I Wish I Was An Eighties Teenager

So, a day later after my "1,920 calories!" freakout I discover that in my food-deprived state I mistook kJ for kcal and got it all wrong. The blog before this one is just an example of my capacity to end the world over nothing. This below is going to be a rant about specific novels and their recent movie adaptations, a stark deviation from my usual emo rants about my life being so terrible, WAH, WAH, WAH.

Finishing The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, I realise I have never had my heart broken and lifted and broken again quite so many times in one day, all in one novel. I suppose this is probably due to seeing myself in the lead, Art Bechstein, to some extent. And to the other character, Arthur Lecomte. It irritates me wholeheartedly that now, the Hollywood adaptation by Rawson Marshall Thurber of Dodgeball fame complete excises Arthur from the film, compresses his character traits into a supporting character who is brought into the foreground and entirely adds a new love interest, as if to create an excuse to cast the much-overused Sienna Miller. In taking the Cleveland character and making him a bisexual biker kid instead of the devil-may-care straight guy, they destroy the film's message about sexless friendship. In removing Arthur, they make EVERYthing that happens in the novel entirely implausible and impossible. In removing the words of the author for those of the arrogant screenwriter, you alienate the fans of the book. Naturally, what would be (as with the adaptation of Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys), movie gold has been transformed into a dreck forgettable film that from release day onwards cries out for a remake. I will see it, to watch the train wreck.

Also this month in America, is the movie adaptation of The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis. Due to a combination of backwards American social mores, and (ironically, given Ellis' undeserved controversies) institutionalised Hollywood misogyny, the film we are given is now one about Amber Heard's breasts and soulless debauchery. Thanks to producer mishandling, the film has strayed far from the original premise of the adaptation, while remaining somehow quite similar to the source material. After taking away the director who worked on the script and satirical vision for three years - who had something more like The Rules of Attraction, presumably intended - and replacing him with an Australian director known for boring movies, who has never seen 1980s Los Angeles, they have destroyed this movie beyond recognition. Both movies, while fundamentally very opposed (Ellis' nihilism vs. Chabon's sentimentality), have similarities: pretty American youths fucking around and experimenting in 1980s, and the mutual miscasting of the admittedly delectable Jon Foster. Nevertheless, an Ellis adaptation remains a must-see for me.

I am spurred to read more Michael Chabon by the powerful book, which much like The Informers, has inspired me to no end. Although, I can't imagine the inspirations gained from these two distinct readings as capably coexisting within one attempt at a novel.

A 100g Bag of Mini Eggs

There are 1,920 calories (kcal) in a single 100g, yellow bag of mini eggs. This is precisely the right amount to end my whole world. This is agonising. Let's roll back against the winds of time, let the Earth spin backwards on its axis for a moment, and take ourselves back in time 3¹/₂ weeks. The sky is a brighter shade of whatever ambivalent colour we can conclude this is: greyish, murky, misty blorange, sprinkled with toxic glitter, stagnant like the depressing glitz in carbonated water. My arms and heels are equally tired from taking a long train, carrying all my essential possessions in a suitcase, from the comfort of my green, warm and friend-filled quad in Balliol all the way to my timelost little hicktown of Southwick where no one knows who George Eliot is. My room in Oxford is gutted and bare, and my room in Brighton is by contrast full of the forgotten trappings of youth, and memories of schoolyards and friends who like I did the trapping, forgot about me. It is only when I am nearly at Southwick (catching a connecting train from Southampton to Hove, somewhere on that stretch...) that I begin to realise that my own thoughts on the train have been identical to Neville's hateful inner monologue in The Waves, in a similar scene, and it brings my mood somewhere deep underground to know that I am so easily captured by another's words, unintentionally. I put down Lunar Park, which I have just begun reading, into the bag with The Great Gatsby, which I have just finished on the same journey, and prepare myself for the trudge up Southwick Street, past Southwick Square, back to monotony.

