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Today is Beat Up on Elf-boy Day
July 25, 2003, 6:10 p.m. Sif rang me last night. She has a much deeper voice than I expected, but it's very sexy and cool : ) We had a good conversation, although there were a couple of awkward pauses. She says she was rambling, but for me, that's really a par-for-the-course conversation style. We're meeting in August, when she comes down to Sydney . . . I'm looking forward to it : ) This morning on the Breakfast Show on Triple J, Adam and Will had “Tell It Like It Is Friday”, where you get to vent your spleen about things that shit you. This month’s theme was Misuse of the English Language – a subject oh so close to my heart, being an anally retentive English major : ) My pet peeve, as far as grammar-abuse goes, would have to be apostrophe-abuse. Goddamn, I hate seeing signs for “hair cut’s at half-price” and “fresh tomato’s”. That apostrophe is supposed to mean something – don’t just throw it around! Who is Hair Cut and what is this At Half Price that they supposedly own? Fresh Tomato is what, exactly? Basic rule: Are you contracting a word, like ‘is’ or ‘are’, to another? Are you making a word possessive of something else? No? Then why the hell are you putting that apostrophe in?! Oh, and I hate Elf-boy’s purposeful misspelling of the word ‘irk’ (he spells it with an E). I’m sure he does it just to spite me, I’ve corrected him plenty of times . . . One of these days, I should “confess” to my family that Elf-boy isn’t really my boyfriend, that he’s just a friend I paid to come round to the house a couple of times and pretend; that that’s the reason why they’ve only ever met him twice; that every time I’ve gone to see him I’ve really been spending the night in a motel by myself; that I’ve run out of money and I can’t keep up with my lies anymore . . . the sad thing is, they’d probably believe it. It annoys me that he never comes to my house to see me. Not because I find it such an arduous task to visit him, I don’t mind it at all, but because it infuriates me that he can’t put in the same amount of effort. When I tell people that I always visit him, and never the other way round, I can always hear in their reactions, no matter what they say, a sort of pity for me, being stuck in a relationship with a guy who doesn’t appreciate me. I shouldn’t let their opinions bother me, but the problem is, a small part of me keeps telling me they’re right – that he doesn’t appreciate me. He’s told me why he doesn’t come down – he has certain knowledge about my parents, and he’s worried about how that will affect his behaviour around them – but I don’t know . . . I guess I’m an insecure person. Plus, I can’t exactly say, “Mum, Dad, the reason why Elf-boy doesn’t come down is because he doesn’t like you,” so I have to keep telling them that I don’t know why, that I suspect it’s because he’s a lazy sod, and really, I dislike having to lie about him to them. It’s that damn “ooh, trouble in paradise” look they get about them . . . I really should learn to keep my mouth shut about my parents . . . I cannot complain about them to people, they never understand how I can love and despise them at the same time.
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