I Am Jack’s Smirking Revenge

I have lost all my creative faculties. All this reading and studying, not that it’s that much, it just inhibits me from producing anything original. So I’ll just tell you about some of the fun I had since my last update.

Sibling Rivalry

I have a fucked exam schedule, one right at the beginning with no study leave before it, and then three weeks of nothing, then four exams in quick succession. I only have two remaining, the first one a triumphant success, the second, pretty much the same, the third and most recent was a drastically average oral exam, I hate doing ‘okay’- I mean, what good is okay? If I was crap, I’d just avoid that subject (Indonesian language) in future, and if I did great, well so much the better, but no, being average is a terrible thing. I’ve never been very decisive, I always just had decisions made for me by either being brilliant or completely useless at things, the fact that I was even born puts me ahead of my miscarried siblings- btw, do they just throw the fetuses away or is there a small graveyard of my dead brothers and sisters somewhere in the world? I heard they can turn fetal tissue into collagen for facelifts and cosmetic surgery- why, right now someone could be walking around with their lips lusciously packed with my unborn sister’s leg! Anyway, since then it’s either been ‘do or do not, there is no try’ sort of thing for me.

Food for Thought

Well here’s some things NOT to do when you have an exam:- listen to catchy Italian folk songs the night before (they’ll haunt you when you get stuck on anything); hang out in the SOAS bar whenever those bastard hippies are banging away on their bongos (ooer); and, of course, don’t have a catnap prior to an oral exam because the grogginess does little to impress the examiners. That said, I’d strongly recommend getting smashed before an oral exam, because it lowers your inhibitions and makes you more talkative, plus, for some odd reason, you can convince yourself that you speak languages you’ve never learned before by speaking in a funny accent. Accents are a great thing, except for Americans, Northerners (Manc’s okay, mind, I once briefly dated a Mancunian girl), West Country types, and, naturally, Australians. The funny thing about Australian accents are that they can never pronounce ‘Australia’- it comes out as ‘Oz’ or ‘Stralia’ but they can never manage to combine the two. A guy I used to be friendly with (but not in the boarding school communal showers sense) at Connaught Hall, professedly Pakistani but actually about as Reading as they come, made me laugh my ass off and cheered me up immensely after my disastrously uninteresting exam. Some drunk old guy in a pub was hassling him and my (sort of former) mate (acquaintance?) just stood up, turned around (bearing in mind he has a Mr. Litvin sort of accent usually) and said: “Look, just bloody well piss off” in the broadest and most caricatured Indian accent ever, as a piss-take. I was choking with laughter at it, and the old dude, sure enough, pissed off. It reminds me of a certain homosexual debate taking place over at the normally placid digital diary that is our sister site FWUK- to which all I can say is this: confrontation is the best means of making someone reconsider a negative opinion. Sit a Nazi next to a Jew, a young fundamentalist next to an Israeli special forces serviceman, or a homophobe next to a homosexual, and they’ll all cack themselves, guaranteed. What people hate isn’t race, or sexuality, or whatever, it’s weakness. Hate is essentially a product of fear, but before I end up quoting Yoda again (I’m starting to sound suspiciously nerdy here), prejudice is just a form of ignorance. Now, I won’t berate someone for not understanding what they’ve never seen before- I’ve never seen God, and hence meekly assent to the ranks of the faithless, and who could call a farmer stupid for not knowing about astrophysics? I think the entire content of opinions displayed on the site are essentially expressions of people who simply don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Gayness and Biochem

Gay people don’t exist in Brunei, anyhow (not to my knowledge), but what you do have is an awfully large number of sissy men who like to dress up in camp chic and mince about acting like women. Now, I have nothing against that, not my cup of tea really, but nothing about it is seriously objectionable or offensive. The reasons? Not homosexuality. The average Bruneian male lacks the three basic activities which stimulate the secretion of testosterone- namely, exercise, sex, and, unbelievably enough, alcohol. Yep, you heard me right. An athlete in the Olympics who tested as having an excessive amount of testosterone (which led to accusations), laughed it off saying he’d had six beers and four sexual encounters the night before an event. Sure enough, the egg-heads with the much-coveted biochemistry MSci’s confirmed it: this was enough to explain a double-dose of male sexual hormones. So, for various cultural reasons, Bruneian men have less testosterone than they should, aside from an unfortunate genetic predisposition towards diabetes and a noticeable lack of HGH, which stimulates the development of muscular tissue in the arms and legs, this helps to explain why Brunei is overflowing with what may reasonably be called ‘fags’ but not ‘gays.’ I’m not being judgmental, these are all scientific facts, and no amount of terrifying threats from huge gangs of irate 8-year olds is going to change that. It’s nothing personal or condemnatory, I myself may have a genetic disorder leading to excessive blood clotting, although I haven’t been tested yet as I’m not sure what good it would do me to know that. I’m also extremely lazy, never exercise and never get any sex. I really should try to change both those things. And quit smoking. And fix the damn ozone layer while I’m at it.

