The Declaration is a YA novel set in a dystopian future England. It’s 2140 and years ago, scientists found a ‘cure’ for old age (as though it was a disease or something, which interestingly is how a lot of people seem to talk about it when they promote anti-ageing products and scientific developments. Scary). They created a drug that could completely halt the aging process and actually prevent death. Naturally this led to a massive increase in population that the planet and its resources could no longer sustain, so laws were introduced to inhibit reproduction. Which always works out for the best. It’s an interesting and very quick read.

Incidently, I think I am addicted to buying books, and actually to bookstores in general. My mother and sisters started refusing to enter a bookstore with me by the time I was around 12 or 13, because it would take them hours to get me out.

A very shiny manouvre of fate has me working very near the biggest bookstore in London - the seven-storey Waterstones on Piccadilly. Or as I like to call it, The Place Where Awesome is Made. So whenever I am feeling like a social zombie (which is increasingly often), I drop in and pick up some paper happiness that I can take home and use as an imaginary buffer between me and the rest of the world.

Lemonia, Primrose Hill

Fabulous and hugely popular Greek restaurant on Regent’s Park Road that I’ve been meaning to try for ages. Finally went with LC Hammer in tow this weekend, and was not disappointed. Really good food, really great atmosphere. I recommend the moussaka and halloumi.

Burn After Reading

Coen Brothers + Frances McDormand + John Malkovich + Brad Pitt + clever and highly original screenplay = super good times.

Trojka, Primrose Hill

While I was in the trying-new-things-in-my-neighbourhood mode, I did lunch at Trojka on Sunday, a Russian Tea House on Regent’s Park Road that, again, I’ve been saying I’ll try forever. It was great - not the food so much (the food was fine - although the borsch was a little lukewarmish), but the always fantastic experience of Eastern European customer service. You come for the latke, but you stay to be scowled at and ignored by an eye-rolling, out-of-work Russian model slash waitress.

I felt the one unacceptable part of the Trojka experience was that they were playing the soundtrack to The Bodyguard on a loop.

Rain Man

Usually the thought of seeing Josh Hartnett act in anything makes me want to punch myself in the face until I cry, but this was getting some great reviews so I thought it might be okay. It was actually great. Adam Godley was brilliant as Raymond, the autistic brother, and - surprisingly (to me anyway) - Josh Hartnett was pretty terrific. It’s playing at the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Ave in Soho until 20 December, and I recommend getting a ticket.

A friend of mine (who lives in Australia and hates TCotU) once said that the place at the heart of your first Big City Experiene (BCE) must always be the one you love the most. For him it’s New York. For me it will always be London.

Since moving to the UK about a year and a half ago, I’ve had two very different living experiences.

The first was in Fulham. Fulham High Street, to be precise.

In May 2007 I was fresh off the boat from Australia… you remember Australia of course, it’s that place at the bottom of the world where you used to dump all your criminals. My dear friend LC Hammer was living near Fulham Broadway in a semi-detached Victorian conversion (now that I write about property for a living, I bother to use phrases like these. When I first got here, it was just a pretty house on a pretty street). Like most young Aussie professionals, she was living in a sharehouse with two fellow Aussie professionals (let’s call them AusProfs, because it’s quicker and it allows me to embrace my inner wanker), and was part of a thriving community of south-west London AusProf friends.

Like many of those who came before me, I had the good fortune of a connection like LC that meant I could slot straight into a ready-made community. Before I knew it - and before I’d even shaken off my travel-induced daze - I had moved into a flat, P-Vizzle Court, with a couple of her friends, Carrie Powerhouse and GI Jono, and a friend of theirs, Kibble Mahoney.

Ah, the times that were had at P-Vizzle. The ‘family’ dinners almost every weeknight. The movie nights. The Get Pissed Wednesdays. The glasses we broke in the bathtub (that was just me really). The Sunday night scampi. The trips to the circus. The many, many stray Australian visitors that Kibble would bring home to sleep on our living room floor.

The thing about the Aussie sharehouse, though, is that the experience is transient by nature. One by one, Aussies left and were replaced. Eventually Powerhouse went home to Brisbane, and was replaced by Kibble’s friend Jellabean, who proved to be another excellent addition to the P-Vizzle set. Then Kibble himself moved home, and was replaced by ScottyDon’t, who proved to be a wanker.

