Budapest.

What a lovely place to go on holiday.
The architecture is like Disneyland but real.
They are also quite nice to their homeless people, and buskers have people with bubble guns to give them a mystical aura while they sing.

Putting on stupid voices ALL THE TIME

My Mum has a German girl staying with her. (I'm not sure why, I tried to ask the German girl herself but she just started talking about the German A-Level system.)
Anyway, this has made me notice that I put on stupid voices constantly. Not just when I'm doing impressions of somebody, although this is often the case, but just to jazz up my sentences a bit. For example I might say 'Bob can you move up a bit' in an Australian accent for no particular reason, or 'Mum can you pass the salt' in a really deep voice. Whenever I do things like this, the German girl peers at me. She just gives me a good old peer, as if to say 'Why are you talking in that weird voice?'. This makes me feel awkward, so I start putting on my 'awkward' voice, which I normally like to save for one of those situations where a conversation between two of your friends is threatening to escalate into an argument. The 'awkward' voice is very nasal. I think it's meant to be funny but I can't be sure.
Also in my repertoire is the 'best friend' voice, which I like to save for my oldest friend. That's a pretty weird voice, it's very high and makes you sound really thick. But the German girl will probably never hear that voice. She ain't my buddy.
(See? I even do it when I'm typing. That was meant to sound like Samuel L. Jackson.)
(Also I would like to clarify that the German girl is quite nice. I just don't really understand her and she definitely doesn't understand me, so there isn't much of a foundation for a firm friendship there.)

The Best Cuddly Toy I Have Ever Cuddled

I don't normally go gooey over cuddly toys but oh my god this panda.It is so soft and strokable, and just the right length so you can cradle it, and the soles of its feet are inexplicably red and it just looks so happy.

My Fight Club Alter-Ego

The other day I watched Fight Club for the first time. I rather liked it, and not just because Brad Pitt gets all roughed-up in it and it's weirdly sexy. Or because Helena Bonham Carter was playing a slightly different character to the one she usually plays in everything (although this helped). I liked it because it was clever and it made me think about what it meant etc.
As anyone who is even a tiny bit of a film boffin will know, the plot is about a man who gets insomnia because he is emasculated by his boring life. Then Brad Pitt turns up and it all gets really interesting. Anyway the major plot twist is that Brad Pitt is actually *SPOILER* imaginary *END OF SPOILER*. He's everything that Ed Norton's character isn't, and he represents everything that Ed Norton's character wishes he could be.
This got me musing about what MY Fight Club alter-ego would be like. Obviously my Fight Club alter-ego would be more attractive than me, but I think that is a given for all Fight Club alter-egos, everywhere. Other than that, I could only really come up with two things. I can't decide whether this makes me very boring or very content. Anyway, here they are:

1. My Fight Club alter-ego would be able to complain. Properly. I cannot complain properly, which means that I always end up putting up with bad service or shoddy goods whilst tutting to myself and feeling cross instead of actually raising the issue with someone. The closest I have come to ever actually complaining was phoning my accommodation service in second year to tell them not to send me any more threatening letters. (They thought I owed them money but I didn't, and I had told them this.) When the woman picked up the phone I actually ASKED if I could make a complaint. I literally said 'Can I make a complaint please?'. And the woman on the other end was bemused and said 'Er...' Then when I had permission to make my complaint I said something along the lines of 'This really er... isn't on. Sorry.'
My Fight Club alter-ego would not have done this. She would have phoned the office and said something like 'I know my rights, if you don't stop sending me threatening letters I'll go to the Citizen's Advice Bureau and consider taking legal action!'
My Fight Club alter-ego would be the type to slam her drink down on the bar and say 'This is Strongbow, but I asked for Fosters!' or take her tub of ice cream back to the cinema stand and say 'I found a lump of plastic in this Cherry Garcia! I demand a refund! I could have choked and died!' or to call the waitress over and say 'We've been waiting for around 37 minutes to get the dessert menu, I demand that you get the manager so I can give him a stern talking-to!'
This would be the kind of complaining that my Fight Club alter-ego would do. Dignified and menacing. Never 'I'll PETROL BOMB YOUR OFFICES AND WRING YOUR SCRAWNY LITTLE NECK IF YOU DON'T DO WHAT I SAY RIGHT NOW!'
No no no. My Fight Club alter-ego would have a teacherish air about her when complaining, the kind that makes people go 'Yes Ma'am, sorry Ma'am.'
As it is, I think I am going to have to continue tutting and muttering for the rest of my life.

