Curse of the food hole

Food. We love it. We consume it every day. It’s either bad for us and delicious, or good for us and like licking a piece of cardboard that a sweaty monkey has rubbed all over itself. Then set fire to. Then taken the ashes and peed on them. Then served it to you as soup. And of course you took the soup because the monkey was dressed as a waiter and that’s how monkeys get you - they wear people clothes and it’s so funny that you forget you can’t trust them.

The issue with deliciousness is that once you get the taste for it, it’s hard to stop shoving things in your mouth (by ‘things’ I mean food things, stop thinking that other thing you were thinking). ‘I’ll only eat one Tim Tam’ turns into an empty packet. ‘I’ll just have a light dinner’ turns into the pain of trying to digest an entire dead animal. ‘I’ll just have a quick sandwich’ turns into a quick sandwich followed by an apple and some 2 minute noodles and a bigger sandwich and some chips and eating Nutella off anything else you could find. Generally a spoon. Or your finger.

This anti-will-power phenomenon is something I like to call ‘opening the food hole.’ It’s like opening the floodgates, except the gates are your mouth and the water is fried chicken.

For many years I excused my behaviour with the old standards ‘but think of the starving children in Africa!’ even though me having another piece of cake was never going to help a starving child in Africa, and ‘I better eat it before it expires’ when the expiry date was months away. I thought I was doing fine until late last year when I finally decided to do something about the couple of kilos I gained in Europe. I came up with a brilliant idea: I was only going to eat when I was hungry.

This plan lasted longer than I expected. I dropped two dress sizes. I had to buy a lot of new clothes. I can walk up stairs now. Well, some stairs. More stairs than before. Stairs are hard. But recently, I started to slip. I allowed donuts back into my life, and they brought their friends with them. Their cake-y, chip-y and deep fried-y friends.

I’m trying. I really am. My jeans still fit, but I’m constantly faced by the struggle of working around baked goods and having lunch once a week with that friend who never finishes her food.

It’s not my fault. I blame the deliciousness.

All by myself

I’ve been on my own in a rather large house since the 25th of April. Here’s why I should never be left alone for long periods of time without proper adult supervision:

I’m not good at killing spiders.
There’s no one to vent to but the stuffed animals.
I refuse to unclog the shower drain because the hair monster smells. Bad. Ignoring the dishes doesn’t make them go away.

I have no self control when it comes to food.

FAQ part trois

Hey, Lauren! How’s your novel coming along?
Yeah, alright. I wrote almost 400 words three weeks ago.

That’s… that’s not a lot.
It’s not like I haven’t been writing, I’ve just been busy working on other things.

Such as?
I wrote a pretty kick ass greeting in a birthday card last weekend.

Ok…
I’ve also been responsible for some rather amusing text messages.

Right. I heard you’re living on your own at the moment, how’s that working out?
There’s a hair-monster living in my shower drain that I’m too much of a princess to remove, so now I play this game I like to call ‘Can I finish showering before the bathroom floods?’ So far I’m winning.

Uh huh. And how many times have you had ice cream for breakfast this week?
Not once!

Does 'not once' mean 'twice'?
No.

Three times?
Maybe.

I was looking at some of your older blogs this morning. They’re great. Why aren’t you funny anymore?
Shuddup. You write something better, genius.

Ok, I will.
Good.

Good.
I look forward to reading it.

I look forward to you reading it.
And I look forward judging you, Judge-y McJudgeface.

That was mature. How old are you?
How old are you?

I don’t know. I don’t exist. You made me up.
Oh yeah.

You’re a strange lady.
Your mother’s a strange lady.

Good luck with the hair-monster.
Good luck with your FACE.

So... then what happened?

The itsy bitsy spider climbed up the water spout.
Down came the rain and washed the spider out.
Out came the sunshine and dried up all the rain,
so the itsy bitsy spider climbed up the spout again.

This is just a pattern, he never learns from his mistakes.
All these pointless antics just make his wife’s head ache.
Like his gambling problem or that pyramid scheme,
or the time he woke up naked with half a football team.

The question is; why does he want to stay out of the house?
And the answer he will tell you is his really annoying spouse.
She’s mean, she’s cold, she’s a little bit ditzy,
then there’s the fact she calls him ‘Itsy Bitsy’.

She puts their 200 kids to bed while he’s at the pub.
He returns home to her angry hubbub.
Itsy turns back to the door, ready to walk.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ she says. ‘We need to talk.’

‘You’ve been talking to your ex on Facebook, I only just found out.’
‘I don’t have time for this,’ he says. ‘I’m gonna go climb the spout.’
She throws a glass vase and yells ‘How dare you walk out that door?’
He says, ‘My dear, to be honest, I’d rather climb up that spout than yours.’

I was drinking water just now and I missed my mouth

I have a lot of ideas. Sort of. The problem with my brain is that it’s not really capable of having a full idea, it just comes up with tiny little idea fragments.
Many times I have had what I considered to be a brilliant idea for a blog. I started writing and realised that no, I was wrong. So ladies and gentlemen, I present to you what I like to call ‘The blog where blog ideas go to die’ featuring scrawlings from many random scraps of paper:

HALF BAKED IDEAS

There’s still so much I don’t understand. Why does every letter of the alphabet have its own Wikipedia page? What’s keeping Keith Richards alive and where can I get some?

Think of stupid things to put on a bucket list*

How your iPod will always embarrass you if you put it on shuffle in public: I don’t like B*witched ironically. I genuinely like them and people who come into my place of business don’t need to be aware of that. It hurts my image.

