In keeping with the recent “hateblog” reference in my college newspaper, I’ve decided to use it as a theme for the time being… or this post at least.

Pushy people. I met one in Boots only a couple of weeks ago while out shopping with my friend. We went in there so I could buy a hairclip at first, but then a pushy sales assistant walked up asking if we had Boots cards. My friend said she had, but had left it at home, to deter her from telling her to sign up for one. I, on the other hand, said no… and my reasoning for not having a Boots card was not because I wasn’t eager to save 4 cent on every euro I spend, but because I don’t spend money very regularly in Boots as it is to really justify having one. And not just having one, but carrying it in my purse along with stacks of other plastic cards I rarely use. Waterstones, Subway, Debenhams, Tesco, Dunnes, to name others I have, but rarely use. So when I said, “No thanks, I don’t spend enough money in here to justify one.” the sales girl would NOT take ‘No’ for an answer. She kept reiterating her point about 4c… well honey, I can find four cent just looking down the back of my car seat, or in an old handbag. Four cent isn’t really an enticement. I had to say no maybe three times, and coupled with trying to walk away from her, she seemed genuinely annoyed that I wasn’t willing to sign up. I’m sure this goes against company policy on some level because these people are like air stewards. They’re meant to maintain levels of perkiness the rest of us can only get if we received constant good news… like, “You’ve won the lottery!”, “Your clothes were drying on the line all day and it didn’t rain!”, “Here you go, I’ve found your house keys!”, etc. So that incident was enough for me to forget about buying a hairclip there, which is why we were in there in the first place. I left having made no purchase whatsoever. Her pushy attitude made me forget what I wanted to buy and that shop didn’t make money from me. Instead, Debenhams did. The next day I went back into town and, in avoiding Boots and their mad sales girl inside, I went to Debenhams and they got my money instead.

I don’t think people have to be pushy about signing up. Especially if the customer’s response is a politely put ‘No’ and backed up with a polite reason for why you’re not interested. 4 cent…? I mean, to wield any sort of payback with that card I would have to spend 400 euro in there. As a student as well, I mean… it’s totally unrealistic.

So people shouldn’t be so pushy. A no is a no, as politely and as inoffensively as it can be said. Take it graciously!!

And now this guy has been elected VP (I didn’t put him as my number 1 at all, I voted him 6th), he has his hands on everything. It’s almost complete control. A totalitarian campus!! I’m sure I’m the one of like… 2 people… who would give a shit about this. The communist in me says that 1 person can’t have 2 jobs. Especially 2 jobs that are a big deal and hold some power. Editor of the newspaper and VP are two big jobs.

I dunno… I’ve emailed him over the state of the newspaper, and he replied very politely. But I’m still not satisfied… I want to roll my sleeves up and rattle the fucking cage a little bit. The journalism in the paper is crap. It doesn’t ask or answer any question, it’s nicely blasé, full of meandering, half-hearted opinions… It could be so much more. I want the dean to write an article to contribute to the paper every edition, so we can read what he says about things. I want investigation… What’s wrong with departments? Faculty politics, any student robberies recently, why are we being called animals? What do the police have to say about us? What’s going on in the city? A new SU president has been elected, I want to see his manifesto challenged. How is he going to digitalise campus, how he is going to get our student cards to work like credit cards to buy food in campus restaurants etc.? What are the prospects for our graduates? Why do so many go abroad? Who cut the student grant percentile? Not just “Oh the government did.” Their should be a name, one woman or man to answer for it, and be interviewed and criticised.

And when I emailed the editor, now vice president, I got some typically watery response about how the newspaper should be an “escape” for readers, away from the academic light, away from the scholarly spotlight, how he wants to make it fun for students to read, and how his journalists don’t like writing about serious subjects and prefer to do “funny” things.

I don’t think this should be so. We should meet and surpass the standards of other campus newspapers of other universities. There should be no dumbing down. It’s embarrassing to compare our newspaper to what’s actually out there when it has the potential to be a lot more. And yeah, people prefer to write about light hearted things I suppose… but that’s no excuse. If you have a newspaper, its a mouthpiece for views and opinions, sharp, investigative journalism. We’re taking ours for granted. As it stands now it is effectively worthless.

