Imagine queueing on a mountain

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I will never queue at the top of a mountain. Are you dumb.

I’ve reached a point in my life where if I wake up after 7am, I am a huge lazy failure who is wasting her entire sloth life away. Like today. Obviously, this isn’t a humble brag – I hate it and I don’t want to feel guilty for waking up ‘late’. I am a woman. And I am tired.

Being up early means I have more time to think. Having more time to think means I have more time to drop myself into scenarios that I haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing. Like this one that has recently plopped itself on my radar: the queues on Yr Wyddfa (Snowdon), and the fact that people are upset with others for refusing to adhere to their nonsensical queuing system. Read more

To write well, you must live: part 2

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All consuming and no living makes Jack a dull and stupid idiot

There are times I’ll have a conversation with someone and they’ll actually say something like burnt toast theory. It’s giving. Ate and left no crumbs.

I get that language evolves, but genuinely what the hell are you talking about.

Other times, I’ll have a conversation with someone who is so detached from anything online that I am embarrassed for myself when they don’t understand a reference I’ve made (road work ahead? Uh, yeah, I sure hope it does).

In that moment, I realise some people really are just living their life away from social media influence (as intended), and others have TikTok (or Vine) fully wired into their brain. There’s a sweet spot – where you get the reference and you know what the trends are but you don’t fall victim to influencer crap.

When you’re incessantly consuming repetitive content, including “tips and tricks” from people around the world (who seem to live the exact same life, for some reason. The beauty in our differences is lost.), you also don’t really have anything interesting to talk about except the regurgitated shit you’ve read and heard.

Consequently, you can only repackage it through your own point of view that has also done nothing but go to the gym in Oner and a slick-back, eat a healthy high-protein balanced meal, take 15k steps, and use red light therapy. Or wake up and make a cup of tea, take a nature walk, write in your journal, post an article about ‘the media I consumed this week’, and be in bed with your kindle at 8pm. Everyone seems to want to be boxed up into one of few categories, and doing one is no better than the other.

Content – on TikTok, Instagram, and now even Substack – becomes a snoozefest. We’re inundated with nothing but articles and videos about how to schedule your day to be exactly like each others. Read more

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

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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.

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PSA: Social media is f*cking you up. Again.

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A while ago (almost a year and a half ago, actually. I’m weeping at the passage of time as I write this), I wrote a post about social media and how it largely irks me, though I have yet to find a way to escape these shackles with which I am bound.

I’m happy to admit that my sentiments haven’t changed and I’m still a bitter old lady waving her cane around. I guess the youth I complain about also includes my own generation to an extent (though my smile lines and diminishing metabolism would like to disagree) because we pretty much still also shape what the future will be like.

Social media is a little different, though.

I think it’s always influenced by the youngest. I’m slowly withering away and there’s a reason I have no idea how to do Tik Tok dances; I still mourn the loss of “buffting” and I like thin eyebrows. The problem with the youngest ducklings, those spring chickens, is that they’re a group of conflicted people who don’t really know what they stand for – through no real fault of their own. Growing up in the age of social media means you’re constantly ingesting new information at rapid speed every day; you never had time to form your own opinions before thousands of others were thrust upon you (in Freudian terms, you kissed goodbye to the id at birth). Even before you made a Twitter account, the opinions you heard from others were shaped by recycled opinions they read online; there’s little authenticity in anything and validation is the goal. You melt at the touch of any sort of offence (see: snowflake), and simultaneously like to compensate for this fragility by going a thousand steps too far and making disgusting jokes under the guise of ‘I just have a dark sense of humour’. No, you don’t. You’re confused.

I’ve revisited my old post in celebration of Social Media day, and I’ve decided to give my two penneth again now that I’m a little older, not much wiser, and a bit less angry – but lockdowns forced me to spend an obscene amount of time online so I’m now obviously an expert in the field. 

Let’s discuss. Read more

Beauty Standards // To B(BL) or Not to B(BL)

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Unless you’ve been hiding in the deepest depths of the internet away from everybody else, minding your business buying human bones and watching decapitation videos, you’re aware that BBLs, lip-fillers and everything in-between have crept their way into the lives of normal folk. Normal women-folk, should I say, because it seems that men aren’t subject to the same pressure with regards to their physical appearance. Sure, there are men getting beard and hairline transplants… but that’s as far as common, invasive treatments for men go. I also don’t think there’s a desire for ‘mum-bods’ as there is for dad-bods, but alas.

