3 Fun and Easy Ways to make Social Media Managers Hate You

You might think a big business’ social media just happens, like rain or Saw sequels. But there are thousands of disgruntled Humanities majors who got swept up into the role of brand bitch social media manager because their life’s biggest achievement is their facebook profile, and that’s something you can put on a CV now.

Here’s how to make them hate you.

#1: Assume the social staff own the company

CEOs spent their time racing radio controlled sharks and rolling gold blunts, right? Wrong. They’re painstakingly replying to every single dumb question on their company’s facebook page.

#2: Be in a demographic that can’t spell

I’ve worked on brands who try to speak to the youth of the world by saying ‘da’ instead of ‘the’. Sadly, these brands often have no idea how anyone actually talks, so writing with their style feels less like a dialect and more like a speech impediment. 

#3: Be a sore loser. And a sore winner.

Brands love running contests, it’s the easiest way to get the unwashed masses valued consumers to engage with them.

Sadly, most people who enter contests on social media are not usually… well… they’re not the kind of people you’d nominate to be humanity’s ambassadors to an alien race. Unless the aliens came over because they heard Human Nuggets were delicious and nutritious.

Sore losers love to cry foul because no fair and just universe would keep them apart from that random thing they want for free.

And if you think losers are bad, you should see the winners

Never like your own post. It's like high-fiving yourself in the mirror while taking a selfie.

And here's a pro tip if these don't work: if you really, really want to make a social media manager hate you, just remind them that they'll probably never make a living from their scathingly witty blog. :(

Why the fuck should I care if anyone thinks I'm pretty?

I was at a pub with some awesome people - five girls and one guy. He said he didn't really feel like 'one of the girls' so I lent him my alice band - which had a big black bow on it. (He totally worked it, for the record.)

We had a few laughs and a little while later he handed it back. 

Then some random middle-aged man came up to me and said, "Give him back the bow - he looks much cuter in it than you. No offence, hahaha!"

Naturally, I smiled. I do that when I'm nervous. Then I told him to fuck off. I do that when I'm not happy. And then, because he thought I was joking, I ignored him until he went away.

The conversation in our group was a bit stunted by that rude and awkward encounter, but it started to flow again. More jokes, more shots, more silly stories.

But I wanted to take the bow off.

I couldn't WAIT until I could take the bow off. 

In fact, the only reason I didn't reach up and pulling it off  right away was anger. Anger that some fucking random douche in a bar thought he could a) tell me what to do, b) insult me in front of my friends and c) make me feel like shit because...?

Because what? 

Because I let my mood - nay, my entire self esteem - be dictated by the whims of a random stranger.

Because it's normal for someone like me to feel completely collapsed by a smidgen of negative attention from someone like that.

Because he thought he - as a male or a white guy or king of the universe or whatever - believed he had the right to dictate how I should look. 

Because every single day, society tells me that I'm worthless unless someone thinks I'm pretty.

And what the fuck is up with that?

I don't think I'm really under the thrall of mass media. I roll my eyes when big media posts a picture of a woman existing, and declares that she's flaunting or bravely baring her body. Like every moment of a woman's life is spent trying to project her hotness to the general public. 

Like the idea that a woman might just fucking BE instead of obsessing about how she looks is inconceivable.

But clearly, some of those messages stick like splinters in my subconscious. From Seventeen to CNN, every institution tells me: 'To justify your existence, you must be beautiful."

It's also something that bothers me about the fat positive* movement. Of course, as a fat girl I appreciate the acceptance and understanding that fat positivity brings. BUT it bothers me that so much fat positive stuff boils down to "Look -  fat girls can be beautiful! Fat girls can be sexy! ALL THESE MEN approve of plus-size women! Yaaaay!" No. Not yay. Boo.

Boo for "but at least SOMEONE thinks you're pretty" being the bottom line.

Boo for that raw inner nerve that's still struck by a random man being rude to me. That tiny belief that if only I were beautiful, I'd be safe. 

That nerve that's still there even though I know I am smart, talented, and loved. Even though I know in my head that I am a valuable human being who has a right to exist - no matter what I look like.  

Confession: I thought about ending this post with a picture of me in the offending big-bow alice band. It's tempting to end on a note of "But that guy was wrong, I DID look totally cute!" 

But I won't.

I don't have to prove to anybody that I'm pretty.

I don't have to care.

I don't have to give my power away.

And I'm going to keep telling myself that, until that raw nerve is healed up by my self respect.

*Obviously this is only a single facet of the fat positive movement - and I do think it's important as a whole. I just think the "don't worry - fat girls can be pretty too!" thing is misguided.

