An Evaluation Of Myself

There are times when this place goes deserted for weeks on end, and there are times when I essentially become a writing whore. I feel I'm currently in a period of the latter.

This has pretty much been brought on by a couple of reasons: 1) because I've been reading other ranty-writery stuff (which I'll get back to more in a minute) and 2) because I've got stuff to rant about, all screaming inside my head that it's wanting so much to burst forth and set itself free onto the world to the point that I'm (I'M!) worried for my own mental state... and that's actually saying something when I'm the one worrying about somebody's sanity.

Mostly, I'm bothered by the realisation that I have a mere five more weeks left to get cracking with the four biggest assignments of the year. And sure, five weeks is, like, over a month. It's easily done and blah blah shitting-blah, but you seem to forget... I'M A GOOD BOY! I like to do my work on time and make sure I don't leave everything to the last minute (and I mean that in a literal sense, since I'd undoubtedly struggle trying to shit out a grand total of 8,000 words in sixty seconds without having to resort to the ol' copy-n-paste method, which, quite frankly is more than tempting in the Age of Wikipedia we are so firmly embedded in right now).

Altogether, I'm finding myself taking deep, soothing, self-patronising breaths in between the thoughts of an original short story (1,000 words), a study of the 1974 film Chinatown with regards to film theories and other such shite (2,500 words), trying to explain how the American 'let’s-answer-his-question-with-another-question' Lord Of The Flies-esque programme Lost can be described as a "Quality Drama" (2,500 words) and a, quote, self-evaluation on myself and my progress over the year with regards to being a writer (2,000 words). For that last one, however, it's just occurred to me that should this post happen to come near that amount (which is more than likely with all the crap swimming around in my head right now, seriously my fingers are tapping away so quickly they won't stop for air, but that's OK; fingers don't breathe [I was going to say that the rate they were typing was 'fast and furious' but decided against it because a) it's clichéd and b) it just goes to show how much my brain has been permeated by endless repeats of Catchphrase on Challenge {right at this moment, I have Roy Walker's Irish tones telling me "it's fast, it's furious, it's the Ready Money Round!" while my brain conjures up images of Mr. Chips tap-dancing on a mountain of animated gold coins}]. Wow! See, I might actually get up to 2,000 words after all!), I could always just submit this as an evaluation of myself. Pretty damn accurate, too.

Furthermore, I need to give a presentation in, well, technically two days since it's gone midnight and it's Sunday now. This presentation shall look into the workings of a writer of non-fiction, meaning that I've spent the last week-and-a-half or more reading through almost anything and everything written by columnist Charlie Brooker. Naturally, I'm in ranty polemic mode as a side-effect and can only apologise now if I happen to make any references to people "shitting pine cones", coming across as overly sociopathic or ending this whole thing with a sign-off like 'now, go away.' The worst part of this is that I need to formulate all of the knowledge inside my head (and Wikipedia) into some kind of a 5-minute presentation-slash-speech-slash-jittering at the front of the class desperately telling myself not to pee my pants, all within the next two days.

Now, it's at this point I could point out that all the other big assignments I've done, I've managed to knock out in two days (or in the case of the last presentation, a single afternoon... and even that was interrupted by Family Guy and chips) and managed to get respectable marks for each one of them; and no wonder really, judging by some of the crap I've seen other people churn out. Like I said, I'm a good boy; I may rush the work but at least I'll do it properly. So I suppose I could, you know, not worry too much about the 8,000-word mountain I've yet to scale, but instead leave it 'til a week or two before the due dates and lock myself inside a darkened room with only the necessary literature and a restricted access to the Internet, which would admittedly give me more time right now to procrastinate.

One such feat of procrastination as of late being my rediscovery of the great oft-overlooked sketch-com Green Wing, which I have, in fact, spent days lying in bed re-watching the whole thing from start to finish, praising the fact that they didn't ruin it by going on any longer, yet cursing the fact that it didn't go on any longer thus bringing more laughs, and the fact that there's been nothing like it since.

Well, dang me britches (whatever the hell 'britches' are, anyway) for only just recently I've come across the news that a brand new show by the same writing folk, by the name of Campus, premiered as a pilot just over a year ago and is coming the tellywaves sometime in the coming weeks. And to have a Green Wing-style comedy with a name like Campus, you wouldn't be far wrong in assuming it might feature an ensemble cast in a University setting. I managed to hunt down this pilot earlier thanks to the miracle of 4OD (well, technically 4OD on YouTube since real 4OD refuses to show me the stuff I desire to watch) and while it's not exactly the same as Green Wing, it's a nice stupid and surreal substitute that can keep us going for a while. What I'm finding spectacular, though, is that the whole notion of me re-watching it whilst in University coincides with a new similar series set in University, and just seems to scream out to me that this is a sign that was meant for me and only me like nobody else in the world actually matters at all. This has also prompted me to start thinking of winning the lottery non-stop for the next week, until come Friday afternoon, I pop down and get a lucky dip and just play the waiting game until Saturday night when I eventually go from plebeian student to "rollin'-in-da-moneyz'.

