ODINESQUE OBSERVATIONS

TRINA: A CHARACTER STUDY

At first I was banjaxed by your spectacular audacity and bad manners, but I would like to thank you for your keen interest in my post, as evidenced by your multiple comments on the topic I brought up on my blog. I’m also very flattered that you took the time to speculate so intensely about my character, and it has spawned a business idea.

According to you, I am a number of things that include (but are not limited to):

• An idiot who should look at my life and STFU
• Insane/pathetic/have an empty life due to excessive worrying about the parenting techniques employed by certain celebrity mothers
• I have issues (though the specific nature of these hasn’t been revealed)
• I am immature (most likely I haven’t got children, which is fortunate as evidently I would be a bad mother), uneducated, ethnocentric, arrogant and ignorant.

The list would go on if I had the stamina to type it out, but a certain picture has already emerged. I shall not lie and pretend it’s a pleasant one, but I have anyway never been one to strive for perfection, so I’ll be good about this. Forgiving, you might say. It’d hardly be a stretch of the imagination to assume that you’ve provided me with enough material for a couple of chapters in a potential biography, and people always say that when life hands you lemons you should make lemonade. In this spirit, I’m now toying with the idea of publishing your study, provided I can conjure up an audience. I don’t think this will be a problem, however, as I’ve never been hesitant to take my artistic license to strange and fantastical places.

Bearing in mind that the post upon which your entire analysis is constructed is fairly short, it is with utmost sincerity that I must commend you for your observational powers.

I am indeed relatively young, and you’ll be relieved to hear I don’t have any children yet. You’re also right to think this combination – young and childless - doesn’t lend an awful lot of credibility to that claim I’ve obviously made to be an expert on child rearing. Perhaps it’s finally time for me to abandon branding myself as one?! It’s not as glamorous or prolific as it sounds, anyway.

Kudos then on spotting my youthful naivety, but having said that, I hope you will allow me to offer a little constructive feedback on the few points of dubious merit in your work. After all, who knows me better than I do, and for a book deal to really materialize it’s probably best to introduce a measure of accuracy, no?

Firstly, it’s a little off the mark when you suggest I’m a fan of the Twilight franchise. Perhaps you rushed this part? My knowledge of these films doesn’t stretch far beyond realizing they feature otherworldly creatures, and it is definitely not developed enough for me to have a well-considered stance on the whole Edward vs. Jacob debate. You have shrewdly identified me as a film enthusiast, but my favourite films are in fact Before Sunrise/Sunset. It’s a trivial point to make, but the editors will no doubt expect us to be meticulous in our approach to the research.

(I think they’d also like to know that I speak three languages and once helped a blind man cross the street. Everyone’s gotta have a couple of redeeming qualities, wouldn’t you say so?)

Next up, I’m not technically uneducated, being enrolled as a postgraduate student and all (albeit one on leave of absence).

Regrettably, I am also trying to work out what went through your brilliant mind when you questioned my sanity in caring ‘so much’ about Hilary Duff’s infant-related memorabilia, for this is actually only true in a trivial sense, and false in a more substantial one. You see, in my daily battle against the monotony of unemployment, living vicariously through celebrity stories is an easy win. Am I prone to getting sucked into the black hole that is Femail? Sure. But do I care about any of the stories beyond having some sort of trivial reaction? No. You’ll be fascinated to hear how I contrive to reserve passion and genuine interest only for the people I know in real.

I really hope you aren’t discouraged and take this to mean that I don’t appreciate your otherwise fine character assassination assessment, but I should also point out that I’m not entirely sure what you mean by me having ‘issues’. Either way, I’m sure we can develop something for the publication (assuming I can rely on your co-authorship and continued inputs). Having a sob story up my sleeve for the promotional circuit would be a great way to entrap an audience, and in the very least it’d be a guarantee of garnering publicity in the Mail. I think that is the sort of readership we’ll be aiming for, don’t you?

