Posts Tagged ‘patrick bateman

11
Aug
11

What the Emoticons You Use Say About Your Mental Health

By SlickTiger 9 Comments
Categories: Killer Posts
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

406268It must have been a truly epic, universe-changing moment the first time man sat down to write something and after accidentally placing a colon next to a closed bracket, realised he’d just made a smiley.

“Hey guys! Guys! You gotta see what just happened!”

“What, what did you do? Cure cancer? Discover a cure for AIDS? Become immortal? TELL US!”

“Something way, way better than all those things. Check it out…”

🙂

“Woooaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh… That’s… that’s fucking AWESOME MAN! It’s like, now when I’m happy, I don’t need to write ‘I’m happy’ I can just use that convenient arrangement of punctuation, hooray!”

And so on, and so on.

Of course once emoticons started being used (which Wikipedia tells me was sometime around 1982), teenage girls the world over took things to a whole other level and before we knew what hit us, there were literally hundreds of the fucking things smiling, winking, crying and frowning their way across cyberspace at us like a yellow circus of over-emotional disembodied heads.

 

 

And yet, as with most things in life, when faced with so many choices as to how to express oneself through the use of these clever little icons, most people defaulted to only using one, two at the most, over and over and over again.

So here’s a summary of your current state of mental health according to the emoticons you use the most often based on extensive scientific research by SlickTiger Industries. Dig it.

 

Smile The Regular Smiley

Emotionally bankrupt. By far the most common of the whole bunch, people who use regular smileys are uninspired, emotionally distant, bored and boring. Don’t be fooled into thinking they are happy. These people need industrial strength anti-depressants to feel anything close to happiness.

 

 

Open-mouthed smile The SUPER SMILEY

Psychopath. People who use the SUPER SMILEY are hiding something. No one is that happy, it’s just not humanly possible. There’s a good chance this person has just murdered someone in cold blood and fed their remains to pigs. Never go to a cabin in the woods alone with the SUPER SMILEY person, and if you do, you better make sure it puts the lotion on its skin…

 

 

Winking smile The Winky Face

Paedophile. Either that or deranged sexual predator. Even the name “winky face” immediately conjures mental images of the old dude in the brown duster that used to hang around our pre-school with a bag of candy and a grin that would make Freddy Kruger run crying to his mom. The Winky Face says “I collect restraining orders”. Unless you ever had a burning desire to have your face printed on a milk carton, run far, far away.

 

 

Surprised smile The Shocked Smiley

Closet nymphomaniac. The whole acting shocked thing is all a big lie – this is the internet fer chrissake! NOBODY gets shocked anymore. If you’re blind dating a girl who sends this emoticon at any stage during your correspondence, you can bet money she’ll put out on the first date. If a guy uses this, I got bad news ladies, he’s a flaming homosexual.

 

 

Smile with tongue out Pulling Tongue Smiley

Junkie. Pulling Tongue Smiley users are strung out on drugs and have been for quite some time now. The pulling tongue smiley is commonly interpreted as being fun or cheeky, but don’t be fooled. This person does boatloads of drugs, and not the good variety. We’re talking about the kinda guy that huffs glue and paint fixative to wake up in the morning and then klaps a button of Mandrax mixed with BB tabacco in a hollowed out koki for breakfast. This person WILL steal your stereo at some stage or another, that’s a given.

 

 

Sad smile Sad Face

Emotional blackmailer. People whip these bad boys out when they want to lay the guilt on nice and thick. “Wen u comin home? :-(“ or “Missd u @ church y/day :-(“ are common examples of how this emoticon is used to dial the guilt right up to the “1000 hail Marys” mark. People don’t use these when they’re sad. They use them when they want to make YOU sad. Don’t play those petty games, tell them to man up and get off the fucking cross. The world has enough martyrs.

 

 

Crying face Crying Face

Suicidal. But not the “I’m going to eat a bullet” kind of suicidal, more like the “I’m going to go put my head in the oven now” kind of suicidal. These people cut themselves with pencil sharpener blades and then blame it on their non-existent cats. They listen to Anthony And The Johnsons and read to old people and secretly pray they’ll never live that long.

 

 

Disappointed smile Nothing Face

Sociopath. Probably the most obvious of the whole bunch. On the outside this person is a respected investment banker, but behind closed doors he chops people up with an axe whilst humming Huey Lewis And The News songs.

