Bombs Balls and Bullshit Biology

So just in case you thought the world has never been worse, and that for the first time in history we finally have the full capability and propensity to terrorize eachother into post-apocalyptic paramilitarized cults of religious zealotry and commercialized zombiism, Scotland's SECRET UNDERGROUND BUNKER is here to tell you that compared to the media of the cold war, Fox news is mother fucking goose. Check out this winning headline entitled, creatively, HOLOCAUST encased in a giant mushroom cloud:















Welcome to the 60s kids, a time before Madonna, before MMORPGs, before smoking pot was only for the cool kids. And it wasn't all daisies and folk music, no back in the day everyone was genuinely fearing for their lives as the possibility of nuclear attack loomed large. Much more terrifying than that, however, was the fact that every leading authority figure from here to Hiroshima (got the short straw there, huh guys) claimed that the best method of avoiding skin melting radiation and lung ravaging fallout was to crawl underneath pieces of wooden furniture, chair, desk, table, what have you, and put your hands over your head. This was a very bizarre exhibit but also heartening in a way- things have always been insane, and at least nowadays the government has stepped up the transparency of their idiot advice by telling us to use duct tape and plastic to cover our windows when the biobomb strikes instead of hiding under wood.

Scotland's Secret Underground Bunker was built under an unassuming farm house (though I assume SOMETHING was assumed based on all the thousands of tons of concrete steel and supplies being carted in an out of town whose former largest traffic source was a double row of sheep crossing the road). Housing full medical, living, radio station, radar, and communication facilities, this place was meant to keep the leaders of Scotland safe and give them a base in the event of nuclear attack. And then in 40 years they turned it into a tourist attraction complete with retro action mannequins:


here's one sexy lass who looks like she's been hitting the bottle a little hard since news of nuclear apocalypse













Here's me and dashingly handsome General Plasticock.















For some reason museums here really enjoy letting little kids dress up in clothing which smells like your grandmother's knickers drawer, and at the risk of getting lice I communicated some key military information to the zombie hunters aboveground in this authentic army helmet.







And me and Midge the sassy secretary directing some very important top secret calls:
















Then, if that wasn't enough fun for the whole family for our entire trip, we visited the St. Andrews golf museum, which also had fun costumes. Here' me dressed as a dapper golfer circa 1810:
















They had thrilling exhibits on the history of golf, the history of holes, the history of clubs, and (steel yourself folks) the history of ballmaking:










Then we went to the aquarium. At the aquarium, which, as I mentioned before, I will refer to as Aqua Alcatraz, they ran out of exhibit thrills after the dead crab and this giant fucking lobster thing, (which I'm pretty sure is just what a supermarket lobster looks like if you feed it butter instead of eating it with butter). Never ones to give up at AA, instead of throwing in the towel they decided to display whatever the hell else they could get their hands on, on no matter how irrelevant and anti-educational. Examples include: a chocolate display, an assortment of alien shaped erasers, and this neon orange dinosaur vehicle. "Dinosaur is an animal!" says McMoron the assistant curator.















and finally, here is me caught between flipping you the bird and giving you a peace sign as my brother Sam collapses on the bed in a blissful ambien-induced stupor. I'm having a claustrophobic time here but we're finally at the Edinburgh fringe where we will be in the same place for more than 2 days, which i'm really looking forward to. Keep me posted, take care, eat your veggies, and remember that even when the world seems at its darkest to be thankful that we're not back in the days when we thought duck and cover would save us. Now, at least, we know we're totally screwed.


much love
xo
H

YALE. Prefrosh: read if you dare to actually be an informed person.

