Sing along and it might just get you thru'

So a few weeks ago I saw this post over Random Ramblings About My Crazy Life (Read it... Read it... Read it...) and I got thinking. I really love music. There's always a song for each day and one I'll always especially relate to one particular song at any given moment. Lately I've been spending a ton of time at home and it's been getting warmer, so when you're sat out on a balcony watching the street coming to life you start to notice things... Things like how the police hang around here a bit more, and then everyone seems a bit shady, and everythings grey and the language is multicoloured and finally that the majority of people in my area don't speak English. It's a really strange place. My brother's been mugged twice, one of my neighbours is a drug dealer, there is a woman who sits on the corner of the street for hours on end, and a couple of years ago my dad found someone dead outside the pub (natural causes I assure you... Perhaps brought on prematurely by excessive booze).



But I like it here. Its little quirks make me smile. The loud, insane cashiers at the local shop make me laugh at whatever obscene hour of the morning I wonder down there. Even the stupid chav-like people tickle my ego just by being dumb dipshits to the point that I feel top of the class. The petty criminals add character to what would have been just another council dumping ground.

So, to all these little things, I say ta. And offer them the wonder that is Pulp.

Common People

She came from Greece, she had a thirst for knowledge
She studied sculpture at Saint Martin's College
That's where I caught her eye.
She told me that her Dad was loaded
I said in that case I'll have a rum and coke-cola.
She said fine and in thirty seconds time she said,

I want to live like common people
I want to do whatever common people do,
I want to sleep with common people
I want to sleep with common people like you.
Well what else could I do - I said I'll see what I can do.

I took her to a supermarket
I don't know why but I had to start it somewhere, so it started there.
I said pretend you've got no money,
She just laughed and said oh you're so funny.
I said yeah? Well I can't see anyone else smiling in here.

Are you sure you want to live like common people
You want to see whatever common people see
You want to sleep with common people,
You want to sleep with common people like me.
But she didn't understand, she just smiled and held my hand.

Rent a flat above a shop, cut your hair and get a job.
Smoke some fags and play some pool,
Pretend you never went to school.
But still you'll never get it right
'Cos when you're laid in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you call your Dad he could stop it all.

You'll never live like common people
You'll never do what common people do
You'll never fail like common people
And dance and drink and screw
Because there's nothing else to do.

Sing along with the common people,
Sing along and it might just get you thru'
Laugh along with the common people
Laugh along even though they're laughing at you
And the stupid things that you do.
Because you think that poor is cool.

Like a dog lying in a corner
They will bite you and never warn you
Look out
They'll tear your insides out
'Cos everybody hates a tourist
Especially one who thinks
It's all such a laugh
Yeah and the chip stain's grease
Will come out in the bath

You will never understand
How it feels to live your life
With no meaning or control
And with nowhere left to go
You are amazed that they exist
And they burn so bright
Whilst you can only wonder why

Rent a flat above a shop
Cut your hair and get a job
Smoke some fags and play some pool
Pretend you never went to school
But still you'll never get it right
'Cause when you're laid in bed at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your dad he could stop it all
Yeah

I want to live with common people
I want to live with common people
I want to live with common people
I want to live with common people

I want to live with common people like you
I want to live with common people like you
I want to live with common people like you
I want to live with common people like you

I don't like Mondays.

Have you ever been unable to think about what you're meant to be doing today because your mind's too busy going 'wrarrggghhhh' to do anything else other than more wrarrggghhhhing?

Hmm... No? You don't know how lucky you are.

Today saw the first and second proper performances of a play I'm doing for my drama GCSE called Teechers which is beyond terrible after the 47th take, but hopefully you'll never have to see it.

Ever.

You lucky, lucky people.

Anyways. I spent four and a half hours in the drama studio getting a verbal beating from various 'superiors' - self-proclaimed or otherwise - and was slowly getting very very angsty, nervous, miserable and unquestionably the most dangerous of all, I was hungry. It was 2pm by the time I got to the youth centre for food - eight hours after my meagre breakfast.

Fucking ouch.

Maths arrived too soon. I've been hassling my head of year/slave to let me skip the exam for ages and we've reached a mutual agreement with it but DEAR GOD WHY OH WHY do I still have to go to those lessons? You can only count numbers, silly, how the hell am I supposed to know what x + y is?

