Existence-based guilt

I meant to write a post on this before. I have meant to do it many a time. Fear of making some invisible descent into irredeemable humourlessness/congealing self-pity held me back. Plus, y'know. It's BIG SHIT. It's like serving up an elephant turd in a kitty litter box. Haha. I would be presenting you with the elephant turd (existence-based guilt) in the kitty litter box (my blog) and your eyes would roll collectively back in your heads before you fainted. Or you would go 'That's not cool, man. Get over it' before continuing about your business.

But - y'know what? THIS IS MY BLOG! That basic elementary fact eludes me sometimes - rather too much - and that in itself says a lot. I've never really had a physical place in which I felt 100% 'safe,' especially not a place which could be accessed by others. That's probably why I forget that my blog is such a place. No-one has tried to hound me out (yet). It may never happen. The length of my posts probably wears them down. Haha.

Anyway, the nub of my gist is that while my place is 'publicly-accessible,' I don't have to tolerate whatever. I take a similar line to many feminist blogs, although I've not had anywhere near the level of trolling that they have. I set it up and it belongs to me, hypothetical bitches! So now, I can proceed at last to offload.

I think I've mentioned this particular issue of mine before. In this post, here <--- look! :-D I brushed over it quickly though, as if I were simply glazing pastry with milk, or egg or... Anyway. I need to explain the whole meguillah properly. 'Existence-based guilt' is when I want to die. It's not that simple, though. Take two. 'Existence-based guilt' is when I am hurting inside - for WHATEVER REASON - and then I proceed to reach into said pain, pick it up, stretch it out even further and then stab metaphorical sharp objects into it. I make it bigger and more acute. I try to make a whole, functioning personality from it, because, you know what? When I am depressed, I am like broken pieces of a mirror. Lots of little fragments which should be related, but which aren't. I chose the mirror image not for emo appeal, but because a mirror shows a reflection. It passes no judgement in its own right. That is what my mind does when depressed - it doesn't pass judgement, it simply reacts to external stimuli in a completely irrational and suspicious manner.

I don't know who I am. That's not me being melodramatic, it's the result of a very genuine FEAR and confusion. Do you know me? Have you met me in real life? Whether or not you have, let me tell you something now: I have lived my whole life rooted in fear. You may reflect now, and think that actually, yes, you can see it. You can see slices of the fear and uncertainty in my responses to things, in my social interactions. I don't think I hide it that much, though I have been told that I am 'remarkably well-adjusted.'

Plus, y'know, you get used to living a certain way. You can FORGET that that is your life until the mirror breaks.

Ever since I was little, I have been very emphatically 'the odd one out' of my family. Now, this is nothing new. It led to a situation which was also 'nothing new': the second-generation liberal Asian female child rebelling against older, more conservative, more religious Asian parents. That is FOINE. Well, it's not, but for now it is.

The problem is not that particular conflict, but another one altogether: that of the crazed, wrong and abnormal VS. the sane, right and normal. My mother must be singled out and accorded special status here. Bluntitude time: this woman should not have had children. Or married. She should have been working on projects at NASA.

However, she was born in the India in the '50s, so... dream on. Here we are today, and here I am. For whatever reason (and I strongly suspect that it emanates largely from her own disappointment and resentment), my mother has somehow bypassed the whole 'maternal instinct and human empathy' bit.

I am extraordinarily sensitive. I don't know why, I didn't ask for it and that should be the end of the story. Unfortunately, I was (as I said) born into a family much in the manner of a cuckoo appearing in a nest. I had two older sisters who were 10 years above me, and then I got a brother who was two years younger and the youngest. My sisters hence were on the receiving end of my parents at their most energetic, erratic and maladjusted. Immigrants to this country, they underwent cultural displacement, racism and a late swing towards major religiosity inspired by guilt. Great. Naturally, the deeply-conservative values that this all reinforced, were passed on to my sisters.

Social conservatives, let it be said, do not generally look kindly upon difference. Maybe, if I had not had two older sisters, or if I had been the youngest, things might have been different. I found out years later that apparently my parents thought I was going to be a boy, which may have explained a lot.

