Europhiliac

Hooray and yippie and welcome!

(maybe more later)

Me me me...

I feel. I have feelings.

Maybe they don't matter much, maybe they are secondary to other people's feelings because of the way things are and the way I have chosen things.

But they're real enough to me.

Fuck you. You you you.

Yahoo Messenger 6.0 Beta

is freaking great!

The new smileys are the best! The old smileys are better!

You can dress your avatar in an MJ shirt.

And you can put individual people on invisible, how bloody cool!

Ja so get it.

Women's interests

The other day as I was leafing thru women's magazines at the newsagent's, I realised yet again that none of the subjects treated therein interest me in the slightest. They are superficial, trivial, downright idiotic even and I cannot help looking down on people who are interested in them.

What's in fashion this season (and make sure you're not seen wearing something "last year"!), how to put on your mascara (and which brand to buy), what Posh is gonna do about Becks and a glimpse of Tara Palmer-Tomkinson's knickers, the sex position of the week and how to make sure you've got the right man (and how to keep him).

Dreadfully boring and horribly irrelevant. It makes me wonder, are women really interested in that?? Well apparently they are - at least according to Andreas Lebert, editor of German women's mag Brigitte: "Women's mags are about fashion, cosmetics and cooking because women enjoy those things." Oh puke, give me a break!
How utterly depressing!

Heeheehee

Launchcast Radiooooo

I love it love it love it! I am fucking addicted to it!!

(um, Launchcast is Yahoo's wonderful webstream radio thingy that comes with new Yahoo messenger)

My own station is the very best of course and if you have the software you can listen to it right here, hehe.

I have never...

Stolen this from Vega (who is back so visit her site!).
The things I have never done are in bold.

I've never been drunk
I've never smoked pot
I've never kissed a member of the opposite sex
I've never kissed a member of the same sex
I've never crashed a friend's car
I've never been to japan
I've never been to europe
I've never ridden in a taxi
I've never been in love
I've never been dumped
I've never shoplifted
I've never been in a fist fight
I've never had a threesome
I've never snuck out of my house
I've never pissed on myself (I'm sure I have, but not since I was a kid)
I've never been arrested
I've never made out with a stranger
I've never been on a blind date
I've never lied to a friend
I've never had a crush on a teacher
I've never skipped school
I've never thrown up in public
I've never purposely set a part of myself on fire
I've never eaten sushi (unfortunately I have)
I've never been happy with myself
I've never met a movie star
I've never cheated in any test/exams
I've never confessed my feelings to anyone before
I've never run away from home
I've never been on a stage

New Smileys & Launchcast tragedy

Right, so first off, as already mentioned, with the new Yahoo messenger came new smileys (and many of the old ones have changed, some for the better, some for the worse). So I had to update my own smileys as well of course. We now have 8 new smileys at our disposal:

Ja and then the shocking LAUNCHcast revelation earlier today! I was happily listening to my station, then all of a sudden - silence! So I check what's wrong and I get this: "you have listened to over 400 songs this month. for the rest of the month your free service will be reduced" How dare they!?! The limitations are: no more skipping, no customized radio and only low quality. So that's the end of that eh - esp. considering it's only the 4th of the month! And I only started using it on the 2nd! Yeah so since I'm addicted now (the bastards) and finding my Winamp playlist extremely unsatisfying, I might have to subscribe at "only" $2.99 a month.

Celebrity Obsession

(from News  magazine)

TV presenter Davina Mccall looked sensational in her scarlet, figure-hugging Baftas gown - we found out how she lost the baby weight after giving birth to her second daughter, Tilly... p. 14

So you turn to page 14 and you read the main caption:

Wow! Davina at the Baftas showing she's shaped up nicely - by healthy eating and exercise.

No REALLY now.

My latest obsession and other stuff

LAUNCHcast is bad, LAUNCHcast is evil, LAUNCHcast is the work of the devil and LAUNCHcast will be my downfall. Ja so LAUNCHcast is my latest obsession, and they took it from me the bastards, and I had numerous horrifying withdrawal symptoms all afternoon. Then I found I could listen to squiZZstation at least by using a different Yahoo ID... but tho squiZZstation is quite good my own is of course much better, so withdrawal symptoms were increasing manifold. So with the help of squiZZ and his cheating ways I subscribed to LAUNCHcast (which is available only in US and Canada apparently) and now I'm back in business, woohoo, and have wasted quite a few hours rating and customizing.

