Nose Picking….eww!!

I was on a bus the other day, nothing special about that, unless you mention the teenage kid opposite me who wouldn’t leave his nose alone. He may have been suffering from a mental problem I wasn’t aware of (and I wasn’t prepared to enquire as to what exactly the condition would be that forced him to try and hammer his entire fist inside his nasal cavity) or he must have had something stuck up there. At one point I swear his index finger went right up there until his knuckle reached the rim of his nostril.

Everyone with a nose will have a booger problem at some point. Nose problems are not restricted to the human race, some animals have tongues that let them lick their noses thereby keeping the flow of mucus warm and dribbly and easy to lick away. So why is it that humans often seem pre-occupied with snot?

This teenager was a spotty reject and totally oblivious to his surroundings as he went about his nasal mining operation. At first I was appalled to think anyone could be that disgusting in public, but after a while I became fascinated by his attitude to the job in hand. He appeared to be a seasoned nose picker as he switched fingers and nostrils frequently and managed to tug free some spectacular chunks of snot which he wiped on the seat beside him.

Many times I came close to saying something to him but I couldn’t find the words that would sound sane enough to my own ears. I would have to find words that matched his moronic teenage intellect and dismal outlook on life, something like: “Found anything cool up there kid?” or “Boogers huh? Love em or hate em, they’re a nuisance huh?”

I sat there and watched him ferreting around for 25 minutes. I realised I wasn’t the only one who was watching. An elderly woman was glancing at him from across the aisle with an expression of disgust on her face. A pencil neck next to her did a double take and seemed shocked at the view before him but when he smiled I wondered if the teenager and the pencil neck were sharing a secret joke.

I was quite startled to discover that after several minutes watching the Nose Show I wanted to pick my own nose. I wasn’t sure if I had anything up there, I couldn’t feel a particular blockage or sharp bogey stick causing me discomfort but I just felt like a good root around might benefit me in some way. After all the teenager always looked intensely satisfied when his finger dug out a large lump of green mucus. Perhaps I would feel a sense of satisfaction if I found a snotty pile inside my nose?

So next time you catch someone eagerly drilling away inside their nasal passages, don’t mock or dismiss them for being dirty and gross, watch them like you would an Animal Kingdom documentary. I admit that once I was within the privacy of my own home I spent a solid 5 minutes rooting around my nostrils and did manage to haul out a pretty impressive booger. Yes it was freakishly satisfying.

EMO…WTF??

...you just don't understand me!!!!

Anyone who knows, or cares to find out, will recognise certain fashion trends; Mods & Rockers, Greasers, Punks, Hippies, Goth, Chav, Trendies…and so on. And now we have a new variant, the Emo.

Let’s get the misconception out of the way first shall we? Emo, although widely used to describe a section of the teenage population, is actually derived from a musical movement based in the 1990′s labelled as “Emotive Hardcore” and shortened to “Emo” along the way.

The streets are currently littered with sad pathetic teenagers who resemble the above image. As you can see they are very easy to spot. They range between 14-17 years of age and consider themselves to be in touch with their emotions and are not afraid to show this “unique” trait to the world, or at least to any normal person who happens to glance in their direction for 0.02 seconds before dismissing them as a waste of space.

Most Emo’s will declare they are depressed, that the world doesn’t understand them, but are simply too frightened to find their own identity. Many teenagers find that taking the “sheep” approach much easier than discovering who they really are. It’s easier to blend in with a crowd then be truely unique. It’s easier to defend your appearance to “normal” people whilst with a crowd of your peers than set yourself apart from your peers by looking/acting differently.

The phrase “alternative” crops up when discussing this trend, and yes it is just a trend, one that is dropped very quickly by each and every Emo kid once they get closer to their 20′s and realise they need to get out there and work for a living. Most Emo’s are far too ignorant to realise that fashion trends are purposely spread like a plague by the music and fashion industry in order to make money. Most Emo kids are sadly too self involved with their image and bubbled culture to realise that the entire Emo Culture is one giant marketing extravaganza to make rich people richer. They think they are unique, HA! Sure, that’s right, that’s why hundreds of high street clothing stores sell the same mass produced crap for you to buy and wear!