And I am hauled sometime that evening by arms not my own, not even present in a physical sense (the arms of fate, predestination, determinism, inevitability, hopelessness, and inertia, and other words which evoke my preoccupations) upon a cold, white, metallic square and stare down to the glowing, red, digital display of numbers. I am not going to say exactly what the scales weighed me as, but it was grotesque. A stone over my last weight count, 8 weeks prior, which itself was pushing the boundaries of what was considered thin or "normal" weight. My mother says to me, later, that I look like I've put on weight. This is disheartening. This is why I'm single, this is why sometimes I'm sad for no reason, this is why people don't take to me without my effort, this is why things always go wrong. Some terrible, unlucky number. So, I vow to lose (at least) a stone before I go back to Oxford. My other objectives are to finish Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis, to start and finish Atomised (Les Particules elementaires) by Michel Houellebecq and À rebours by Joris-Karl Huysmans. (I would later, get distracted by another title, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh by Michael Chabon, and decide to temporarily delay my reading of À rebours.) The results of the weight loss vow were almost instantaneous within a week: something like 8 pounds in a week, just by changing from Coke to Coke Zero and cutting out inessential snacks and seconds. The only gym I can afford is a free one, though, and the only free one is ironically back in Oxford, but problematically below the Pantry and opposite the bar.

However, weight has become stuck at Xst 6lbs, which is still many pounds too many and I cannot see the weight loss in the mirror so I worry I am grotesquely fat still. I worry this, despite knowing all the symptoms of body image dysmorphia, etc. etc. but am comfoted by knowing that my critical awareness when it comes to myself has never been impaired before, so I have come to trust my eyes in this instance. I am not fat, per se, I am not stupid enough to quite contend that - but I miss the skinny me of 14, or the brief time when I was 17 before my A Levels that going to the gym had made me slightly toned. I blame Balliol bar, the sedentiary life of an English student and my discovery of English breakfasts, courtesy of Pantry.

I've woken up and had an ultra-lite breakfast. Ultra. Plum tomatoes on toast, if you must know. Then, skipped lunch, and had dinner - kievs, roast potatoes. Fairly carby, but way under my 2000 calory daily allowance. I'm ill, too, so energy exertion is limited. I treat myself to a bag of mini eggs (curse the season) while I sit back to watch an indie film about kids on prescription drugs (The Chumscrubber) which feels like it's black and cynical enough to garner a few chuckles out of me, and then turn around the bag (now reduced to two or three eggs of vile colours, due to my rapid snacking) and read that each egg contains 65 whole calories. What's more, an entire bag is 1920 calories. What. The. Fuck. Why do they even sell these, when they know a single person is likely to gorge and eat them all? My entire day of practically starving myself (I am a very hungry boy) is ruined for nought, and I have now essentially eaten double my daily allowance.

I am going to get fatter and fatter and it feels like there's nothing I can do. I wanted now to describe in achingly ill-constructed metaphors the problems of my life hatching from chocolate eggs, and the contents of my mind falling like napalms from my head into the bag of Cadburys, and myself strung on the cross and rising days later as an Easter Bunny, but I can't be bothered at all. I have exhausted myself mentally, and this is in itself a worry. I will put it down to flu, or whatever this ailment is, but I cannot be certain.

I am not going to Revenge tonight, much like I didn't go last week, because it is no fun. And because I am not thin enough to have fun in a club like that. And because no matter who I am that night, in what mode of mind or state of soul, nothing ever goes my way. (He says, vaguely contemplating an impromptu reading of a Morrissey ballad.)

I am staring at the yellow bag, full of the evil chocolate eggs, and my eyes are hungry for revenge on some nameless entity which has made me this way.

(He relents.) Please, please, please, let me get what I want, this time.

The Day Compels Me

Yesterday, Holly signed into her old myspace and I saw and was like WOAH, blast from the past much. Signed into mine. Yeah, this takes me back. Pretentious "about me" section, check. Lack of colour, coding etc. so as to seem like a guy with an "I-don't-care" attitude, check. Image to conceal the stupid "In your extended network" box which recalls a line from Less Than Zero, check. Oh, what a twat I was. Am. My about me has been updated sufficiently to say I'm at Oxford studying English, I slip in some melodrama, mention eternal my hair colour concern ("I used to have blonde hair, but it got darker") and brilliantly contrast that with the staccato "I don't know if I've ever really been in love." I think I was literally channeling Bret Easton Ellis when I designed my myspace, that day. I think I wanted more than anything to be Clay from Less Than Zero: sexy, blonde, bisexual, passive, expressionless, mechanical. There's something ironic about trying really hard to embody that jaded, indifferent '80s LA aesthetic.

