The Perils Of Being A Fangirl

Here. This post is the raison d’être of my blog. This post is the one in which many of you will share a sense of camaraderie with me. This post will show you that YOU. ARE. NOT. ALONE.

And that it’s okay to be obsessed. You know, as long as it’s not drugs, or sex, or underground cults. 

(Note: Does anyone know the gender neutral term for FANGIRL? And please don’t tell me it’s FAN – as far as I am concerned, that word is an umbrella term, not a synonym. And I beg your pardon while I treat this post from the view point of fangirls specifically – it’s a shame I don’t know more fanboys personally.)

1. Risk of Degradation of 20/20 Vision

Due to –

(a) All that late-night reading under your blanket with a torch, because you don’t want your parents to catch you up past your bedtime and risk unleashing their wrath in the corporeal form of THAT’S IT NO MORE BOOKS

(b) TV show marathons as a reward for academic excellence (which is code for surviving through exams avoiding all your guilty pleasures)

(c) Excessive social networking – especially when the other fangirl you’re with over the miracle called the Internet, is in another time-zone, depriving you of sleep

2. Catching Up On Deprived Sleep During The Daytime Especially During Class HoursAnd Zombie-Walking Through The Rest

Due to the above mentioned.

3. Lack of Non-Fictional Romantic Life

Reading too many books starring heroes of the fantastically perfect variety, or watching too many TV shows with the same category of protagonists can affect the average reader to such a degree of romantic sterilization of the mundane sort by raising par of male excellence. (Or if you swing the other way, then female excellence.)

4. Managing All Your Social Network Accounts

I swear. This is a talent that is gifted to a fangirl, upon her baptism into this community. How else do you explain the superhuman memory and multitasking capabilities involved in remembering all your ten thousand usernames and passwords, who you last chatted or tweeted with, and maintaining an unbroken comment thread to avoid any non-civil interactions?

5. Empty Wallets

For those of you out there, whose financial aspects are still governed by a superior authority of the parental sort, then you have limitations (like me) on how much merchandise you can own. You resort to pinning wishlists and loaded virtual carts on your Pinterest boards and bookmarks bar, and just staring at what could have been on your laptop screen. When that happens, you turn to –

6. Your DIY Skills and Photoshop Expertise

However deplorable they may be, we have that shoddy wad of bookmarks made by hands smelling of Fevicol, t-shirts we spent that last batch of fabric paint on, and folders (both digitally and otherwise) filled with our own edits and sketches.

7. The Need to Celebrate Holidays Unknown to Mere Mortals/Mundanes/Muggles

We have reminders on our mobile phones and of course, in case they fail, we also have the ever-reliable power of the online fangirl-hood to remind us when to eat only blue food or randomly scream DEATH TO DEATHEATERS or whatever.

8. Research and Intellectual Debates

We are never happy knowing what we already know. We thirst to read up on all the different versions of backstories of the various characters, the author’s perspective on how (s)he chose all the proper nouns in the book, and then unwittingly become party to raging wars on whether or not a particular character is a hero or a villain or other civil debates. If you’re talking about a TV show, then it goes without saying that unless and until we’ve dug up bloopers and the actors’ Wikipedia pages, we’re never going to attain closure.

9. Shipping Through Choppy Seas

This is mostly self-explanatory. The FEELS fuelling our primal fangirl instincts to keep calm and continue shipping canon and headcanon ships in the face of tempests exacts a heavy toll on our head in the form of acute headaches that only tear-stained pillows can cure. Speaking of which – 

10. Tears Both Shed And Unshed

I have always maintained that a significant percentage of the average global tear-level has been contributed by the tear ducts of fangirls. To cry, clutching the damned book in your arms or after watching that tragic final episode of a Korean drama series, is an occupational hazard.

11. HANGOVERS, MAN. Hangovers.

It’s not enough that we’ve been cursed to harbouring eternal feels for a series (book or TV), but we’ve also been damned with being left to our own devices to deal with that inexplicable limbo stage of our life that follows after the final episode or chapter. We then face the big question – WHAT DO WE DO NOW?

