Hardly Amazing

Adventures In Mundanity

2012-02-01T11:14:00.000Z

Once again, I've plundered the hypothetical depths of the overdraft. This adventure into nothingness comes courtesy of the humble property-owning agency from whom I sought shelter in exchange for money I'll be paying back for the rest of my life and possibly an extra seven years after my own personal oblivion.

The situation plays out thus: in order for me to live in this house for another year (and when I say "year" I use the term loosely to mean "Academic year" which everyone knows is just a fancy way of saying "seven months"), our friendly neighbourhood owners have requested a deposit that's not really a deposit since it's non-returnable. Think of it as more insurance to keep my name, my life and several Earthly possessions (that is to say all of them) shackled unto this place and not have it flogged on to other students looking for some kind of shelter. Naturally, myself and fellow tennants were given prior notice that this would need to be paid, but no prior notice of a "deadline date" as it were. Cue Saturday morning where the wee letter sits on the wee mat at the front door and says we have until Monday to meet their insurance demands. Okay, that sounds a lot more dramatic than it actually should be, but the point I'm attempting to get across (rather lazily) is that given just two days notice, I'm now fresh out of money and will to live.

For the record, when queried on the short notice, it turns out a bit of bad luck, honest human error and a mischievious pixie (probably) were to blame for not giving us (or any other student renting property from them) the appropriate notice, so I can't chastise them too much for it. I'm not badmouthing the company I let this room from, just having a good ol' moan and gripe at an undesirable situation. Translation: if you're reading this and happen to be affiliated with my homeowners, PLEASE DON'T KICK ME OUT!!!

Anyway, with the loan company's money all gone, I'm now burying myself comfortably into the bank's lovely little safety net. Comfortable, yes, but worrying also. If I stay here too long, I fear mesh patterns embedding themselves into my skin and tattooing me with "I don't have my own money, I'm living off other means, I'm scum, berate me!" It is because of this, I've had to, for the first time in over three years, go out to find a job. Now me, sweet innocent me, has been trundling along in fairy-head mode where everything is fine and dandy, things will definitely work out the way I imagine them with no problems or complications at all and life will float on by with the greatest of ease and calm and splendour on the song of a bluebird and cool summer breeze. In case you weren't sure, that laboured metaphor was supposed to tell you that after working for the three years in the same retail outlet, my familiarity and experience within the store would grant me easy, if not instant access to a different branch of the same store chain. After all, they like me so much back home, how could I possibly fail?

I enter; copies of CV in bag, confidence in my head, certainty in my heart, a pocketful of dreams and Paramore (or something) on the iPod. Nothing can bring me down! My luck continues, the first staff member of this particular branch that I come across is a young woman, a friendly looking young woman, dressed in what I know to be the uniform blouse of one in a supervisory position in this particular store chain. I approach.

"Excuse me? Hi. I wonder if you could tell me if you currently have any part-time job vacancies?"
Almost instantly my polite and smiley, confidence driven question is answered: "No."

Aha, a stumbling block. One might have expected such a thing. No matter.

"Could I hand you a CV just in case anything opens up?" I offer, knowing that upon viewing, she'll realise that I would be more than capable to fill the space left by the next victim of a brutal sacking. Again, my discoursal adversary greets my humble polite offer with a syllable: "No."

It's a weird kind of exchange. The answers to my queries are negative, but they're accompanied with a smile; the kind of smile one must always maintain in the retail business, else risk execution. Alas, the optimism-house sort of smile paired up the rejection of my employment query seemed to mock me. This woman was mocking me. This woman stood there and went "nyeh-nyeh-neh-nyeh-nyeh", stuck her thumb to her nose, wiggled the rest of her fingers in front of her face, blew a raspberry at me with just the right amount of spit-flecks and essentially said "I have a job and you don't! This is my job, you can't have it, it's mine! So nyehh" all with a simple smile.

Somewhere in the deepest recesses of my brain, I had anticipated this, or an event similar, in which I might require multiple copies of a CV. It just meant that, rather than cast the majority aside after my place was definitely secured in my first choice of employment, I would have to wander the town and offer my part-time retail services elsewhere. But as it happens, nobody wanted me. I don't think it was anything personal, nobody wanted anyone! Eventually, a whole three places felt some kind of sympathy and took a specially printed sheet of A4 off me with the vague promise of keeping my words in their offices, you know, "just in case anything opens up."

Basically, in almost 1,000 words, I just told you how I'm failing to make an independent living at the moment, but since many people are doing that these days I don't see how my adventures in mundanity are any more significant. Let's take you for example. If you've made it this far, you've just read all this. Your life must be even worse.

Just something to think about.

The Ultimate Inevitability

2012-01-25T17:06:00.000Z

Because life gets so boring on occasion, I end up resorting to daydreaming for a considerable portion of time. It's the only time my brain gets to cut loose and run riot and other mildly anarchic sounding phrases as well. Sometimes, the brain strays too far from the boundaries (even though there are no boundaries, but for the sake of this I'm declaring boundaries) of normality and delves into an as yet non-existent future regarding many different scenarios including, but not limited to, future career prospects, future relationships, future living situations, becoming famous, becoming homeless, winning the X Factor, buying an iPad, eating a Terry's Chocolate Orange and, probably most scarily and morbidly of all, imagining a close friend's funeral.

As humans, we're intelligent enough to not only be aware of our own mortality but also to blank it from our minds completely like it'll never ever happen to us in a million billion years for ever and ever, Amen. Somehow, my consciousness didn't get the memo (either that or it was just drifting off, not paying attention to reality again) meaning it occasionally super-fast-forwards to the ultimate inevitability. We will die. You, right there, yes, you reading this now. You will die. Sorry, but... it's true. Don't blame me. Don't blame anyone, there's nobody you can blame, except biology I suppose, but even then it's difficult to assign conceptual blame to a scientific field. If it's any consolation, I'll die too. Nothing special about me, I will cease to go on living one day, and so will every single one of the seven-billion amongst us. The thing is we won't all pop off at the same time on the same day. Some of us might make it to a ripe old age and just give up when we can't see or hear what's happening on Countdown any more. Some of us might unknowingly attempt to cross the road a second or two too early. Some of us might fall victim to incurable diseases or maladies. Again, for that one, blame biology... if you can.

This notion of death not having a schedule has also been picked up on by a Facebook app which I believe is called "If I Die" (it might not be that exactly, but since I can't be bothered to go check that's what I'm going to say it's called, that way I'm not directly advertising it just in case I so happen to be correct). Apparently, using this app, you can write a backlog of status updates to be released onto your active Facebook profile after you're done with this existential plane. Essentially, you're zombified through the medium of text, able to provide your loved ones with witticisms from beyond the grave. If it were me, I'd probably opt for vaguely inappropriate, sad reminders that I'm dead, such as "still dead, sorry bout that" or "not coming back today... or ever, lol" or "I suppose Belinda Carlisle was right, heaven IS a place on earth since I'm in HELL!!!"

Back to my stupid brain, though, and interestingly during my morbid daydreams, I never envisage my own demise, but I suppose that's mostly because it'd difficult to perceive imaginary events in my own future life after it's ended. That, plus I'm an egotist. However, imagining other people's funerals seems to be a common occurrence in my mindspace. Not common in the way that it happens every single time my brain runs off, more common in the way that Gunther may or may not show up in any given episode of Friends. Furthermore, whenever he does show up, his appearance is only minimal, almost background and he never has a main plotline focus of his own. In imagining such an event, I instantly do two things; the first of which being chastising and yelling at my mind for coming up with such a horrific thought and forcing it to stop thinking about it at once. Naturally the brain retorts with the idea that once a thought has occurred, it cannot be unthought, therefore bugging me with the notion that, in my mind, I've just killed off someone close to me and I do not wish to jinx the fact that they could actually die at some point in the near future since, in my head, that would make me entirely responsible. Which leads me to the second thing that I do; I instantly realise how much this person actual means to me and has influenced my life on some subconscious level. Then I go out of my way to make sure I keep in close contact with that person in the hope that my continued presence before them makes them feel somewhat good.

Basically, you're not really a close friend to me unless I've killed you in my mind and felt sad about it. However, since I hypothetically ended whoever is reading this by pointing out your future death, whoever you are, you are now apparently very important to me. Now don't you just feel loved?

Time

2012-01-04T17:45:00.000Z

Whatever happened to time? When you're a child time seems infinite, school drags on forever, Friday night feels miles away from Monday morning. As you get older, you wake up, make breakfast, eat it, watch TV and suddenly it's night. And I'm not just saying that from a TV addict's perspective. Whilst, yes, I do get lost in television's radiant, plasma-fuelled glow for hours on end and never want to unplug it because it's my bestest friend in the whole wide world who I know will never ever leave me, even putting Scrubs repeats on (because Friends repeats now belong to subscription telly) for an hour or so seems to drain the day away.

Of course, it could just be the simple fact that it's still Winter and our top half of the Earth gets fewer hours of sun exposure than them southerners (*shakes fist angrily and mumbles 'grr Australia'*) that makes time feel fleeting. Statistically, we get approximately an hour and a half of daylight now and things will remain that way until mid-May. (Actually, we get more like eight hours, but with our adult perception of time it feels like a mere ninety minutes.) I suppose this is what makes me so glum every this-time-of-year-again. We're so engulfed in darkness that moods have to, by law, be lower than a Jamaican limbo champion competing on the seabed. Because of this, I start making a list of things I should do, things I need to do, things I want to do, and things I know I'll never do - all such things appear in all of these lists - in an attempt to make me feel better about life. But that fact that I'm hypothesising about doing things and not actually doing them makes me feel bad about myself, even though I'm very aware that there are practicalities as to when and where I can do certain things and whenever I do have a chance to get on with something the motivation glands within me go straight to sleep the moment it turns dark, making it so that after 4pm I essentially become a brain dead moron with my head tilted to one side and a drooling tongue lolling out the corner of my mouth as I sit staring at a blank wall. Either that or a television.

The good thing about keeping time though is that I get to memorise the schedules of certain programmes that will televisualise themselves onto my eyes and ears and make me want to live, at least until the end of that particular episode, which reminds me, Scrubs is on again in a bit.

A New Calendar...

2011-12-31T16:03:00.000Z

According to the common Gregorian calendar, today is the last one before the calendar runs out and has to start all over again for the 2,012th time since people started counting (except if you're in Samoa). It is because of this momentous fact, that there's nowhere else left to go after December except to go back January, that people decide to drink and shout descending numbers at each other as the clock approaches midnight.