My mother despaired of me as a child. From the start I was shy, artistic, imaginative and rebellious. She thought for a while that I might be autistic; I apparently refused to do anything but draw, and would not learn to read English until my drawing was threatened. Eventually, I started to get it together and by year 2 I was top of the class and apparently 2 years ahead of my peers ability-wise.

Then, disaster struck. I got into books. My mathematical ability vanished; my artistic inclinations deepened. My natural shyness and bullishness prevented me from being especially sociable. I've pretty much been that way ever since.

My mother despaired. She couldn't understand me - so she condemned me. In the harsh Indian world she grew up in, her father smacked her hand repeatedly when she said she 'couldn't' learn times-tables. The fact that I wasn't like her, or any of the others, meant that she had nothing with which to 'manage' me, and my brother, the much-longed-for boy, made an appearance before too long. Instead of taking time to treat me as a human being, she criticised me incessantly. Why was I so slow? So lethargic? This lethargy was not only physical but mental too, according to her. Why did I not have Asian friends? Why did I give her trouble, by refusing to acknowledge teachers who were mean to me?

On its own, I might have dealt with this. However, seeing the love my brother got made me intensely jealous. One of my earliest memories of him is of scratching out his eyes in a picture everyone loved, and being put in the garden as a punishment. I paced, weeping 'Nobody loves me, nobody loves me.' I knew that what I had done was wrong, but my parents didn't allay the terrible anxiety that I had about being replaced. My brother was beloved, and I was a problem.

My sisters, supposed to be the elders, also could not help being resentful of the lenient treatment and spoiling that my brother received. While my parents constantly made a show of how we were all equal, the hypocritical truth was always there. One way my parents made us equal was to turn any telling-off of one person into an attack on all the others. Imbibing this, my sisters were resentful not just of my brother, but of me too. In some ways, this was useful for me. In many others, it wasn't. Both were training to become healthcare professionals in the NHS - a stressful job - and had to look after us too while my parents worked. Hence it became 'OK' for them to take this out on us, particularly me. My brother, detecting his inborn advantage early on, started exploiting it before very long and would cheek them constantly. In a strange way, I think they themselves ended up seeing him as superior; he was rarely punished though empty threats were frequently made by my parents.

I took their attacks because, well, I couldn't not. When you are one of six living in a house and the second youngest, where do you go to escape? I didn't have my own room, and the toilet was hardly a place to relax. I had to deal with being told that I was fat, lazy, useless etc. etc. constantly. My brother and I bickered a lot, and soon my sisters refused to intervene at all, so the only one who could avenge what he said to me was ME. That got me in further trouble. I ate my sisters' low-fat snacks because... well, it was something to do, I suppose and eating made me happy. More trouble for me. When my sisters had PMT, I knew I was going to get bullied. They often ganged up on me, making bitchy comments together. My boobs were too big. My dress sense was weird. I breathed too loudly. I dragged my feet. I thought I was 'so clever' and a 'tortured poet' (as if! Just because I wrote). My mother in particular gave me life-long insecurities about my nose. She kept saying I looked like a duck, that I had a 'duck' nose; she would then say it was going in the wrong direction, seize it and try to 'pull it back.' The others subsequently made the same comment, and I became paranoid about my nose. I only tried to stop her yanking it - and stopped doing so myself - after blood came out. Even now, I do it without noticing.

My brother joined in with GLEE when I got older, and then I was well and truly alone. My family repeatedly impressed the notion of not trusting anyone outside the family on me. I felt like I couldn't tell anyone about what was happening to me anyway, because it was normal. They all told me it was normal; no-one behaved in any way that indicated that my position was especially hard. When I threatened to commit suicide, I was laughed at. Everyone just thought I was a weirdo. It didn't matter that I was good at some subjects because in my family's eyes, they weren't useful. Besides, they were not subjects we had ever done in our family before. When I said I wanted to study English, my older sister said 'Over my dead body'.

