Tywin Maiden

You can tell a lot about someone by their shower rituals. Some of the more artsy types like to sing in the shower, or draw things on the condensation, with more sensible people actually washing themselves. Personally I like to think of myself as a more grounded person, not caught up in silly fantasies, and instead hum Rains of Castamere over and over until the shower finally runs out of hot water. For the uninitiated, the “Rains of Castamere” is a catchy little number featured in the A Song of Ice and Fire books (or the much more commonly known TV series Game of Thrones) about Tywin Lannister’s destruction of the minor houses Tarbeck and Reyne.

And who are you, the proud lord said,

that I must bow so low?

Only a cat of a different coat,

that’s all the truth I know.

In a coat of gold or a coat of red,

a lion still has claws,

And mine are long and sharp, my lord,

as long and sharp as yours.

And so he spoke, and so he spoke,

that lord of Castamere,

But now the rains weep o’er his hall,

with no one there to hear.

Yes now the rains weep o’er his hall,

and not a soul to hear.^[4]

On the surface level it doesn’t sound too bad – after all Westeros seems to exist in a perpetual state of murder, rape, and realpolitik with the odd famine here and there – it’s not until you pick up on all the little details you start to realize their significance. See House Lannister is the richest and most powerful house of the Westerlands, due to their access to gold mines, with House Tarbeck and Reyne being their most powerful bannermen. Tytos Lannister, the aging patriarch otherwise known as the Laughing Lion for his amiability and his meek nature, allowed House Tarbeck and Reyne to borrow heavily without any agreement on when the loan will be paid back. Tywin Lannister at the age of 16, angry that his lord father’s bannermen were mocking him by refusing to pay and further incensed by House Tarbeck and Reyne openly rebelling, takes command of his father’s forces and marched on Tarbeck Hall. When the Tarbeck garrison refused to surrender and swear fealty he ordered every man, woman, and child loyal to House Tarbeck to be killed, razed Tarbeck Hall to the ground, and then salted the fields to ensure nothing would ever grow. On a scale of 1 to Genghis Khan for brutality – Tywin Lannister is pretty goddamn Khan.

Then things get even worse (or even better depending on how metal you are). House Reyne, unlike House Tarbeck, had built their castle (Castamere) over their gold mines and this meant that Castamere was mostly underground – and therefore didn’t have the weaknesses of Tarbeck Hall.  There were no walls to scale, no exposed towers to destroy with magonel or trebuchet, the only entry point to Castamere was a narrow tunnel guarded by knights. With Castamere having ample time to take preparations for a siege: killing and salting their livestock, burning their own fields to leave nothing for the advancing army, stockpiling all their food reserves – the likelihood of the Lannister siege succeeding was low. Tywin, knowing that he couldn’t waste time starving the Reynes out; especially with the possibility of another house joining House Reyne and catching the Lannister host from behind; and ordered the neighbouring river to be diverted directly into the main tunnel of Castamere, killing everyone trapped inside and destroying the ancient castle.

I dilly dally my shower time by humming the “Rains of Castamere” because it is literally the most metal song ever made. Tywin Lannister tells his dad to hold his gold and goes Genghis Khan on two houses because:

•                A) They didn’t pay him back

And

•                B) They disrespectin’

The only way Tywin could be more of a thug is if he was sitting pimped out on horseback while the Reynes went down, being handed a joint rolled between the thighs of beautiful women by Snoop Dogg himself.

This makes me glad we live in a (fairly) civilized society. Imagine if creditors would call you up and sing the Bills of Microsoft as a gentle reminder when you’re behind on your repayments. Or if VISA changed their slogan to VISA pays its debts; with Mastercard releasing a new advertising campaign: “Calling your banners: 10,000 dragons, equipping your host: 300,000 dragons, destroying your enemies down to the last child: priceless. There are some things in life money can’t buy – for everything else, there’s Mastercard.”

I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the neighbourhood friendly loan shark breaking my knee caps any day of the week.

 

Critical Failure

I like to think of myself as a fairly reasonable and rational person when it comes to my fears. Instead of being afraid of irrational things: like ghosts, clowns, and My Little Pony, I’m made of sterner stuff and instead afraid of the anti-bacterial hand wash sitting in my bathroom.

