Depressing Places
I have been in several depressing places over the past two days. The sports hall today for a Film Studies exam.
I found it extremely hard to get over the smell of stale socks and rubber basket-balls, which sparked off memories of hateful Physical Education experiences, involving running hamster-circles around the sports hall at school, collapsing onto some teacher's coat on a muddy field and not being able to breathe for quite a long time. I was also reminded of doing group-glowering at The Dancing Girls as they synchronised their sexy-dance routines to 'Working 9 To 5', which involved much gyrating against chairs and each other (while the rest of us swung our arms around unenthusiastically in the pretence of being excited by the unexciting prospect of choreographing our own dances)...etc etc. I have an entire backlog of hateful exercise-related memories. PE three times a week for three years, and twice a week for two more years has that effect on most normal people (normal being all those who have an aversion to physical exercise involving any prior changing of clothes before skinny peers wearing snoopy g-strings).
Also, it took a good fifteen minutes to thaw my fingers so I could hold onto my pencil without it slipping in a futile manner to the wooden echoe-y floor, and thus disturbing the entire population of furtively scribbling students rolling up their sleeves surreptitiously to peek at the biro-tattoo notes on their forearms. So I sat and twiddled my thumbs, panicked, and made mental notes which I would later convert to scribbles on shiny regulation exam paper. I thought about Propp's actions as functions, Toderov and Umberto Eco. Cultural and patriarchal hegemony, ethnocentrism, and signs of any class divides in the Beatles film (the one where one second they are playing cards in a train thing with a dog, and the next second bursting into addictive song and inane grinning). I tried and failed to remember what exactly extra-diegetic autonomy is.
By the time I got round to writing, I had wasted 15 minutes of my precious time, and I had to write faster than the speed of light, leaving me with a lingering cramp-thing in my left little finger. It still hasn't stopped twitching.
That was one depressing place. The other depressing place I cannot name. Let it be said it involved waiting for a very very very very very long time, and being surrounded by nervously snickering girls surrounded by little gaggles of giggling friends. The whole thing was rather like going on holiday and realising you have to share the place with 60 or more thirteen and fourteen year olds.
After that burst of writing too many adjectives, I may have to lock myself into an adjectiveless place and do a bit of adjectiveless meditation.
PS - The budgie can now say "Woodstock" in a similar tone to the one my brother uses when he tries to explain away my mother's enjoyment of everything from listening to Cat Stevens (sorry, Yussef Islam) to wearing long skirts and colourful tights, and burning incense.
I found it extremely hard to get over the smell of stale socks and rubber basket-balls, which sparked off memories of hateful Physical Education experiences, involving running hamster-circles around the sports hall at school, collapsing onto some teacher's coat on a muddy field and not being able to breathe for quite a long time. I was also reminded of doing group-glowering at The Dancing Girls as they synchronised their sexy-dance routines to 'Working 9 To 5', which involved much gyrating against chairs and each other (while the rest of us swung our arms around unenthusiastically in the pretence of being excited by the unexciting prospect of choreographing our own dances)...etc etc. I have an entire backlog of hateful exercise-related memories. PE three times a week for three years, and twice a week for two more years has that effect on most normal people (normal being all those who have an aversion to physical exercise involving any prior changing of clothes before skinny peers wearing snoopy g-strings).
Also, it took a good fifteen minutes to thaw my fingers so I could hold onto my pencil without it slipping in a futile manner to the wooden echoe-y floor, and thus disturbing the entire population of furtively scribbling students rolling up their sleeves surreptitiously to peek at the biro-tattoo notes on their forearms. So I sat and twiddled my thumbs, panicked, and made mental notes which I would later convert to scribbles on shiny regulation exam paper. I thought about Propp's actions as functions, Toderov and Umberto Eco. Cultural and patriarchal hegemony, ethnocentrism, and signs of any class divides in the Beatles film (the one where one second they are playing cards in a train thing with a dog, and the next second bursting into addictive song and inane grinning). I tried and failed to remember what exactly extra-diegetic autonomy is.
By the time I got round to writing, I had wasted 15 minutes of my precious time, and I had to write faster than the speed of light, leaving me with a lingering cramp-thing in my left little finger. It still hasn't stopped twitching.
That was one depressing place. The other depressing place I cannot name. Let it be said it involved waiting for a very very very very very long time, and being surrounded by nervously snickering girls surrounded by little gaggles of giggling friends. The whole thing was rather like going on holiday and realising you have to share the place with 60 or more thirteen and fourteen year olds.
After that burst of writing too many adjectives, I may have to lock myself into an adjectiveless place and do a bit of adjectiveless meditation.
PS - The budgie can now say "Woodstock" in a similar tone to the one my brother uses when he tries to explain away my mother's enjoyment of everything from listening to Cat Stevens (sorry, Yussef Islam) to wearing long skirts and colourful tights, and burning incense.
kiwiqueen - 16. Jan, 12:24
