Today I have a guest post, from Troy Harris. I’m happy to post it here, so enjoy

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I went to a strip club recently(it doesn’t matter how recently I went, because this story isn’t topical). I know everyone on the Internet is wont to lecture on morality, so let me justify myself: this was a total ambush for one of my friends. You see, she’d never been to a strip club before, and her twenty-first birthday seemed like as good a time as any to introduce her to the world of faux carnal sin and infinite debt.

There are two fatal mistakes we made when we went to this particular strip club(which would have been mistakes at any strip club, mind you): first, we went on a Tuesday. Second, we went at three in the afternoon. Weird thing about the South, they have strip clubs that are open all the time. Unfortunately, when you run an entertainment establishment twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, you have to lower your standards when it comes to quality. Y’know, like the meat packing industry.

When we walked into the joint, something screamed ‘wrong’ at me from the get-go. Maybe it was the stainless steel bar, maybe it was the fact that the beer was served in clear plastic cups, maybe it was the fact that the dancers had towels that they put on the chairs before they’d sit down next to you. Who knows? As soon as we sat down in the otherwise empty main room, We were bombarded by the finest high school dropouts that south Texas had to offer. “Hey there, stud,” One of the sultry beauties said to me, the air whistling through the gaps where some of her teeth should have been. Over intoxicated and undeterred, I was determined to score a lap dance for Jessica, my nubile young friend who currently looked like she wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or vomit. “Well hey, yourself,” I said, smooth as could be.

“Y’all must have the day off,” she said, her voice a combination of five-year disillusionment and ten-year-smoker’s growl.

“Nah,” I replied, “We just decided to skip work. It’s Jess’ twenty first birthday, and we’re starting early.” The dancer laughed, a sound not all that dissimilar to Jabba the Hutt. “You remind me of my son,” she cooed. I looked over to Jess, who, having made her decision, made a mad dash for the restroom. But I was determined, friends. Even after I, upon closer inspection, noticed the dancer’s cesarian scar and stretch marks, I remained determined to score my friend’s first lap dance for her. I leaned in to seal the deal. “Look,” I said, “My friend has never been to a strip club before. I was wondering if you’d do her the honor of giving her her first lap dance.” “Of course, sugar,” the dancer crooned. “It’s twenty dollars.”

“Twenty dollars! That’s egregious!” The poor girl looked as though my words had physically harmed her. In retrospect, that might have just been the black eye that her boyfriend had given her. I regained my composure. “Isn’t there some sort of birthday discount?” I asked, my aura of calm restored. “Sorry, honey,” the girl said, “company policy.”

I’d lost the battle, but the war was far from over. I reached into my pocket and produced a twenty dollar bill. Looking around, I spotted Jess emerging from the restroom. “There she is,” I said, “get her.” Friends, what happened next can only be described as best sequence of reactionary nonverbal communication to date. Jess alternated between looking at me with utter disdain, looking at her dancer as if trying to crack a safe, and looking at the ground trying not to cry. It was the best twenty-first birthday for someone else ever, in my eyes. Jess hasn’t called me since, but it’s only because she lost her phone in one of the dancer’s rolls, I think.

Troy writes a column at Kamikazedy. You can also follow him on twitter.

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Well there it was

Anyway, a new post from me should be coming today or tomorrow, so stay tuned, I guess. *goes back to browsing cars and sighing wishfully*

I’v seen a few Clint Eastwood westerns, The Matrix, Popeye Volume 1 (don’t ask), a documentary on Bigfoot, a 1920 Alice in Wonderland movie, and god knows what else.

I think I’m going through some movie obsession or something- and only realized my dad likes the same movies as me 2 days ago. He loves the Terminator, Clint Eastwood, The Matrix trilogy, The Godfather, Indiana Jones etc.

So today I opened the cupboard in the living room, looked at the shelf dedicated to movies, and took note of his movies. These are the movies I must watch:

• The Terminator movies (seen em, but I gotta see them again!)
• The rest of the Matrix trilogy.
• The Untouchables
• The Godfather I and II
• The Indiana Jones movies (seen em all when I was 10- went through some pretty unhealthy Indiana Jones phase- went as far as using my skipping rope as a whip, and wearing an Indy-like jacket all over the place)
• The Exorcist
• All the Die Hard movies
• John Wayne movies
• Alien (this was frickin’ awesome)
• Aliens
• Dirty Dancing
• Thelma and Louise (seen it when I was 6- good times)
• Gran Torino
• Ghostbusters
• The Great Escape
• James Bond movies
• Mission Impossible movies
• Godzilla
• Tom and Jerry marathoonnnn!

