I'll just say that being repeatedly pinched, kicked and pushed, and having stuff thrown at you, over a period of time, pretty much destroys any natural impulse to be different.

After that, the things that were previously responded to negativly were suddenly met with enthusiasm: my new friends telling me how they loved my style, envying me for being 'so clever' or being 'such an individual'. Insignificant as it sounds, every compliment and show of affection was balm to the years that came before.

But these are things that i notice in hindsight: i paid little notice to them 6 years ago because there was a much bigger point to my fantasy, that shrunk every other detail in comparisome. In the fantasy, i had friends- good friends. In the fantasy, they liked me for who i was and felt as lucky to have me as i felt to have them. In my fantasy, i was happy...and for me at that time, being really, truly happy felt like a fantasy indeed.

I never realised my fantasy: it went, like so many others, unfullfilled, and, like so many others, it will probably never be fullfilled in my lifetime.

I am lucky that it was never fullfilled, though.
I will never be the girl i am in that fantasy, for several reasons.

I will never walk to or from school again, and when i did, my friends and i never looked like that.

My hair will never go back to being brown: i predict it will stay cherry-red for a good while longer before i change it again.

I cant afford shoes and bags like that (student debt, anyone?) and if i could, i wouldnt choose that style for myself anymore.

In fact the only part of the fantasy that still attracts me is its most basic premise: unconditional, unbound friendship, but it isnt something i fantasize about any more.

After all....why fantasize about something that i already have?

There is nothing like alcohol to make you reflect...

The first Skool Dayz of Term 2 (and I should say that it caused me physical pain to have to spell School as Skool), and a lazy saturday of accomplishing nothing much, after a wonderful night, watching a wondeful play with wonderful people last night.

The time it takes me to get ready provides ample time for reflection: today, as I reached for the hairspray and waved my newly painted nails in the air to dry, it struck me that i am using my-

(a break as my flatmates inexplicably knock on my door to check that i am ready, then shriek with surprise as i open my door. Seriously, girls....it's barely 9am. How are you drunk ALREADY?)

- that i am using my Upper school tie for my costume tonight.

It's a tie I've had for a long time. I first put it on as a chronically shy 13 year old, with tentative hopes that this school would be different.

I was wearing this tie on my first day of Year 9, when I got on the bus with butterflies in my stomach and a new bag, filled with new pens and perfectly-sharpend pencils, and I was wearing this tie when i was late on my first day and ran across the tennis courts to join the end of the line of new arrivals in my new school shoes, hoping no one was really noticing me.
In retrospect, I shouldve guessed that the less-than-perfect start was indicative of the future....

(And now i must leave: my flatmates have resumed shouting for me to join them for the ceremonial opening of the first bottle of vodka of the night. I will continue...later...)

Just right

I get things wrong.

I don't say enough, do enough.

I say goodbye to a friend, then wonder, when i get home, why i didn't press a little harder when they say they're fine, because obviously that isn't true.

I agree with a friend about how we both think we're going to fail our degree's, and then walk away, feeling so happy with all the lovely positve things they've said to me, and then stop: why didn't i say those things to them? Why didn't i comfort them instead of letting them comfort me?

In short, i can be a self-centered douche at times, and i feel bad about this a lot, for all the times i've said too little or gotton it wrong.

Today, though, i think i can be happy that i got something right.

We're talking about a new friend of mine whom i've only recently started to talk to properly.

We're talking about a girl with the enthusiasm of a child- the purest form of high-on-life that most of us will spend our lives wishing we could regain.

A girl who makes her own jewlery and wears feathers in her hair and turns handstands in the halls of the dorm just because she can, and puts on voices and accents as easily as breathing.

A girl who overturns my own predjudices against religion through her own testimony, who gives me a new look at what faith can be and what it can mean, and makes me think over my own beliefs.

But also a girl who hides insecurities behind her bubbly front. A girl with worries and fears and problems, just like everyone else.

Mostly because people just don't get her. Narrow minded, grey minded, close minded people who cant see past their view of what is normal to appreaciate her vitality and warmth and energy.

It breaks my heart to see her close off her very essence of self because she is sick of their laughter, their comments and glances and bitchiness.

Like i said, i usually don't know what to say, but today...i got it just right when i told her what she needed to hear. Because i knew what she needed was not sympathy, not for me to know how it feels to be her, not even the assurance that our kitchen is her kitchen and my door is open to her always (beside, she knows that).

She needed, quite simply, to know what i knew already: that to be judged negativly by such people sucks....but how much worse to be liked by them? How much worse to be like by people so petty, so braindead, so unoriginal, so cruel? Better to be disliked, by far.

And i got through to her.

It was the sun coming up over the hills, the freeing of a butterfly: the wonderful feeling that she was coming back to herself, that i had helped do that, that i was leaving the world with a little more good in it than bad today, that somebody was feeling better becasue of me.

The feeling of having got it just right.

I think...

I can, for all of my look-at-how-much-of-a-feminist-i-am….erm- let’s call it posturing, for want of a better word, even though it makes me sound far more insincere than i really am- have, quite frankly, the kind of mindset that, were any of the trail-blazing women of history to know of it, would probably make them throw down their weapons in disgust.

I never really considered it until today….and I don’t mean I found myself thinking “You know…I really HATE having the right to vote” or “God,don’t you love being objectified?”

It was completly random, just a memory of a particular seminar, when we were all picking texts for next term.

I didn’t scream for Brecht because I don’t scream for anything, ever (or hardly ever. Concerts and when people jump on me from behind are the exceptions).

But the boy beside me did scream for it (or….well, shouts a bit more masculine, isn’t it?) and thus secured it fairly as his own property.