Eventually P-Viz disbanded, and my next London living experience - my current London living experience - began. In Primrose Hill. Primrose Hill Road, to be precise.

Here life is different. Instead of living in a two-bedroom flat with three other Aussies (this was the reality of life at P-Viz - extremely fun, but not very practical), I live in a two-bedroom flat with one English girl, Vicky Ghetto, who owns the place.

Vicky Ghetto is unlike the P-Viz inmates, but equally awesome. She is very funny, in an English way, and has an equally funny but even Englisher boyfriend. Vicky was the first Jewish person I’d ever met in real life, which I’m sure she finds amusing in a quaint, oh-you-silly-Australian way, but which for me was super exciting. I know this makes it sound like my parents were Grand Dragons in the KKK or something, but actually my hometown is just embarrassingly monocultural. Being a pasty brunette throughout my school years qualified me for the status of Strange and Exotic. The reproductive norm on the Sunshine Coast is for each family to create a small army of tanned blondes, who marry other tanned blondes and make lots of little tanned blondes of their own. If you want diversity, you go to Melbourne.

As I was saying - living with Ghetto is completely different to living at P-Vizzle - but I’ve totally lucked out, because both experiences have been perfect in their timing. A year ago, I didn’t know anyone in London, didn’t know anything about London or about living in London, and having a bunch of Aussies around me who were experiencing the exact same cultural shift was absolutely crucial to my survival in those first six to eight months. If I were in that same sort of situation now with different people, though, it would kill me.

Gosh, I can’t remember what my original point was. Oh right… it was actually going to be a comparison of south-west to north-west London. Hmm, I’m way off.

I guess when I was living in Fulham I just couldn’t have imagined living anywhere else. We had everything right outside our building - good transport links, good shopping, a cinema five minutes away, fabulous restaurants, our own gorgeous local pub - The Temperance (which is on Fulham High Street, on the right side just before Putney Bridge, and is awesome and I highly recommend it), the best fish and chip place in the city right across from us (Fishers - holy cow, try the scampi), the Thames about a two-minute walk away, a beautiful park, a beautiful church, hilarious Pakistani guys in the convenience store downstairs who knew our names, and of course all our Aussie friends living nearby.

But then I moved to NW3. Ahh, the north-west. The best view and nicest picnic spot in London, Primrose Hill, is a five-minute walk from my flat. England’s Lane at the end of my road is the perfect London street - it has a Starbucks, a little Tesco, a florist, a butcher, a drycleaner, a brilliant pub called The Washington, a newsagent, a cute gift shop, an Indian restaurant, a couple of cafes. Supposedly the place is crawling with celebrities, although I’m not very good at noticing them, and frankly I’m still waiting on that welcome-to-the-neighbourhood casserole from Gwyneth and Chris. It’s leafy and peaceful here, but not too quiet. I feel closer to central London, especially since I don’t have to get on the dodgy District Line to get there. The frights and delights of Camden are ten minutes away. Oh, and my friend LC Hammer also remains my neighbour LC Hammer, holing up in NW1.

All in all, north-west is definitely best.

But now I have my new best friend, Blog. So when I woke up from a horrible and extremely lifelike dream this morning just bursting to tell someone about it, I thought, Blog will want to hear about this! Blog is probably DYING to hear about this! I should tell Blog straight away!

Because I don’t have swirly music and hazy camera techniques to denote the dream sequence, I will have to rely on the power of ITALICS as a dramatic storytelling device.

I was with one of my brothers, Crazy Brother, and one of my sisters, Narcissistic Sister (or ‘Narcissister’, if you will). Crazy Brother was, strangely, going to see a drug dealer, and even more strangely, thought this would be a fun excursion for his two younger sisters, Narcissister and Geeky Sister (that’s me) to accompany him on.

Crazy, Narcissistic and Geeky approached a very suspect property where a man stood outside holding a machine gun. Crazy and Narcissistic didn’t appear to notice the man holding the machine gun, and continued merrily toward the front steps of the house.

