So…

Did the Earth move for you last night?

when in trendyville…

It’s been an interesting weekend, Friday the Wizard and I went to Huntingdon to visit some friends of ours and were taken trendy clubbing. I don’t mind a bit of oom cha on occasion and had quite an enjoyable time dancing to lots of out of date club music in the rather villagy feeling Musicbox in St Ives. It worries me that some of the people out there must think that’s what clubbing is!

We went home on Saturday accompanied by whatever tapes we could find in my mums car. I was impressed to find a Wayne’s World soundtrack, though I think that it probably belongs to one of my sisters. After dropping the car off and heading for mine I discovered my Oyster Card has died. I won’t go into the massive rant about it now, suffice to say there’s a stinky letter due for TFL.

Sunday was supposed to be poker in Romford, but The Place (that’s actually what it’s called) had been shutdown with very little notice, so a few of us ended up back at mine for a GH3 session. I’m very slowly making progress on hard, though I died trying to beat Tom Morello

Yesterday after work I went to the Wizards flat to chill with his flatmate watching horror movies, Trailer Park Boys, and playing online poker (he’s trying to train me to read people now that I’ve got the discipline (disserprine) side of things sorted out).

Tonight I shall mainly be stumbling about on the net, watching some TV, wombling about half-heartedly attempting some housework, and waiting for the shopping to be delivered, how exciting!

The Devil and me

I had a very strange dream Tuesday night, possibly due to all the caffeine I had crammed into my body…

I was on my way out of my work building when I noticed the Devil talking to some people in the hallway. He was wearing a suit and looked like a normal person except his skin was red and leathery. I carried on out to the underground car park where he caught up with me…

Me: You don’t make sense
Devil: Why do you say that?
Me: I’m an Atheist, I don’t believe in God, therefore I don’t believe in you
Devil: God doesn’t exist, it’s just me
Me: Well then I’m screwed
Devil: It’s OK, the rent is cheap

I turn and get into my car, I can’t get it to start, the key feels soft (I think I may have been trying to use my duvet as a key). The Devil gets in next to me, my alarm goes off…

Last night I discovered…

It takes 9 hours to rewrite 3500 words, and research and write another 3500 after that

2 cans of Relentless, 4 mini chocolate bars and 2 Pro Plus will keep you going until about 5am

2 cans of Relentless, 4 mini chocolate bars and 2 Pro Plus don’t agree with your stomach

I have learned a lot about art through my sister

It takes about 5 hours of serious concentration before I need to dig out my glasses

another brain dump

Misguided sense of self importance, I guess that’s what it was. And here I am today still trying to be useful, still trying to find my place. There are no heroes anymore, only people. Always too eager to please, too reliant on outsiders, with no one to help who would I be?

Is it wrong to feel compelled to help out? To try and be involved? It’s surely not selfless as the human condition doesn’t allow us to do anyting truly so, therefore we must assume that it is selfish, in which case is it right to interfere? Some part of me needs to be able to assist people with things, a younger me would have seen this as my purpose in life, an older and more cynical me sees it as a weakness, a reliance. In truth I doubt either theory is correct, I just am.

It’s probably considered abnormal to analyse oneself this much. Another thing I cannot change, I have been sporadically observing myself almost like a character in a story for as long as I can remember, and naturally over the years the observations have gone from the excited youngster with a million schemes to a critical being that still cherishes her once carefree, confident and surefooted inner child.

We all settle into our little slot eventually, don’t we? Those of us that have given up on being something amazing, who have put to rest our conviction that we can change the world.We grow up, we learn that we have to live within the constraints of society and economy, but somewhere, buried inside, there’s a part of you that still believes.

Looks like I’m in for an all nighter

My sister Vikki, the art student, has her dissertation due in tomorrow and needs a bit of help with getting the final write up done. She really knows her stuff when it comes to art but due to her dyslexia (and probably also because she takes after me for leaving things til the last minute) she finds it difficult to get all this knowledge down on paper sometimes.

I did a couple of years of Uni through my company so I’m pretty well practised in beefing up essays to the right word count, plus I’m a bit of a grammar and spelling geek so hopefully I’ll be able to spot any bits the spellchecker has missed. The tools we have are so inept where spelling is concerned, dyslexics aren’t going to know the difference between their, there and they’re, our language is very unfair on these people!