This time last year, I was unaware when the exact second of midnight-approaching happened for reasons too complex to get into... but let's try anyway:

In what would later be known in a pointless blog post by someone recalling the event as "the great break-up of 2010", I spent the evening with a large group of people, many of whom have no problem with me personally, but many of whom have personal problems with others of the many, but tolerated each other for the simple fact of getting along and being civil and other phrases which suggest a mutual disdain masked with friendliness. (Reading that back seems like I'm calling such people two-faced, which I'm not really but incidentally that does coincide with January being named after the Roman god Janus - the god of new beginnings often visually depicted as having two faces, one looking back retrospectively and one looking to the future. Funny how stuff links up.) As the stroke of January approached, the air between parties became bitter, or maybe it was because it was Winter. Either way, by 11:45pm it was clear that one lot of people wished to vacate via taxi; a taxi which did not arrive until 11:53pm (or something, I was fairly tipsy by this point and being fed information that someone hates someone else and someone said things about someone's dress or something and someone's hair was probably pulled). Our friend, the taxi, managed to get a group of six (probably) of us to somewhere else by the time 11:59pm came around. Upon leaving the taxi to walk somewhere more indoorsy, someone probably collapsed onto the snow (or slush) covered ground and fireworks went off in the distance all around. Any single one of these seconds I was living through could have been the momentous midnight maker, but with no TV, radio, or Greenwich-synchronised time-telling device to tell us exactly which one it was, that entire walk from the taxi to the front door became magical. Except it wasn't. It was a walk to the front door after getting out a taxi after a night out. The world carried on as normal, just as it always does.

I haven't become cynical of celebrating New Year (as many of the people who can see the crap I put on Facebook might often think), but there are those who use the humble realm of Facebook to proclaim how the new year is an excuse for a new start, a new me, a new diet, a new change of underwear, a new dog, a new calendar... Somehow I don't particularly see the appeal in altering my outlook on life or eating habits based solely on the fact that the little '2011' in the corner of my computer screen is henceforth to be replaced with a '2012'. My outlook on life has always been mediocre with occasional hits and occasional misses and I don't believe that any force or power on the planet will take notice and make the next 365 days (or is it 366 this time?) filled with chocolate and rainbows and boobs.

This portion of the Internet will still exist and occasionally churn out gormless crap (like this) erratically and sporadically, despite my best intentions to keep doing this on a weekly basis. The fact that it's been over three weeks since the last one and that today is Saturday just proves how incoherent my posting-every-Wednesday mentality has become. Having said that, don't expect anything too special on the 4th, if anything at all.

Incidentally, once again I don't have anyone to kiss at midnight.

The Festive Spirit

2011-12-07T00:03:00.002Z

In the midst of hand-scrawled sheets of lined A4, books big enough to squash rats, clothes that haven't been hung up again days after being discarded onto the futon, half a packet of malted milks, an empty mug, a plate with nay but a splattering of disused tomato ketchup left upon it and the cold air of a house in December without the central heating on, he sits at the computer, in between finishing one mammoth essay and preparing to start another, and tries to collect all the thoughts and musings he's had brewing up over the last three weeks. And, do you know what? He's gone blank again.

Now that December's actually arrived, I don't feel so cynical about people getting excited in preparation for Christmas any more. Sure, I don't exactly get into the festive spirit until about 7pm on Christmas Eve - and even then I quickly snap out of it by the time The Queen's on - but I don't mind others getting excited during the month of December. But this year seems to have taken the proverbial candy cane. My Facebook News Feed (because I'm, like, so up to date, you get me?) faced a torrent of festive, and somewhat illiterate, abuse from the easily distracted. "omg soo exited for xmas" was just one of the fictional examples I just made up to give you the impression of what I faced... in the middle of November.

You know who I blame? Coca-Cola. Well, not necessarily the drinks manufacturers themselves, but the infamous traditional television advert that comes this time each year. For those who may be reading this from Mars or have been under extremely heavy sedation for a vast chunk of life, the Christmas-themed advert for Coca-Cola depicts a morbidly obese, myopic, elderly man, who clearly hasn't shaved since Take That first split up, riding around streets littered with as many people as there are snowflakes in a giant red truck with an obscene amount of fairy lights stapled to it so that he can pass around retro-style glass Coca-Cola bottles to children. Essentially, Band Aid (and subsequently, Band Aid 20) needn't have sang "Do They Know It's Christmas?" at all if only Coca-Cola felt like they could've just cancelled Africa's debt with a snap of their fingers. Nevertheless, for the masses, the first sight of the eagerly anticipated Coca-Cola Christmas advert is the first big signifier that Christmas is on the way. The fact that this momentous occasion happened in November this year made me somewhat irritated at the socio-cultural phenomenon of the Facebook-status boom. That plus it happened during the results show of the X Factor, which just makes me wonder why Facebook itself didn't just develop a consciousness and shoot itself there and then after a vast activity overload.

For others though, the apparently now sadly departed Toys R Us TV spot (which, for the sake of nostalgia, I have included a little linky there) gets people all of a merry. And why do I call it "apparently now sadly departed"? Because even though Toys R Us are still advertising on TV this festive season, they've given the advertising promo a complete revamp. Gone is the magical place we drive down the animated road towards. Gone is Geoffrey the Giraffe, who assured us there are millions of toys all under one roof. Now we get a CGI Toys R Us catalogue with the enchanting, night-time singy voice being replaced by someone who got fired from singing The Tweenies' theme tune and told us there is such a child label as a "Toys R Us kid". For the benefit of all that is right with the world, I won't be including a link to it for two reasons: 1) You can probably catch it on TV right now as it's currently running as opposed to the 90s advert which, as you might have guessed, is not, and 2) because I don't like it.

Other cultural signifiers which allude to the oncoming of the Christmas period come from the world of popular music. "Christmas" can easily be defined as a musical genre in its own right, with the cheesy, the sublime, the heartwarming, The Darkness and the easily-sing-along-able-to all featuring at this time of the year. Songs like the aforementioned Band Aid effort, Shakin' Stevens, Wizzard and Slade have all integrated themselves into the subconscious of many that it's hard not to enjoy them, "Last Christmas" is a nice song haunted by the fact that it was, in fact, Wham! that sang it in the first place, Cliff Richard will always be present and by the time it's taken me to finish this entire piece, Mariah Carey still won't have finished squawking the intro to "All I Want For Christmas Is You".

For many though, the recent resurgence in popularity for festive slanging match "Fairytale Of New York" has gone from strength to strength, which is unfortunate since it took the untimely death of singer Kirsty MacColl in the December of 2000 to boost it. Since then, the song's been praised by many and criticised by the prudish (mostly because is has the word "faggot" in it and non-gay people think it's probably offensive even though they have no concept of context) and has time and time again been cast into the shadow of Christmas number 2, or 3, or 5, or whatever, never managing to reach the festive top spot.

As for myself, I care a great deal for The Pogues' Christmas effort, but that was mostly because I like to go for the underdog, the relatively obscure and unknown and the generally underrated things in life. However, with so many people feeling the love for "Fairytale Of New York", while I don't deny it being a definitive Christmas song, I feel like I have to have a new underdog, a new joint favourite. And luckily, two years ago I rediscovered a Christmas song from my childhood. And I know I remember it from my childhood because my sister told me recently that she held the same sentiments for this particular tune, even after our mother told both of us she was completely unaware of it. Who's the crazy one now, hmmm? Anyway, as much as it appears around Christmas, Kate Bush's "December Will Be Magic Again" revolves around, well, just that, December. As such, I've been doing well to stick to a regime of listening to the song at least once a day from the first of this month, which, I suppose, is more than I can say for vowing to myself to post to this thing once a week. Give me another three weeks to get back to this.

Meanwhile, I'll probably forget to listen to Kate Bush somewhere around December the fifteenth.

In Bed

2011-11-16T14:04:00.000Z

According to Horoscopes, it's currently the lunar high. Basically what that means is that the moon is presently in a position in its orbit that, from an Earthly viewpoint, makes it correspond with other stars in the sky in such a way that it casts positive feelings upon the peoples of this planet, and it also proves why I'm somewhat sceptical of astrology. I'm not feeling such positivity. I'm far from feeling high. The only thing high about me is my hair which, due to excessive sleeping and lack of hair washes, is stuck in an upright position one could easily assume to be a "bed-head" look or possibly an audition for Jedward.

With that in mind, I wouldn't so much say I'm depressed. However, with Winter very much here, that ol' Seasonal Affective Disorder has managed to kick in again (and for the record, whoever came up with the name of a mood-affecting mental problem which can be condensed into the anachronism SAD clearly shows severe signs of sarcasmic bastardery). Okay, I've never been officially diagnosed with what is essentially wintery depression, but I'm not denying that every end-of-year for the last six I've managed to (for no reason other than because I feel like it) not eat, think about how little money I have, and stay in bed for large portions of the day. Hell, I awoke at 11:30 this morning desperately needing to pee and it took me until after 1pm to actually get up and go. And what did I do for that hour-and-a-half of lying perfectly still? Why, a conversation with the self about... something... or something else, I can't remember which. Either way, it wasn't important enough for me to remember. Coming back to the present time as I type this, I'm back in bed and it's at this time I'm thankful that I'm a complete douche with a laptop as a well as a desktop.

Part of the reason for a poo-poo mood at this present time stems from my frustration at the University; my reasoning for this taking us back to the days of High School. Initially, we're told to prepare ourselves for deadlines so far in advance we could take the next two years off if we get a move on. That's why at this level of education I've fully expected to have preparations for assignment work (due in during the first week of December) drilled into me from day one. It's now two or three weeks before deadline and I still have nary an idea of how I'm supposed to approach such work. It's got to the point where I'm fully believing that the University is worse at keeping track of assignments than I am, and now we're at this point, I'm reluctant to even do them if it means I have to move at least three inches from this bed.

There was probably going to be more to this, but since it's taken me over an hour to get through that much it's quite clear I'm not even up to tapping away at this thing any more. Or using my brain to come up with more words. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a whole lot of nothing else to do today.

Showers

2011-11-09T15:54:00.000Z

I've arrived here with a brain all of a mess, with nothing in particular to focus on, with a cup of tea I somehow forgot to put the teaspoon-and-a-half of sugar in but have been drinking it anyway because I simply can't be bothered going back to the kitchen.

I'm cold, so much so that I'm still shivering under three layers of clothing and a double duvet next to a radiator set to 22°C.

It's dark. The kind of "Winter's coming", four-in-the-afternoon dark where it's barely actually dark outside, but dull - the sun's on its way back under the horizon; a horizon blocked by the row of terraced house outside my window (which has the blinds shut, mind). I don't have the room light on, meaning that the only way I can see this keyboard as I type stuff on it is by crouching over it with screwed up eyes next to the fluorescent white currently projected from this monitor.

I need to pee, but I'm hellbent on finishing this first, even though I don't know where it's going or how long it will end up being. Incidentally, I just farted.

I have other work to be doing; work I should've been doing earlier in the week, or even late last week, but I haven't. Naturally you may think I've been leading an unbelievably interesting life in the time that's passed. I haven't. I've arsed about mostly, and when I haven't arsed about, I've been thinking of arsing about (is that how you spell "arsing", or does it have an 'e' in it?), and when I haven't been thinking of ars...thating about, I've been asleep, and when I haven't been any of the above, I've been so bored I've resorted to taking a shower because just sitting there makes me feel like I'm collecting dust, or germs, or procrastination mildew. I've been so bored I've showered an awful lot. I've had more showers this week than I have since April 2006... probably.