Geeky was, suddenly and completely, unable to move or speak. She could only stand there for what felt like forever, but was probably only a few seconds, and watch as machine gun man lifted his machine gun and pointed it towards Crazy and Narcissistic. Finally Geeky managed to splutter out something unintelligible to alert Crazy and Narcissistic to the danger of being on this very suspect property with this very scary man holding a machine gun. Alas, it was too late. And while Crazy managed to duck to the ground just in time, Narcissistic was mowed down by the scary man with his machine gun.

Geeky rushed to where Narcissistic lay on the footpath and was relieved to find her heart still beating. She waited a long time for the ambulance to arrive, and it finally showed up approximately eight minutes later. The End.

Phew. Well, Blog, I hope you enjoyed my dream and thank you for listening.

2. I wonder if I’m getting enough hours of sleep.
Eight? Six? Five? Five and a half? Four? What exactly is the ideal nightly amount? I am on a constant quest to find my own perfect sleeping-to-waking ratio. Sometimes I can function for days on only four hours a night, and I become convinced that four hours is my optimum, and start to cram in loads more to-do list items to fit in my brand new 20-hour day, and get a bit full of myself, and start looking down on all the suckers who need a full eight hours in order to go about their humdrum lives. And then on the third or fourth day, I forget to wear shoes to work.

3. Sammie Lesbot didn’t reply to my text message. She always replies to my text messages. It’s been several hours. She must have been hit by a car, or kidnapped, or stabbed in Tesco. She must be trapped under the tube.
Actually when you think about it, it’s an amazing feat of cerebral athleticism, leaping straight from reality, OVER rationality and logic, and landing effortlessly on top of unfounded panic without even breaking a sweat.

4. Hmm, this economy thing sounds bad. I am a grown-up now. This could possibly affect my lifestyle in some way. Nonetheless, I am going to buy some new boots and this very nice purple coat. Ooh, look at that iPhone. WANT.
I got both my financial prowess and indefatiguable shopping ability from my mother.

5. Hmm, this road seems clear enough. Although… there seems to be a vehicle coming. Or is it a tree? It’s hard to tell from this distance. Well, I will just wait it out before attempting to cross the road. Tra la la.
Better embarrassingly safe than sorry.

If I had actually planned this trip to Oz in advance, I might have been organised enough to drop a post before I left. But alas it was all very last-minute, which to the untrained eye might look like a mildly exotic streak of spontaneity, but actually was more due to a minor nuclear meltdown in some part of my brain that I guess came temporarily unhinged. Danger, Will Robinson!

So my thought process, apparently, was that when life gets you down, when you have a complete mental spazfest and you don’t know how to fix everything up all neat like, the OBVIOUS solution is to flyyyy! Fly, my pretty! Fly away!

Because – derrr – when you come back from your little sojourn, everything will have miraculously fixed itself in your absence. Suffering writer’s block every time you sit down to work on the novel you keep telling yourself you’re writing? Feeling too completely inept to achieve anything at work? Worried that all the social retards at your magical life-changing seminar series are somehow “getting it” while your under-developed brain is just too simple and childlike? Suddenly horribly aware that in the face of overwhelming evidence, you might now consider the existence of God (or Whatever) to be equally as probable as leprechauns, garden fairies and anybody ever solving the world food crisis? Shocked and appalled that for once you’re just not getting every single bratty little thing you want? And any number of other fairly insignificant problems that your inner drama queen has blown up to ten times their original size, like horrible paralysing sea monkeys?

Well, have I got a solution for YOU!

Yes, the logic astounds. So needless to say I came back to London (quite happily) to find that not only was my life and everything in it exactly the same as when I left two weeks earlier, but there was actually nothing particularly wrong with it in the first place.

Huh. How ‘bout that.

I have no theories behind this minor life event. It remains a mystery, like the Bermuda Triangle or Pete Doherty’s enduring fame.

So because I have been away from this thing for so long, I am burning up – BURNING UP! – with things to talk about, and I shall begin with

The Paralympics
Does this festival of differently-abled athletics seem a little… patronising? I’m genuinely asking, because I can’t decide how I feel about it all. What is the point of the Paralympics? And because the Paralympics exist, does that mean disabled people aren’t allowed to compete in what I probably shouldn’t call the “fo’ real Olympics”?