Think I’ll get some booze in to help the night along

another weekend flies by

If you’d like to spend the rest of your life on the internet, you should download stumble upon. I started using it this weekend and I’m completely hooked! It’s this little button that sits in the corner of your browser window which you click when you want to see something new. You pre-set it with any number of preferences available and it takes you to a site that it thinks you’ll like based on the information you’ve given it. I spent about 3 hours online yesterday wombling from one interesting site to the next… it’s like all of a sudden the internet is only full of the things I like! Be prepared for more links to things like this from now on:

http://users.telenet.be/leukelinks/flash/elmo.swf

I just found a tenner in my purse that the beer monkey didn’t steal, quite impressive as it’s been a really good weekend. I survived work on Saturday, then went to the Wizards for a while to chill there before heading for home. In the evening we headed to Eddies where we watched as a few of the guys took it in turns to kill zombies in dead Rising, which is the perfect game for anyone that literally just wants to kill zombies. Pixie lady turned up after the pub (by which time I was incapable of moving from the sofa) and we had a little catch up. She decided at one point that she was the lovechild of myself and the Wizard and that she wanted to be carried around in a papoose… she’s a strange one that girl!

Sunday I did my rounds in Collier Row. I went to see my learning disabled friend for an update on the various hospital visits she’s endured since I last saw her. She takes it all with good humour, I don’t think she even sees it as unusual to visit the hospital at least every week. She has rather severe epilepsy and they’re starting to worry about the number of fits she has because they think it might actually be doing lasting damage now, deep joy. She’s invited me to her 26th birthday next month, a meal at a local Chinese and Indian buffet, hopefully she’ll be OK to go.

My next stop was a visit to my Nan and Grandads’. I love my grandparents dearly, they spoiled my sisters and I rotten when we were little and one of the highlights of my week when I was a child was knowing I was going to have dinner at their house every Thursday after school. Nan would make minced meat, peas and mashed potato with pastry shapes, and Grandad would often play card games with us. We had the run of the place and always had a whale of a time. I still love going to see them, even though Nan’s started to lose it a bit, they’re still fascinating and they have so many interesting stories of how things used to be.

On arriving home from my travels I found the Wizard on the last leg of a poker tournament and his friend sitting in the Hall. The fridge was stocked with beer… several beers and a few people later and we all headed up to the pub… and then on again back to Eddies… I woke this morning to find that the beer monkey had shat in my mouth and stolen all my money, the sure sign of a good weekend!

The Official God FAQ

http://www.400monkeys.com/God/

counting my blessings

I’m stuck at work again on overtime, but it’s alright. As I work through the mundane task that I’ve been set to keep me busy for the day I look around and I’m surrounded by reminders of why I come in and do this every day. Sitting atop a box file are various little representations of good times; including some ball pond balls I nicked from a pub after we had a Halloween party in a Wacky Warehouse a couple of years ago.

Across my cubicle wall are aerial photographs of Reading 2006 and 2007 with arrows pointing to my tent, there’s a Freak flyer (an old alternative night that used to run in Romford), a train ticket from a puzzle solving day I went on when I was playing Perplex City, a Nemi clipping about nights out at the pub, and just because they make me smile a poem called Porphyria’s Lover which I studied at school, and my dad’s favourite poem, If.

My desk itself is littered with little trinkets that I’ve gathered over the years, a pewter faerie from someone who once helped me change my life, a broken arrow, purple guitar picks I was given by a guitarist guy I used to see, a grey Danté from Clerks who represents my bad days at work, a little paper Mario star that my mate Scouse sent to me, a pile of crystals to remind me of the little hippie mystic nut I was when I was a kid, a framed postcard of my favourite piece of Amy Brown art called Cloak of Stars, and a lot of smiley faces stuck to everything.

When I leave my computer for a little while my screensaver comes up, a slideshow of all of my friends having good times and smiling out at me, some from Reading, some from nights out and parties, all reminding me that I’m here today so that I can afford to spend more time making memories with them and collecting more trinkets to add to this messy happy desk as I go.

Bad day

Sometimes I wish I wasn’t so nice. I can’t change me, and when it comes down to it I wouldn’t, but on occasion I could do with a bit more oomph. Yesterday is a perfect example of my empathy getting the better of me.