The thing that I learnt better than anything else was that you could not question ANYTHING. Question my sisters' authority, and they and/or my parents would punish me. Do the same with my parents and ditto, but even worse. Question my own or my brother's position, and I would be made to feel guilty. Any deviance from their beliefs was asking for trouble. I spotted my family's hypocrisy over religion early on, because I became devout for a while. I did a lot of reading and realised that a lot of their actions and claims didn't match up with how Sikhs were 'supposed' to be. This led to me becoming agnostic.

The turning point came when I confessed to being agnostic. Big fucking mistake. My whole family sat opposite me. Now that I reflect, I remember that I was literally up against the wall. As if I were facing a firing squad. I sure felt like it. My second-eldest sister, who I partly wanted to be like, smugly asked me why, what my arguments were. I could make none, I was terrified. My father had just accused me of betraying him, stating that he couldn't believe that a child of his could live under his roof and say that. My brother thought it was hilarious, naturally. I didn't want to be kicked out or shunned. They kept me there for three hours, until I was wilting with tiredness, then I was watched like a hawk for months.

(Apologies if I've described this incident already...).

See, I got into a relationship and my ex-boyfriend slowly started to make me see that what was going on wasn't normal. My family had no right to shoot me down just because I didn't agree. My mother had no right to say that I was a psychopath just because I refused to obey her. I got the courage to tell friends, and slowly but surely I got to the stage where I am today.

However, the problem is that along the way, I lost my anger. Much of my teens were consumed in a burning rage, I would literally sit in my room, reflecting on things that had happened, until I was shaking with rage and crying hot tears. I wanted to kill one of them, but I sincerely believed that I would be arrested and/or killed myself if I tried. I came close to striking my mother once, and she used the guilt against me like a billy-club.

Just as girls are trained to do, not just in South Asian culture but very acutely and particularly in SA culture - I began turning the anger and hatred inwards. My parents HAD worked hard to support us, my sisters HAD been like mothers to me. I couldn't reconcile these facts with my anger at the way they'd treated me. So, I absorbed them. I got myself into a destructive relationship, repeating the same dynamic of harsh criticism and inferiority that I had with my mother. He was always seeking to change me, to 'improve' me somehow, and I thought that was good because of my messed-up values.

This relationship absorbed a lot of my self-loathing. In some ways, it was a coping mechanism - though I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. I spent five and a half years not being quite right, pouring all my energies into my partner who had problems of his own. He emotionally blackmailed me; I gave him money. I don't even think he was doing it consciously, but it happened nonetheless. My outbreaks of PMD (pre-menstrual depression) which I was then unaware of, baffled him. He could not listen; he tried to tidy me away. Like my mother, intense emotion was beyond his comprehension.

Away from him in France, I got myself into a similar relationship with a friend. Our intense friendship impacted upon my mood severely when it was in a 'down' (which it was for many months). At one point, I deliberately endangered myself, subconsciously hoping that something bad would happen to me. I wasn't sure what, but I 'reasoned' with myself that I didn't really matter enough for it to be an issue if something did. That was the first time my mind 'fragmented' and the evil depressive demon appeared. It justified my decision to me, and after I took it, I regretted it. I was reeling with guilt, and my then-boyfriend's reaction made me suicidal. The friend who had 'replaced' him expressed relief at my safety, and that brought me back to something resembling normal.

When I came together with The Libertarian, I finally got what love was supposed to be about. I realised early on that I was going to fall for him. The day we met after kissing for the first time ever - it was our sixth meeting - I told him how my sisters had shredded my self-confidence. He did not respond. He stopped walking, let go of my hand, turned me to face him and then pulled me into a tight hug. Things finally made sense in me; I felt delighted. This, THIS was what I needed! How could he understand that so instinctively, so easily, when my boyfriend of five-and-a-half years couldn't?

In a relationship with a wonderful man and realising that I had trustworthy friends after all, it was me VS. the demon depression. I determined that I was NOT going to let it wreck things like it had with my ex, even if he was wrong for me. I would prove my mother wrong; I was NOT going to turn out to be a serial killer. I was NOT a psychopath. Sadly, it's taken a lot of hard work to convince me that I can trust people and believe in myself. Even now, I belittle myself and my needs, especially when PMD strikes. I cannot believe that love - whether platonic or romantic - is unconditional.