A friend of mine was telling me about a girl with only half an arm (well, she had one full arm, and one that was kind of a stump or something. I’m sorry, I have no idea what the PC term for this is, so if anyone can enlighten me, please do) who won gold in some bike riding marathon thing (probably not the official name). Apparently people were saying that if she’d been in the Fo’ Rizzles, she’d have won bronze.

If she’d known this, would she have wanted to bypass the Paralympics and go straight for third place in the Olympics? Would the fact that she was competing against… oh gosh, whatever you call non-disabled people… make it somehow a more significant win?

And knowing that this girl could have kicked most of their arses, how does that make the Fo’ Riz Olympians feel? Perhaps this is why they have to separate the Olympics from the Paralympics. Just in case some stud in a wheelchair decides to get his awesome on and sail into a victory, making all the rest of them feel like utter knobjockeys. Imagine if that girl really had competed in the Olympics and come in third. What a kick in the guts for the winner… she gets the gold medal and STILL has her thunder stolen by Stumpy and her bronze. Tough gig.

Agyness Deyn
In my favourite part of the London Lite – the text column – someone raised a most excellent point this evening. Why is everybody obsessed with Agyness Deyn? It’s not that I don’t think she’s pretty. She’s pretty stunning. I like her eyebrows especially. (I’m not being sarcastic; I really think they are cool.)

But… there just seems to be something of an imbalance between the level of interest in her and the number of interesting things about her. I can only count one – her eyebrows. Well, I guess that’s two.

I’m so confused.

You know who actually IS interesting? Maureen Johnson is interesting. That’s who.

Maureen Johnson
Oh I love her! Love to the power of love. I don’t remember how I came to find her blog one day a few weeks ago, but I am now obsessed with it.

Maureen is a young adult fiction author from New York, and I have not read a single one of her books. I hadn’t even heard of her before accidentally stumbling upon her blog, but I guess now I will have to read some of her work, because she is like awesome made solid. Funny, insightful, genuine and fabulous.

She is so seriously cool, that I’m left pondering why people like Pete Doherty and Agyness Deyn and Amy Winehouse and whoever else is the Train Wreck Du Jour keep getting our attention and print space, when clever and cool people with lots of interesting things to say like Maureen are left to languish in comparative obscurity.

I would like to make it my mission to let people know the radness they are missing out on if they do not read Maureen’s blog and buy her books. I am going to have Maureen Johnson t-shirts made.

Large Hadron Collider
I am super excited about this. I know it’s old news by now, but aren’t you excited still? The day they kicked this baby off, I was refreshing Radio4’s dedicated Big Bang Day website every five minutes. The updates were mostly just things like, “Oh lovely, now we’re all bathing in champagne and our own cleverness, which we’ve managed to turn into liquid because we’re clever scientists, what a marvellous day this has been”, but it was all just so exciting!

In case you have been living under a rock, the Large Hadron Collider is a big ol’ sciencey kinda machine built at CERN, the world’s biggest particle physics lab in Geneva. Its Big Sciencey Destiny is to fire protons around a huge tunnel the length of the Circle Line (a line on the London Underground, for those of you reading this from outside the centre of the universe) at the speed of light, and smash them together to see what sciencey things happen!

And oh, the things that will happen! Not only could they recreate the conditions surrounding the Big Bang, but apparently this machine could do lots of other fun stuff as well. The people in charge have said it could lead to a cure for cancer or bird flu, and maybe even solve the problem of radioactive waste.

I am sure it is far more complicated than the image in my head, but what I imagine (and please don’t ruin this for me with the real sciencey truth, if you happen to know it) is that the protons speeding around the Circle Line, when they smash into each other, will spontaneously burst into things the likes of which we’ve only dreamed of.

Boom! Look, a little tiny universe, with little tiny humans! There’s me! Look how tiny I am!

Boom! Look, a cure for cancer! It says it right there on the label!

Boom! Look, a unicorn! A garden fairy! GOD! There you are! You’re shorter than we expected, but welcome!

It’s a whole new world of possibilities, people, and I for one am going to start planning a new wardrobe.

So here’s what I needs ta know, aiight.

