ONLY KIDDING I pretty much spent two weeks spinning around in my revolving chair, holding XXXX-treme drinks parties and basically having one hell of a good time... meh. Like the other day, I had a free house, so I said to myself "I'll invite some friends round, have a few civilised drinks, kick back, enjoy ourselves... it'll be lovely". About eight hours later, I was sat around a table, playing a drinking game that apparently seemed to be called "Clap lots, then if you clap wrong, have a shot". We didn't have enough shotglasses so I found some egg-cups. The shots themselves were made by all the other players of the game, out of the contents of the table, which at that point in the evening was a veritable cornucopia of bottles, cartons, and glasswork. One member of the circle proudly boasted "I haven't lost a single round yet, I'm much less drunk than all of you!" We wiped the smile off of his face by banding together and cheating at the game in order to make him take a shot that was 60% sambuca, 20% bacardi rum, 5% vodka, 5% mango and passionfruit smoothie, 10% milk, with a bit of cereal thrown in at the top to finish the effect. Yeah, we wiped the smile off of his face good.
About eight hours after that, I woke up. The thing about waking up at a house party you've hosted is that you examine the damage and it's like various jigsaw pieces of some enormous puzzle or - to put it more accurately - reading a pulp crime novel. You get the feeling that all of these seemingly random and unconnected events will somehow add together to form some bigger picture; that it would all make sense if only you didn't have such a fucken hangover. Then there's the added confusion of - do I really remember all of this properly? If I had a video recording, would I in fact find out a: The reason for this damage, or b: how the damage came about or c: I'm actually the one who caused the damage in the first place?
It was all very confusing and slightly ominous, and as I progressed further into the labyrinth, my heart sunk. Someone had thrown up red stuff into the toilet. And also on the bottom of the toilet. How do you vomit UP? There were a load of crushed berries inside one of the sinks. Down in the kitchen, all of the chairs were piled up against the front door. There was a hat pinned to the ceiling. Someone had gotten out a breadboard and had covered it in large blobs of Marmite. About a quarter of the kitchen table had gone blue (seriously). There was broken glass all over the floor. There was a crumpled up bit of paper in the middle of it. Gingerly picking it up and unfolding it, I saw that it was a picture of the actress Michelle Monaghan wearing a Santa Claus outfit (if you've seen Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, you'll know what I'm talking about HIGH FIVE); someone had outlined her, drawn a smiley face over her belly and written ANDY ROBERTS in a heart next to her face. I think that ANDY ROBERTS relates to a rowing coach at our school; either that or it was relevant to a former West Indian cricketer, and the evening was a hell of a lot weirder than I gave it credit for. But that wasn't all. Going outside, I found that my little sister's wendyhouse was filled with grafitti. Notable was a picture of a jewish star with the words 'Jewz 4 Life' (nobody at the party was jewish). I stared blankly at it, then accidentally sat on a jar of olives that had been left on the beanbag. How confusing.
Also, somebody poured italian seasoning in my car. Yes. I looked at the car, looked at the tin of italian seasoning, then looked at the guy who was busily trying to erase 'Stocker is gay' from the roof of the wendyhouse (there was nobody at the party called 'Stocker'). "Did you pour italian seasoning in my car?" I asked. He looked sheepish. "Yeah, I thought it'd be funny. And all those berries in the sink were because I picked up some berries and was showing off my flexing abilities by crushing loads of them". He had a point.
After about a month of scrubbing, the house was clean, and I learnt a valuable lesson: You can pretty much do whatever you want when you have a free house, as there will always be enough chemicals under the kitchen sink to hide the evidence from your mother when she comes home. And you shouldn't write a blog explaining the damage that you did to her house. Whatever, I got into Oxford yesterday and got all As in my exams, I'm untouchable. For the moment.
Oh yeah, I got into Oxford, and this - in a roundabout way - explains why I'm blogging right now. Not to show off or boast about the fact that I'm pretty much going to the best uni in all of the Empire (would I do a thing like that?). Mostly because I am going to Oxford THIS OCTOBER. YES THIS OCTOBER. Argh. Thing is, I'd previously been given a gap year. Which I didn't want. So basically I kept pestering Oxford to let me go this year and then FINALLY yesterday I was like "OMG LET ME IN UR COLLEGE I HAS THREE A'Z" and they were like "STFU UR ALREADY ON THE LIST INNIT" and I was like "Wait a second, you say I'm already on the list for 2007 entrants? Yet you've been perservering all this time that I'm going in 2008, a viewpoint that has cost me my girlfriend, my happiness and my sanity?" and they were like "WTF MY BAD". So that was annoying. But the upshot is that I'm going in October. The up-upshot of that is that I have to read the entire reading list in about a month.
The reading list is long. It is hard. It is filled with Victorian authors and girls books (Bronte... boringgggg they should've filled the list with pirate books and, like, porno comics, that'd rule). Added to this is the issue of my reading style. My reading style is that I read two pages, and I fall asleep. I wake up, struggle through another paragraph, then I fall asleep. This has happened with every book I've tried to read since getting into Oxford, and frankly it's beginning to become a teeny bit of a worry for me. This is especially an issue if the book in question begins with the sentence:
Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?
This book, by the way, is "Middlemarch", by "George Eliot". Unfortunately, the "George" is actually a woman pretending to be a man, or a 'trannie' as they are known in the business. Although, actually, looking at a picture of her, I get the idea that her pretending to be a man wasn't as much as a stretch as you'd originally think...
She is actually a woman pretending to be a man to gain credibility, though. Not the other way round. That's a bit annoying, actually. Like, you look at the list and think "Heyyy, lots of male writers there, this is gonna RULE, lots of testosterone and gunfights and stuff! YEAH!... but then you read it and it turns out its just loads of women in drag who are all like "Oooh, Jamie Statton wants to marry Dot, but she likes Eddy, and then maybe Jamie will like her little sister" AND ITS LIKE FUCKING EASTENDERS. Boo.
Therefore, in order to put off starting to read the reading list, I have been doing many exciting things. Such as:
Eventually I managed to force down a few chapters. Oh my God. "Force down a few chapters".
DO YOU PEOPLE REALISE THAT I'M MEANT TO BE READING FOR PLEASURE HERE. I'M GOING TO DO THIS FOR THE NEXT THREE SOLID YEARS. I SHOULD NOT BE STUDYING ENGLISH AT OXFORD. I SEEM TO LACK THE FIERY PASSION THAT IS INHERENT IN AN OXFORD ENGLISHER.
Oh well.
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