How To Suck A Little Less At Twitter

Have timeline, will bitch.

I'm hardly a social media expert, but I'm nothing if not a social media addict. There's plenty of advice out there on how to be great at twitter - be funny, be interesting, be a good curator, blah blah blah. But I've got a few pet peeves that I haven't seen mentioned on any of these lists.

Protip. (source)

This is by no means a definitive list on how to behave on twitter. The average user (myself included) probably does a few of these now and then, because we all sorta suck, right?

My mission is a small and achievable one: to suck a little less at twitter. Here are some fun tips to make that happen:

Stop detailing your bodily functions. If all you tweet is I’m so hungry! or I’m so full! then you may as well just name your account after your stomach. Same goes with I’m soooo cold. Following accounts from both hemispheres, I’ve constantly got someone whinging about being cold in my timeline. It’s dull. You’re giving me nothing. I want insight. I want a new perspective. I want frostbitten spirit-fingers!

Quit the TMI app. Specifically, abusing the TMI feature by making every tweet ridiculously long and drawn out. The joy of twitter is that it’s a series of short, readily available, self-contained messages. Usually I only click through if you’ve offered a particularly interesting comment on something you’ve retweeted, and I want to see the whole retweet. But if you start with ‘You know what’s wrong with the world…’ then I am so not clicking through.

Stop tweeting inane decontextualized song lyrics. Maybe you’re listening to this amazing song and it’s bringing your soul to delicious musical orgasm, but twitter is a text-based experience and all I see on my screen is ‘baby baby baby oh baby baby baby no’ - and I just don’t give a duck.

Limit the text speak. Perfectly acceptable for your average tweeter with three bots following them. But what blows my mind is when self-proclaimed writers use text speak when it's not necessary (we've all had to make sacrifices to save that -1 character.) But dude, you’re trying to sell me a book you wrote? You better damn well show me that you know how English works.

Quit being didactic or overly philosophical. Thinking out loud isn't always equivalent to making other people think. Being high-minded now and then is refreshing, but if every tweet is an abstract attempt at being deep, you're probably coming off pretentious (at best.)

For the love of pie, quit with the ever-so-unique nicknames for people in your life. You can’t just say my husband or Dave (if your husband’s name happens to be Dave), oh no! It has to be The Man, The S.O., Mister BetterHalfington, and all that shit. And kids become The Princess or Little Winner. You’re not being cute and creative. You’re being that married person or parent who makes all the other married people or parents look like lame, kitschy dorks.

Now that I've alienated everybody ever, here are some things other people say to stop doing, that I say keep doing on twitter:

Swearing. Apparently not many people like swearing on twitter, but I think if that's part of your personality, don't censor yourself to appeal to the masses. Fuckbuckets.

Drunktweets. Yup, it's an art, and completely depends on what kind of drunk you are. I happen to be a happy and inappropriate drunk, so my drunktweets are by far what gets me the most followers. Unless you're tweeting on behalf of your boss, or your parole officer is following you, I'd say drunktweets are harmless fun.

Oversharing. Twitter is beautiful because it gives you the freedom to post whatever you want. And if you want to post “The thing that bothered me about my ex is that he had really weird junk.” then I am totally gonna follow you and favourite that shit.

Did I miss anything? What would you add to the list, or take off it? Have you ever tweeted about a fire before fully evacuating the building? Share in the comments!

Snarky Review: No Excuses! by Brian Tracy

Oh hey, guess what? I have a facebook page now! So follow the link and click like if you want to want to keep up with me over there, or if you want to contribute to the part of my self-worth that I gain from the internet (which is a pretty big part.)

Now, let's talk about THE POWER OF SELF-DISCIPLINE, BITCHES!

This double-negative stresses me out. NO No Excuses! This is an excuse-only zone!

Of course, I got this book because I'm a loser. I doubt many winners bought this just to feel good about themselves, right? In my constant half-assed quest to get my shit together, I figured I could get a few tips on how to stop sucking and be awesome instead. 

Here's what Brian Tracy taught me about winning:

1. You should stop doing those things that make you a loser, and start doing things that winners do (Though I'm paraphrasing, he literally doesn't get more specific than this.)
2. Your suckiness is at the very core of your identity and personality – so “to achieve greatly, you must become a different person.” Yup.
3. WINNERS DON'T HAVE FRIENDS. Socializing is an overrated waste of time. Are your “friends” going to give you a yacht? No? THEN WHY ARE YOU HANGING OUT WITH THEM?
4. WINNERS DON'T HAVE FUN. They're too busy winning. And if winning is fun, you're not doing it right.
5. WINNERS DON'T EAT ICE CREAM. Ice cream is equal to “personal weakness, underachievement, and failure.” That's on page 13 if you want to look it up. I'm not even kidding.
6. Winners accept responsibility for everything. EVERYTHING. Even Hurricane Katrina (p.57).

