I feel like if our hair is touching
it’s sort of like we’re doing it already
and I don’t really think “saying anything about our feelings”
is more powerful than just how much our hair is touching
Like I already gave you the hair
from my HEAD
which is the best part of my face outside of my lips
is the head
It’s my favorite part of me that’s above the neck
Anyhow.
What else do I have to do to prove my love for you?
Some men (Keats for example but I’m not naming names)
don’t even have enough hair that they could give you any extra.
I could give you like half of my hair
and I’d still have a full head left over to give to Shelley
or whomever.
So I honestly don’t understand why you’re crying
LYDIA
is it because you ENJOY making me wait outside for you
in a GARDEN
like some sort of ANIMAL
or ITALIAN
like some sort of ITALIAN ANIMAL, LYDIA
is it because you saw Romeo and Juliet once
and you thought the only place anyone ever goes for surreptitious handjobs is a garden
because there are a lot of places
Lydia
where people can go for surreptitious handjobs
can I at least come inside
it’s fucking England out here
it’s Italy inside my pants though
if you catch my drift
goddamnit woman I gave you a piece of my hair
please just can we fuck indoors
“it’s fucking England out here
it’s Italy inside my pants though
if you catch my drift”
GUESS I HAVE A NEW PERSONAL MOTTO
crying (but only the sexiest tears of delight tho)
Same.
it’s Italy inside my pants though
if you catch my drift
this is a tragically better pick-up line than the one used on me this weekend
GO OOOONNNN
dude: No one is taking any sexy shots right now![]()
me: that’s because [mutual friend] used up all his blowjob shot supplies
dude: *whispering drunkenly in my ear* you said ~blowjob~
me:
I feel like Byron and not Extreme wrote ‘More Than Words.’ Just change the part about hands touching to hair touching.
He would sing in that same whiny, cajoling tone, wouldn’t he?
At least his hair would be immeasurably – dare I say *extremely* – better!
OMG what a terrible song, I had forgotten how much I hate the opening lines. What person who speaks english actually said, ok, yeah, this syntax and noun/verb agreement is totally cool and not at all moronic:
Sayin’ I love you
Is not the words I want to hear from you
It’s not that I want you
Not to say it, but if you only knew
How easy it would be to show me how you feel
More than words is all you have to do to make it real
DEAR GOD
Not in the least repentant about his self-regard, that man.
You know, in the last few months I have been challenging myself to act with the confidence and entitlement of my male peers, and while it has payed off in certain respects, the HORROR of realizing how much regard they hold themselves in is REAL.
Were I a different woman I would attempt to hit Byronic levels of self-regard, but I think I would end up like, actually Rumplestiltskin-ing. No mere mortal frame can bear that much self-regard.
I feel this. I’ve been trying to embrace my own legend so I’ll stop writing waffly wishy-washy cop-outs into things I need to be confident in but I think I’ve overshot and ended up in Byronland.
Whatever. I’m great and I have amazing hair, why shouldn’t I be in Byronland?
Except for the incest maybe.
Hey, ALLEGED incest
I SAID INCEST MAYBE
I’ve been using “librarian and feminist” as my tagline for years, it’s probably not going anywhere, but I am tempted by “I’m great and I have amazing hair”
Byronland, one of the greatest and most questionable adults-only amusement parks of the century!
At a much smaller level, I’ve been challenging myself to walk more confidently. I saw this diagram recently about how confident men will just walk in a straight line and expect people to get out of their way, while women tend to move around other people as they see them. So, I’ve been trying to walk in a straight line, and you probably wouldn’t be surprised by how many men I’ve literally run into/side swiped.
Just drop your shoulder before impact and OWN IT
A-fuckin’-men. Bonus points for giving them a steely glare and refusing to apologize.
If you yell JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE A PENIS, HUH? accusatorily at them, you get grrrrrreat facial expressions of shock and horror.
WALK LIKE MURDER.
The only way to walk, really.
I do this! I run into so many people (or they run into me?). My friends call me clumsy, but I like to think that I’m choosing to NOT non-verbally apologize for walking by dancing around everyone who is walking straight.
Ugh, I almost collided with a man last week, but I stepped out of his way. Every moment since, I’ve wished I hadn’t, just to see what would happen.
The guy I walked into this weekend was holding hot coffee and spilled it down his front. I felt REALLY bad. I didn’t see it!
I do the same thing quite often, and most especially when I’m fed up with everyone expecting me to accommodate them. Just walk straight down the sidewalk and don’t shift aside for anyone. Most women will detour around me but a number of your more alpha-type men have seemed surprised that I didn’t get out of their way. Oh, to be so accustomed to such privilege.
Highly recommend never moving out of the way of confident men as a hobby.
Walking-in-a-straight-line chicken! I play this game too! It’s fun when some men see the imminent collision coming and flail out of the way at the last moment.
I want so much to be able to do this. I am the Underground Man. I literally identify with him every single time I can’t go through with it.
How much regard, but with so little bearing on reality.
One of my girlfriends is a priest. She has lots of self doubt. She was telling me about this situation and about how she was angsting about having to deal with this woman after their previous contact was less than cordial. I asked her if she thought any of her male colleagues would put that much thought into this interaction. She said no before I’d even finished.
There are like seven Byron poems titled “To a Lady,” which made finding/laughing at the original slightly more difficult. But only slightly. It’s tough to miss.
But so *very* worth it: for those to lazy to google,
That is a link to this very post.
Huh, I don’t remember it being so clever and self-aware the last time I read it, but you’re right, that was worth it!
