What Even Is Fun?

   When companies use adjectives as a part of their brand name, their should be some sort of licensing procedure to ensure that the adjective is agreed upon and appropriate, so as not to lead consumers astray.
   Today I saw an ad for some sort of establishment called "Channel Fun". I don't know if its an event space, or an arcade or what, but it seems unjust that they can dibs the word fun. The dodgy subway ad did not particularly ooze of fun to me. 'Fun' is a pretty ambiguous term. Generally we can all agree on what is not classifiable as fun; breakups, getting murdered, and clowns of all kinds. Its harder to agree on what definitely is fun. Having just gone through university Fresher's Week, I can truly attest to that.
    There are people, for example, who delight in the idea of paying 30$ for a ticket to board a night-long cruise with nothing to do but enjoy liquor and dance to disco music. This, to me, despite all the water is literal hell. It's like a floating prison full of boozy, nostalgic people. The worst kind of folks.
   Also, champagne showers. If you're the rich party boy doing the showering, you're golden. But there are actual people who like the receiving end of a champagne shower. What is good about putting on your best threads and subsequently ending up covered in champagne? It's expensive, and sticky. People enjoy it though.
   Or, like, wrestling. Seriously, what is the appeal? Widely associated with being fun, wrestling is essentially a dramatic skit enacted by two scantily clad oversized men. Often with beards, masks and capes. If I wanted those things, I'd watch a twenty second Kudoo commercial.
   To avoid such clashes of what is fun and what is not, there should definitely be a committee who take their jobs very seriously. Fun is no laughing matter.

Packaging Struggles

   There's this thing that I've seen quite a lot of in the UK. It is called putting things that are not ice cream into packaging thats looks like an ice cream cone. Like hair elastics or various trinkets in a flimsy waffle patterned piece of paper. Why you do, UK?
   Maybe it appeals to diabetic old ladies who can only engage with ice cream structures, but not actual ice cream. And by "engage" I mean buy it for their sassy thirteen year-old granddaughter who was really hoping for the iPhone 5 for her birthday this year, but whatever.
   The major flaw in this packaging trend is that as soon as I am reminded of ice cream, I want to obtain it. Its a visceral reaction; fight, flight, eat ice cream. I would do well in the zombie apocalypse, clearly. With regards to the fake cone packaging, all apocalypses aside, once I'm thinking of ice cream, if I have money in my pocket, I'm gonna go buy real ice cream. Not hair elastics that are pitifully impersonating it.

Lonely Bible

   When I first arrived in the UK and moved into my flat, there was a complimentary Holy Bible and New Testament/ Psalms in my room courtesy of university accommodation. Apparently not everyone got one, so I guess they have been keeping up with my track record and decided I would benefit from religious material. I was a little weirded out, coming from a city where the subject of religious freedom has been in the news a lot lately. I haven't been in Scotland long enough to have an educated opinion on the politics of religion over here, but it struck me as something very foreign.

   I know that it is standard practice in North American hotels to keep a bible in the room for guests. I am not offended by the practice, nor would I be if it were any other religious paraphernalia in the room. What I feel about the religious material in my room is something like discomfort, rather than offence. That discomfort was furthered when I accidentally dropped the New Testament out of my bedroom window and into the thick bushes below.... Thats a different story though.

   I don't really know what I'm getting at because I don't really know how I feel about it. A hotel room is one thing, but someone purposefully left a Bible in my room, where I live. It sits on a shelf beside the only other (I was about to say "mildly fictitious literature" but then I was like, no. Not that can of worms) book that I have besides travel guides-- my journal. The two are highly personal books-- one being largely personal to a lot of people and the other being largely personal to just me. 

    I feel even a little guilty, just because I tend to feel empathy for inanimate objects. It pains me to think of this Bible just sitting there, never being opened all year. I'm not going to lie to it though; there will be no religious revelation for me this year. 

Bad At Planes Pt. 2

The act of flying in an aircraft might seem liberating to some, but it is a loss of control that I totally cannot fathom. I can’t handle the thought that I am so totally vulnerable and there is nothing I can do about it. Nor did I really ask to be put in this position. Ship travel still seems practical enough to me. I wouldn’t mind lying on a cot in the hull of a cargo ship, wedged between bunches of bananas. I could pretend I was a banana. Also, potassium.

If we aren’t technologically advanced enough to travel via a network of human shaped tubes, then why travel at all really? Alternatively, to avoid polluting the ocean with human tubes, we should develop a canon with an transatlantic range. You’d have to pack lightly, but the departure from materialism would surely be more liberating than aviation. 

Bad At Planes Pt. 1

 I do not do planes very gracefully. It comes in waves, but usually I am filled with extreme dread as my flight draws nearer, until a few hours before take off when I am weirdly calm. The calm lasts until the vehicle actually starts moving, whereupon there are serious premonitions of death once more. 

I dislike almost everything about flying, but my most prominent fear is that there will be a mechanical failure be it prompted by the weather or completely unprecedented. The result is a religious awakening. As I am tossed up and down, hurtling through the air in a glorified metal pipe, I become religious for the first time since my last airplane ride. Suddenly there is a god, and I am a compassionate human being who demands more time to spread love around as if it were the new Chlamydia.