I'm currently down to one meal a day through current eating habits; two if you count a packet of instant noodles as a bona fide meal. I don't feel undernourished. I don't feel hungry at all. I could probably pass for anorexic if I didn't live so close to an onslaught of takeaways and kebab houses.

I keep thinking "there's got to be some story to this", but there isn't, and probably never will be. This is not a narrative. This is not a sharing of my opinion over a certain matter. This is an assortment of last minute, here-and-now observations I've decided to note down in a desperate attempt to force myself to fill this space up a bit more of a Wednesday.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off for a shower.

The Chilli/Chocolate Combination

2011-11-02T13:11:00.000Z

So here it is, as an 89th episode spectacular (and mostly because I can't be bothered tocome up with anything new today but want to stick to my once-a-week, doing-one-of-these-every-Wednesday kinda thing), my first (and so far only) published bit of rambling. Huzzah and joy and such. You can see the original broadcast of this one courtesy of those lovely people at Gumbo Press who make Word Gumbo, free and online. Based on its second-issue-from-August theme of "Opposites", this little bit goes on in very much the same way as the rest of my bollocks, in the way that I have a boring life which I attempt to make more interesting by using long words. And now that my back-up option is gone, it means from now on I'll have to actually write something every single week. Enjoy a wee slice of my typings past.

Have you ever tried chilli and chocolate? I haven't, but I imagine it to be absolutely awful. Although, having said that I don't really like chilli, so the fact that I'm using it in an argument seems somewhat redundant. It's not the chilli per se, but all hot and spicy food in general. Evidently, my tongue lacks the capacity it would normally need to have what you could call an "extensive palette", and instead decides to ignore any taste provided by such spices in lieu of screaming out 'Oh, my God, why? WHY?! The pain! Seven-thousand fire-tipped needles of pain, na na na, na na na, no we don't like vindaloo'. Fortunately, my tongue doesn't have a mouth of its own thus can't verbalise such exclamatory-ness whenever faced with such a situation at a formal dinner party (although, the idea of a formal dinner party that serves vindaloo as its main course seems a whole other situation altogether). But I digress...

I could've said "Have you ever tried cheese and chocolate?" since I can cope with cheese. I quite like cheese. In fact, half the time I order a pizza in, I'm a little tempted to leave all the extra toppings, ask them to hold the tomato sauce, and just forget the bread while they're at it in the hope that they'd be so kind as to just bring me a box of melted cheese, but I'm getting away from myself again here. I can't imagine cheese and chocolate being too complimentary. I mean for one thing, they both start with "ch" and end with "e"; it's a marriage made in Hell. (Moments after typing that, I noticed that "chilli" also starts with "ch" so had to add the thing about the "e" at the end too to make my point somehow appear valid.)

But I suppose the reason people like the chilli/chocolate combination comes down to their apparent oppositeness. Things just tend to work well together when accompanied by something on the other end of the scale: light and shade, sweet and sour, Philip Schofield and Holly Willoughby, they all manage to not overpower the other one. There's even more, an almost endless list of opposites that attract (which I won't go into on account of the fact that I'm already about 400 words into this and the fact that I'd like to go to bed sometime tonight), so why did I open with the food one?

Well it would be a bit rubbish if I didn't answer that question considering (a) the question has now been imposed unto the world, and (b) you didn't actually ask it, dear reader, but are now filled with moderate intrigue as to why I posed the question in the first place in the vague hope you get an answer to satisfy the aforementioned intrigue, meaning that I must now (a) come up with something which I suppose could validly be considered an appropriate answer, and (b) not go to bed.

Umm...

Ahh...

Oh, OK, how's this for ya? I've very recently become somewhat addicted to culinary ventures. I suppose (in my head) that's a fancy way of saying 'I like cooking', but of course it gets pretty tough trying to cook something exquisite when you're a student and you're essentially living off beans, mouldy bread and half an onion. Also I have a not-so-broad palette, did I mention? Therefore, I get my cookery fix from the magic picture-emitting machine in the corner of the room. I suppose I like to think that if this whole University course ends up falling through, or leaving me with no options, or Deal Or No Deal doesn't accept my application, or it does but when I get there I don't get my hundred grand, then at least I could try my hand at cooking.

Maybe not professionally, mind. That whole 'yes chef, no chef, three haggises full chef' malarkey, where Gordon Ramsay ends up saying the f word just because he fuckin' feels like it would probably get me down after a short while. But if I managed to end up in a Greasy Spoon somewhere, making tried-and-tested breakfasts for construction workers, et cetera, it wouldn't be the most terrible thing to me. Because right now, I know terrible. Terrible is sitting in front of the TV, watching people making the perfect duck à l'orange with glazed carrots and dauphinoise potatoes and other such things that sound really fancy while I'm chowing down on my third packet of Super Noodles of the day (and my sixteenth packet of the week).

So there. There's opposites. There's me, sat in a pokey little flat boiling a kettle for a living, versus the chefs working some amazing culinary processes on the best cuts of meat imaginable. I guess you could say that's more juxtaposition, or contrasting, but for the purposes of this little (well, I say 'little') rant about nothing in particular, I'm going to call it opposites. So there we have it. Opposites like chilli and chocolate complement each other, opposites like braised beef and wafer-thin ham make you feel terrible.

I suppose you could say they're opposites.

Cheesing Hell

2011-10-26T12:05:00.000+01:00

Language is such a bitch, very much in the way that one person's "bitch" is another's "naughty word". It's just as subjective as philosophy, religion or social standing, and yet it's one of the key things that's supposed to keep us all united in the same frame of reference.

In the flashback portion of this post, I'll be taking you way back to my A-Level English Language days. I studied Sixth Form in my old High School, thus knew the teachers from the age of eleven. Therefore, reasons for not swearing in school were two-fold:

1) On some moral level, you didn't want the teachers to have a negative view of you as an uncouth, monstrous, little devil child.
2) On some selfish level, you didn't want to get detention.

During one of my first English Language classes at the A-Levelly age of sixteen, therefore, when asked to read out from a given sheet, one girl hesitated when she came to the word "shit". That dilemma hit. I could read her mind.

"Do I say it and risk being told off for swearing in school? Do I say it as if it's just a normal word and no-one cares about its use? Do I skip it as if it doesn't even exist?"

It was at this pause that the teacher stepped in and said the thing I made you read through all this expositional bollocks for, the thing that stuck with me in regards to my view on, not just "swear" words, but on language as a whole.

"Don't be afraid of language. As linguists, we're here to study language, and part of that means looking at language which may seem bad, and why it may be used in this way."

OK, that's not exactly what she said; please remember it was over six years ago that this linguistic epiphany came about, but that's pretty much the message I got from it. Now, I wouldn't particularly call myself a linguist. I don't study language for a living. If anything, I observe it as a hobby, and the fact that I do that just proves to you how boring I actually am. But the general point I'm trying to get across here is that I am not afraid of the various uses of language and all the linguistic possibilities that language has to offer. (Are you bored of me using the word "language" yet? You should be. Anyway...) The fact that I see little problem with words in this way makes me wonder why other people (who are not myself) do. This means I have to crawl out of this narcissistic shell of mine and take into account that, yes, there are other people on this planet, and yes, their minds do work differently to mine.

To explain the random mess of my mindstuff slightly less erratically, let's take a typically formally-unacceptable word. Pretty standard one: "fuck".

"Fuck" exists. You might like it, you might not. Whether you like it or not, it exists.
        Fuck.
        F-U-C-K
        /fʊk/
        fuh-uhh-kuh
It is fact in both combinations of written letters and phonetics. There is no denying the existence of the word "fuck". Complaining about the existence of "fuck" is like complaining about the existence of Simon Cowell: people may not like it, but nevertheless, it is fact.

However, when it comes to the meanings of words, "fuck" has - over time - adopted generally negative, unpleasant and occasionally uncouth connotations. Yet there is nothing within that set of letters, or sounds, to suggest such negativity. "F" and "U" both appear next to each other in the word "fun", while "C" and "K" can often be used to refer to items of stylish mens' clothing. Otherwise, the "CK" combination can be found in many words; one such word being "lucky", a fairly positive-feeling word, n'est-ce pas? Therefore, those who claim not to like the word "fuck" whenever it's used cannot possibly disapprove of the word itself, but rather the connotations it conjures up in their minds, which just seems totally ironic considering that those who disapprove of the word would, in fact, be the last people you'd expect to have such uncouth thoughts in their heads in the first place.

It's by this logic that I do not particularly regard "fuck" to be a "bad" word. In fact, I'd probably view it in the same way I view the word "baby" in that they both consist of four letters: three consonants and a vowel. That is, of course, only looking at the words as entities in their own right. If I were to look at the meanings of both of them, I'd view them differently, seeing as "baby" denotes a human infant, all cute and pudgy and running around and screaming the house down, whereas "fuck" indicates an expression of sudden shock that the irate parent may exclaim when the infant starts accidentally drinking bleach, or (in some respects) could refer to the physical action that functioned as a precursor to the resulting existence of the baby.

If, for some strange, fucked-up reason, the various meanings of "fuck" were reversed with that of another word - "cheese", for instance - then "fuck" would not actually be considered a bad word. If its meaning could be defined as "a dairy product made from curdled milk", "fuck" would seem like a fairly normal word indeed; whereas any use of the word "cheese" in television broadcasts before 9pm would be bleeped out, teenage boys would talk about "cheesing" as many girls as possible and the stressed out parent would scream "cheesing hell" as the baby's stomach turned inwards on itself after guzzling too much Cillit Bang.

Anyway, that was just my general observation on language as a whole. I don't really think there was any fucking point to this, except I do like the fact that it gave me an excuse to say "fuck" a lot.

Pseudo-Mathematics And Marker Pens

2011-10-19T01:28:00.000+01:00

Some hours after my last feeble attempt at begging for attention using words oft found in your local dictionary, I managed to cast off the shackles of monotony and - by extention - stop using clichés by entering into the social realm of public houses, or rather public house, singular. This allowed me an opportunity to evaluate human psychology and witness ulterior motives, which may transpire amongst competitors, through the medium of pseudo-mathematics and marker pens. I speak, of course, of Bingo.

The opportunity to experience the respective insanities and mundanities of human existence, however, flew over my head quicker than explaining the definition of the word 'existentialism' to somebody from Essex. From the moment my eyes latched onto the skin-thin slips of paper and multicoloured blobbers (which I believe are called 'dabbers', but I'm calling 'blobbers' for the purposes of perceptive accuracy), my whole being became transfixed with the idea that this game of chaos was, in fact, the most important moment in my life thus far. When that round inevitably fell through, the next round of number-mentioning became the most important moment in my life thus far. And so on, and so et cetera in that fashion, until either the night ended or the random number generator ran out of double-A juice.

All concept of human behaviour, social interaction and bladder functions suddenly need not matter in this domain of fat ladies and little ducks - none of whom, unfortunately, made it. The announcement-of-the-numbers ceremony took place in a much more civilised manner, without any berating of overweight women or undersized Anatidae. Naturally, I felt somewhat cheated by this, but you know what, fuck it, I'm playing bingo, and damn it all if I don't win.
I didn't win.
DAMN IT ALL!
Except that's a lie. I did actually win, and my life's sole purpose as far as the night was concerned had been fulfilled on the final game of the evening. My prize: no selection of prize.