In other news... I've been planning to write a serious "opinionated" entry all day, but wasn't quite sure about what, so asked anyone that came my way, but it's still pretty much undecided, so feel free to cast your vote... the options are as follows:
1. EU (following up on the recent Europhiliac entry)
2. love (non-existence of)
3. smileys (and communication problems)
4. torture (sadism, cynicism and hypocrisy)
Ja that's it. Yet again I've wasted a day doing next to nothing. How nice.

Torture and why I'm not surprised

Ja so here's my Torture entry... not about the Jacksons song but about what has been happening in Iraq. There has been this huge worldwide outcry with everyone acting all shocked and surprised, and I'm just like, uh yeah!? That's what happens eh.

And quite fittingly, as I went to the BBC News site to find a link for the Iraq thing, I found this linked from the main page: Is it in anyone to abuse a captive? Aaand the first person the article quotes is Philip Zimbardo, whom attentive ClarissaBlog readers (haha) may remember as the initiator of the Stanford Prison Experiment. Lesson learnt there: people tend to become sadistic when they are in a position of power and these situations quickly develop their own dynamics, esp. under the influence of peer pressure. Interesting also the Milgram experiment about obedience and the effect of authority.

So: is it surprising to hear about the cases of torture, and the (daily increasing) extent of it? Of course it's shocking, esp. the cynicism of seeing the same behaviour repeated in the very torture cellars where Saddam's regime had raged for so long. But it certainly isn't surprising. The fact that these soldiers' behaviour is not seen as legitimate by their regime has little influence on the concrete situation on site, which follows its own rules.

Incidentally, just a few weeks ago I came across the investigations of local paper Toledo Blade about the atrocities committed by an elite fighting unit in Vietnam. Same thing, different war. It's definitely interesting to read what those involved in those events have to say (if you have a few spare hours). The authors got the Pulitzer prize for their report btw.

Various opinions - the short versions

Love is nothing but an illusion necessary for human procreation and child-rearing, a biochemical process at best. Humans are self-important pricks who can't face the fact that the only reason we're alive is to create more of our kind - just like ants or birds.

The EU is really quite a good thing (despite the inevitable problems involved anywhere lots of people try to make something work together), and the constant whingeing of the Euroskeptics is getting on my tits. Why are people so darn short-sighted? The EU is quite possibly gonna fail because of this and they'll all regret it later, mark my words.

Smileys I've always considered a very cool means of online communication - I liked the conciseness and even the possible ambiguity. But when people have vastly different ideas on what a smiley is meant to express, huge misunderstandings can ensue. So maybe smileys aren't so good.

Bonus opinion: Einstein apparently said something like "humans are a bad invention" and he was very right. He also said "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe," and he was even righter there. Einstein was a very wise man.

Free supplementary rant: I truly hate people who can't spell. I wish I could initiate a worldwide literacy campaign.

Guess what!? - What?

I squiZZ.

Fucking hell

Talk about a quick mood shift!

I was feeling fiiine, was gonna do a long diary entry... then made the mistake of digging out something that I really should have left alone, and now I feel all weird and all wrong.

All wrong. And I don't even really know why. I couldn't put it into words (which is why I'm not), it's just a feeling of... wrongness. How strange. It's late, I think I will go to bed.

(This has got to be the most pointless entry ever. But I felt I had to write something  tonight.)

Inventory

The Difference

Some days I decide I won't bother with my dissertation, so I just hang around being lazy and that's cool.

And some days like today I resolve to do lots of work on it, but I still hang around being lazy, with the sole difference that I feel guilty about it.

I suck

I'm surprisingly good at doing things wrong.

Socially inept? Thoughtless?

I'm sorry.

Tell me something I don't know

This whole Iraq torture business... doesn't move me one bit. Doesn't surprise me, doesn't shock me, doesn't even outrage me. All it does is confirm yet again so many of my convictions about the human race. I wouldn't quite say 'I didn't expect anything less from them' but the fact that this has been happening, has (partly at least) been done on orders, has been fairly widely known up to the highest layers of the hierarchy... all it elicits from me is " mhm, so?"

Am I too jaded? Too cynical? They're not even rhetorical questions, I'm really wondering. Not that I can change anything about the way I feel. I always end up being proven right in these matters anyway. *lol*

Muahahaha-hehehehe

Googly-google, coochie-cooo!!!!

(help meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee)

I suck II

How can you feel something and know it is complete rubbish yet you can't help feeling it all the same? Is there some sort of communication block between... er, the emotions part of the brain and the reason part?

