The Live Messenger 'Today' title screen seems increasingly designed to make me want to kill myself


[click to enlarge* silly]

(that's what she said)

Wow, you guys talk like grown-ups!

Dudes. I am totally bummed by this Tai dying shit. That's seriously effed my shizz UP. Only thing I can think of doing right now is downloading and listening to ADOAA podcast. And maybe get crunk in honour of my gurl Brittany Murphy. However, as someone older, can I please give you some advice? It is one thing to spark up a doobie and get laced at parties, but it is quite another to be fried all day.

Quite.

Ever have a day like this?

I am having a day like this.

Are you there God, it's me Sazzle

What the fuck are you up to? You are just fucking with us now right? Seriously, seriously, John Hughes? What the fuck did John Hughes ever do to you? (Apart from pen Baby's Day Out I mean). I guess this is some kind of retribution for me being all like 'well, yeah, but none of you freaks ever really knew Michael Jackson did you?' when the levels of sadness got a little too cloying (and they did God, let's not fuck around. People went nuts who'd never even met the guy. I mean, he was weird, he made great music, but it's not like everyones plastic surgery obsessed mother died is it? About 25-50 people had the right to freak out as much as they did. Everyone else needed to chill. The. Fuck. Out.) But I didn't even do that that much! I kept that thought in my own head, apart from saying it to Mat the hairdresser but there's only so many times Radio 1 can play Man in the Mirror whilst I'm getting my roots done before somebody makes a comment like that right? So it happened to be me, that doesn't mean you have to take my idol, my hero, the writer I worshipped beyond everything else does it? I make one stupid comment and this is how I'm punished. As Duckie would say, it's called a sense of humor - you should get one - they're nice.

For an omniscient being that I don't actually believe in I really hate you sometimes God. John Hughes was the bomb. You are not.

Yours sincerely,
Sazzalish

How we know Love still exists

It takes a LOT for me to feel like I've hit rock bottom but sitting through the advert breaks on 'A Shot At Love 2 with Tila Tequila' because I didn't want to miss any of the show is possibly the lowest moment I have ever found myself in from a life that offers a vast array of debased delights.

See, I somehow, accidently, found myself watching the first season finale whilst just idly flicking through the 'music' channels (most of which show about as much music in an hour as my mum has CDs: i.e. hardly any) one evening and happened to catch the last episode of the ORIGINAL 'Shot at Love'. Watching a lesbian and a fairly buff (yet surprisingly effete) man rapping about their (so-called) love for Ms Tequila was enough to actually make me pause the channel-hop adventure I'd been on up till that point (and let's face it, it is a crazy wicked adventure to embark upon - reality shows, infomercials, and low-grade soft porn are all just a button click away and jostling to retain your interest if you hit that particular Sky-based adventure at just the right time) and become transfixed with the tragi-comedy that was playing out before my eyes. The concept is not Nobel-prize worthy. Model-slash-professional-bisexual-slash-Myspace-whore Tila looks for 'love' amongst a bunch of lesbians and straight dudes. Only one can ever obtain the keys to her heart and entry into the inner sanctum that only a handful (*cough*) of people have ever been allowed in to: the sacred Kingdom guarded between Tila's tiny bird-like thighs. It's a beautiful thing. It makes me believe in love again. (Or, you know, doesn't).

HOWEVER, intrigued I was to see lesbian battle straightey for the 'prize' of Tila. They both genuinely seemed to be, if not in love, then at least in awe of Tila. Or were sufficiently capable of faking it to make me think that they were. (When it comes to reality TV shows who really cares either way? If it's on TV then it's true. That's the way the world works right?) Anyway, in the end the dude won. Big shock. This may be a touch controversial but I get the impression that Tila's one of those bisexuals that makes out with girls cause she knows guys think it's hot, or it makes her 'kooky' in some way (you ever meet those people that just do slightly outrageous things because they think that's a good enough substitute for actually having a personality? Yeeeah.) I'm not saying that all bisexuals are like this but enough of them are for me not to want to define myself as bisexual even though I'm attracted to guys and girls because most people that DO say they 'swing both ways' or whatever are (and not too over-generalise or nuthin), complete dicks. Anyway, the point is, Love prevailed. Love won through. Love was given a chance to shine.

