The "Wish I Were More Prolific" post

It’s been almost two weeks since my last post. Which is absolutely disgraceful considering I left you with a clichéd “Until next time winkey-face xoxox” type thing.

 It’s time I started writing again.

It’s not that I don’t like writing. I really do. It’s just that, well… something always comes up. I don’t know. I need to check my Facebook account for the fifth hundredth time (NOT ONE SINGLE NOTIFICATION?! IT’S BEEN LIKE 2 AND A HALF MINUTES?! WHY DOESN’T ANYONE LOVE ME? *Cough*) and that knock-off I got in the Oxfam bookshop isn’t going to read itself…

… I’ve got a little problem.

My name is Louise and I’m a procrastinator. HARD CORE. Procrastination. I put the “pro” in it.

 This is laughable until it actually becomes a problem. Which it will, I’m positive about it. For some unknown reason, I put things off as long as is possible – or until that DO OR DIE instinct kicks in saying “The driver theory test is half an hour away. It’s time to do something about that”

 It’s not that I don’t LIKE doing things. I do very much like doing things…. Later on. Tomorrow. Eventually.

(Ironically, this is one of the reasons why I started blogging. I was procrastinating over essays and then thought I should actually do something semi-constructive. Blogging seemed semi-constructive at the time. And now I’m even procrastinating on it. Procrast-ception)

Eventually, I will change my ways. Someday. *Sighs.

But I’ve been waiting for “someday” for the last 18 years and it still hasn’t arrived yet.

SOMEDAY.

What do I visualise happening on this glorious day?

Not some sort of second coming of Jesus in a space suit eating a KFC bargain bucket saying “GTFO of bed, you’ve got a lecture on medieval poetry in seven minutes” – although that would be pretty freaking cool.

No. Someday, I’m going to actually tick off every single thing that needs doing on my evergrowing TO DO LIST. And I’ll do it ALL on that ONE DAY. And that is how I will live my life until I, you know, get arthritis and a bad back and dentures.

Someday, the alarm on my phone will ring at 8am, and I’ll ACTUALLY GET UP at 8am.

Someday, I will be given a French assignment and I will do it on that day, methodically, using footnotes and a French dictionary. Rather than waiting stupidly and needlessly for another 6 days to pass until the night before the deadline; perving my way through facebook and listening to [insert obscure indie band here – f*ck it, who am I kidding? – Gangnam Style] on youtube and typing whatever crap that comes into my head into Google translate.

Someday, I will actually do sit ups.  Someday, I will make my bed the minute I get out of it. Someday, I will update my CV, print it out and look for a job. Someday, I will make myself a decent meal – yes, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve finally realised that Aldi Noodles are not a food group and if I continue eating them for every single meal will end up with rickets. Someday, I will go to Walton’s, buy a G-String (FOR MY GUITAR YOU FILTHY MINDED PEOPLE), fix aforementioned guitar and learn the instrumental bit to Everlong.

Someday, I will pay my library fines. Someday, I will not go to my 9 am tutorial hung-over. Someday, I will learn the rest of the Japanese alphabet.

My favourite film of all time is a French Film called The First Day of the Rest of Your Life (If you haven’t seen it, you should) and there’s just a wonderful moment in it where Raef – about 26 years old, still living at home, a perpetual procrastinator – is sitting in his pyjamas well into the afternoon playing Lara Croft on his PS1 (the year is like 1998) and his mother stands in front of the telly and says “Someday you’ll have a to do list so long that the rest of life won’t be enough to get it all done” (or something along those lines – and also in a sexier accent. Because she’s French and the French are good at that sort of thing) and then Raef, uninspired, whines about how Lara Croft has just been eaten by a wolf. It’s a great film.

Anyways, the point is. One day I’m going to wake up, a secondary school teacher (let’s face it. It’s going to happen) with responsibilities… Like, I don’t know – a car (actually, I hope it’s a cute little Suzuki Jimny) to fill with diesel, a crack in the bathroom ceiling above the shower to fill with sticky glue-ey type stuff and copious leaving cert essays on “Why Hamlet delays” (also about procrastination – myself and Hamlet have a lot in common, apparently. Except for the fact that he has to avenge his father’s death and deal with his own subconscious, incestuous feelings for his mother whereas I only have to take out the rubbish bins) to correct. Someday, I won’t have the option, the liberty, the freedom to procrastinate because I will have actual things to do. People are going to depend on me TO GET THINGS DONE ON TIME. ALL THE TIME.

 

So why the hell don’t I just do things on time right now?

Because I’ve got a Downton Abbey  boxset. But I swear I’ll do my homework afterwards….