That is where existence-based guilt comes in. A lifetime of negative thinking that was both passively inherited from, and actively reinforced by my mother, kicks in. This links neatly up with the ongoing pressure on women to be perfect, especially in SA culture. Add fear of being 'unwomanly' and a desire to change the order of things as a feminist, counterbalanced by the ugly knowledge that nowadays 'feminist' is a dirty word that carries a huge burden. I cannot settle for my contradictions, like most people can. Ever since I was young, I have to 'choose' whether I'm British or Indian. However, it's always other people who set the parameters of those categories for me. My mother framed the choice cleverly, in terms of health and the greater good. My family specialise in hyperbolic distortion with a tiny grain of truth embedded in it - and when PMD strikes, that little grain flies like a fishing hook, embedding itself in me. I wish I had never existed, I wish I was dead. I wish this because I cannot wish to be what my parents want - for emotional reasons (my mum's never happy and it's already ruined our lives) and logical reasons (they already have my brother).

I wish death upon myself because it would be 'easy.' I am not an 'easy' person, I'm always analysing shit and refusing to be gift-wrapped as 'Asian' or 'English.' After my family's bullying, the LAST thing I want is to identify myself with a group of people. A whole, hurtling boulder of pain and guilt is too much for any individual to bear. I do not want to wear out the love and patience of those who I always turn to. There are no human Atlases for me; I have outgrown mythology. That is when posts like this one pop up, and I tip the load off my back and into the depot of cyberspace. Forget gods, forget humans - machinery's the future!

Skin deep and deeper

For the purposes of this post, I'm going to do something unprecedented:

That right there - that is me. Of COURSE I always look exactly like that :-D. As you can see, I look sort of - well, you know. Unspecified. What ethnicity would you say I was? Do you have one particular idea en tête, or would you hedge your bets?

Anyone who reads this blog regularly (not a lot of you, I'd warrant) knows that I'm of Indian extraction. The only person to ever guess that correctly, however, was a Turkish man. The most frequent guesses are Iranian, Greek, Spanish and Turkish. The first two in particular.

So, what was the point of all this apparent navel-gazing and skin-based angsting? Well, this post was inspired by a sarky comment in response to a comment of mine. The poster wrote:

Personally I've yet to cash in on my white male privilige, but if I could get one of the brotherhood to get me a well-paid sinecure, a detatched house in Shropshire & a ridiculously beautiful wife I'd be grateful. The system surely wouldn't leave one of its own living on a council estate in Stoke, would it? But I must have been absent on the day they taught us how to exploit our advantages...

This didn't make me as angry as it might've. Strange formulation that - but accurate. I think the fact that the poster didn't dismiss the notion of privilege outright gave me hope. I got a picture of somebody who doesn't fully understand how racial privilege works (fair enough, it's not particularly easy to explain or understand).

I decided to strike back at this using my own personal experience. Many white people, especially those who are of working-class backgrounds but educated (like this fella was) have a hard time accepting the fact that they have an advantage over people who aren't white. Given that there are highly successful middle-class Asians and blacks in this country, you can sort of almost see what they mean.

However, the fact is that 90% of this country's population is white, and if you don't belong to a 'model minority' (read: if you're Muslim), your life is NOT going to be easy, because if there's one thing the papers hate more than chavs, it's you. Let's not forget the fact that many who claim to be Islamophobes are actually 'Muslimphobes'. For people like that, supporters of the BNP and similar - the technicalities are unimportant. The colour of your skin says it all.

Hence this post. I have always made people uncomfortable. Sometimes it's something I enjoy, sometimes it's highly isolating. When I was younger and trying hard to be what my family wanted, I actually felt bad about the way I look. Why couldn't I look more like other Sikhs in my area? Why wasn't I a 'proper' Asian girl? Most of the Asian teenage girls I knew were identikit black-clad, feather-haired clones. However, as well as dress, their complexions and features united them. Most of them had a skin tone like Parminder Nagra's or Konnie Huq's, and were either long and skinny or tiny and skinny.