I’m currently writing up a response to his email where I want to ask him if he gets paid to be the editor. If he’s accepting a salary to produce this… I mean, there is something DEFINITELY wrong in that case. The quality just isn’t there, no one should get paid to produce this.

This cover  confused me when I saw it.  The caption top right says “A historic photoshoot with the prince”. Usually words starting with a vowel or silent H have “an” in front of them. So shouldn’t it be “An historic…” rather than “A historic…”, the latter sounds odd to me. Plus the photo is so awkward. He looks hunched over. His face looks really big. Not his head, just his face. His bottom half seems tiny in comparison to his shoulders. He has barely any neck, which makes him look hunched. Its like his face is just onto his shoulder line. Which is a shame, because he’s meant to be a tall, well-built kind of guy… this cover just does not do him justice. Plus his thinning hair is suddenly a swathe of thick, dark dark brown. His hands in his pockets just tops it all off. They don’t really look like they’re in pockets at all, but his waist band.  The people at OK would have done so much better just to put him in a plain open blazer, open collar shirt, slightly untucked, a belt, and lighter colour pair of jeans so we can see that, ah yes, his hands are doing into his jeans pockets, not his waistband. The jeans here are too dark compared to the black shirt, so it makes it looks like there’s no pockets or anything.

My idea of the blazer is probably too formal since for some unexplainable reason, every Royal under the age of 40 wants to be seen as a come-day-go-day regular person. When they try to blend in with society, like this picture, it doesn’t work. So they should’ve dressed him up a little bit, not too formally, but just enough to say I’m the same as you, but not quite the same as you. Plus he has quite a nice smile-face, the photographer should’ve had him smiling more openly, and maybe not looking straight at the camera. I dunno, the whole thing is just a complete do-over.

This, a random snapshot that’s not even posed, works so much better…

If you stare at that for a while your eyes kinda go blurry…. And it might just be my defective subconscious screaming a message at me,  but I can see a heart if I look at it long enough…? Anyways! I still have 2 whole presentations to give. I’m suddenly anxious about one of them because I learned today that a smart American person who joined our class is doing his on the same artist as I’m doing, on the same day. So his will be infinitely better than mine… and I’m not being defeatist. So I’ll give my presentation on some light, fluffy aspect of Broodthaers’ art then he’ll take the podium after me, and give some massive, ground-shaking art historical cool thing I’ll have never thought of. Worst of all, we’ll have to both stand at the podium at the end and take questions from people. And he’ll probably answer everything better than I will and I’ll just be there… like a potato or something…… *potato*

Lots of work to do… and lots of “what are you doing with your future” talks with my dad lately. I got fed up of being asked so I told him I had no life plans, and that all I wanted was some aviator shades, to go off, do some drugs and listen to loud music, poolside on a sun lounger, sipping cocktails. He didn’t think that was very funny.

There are people in this world who actually get to live like that though. Anyways, the point I’m trying to get to… Dad always hmmm’s my idea of waitressing. Seriously. He shouldn’t. Shit always works out for waitresses…. according to nearly every movie and every fictional novel ever written about a waitress. Helen Hunt (in As Good As It Gets) served Jack Nicholsen… and her son got the best doctor care ever, got cured and she fell in love with Jack and they went to a bakery at 5 in the morning. And I wouldn’t mind dating Jack Nicholsen (the young version). I think its just because he’s a perfect bastard in real life and when a guy cut him off in traffic he got out of his car with a golf club and smashed his windscreen in. But that’s just testosterone… which is getting rarer than gold in today’s world.  I mean… yeah, you can’t go around breaking people’s stuff and yeah he messed with LSD and did filmed a whole movie whilst high…  But he paid for the damages to the car… I just think that its appealing in a bad-ass way. And he had a statue… a STATUE… of Meryl Streep in his garden because he was that into her. And his teeth are 100% natural born-that-way too. He didn’t need to pay an orthodontist when he was 13-14 like some of us mortals… *ahem*.

