– urgently marched into A&E and said ‘we’re having knee pain!!’ to the confused receptionist. i had to explain that it was only my knee and that he was just worried
– when asked to tag me in a meme of ‘what water are you?’, said ‘you are the ocean: home to all friends’
– loved ‘filthy gorgeous’ and, rather than learning the words, learned ‘all three parts in the song where they ring a triangle’
– after we had an argument about him not ‘getting’ my ADHD, i caught him halfway through a three hour playlist of lectures on ADHD, with a pen in hand, taking notes
– he suffered a TBI last summer and he did not like the orienting questions they ask (’what year is it? what day is it?’ etc). when asked ‘do you know where you are?’, he cracked one eye open and angrily said ‘in bed!’
– he played knack 2 and hated it. when i asked why he was still playing it, he said ‘so i never have to play it again’. he got every achievement and as soon as he got the last one he stood up, ejected the disc and returned it to the store
– lately he’s given up on making lunch so he just drinks huel which is a meal replacement shake, except huel is kind of boring so he sometimes puts nesquick strawberry powder in there
– my favourite drink is pepsi max. when asked about his dreams for the future, they often involve ‘being rich enough to find a way to pump pepsi max directly into our house’
– one time in our first year of dating i hadn’t seen him in weeks, whereas we normally saw each other all day every day, so i was gonna go stay with him for a couple days. he had a temporary job (i’m talking 2 weeks total) at the time and i was bummed that i was gonna be alone at his for a bit, but w/e. he was texting me like ‘work is going okay, in the line for the canteen right now’ while i got on the bus. i found the key where he said it was, i found a note on the table like ‘hi love! the wifi code is [password], I’ll be back at 5!’, and then I went into the lounge and he was there. he was lying on a fold-out bed with Marvin Gaye playing. the TV was on a powerpoint slide that said ‘Welcome, Jess. I quit my job.’ he was entirely naked except for a cushion with the letter ‘D’ over his crotch. im 95% sure there were candles
– we play the game Rimworld, where you micromanage a colony of people on an alien planet. he uses it entirely to simulate a peaceful colony, mostly of women, who have a large number of animals they care for and train. one time he got this random event where all the women in the colony got a psychic mood boost and he was like ‘honestly that’s my life goal’
– when he was in hospital and his cognitive functions were slowly coming back, he looked up from twitter with horror and said ‘jess… is the american president a racist?’
– we were playing Articulate, which is a game where you have to describe a word without saying the word itself. His partner said ‘when you’re beginning sex, you are…’. he, without a second of hesitation, yelled ‘FOREPLAY’. the answer was actually ‘initiating’, but my ego grew like fourteen times
– one time he asked me what guacamole was, and i told him, and he said ‘if it’s made up of things that already have names why does it have a different name?’ i have not let him live this down yet
– i used to have an eating disorder, and whilst i’m good 99.9% of the time now i occasionally do have wobbles. one time i’d eaten some mini-donuts and i told him ‘i kind of want to check the calories on those…’, so he immediately pulled the label off and ate it
– i lost him for like twenty minutes at a uni event, and when i found him he presented me with a pepsi max badge and said ‘i rode this mechanical bull to try and win you a year’s supply but i fell off pretty quickly. sorry.’
– we won the ‘best couple’ award in our year at uni, but neither of us were there to collect it because i was ill and he left halfway through to come home and take care of me
– one time he wasn’t paying attention while making lunch and he cracked an egg directly into the bin. the look of confusion on his face was priceless.
– on the rare occasions when i wake up before him, when i kiss him/ touch him he makes these little like… activation sounds? you know like when you touch a cat? it’s like those
This is the cutest thing I have read with my own eyes
My goal is get a boyfriend this dorky and adorable
I’m getting a lot of requests for the Macbeth story, which I’m sure I’ve told before but an old classic never dies.
Welp, might as well do something while I’m on the bus. Excuse any typos, typing on mobile is hard.
In news that will surprise no one, I was a drama school kid. I didn’t so much like to perform, but I did enjoy writing scripts and being the occasional narrator or background person.
In 5th year English class we were assigned a group project of retelling Shakespeare in six minutes or less. I rewrote the entire of Macbeth in a series of rhyming couplets, which by happy happenstance, synced up perfectly with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain” (”yooooou’re so vain, I betcha think this throne is bound to you, don’t you, don’t you”) which is what the group sung it as, while my favorite English teacher (the one who did the Lord of the Flies experiment with us) sat with his head in his hands, occasionally making noises like he was crying.