My family are all quite fair by Indian standards, but I was most definitely the freak. Naturally, this HAD to be topped off by my having a rounded body with large breasts. The day of reckoning, when I faced down my actual size, was terrifying enough without my mother's input. We were going to India soon afterwards, and I had to get bras my actual size. 'I'll get a few here and some in India,' I told her.
'No!' I knew she was appalled that I had let her down by allowing myself to be so un-Asian, but this was a bit much... 'They won't have them. Your size doesn't exist in India.'

I thought this was a joke. It wasn't. Every time we went shopping and even remotely neared a rack of underwear-type garments, I would start looking, with no success. Underwear aside, even most of the 'Western' clothes could only have been worn by me when I was hitting adolescence! My body was wrong. My face was most definitely wrong - I realised my features were not tiny and delicate, and I didn't have huge eyes like Indian women are often expected to have. Nor was I anywhere near being a Bollywood actress.

Men and women alike gawped at me and gave me hostile stares while I was in India. In France, people automatically asked where I was from whenever we were introduced, and when I was there with my ex-boyfriend (who is unmistakably Asian in comparison) we got some looks of absolute loathing. Even in this country, once I venture out of the little Asian enclave where I grew up, I notice people looking at me sharply. Some people are just curious of course, but the fact is that I make others uncomfortable. They can't 'place' me automatically, they can't fit characteristics and assumptions to me just like that. It should be fun, but it's often not. South Asian women often give me hostile and disapproving looks. I don't totally blame them for it, because Indian culture obsessively prizes fair-skinned women, leading to the coinage of the famously awkward term 'wheatish' in matrimonial adverts. Old white women have looked at me with a kind of disgust. That was just when I was with my white boyfriend!

On my own (and with him), I have had to deal with territorial behaviour and disapproving glances from Arab and Asian men alike. I've occasionally had white tourists look at me for that bit too long. I think the problem is that I look so close to white, but for those who are looking hard, my features have something oddly Arabic about them. My hair's a bit too dark. I'm not as rosy as a white person should be; nor am I white enough. Though it might sound crazy, sometimes I catch myself worrying that people look at us together because they think that I am 'not white enough for him'. Why do I even have to worry about shit like that?!

The point I'm trying to make, is that this just goes to show that white privilege does exist. Just because people aren't aware of how it works, or don't consciously choose to exploit it, it doesn't mean that it's not there. The only other people I know who've had similar experiences to mine are a) Asians/blacks who are perceived as 'wanting to be white' ('coconuts' or 'chickpeas', as I've been called myself) and b) mixed-race people. If you're white in this country, you're part of the majority and you get to be invisible. Even in London, where everyone wants to be invisible. Not even consciously, but recently I have perhaps begun trying to 'pass' more than previously. I say 'not consciously' because I do want to look different to other Asian girls, but not for research's sake - just because I love colour! The more I've tried to 'pass,' the more I see that I can't, not fully, but that it is advantageous to do so. Who thinks indie girls are 'exotic,' after all?

The whole thing doesn't generally bother me that much, because I like to have both parts to my identity: British and Asian. 'White' and 'brown.' Still, everyone has times where they want to belong, where it feels safer to be part of a pack, and frankly, I can't choose. Many middle-class Asian kids like to think they can 'choose' their identities by pretending to be black, but it doesn't really work. They are almost all eventually faced with the choice of being 'true to themselves,' being 'black' or being 'white.' Usually, 'true to themselves' means acting black for a while, then shifting back to becoming like a white middle-class person, with the extra Asian culture thrown in for good measure. White people never really get made to 'choose' unless it's the tired old narrative of 'selling out their class' by moving up socially. Even then, it's on one front. Try having to 'choose' twice over! Minority cultures dismiss their own for acting 'white,' but white people are allowed to 'act black.' For example, consider how common it is to have white rap artists (Beastie Boys, Eminem, Asher Roth, Skinnyman, etc. etc.); how many black or Asian artists can you think of who are as well-established in 'white' forms of music (country, indie, electro)? Kele from Bloc Party, TV On The Radio, er... Their (white people's) identity is not getting erased by their doing so - because they are over-represented everywhere in mainstream popular culture (and even more so in 'high' culture). To be invisible and yet omnipresent. What is that, if not privilege?

