The man who fell in love with a paper doll.

There once was an ordinary man. This ordinary man had an ordinary wife and two ordinary daughters and a mid-sized black Labrador. His ordinary daughters played with ordinary toys and his ordinary wife baked ordinary cakes and his dog said “woof”. His daughters were named Sarah and Jane, they were seven years old and were the correct size for girls of that age. Sarah was no cleverer than ordinary, and Jane no prettier. They were all very happy. The ordinary man’s name was John, and his ordinary wife’s name was Joan. They all found their lack of nuance comforting.
At school one day the ordinary daughters made paper dolls for their paper doll house. They brought them back to their ordinary home to show their ordinary parents. Joan praised her daughters equally, holding each doll for an equal amount of time, using an equal amount of superlatives, with an equal, balanced look of pride on her ordinary face. She told them to show their ordinary father.
John looked at Jane’s doll first. It was small and stiff, with straight arms, straight legs and straight yellow hair on it’s bulbous round head. He smiled his ordinary encouraging smile and sent his daughter on her way. John looked at Sarah’s doll next.
Like that old maxim, she was small but perfectly formed. Good things did come in that tiny package. She had perfect little legs, perfect little hips, perfect little breasts and a coquettish little smile on her perfect little lips. John was in love. He asked his ordinary daughter if he could keep this extraordinary doll and Sarah said “yes daddy,” so he kept her. He held his perfect little paper doll close to his ordinary chest. He named her Jessica.
John and Jessica’s love was pure. They spent hours staring into each other’s eyes, his blue, hers black. They understood each other without speaking. He held her for hours on end, and took her everywhere with him in his breast pocket, close to his heart. She slept under his pillow. In his opinion their love was stronger than human love. It could only be destroyed by water or fire. John lived safe in the knowledge that she would never leave him, that she would stay young and beautiful forever. But gradually his desire for her grew.
The first time he tried to kiss her she gave him a papercut. After that she was silent, but kept that elusive smile on her face. He asked her if she was angry with him and she did not say no. He asked her if she wanted him to leave, and again, she did not say no, so he stayed, and in time it was forgotten. A few weeks later her tried to kiss her with tongue and she went weak, and he supported her, held her together until she recovered.
The ordinary man’s ordinary wife had noticed something odd. Her husband was spending less time with his ordinary daughters and average dog. She had noticed the perfect little presence in her husband’s hand, pocket and pillowcase. The tiny woman in her bed. Her ordinary heart was ripping, so she did what any ordinary woman would do. She decided to tear them apart.
John and Jessica were together in his office when Joan came in with a cup of tea. Joan didn’t have a plan yet, but was startled by the sight of her husband’s ordinary hand coiled around this tiny woman’s tiny waist. She didn’t look as she stepped into the room, didn’t see her average dog step in front of her legs. The tea flew through the air, covering her husband and his miniature love, and they watched in extraordinary horror as the paper doll came apart between his ordinary fingers.
Their ordinary marriage ended in an ordinary divorce. Joan kept the daughters and John kept the Labrador. They never spoke about Jessica, and John never drank tea again.

I wrote it during write club, so i was slightly distracted, and i haven't really edited it properly, so think of it as a rough draft, but feel free to comment on it.

"Death can't stop true love, only delay it for a while"

Nothing really to say today, but this postsecret made me cry, so i thought i'd share it.


I wrote a short story today, if i get time i'll write it up and post it. It's called "the man who fell in love with a paper doll."
Love you all.

I literally cannot wait

The fangirl in me, the big fat one with winged, bottle thick glasses, who goes to conventions in gold bikinis, that girl is very excited.

She is excited because of this:



It makes her and me do little fangirl squeals of joy and anticipation.Joss and Eliza together again! I just don't understand why he stays with fox; did he learn nothing from Firefly?
Now you've been inflicted with the mental image of a fat lucy with glasses in a gold bikini, you are free to carry on with your day. Enjoy it.

“ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.”

This is my gift to you, if you've not seen it before, and even if you have, because i re-watched it this weekend and it brought back some memories. It has 2 of my favourite people in the world in it, and is directed by the director i want to be. Enjoy it.

http://madwell.com/flash/hotel.htm


I promise i'll never be your friend.

