The Perils of Being Unable to Say No:

1. Unable to Say No to Food

- When one of your best friends is pregnant and goes through mad cravings, you run to the supermarket with her in 50-degree weather.

- You try cucumber sticks with peanut butter, carrot sticks with nutella, goats’ cheese with EVERYTHING.

- You gain more weight than she did during her pregnancy.

2. Unable to Say No to Friends Who Are Leaving

- You go out every night with them.

- You go out every night with them and do mad shit that ensures you look like a wreck in the morning (and throughout the day…week...nevermind), but have a blast doing said mad shit.

- You log in late to work every day for a week as a result of only getting to bed at an hour that is both too late and too early to be sane.

3. Unable to Say (a Loud, Rude, Vociferous) No to Guys Who Ask You Out

- Your polite refusal is taken as a sign of weakness.

- They keep pestering you, even when they have a chickie baby on the side (honestly, am I the only one who sees something wrong with that???)

- They eventually turn into psycho loonies who make up mad shit* about you.

(*not to be confused with the more pleasant, enjoyable mad shit referenced in point 2. This mad shit is all bad and bound to earn someone a kick in the nuts).

4. Unable to Say No to Shopping Expeditions

- You get to a point where you’re scared to look at your bank balance.

- Your shoe collection could make Imelda Marcos say: “Whoa there, a little restraint please!”

- You cannot open your closet door for fear of being buried in the fabric avalanche and not being found for a week.

5. Unable to Say No to Books

- Your overflowing bookshelves make your closet look pristine in comparison.

- When an idiot at a club tries to strike up a conversation using the lame-ass line “You know, the dress you’re wearing is the druidic colour of healing!”, you’re actually in a position to say “Um – no, lameass – that’s green, not purple.”

- You can quote William Shakespeare and Pablo Neruda alongside J.K. Rowling and Charlaine Harris, but no one else gets that and you just sound pompous anyway.

So, lesson learned: the new word that I will wear out, and I mean really wrestle down to the ground and make my bitch, is “No.”

Life’s too much bother otherwise.

Apparently I Was One Of Those Angsty Teenagers

My God, I could not be a BIGGER cliche. How disappointing. Looking through my old stories (Draco Malfoy/Hermione Granger fanfiction, how I miss thee), I came across a poem I had written at the ripe old age of 19. It positively drips with love scorned and world-weariness. Sheesh. How pretentious we are at that age, how we think we know EVERYTHING and have been through EVERYTHING and NO!ONE!UNDERSTANDS! I'm quite embarrassed by it, actually!

Of course, chances are I'm going to stumble across this blog post in 10 years' time and think the same thing :)

For anyone who cares, here's the melodramatic goodness:

Waiting and hoping,

Watching and praying;

Replaying the words

Of the rubbish you were saying

To make me forgive you,

To make the lies true;

To make me forget

My trust in you.

Mumbling and cursing,

Smiling and rehearsing

My most genuine fake smile

To keep your lips from pursing

At how childish I'm being;

How naive I am for not seeing

Through the half-truths you told me

To keep me from leaving

When I could have walked without getting hurt;

When I could have left without feeling like dirt:

Walked all over by you

Like I'm not even worth

A proper kiss,

Or a promise you'll miss

All that we had

All eternity, then this:

Nothing.

Would You, Really?

Want to be immortal, I mean?

This isn't anything to do with my aeons-old vampire fetish, but rather a book R lent me to peruse while I was sick and recuperating at home last week: The Book of Skulls by Robert Silverberg. I'm not a die-hard science fiction enthusiast, but despite being tagged under Sci-Fi Masterworks, I'd classify this book as more occult and mysticism, with a lot of study-of-human-nature thrown in.

The premise is this: 4 boys in their final year of college set out on a cross-country trip to Arizona to locate a sect shrouded in secrecy and mystery: The Brotherhood of the Skulls. According to ancient but reliable texts discovered by one of the boys, the Brotherhood offers the gift of immortality to those who seek it, but with a few catches: those questing immortality must present themselves in groups of 4; they must stay the course of the initiation without informing the outside world; and of the 4 only 2 will survive "for the price of life is always a life". Sinister stuff, no? Half the book is comprised of their journey there, and the thoughts of each one - I loved how the author alternated between each boy and allowed us a detailed (and often disturbing) travel through each one's psyche.