So I see that someone in Norway has visited my blog, and I'm assuming it's due to my recent advertisement on the college admit board websites, and not my huge Norwegian fanbase. And up until now I haven't done a lot of college reminiscing because I assumed all the people who know me are sick and tired of hearing me whine, but i feel like I owe it to N.Weejee (hope you don't mind that's your new nickname) and to other kids who are lost in that hurricane of horrible called the college admissions process to give you what you came for:

Yale.... YALE yale. Is a place. just like any other place. And the fact that those four little letters have made you visit a blog of a person you've never met and who has zero net legitimacy (though I appreciate your faith) shows a spec of how powerful a name can be. And I'm not going to tell you it's not a name that opens doors- it's this little invisible tattoo that you can shine a special IvyLeague certification light on if your intelligence is ever in doubt. People who are looking to hire you will raise their eyebrow. Maybe even both. "hoho" they will think to themselves "this person is not a retard. Or if he is, he is an EXTREMELY well connected motherfucking retard and I want in on that." And maybe you'll get the job.

If you want to conquer the financial world it's probably helpful to have gone to Yale. But please think of it as just what i described- a badge, a hoop to jump through, an obstacle course, and nothing more. Yale is not the utopia it makes itself out to be kids, it simply isn't, and if you have any little nibbling doubts when you start going on campus tours and realize that they are all the fucking same, and that every place has a *stellar* social life and *super* diversity and *amazing* classes with *passionate* teachers then you should listen to me when I say: college is a business. A branding. You are paying 40 grand a year to go to a hyped up summercamp where instead of relaxing you have to do all sorts of bullshit busywork.

So great- we always knew most of school was a waste of our time. Almost no institution has the budget to give you a teacher who has time to really learn your interests innate abilities talents flaws and unique information assimilation style, so instead of having an apprenticeship system, instead of really figuring out how your brain works and giving you the tools to rock it, they make you take lots of tests that are all calibrated exactly the same even though every person in the room is completely different, and if you do well, then you get a gold star or something. Good job kid, you've done what you are told, even if it is boring and unproductive and uncreative, and therefore you get all sorts of high numbers. High numbers are better than low numbers, and because the system is not designed to treat people as individuals, they have to rank you all, low to high, so even though your unique selfhood might as well be a big piece of flaming shit for all the bureaucracy cares, at least you're the poop on top.

And you bath there at the top of your highschool- you get honors and whatnot, you get elected to positions with little or no opportunity for real change, but you get to put them on your resume. And then one day, you are baptized into the cruel cruel reality that now you must leave this safe place where you are on top and compete blindly with millions of other poops who are just as, if not unfuckingbelievably more talented than you in every way. And even if they are not, some of them can afford to buy the types of services they provide in Westchester- $30,000 for guaranteed Ivy League admission (or your money back). The system isn't flawed, it's fucked, and it's no longer about learning, it's about earning.

Yale has a 28 billion dollar endowment. 28 billion dollars. And still, they couldn't find the funding to keep my junior year room from flooding with toilet water. Thrice. When the plumber came up to fix it after 2 days of my screaming on the phone, he laughed and shook his head, "every year for 9 years I keep tellin' em to fix this room or it'll flood in the fall." Whaaaaaaat? Nobody complains because it's Yale. If you don't like it, go to a state school. You're only here for 4 years and the shittiness of the facilities becomes a laugh, a test, we bond in squalor and everyone thinks it's pretty funny after a while- then they don't petition to fix it because if they had to deal with it for a year why can't you? And you will, little freshman, you will.

I came to yale expecting a utopia and found New Haven which is literally a fake gothic pouch of pretentiousness wrapped in ghetto. Want to witness the brutal effects of forced gentrification? The thrills of living with a community of people who hate themselves so much they study all day to keep the voices quiet surrounded by a community of people who hate them so much they hold you up with knives and guns? Come to New Haven.

One thing I will say for New Haven, the food, for a depressed urban hellhole, is actually quite impressive. That's the food in NH, not at Yale, where the food is provided by the same people who have the biggest prison food contract in the country. We're eating prison food and believe me, you can taste it. Going in and coming out.

"But the professors! FAMOUS people teach at yale!" Ya, famous people live in Hollywood too but that doesn't mean you should go there expecting to become enlightened. Yale professors are required to teach, unlike at other colleges where they can hold up in their offices doing research and banging grad students. Yale likes to advertise this as some wild benefit, but in reality it means you have disgruntled people who are forced to teach to keep tenure when all they really want to do is, well anything but teach. They dust off a 30 year old syllabus and stand up and a podium twice a week and read from a script they wrote back when they still had hair and you sit there wanting to stab yourself in the eye with a fork for not realizing the whole charade sooner.