Once upon a time, most of us could only sigh in amazement as we saw celebrities with chiselled faces and voluptuous bodies. Now, it’s within reach for a lot of us who are willing to make some sacrifices to the quality of our lives. It’s scarily accessible; women can now opt to purchase a body modification for less than the price of a car, depending on how reputable she wants to go and whether or not she wants to actually live to enjoy the fruits of a dodgy doctor’s labour – and I’m sure there are a lot of women who will happily ride a bike for a couple of years if it meant they had two brand new bum cheeks to show off. I remember a time where these new bodies were mocked; her lips look swollen! She looks like she needs her nappy changed! Why does she look like a man who can’t smile? Does this not firstly highlight how ever-changing these standards are? Only now it’s not about new makeup techniques – you’re changing your features and sometimes putting your life at risk.

On the other hand though, I notice I mentioned “sacrifices to the quality of our lives’, when the truth is a lot of women are doing it to improve the quality of their lives. Beauty standards are so ingrained into the minds of some people, to the detriment of their mental health, placing them into a perpetual state of anguish because they’re not as attractive as the girls whose pictures their man-who’s-not-their-man is liking on Instagram. “Improving” the quality of your life based on a fickle beauty standard that will change within a few years, when your implants have sagged, your lips deflated, your nose bridge collapsed is… risky. I’m all for improving your appearance if you want to and you have the means – but never if you don’t fully understand what you’re getting yourself into. I’m especially against anybody undergoing a procedure but claiming to be natural, particularly if you’re in a position of influence. Read more

PSA: Social media is fucking you up

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Out of touch with reality hoes

“Every form of addiction is bad , no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine, or idealism.”

 – Carl Gustav Jung

 

Imagine you sign a contract with a ghost, in which that ghost fucks you in the ass very violently all day every day for years in return for some meaningless validity. You forget about it until one day you just feel a gaping void down there and you urgently need to fill it with some toxic ghost dick even though it’s ruining your life now that you are aware you need it in order to feel normal and validated. That ghost dick, my friend, is social media.

Fuckin’ you in the ass as you read this.

I think I wrote something about social media a long time ago, both pros and cons. Of course, I’m a lot older and inevitably bitter now, which means my sentiments towards social media have become… hostile. I’m frequently talking a lot of shit on Twitter and posting pictures nobody wants to see on Instagram. I’m not old enough for Facebook yet because I don’t have friends with babies (step on it girls, yeah?) But the past few months I’ve been disgusted with social media despite being very active on it and I’m just.. sick of it. I’m sick of it all and I want to disappear off the internet.

In the grand scheme of things, social media is great, considering how far we’ve come in the world.

One of the best things is how easy it is to find information that mainstream news outlets won’t tell you – not in a timely manner, anyway. You can find out exactly whats going on in most parts of the world. Had we only the BBC and the Sun to give us information, we’d be perfectly ignorant, brainwashed individuals fitting for an Orwell novel. Probably racist too. But we have Twitter to spread videos of racist police officers, we have viral pictures of mutilated babies and children as a result of angry men in high places, we have pictures and videos of destroyed buildings in the Middle East, we have posts about developed and beautiful places in Africa and Asia where our old racist school teachers had us believe it was all barren and everyone was starving to death. We have pictures of missing children with contact details, and a simple click of a button from a few hundred people has helped find them. We know more about what’s going on in other parts of the world because we hear from people in other parts of the world; gaining information is easier, and it’s harder to excuse racism and xenophobia. Information is fed to us, we don’t need to dig deep for it anymore.

Social media allows people to go viral, it allows small businesses free advertisement and that’s beautiful. I’ve seen people successfully share their art, their photography, their writing, their messages. We have instagram, which helps keep us momentarily happy because of fire memes. The little things, you know? It helps you meet like minded people, might meet the love of your life, it helps keep friendships alive and hanging by a thread, but thats about where the positives come to an end. Now I can complain.

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