pretentiosity

Being pretentious is a bit of a catch-22 sometimes, isn't it?

The word itself implies an act, a false face, pretending to be something you are not. So can you even be pretentious if you hold your hands up and admit it? Because I am self-aware enough to recognise I bear a worrying number of symptoms of the typical pretentious student. I have the tortoiseshell frame glasses, am off to do an English degree next year, but not before a holiday around Europe on trains through cities with cultural landmarks but more importantly lots of bars. For god's sake, I even bought a tweed elbow-patched blazer the other week, and THAT wasn't enough. I had to replace the existing buttons with gold buttons too (top left).


But I think the final straw came last week when I went to pick up the developed photos from my disposable camera last weekend. Yes, an old school Kodak disposable. The first half of the photos are from my recent holiday to Istanbul. I could always plead the excuse that I forgot my digital camera, but I won't deny that I took secret joy in trying to get arty angles of the authentic side of the city - no cheesy posing in front of buildings for me!


I want the protests, the noise, the unposed passersby (except for when they get in the way of my carefully composed portraits). I want the multi-layered landscape.


That's until I got bored half-way through the film and forgot about the camera, until New Years Eve. The next half of the film is a sequence of drunkards pulling more and more stupid faces while dancing to hideous noise. But it's all OK, because our New Year's Resolution is to read Ulysses.