Psychopathology

A more Freudian explanation of Bruneian transgenderism (why am I writing so much about this? People shall talk…) would simply be that men aren’t allowed to see women in Brunei, let alone screw them. When Bruneian guys reach the age of about 18, they generally try to find some girl to get married to, primarily because they’ve never had the kind of access people in the West take for granted. Hell, it’s a young population, why shouldn’t there be sexual liberty? There again, it’s not as if Brunei is immune to AIDS and all the other shit that swims about in the murk of South East Asia, angry little bacteria kicking their flagella against your intestinal wall every time you foolishly and quite erroneously assume that the guy who makes the roti’s doesn’t wipe his ass with his hand. Enough biology, let’s get back to psychology. Does Rich Litvin still look like Satan having a bad hair day? I don’t think he’s such a bad guy, he’s just very resourceful- I mean, you can tell he’s one of the 0.001% of FHM readership that even glance at the extensive ‘fashion’ section at the back (last issue it was like, 50 pages, what the fuck do they think I do for a living). Well, I’ve worked out a way I can earn some money. A girl from my Indonesian class turned me on to Clinical Psychology Trials. They have a group of psychos and a group of students, and we each watch some videos of a bad car accident, then keep a diary for a week. How much do we earn? Five pounds an hour… not bad, considering I know a guy who had to work in a Star Trek/Forbidden Planet type place for six, and he always had people coming in dressed as Ferenghis and trying to ask for stuff in Klingon. Poor sod. All I have to do is be grossed out and talk about my feelings afterwards… however, they turned a few people away because they weren’t interesting enough, or something, so perhaps if I collapse in tears and burst out laughing alternately each time they show the video I can spend the next few years getting paid to tell these psychiatrists what’s funny about a three-car pile up on the M25.

Note that the original format was used by Eminem, but I am not a tosser. Nor do I accept the validity of white rap.

I can’t believe no one told me there was porn on Channel Five at night. This will ruin my already shaky social life. I’m sick of women not taking me seriously, they all think I’m just some ultra-hunky piece of meat that they can tantalise with their pitifully ordinary existences, their received opinions and predictable tastes (this does not apply to a certain someone whose initials are the first two letters of the alphabet). I’m sick of being snubbed by ex-girlfriends and non-smokers. I’m sick of seedy latino guys taking my laundry out of the dryer before it’s dry ‘because I waited for five whole minutes and no one showed up to claim it.’ I am sick of ‘The World’s Most (adjective) (noun) (optional noun) Caught on Tape’. I’m sick of home videos with kids sneezing on dogs and cats meowing the star-spangled banner, old people falling over plant pots and bridesmaids picking their noses. I’m sick of interviews with leading ’emotional doctors’, though the clitoral stimulation special I missed. I’m sick of no not that stuff, that’s no good, drink this stuff im drinking, no not that place, they don’t play this music, which you should listen to. I’m sick of people trying to be nice by giving me pot, I’m not reciprocating you smug communal bastards. I’m sick of people assuming that because I dress shabbily, I must be interested in the cruel oppression of fascistic belligerent states and the plight of Ethiopian lesbian glass-blowers who can’t afford dildos without my contribution of 2 quid a month. You want my contribution to the world? Okay, how’s this: I refuse to buy crap whether it’s made by a faceless corporation or an all-shemale vegan neo-punk kibbutz. I refuse to protest GM crops whilst people in the first world still have to put up with terroris2009m, racism, and arranged marriages (this a special inclusion for a friend and a colleague from university who will be celebrating her graduation by marrying some guy she’s never met- reminds me of a joke: how do you start the Karachi Women’s Marathon? Toss a bouquet). When a Jew can sit down to Yom Kippur without someone nicking his country and a man can put his dick anywhere he pleases (pending express verbal consent and confirmation of the appropriate statutory regulations) shall the world be redeemed. Consider my words the breeze that carries flames across the autumnal forests canopy, you heard me the first time, this one’s for emphasis, I am Jack’s Smirking Revenge.

Rod