Friday 19 August 2011

buying a hairbrush

I am feeling peculiar. It's an odd blend of lacklustre and contentment. I don't want to go back to Uni. I don't want to have to be told to read a thousand books. I don't want to go to the shops and buy food. I don't want to take the rubbish down to the skip. I don't want to clean the bathroom. I don't want to pay my rent. I don't want to get out of my pyjamas. I don't really want to do very much except occasionally pop to the Costcutter for a sandwich, a Capri Sun, a big bag of Twiglets and some Maltesers, lay in bed and read Bridget Jones's Diary. But I'm not bored. I'm not unhappy with this feeling. I actually sort of like it; the doing nothing feeling. I have always liked it actually. I enjoy it when my life is active and full, like last month, but I equally am content with how I live at the moment. I did, for little known reasons, a couple of times become irrationally nervous doing every day tasks and being around people. Like the other day, on one of my Costcutter ventures, I went in and the whole time I was extremely anxious. It was this weird anxiety where I felt eye-piercingly judged. As if the boy working in the shop was watching me choose my three packets of crisps (one salt n vinegar, one Doritos and one cheese and onion - variety is the spice of life), and thinking I was a right fat pig. I would not normally think nor care about this, but that day I did, and it was a horrible feeling. I hated being out in the open. It was like being an awkward 13 year old again, where your very existence is someone's problem. I did not like that. So I speedily paid and left the shop.

My second "I hate the UK" moment was when I was in Boots. The big one on Princes St. All I wanted was a hairbrush, as my freshly cut fringe (beautifully timed for the Fringe festival) goes a bit flat at the bottom if  you don't  brush it right, and I've just moved in to my new flat and I stupidly left mine back in the Borders. So, there I am, in Boots, with my bank card, ready to pluck out the lucky brush, and I'm confronted with a fucking wall of hairbrushes. Big ones, small ones, medium sized ones; big black ones with big spaces between bristles, little spaces between bristles, thin bristles, thick bristles, plastic bristles, non-plastic bristles, ones with bristles all the way round, little pink ones with bright green bristles,  big orange ones with purple bristles, ones by shampoo companies, ones for styling, ones for curly hair, ones for bushy hair, ones for children, ones for your handbag, ones for hardcore de-tangling, ones with little mirrors, palm-sized ones; I mean a WALL of hairbrushes. It was absurd. And it was stressful. Sign me up for www.whitewhine.com right now, because I just wanted to run away from that intimidating display of beauty items, screaming and tearing my hair out just to avoid the unbearably tedious decision. And of course they were also all stupidly expensive. There were very few under a fiver, which is appalling. It is a piece of plastic with smaller plastic sticky-uppy bits coming out of it. That cannot surely be that expensive to produce. In the end I settle for one called some unnecessarily extraordinary name like "Babyliss Hair Styler 5000" or whatever the fuck it was. It's fine. My fringe is happy.

I better go. I would stay, but I've run out of Capri Sun and have too much self-confidence.

Until next time.