The Generation Game-esque conveyor belt of mediocre prizes graced the bar with its presence for most of the evening. A toilet brush here, a money box there, a set of men's deodorants, a toaster, a desk fan, a pack of bingo markers, a cuddly toy; it gave all the feel of a village fête raffle or an explosion in the SmartPrice section of Asda. However, along with my prize-selecting abilities being relinquished, I was granted ownership of the final prize of the night. (I'm going to stop using the word "prize" now, for reasons which will become apparent in the next string of words or so.) So lo, and behold, the white box with the green stripe and the picture of white plates blending into its purgatorial scenery: a plain, bland, Asda-brand Dinner Set.

Huzzah! Now I can dine! Joyousness and other such jubilant feelings. Except not really because I could do that anyway. And even if I couldn't, I could've anyway. Explain? Alright, regard:

When I set up dwelling in this new house, the three of us (the people what live here) brought along our own belongings. For the kitchen, this means the cupboards currently overflow with three mismatched sets of cutlery, utensils, cheese graters, three mismatched sets of pots, pans, baking trays, three mismatched sets of cups, mugs, glasses, and a whole mindfuckery (which I'm using as the collective noun) of plate, bowls and dishes. For three people, it's fairly difficult to get through nineteen plates in a short space of time, and believe me, we've tried. There have been times when the pile next to the sink has multiplied drastically, growing like the mould on the very plates themselves. We don't need any more plates. On my Christmas list to Big Red Dumbledore, I will not be asking for plates. Trust me on this. Meanwhile, as part of the moving-in ceremony, the woman what birthed me (whom, I'm told, is commonly referred to using the name "mother") granted me with the very same SmartPrice Dinner Set I'd go on to 'win' some weeks later. Cheers Mum. Excellent foresight.

Now the white and sparing green boxes live in my kitchen, along with all the other white and sparing green items of food which grace my cupboard so. I live the SmartPrice way now. And no, I'm not advertising Asda. I'm not advocating Asda. I'm not a plant, nor a mole, hired to attract more customers to the consumer conglomerate that used to have adverts that condoned self-spanking. I'm not getting paid for using their name in this way, for Tesco's sake; I just told you I'm living SmartPrice!

Nothingness Overdrive

2011-10-12T15:40:00.000+01:00

Having to live as an adult - because "overgrown child" isn't as acceptable in modern day society - means I'm rapidly running out of time to do nice things. The arduous tasks of going to classes, self-imposed studying, buying food, cooking food, eating food, defecating, cleaning, tidying, walking, even waking just seem to occupy every second of the day, if each day lasted approximately 173 hours. I've resigned to the fact that I'm simply existing rather than living right now, and will do for a considerable chunk of the foreseeable future. Even socialising feels like such a chore when I have to walk through the cold and dark, especially considering that sometimes I'd prefer to be alone and lie motionless with my head propped in a fixed, non-moving position directed at the moving-picture rectangle. Either that or sat bolt upright holding some form of interactive game-playing control device and doing the interacting; either way, the TV's involved. The fact that I've managed to put aside twenty-or-something minutes to aimlessly tap a bunch of letters into this thing seems nothing short of a miracle these days.

But surely, ya daft idiot, that means you have an awful lot to talk about from your past week of adventures, rather than moan on about how boring you feel your life is?
Ah, but that's just it. I find it unbelievably boring to even think of such misadventures, since that would actually involve active thought on my part. I'd much prefer it if, when life happens, it managed to be interesting and the memories of experiences gone by stayed inside this sieve-like mind, but life (being life) doesn't like to cooperate like that, instead opting to occur as monotonously as possible. Case in point, you just read a paragraph or two in which absolutely nothing has happened. Ha! Take that, you! You just got owned by life!

Even so, when something interesting does feel like happening, it tends to be on the verge of sleepytime, when the brain goes "Hey, I've got an idea" and the rest of the body shoves a tranquiliser in its gullet and rubs its neck 'til it goes down and forces it to slumber and leaves me to ponder why I've suddenly anthropomorphised my brain and given it a throat. Furthermore, I'm now creating sentences with far too many words and almost as many commas, without breaking them up any other way. My tedium-ridden mind is now in nothingness overdrive and likes spouting off words consisting of more than nine letters, which is ironic since Countdown's on in the background, bringing with it that daytime-friendly version of the Apocalypse through song upon the elderly and those who can't find the remote in time. Or those who just want background noise as they make words appear in a blog post and it's either that or The Alan Titchmarch Show, which, quite frankly, is a programme title bad enough to strike overwhelming depression into anybody's existence.

Is this actually going anywhere? No? Didn't think so. Anyway...

It's now been half an hour since I tapped Enter twice after "Anyway..." and I seem to have lost the will to comprehend any human thought whatsoever, meaning I might as well pretend to do some work towards studies, cook something, eat that something, tidy up and socialise once again, and stare forlornly at the red standby light on the Wii, as I apologise for neglecting it for yet another day.

Poetry Is Not Necessarily My Forte

2011-10-06T17:28:00.001+01:00

Today is National Poetry Day, and to mark this ground-breaking, monumet-crushing, planet-annihilating event, I've produced a poem based around this year's obligatory theme: Games. Read this and understand why poetry is not necessarily my forte. Also try and make sense of it.

The Game Of Life

There is no box.
There is no picture on the box.
There are no pieces inside the box;
      they lie scattered.
There is no indication
      of eventual completion.

There is building upwards.
There is climbing the ladder.
There is fear of falling.
There is fear of snakes.

There are obstacles.
There is advancing one step at a time.
There is making it to the other side –
          King me.

There is no box.
There are pieces missing.
There is no logical solution
          to the mystery
other than finding Professor Plum
          in Old Kent Road
                    with the Funny Bone.

Grown-Up

2011-10-05T12:42:00.000+01:00

October 5, 2011

Dear friend,
       It's been two weeks since my last one of these to you. I'm sorry. I really wanted to do one every Wednesday but missed last week's self-imposed deadline. I suppose normally that would mean I'd have an awful lot to write about now, but to be honest, I'm still struggling. I guess I can start with the basics, though, and see how it goes from there.
       The fact that I'm now writing to you means that I now have Internet access in my house. I'm so happy about this. It means I can watch things like Kleiner Hai on YouTube, look at naughty pictures (if I so wished), and type the starts of sentences into Google and see what the Auto-Fill suggests whenever I want from the comfort of my own room. It feels strange though, because I've been living in this house for two-and-a-half weeks without access to the Internet that I'm sort of used to it. I'm used to filling my time with making food and watching crappy daytime television. As I type, I have Masterchef Australia on in the background and it keeps distracting me from this every forty seconds or so.
       I've also been trying to read a lot more; in fact that's why this particular entry looks and sounds the way it does. I finished Stephen Chbosky's The Perks Of Being A Wallflower some eight hours ago - that was at 4 a.m. just before I went to sleep - and I still have it on the brain. I know it sounds cheesy to say that the book really speaks to me and I find it easy to relate to. So I won't say those things. Except I just did, so instead I'll just say I liked it and can understand certain things from within the story. Also, it's set in America in the early 1990s and since I was only two or three years old then, I had no concept of what America even was, so I guess I can't relate to it all that much. Apparently, they're also making it into a movie ready for next year starring that clever girl from Harry Potter, so I hope it turns out well.
       Some of my normal book-reading has been disrupted by University, unfortunately. Although, it's probably not unfortunate, it just feels that way because if I'm going to read, I'd rather read for pleasure than to read up about theories of concepts I barely understand. It just so happens that understanding those concepts are what will help me pass University and therefore they should be a priority. But those in-depth readings have made me tired and sleepy with too many words ending in "-ism" and "-ist" and "-ity" and "-ology" and it keeps making my brain hurt. By that logic, I also want to blame it for my stomach aches, intestinal whines and general bad feeling for the last few days, but I may have to put that down to eating possibly out-of-date food since Monday.
       Luckily, I have today and tomorrow to crack on with the work I need to do, but tomorrow I'd like to put something here again, breaking with the not-very-established tradition of posting on Wednesdays. It's purely a one-off though. It just so happens that tomorrow is National Poetry Day, and even though I'm not normally one to do poetry, the poetry tutor I had for half of last year is, in fact, the organiser or the director of National Poetry Day or something like that. Whatever her title or position is, she's pretty much in charge of it. So I'm inspired to at least do some poetry, even if it is only for one day of the year. And the theme is Games as far as I can remember, and I had an idea for what I could put in a poem a while ago when I first heard about this, but it's not complete so I suppose I'd need to finish that today if I'm to put it here tomorrow.
       I keep feeling like there's something I'm forgetting here, but I can't remember what it is. I guess that's the curse of forgetting stuff.
       Oh, I remember, that's it. I woke up this morning to an envelope by the front door. Turns out it's a water bill which we only have to pay as a one-off once a year, or once every six months or something like that, but split between myself and the people I'm house-sharing with, it's going to cost us about £60 each, which I'm sure I do have, but I only have a limited amount of money to last me for the rest of the year and I'm not entirely sure how much of it I actually have left. I've even resorted to signing up to Google's ad-revenue scheme for this blog and for my YouTube, in the vain hope that you actually exist and that you actually are reading this right now and that you form a small part of Internet traffic for this site, which could culminate in me getting paid about 14p for a year's worth of writing. In that case, I'm sorry if the sudden inclusion of adverts is distracting. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how the getting-paid-by-Google-for-doing-this actually works. All I know is that if there's a chance I can get extra pennies by doing one of these every week then I might as well not pass at the opportunity.
       I suppose that's pretty much it for this now. I need to go and check my bank balance, worry about paying the bill and make breakfast before sitting down and getting on with my studies. When did I suddenly become a grown-up?

Love always,

Jamie

Another Week

2011-09-21T16:19:00.000+01:00

Living without the Internet means I have a limited time to do words here. Also it means I end up feeling lost and lonely at every opportune moment. Whenever I hit a period of relative boredom, my default setting is to fire up Facebook and stare longingly at it to amuse me. However, without the option of a worldwide distraction and the time limit of a fruit fly in a cemetery, I'm feeling hard pushed to say anything of relevance now, despite wanting to fill this out a bit. Oh well, if you want, you can imagine this page is full, although this sort of length is probably more desirable. Anyway, yeah, done now, leave me alone for another week. Hopefully I'll have my own access by then.

Crying Out For Attention

2011-09-14T11:58:00.000+01:00

Trying to stick to a schedule is difficult, especially when you haven't even started it yet. In my pursuit of wanting to make this place buzzing and constant and other words I can't be bothered to pull out of my head right now, I've decided to do something on here every Wednesday in an attempt at being regular with my "work". The fact that I decided to do this last Wednesday, however, seems pretty redundant. Even now it doesn't feel right, but that's mostly because I don't have much to throw down here. And since it's been months (probably) since my last lot of something-or-other on this thing, I technically should have a lot to ramble about. Just reading all of that back I can already tell this is going absolutely nowhere and lacking in stupidity and obscure references to one-hit wonders of the 80s.