I am a fair judge and I will give Yale one thing: shopping period is really great, 2 weeks to do whateverthefuck you want and visit all sorts of classes to figure out what kind you should take. Great. Great in theory, but if you want to take anything that actually seems cool with a teacher who is actually not an incompetent jurassic hack, you need to SUIT UP on the first day of class. You have to get there early, shmooze, and do possibly all of the following things in some combination:
be friends with the department head
be friends with the teacher
be a senior majoring in the class major writing a paper about exactly the topic covered
be really fucking lucky

For some of the best classes I ever shopped there were roughly 250 people gunning for 12 spots. And those 250 people, as I mentioned before, are the top golden poos in all their regions, sometimes in their entire countries, so you are constantly having to assert the fact that you're the best, even when you've gotten into Yale. And you might be. But you know what?

nobody cares.

The advisership system is, in general, a fucking joke- a new person every year who is so busy you could have changed gender and species before coming in to ask them to sign your schedule for a second time, and they wouldn't notice. And this is the average kids, this is my experience, I'm not saying there isn't a single competent adviser, but I'm saying that IF YOU, LIKE ME expected to show up to the golden gates of an Ivy where people would be skipping through Shakespearean meadows reciting quadratic equations, skimming over the vast pond of philosophical ponderances sampling the fruits of the literatti trees, you are living in a fantasy and it's time to snap out of it. You'll only be hurt by your optimism.

Schools are businesses. I should know- I worked for yale in the admissions office all 4 years. And I learned that there are parts of the official tour that are banned. That the map instructions they give you to get here take you a loooong circuitous way through cottage grad student housing, instead of the fast way straight through the ghetto. We spend millions of dollars a year on outreach and admissions packaging because we, like cigarettes, are going to convince you that we are going to make you super cool, super sexy, super fantastic, even if we're lying straight to your face.

So if you've gotten to the end of this post you're either my father, or someone who feels intrigued by hearing someone tell them that the strange feelings they're feeling about this 'big decision' are well founded. Ask me questions. Please ask me what you want to know about working in admissions, about being a yalie, because these are the things I wish someone had told me. Yale is not utopia, it's not a dump either. I'm not saying that I didnt appreciate my educaiton- I'm not going to sit here and bitch about having gone to a place where all I was expected to do all day is learn. Learning is great.

But you can learn where people care about your brain and your uniqueness. You can learn at a place where not everyone wants to slit their wrists because the pressure to be the best is so overwhelming and the competition so impossibly steep. YOU CAN LEARN AT A PLACE THAT IS THE BEST FOR YOU. Everyone goes around saying yale is one of the best. The best at what? The best at advertising. There is no objective best, and the fact that people think that way just shows how deep rooted the linearly ranked system is. If you want to be your GPA, if you don't have a personality or any desire to be anything other than top poop, then Yale is the best for you. But if not, then yale is just another school, a school in a bad neighborhood with lots of benefits and lots of flaws, and you need to strip away the name and actually look at the facts. I didn't do that. I saw Yale- and i was sold instantly. And sometimes I wish I could have looked at all the schools totally unbiased, without the names... Yale would not have ended up being even near my first choice. It wasn't the best for me.

But again- I'm not saying it's not the best for you, I'm just suggesting that if you get into 5 schools including Yale, Yale should not automatically win just because it's Yale. Do some thinking and soul searching, and decide what you are willing to sacrifice for a name brand. It might be your integrity. your social life. your educational satisfaction. your time. your money...

Please ask me questions- I'm always excited to share what I wish I had known.

