Katyboo1’s Weblog

I am having a little celebration because I have written my essay plan for the dreaded Romeo and Juliet experience.  It’s only a mini celebration because I’ve still got to craft 1500 words out of a load of scribbled notes and a cunning plan, and it’s not a very good essay plan, and technically I haven’t finished the reading yet, but I was twitchy, and I felt inspired to stuff some things down on paper, so there it is. 

I don’t know what’s up with me today but I’m as nervous as an ant at a picnic for large footed, large bottomed people with bad eyesight (not a great simile, but I’m trying).  I’m all over the place.  I had my usual two cups of coffee to get me going this morning, but it’s gone straight to my nervous system.  I should not be trusted to soothe people today, nor to operate heavy machinery, or possibly even a pair of scissors.  So, no working life support in hospitals whilst making paper snow flakes for me then.  Typing is alright because my fingers are working off some of the excess adrenaline.  Good job something is or I’d be bouncing off the walls, and that would really hurt.

As for the essay plan, it’s actually quite detailed for an essay plan of mine. I feel that I may have a career ahead of me just writing essay plans and not bothering with the actual essays themselves.  I could even decorate them with suitable pictures and laminate them and then they would have a double use as coasters and essay plans.  Then I could sell them on Ebay and buy a private island with the profits.  How very Shaker of me ( for the plans, not the island bit), both beautiful and practical.  I love laminating.  I have my own laminating machine.  It’s a very needful thing, and something I find very soothing, although in my current state of nervous excitement I should definitely avoid it.  It would be a shame to get caught up in a frenzy of laminating, and to have Jason come home to find he can’t get in the front door because I’ve accidentally laminated it. 

It would also be sad if I were to accidentally laminate myself.  I once stuck my hand to my alarm clock due to my overenthusiastic use of superglue, so it is entirely feasible that I would end up laminating myself.  I once stapled my finger just to see what it felt like.  It hurt, surprisingly enough.  When I was a child I also expended considerable time and effort trying to break my right arm to get out of school work.  It never worked, because I am basically one of the world’s greatest cowards.  I tried to give myself a Chinese burn once, so that I could blame it on my brother and get him into trouble.  That didn’t work very well.  It’s a kind of two handed operation to all intents and purposes.  So, from this brief list we can see that I am well prepared for the kind of stupid self-inflicted injury and all its attendant agonies, and that laminating myself would just be one of a long line of similar and idiotic accidents that have brightened up my otherwise dull life.

Mind you, wipe down anything is good in our house.  My friend came round for coffee this morning and apologised because her baby daughter threw up on her top.  I am the last person in the world to mind about such things.  I wouldn’t have even minded if she’d thrown up on mine.  After nine years at the coal face of parenting you get completely immune to wandering round with garments soaked in other people’s bodily fluids.  If I didn’t such an interesting shaped body and an inhibition about taking my clothes off in public, I’d probably make an excellent porn star.

Moving swiftly on, the essay title is: ‘Romeo and Juliet is a play that calls into question the ideals of manliness embraced by most of its characters.’ Discuss.  This is a bit of a classic essay title don’t you think?  I haven’t had a ‘discuss’ essay for years and years, and I did feel a bit nostalgic when I read this one.  I came over all warm and furry for the past.  If it had had the word ‘consider’, in it as well I may have had to have a little lie down.  As it is, we must be content with the word discuss.  Maybe my next course will exceed expectation and provide me with the perennially popular, ‘compare and contrast’.  Oooh! How lovely.

As it is a play in which nearly all the characters wander round with their swords drawn for the entire time and when they’re not stabbing each other in the gizzard they’re all talking about stabbing each other in the gizzard or having brutal, pain filled sex with each other, I’d say that there’s a case to be made for a world of testosterone filled hairy chested manliness going sadly awry.  I know this because everyone except the very old people are mercilessly hacked down by the final page.  Why don’t they hack down the very old people as well, I hear you cry?  Well, because it’s not worth the effort frankly, as they’re all going to die soon anyway. 

So, nobody left to have babies and propagate the race and nobody except Lady Capulet left to make a nice warming cup of tea and some toast.  Plus, you know she wouldn’t do it because she’s a hard, two faced bitch who is clearly related to Lady Macbeth in some way.  She’s a fledgling psychopathic murderer, and it’s only because the stage is already awash with hacked off limbs and corpses that she doesn’t get in there with the best of them and start fingerpainting in Romeo’s entrails and baring her teeth at all and sundry.  It isn’t for the want of trying.  Oh! The nurse is left as well, but as she’s one step up from The Wife of Bath, she’s probably in a corner working out sexual innuendos that rhyme with corpse and twittering on aimlessly to herself, so she’s neither use nor ornament.

Interesting that both Lady Macbeth and Lady Capulet are quite bloodthirsty.  Maybe there’s something in the title ‘lady’ that turns them from mild mannered, peacable women about town to axe wielding maniacs, high on civet and toting a musket, or whatever form of gun shaped weaponry was around at the time.  My knowledge of Tudor weaponry is not extensive, as you may have gathered.  Actually, Goneril and Regan in King Lear are hideously vile and addicted to torture, deceit and chicanery, and they’re not ‘ladies’, so maybe its just a Shakespeare thing.  Germaine Greer has apparently written a book about Anne Hathaway which claims that she was an all round top bird and the power behind Shakespeare’s quill.  Dramatic characterisation might make us think otherwise.  Maybe she was a terrifyingly fierce, power crazed maniac who Shakespeare could only escape by running off to London, and who he could only escape mentally by writing about through a series of vile women who make the evil men villains look like Bagpuss on a particularly dozy day.  Mind you, I don’t want to get into a fight with Germaine Greer.  I reckon she’d take me down any day of the week.  Luckily for me I don’t think she spends her idle hours perusing blog references to her good self and taking umbrage.  I hope not anyway, or I’m a goner.