I Whedon Your Grave

You may remember country-western singer Faith Hill from the heady country/pop explosion of the late 90s. Like Shania Twain¹ before her she realised she could make money if she stopped sounding like a dying cat for three minutes and record something that normal people could listen to. This resulted in an album called Breathe - you may remember tracks such as ‘Breathe’, ‘This Kiss’ and ‘The Way You Love Me’ from stealing them off Limewire. Like all music (and most things) these songs were secretly about dirty dirty sex. And though I’ve listened to and enjoyed them quite a bit, it was only recently that it sank in what a douchey pervert Faith Hill is.

I submit as evidence the opening line from ‘The Way You Love Me’:

If I could grant you one wish
I wish you could see the way you kiss

The rest of the song may be disregarded as irrelevant - it offers far too much context for me to prove my point. Let’s take this line at face value and extrapolate, shall we?

If Faith Hill could grant you one wish

Seems nice on the face of it, doesn’t it. How thoughtful. Nevermind a wish for herself, she would rather grant a wish for YOU! First off don’t forget the “if”; she admits upfront she can’t really do it, so it’s easy to promise that hypothetically we’d do something if we don’t actually have to.

Secondly, what kind of a shitty wish is that? Wouldn’t it be better to grant world peace, or bring loved ones back from the dead? Or even something cool like give you a jetpack that let’s you fly, or something practical like cure your crippling sciatica? No sorry. Her wish is…

She wishes you could see the way you kiss

How would this be accomplished? In order to experience your own kiss externally, you would have to be a whole other person. But also still you at the same time. Essentially she is wishing that you were a set of identical twins making out with each other. A jetpack is looking better and better huh.

Ok so, are you gay? Because your twin would be the same sex as you. Do you enjoy same sex kissing? Chances are that a reasonable majority of you answered ‘no’ to that question. That’s just statistics - don’t make me prove it.

Do you enjoy incest? Chances are again that a reasonable majority (outside South Australia) said ‘no’ to that as well.

Finally, are you totally hot for yourself? Could you think of nothing more arousing that copping off with your own mirror image? Are you Narcissus?²

So to recap, Faith Hill thinks that a really great present would be to split you into two people and force you into some (no doubt emotionally damaging) gay, narcissistic, twincestual tonsil hockey. And she presents this in the guise of a gift; like you should be grateful to her.

While we’re on the subject, I have a further question for you: do you even KNOW Faith Hill? No? Then why is she singing to you and granting you wishes and picturing you doing dirty, soul destroying things to yourself? Is she some kind of crazy stalker who has been following you around without your knowledge? The only reasonable answer can be: sure, why not.

Admit it Faith Hill. You have a problem. Twincest is all very well and good on the internet or in some seedy hotel in Thailand where you don’t actually know the twins, but why would you force someone you know and purportedly love into this uncomfortable act? I think you should get some help and join the Stalkers / Twincest Fetishists Support Group. If you drop me an email I know the contact details…. er, for some thoroughly innocent reason. Yes.

You are a pretty lady and a talented singer. But you are a douchey pervert and it’s time someone spoke out. For you own sake, if not the sake of others. Get help. Then accept that I saved your soul. Then send me money. Thank you.

There is a certain kind of experience that you will (hopefully) have a strong reaction to as you get older. When you’re a child it’s a regular occurrence, but as you get older, wiser and more cynical it becomes rich and rare: the experience of suddenly realising that something exists in the universe that you knew nothing about. I’m not talking about discovering a new flavour of ice cream. I’m talking about when you find out that dinosaurs used to roam the Earth, or the first time you saw a venus flytrap. One of those time when God pulls the rug out from under you and scream “Surprise!” Maybe you’ll be indifferent. Maybe you’ll be scared. But hopefully, if but for a scant moment, you’ll recapture your sense of childhood wonder and be filled with delight and awe. Sometimes we have to think about these moments before we realise we’ve even had them. Sometimes a thing is so weird or wrong that you don’t realise what a blessing it is that it has leaped out in front of you and forever expanded your world view.

Of course I’m talking about…. CAKEFARTS!

If you’re like me you probably just went “huh?” Let me fill you in, friend. On this thing we call the worldwide web there are a near infinite number of experiences to be had. But surf around on it for six months or so and you will be convinced that you know everything it has to offer: online shopping, porn, blogs, porn, blogs about porn, online shopping for porn. But then once in a very long while you will see something so amazing that you will be glad you didn’t give up looking. One such example would of course be the Llama Song. And another would be Cakefarts.