Also- college is important, but here is a list of people who didn't graduate from a college:

Shakespeare
Darwin
Bill Gates
Aristotle
George Washington
Jesus


Think about it. College isn't magic- it's an expensive holding tank.
And I, for one, didn't learn anything SO AMAZING in college that I couldn't have learned with a library card and a big helping of dedication and curiosity. Make it fun. Make it worth your while. Make it about what you want instead of what you want people to think about you, because living your life in designer jeans, worrying about what people think all day long, simply isn't very productive, and if you're a smartie IV hopeful, you'll know I'm right.

xo
H

Wee Mad McGreggor

Staying at an Inn on the coast in Fife which was built in the 1600s and smells like a barn, possibly because it was a barn not too long ago. I also learned in the literature that it is haunted by a mean horse as well as an alcoholic midget with bells palsy named Wee Mad McGreggor who drooled. Copiously. Seriously, it's right there in the freakin' literature. And if the only way you can hype up your creepy old Inn is to dig back hundreds of years to find a crazy guy with a half paralyzed face who passed out here and never woke up, maybe you should throw in the towel and open up a pub like everyone else in this godforsaken country.

And despite the ridiculous description of Wee MM, the 7 year old girl inside of me still wants to sleep with the bathroom light on because ghosts are freakin... scary. And notoriously untrustworthy. And a paranormal being able to pierce the interdimensional barrier is really going to be intimidated by my bathroom illumination.

Even so, I feel slightly safer here than at that aquarium. Yesterday we visited the St. Andrews aquarium which was about the size of my bedroom and included a dead crab, a half dead seahorse, a seal with green fungus growing all over its mostly immobile body, a giant crayfish frantically clawing at the glass seam, and some shrimpy things banging themselves into a rock over and over again as baby sharks swam in circles over and over again in some kind of synchronized depression dance. It was like aqua Alcatraz.

A horse haunting you is one thing but an angry shark ghost is entirely another... those mutherfuckers can probably swim through walls and bite through faces in a single chomp. Or maybe they'd savor it and sample you VanGogh style before the big finish. In either case I've succeeded in freaking myself out before bed. Picture post to come. Hear all about the... *drumroll please* golf museum! Yes that's right folks, if fish who have lost the will to live and handicapped ghosts wasn't thrilling enough for you, Scotland keeps bringing the wows with the greatest golf museum in... you know what? it could be the greatest golf museum in the land of music extravaganza chocolate puppies psychadelic orgy town and it would still be a museum about guys hitting balls with sticks. Then making up 8 zillion rules to make sure they are the supreme ball hitters and that other ball hitters can't join their club. Ridiculous. Check for pics soon.

xo
H

Picture Post

If you are like me you have the attention span of a goldfish when it comes to- see there now I've probably already lost you. I always hated information in school which was presented in massive block paragraphs of tiny text with nothing fun to supplement so here, in no particular order, are some pics to illustrate some updates:

Here are creepy fish from the B&B we're staying at.












And here is me with my very first check. I am experiencing something between a brain freeze and a mindfuck at the prospect of being paid to diddle around on my computer.













Here is me and my mom and Amelia the monkey hanging out in the kitchen before we left for the trip. I am annoyed about the fact that they don't want to let me bring the big suitcase. My mother is annoyed that she is going on tour at all. Amelia is pondering the complexities of quantum physics. Or about to poop.











And here is me at the psychadelic fiberoptics museum which I insisted we visit. This is an exhibit on... glowy stuff. In bunches.


Anyways I'm sitting in a coffeeshop and procrastinating another chapter so I should get moving. Leave me a note! xo H

Captain Sarcasm the Intestine-clad Cock

Yesterday I ate some blood pudding by accident and wasn't too pleased. I mean at least they're not pussyfooting around the issue like those sneaky Prairie Oysters... blood is right in the title. And all around the inside too.. globs of it. You cook the meat in blood until it is congealed and then, I don't know, shove it inside lamb intestines or something. I want to know who was the first guy to discover that if you put your cock inside a lamb intestine sheath it'll collect the jizz. Something makes me think he wasn't looking for a responsible way to please his woman when the Eureka moment came. Came. That's right people, chuckle.