Sure, all the loser / winner talk is alienating because Brian Tracy doesn't understand that the audience of his book are obviously looking to better themselves, and so fall into the 'loser' category most of the time he mentions this great divide. But goshdarnit, Brian Tracy's a winner.

A winner who will fuck you up without getting blood on his lovely sweater.

The worst part of this book wasn't even getting called a loser every few pages, it was the constant barrage of invented terms, arbitrary definitions, and RULES. All the rules. Brian Tracy loves rules*. Rules He Can Capitalize Because That Makes It More Official. And the rule about rules is “we can put them in quotation marks because it sounds like we're quoting the Grand Handbook Of The Universe, even when no external source is noted.”

The amount of rules and invented terms is really astonishing. Because I love my readers (and hate myself, apparently) I made a list of my favourites:

Someday Aisle – the place where losers live without goals (but presumably with ice-cream?)

Excusitis – the disease losers have.

Path Of Least Resistance – the path that losers take.

The Expediency Factor –  this is defined at least three times in really ambiguous terms. But I get the gist that it's something about losers not thinking of the long-term consequences of sucking so much.

The Law Of Unintended Consequences – Uh... sometimes when you do stuff, other stuff happens... that you didn't intend? Apparently this only happens to losers.

The Law Of Perverse Consequences – Not as fun as it sounds. Zip up, losers.

The Iron Law OF THE UNIVERSE MOTHERFUCKERS – It's fantastic that Brian Tracy just casually mentions this as if he irrefutably knows how the entire universe works. Also called the Law Of Cause And Effect and the Law Of Sowing And Reaping.

The Law Of Correspondence – if you suck on the inside, your life will suck on the outside. So, look around you... that's how much you suck, apparently.

Choosing Organisms – what everyone is. Because people make choices. And are also organisms. Don't capital letters look like they're having more fun? Let's put them on every word!

The Law Of Concentration – Apparently, this law ensures that whatever you concentrate on becomes a greater presence in your life. So Benedict Cumberbatch should spontaneously materialize beside me any moment now.

Response-Ability – the ability to take responsibility (?!) I'm so glad we have a term for that now.

The Failure Mechanism – an incredibly vague part of your brain that clicks your default life setting to “lame.”

The Success Mechanism – an equally vague part of your brain that is triggered by having goals, and turns your brain into the rudder / compass / ship / mermaid of your life.

Major Definite Purpose – the goal that's most important to you. So important it gets its own military ranking *salutes* Major Definite-Purpose!

Mindstorming – exactly like brainstorming, only without the copyright violation.

Just Over Broke – the hilarious acronym that the word job apparently stands for – when it comes to losers who are just getting by that is.

Personal Services Corporation – an odd extended metaphor that has something to do with growing your own stock and also investing in yourself and also making yourself a company that you work for. Ignorance is strength. We were always at war with Eurasia.

I get the feeling the first draft of this book was 50 pages long, because the amount of padding is incredible. And it's not just tangential anecdotes, it's mind-blowingly condescending explanations of really obvious things. 

Here's a list of things that apparently take at least a paragraph each to explain to the humble reader.

• Why dinner comes before dessert.
• When to pay in restaurants, and when to pay in cafeterias.
• Parenting is an important responsibility (as opposed to the popular misconception 'parenting is a ham sandwich'.)
• The (American) Constitution and the Bill Of Rights are legal documents.
• Doing good things makes you feel good.
• Doing bad things makes you feel bad.
• Children are dependent on their parents.
• Frivolous lawsuits are frivilous.
• Writing things down is a good idea.
• Watching TV is unproductive.
• Homing pigeons are neat.

Like any condescending self-help book, this one has exercises. Deeply unhelpful stuff, too – every single one is a variation of Make a 'To-Do List. Do it. Loser.'

It's achingly clear that Tracy really believes that life is a competition with winners and losers, but when he puts it like this it's really a bit scary: “In biology, life forms are categorized from the least to the most complex, from single-celled plankton all the way up the increasingly complex spectrum of life to the human being. Similarly, human beings can be organized along a spectrum as well, from the least to the most developed.” (p.42)  GOSH THAT SOUNDS AN AWFUL LOT LIKE A PREMISE FOR EUGENICS.