If I ever find those notes I’ll let you know, but that’s not what this story is about, but it is where it started. Cause I won an award for that hot garbage, and found myself propelled into the actual drama class in sixth year because of it and that’s when shit got weird.
First of all, everyone knows you don’t call it Macbeth around actual drama people, you call it The Scottish Play because of the well established curse. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scottish_Play)
Which is what we all being good Scottish superstitious kids did. We called it “The Scottish Play” and never spoke any lines unless we were rehearsing cause that’s just what you do. And when your school is built less than a mile away from an iron age fairy mound and was built on the site of what used to be an old laird’s house that mysteriously burned down in the late 1800s and was subsequently rumored to be haunted, ye dinnae fuck wi fate like that.
Unless of course, your name was Mister Hadley, and you were a) newly arrived from England and b) didn’t believe in superstition and c) took every opportunity possible to spit in the face of the gods and call it MACBETH like you had nothing left to lose.
And this is my stop so I’ll post more when I get home.
Okay home now, lets do this.
So Mister Hadley was a hip young thing, or at least he likely hoped he was. He would show up every day regardless of the weather wearing sandals under his dress trousers, and trying to hang out with us like we were his friends and not his students. He was, in hindsight, the exact type of smiling, friendly lech who thought Woody Allen was the pinnacle of genius and was likely writing a novel about a teacher who has a love affair with one of his students. And he hated superstition. Like, HATED. And he really hated that we kept correcting him whenever he called Macbeth, Macbeth while in the theater room. To the point where one day while standing on the stage, he got really exasperated and started yelling “MACBETH, MACBETH, MACBETH! There, see nothing bad happened! I mean, what could possibly go wrong?”
It’s subtle at first, like half the supporting cast coming down with mono the first month into rehearsals. Not an unusual thing of itself for a bunch of 17 year olds in close contact all the time.
But after that things get progressively weirder and wilder. And perhaps you might argue it was something of the Salem witch trials hysteria effect taking hold, and maybe it was. But let me tell you, it’s hard not to start having hysterics when one day in the middle of rehearsing her “out damn spot!” soliloquy, Lady MacB almost gets taken out by a falling stage light that plummets out of the darkness of the ceiling and smashes through the floor like an acme anvil falling through thin ice. It was so loud several teachers came running down to the auditorium cause they thought something had exploded, but all they found was Lady MacB standing frozen in the center of the stage covered in dust, starting at her upraised hand where she’d felt the falling metal whistle past her fingertips, and all of us staring at her realizing we’d almost watched out friend get crushed to death by falling stage apparatus. The school had to call in a second councilor after that.
And I mean, you’d think after that the school would think better of hosting this end of year play. You’d think. But after the room was inspected and repaired and the falling light deemed a freak accident we went right back to it. Persevering through random fire sprinkler mishaps that soaked the stage and scenery (not to mention the electrics), my friend Mark who was Lord MacB getting thrown against a window in a fight and falling out of it when it shattered. And several other small mishaps which by themselves wouldn’t have mattered, but when you compiled them all into one stressed out space, became completely overwhelming to the point where people left.
The cast began dropping like flies, their final grades be damned. Some others who needed to complete the class for their chosen elective the following year stuck around out of desperation. And then there were the ones like me, just there for the shit-show and to see who would be left standing at the end up. We all used to huddle together in the drama room on the 2nd floor after rehearsals, survivors of this mutual train wreck of a monument to our teacher’s ego, carrying salt in our pockets and throwing it over our left shoulders whenever we talked about the play even though we never said its name.
Mister Hadley
did though. All the time. Repeatedly. Even when we begged him not to.
Cause you see guys, this is Mister Hadley’s vision and nothing
small like 15 kids coming down with mono or having near death experiences is going to stop him. So I get
moved from helping to rewrite lines of this Modern adaptation which is
shaping up like Trainspotting meets Willy Wonka down a dark alleyway,
and I wind up on the raised podium off at the side wearing a black hat
and holding a broom. The irony of which was not lost on me or half my
friends, but hey, it’s supposed to be good luck to have a “real” witch
acting as one of the witches, maybe that’ll save us.
You might be thinking at this point, “buy Joy, what did your parents have to say about any of this, why was no one doing anything?”