We feel as if we’re trapped in a tunnel, the vision of closure mocking at us in the far-off distance. Comfort Food, Comfort Reading selected passages, and Comfort Replaying selected scenes becomes the norm for some days.

And I will thank Ron Weasley to define what being a fangirl truly means (courtesy of Tumblr) – 

"Not A Review" Review: The Unbecoming Of Mara Dyer - Michelle Hodkin

Thank you Skylar @ Life Of A Random for motivating me to read this book despite a certain degree of prejudice I may or may not have harboured against this book. (Why, you ask? Well, the cover for one. I do not like decapitated females in pretty dressed with male arms around them.)

This is a book which becomes less in terms of read-ability once I write a review (hence the title). Because it will sound horribly like a cliché once the review is done. What with a heroine who has a messed up history that even she’s not clear on, the “typical bad-boy-falling-for-her” phase (complete with the cigarettes, the jacket, the messed up hair, the scruffy chin, the untouchable attitude, the sighs of women scorned ensemble - wait did I mention the “Attraction At First Sight” that happened?), the typical “she-falls-hard-despite-his-reputation” phase, the “I’m-dangerous-for-you-please-leave-me” phase …

Need I continue?

I do not have the patience to be as experienced in the field of clichéd ships as Miss J, but from my few experiences, I put together a post on how corny ships have got to stop sailing across YA pages. And although Mara and Noah technically qualify as a cliché (boy, I’ve got to stop using that word) –

I ship them. (dramatically gasps)

What do you know? Turns out the disillusioned spinster can be a hopeless romantic.

In my defence, it’s because there is a plot OUTSIDE their love story (yes, well the love story takes up a chunk of the plot too - HELL I CAN'T MAKE UP MY MIND) which features a lot of PTSD (ooh, yes I’m a heartless bitch I love PTSD stories) and sibling love and witty dialogues and how Mara desperately tries to rationalize whatever the hell is going on with Noah (buts fails miserably) and the overall plot. Yes, the bitch who won’t give decent enough stars to books likes the plot. And even though technically (lately this word is my excuse for everything happening) the writing was just average I suspect it was a prime contender for Reasons Why I Liked This Book.

So, putting things in perspective –

VERDICT: 3.5 stars

(God you guys have no idea how much the literary and the romantic idealist sides of my brain enjoyed a tug-of-war over the rating - how much I edited this un-review-y review. Eventually the former won.)

(Can you comprehend what I feel about this book?)

(I am a bad reviewer.)

REVIEW: Grasshopper Jungle - Andrew Smith

CAUTION: Reading this book has licensed me with the authority to use the word that is a more commonly used synonym for excrement.  You have been warned.

Austin Andrzej Szerba is his name. It is Polish. Since human beings are genetically predisposed to record history, (we believe it prevents us from doing dumber and dumber shit), Austin takes on his role as a historian recording the end of the world. 

There are things in here: babies with two heads, insects as big as refrigerators, God, the devil, limbless warriors, rocket ships, sex, diving bells, theft, wars, monsters, internal combustion engines, love, cigarettes, joy, bomb shelters, pizza and cruelty.

This is his history.

From the various sources of bookish information, I have concluded that the bookish population doesn’t know WHAT TO SAY ABOUT THIS BOOK. In this post, I shall be attempting something that resembles a review.

I mean, hello, HAVE YOU SEEN THE BLURB. I guess that itself vindicates the varied reactions this book got that ranges from “Holy Shit.” (Excrementum Sanctum) to WHAT THE HELL WAS THIS BOOK to I LOVED THIS.

Again, I shall be merely attempting.

The first coherent thought that my brain grasped at was “Austin Szerba is an extremely horny, confused Polish kid”. This point in itself is half the story. The other half is credited to the emergence of six feet tall bug-like creatures that do only two things: f*** and eat. Therefore, they bring the end of the world with them.