Read... if you think you're HARD enough.

I’ve got a cold so - armed with a box of Kleenex and some throat lozenges - I’m going to go all nostalgic on yo’ ass (blame it on several mugs of steaming TK Red Lemonade).However, I won’t give you my own regurgitated version of Kavanagh’s “A Christmas Childhood” because I think we’ve all overdosed on sentimentality over the last two weeks. So…. In this post I’m going to pay homage to the Junior Disco.

If you never went to a Junior Disco - if you were too cool for that scene, too shy or had overprotective parents.... I would say "of course, you didn't miss anything at all - the state of the place! The music was awful, the dresscode was so tacky, etc,etc,"  But I’d be lying. The fact of the matter is, I absolutely loved going to Junior Discos. They were, as my fourteen year old self would say,  “Claaaaaaaaaas!”

I really don’t know what was so class – class was something that you left at the door upon entering the establishment. But I loved it all the same... Chelsea Jerseys. Pink fluffy boots. The smell of sweat, Lynx and radioactive fake tan (Johnson's Holiday Skin. Chicken soup smell. Grand job). The way you could actually feel the bass in Tiesto's Traffic  bounce around your my ribcage. That rare tap on the shoulder, "Will you meet my friend?" That was the most glorious thing an insecure 14 year old will ever hear in her life. Meeting. Nowadays we say shifting. Meeting is far too ambiguous.

- I met yer man in town the other day.

- WHAT?! YOU MET HIM??

- Don't be silly! Of course I didn't meet him. I only met him.

 

Apparently score can be used? However, I only ever heard that from the ugg boot clad, Abercrombie army in the Gaeltacht. I’ve heard that Feek is used in the south west of the country...? Personally, I think Feek sounds like a type of fungal nail infection.

Shift is far less hassle. Everyone knows what a shift is. (However, there can be the odd day when your dad takes the initiative to do some housework *thick midlands accent* "Will you help me shift this table?" It’s strange)

-Will you shift my friend?

- No... But I'll shift you.

 We never kissed. Kissing in my mind means something more. It's affection. In that awkward 14-15 year old stage in your life... you didn't need affection. You needed the shift. And not just one shift, but lots of them. Shifting was like currency. It was validation. If you got the shift it meant you weren’t all of those horrible things that you thought of yourself when you looked at Rihanna in Kiss Magazine. Getting the shift was like a stamp of approval from the world. YOU’RE NOT UGLY/FAT/WEIRD! Of course you’re not! How could you be? A fifteen year old smoker in a Chelsea jersey thought you were alright enough to put his tongue in your mouth and feel your arse for 56 seconds – you’re just dandy!

We didn’t dance either. You don’t dance to Bobby Joe. You just stood there pushing your chest forward like some sort of pissed of rooster and fist punched the air - because you were too hard for anything else. Some clever people remembered to bring glow sticks. Instant hardness. Glow sticks were so handy because they co-ordinated so well with your outfit – ladies, you needn’t have bothered going to the Junior Disco if you weren’t wearing something LUMINOUS. If you were really up for the shift you stuck the glow stick down your tank top... It worked.

Of course, a lot more than just shifting went on in the junior disco... There was the odd fight (okay, there were a lot of them to be fair) and if you ventured into the darker areas over by the couches later on in the night you might have seen something that could’ve been from the Discovery Channel. 

Alas, the days of the Junior Disco were numbered when all of our Mammies found out about the shenanigans of the Junior Disco. Do you remember in 2009 Gerry Ryan (may he rest in peace) dedicated a whole hour of his show one morning to exposing what an awful place it was and that no parent in their right mind would let their son or daughter out to it?

It was a dark day for all Junior Cert students. It was even worse than the time that they threatened to shut BEBO down.

(You know awkward conversations with your parents? Those conversations. When they arise my first instinct is to just run out of the room, plugging my index fingers in both ears screaming "LALALALALA". Of course you can't really do that in a car going about 40km/hr because then you end up in a ditch with internal bleeding) I remember coming home in the car that day and my mother explaining to me what snowballing was.  

Needless to say, I wasn't allowed out to the junior disco for months.

 

Anyways, if I don’t stop writing about this I’ll start getting urges to stick on Maniac 2000 and start shouting (okay, quietly whispering – there’s a plumber in the house fixing our radiators) “WOOP THAT ASS”

 

Until next time :)

Everyone else is doing it. I want to be cool too.