Sarah Palin Offers An Uneasy Glimpse of The Future...

Taken from here. Good Lord.

'I see you as president.' 'Maybe in eight years,' says Sarah Palin

• The Guardian, Tuesday 4 November 2008
• Article history

This is an edited transcript of Saturday's conversation between Sarah Palin and comedian Marc-Antoine Audette of Montreal radio station CKOI, posing as Nicolas Sarkozy.

SP: This is Sarah ...

MAA: This is Nicolas Sarkozy speaking, how are you?

SP: Oh, so good. It's so good to hear you. Thank you for calling us.

MAA: Oh, it's a pleasure.

SP: Thank you sir, we have such great respect for you, John McCain and I. We love you! And thank you for taking a few minutes to talk to me.

MAA: I follow your campaigns closely with my special American adviser Johnny Hallyday [a French singer], you know?

SP: Yes! Good ...

MAA: You know I see you as a president one day, you too.

SP: Maybe in eight years.

MAA: Well, I hope for you. You know, we have a lot in common because personally one of my favourite activities is to hunt, too.

SP: Oh, very good. We should go hunting together.

MAA: Exactly, we could go try hunting by helicopter like you did. I never did that. Like we say in French, on pourrait tuer des bébés phoques, aussi [we could kill baby seals, too].

SP: Well, I think we could have a lot of fun together as we're getting work done. We can kill two birds with one stone that way.

MAA: I just love killing those animals. Mmm, mmm, take away life, that is so fun. I'd really love to go, as long as we don't bring Vice-President Cheney.

SP: No, I'll be a careful shot, yes.

MAA: Yes, you know we have a lot in common also, except that from my house I can see Belgium. That's kind of less interesting than you.

SP: Well, see, we're right next door to different countries that we all need to be working with, yes.

MAA: Some people said in the last days, and I thought that was mean, that you weren't experienced enough in foreign relations and you know that's completely false. That's the thing that I said to my great friend, the prime minister of Canada, Stef Carse [a Canadian singer].

SP: Well, he's doing fine, too, and yeah, when you come into a position underestimated it gives you an opportunity to prove the pundits and the critics wrong. You work that much harder.

MAA: I was wondering because you are so next to him, one of my good friends also, the prime minister of Quebec, Mr Richard Z Sirois [a Canadian comedian], have you met him recently? Did he come to one of your rallies?

SP: I haven't seen him at one of the rallies but it's been great working with the Canadian officials in my role as governor . . . You know, I look forward to working with you and getting to meet you personally and your beautiful wife. Oh my goodness, you've added a lot of energy to your country with that beautiful family of yours.

MAA: Thank you very much. You know my wife Carla would love to meet you . . . even though she was a bit jealous that I was supposed to speak to you today.

SP: Well, give her a big hug from me.

MAA: You know my wife is a popular singer and a former top model and she's so hot in bed. She even wrote a song for you.

SP: Oh my goodness, I didn't know that.

MAA: Yes, in French it's called De Rouge à Lèvre sur un Cochon [Lipstick on a Pig], or if you prefer in English, Joe the Plumber [sings] it's his life . . . I don't quite understand the phenomenon Joe the Plumber. That's not your husband, right?

SP: That's not my husband but he's a normal American who just works hard and doesn't want the government to take his money.

MAA: Yes, yes, I understand we have the equivalent of Joe the Plumber in France. It's called Marcel, the guy with bread under his armpit.

SP: Right, that's what it's all about, the middle class and government needing to work for them. You're a very good example for us here ...

MAA: I must say Governor Palin, I love the documentary they made on your life. You know Hustler's Nailin' Paylin?

SP: Oh, good, thank you, yes.

MAA: That was really edgy.

SP: Well, good.

