The Awkward Girl's Guide to the Week | In Which There Is a Dilemma
It's Titanic Vs Air Force One, folks...
Hi, it’s Amber, with The Awkward Girl’s Guide to the Week: your regular look at what I’ve been reading, watching, and otherwise getting up to lately. These posts are free to all subscribers, but a paid subscription will help keep me out of the Victorian workhouse, allow me to continue creating content for you, and ensure that all of your Vinted purchases arrive on time, AND in perfect condition.
Hey, remember last week’s newsletter, when I was all, “Haha, all we need now is for one of us to get sick”, and then Christmas Bingo will be complete?
Seriously, that very day — THAT VERY DAY, PEOPLE — Max came home from school sick. I kid you not. Fortunately for him, he had recovered enough by Sunday to be able to attend the Santa visit my mum had booked about 6 months ago (More on that later…), but then he took a mysterious turn for the ‘worse’ that night, which left him insisting he was too unwell for school on Monday, although apparently not too unwell for anything else he wanted to do, basically.
It was one of those parenting dilemmas that nothing really equips you for. Do you force a possibly sick child into school, or do you allow a possibly lying child to stay home? How do you know which is which? Why is this so hard?
This was not, however, the dilemma referenced in the title of this newsletter. No, that dilemma presented itself on Sunday, when we went to see what Max assures me was definitely the REAL Santa Claus (We know this because he had an actual beard, that was growing out of his face, and not one of those cotton-wool jobs that aren’t convincing anyone, frankly…) at a Winter Wonderland extravaganza we go to every year.
“And what would you like me to bring you for Christmas?” asked Santa jovially. Terry and I exchanged smug glances, knowing Max was going to ask for the giant LEGO Titanic kit which he doesn’t think he’ll get, but which we’ve had secretly stashed away for weeks now, even though we know building it is going to literally destroy us.
“I’d like a model Air Force One, please,” said Max, ushering in a new era of obsession. “I’d also like a LEGO Titanic, but the Air Force One is the main thing.”
And, the thing is, we HAVE actually got him an Air Force One model… it’s just that we’d got it for his birthday, which is four days after Christmas, rather than for Christmas itself. Which brings me to the dilemma. Do we now give him it for Christmas, along with the Titanic, and have to spend money we don’t have on something different for his birthday? (And if so, WHAT?) Or do we stick to the original plan and risk a disappointing Christmas morning, followed by four days of him thinking Santa didn’t bring him the MAIN THING he asked for?
I’m voting for option number one, but that’s because I’m notoriously fiscally irresponsible, and have basically reached that stage of the month where I feel like we’ve spent so much money now that we’re going to the workhouse in January anyway, so we might as well go out in style. Terry — who is wrong — is voting for option number two, because he still remembers this one time when he was a kid when he thought he hadn’t got the new bike he’d asked for, but then his mum asked him to get her something from the kitchen, and there it was. And I get that this is obviously a core memory for him, but I’m personally not a fan of the “deliberately disappoint your kid so they’ll be even happier later” school of parenting, and, even if I was, there’s a difference between four minutes and four DAYS, isn’t there?
(I am right about this, aren’t I? Say I am right…)
Speaking of Air Force One, meanwhile, here’s a picture Max drew of it:
And here’s a close-up from that picture:
Yes. 1
The dilemma surrounding this aircraft is just one of the things currently keeping me awake at night, though. Here are some more of them…
Things I Have to Do This Month, Ranked in Order of How Anxious I Am About Them:
Figure out what to wear to the village NYE party, which will be attended by LITERALLY EVERYONE.
Host Max’s birthday party at a venue TBC, although it’s almost definitely going to end up being my house, because I had pinned all of my hopes on somehow becoming incredibly wealthy and being able to just throw money at this problem, but, needless to say, that didn’t happen and now it’s too late to book anything else.
Host a party in my home for Terry’s entire family.
Figure out where to store the vast quantity of STUFF that will be entering the house over the course of December.
Earn enough money to pay for everything I’ve bought this month and everything I probably WILL buy in order to check off numbers 1-3.
Realize we haven’t bought enough gifts for Max and try to buy more, only to discover I don’t have any money and everything is out of stock anyway.
Avoid further illness.
Figure out how to fit in work around around all of the assorted festive ‘events’ that are happening.
Also hair washing. How do I rearrange my hair-washing schedule to fit all these events? Should I make a spreadsheet? How do I make a spreadsheet?
Wrap Christmas presents.
Continuing uncertainty over which days are school uniform days, which are Christmas jumper days, and which are full festive attire days, because it’s like a full-time job trying to keep up with this stuff. The parents’ Facebook group has been a RIOT this week, seriously.
Edit an entire novel, ideally before Christmas, because God knows, there won’t be much work getting done once the ‘holidays’ start…
Come up with an amazing idea for a new book, so I can start writing it early next year.