I wish I got myself. It was all so simple when I was 12. Anyway I've decided I'm on another 12hr Will You Be There marathon. Seems to me it's a safe place to be. Nice and familiar.

EmJay Love

So was doing that WYBT thing again last night and lay in bed listening to the most wonderful music in the whole world and it hit me again

1. how fucking amazing Michael Jackson really is
2. how damn lucky I am to have him in my life and to be able to enjoy his music and his presence and his influence
3. how he really is almost Godlike to me in many ways
4. how almost all of what I have now - friends especially - I have thanks to him
5. how there will never be anything that surpasses WYBT and how I am convinced that in 200yrs they will still appreciate his music the way my Wolfgang's still is today

Ja. All these things. And then today I came online and lo and behold, both Dee and Kal have done an MJ love entry too. How spooky.

Site Update!

Hooray! I've spent the whole fucking day at the PC doing next do nothing (mainly chatting to delicious Dee and lovely Lo actually, and occasionally to the P... I mean sexy squiZZ when he wasn't, like, working on boring essay).

Ja but I've also done some updating here - admire the squiZZhands above (muahaha), and I've also changed the splash page to this colourful thing - maybe some day I will add funky hover tooltips. That's it for now. Hehe.

Oozing creativity

Sooo... been to town and bought stuff (mainly cool trousers), then came back, stole some ideas from the Net and made funky T-shirts... check them out:

The 2nd one says "growing old is mandatory, growing up is optional" (is kinda hard to read, but looks a bit better in real life, hehe). The 1st one has the Windows Bliss wallpaper as a background, which looks rather smashing if you ask me. I rock! *lol* And hooray for cheap Primark clothes!

[edit] sunshine!!! beach here I come!!! [/edit]

Disturbing normality

India's just had elections. At least 45 people died. Not a big deal right? Just the usual violence. Spiegel Online sort of brings it up as an afterthought, BBC doesn't mention it at all. Fucking hypocrisy. A dead person is a dead person.

I've added hover effects to the splash page. I rather like them. Simple but nice and effective. I've also been to the beach, only for an hour, but was very nice.

I got a letter from my bank this morning. They're offering me a graduate loan at a rather good rate... it is extremely tempting. I shouldn't, it's bad, evil, and everything I never wanted, but well yeah it's an interesting idea and if I don't have a job by the time we renew our lease I may well have no choice anyway.

Sunshine tho. I love sunshine. I also love squiZZ, and I have to say wow & fucking hell @ him managing to write more or less 8000 words in sth like 2 days. That is very impressive (and I am not so bad at leaving things until last minute myself). Ja so and all that. (not that I condone the practice of leaving things until last minute of course. in theory)

Yeah and sunshine. Anyway am off to Lidl now to buy cheapy pizza, hehe.

WHEEEEE - I'm moving back!!!!

Hehehehehehehe

We're keeping our banking secrecy!!!!

THAT is mighty cool! (I know none of you give a fuck, lol)

I suck III

Had to be said for the sake of... things.

Consistency?

Aye.

The Gif

This entry is dedicated to Dee and Tris. (for various reasons, you know why)

Oh so tired

I'm almost packed up and everything (did I mention I'm going to Glasgow tomorrow? *lol*) so I guess I could go to bed... but then I'll wake up at sth like 6am and collapse tomorrow night at 10pm or sth. I'm sure that would be appreciated.

Am travelling from my beloved Gatwick tomorrow. I dunno why, but to me Gatwick is the coolest London airport, hehe. My mum freaked out when she heard that I'm off to Glasgow again - like, seriously, "why did you have to ruin my evening" and all. Why did I tell her? I dunno, I didn't realise it was still that big a deal, I thought she'd finally accepted my, um, obsession. The more she rants about it, the more obsessed I'll get, just to piss her off.

I hated customers a lot again today. I hope they all die. How dare they do their shopping at the supermarket I work at!? God why am I so tired? Think I'll finalise my packing now and hit the sack (ugh I hate that expression). Byebye, see you round y'all.

PS Woooo, WYBT just came on my Launch! That's the 2nd time today!

Hello how are you

squiZZ would like me to quote this in my diary entry...

Imagine pageant
In my head the flesh seems thicker
Sandpaper tears corrode the film

Open fire on the needs designed
On my knees for you
Open fire on my knees desires
What I need from you

Um yeah apart from that I dunno what to say really. I just kinda felt I ought to update since no one seems to be commenting on my previous entry anymore and I crave comments.