There’s probably some I missed out buuut, these will do! Man, I’v got a lot of work to do…

Sorry that I don’t post that frequently any more, but you have no idea how much homework I am getting *shudder*. I promise to never leave this blog, though I’ll always post, at least 3 times a month

It was my dad who passed on that cold to me, and I still have to figure out how to thank him. The first day of the cold I felt like someone shoved a brick down my throat, and my  voice sounded like the possessed girl from The Exorcist.

The next day I stayed at home, and ate pretzel sticks while watching old Westerns on my iPad. If you haven’t seen the Dollars trilogy, buddy you’re missing out. I spent a few hours tapping my foot impatiently waiting for Bittorent to finish the goddamn download, and then another hour to convert those films to mp4.

After watching The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, I became obsessed with anything Clint Eastwood. Guy’s got style.

I became so obsessed I drew him.

Yup. I can get pretty obsessive. And did I forget to mention that I dressed up as him too? I don’t think I’ll be posting a picture of that though.

Next movies to watch…The Great Escape, Godzilla, Star Trek, and Untouchables. What? I like old movies.

There’s one thing I don’t get about my body though. I wish for it to be happy every single day, and when I ask for a cold, I get it immediately. Yup folks…I asked for a cold. *sniff*

Anyway, tomorrow I’m apparently going ice-skating with my parents. The closest I’v ever got to ice skating is watching people catapult themselves around the rink trying to act like professional (this was last week :/). My mum promised me we’d go, but thought she’d break her foot.

I thought she was being unfair till she started graphically describing how she wouldn’t like someone to cut off her fingers if she fell. She thinks that if she falls, as she leans down to get back up, some massive ass skates will collide with her fingers and chop em’ off.

I also watched Ratatouille yesterday. It was mega, and my dad was being real weird about it. The mouse’s brother had the same name as his, and the strangest thing was that when they ate something in the movie, my dad went and got it from the fridge.

For example, Remy was snacking on some cheese, and my dad got up and cut some, gleefully offering it to us. He also snagged some wine after glaring at the scene of the boy drinking some. They were eating some unknown bug infested moldy food at some point, and I had to glare at him to not get up and grab some from the behind the toilet.

Guys this week was really tough on me, and I only got 4 hours of sleep last night…yawn. I had a geography exam today, I probably failed.

So I was lying on the sofa, wondering if my stomach would be able to contain any more food. I had just eaten my way through a steak, potatoes, mushroom mush thing (my mum loves that thing so much), fake wine (mum’s idea again, sigh), and this badass salad that consisted of plain yogurt and cucumber. Mm.

I had eaten nothing during the day (just like Christmas eve and Christmas day) so I could get all that it. Still, my stomach had began to protrude a little. This did not please me, but I continued to watch Come Dine With Me joyfully, ignoring my mother’s loud laughs at the narrator’s sarcasm.

Oh and I forgot to add that we had baklava for desert… Omg that delicious thing I don’t even know how I managed to eat it without scoffing the whole plate down as well. So I had another piece. And then we made popcorn. And then I had some more of that badass salad. And then after 12pm, we had banitza. It has lucky slips inside, kind of like fortune cookies but less ‘Yoda’ish. Just the general ‘luck’ or ‘new car’ were included in every slice. I got ‘money’, ‘family happiness’, ‘luck’ and ‘health’ over the course of two days. Of course I had to eat more than one slice I was so lucky I had TWO lucky slips in one slice.

The lucky slips banitza was a little creepy as my parents got exactly what they wanted. My mum got ‘new car’, and my dad got ‘luck at poker’. Oh and then my mum got ‘love’, and my dad got 50p. It’s a tradition to put money in there. I’ll put pictures in this post when my computer is handed back to me :/

So we all go to bed happy, but I wake up angrily. Jeez, after two days it would be time for school. In the whole day I only watched Don’t Tell The Bride and Come Dine With Me. I also didn’t eat half the day. Then I went crazy on more banitza and baklava.

Yesterday…I had planned a strike to not eat and not get out of my bed the whole day. This was because my parents wanted to send me to school. I thought they let me be home schooled! Make up your mind…anyway I did stay in my bed the whole day, but I snuck in raisins and salt sticks. Then at dinner my mum made me eat moussaka and bread and then a cracker with cream cheese and an apple. These past few meals have been very irregular.

During that day I got my Internet, computer and charging cables for everything taken away. Great. I’m happy that I hid my iPad and iPod though. The bad thing is that the battery is…slowly going…down…

But I had to write today! I don’t want y’all to think that I ran away with another blog and left you all heartbroken. We’re engaged, remember?

