Blowing my nose in the Queen's eye and other social faux pas....
Hi everyone - long time no journal updates. Sorry about that - not that anyone much cares I suppose!
There is however a reason. I'm now back in England and it is all very weird and has taken some getting used to. Culture Shock 101. Who knew being away from your own country for a year could make you realsise how odd the places that you come from are and how much you don't really want to be in them any more.
My summer - after the excitement of first being home, seeing my friends and family and then Josef visiting and consequential galavanting around the UK, with a quick pit-stop in Dublin - all now over and school rapidly approaching, has for the main part, been crap!
The weather this vacation has been, of course, horrid - either raining and cold or humid and hot. Though now that it is the 1st of September we had our first frost this morning - so there goes the humid and hot. Winter is now on its God forsaken way, great six months of drizzle and darkness here we come! Just a warning this post is going to be very derogatory toward the UK so any anglophiles better bugger off - This is not going to be pretty, I'm afraid any sense of nationalism I had whilst living in another continent (rose-tinted glasses firmly stuck on face) has quite radically fucked off some place else.
Oh and yeah, I may have been away from merry old England for a while - but I'm back now and so is the bad language that our people can be so proud of. After all, as anyone who has seen that spark of filmic genius 'Eurotrip' will know,(irony people - we're good at that too) we English are "on a whole other level of swearing". I know swearing is not big and not clever and all that crap and I do know that it is not lady like but I assure you I am indeed a lady and anyway who said a lady shouldn't swear - 'the man' - that's who - and we all know about 'The man'.
I don't know if they censor swearing on Live Journal - but if they do, my writing will have been band by 'the establishment' man and that'll be something cool to tell the kids.
So back to the slagging off - but oh my, do you have that expression!? Perhaps not, but I'm sure you can guess what it means - Anyway, but good God this place is so ridiculous - I cannot quite believe it. I have never heard any group of people ever, talk about the weather soooo often as these bloody people. I don't know if perhaps I just hadn't noticed it before, growing up with this lunacy and all, but it is so fucking trite. I swear to God, anyone would think that we actually had some kind of interesting weather here or something, the amount of time we spend discussing every nuance of it! But upon returning to this place I've realised, we don't actually have very much weather at all. In other places the weather must seem exciting - I know I have had the pleasure of seeing 'Twister' after all. But honestly NOTHING like that ever happens here, don't get me wrong, all that scary weather, well I'm quite pleased for that to stay right where it is - Good God man, it's not like I have a desire to move to Bangladesh or anything. It's just that this place gets so ludicrously excited is anything 'out of the norm' happens weather wise. Yet all this supposed 'out of the norm' stuff happens ALL THE BLOODY TIME - We have occasional floods that cause a bit of occasional damage - sometimes we have frost in August and it rains solidly for two weeks in the middle of summer. But it's not like anyone dies or anything. Gosh, you'd think we'd have just realised that as a nation we suffer from crappy weather, deal with it and move on. It's not great weather, but it's not dangerous or anything - it's mediocracy at work. If you look at it objectively, in every possible way this country is so soft and gentle and that includes the weather really.
I don't know - we complain and we winge because in the fall loads of trains are canceled due to "leaves on the track" - I'm serious, actual giant locomotives brought to standstill because of some leaves. You'd think that having a seasonal leaf loss since inception we would have dealt with those track loving leaves by now. But no, everyone's late for life because of leaves on the track and we just nod our heads and in that frightfully English way we say to ourselves "mustn't grumble" and carry on as if nothing has happened.
Now don't get me wrong - all of this would be fine if it was only the weather. But it grates on me something rotten because we only complain about the weather - The one thing we cannot, even at the top of every possible chain as we humans are, change we choose to discuss, day in day out, as if maybe one day God will listen and take pity on us, spreading glorious sunshine across the land - whereby each and every mutha fucka here would start griping on about how bloody hot it is.