Up until the point that the next season was commissioned so Tila could get paid to go through it all again.

Obviously I couldn't miss a second of this. How many people get a second 'shot' at finding true love? Not many. Even fewer get to do so on a low-rent MTV show. This is history in the making, I feel it is my duty to observe and judge what must be a further sign of the impending apocalypse.

Firstly, it becomes even more clear this time around just how much of a complete dick Tila actually is. I can't work out if she's utterly deluded, slightly retarded, or an evil genius but don't try and sell me the fact that you were heartbroken about it not working out with thingymabob from the first season. Either rename the show 'A shot at getting to fuck Tila Tequila for a bit' or don't do a second season. These are your choices, you do not get to pretend that you're still in this for love and not for money and exposure. None of you do. That means you Brian and Gary and Billy-Bob and Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel and V and Tiffney and Sparkle and Bitch-face (two of those are actually the names of the contestants. Which ones those are may surprise you). In fact, let's just be done with it and rename the show 'A shot for money-grabbing fame-whores at getting to fuck the money-grabbing fame-whore Tila Tequila (for a bit) in a mutually agreed (but not specifically talked about) bit of money-grabbing and fame-whoring'. Although, that title may be a bit unwieldy when coming to make it fit in the TV guides so I'm guessing that this (AND ONLY THIS) is the reason they didn't go with it.

Secondly, Tila may be a dick but she is positively Mother fuckin Teresa (although, that bitch was a bit of a judgmental cow being Catholic and all who felt that suffering was good because it 'brings people closer to Jesus' and wasn't actually that concerned with 'helping' the poor as much as 'helping the poor get indoctrinated into the Catholicism'. Riiiiight. Nice philosophy. Who needs medical attention when you have eternal salvation? So, ok, maybe not the big MT. Maybe... Fonzy) ... she is positively Fonzy when compared to the contestants. All of whom seem to have been chosen to specifically to illustrate the very worst that humanity has to offer. I don't really want to say this but Tila can do better. Out of all of those people, not ONE is good enough for her (although I did fancy one of the girls but she was kicked off on the last show I watched for reasons that were unclear - maybe not being utter pond scum doesn't turn Tila on, in which case; Tila - you gots to work on your self-esteem honey, this type of behaviour really will not do. Or, and more likely, the girl was approaching nice and normal which is not what reality TV producers want out of their ridiculously preening, arrogant, imbecilic contestants). All of these 'people' (I use the term loosely) split into teams of boys v girls and agreed to downing as many 'shots' (SEE? SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE?!?!?!!!!1!!!one!) of various disgusting condiments to 'prove' their 'love' for 'Tila' (oh no wait, Tila is actually her name, no need for sarcasi-quotations on that. Or is she? Her name can't actually be Tila Tequila can it? AND OH MY GOD!!! I JUST REALISED WHY IT'S CALLED 'SHOT' AT LOVE! TEQUILA! SHOT! (!!!. !!!!!!!. !!!!!!!!!!!!) Fuck me, I'm dumb) anyway, the 'winning' (I'll stop with the quotes now. Just assume everything from now on is said with a raised eyebrow) team then got to battle it out between each other to see who could eat a pig's vagina the fastest with the prize of spending time with Tila alone.

Let me just say that again:

The WINNING team then got to see who could EAT A PIG'S VAGINA THE FASTEST.

A PIG'S VAGINA. EAT. EAT A PIG'S VAGINA.

I don't care who you are. Robert Downey Jr, Dylan Moran, Karen O, I am NOT eating a pig's vagina to prove my love. That is not how love is proven. I will rub your feet if you're tired. I will listen to you bitch about your day. I will paint you a picture, make you a mixtape, write you a story, anything but eat a pig's vagina to show you how I feel. If you are insisting I eat a pig's vagina to spend alone-time with you then I chose to not spend ANY time with you. You are insane and must be stopped immediately.

To add insult to injury, Tila was not impressed with how many of the girls couldn't handle the challenge OF EATING A PIG'S VAGINA.

'It just seems like, if they really cared, they totally would have like, tried harder' TO EAT A PIG'S VAGINA! TILA! What kind of sadistic bitch are you? It's a PIG'S VAGINA! CUT THEM SOME SLACK. But that's not how Tila rolls, Tila, who obviously grew up starved of affection and attention and thus has some kind of weird Freudian shit where EATING PIG VAGINAS = LOVE, does not believe in slack.