I wanna be 12 again.

Snigger

Cyber-Satans plague online church

The world's first Internet church has fallen victim to a plague of virtual demons, some of whom have been logging on as Satan and unleashing strings of expletives during sermons.

Very amusing don't you agree?
We're @ squiZZhome btw, is sunny outside... but we're online.
Was sunny outside, is windy now, says squiZZ, who is eating my sour skittles.

Byeeee!

Well I can always tell myself...

... at least I'm not in Luxembourg.

And I have the "holding Ctrl while clicking popup links" disease again.

I dunno...

... you think I should tidy this place?

Substitution

So apparently whatever I do and like is a substitute for something else... Michael Jackson fandom, substance abuse, binge eating, squiZZ (and previous) obsessions, you name it - they're all things I indulge in because I lack something... something better, something real.

But the question is, how will I know when I've found the real thing!? The one that isn't a substitute for anything? What defines that? Doesn't it all go round in circles - we're perpetually chasing something that we can't ever attain, so we fill the void with whatever replacements we can get hold of. Then we die.

Blowjob

is my No1 search engine keyword.

By far.

As far as I'm aware there is no mention of the word anywhere on my site, and Google agrees.

I am so lost. Anyone care to enlighten me?

Only for TrisTris

So stay away the rest of ya!

Ernesto "Che" Guevara

I got rid of my "Live & Learn" category when I split up my blog earlier this year, but I thought I'd do an entry for it today anyway. The reason I've decided to write an entry about Che is that I'm a big fan and have often been asked who the fuck that guy is (especially in this country), and the reason I am writing now is this article about Walter Salles' homage to Che and its success in Cannes.

You know what would be cool

If I could wrap a hair around the little guy in my coffin ring and then that person would die or something.

I wanna have superpowers.

Accident

I wanna go and see if there's dead people or gore or sth but

1. They say one is not supposed to do that and
2. I am too lazy (main reason really)

A very pleasant morning

Got woken up at 9.30 by the postman - now you might think that was a bad start, and so did I at first, but then I looked out the window at the immaculately cloudless sky and decided it was a sign. Sooo I quickly washed my hair and disappeared to the beach, where I roasted in the sun for about 90mins before returning home, having a quick shower, covering myself in aftersun lotion and, er, sitting down at my PC.

I have a problem. I really hate wearing bras. They make me feel claustrophobic and suffocating, and my current stomach issues aren't improving things. I'm gonna have the saggiest tits in a few years' time. I guess I could look into those adhesive pad things. Or have a double mastectomy? Or have plastic surgery once they start sagging too much.

There's your "random bit of into you didn't know about me" for the day. I think I shall get ready for work now or sth. I'm in such a good mood I don't even mind playing checkout girl for 6 hours! (tho that doesn't mean I won't get bored and annoyed about an hour into my shift...)

Describe me in 160chars

Sorta modified version of a meme I found a while back on Skyler's LJ. Is mainly out of personal interest tho. I was trying to describe myself the other day, wondering what defined me - my job, my tastes, my convictions, my experience... and I wasn't really sure so I thought I'd see what other people think.

You're not meant to suck up to me so please be honest. What would you tell someone who asked you "so who's this Clarissa person?" The 160chars limit is arbitrary - I had to find some limit and one SMS length sounds as nice as anything else. 35 words if you prefer that.

[edit] I bet no one's gonna fucking bother. Y'all better do this you punks! [/edit]

I dreamt...

... I was visiting my nan with the whole family and my brother broke my mobile and I freaked out and had a shouting match with my father.
... I pierced my nose (myself) using squiZZ's blue tongue piercing (his suggestion) and it looked rather too big and my mum made me remove it.
... I was making a living buying fucked up horses and training them and selling them on at great profit.
... of Hanson's song Weird (no idea where it came in, but I had it in my head when I woke up. so had to download and listen)

Fascinating uh? Do you think I sleep too much? Sunshine so guess where I'm off to now...

This is me... then.

Thought I've give you some pics of myself for a change. Not done any of these in ages as I've been hating myself rather a lot recently, but thought I'd give it a go today (better than doing all that stuff I ought to be doing) and some of them weren't so bad I guess.

Being bitchy

I don't like being difficult and a bitch. I mean I'd rather not be, if I could really control it, and I am well aware I sometimes turn nasty on the wrong people at the wrong time, and I feel bad about that afterwards. (provided I care about them in the first place. I don't give a fuck if I don't like them anyway. Why not let my frustration out on them?)

