Another Fruit-y/-less Friday

Friday night. 11pm. Sometime between the hours of “tragic” and “lackluster” I left a beatle-themed church dance wondering what my life has come to. Shoes off and another 3 calls to my still unreachable boyfriend who feels it is ok to fall of the face of the earth to go gallivanting about in Sequoia National Park, leaving me to conjur up terrifying scenarios where he is tied to a tree by manic Greenpeace activists and left to imperialist chainsaws, rabid wolves etc.

Really I should be thankful. Downtime has become a mirage in a desert of scornful politics professors who leave trails of academic devastation behind in their passing. With the only other significant monopoly of my time and energy on an impromptu Sabbatical in the backwoods of California that gives me an entire hour and a half daily to play with.

Let’s see…I suppose I could start by catching everyone up with what’s been going on in my little corner of the world. After a rather shaky start, my dance partner and I finally made it to our first ballroom competition and believe it or not medaled in waltz…twice. Not to worry though, we swam right back to the shallow end of the gene pool with our quickstep and at least two of our latin performances, thus righting this particular cosmic imbalance.

Leeds in general is still a mostly sketchy place to be out and about in between 4 pm (the start of the average Otley run pub crawl) and 11 am (the end of the morning after migration, also know as the “Walk of Shame”). Thankfully seasonal prime time favorites like “X-Factor” and “I’m a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here” make for safe indoor entertainment and most of my free nights are spent on a couch enjoying them with either a likeminded roommate and/or a nice cup of decaf chai (courtesy of my lovely friend Johanna). That’s not to say that I don’t occasionally enjoy a night out on the town in some come hither heels. Just the other week I had two bottles of lager consecutively spilled on my brand new dress at Fruity Friday because apparently being the only sober white girl in a club merits some sort of embarrassing punishment that not even the sexiest heels can distract from. My sister who actually came to visit me in Leeds has convinced me though that in the end, in the interest of saving myself from the dreadful abyss of spinsterdom and multiple cat ownership, some sacrifices must be made, clubs attended and dresses inadvertently trashed.

The Vicious Truth

It’s a story as old as time. Girl starts blog. Girl listens to Radiohead on repeat for hours on end. Girl realizes that she spent her last creative neurons on Lib Dem apologetics and stares blankly at well intended but sparse blog. Honestly I think there’s simply too much to talk about. As soon as I leave the movie theater ready to review and provoke I find myself in a heated debate about the tragic state of the English parliament after which i’m finishing The Time Traveler’s Wife over decaf Chai and appreciating how much better Magnet’s cover of Lay Lady Lay is than Dylan’s original.
Thankfully, youtube can always be relied on to relieve creative stagnation and so I will begin by stirring up some old controversy. In March 2008, 8 teenagers, 6 of whom were girls lured an alleged friend into one of their homes so they could beat her senseless and then put the video on youtube and myspace. Apparently the victim had posted slanderous statements concerning the attackers on the social networking sight and thus obviously deserved to be beaten to an unrecognizable pulp. Their logic was a bit baffling to me but apparently being 21, according to my 16 year old sister, makes me completely unqualified to pass any sort of judgment on the troubled universe of her age group. Independent of age of course remains the mind-boggling stupidity it takes to sandwich a violent felony between fuzzy kittens and sushi tutorials for all to see. Not surprisingly, all 8 were arrested and tried for their 7 minutes of fame, leaving only a trail of talk show speculations as to why these things are happening more and more frequently. The primary culprits according to parents are of course youtube and the media with their morally neutralizing powers.
Now I may of course be overstepping boundaries once again by declaring how fantastically ludicrous that is, but what the heck, I’m just going to go ahead and step on some toes. If eight 16 year olds trap a defenceless classmate in a room and go town on her skull it seems to me that there may be a little more to it than a misguided use and abuse of the internet. In fact, I’m going to tread a little farther on this perilous trail and say that there were in fact some parents involved that desperately failed at doing what God intended them to do…RAISE THEIR CHILDREN!!! That is, not just feed, clothe and occasionally get them to take the trash out, but actually teach them the difference between RIGHT and OH SO TERRIBLY WRONG. I am so sick and tired of switching on the TV and having to listen to yet another mother offer up her grain of salt concerning teenage violence. “It’s definitely Mortal Combat with all that killing. Oh yeah! And all those Slasher movies. No wonder kids are acting so aggressively towards one another”. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not particularly fond of excessive violence either but somewhere deep down I know that the reason I don’t slit people’s throats in broad daylight has a lot to do with who I am as a person and the values my parents instilled in me. Of course some kids are more sensitive than others and should not be left to point crossbows at armies of the undead, but that once again brings us back to the frequency only a parent or guardian can tune into. If you’re going let your kids play these kinds of games or watch those kinds of movies, have the good sense to observe your offspring and intervene when necessary.
The tragically underdiscussed issue remained of course the trigger of the whole fiasco, Lindsay, the victim’s, inappropriate comments on Myspace. According to the girls, she had repeatedly spread false rumors and badmouthed the attackers on her page, humiliating them in a way they felt they could only repay her for by assaulting her and filming it. Let’s address for one minute the issue of how far we’ve fallen from social grace for this degree of virtual defamation to become the norm among teenagers. Of course there is no excuse for what those kids did to Lindsay, but you do have to wonder what the heck that girl was writing in the first place for them to even consider such an act. At the risk of sounding like I was born in plaid and pantyhose, I really don’t remember reading about anything of this nature when I was in my early to mid-teens. Sure, kids said terrible things to each other but those who did generally had the good sense to keep it within the bounds of hushed conversation and/or hallway disputes. If you didn’t like someone you confided in your friends and that was usually that. Nowadays every ugly truth, every hideous rumor is immediately exposed to the harsh glow of a computer screen and as we have all witnessed this method seems to breed particularly poisonous results.
OH for the days when you stuck your tongue out at your arch nemesis and left covered in mud rather than blood and a world wide web of shame.