I've always been wary of the internet medium as highly misinterpretable ever since that fateful day in 8th grade when I told Chris Nolio that I wanted to show him my TI (calculator) to explain the math problem we were IMing about and it ended up looking like this in my terrible typist wannabe l33tspeek:

Ya I tink I jus
t need to show u
my Titos
how u how I did it

and subsequently being interpreted like this:

"Hey guys, Hannah said she wanted to show me her titties on aol!?"
"No way, liar."
"For real! Check it out I printed it!"

I was quickly and helpfully reminded by every 8th grade boy in an 8 mile radius that I had no titties to be offering a peek at, and my TI calculator explanation wasn't exactly ironclad in terms of getting me off the hook as a giant breast flashing calculation loving nerd.

So I tell you this... I don't really know why. Oh the intestine cock thing- right, so sometimes I feel like the tone is totally lost. Like when I say "wow the rubbery tubey insides of a farm animal can turn me on like nothing else" I might mean that I can think of nothing more repulsive because I'm being really sarcastic, OR you might be missing your one and only opportunity to have me as your devoted loveslave if you don't come to me on Halloween entirely encased in intestines holding a bouquet of roses which are also sheathed in intestines. Maybe it can be, instead, just a bouquet of intestines. And also blood pudding. Because then I'll totally want to show you all around my TI-83. Umm- I think for everyone's best interest I'm going to stop right there. Check back in later for a picture post.

xo
H
P.S. I wanted to put in some funny mathy double entendre up there just now but I have avoided anything that involves more adding than it takes to buy gas for years because I hate doing math, and we might have just gotten to the root of why I hate doing math. In a pathetic attempt to google someone who knew more about math and brought with the funny, I stumbled upon this really stellar pickup line which is not math but science related, but hey close enough, and this, really, this one is for sure the key to any woman's heart. Makes me wet just copying and pasting it:

If I had to rate my cock on the Mohs scale of mineral hardness, I would be an Aggregated diamond nanorod, because I simply cannot get any harder.

And with that folks, I'm out.


(of talent readers and good taste)

H to the Nth

I have been evicted room my room because my brother does not want me typing and now I’m in the hallway staring at the B&B fishtank filled with those gross Chinese restaurant fish who look like they had golf balls surgically implanted in their eyesockets. Golf is a huge thing in this town, 8 stores in a row all dedicated to the thing. It was invented here in St. Andrews, apparently, and they’re damn proud of it. I also learned that the longest animal in the world washed up on the shore- a nemertean worm that was 186 feet long. They're proud of that too. And if the two things a town trumpets as their greatest accomplishments are a dead someone hitting a tiny ball with a piece of wood and a dead invertebrate you know you're in for some fun times.

I am having trouble writing. I can’t seem to get into the flow and I feel like If I tell you guys what is going ion inside my head maybe that will make things easer, here goes:

BITCHY HANNAH: What do you mean ‘tell them.’ Who is them? Nobody is even reading this blog you're a terrible boring writer and an allaround lame excuse for a woman.
SENSITIVE HANNAH: I’m not always boring…
PRETENTIOUS PATROL HANNAH: When you’re not being boring you’re being pretentious and nobody likes a know it all. And when you’re not a know it all you are being a poser.
OCD Hannah: Totally a poser. Definitely. Definitely. A huge poser. Also, a bad writer.
CONSPIRACY THEORY HANNAH: Shit. If I say I’m a poser on the site maybe my possible poserdom will shine through even more clearly than it already does… and then people will want to assassinate me.
BITCHY HANNAH: Nobody cares enough about you to even read this blog letalone want to assassinate you you moron.
A.D.D. HANNAH: Wow that fish is freakin’ gross. Hey he kinda looks like Nixon!
BUSINESSLY H: Stop getting so distracted
SENSITIVE H: But look at those googly gills!

I keep checking my word count every 600 words and that makes it hard to keep going. Not to mention the fact that the girls don’t seem to want to be quiet:

BITCHY H: Nobody wants to read this. It’s drivel.
PRETENTIOUS PATROL H: Don’t make a Diderot reference that’s fucking ridiculous you Ivy League baffoon.
OCD H: I think you spelled baffoon wrong. Wrong. So wrong. OMG everything is definitely wrong.
CONSPIRACY THEORY H: Even this right now is boring, nobody wants to read a conversation of yourself and yourself and if they do they will think you’re crazy and the government will notice that you are an iconoclast and will tap your phone lines and then systematically turn your family and friends against you in a plot to undermine your creativity. Damn the man.
FED UP H: You have huge problems. Seriously. Get into therapy.