The writing is unadulterated, unedited, incoherent first hand witness account. A history textbook written by a horny teenager nearing Doomsday.

Excrementum Sanctum.

You know how if you pick up a book and read it, you’ll straightaway come to know the author is John Green? I have a feeling that if I pick up anything so much as a grocery list written by Smith, I’ll know.

This is a compliment.

This book has titles for each chapter. And not the one-word/poetic/thematic kind. The “Denny Drayton Has a Gun, Motherf*****” kind. The “The Right Kind Of Cigarettes to Smoke Just Before You Kill Something” kind. The completely awe-inspiring kind.

The characters introduced in this book come with their history. Robby and Shann come across t-totally. I have unashamedly fallen in love with Robby (who’s gay, so even if he existed in real life, I’d still be doomed to having a crush). You get introduced to Austin’s whole family tree, including the scandalous twigs.

This book constantly jumps back and forth in time. Not through the plot, per se, but by how we come to know certain things. Just like a history account – there is no suspense. The climax has already come and gone and this is a mere account.

And so I loved the way this book was written.

But not so much the story. You take away the writing, and I could probably tell the story in ten minutes or less. But then again, I don’t think this book was meant to be plot-intensive.

Actually, I don’t know what this was meant to be.

There is a whole lot of other shit. Shit we know couldn’t have happened in real life, but is tweaked into this book anyway. Shit about Nixon, Pope Paul VI, the Chinese prime minister Chou En-lai, and others.

This book also ponders over why history is always abbreviated. Why it’s never been written Winston Churchill took a shit sometimes. Shit like that.

Weird shit, this book. Weird plot, weirder writing. The first “weird” was said in a disapproving tone, the second “weird” was “hell, yeah”.

History lesson is over for today.

VERDICT: 3 stars

P.S.: Judge the book by its cover. I dare you to.

Wannabe Weirdos Vs ME

Right, I get it. Weird's the new Cool. But I REALLY  can't stand it when the in-crowd label themselves "weird" when all they do is the generic cool stuff that the generic in-crowd does. HOW COULD YOU? YOU STOLE EVEN THE WEIRD FROM US WEIRDOS.

Here. These are the reasons why people started calling me weird and why I embraced it:

1) It was two in the am when I decided to brush my teeth after losing a battle with my conscience when my argument was "WHY BOTHER WHEN I'LL BRUSH AGAIN IN FIVE HOURS?" As soon as I made this decision to save my teeth from further deterioration, I take my dad's sunglasses from the 90's, put it on, and while I'm posing for the mirror, I brush my teeth.

2) I just took stock of what's in my bag and I discovered that if apocalypse were to make an entry now, I would armed with three data cables (Lenovo, Samsung, and the usual)-what they connect is loudly absent, lip balm, and the wrong currency (I'm in Dubai now and have rupees in it). End of the world, I am SO ready for you.
(I'm thinking I'll go pull a Sheldon Cooper and fix an Emergency Escape bag).

3) While normal girls talk about films and actors, know how to fix a cup of tea that won't poison anybody, gossip, are familiar with the various Facebook operations and terminologies, (I realize I've presented the stereotyped female, but that's what I've felt), not only have I proved to be inherently incapable of the above mentioned, I talk at mph on any given Physics topic, books that I like (caring tuppence about who I'm talking to), clam up when social niceties dictate me to interact in a non-uncomfortable manner to the poor soul who wound up next to me, keep my Facebook chat permanently off, and continues living for months without updating my outdated Whatsapp version.

4) This is the part where I've felt the whole world's weird and I'm normal. If you acknowledge that you're scared of nothing but lizards, you're normal, but if I scream when some yet-to-be-identified creature of the six-legged variety stings me, all I get is WHY THE HELL CAN'T YOU SHUT UP. The fact that only lizards don't scare me to a scream sometimes elicits a REALLY? reaction from some. Sans the sarcasm.
Sometimes.

5) I'm prepared to "sacrifice" two hours of sleep at night to finish a book.

Yours Unashamedly-Happily-Weird,