hmmmm....

I'm not entirely sure why I started this blog but i've given myself 24 hours to come up with a perfectly rational reason after which I will start blaming everyone around me and generally lash out at the fabric of society.

Life is normal for all intents and purposes. I've been steadily working on my novel at the rate of about 3 sentences a day and hope to be past the halfway mark right before my future disenfranchised grandchildren cart me off to a retirement home of their choosing.
I am also gradually settling back into Leeds after a long summer of American merriment. May ended with Johanna Phelps' (now Hillen) nuptuals for which I flew to New York. A beautiful ceremony for a beautiful couple that ran its course seamlessly after several days of last minute flower arranging and a hairdryer incident that fortunately spun out into comic relief rather than chaos. After a short return to Leeds, Las Vegas beckoned and I was once again being questioned suspiciously by U.S customs as to my purpose of travel and whether I had ever committed any Nazi war crimes between 1933-1945. I've often played with the idea of admitting that I am in fact Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring following a stint in cryostasis and gender reassignment surgery, but I suspect the U.S government has little appreciation for that sort of thing.
Self-preservation won me over and I decided I would rather make hundreds of airport patrons uncomfortable with wildly passionate PDA than spend a week in a padded prison cell.

Having done that, Tyler and I spent the next two months making plenty of other innocent bystanders uneasy up and down both Utah and Nevada while working his family’s lemonade business, hiking Mt.Timpanogos, going to a Secondhand Serenade concert and doing many other things.

For those of you familiar with my romantic antics of the past, you’ll be happy to know that this relationship has made it past the first year mark without either one of us moving to a country where malaria is served as a side dish or any severe emotional carnage. We’ve got 2 years to go until we can realistically even live on the same continent, but as it turns out, some people are worth it and one of them happens to be my boyfriend.

For now then, I’ll be concentrating on finishing my degree, getting a decent job and enjoying life, which anyone is welcome to join me in doing every Friday afternoon in Hyde Park where I plan to stare up at the sky for 10 minutes and appreciate the world, the universe and God for all their bounty. Feel free to bring snacks for a post-deep thought picnic and hangout.