It’s simple logic really. The label on the hand wash states that it will kill 99% of all germs. In theory that seems fine – having 99 problems and a germ be one isn’t too bad for $4.99 a month. But much like slogan of the Occupy Wall Streeters: what about the 1%? Germs seem to have a rather nasty habit of mutating and becoming resistant to things. If we go about routinely killing 99% of them – doesn’t that mean that the 1% that survive become resistant, and now have motive to start plotting our demise?

Considering that germs don’t have to keep up with the Kardashians or spend their time dumping buckets of ice water over their heads; their life is pretty simple: eat, replicate, plan coup d’etat. Every time I go and wash my hands I’m creating another generation of parentless 1% germs to join the insurgent army hiding in my skin. Eventually I’ll go to wash my hands and I’ll hear a microbe whisper in my ear, “My name is Ortho Myxoviridae, you killed my father, prepare to die” and I’ll know the end is nigh.

Then again, as someone with no allergies and a fairly robust immune system maybe I’ll be spared the hand wash epidemic that ravages the planet – alongside people who don’t have hands and hypochondriacs in sealed suits.

Call me a quisling, but I for one welcome our new pandemic overlords.

Accidental Incest

At heart I am a pragmatic man. Whenever my mother would tell me to bring home a nice Christian Korean girl, the first thing I’d think about was how likely it’d be that we’d be distantly related. See Korea has the misfortune of having the lowest surname diversity in the world. Three surnames: Lee, Park, and Kim make up half of Korea’s 50 million population; that’s not including North Korea where accidental incest is the worst of your worries. At my high school graduation alone we had 13 Kims, 9 Lees, 3 Parks, and 4 Chois; and this out of a graduating class of 50. Keep in mind that thanks to Genghis Khan, not only has Baghdad never recovered, but there is a 5% chance you are distantly related to the old warlord himself; so in a place like Korea you have to be extra careful lest you wind up with 9 toed children.

Now I always thought myself lucky since my family surname Yu is technically Chinese. Because the Korean alphabet, Hangul, is completely phonetic, things are spelled out exactly as they sound. So under Hangul my surname should be spelled Yoo instead of Yu; but for whatever reason my ancestors decided to hold onto the Chinese spelling.

When I first met my girlfriend I was over the moon. In a mental checklist at the back of my mind I was ticking off boxes as they came up. She was smart and was studying the same thing I was (English). She was funny, with the same kind of goofy humour. She was independent in the autonomous, self assured, way I was. Out of the thousands of people I’d encountered, and the hundreds I’d known; I had never met anyone I felt so immediately compatible with. The fact that she was cute as a button certainly helped as well. We were talking for hours, swapping stories, trading jokes, holding hands. You get the idea, the whole kit and caboodle. At one point I mentioned offhandedly how I’d always look up whenever the teacher said you in case he was calling me by my surname (har har). I was expecting a few laughs, but instead she turned completely pale and said she did the same thing – because her surname was also Yu.

Because I am a pragmatic man I knew I that there were two courses of action that I could take. The first was to pray to the old gods and new that she wasn’t also Korean. The second was to politely excuse myself from her company, walk back home, lock myself in my room, and live out the rest of my days as a cat. Fortunately for my flatmates, my girlfriend turned out to be Han Chinese so the likelihood is low, what with me being Korean and all.

That being said Yu is a fairly uncommon surname, and if there’s anything I’ve learned from Game of Thrones is that incest, accidental or otherwise, is never a good idea. I’m already terrified of the possibility of having a teenage daughter later on in life; having a teenage daughter who is also the result of incest is a whole other can of worms. I would ask her to go do her homework and she’d start screaming at me about how she is the blood of the dragon, and how she will return one day to retake what is rightfully hers with fire and blood. I already have enough trouble as it is keeping up with Kardashians; keeping up with the Targaryens as well is too much to ask.

I guess in the event that I do wind up with a crazy, incest-born daughter, I’ll just send her overseas to some nice young warlord and pray she doesn’t give birth to dragons. It’s always good to have practical solutions prepared for situations like these.

How To Dance Like A White Person

The saying goes that travel broadens the mind and with this I would have to agree. It is a liberating experience to live in other countries, constantly being exposed to new cultures and new customs. While you can struggle with feelings of homesickness, one can often find solace in finding similarities between these foreign places and home.

In my travels I would find comfort in going to nightclubs, confident in the belief that whatever country I was in, or whoever I was with, there would be one individual who would be dancing like a white person. It is a very particular dance, full of colonial ambitions and abysmal hand-eye coordination. It is the dance of a jellyfish having an epileptic seizure, or a caffeine-addicted child on a trampoline.