No Excuses falls into every trap of bad self-help books (and even invents a few ones) – it's condescending, vague, unsympathetic, badly written, and, well, unhelpful. It also does that thing where arbitrary words are bolded AND italicized to bring the point home – I'm sorry, but unless the message is THIS PAGE IS POISONOUS DO NOT LICK, there's really no need for this ugly double-formatting.

This book is not about how to get your shit together, it's 293 pages of why people who have their shit together are happier than those who don't. SPOILER ALERT: because having your shit together makes you happy. 

So I'm gonna give it a big fat 1/5, or 2/10. Avoid!

*As Monica Gellar would say, “Rules CONTROL the fun.” Frankly, I doubt Brian Tracy would approve of the fun at all.

The Perils of Second-Hand Books

First let me say I love second-hand books. They're conveniently sold at the place where I work, it's nice to support independent traders instead of bullying corporations, and best of all, they're cheap!

But like dating a divorced guy or taking in a stray cat, sometimes you're bound to run into the darker side of their damaged, worn and sometimes sticky past. There's always dog-ears and maybe a few water-warped pages, but now and then you find something annoying, something weird, or something... perilous.

The Scribbler

Often in textbooks or self-help stuff, the previous owner saw every page as a blank public-toilet wall just begging to be vandalized.

Geniuses use pencil, bitch.

Not only is this lameness shortsighted (yeah, because you'll own this book until you die and then it'll be buried with you) it's also just WRONG. Writing in a book is like recording your own commentary to a rented DVD. Nobody cares. Get a blog!

The Leperous Softcover

They're falling apart, so well-loved there's only sellotape and hope keeping them together. 

I can't believe this is second-hand.

You figure there's one more read in them and they're in the bargain bin anyway... but you find yourself compulsively checking that the page numbers match as you read, checking if anything's gone missing while the poor thing was raging against the dying of the light.

The Hidden Horror

Forget the plot, what's scariest about these books is the disturbingly anonymous materials found between the pages.

For the love of God TURN THE PAGE. WHO CARES WHAT HAPPENS ON THIS ONE.

Most of the time, you don't even want to know what this is. Tea leaves? Unimpressive confetti? The last owner's dehydrated kidney? The answer would probably horrify you.

Suspicious Stains

The best you can hope for is that this was a fluid going into someone's body and not coming out of it.

That's... probably just orange juice.

Like the hidden horror, you're probably better off inventing a happy, non-gag-inducing tale about these marks than actually giving it a good think. You can't handle the truth.

The No Seriously WTF

The second-hand peril that inspired this entire post? HUMAN TEETH MARKS. 

Maybe the previous owner was a raging alcoholic.  Maybe they were trying to prove some obscure point about consumer culture. Maybe they lost a bet.

Maybe they just love the fibrous crunch of yellowing paper under their incisors.

Whatever the reasoning behind it, this book was in someone's mouth, and... They. Bit. Into. It. So hard that the marks persist months and probably years later. That's... just... excuse me while I scrub my hands with antiseptic.

Have you ever had to put a second-hand book down to take an emergency shower or preventative Listerine? Share your perilous – or marvelous – story in the comments!

Divine: The Series - A Snarky Review

This post contains spoilers for Divine: The Series*. You could read it cold but I'd love you to give the series a gander to see how scathingly accurate my review is. There are six twelve-minute episodes, linked below:
 

The One with the Magic Loaf of Bread

The One with the Evil Baby

The One where the Literal Fish is a Symbol for a Metaphorical Fish

The One with So Many Feelings

The One where Lady Gaga Makes Out with a Mascot

The One that’s Even More Confusing than the Last Five

Because I'm fair and wonderful and I don't want to burn in hell, I'm going to employ the sandwich-method approach to this review: positive-negative-positive.

With this bread I shall make the holy sandwich of criticism

Here are some good things about the series:

1. The lead actor, Guy Whose Name I've Yet To Google**, is naked for the duration of the first episode.

I'm okay with that.

2. Misha

3. Collins. 

4. Misha Collins plays a priest. Maybe because I wasn't raised religious, but there's something about that collar that just makes me want to... confess stuff. Granted, he doesn’t do much acting, because his character is in perpetual awe of everything, so he basically spends his days reacting…

This does not mean acting again.

Okay, are we happy so far? I'm not being horribly unfair and mean? Right, here's the negative stuff. Don't worry, there are only 8 points to get through.

1. There's a stone-faced self-flagellating superhero named Divine. Not an imposing name for a superhero. Well, not a traditional superhero, which he seems like. Could've worked for a cross-dressing superhero. In that case, it'd be great if his name was Divine! with an exclamation mark.

That would've made the series a lot more fun.

