Murder on the Dance Floor

The Disturbing Similarity Between My Life and a Hamster's

Post-Traumatic Book Syndrome

Revenge of the Boots

The Ultimate Tamagotchi Quest

I had bad luck with pets. They were always eloping or getting flattened by traffic.

I cursed those that eloped and shrugged at the road splat. You get used to dead pets when you live in the countryside. You get a pet, it dies, end of fascination. That was until the Tamagotchi, the pet that was reborn every time it died.

The Tamagotchi might have been a small digital toy to anyone else, but to me it represented immortality. I wanted one, I would do anything to get one. My mother wasn't so keen on the little gadget, she maintained (as she did with all technology) that it would transform us into couch potatoes with square eyes.

I had accepted that I would never have a Tamagotchi to call my own, when I spotted the key-ring edition. I was obsessed with key-rings. My backpack sported whatever key-ring I'd spent all my pocket money on during the last school tour.

 

In an effort to stop our minds and eyes becoming two dimensional shapes. My mum was always banishing us to gardens. The worst of these gardens was at my Granddad's house. We would sit in the small box garden sulking about the life we weren't allowed to have. 

Often, to stave off boredom, we would spy on the adults. 

One day, during the garden ritual another child popped her head above the garden wall. Granddad lived in the city and so had the luxury of neighbours.

This particular child seemed to know my deepest darkest longings. She held in her small devil-like paw a Tamagotchi. She invited me over the wall to make a trade. I wasn't the sort of child that usually ran away to make black-market deals with suspicious children, but that day I became one.

I left my sister with clear instructions to tell nobody where I had gone. I would be back with a Tamagotchi, that was all that mattered. The garden on the other side of the wall was the exact same as my granddad's. I stood in it, holding up my pocket money for inspection.

 

The devil child tried to haggle. She soon realised that it really was all the money I had and invited me into her kitchen. 

 As we entered her dimly lit house, I thought briefly of my sister - alone in the small box garden. 

And though I wondered how she would cope under the pressure, I was sick with a feverish want. The Tamagotchi was almost mine. 

I can still remember how thump-y my thoughts felt. They were thudding about in my head going TAMA TAMA TAMA GOTCHI. They were not capable of sound reasoning.

I can still remember the feel of the Tamagotchi in my hand. The plastic was a bit warm from the other girl's hand, the egg was not yet hatched. It was small, round and ready to be loved. We would never part, this immortal pet and I. 

In my hand I held everything I had ever wanted. Better still, this pet would last forever. It wasn't going to be taken away by careless drivers or get caught in the tide. I had approximately five minutes to enjoy the momentum of this endless relationship...and then my mother arrived. She was saving me from a life of square-eyes and a potato brain, but what she really taught me was that love, however perfect, is always fleeting. And that my sister, however willing, was not a sufficient partner in crime.

The Truth About Online Dating

Dating has always been a horror for the terminally anxious, but then someone added the internet to the equation and things turned into the kind of horror that turns up in your kitchen at 4am with a meat cleaver and a menacing grin. Or at least that’s how I thought of online dating. I was somewhere between drowning in tiramisu and talking to my inner spirit guide (some description of cat) about where it all went wrong, when I decided to give in and  put my "love life" in the hands of the internet.

I guess I got propositioned by enough people my mother’s age to think - You know what… NO. I am a mentally stable-ish young woman I can find someone my own age. I will find a man on the websites like a modern person. Unlike a real modern person I had no idea about Tinder. My friends tried to convince me that the internet was meant for other people, people with life skills and good judgement. I was going to prove them wrong, I stayed up till 5am making the ultimate man catching profile.

After uploading a version of myself that my mother wouldn’t even recognise, I decided to have a gander through my options.

And man, oh man, was I impressed.

 I logged off and slept soundly in the knowledge that my future had abs. I woke to ALL THE MESSAGES.

But Mr Abs was not the sort of person who had decided to message me …oh no….

Worse than the profiles of the various paedophiles who wanted to marry me, was the attempted conversations by 90% of the people who liked my profile. 