No, the problem I have is that everyone here seems not to complain about anything else, the stuff that we actually can change. Thus I have finally come to the realisation that I am essentially living in a Communist state. And the architecture alone seems to give proof to this theory. I went on the London Eye a while ago - I don't know if anyone knows it, but ot's this huge (rather impressive actually) ferris wheel type thing - like you get at the carnival, only it's like 5 times as tall. It has carriages that you stand up and walk around in with about eight other people and slowly it goes around and you get a marvelous view of the London skyline. Well, as I reached the top I got a look at London's architecture from a rather good vantage point. I shall give my kinsmen some credit here - as a nation we have designed and built some AMAZING buildings - St Paul's Cathedral, the Houses of Parliament to name a mere two out of hundreds if not thousands of equal competitors. Soon enough I realised something was up. I couldn't see the beautiful architecture - not properly least - hardly any of that architecture that conjures up images of a London that was once grand and enviable the world over. You know why? because it was all hidden or obscured by hideous bloody sixties monstrosities! The sixties, ah an enlightened age of free thinking that led to loads no strings sex and not much else. What a decade! (I do of course accept that many other important things happened in the sixties, but I'm pissed off and and thus unable to think rationally.)
Yes, the sixties - when architects were God and yet had absolutley no idea of what looked good and did not take heed of Spiderman's uncle when he told us all that "with great power comes great responsibility" and that includes buildings dude! So rather than hitting the books and studying the work of their predecessors, they instead looked into their really rather shallow minds and came up with a reconstruction of communist Eastern Europe. Yeah, like good job guys. There are huge really ugly concrete buildings (shame on you Mr.Concrete and your concrete like ways!) that all look the same except for perhaps the windows which are occasionally a funny shape. The windows must, I can only assume, have seemed like 'radical man' - but really it just looks as though some cock-eyed retard on day release from a 'Home for Special People' got their hands on some crayons gained access to the designs whilst no one was looking. So at the top of the wheel I saw a horrid sight: All those fantastic and unforgettable masterpieces, hidden behind a concrete shit heap. Tragic.
The funny thing is, everyone seems to agree that the buildings are ugly and were a mucho mistake. But unlike me they seem reluctant to run at them with a bulldozer. Instead they proclaim that we should concentrate on creating new buildings and so put up another box, but this one's made from glass and not concrete - so that's ok, even though in ten years time it will look just as dated and ridiculous as the sixties buildings.
But the fact that everone agrees that the sixties was an architectural faux pas, and yet continue to let them be is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. No, I have come to comprehend that the british as a whole could be overtaken by coummnists at any given moment and probably most people wouldn't even notice. If they did they would just say under their breath, barely audible - "Well, it's done now, a spoon full of sugar and all that."
Since being back here I have stood in line more times then I have actually managed to be served. Not one person complained. Not one person raised an eyebrow. They just stood there morosely, as if waiting in a bread line - which I'm sure they could easily do without even noticing. I meanwhile, evidently having been in America long enough for somethings to rub off, proceeded to loudly proclaim that it was totally abhorrent that we all had to stand in line for what seemed like hours already, in order to bloody well hand over money to the Government for something I find totally repugnant and essentially wrong. (I was paying £150 - that's almost 300 hundred bucks - for a years television license. Yes that's right, in order to watch or even own a tv set in this country you must have a LICENSE that you PAY for. And we only get four fucking channels. It's supposed to be five, but living as I do in what appears to be the British equivalent of Outer bloody Mongolia, that is 35 minutes from our beloved capital, the transmitters for channel 5 don't reach us.
Anyway, everyone else in the line looked at me as if I had just blown my nose in the Queen's eye. God forbid I should complain, "no one like's a complainer" I heard someone mutter. Well, I don't like living in a shit-box, but no one seems to want to do anything about that!
The trains never run on time, they are dirty and smelly, the tracks are strewn with litter and rubbish and dead babies (ok so that last one was an exaggeration) and they still have the fucking cheek to charge me £38 of my hard earned and highly taxed money for the pleasure of sitting on urine smelling seats with gum stuck on them, while I'm delayed due to previously mentioned leaves on the track. Thirty-eight bloody quid, that's how much it cost me to get to my University from my home - which is about the same distance as most American would travel for good coffee and most British people seem to imagine that your need a week to prepare. (We do have a remarkable capacity to imagine that country is about the size of a slightly smaller Australia, when really you could fit it quite comfortably into one of the lakes in Canada and have room to spare.
Anyway - good grief this is way too long an entery to sustain attention. I don't imagine you American's with your short attention spans will be able to make it to the end. (That totally unwarranted American insult was put in here merely to illicit a response and thus act as a test to see who reaches the end of this mammoth entry!)
So, sorry to have gone momentarily mad, this is the end now. So let me know what you think you want. I encourage you to rant and rave about your own country - it's very cathartic - suddenly I feel patriotic, all the spite and pain is slowly drifting away...what's that I hear...music?
Why I seem to be finding myself singing...
God Save our gracious Queen,
Long live our noble Queen,
God save the Queen....
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