The more time I spent overseas, the more I would spot this phenomenon; in clubs, at parties, even occasionally on Youtube. The white person dance is not restricted by gender; the only difference would be that girls would yell WHOOOO and twirl their hair; nor is it restricted to race as American media corrupted all youth equally.

Over time I became an expert. Like John Dunbar in Dances With Wolves, I too spent much time studying these people and learning their secrets. From the elevated blood alcohol content, to the absence of higher brain functions; through patient observation and careful mimicry I was able to replicate their movements, and understand their thought processes.

You can view dancing, at its most elemental level, as an expenditure of energy. In the developed nations of the first world, where issues of survival are non-existent and consumption of refined sugar is at its highest, energy expenditure is not an issue.

The first step in dancing like a white person is therefore to live a sedentary lifestyle and to snack often, the more sugary snacks the better. Exercise and balanced diets were for our plebian ancestors, not for the sons and daughters of the western world. Get out there on the dance floor and flail your limbs around with all the energy your calorie-rich diet has to offer.

The second step is the assumption that what you are doing is inherently better. Most western cultures lack the tall poppy syndrome that enables humility to fully develop. With this absence of humility you are free to defy conventions and rules; after all, you are better than the time tested methods of classical dancing. Ignore your absence of training or hand-eye coordination and jump up and down like you can hear the beat.

The third step, simply put, is inebriation. Alcohol inhibits higher thought processes in the brain and impairs executive control. Parts of the brain that usually concern themselves with looking silly take an alcohol induced nap, freeing your pioneer spirit. Make your presence known with your actions. Grind up against people of the opposite sex; shake your head until the world gets dizzier than it already is.

The fourth and final step in dancing like a white person is to ignore the beat. Traditional dancing is done in tune to the beat but that is for foreigners and immigrants. Sneer down on the timing of the beat with the haughty imperialism of your forebears.

Remember that as in the closing lines of Invictus: only you are the master of your own fate.

 

 

 

Faster Than Life

When it comes to strategy games I am a total addict. I have hundreds of hours on XCOM, I’ve beaten Civ V on its highest difficulty, rained death on the virtual battlefields of Shogun 2, and spent thousands of hours in the constant pursuit of perfection in Dota2. There is something endlessly addictive in coming up with strategies on the fly and executing them well. I like to think that if math involved coming up with ways to blow people up in the same way video games do, I would have a lot paid more attention in class. But that could just be my inner sociopath talking.

Take my current video game addiction Faster Than Light (FTL) by Subset Games. It’s an 2012 indie rogue-like strategy game where you command the crew of one of dozens of different ship layouts in a journey across the stars. Rogue-like games take design minimalism to the extreme with only a basic plot, simplistic graphics, and an emphasis on a series of randomly generated events. Because of their design rogue-likes aren’t a massive time commitment; a single play through of FTL can take between twenty to forty minutes. However because of the random nature of rogue-likes, they are meant to be played over and over with no two play throughs being alike.

The objective of FTL is very simple: get from point A to point B and then fight the boss. Where FTL differs from other games in its execution; unlike other spaceship games where you’re piloting the ship, FTL focuses entirely on the strategy. Your ship has systems and subsystems, all of which have crucial functions (e.g. weapons, engines, sensors, life support ,etc), most of which can be manned by individual crew members, and a finite supply of power that is used to power these systems. While you do not ‘pilot’ the ship, you instead dictate what to do with the finite resources at your disposal. Do you divert power away from shields to keep your weapons up? Do you temporarily turn off oxygen to make sure that your shields don’t give out? Do you take away one of your crewmembers from the engine room to help fight a fire elsewhere on the ship? It seems like an incredibly simple system; but the elegance of the game is that it is always forcing you to make important decisions quickly. These decisions are weighted with the knowledge that any crew member deaths are permanent, and the destruction of your ship will result in an immediate game over.

Just like any other strategy game the aim is to beat the enemy; in this case you try to blow up the enemy ship. Since both the ship you control, and the ship the enemy controls, is broken down into separate systems and subsystems, it’s not a case of button mashing or frantic clicking. Instead you get to choose which parts of the enemy ship to target, and that’s where the strategy comes into play. You can blow up the enemy weapons systems, forcing them to divert crew to repair it if they want to keep plinking away at you; you could drop teleporting fire bombs into their life support and watch them asphyxiate to death; the more you understand the mechanics of the game the better it gets. Keep in mind the exact same applies to you; all it takes is a stray missile to ruin your day. One minute you’re whistling dixie, and the next your captain is on fire and there is a hull breach in your engines. Like a pixelated Mad Eye Moody, FTL is constantly barking “CONSTANT VIGILENCE” lest your concentration waver.