Some brief examples of the scintillating conversations I had on the internet:

Person: How R U?

Me: Disillusioned by your flippancy with basic literacy

Person 2: Sexy pic gurl, I like your smile, smile at me?

Me: Just no.

Person 3: Want to eat duck and watch Sylvia Plath?

Me: You realise she’s dead and that would make this both creepy and illegal.

Person 4: Hi!

Me: Bye

Person 5: Have you got any more pics?

Me: Yes, please find attached a close-up of my left eyebrow.


In the end,  I would have gone on a date with anyone who could write a paragraph and  in that paragraph displayed any basic reference to the content I’d written on my profile i.e. I felt like someone correcting the Irish comprehension paper in the leaving cert- Oh look, they’ve copied an entire sentence I wrote and spewed it back at me, at least they tried, attempt marks! This is an okay way to mark a comprehension paper, because otherwise we’d have to admit that about 5% of our students can actually speak the damn language. But it is not a good way to decide who to date. It results in a lot of pre-date anxiety.

Which is followed by on the date anxiety.

Which is followed by how do we end the date anxiety.

Which is followed by why do we bother trying anxiety.

Which is followed by talking things through with your inner-cat lady.

Once I'd gone through this twenty or so times (never let it be said that I'm a quitter) I deleted everything. I'm sure I'll have a spoon too much of tiramisu and end up on the rollercoaster again some day, because that's what tiramisu or online dating or our stupid brains convince us of. They say - This time could be different, this time you might actually find someone vaguely compatible and hold hands for a few weeks.

But even then, even if you find your happy-for-a-while person, we all know how the story ends.



                                                                                                       

Binge Dieting and Becoming a Sugar-Free Prat

It's probably a little scary the way women, or at least many of the women I know, are programmed to beat themselves up over their weight. Not obviously, because that would be embarrassing now that we’re all self-aware and informed. But even the smallest women I've met (and they are teeny tiny runners that look like they should be drip-fed sandwiches) seem to count calories and consider any food that tastes better than lettuce to be some sort of luscious treat. A treat to be earned by squatting till their thighs bleed.
 
I, like many women, grew up watching my mother diet. She was never particularly heavy, but even at her lightest - she saw room to get leaner. I would consider my mum to be the kind of strong, quietly bull-headed woman that very few people could stand in the way of. But like many forward thinking women she had this crazy body hang-up.

My mum isn't the reason I have body hang-ups, neither are the slew of women I know on various diets. Gluten free, Paleo, sugarless or OH I JUST DON'T EAT FOOD ON MONDAYS. I can see how silly it is and I struggle with it as much as the next woman. But I also pretend, for the most part, that I'm not susceptible to this kind of pressure. I do the whole - I am chewing lentils because I want to be healthier and I like the taste. I'm running around in circles because I'm challenging and strengthening myself. On many levels this is all true. But on a deeper level, I know that I am driven by a need to be small, a feeling that thinner/stronger/fitter/better me is just a few mile repeats away. I even do the malignly evil thing of pretending I eat more than I do, or convincing myself that I eat healthy. There was even a stint where I was throwing back junk food in a sort of stick it to the man, I can eat what I want regime.

And I’ve never really lost or gained weight in a dramatic sense. Like most women I sort of fluctuate mildly. So therefore I must be healthy. Yeah right. I have a fast metabolism, I am naturally on the smaller side of things, but I don't feel that way. The summer I ran 60 miles a week - is the summer I beat myself up over everything I ate, but pretended to be a burger shovelling enigma in public. There's this romantic notion of thin girls that eat loads. They're the cool girl, the not worried about weight girl. Very often they're also going to ridiculous measures to remain that way behind closed doors. I've seen women run half-marathons and then eat half a sandwich as a reward. I know athletes that trained constantly and still threw up every second meal. At my thinnest, I used to drink 7-up to substitute meals. Which is all awful. Which is all more common than any of us allow ourselves to believe. Given how common it all is, I try to consciously steer clear of the debacle. I try not to weigh myself, because that’s not how I should create self-value. I’d managed, more or less, to kill a lot of the bad habits when I stumbled upon the idea of sugarfree living.