 

 

So there you have it boys and girls, all the most common smileys and the associated mental disorders of their frequent users summed up based on decades of extensive research.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I gotta go pick up a random hitch hiker and take him / her through to this great little cabin I found in Elgin, super stoked Open-mouthed smile

-ST

07
Feb
10

Suitcases and Empty Spaces

By SlickTiger 3 Comments
Categories: Killer Posts
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nothing sounds like polyurethane suitcase wheels bumping over bricks. You could record that sound and play it to anyone and they’d be able to tell in a second it’s the sound of a suitcase being wheeled around, it’s the sound of someone arriving or someone leaving.

This morning it was the sound of my girlfriend starting our new life by herself. It kills me that I couldn’t be there with her, stepping onto that plane together, hand in hand to face whatever the future brings. Instead I’m left behind, sitting on my bed in a room as bare as it was before she moved in.

And round and round in my head the same line from the same song plays on infinite repeat.

Baby I’ve been here before, I’ve seen this room and I’ve walked this floor, you know I used to live alone before I knew ya…

I never bothered to decorate my bedroom before J-Rab moved in. It was functional; bed, bedside table, lamp, bookshelf, washing basket. Patrick Bateman would have loved it. Then she arrived with her photographs and her drawings and her Indian elephants and her stars and the space I lived in came alive.

 

 

I’ll never forget the Saturday when her and Jenni-fuh busied themselves for hours cutting little golden moons and stars and spaceships out of some wrapping paper they found and sticking them up on our living room wall. It wasn’t long after I started this blog if I remember correctly, you can go here if you want to read that post.

I arrived home on Friday to find J-Rab taking the last of those stars down. There’s only a tiny crescent moon left, high up where her and Jenni-Fuh asked me to put it, too close to the ceiling for either of them to reach.

I think I’ll leave it up there.

We drove most of the way to the airport in silence this morning, her hand resting lightly on my thigh as I drove, and ironically, it was one of the most beautiful mornings Joburg has had in weeks.

“Well, at least Joburg is giving you a nice farewell,” I said.

“Yeah, great. It pisses down with rain for almost the entire summer, then on the day I leave the weather couldn’t be better.”

“Heh heh, yeah,” I chuckled, “asshole city.”

The man at the check-in counter told us J-Rab’s luggage was 2 kilos over the limit and looked like he was going to do something about it until the two of us verbally clothes-lined the motherfucker.

 

 

“C’mon, she’s moving her whole life down to Cape Town, everything! How the hell do you expect her to keep to your ridiculous 20kg limit? So she’s 2 kgs over, I’m pretty sure the plane’s still going to be able to take off. Please dude, help us out here, this is an emotional time for us both…”

Of course he let it slide. Only problem was J-Rab’s overhead luggage was the size of a St Bernard, but he let that slide too. We make a great team, my lioness and me. I wouldn’t want to fuck with us.

I held her for a long time before she went through the departures gate, but it wasn’t long enough. I watched her take her laptop out of her bag and put it through the x-ray machine along with the St Bernard and then put it back in on the other side.

She turned and waved one last time, I waved too. I swallowed hard.

I spent the rest of the morning at Peggles’ flat – he was actually arriving back from Cape Town at the same time J-Rab was leaving so I gave him a lift from the airport back to his flat and drank coffee there and tried to enjoy the morning.

By lunchtime it was pissing down again and I drove through the deluge back home and wandered aimlessly around the flat, opening the cupboards, staring into the fridge, stacking the dirty dishes but not washing them, eating the couscous salad J-Rab made us for dinner last night and then finally collapsing onto the bed with all my clothes on and falling into a restless sleep.

We watched Dexter until 3 in the morning together, season two, we had to finish it before she left because it’s not the same watching it alone. I think I dreamed about it, but I can’t be sure.

I know I dreamed about something.

She called once she’d arrived at our new place and took some pictures with her phone and sent them to me.

I found myself squinting at them, trying to get a feel for the place, weighing up the pros and cons. Here the pictures are. It’s weird to think this is going to be the place where I’m going to live and you, a bunch of perfect strangers mostly, know as much about how it looks as I do.

 

 

 

Tomorrow I’ll wake up and look at this city with new eyes. I’ll drive down the same roads I have been for years, but they’ll carry a certain charm that they didn’t before and the tiny details that make up this city will jump out at me, larger than life because in two weeks and two days, I’m packing everything up and hitting the open road.

In my mind I can see myself pulling into the dusty driveway of the wooden house where we’re going to live and I can see her running out the front door, her henna-red hair moving in slow waves as the afternoon sun sets quietly behind us, and the distance between us closes for the last time.

It’s not long now… not long at all.

-ST