2. My Fight Club alter-ego would have 20/20 vision.
I am very VERY short-sighted. The kind of short-sighted where you walk into the kitchen and say 'Hello Dad' to your 16-year-old sister in the morning. I can see around an arm's length in front of my face without glasses or contacts. For someone who looks like a total dweeb in glasses and who is afraid of pain and paying lots of money for laser surgery, contacts are a godsend. I get a set of nice new lenses sent to my house every month with a little pot to keep them in and a nice bottle of solution, and they allow me to walk around without bumping into things and without looking like Eugene from Grease.
HOWEVER, there is a bit of a problem with contacts- you have to take them out at night, and you have to put them in new solution. (The consequences of falling asleep wearing them are pretty disgusting.) This means that you have to do some planning ahead. If you suspect that you won't end up staying at your own house, you have to make sure you take the little pot out with you and fill it up with some  new solution before you go. The number of times a potentially spontaneous and rock 'n' roll evening has been ruined by my contacts is surprising.
'Hey, why don't you all come back to my house and we'll play Mario Kart until the early hours of the morning?'
'Why, that sounds like a lovely ide... DAMN I don't have my solution, I shall have to miss out on hours of rock 'n' roll Mario Kart fun.'
I should imagine if I were single it would be even worse.
Also, it ruined some of my holiday in Thailand. (Here comes Lucy the middle-class backpacker, brace yourselves). I happened to run out of solution while we were visiting a National Park in the middle of nowhere, then lost my glasses whilst swimming in a river (yah). This led to the following set of conversations over and over again:
'Wow Lucy did you see that snake it was awesome!'
'No, I can't see anything.'
...
'Wow Lucy did you see that monkey just then?'
'No, I can't see anything.'
...
'Wow, that plant was amazing, did you see it?'
'No, I can't see anything.'
etc.
Some might say that an easy solution to this problem would be to take the little pot full of contact lens liquid everywhere. To them I say 'shut up'.
Anyway, my Fight Club alter-ego would have 20/20 vision. This would enable them to go out and not know where they were going to end up. They could go out in Spalding one night and wake up in Mongolia if they wanted to instead of having to miss out and go home and put their stupid lenses in their stupid pot.

FIN.

Cupcakes

At my boyfriend's house today, I started absent-mindedly flicking through a book his Mum owned. It was called '200 cupcakes', and as you would expect, it contained a vast array of different recipes for cupcakes. There were all sorts- honey and banana, frosted flower (yes, edible flower with frosting on it), fruit and nut, all beautifully iced and sitting decoratively on a lovely stand with lovely things like rose petals and stuff adorning them.
And I started to realise something: cupcakes make me uneasy. There is something inherently suspicious and mistrustful about a cupcake. I think that the main trouble is that they look so nice. Their appearance makes you want to eat them because you want to eat things that look nice, but it also makes you feel like you shouldn't eat them. It always seems a shame to ruin some nice piped icing by putting a massive bite mark in it. And if they are decorated with inedible things, like flower petals or plastic decorations, you have to pick them off which makes them look less nice. It's almost as if we're not supposed to actually eat them, just sit and admire how delicious-looking they are, like you're presumably supposed to do with this ceramic one. This paradox is unsettling and confusing and makes me feel weird inside.
Also, underneath the nice smell of vanilla essence, cupcakes give off the unmistakeable whiff of toil. Someone will have toiled to make those cupcakes look so delicious. I would estimate that icing a batch of cupcakes properly and meticulously adding all the decorations and things before arranging them nicely on a stand probably takes an average of 45 minutes. And I would estimate that the maximum time anyone takes to eat a cupcake is probably around 7 minutes. So why the toil? It makes me wonder if the only people who make cupcakes are:
 a) People who are desperately bored and have A LOT of time on their hands and get some sort of sense of achievement from really carefully making cupcakes look just so. (This kind of toil reeks of unfulfilment.)
b) People who like to arrange their food but not actually eat it.  (This kind of toil smells of underlying food issues.)

Obviously I am generalising about the cupcake-making populous here. I am sure there are some people who make cupcakes because they just find it relaxing or something. Also, I do understand that it's nice to eat food that looks good. The thing is, though, that you could probably make a cupcake look alright and pretty appetising with a bit of water icing, which takes about 3 minutes to make and put on a batch of cakes, and some sprinkles, which probably take about 2 minutes to put on some cakes. It seems so needless (and expensive) to whack out the banana chips and the fondant icing and the buttercream and the bits of lavender and whatever.
My other problem with cupcakes is that I don't actually find them that tasty. The icing is so thick and sugary I can practically feel my tooth enamel eroding as I eat it, and this distracts me from any deliciousness that might be contained in the cake. To me, the icing tastes of going on a bouncy castle immediately after jelly and ice cream at a kids' birthday party. Sort of sicky. This leads me to ANOTHER problem I have with them- the 'kiddiness' of them. They are cutesy in an incredibly try-hard sort of way, like a girl who talks in a baby voice to make boys like her. Their cuteness is their only distinguishing feature, really, and I feel that as an official grown-up, (I am 20 and a graduate and my title is Ms so there), I should be tucking into something like a carrot cake or a nice slab of banana loaf. I can at least pretend that these things have some kind of nutritional value and aren't going to make me go 'hyper' for 3 hours after eating them.
After some rooting around on the internet, I have found that I am not alone in my dislike of cupcakes. This facebook group are quite extreme in their hatred, showing the strength of feeling that a cupcake can goad people into. This website takes quite an academic approach to their dislike of cupcakes (and the author would also specifically rather eat banana bread or carrot cake than a cupcake, how weird). This person also hates them. I am sure there are thousands more.

