"I use dating apps and decide I would be happier coming of age in the 1990s, or China"

In a unsurprising turn of events, my boyfriend and myself have broken up. In a surprising turn of events, it is the least dramatic thing involving two raging homosexuals ever to have occurred, which I am very, very grateful for.

I suppose the fact remains that whilst we are deeply incompatible in a fairly important sphere, there's no need to do anything as drastic as unfriend each other on Playstation Network, or stop watching Youtube videos whilst pissed over 15,000 calories worth of takeout pizza. Thus the Boyfriend is now the Platonic Man Friend, or perhaps the Housemate. Plus ça change, etc.

And so we arrive at the current position, where I studiously avoid certain danger zones on iTunes (Coldplay, Tegan and Sara, Adele) and have emerged blinking into the world of Dating Apps.

We didn't have all this malarky when last I was single for any period of time (sometime when News of the World was still in operation and dinosaurs roamed the earth). Back then it was mostly a matter of meeting someone on an LGBT social and worrying the next morning about being barred from the toilets in Little Johns.

The Platonic Man Friend has very much taken to dating apps. He seems to have developed the knack of going from 'pics ;) ?' to 'I can be there in 45 minutes' in the time it takes to level up on Fallout 4 and eat a pack of chocolate rich tea biscuits. I am happy for him (I.e seethingly jealous) and pleased that he is embracing his new identity (I.e seethingly fucking jealous). I think to myself, I would quite like a piece of this getting people to want me action. I can do it too, can't I? I should. I should try. It'll help. 

So I downloaded:

Whisper, anonymous confession app - mostly home to catfishing 15 year olds, dogging fetishists and very lonely single men from Stockport. 

Tinder, mostly heterosexual dating app, famously terrible. 

FindHrr - Grindr, but for lezzers. 

Her - again, for lezzers, but where you actually have a profile and several photos and stuff .

Results so far have been.....mixed.

Let's put it this way. They see your face before they start talking to you. I would much rather they saw a picture of Daria with her head in her hands and listened to some awkward non-chat up lines first. It also means that (damn, damn) they get to decide to not talk to you because you have a ratty blue mohawk and eyes like pissholes in the snow currently but you don't want to lie to them and put up an older picture and see the horror dawn slowly on their face as they see you approaching and then pretend to need to be in Superdrug for the next 50 minutes with their phone switched off.

And there was the unfortunate self-esteem sapping incident of sending a picture on request and it ending the conversation....5 times in a row. Now, I checked and it wasn't accidentally a picture of Myra Hindley. I was smiling. In a relatively non-creepy way. I have charitably decided this is because I am an acquired taste.

So this is the first problem.

The second problem is that I have no idea how to do small talk, which you seem to have to do before you are allowed to say anything like 'do you fancy having sex' or 'we appear to have nothing in common, can we have a one night stand please instead of talking about how much you love psytrance/incest fantasies/making your own clothes'.

Thirdly – I actually don't like talking to strangers. Or anyone. I text back with a 5 hour time delay, if at all. In any given social situation I would probably rather be watching Jane Eyre, or lesbian anime, or porn, or Diners Drive in and Dives in my boxers with a can of Carlsberg, covered in rats. So, all things concluded, the dating app experience does not appear to be My Thing.

I have discussed this briefly with friends. The consensus appears to be that I am 'alternative' and this is putting people off.

Various solutions have been advanced – I have had a kind offer from the LGBT Network Bosslady of dressing me up as a 'proper' lesbian in blue jeans, a white t-shirt and swoopy hair (and, I'll be honest, I'm considering it). Beelzebub (aka She Who Must Not Be Named, she of the horoscopes and indestructible cheerful life tips) has suggested roller derby – also something I'm giving some thought - chock full of lesbians and alternative types - although with the risk of making a cunt of myself on skates when I manage to trip over my own feet a lot, without wheels attached (this advice, however, coming from someone who has a nuclear-fusion level smile and could probably get laid at a Westboro Baptist Church convention. This does not make it bad advice, I recognise).

And you know what, yeah, maybe I'll try that stuff. Lose some weight, get some more tattoos, try a few different looks, go out, do stuff, submerge myself in a world of alternative gay creatures zooming around on wheels and whooping, try smiling a bit more. Go to the gym. Go to social groups. Save some money. Plan a career. Move to shared housing. Listen to fun music. Go abroad. Cook. Find out who I am. Get some confidence back. I've been thinking about it, and thinking, yes, that is what I need to do, I will be happier, and then someone will want me.

