Dear Miley Cyrus . . .

Sweetie, I believe I speak on behalf of every single living being who has seen your performance at the VMA’s when I say what the hell was that?

1. Why does your tongue spend more time out of your mouth than inside it?

2. A lot of your dancing involves standing with your legs very far apart. It looks a bit strange, as if the skin between your thighs is chafing, so you’re being extra careful not to let them rub together. Briiiing the legs in bud, they’re not going to bite each other.

3. You seem to have misplaced your clothes. Of course, so did Lady Gaga, so maybe you can schedule a shopping trip together.

4. You also bend over an awful lot. Good for you, I guess, I try that after going for a run, but I can only reach halfway to the floor. Some day I aspire to reach all new lows like you. (that was a pun, and it sounds really catty, but I don’t want to delete it because I’m quite proud of it).

5. I do actually like your new song, wrecking ball. Maybe we could get a half decent music video for that one? Y’know, one where you aren’t channeling your inner stripper? Yes? Wonderful.

The waiting game

Today was an odd day at the beach.

Mama, my little brother Cory and I had just found a spot on the sand to build a long-awaited sandcastle. (Long-awaited because I’ve been saying for years that we should make a sandcastle when we go to the beach, and all we ever do is end up swimming).

Cory has recently shot up in height and dropped his voice an octave, but he’s still a kid enough to build a castle with me, and that’s the important part.

So we’re digging a big hole in the middle of our castle when a woman comes onto the beach in her bikini, listening to her ipod. She stands in the ankle deep water ahead of us and starts to dance.

Mum and I exchange bewildered looks every now and then – dancing girl is really getting into it, busting out all the moves. Sometimes she cartwheels, sometimes she does a backward roll on the sand; sometimes she even drops down to her knees and bends all the way backwards. We do not know what to think of this display.

“Hey,” says Mum, “I reckon that guy coming up on my left is with her.”

Enter: dancing man.

It was a good catch by Mum, I don’t know how she guessed it but the man walked straight up to dancing girl, and they started talking. It was obvious fairly soon that they didn’t know eachother, but simply had a lot to talk about. Suddenly, the man dropped down and did the splitz. He then did a few strange dance moves that looked a little like some form of martial arts, and then carried on talking to dancing girl. After a while, he wandered off into the surf.

Dancing girl continued dancing – and singing – before moseying off down the beach and out of sight.

Strange, we thought.

Meanwhile, Cory and I had built towers with our makeshift buckets (two plant pots and a large yogurt container) and had built a small channel in the hopes that the waves would eventually reach it and pour into the hole in our castle. This is where the waiting game began.

The three of us went to stand in the waves for a while and splash our feet around. None of us had brought our togs, so we had to make do with standing in knee deep water.

After a moment, I turned around to see a little two or three year old girl running over to our castle, stomping down all the towers and then running off again. Then, as a seeming afterthought, she ran back and nicked our yogurt container.

We watched in disbelief. Cory was visibly distressed about the loss of the container – it was the only one of our pots that didn’t have holes in it. We came back to the castle and rebuilt all the towers.

Not long later, as we were standing out in the waves again, we saw the little girl running to our castle once more. Cory broke out in a sprint, but was not able to save all of the towers; she’d already stomped down two again. I’m not proud of what I called her under my breath.

Mum and I watched through tears of laughter as Cory gave the girl a stern talking to, and she tottered off back to her own castle. Fearing that it was unsafe to leave our kingdom unmanned , we returned to the castle, waiting for the waves to come out close to the channel.

While we waited, dancing girl returned, and provided some light entertainment for us. We weren’t the only ones who noticed her antics – some men further up the beach were watching and imitating her.

After she left, we continued to wait. It must have taken at least half an hour, but finally a wave came far enough up to fill the hole in the middle of our towers. Feeling that our mission was complete, we went into the water to wash the sand off our hands before heading home. As if the ocean knew, somehow, a particularly large wave chased us up the beach again, completely demolishing our sandcastle.

“Haha”, said the ocean. “Haha.”

Or at least, that’s how I imagined it.