And then Zen master Hannah descends froma cloud. She has taken a lot of time off to sip tea on clouds, high high up there if you know what I mean.

ZEN H: Don’t worry. This writing thing is for you, do it because you enjoy it.
H FROM DA HOOD: Are you fo real g? I’m doin this to pay da billz billz billz.
P.C. HANNAH: That's totally offensive- like unspeakably offensive.
PARANOID H: This thing better sell a gagillion freakin’ coppies
FASHINISTA H: Then I can be on magazine covers
HYPOCRITE ALERT H: If your message to young girls is to love yourself you can’t go all Hollywood on us and dye your hair blonde and get photoshop touchups that would be totally against your philosophy.
FASHIONISTA H: Not even a little dolled up?
HYPOCRITE ALERT H: No
PROBLEM SOLVING H: I’ll pose for these magazines but insist there is also a picture of me looking normal and makeupless and regular without any touchups to reveal the juxtaposition between the two, the paradox of a person perceived… Ceci n'est pas une Hannah.
PRETENTIOUS ALERT H: Fuck you.
S&M H- what about playboy wold you do playboy?
BILLZBILLZBILZLZ H:Well I guess I would if they offered like $250,000 that would pay off my student loans and then some
FASHIONISTA H: And then some shoes!
ACTIVIST H: Or some orphans in Malawi
REALITY CHECK H: You know what you are a freaking psychopath none of this is happening. What are you doing? Get back to work.
PESSIMIST H: I concur, except that not only are you a hypocrite but a total hack and it’s ridiculous to even consider this type of attention because this book will fizzle and sizzle and die as you have no talent whatsoever and might as well start busking on the street for quarters.
UBER PESSIMIST H: Fuck you. Fuck you. Your writing? Fuck that with a flaming chainsaw.

ZEN H: Just breath Hannah, breath.
SARCASTIC H: Thanks for that update genius.

All the hannahs are getting tired and exhausted and then internet browising Hannah comes along…

INTERNET BROWSING H: I know! How about you google obscure easter eggs hidden in lost on lostpedia!
PESSIMIST H: You know what this reminds me of, that play that you never finished. That sucked. You will never finish that the right way.
TANGENT HANNAH: The floorboards make a nice pattern.
ZEN HANNAH: Within men there are multitudes.
WIKI HANNAH: Who said that? Let’s check…
BUSINESSLY HANNAH: Okay guys, here is the plan. We’re going to just go freakin type and do it and do it and do it and it’ll be done.

Right! Say every Hannah except for internet browsing Hannah who has just found a totally cute video of kittens moving their heads back and forth in synch to music. Look at ‘em all! Kittens! Woohoo! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY0MSuyaKMk


Silence. Silence as the sleep kicks in. I am tired and list making Hannah starts making the day begin before the sun has risen- must write 7000 words or 6 pages 200 pages divided by 11 days…

ANTI-ALGEBRA Hannah: fuck you math
PROBLEMSOLVING H: oh ‘c’mon we can do this one. It’s not that hard.
HANNAH- hey I’m pretty pleased with this whole multiple voices thing. It’s a good way of communicating what’s going in on inside my head. I like it. Right guys?

For once there is no disagreement. Perfectionist thinks of course that now there needs to be a book movie epic novel and life changing broadaway adaptation of this which wins 9 tony awards and sweeps the Oscars in its movie adaptation before it can actually be taken seriously. Pessimist H thinks it could be better. But for the most part we are contented and in agreement. And maybe that’s why I like writing, because after all the bullshit if something is just right, then for a brief moment all the hannahs are in synch. Even Wiki Hannah knows that the only place I will find the truth I’m looking for in exactly the right words is somewhere between all of the voices, and when we find it, (quick note, Pretentious Alert Hannah thinks that using the royal "we" might come off as really fucking pretentious but that stating the concern here openly will absolve us)… sometimes, when we’re all on the same page, I feel like I can write like a motherfucker and I'm on the right path- I don't know where it goes but at least I'm on it. Pause. Breath. Ha! Perhaps an edit. Perhaps an edit or two, A few?