I cannot WAIT to see what other, frankly disturbing on heretofore unrecognised levels of insanity, tasks Tila sets to find her one true love (the err... second one true love in as many years might I add). This shit is golden. And is also sucking my soul out right before my eyes. But do you know what? I say suck away Tila, suck the fuck away.

The Curse of the Squeaky Shoe Days

Sorry for my little diatribe yesterday. Note to self: Do not watch Cabaret when hungover as three things will happen;
1. You end up wanting to buy false eyelashes and get a bowl haircut,
2. You wish you had a flux capacitor enabled DeLorean so you could live in 1930's Berlin,
3. You feel sorry for Sally, and then yourself, that neither of you can keep a man and then take it out on everyone else.

Won't happen (publicly) again.

I had a squeaky shoe day today. Squeaky shoe days happen to us all every now and then. For most people it's a metaphorical thing, it's those days you wake up after forgetting to hit 'snooze' and just carry on sleeping for longer than you should and then awake panic-stricken and confused and trip over yourself trying to get out of the house on time (panic + confusion = bruises). Or you leave the house when you're already 10 minutes late, get half way down the road and realise you left your ID badge to get into work and, more importantly, your mobile phone on the dresser (which gives you your only link to the outside world during the hours of 9 till 5.30 and is thus the only tool which has the capabilities of keeping you sane) and have to do a pretty nifty (read: 'slightly dangerous') three point turn to get back home again. Or days when you get this really minging spot one centimetre left of the spot you *just* managed to rid yourself of a couple days before. Or days when you forget to put your car park pass on the dashboard and get out of work to find you have a parking ticket (despite the fact that you need a key card to get into the staff car park in the first place and do NOT drive chitty-chitty bang-bang so can not fly over the barrier and cannot do Knightrider style tricks to make your car drive on two wheels so as to get through the bollards. Plus the fact that yours is the only burgundy 1978 MGB GT out of 100 cars and is thus fairly easily identifiable that you normally park there and normally do have a pass displayed prominently on the dashboard). Yeah, a squeaky shoe day is when things like happen. But it's made all the more delightful if, like me, your slightly below-par days decide to manifest themselves with the aforementioned literal squeaky shoe. I don't know why they do that. I wear the same shoes to work everyday. They're the only shoes I own that are smart and don't rip my feet to shreds from the outside-in.* I wear them everyday with tights (and other clothes too but the tights are the only things that make contact with the shoe itself), the tights may occasionally vary but are rarely anything but Marks and Spencer's finest black 60-denier jobbies. Plus, tights are tights so you would expect them to have the same effect on the shoe regardless... and normally they do. No sqeaks, no peeps, not even an arresting cheep. They're silent. As shoes should be (except for the click-clack noise they make on hard floors which is a sound that I have some weird inbuilt female-brain hardwired setting to enjoy hearing). But on days where everything is predestined to go wrong, where every sucky moment that is normally stretched over a week or even a month, is all compacted into 24 hours... the shoes, they squeak. There's nothing I can do except ride it out and perversely enjoy it. And not spend too much time away from my desk, walking around.

As such, I had plenty of sit-down pondering time today. There were three main topics of ponder:

- Having seen a schoolgirl with ginger hair waiting to cross at the traffic lights that morning and thinking how awesome her hair colour was and whether I could hope to achieve it from the hair dyes on offer at Superdrug, I was struck with a profound sense of melancholy that she probably now, or at some point has had, the piss taken out of her for her hair colour (a bullying staple that I have never pretended to understand). I then realised that I couldn't think of any instances in tv, film, music, real life where an American person has made fun of someone for having ginger hair. Can you think of any? It just doesn't seem to be a stigma over there. If anything, it's revered (I'm thinking of Mr Holland's Opus where the girl who was Cybill's daughter got told her hair was like sunsets... I think... it's been a while since I saw that film. Although, in Cybill, I'm sure she also got 'props' many a-time for her beauteous hair. As did Claire and Ruth in Six Feet Under. AND it was never an issue for The Plastics that Lohan is a ginge). It may be that I just spend too much time watching estrogen-heavy shows where no-one would even think to mock hair colour but really... it's just weird how it's so besmirched here and I can't think of any times when someone's been made to feel bad for having glorious red hair once from our trans-Atlantic pals.