"Oh, you've got BLOGS, you're one of those guys" she observes, noticing that literally half of my myspace is the tiny little box which links you to my most recent blogs. Myspace was my old blog site, but I decided that as Myspace got younger and younger and I got older and older maybe I should just get an actual blogsite, perhaps interlink it with my Facebook. Cynical, I feel like I'm working for ratings. I'm constantly selling my emotional outpouring for some vague, half-hearted admiration of my prose style. Bleed all over the page, all over the keyboard. So yes, I was one of those kids. Boy, I haven't changed that much. Certainly I'm a lot healthier than I was: a lot less depressed, a lot less lonely, a lot less insecure. But really, I'm tracing all my old blogs back to when I was 15 and first wrote a blog where I bitched about the universe treating me unfairly and here I conclude that the same themes have haunted me as far back as I can really remember. All my teenage angst has not been properly jetissoned. I'm so emotionally retarded.

Cue my looking over the comments as much as the actual blogs. Ones from my first ever boyfriend, a girl I thought I fancied, a friend at school who wasn't my friend. All to the same effect: "everyone feels this way" or "you shouldn't feel like this" or "you're only fifteen/sixteen/seventeen, you shouldn't be thinking about your life this way." I tend to write in a style which emulates the way I think but it conscious of a listener, an edited account of my thoughts, a streamlined and much truncated adaptation of this maddening, harrowing, neverending life narration. It's even worse when I have headphones in, and I'm silently going somewhere, because everything is interpreted as the movie of my life and this is the song that's currently playing and I'm the director all of a sudden asking the actor playing Liam, "is this how Liam feels though? Maybe you should try and be reflective of the surroundings. Try and BE Liam." I blame Bret Easton Ellis for that, too. Stupid but throughly amazing Glamorama. And yes, where was I? My conversations with people who I cannot properly interpret take yet another mode, one where I'm trying really hard to speak to them in monologues and convey the reality of my experience but I do not account for their input (or at least, one which deviated from how I would imagine it) and it all goes wrong and I find myself just repeating "I'm having trouble finding words which can accurately express what I'm trying to say. But I know exactly what I mean, Ok." Reality is so much more complicated, especially when it's all going wrong.

"The Day Compels Me." Blog title. What day? Valentine's, of course. If I did one for Christmas, why not one now? The Christmas one was a really sort of malicious one where I took out all my anger about stupids friends of mine who think it's not utterly transparent that they're both lonely at Christmas despite being entirely incompatible, but also malicious that someone I fancied but was respectfully giving time to get over their ex and someone I used to fancy had coupled up. Over it, not bitter. Anyway, THIS blog instead has taken the form of a rant perhaps. An account of my day, in a sort of non-linear fashion as I seem to be recalling various events from 2005 to now, and am running them parallel with allusion to various episodes from last December to last week. GOD: last week. Hellish. ANYWAY. Anyway. I keep saying "anyway" like this will help me spit it out. Anyway ... spit. Doesn't? Doesn't. My prose style is getting more INTENSE as if I think I'm doing this intentionally, but it doesn't portray how I really think in the best light. I am genuinely quite a sane individual. Where was I? Anyway. Yes, I find a blog lamenting Valentine's Day which I wrote when I was 15 and I couldn't help but feel I could have been writing this -- I like my style of writing at that age -- I could have written as much last year or this year or any other. It was like, WOAH. Liam's big concerns are just not going anywhere. They are essentially thus: Liam wants a boyfriend; sometimes, Liam wants a girlfriend; Liam feels like no one looks at him in clubs, like no one fancies him; Liam feels he's deserving of far more than he gets. So yes, today has compelled me to write a sequel, I suppose. I feel like I've completely exorcised the ghosts of my Not-My-Ex. All the Never Weres are Never What?

I worry that I'm becoming consumed by all the vanities and superficialities of the world that I used to look down on. For example, the major counterpoint to Valentine's-Day-Sucks is I-Got-A-New-Haircut which puts me in a majorly good mood and I balance out around normal. I feel like being the kind of student who gets a Toni & Guy haircut is probably a bad thing. I feel worse today that I went to Boots to get that platinum shampoo that makes your hair slightly lighter every time you use it. I don't know what I'm becoming. Maybe one day I'll be happy because I'll have become one of those monsters who I hate and perhaps envy in equal measure. Then I can do monstery things without remorse.