Have you ever tried to tell your parents “our drama teacher cursed us all by saying Macbeth instead of The Scottish Play and now we’re all going to die”? I have. My mother said “no you’re not, dear” while my dad said “that’s nice, dear” and carried on reading his book. They genuinely did not believe us, and attributed it to “high spirits” and general shenanigans.
Until opening night that is, when the curtains lifted, and Lord MacB is standing there with his shredded arm in a sling, (there are pictures of this and I have been facebooking friends all night trying to get hold of them)
Lady MacB keeps looking up at the ceiling like she has a nervous tick, and everyone else is just plain god damn miserable and more than a little wild around the eyes.
But we get through it. Nothing else bad happens and no one nearly dies. Right until the very end, when
Mister Hadley
gets up on the stage to address our horrified looking parents to thank them for coming, says “ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming to tonight’s performance of Macb—” loses his footing, and promptly falls off the stage and breaks his leg.
And that’s the story of my schools first—and last—official performance of The Scottish Play.
Ok so today I was on the bus with another trans guy and we were talking about how hard it is to get testosterone. The waiting lists, the price, all the doctors you have to go to, that kind of stuff. Except, we were calling it ’T’, like you do when you’re both closeted and in public.
Then suddenly the elderly lady sitting behind us was like ‘young men, either I’m going crazy or you both have never heard of supermarkets, they have shelves full of tea there! Do you need directions to one?’
To which my buddy starts to explain, because why not. ‘Well you see, we’re both trans, and… ’
The lady didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. ‘Oh no, I don’t mind that at all! Now do you want to know how to get to a place that sells tea? I’m actually heading there right now!’
We let her take us to the supermarket. We let her show us, excitedly, where the tea was. We both bought loads.
This is beautiful
Confused elderly lady doesn’t care if you’re trans or not. She just wants to make sure you’re stocked up on tea.
Kelston Boys’ High School perform a massive haka in honour of the new Maori carving on campus
I live for this
This is the first recording of a Haka I’ve seen that manages to capture even a fraction of the true energy of it. And it’s because there’s so many of them that those boys would have been shaking the ground.
Seeing these boys in their modern uniforms and jackets and backpacks that say NIKE, participating in this ancient ritual, really just drives home what people mean when they say “I am not a costume.” The clothes here are not important. The energy and participation are important.
i thought i’d written this up on here before, but i can’t find it. so let me tell you my favourite story about my time in oxford.
my college library is a converted church (with graveyard still attached). and it closed at about 1am every night, but they let people keep working in the vestry – where there were… i think six desks? – overnight. i was not very good at doing my work at anything other than the absolute last minute, and would fairly often end up in the vestry the night before an essay was due.
it was grim. honestly i do not miss it.
the highlight of those nights was when i allowed myself a break to go out to buy a burger from the kebab van that was on the other side of the high street. the nearest kebab van was ahmed’s. kebab vans in oxford are serious business (there are few kebab shops, and they’re mostly not near the colleges, where the first and third-year students often live in). i just looked ahmed’s up to check i was spelling his name right and found this amazing painting of the van!!
anyway. so one night in – i guess it was probably april? i think it was in my final year, and not too long to go before exams – i walked out to the kebab van. it was 2am, or maybe 3am. a weeknight – maybe a tuesday – and there was nobody around. too late for other people taking study breaks, and maybe the people who were out clubbing weren’t coming back yet. i felt like i and ahmed and the other guy who worked in his van were the only people alive.
and then an entire band of men turned up in full 16th century regalia.
i think maybe one or two of them had musical instruments with them, but not all of them. they stood there. they didn’t seem to think that they were doing anything unusual. i guess for them, it wasn’t. nobody else came by. nobody said anything except to order some food.
i thought: am i hallucinating??? what is happening???
i always ordered a cheeseburger at ahmed’s, and as it wasn’t a busy night they didn’t already have any cooking, so i stood by the van for a good five minutes while it cooked, just watching these men, who seemed like time-travellers, solemnly order their kebabs. none of them had phones out or anything. nothing broke the illusion except the situation we were in. it honestly felt like time was collapsing. like we had all been pulled out of the timestream and were just chilling here together. it wasn’t april whatever, 3am, 2011. it was no time, no place. The Kebab Van At The End of Time.
they just seemed like people from the past who wanted to get something to eat. an eternal constant. and the guys in the van were as nonchalant about it as the men themselves were. yeah, we get sixteenth century people through here all the time.
i'll apple your turnover 