Aaaand then Miss dropped Le Bombshell.

You know, the C word.

Yeah. Coursework.

Turns out I'd completely forgotten about a some last-minute piece of work. And it was due in last Friday. And I'd completely forgotten. And I wanted to live. And I had too much to do. And-

Part of me just... snapped.

Though after twenty or so minutes of hiding/crying in the toilets, I discovered that I wasn't nearly as far gone as the teachers.

They have fucking motion detectors in the toilet. It wasn't long before the 6"7 PE teacher came along to evict me.

Emotionless bastard.

The short of the long of it is that I ended up in ...The Inclusion Room... for the third time ever.

*SHOCK HORROR*

And then! AND THEN!!

I had to go to drama for the performance for the teachers and Tilda had my bag so I was hunting her down and my BFF Main Gay.5 caught me in the Quad and gave me a hug.

Innocent enough, right?

Apparently not. The Badger (Head Teacher) came along, stopped next to us and said 'We have a six inch rule here'.

A SIX INCH RULE?!! The cheek of it!!!

How on Earth are we supposed to continue the human race now that swine flu has STRUCK US DOWN with a six inch rule in place?!

I'll be honest, a six-inch limit doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun.

Aaanyways...

I did the performance with a crippling headache and only forgot one line, which is an achievement really.

But I have an oral to do tomorrow.

That's an oral exam by the way.

Yeah, my day's been full of that humour.

So sue me.

Despite the day being shitty beyond belief and a month of Thursdays (And I HATE Thursdays), I managed to find a bright side whilst sitting in inclusion.

"Well," I thought. "At least this makes good blog fodder."

Typico.

Teenage lobotomy

The fantastic thing about having a strange interest in all things lingual (words make me happy) is that I can frequently go about my business and drop bombs in all different languages, and by the time someone figures out which language Nicole's inner Prince Of Darkness is hiding behind this time, I've already slipped off the radar again. It's infallible.

Knowing things is cool, kids.

Recently I've been trotting all over Europe this way, from the dizzying heights of Finnish to the soaring other heights of Dutch, it's all been said and done. Lately I've been bricking it over various things, and goodness, badness and in between-ness knows that I've tried to alert the great gig in the sky to this. I've written numerous strong-worded letters, I've practically become the patron saint of Britain by complaining to kingdom come and back and I've taken a dive with most of my work just to make up for lost time and it's STILL not enough.

Did you know that I forgot about my birthday? My SIXTEENTH birthday? The one that I have been awaiting with crude expectation for the last three years And Believe Me That's A Long Time When You Have No Motivation To Grow Up?

Yeah. Clean off of my memory.

I'm not sure if that deserves condolences or a slow but meaningful clap.

You see, school did this. Those evil, evil bastards lobotomised me in my sleep a la The Simpsons where Flanders becomes the unquestioned leader of the world and he takes peoples' brains (ZOMBIES!!!) so that they're all 'Hi-de-lee-ho neighbour-ino' and Homer's all 'AHHHHHH!' and he runs away because he doesn't want to conform to green sweaters and dorkitude.

Yeah, school's like that, only completely not. They stole my brain, turned it into mush and then made me remember things only in a series of deadlines and complicated equations like this one and to hell with anything else.



See? I'm enlightened.

Watch out school, I'm onto you.

Oooooh it's that time of... huh, whatever.

It's way too hot to go outside, so I made a den under the stairs to avoid those deadly sunrays while I made another little comic for you...

Presenting...

(Click to Enlarge)

Happy Monday.

No, I don't actually believe that.

Put the knife down.

Something like crazy.

Christicles. I am NEVER taking a night off from blogging again. It's taken me three hours to get through my blogroll.

Let me tell you that the last three days have been the peak of my fortnight off.

Wednesday: I saw Marley & Me. It's a great movie, it made me laugh like a loon. I zoned out towards the end though because I was too busy telling myself to 'stop crying you pansy' to pay attention to the last two minutes.

Yesterday I lost my pride from 6.5 feet in the air.

Do witness...



And Tilda somehow still managed to label me as 'graceful' or some such nonsense.

But it doesn't matter too much because I found out that I was a god of some sort.



Well I can see the resemblance, anyways.

(Also, that man has tiny junk.)

(Just thought I'd point it out.)

(Because he certainly isn't going to.)

