» School Days

Freak bites back with atomic toilet
I could begin by trying to describe what it feels like to be very, very badly bullied.

The way I walked was funny, the way I spoke was funny, the way I crossed my legs was funny, the bag I carried was funny, the way I ate a sausage roll was funny.
I was funny-looking.

And the bitches just laughed and laughed at me. Every day. For seven years.

This one goes out to all the B3tans who don’t need to be told what that's like. If you are nodding and getting a sick, sad feeling inside – in the place where you would keep your happy memories, if you had any – then this revenge story is for you.

A core pod of bully-girls, the ones who humiliate you for the amusement of the rest of your school, always contains one key character : the one who is smarter than her gibbering goon-friends. She hates you (or not, I mean, lets face it, you are just lower in the food-chain). This is the person that your mammy tries to tell you is just jealous because you are so pretty and clever. Yeah right, ma. She comes up with the taunts that her peroxide lackeys hurl at you.

Can you fly without your broomstick, Goth?
FREEEAAK!

It’s never *her* that pours a can of fanta into your bag; but she’s right there watching when it starts to soak through. Let’s call her Emma. You know why.

In my final year I had a massive nervous breakdown and ended up in a mental hospital for a while, following a suicide attempt. I am informed in retrospect that some of my year were very sorry indeed.

Who would of thought she’d try to top herself?
I mean, she always thought of something clever to shout back at us, right?

I sat my A levels in a private room for my own safety.

At the end of the year Emma threw a massive party. Whole year invited. Her family was so rich she had her own little studio flat and party room in the grounds of their mansion. It was going to be a big night. I was phoned by some of the kinder girls, written to by the head-girl. Would I please come? They wanted to see if I was OK.

I went. Oh hell I went. I thought I’d be able to have a nice night with some of the solid, kindly types, the prefects, those that would never have stuck fanny-pads to my back but couldn’t let me sit with them in school anyway. I was just too dark, too angry, too fecking cynical.

The party was awful, just awful. Anyone read Carrie?

The bullies were drunk and they tore me to shreds. Cuckoo! Cuckoo! Was the loony-bin like prison? Did you have to lez up? Bet you liked that, yeah? I heard they sectioned you because you ate your own shit? Give her a plastic cup, you can’t trust the crazies with real glass. Go home, bitch.

I got my coat.

In the hall toilet, not crying. Just too tired for any more.

My gaze fell on the bottle of bubble bath sitting on the sill. Barely thinking, barely breathing, I shifted the lid of the toilet cistern and tipped the whole lot in.

I was half way down the drive-way when the screaming started, but I heard all the details from survivors in the following days. Drunken bitches go to the toilet *in groups* Oh thank-you Jesus.

It was apocalyptic.

Within ten minutes the whole of the downstairs was filled to shoulder height with piss flavoured foam.

WhuuMMMmMMMMMMMMMMMMppppHffffffffffffffffffffffffffissssssssssssss

And, unbelievably, they never worked out who did it. Loads of drunks, gate-crashers and pranksters to choose from, see? And I’d already gone home.

So that, my dear, dear friends, is how to get your own back. Drown the bullies in fluffy sewage at the biggest party of their young lives. The shock, the panic, the wails of horror. The sliding in it, the wet, straggled hair. Mascara running down sticky cheeks as the fire brigade screech up out of the night.

I felt much, much better.
(Tue 3rd Feb 2009, 19:00, More)

» Bizarre habits

Like many of my fellow b3tans...

I HAVE to keep my music in strict alphabetical order. I fully believe that to do other wise indicates that you are sub-normal and not to be trusted. Most people recognise this and respect my general alphabelical system however:

It drives me gibbering-batshit-mental when browsing friends disrupt the 'internal' order of each letter category. eg ABBA, Aretha Franklin, Adam and the Ants.

AGGGGH.

I find myself checking, album by album, after any guest leaves.

Whether or not we were listening to music.


But that's not the funny part.


I bought and assembled a full wall of slick IKEA CD shelving. One shelf per letter, to fascilitate my alphabetical obbsession, because I have a further problem: Artists beginning with J CANNOT share a shelf with those beginning with K (and so on).

The trouble now is the uneven distribution of my musical preferences.

My favourite artists are:

Oasis
O.A.R.
The Ocean Blue
Oceansize
The Octopus Project
Odds
Of Montreal
Office
The Offspring
Oh No! Oh My!
OK Go
Okkervil River
The Olivia Tremor Control
Olenka and the Autumn Lovers
One Republic
Oppenheimer
Operahouse
Orange and Lemons
Orgy
Beth Orton
Ostava
The Others
Our Lady Peace
Ours to Destroy
Out Of Sigh
Owen
Owls
Oxford Collapse


But all the albums wont fit on the shelf!




My 'O' CD's are out of control.



Thank you.
(Tue 6th Jul 2010, 13:20, More)

» Housemates

Dances with mice
Pill Popper's post:

www.b3ta.com/questions/housemates/post379777

sparked lively discussion about the fluffy little housemates that seem so unusually prevalent in Edinburgh. Which reminded me...

My mate Pippa and I had a flat in central Edinburgh during the festival in 2005. We were 21, carefree, and easy on the eye. We got drunk and made new friends quite easily.