I suppose I can blame bad moods for this. For longer than I can even begin to think to care about I've been feeling down. Not over anything in particular, just one minuscule unimportant hiccup after another minuscule unimportant hiccup until all those tiny hiccups become one massive belch accompanied by projectile vomit that's got blood in it. Screw the last straw breaking the camel's back, I've suffered the final hiccup to make me hurl. Naturally, I assumed I was just on my period. Not a biologically menstrual one where I cry, eat chocolate and am not allowed to go swimming for five days, but a general crap mood that's brought on by nothing in particular, makes me angry and irate for reasons too pathetic to even remember and subsequently passes after I've watched a movie in bed whilst wearing comfy pyjamas.

It's a good thing that I didn't add to this during such a time, otherwise you would've been subjected to attempts at subtly crying out for attention, shorter sentences, and direct quotes from songs by Alanis Morissette or someone whilst I try to scratch my own face off. Of course you wouldn't be able to see the face-scratchy-off-ness, therefore would not know about it, unless I included it in a short sentence where subtly try to tell you there's something wrong with me. There is something wrong with me anyway, but that's beside the point.

On the plus side, it would've gotten me closer to my 100th post (which, knowing me, I'll probably just give up entirely once I hit that), and I'd much rather get to 100 posts on here before I hit 100 tweets on Twitter. My current tweetage stands firm at 73. So far this one's winning, but then again, this one's been going for two-and-a-half years, whereas my Twit speck has been active for two-and-a-half months and it's already coming up fast on the outside. I pledge to make it to 100 here first though. And if I don't, whoever bothers to notice this gets to point and laugh derisively at me in the street if you can find me. Now if that's not a call for attention (for readers, even) then I don't know what is.

The Grand Proof-Read Of 2011

2011-08-26T13:12:00.001+01:00

I spent most of last night (I say "last night", it was really 1am, thus, early today, but for the sake of now existing in a totally different stream of consciousness, what is technically today will henceforth be known as "last night") reading over a bunch of my older posts on this 'ere incarnation of my inner thoughts and that. As it happens, there are seventy-nine of them (well, eighty now with this), and I seem to have a knack for mis-spelling words, leaving words out, missing grammar, missing spaces, and all that kinda crap that I generally hate and usually complain about when other people do them. These seem to be mere instances of human error; after all, you'd probably accidently end up adding an extra "o" to "to" to make "too" and looking foolish because of it if you typed a thousand-or-so words off the top of your head. I, however, refuse to believe I'm clumsy or stupid and put the whole thing down to lack of proof-reading before posting. Mainly because why would you want to read a thousand-or-so words you just expelled from your brain? There's no point putting them back in there.

Therefore, as an eightieth post extravaganza, I'm using this to let you know that I'm going through the entire lot for what I suppose I'll call (with no thought or prior planning going into this) the Grand Proof-Read of 2011. It'll probably take whole hours to complete such a task, maybe even days. It will involve me going back to the very beginning (of this one, I used to have other blog places that I posted about twice in and never bothered with again) and reliving the last two years-or-so of my life with cringing hindsight and bad grammar related tutting in an effort to get everything all ship-shape and updated.

You know, just in case you felt like checking the archives. Which you don't. Because you're an ass. Because you have your own life and you think yourself more important than anyone to take any interest in anyone else, you selfish bastard. So yeah, I'm gonna go back in time to do my best to make myself look good.

300 People In My Living Room

2011-08-20T21:33:00.001+01:00

The world is a mighty confusing place. So much so that this particular rant should've technically been written some three days ago, but at the time, I had nothing to say on the subject and yesterday afternoon's "hunger and loneliness" vibes proved too strong to be shunned. Anyway, I was going to write this thing with regard to myself (in the company of friends, of course, I'm not that much of a miserable loner) venturing to a cinema to watch The Inbetweeners Movie. However, I'm not going to talk about that. Mainly because every other fucker on the face of the Earth who's gone to see it (which apparently seems to be every other fucker on the face of the Earth) has already spouted off about how 'awesome' it was, and how 'amazin'' it was, and how 'ded funni' it was and blah-fucking-blah. So instead, I'll have a wee moan about that instead. This is more about my whole cinema viewing experience, rather than that a review of a film, for two reasons: (1) I find the whole cinema experience much more exciting to write about, and (2) I don't do film reviews. Why does anyone write film reviews, by the way? Correction. Why does anyone who think they can write film reviews write film reviews? Honestly, I've read a bunch and it feels like torture. Like some kind of fanboy 'OMGZ dis film woz well gud, yeahzzz' that any 5-year-old would probably cringe at. So yeah, fuck reviews. (Noticed I'm saying "fuck" a lot... apparently I'm agitated by this and haven't fucking started yet!)

The cinema experience began after 9pm for the ticket purchasing ceremony, although this was preceded by the procession of waiting your turn. By the time the booth people were able to take my money, the next available showing time transpired to be bordering on midnight. This allowed time for snacks and beverages in a nearby bar, but meant that it'd virtually be 2am before I'd see the credits roll. The joys of sleep deprivation. Watching an entire film in a darkened room with itchy, strained eyes just adds to the uniqueness of the experience. The people were a bit odd too. I mean, afterwards, someone told me they found it a bit odd watching The Inbetweeners on a big screen because they weren't used to it, but in that respect, I should really be notifying people that upon my recent purchase of a new 26-inch TV, to replace my little square TV-video-combi thing I've had since age twelve, I started to find it easier to read rolling news tickers and I was confused at how Deal Or No Deal's boxes had suddenly grown massive. I could kind of see what they were getting at, though. I never watched the show avidly, but have found it to be of light entertainment value whenever it's been on. Humorous moments have provided a small chuckle from me to myself as the only one in the room. Sometimes there have been one or two others in the room with me and small chuckles have emanated from each mouth and disappeared a second later. In a crowded, sell-out cinema screen, however, the chuckles amassed and reverberated for minutes longer than was absolutely necessary, giving the whole thing the feeling of there being over 300 people in my living room. And while everyone was too busy laughing at one joke, they missed at least seventeen new utterances that could've contained more joke. Defeated the whole point, really.

Special mention goes to the dumb-fuck sat behind me at the point when, SPOILER ALERT, one girl kisses one guy to make another guy jealous or something teenagery like that. We see lingering shots of her looking at the one she's trying to jealousise (is that a word? Fuck it, it is now!) and reaction shots from him too. Cue the idiot in the chair behind mine, with a genuine sense of "I know something nobody else knows" cleverness, a good 18 seconds after the scene ended: 'oh she was only doing that to make the other guy jealous'. Congratulations. Here's a crash helmet and some armbands. Try not to fuck yourself up too much during your stay on the planet.

Somehow, though, I can't help feeling I'm missing something, because this movie was essentially a spin-off from a TV show, and a very short one at that. So why is everybody cacking their pants about it? The Inbetweeners has existed for three series', each at a total of six episodes, essentially amounting to a total of eighteen half-hour episodes. In comparison, Black Books, which I've recently started watching, produced exactly the same amount of episodes and lasted exactly the same amount of time. Where's the Black Books Movie?!?! And where's all the hype for it? And where's all the love for it? And etc. and all that. For Christ's sake, The Inbetweeners never even had its first run on a main channel! It first blinked into existence on digital channel E4. Although, saying that now does feel a bit redundant since the whole country's practically gone digital. Let's face it, the issue of analogue versus digital channels only affects you if you're elderly or reading this in 1986, which, considering you're reading this a whole 25 years before it's actually been written, is nothing short of miraculous.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not slating The Inbetweeners. I'm just saying I don't understand the hype. To me it's a piece of light entertainment youth comedy blah blah with a few points where it seems to lack a certain something special. But that's it. It's not God. It's not the greatest thing ever to grace the history of human existence. It's just a nice piece of filler-TV. Stop hyping it so much!

Altogether, in my non-professional, non-film reviewy review of not a film, I'd give the film four mundane looking asterisks. * * * * . Look. There they are in all their ordinaryness. Ahhh, it's almost like M*A*S*H without the letters, or they could be used to cover up every time I've mentioned the word "fuck" in this thing, the number of which just so happens to be ten.

Things Single People Tell Themselves

2011-08-19T20:27:00.004+01:00

I made dinner three-and-a-half hours ago and I still haven't eaten it. That said, I ate half of it originally and will, soon after finishing this, have to resort to entrusting the microwave to cook it again for me. In the time in between then and now I've had a shower, writhed around in pain and read part of a book. This has led me to come here and talk about my feelings and whatnot; mostly feelings of internal pain that start in the head (as your typical headache), continue down my back (as your typical strains of manual labour) and stomach owwies (because I've barely eaten for days, hence why I could only manage half a chicken pie accompanied with half a Pot Noodle). Not just this, however, as my current emotional state at this time, coupled with one or two articles in Charlie Brooker's The Hell Of It All what I just read, have put on the biggest downer I've known for years. I think it's fair to say that whenever the time comes that I lie on my deathbed, squinting into the bright light emanating from a doorway, haloing a silhouetted figure who's beckoning me to depart this plane, or squinting into the bright lights of a speeding motorist coming towards me (whichever wants to come first) and my brain does that thing of showing me all the stand-out moments of my life gone by, like a "Best Bits" montage of my stay here on Earth accompanied by a remixed version of Lady GaGa's Born This Way, I can imagine looking back on this point of my life as being a bit of a crap one.

Enough of my future death. Let's back up to now, shall we? Earlier today, I read a certain polemic written by Charlie Brooker (whose style of writing I'm absolutely not copying, but merely gaining inspiration and creative freedom from, you morons) some two years ago. In it, he went on about not having a wife, partner or potential love interest at all, and the whole article went something along the lines of "blah blah, go away world, blah blah, love's overrated, everything's complicated with other people involved, wahh wahh, we should all marry robots or something". Obviously I'm paraphrasing but you get the general idea. Being involved in a romantic relationship is stupid and only idiots fall in love, except they're not in love with the other person but instead in love with the idea of being in love with someone or at least the fact that there's somebody else there to share in the misery of their ongoing existence and all those kinda things single people tell themselves to make themselves feel less bitter.

Lately, and for probably more than a year now, I've been able to quell the shrieks of neverending loneliness and such and have been able to get on with the other good things in life such as... erm... well... not really caring much about the fact that I'm lonely, and to be honest, it's actually worked. And yes, it has worked. I know this because around a week ago or something (I'm not too good with exact timings), one of my close friends announced the beginning of a new romantic relationship. It was at that point that two things hit me:

The first is the one that's always hit me whenever a close friend has entered into a romantic relationship, wherein my internal monologue glances to the left and says "Hey. (insert name of whoever's applicable at the time) has a girlfriend. Why don't I have a girlfriend? I should have a girlfriend! Hell, I'm better than (insert name of whoever's applicable at the time). What does (insert name of whoever's applicable at the time) have that I don't?" and so on. Therefore, not only do I judge myself on a 'loser' scale, but also end up comparing myself to someone I'm close to, belittling them in an attempt to make me feel better about myself, which ultimately doesn't work since I'm (a) actively trying to think negatively about people I'm fond of, and (b) when I do start to think badly of them, the fact that they've still managed to enter into a relationship with someone else before me makes me feel even worse than that.