• Who is the scariest villain of all time?
• Why is he or she so damn scary?
• What makes a good villain?
• Is it more important that a villain has a story behind their villainy, or that they are unpredictable?
• Do men make scarier villains than women?
• What’s scarier in a book: the unseen/unknown, or something that’s physically confronting?

These are my scariest keep-me-up-at-night villains:

The Wheelers

Fucking terrifying mofos from Return to Oz, the 1980s sequel to The Wizard of Oz. This film starred a young Fairuza Balk (the scary chick from The Craft) as Dorothy, and presented a MUCH less cheerful vision of Oz than its 1939 musical counterpart. As well as electro-shock therapy performed on children, Return to Oz featured these terrifying creatures with high-pitched giggles who rode around Oz on four wheels attached to their elongated arms and legs, and wore scary long-haired masks on the top of their heads. You knew they were coming when you heard the squeaky-squeaky of their wheels.

My best friend from high school and I used to walk around the empty streets of his neighbourhood late at night freaking each other out with sudden declarations of, “You know what would be super scary right now? If the WHEELERS just came around that corner. OMG. Totally.”

Mombi

Another treat from Return to Oz (obviously this movie has scarred me for life). Mombi was a seriously sinister princess who had a gallery of women’s heads that she had chopped off real women, and she would wear a different head each day.

At one point, just to crank up the creepiness, Dorothy is wandering through the gallery of disembodied heads, all of which are watching her, and comes across Mombi’s real head in a cupboard. She accidentally wakes it up, the head screams “DOROTHY GAAAAAAAALE!” and then the headless body comes lumbering out of the bedroom to fuck Dorothy up. For fucking reals.

The Gentlemen

Can’t even shout, can’t even cry
The Gentlemen are coming by.
Looking in windows, knocking on doors,
They need to take seven and they might take yours.
Can’t call to mom, can’t say a word,
You’re gonna die screaming but you won’t be heard.

Okay. Now… imagine that said in a sing-song nursery rhyme kind of way by a little girl. Then imagine silent, gliding skull-faced men in immaculate black suits who have stolen the voices of an entire town and are slowly making their way through it overnight, taking seven hearts out of seven chests.

SO brilliantly creepy, you’d never realise it was a plot from an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Hey! It won an Emmy, okay?

There are obviously loads of others that I’ve missed, but these are the three that always stand out in my head (and my nightmares).

So who keeps you up at night?

InSpiral is this little place on Camden Lock, opposite the stables. The place is great for internet, guarana truffles, hippies and rockin’ the ganj. (Sorry, I tried to sound cool just then when I’m quite obviously not. It won’t happen again.)

It’s 10:34 pm, and while two hours ago I was peacefully tapping away and devouring my favourite blog of the week, I have suddenly looked up and found myself surrounded by a large, impromptu group of percussionists.

I guess they must assemble here regularly and it is in fact I who have disrupted their chi and not the other way around. This merry band of minstrels consists of one very bad female guitarist-slash-singer, three guys with very loud bongo drums, someone with something that sounds like a kazoo and a surplus of people who seem to be competing as to who can bring the most haphazardly assembled instrument that makes the least musical sound. Plus one guy who can’t seem to decide what he wants to play, and starts singing loudly at random intervals, apparently when he recognises a song he’s heard before or thinks he may know the lyrics to (he doesn’t).

The prerequisite for membership of this band seems to be having dredlocks and either an item of clothing made from hemp or a funny hat. I wonder if they held auditions.

Oh good lord. I just looked around, and I’m actually surrounded. They’ve blocked my exit. What’s a coffee-chugging, capitalism-loving super-consumer to do?

WTF? (That was a rhetorical question.)

Apparently it’s not just London that’s gone loopy. Things are c-c-c-crazy in Kent as well.

This is the third or fourth time that I’ve heard of someone being knocked from a platform onto train tracks (deliberately, accidentally or otherwise) in the last month.

Standing on the underground platform listening to music or writing a text message I used to idly wonder what would happen if I were to drop my phone, iPod or other precious and essential item onto the tracks. The silly thought in my quaint little brain was that if there was no train due for two minutes or so, I could probably just jump down and grab it.

That was until I learned the track is ELECTRIFIED! Oh yes. Like greased lightning. Oh no, that’s electrifying.