I’m not going to link to the website, because it COULD be considered porngraphic, or at the very least extremely distasteful. I wouldn’t want anybody to be offended on my account. But I will describe what it’s about so if you want to stop reading now, be my guest. You can’t though, can you. Good man.

Cakefarts is just a single webpage with an embedded video, one and a half minutes long. Set in a kitchen. On the kitchen counter we see a chocolate cake. A lady says she enjoys “cakefarts”, removes her pants and climbs (bottomless) on to the counter top. With her back to the camera and her rear end sticking out, she hovers over the chocolate cake and farts on it. Then she sits on the cake and presses her butt firmly into it. Then a farts a few more times right into the cake. Then she pulls her butt out of the cake. Her butt is covered in chocolate icing and bits of cake. It looks kind of gross - like peeling a dirty nappy off a baby. Then while still covered in the stuff she pulls her asscheeks apart and farts loud and hard into the camera. You get a front row seat of her sphincter contracting as she blows gas and presumably microscopic bits of cake at the lens. And that’s it.

So in the literal sense, THAT is cakefarts. But what is it really? Is it pornography? Is it a gross-out video? Is it comedy? At first I thought it was a real attempt at porn, but the more I thought about it the more I started to think it might be a really clever (if vulgar) satire on internet pornography. Is it commenting on the random stupidity of fetishes? Is it mocking the sort of people that are aroused by weird material? Possibly. Maybe a couple of people just thought it would be a good idea to put it out there for it’s own sake. Or maybe they thought it was funny in a random kind of way. The tragic and possibly hilarious bit is that you know for a fact that there is at least one person out there who has been genuinely aroused by it. Who played it over and over while punishing themselves. I would just as soon never meet that person.

Sex-vid, joke, or an overbaked attempt at a deliberate internet meme, cakefarts is out there. You can’t put the fart back in the bottle. It probably has its own Wikipedia page and / or Facebook Group. And while I personally find it kind of gross, ultimately I wish to thank cakefarts. Until today I had no clue there was anything even remotely like a video of a woman farting into a cake in the world and now I do. For one moment I felt like a child again. A child that for the first time in his life, does not want to eat cake.

Trains are fickle organisms that should be approached cautiously. Often harmless (unless you lay down for a rest in front of one) but like a tamed elephant or an extremely strong tamed beaver, they can suddenly snap and straight up murder your ass. We take them for granted because most of the time they don’t kill us, but next time you step on to one, imagine yourself as a modern-day Jonah (or Jack Sparrow) calming stepping into the maw and wandering down into the belly of the beast. Well may you shudder.

I caught the train home from work tonight. I have to get on, travel one single stop then get off and change to a different train. I got on from one side of the train but at my next stop I had to exit from the opposite side of the carriage. Except the doors didn’t open. When I got on, I had failed to notice that the doors opposite me had a big ugly sticker saying “Out of order - please use other door”. Perhaps tired after a long day, I interpreted this as best I could, turned and tried to go out the same doors I had come in. Of course, these wouldn’t open either; because if they did I would have fallen out onto the tracks and gravel where the platform wasn’t. I had to make a split-second decision before the train started moving again: should I dash to the other end of the train compartment, or do I travel through the nearby double doors separating my carriage from the next and get out that way? I decided that was the quicker route. I stepped through the first door and pulled it shut behind me. I opened the next door and found… that the adjoining carriage was empty and in darkness. Apparently that whole half of the train had been “switched off”. The outer doors were not opening there either. Shit. I seriously doubted I would now have enough time to backtrack to my starting point, THEN dash to the opposite end of the carriage and exit the train. Little did I know that was the least of my problems. When I tried to get back into my carriage the door was locked tight. I was stuck on the landing between two train cars.

I don’t know why, is the frustrating part. Those doors are not supposed to be locked from the outside. How would anyone move between carriages? It would have made sense if the door to the abandoned part of the train was locked. But no. The door just hated me I guess. I had been eaten by a devil train and would spend the entire night standing on the landing while I moved further and further from my intended destination…

But luckily, the carriage I was trying to get back to had a couple of people in it. They looked quite puzzled as I attempted to get back in and failed. Probably they thought I was some sort of headcase. But I knocked on the glass window and they very obligingly got up and let me in. Had I pushed past them and bolted for it, I might still have made it off the train at the correct stop. But as they let me in, I suddenly worried for them that they might make the same mistake I had and there would be noone left to help them. Like me, they had not noticed the ugly sticker on the non-functional door. They seemed very grateful as I pointed it out to them and cautioned them to move to the other end of the carriage. Before I had left them the train was moving again. Shit.

