NEWS: Local woman has the courage to watch a film alone

August 1, 2023 by kkamilah Leave a comment

Town members of Co-dependentville have gathered to express their admiration and respect for a local lady who was spotted sitting alone at the cinema. Pathetic Patrick, resident of Stalkershire just few miles away, reported the story to us after he was ‘minding [his] own business, and just happened to see her there. And it wasn’t the first time either!’

‘It’s incredible,’ Mother Marlene said, nacho cheese on her dress and tears glazing her eyeballs. ‘I can’t believe how brave she is, it’s really quite an amazing thing to see how far we’ve come in the world, as women, as people. If she doesn’t want to have children so she can continue doing things alone (unlike the rest of us), she should definitely carry on! She should, because she won’t be able to do that after she has kids. Us parents have so much responsibility, it would be nice if someone could take our little wretche– bundles of happiness off our hands so we could have the same opportunities.’ She smiled as she looked down at the three children sitting innocently by her feet, red-cheeked and pouting, each with a mixture of ice cream and Fanta spilled down their front, one with a glob of snot hanging out of his nostril. Marlene seemed to have a handle on her animated children while the man beside her (we later learnt to be her husband) was intently tapping away at his phone, updating his 34 Twitter followers with the criticism they did not ask for.

Across the crowds, a local influencer, Vain Veronica, was spotted, fixing her hair behind her ears as she almost wept into the camera of her phone.
‘For real, she’s just so inspirational! I really hope I can be like her when I’m older; so unbothered about what people think. Her strength is like… really inspiring to us all, I could never in a million years walk into a cinema alone – imagine if someone saw me! They wouldn’t let me live it down, I’d be all over everyone’s socials. The meme pages just wouldn’t shut up about me. I just don’t live the sort of life that lets me do things out of the ordinary, I like to just keep a low-profile as I’m a really private person, you know?’
We didn’t get to speak to Veronica, so we captured her words, verbatim, from her Instagram story. We also learnt, a few hours later, that she went out for dinner with her two close friends, where she ordered three French martinis, a side of prawn dumplings, and another side of the waiter. She got food poisoning, however, sent the waiter home, and spent the night sat on the toilet instead. Our thoughts are with Veronica at this difficult time.

Why you should be scheduling

July 15, 2023 by kkamilah Leave a comment

I like to think there are other people like me. People who get ferociously, terribly, horribly angry whenever their time is wasted in any way whatsoever. A minute in the real world is an hour in the world of someone who meticulously plans each and every segment of their day, right down to fifteen-minute increments. At 05:30 I will wake up. At 08:15 I will read, at 17:45 I will change my bed sheets, at 21:00 I will be in bed with a candle flickering and Alexa playing Last Hope by Paramore… and so on, and so forth. Is this normal? I’m not sure.

Some might call it obsessive, some might call it insane. Some might say it’s perfectly normal to want to squeeze as much from your day as possible, considering how fast time is slipping us all by. I am obviously of the latter; planning my days so carefully allows me to feel like I have control over my life. I never, ever go to bed lamenting over having wasted the day or week, and it’s simply because I have done everything with purpose. Even the useless things. Maybe it’s boring or too grown-up, maybe it leaves little room for spontaneity — but I do consider last-minute plans. I am definitely down for an impromptu trip to Franco Manca, I just need to consult Outlook and move my Sims block elsewhere.

From playful and fun, to politically correct: Censoring Roald Dahl

February 19, 2023 by kkamilah Leave a comment

Roald Dahl books, nationally revered and loved by kids everywhere, are having lots of alterations made to them by woke, politically correct editors who want to appease snowflake adults. Roald Dahl, nationally revered and loved by kids (lots of whom are also adults now), is also dead and unable to speak out against the censorship being placed on his books.

I am against censorship in books and I am against banning books; sanitising them isn’t too far off. There are books and authors whose writing I despise – but I don’t believe in rewriting or banning them. Even if it is Salman Rushdie.

It seems to me that people would rather pull the wool over their children’s eyes than use ‘offensive’ language as an opportunity to explain the real world to them; the real world which, might I add, is a lot worse than how Dahl portrayed it. And let’s be very honest, the reason we love those books so much is because that language is all around us; it’s playful and it’s descriptive and it’s something we understand. I’m sorry you don’t like the words ‘ugly’ and ‘attractive’, but they are adjectives that exist nonetheless. It makes no sense to censure the use of the word ‘ugly’ when it is being used to describe characters whose entire story is based on the fact that they are ugly (both inside and out). How do you rewrite that? Not to go all Hopkins-Clarkson-Morgan, but I don’t understand why we need gender-neutral terms in the books either. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why ‘Cloud-men’ is more offensive than ‘Cloud-people’. Why is the word ‘man’ offensive? Men and women, boys and girls, exist; this fact shouldn’t offend anyone, regardless of their own beliefs about gender. Are we going to rewrite every character in every book as gender-neutral? Must we rewrite Harry Potter as the person who lived? Read more

Old habits… die

December 11, 2022 by kkamilah Leave a comment

When I think back to days gone by — you know, the days before voluntary 10pm bedtimes, a strong aversion to teenagers, the discovery of more than a few grey hairs, and a tendency to feel every single ache under the sun — I remember being a 19-year-old caffeine-fuelled creative powerhouse who didn’t stop until the sun started to bleed into the night. Sometimes I was convinced it even rose a little later just to give me more time to myself, but maybe that was just me thinking the world fell at my feet whenever I willed it. That I could have anything I wanted. I was right, though; I could.

Unsurprisingly, it would take more than a spell of dizziness, a gnawing stomach, and tired eyes to break me from the almost physical connection I had to the keys on my laptop. Writer’s block? I didn’t know her. I wrote when I wanted to write, and my day ended when I wanted it to end. I was juggling a million different hobbies and somehow still able to squeeze twenty-five hours from a day for everything I wanted to do (and all the things I didn’t). My skin suffered, I was a little underweight, and everything I created was borne out of some sort of affliction, but I always had something to be proud of at the end of the day. That’s what kept me going – I was addicted to the dopamine I sorely lacked. In truth, I was never really living in the real world. I was living through each piece of art I created, and it showed, weighing heavy on my entire being, scrawled all over everything I produced. I lost touch with reality; it started with books, which plagued me with a billion different perspectives of the world and only managed to feed my cynicism, and then I turned to writing in an attempt to drain myself of all the excess poison in my mind. I’m not sure if what I wrote was good, or I just needed something to relate to – whichever it was, I made it appear, and it worked. I dare not revisit the things I used to create, but there was a lot of it. Read more

The Artist’s Dilemma

April 27, 2022 by kkamilah Leave a comment

I sat down to start this post in my usual fashion; with misery, cynicism, and a little self-loathing. But then I remembered that negativity begets negativity, and the last thing I need is another reason to beat myself up. So, I’ve picked the next closest thing: honesty.

I took yet another break from writing in general. People have told me and continue to tell me they love my blog posts, my copy, my short stories — whatever it may be — but I just… don’t believe them. Imposter syndrome, I believe they call it. Feelings of inadequacy that block us from ever proving to ourselves that we are better than we think we are. It’s a vicious cycle that I often struggle to break out of.
We create art to express ourselves and resonate with people, so when they tell us they want to see us or hear us, why can’t we deliver? Why do we feel like frauds in our field –surely I’m not meant to be in this club? You’ll find that this club is filled almost exclusively with people who are, in fact, very good at what they do. Conversely, there are a lot of people who produce ridiculously sub-par work, but because they believe they can get to the top with it, they soar. Right to the very top. Read more