Like there weren’t enough things in London to induce mild panic attacks on a daily basis (I’ll make a list some time). Now I have to worry about people pushing me onto electrified train tracks.

When did we decide steam engines were a bad idea? I would be okay with going back to those.

In a strange turn of events, the piece of really, really good news I got turned into really, really sad news. And the really, really bad piece of news turned on its head and is dandy once again. I think.

Has anyone been watching Summer Heights High? Chris Lilley is a genius.

I promised a Landmark Forum wrap-up, and here it is. Can’t say I don’t deliver.

To be honest it’s not really what I wanted to write about tonight, and I don’t think it’s going to be wildly entertaining for many peeps. But on the other hand, when I was leading up to my forum weekend I was soaking up every blog post about Landmark I possibly could, whether positive or negative. So I feel like now that I’ve done the forum myself, I should contribute to this dialogue in some way.

Annoyingly, most of the reviews I stumbled upon while I was researching the Landmark Forum had one thing in common – EXTREMISM. (Yes, I used all capitals for that. What of it?) It was either the cheerleaders with their verbal arse-lickings of “OMG! The forum has changed my life! I will never be the same again! The last 45 years of my worthless existence have been completely overwritten! In the immortal words of Yazz and the Plastic Population, the only way is up baby!” or the conspiracy theorists whining “Run! Run away children! It’s a cult! They make you give all your money away and they don’t even let you nick out for a loo break!”

They used a lot of exclamation marks, those damn bloggers.

So anyway, hopefully this will be a more balanced review. I’m going to be completely honest about my experience, but it’s just one girl’s opinion really, so make of it what you will.

For those unfamiliar with the Landmark Forum, the basic facts are that it’s a personal development course that runs over three days in London, around the Mornington Crescent area (and also in many other countries around the world). You’re in a room with around 150 others and one forum leader. My leader was David Ure, who was Australian.

Let’s shoot out some highlights and lowlights.

Highlights

• Watching one annoying woman’s face fall in the first ten minutes of the weekend when the leader called her a jerk and she realised it wasn’t going to be three days of rainbows and group hugging after all. Cop that, bitch.
• Putting together the weird little puzzle of events in my life that have led me to where I am with certain people, and then actually being able to wipe that slate clean for good.
• Realising that one of the most important things to me is having the integrity to keep your promises – no matter how big or small - and finding practical ways to implement that possibility in my life.
• Being told that life is indeed meaningless, and feeling excited about that fact instead of depressed.
• Getting real with myself about the insane interpretations I’ve had of things that have happened, and realising that they’re just that – things that happen – and nothing else.

Lowlights

• This one was pretty key for me. Because I had read so much about the forum and knew what to expect, I got everything David was saying straight away. That was slightly problematic, because I felt that the entire weekend I was “getting” everything on an intellectual level, but not having these amazing “Ah-ha!” emotional moments that it seemed every other person in the room was having. I therefore spent a lot of the weekend worrying that I was missing out on some deeply personal revelation. Don’t do this.
• There was a lot of yelling. (On the other hand, there was a lot of laughing too.)
• There were a lot of annoying new-agey types who just wanted to hug everyone and talk about their feelings a lot during the breaks. I tried to discourage this behaviour by pointedly putting in my earphones whenever anyone wearing wooden beads or a multicoloured headscarf started to sidle my way.
• The hard sell – YIKES. To be honest I don’t know if I’d bother showing up on the last night unless you’re particularly keen to do so. They make a big deal about how you really, really, really, really, REALLY have to come on the last night, and then it turns out they just wanted to recruit your friends and sign you up to the next course. I didn’t get anything else out of the last night, personally.

Just to answer any lingering questions you may have after reading some of the craziness lurking online about the forum, its purpose and its effects, here are some quick FAQ.

Is it a cult?
No. The people who call it a cult are stupid and sensationalist. Calling it a cult makes it sound much more glamorous than it actually is. If I join a cult I expect to be mentally seduced by a charismatic bald guy wearing leather sandals, not called a jerk and told to stop acting like a brat by a middle-aged Australian in glasses and a brown cardigan.