Here’s what else I’ve been getting up to this week…
READING
No Filter, Maxine Morrey
This is a book my husband picked up in a charity shop one day, thinking I might like it because the main character is a blogger, and I, too, am a blogger. Oh, and she’s also a redhead, and I, too, am a redhead. That’s where the comparisons end, though, unfortunately, because not only has my blog not been attacked in a national newspaper for promoting unattainable levels of perfection, my blog has never even been MENTIONED in a newspaper, and, if it was, it definitely wouldn’t be for being too perfect. I think that goes without saying.
(I think I would quite like to at least have the opportunity to be attacked for being “too perfect”, though? That feels like a good kind of problem to have, no?)
In all honesty, it was probably a bad idea for me to start reading this because I knew that, as someone who has actually done the job Libby is supposed to be doing (albeit with significantly less success), I’d have to fight the tendency to be super nit-picky about it, which isn’t an element of my personality I enjoy.
But… but… Libby uses hashtags on blog posts. She wears a business suit to meet a cosmetics brand to discuss a potential collaboration. She speaks to everyone as if she’s writing an email pitch. And so I’ve spent the first few chapters of this shouting, “THAT’S NOT WHAT BLOGGING’S LIKE” at absolutely no one, so now I guess I’m shouting it at you. Sorry about that.
WATCHING
Leave the World Behind [SPOIILERS]
I happened to come across a Twitter thread where people were complaining about the abrupt ending of Leave the World Behind mere minutes before watching it, so not only was I mentally prepared for it to end somewhat suddenly, I wasn’t particularly disappointed in it, either, because I felt like we knew what was going to happen after that point anyway.
Anyway, I really enjoyed this. I liked that it managed to be creepy and unsettling without being super-gory, or relying on huge explosions, or the usual scenes of people looting and panicking that we’re used to now in movies about the apocalypse.
(Also, I’ve long suspected that if the apocalypse DID come about, I’d probably be cleaning the bathroom at the time, or listening to Max rank his favourite aircraft in order of preference, and it would take me quite some time to cotton on to what was happening, so I appreciated the fact that this showed the world ending with a whisper, rather than a bang, so to speak — for the protagonists of the movie, at least. )
TRYING
Rucking
I said RUCKING — get your mind out of the gutter.
So rucking-with-an-R is a type of exercise which basically involves walking while carrying weight. It’s supposed to be a good way to get some strength training into your routine without having to lift weights (Which always bores me to tears, making me want to give up immediately), and as I’m currently in my Lazy Girl Winter era, I figured it could be a good way to get me out of the house AND lifting some weights at the same time.
The first obstacle to this came when I realized I don’t actually have a rucksack, and thought I was going to have to use Max’s old Harry Potter one. But then Terry kindly dug one of his old rucksacks out of the attic for me, and I’ve been walking around the village for half an hour or so after lunch with a couple of hand weights in it.
(There are special “rucking” —No, it’s no good, I can’t say it without the inverted commas — weights and backpacks you can buy which distribute the weight more easily, but this is going to have to do for now.)
I haven’t been doing this long enough to decide whether or not its going to be the exercise for me (Hence why I’m not going to rush out and buy any ‘special’ equipment just yet), but so far I’ve found it a lot more challenging than I expected it to be… I’d kind of imagined myself just slipping on the backpack and bouncing off with it like Bambi or something, but our village sits right at the top of a very steep hill, and wow, but that’s an effective way to get the heart-rate up, for sure.
I actually broke a sweat yesterday on the uphill stretch, which isn’t something I normally do from walking on its own, so I guess the big question now is whether I’ll actually be able to stick at it, or whether it’ll just be like all of the other forms of exercise that were going to totally transform my life, and yet here we are.
Maybe some people are just destined to always struggle with liking exercise? Maybe I am one of those people?
BUYING
I just don’t even know what to say here, to be honest.
I mean, it would be fair to say that I’m well and truly off the wagon in terms of breaking my shopping addiction. December has destroyed me. I have lost all sense of willpower and control. I’m basically just buying things now, then sending them back, then sometimes re-buying them, because, whoops, should really just have kept that one, shouldn’t I?
Seriously, just this morning I bought a dress on Vinted which is exactly the same as a dress I SOLD on Vinted around about this time last year, thinking I’d never have the opportunity to wear it, so why bother keeping it? I sold/donated the rest of my party dresses for the same reason; to be fair, at the time I did this I hadn’t worn any of them in literally years, and had no reason to suspect I’d ever wear them again. I should have realized, though, that getting rid of them all would be an excellent way to guarantee I’d suddenly start getting invited to stuff again, and yup — that’s exactly what’s happened.
So, this month I have a bunch of events to attend, all of which will require varying degrees of “dressing up”. Just to make matters worse, quite a few of these events are almost back-to-back, and involving the same set of people, so I can’t get away with buying just one thing and re-wearing it, either. This, it turns out, has been quite the headache, because I’m honestly not exaggerating when I say I got rid of ALL of my party-wear.
BUT.
This, it seems, is the story of my December. I am not proud. And you know what the worst thing is? I STILL don’t have anything to wear to the first of the parties, which is — DRUMROLL — tonight.
Wish me luck…
What’s weird about this is that we have no idea how he even knows about Biden falling on the steps. How?! Are they teaching this stuff in school?
Can you not give him the titanic one for his birthday?