MAA: I really loved you and I must say something also, governor, you've been pranked by the Masked Avengers. We are two comedians from Montreal.

SP: Oh, have we been pranked? And what radio station is this?

MAA: CKOI in Montreal.

SP: In Montreal? Tell me the radio station call letters.

MAA: CK ... hello?

Round-Up of the N00z...

First off, Indonesia has banned porn. Read about it on the BBC website. I particularly love this tidbit:

"This law will ensure that Islam is preserved and guaranteed," said Hakim Sori Muda Borhan, a member of parliament from President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's Democratic Party.

"It is also not in the interest of any specific religion. The law is also meant to preserve arts and culture and not destroy them."

Er... huh?! DIRECT discrepancy, I'd say, mate.


Meanwhile, the Catholic Church continues to try to project an image of 'modernity' without making any fundamentally important changes. See what SNAP had to say for my thoughts... I DO like the picture of Benedict though, he looks a lot like Red Robot from Diesel Sweeties... (see the third panel of the comic strip for an idea of what I'm talking about...).

For anybody feeling low about their writing talent, for the love of God, read this pile of steaming horseshit 'written' by Peaches Geldof, the monumentally annoying wastrel who dabbles in many occupations without being even remotely good at any of them and has thankfully fucked off to America. I don't like to indulge in pointless sleb-hating for the sake of it, but PG really really irritates me because she exemplifies for me the trend of people who are famous for fame's sake (and because their parents are/were famous). People often lump her with the likes of Lily Allen and Daisy Lowe (or whoever she's currently been seen partying with...) but I do think Lily Allen is smart, talented and witty in her own way (see her response to Marina Hyde's attack on her here!) and Daisy Lowe is actually a model. She doesn't 'pretend' to be one when the mood takes her (or when her friends decide to get her off her idle ass...). This is, to paraphrase Peaches, a 'patchwork quilt' of clangingly obvious cliches, blithe and breathless arrogance, celebration of sartorial cheapskatery (she paid a dollar for someone's family heirloom?!) and painfully obvious attempts to be Michael Palin. My bezzi called my attention to it, and I found myself ACTUALLY HOWLING in a sort of wounded shriek/laugh/weep/growl. So banal it's offensive.

The 'dark side' of joining the EU, for Romania? Really quite depressing reading, and not least because the article shows that a) we're not all as 'globalised' as one might think and b) it suggests that dictatorships (i.e. China and Romania under Ceausescu) are the only way to make construction happen fast these days... I could be ODing on the doom-and-gloom there, though.

The sort of story that tends to give France a bad name. Wine! Football-team comparisons! Bitter feuding! Utter pettiness.

Last but most definitely not least, the Daily Mash's absolutely excellent take on the bloody Brand/Ross BBC fiasco, which anyone with half a brain cell doesn't really give a crap about. They express my own feelings on the matter better than I ever could (and this just durn well tickles me pink too, as a perhaps-inadvertent satire of the type of people who tend to watch things like Strictly Come Dancing religiously. Absolutely brilliant). That most excellent man of mine turned me on to le Mash, and I thank him for't.

ONE MORE LINK! A necessary piece of tasty, sexy disco to see you through till Monday morning. This song has so effectively seduced me that I can't listen to the rest of the (not bad at all) album.

Well, this blogger is heading off for a good seeing-to this weekend... Eeeee! Catch y'all later and have a great evening/weekend/week ahead/whatever!

Englishhhh People!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

My boyfriend just linked me to this video of fucking Steve McLaren (former coach to the English football team). The team he's coaching now are Twente Enschede of the Netherlands because, as my boyf put it, 'NOBODY else would touch him as he's SHIT - really shit.'

However, it would appear that that is a grossly unfair underestimation of Mr. McLaren's character - he's a moron too! I didn't really notice it as much at first, but he is doing that very English thing of insulting other nationalities by responding to his interviewer in deliberately slow, bizarre English (at one point, he actually says 'Everything is there for a surprise' !!! WTF?) and adopting a slight, fake Dutch accent.