Lastly, I should like to note that I’m quite a mellow girl, despite what my totally out of control habit of writing ‘tongue-in-cheek’ commentary on blogs may suggest. 

Once again, thank you for sharing your thoughts – it’s not everyday people write about me at such length. I was particularly impressed by the confidence with which you liberally inferred damning character traits from a short paragraph, and I can only hope to learn from your style. I’ve got to say I’m very excited about the prospect of my very own biography at the unaccomplished age of 22 - apart from anything it’s a great chance to spread that life lesson of yours that ‘people do things differently’. I quite fancy myself as a beacon of self-acceptance. I wonder who would play me in the movie…

A little thing called ‘oversharing’

Celebrity mums are starting to really creep me out, and I don’t just mean because of the weird names they give their kids (Bear Blu? Apple? Bronx Mowgli?).  

• Hilary Duff: I keep my son’s umbilical cord stump in my make-up drawer 
• Alicia Silverstone: I regurgitate food into my infant’s mouth - It makes sense to me that she wouldn’t expect her kid to operate cutlery (babies’ fine motor coordination skills are notoriously poor), but I always thought baby food was blended or mashed, as opposed to pre-chewed by a parent only to then be spat into the offspring’s mouth. Without any loving motherly instincts to guide me, I’m left with mere logic, and it seems to be that it’d be more nutritious and time-efficient to blend it with a fork. But there ya go, what do I know?
• January Jones: I ate my placenta
• Gwyneth Paltrow: I co-bathe with my children (aged 6 and 7) in the tub
• Kelly Preston: I breastfeed my 16 month old kid, even though he’s old enough to walk up and ask for it

Perhaps being chased around by paparazzi wherever they go is has what led them to mistakenly believe that there is no such thing as too much information. 

Copyright trolls: the unscrupulous enemies of peaceful society

Woke up this morning to a question I’m rarely asked. Oh wait, that’s right - I’ve never before been asked whether I use BitTorrent to download porn illegally. Not quite lucid yet, I assumed my sister’s questioning was a mere trick of the imagination or part of some twisted dream I hadn’t woken up from. As it turns out, my mother’s been presented with an ‘infringement of copyright’-related lawsuit after someone on our premises downloaded a film titled ‘Wanna Fuck My Daughter Gotta Fuck Me First’.

You guys, IT WASN’T ME!

Madonna’s more likely to finally take up knitting than I am to watch something so sordidly titled. Personally, I’d have more fun doing an 800 piece Ferrari engine jigsaw than watching porn (unless it featured Michael Fassbender aka Sexual Flypaper For Women, natch). I found it hard to believe that anyone in my family would seek out such cougarific filth, and yet my immediate suspect – our houseguest M - is quite clearly a closeted gay. I can only speculate as to what thrills he would get out of the distinctly female dominated mother/daughter performance, and I wouldn’t ordinarily have pinned that kind of MILF-y skulduggery on him, but by a process of elimination it had to be. When his father threatened to have his computer searched, the kid ‘fessed up. A true moment of unintended hilarity.

Oh, M.

At first I felt sorry for him. It’s gotta be pretty uncomfortable when people around you are let in on disgustingly specific details of your otherwise private nocturnal recreational habits. Then I started thinking: isn’t it just a tad cheeky to burden a potentially, ahem, pristine network with illegal downloads? Worse still, M was lodged in my 5-year old brothers’ room (WITH them, mind you). Isn’t porn watching (+ associated activities) hugely inappropriate whilst in the, albeit unconscious, company of minors?

So anyway, now the porn mafia is out to get us in a grubbier version of the music industry’s legal battle at the start of the new millennium against online piracy. Apparently mass lawsuits of this kind are happening frequently these days in what has been called ‘copyright trolling’. Crummy porn attorneys launch mass lawsuits against a large number of John Does as based on their IP addresses, accusing them in nasty letters of infringing clients’ copyrighted work. You could call this a ‘low-investment, high-return business plan’, as the objective of these often weakly premised lawsuits isn’t taking the defendant to court. Despite having to cough up with a decent sum of money (in our case a ‘modest’ €900), most will feel coerced into a settlement at the prospect of an even more expensive case before a judge, as well as in order avoid the embarrassment of being associated with pirated porn -  guilty or not. As one article says, ‘… a broad swath of the Internet-browsing public’ is treated as the ‘personal ATM’ of porn studios and lawyers.

