M is for Mmm

When you think about it (and I mean really really think because I couldn’t come up with anything to write about for the longest time so this was pretty difficult to come up with. I do hope you appreciate the amount of effort I go to for you people), mmm is a relatively powerful little syllable. It can mean all sorts of different and terribly exciting things. It can sometimes be a little difficult to tell what’s going on, the intent behind the use of such a word. But fortunately for you that’s where I come in because I really don’t have anything better to do at this particular moment in time.

There are good mmms and bad mmms in this merry little world of ours. Let’s begin with food because I’m a bit peckish right now and with any luck this will take my mind off it to a certain extent. Depending on the pitch of the mmm one chooses to employ, the mmm in question might be an enthusiastic ejaculation of pure delight at the example of culinary excellence you’ve been fortunate enough to have the chance to sample or it could be a shakily horrified way of expressing disgust in a manner that will keep your jaw firmly clamped shut as throwing up in public would be so indelicate.

But there are more mmms to be found in the daily exchange of social intercourse. Mmm can be something of an assent to an idea you approve of for whatever reason. On the other hand, it could also be a way to delaying the need for a response in a conversation because you can’t quite bring yourself to agree with what’s been said. Mmm can even be a method of putting across your tight lipped disapproval of something extremely heinous indeed. The power of the word is in your hands, it’s all down to tone and facial expression and whether or not you’re giving the other person the finger.

L is for Losing an Hour

It’s incredible really how the glorious embrace of smug satisfaction of last October effortlessly melts away at this time of year to leave you with something scratchy and irritable to make you ratty and discombobulated. Why does a perfectly good hour that could be spent doing something interesting and productive like staying in bed have to be snatched away in such a ruthless fashion? Really though, in this modern and enlightened day and age why do we still feel the need to shape our daylight hours around the wants and needs of farmers? What have they ever done for us? We’ve got McDonald’s now, it’s not like we should have to worry any more about food production.

Alright fine, that might not have been my most serious of points ever but the loss of an hour is a bit of a hassle. Not a complete hassle of course because it’s only an hour after all and the majority of devices in your life will automatically make the change anyway. But this is the sort of thing you’ll make a mental note to remember, inevitably completely forget about because that’s how life works when you make an effort and end up waking up in a slight panic as you now have no way of being entirely sure what time it really is.

On the other hand, the whole time shifting situation does provide a handy and totally legitimate excuse for being late to things for the next few days due to all the confusion. Sure, you’ll look like some sort of foolish mug who lacks a certain degree of control over the various factors in your life but then again it’s not exactly the end of the world for people to truly know the real you. I’m sure we can all find a way to dig deep and find the strength to be able to cope with the various changes that life has to offer. Such as it now being an hour earlier than it’s supposed to be.

K is for Kati-kehari

Yes well done, that is not an English word. It happens to be Hindi if you’re at all interested (and clearly I’ve decided that you are at least for today so you might as well get on board). I got it from a list of foreign phrases regarding love and relationships that don’t have a direct translation into English. Some of them are delightfully cute like the German concept of anhimmeln which is to be enraptured by someone. I know, sweet right? Then there are the cultural traditions that certainly ought to become more widespread such as the Japanese idea of chocolates given with true feeling. Of course there are also the phrases that really should remain untranslated as they’re much clunkier in English and quite a bit less romantic. For example, avoir des atomes crochus sounds rather better than having hooked atoms.

But the focus of today is a concept either whose significance I don’t fully appreciate or just generally doesn’t make sense. Kati-kehari is having the waist of an elegant lion. I do hope that this is a compliment. Are lions particularly known for their attractive figures? I have to admit that I’ve never actually seen one in an Empire line frock. Oh what do I know? They might look better in a dropped waisted number. One can never be entirely certain how human fashion is going to translate when one applies it to big cats.

More than that though, is the lion truly the possessor of the optimal waist of the animal kingdom? After all, Simba was never exactly portrayed as any kind of sex symbol. Lions do admittedly have a certain feline grace to them and their lithe waists are a world away from other comparisons that could be made. Telling someone they have the waist of an elephant for example is probably a roundabout way of letting them know they’re a bit dumpy.

J is for Just What Were They Thinking?

In the name of raising awareness for cancer, you know, that incredibly prevalent thing that no one’s ever heard of in this day and age, people are taking some very strange photos indeed. One thing is for sure, my generation doesn’t take anything like enough photos of itself, so very many people my age feel this inexplicable (as far as I’m concerned) compulsion to document every waking moment of their lives with stacks of photos (clearly my way of doing this through blogging is vastly superior. If a picture is worth a thousand words then I’m essentially cranking one out every three days, a highly manageable rate of production without even the slightest hint of self indulgence).

