Vic Sautter: Week 6

Alright. Let’s get anecdotal.

It has occurred to me that, fun as it is to use my column as a platform for my beliefs and obsessions, I might be taking it too far. I’ve reached this conclusion since this week’s original draft was turned down due to the fact that it was essentially a 900-word tirade about why you should all watch Community.

But seriously, you should all watch Community.

So I’m going old-school column-ing. This is an article that’s just going to be about me and my life. Let’s go.

Umm…

Errr….

Okay, so here’s the snag: my life is kind of dull. My week has consisted of the following: The conclusion of my three year stint as Props Mistress for the Magdalene Musical, a diagnosis of Sinusitis (which followed being told by NHS Direct that I needed to call an ambulance), and getting over the halfway point on my mission to watch all the James Bond Films. (Diamonds Are Forever, if you’re wondering).

And BOOM, we’re back at popular culture. It’s like I have nothing else to talk about. There is genuinely nothing more to me. I don’t have any hilarious lecture stories, because I don’t go to lectures. I’m a finalist, so Cindies is a distant memory, and, since Potential Husband stopped commenting, the love life has dwindled back into nothingness too. Now, I don’t really care about this – in my opinion, popular culture is an awesome thing to be defined by – but it does make writing a column that’s genuinely just about me, Vic Sautter, difficult, and bloody dull.

One glance around my room tells you all you need to know about me. The first thing you notice is the mess. I am NOT a tidy person. But then you look up and see the ‘Things I learned from Doctor Who’ poster, the Hobbit poster, and my beloved Shakespeare posters. Turning around, you’ll find my ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ calendar and a Naruto Leaf Village headband pinned on my notice board, alongside another Doctor Who postcard. Next to that, if he’s out of storage, you’ll see my cardboard cut-out of The Doctor. On the walls, you’ll find postcards of paintings, and a few inspirational quotations I printed out, because I’m a little pretentious. There are precisely three pictures of people I actually know. And they’re only there because I found them and there was a space for them. My room tells you what I like, not who I am.

But why can’t they be one and the same?

In case you haven’t picked this up from previous columns, I don’t like myself very much. Not in a “oh I’m so tragic and misunderstood” sort of way. It’s just I went to an all-girls boarding school and thus have a bizarre combination of intense vanity and self-loathing. Well, saying I don’t like myself is a bit extreme; what I mean is that I am painfully aware of my own shortcomings, yet lack the conviction or determination to act on that and make myself a better person. But I do know that I have pretty damn flawless taste in television, film, literature and music, and so that’s the part I present to the rest of the world because I’m so darn proud of it.

I see nothing wrong with this. Maybe some other people do. Fact is, I’m going to keep hiding in my Doctor Who, Firefly, Community- forged shell. You may not get my ‘inner depths’, but trust me when I say that this is better. It makes me better.

I have no clever way to close, but, as always, television can help me out. Take it, Abed.

“You can do whatever you want; you just have to know what that is. For me, it’s Lucky Charms and TV.” – Abed, Community