How hairdressers are like prostitutes – you pay them money for a service and they pretend to like you. They are hair-stitutes.

The meaning of life - something to do with donuts?

How I tried to get swine flu in 2009 because I hated my job: When I saw someone cough on the train, my first instinct wasn’t to move away. It was ‘quick, lick his face. LICK HIS FAAAAAACE!’

Money saving ideas – it works out a lot cheaper if you just kill the prostitute.

‘Baby it’s cold outside’ is a date rape anthem and really needs to stop being so damn catchy.

How pop music has become dirtier since I was a kid: The dirtiest song we had was Genie in a Bottle, except we actually thought it was about a genie in a bottle. Our innocent little minds never clicked that maybe there was something a bit suss about having to rub her the right way, honey.

SHORT BITTIES THAT I HAVE NO RECOLLECTION OF AND NOW DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT I WAS GETTING AT

I have no respect for personal space. I’m going to sexually assault you now.

Check out my new pocket watch. I’d get more chicks if it was the 1940s.

For a small fee and the cost of transporting a drum kit, I’ll follow you around all day and make everything you say instantly become 42% funnier (mathematically proven). BA-DUM-TSH!

Pineapple

Cherry ripe: you make me sick, with your dark chocolate and your grainy content.



*I couldn’t think of any stupid things except blue bucket, red bucket, big bucket, there’s a hole in my bucket, etc.

Born with a love for the wrote & the writ

Late last year my manager came into work one morning with some new stuff on her iPod she wanted me to listen to. She reckoned I’d like this guy because I have a lady crush on Laura Marling and it was a similar style. She put a song on for me, and approximately twenty seconds in, I responded with this:
‘Nup.’

Time went on. His music remained on many of her playlists. It started to grow on me. I started to enjoy it. But of course, because of how quickly I’d shot it down, I couldn’t admit to this (and anyway, no one ever wants to admit to enjoying filthy folk-ish music except for filthy folk-ish people. Unless it’s Laura Marling. Because she’s lady crush-able). So I went home to quietly Google him, expecting to see a thirty-something, slightly bulky, hippie, beardy-faced man.

That’s not what I saw. What I saw was a man child. A beautiful, inappropriately voiced man child.

About a week later I was playing some of his stuff while in the car with my mother. ‘Who’s this?’ she asked. ‘I don’t mind it.’
I told her who it was. Then I told her the story of his unexpected pretty-boy-ness. Then I loaded a video on the YooChoob machine and showed her.
‘You’re kidding?’ she said as it started. When the vocals kicked in, it was followed by ‘Oh… no. No. Nope. That’s not right.’

If you’d like to check out the freakshow for yourself, you can do so here. But a word of warning: you might get pregnant.

And if he must insist on sounding like that, I must insist he stops looking like he’s in a boy band. It’s very distracting. And confusing. And sexy. And confusing.

How to write a romance novel

Lesson one: Writing sexy dialogue
Ok, so there’s a pretty basic storyline for romance novels. Boy meets girl, then boy ‘meets’ girl. And there’s some kind of love rival who’s a dirty no-good scumbag and so on and so forth.

You have to use a certain type of language to keep your reader interested. Instead of using the correct names for things, sprinkle in a ‘ding-a-ling’ and a ‘hoo-haa’ here and there. And ‘mound’. Everybody has some kind of mound. So many mounds.

Most of it is pretty basic stuff, but people tend to struggle with writing sexy dialogue. They say it’s best to write what you know, and I’ve found it helps to take inspiration from my own life and just change a minor detail here and there.

In this scene, the attractive nameless man who is trying to get some shelter from the rain has just walked into a café where the only staff member is… let’s call her Laurel. There are no other customers. Just the two of them. And the glistening rain.

WATCH AND LEARN!

Laurel: ‘Hey.’
Attractive man: ‘Hi.’
Laurel: ‘Still raining outside?’
Attractive man: ‘Yep.’
Laurel: ‘You’re uh… you’re quite wet, there.’
Attractive man: ‘Yep.’
Laurel: ‘I mean… your shirt is all clingy and see through and… clingy.’
Attractive man: ‘Yeah… look, I just need somewhere to stay until the rain stops, do we really need to make small talk?’
Laurel: ‘Maybe you should get out of those wet clothes.’
Attractive man: ‘No, I’m alright. Thanks.’
Laurel: ‘Are you sure? You look cold. You know, the best thing we can do right now is get naked.’
Attractive man: ‘Excuse me?’
Laurel: ‘What is it they say? About shared body heat and all that? It would probably help if we created some friction, too.’
Attractive man: ‘Did… did you just lock that door?’
Laurel: ‘You know, the rain has made your skin look all shimmery.’
Attractive man: ‘Is there anyone else here?’
Laurel: ‘Nope. Just you and me. And the homeless man watching through the window.’
Attractive man: ‘I’d better get going.’
Laurel: ‘Do you want a drink?’
Attractive man: ‘No… OH GOD WHAT THE HELL IS IN THAT?’
Laurel: ‘Nothing.’
Attractive man: ‘WHY IS IT SO CLOUDY?’
Laurel: ‘It’s… supposed to look like that…?’
Attractive man: ‘I’m calling the police.’

Then she rips his clothes off and one thing leads to another and he’ll pretend he’s not interested and he’ll still go to the cops later but if he wasn’t up for it then he wouldn’t go walking around being openly attractive, would he?