Seems like extortion to me. 

Rabbits – The Not So Family-Friendly Choice Of Pet

I like the Easter holidays. I’ll admit that I don’t really know what it’s about (something Jesus-related, no doubt), but I do know they meant I was more or less obliged to eat chocolate. Right?? It also meant time off, but being unemployed, the concept of time has lost all significance to me. Monday, Tuesday… Sunday – I don’t even know anymore.

Anyway, Easter produces a wealth of bunny merchandise, obviously related to their generous role in the festivities. Once a year they come to share chocolate and candy with children, thereby instantly endearing themselves to the younger generations in their formative years - the same old PR trick that worked wonders for that fat guy called Santa. Their excellent public image is no doubt also enhanced by their physical features. Bunnies are sweet. They’re softer than silk, have big ears, and will make adults and children alike coo in delight at the mere sight. If it were possible to produce a scale of cuteness, entirely scientifically, they’d be quite near the top next to puppies and kittens.

(Snakes would be AT THE BOTTOM.)

There’s no arguing with the science of cuteness, and throw in their small size and easy going nature and you’ll have yourself a natural choice of pet.  But here’s where you’re wrong. I’m about to uncover a shocking truth: rabbits need to be kept well apart from your as yet innocent children, for theirs is in fact a corrupting influence.

I should note that I come from a family of rabbit fanatics. At any given time we’ll have enough woodland creatures housed on our property to warrant us status as professional breeders. If you’re looking to purchase one, there’s a good chance we’ll be able to meet your needs, however specific. Floppy eared? Giants? Dwarfs? Albinos? If you haven’t tripped over your particular preference on your way through our garden, there’s a good chance we’ll have one on the roof or in the garage somewhere. This eternal and abundant presence of all kinds of rabbits has allowed me to observe their behaviour in some detail, and I’d like to think this qualifies me as an authority on rabbit psychology.

I’ve come to conclude that rabbits are highly sociable animals, and herein lies the problem. I’ll give you a clue: humans guilty of voluntary incestuous relationships are considered evil. I remember a story about two German siblings who lived together for years in a sexual relationship. When the authorities discovered their shared genetic background they stuck together, and were repeatedly prosecuted in a reflection of the revulsion most people feel at the mere mention of such a scenario. Copious vomiting ensued across the global media. In rabbit world: not a single fuck is given. They aren’t deterred by the general stigma surrounding ‘coitus between relatives’. WHAT THE FREUD IS THAT ABOUT?

You know the saying ‘mating like rabbits’? Substitute ‘rabbit’ for another animal, and it wouldn’t carry the same punch. Mating like badgers? Turtles? Seahorses? Surely they do mate (continuation of the species and all), but nothing compares to a rabbit’s sex drive. Truly nothing will get in the way of rabbits’ perverted urges. And don’t expect them to at least afford their relatives a monogamous relationship or any measure of loyalty. If the opportunity presented itself, rabbits would unashamedly do a Ryan Giggs and shag their sibling’s wife in a clandestine, decade-long relationship. They’d cheat on their lover too with an underwear model. Are these the values you’d like to instill in your kids?

Another clue: ‘THE rabbit’. If you’ve ever watched ‘Sex and the City’ or frequented a sex shop, you’ll know what I’m referring to. Also, do you remember that scene in ‘Friends’ where Ross casually converts a penis shaped birthday cake into a rabbit? Not such a big leap of association.

