What's happening in your life? Part 2

Can I be arsed to cook?

The 'dishes' need doing (like most of them/it) and I have relatively ambitious plans.

"Sling" and "fling" are instructions that I try to avoid when preparing piping hot comestibles.

The Call of the Wendigo wrote:Just sling everything into a bowl and fling it into the microwave.

Good god woman, haven’t you bought an air fryer yet?

I couldn’t live without mine. Microwave instructions have perplexed me for years, and don’t even seem to apply to stuff that’s first been slung in the freezer - those things require a whole lot of mathematics to be going on, on different settings that you have to remember to change in between rounds. Since the air fryer, I’ve been able to make myself hot meals at home without burnt parts, frozen parts, melted containers, melted appliances, smoke alarms, and everything having to be heated - by guesstimate - separately. If I wanted a reliably hot and fully edible meal before, I had to go out for it.

My spend on restaurants has gone down by several hundred pounds per month since my mother gifted me hers, due to an upgrade on the model she was already having delivered. I’ve basically got one of the cheaper, older, more basic models. Even considering, I’ve can’t even remember the last time I used the microwave. It’s gone from the only way I could cook something to just sitting there taking up space.

My friend has a mini rice cooker, capacity 0.5 litres, which she allowed me to experiment with when I visited yesterday. It doesn't make any steam to speak of. Such a device would be perfect for heating up tins of beans etc in hotel rooms.

I had one of those days. This morning I woke up, felt nothing much - not up, not down, and then I went to the mirror to see what I was dealing with as a new week dawned.

My hair was sitting beautifully, my skin was gently flushed, my eyes were sparkling. I looked ten years (at least) younger. If I’d told myself I was 28, I’d have believed myself.

I wish I hadn’t bothered watching any news tonight. I was going to have a nice steam shower there, and instead I thought ‘I’ll watch the news for a while’.

A new emerging trend - filming animals being killed by catapults. Sky News are discussing this, showing clips of dead rabbits, ducks, and other animals.

I read something last year that distressed me - there’s a corner of the internet I’m thankfully not ever in where baby monkeys are placed live into blenders.

It seems this stuff can’t be reported without the mythologising ‘we are a nation of animal lovers’ and ‘children instinctively love animals’. It seems not really.

Yeah, CT, don't go there.

I frequent forums and subreddits that graphically show pretty hardcore stuff re: violence (mainly wars, street fights and gang violence), but, even within those communities, animal cruelty is banished without question.

Of course at least as bad goes on in the name of science and in order to feed the glazed-over populace, but, yeah, the thing you're talking about has been going on since video cameras and the internet met.

So, in summary, don't go there.

Or anywhere for that matter.

Stay indoors.

Put a Cher album on.

Relax.

Don't do it.

I would be so upset to see a baby monkey being put in a blender. I read a whole article on it where viewers apparently send in their requests like ‘just do the arm’ or whatever. I know the jails are full, but in these cases I think a quadrupling in the cell occupants, with someone left to sleep on the floor and another on the toilet pan, would be justified.

I really feel strongly that great apes should have legal personhood. You can tell in their eyes that they’re ‘all there’ in a sense that cats and dogs and whatever else, however sweet, aren’t. It’s quite apparent that they’re people, for want of a better word.

I’m aware that little monkeys aren’t great apes, so I’m not including them when I say great apes should have legal personhood. They’re cute but they aren’t people. Although anyone who puts one inside a blender should be serving serious prison time.

Fuck monkeys.

I had a flatmate whose boyfriend used to come round and watch all those beheading videos from Iraq. He’d steal my weed, and use our internet to watch beheadings. He was quite intense company.

I was just reading last night about dreadful online spaces where older kids abuse younger kids by blackmailing them into self-harm, or killing their pets etc. The human capacity for evil is very troubling.

I've been to the town of Barnard Castle today.

Things have exploded again tonight with my mother. She’s always coming round and throwing stuff out/stealing/destroying things. Anyway, I was blamed for the disappearance of a sweater belonging to my son. Not guilty.

I actually found it buried at the bottom of a laundry basket, covered in bleach stains. This is one of her things - she bathes stuff in bleach, trying to be helpful, destroys it, and then either hides or throws it out in a panic.

She will never learn that throwing bleach about is destructive to fabric - it just doesn’t go in and stay there. I rang her to say she’d got me into trouble, and she was so nasty, ‘stop picking on me, you’re always blaming me’.

I said that I hadn’t forgiven her for throwing out the leg of my original 1996 Biggie/Notorious Medusa head Versace sunglasses - it was just waiting to be pinned back on, she saw it, threw it out. Now they’re irreparable.

We’re not speaking. I’ve emailed.

This came about when she went away over the weekend. I said I’d lend her an overnight bag she liked - that’s why she was here and able to do this when I wasn’t in. I said be careful with the zip, it’s fine, it’s just a bit stiff at the start then it’s fine. She broke the zip, and USED SUPERGLUE to ‘fix’ it. That this would wreck the entire point of a zip - any zip - didn’t compute. This item - handmade to my exact order in Lebanon - is another now fit only for the bin. The zip is jammed right at the beginning of its journey along the top, with superglue stains smeared down the suede lining.

Anyway, I’ve said in my email that I put this down to my grandparents refusal to physically chastise their children. It was the done thing for her generation, and they didn’t do it, making her think she could get away with everything. Had she been properly leathered as a child, she wouldn’t now be destroying leather and thinking a quick sorry (barely even that) would do.

Not that she ever spared me I must say. I was about 17 when, as she attempted to drag me through the hall by my hair, I finally hit her back, and she burst into tears, sliding down the wall like a dying swan - and has ever since claimed I caused her to have muscular skeletal (or whatever they’re called) problems that she’d never had before. Destructive and dramatic.

My mum told my bank to f*** off when they phoned for me, cos she thought they were spammers. They thought it was me they spoke to, and are trying to give me a warning for abusing their staff.

I had to lamely tell them it was my mum on the line, and sheepishly apologise for her.

I've also taken their landline number off my bank contact details.