Glamorous, dirty, quiet, and loud

These men are cool. That's really all you need to know. Any man having sartorial difficulty really need look no further than the following photos. Everything you need is just here.



Cary Grant



Francois Truffaut



Robert Redford



Sean Connery



Jean Paul Belmondo



Kurt Cobain



Jonny Depp



Paul Newman



Muhammed Ali



Elvis Presley



Steve McQueen

They each have their own definitive style, but still all look amazing in a well tailored suit. Why doesn't everyone wear suits more? I know i go to a hippy university, but i'd love to see more guys willing to brave some matching trousers and jackets rather than the same old trainers and t-shirt combo. Step it up Gentlemen!

Yes We Can!

Finally, over 4 years after that story being written, it has an ending. And not just an ending, an amazing, awe inspiring, audaciously hopeful ending!

I stayed up until 6 in the morning watching the BBC coverage at East Slope bar with hundreds of other students, and it was the most fun, exciting and stressful night of my entire life. I didn't stop crying for roughly 2 hours after i found out Obama had won, i was that happy. I only got 3 hours of sleep last night, but i've been skipping around all day grinning at people like a mad thing.

Another good thing that happened today, which makes me rank November 5 2008 (because in England the votes came in on the 5th, i'm not a stupidhead who got the date wrong) as right up there on the cool day scale, is that i made a proposal to the drama society to direct Othello for the Brighton Festival. Brighton is England's largest arts festival, considered Edinburgh's little, but quickly growing sister, and my proposal was accepted! Come May, members of the general public and theatre going community will be able to watch a play I directed! I'm so excited i could scream, but i won't because the walls of my room are paper thin and i think Paul is trying to watch a film next door.

anyway, that's all i wanted to say. Life is good.

If you're not smiling already, then here's a postsecret that made me laugh.



Also check out today's a softer world comic, and put your mouse over the image, and think happy thoughts.

Sleep to dreamier sleep be wed, Pt. 3

The people called Americans continued to sleep. As we mentioned earlier, they existed in a collective nightmare, which was shaped and guided by their highest-ranking leaders, including the most creepy and - overtly, comically - evil-like person to hold high office since - well, the comparison is difficult. Who would compare, in a democracy at least? Would Thatcher rank this high? (Discuss.) Anyhow, this particular wretched person was named Cheney (Dick), and though everyone knew he was a bad man, there was a large group of the sleeping Americans who chose, apparently, to think of him as cute-bad, as opposed to truly bad-bad. That is, they knew that while in Congress he had voted against the honouring of Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela, and for logging the living shit out of every forest known to man, and against pre-school for disadvantaged children and about a thousand other things that seemed reasonable enough to reasonable people. But still they thought, well, yes, he is quite creepy and very evil-seeming in every conceivable way, but isn't he, somehow, so evil-seeming that he's actually kind of cute? Sort of like David Bowie in Labyrinth or Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet? You know, that kind of evil that's so ridiculous that you almost like the evil-doer, because they're so willing to go out and camp it up? This is what the sleepers of America thought about Cheney, who kept them living in a constant nightmare from which they could not awaken. He and his little friend, who looked like a turtle, told the Americans that the nightmare was a dream, that chaos was safety, that blood was gold, that their feet were actually their mouths, that leprechauns were hippos and that cookies were shrubbery. And so many sleeping Americans thought it all so ludicrous that they kept sleeping, as waking up would surely deprive them of such rich entertainment. Meanwhile, the other half of the American sleepers, those who wanted to awaken from the nightmare-dream, were trying like mad to awaken the sleepers and thus awaken the collective body of Americans. All had to awaken at once! And this was very hard, for everyone was very tired. What would it take, the wanting-to-awakens thought. How to rise from this state of near-coma? They kicked and screamed to no avail. They rang bells and threw cold water on the bed. But, in the end, do you know what did it? What woke up the willing sleepers and allowed the nation to rise from this red-black slumber? Neither do I. This story needs a good ending. Please send help.

Hopefully in a couple of hours we'll get the ending the story deserves. If not I'll just stop being American, because there's no point.

