Columns

“Girl, I have no passion for scandal. In fact, I feel decidedly unenthusiastic about putting my ego out there, as is our custom.” – Boy.

irl: 
For different reasons both Boy and I have been going through patches of life in which checking out the opposite sex, or even partying, have taken the back seat to other more mundane, less column-worthy pursuits. For example, Boy has a job. For further example, I have mountains of post-graduate work to do and a box set of all seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Boys of Dunedin, I’m afraid you can’t compete with that. Not that you’d want to if you could see me in my over-priced pajamas, feeding myself grapes and mooning over Spike for hours on end. Seriously, Spike is so perfect. And the feminist inside me groans, and goes “Here we go again,” as once again the cliché of a girl mooning after a borderline-abusive control freak comes to fruition. 
I can mock tween girls about their obsession for Edward Cullen all I want, but really, it’s the same thing. Okay, I’m lying, it’s not the same thing, since Spike is more that just a sulking stalker (see: YouTube, “Buffy Vs Cullen”), but the idea of a vampire who wants to kill you being sexy is much of a muchness. Ditto – almost every girl I know has a secret (or not so secret) thing for Chuck Bass of Gossip Girl, a character who is introduced to us as a man who has both conquests and “victims.” So, basically, I’ve been staying in and pining for fictional characters I would never want to meet in real life, eating breakfast for dinner and dancing to the Beach Boys with the heater on full. Winter must be on the way. 
Boy:
You’re not into things Meyer-esque either – that thing is being overplayed, and those movies have a patronising didactic structure, which is boring. So, you pick up a dictionary and find a definition of didactic and then, as you haven’t watched Twilight, think it really doesn’t matter. What to do? You can’t eat because there’s no food, which voids any plans to wash dishes. I suggest you sit down with seasons one to five of The Wire. It’s set in Baltimore. Baltimore is director John Waters’ hometown and favourite town. Keep this is mind and imagine a John Waters director’s cut of each episode. Sure, The Wire lacks the visual humour of a John Waters’ feature, but the characters are surprisingly similar: self-obsessed alcoholic ego-maniacs sit round fuelling each others’ transgressions over dead bodies. In this regard, could Baltimore and Dunedin be sister cities?