So hello, notorious bastard, hello perfect man.

]]> http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/2010/02/13/wanted-a-notorious-bastard-whos-into-sculpture/feed/ 0 unpaintedmasterpiece brick HKT.A.2009.116970.012 jack-nicholson http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/doctor-doctor/ http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/doctor-doctor/#comments Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:27:44 +0000 unpaintedmasterpiece http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/?p=461 ]]>

My Thursday… I woke up, had a shower, went out to buy an external hard drive, which looks like this, ta-daaa….. aaaaaaa….

I’ve never owned one before. They’re cute, and surprisingly light and small. It came in a lime green box.

So after that purchase, I went to find another random doctor who I had to go see. I had my final-Final doctor’s appointment for the car crash. Fourteen months or so? It’s taken ages but at long last, no more physicals or anything. I actually disliked this guy the most, because it wasn’t a story-telling thing, “Well we were driving along one sunny day, birds singing, Bambi prancing alongside the car winking at me, and suddenly then the car flipped over, the end”, it was more interview-y. Because he’s working for “an impartial third-party type deal”

…. so I had to answer really weird questions that HAD to be asked, even if the answers were obvious. For example, “Are you male, female or transgender?” and I’m sat there and even though I’m clearly A GIRL, I still had to say, “Female.” So that was odd. And it went back and forth like between the two of us for a while with questions and answers. Other things I got asked was, “What’s your weight?” (“A feather”), “What height are you?”, “Were you pregnant at the time of the accident?”, “Are you pregnant now?”, “Are you single, widowed, divorced or married?” “Any mental illness history in your family?”, “Are you schizophrenic?”, “Are you on any medication?”, “What was your last prescription?”, “Do you have a criminal record?”, “Do you have any STDs, STIs and/or similar?”.

So I spent time, time, out of my day, to tell someone “No” to all of those questions. Then when i said “I’m 5.7″ for my height he looked up and was all, “You are not. Stand up.” so I had to stand up and he’s like, “You’re 5.8 and three quarters. Tall girl.”  He was one of those people who talk like they’re talking to themselves rather than to you…  And when i said, “Single” to the marital questions he was like, “And stay that way for as long as you can. Trust me.” Anyhoo, then the physical… all fine, my body hasn’t fallen apart (*touch wood*), and I don’t need 7 years in med school to declare that.

Although it was totally awkward, when he got to my neck it was like, “Can I touch your neck?” and I dunno… It’s awkward when they ASK PERMISSION. Even though they’re doctors and its their job but…. don’t ask! just do it. That way no one has to feel awkward, it just gets done. Then there was one where I had to stand with my arms by my sides while he put one hand in the centre of my upper back and then one hand on the front of my chest… which, for a woman, is an Area. Like the Area below a guys belt. So he was like, “Do you mind if I touch you here?” and inside I’m dying like, don’t ask me just do your job. I’m mortiiiiiiiified. Because I have to answer, “No, I don’t mind” and that’s so weird to me… “No I don’t mind, its ok to touch me there.” O__O All the other doctors just did it… I dont know. He was old. I fucking blushed as usual anyway and just looked kinda up at the ceiling so there was no eye contact and we could all act like as normal and as uncomfortable as possible. Yay.

But anyways, they put one hand on your centre upper back, one hand pretty much between your boobs and they ask you to inhale as deeply as you can while they put light pressure against your chest. I don’t know what it proves… that you breathe in when there’s weight either side of your lungs maybe…  It all made for a very awkward time anyways. The point is I’m good.

Then I got rained on. And walked frigging MILES to my lecture, arrived late, and my hair dripped all over my notes on the page for the whole hour and I sat in the back row of the class on my own because I felt like such a wet, distracting, post-doctor’s-office bag woman, the end.

]]> http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/doctor-doctor/feed/ 0 unpaintedmasterpiece 100_2336 doctor http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/just-do-it/ http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/just-do-it/#comments Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:01:35 +0000 unpaintedmasterpiece http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/?p=435 ]]>

Thought I fell out of my itunes until I remembered to listen to “Never Again”. I’m not going to say who sings it, people will judge my music tastes.

