Halloween

As some of you know, I got to see the new James Bond movie a week before you all did. I know; I’m just that awesome. It came out on Halloween, and so naturally I felt as though my costume sound be along that theme. The problem is that in my day to day life; I am, pretty much, a less emo version of James Bond. It seemed silly to go as him, so I went on an adventure to the Salvation Army where I found a rather frumpy-looking black dress and knee high boots. I went to Staples and bought a small thing of glue and some glue sticks. I was a bond girl … get it? I know: I’m so droll.

My friends and I went to ‘a fancy dress’ party that was going on in my building to start off the night (Fancy dress, for those who don’t know is British for costume party). I had no idea who the people where who where actually throwing the party; but when you look as fabulous as I did, you as welcome at any party. I am sure it will not come to surprise any of you that with my knee high books and short skirt, I was the belle of the ball.*

At some point during the party, between being asked to take photos with random people, I found myself by the refreshment table eating what I believed at the time to be the greatest cupcakes ever made when a witch came up to me and told me that she had made the cupcakes that I was now enjoying. I called her a witch because she was dressed as such. As I was in the witch’s house and eating her cupcakes; I thought it was only appropriate to try and make conversation seeing as I had never actually met her before. We talked for a while and judging from the amount of whiskey that she kept putting into my drink, it seemed as though she fancied me. We got onto the topic of music and it came out that the witch was BFF with Jenny Lewis. I guess Jenny is dating a Scottish guy and somehow the witch and her met and became friends. She told me that she had some pictures of the two of them together and we went to her room where she showed them to me.

I’m not sure how exactly it came up; but as always the case with Europeans, we started talking about American politics. It turns out that the witch is a rabid socialist who decided that it was her mission to convince me that capitalism had failed and that Marxism was therefore right. Her logic was specious to say the very least.

I don’t quite understand how it is that so many Europeans actually believe in Socialism. Everywhere I look and around every corner I turn, there is either a socialist society poster or a person handing out a socialist newspaper called, aptly, the Socialist Worker. These people have meetings every week and the posters are all over the city like. Oddly enough, the Socialist Organizations seem to be extremely well funded as their posters are always quite fetching. The thing is, these people who seem completely normal and sometimes even intelligent actually believe in Socialism. They were, at one time, card carrying members of the party; but somewhere along the line they had to cut up their cards and give them to new members. It would have been wrong for some people to have had cards while others did not.

Talking to a Socialist is like having a conversation with someone whose life experience is limited to having lived with a pack of wildebeests in a cave cut off from human civilisation. There is simply not a common background to even frame a conversation. It’s like trying to talk to someone about astrophysics if their only point of reference is Euclidean geometry. Their minds are too narrow to fully understand the universe. They can only live in a world where the sum of the angles of a triangle equal 180 and the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. There is not enough knowledge base to understand the world because their construction of it is too limited.** For this reason, it is absolutely impossible for me to have a conversation with a Socialist.

I needed to escape from the Red Witch; but I didn’t know how to make a clean break. My friends wanted to go to a club; but I know that because the Red Witch fancied me, I would have no way to escape from her grasp. Then I had a brilliant idea. I decided to chance the subject in such a way that I would be able to join my friends without her following me, in fact, without her ever speaking to me again. I started to talk about her costume and said: ‘You know you must be really good with makeup. I have been wondering all night, how did you manage to put that hideous looking mole on your face?’ The mole was clearly not part of the costume.

I made my escape to the club where I imbibed in calibration.

The next day, Saturday, a friend that I made from the Rotary Weekend in Birmingham came to visit me and stay for the first part of the week. After living in Ghana and Indonesia and working on water projects, she is studying development at the University of Manchester this year. She and I really hit it off during the weekend and had been talking via the facebook for a while. She had a reading week and we decided that she should come and stay with me for a few days. We had a great time doing the tourist stuff around Glasgow that I had been way too cool to do when I first got here.


* You may wish to refer to the Facebook for photos; but I will tell you must of the good ones were bared from the public domain.

** This is the single greatest analogy I have ever come up with in my entire life. Shut up.


Later days,