I had to get off at the next stop, get back on a train going in the other direction just to get back to where I started so I could get off again, again, and catch the right train home. By the time I got to my suburb I had missed the last bus to my street. That’s ok, I like walking. I like getting raped and murdered less so I walked fast. I could have just listened to my iPod as I went but I really don’t have any good songs on there so instead I enacted half of a conversation to an imaginary walking buddy (including some very interpretive hand gestures) explaining how the Doppler Effect causes a car to sound louder when it’s coming towards you than when it’s going away from you, to amuse myself. As you do. I was so distracted that I failed to hear the Doppler Effect at work on a car that actually WAS coming towards me. Then my uncle pulled up out of nowhere and drove me the rest of the way home. It was a lovely coincidence that he happened to be driving by.

I guess the moral of the story is that you have to take the good luck along with the bad. Sometimes luck is a lady (like when a relative conveniently crosses your path) and sometimes luck is a worthless bitch (as when you become a hostage of and simultaneously upon a method of public transportation). Other times you may win the lottery (I guess in that instance luck is your dirty dirty whore, who throws you to the bed so hard that your bones crack and then she gets on top of you and does all that freaky stuff your girlfriend isn’t into…. Ahem). Anyway I haven’t won the lottery yet, or even met a girl like that but I guess it happens once for every time someone get’s their balls torn off in a cycling accident, so I’ll keep rolling that dice of life if you wouldn’t mind blowing on it for me. Ta.

Time for another infrequent update about my weight. I had my weekly weigh-in tonight and I am 133.3 kilos. I am officially the lowest weight I have been since I began my weight loss, now over five months ago. This is good news to be sure. I am not complaining.

I have lost just under 12 kilos in under six months. This averages to about half-a-kilo per week. This is both good and bad. Why? Well to look at the good side: half a kilo per week is a very healthy amount of weight to lose. It’s the kind of slow, steady loss that is easier to maintain than if I had lost it several times faster. The negative side to this is that I don’t need to lose a few kilos; I need to lose A LOT. For my height my ideal weight is somewhere around 65 kilos. And I don’t think I’ve been that weight since I was ten years old. Let me say this plainly and upfront: I do not believe I will EVER get down to 65 kilos. I just don’t physically think it is possible. But IF it was (and it’s a big if) at my current rate of loss, I would be working at it for the next three years. THREE YEARS. Have you ever stayed on a diet for three years???

But here’s some more good news: I’m not on a diet. And so yes, absolutely I can do this for the next three years. And after that I can do it for the rest of my life. Because I’ve come to realise that that’s what this is really all about. I’m fat. I’ve always been fat. I’ll always be fat. There is no solution, short term, or long term, for this. This is who I am and this is my life. I made a decision that I did not want to go on being the size that I was. But I also know that realistically there was not a fad diet that could fix me. The problem is not what I eat or what I do; it’s how I think. I didn’t need a diet or an exercise plan - to stick to until a goal was attained and then to abandon - I needed to fundamentally change things about my life. To wake up to the choices I was making for myself, the patterns I had gotten into, and find a way to break those; to get into new, better patterns; ones that I could live with for the rest of my life. Because I know now that this will be for the rest of my life. Maybe I’ve always known that. Maybe that’s why it took so long to commit to it. But I’m ready now.

I don’t have diet plans. I don’t have an exercise chart. I don’t have weight loss goals. My only goal is to make the healthiest decisions I can every time it is time to make one. Any week that I step on the scales and weight the same as or less than the week before - I call that a good week. In this way, I win my challenge, over and over. And I keep playing.

I explained this to a friend. Told her my family was doing a weight loss challenge and that when it was over I didn’t win it. But I was going to keep playing, for myself. And she said - it seemed funny at the time - “I think you will win, at life.” It was sweet and silly at the same time. But you know what? I think she’s right. I think I will.

I’m a bit of a book fiend, me. I love to read, but more than that, I just love books. I love the feel and the smell of them; I love looking at a big stack of them and imagining the possibilities inside. All my life I have never not been surrounded by books and I hope I never will…. not. Or something. Damn language. If only there was some way books could help me improve my ability to… oh right. Anyway.