I want to bitch about my kitchen’s oven. I have a full day off tomorrow so I’m not even going to do work tonight so I have time to take a picture and show…

This is one of the dials on my oven. It has four functions, all of which are completely incomprehensible.  These little signs around the edge are totally favoured towards the illiterate who have a good visual vocabulary so that they’re able to understand what these images are meant to signify.

I can read words, not microscopic vague diagrams. And I’ve lived with this kind of oven and its diagrams for 3 years. There is a zero at the top, which probably means “nothing”. You turn it to the right and there’s a circle with lines coming out of it. Lightbulb? Yes, it turns the light on in the oven. Now, the SECOND one. What the blue hell is that please? Three years and I don’t know what that oven function is. I’ve never ever used it. It’s a fan, with a tear drop coming from it. What’s that meant to do, it cooks water? It dries itself? For things that are watery and need to be cooked? What? The third is just as ambiguous. It took me a full year before I was brave enough to use this one because I didn’t know what it meant. It’s a square, with a circle in it then a 3-pointed cross-type thing. Only by turning it on would you realise, “Oh, its the fan oven.” The fourth is again, a square, with zigzag type lozenges pointing downwards. This is actually the grill, but it doesn’t scream, “THE GRILL!! IT’S THE GRILL!!” at me. I might be domestically retarded, maybe other people find this easy. But those images don’t tell me anything and why not just have it in writing rather than images, so it would go “Nothing, Lightbulb, Ambiguous Cooking Water Function, Fan Oven, Grill.”

Why am I talking about this. Because all I wanted tonight was my 3/4 quarter length pj pants, pink slippers and baggy shirt. To make chicken dippers with barbeque sauce, a pizza and watch Family Guy on my bed whilst eating them all like a… I don’t even think I could assimilate myself to an animal… I’m my own species when I get like that.

Anyways, getting back to the point, I threw the pizza and chicken dippers in. And because the dial is SO UNCLEAR I accidentally put it to GRILL (the triangles) when I meant fan oven. I then go away to load up Family Guy, come back and my pizza is BLACK because the grill is on and not the fan oven >__< So I had a partially burnt pizza. And then Family Guy wouldn’t load. So I looked to the ceiling and said, “God, all I want is a pizza, chicken dippers, barbeque sauce, a glass of water and Family Guy. Come on.” then went back out to the kitchen. I went to take a bit of pepperoni off of the pizza and I accidentally dropped it. And the first pepperoni is always the best =(

I had a huge debate with myself as to whether or not I should have pizza. But fuck it, why deprive oneself? And that goes for all things. Don’t listen to anyone, live life. It’s not about restricting yourself, there’s no yellow tape. Criminals. Do they give a fuck what anyone thinks? No! They get into trouble for it, but they live their lives without boundaries and Must Not Do This Because Something Said I Can’t. They indulge themselves with pizza, murder and common thievery!  Like who actually SAYS you can’t steal a loaf of bread? The “law”, but the law only stands on society… so if everyone just went to the shop and took a loaf of bread and walked out, it wouldn’t be illegal, because EVERYONE would be doing it. Not that I’m saying I’m about to go klepto over some bread or anything, it’s just a good example. I just think we should all allow ourselves a bit more freedom than we do. Dance to your own beat, or whatever. Or like the Nike ad, Just Do It.

]]> http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/2010/01/26/just-do-it/feed/ 0 unpaintedmasterpiece Photo0113 http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/im-top-of-the-food-chain-but-not-the-key-chain/ http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/2010/01/23/im-top-of-the-food-chain-but-not-the-key-chain/#comments Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:18:22 +0000 unpaintedmasterpiece http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/?p=426 ]]>

So today was Saturday. Went grocery shopping with my dad at about 1 o clock and managed to lose the house keys. As in, they slipped off of my dad’s car keys and fell to the ground and neither of us noticed because we spent the entire duration of grocery shopping bickering on and off. He kept annoying me and I was being nasty about one of our dogs because she had barked at me that morning. I know it seems totally stupid, but I wasn’t in the mood to be barked at like I was a stranger by my own damn pets. Its like when the dog you own snaps at you… my philosophy says “Starve it out of punishment for a day and a half”, my dad’s philosophy says, “Be nice to it unconditionally so they all think they can bite you whenever they feel like it because they’re our beloved pets.” I love animals but I’m the human. I’m  top of the food chain, so they should work by my rules. My dad thinks differently.