Secondly comes what I like to call "odd-wheel syndrome". Of course, everybody knows the expression of being "third-wheel". For example, I have one friend. Me and friend play happily together. Yay, etc. Friend becomes involved with another, they spend more time together. I am forgotten about, except for the few times I'm remembered, but whenever me and friend play together from now on, friend always invites another. Friend and another spend all time together. I am forgotten about despite being in the same room. This has happened to me a fair few times before in life, so much so that I've been more than just the third wheel, but have stretched to fifth and even seventh wheel at certain times. I pretty much become unnecessary and roll away. I've spoke to this close friend of mine about both of these loneliness reminders falling upon me and even got to the point where I couldn't even muster up the words to say I felt happy for him. Why? Because I didn't. Christ if I can't feel happy for myself at any one time, how can I feel happy for anyone else? The best I could do for him was a mock-celebratory 'woop-woop' and a moderately enthusiastic 'yeah... go you!'

The fact that both of these ideas hit me at once proved to me how little thought I'd given to my desires for romance over the last few years at least and now all those banked, unused thoughts and feelings are coming out in the form of words. Luckily, I feel as though I've managed to harness the power of words into this rambling, shambling format where I just go 'AARRRGGHHH' about stuff then click publish, rather than writing depressing poetry in a darkened room with my hair covering one eye. Mostly that's because poetry's not really my forte and I had a haircut recently, however it is starting to get dark outside.

I have a few friends who are a bit hippie and psychic, which is a demeaning way of saying they're in touch with their spiritual side. They pick up on people's moods based on instinct and intuition, they talk to stones and probably relax by playing Solitaire with a standard Tarot deck. They probably laugh in the face of a magic 8-ball and communicate with spirits on another plane of existence without having to close their eyes, pull a contorted face and shudder violently like they've just done several shots of Wray & Nephew's White Rum... you know, like TV "spiritual mediums" do. Anyway, they assure me that things could soon be on the up with regards to my romantic life, but after being told the same thing for years I seem to have developed cynicism on that front. One, however, did tell me - through the means of instinctively picking up on my soul and analysing my personality traits - that I have so much love inside of me to give to all, and that I agree with. I have much love inside of me for those who deserve it. Mainly myself, a select few friends, one or two family members and Karen Gillan off Doctor Who (all for very different reasons). However, after the horrible re-awakening of my loneliness, I've found it difficult to continue playing The Love Fountain and apparently it's given me backache.

Anyway, I still have stomach pains and half a dinner to re-heat.

As a wee amendment, I'd like to add that 24 hours on from this, I walked into the path of an oncoming car without realising. Seems that mode of death is more likely than letting myself just tick away. And for the record, my iPod, whilst in shuffle mode at the time, apparently decided that Marina And The Diamonds' "I Am Not A Robot" is much more likely to accompany my Best Bits.

I Joined The Mob

2011-08-12T15:50:00.001+01:00

So it's finally happened. I have become one of "them". I swore I'd never get sucked into such a world of corruption and devastation and what is frankly unnecessary. But I just couldn't help myself. During the great UK riots of August 2011, I joined the mob. I became a Twitter user.

That's right. I actually "tweeted". And not the stupid pointless doesn't-make-any-sense-but-I'll-put-it-anyway-in-an-attempt-at-being-ironic tweets (for example: 'Made up a joke about batteries before, but have come to realise it doesn't work when typed, thus rendering this lot of words pointless.' and 'green lantern is green') that I told myself I'd only ever use it, sparingly, for. No. In the space of one night I practically doubled - and then some - my total amount of "tweets" with a bunch of shit regarding what was happening in correlation with current events. Some were vague attempts at humour ('did I just see someone whacking a sea bass against a the window of a Ladbrokes?'), others were vacant reactions to news developments ('Apparently Camden Market is now burning. This angers and infuriates me.'). Most, if not all, of them included #hashtags. Sometimes even ###multiplehashtags because the attention-seeking bastard monster inside of me wanted to be noticed. Sadly, no attention was given to any of my words and the monster has retreated back inside of me (for now) to have a little cry and remember a time when B*Witched were popular.

But on the subject of the UK riots, which, quite frankly, is a lie (and a lie that BBC News kept ramming through my telly-screen for a solid day until they realised that Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the smattering of other islands what the Queen looks after didn't want to join in with all the madness and eventually had to resort to telling the truth since the only places that people felt the need to take stuff and burn places existed solely on English turf), I must say I found the whole thing oddly surreal. Watching parts of London burning was less like watching an episode of London's Burning and more like watching some apocalyptic disaster movie. Unlike an apocalyptic disaster movie, however, it seemed to go on longer than two hours and largely consisted of the same live shot with no fast-paced edits where we cut to different camera angles of the burning buildings, crowd reactions of people standing in the streets looking upwards with mouths open in unison and pointing, and one man in a skin-tight, pastel coloured uniform running through the streets at break-neck speed on his way to "save the day". Instead, it took a while for me to realise that this was "real" and the stuff on TV was "really happening". Later on, things started looking like some horror-movie with zombies, but not the slow zombies of the 80s, complete with incoherent moans and bits of limbs comically falling off and landing on the ground with a soft thump. No. This is the 21st century and the zombies are faster and cleverer and filled with a riotous energy, not stopping at anything until they get to feast on the living flesh they want. Except these zombies wanted not flesh, but electronic goods. The fact that the phenomenon spread across the country the way it did added to that sense of this whole thing being a movie-adaptation of "What if society went really bad?", but the more it went on, the more reality pounded the crap out of the movie-ness thoughts, leading us to try dealing with the fact that "Shit, guys! Society went really bad!"

Luckily for me, most of the absurdity happened on Monday night, which meant I could stay up and follow the events since I didn't have to work on Tuesday. Therefore I managed to remain in a state of awareness and constant consciousness until pretty much 6am, when the breakfast news people started and my brain stopped. But all through the early hours, my constant desire for news updates grew and grew as the news updates themselves started to dwindle. My one source of constant refreshing during this time, therefore, existed in the form of the one website I vowed to myself years ago not to become involved with. Now, as I type this, my current total of tweets sits at 54. FIFTY-FOUR! Christ, I've only had the thing one month, I should be somewhere around 2... 3 at the very most. I never expected to be up to 54 until I was approaching 82! Evidently, my embracing of Twitter appears to be just the next thing in a long line of fads I never really liked to begin with but apparently somewhere along the way have subconsciously decided "well, if you can't beat them, reluctantly begin to join them in a few years against your own will".

Don't be surprised if I end up taking to the streets in a black tracksuit with a hood over my head, scarf over my face, a lighter in one hand and basebat bat in the other because I want a new mobile phone sometime in 2016.

Decorum

2011-07-22T12:49:00.001+01:00

Did you come here expecting a self indulgent rant about the state of society? Then come on in! Take a seat. No, not like that! Sit up straight, hands in your lap and be quiet while I'm talking. Goodness, you people really have no manners, do you? Well actually, chances are that you're sat there silently as you read this anyway so I won't accuse you of being rude. The rest of the world, on the other hand, might as well sprout legs and take a running leap into the Sun itself. The following takes place between 18:47 and 19:47 on whatever date it was yesterday...

As it stands, I've more-or-less accepted that people are idiots. By that I mean, even though I don't see the resemblance other than the fact that I'm ginger, people (or "idiots") seem to be obsessed with comparing me to him what plays the ginger one in the Harry Potter movie franchise. Apparently the fact that I wear rectangular glasses, have a lack of facial hair and sound slightly more Scouse than my movie-making doppelgänger seems lost on people. They might as well approach me with 'Hey, has anyone ever told you that you're ginger?' Not only is this completely fucking pointless, but it gets even more excruciatingly boring with each mention.

For example: Imagine an elderly man in a wheelchair. Now let's see some sample conversation. Well, I say conversation... it's actually the words of Joe Public.

'Hi there. You know, has anyone ever told you you're old and immobile? Just thought you might like to know; wasn't sure if it'd been brought to your attention before.'

Naturally, living where I've lived, and where I currently happen to be residing in a limbo state right now, the folks have no decorum. If there is, in fact, a Pleasantness Fairy scattering her Peace, Love and Harmony Dust across the land, I can't help but shake the feeling she forgot about this place. Either that or she took one look at us and thought she wouldn't even bother wasting it on us for all the difference it wouldn't make. As I embarked a train with the sounds of an iPod deep in my ears, I happened to walk past and sit a few "sets-of-four-seats" away from a group of young females. You can imagine the type: Scouse, about fifteen years old but look like 10-year-olds trying to look like whores. I imagine myself as a better person to them for even though I bear such thoughts about them, I've not physically shouted them out in the public domain, in close proximity to them, speaking as if they're not actually there. They, however, did. Even though I had musics in my ears, the loudness of a typical dumbass will always overcome it. Of course, I had to mute the bloody thing to gauge the full extent (or rather limited range) of vocabulary that such idiots are able to use. You may think 'Why would you mute the music but still have earphones in to spy on what people are saying? That just makes you seem worried', but unless you've grown up where I've grown up and developed what I can only call "Harry Potter induced paranoia" over the last ten years then I'll probably answer you. Much to my surprise, my suspicions proved true as, at the moment of pause, miniature whore number two spake the words: 'He can't hear you, he's got earphones in'. This is not a good example of decorum.

For example: Imagine, once again, our elderly man in the wheelchair. He has a somewhat disfigured face and a hearing aid in each ear. Commence the words of whores.

'Heehee, look. Freaky old man. Urr, his face is all wrong. Oi! Freaky old man! Freaky old man? Hellooo? Oi! Heehee, freaky old man! Ey, freaky o- Oh, he can't hear us, he's deaf. Ah well, hellooo?! Freaky old man!!!'

I'd been contemplating whether or not to stop for Chinese food on the way home and the idiot whores had pretty much confirmed my decision. (By the way, sorry I keep referring to them as "idiots" and "whores", but in honour of the subject matter I'm choosing to lack creativity and force a limited vocabulary on myself. It's Hell.) My endeavours in a local Chinese takeaway didn't do much to boost my already flagging self esteem. After deciding upon my dinner of the evening, I waited patiently for my turn. In comes a couple and the Keeper of the Chips approaches them. In any normal, civilised situation, where manners and decorum exist, this couple would turn to me and say something along the lines of 'I'm sorry, this gentleman was here first'. Instead, I obviously forgot my whereabouts, being on that side of town (where it's even worse, if you can dare to put your brain through imagining) and instead the couple's response was a heavily Scouse-ified 'Eeerrrm yeah, twenty portions of chips, large, pleeeease, and eeerrrm a pie dinn-, no, three pie dinners, an' a can o' dietsss cokkhh, pleeeease.' (That wasn't actually what they ordered, but it's what I imagine they did because my brain was too busy saying 'bastards cut in front of me' *hypothetical shocked face*). Furthermore, the Chinese lady behind the counter went on to deny my existence by asking for orders from more people behind them. I'd suddenly become not just invisible, but non-existent.

