Word-Rage!

This post is dedicated to Miss Keable. And her crazy demented problems with repetition.

Today I am hating words.
Not all words, for some of them are lovely.
Like ricochet, which is one of the best words. I love ricochet.

I also like palindromes. There is nothing quite as beautiful as a palindrome. Words like ‘reviver’, ‘minim’ and ‘evitative’ make me want to dance around and pick daisies.

I recently found out that there are people with the name ‘Zerimar Ramirez’. I want to find one of these people so we can be married, and then we can run around in a palindrome world, and pick beautiful daisies together!

And then we would go and live in Neuquen in Argentina and have children called ‘Anna’, and ‘Hannah’ and ‘Eve’, and I would have to kill all the boys because I can’t think of any male palindromes!

And people would be like ‘wow, your life is so beautiful and symmetrical! Can I come and live with you?’ And I’d be all like ‘No!’

But some of the other words! Gah! They make me go crazy and want to stab them. In the eyes.

Today this word is ‘ridiculous’.
This is because it is in fact ridiculous.

No matter how hard I try, I can never spell it right first time. I want to put ‘e’ instead of the first ‘i’, then I want to spell the ending in a way that wouldn’t even make sense if I tried to pronounce it. Because this does not happen with many other words, I have deduced that it can not be my brain that is wrong, it is the word that is stupid.

I am also not loving the way that my spell check automatically changes my s’s to z’s in words where there should be no z.

If I say that I want to organise something - then I want to organise it! I don‘t want to organize it - putting a z in it makes it dirty and wrong. It should be ashamed of itself.

Then I noticed that all my -our’s were being changed to -or. Color?! Labor?! What are these monstrosities that have been vomited upon my page by the hideous and unscrupulous American spell check that inhabits my laptop?!

And why has my laptop suddenly decided it wants to be American anyway?! It was doing fine before, with it’s lovely English spellings. But now! Now all it wants to do is eat fried chicken and will only answer to the name ‘Billy Bob’.

However, today, one of biggest problems I am facing is with words that have ceased to be words due to overuse.
This happened the other week when I was writing the post about the ulcer. I had to write the word ‘ulcer’ down, a lot. After a while ‘ulcer’ stopped looking like a word. It started looking like a mess. I was doubting my spelling of it. I started to try to spell it different ways, to see if any of them looked any better.

I went and looked at an online dictionary to make sure it was correct.

Then I checked a physical dictionary in my house because I couldn’t trust the internet with a task of that level of importance.

I’m just dreading the day when my spellchecker will automatically change my sentences to text speak...

and my brain shall explode.

　
Disclaimer: I would not kill a child, nor would I condone that action.

Just making sure we’re all clear here.


EDIT: I have just been reliably informed that Zerimar Ramirez is, in fact, a girls name. I have decided I don't care.

Showering Danger

In my first year of university I was posh and I got in the halls where we had our own en-suite with a shower. This made me happy beyond words, because I do not like sharing toilets/washing facilities with anyone else. Because I am a snob.

Because we did not have a big communal bathroom, we were in charge of keeping our own room clean and tidy. Not a problem. I had lots of bleach and wipes and things and kept it shiny. I cleaned my bathroom often.

This is the story of what happened on one cleaning occasion...

It was about 3am and I was watching Prank Control on my laptop. I was a student and therefore being awake, and watching children’s television on BBC iPlayer at 3 in the morning was totally normal.

I had a sudden and overwhelming desire to clean my bathroom, and then myself. This was not so normal, as usually after Prank Control I caught up on ‘Do Something Different’ with the wonderful duo, Sam and Mark.

Despite my love for Sam,

I went to the bathroom (which, was the size of a large cupboard). Being winter, the heating was up quite high at the time, and the bathroom was very very warm.
Undeterred I started to clean the sink and wipe the mirror. Eventually all I had left to do was put toilet cleaner in the toilet bowl and scrub it a bit. Upon doing this I came to realise that I had come to near the end of the bottle.