So, to put it into context, that’s what sparked off my dad and I bickering and we didn’t notice that the house keys had come off his car keys. We had gone to 2 different supermarkets, and walked to 3 separate shops. Didn’t realise the keys were gone until we got home to our door. We were still bickering like, “You should train that stupid bloody dog not to bark at me like I’m about to rob this place.” and he was all, “You look like a damn thief anyway with that bloody hat on.” (I was wearing a beanie because my hair was shit and I didnt have anything to clip it up with). So I was like, “Omg, I can’t believe you went there You’re so insulting…” blah blah.

I didn’t have my house keys with me, I had left them in my apartment 40 to 50 miles away. And the keys I would need to get into my apartment anyway were IN the house. So we were like, “Amg where are the keys!!” and luckily I remembered I had seen something silvery on the ground near our car once we were reversing out of our car spot in the second carpark we were in. But I never thought “Oh wow, they’re our keys.”, who would? It was in the distance, it looked like nothing, I just remembered it because it was a silvery bunch. It just looked like a piece of foil from a wrapper or something. It’s worth pointing out that we don’t keep spares… yeah, we’re that kind of unprepared/disorganised household.

Jumped back into the car.. and honestly, I’ve never been in the car with my dad driving so fast.  A journey that takes about 20 mins at his usual donkey-trot speed, he did it in 6 mins. I hate fast driving, but the situation was exceptional so I went with it. But if we didnt get those keys, we’d have absolutely no way of getting into the house. Anyways, went back to the spot, and by luck they were still there on the ground. Spare keys are going to be made now. Lesson learned. And maybe don’t go around the place all distracted by trivial arguments about a dog barking at you and blah blah.

I also want to add this as it made me laugh:

Facebook, how annoying. I don’t mind old friends adding me, its interesting to see what they’re like now and stuff. But one girl has added me and we were friends when we were like… 8, usual thing, went to the same school/parents were friends etc. (and we’re very distantly related to each other through cousins or something) So I accepted her add, only to see that she’s suddenly in this band (that’s a duo). Which doesn’t surprise me because I knew she went to a performing arts school, but still. If you asked me, “What do you think she’s doing right now?” I wouldn’t say, “Here’s her band’s myspace: http://www.myspace.com/kicaberry“.  I don’t ever recall her playing a musical instrument when we were kids or singing, but I suppose these things can spawn in your teenage years instead of your childhood. She’s the girl behind the guy. I find it hard to give this the gravitas it might deserve because I can remember going to the swimming pool with her, and playing a game where we both held hands and were meant to run and jump into the pool together. Only, when we ran and got to the edge, I chickened out, stopped running and didn’t jump. She, however, jumped, still holding my hand, and because I didn’t let go, she just hit off the edge of the pool instead of landing clean into the water. Then she got hurt and cried, the end. Always thought that moment said a lot about my kind of personality… Anyhoo, I think she’s a drummer.

It snowed recently. It was pretty while it lasted, people were having snowball fights. Embarrassingly, I was watching a group of people throwing snowballs around from my apartment’s kitchen window, and I must’ve been staring hard because a guy stopped and looked up and made that hand signal you do that means “Hey, come down and join”. And I shook my head and waved my hands in a “no its ok” way, which also translated as, “I’m incredibly shocked and embarrassed that you caught me watching you all, like I’m a hermetic loner here in my kitchen”. So I said no. Besides, there’s no hand signal known to man which could mean, “I would play, but I don’t know you, and you’re all playing very roughly, throwing it at each other’s faces when really these things should be targeted waist-or-lower. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye. And besides, I’m not wearing the right shoes. So thanks anyway!”

In a parallel universe somewhere, I signaled a “Yeah ok!”, went down to him, ran across the snow, he threw a snowball at me, I threw one at him, we kissed and it was love. The end.