- For some reason this lead me on to the ponder of trying to think of any instances that I ever heard an American person, in real life or in make believe land, say the word 'poo'. Do they use the word 'poo' ever? Is this a just curious British saying? 'Poop' yes, a million times over have I heard the word 'poop' escape an Americans lips but never 'poo'. I know there's plenty of words we don't share but it had just never occurred to me about that particular word before. I'm going to be listening out for it hard from now on. Just to prove myself wrong.

- Finally, I spent a lot of time trying to work out why it seems weird for a stranger to go into the toilet cubicle you've just come out of when there's no queue. It had never even crossed my mind until the last time I was in Leigh Delamere** service station toilet's where there's about 30 cubicles. When I went in the majority of the cubicles were free and yet, and yet, I was compelled to go into the one toilet that a woman had just vacated. She shot me the look of someone who's halfway between terror and puzzlement. To this day I don't know why I made a beeline for that toilet. I just felt this compulsion as I saw the door opening to walk towards it and by the time I cottoned-on to what I was doing I couldn't stop or body swerve as it would have made matters even worse. But why was that so weird? Why did it make us both so uncomfortable? Why did it seem so strangely intimate? If there had been a queue it would have been weird NOT to go in. Social rules and regulations innit, I guess they're mostly a force for good... It's the only thing that makes us all resist smearing slogans on walls in our own faeces (for instance).


*Although I have a fairly impressive collection of shoes that also perform this (some might say) fairly simple and expected task (those would be of the 'male' or 'mum' persuasion generally speaking) they tend to be constructed from leopard-print material, or have sequins or bows or 'Vans' written on them. Or, sometimes, they might have appliqued pictures of baby deer running through forests (I shit you not). None of which, you may be surprised to hear, are suitable for work. Everything else that would pass muster does the aforementioned foot-destroying thing (the pain of having to walk in shoes that have managed to rip a layer of skin off from various points across the sole and heel of your foot rivals childbirth) (probably)

**NB: Sazz's personally endorsed greatest service station in the country... mostly for the name if I'm honest but also for the picture of the manager 'Mark Slatter' who has the whitest teeth and bushiest moustache I've ever seen