(Psst, you just linked here!)
http://mykeep.com/lordbyron/toaladywhopresented.h…
Oh my god, it’s only 44 lines and I could not make it through in one go, due to being overcome by hysterical laughter.
True. I tried just Googling “Byron To A Lady” and got the wrong one, so I changed it to “Byron To A Lady Lydia”. The first result was this Toast post, and the next two were Holstein-Friesian cow pedigree records.
“To a Holstein” was one of Byron’s more under-appreciated poems.
here’s the link – http://readytogoebooks.com/LB-lady99.htm
The title really sets the tone –
TO A LADY . . .
WHO PRESENTED THE AUTHOR A LOCK OF HAIR, BRAIDED WITH HIS OWN,
AND APPOINTED A NIGHT IN DECEMBER TO MEET HIM IN THE GARDEN.
By
Lord Byron
A retort: “A boot, in your pants? What a good idea!”
If anyone ever tells you men are smarter than women because they have statistically larger brains remember that Byron has the largest cranial capacity on record and didn’t have enough sense to come in from the rain.
This is a perfect comment. I would like to begin collecting and writing these out on paper soft enough to dry my tears with come July.
some handkerchiefs should be embroidered
Wait, is that actually true about Byron’s head? (Being unfeasibly large I mean)
If by head you mean the lower one where he did his “thinking”, then yes, he would very much like you to know that it’s true.
Yep! This is the first thing I found about “brilliant human poet Byron” as a mere chick. Imagine my growing horror at his epic dirtbaggery.
You. You might be my favorite, for this.
And yet again I mourn that there hasn’t been a novelization of the lives of Byron, Keats, and the Shelleys. Or at least a buddy comedy!!!
Obligatory Kate Beaton links: http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=56; http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=319
This is exactly what I had in my head, haha.
I once read a novel I really liked that was told from the perspectives of Mary Shelley, Caroline Lamb, Fanny Brawne, and Augusta Leigh. So obviously Byron, Keats and Shelley featured prominently. I liked it a lot!
Oo, do you remember what it was called?
It is called Passion and the author is Jude Morgan. 😉
Thanks!! 🙂
But there is the terribad movie Gothic, starring Julian Sands as Shelley and Gabriel Byrne as Byron, standing on the roof in a thunderstorm, declaiming.
(I don’t remember what he’s declaiming. It doesn’t matter.)
This sounds …. hilarious?
It definitely was, and I am now requesting it from the library because it’s been too long since I’ve laughed at this movie.
It would inspire movie yelling.
This definitely seems like something I need in my life.
That film is howlingly and gloriously terrible, I must watch it again at once.
Well, check out the version by Tim Powers — The Stress of Her Regard.
Saw this tweet yesterday about Virginia Woolf just brutalizing Byron that was pretty fun: https://twitter.com/keightdee/status/734284121627…
“Intolerably condescending, ineffably vain, a barber’s block to look at… swimming in vapours of sentimental twaddle…”
Some third degree burns in there.
Oh man that is some A+ shade.
not shade, but definitely a read. (I was obsessed with Jezebel’s Shade Court articles)
if it’s pronounced “lih-DEE-uh” instead of “LID-ee-uh” we get a pleasant meter in “so I don’t understand why you’re crying LYDIA”
Oh, I like that! Here I was, reading it like a pointed comment from a sibling: “SOME of us can’t watch tv because we actually have to do HOMEwork, HANNAH”
Full disclosure: this comment was never directed at me, 99.5% of the time, I was the one doing homework and/or being sassy about it.
I feel like Byron would be the type of man to repurpose his girlfriends’ names
I had a fantastic moment in Aberdeen last year, when a local friend-of-a-friend who was kindly taking me around had us go past her children’s grammar school so she could show me the school’s flattering statue of famous alum Lord Byron. I laughed until I cried; the idea of holding up Byron as a role model for the youth is just…really special.
“The weather is rigid, like my penis.”
“please just can we fuck indoors” is damn near a perfect sentence.
There have been actual circumstances in my life where I could and should have used this line. I am filing it away in case they recur.
Tbh I think the thing I’ll miss most about The Toast is Mallory trolling on Lord Byron.
I felt this little pang of regret seeing this post, knowing that our days of rewritten Byron poems are numbered.
Same. Same. Who else does this?
No one, really … but I just thought of this, from a decade ago, which toasties might like if they haven’t seen it: http://waste.typepad.com/waste/2005/11/this_be_cl…
The comments have some exquisite missing-of-the-point.
Jeez, he got pretty aggressive there at the end.
Maybe he belongs outside
Lord Byron is best left outside until he can learn how to behave properly. Ignore the whimpering and pawing at the door, it’s for your own good.
I’m now picturing Byron and John Donne comparing seduction poem metaphors in the afterlife. “The braided hair conceit is elegant, m’lord, but I invented it. And my flea idea was bolder.”
So your penis is politically disorganized and prone to foreign invasion?
That’s a fair assessment, actually.
This is so beautiful and perfect that I had to transcribe into Microsoft Word: first the original version, then page break, then your version. With special fonts and things. I might even need to make a PDF of it. That way, it’s saved on my hard drive as well as in my heart.
Also, this poem would work really well for Kylo Ren, if he had someone to send it to.
This is so beautiful and perfect that I had to transcribe into Microsoft Word: first the original version, then page break, then your version. With special fonts and things. I might even need to make a PDF of it. That way, it's saved on my hard drive as well as in my heart.
Also, this poem would work really well for Kylo Ren, if he had someone to send it to.
It would inspire movie yelling.