In other news, here in the non-parallel world where we shy away from boys, my preoccupation right now is my right foot, which is all achey and sore. I can walk on it fine but it hurts a little, I might have strained it. Hmm. And, as of this morning, my back is sore. I might have slept weird.

I bought the Pussycat Dolls workout DVD. I’m so unfit, I tried it out last night at like… half eleven in a ponytail and my pyjamas. Anyways, I got through the warm up and had to pause and go to the kitchen for water and to catch my breath. It’s annoying that our college gymnasium is not open. Honestly, it’s making me resort to a commercialised workout DVD which isn’t really a workout at all, but a Stripper 101 module in diguise! Instead of my own tredmill and ipod, I have Robin Antin jumping around shouting on my plasma screen saying, “Lift that booty! Lift that booty! Pop it pop it pop it, uh uh uh!” And this is her on the right next to Kim K, ahoy:

And she, Robin Antin, is the boss ho of all these hos:

The Pussycat Dolls themselves. That’s me there, the blond centre right. And yes, to answer your question, the Pussycat Dolls workout DVD gave me that body. In the 15 minutes I could manage of a 59 min workout, I managed to carve that stomach and those thigh definitions. Nah, in truth tho… Yes its very stripper-y, but it brings out your fun side doing it. And Antin and her ho squad are doing these stripper-esque exercises in heels. How do they not fall over.

]]> http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/2010/01/17/hos-foes-and-woes/feed/ 0 unpaintedmasterpiece kim-and-robin_472x688 Pussycat Dolls http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/postsecret/ http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/2010/01/11/postsecret/#comments Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:45:36 +0000 unpaintedmasterpiece http://unpaintedmasterpiece.wordpress.com/?p=399 ]]> sometimes I read postsecret and come across ones where I think you know the person who sent it in, or that it strongly relates to them!

I think I’m a very jumpy sort of person. I’m alone this weekend in the apartment so I did some vacuuming and I was pushing it back and forth over the floor like you’re meant to and I got to thinking, “God, I’m alone in here. What if a weirdo killer guy similar to that from Prom Night or Red Eye was in the apartment right now and I don’t know and he’s standing behind me while I’m vacuuming because the vacuum is making a lot of noise and I wouldn’t hear him there or anything, or have time to react.” or words to that effect, and then the vacuum stopped making its usual noise and started making a very sudden, different, frightening noise and my heart stopped and turned around to the door thinking it was someone behind me when obviously the sound was from the vacuum cleaner because I had sucked up a weird piece of plastic.

So… I freak myself out. This also happened New Years night. About ten mins past midnight, I got out of bed (yeah, I go to bed on NYE, sad) to go get a glass of water. And I hate going downstairs in the dark, so I was feeling a bit scared, plus there was an old family friend who at the time I was thinking of looking up in the obituaries online to see if he’d died (cuz he was old and we haven’t heard from him in a long time and since then its turned out he has actually died, which was sad to find out) and I was thinking about death and shit while getting out of bed, which is always bad, plus on top of this… the family friend was actually a priest, so in my head I’m making connections like “church, religion, are there ghosts, Heaven, what” whilst going downstairs so I’m already a bit on edge.

So, with the thought of all this, I turn all the lights on the way to the kitchen. As soon as I flicked the switch for the kitchen light the lightbulb popped loudly and a fuse blew so the whole house was plunged into darkness, and that, along with the thoughts of how creepy it is for priests to die, it was enough to make me run out of the kitchen screaming. Like, the quintessential girliest, lasting, high pitched,scream I’ve ever pulled off. And I ran screaming for my dad, who came out of his room thinking I was in trouble and then when he found out it was just a fuse that had blown he gave the big, “You mustn’t do that to me, frightened me half to death, I thought you were being murdered” lecture and I’m giving the big, “I thought it was a ghost or something” lecture, and he’s countering it with his “Ghosts don’t exist, stop being afraid of the dark” lecture and yadda yadda yadda I’m a great big jumpy wussbag: a lightbulb and now a vacuum cleaner can now prove this.