Fuckin' why? Why do English people do this? It isn't just white English people of course, although it often is. By 'this', I mean trying to imitate the accent of the people they're talking to and/or speaking English slower and/or louder. If you're going to move somewhere, LEARN THE FUCKING LANGUAGE. No-one's saying you'll be fluent, but at least make SOME effort before you go there. In Paris in 2003 or 2004, I remember cringing as my parents enthusiastically mispronounced the names of things and did the talking louder/talking slower thing repeatedly. Oh yeah, and we also went to an Indian restaurant. In France.

However, I can almost forgive it in my parents. They speak three languages as it is. Learning English was an absolute nightmare for them - learning French would take so long, there would be no point at their age. My parents are the same age as some people's grandparents. On holiday, it can almost be forgiven, provided your holiday isn't a month or longer. In that case - PHRASEBOOK, bitch.

I know this might sound bad, but when it comes to fairly middle-class white people moving to Europe, though - the staid, Daily-Mail-reading, aspirational types who actually visit the chateaux near where I lived last year for enjoyment - I have very fucking little sympathy. I feel the same about ethnic minorities in the same position, but here's the thing. Ethnic minorities don't generally make a habit of moving out of choice, especially those who've already grown up in somewhere that's not their place of origin (Who does, really?!). Laxmi Mittal/Hinduja brothers-style exceptions aside, most of them aren't even rich enough to think about getting a villa in Spain or whatever.

Back to the hate-spew, though. Daily-Mail reading, aspirational pricks going to live in Spain and France and the like have never held much appeal for me, but now I feel even more coldly towards them since my year in France. There is a country that is struggling as it is to work out where the fuck to turn and what to do underneath a populist and hugely divisive president (the left HATE him, so do some of the right and the rest either don't know or are going with the flow from what I know). I heard more than one person saying 'This is their 'Thatcher years' while I was there.' I don't know about that. What I DO know is that in a country where race desperately needs to be discussed and dealt with openly and where the status of the language is continually under threat from English, the last thing they need is an influx of self-centred, bigoted, idyll-seeking Middle Englanders who don't speak their language and don't have a fucking clue about their culture. Those who live there and don't learn the language at all REALLY drive me nuts, much like the ethnic minorities who came here and depend on their children to do everything for them. Unless you're actively prevented from mingling and learning, there's no excuse.

It's all very ironic really, because these types of people, who tend to see themselves as beacons of righteousness, are responsible for destroying a lot of the 'positive' stereotypes about British people. Polite? Not when you can't even be arsed to learn the language of your new home-to-be? Eccentric? Not so much as isolationist and self-centred. Individual? Hardly, when you consider they still act like the British Empire's in place, as if France didn't have enough right-wing bigots of its own to worry about.

Of course, Spain is the country that really needs to worry, since France repels people more efficiently than Spain does. Spain doesn't have the same notorious suspicion of foreigners (be they coloured or not!) and while Spanish isn't necessarily straightforward, French is more difficult to learn from scratch.

This highly irritated and ranty post is over now. I will not be surprised if I receive lots of comments bollocking me for my intolerant bollockings of intolerant bollocks.

Alors, pour commémorer l’anniversaire de mon ami Fabien (bien que je lui aie envoyé une carte électronique et je lui ai téléphoné ce soir), voilà ce petit message et cette affiche sur mon blog (malheureusement en anglais, je sais, mais c’est difficile pour moi, être en colère en français, tu sais ; pour ca il me faut penser, et être en colère, ce n’est pas penser !). MORT DE RIRE :-P. Si tu veux, de temps en temps, j’afficherai des messages entièrement en français pour toi, parce que j’aime toujours discuter avec toi, quoi que ce soit. Maintenant, je m’arrête de me comporter comme ton rôdeur (MORT DE RIRE) et je m’en vais ! Tout ceci n’était que pour te dire que je n’ai pas encore réussi à trouver un anglais aussi intéressant que toi ! MORT DE RIRE et GROS BISOUS, je t’ai laissé ce message parce que je n’arrive jamais à finir ta lettre et il me semble que peut-être je ferai mieux à terminer le projet de le faire… ?