MAD HANNAH: How about a delete.

Okay okay enough already I get the point. I write with a merged mass of minds. I am rarely a phenom but sometimes things ring true and the voices shut up for once. It’s refreshing. It’s awesome. It’s what I hope comes my way more often… here’s to hoping.

xoxo
H
(&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H&H)

Wee Posting

So I need to do this quickly before my computer craps out- my mother and I have to trade back and forth with the power adapter because the UK likes to be aware of convention, do whatever the fuck they want in the face of it, and extort millions of dollars from the poor hacks who happen to come over here needing to plug something into a socket that isn't designed for three enormous rectangular prongs the size of my thumb... who designed this shit?

Other things I am enjoying immensely about Scotland... I really like the adjective 'wee' that gets thrown around so often around here. It really softens any situation. "Walk right over here past that wee homeless bum and towards the castle" "I'll give ye a wee surcharge for late checkout." Wait- you're charging us for being 3 minutes late? There's nobody else in the hotel, who cares what time we check out nobody is checking in!.... Scot the Scot remains calm... "Just a wee charge sir." And my father, usually nobody's sucker, seems placated by this, nods his head, and signs the bill.

I am learning to love the fact that my family is incapable of getting to anywhere from anywhere without at least 2 major insults which harken back to 2 epic fights in family lore. It's like we all get in the car for 6 hours of misery and windy roads (which incidentally all go the wrong fucking way. Really England? We really pissed you off that badly that you had to go and put the steeringwheel on the other side of your cars? That's not even a cool rebellion it's just annoying. And confusing for all involved. I'm giving you the metric war, we were the dicks there... measuring things based on the arbitrary size of a dead guy's foot is not exactly decimal brilliance but if we agree to convert I fully expect you metric maniacs to get your motorways in order.) Oh so anyways, family, fighting... my mother yelled at my father for being to slow, which is her code for saying that he is boring and meandering and difficult to pay attention to for any length of time because he rambles so much. This is also a dig at the fact that his tempo is so slow, a very measured plodding duuum da duuuum da duum like that of a geriatric elephant. In family speak this means she's calling him not only boring, but also fat, and he's not too pleased about it. Slow means so much more than just slow.

He tells her that she is being 'difficult' This means a plethora of things, some of which I probably don't know and don't want to know, but as far as I've gleaned this is code for: my mother is unsupportive in ways which might have cost him his career, she is negative in ways which might have cost them the marriage, and she is impossible to please. He is basically calling her irrational and also a bitch and also appealing to her sense of wifely duty by implying he does all the compromising and she sits around complaining. All in one word. Difficult. They're clever those two.

For me, hearing that I am being "overdramatic" is the family's code to let me know that I'm a self centered reactionary bitch who doesn't fight fair. And that part is a little bit true- if I'm going to fight why not fight with guns blazing. I'm not sure if everyone in the family has detected the evolution of these words and the history behind them, but having spent a long time thinking about it I am probably best suited to extract the essence of their lessons and use them for my own purposes.

And this sounds totally sick talking about family life like warfare but in terms of psychological preservation, in terms of making sure you stay sane and happy without smothering one of them with a pillow, you need to be tactical. Good cop Bad cop. I told my mother she was my favorite travel buddy but that it stressed me out when she seemed anxious. I was careful not to call her difficult. Anxious implies the negativity but not the willful bitchiness, just the sad state of being anxious. We are getting along pretty swimmingly actually, everyone. I got to 200 pgs today. FUCK YAAA 200 pages of blathering goo which I need to sort through. FUCK NOOOO I'll keep you posted.

KK I miss u! Thanks for commenting i'll write soon.

xo
H