I also spent a great deal of time on 4chan.org. Woah, calm down! I did NOT go on the random or /b/ board. Well, I did, but that was only for like one minute before I stumbled on something…unpleasant, and quickly clicked away. I stumbled onto the paranormal or /x/ board and spent a lot of time there. I read tons of ‘creepypasta’ and am now scarred for life. Yeah. That about sums it up.

Anyway, yesterday night my mum made me choose between staying home today cos I was so traumatised from school, but then I had to go tomorrow, or staying at home and letting social services take me away. Man, I hate decisions! But I chose to stay at home, and my mum phoned the school saying I was ill. And now it’s raining hard outside, and the students are all unhappy and miserable, learning about atoms while I’m at home, writing here happily!

I have to revise at some point… I have a geography exam and god knows what else. But I don’t care, if I’m going to be home schooled soon, why the hell revise for tests which will mean nothing?

Ah…I can’t wait to be home schooled. Getting up at 2pm, doing work in my pyjamas, drinking hot chocolate, watching tv… Fun life.

So I have to leave you there, everyone. I have to commence in my ugly learning journey now. I’ll try and write soon…I don’t know if my battery will last. It could be days or weeks before I get everything back. Please don’t leave this blog, please check back, and I love y’all!

Diya

Let’s talk about my sensitive ears first. My ears are calm, kind beings. They hear many profanities, but never answer back! They never reply with a mean remark, they never question life. Poor ears. I don’t know how they’re still coping with all that I hear. Only a week or so ago did I hear what a twelve year old had ‘experienced’ with her boyfriend. I truly feel sorry for these sinless body parts.

Next, my mouth and nose. These features hate each other. My mouth likes closing itself to make my nose do all the breathing work. The nose gets very annoyed at this action. So it gets its revenge by striking up a cold and preventing my mouth from receiving taste from food :/ of course this annoys me, how can my very own body parts do this right ON me? Jeez.

My eyes, I cannot express how much they have suffered. One eye is a lazy eye, but that’s ok as the other one loves concentrating. They make a great team, but when I look to the right, because of my nose, my lazy right eye sees everything blurry. Yeah, I’v tried waking it up, no success.

These eyes have seen ghosts (yeah, comedy aside, I’v seen god knows what), photos of her ten year old friend kissing (if you’re wondering why I have a ten year old friend, Facebook does weird things), and also her teacher joyfully making out with another teacher. Plus- they sting whenever I get nervous or wake up early. Imagine a weird girl trying to convince people she isn’t crying when her eyes are gushing out more water than the Three Gorges Dam.

What can I say? My face (or rather, head) has been through hell. And it’s not just that limb. It’s my foot and finger too.

I broke my ankle when I was seven. It was in school. I was pretending to be a dog, and my friend pulled me up, animal abuse, much? I stood up awkwardly and twisted my ankle, causing a quite melodic snap. My best friend was obsessed with doctors. And pressed around which probably made it worse. I was forced to walk all over the school on it, and then lie that my ankle was not broken to the doctor. It was painful. I hated doctors. I was told by an older girl that they shove tubes up your broken part and smash it with a hammer to set it if it grows wrong. So I lied that it wasn’t broken. Ouch. Not easy. It got better, but still hurts at times.

I broke my middle finger (on my left hand, unfortunately, I still had to write at school) when I was running home in fear of being late. My bag caught in the radiator, and as my fingers where caught in its straps, my finger got pulled. I only noticed the damage in the bus. It hurt like hell and still does. I was twelve. I was disappointed that I couldn’t flip people off with both middle fingers, though. Yeah, I missed that. I got the people on my table to do some of my work, still.

And back when I was in Primary (or Elementary) school, a boy broke his leg. Everyone loved his crutches. Oh, the joys of hopping about on two sticks. In fact, they liked them so much that they started throwing themselves off buildings to break their own wrongly proportioned anyway legs, and bag a pair of crutches.

In other news (I’ve gone quite fond of that phrase), my parents agreed to home schooling. Mission completed. Now they just need to organise it ahhh, I have always been a good persuasive speaker.
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(no Diya image signature, as I’m typing this on my iPad. Right, off to Angry Birds.)

Well, if you read my last post you were notified of me wanting to be home schooled. After long-ass researches and practices, I asked my mum.

I was kind of imagining a strong, confident, knowledgeable speech that presented her with tons of facts and statistics about Einstein-like kids, but all that came out was a spring of tears and tons of ‘please!!!’s.

She agreed to research this ‘home school crap!’ (in her words) as long as I promised to visit the doctor in case I have some MASSIVE anxiety problem that prevents me from socializing and going to public school normally. Like wtf? Just because the public Torture Chamber for kids doesn’t suit me, it doesn’t mean I have a long streak of nervous and anxiety disorders.