There was just a bit more than I needed, but not enough to be saved for the next time.
Therefore I dumped the lot down the toilet and started to run the water for my shower.

Now, my shower was unpredictable at best, and so the water usually ran slightly hotter than was comfortable, and due to the small size of the bathroom it tended to steam up extremely quickly.

Usually - not a problem. Steaming up is what happens in bathrooms. It’s just one of those things.
Apparently it becomes a problem when the said hot steam is in the same room as a large amount of unflushed bleach.
The bleach heated up and mingled with the steam, making some kind of toxic chemical cloud in my bathroom. I, in my shower, was oblivious to this fact until the headache started in.

I had not had much to drink, so I passed it off as dehydration and carried on.

Then came the strange wooziness.

Despite the fact that the room was full of the overpowering stench of bleach, I passed the wooziness off as yet another side effect of not having enough to drink that day. Because I am a fool.

The next sign came in the form of a burning throat and nasal passage. Now, even I could see that not having enough to drink could cause that amount of burning to my insides.

But, if you recall, I am a fool.
So I continued to shower.

I turned around to rinse the back of my hair and a wave of wooziness swept over me.
And I nearly fainted. My knees buckled and I head butted the shower knob.

That was when I realised what must be happening. And it had only taken 3 symptoms and a near death experience.
But, I am a fool. And my hair was full of bubbles.
Was I going to get out of the shower with shampoo in my hair or was I going to risk death by rinsing it out?

Yeah. I stayed.
I also then conditioned and rinsed my hair again before getting out, throwing my window open and collapsing on my bed wrapped in towels, feeling really really sick.

‘What if you had passed out in the shower, fallen and died/drowned?!’ I hear you cry!

Don’t worry. I took precautions against that...


I sat down.


Because I am a winner. Always.

Wetting Oneself...

Hippo and Happy New Year to you all!
Yes, ‘tis I! I am back to blogging and am kicking the year off with a tale of shame and urine - for what better way is there to introduce 2011?
And so… on we go!

Last year, when I was 21, I wet myself.

Now, I do not mean I metaphorically wet myself, or figuratively wet myself. No.
I mean that an (unfortunately large) quantity of urine was expelled from my bladder whilst I was still wearing my underwear *and* jeans.
I was outside, playing a crazy game in the garden with Mum, Dad, Michael and Charlotte, and something hilarious happened.

I don't remember exactly what this hilarious thing was, only that it had something to do with the ball game we were playing, and the fact that it was so funny that I fell over in hysterics and was unable to breathe.

As this amusing thing carried on I realised that not could I not breathe but that I also was laughing so hard I couldn't stand back up *or* move. At all. Cue the hideous realisation that I desperately needed to wee.

So imagine, if you will, that you are lying down in the middle of the garden. You are screaming with laughter and you literally can not move. And you need to wee more than you have ever needed to wee before in your life. Now imagine you have started to panic, but you are still half hyperventilating half laughing.

And, in between horrendous screams of laughter, you manage to start shouting 'help me! I'm going to piss myself!' over and over.

Now imagine your family standing there, still laughing at you. Doing nothing.

So what happens?
Yes. You wet yourself.

Suddenly my family realised that actually this isn't just another random laughing event in which I merely threatened them with an unwanted urine spillage, but that it had actually happened.

My brother ran around the garden, pointing and screaming 'Wee Girl! Wee Girl!'

My dad looked at me like he wasn’t quite sure what he should do.

 Mum just started laughing even harder.

None of them helped me as I stood, still laughing but now slightly wetter and warmer in the jeans department.

And so, alone, I waddled upstairs to the bathroom to immediately dump my pants and jeans into the bath and blast both them and myself with the shower before drying myself and getting into your pyjamas.

It wasn’t until later that I remembered the £10 note in my jeans pocket. I managed to salvage it, now a little damp and smelling faintly of urine.
I spent it the day after.