But the thing that makes Faster Than Light so addictive is it’s difficulty. It’s like life: it pulls no punches, and every once in a while someone you love will be set on fire. You are not meant to win FTL; in fact one of the opening tips simply states “losing is fun”. The RNG(Random Number Generator) gods are cruel and merciless, the AI brutally punishing, and the game is always rigged against you – and that’s just on easy. The only advantage you have is the fact that you have a brain with frontal lobes (or at least an IOU where they should be).

Because of its difficulty FTL often transcends into a life metaphor. It will teach you over and over again to play to the strengths that you start out with; to tackle your problems one at a time; and that sometimes, no matter how well prepared you are, things just fall apart. Above all else, the key lesson of FTL is that no matter how bad things get, you can always start over. In a game where failure is almost to be expected, your mind is free from the anxiety of defeat and from that freedom you can often find a hidden wellspring of creativity, or at very least an indomitable spirit to persevere. And sometimes, when the perfect storm of circumstance and ability occurs, you might just pull out a win.

It is rare to find a video game that is both amazingly complex and easily accessible. Dota2 for instance has such intense learning curve that it is more like learning to play an instrument than anything else. Others, like Angry Birds, are so accessible that anyone can pick it up and play but it because of its accessibility; it loses the depth and complexity that games are capable of achieving. FTL achieves this balance by being incredibly elegant in its simplicity, while at the same time having the strategic depth that makes it so addictive. FTL is a game that forces you to experiment, encourages you to always learn from your mistakes, and keeps pushing you until you at long last succeed.

Now if you excuse me, I’m off to asphyxiate enemy crews because after all; in space, no one can hear you scream.

Fear of Houses

I never understood homophobes. Maybe because I’ve never been particularly religious. Even so, I like to think that the god of any religion which preaches compassion, kindness, and good will to others would be supportive of love, regardless of gender. Instead, like barely literate mushrooms, homophobes sprout out of the dark places of the world to oppose gay marriage.

From what I understand, while people are homophobic for a variety of reasons, it really boils down to two fundamental ones. The first is that it is ‘icky’. This I can almost understand. I remember as a kid going to a Catholic school and being terrified of girls. I don’t know if the two were related but being beaten with rulers by sexually frustrated nuns certainly didn’t help. Back then, before puberty or boobs kicked in, girls were ‘icky’. If they touched you, you had to disinfect yourself from cooties lest you become a pariah. Gay people have it rough because not all of them develop boobs. This leads me to the second fundamental reason.

Homophobes, funnily enough, turn out to be the ones most aroused by gay sex. In psychology we call this reaction formation, forming the opposite response as a defence mechanism. In real life, we call this hilarious. Studies conducted by the American Psychological Association have found that the more homophobic a man is, the more aroused he is when watching gay sex. It is one thing to be a homophobe, it is another to be a hypocrite. A secretly homosexual homophobe who is being hypocritical is one H too many for my liking, but that could just be me.

The more religious homophobes like to claim that the bible says homosexuality is wrong, and therefore gay marriage is wrong. Now I have nothing against the bible, or religion in general. My stance is that so long as it doesn’t actively cause harm, religion in moderation can be a powerful part of people’s lives. I understand that historically a lot of the laws in the bible make logical sense. Jews were forbidden from eating shellfish, as shellfish spoil easily and can cause illness, Muslims were forbidden from eating pork because pork has to be cooked properly or else it can cause food poisoning. These have been incorporated into their respective cultures with a dash of mysticism but served a purpose at one point. If we are to believe the religious argument that gay marriage is wrong on the basis of the bible, then shouldn’t we also follow the laws of Leviticus, which prohibit wearing clothes from blended fabrics? If your logical argument is that an ancient book says this is bad, then you don’t get to pick and choose which ancient rules you follow because it suits you. That is a right reserved only for parents and for politicians. But maybe that’s just me.

Diamonds Suck Forever

I never understood the appeal of diamonds. They are the laziest of gemstones. Rubies have their red gleam, sapphires their azure blue, diamonds are just shiny rocks that happen to be very hard. If being hard and shiny are enough to make something ludicrously expensive then jewellers can put glitter on concrete and call it a day.