And then, I thought, is this, the whole dating app thing, the trying to make myself someone someone else will want, the best use of my time? Do I need to do this? Or is it just because I'm jealous and really I just want to feel attractive? Like someone wants me? Am I just doing it because I feel I should be able to? Do I even want to be with someone right now or am I just scared of being alone? Do I need to change myself for someone else? Should I try to be making myself happy for somebody else?

So no. I'm not going to do that stuff to get laid. Or find a relationship. 

I'm gonna do it because I've decided I would actually quite like to be happy. Just for me. 

I might write that again. I would like to be happy. I want to be happy. Me. Happy. Myself. 

I-want-to-make-myself-happy. I am gonna be happy and fuck everyone who doesn't want me to be. Now is the time. Right now. I've not really given it a shot yet. I'm 26 and I've never really stopped to think, hey, I want to try just making myself happy. And thinking of all the exciting things I can do made something click in my brain. I don't have to do it to distract myself, because I'm in pain, because I want to find someone. Those don't have to be my goals. It could just be my goal to be happy. Just because I want to be. And perhaps I will find someone I can be happy with and make happy and grow alongside. But if it's going to happen it will happen. I can't live my life based on that. Sure, I have little hopes and dreams. But my priority right now has to be me.  

And it has to be now. On the wave of another shitty existential crisis, on staying home from work, drinking too much, wanting someone to want me, desperately, and that making me unhappy. Because it is.In a wandering about in a daze, while my soul tries to escape in spectacular gory chest-burster style, causing icy lances of oh-God-what-the-fuck-make-it-stop kind of way. No more of that. It's highly inconvenient, aside from anything else. No. This is the time. I've got to start. I want to. 

Will I still be jealous? Yeah, probably. Will I still probably be sloshing about for the next few months full of Feelings and half-regrets and worries, wanting to be wanted? Well, I'm not going for a personality transplant here, so yes. Will I still have moments of weakness where I basically just really want a shag? Please see answer to above question. 

But I'd just like to wake up and think, I'm happy today. Just because of me. Not because of anyone else. And know who I am. 

So, in summary, fuck Tinder.

It's going to be ok.

"I and other Scarborians gay the fuck out of tea-time TV this Thursday to raise awareness of homophobic bullying. We also ate a lot of chips."

Go team.

I didn't make this but if I did it would have more Tina Fey and Jodie Foster flicking ice-cream at each other and giggling coquettishly

"I spend more time that I am comfortable watching gifs of Thatcher trying to stare a hole through Archie's Macbook screen."

Reaction of determined teenagers/viewers of illegal x-rated material to Cameron's proposed porn filters

"Look son! I'm doing 'the hacking'!"

"If I want to look at shitting dick nipples in the privacy of my own home then that is what shall very fucking well do."

Reaction of everybody else

Marks out of ten

"None. Stop being a turd."

"I have been browsing Pitchfork Media recently and feel guilty about it"

This link, basically.

This is one of those posts where people who don't spend a lot of their time internetting (how did you get here?) may get a little confused. Don't worry, I have compiled a fun little quiz below.

How familiar are you with sexism and the internet?

Question 1

What do you think about the Men's Rights movement?

a) Men's rights? Well, there's a women's rights movement, I suppose it's only fair. I guess they're like Fathers for Justice with less stupid spiderman costumers and climbing up public buildings.

b) I left Reddit in 2011 and looking at the front page makes me feel a little queasy. 

c) Never heard of it.

d) Finally, someone standing up for men against female privilege!

e) It's a satrical movement and it doesn't actually exist

Question 2

What do you think about 'Rape Culture'? 

a) I don't listen to punk rock

b) I own one of these t-shirts. 

c) It sucks? That's kind of like asking what I think about syphillis. It's not great. It's not my favourite. There's probably someone out there who loves syphillis but....I lost my train of thought. 

d) It's a feminist conspiracy and 40% of rapists in America are female.

e) It's a satirical concept and it doesn't exist. 

Question 3

Who do you think generally experiences more oppression in society - men, or women?

a) Men.

b) Women.

c) 

d) "Women can use the government to oppress men without question, whereas men who wish to oppress women do so entirely independently. This is the critical distinction between men's rights and women's rights in the modern era."

e) This whole questionnaire is a waste of time and if everyone got on with working together to make sure we're ALL treated equally we wouldn't be in this mess.