I had planned to have quite a boring evening, going to my parents place for a bit, then over to my aunts to go through my stuff in her loft, then home for a relatively early night and a catch up on my reading. Some time in the early afternoon it was suggested that since poker wasn’t on in Brentwood due to some of the guys being henpecked by Valentines supporting girlfriends, it could possibly be held in Romford instead.

I thought this was a cool idea and figured I’d be back from the olds in time for a little poker, and soon it looked like chips, cards, and people were as good as sorted. When no one was forthcoming with a venue, I realised I was probably the only one in Romford who would be a viable option, and thought it’d be OK to invite people to mine, plus I’d be able to stumble to bed whenever I went out if I wanted to. I made the suggestion, it looked good… then my flatmate tried to get me to change the venue to a mutual friends place instead, I got a tad agitated.

Jon isn’t a fan of poker. Well, he’s not a fan of playing it as seriously as I do. He gets bored with it taking so long and annoyed by the attention paid to blind levels and burning top cards. When he started trying to get me to move the game elsewhere, my immediate assumption was that he was being a moody sod, he’d already organised football at the flat and didn’t want his night being disturbed by mine. This seemed very unfair to me because my nights are often disturbed by a less than sober Jon announcing his arrival home at ridiculous o’clock, and I’m often kept awake for some time after going to bed by the sound of people in the flat, something I never complain about because as far as I’m concerned that’s what I signed up for when I moved in with him.

Anyway… now slightly peeved but still in the mood for poker, and ever the diplomat, I contacted Eddie to see if we could hold the game there. Ed always has a Zombie Movie Marathon on Valentines, and this year was no exception, so he said he wasn’t up for it. I knew this was going to happen anyway but figured now I’d exhausted that option poker would be good to go at mine. What actually happened was I ended up getting into an email argument with Jon and left those waiting on confirmation in the lurch with a very brief notice that poker wasn’t happening at mine that night.

During the course of said email argument it emerged that for the first time in quite some time Jon actually really needed a quiet night in, and the thought of poker until the wee small hours just wasn’t going to help. I suggested he chill in his room, he pointed out that his room was crap, I suggested Eddies and Ivans, he said neither would really work (which is fair because if you want to have a quiet one you don’t want to be trapsing around town).

I was being worn down. I don’t like being on the wrong side of people and I was beginning to see that Jon wasn’t being purposefully obtuse, he was just having a bad day. Of course the fact that I was frustrated and wanted poker was a problem, but there only really seemed to be two of us that were really trying to get poker sorted, and the whole row seemed like too much effort for the sake of something which might not actually happen anyway.

I felt resigned, I was angry at Jon for not doing anything I could actually be angry with, I was angry at myself for being too nice, and I was angry that I’d be letting some people down who actually wanted poker. I left a to the point message on the forum telling the guys poker wasn’t on, I played nice to Jon on the email for a bit so he wouldn’t feel bad because I figured he didn’t need me being moody adding to his day, and I left work feeling very frustrated and unvented.

To add to my foul mood, my bus didn’t turn up, then the next bus didn’t turn up so a bunch of us were forceed to walk to the station, from there we had to get a train to Gidea Park and then a bus to Romford because Romford station was shut due to some selfish asshole deciding top himself in a very public manner. Jumpers are so bloody inconsiderate, fair enough if they want to take their own life that’s their choice as far as I’m concerned, but to do it in a way which will potentially expose disturbing things to the driver, people on the platform, passengers, staff at the station, police, and medical crews, as well as possibly putting others lives at risk… it’s just uncalled for. Plus it buggers up the trains and that’s something that London Transport is perfectly capable of doing without any help.

By the time I got to mum and dads I had a beautiful headache, then I had to sit and eat my dinner in the hallway because mum and dad were doing Valentines stuff in the dining room, and Vikki and Alan were halfway through Torchwood in the lounge (I need to see it and don’t want to ruin the plot). After I’d eaten and calmed myself down a bit I sent a few texts out to people apologising for being moody… yet again with the too nice. I wasn’t in the mood for going to my aunts to sort my stuff out, so I spent most of the evening wombling about on the net and then talking to mum and dad about trivial stuff.

I was glad to go to bed when I got home.