Emo kids have the same values, listen to the same music style, dress the same and act alike. It is very important for Emo kids to hang around local towns in herds, where they stare at passers by as if daring them to actually stop and gaze in wonder and question exactly what they are looking at. Emo kids have the arrogance to consider themselves “alternative” or “unique” or the other overly grown-up word; “non-conformist!”

Emo culture, as it is laughably called, is predominately dominated by middle class suburban white kids. It revolves around falsities such as: self loathing, weak music, dramatic exits and an obsessive fixation on constantly updating their MySpace page.

This is where Emo kids often get their fix, they blog about how crap their lives are, how no one “get’s them” and that “the whole world fucking hates me.” A true Emo kid’s MySpace page will undoubtedly contain around 24,000 photos of them-self, usually looking moodily into the distance, staring straight into the camera with a “wtf you lookin’ at, you don’t understand me” expression, or pretending to be stoned and bearing the expressed of: “yeah I smoke spliff, and I don’t care what the world thinks, it’s my body and my right”…..blah blah blah….get a life you sad losers!!!

I was tempted to try an experiment, but unfortunately I’m a realist and far too optimistic to lower my moral code and dignity to try. But the experiment centred around rushing to my local shopping mall, buying up all the Emo clothing I could, changing my appearance, then slouching around the town and timing how long it would take to fit into a nearby Emo-Herd and strike up a conversation about the bleakness of existence and how many times I had tried to kill myself this week.

However, failing that I thought I would compile a simple guide of how to become a member of societies current rejects.

How To De-evolve to an Emo:

1) Clothing

Get skinny jeans. Find some that fit then buy the size below, if you can barely walk you’ve found the right size. Tight shirts, you’re aiming for the ability to just about breathe without passing out. Shoes are out, you need low-top Converse. Buy them, then rub them against a brick wall until scuffed, after that take a pen and scribble some words and gloomy cartoons all over them. Buy a chain, clip it to your belt and stuff the end into your pocket, you don’t need anything on the end, just let it flap about.

2) Hair

Cheap crappy black hair dye, don’t get the expensive stuff, you need to look cheap and dirty. Now make sure some part of your hair is dyed a different colour, red, green or white will do, just enough to make it stand out here and there. Make sure you look like you’ve just fallen out of bed and hopped through a tornado. Your hair needs to be short at the back and long at the front, ensure that at least one eye is totally covered most of the time.

This means you will need to flick your head to the side a lot, if you need a neck brace at the end of the day you’re on the right track. To conclude: your hair must scream out loud and proud “I look like a total twatbag, please kick me in the balls as hard as you can then laugh at me until I run away!”

3) Piercings

Eyebrow, lip, tongue, nose, ear (several places at once), just pierce whatever you can reach and hold onto. Use the strangest rings you can find in the local “obviously pretend (but possibly for real use) bong shop.”

4) Makeup

Boys, now’s your chance to do what you’ve desired since you started wondering what being a girl is like, you remember the time…right after your first awkward hand shandy with that tiny chode between your legs. That first one that leaves you scared that you broke it and starts you wondering that maybe a nice pair of titties would be so much more fun to look after. This is also roughly around the same time when you get yourself a few pubes and whilst standing in front of the mirror evaluating your new muscle tone you decide to pop your todger between your legs and imagine yourself with a lovely lady garden instead of a stubby cocktail weiner. Anyway, you need to slap the makeup all around the eyes, dark and brooding, black lipstick is a good way to go, whatever you can find that sets you apart from all the normal people.

Girls – more more more! You’ve been slapping that shit on your face since you first found your mum’s (or dad’s) makeup when you were little. You need a pale face, weird coloured lipstick, and crazy eyes, the look you are going for is a blend of Egyptian and Vampire.

5)Behaviour

Moan…a lot! Whine about everything, mainly about how pathetic your life is, tell your friends your parents are divorcing or your sister is on smack, whatever makes you appear more of a loser. Never reveal how good you actually have it!

6)Persona

MySpace is the key, Bebo at a push (if you’re still pretty much a primary school kid). Set your mood to “apathetic” or “suicidal” or other similarly depressing one word description. You must have 20,000 moody and depressing photos of yourself in your photo gallery, and don’t forget to include captions like: “…depressed again…” or “…after I cut myself to feel alive…” It is also compulsory to become a MySpace whore, beg for comments and feedback on your blog every 5minutes.