Trouble is a lonesome town

I think I have sleeping sickness (in the sense that all I want to do lately is sleep, I'm pretty sure I haven't managed to contract a parasitic disease endemic to certain regions in Sub-Saharan Africa) (well... I hope I haven't). This sort of thing has happened before so I'm extremely wary of it. It normally precedes one of my branded descents into woe-is-me style self-loathing and misery (known as 'hitting it emo style'). I know exactly why this is. It's because work have stopped us doing anything non-work related whilst we are sat at our desks. That seems fair enough you moaning emo-bitch, I hear you cry. Well, yes, I concur. However, if you're job consists solely of answering calls and NOTHING ELSE and you're taking, on average 30 calls in a day, each of which last less than 2 minutes a piece (I constructed a table to track this on Friday. Ben who sits next to me then made a graph out of the data. That was pretty awesome I admit)... well then you're left with a lot of downtime. How 'the temps' have been choosing to fill this downtime is by reading, doing puzzles, perhaps occasionally constructing towers out of plastic cups (you know, the usual). All fairly non-obtrusive things to keep our minds occupied. This, it would seem, is quite offensive to the regular staff. I get that it seems unfair that we can sit there and doss all day AND get paid for it. If I were them I'd hate us too, but there is literally, literally literally, N-O-T-H-I-N-G else for us to do. We take calls. We don't follow up on calls, we don't try and sell stuff to people, we don't have to fill in any paperwork or do any admin. We. Take. Calls. We then might take a message for someone qualified to call them back, we may transfer the call to a different department or a branch so they can speak to someone with an ounce of knowledge, we may even be able to answer someone's queries ourselves (it happens. Sometimes). That's it. That's the extent of our working day. It's futile and pointless but more fool Lloyds (or the temp agency I guess) for paying for us to complete that service. If our training extends to all of ten minutes sat round a whiteboard then that's all we really can do. But now, now we're expected to just sit and stare at the walls of our cubicle for the 362 minutes of the day where once we were quietly indulging our natural geek tendencies. They seem to assume we're Jonny 5-esque robots ('Hmm they appear to have human emotions but can they really be sentient beings? Preposterous!') (of course, the absence of Ally Sheedy and a blacked-up Fisher Stevens running about the place should have tipped them that they are way off on this score). Anyway, yes this makes for a boring day, yes everyone has been moaning about it, no I'm not the only one affected. But I am the only one (as far as I know) that needs to be doing something with my brain for more of the day than I'm not doing something with my brain as, if I don't, I tend to start unraveling a bit. It starts slow, the hunger for alcohol and weed grows stronger where there was no hunger before. I start daydreaming about driving off into the sunset and running away to start a new life (to the point where I sometimes convince myself that this new life is one I actually want to lead rather than just being an elaborate fantasy sequence), I find it harder to look at myself in the mirror as what is reflected disgusts me more than it did before, eventually as my wine and weed intake increases exponentially I'll find it harder and harder to wake up in the mornings and to go to sleep at night. Thus I'll have to drink and smoke to ease myself into a slumber, making it more difficult to pull myself out of bed the next day. And so it goes. It will all culminate in me growing ever sicker with my self-centeredness and I'll hibernate for a while until I feel better again. Except this time I don't want to reach any of those low points. It's a fun ride and all but on the hundred-and-fifty-seventh go round it loses some of the sparkle that the previous hundred-and-fifty-six goes had. Of course, I'm supposed to be starting a job I don't really want at some point in the near future but I still havent heard back from the council guys. They said they needed to check on my references and once that was done would get back to me with a start date. However, the fact that I've heard nothing all week is just fuelling my paranoia that they've stumbled across this blog and have read all the libelous comments I've been making. Still, if I did get sued then that would be really good publicity for my blog and, when all is said and done, isn't that the most important thing? (yes)

I've met enough people to know that people are bastards

So it seems I'm actually kind of okay at my job. Which, and I hope this goes without saying, is seriously fucking depressing. I'm good at sounding vaguely upbeat when answering phones and typing in town names and getting numbers of specific bank branches, or, in some cases, I'm good at sounding vaguely upbeat on the phone and then bullshitting an answer to a question I don't really understand and passing it on to some other poor soul who might be ever-so-slightly more informed than I am.

This is not what you might call a 'taxing' job.

Which I suppose, were I a rainbow-loving, unicorn-poster-owning, optimist, would be a good thing. Trouble is, I ain't going nutty in the presence of rainbows and I've never been moved to buy any posters depicting mystical creatures (as yet), and I certainly wouldn't describe myself as an optimist; thus I do not see this as a 'good thing', I see this as a 'for the love of God will someone please help me escape this prison-of-my-own-making' thing.

But then, sometimes it's fun to slum it for a while. Boredom can either inspire apathy so that you just give up and accept your fate or it can encourage passion to change your circumstances. For the time being, and despite all my belly-aching I'm taking the latter option. I may as well make the most of the fact that I still have some fire in me, I'm sure by the end of my amazing call-centre adventure all the fight will have been knocked out of me, leaving me somewhat akin to the bugs at the end of Starship Troopers.

Fuck. Maybe I am an optimist after all.

I think the main problem I have is that I'm trying really hard not to be labeled as 'the misanthrope' (or, and more likely, 'the lame loser'). You wouldn't think this would be hard. Every single person there seems intelligent (to one degree or another) and is nice and reasonably friendly. But this is me, so it IS hard. However, if you've been keeping abreast of Sazz's recent misadventures I've been trying to be less like me lately. For everyone's sake. Thus, I've been going against every natural urge and sitting with my colleagues in breaks and before work and trying to participate. Obviously this hasn't been going great, because I've forgotten what it is to care about what other people think of you and so my social dysfunction just keeps steam rolling faster and faster out of control... But at least I'm there in body, if not in spirit. However, what I really want to do is just go and read my book or write my stupid stories. I really just need a large portion of the day to be devoted to 'NOT TALKING'. Else I find it difficult to function (this is particularly important considering the fact that I'm working in a call centre TALKING all day). I don't know how much longer I can keep the charade up though. Not being a dick all the time is tiring.