The book had me alternating my views on whom I wanted to live or die, and I think that disturbed me more than anything - playing God even in that small measure, judging and weighing each of those fictional characters' lives and decisions and flaws and failures. Stupid, I know, but the tone of the book is such that it makes you question so many, many things - including yourself. Brilliantly written. Any book that gets me to question beyond who, what, where, when and why deserves all the awards and accolades out there.

The end lived up to my expectations, but all through the book, I kept asking myself: would I? Given the chance, would I WANT immortality? For me, the answer is no: simply because I wouldn't want to live out forever without the people I love by my side. The book (and R) expostulates the myriad possibilities : discovering new things, learning every day, mastering new crafts, greeting the dawn of new centuries - new millennia even! To which my simple answer is: what is the point of all that if you don't have people to share it with you? Give me a few good decades with everyone I love and I'll gladly forego forever.

What about you? What if you could choose to live forever? Would you?

For Those of You Out There

... who need inspiration. Or a wake-up call.

In my circle of acquaintances, there is:

- A woman frustrated with her dead-end job in a male-dominated office in a male-dominated country.

- A woman steadily climbing the corporate ladder, respected and liked, and grateful to the predecessors who have paved the way for her.

- A woman whose husband has cheated on her. They're trying, everyday, to rebuild what once was, but it's a steep uphill climb.

- A woman whose husband cheated on her after 30 years of marriage. She unceremoniously threw him out, took hold of the reins of her family and her life, and is the happiest she's been in the past 3 decades.

- A woman who was accosted by a man in broad daylight on a busy street in a big city. People came to her aid as he tried to stuff her into a waiting van, but she still fears for the day when there will be no one around to hear her scream.

- A woman who has to ask her husband before spending a single cent of the money he earns. Resentful, she wishes she had gone back to work after the baby, had studied further, had chosen another life for herself.

- A woman who did choose another life for herself. And who glories in every pair of shoes or piece of jewellery she buys with her own hard-earned money.

- A woman who was forced to have an abortion 3 years ago. She still thinks about the baby, and what she would have named her, and what dress she would have worn on her 3rd birthday.

- A woman who wants a baby so badly, she's beginning to resent the woman who had the abortion, for abandoning something so precious, so desired.

- A woman who is in love.

- A woman who thinks she might have given up on love.

- A woman whose husband has never raised a hand to her, but beats her down every day with words, with gestures, with eye-rolls, with blatant disregard.

- A woman whose boyfriend adores her, wants to marry her, and can actually picture no greater bliss than spending the rest of his life with her.

- A woman who is happy and content.

- A woman who cannot remember the last time the word 'happy' crossed her mind, let alone her lips.

But every single one of them hopes. For more, for better, for themselves and for those around them.

When I read about this:

... I couldn't help but take the opportunity to tell (however briefly and however anonymously) the stories of these amazing women's lives.

Because, with everything they go through and everything they face, they ARE amazing, simply for getting up in the morning and putting on a smile for the world.

And I want to tag Nusy, Standy and JSO: so they can tell their own stories.

Jumping On The Bandwagon

It seems every networking site, every blog and, of course, every news site, has fans bidding their own personal farewells to Michael Jackson. I can't say I was a fan of his later work, but I adored every album from "Off The Wall" to "Blood On The Dance Floor:HIStory in the Remix", and the album "Dangerous" was played on constant repeat when I was 11. Don't even get me started on how I'd drive D.S. mad by playing "Give In To Me" a million times over when I was 18 and rediscovered a passion for Michael Jackson/Slash collaboration songs...

Goodbye M.J. May your death be more peaceful than your life. It's been a priviledge and a pleasure rockin' with you all these years.

In other news, Farrah Fawcett finally succumbed to cancer. Poor, beautiful girl...she wasn't my favourite of the original Charlie's Angels...that was always Kelly, who seemed more kick-ass to me. Man, it sucks to wake up from a night of debauchery and read of all these known names dying.

Although, as my friend pointed out with a shrug...why write about this? We're not consciously mourning the other hundreds of thousands dying every day in the world, are we.

Sometimes, I wonder if I'm more of a hypocrite than I like to think about...or just disgustingly shallow.