Answers

You should probably just google Men's Rights. I'll be waiting. 

Anyway, the point I was eventually labouring towards is that a band (artist? I feel a bit of a twat typing that) called Default Genders has recently put out a song called 'on fraternity' and it's about rape culture. This is a very good thing for several reasons, one of which is that it's by a male.....artist....and I am surprised to say that the Youtube comments section isn't full of rabid trolls making barely veiled holocaust references and going mental. Also it makes a nice change for a feminist song to be less like the usual Bikini Kill rattle-trap screaming that sounds a little like it was recorded in a toilet.

I love you. I'm sorry. 

Anyway. It's good and you should listen to it. 
Also the internet has turned into a bit of a toxic misogynist pit recently. Just joking, it was like that before but there was a section for it on Sickapedia rather than Wikipedia. 

"I sit in the flat staring at the home made derp and derpina masks I made out of cardboard and matt white paint for a night out"

A fellow South Cliff resident of dubious morals has stole the coffee table I left in the parking bay downstairs. I suspected it might be the unseen Samaritan who puts our bins out tirelessly and never complains about the empty 0% beer cases in his recycling but then I remembered that would be taking the piss.

So. Someone’s nicked my coffee table, which I’m quite pleased about because I can’t afford to take it tip and left it lying around outside secure in the knowledge some scrote would spirit it it away in the night.

 I’m in the flat mainlining cups of fruit flavour infusion style drinks (“fucked up tea”, in the words of my mother) because The Male Person is awaiting a highly important delivery of a) Skyrim and b) another binder.

 This binder is for the purpose of flattening Archie’s chest area so he trip merrily out into the world without having to explain to 50 confused customers per day that:

a)    Yes, those are breasts, you have probably seen some before.

b)   I am not a “love”, “duck”, “sweetheart”, “darling” or “sugar tits”, I am a young man and I leave boxer shorts and unwashed socks trailing around my flat with the best of them. Male. Maaaaaale.

c)    I am not ‘basically a lesbian’, as my formerly lesbian girlfriend can tell you. (Don’t ask actually her though, she will probably rip your cock off.)

d)   That’s £5.99 for your bastard sack of sodding concrete, please.

 The binder that he currently has is probably now so marinated with sweat that one day he will leave it on the living room floor and return to find it has evolved into its true form, a bottle of malt vinegar.

 Binders are tricky because obviously it is important for Archie that he passes as his true gender and understandably he’s not going to feel comfortable if there’s something so obvious stopping him from doing it, so if it’s being washed he has to stay inside.

On the other hand, if you do put them into the washing machine they wilt like a delicate petal into a baggy grey mess that Steven Hawking would beat hands down in a titty holding contest, so that’s out.

 Why doesn’t he have spares? Because that would mean one of us being organised.

 So yes. Looking forward to the post today.

“I sell my most loved possessions for £50 so I don’t overdose on value beans next month”.

Another one of those shops full of shitey tat and dead grandmothers’ old desks has opened across from the office. It used to be a tattooist with a sign designed by someone with an overfamiliarity with Microsoft Word fonts but their window kept being smashed in by someone with a hammer.

It's a mystery.

 Now there’s just a fuck off big smashed bit in the glass and a Victorian sewing machine behind it with a dirty orange looking bloke standing about outside smoking tab-ends. The street the Workplace Of Which I Must Not Speak stands on seems to be sustained solely by these assorted crap-hawking bastards buying impoverished people’s possessions for fuck all and selling it on with a thirty quid mark-up. Scarbados is pockmarked with them and their diabolical cousins the Cash For Crushed Hopes and Dreams a.k.a Single Mother’s Ruin.

 Cash-Converters is probably the less seedy of these, in the same way that the lead singer of Babyshambles is probably the less out of his miniscule mind on skag compared to that white-bread twenty-something OD casualty from Glee, or perhaps more accurately, Glum. Walking into Cash-Con is the spiritual equivalent of that from the beginning of 1984 where Winston Smith walks out of a ‘vile’ wind straight into Josef Fritzl’s own tower-block concrete hell-hole of peeling Big Brother posters and hideously repressed couples with dusts in their creased bits. Yes, it does look a bit flash when you go through the door, shiny tv screens, iPhones, electric guitars, LED screen titanium sex-aids (no) – everything is bright coloured red and yellow posters and the staff look about 75% less willing to kill themselves then the ones in McDonald’s. But then you go up to the counter and try and sell something and instantly you are aware that the people behind the counter, the people behind you in the queue, the small child uncertain of your gender because women generally don’t have buzzcuts with wobbly tramlines, anyone who saw you walk in – They Are All Judging You.