2. Blood. Lots of blood. Gooey blood. Blood makes us edgy! I’m not opposed to blood, but making someone bleed doesn’t automatically make me care about them. It just automatically makes me wonder what they use as a thickener for all that red dye.

3. Divine! has a 'sidekick' who's a hot Asian girl in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit, goth make-up, and coloured streaks in her hair, which is in fucking pigtails. I'm not entirely sure what her purpose is, because she can't climb a ladder, and can't fight anything the size of (or presumably bigger than) a baby.

It's okay, it was an evil baby.

3. In episode five, Divine saves a hooker (or doesn't save a hooker? It's so ambiguous! Loose ends make us deep!***) who's co-incidentally dressed up as Lady Gaga for Halloween. Well, that last bit's not exactly in the show, but it's the only way I can explain her outfit.

Just dance! Or pose.

The hooker is squirming in unnecessary ecstasy under a john, when she suddenly decides she's done hooking and wants to go back to school to fulfil her dream of being a nail technician. Probably. The fact that she rejects this evil dude before he attacks her is so problematic we don't even have time for it today. Let's just say that it's not enough that he's a demon beast thing and is therefore evil – no no, it's her asserting her right to choose what happens to her body that really pushes him over the edge.
  
4. In keeping with the Halloween theme, the perfectly normal guy MAGICALLY transforms into a guy wearing a crappy bull head. I assume he just put on the head because the full bull mascot costume gets him all sweaty when he beats up hookers. We just don't know.

Go Bulls!

Divine! saves the day and Asian girl crouches next to the victim, watching Divine get stabbed. She does absolutely nothing to assist, unless you count her continuing to be hot and Asian as doing something. 

5. These are just the action episodes. The poorly-thought-through talks-about-God episodes are even worse. My favourite part was when a curly-haired priest (not Misha Collins – boo) gives the old 'teach a man to fish' saying WHILE HOLDING A FISH. To REALLY bring that point home.

I had more sympathy for these fish than for any other character.

6. I almost liked a character once. There's a taxi driver who speaks probably more than all the other characters combined, and says some borderline amusing things. He generally doesn't have that ripe-for-parody serious!face everyone else does. Then he starts bleeding and mumbling in Latin and we never see him again.

./

Wait... what?

7. I get the sense that everybody thought the whole superhero + Christian mythology crossover was a great idea – but nobody felt the need to explore it or do something new and interesting with it.  There's a single moment where maybe a sticky issue is almost tackled. But then it's not. See, Curly Priest (the one who's not Misha Collins), while holding a fish, talks about how he feels guilty that a friend committed suicide because he (the friend) was gay. And Curly Priest couldn't help or support him, so now Curly Priest has angst. Unsurprisingly, this is all left open ended and Curly Priest doesn't actually say it's stupid to hate people because they're gay. He just cuts up fish and pouts. But whatever.

8. The whole series gives itself an air of gravity and importance that it doesn't earn through story development. Also, I hold a deep dislike for websites with light text on a black background. But now I'm just being difficult. Let's get the crusty top onto our review sandwich.

More good things! Continuing from the list above...

5. Um, it was free?  

6. Oh, I did like the Sin City-esque aesthetic they went for. Kinda feels like they ran out of money towards the Halloween episode. But the first few episodes look nice.  

7. The series was a public-funded project and apparently the supporters were really made to feel special and a part of the process. That's nice. 

8. Oh, did I mention Misha Collins as a priest? *scrolls up* damn it. But at least now I have as many good points as bad ones. Sandwich complete!


So that’s my – wow, very long – review of Divine. Overall, I’d recommend the series only if you have a snarky friend (or a companion blog post!) to watch it with.

For added fun, put some pictures of the cast into the Marie Claire Virtual Salon and see what they'd look like with Tyra Banks' hair, like I did with Dan Payne above. Sorry Dan, apparently we can't trust the Marie Claire robots to apply eyeshadow. But I still think you look divine.


*Not to be confused with Divine: the perfume, Divine: the gospel trio or Divine! The heartwarming TV movie about a gang of crazy kids that take their drag show from the convent to Vegas.
**Real name: Gregor Googlevitch. Ha, kidding... It’s Dan Payne. Which, coincidentally, is quite a heroic name.
***Or lazy. Or nearsighted in terms of story development. But probably deep.

The Worst Decision I've Ever Made

Let me tell you about my TESOL course – otherwise known as the worst decision I've ever made.

About five months ago, in July '11, I took a course in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages. It was the first major decision I'd made by myself – I spent my own money (okay, maybe I borrowed a bit) and happily lay down ten grand to go through this one-month intensive course.