I don’t, so that’s not a problem, is it? Yup, it is. You see, doctors are known for falsely diagnosing someone of schizophrenia just because they thought they saw their long lost grandma, or anorexia after the scale went down 1 pound.

Their gonna diagnose me with some dire disease and prescribe me medication that makes the pharmacists gasp behind their gentle paws. And that medication, my friends, will make me worse as I actually don’t need it. And then that will lead people to actually believe that I have that disease that I was wrongly diagnosed with.

So fine, I will go to the doctor, but I will definitely not accept any medication, because I am fine without any.

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It was the metro strike today, so we couldn’t get there. The only thing we could do was catch the 95 bus. We were about to go home, when it just came from nowhere like a freakin’ ghost.

We got on, and it was so friggin’ packed I don’t know how we didn’t come out of there like pancakes. We probably did.

I was happily talking in my language about wanting to smack people and farting and all that lark, when I realized that people from my country were on the bus, right in front of me. -.-

In the actual shopping centre I probably received around 70 bruises from overweight women rushing to buy things half price in the sale.

My goal was to drink coffee and eat croissants with my mum, but all that was available from their stupid shop was jam donuts and cola. Great. In the end all I ate was an apple, and the only thing we bought was a muffin (my mother ate it for lunch). It was blueberry, and looked like a god to my hungry mouth. But of course I didn’t eat it, cos I pigged out yesterday at Christmas.

We got bored and decided to go home, but guess what? There was so much traffic, so much people and the bus was 1 hour late, and didn’t even stop. We had to catch like 40 other buses to get home. On one of them some guy farted in my face while I was sitting down :/

On the bus I was thinking about home schooling myself. It turns out it’s legal, and you can actually do it. School is traumatic for me, so I think that if my parents let me teach myself…wow I’d have the best life ever.

Eating ice-cream while poring over science textbooks, stroking my cat and studying a novel while leaning against the radiator…it all sounds so appealing! Of course my parents will probably mutter something about how ungrateful I am that I’m getting a sound education. Yeah right, as if trying to hear over other people’s screams and shouts all day is a sound education.

In other news, I’v had a change of heart about my Christmas presents. That Nintendo magazine is pretty damn awesome, and the iTunes gift card let me buy Angry Birds and Garage Band! I’v been switching between them non-stop!

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So it’s Christmas- finally. The only thing I’m looking forward to is the roast turkey.

My parents promised me wonderful things- yet this morning I got clothes, socks, some book and a magazine and an iTunes gift card. Sounds good- right? Yeah, but it doesn’t look good when you were promised money, iPad things and rings.

So here’s a list of things I wanted and what I actually got:

iPad Cover- “I’m sorry, the one we ordered stunk of old leather.”

Book on drawing- I got a classic.

A goddamn normal watch- “There weren’t any.” (are you kidding me?)

A normal ring that costs no more than £5- They’re all ugly.

You can probably sense that I feel very negative today :/ I hope dinner is nice, though. I haven’t ate all day so I can pig out tonight

My mother made that ritual bread I was talking about in the last post, and I’m not even kidding- you could use it as a spare tire.

Sigh. See you all later I guess.

It’s called a ritual table, and it has 7, 9 or 11 meatless dishes. They can be: bean soup, cabbage leaves or peppers stuffed with rice, boiled wheat, pumpkin pastry, dried plums, garlic, honey, walnuts, wheat, fruit, rite bread, cheese pastry or cabbage pastry. Some families leave the table set all night – as the dead come for supper (creepy, I know).

The oldest person in the family hands around the ‘ritual bread’ (it’s tastier than chocolate- no kidding!) from the oldest person to the youngest. That means I get my piece last, and by then I’m practically drooling all over the table.

Read more about this here.

Anyway, today I’m barely eating so I can stuff my face at dinner time. If you saw the things served you would want to dive into the food. Don’t try it though, no one appreciates it (learnt it the hard way).

I’v made Christmas cards for my parents, and even decorated the wrapping paper (only to have it ripped apart tomorrow by my parents in the excitement of receiving a new calculator or knitting magazine).

I sure hope that my folks don’t turn on the news while we’re eating, I don’t feel like being updated about the debt crisis or Gordon Brown’s new haircut. I hope they turn on the music channel, I hope they’re playing old Christmas songs, and I really really hope they don’t put on the Justin Bieber Christmas song covers. :/

Have a nice Christmas Eve people, and I’ll post again tomorrow (after drowning in my new socks glorious presents).