7)Finally

Never admit to being Emo! You are “scene” or “goth” or “alternative” or even “non-conformist” even if you don’t know what it means or don’t understand what a dictionary is for. Bare in mind that despite what you tell people you will always be a frightened little person who is too scared to find your own identity.

And there you have it. My rather damning opinion on what Emo kids are like. I know how it is, trust me. I might have short hair now but back in my teen years I had long rocker style hair, bangles, listened to “industrial rock” and hated…stuff in general, well for a short time until I grew a pair of balls and stopped thinking everyone hated me.

TeenagerLand is a strange and scary place, hormones, peer pressure, uncertainty over your sexuality driven by the media injecting you with bullshit every 2seconds to ensure you buy something you don’t need, and there is the desire to fit in to contend with. Do you really want to kiss/snog/pull/grope/etc another boy/girl? Or is that just something the media has brainwashed you into thinking you want to do because it’s cool or “everyone is doing it…ffs….you just don’t understand me…!!!”

It has never been easy to travel through TeenagerLand but we all do it, and almost all of us come out the other side fairly well balanced. It’s a kind of test. So if you’re an Emo kid and currently languishing in that pit you call a bedroom (hating your parents,  texting “nuffinU” in reply to your mates who ask “wup2″ and scribbling on your Converse) remember that one day you will look back on this period of your life and either laugh till you cry at how stupid you looked or hide the photo’s so you don’t have to be reminded of how embarrassingly stupid you looked and behaved. Be prepared for that inescapable day when your own children find your Emo photo’s and burst out laughing, even as you look at them with detached bewilderment at their own weird and bizarre fashion and shake your head…trust me, you will!

With all it’s sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a wonderful world! Be cheerful, strive to be happy.

BTW, I genuinely don’t hate Emo kids, I just find them hilariously amusing!!!

Snow…this ain’t snow!!

This ain't real snow! You can still see the road!

A few years ago we had a few inches of snow in England and a bunch of people got trapped on a motorway, cars stuck in the snow, police dashing around making sure everyone was ok, and lots of reporters thrusting mic’s in people faces asking silly questions.

And those poor stranded folks were very eager to offer their irrelevant comments: “I’ve been stuck in my car for 1 hour – We had no warning at all – Where am I?.” And so on.

Eventually the camera shifts focus to a red faced lady who was smiling broadly. When the reporter asked what the lady thought of the snow, she replied that she found it all pretty amusing. She was visiting from Russia, Moscow if I recall correctly, and she found the situation laughable. Here we have a few inches of snow and the entire country goes mental – as a nation we stop functioning! Schools close, traffic grinds to a halt, people moan and complain as if seeking to find someone  responsible for the bad weather. Yet this Russian lady found it hilarious as she explained that in parts of Europe they have snow not measured in inches but feet, or metres as our metric main land friends use!!

And so we move onto the recent flurry of short lived snow here in the UK. I call it snow as it is crystallised water that falls from the sky, but it’s not really snow snow. Real snow is thick and luxurious, landscapes swathed in blankets of the stuff, not this crap that falls over the UK that turns to dirty black slush and vanishes in a day or two.

I don’t really want to start with the phrase: “When I was a lad…” as it makes me appear old, wrapped in a brown cardigan and shuffling about in my slippers. However, back in the late 80′s early 90′s we had some nasty snow, deep enough to reach the tips on my tyres on my mountain bike at least, but even that doesn’t compare to the madness that gripped the UK back in the late 1960′s, 67 or 68 i think. I’ve seen old clips of men shovelling endless roads to let funny old cars through, great mountains of the stuff heaped by the side of the road. And that stuff hung around for months, not just a couple of days.

Now that's what you call SNOW!!

Look at that lot! Yes that it is a double decker bus stuck in the snow. That white stuff is where the road is supposed to be! So next time you see people complaining about the snow you can take a moment to reflect on a few things: 1) Yes it’s a pain and we’re not used to it here in Blighty, so any snow is problemaic. 2) We have it easy compared the glorious olden days where the weather really seemed to hate us Brits. 3) Smile, it’s only snow!

No one is to blame, it’s called weather, look it up! If you get stuck in your car  and believe you have something to complain about, think again, there are weather warnings all the time. You should have made sure you had warm clothing, a fully charged/credited mobile phone and also the foresight to judge if you really need to leave the house at all!