Sleep to dreamier sleep be wed, Pt. 2

The people called Americans could not, it seemed, wake up from this nightmare wherein their two highest-ranking elected leaders were so clearly the wrong people for their positions, so ill-meaning in every way, that the situation defied even Nixonian standards of White House-based nefariousness. The most fiendish player in this nightmare, as we were explaining in the last instalment, was the vice-president, whose name cannot be uttered here for fear of upsetting children and plants and clouds. Suffice it to say that he was more evil than the designers of Happy Meals or the makers of smokeless tobacco, and the Americans dreamt dreams of him, constantly and without end. The Americans as a group were asleep for many years and were experiencing wretched dreams full of exploding children and men beheaded on TV, of ever-present fire and screaming and eyes everywhere wanting murder. The Americans were trapped in, it was thought, one collective red-black dream, and the only way they could awaken from the dream was for most of the dreaming Americans to choose to wake up. But the problem - the very strange problem - was that half of those dreaming chose to remain in this dream. (Did we say dream? Have we been saying dream? It was a nightmare, of course. A nightmare unlike any other, a nightmare that felt like the wearing of a lead cloak without holes for air or sight.) So while about half of those sleeping wanted to awaken, the other half watched, indeed, lived in, this very upsetting dream full of flames and blood and said, "I think this dream is OK", or "This is the best dream to be dreaming right now", or "It would only get worse if I chose to awaken". This was, of course, very frustrating to those who wished to wake up. Those who wished to awaken stirred and turned restlessly. They grabbed the covers, they opened windows, they moaned and coughed and kicked. But nothing, it seemed, would work. The sleepers slept and slept and even, sometimes, nodded and smiled when they watched and listened to the two men leading their nightmare. The two men would say to them, "Have you enjoyed the nightmare thus far? Because if you love the aforementioned exploding children and endless fire, we have more so very much more! - of that, to come."

Concluding part comes tomorrow.

Sleep to dreamier sleep be wed

I'm reading this out at Write Club this week, because it's the night of the elections, and because i want as many people to know the true extent of Dave Egger's genius as possible. It's in 3 parts, Here's the first:

There was a group of people, called the Americans, who once had a very vivid nightmare, simultaneously. The nightmare, which lasted many years, was nightmarish in many ways - but one notable facet was that in this nightmare the vice-president of their country was someone so outwardly and cartoonishly evil that his existence seemed ludicrous and wholly unbelievable, even in a nightmare. In the history of nightmare-villains and movie-villains and villains drawn with crayons by troubled children, this man stood above them all, though he was not very tall. Or maybe he was tall, but it was impossible to tell, given he walked very much like a hunchback, his head set deep into his shoulders and favouring one side. This way of walking seemed suspect, but it was nothing compared with the way he spoke. He spoke out of a small and dark corner of his mouth, in a way that was so comically fiendish that it seemed a put-on. If an improvising actor, asked to conjure a bad man or perhaps a minion of Satan, conceived of such a way of talking, his acting coach would say, "No, no. Pull back. Way back. We're doing the vice-president here - not Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein." But this was indeed the way the vice-president spoke and walked. And his laugh? A mirthless thing, a chilling "Heh heh heh" (again, emitted from a dank corner of his mouth) accompanied by a forced shaking of his round fleshy back. Yes, yes, a fleshy back that was, like the rest of him, always sweating. Or it seemed always to be sweating, every inch of him, oozing with oil and perspiration and, perhaps, small brown-black worms that would leave and enter him via his pores, their bidding known only to him. Was he impervious to death? He seemed to be. Over the years of this nightmare-life, God had tried, four or five times, to kill this man, by striking his heart. But each time the man's heart was struck, the vice-president laughed his rat-rat-tat laugh and shook his fleshy back, mocking God in much the same way that vampires mock certain crosses, or, say, anal leakage mocks olestra.

I'll post part 2 tomorrow and part 3 on Tuesday, before i go to the bar to watch the elections broadcast live. Should be a long night!

Drink up, me' Harties, Yo Ho!

Spot the similarities.







I sense a recurring theme in my choice of costume for various events over the years. Do you see it too?