Standing In Line to See the Show Tonight

Two pints in the left one!

My heels are on fire. They’re pink, sore, and blistered. My eyes are bloodshot and drooping, my hair’s got a life of its own, I’m hungry and tired, I may have caught pneumonia, and my body feels like I’ve just endured Arnie Schwarzenegger’s Mr. Olympia training routine.

BUT, all of that was worth it.

I got home, and wrote that little paragraph on Monday about seeing the Red Hot Chili Peppers live. Despite being completely drenched by torrential rain on the walk in, sitting in soaked jeans and grinning through cold shivers for three hours, our moods were brighter than the spotlights. So what if I kicked a pint of Strongbow all over my bag, or nearly bludgeoned bystanders by dancing; we had an incredible day filled with laughter and excitement.

There were a few surprises in the setlist which deserve an honourable mention:

I Like Dirt – I’m not sure if this track is played live often, but for me it was a shock considering this was a big show, and the majority of the audience seemed to have gathered for the hits (boring people, I otherwise like to call them). We air-jammed and jumped around for the entire song… Much like the Chili’s themselves!

 

If You Have To Ask – Again, another old favourite! Blood Sugar Sex Magik helped introduce me to the band’s funk genius, and it kills me that a lot of the album tracks aren’t played live. The super fans in the crowd went crazy for it.

Soul To Squeeze – It’s hard to find decent live videos of this song online, let alone be lucky enough to actually experience it being played to you. This song holds so many memories for me that I STILL can’t believe the coincidence! It’s “our song”, and us being there together made it even more special.

Overall, the entire experience was magical. Kind of wish somebody had told me how difficult it was to get a Goddamn taxi in Sunderland beforehand but y’know, I was that tired, tipsy and high on adrenaline that I can’t even remember it properly. We got free drinks out of finding one in the end so that’s all that matters!

The Future Is Autumn

Five minutes, I mused, clicking the minute button in rapid succession to microwave my six-day-past-its-use-by-date Tesco Finest lasagne; concluding that if I added an extra three clicks then maybe this microwave would nuke all of the invisible, festering bacteria.

Behind me, equally as concentrated, my boyfriend furrowed his brow while struggling to find the perfect number of custard creams to accompany his fresh pint of steaming coffee. It was cute, I thought, that he’d emptied the biscuits onto a separate saucer instead of just snaffling them out of the packet with reckless abandon; our usual method of portion measure.

There were three of us in the kitchen at lunchtime. Half in, half out of the main cooking area stood my friend (who for privacy purposes I’ll call Ribs), tucking in to a plate of assorted chicken thighs and wings; 9% breadcrumbs, 91% liquefied lard. He looked about as unimpressed with his purchase as a fat kid with a salad, yet was gobbling it up anyway, occasionally pausing to shade my attempts at making my lasagne look slightly more edible.

“That looks… fucking disgusting,” he laughed as I poured the extra runny grease down the sink drain before serving. It was previously swimming around the plastic container and had somehow materialised during cooking. I grimaced, but continued.

“It smells alright,” I replied. “It’s Finest.”

“It smells horrible! I can smell it from over here!” My boyfriend exclaimed. Ribs laughed again.

“Shut up, no it doesn’t.”

I had no time to react before Ribs appeared by my side, furiously sniffing my lunch. It was at this point I was reminded of a leaflet I picked up from my future university campus on Friday (I start in September), titled “Eating Well on a Budget”, and aimed at students who are living in rented accommodation. Apparently, you can have a decent, energising diet by solely surviving on meals of beans on toast, jacket potatoes, and cereal. (The leaflet wasn’t stingy enough to disallow a heavy booze allowance, either.)

With that in mind, I think the three of us have been eating pretty well these past few weekends.

The months, weeks, and days I have left to check off my calendar until autumn are absolutely crawling by. Over the past few months, since late February to be exact, I’ve found myself warping into the exact kind of person I despise. The catalyst for this transformation being my job, but I’m not going to whine grotesquely about it for reasons you’ll have to read about in Self Loathing Modesty, below. This is only the internet, after all.