 Wait a minute, you may plead, I’m just selling my Kindle because I have the app on my iPhone and now I can spend 10 minutes on the toilet at work reading Game of Thrones without having to smuggle a notebook-sized e-book into the ladies. Besides, one of my rats has urinated on the back of it and I just don’t need it lying on the windowsill. I don’t even take drugs, I have paid my rent and council tax and I don’t need to buy milk formula because I don’t actually have any children. I literally just want a twenty quid in my pocket for some Ross Kemp documentary or a quarter of a pizza from Dominos. I am here of my own free will. Dictum meum pactum, your honour.

 The sales assistant glances down at your sweaty hands laid out on their counter and asks a series of rapidfire questions you answer in an fake off-handed manner to conceal your growing paranoia that they think you have bought it under the table from some bloke in the Golden Last and are going to be led out by a PSCO. They crash about on the keyboard for a bit and then offer you about enough change to buy a black coffee at which point you make some flimsy noise of protest and are then offered what someone else in Basingstoke is asking for theirs on Ebay.

 At this point people in the queue are muttering stuff like ‘fuck’s sake’ and staring murderously at other staff members who have the gall not to be on the tills right fucking now and you are beginning to wish that you had just offered it to someone at work for a fiver and continued on unburdened by shame, even without pizza money.

Not fucking worth it.

   After the item has been turned upside down and peered at and various menu screens have been flicked past and money paper is finally presented, you are encouraged to enjoy the rest of your day. You then exit into the outside world of people whizzing past in their cars that they can afford because they are adults with grown-up jobs and budgets and savings and wander on, Kindle-less, deciding what to spend your £13 bastard pounds on and settle for a can of diet coke and an I newspaper (20p).

 I have had enough of standing around in second-hand shops smelling of fag-ash and some hand-rubbing con-artist telling me my electronic goods are worth less than my Doc Martens. I have had enough of turning up to work at the end of the month with a tin of value ravioli and value bread, neither of which I like, and pretending that I have actually chosen to eat it for lunch. I thought when I stopped inflating my liver like a balloon with Fosters and making my gums physically shrink away from my teeth with Stella that I would suddenly have disposable cash and finally be able to own more than 5 pairs of trousers. Thus far this is not the case and I really need some new cargo shorts.

This is it. It is Time To My Shit Together And Stopping Pissing Away My Money, aka Operation At Least Pretend To Be An Adult, For Fuck’s Sake.

It would be nice to be able to afford Grand Theft Auto 5 AND a birthday present for my sister. 

“I decide to review a book called Skinny Bitches and want to blast myself off to a third-world county where people are less fucking mental”

Last week at some point. 

  Today my picture got uploaded to our internal emails system. Now everyone will realise that the boring lunatic who pioneered a whole new set of auditing spreadsheets/is a bit over-keen on profoundly dull database functions is a female in their early twenties with a bald head, pierced ears and a large black mohawk. Oops.

 I actually have to have a set of special office clothes (ill-fitting men’s polo shirts and chinos). Apparently jackets covered in spikes and glued on feminist patches made from pen and bedsheets/skinny black jeans paired with rat-nibbled gamer t-shirts/camo trousers and leather jackets aren’t professional. I disagree, at least that way everyone can instantly tell I’m a humanities graduate - a certified expert in bullshit. I perform quite well in job interviews because I am instantly backed into a corner by my own uselessness and start babbling half-remembered factoids and self-congratulatory anecdotes – and are these not the founding principles of managerese?

 I’d like to tell you more about where I work because a lot of the people I work with are radiantly bonkers, but I can’t. That’s one of the pitfalls of working for CENSORED CENSORED 1%-pay-rise CENSORED.

 Anyway, as I recently accidentally exposed myself by confessing to not having weighed myself for the last six months, today one of my colleagues lent me a book called ‘Skinny Bitches’ and said something along the lines of ‘read this, you’ll probably hate it’. So that’s in the pipeline. Should perhaps also purchase a guide on How To Prepare For Your Coronary Thrombosis.

 She also suggested I start a blog.

And here we are.