And I guess I'm mainly being a bitch when I feel hurt and insecure and paranoid. Not that that's an excuse. But I ain't really evil. I'm just complicated. I think I'm only realising that now really. The complicatedness I mean - or the full extent of it. It makes me feel sometimes, but then again I think why the fuck not? Everyone's being fucking complicated, so why can't I? Exactly.

So then I turn into a bitch sometimes. I still think I'm doing ok most of the time, or at least trying to. I try not to take out my shitty moods on other people unless they've done something to piss me off (tho it may have been unintentional if they did, I admit). And I am working hard on putting things in perspective... and apologizing when I realize I've messed up again.

But sometimes it don't work eh. Mea culpa, I suck big time and all that. In my next life I'll try not to let shit get to me. *lol* In the meantime you'll have to deal with the flawed me, just as I do. *lol*

Horrendous

So I've been wanting to do a Requiem layout for a while now.. originally of course it was gonna be much more elaborate and all new and different from the current one, but as usual laziness won in the end so is just a slight variation again, and a pretty horrible colourscheme as well. But for now it will do. At least it's dark.

Been shopping today. Found some cool stuff for £1 and so on. Went to the beach (no sunburn, how boring) and finally sent the application form for "that job" (sorry, link gone as deadline over, hehe). I knew I'd forgotten sth important (well I always do) and realised about 2hrs on that I hadn't dated the application form. Ah well. Didn't bother me so much at that point (just another job I won't get - wouldn't have got it anyway) but then tonight it all turned into a huge tragedy again. Am over that too by now tho. I'm just sooo damn unstable these days.

I've also booked my Eurotunnel trip for Tuesday (am going to Lux next week, to collect and sort some stuff and "celebrate" my mum's Bday and the anniversary of my dad's death). Fucking £45 that cost me. Same again on the way back, and petrol on top. *sigh* What a fucking joke.

Yeah so I'm reading Vernon God Little at the moment and it's making me cuss rather a lot (tho he spells it "fucken", to be cool). I hate it tho, the book I mean, it's one of them "too many hardships to make it even remotely believable" stories. It got all sorts of prizes, and is being hailed as the new Catcher in the Rye (which I hate too - I should have known eh), but it's just such a damn frustrating read, and absolutely not credible (yet I can't put it down cuz I do want to know how it ends).

I also hate pseudo-precocious-yet-totally-uneducated first person narrators like Vernon - he doesn't know the word paradigm yet he's having all these deeply insightful thoughts about what everyone around him is vainly pursuing in life. Yes I'm aware you can be smart yet not manage well at school, but when you're smart you should at least be interested in what's going on around you and try to walk through life open-minded. Actually I don't give a fuck what pseudo-precocious little boys in Texas do, but I want my narrators to be more interesting than that.

Er yeah enough about that. No one cares about my book reviews. It's just that I've been kinda disappointed with a lot of books I've read recently. Gimme some good stuff damnit! Ah well, I still have quite a few to go. I recommend the Virgin Suicides and The Curious Incident... (just so I don't end on a negative note and all). That's all. Now bugger off or I'll turn into a bitch again.

Don't say the news ain't funny!

Radical islamic preacher Metin Kaplan disappears after a German court ruled yesterday that he can be extradited to Turkey. So now they're frantically searching for him and looking for a scapegoat to blame his disappearance on. Apparently it's no one's fault. *giggle*

Questionnaire about squiZZ

squiZZ is forcing me to do this. Have to do it here cuz he won't let me use my beloved Yahoo smileys on his comments. (his entry here)

A day without smileys

So d says I am overdoing it with the smileys.
Ok everyone says I'm overdoing it but d said just now when I asked him.
So I rise to the challenge. One day without smileys. On Yahoo and on here.
Good thing I'm working 4-9 tomorrow. *hehe*

[edit]1min later... I've already failed *lmao*[/edit]

It is a miracle!

I got back from work almost 2 hours ago and have been online since and so far I have not been bored!!! I don't think I've had that in months!! This is due 1stly to many people being online to chat to, and 2ndly to the latest B3ta newsletter (which I have now finished reading, which is why I am updating here...)

It's sad in a way uh? If I find online so boring then why am I here? Because I have nothing else to do, and can't be arsed finding anything. I've had lots of random deep thoughts at various points over these past few days but I never wrote them down and now they're all gone. Ah well. It's raining outside and I'm feeling a bit weird again so maybe I should just leave and go to bed and read Brick Lane.

There. Updated. Happy?