For example: Imagine, again, the deaf elderly man in the wheelchair with his "freaky" face. The Chinese food merchant thinks on the job.

'Right, who am I going to serve next? Someone who's already here? Oh, no, what a freak old man he is. I don't want to serve him, he could infect me with weird-face or immobility or something... I WANT TO LIVE, DAMMIT! Oooh, people just through the door... "Can I take your order please?"'

After finally getting the food I wanted, I proceeded to power walk home, thinking things couldn't get any more preposterous. I noticed an annoying spot in my direct line of vision all of a sudden and went on to find that a fly had decided to land right on the right lens of my glasses. Even the flies have no manners here.

For example: Deaf elderly man, wheelchair, face falling off. Internal fly thoughts.

'Wizz-wizz-wizz, ooh I'm a fly. What a wonderful life it is for a fly. Gee, I could do with a rest. I think I'll go and land somewhere. Somewhere glassy and shiny, yes that'll do. I'm in the mood to land somewhere shiny. Hey, over there, that looks quite shiny. On that old guy's face. Looks like his eye, though. Nah, can't be his eye, it's halfway down his fuckin' face. Think I'll go and land on it.'

I intended to flick the fly away, but I'm not sure if it was a lack of accuracy or my outrage at the state of humanity itself, but landing on my glasses was the last thing that fly would ever do. My inaccurate flick resulted in it not being flicked away, but all of its internals being flicked across the lens, resulting in me having to waste more effort in wiping the damn thing clean.

Anyway, I ate the Chinese food, watched TV, stayed in bed all night and now I'm telling you here that I have much more respect, compassion and sympathy for abnormally-looking elderly gentlemen in wheelchairs.

A House Of Optimism

2011-07-11T13:04:00.003+01:00

Have you been injured at work? I haven't, although I do come away from the place suffering aches and pains after constant hours of manual labour. Maybe it's because I've been away from the glamorous world of discount retail for just over nine months and I've gotten used to lazy weekends filled with freedom and me time and doing whatever the Hell it is I want to do. Mostly nothing, but it's been nice to have the option. As of two days ago, however, I've been back to the fluorescent light emporium for the purposes of trying to have money as a student who doesn't know any better, and for each of those two days, I've left the place and come home feeling like my spine's had a run-in with a baseball bat and my feet have been stabbed numerous times by a croquet mallet... and I don't even know how that would work. I suppose I never noticed the life-diminishing pain and agony before because I'd simply "gotten used to it", but now it's nine lazy months on, and I've got a lot of pain to make up for.

If you've ever worked in retail, you'll know the feeling. You'll know how your place of employment is essentially a soul-crushing factory line disguised as a house of optimism. "Good morning, and how are you this fine day, dear citizen?" beam the faces of the company. The voices of the masses, however, often seem gruff, confused, loud, and every fourth word is 'fuck'. That last one was even picked up on by another customer, who I assume "isn't from round here" and noted what a lovely town this is where 'every word is a swear word'. True story. Maybe it's just prevalent where I'm located, which would make sense since, after nearly a year away, I'm suddenly seeing how the rest of the country sees the Scouse accent. Honestly, the amount of 12-14 year olds who've been about this last weekend with mouths and voices and words-that-don't-really-sound-like-words-but-rather-a-continuous-stream-of-noise has been immense; half of them sound like they've just eaten Cilla Black, John Bishop and Sonia for breakfast, washing it all down with 57 cigarettes and a kazoo. The sad thing is I'm still able to understand fluent Scouse.

Fortunately, I've not had to deal with the typical, monolexical attitude of some. You know the ones, the ones who approach from behind unannounced and throw a single word at you and leave you to interpret the rest of the sentence.

"Crackers."
[internal processing... calculating question... *BING*]
[smooth calm female voice: "Could you tell me where the crackers are?"]

Thank God they manage to pick the word signifying the thing they're looking for. Imagine if they approached me armed with just the word "Could". My poor brain would probably get stuck in an infinite loop and explode right there and then in the middle of the shop floor. The soothing female voice would go into overdrive. "Could you tell me where the could you tell me where the could you tell me where the could you tell me where the could you tell me where the could you tell me where the could you tell me where the could y-" *BRAINSPLAT* [bing-bong] 'Clean-up on aisle two, please'.

I do hope, however, that one day someone will approach me with "Mouthwash", therefore I'm justified in assuming they were just simply telling me the title of their favourite Kate Nash song. I could do shifty-eyes and lean over towards them as I give my response. "Wuthering Heights". The confusion in their face leads me to realise what I've actually said. I need to pick up the ball I've just dropped. I let out a forced chuckle and pat my adversary on the shoulder as if lightly batting them away. "Oh-ho-ho! I got it wrong, didn't I? That's Kate Bush, isn't it? God, I am a silly-moo! Ah well..." I wipe a fake tear from my eye "...you win, thanks for playing though, I had a great time."

That one could probably also work with "Foundation".

Beansprouts

2011-07-08T13:38:00.000+01:00

Remember when I told you three weeks ago about my recent vacation in Germany? Well there was just so much stuff I had to talk about I can't believe I've missed some out. It largely centres around the E.coli epidemic that was going on over there and the time I thought I had it. I didn't really have it, I'd just eaten far too much cheese, chocolate and ice cream (although not all at the same time, that's just ludicrous!) so my diet went all wibbly and my bum bum felt like a fucking warzone. Lying down on the cool tiled bathroom floor seemed like a good idea at 3am in a panic-ridden state of "oh my God, I'm gonna die here tonight", fearing that I'd crap so hard I'd end up flushing my very life and soul down toilet never to be seen again. Cool tiled floors are never what they seem though. They are, in fact, not cool. They're fucking freezing. I even needed to lay a towel out on the floor to act as a buffer between body and temperature-not-best-suitable-for-body. I don't think I fell asleep there but I might've well done for about half an hour. But hey, when you're in a hot room in a hot country with only the bare essential underclothing on and feeling like you want to undress more but don't wanna leave a trail of blood and innards all over the place, you kind of want to go lie in a cold room for ages until it passes!

I don't think I had the evil disease, though, and it was probably just paranoia kicking in, and I believe this for one reason: during the entire trip I didn't see any beansprouts at all. This even displeased me in a Chinese restaurant one night where the all-you-can-eat buffet lacked one vital ingredient. "God, you'd think they'd have some beansprouts," Jamie muttered stupidly to himself, the dumbass, before eventually remembering that Germany's supply of beansprouts was under intense investigation during this time for putting people in hospital. The thought didn't come to his mind straight away though, like a lightbulb coming on, but instead was more like a fluorescent tube light that flickered for a few seconds before blinding him with the stupidly obvious realisation. I think it was the fact I was in a Chinese restaurant that threw me off. They have the same things in Britain as they do in Germany which is weird because they specialise in food from China and my internationalism-scope-er-ometer must've malfunctioned for a few seconds.

I learned to use chopsticks for the first time though, so it wasn't an entirely horrible trip.

80 Kilometers-An-Hour Auf Der Autobahn

2011-07-05T14:12:00.002+01:00

Well, it's been a long time coming, but I finally have the time to do this. Then again, I always had the time, but I now have the notes and the willpower to do this. But first, let me cast your mind back a wee bit, for this post isn't supposed to have been this late. Instead, the day is Monday the 13th of June: the weather has been fluctuating between scorching summer heat and dreary miserable rain, the Paris episode of The Apprentice hasn't happened yet, and I'm still twenty-one, and yesterday night I arrived back on English soil after a week of visiting relatives in northern Germany...

We've all seen it. That one person/couple/family/group of morons in a public place you just seem to see everywhere you go. The people who complain about the way things are run in plain earshot of the crowds of randomers, the people who complain about the way things are run in plain earshot of the staff who are just there to enforce the rules, the people who complain about their seat on public transport not being the seat they wanted, the people who complain about the fridge being set to 4°C instead of 3°C therefore destroying the optimum integrity of milk... the people who complain about, well, just about anything as though the world should be run according to their own personal standards and not by any pre-devised regulations that have already been constructed for the convenience of the masses of people what make up the general public. Yep, we've all seen them. But at the start of this trip, Manchester Airport played hosted to my parents being the centre of attention, whilst that younger guy in the glasses who's stood with them - yeah, him, the one with his head in his hands - tried my best to remain as normal in keeping with the rest of the public as possible. It's very rare for me to act normal and I refuse to have my chances ruined by the folks when every little thing that could possibly go awry, does.

I would just like to take the opportunity to say that I am not, of course, slandering my own parents here, but merely exaggerating an undesirable situation for pseudo-comic effect. (Just in the event that one of them happens to read this and thinks I'm saying bad things about people I know on the Internet for all the paedophiles and axe-murderers to read, since they are the only people who use the Internet anyway.)

So yeah, I became one of "those people", you know, the group of people who make a scene in public, and you know you shouldn't stare at them, but you so desperately want to. Luckily, two hours sat in the seat at the very back of the aircraft with your face stuck in a random book managed to calm my paranoid mind of 'everyone looking at me'.

T-Mobile were the first to welcome me into the country, notifying me of the extra charges on my phone if I were to ever use it during this week. Surely though, one text message should be enough. When it takes them six texts to tell me (over the course of 40 minutes - by my calculation, one message every 6 minutes and 50ish seconds) of this necessary information, I've never felt more likely to hurl my phone onto the Autobahn, or call up the head at T-Mobile and tell them that I'm aware I'm currently in Germany and quite frankly I don't care about the tiny changes to the cost of my phone calls, although incidentally, such a phone call would've probably cost me dearly. However, for your reading enjoyment/pleasure/frustration, I present to you a typical text message alert from the first night:

T-Mobile welcomes you to Germany. It now costs (ever-so-slightly higher price tariff than normal) per minute to call, (same again but can't be arsed typing it all out and feeling slightly more creative than to simply copy and paste) per text message. To use the Internet on your phone, you will need to purchase Euro-Boosters, which will grant you 20
           PAGES
            OF
             ANNOYING
              TEXT
               MESSAGE...

And so, onto the first night, and through some 'legally grey-area' complication, we were able to receive British TV over there (which, a little later in the holiday, prompted my mother to be branded a holiday 'spoil-sport' for a whole thirty minutes as we "didn't come all the way to Germany to watch Emmerdale") meaning that an extensive range of English-language films were on offer to us. Unfortunately, since the flight was delayed by about an hour, it ended up being closer to 11pm when we arrived at our lodgings, rather than "just after 9", and by 11 o'clock there's barely a decent film showing on normal telly. Ultimately, we ended up settling on Schindler's List, quite fitting if we visited Germany in the 1940s, but it's been around 70 years since the happenings of the Second World War, Hitler and the Third Reich, and all those Jewish containment camps, and somehow I can't help shake the feeling that time's moved on. Oh well, being one of the only open-minded people in my country (it seems), I'll just have to be lumped into that category of ignorant English pigs who still lord it over the Germans about how we beat them at international war and football tournaments. Thank God the Eurovision Song Contest isn't significantly popular, or else we would've felt their wrath this time last year when Germany romped to victory and the UK finished dead last. However, since Schindler's List goes on for six-and-a-half hours (well it doesn't really but I imagine that's what it feels like) and it already being well after midnight before the little girl in the red coat showed up, majoritatively we resigned to tiredness.