I was a very ill baby. As a result of a medical condition I basically didn’t sleep ever (as so neither did my poor mum). I couldn’t breathe if I was laid down so I would sleep, propped up in her lap or over her shoulder, for twenty to thirty minutes at a time. Twenty-four hours a day I snatched sleep in these tiny chunks and spent far more time awake. To pass this time, mum read to me. From about four months old, books and stories were always with us. As a young child my party-piece was “reading” before I could read. From the age of two, I could sit and “read” childrens’ books simply because I had them memorised - right down to the correct moments to turn the pages; a feat which delighted and horrified many a bystander. But I didn’t actually start reading reading until I was about three-and-a-half.

At school I was told I was a “good reader”. What this really meant was that I could read and absorb books fast. This was a boon to whichever teacher was supervising the MS Readathon, but in truth, speed-reading does not equal “good reading” and it was a terrible habit to get into - to this day I can rarely sit and enjoy a book without frequently noting the page number I’m up to and calculating roughly how long it will take to finish. This itself is a poor enough habit to fall into but sadly it was coupled with the other vice that captured my young mind: Dr Who. Rather than an early introduction to the classics of literature I filled my mind with “tv-tie in” pulp. I still have the Dr Who books I collected as a child but I keep them for sentimental reasons - they are mostly unreadable trash.

Only in the last few years have I really started to make real headway into reading and enjoying books PROPERLY. I still read Dr Who from time to time but I’m also making my way through all sorts of other genres and authors. Fortuitously this reading revolution roughly coincided with a new BORDERS opening at a nearby shopping centre, and it’s one of my favourite places to be. I go almost once a week and spend hours just wandering and browsing the shelves. BORDERS is brilliant for book lovers. They have practically everything you could want and they encourage customers to sit and sample the books before they purchase them. It’s a great franchise, my local one is a great store, and I love it there. So what’s pissing my off today? Piles of Asian children!

Now hold up, hold up. Before I start getting hate mail, let me preface this. I do not hate Asian people, of any age. I have lived in the western suburbs of Sydney my entire life and happily go entire days without seeing a single white person in the street. We have a diverse mix of people from all around the world here and I’m fine and dandy with that. Well done you people of many colours and creeds! No complaints here. So why are Asian children bothering me in BORDERS? Because I can’t browse the ‘A’ to ‘D’ of science fiction authors without tripping over one.

Like I said, BORDERS encourages its customers to read books inside the store. No worries. But BORDERS has a large section dedicated to black-and-white illustrated stories of huge-eyed children and adolescents with bowling ball-sized tits engaging in activities of mindless violence and / or softcore pornography (also known as Manga¹) The Manga is shelved opposite the first row of the sci-fi section. For this reason I have no idea which ‘A’ to ‘D’ sci-fi authors BORDERS keeps in stock. I’ve been in that store about a hundred time and I have NEVER walked past that aisle and not seen a minimum of two Asian children sitting on the floor right smack in the middle of the aisle reading Manga books that they have no intention of buying. They treat the place like a library: a library where the ideal arrangement is to sit and block access to the shelves so that other readers can’t get anywhere near the books. Today there were six of them. SIX. All sitting, taking up every inch of space in the Manga / sci-fi aisle. Parents don’t care, the BORDERS staff don’t seem to care. And the kids themselves certainly don’t give a shit. On more than one occasion I have accidentally stepped on one while trying to navigate past them and they don’t even feel it. The Manga has rotted their brains and put them into some sort of stupefying trance wherein they cannot even feel the pain of an enormous fat man standing on them. I bet you could kick them and they’d only shrug. In fact I may next time.

Look, I don’t care if you kids want to read garbage. If this is your “Dr Who” then good luck to you. Maybe it will lead to worthier things in time. But buy the books. Don’t spend entire days living in book stores, dog-earing, spine-cracking and generally molesting entire series’ of books that you have no intention of purchasing. And if that’s too much to ask, at least consider taking the fucking books to a designated reading area (hint: where the couches and chairs are!) instead of dropping to the ground wherever you happen to be standing, and blocking whole areas of the store like retarded stalagmites made of meat and backpacks. Please for the love of God, get the fuck out of my way so I can replace my copy of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy that has fallen to pieces (from years of reading, at HOME, after I BOUGHT it with my own money), or next time I will kick you. And then I’ll be the bad guy. You see what you’ve driven me to?

Fucking Manga.