Cult is a strong word. But that's what the book feels like now. It gave me enough facts to be able to support the new diet with buzzwords like healthier, energised and less sluggish. But I wasn't really motivated by much of that, it was there, on some level. On a more obvious level there was the picture of the sugarfree girl on the front, there was the promise of not being hungry while nibbling kale and the idea that I would have cute colourful lunches in Tupperware. A svelter version of myself would frolic into the world. Svelter, would also somehow mean I became more emotionally balanced, happier and full of joie de vivre. I'd be picking flowers to place artistically on top of my homemade salads. I'd be doing Yoga on cliff sides in under a year. I'd be worthy of an instagram account to detail my morning jogs. I'd be the kind of super woman that stands on her head while making sugar free brownies for the homeless at 6am in the morning.

I'd like to point out that the book isn't to blame either. Nobody is. This is just how diets work. Or how a lot of us do. We try to better ourselves and go for the most obvious and external thing. I did the fridge purge. Muttering to myself in the kitchen as I cast aside all the devil food I had been living off. Asking myself how I hadn't become a coconut-butter loon sooner.

As with lots of diets, the easiest way to make yourself do it is to tell a load of people. So, spiel in hand, I offloaded my sugarfree plot on anyone that would listen. People look baffled when a thin person goes on a diet, as they should. But I peppered the conversation with buzz words, I was going to be healthier and happier this way. THEY WOULD SEE. My future fitness Instagram-ing wonder self would show them.

I don't know if you've ever tried to shop sugarfree, but don't believe the hype. It's all painful. It's painfully expensive, unless you go for the -tinned tuna, cucumbers and rice cakes- end of the scale. Which let’s face it, is actual torture. And with the exception of rice cakes (aka Styrofoam) I like those things. Not only this but reading food packaging that closely makes you feel bad about yourself. The sugarfree diet does a lot of things, one of them is to manipulate you into thinking former life choices were stupid and that somehow a custard cream will probably kill you.

What's worse is that all your insecurities manifest themselves in long speeches to friends on the benefits of sugarfree living that are more for you than them. Nobody needs to know how delicious each item of food you eat is or that you now feel like you can conquer the world. You crave other converts and judge other people for their sugary purchases. You become a horror.

The kind of horror that laughs about withdrawals. But really feels like death when she's face-planting the local park, instead of running. I know, I spent a good ten minutes crying into some daisies in Bushy Park, while my stomach tried to murder me.

Even then, with knives riddling my insides, with my body almost convulsing from the diet, I convinced myself that it was withdrawal symptoms. I’m not the kind of woman that gives up, I am stronger than that. And there lies the issue. We’re all struggling so hard to be this independent, thin, brilliant, together woman and I’m not sure she exists. Why death crawl around your kitchen to find some cucumber to gnaw on, when you could sit down and have a biscuit? Would the brilliant woman not do that? I really hope she would.

Or would she, like me, keep going. Talk about vegetables incessantly and become the sort of person that has to write an article to realise she’s being an idiot. Or worse, only realise the error of your ways when you’ve lost all your friends. There’s only so much carrot-championing that a person can realistically condone, no matter how much fun you used to be in your pre-sugarfree days.

Would she lie awake at night having monumental nightmares about eating M&M’s? Sure that sounds hilarious. But the actuality of waking up in a cold sweat over a dream about ingesting one heavily coloured piece of sugar is a little disturbing? Isn’t it?

I like to think the brilliant woman wouldn’t just substitute sugar with cheese. She’d understand that you can’t just trade in one food crutch for another. She actually really does like spinach smoothies. The brilliant woman wouldn’t ever give up on being sugarfree, she’s too busy writing a book about it and changing the world through the unprecedented flexibility of her yoga moves. The brilliant woman, the one just over there, around the corner or up the next hill - isn’t feeling guilt about looking at cakes or eating enough cheese to clog all her arteries. But then again, that brilliant woman doesn’t really exist. Does she?