Don’t get me wrong, diamonds have their uses. Spaceship windows are made from diamonds, surgical tools have diamond tipped edges and jewel thieves need something to aim for. Diamonds are one of the hardest substances known to man and have an amazingly high heat conductivity so there are all sorts of nifty industrial and scientific reasons to keep them around.

But for the purposes of looking pretty, diamonds suck. The price of diamonds is completely artificial, DeBeers launched an incredibly successful marketing campaign to promote diamonds as the primary gemstone by stating that “Diamonds are forever.” Entropy is forever as well, but you don’t see me giving my girlfriend a ring box full of heat. DeBeers is the reason why an engagement ring should cost three month’s salary. There is no logical or emotional reason behind this. You don’t love someone any more, or any less, because your ring has a slightly bigger rock on it. Or maybe marriage is one of those amusement park rides with the sign out front, your diamond must be this big to enter. I couldn’t tell you, I’ve never been married.

This isn’t even considering the fact that the majority of jewellery quality diamonds come from places like Angola, or from Sierra Leone. The fact that the price of diamonds is artificially controlled by cartels like DeBeers makes diamond mining a lucrative prospect for warlords. Grab a few third world children, point a gun at them and get them to go shiny rock digging. Take the money you get from cashing in those sweet sweet blood diamonds and go buy more guns, or children, or whatever it is warlords do with their money. I get the feeling it probably doesn’t involve hedge funds.

Maybe I’m being too harsh on diamonds. In a way it’s almost flattering having a conflict diamond. Nothing says I love you like half a dozen dead children. Imagine the conversations your fiancé would have when she talks about her ring.

“Oooh that’s nice.”

“Yeah he told me this one was worth only four Sierra Leonians.”

“Only four? I hear Tracy’s diamond is worth twelve Angolans.”

“Yeah but Angolans aren’t worth as much so it’s like five Sierra Leonians at current value.”

“Oooh sounds like trouble in paradise for those two when she finds out.”

All I know is I’d hate to be Tracy’s fiancé.

The Scarfie Sleeps Tonight

When I was younger I found out that I wasn’t very good with musical instruments. After a year of violin lessons my parents found this out as well. For whatever reason the bits of my brain that are responsible for math and being good at music got swapped out for other bits. Namely bits that think about war, and cats, and sometimes song parodies. It makes me wonder if I’m a descendent of Genghis Khan or if God has a strange sense of humour. Maybe both.

Now that I’m older and a little bit wiser, I know that while I still can’t read music or play instruments, I can sing so I’m not a complete lost cause. That being said I’m not so much a singer as a glorified parrot. While your musically minded folks are talking about what all those weird squiggly lines mean, I just sit there and mimic melodies until I get it right. Being mostly music illiterate I’ll listen to other tenors sing until I can copy them note for note. It’s not so much practice as it is beating notes to death and hammering their remains into songs. A musical Visigoth walking along the paved roads of the musically literate, sacking and pillaging their talent on my way to Rome.

Since singing in a choir is a team effort, in between bashing notes and trying to read music, my brain will drift off and come up with parodies for whatever song I’m learning at the time. For instance, take The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Pretty simple song, all the guys do is sing ‘o-wim-o-weh’. It’s one of those songs where you listen to it a few times and it’ll be stuck in your head forever. Add  dash of boredom, a bit of keyser sozeing, and you have The Scarfie Sleeps Tonight. It’s easy enough that anyone can sing along (just add a few ‘o-wim-o-weh’s and you’re good to go).

-verse 1

In the city, the student city

The Scarfie sleeps tonight

In the city, the student city

The Scarfie sleeps tonight

 

Oh heeeeeeEeeEEeeee’s

Gonna go to town

Oh heeeeeEeeeEEeeee’s

Gonna go to town

 

-Chorus

O-wim-o-weh

O-wim-o-weh

X 14

 

-verse 2

In the Monkey, the filthy Monkey

The Scarfie pulls tonight

In the Monkey, the filthy Monkey

The Scarfie pulls tonight

 

Oh heeeeeeEeeEEeeee’s

Gonna get Chlamydia

Oh heeeeeeEeeEEeeee’s

Gonna get Chlamydia

 

 -Chorus

O-wim-o-weh

O-wim-o-weh

X 14

 

-verse 3

Hush my proctor, don’t fear my proctor

The Scarfie sleeps tonight

Hush my proctor, don’t fear my proctor

The Scarfie sleeps tonight

 

Oh heeeeeeEeeEEeeee’s

Still has got Chlamydia

Oh heeeeeeEeeEEeeee’s

Still has got Chlamydia

 

I don’t think the world is ready for my brand of taboo song parodies, but that could just be me.