(Hmm... Maybe God is pointing it out, and the man just misinterpreted the body language - I hear men are good at that.)

(Anyway, Anna has much bigger balls than me... Maybe.)

But I think I digressed.

Friday was traumatic... After having breakfast tragically cut short by my mother's horrendously good timing, I was whisked away to my SIL's house where it was announced that I would be the 'model' in my mum's new campaign.

Please note that this was a teenage parents campaign.

I already knew I'd be made to do it, but this was crippling to my ego.

I was handed Rhiley (baby nephew) and suddenly I was staggeringly grateful that my 25-year-old brother wasn't there. Now that would have been painful.

So the photographer bloke* arrived with one of those HUUUGE cameras that are made to scare the model stiff and my mum started teaming up with him and saying 'Oh, Nicky, we don't want to see your face for this, pull your hair down'.

Queue the mother of all disparaging looks.

My SIL was fabulous as always, making sure Rhiley kept laughing and smiling ('The baby needs to look happy.' The cameraman said. 'The mother needs to look stressed and tired.') and I just sat pretty and felt my mental age - somewhere in the mid-forties.

It was over in ten minutes, but BELIEVE ME they were the longest ten minutes of my life.

In other news Hitler my drama teacher has called rehearsals after school next Wednesday. No doubt I'll have tales of utter joy to tell then.

[* The photographer bloke was actually really nice even though this is all EXACTLY what happened, I'm just being an arrogant bitch here.]

Shut up and eat your eggs.

For the last two or three days I have been fighting a losing battle against HTML on behalf of mankind. I've screamed, I've shouted, I've typed my poor little fingers (useless trivia: I have small hands) to the bone and then I sent off the codes to Matt who fixed them in 0.2 of a second which is just a typical example of my stunted life.

Fuck you, man.

But, you know, thanks.

So I've re-done the whole of the Urban Family Blog* to look icky and twee and then slammed in some of Anna and Ashley's handy work in the banner to highlight the only rational fear there is.

Man-eating horses.

The sign says so, so it must be true.

Then I realised that the U.F. blog doesn't really get much done to it, because I'm the only consistent blogger out of all of us and they're bound to get bored of my nagging them at some point.

So I added a new feature, which I'll post here too because this was too funny, even if it is kind of an in-joke.

Urban Family Movies: Matt Fails Easter.



Enjoy!**

---

* Urban Family is the general name for myself, Matt, Tilda, Anna and Emma... Snagged the name from Bridget Jones' Diary... so sue me.

** I am not a sexy nurse and I never plan to be.

Reasons why I can never be Spider-Man

You know when you're a bored, uninspired teenager and you see an advert on TV for FilmFour's showing of Spider-Man 2 and you're all 'but I've got that shit on DVD!' so you go and watch it at some grossly inappropriate hour of the morning and then you start thinking?

No? Oh well.

Sometime between watching Peter Pan Parker's costume shredding to pieces and him throwing himself off of the top of very tall buildings I came to the only inevitable conclusion a girl can reach.

I can never be Spider-Man.

I mean, for one, I hate spiders with a fiery passion. I can't stand to exist beside one, never mind be bitten by one. And then to fall in love with the girl that freely admits she loves them! I mean, c'mon. That relationship just wouldn't work out.

There's also the small issue of costume. Lycra/rubber is not my most flattering look. In fact, if I took to the streets now in anything close to either I'd probably be lynched.

I'm not even joking. Ever visited York on a night?

And then there's the whole 'with great power comes great responsibility' thing. Erm... Yes. The robot typing this right now is actually the latest model of my kind - the Nicole Smith 2.0. Upgrade from the last one? I'm responsible not once, but twice a week. Give me super powers and I'll screw up the world soooo bad...

Oh? And the whole deal with the web coming out of the wrists? Hopeless. I'd be too busy giggling 'oooh it tickles!' to do any saving the good citizens of New (and otherwise) York business.

I couldn't even be Batman, because The Joker freaks me out and I might... you know... get bats in my hair or something.

Superman? Don't get me started.

I couldn't pull off the Watchmen look because I don't have a glowing blue penis and again, Lycra is a big fat NO, right there.

Le sigh... I'm hopeless.

Then it hit me.

Could I be one of the helpless damsels in distress?

Hahahahahaha...