This is a New Year's Resolution thing that has begun 6 days late (Start as you mean to go on and all that jazz)

 I'm going to write a blog. I think if I write a big long "HEY MY NAME IS... I LOVE WRITING... I HAVE A PONY*.... Blah blah" post, I will probably be so disgusted with myself that I'll never write anything again (I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with doing that... It's just that my life is so incredibly generic that I'd bore you so much that you'd open a new tab) So I'm just going to pretend here that I've done this whole blogging thing loads of times before and this isn't the first time I've ever done this. Ever.

I'm also the type of person who takes up things and then drops them after a few weeks. I have to say, I'm a fantastic beginner. I've got beginner's luck in abundance. I think it's my talent. But it's a really crap talent to have because it only lasts about three weeks. Perhaps "fantastic beginner" is just a euphemism for "prolific quitter".

THINGS I HAVE STARTED AND QUITTED:
- Violin
- Cross Country Running
- Japanese (well, I haven't quite quitted it yet... I hope I haven't - I was kind of getting the hang of Hirigana)
- Camogie (for the benefit of glass windows everywhere this was probably a good thing that I quitted)
- Smoking (after smoking half a box of my friends cigarettes one night I woke up the following morning without a voice. F*cking karma)
- Going to the gym (anyone who says that they ENJOY going to the gym is a super fit LIAR with abs so defined you grate cheese off of them. The gym is NOT a fun place to be. Only hamsters should enjoy going to the gym because that's exactly what treadmills make me feel like... a hamster on that stupid wheely thing. Yawn. And also burrrrrrrrn. So much burning of the hamstrings)
- Blogging (I totes lied earlier on. Soz babes. I started one last year.... but I only ever posted once and it sounded like something that I would've written in the Composition part in my Junior Cert English paper that I was far too ashamed to continue with it. I also forgot my username and password)


Anyways. Yes. I'm going to write a blog.

hmmmm.

Right.

This is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I LOVE the idea of writing a blog... I'm so envious of people who say "Well, I'm working on a blog at the moment" whilst taking a sip out of a Costa cup with one hand and adjusting their trilby hat with the other (sorry to generalise but I study arts. I'm surrounded by arts students all day. THIS IS WHAT WE DO)... it's just actually writing one?
 I think this is just one of the things that people just EXPECT you to do when you study English (I also study French... but French is hard and I hate the subjonctif and I have no idea what the plus-que-parfait is so I won't talk about that. Let's just pretend I don't study French at all so I don't feel guilty that I haven't opened a single text book in four weeks). And here we are. Three cheers for conformity!

What do you actually write about when writing a blog? Is this it? Do I just sit and stare at Google's rip off of Microsoft Word? Can I just write about what ever I want to write about?
What if I've got absolutely nothing of interest to say?

Ah sh*te.

That's kinda the point, isn't it?

Okay. Maybe I should just have started like everyone else and not have tried to be cool. Because I'm really crap at being cool. LAME (Who even says "lame"?! It's such a rubbish word. Usually I would say "gay" ie. "that's soooooooo gay" I say it a lot It's not a nice thing to do though; describing anything that I think is shite as homosexual. That's not right is it?)

New Year's Resolution #14: Stop using "Gay" as a derogatory term because then people will think you're being a douchebag and homophobic and stuff and someone will punch you in the face and you will have earned it.

So....

This kind of reminds me of those really awkward conversations I had with my first "boyfriend" in the Gaeltacht when I was about twelve. You were only "boyfriendandgirlfriend" because the night before the pair of you were so desperate to lose your FRIGINITY at the díoscó mór that you were pushed together by his taller, less spotty - therefore hotter - friend. And then, 24 hours and a generous exchange of saliva later, you were lovers "So..... what do you want to talk about?" I DON'T KNOW. YOU TALK. Please talk? Tell me what to say? It would be so much easier. I don't have any opinions. Well I have opinions, but you know... we barely even know each other. I don't want to scare you off by talking about BIGMAJORWORLDISSUEPROBLEMTHINGS like, I don't know, how the bean an tí is a really useless cook or how her dog shat on my fake ugg boot the other day. JUST PUT YOUR ARM AROUND ME *PLEASE* SO THAT TO EVERYONE AT THE CÉILÍ  IT LOOKS LIKE WE'RE TOTALLY IN LOVE.

Or maybe that's just me. Maybe you're freaked out now. Maybe this is why my first lover never even texted me (I was heartbroken) after our two and a half weeks of rain,romance and the módh coinníolach  at summercamp in the wild, wild wesht.

Sorry for using so many caps locks. I know, they're really ugly. Next time, I'll use less. YES there's going to be a next time! ( I've got at least a fortnight of enthusiasm left for blogging before I drop it. )


Slán



*disclaimer: does not own pony