Yop

Us Kiwis are a pretty lazy bunch when it comes to English. We don’t mess around with things like pronunciation and proper word length. Kind of like hobbits our words are short, simple, and kind of strange looking. Instead of give we’ll say giz, instead of saying cheers we’ll say churr, by chopping off that one letter we really save on time that could otherwise be spent being inebriated. It really makes you think about the long term effects of binge drinking.

Acronyms are a whole other ballpark. They are to Kiwi slang what atomic bombs were to Oppenheimer. Now instead of chopping off letters we can condense entire words down into a single letter. Acronyms have become death, the destroyer of words. The Otago University Student Association becomes OUSA (pronounced OoSuH),  the National Certificate of Educational Achievement becomes NCEA (pronounced not certified to educate anyone), and our beloved alma mater becomes UoO (dare to pronounce).

It’s reassuring to see that our yankee friends across the drink have the same idea. My girlfriend is on exchange here from the University of Pittsburgh so I’m privy to these sorts of things. Now to my credit I know exactly two things about Pittsburgh, A) that the city makes steel, and B) the locals refer to it as ‘Pit’. There is also something about cheese steaks but I think they’re from ‘philly’. I don’t know if they put cheese on a steak, place a steak inside a slab of cheese, or have successfully managed to interbreed cows with dairy products. I have never been so curious and so horrified at the prospect of food before.

So while my girlfriend was drinking from her University of Pittsburgh water bottle, I thought I had found a perfect opportunity to demonstrate my newfound knowledge of her home.

“I see you’re drinking from a Pit bottle.” I expected knees to swoon at her recognition of my cultural prowess. It isn’t easy bridging cultural gaps you know.

“My what?”

“Your UoP (‘yop’) bottle.”

I could picture it in my head, at football matches where the University of Pitt Yoppers would face off against their rivals, the Pitt State Mates. One side of the stadium would chant YOP YOP YOP and the other side would chant MATE MATE MATE before both sides would clash on the field and start beating each other with red, white, and blue sticks. I don’t know an awful lot about American Football but I think they call that a Hail Mary.

Instead of swooning at my diplomatic coup, my girlfriend laughed so hard she started to choke on the water from her yop bottle. I was torn by her reaction. On one hand I had never killed anyone with laughter before, if anything it was kind of flattering. On the other hand I didn’t have an alibi and the thought of pleading in court that the yop bottle did it didn’t really appeal to me as a strong case, but I’m not a lawyer.

At any rate I’m going to stick with things I do know about ‘Pit’ and go buy some steel. I don’t see how I can fail this time.

Sensual Apple

Every day we learn something new. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a world shaking revelation. As much fun as it is having Socratic dialogues with yourself while you’re on the john, sometimes you learn something more mundane and a bit more applicable. A few days ago I learned that apparently there are two ways of eating an apple:

A) The regular way

B) The sensual way

It’s a lot like the difference between Seth Rogan’s characters in each of his movies, there isn’t one but a lot of people insist there is. While I was talking to my girlfriend’s flatmates, I noticed that out of the corner of my eye she was eating an apple. It was a pretty ordinary thing to do, she was feeling a bit under the weather so an apple was needed to keep the doctor away. I filed it in the part of my brain where all these mundane everyday occurrences go, right next to the part of my brain that thinks about time travel, and carried on talking to her flatmates. Halfway during consumption of said apple my girlfriend bursts out laughing, later confessing she was attempting to ‘sensually eat the apple’ to get my attention.

I must confess I am a simple man. I like my video games to be violent, my novels to be by Stephen King , and my body language to be (fairly) straight forward. Trying to analyse the Judeo-Christian themes in my girlfriend’s body language while she eats an apple a la Eve is a bit too much to ask for on an ordinary weekday, but that’s just my humble opinion. Maybe I’m just terrible at noticing these little details, although don’t tell her that.

At least I can count my lucky stars that it wasn’t a banana. I have enough difficulty waking up in the morning and making it to class as it is. I don’t want to add aroused to that list every time I walk past the fruit stall. I feel it gives my history lecturer the wrong impression to walk into a class on WWI with a tent in your pants but that could just be me.