I thought it was going to give my life direction and purpose, set the tone for the next five to ten years of exploring the world and blessing everyone around me with the gift of English.

Yeah, that didn’t exactly work out.

When I interviewed for the course, I was told I was the perfect candidate. On paper, I was. I had a university degree and a year of tutoring experience. I wanted to go to Asia to teach tiny well-behaved Asian children and eat noodles. I love English – I say 'whom' and know what a semi-colon is for.

Ha. Guys, I'm also a very very VERY bad teacher.

Not bad in a good way.

First of all, it was an intensive course. One month, full-time, with homework and practicals. Shit, I'm getting stressed just thinking about it. I thought I worked well under pressure, but I was deeply, horribly mistaken. We had a pre-course assignment to hand in on the first day, and obviously I'd left it to the last minute and stayed up all night finishing the damn thing. I was all pressured out before I even showed up to class.

At first I thought I was doing alright – we learned fun stuff like what a Concept Check Question was. Apparently, saying 'Do you understand?' is some sort of blasphemy, because nobody's going to cut into your lesson and admit they don't know what's going on. A CCQ asks for content in response to your question, so instead of saying “You have five minutes. Do you understand?” You say, “How much time do you have?” and the bright sparks are all “FIVE MINUTES TEACHER!” In theory, anyway.

Next was the practicals. Keep in mind I was not only teaching arbitrary language rules for the first time in a real classroom, but my fellow trainer-teachers and a MODERATOR were at the back of the class FUCKING STARING AT ME AND TAKING NOTES.

It was a nightmare. I can only look back and laugh now because I was SO bad, the only reason they passed me was because technically I was doing some stuff right. I wrote up my lesson plans and printed out my flashcards, but as soon I stood up in front of the class, I was awful. My voice shook, I went too fast and then backtracked, I taught to the floor because I was terrified of my students, whose names I'd either forget or mess up.

They were an adult class of refugees from different parts of Africa, and our class had the least English of anyone in the program. They were a very intimidating bunch and the fact that my voice went up a few octaves every time I talked to them didn't exactly command respect.

Pro tip: when you're in charge of a room of people who mistrust you as an agent of oppression in their lives already so scarred with political and economic crises that they had to flee their homes, making them eternally bitter, DO NOT try to make them play broken telephone.

It will not cheer them up.

I used to think I could teach. I was a tutor in university and enjoyed it. I like saying clever things and hardly ever tire of my own voice. I had a particularly bright class as my very first tutoring experience, and I think they inflated this delusion that teaching was a skill of mine. I thought I did okay – their work improved over the course, and I even made them laugh a few times.

So when I applied for the TESOL course, I thought I was just going to nail it like Jesus to the cross. Oh, how very wrong I was. Every practical was like walking the plank and jumping into burning oil.  Two weeks in I actually broke down and wept in the middle of the after-class assessment. Yup, I was that girl, and it was not cute.

I learned that tutoring isn't teaching, really. A tutor's job is to build and expand on whatever's taught in lectures and maybe incorporate some general knowledge or useful anecdotes or theories. Teaching is a thousand times harder:

• Imagine explaining the past perfect tense to someone who has  no concept of it in their first language.
• Explain it using simple terms because they're hardly going to know what “x is relative to z” means.
• Imagine them giving you the stinkeye while you're trying to explain it.
• Don't forget to stress about sticking to the eighteen minute lesson plan - you just spent sixteen minutes on the bit you allocated three minutes to.
• What's that sound in the deafening silence after you ask a question?
• It's the moderator's pencil scribbling “YOU SUCK” across your little assessment paper.

Some of my good friends are studying to become teachers, and mad props to them. I just can't do it. I don't have the mojo.

It didn't help that I caught the 'flu halfway through the course, and you couldn't miss more than two days because the fascist pigs international moderators wouldn't stand for it. I powered through and by the end of the month, the 'flu had turned into bronchitis. The coughing fits from the bronchitis turned into a sprained chest wall muscle that made it painful to breath, laugh and sleep (my three favourite things) for two months after the infection cleared up.

Yeah, fuck TESOL.

I mean, don't get me wrong, the course I did was pretty high-quality and I learned a lot. The teachers were great and the moderators weren't even as evil as I make them sound. It's more their very presence that terrified me. Other people actually enjoyed the course. For me though, it was a perfect storm of totally-not-worth-it.

But you know what the best part about this whole shitty situation is? That it's over, and I'm alive. Yup. I spent all my money, killed a little bit of my soul, humiliated myself several times over, and got a qualification I'll probably never use.

And everything's fine now. I took my antibiotics, watched a lot of TV, and got over it.