But, despite this change, I feel wrong in adding a new sentence to the end of that paragraph about how this period of my life has been incomparably shit, because that would be a lie. The reason I call my job a catalyst is because without it, I have no doubt that I’d be sitting here, pattering away on my keyboard happily, with my biggest worry being whether or not there’d be bacon in the fridge for breakfast. I owe so much thanks to my parents, my friends (Ribs and co), and my boyfriend, for ripping big, gaping chasms of light into what would’ve honestly been a scarily dark time in my life. So instead, what I am going to do is not dwell on it in words, but write about the future.

In autumn, I have a lot to look forward to. I’ve been accepted into university studying English Literature with Creative Writing, which I plan to tweak into specialising in “pop fiction” (a word I coined from pop culture and fiction writing). Finally, for the first time in my life, by choosing to stay up until dawn to write while the inspiration is hot, I’ll actually do better in the course – an idea which completely awes me. My boyfriend has been scouted to work as part of a band to support an up-and-coming artist in our area, and as I’m the resident taxi, hanging around during practices has led me to have a conversation with the artist, resulting in interest being shed on my lyrics and me being asked to write for not only the band, but the artist himself.

As I posted on Twitter, is there such a thing as alternative-pop-urban-R&B-funk-reggae? If not, we’re about to create it. Watch this space! (Did that sound corny?)

Musically, autumn will be immense. It’s no secret that my two all-time greatest idols are Lady Gaga and Green Day, but I’ve also been a huge fan of The Killers since the release of Hot Fuss when everybody thought they were indie and English. They’re releasing their new album, and so is Green Day, which is a humungous deal considering Green Day’s last gap between albums was a whopping four years. I’ve got tickets to see Lady Gaga at the Born This Way Ball at Manchester in September, which to say the least, I am FUCKING ECSTATIC about. My jacket I’m designing for the show is being studded, the patches ordered, and the design finalised. We couldn’t get standing tickets but I’ll be the one exception into the Monster Pit if it kills me – I’m either clawing my way there or being allowed a wristband the correct way, it doesn’t matter.

So, what was the point in this blog post? In all honestly, this was more of an exercise for me than anything worth brandishing on the internet. If you’ve made it up until this last paragraph I thank you, and also feel that you should count yourself lucky; there was a poem I got close to posting instead, but the fact that I may have needed to write a contract wavering all responsibility from myself if a reader was 20 feet or less away from either an Adele album or a chainsaw, slightly swayed my decision. My last posts here have been quite robotic, and separated from what I’ve really been feeling lately, so count this as an update, while I’ll count this as a reminder of what I have in store; that when these thick, black clouds finally roll away, I’ll have the most beautiful view in the world of the new island I can call home. 

Self Loathing Modesty

Where did this cultural trend of self-loathing modesty crawl out from? 

And more importantly, why is this never recognised as being vainer than self-confidence? 

What I’ve never understood about society is the constant need to wear our inner most insecurities on our sleeves. Oh, listen to me, I am terrified of commitment, my parents have never showed love for me, I’m addicted to prescription drugs and my lack of confidence is making me want to rip out my insides. Would you like me to go into explicit detail about how I’m emotionally scarred while you chew your lunch? 

Surely if we were that preoccupied with our insecurities, we wouldn’t be so ready to reveal them to other people. My head simply cannot compute why as a society, the fear of appearing arrogant is so much greater than expressing any amount of honest self-confidence. We’ve forced ourselves into an unneeded pit of misery which in fact, we’re digging deeper with every confession. 

My idols and my own experiences have taught me to believe that if you consistently lie positively about yourself, you trick your mind into actually turning it into the truth. Unfortunately, the same goes for constantly adding a hateful disclaimer to everything you do. I have no doubt that these surprisingly confident revelations of private matters are honest, but because they have been tricked into to being so through repetition, not because they were born attached to us. 

If anything, it is vainer to obsess so much about your “modest” appearance that you drive yourself into self-loathing, than it is to be happy about who you are. Isn’t it more arrogant to confess your inner and most personal fears to an acquaintance in order to attract the right kind of humble attention that it is to feel good about who you are, and not care what anybody else thinks of you? There are far too many people who I feel are suspiciously secure about their insecurities for me to believe that they didn’t want to seek anything other than an unpredictably deep conversation. 

I hate this depressing culture. Breathe some life into your personalities and start to speak highly of yourself. Who knows, even if it starts out as a lie it might just turn into the truth.