More specifically, there are gender dependent flavours of this particular activity. For the ladies there is the no make up selfie. Well, I don’t think men are excluded per se but a make up free selfie isn’t much of an event for most boys. I’ve mercifully managed to avoid any nomination to do one not that I’d want to do it or that it would be much of an achievement – I don’t exactly wear make up very often. It would seem that the storm has largely passed on this trend as the flood of these photos that were cluttering up my Facebook feed have slowed to a trickle.

But the boys are not to be outdone. Their challenge is to take a photo of themselves wearing only a sock to cover up their naughty bits. I’m not really sure what else there is to say. I haven’t seen any of my friends doing this and am keeping everything crossed for that situation not to change. Just one thing though, how exactly is this escalation in the world of self portrayal doing anything in the service of promoting awareness of cancer?

I is for I’ll Kill You With a Teaspoon

One of these days I am going to have to learn that self service checkouts are very definitely no friends of mine. I’m not entirely sure that they’re remotely concerned about being mates with anyone particularly but they seem to have it in for me in general. Or maybe I’m just being somewhat paranoid. But when an irritatingly snotty voiced machine tries to deny me the purchase of a five pack of teaspoons it turns out that questions do in fact have to be asked.

Just who was it that made the decision for teaspoons to be age protected? What catastrophic event could have precipitated such a choice? Or was it some fevered hypothetical dreamt up by a slightly overzealous health and safety officer? Was it some stroke of genius devised by the police? Having given up on the battle against knife crime as a lost cause have they instead decided to nip spoon assault in the bud? The idea being that if you can prevent them from getting their hands on teaspoons they’ll never be able to trade up soup, table, dessert or, heaven forfend, the almighty ladle?

Teaspoons just aren’t dangerous. Is someone worried I’ll start making people cups of tea they won’t be able to refuse? They’re not even all that good for hitting people with. I feel I ought to point out that in the same shopping trip I was also buying some tins of baked beans. Now those will definitely do some damage if you use them to take a swing at someone. Then again, if we start thinking along those sorts of lines where will the madness ever be able to end? Really though, give me one actual legitimate reason why I shouldn’t be allowed to have a stupid pack of teaspoons. I refuse to allow the machines to win. Also, I’m over eighteen so I’m deemed just about adult enough to buy whatever dangerous but still legal substances I want.

H is for Hangry

Hangry, it’s a new word (which means that there’s an annoying red dotted line under it at the moment) apparently. Let’s see whether or not I can approve of it. The definition I’ve been supplied with says that hangry is an adjective describing a negative change in emotional state caused by a lack of food, for example anger brought on by this hunger. We’ve all been there, felt this way because being hungry is that many degrees of not fun.

Being hungry has got to be one of the most surefire routes to misery in existence, a fast track, a dependable trusty shortcut. There’s a certain hopelessness that accompanies awaiting one’s next round of sustenance. Maybe you haven’t got anything in the cupboard and you can’t be bothered to go shopping or there’s always that interminable pause between ordering something to eat and it arriving be it a takeaway online (with you hovering anxiously over the screen as the pizza tracker ticks on) or something in a restaurant and all you can do while you wait is fiddle with your napkin and make awkward small talk with whoever it is your sitting with (hangriness is especially not good news if you happen to be on a date).

It’s clear to me that if you notice that someone is being moody you should try feeding them to cheer them up a bit. Well it can’t hurt surely? Unless you end up giving them food poisoning or something. I can’t exactly imagine that sort of thing would particularly help the situation. So I think that by this point in proceedings I probably ought to admit to the fact that I do think that being hangry is a genuine thing. We’re all cavemen at heart really with simple emotions and straightforward causes. That is until the next time I’m in a mood and can’t quite work out why.

G is for Glass Peacock

On Amazon for the low low price of a trifling mere $360,000 and no pennies you can buy a glass peacock. Oh look at you all excited, it’s simply adorable. And there’s free shipping and everything. I know, your life must be complete now that you know you could spend an inordinate amount of dollars on a six foot tall glass statue that will do nothing for you but decorate your home. It doesn’t even have the capability to make porridge, my grandfather’s old golden standard of purchase worthiness.

This peacock is a crystal masterpiece, I’m really rather surprised that the sellers in their most surely infinite wisdom didn’t decide that they ought to charge a little more for it. After all, four hundred thousand dollars is a much nicer rounder number than three hundred and sixty thousand. It would make for simpler figures for the tax receipts. In fact, why not go the whole hog and make it a cool even half a million? Do they even have VAT in America because I’m fairly certain that if a whopping glass monstrosity resembling a big blue bird with a shiny green tail doesn’t count as a luxury product then nothing does.