I made a big decision and it turned out to be the wrong one, but that's okay. I didn't die of embarrassment and nobody arrested me for being broke as a joke. It's actually made me a little less afraid of taking risks, you know? And that's a good thing.

To more bad decisions!

Rainbows and smileys and some bad writing.

I ordered business cards from Moo (to be fair, they're baby mini business cards) and as I was browsing through the designs available, my first thought was 'do they have Hello Kitty ones'? Now, you might think nobody who wants Hello Kitty business cards should be allowed to have business cards at all. They should be given printer paper and crayons and sat on a tiny plastic chair. That's what I think, anyway. Maybe it's a symptom of the chronic childishness my generation is trapped in – but screw it. I'm a writer. I'm artsy. I'm whimsical. All the smart, pastel designs seemed boring. I'm a special snowflake, goddamnit.

So I got rainbow business cards. They'll be delivered around Christmas. I'm psyched.

Now, I'm aware that I keep calling myself a writer but please let's not get our wires crossed – this self-imposed label is not some sort of delusional, narcissistic thing. It's an affirmation which I know for a fact is currently false (with the definition of a writer being someone who writes and gets paid and knows how grammar works – see extract below for evidence to the contrary), but which will hopefully become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you're not esoterically-minded, humour me and pretend that an affirmation and a lie are separate things.

I also did something sorta crazy the other day. I've been reading No Country For Old Men and while I'm not mad about the plot, Cormac McCarthy's style just blows me away. When I was still labouring under the delusion that I could mentally handle two years of Masters, I wanted to focus on Cormac McCarthy's novels for my thesis – because The Road is probably my favourite novel of all time. And he's too cool for quotation marks.

So while working on Project: Not A Fanfic, I wrote a whole chapter in a weak impression of McCarthy's style. It turned out to be rather spectacularly bad. Have an extract:

She stood and went outside. It was dark and it had just rained and there were strong winds knotting her hair and raising goosebumps on her skin. The air smelled wet and fresh. The rustle of the wind chewed on the edges of her mind and she pictured a thousand enemies waiting beyond the edge of the darkness for her, breaking twigs and shifting restlessly in the distance waiting impatiently for her to come within reach, within swiping distance.

She shivered, looked at the moon, and went back inside. He asked her what she'd been doing outside. Fresh air, she said. She looked to the ground so he wouldn't see her pupils had become tiny pinpricks in her muddy green eyes.

He said he was going out and that she should have a hole dug by the time he got back. She said how big. He said about six foot long and six deep. It should be easy in this mud.

If she had been sober her stomach would have dropped and her skin would have grown to match the green of her eyes but none of that happened. She nodded and made herself and him a cup of coffee. Most of the time even when he said he wanted coffee he wouldn't drink it. His cup stayed full and a thin brown ring started to stain the cup around the edge where the coffee ended. He packed up his things, real organised, and left. She listened to his truck start and chug dead and start again. She looked at the cup he left behind and downed the lukewarm instant coffee that had a sludge of sugar at the bottom. He hadn't even stirred it. 

She tied up her hair in a knotty tail then twisted the tail around into a messy bun that would stay off her neck as she sweated. He kept the shovels in the shed which he kept locked because some of the tools had blood on them and no point letting people wander in there. Although he liked things clean some stains were sentimental.

I doubt this chapter will survive revisions, but it was fun to write.

Project: Not A Fanfic is going well, by the way. I'm on schedule in terms of word count (37,086 words as of this evening), and just yesterday I tackled a massive action scene I've been putting off since day one. Anyone who knows me knows I consider it a feat of strength to walk and talk at the same time, so my co-ordination and spatial reasoning skills aren't quite at action-adventure levels. Luckily the good folks in my story have guns* so they don't have any messy, confusing, multi-limbed hand-to-hand combat for me to grapple with.

One of my characters gave me a pleasant surprise too – while I thought she was relentlessly blasé and well-adjusted, turns out she's been faking it. I'm thrilled, because she's more real and relatable now. She was bordering on Mary Sue-ish before. Although I realise how problematic it is that when a male character is perfect it's heroic, and when a female character is perfect it's unrealistic.

Like any adult with rainbow business cards, I use smiley stickers to motivate myself.

My new favourite quote and motto for NaNo.

Luckily, perfect people are boring and I won't tolerate them in my stories. Right now every character in Project: Not A Fanfic is so damaged I'm surprised they get anything done. Hell, I don't even expect much from them, I'm just hoping the poor bastards manage to get to the end of the book without turning into a suicide cult. 