They have Ikeas in Germany. Bit of a redundant statement; they have Ikeas everywhere, just like they have McDonald's, petrol stations and grass. But I was somewhat surprised considering I've never been to any Ikea in the UK before so the whole thing was just as special as I imagined. Mainland Europe's most cutting-edge furniture designs all housed in a gigantic building with foreign language descriptions of each product, store section and emergency exit sign. My mother, in a bout of forgetting which country she was even in, did that thing what propa inglish peepul doo, engaging staff and customers alike in super fast paced English conversation only to be met with blank looks from the German population. Luckily, she never resorted to the football-hooligan's guide to speaking foreign languages, wherein every word is spoken in PLAIN... ENGLISH... ONLY... LOUDER... AND... SLOWER... thus forcing the recipient into understanding you or running to the nearest telephone to alert the authorities that people are shouting gibberish at them and they don't know how to contain the situation. The best part was when my Deutschland-dwelling sister, who needed to kit out her living room with flat-pack furniture, bought too much that it all had to be done in two trips, thus leaving myself and mother with a mini-mountain of dismantled coffee tables and such. Asking Customer Services to keep an eye on the purchases while we waited for our second-journey to pick us up wasn't such a bad idea. However, a bad idea was approaching them with a "'scuse me love, spoken English, complex query, blah blah blah", which left the poor old woman behind the counter making muted excuses for going in the back room and subsequently returning with another employee who tentatively asked in her best English if we were the arrogant bastards who needed assistance. Naturally, she didn't know the English words for "arrogant bastards" but proceeded to help us anyway, leaving me to ponder if the whole spectacle could've been avoided if only my mother had opened with some variant of "Entschuldigung, können Sie Englisch sprechen, bitte?", or a simple "Sprechen Sie Englisch?", or even a semi-distressed, panic ridden "ENGLISCH SPEAK-IDY? NEIN?" whilst containing the urge to smear excrement all over the walls.

Already I feel like I've said far too much on Ikea, but the ride home is where all of this has been leading too. See, the second-journey ended up overloading the back seat of the car with boxed goods so much that, legally, at least one of us should've stayed behind at Ikea for another hour or so. Being English, none of us could be bothered with such a situation and thus a novel seating arrangement was improvised on the spot. This largely consisted of three adults and one infant sitting in the car as normal, but with the other "adult" half-crouched in the backseat cavity where the legs go, half sat on the window-winder-downer spike thingy. I tell you what, on the big list of life experiences, I never thought I'd be able to check off "contort self into cramped backseat of car, somehow, with arse almost pressed against window whilst doing 80 kilometers-an-hour auf der Autobahn". Apparently we would've also been driving on the right-hand side, which would've been even more disorienting but luckily I was staring at the floor for most of that half-hour. The whole thing also led to another life experience being ticked off, "exit a car by backwards roll".

More stuff happened during the week but I apparently didn't care enough to write them down; it seems nothing could top the Ikea day, but judging by how long it's gone on for, it's just as well I have not much to write about. That is, except for what I would like to Christen the new and improved German National Anthem: 'The Quarter-to-Eight Song'. Except it's apparently not specific to quarter-to-eight, but specific to quarter-to-any hour. Typically, we're used to clocks chiming every fifteen minutes but with a special chime on the hour, every hour. It's the same in Germany, except the tower clock in the town chimes on the hour, at quarter-past and at half-past. But every forty-five minutes past, the chimes and bells break out in song. Apparently quarter-to-twelve is the new midday in Germany. I haven't had the chance to research this because it's the 13th of June, and I only got back into the country last night, remember.

Anyway, that's it, that's the highlights apart from the gift-set bottles of Jägermeister and complimentary Jägermeister-y shot glasses I got for a decent price in Hannover's Duty Free stop, as you're on your way out of the country. I can predict lots of good times drinking all this Jägermeister and I'll never get sick of it. I'll never become ill from drinking too much of it, and I'll not post anything on the 30th of June saying otherwise.

Terribleness I've Forced My Body Through

2011-06-30T00:44:00.000+01:00

It is at this point in life I would like to express my appreciation for the good folk at the Bachelors food company for making Barbecue Beef flavoured Super Noodles exist. I've unceremoniously put myself through the proverbial wars so much lately that such a gooey and flavoursome snack has provided light relief to my weary soul via my battered tongue that's been ravaged so much by sour sweets; quite frankly you'd probably be surprised if I told you that nobody's actually stubbed out a cigarette on my tongue if you looked at it. Other terribleness I've forced my body through these last few days include sleep deprivation, excessive eye-bleeding and co-ordinated hand and wrist crampage from playing far too much Mario Kart Wii, most of my insides refusing to go on, subsequently leading me to the conclusion that Jägermeister is no longer an optionable drink for me, and allowing myself to watch the infamous "Dennō Senshi Porygon" episode of Pokémon what got banned by the Japanese government after it put 700 kids in hospital after suffering seizures (ironically, the culprit of such erratic on-screen light patterns was a computerised ambulance). I tell you what, if being stabbed repeatedly in the gut by the "masterful hunter" doesn't make you think 'what the fuck am I doing with my life', being subjected to red and cyan strobing frames while you're trying to read the subtitles will.

Anyway, that's my busy week so far and it's yet to continue, which has made me quite wary that things are actually happening in my life to make it feel like I have a life. As opposed to doing nothing and not even trying to let my brain free on here for a bit, just to pass the time, I've been thinking to myself about how much I want to be writing stuff here but can't because I'm preoccupied by several other things at that precise moment, most of them often to do with bodily functions. It actually reminds me of the night on my recent trip to Germany where either my diet was so engulfed by salami and chocolate that my body could no longer handle it, or a very very very teeny tiny strain of the infamous E.coli popped it's head into my system for an hour or two, you know, for a quick hello. The night (or rather early morning) consisted of me lying nearest-naked on the cold tiled floor of the bathroom, although after putting a towel down first so as to reduce the coldness and ultimately making the exercise just that little bit more pointless. But I'm babbling, I shouldn't be including that here. It's all supposed to be in a special "Fun Summer Holiday" post which I am still yet to create with my arsenal of words. Chances are I'll finally get it done by this time next year, just in time for next summer. Either way, it won't be for at least another week.

Oh yeah, I finally succumbed to boredom and committed the ultimate act of betrayal to myself... I set up an account on Twitter. Yes it's evil, and yes it's only really for people who are popular or people with superiority complexes or people with God complexes or people with Universe complexes, but some of those people give out regular updates which I'd like to know about, and to be honest I like the 5-minute time-wasteyness of creating an account with something online. You know, the name, the email address, the password you intend to use which is exactly the same as your password for everything else. So now that exists, but I'm not directing anyone to it for two reasons:

reason Roman numeral i: I won't be "tweeting" anything there, and

reason Roman numeral ii: I feel that anyone who would want to read anything I put there is a complete moron.

Besides, it's a good thing I won't put anything there since character-limits seem to be the death of me. I struggle to stick to 140 words with these things, let alone characters. I had to write a short bio-"about me" thing in 160 characters or less and nearly lost the will to live.

Anyway, I haven't given out my Twitter name to anyone (and no it's not HardlyAmazing, quite frankly I'm bored of the name and all it stands for now but I'm living with it purely for the fact that it exists now), yet I've already been followed by two people from the United States who have names I don't even recognise. They apparently follow thousands upon thousands of people yet have no followers in return and no "tweets". Furthermore both of their web addresses include the words "live porn". Well done idiotface, you've become a spam target. Next I'll be followed by R0lex with a zero and the President of the Nigerian Bank Society. For now though, I shall ponder my next strategy as to whether I include a link to it here, even though:

Latin alphabetic symbol a: I won't be writing anything there, and

Latin alphabetic symbol b: Nobody reads this anyway, therefore any pre-conceived ideas of self-promotion don't just fall by the wayside but fall off the hard shoulder completely.

Having said that, I'm now questioning my choice of motorway metaphors since I don't even drive.

22

2011-06-23T13:59:00.001+01:00

I really should've done this yesterday but God had other plans, ranging from violent hayfever to mindless procrastination. Anyway, the fact that this is a day late means that the original genius idea of such a premise is gone, so if you could just imagine that today is actually yesterday we can get through this much smoother. Cheers.

Woo, yay, and other such words signifying jubilance. Today is most definitely the twenty-second of June, and this particular twenty-second of June marks the point at which I have completed the twenty-second year of my existence (not including the nine months I spent in a state of gestation), meaning I no longer can claim to be full of youth and opportunity at the age of twenty-one and must finally succumb to the harsh realities of the harsh real world by taking my title as a twenty-two year old. In honour of such a momentous event, here are twenty-two facts about the number twenty-two. Why? Because it seemed like such a good idea at the time yesterday.

1) Twenty-two is a number consisting of two twos.

2) Twenty-two in bingo is commonly referred to as "two little ducks". This is commonly met with an audience response of "quack quack".

3) Twenty-two is the number of boxes in a game of popular televisual mind-numbing, zombie making-fest Deal Or No Deal.

4) Furthermore, box number twenty-two in the aforementioned televised science experiment is superstitiously referred to as the "death box" in some kind of ritualistic occult manner.

5) Twenty-two in German ist zweiundzwanzig.

6) Twenty-two, according to the folks of Ancient Rome, is XXII.

7) Twenty-two divided by seven is nearly π (or "pi" if you can't read Greek).

8) Twenty-two is the atomic number of titanium.

9) The Hebrew Alphabet contains twenty-two letters.

10) 22 in binary is 10110.

11) Twenty-two is two times eleven.

12) There are twenty-two Major Arcana cards in a standard Tarot deck, numbered 0-21 (for some reason).

13) Twenty-two is the number of players on the pitch in a game of football at any one time (or if you're American, "soccer").

14) According to novelist Joseph Heller, "Catch-22" is the name of a paradox in which a situation cannot be resolved until the resolution of the situation is achieved in the first place... or something mind-fucky like that.

15) The twenty-second letter of the alphabet is V, unless you're Welsh, in which case it's RH.

16) The year 22 began on a Thursday.

17) "22" is the title of a song by Lily Allen about being 'nearly thirty now'.

18) Twenty-two is the amount of minutes so far I've spent trawling the Internet looking for obscure facts about the number twenty-two.

19) Twenty-two is a less common answer to the popularly customised joke 'How many (insert type of people here) does it take to screw in a lightbulb'.

20) Alabama was the twenty-second state of the United States of America.

21) Twenty-two is the number of bones which make up the human head.

22) Twenty-two is the number of pointless things I've just typed out and you've just read... which is impressive considering I normally talk a lot more random shite than this.