There
is nothing that makes quite as harsh a start to the morning as waking up and
re-reading your post-midnight texts and tweets from the night before. I know I
get punchy and yappy when I’m overtired, but somehow last night while tweeting
with my friend Vera at 3AM local time, I went from a joke about how I’ve got to
stop proposing marriage to buskers (perfectly reasonable and I stand by that
assessment in the unforgiving light of day) to visualizing a man playing
the ukulele while gripping my still-beating heart in his teeth while it pumps my
blood all down his front. Um. What?
I
so wish I could introduce all of you to my friend Maz. She’s lovely. She’s
gorgeous and clever and is possessed of a bone-dry sense of humor, and she also
has some of the most eloquent gestures I’ve ever seen. She has one in
particular that means “surely I must have misheard you, because no one could
possibly be dumb enough to say what I think you just said.” (She’s German.
They’re a succinct people.) If you know Maz, you know exactly the gesture I
mean. It’s a little stiff-armed shrug combined with a side-eye, and I’ve seen
it stop stampeding morons in their tracks. Somehow the critic who lives in my
head has picked up the Maz gesture, and she uses it on me often. When I start
talking about ukulele players and my ripped-out heart and fountains of my
blood, my inner critic does the Maz at me pretty hard.
Freya
and I went to see a one-off performance of Tommy
last week. We both went in completely blind – as far as I was concerned, David
Hunter from the reality show Superstar
was in it. He was the cute one who made me cry a lot, and I quite wanted to see
him perform live. I’m not even
going to try to summarize Tommy here
but if you’ve never seen it: paedophilia, pinball, Christ figure, early
retirement. Yeah, it makes about that much sense onstage, too. After the end of
the show, Freya and I went around back to say a genial “well done, sir” to Mr.
Hunter.
At
this point, anyone who has met me ever is rehearsing the Maz gesture to perform
it along with my inner critic, because you see where this is going.
As
per all expectations, I was the world’s most socially graceless little badger.
I said “fuck” about fifteen times to poor Mr. Hunter, and “jizz” once, and then
I accidentally punched him. It was maybe not my finest hour. Would we go so far
as to call it a “Liz-aster”? I think we can. (I am totally making “Liz-aster”
happen, you guys. It’s not like I don’t have enough events that need that
descriptor.) Much to the gentleman’s credit, he was properly lovely to me. Of
course he was! He’s a retired rock star. He’s probably dealt with weirder shit
than blue-haired sweary American bitches. He really is gorgeous, though, and
Freya and I spent the entire train ride home gently smacking each other in a
blind fog of lust and crooning “Why couldn’t he be awful so we’d have an excuse
to not fancy him?”
If
my inner critic doesn’t stop doing the Maz gesture at me, she’s totally going
to get a repetitive strain injury in her shoulders.