You must understand, I'm about as suitable as Queen Latifah for that role.

It'd be awful. I'd be watching from the sidelines and then when whoever I was simpering over got thrown through a building I'd scream 'Fucking... OWWW!' and that would be the end of my acting career.

I suppose it doesn't matter really... I'm already a genetic mutation.

Just keep those spiders the hell away from me and I'll be sweet.

Sipping tea and trying to remember how to speak English-like

Did I tell you that I speak American-ish?

Yeah. Such is the effect of reading so many American books/blogs and watching too many American films.

Oh, and I know more about baseball than I do about cricket.

Basically, I rock.

It annoys a lot of people though, mostly because I keep calling everyone 'Dude'.

Anna is now known as Dude. She hates this, she may even highlight this in the comments, but maybe not... I think my American-ness is the real reason that she is refusing to elope to the USA with me and Tilda to set up a tent on top of here because we are mere immigrants that are too poor to pay rent and I'm pretty sure that no one person owns the Seattle Space Needle.

Regardless, that's what's happening. Hit me up in a few years.

Back to the point, even my mother has become Dude. She's indifferent, mostly this is just because it's really not worth questioning my dizzying logic. And considering how much I do for her (see below) I'm kind of at liberty here.



Yeah. What wouldn't you do for a daughter like me?

I mean, I come with a free PediPaws kit! (<--- READ THIS: I thought it was pretty hilarious...)

(P.S. I'm fully aware that this post is full of cringe-worthy stereotyping.)

Explicit content, and it's just SO good.

I was thinking today, when debating the importance of the word 'fuck' in today's vocabulary with Bena (you know, the stuff all normal teenagers talk about) how gorgeous the word actually is.

Fuuuuuck.

I mean, there's that fabulously fricative fff sound that stops the world and makes sure that everyone knows what's going down, and then there's that simple yet smartly placed uuu and then it's all sewn up with a marvellous ck which has not one plosive c-sound, but TWO, for extra kiCK.

And you can't even substitute the word fuck with something else, because fuck is fuck you know?

Say it loud and proud, fuck.

It doesn't even stop there.

Shit is just as good.

I hear the word 'shit' and I go 'mmmmm'.

It's the same principle really. The standard fricative 'shhhhh' that just moves me when I hear it, and then a nice 'it' on the end that just EXPLODES in your mouth and you're all 'I GOT THA POWER!' for a couple of seconds before someone else drops a better word and you're all meagre and then it becomes a competition which you refuse to lose. Ever.

However, there is one word I do not like.

The Big C.

Yeah.

There's something about the word 'cunt' that just bugs me. It's ugly. It's too plosive, and God help us all if there are TWO plosives in a word.

Generally I find 'poon' to be a better word. I spent years of my life meaning to order 'panini' from various shops and asking for poonani instead.

You say the word 'poon' and people bow down to you, because poon sounds epic. Poon is the name of gods.

Respect the poon, seriously.

However, on the subject of P-words, let me give you a fine example of a word that needs volume in order to have the correct amount of justice done unto it.

Piss.

Huuuhhuhuuhhuuu...

That word is the equilibrium of my life for sure.

So you see, I have single-handedly given everyone in the living, breathing world the excuse to scream these words with gay abandon, because really, the world is better for it.

I mean, I'm pretty sure that some of the world's most famous paintings have been inspired by such words...







Does anyone actually know what I'm talking about?

*Update*

Tilda has a little more to say on the matter:

I was contemplating the beauty of expletives after browsing over Nicole’s ‘Fuck’ episode… and I found I accidentally also caught the swearing bug.

As a consequence, I Tilda, would like to add a contribution to the world of (abusive) words

Bollocks, for instance…

{ One can roll the ‘l’ nicely on one’s tongue
{ There is a visually pleasing element of the symmetry of ‘ollo’.
{ 2 syllables, is always special- as you can glorify for longer when saying it
{ and of course Smith’s fabulous point, it ends with the Kick of ‘ck’
{ and an ss… to extend it off into the Unknown : )

Boollloockkssss!

Blimey...

So I *MUST* be awesome.

Not saying anything today. Not believing anything today.

Today is National Oh suuuuure I'm not shitting you! day, otherwise known as April Fool's Day and so I cannot say or read anything in case I kill my pride for forever.

But check this out.