But don’t they take all your money and make you dump your boyfriend and stuff?
I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty damn expensive. Especially when you move into the Advanced Course, the Self-Expression and Leadership Program, etc. But on the other hand, who cares? Obviously the people who do this thing can afford to. They’re not paying for it with three years’ wages from sewing Primark handbags in a sweatshop. If you have the money and inclination, more power to you. You’d only have spent it on cocktails anyway.

There was at least one guy from my forum who dumped his girlfriend during the weekend. He did it over the phone too, while she was still at home somewhere in Eastern Europe – which, just quietly, I thought was a bit shit. But frankly, I think anyone who gets dumped as a result of their partner going to the Landmark Forum was probably going to get dumped anyway. The process just got fast-tracked a little, which is likely for the best. If you’re reading this, Eastern European Dumpee, don’t worry about it. The guy DUMPED YOU OVER THE PHONE. And then he hit on me the next day. And he wasn’t very pretty or interesting. You can definitely do better.

But don’t they use brainwashing techniques like the Koreans used on the Americans after the war or whatever?
Um… no.

Well, they do this thing where they make up really arbitrary rules for the weekend, and you’re expected to make a commitment to follow them. For example, one of the rules is no alcohol or painkillers during the full course of the forum. I definitely took some aspirin on the second day and no form of retribution befell me, so relax.

I’ve seen a lot of blogs where people try to justify this rule as, “Oh, they just want you to keep a clear head, it helps you take in the information better” etc, but actually our forum leader gave no such reasoning, and I don’t believe there was any such reasoning.

My guess is that if you can make someone follow a seemingly pointless rule, and follow it to the letter, unquestioningly… then they’re basically giving themselves over to the whole process and will probably shut off that cynical part of their brain that has to question everything all the time. I’m not saying this is a good or bad thing.

Well, actually, it’s probably good. I mean, the thing is, you’ve paid a lot of money to be there, right? You might as well embrace the concept wholeheartedly, even if it’s just for those few days. I wonder if anything I’ve just said makes sense anywhere outside of my own brain.

Don’t they make you recruit all your friends to do it as well? Isn’t it just a big ol’ pyramid scheme?
Yup. That’s marketing, baby. Hey, they’ve gotta make money, they’re not just in this business to make you feel good about your whiny little problems, jackass.

If you’re going to do this thing, you should know that there is a massive push – especially on the final evening – for you to a) bring everyone you know and have them sign up to the next forum, and b) sign up to do the Advanced Course yourself. I didn’t do either of these things. I do actually plan to do the Advanced Course at some point later this year, and I think it will be really fantastic. But I didn’t want to fork out the cash to do it immediately, and I really want to do it when I know I’ve got time for it in my life and I’m excited about it. Not just because someone is in my face saying, “Oh, you’re not signing up for the Advanced Course? Well, that’s okay. It just means that you don’t ‘get it’. You’ve still got some work to do. Yeah, see those people at the back of the room getting out their wallets? They got it. You didn’t. Sucks to be you.”

Honey, I work in marketing and I have a manipulative mother. I’ve heard it all before.

Do they really not let you go to the bathroom?
Don’t be ridiculous. Why does everyone keep saying this? They do encourage you not to be late and not to miss a minute (“That could be just the minute you need to hear the most!” Whatever…), but there’s no burly woman with a crew cut standing at the door waiting to crash-tackle you if you try to leave.

In closing…
Did I enjoy it? Not the whole thing. That weekend was actually one of the most intense experiences of my life. It was – forgive me for this hackneyed cliché (close your eyes children!) – a rollercoaster ride of emotions (cringe. I’ll be back in a minute; I just have to go scrub myself clean).

There were moments at the end of the night when I was at home in the foetal position on my living room floor crying my over-dramatic little eyes out. There were moments when I felt completely empty and pointless as a human being. But there were also moments of elation, and moments when I actually felt a significant shift in my perception of myself, the people in my life, and life in general. A good shift, I mean.

Am I glad I did it? Yep. Will I do the Advanced Course? You betcha. Would I recommend it? Word.

Okay, I’m bored of this now. I’d like to hear from anyone else who’s done the forum though. Are you a cheerleader, a conspiracy theorist, a little of both, disgruntled, excited, elated?

Thoughts? Feelings? Impressions?