We knew we had a lodger in the cupboard under the sink, but we despaired of catching the bugger.

One morning we stumbled home with a young architect we met at an all night party. (Was that you?) We drank whiskey with him between 5 and 8 am, then he went off to work.*

Went to toast some bagels before turning in for the day; noticed the pathetic scritching noise coming from the toaster.

Gottcha.

Out of the flat into the street with a magazine held over the toaster. We tipped him into the gutter and watched him scurry off. Glowing with booze and a sense of karmic oneness with our animal brothers, we attempted to return to the flat.

Hadn't put the latch on, hadn't brought the keys.

We were both wearing little pajama shorts and vests, barefoot. No phone, no money. And it was morning rush-hour.

Being festival time, we took this in our stride. We had a toaster and a copy of Marie Clare. No worries.

We crafted hats and tu-tus from torn magazine pages and improvised little dances and sketches involving the toaster until we sobered up.

By which time we had been given most of the money to pay for a lock-smith by impressed passers by.

Complete result.

*we were not *total* sluts.
(Mon 2nd Mar 2009, 20:01, More)

» Good Advice

Unsolicited advice about pumpkins
Once, when I was a student, I had to take a pumpkin to a Halloween party. On foot. 3 miles. Don’t ask.
This pumpkin was HUGE; it was a pumpkin in need of a gastric by-pass. To avoid back strain, I cunningly devised straps so that I could wear like a rucksack. Clever girl.

Leaving my Halls room, straining against my ponderous burden, I locked my door and dropped my keys between my feet. I speedily bent forwards to pick them up...

WHACK!

Darkness.

My pumpkin counterweight had swung forwards off my shoulders and cracked me across the back of the head, rendering me unconscious for 3 hours.


Slapstick: it can happen to YOU. True facts.
(Thu 20th May 2010, 22:58, More)

» Housemates

The Terrible Toliet-triffid Trumpet from the House of Mould

The residential area favoured by students of Queen's University, Belfast, rejoices under the handle 'The Holy Land' thanks to the theme of the street names. Big Jonty, the two Martys, Sean, Paul and Ugly Dave lived on Jerusalem Street.

The house they shared with 4 other culchie (NI for 'hick') guys had an unusual layout as a result of its former incarnation as two adjacent terraces. Internal walls had been pulled down to create a smelly, labyrinthine student drug-den, but no real renovation had taken place. The basement kitchen was consequently two mirror-image kitchens with a sort of gutter down the middle where the wall had once been. All the fittings remained unchanged, so they had two sinks. This is an important fact to note.

On the way home one night, after drinking cider and smoking weed in the nearby Botanic Gardens until 3am, the boys passed a front garden in which a large, ugly, cement water feature had recently been installed.

'Let's steal it!'

'Steal wha?'

'Water-fuckin-fountain.'

'How-the-fuck? Ye can't steal a fucking wishing well.'

'Aye ye can, there's a spade an' pick over yonder by the garage'

'Oh aye….
….. alright then.'

Took them until 5am to dig it up and man-handle it home, where they installed it on the draining surface of one of the sinks. And plumbed it in.

The finished product was a lumpen panorama of cracked, algae-slimed cement with a sort of windmill shaped wishing well canting drunkenly out the top and half a gnome. It sprayed everything within ten feet with a fine mist of cold, dank-smelling water. Predictably, every surface within ten feet of the 'display' was permanently covered with crud-encrusted plates, bits of pizza and rancid cups of tea.

The Moulds blossomed swiftly.

The grey stipple-mould, already indigenous to their kitchen ceiling, advanced dramatically to encompass kitchen units, doors and floor as well. Greeny fluff-moulds bloomed and decayed across the festering landscape like trees on a zombie model-railway. Brown curly things crept wetly up the woodwork and damp-loving fauna moved into the cornflakes-cupboard.

The air was so full of spores that the kitchen looked as if it was haunted by a solid embodiment of stench.

And then something really disgusting grew out of the adjacent hall toilet.

It began as a slick, brownish encrustation, emanating from under the rim at the back of the bowl, but then, almost overnight, produced a magnificent, 8 inch, vomit-orange toilet fungus in the shape of a gramophone horn. This impressively repugnant fruiting body was lovingly christened HMB (His Master’s Bum) and baptised daily with the piss of lads who had come from as far as Strabane to view the monster.

Tragically, the Toilet Triffid was short-lived. He melted into a slurry of repugnant orange effluent: gone from our lives as suddenly as he appeared. The lads were bereft. It was like the end of The Snowman as it would have been had The Snowman been a Tim Burton/Pooflake collaboration*.


And then………..



IT GREW BACK!

HMB’s rancid renaissance came in the form of a sweeping bridal bouquet of bum-blossoms and allied arse-mushrooms: each a minature version of their dear old Papa. Ugly Dave may just have shed a happy tear, it’s hard to say; one’s eyes tended to water in there anyway.


That house was truly rank, but yet the mould forest possessed a rare, raw kind of beauty in its awesome rottenness.

Like the Chelsea Flower Show. Only not.




*Respect where it’s due: dedicated to the master of the alliterative toilet tale: Mr Tim Burton.
(Fri 27th Feb 2009, 18:53, More)