And my reaction was fair enough: I think I said something like “……FML” or “Wow, I’m really bad at this”, conceding that I had lost.

BUT.

BUTBUTBUT I wasn’t really that dissapointed, despite losing out on the one text I really wanted to do.

Why? Because I didn’t believe that was the end of it.

Of course it wasn’t. He’d won, because he was a boy, and therefore better at securing things by shouting for them (or maybe because he was just more on the ball than I was at that moment, which is also fair enough).

But I was a girl.

I was the fairer, weaker sex, I was, to put it bluntly, the better gender, and after all, they do say ladies first, don’t they?

I honestly don’t know what I expected- not for the boy to be orderd by our tutor to give rights to the text up to me, exactly. I think I just assumed that my jokey reference to my own slowness, half aimed at the tutor himself, would be enough for either the boy to say”Oh, its okay, you can have it and I’ll take Nabakov instead”, or for the tutor to gently entreat the boy in the spirit of being a gentleman to offer me Brecht, and for the boy to graciously concede.

And I, of course, would graciously and greatfully accept.

But strangely….that ISN’T what happend.

Before I go on, I should point out that I’m not an utterly selfish bitch with an entitlement complex, too stupid to pay attention in seminars for more than half a second.

I don’t generally expect things, and, had it been that my rival was another girl and I had gotten there first, I would probably have offered it up to her (not out of gentlemanliness but out of the less nobel spirit of getting-people-to-like-you).

But anyway: nothing happend. The tutor and the boy smiled (as I had expected them to do) at my self-deprecation….they conceded it sucked that I had lost.

They did not, however, offer, or entertain the idea that I should be offered the text.

(Probably while the rest of the group wonderd why the hell it was taking so long to sort out the allocation of a single text)

Of course, I was dissapointed. I was even slightly piqued at their “ungentlmanliness” (although moreso because it meant i was stuck with Nabakov).

However, in hindsight, it occured that, in actuality, i was given, no more and no less, everything that the feminist movement has ever asked for: in short, the wholehearted acceptence of the fact that women are mens entire equals.

The boy and I are equals: we are about the same age, of the same level of intelligence (i base this on the fact that we both survived Warwicks intense interviewing process rather than on actual evidence gatherd in subsequent seminars, which would actually lead to the conclusion that he is rather more intelligent than me).

There is no reason why I couldnt have secured the text under my own efforts: it wasnt any inherent weakness or frailty in my gender that stopped my getting the text, it was my habit of starring intently out of windows that did it.

To offer me the text would be implying that we were not equals, that as a girl, i somehow needed extra help, either from the male tutor or the boy himself, because girls always need mens help to get anywhere, and so, by not offering me the text, they were really acknowleging the inherent equality between the two genders.

“We respect you” they were saying ” too much to patronize you”, and for that i am greatful.

(Or at least, i tell myself this now that i’m stuck doing Lolita…..)

The price of the binge-drink culture (or what i did last night)

Pounding headache....
and two essays and a bibliography still to do.

Spent last night sitting in my friends bedroom with two of my flatmates, and one of my flatmates boyfriends, all of us dressed as pirates, eating dominoes, until 4am, to make sure she didn’t die of alcohol poisoning.

In a very surreal way it was almost abstract enough to be entertaining, as well as mindfuck level scary.

Last night was also the poster-child of the binge-drink culture.

The drunken, vomit-covered, clothes-falling-off, glazed-eyed, cant-hold-her-head-up-or-eyes-open mess itself.

If every child in Britain was made to stand by our sides last night, they’d think twice before getting in that state themselves.

They’d put down the shotglass and think about how terrifying it is when the paramedics leave and tell you to “call them if she stops breathing”, and you’re counting her breaths to gauge the measure because you’re afraid you’ll miss one, and you don’t know waht to do.

They’d think about the shame of it,the shame of falling, rolling, collapsing on the floor of the SU like a fish out of water, as your friends try to help you up.

They’d think about the awkwardness of where to look when people pass by: the sideways smirks and giggles that you hear so loud, and, even worse, the kindness of the random strangers- the girl who brought the water and had it spat onto her dress, the boy who helped heave her back onto her feet and wrestle her back into the chair when she floundered to the linoleum, the girl who gave us the number of security people who would help get her home, who argued with the bouncer when he said he wasn’t liable once we left the SU and who got snapped at for her trouble and yet who still carried on, even though she didn’t know me or you or her, even though she wasn’t from our building, even though she could’ve easily gone inside to the bar with her friends.

They’d think of the masked frustration hidden behind a mask of practised kindness in the eyes of the paramedics- people who have seen much worse than this self-inflicted stupor.

I wondered, as we inched our way back to Halls, keeping up a steady patter of the kind of baby talk you speak to a reluctant toddler, what they thought of us: students at one of the best universities in the country, the best and brightest minds, privileged and blessed with everything one could need, wasting their time by putting ourselves in humiliating states of stupor in the name of “having a good night out”.

There was the immodesty of it: parts of your body that we girls hide or flaunt as we wish in the name of being attractive, that were now brutally on show for everyone to laugh at. There is seduction in the deliberatly revealing clothing, mystery in shrouded flesh, but here there was no mystery, no seduction. The expanses of skin on show by clothing dragged down or up or off was barely even gendered, not even clinical. Just….there. Repulsivly, embarrassingly there/

But most of all, there was the waste- of our carefully chosen costumes, the potential of a night of music and fun and pounding bass and swirling lights gone entirely to dust, and in its place, a night of stress and strain and embarrasment, and ever-present worry that gnawed at us and kept us from our beds on the cold, hard bedroom floor all night as we counted your breaths and prayed you wouldn’t choke.