*I dislike guns and I don't really understand them. If it were up to me, my characters would shoot jelly babies from slingshots at the bad guys. But since the bad guys don't care how I feel, and have guns with bullets, I fear this could put my team at an unfair disadvantage.

Loving Dasia

You know when you get so bored that you google your own name?
*crickets chirping*
Well anyway, turns out there's a book out there called Loving Dasia. At first I was like "Yay! Not only do I have a real name, but other people in the world think it's cool enough to name a book after! Weeeee!"
And then I saw Dasia's dark, handsome, secret-agent lover's name is...
Grimarious. For realsies.

That's Grimmy for short, then?  Lovely.

(For the record, I just linked the Amazon page here to prove this book exists. On no account do I think you should buy it. Need any more proof that you should stay away? Grimmy's last name is Gautraux. Apparently Ana Gia Wright's hobby is to mash fun-sounding syllables together and pretend the result isn't ridiculous. Kind of like fanfic writers who introduce Harry Potter's long lost - totally hot - sister Qi'bnoby into canon.)

Sigh. I wish I had a real name.

3 things about SA that I'm well and truly OVER

Yes, we have sunshine and smiles and rainbow-coloured ponies over here in South Africa, but we also have things that make me want to rant like a... well, like a blogger who's putting off a lot of marking!

1 - World Cup propaganda. Endless soppy TV ads and cheesy billboards encouraging us to refrain from stoning foreign tourists; and reminding us that because some people kick a ball around, we're all homies and this country is incredibly amazing. I can't wait for the World Cup to be over, so we can all go back to being grumpy pessimists.

2 - Malema rage. Yes, he's an idiot. Yes, he's offensive. But every time you react to him, HE WINS. His personal and political agenda is to get as much attention as possible. I'd like to see the energy everyone puts into creating drama around this man be redirected into something constructive. Like throwing shoes at him. Or stuffing his pillows with something he's allergic to. Or just pushing him over so that he falls down.

3 - The new little TV's on buses. I guess this springs from the first point - wow, SA's so great! Sure, a bus may only come by once every four hours or so, and you're lucky if it's roadworthy, but look, it's got a tiny TV in the front! The thing is, the only thing they play is this creepy computer-animated kid's show about a rabbit who lives in some sort of communist fruit-based economy. I guess that's the only way to punish people for taking buses without infringing on their human rights.

Aah, it feels good to fulfill my hater-quota for the day.

White Noise: 310 pages of my life I'm never getting back

White Noise by Don DeLillo is doublepluspostmodern, and not in a good way.

The whole book is about this dude, Jack (why are 75% of all protagonists named Jack?) who's an annoying college professor, insufferable poser, babydaddy, and a guy who generally has too much time on his hands to ponder... wait for it... DEATH.

(DEATH is like so scary, that's why we have to write it in BIG LETTERS.)

Now, DEATH is hardly an overwritten subject, especially in postmodernism's heyday, right? But DeLillo brings it to a whole new level of Oh My God, My Eyes Are Bleeding badness. Basically, good ol' Jack can't stop thinking about DEATH because it's the only thing that freaks him out in his comfy consumer culture.

Poor Jack, DEATH upsets him. Don't you feel sorry for him and can totally relate to his character? No? You'd rather just chuck a portable DVD player at his head? Wow, me too! We should hang out.

DeLillo's description of the overly media-saturated world was probably a big whoop in the eighties, but writing "Leaded, Unleaded, Superleaded" in the middle of a love scene between Jack and his legwarmer-clad wife strikes me as less deep and meaningful and more 'I need three more words for this chapter or my publisher will yell at me again.'

I'm pretty sure that this book got on the Honours reading list, and into academic acclaim in general, through a very clever the-king-has-no-clothes approach: the individual fakes awe and a deep understanding of the book because that's what the collective is expressing. Nobody wants to be the idiot who says he didn't get it.

And after three hundred or so pages of Jack whingeing about DEATH, I was sincerely hoping he'd fall into a giant meat grinder and... wait for it... DIE! But the freakin' dude just keeps on trucking. Yes, it's postmodern. It's also a shitty ending.

The only good thing about this book is that (despite that fact that I found it really, really lame) I get it, so I'm going to write an essay on it this week and not have any more American Lit work until the exams.

Next week we're starting on Black Boy, by Richard Wright. I'll probably write more about it once I've finished it, but let me say now that it's fantastic. One of the best books I've ever read; I can't wait for classes to start so I can gush about it to a begrudging audience of eight.

The only thing is that it's pretty depressing, and brings me to tears almost as much as the first season of Glee. I don't know why I start crying when perfectly good-sounding people break into show tunes. Maybe because it makes me ponder the ceaseless void of DEATH.