I’m not sure that anyone has even gone to the extravagance of shelling out for this thing. The only review online reduces this fantabulous product to little more than a cheap penis metaphor. Who knows? Maybe it was worth it just to be able to refer to the fancy bird as his brand new ‘cock. It’s hardly as if three hundred and sixty thousand dollars goes particularly far nowadays. It won’t buy you the abode worthy of housing the glass peacock, I doubt very much it’s enough for a trip into space, it’s probably not even enough to buy you one measly executive jet. Really, you’d be a fool not to get the peacock, it’s quite the investment.

F is for Flea of Catastrophe

I am hard pushed to think of anyone out there who actually likes fleas. Come on, they’re fleas, bloodsuckers, parasites. There’s nothing remotely romantic about them in spite of what randy English poets might have you believe. Fleas are horrible. There, I’ve said it. They are spreaders of disease and they’re not even remotely apologetic about it. Even in A Bug’s Life, a film that portrays all manner of creepy crawlies as downright heroic, the flea character might not be one of the actual villains but he definitely exerts rather a lot of effort in the cause of getting in the way of the good guys.

What is it then about this particular flea that makes it quite so extraordinary? When did it become the flea of catastrophe? How did it distinguish itself so, earn that mighty accolade? Well I don’t know, his name’s Steve, he has serious ideas above his station, certain delusions of grandeur. He just woke up one day and decided that he was going to change the world. And he’s only a flea after all, you can’t expect him to bring about world peace or universal healthcare, he didn’t come equipped with the tools for making good things happen. So that’s how he began his journey over to the dark side.

Ridiculous as he is, Steve does at least have ambition. He made a cape and everything which is no mean feat when you look at the stitching, it’s on an almost microscopic level. Steve has invented several titles for himself, he is the Flea of Catastrophe, Dark Lord of Terror, Scourge of the Giant Ones. He might never have actually done anything to justify these arrogant titles but for a flea you have to admit that he’s pretty damn inventive. Though if you ask me I think he’s probably just compensating for something.

E is for Expectation is the Root of All Heartache

This is a quote apparently commonly misattributed to Shakespeare. Everyone always thinks he said everything. Probably. A bit. I’d never heard it before anyway. Then again, I’m clearly some sort of strange uncultured hermit woman with little to no understanding of the wider world so me being unaware of something is hardly indicative of anything. Trust me, there are huge heaps of stuff out there that I don’t know. We will probably never know quite how much there is that we still have left to learn. See how I managed to lump the rest of you in with me so that I can bring you down to my unclued up level?

So it turns out that when it comes to this quote that I didn’t previously know existed until I started scratching around for something to write about today no one really knows where it comes from. Expectation is the route of all heartache is really quite similar to the Buddhist noble truth that desire is the root of all suffering. Now to my tiny mind, this similarity probably means one of two things. Either there is just about enough truth in both statements for people who are not Shakespeare to have arrived at them independently through serious thought and study or a shortish bout of alcoholic musing. Either that or someone was trying to show off so copied and pasted someone else’s work but managed to change it just enough in order to pass it off as their own original musings.

Is it true then? Does expectation really have anything to do with heartache? I imagine that it probably does. It’s far easier to be a happy idiot than it is to be equally pleased with your life when you know exactly what it is that you’re missing out on. Is there anything we can do about such a sad state of affairs? Are low or totally non existent expectations the route to happiness in life? I doubt it to be honest because surely someone else would have endorsed this outlook by now? Unless… maybe I really am an unquestionable genius. I always expected that someone would manage to discover this for themselves.

D is for Divergent

I do not like being told that I have to go and see something. It’s presumptive and rude. I prefer to be given the facts and left alone to be allowed to make up my own mind. I am open to persuasion as opposed to overt pressure. That being said, if you are buoyed up with bubbling excitement about a new film, wanting to urge others to go and see it because of the joy then I’m afraid to say I need more than just the fact that there’s admittedly very impressive eye candy. If you offer me twenty nine reasons why I should watch a film then you really need to have something ever so slightly more substantial than a lot of pictures of Theo James in various states of undress.

I’m not naive or totally unaffected, I know that sex and sex appeal are rather major contributors when it comes to the selling of tickets. However, I am a supposedly moderately intelligent woman, I am a writer and there are more thoughts in my head than just the ones that relate to my libido. I have to at least pretend to have one or two actual legitimate reasons for shelling out however much it is on a cinema ticket. What’s the storyline? The interesting plot devices? The stunningly genius directorial twists and ricks? What’s so special about this film that it is supposedly worthy of my time and hard earned pennies?

I ought to explain that I really don’t go to the cinema at all often. In the last sixth months I think I’ve been to see about three films (The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Philomena and Saving Mr Banks. I recommend all of them and I don’t even fancy anyone in the last two). Netflix just requires so much less effort and obviously I have to make that monthly subscription cost effective. Plus I can make all the loud phone calls and rustling noises I want while watching. In my pants. In bed.