On being always the best of the slightly worse

Ok, so I got my degree results today. I got 68% overall, which is the highest 2:1 mark on my course this year. It isn't quite a 1st though obviously.
It's got me thinking a lot about how I always seem to be slightly less than the best: the best of the slightly worse people. I (and the other people who got 68) am the best of the people who got slightly worse than a 1st.
I recently entered 2 of my short stories into a competition and both of them made the 'longlist'. This is a list chosen by a panel from which the shortlist is selected, and the winners are chosen from the shortlist. The fact that I made the longlist means that, again, I am one of the best of the slightly worse. My stories didn't make the shortlist. They made the longlist, which doesn't have the same ring to it. 'Shortlisted for the ---------- ------------- short story prize' sounds a lot better than 'Longlisted for the --------- ------------- short story prize'. But then, I made the longlist. I wasn't just put on the heap of things that didn't make the longlist. So that's good.
During my A Levels, I took an Advanced Extension Award in English. This was an extra little something for people who were good at English. The marks you could get, in prestige order, were Pass, Merit and Distinction. Predictably, I got a Merit. Not quite a Distinction, not as bad as a Pass. A Merit. My work merited Merit, but wasn't distinctive enough for Distinction. This was typical.
All of this sounds like I might be complaining, but I'm actually not. It's quite comfy here, at the top of the slightly worse people. I'm not astoundingly clever, but I am by no means dim. I am slightly, but not notably, above average. To confirm this, I took a (probably not very reliable) internet IQ test. I got the mark of 117, which is above average but not superior. And I think I'm actually OK with being above average but not superior. I am normal. And if I ever want to feel slightly better than normal, I can tell myself that I am above average. (But not superior.)

Things I've been enjoying lately

It's been a slightly crappy week. I've finally moved back to Lincolnshire and am failing miserably at getting a job, or even some work experience. I am convinced that I am going to be unemployed forever and will still be living with my parents at the age of 30. For some reason when I imagine this scenario I also have a beard. In addition to this, my whole family is going to Glastonbury and I can't go because my stewarding place was cancelled at the last minute. I also get my exam and essay results today, which I am very nervous about. Oh, woe is me.
Here are some things that have been cheering me up:
Reading: Running With Scissors by Augusten Burroughs.
I'm only on page 62 of this, but so far it's like a hilarious version of A Child Called It, (if you can possibly imagine that.) It's about a boy whose Mum goes mad and sends him to live with her psychiatrist. Who is more than a bit zany. I don't normally read memoirs because I tend to prefer fiction and sometimes they get a bit miserable for me. I'm not the kind of person who likes reading about people's terrible lives because I'd rather bury my head in the sand and pretend bad things never happen. Actually that's not quite accurate. I think it's just that I prefer not to wallow in the misfortune of others. Anyway, this is a memoir and I really like it, particularly the style it is written in. It's a pretty fast read as well- I managed those 62 pages just last night.
Listening to: Fool's Gold. This band came up on my lastfm and they are A-M-A-Z-I-N-G. They are from Los Angeles and the music they play is African-influenced pop. I can't really describe it but it's great. There's absolutely loads of members as well, so their album has a kind of Arcade Fire-y feel to it because there are lots of different layers to the melody and lots of different instruments being played at the same time. My favourite songs are Nadine and Poseidon. Also, one of the two UK tour dates they're playing this summer is Summer Sundae in Leicester, so I am considering going to that now. I have tried to embed the video for Nadine below, hopefully it'll work.


Watching: The World Cup surprisingly, because I never thought I actually liked football. The England matches obviously haven't made me particularly happy, but some of the other ones have been quite interesting. I haven't exactly sat riveted to the TV, but have enjoyed dipping into them now and again. I always thought when I watched football I was just humouring my boyfriend, but it seems as if a secret enjoyment of it has crept up on me.