In a turn of events absolutely no one could have predicted, our two newest fluffy additions to the family (siblings, might I add) started engaging in distinctly after-dark activities for everyone to witness the other day. My five year old little brother asked me what they were doing. I froze and sat in silence for a minute, racking my brain for some PG explanation on how offspring is produced that wouldn’t also reveal my indignation and disgust. He stubbornly kept his gaze fixed on me in an ‘I-HAVEN’T-FORGOTTEN-THE QUESTION-I-JUST-ASKED-AND-I-WILL-STAND-HERE-UNTIL-YOU-ANSWER-ME’ gesture. I eventually panicked and begrudgingly told him they were… hugging. He sneered at my explanation, but I refused to elaborate beyond ‘they like each other a lot’.

I think that I speak within bounds when I say: whatever you do, DON’T GET YOUR KIDS A RABBIT! They’re deceptively cute, but don’t be fooled. 

Seeing the good in people… (mostly)

They say misery loves company, but sometimes it’s the company that makes you miserable.

In my first memory of M he was a quiet 2 year old with an enormous head. The son of a good friend of my mum’s, there was a time when he was often around. His presence was fairly innocuous, and for a toddler he was really quite well-behaved. I don’t recall any of the piercing cries otherwise associated with his age bracket, he didn’t pull stuff from off book cases, and nor did embellish the walls with crayon portraits. It is perhaps a little unfair then that having done nothing to be considered an object of irritation, my brother, also two years old at the time, refused to acknowledge his presence. I suppose M was a bit of a weird kid in some way that doesn’t lend itself to description.

Fast forward 15 years and M was once again in my life as a houseguest. This time, however, all I could think about was how to send him away. Out of our solar system. In what way did he deserve being made to orbit the moon? I had done a nice response to this and just want to sum up by saying – I’m not really sure. This guy just really drove me up the wall, and every night I’d find myself banjaxed at his spectacular audacity and bad manners. He is clothed in illusion of being the centre of the universe, and I suspect this is the cause of some of his more annoying habits.

Example: He thought out loud A LOT. To demonstrate his opinion on something he would, instead of formulating sentences, grunt, raise his eyebrows and puff air out of his nose. I was never sure what it meant, and I suspect he expected some kind of inquiry on our part, as if we somehow cared about whether he likes a certain salad dressing. We all see the world through our own tiny keyhole. It’s impossible not to be self-involved, but M misunderstood and thinks we all see the world through his keyhole.

Sometimes he would talk. Unfortunately, he’s only really capable of rude sarcasm, so it didn’t win him any favours. If only it were clever or funny sarcasm, it’d at least have been entertaining. Don’t you just hate it when someone is really arrogant and you have to drop their phones in the toilet and set their laptops on fire? Smugness can be overlooked in cases where the guilty party has something to back it up with, but M has an IQ fairly equivalent to his age in years. Or Snooki. Or any cast member of ’16 and pregnant’.

In all fairness I don’t particularly think M meant any malice when he interrupted conversations with his snarky comments. He just didn’t really know how to behave around others. This theory, as backed up by his father, made me think. I often wonder how well equipped I am to deal with the company of others. I say ‘wonder’, but the answer is fairly obvious: a social recluse, crowds and group situations often make me dizzy.  People who know me don’t necessarily call me weird, but many have called me a mystery. With this in mind, I decided to use my brain, realizing how arrogant it is to judge someone you don’t know. Naturally extremely compassionate, if I may say so myself, I decided to change my attitude towards M. As it turned out he was a lovely chap, and I almost miss him now that he’s gone (OK, that went too far). How’s this for personal growth, people??

“If we learn to open our hearts, anyone, including the people who drive us crazy, can be our teacher.” - Pema Chodron. Barfy, but sometimes true. 

Now for people who will always be assholes:

• People who treat small dogs like children – Don’t refer to them as such, and leave the sweaters. They have fur.
• People who stick gum on bus seats or under tables in bars.
• Courtney Stodden - The slutty ‘gift’ that keeps on giving.
• The guy who hogs the arm rest on the plane, and then proceeds to dig his elbow into your ribs for the duration of the flight. He is then suddenly shot when you shoot him suddenly.