Chances are, however, that only one weird miracle coincidence is meant to happen to me this decade and it's just been assigned to me in the form of television, and my inevitable lottery win is actually barely probable at all. So instead, I'll just have to bum off student loans and what essentially amounts to glamourised slave-work in some kind of retail institution or another to make some kind of financial gain in this life, all the while trying to convince myself I can "make it" as a writer doing stuff like this, but chances are that anyone who started reading this seven hours ago got lost somewhere around Catchphrase and has withered and died, leaving a skeletal corpse in Mr. Chips' money pile or something.

Also, I regret to announce that all of the above is just a load of time wasted and, in turn, future time wasted as I don't have the 2,000 words to submit as a serious assignment (it's just as well really looking back over half of this – sleep deprivation doesn't half do some dodgy stuff to my head) so will have to actually have a think about what I do want to spend 2,000 words saying and spend time typing them all out in some kind of coherent order, and all this thought of wasted time is really just depressing me now. Go away.

Now! 58 - Tsunami Special

Ever have one of those moments where your brain breaks down and ends up kneeling in the middle of an abandoned car park at night in the pouring rain with both arms out screaming an impossibly long "NO!" as the crane shot slowly zooms out and pans upwards?

That's exactly a moment what I had when I heard about plans for (and I'm being deadly serious here) a Japan charity LP. Artists like Rihanna, Lady PhoneHead and Just-a Haircut would be featuring on an album to raise proceeds for the disruption in Japan thanks to a very nasty and rude earthquake under the Pacific Ocean right next to the Japanese coast (just in case you hadn't heard). Well, we've seen these charity songs and albums before; they generally consist of big name rich musical stars taking time out of their busy schedules to record two-and-a-half lines of Everybody Hurts or whatever, ultimately making what is essentially a shite cover version with the intention of giving the proceeds to some disaster or another that's in the news. The problem I have with these charity things doesn't just amount to that fact that we've suddenly got a crap version of a classic song suddenly in the media's attention being overplayed to the point it makes your ears want to crawl off, but that all of this could be easily avoided if those celebrities were to stop preaching to us poor folk about how we should "dig deep and give even though financial times are tough" and, oh I dunno, just inject their own inexplicable fortunes into whatever cause they've been told to yabber on about.

The origin of all this came from the, quite frankly classic, Do They Know It's Christmas? for Band Aid, created in an attempt to bring Africa out of poverty, and probably let them know what it's like to have snow since they don't get it at Christmas time (or ever, for that matter). It's become a classic not just for the fact that it's a Christmas song but iconic as it brought together musicians trying to do something decent for a good cause. But ever since then, the same song has been revived by two (not one, two!) different collections of whoever's current at the time. Somehow this has diminished the value of it all while the song still remains listenable to, even if only for the way Dizzee Rascal added some extra rappy bits (cos he's fly and ting, or something).

The problem I have with the 'charity single', though, is that lately it's virtually become more of a preachy cover song by whoever's current and available at the time and wants to look like they care. And more often than not it's orchestrated by someone like Simon friggin' Cowell. Way back in the depths of fifteen months ago, Haiti was struck with a soul-crushing earthquake that left many people homeless and clinging to life. In the following weeks, our ears were violated by every-fucking-body under Cowell's guidance and Jon Bon Jovi (for some reason) bleating out a rendition of the classic R.E.M. track that could drive any miserable old fucker out of this realm and into the ethereal whateverness that lies beyond.

Furthermore, to add insult to injury (quite literally), ol' square-hair's had the brainwave of getting each year's X Factor contestants (most of whom can't fucking sing at the best of times) to cover some shit or other vaguely related to war amputees, presumably because a Glee Cast-esque "ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-etc." rendition of Don't Stop Believin' might be deemed inappropriate when accompanied with the montage of people who've had various bits severed off them all in the name of oil serving one's country.

Why do the rich folk of the bigger industries - who I imagine lounge around in one of their twelve L.A. beach condominiums made of diamond encrusted gold bricks and have a box of fifty's in the bathroom instead of toilet paper - preach to the factory workers, checkout operators and dole-ites of the world to give their money to a charitable cause? Surely it would be easier if they just did it and didn't inflict such crimes against sound (not even music, sound) upon the world. Two birds, one hypothetical murdering implement.

Anyway, enough of that rant, because while the 'charity singles' are created for specific causes, this recent LP to raise money for getting Japan back on track (somehow) actually consists of no special track in particular, but is instead a compilation album of songs that you could get anywhere else anyway! There's the usual suspects: Lennon's Imagine, Foo Fighters' My Hero, and Elton's Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me but even they're stretching it a bit in terms of relevance to a mahoosive natural disaster. So, could someone please explain to me how the fucking hell Rihanna's Only Girl In The World, Pink's Sober and Use Somebody by Kings Of Leon constitute as relevant tracks for something called Songs For Japan... cos I frickin' gagged when I saw the tracklist. If you'd like to gag/laugh/cry/sit-open-mouthed/shake-your-head-and-tut at the full thing, click this bit o' purple. Maybe I've slipped into some parallel universe where things just aren't supposed to make sense anymore, but the whole thing read less like a charity CD and seems more like a Now! 58 - Tsunami Special.

Or maybe it's a case of playing each song in reverse to hear the secret hidden messages telling you to "give every penny you have" and "fellate Simon Cowell" (yeah, I still don't like the fucker).

I Don't Really Have A Drink-Of-Choice Anymore

I can tell I'm getting on a bit when my first night involving alcohol after three weeks of "I'm-financially-fucked" sobriety consists of half a bottle of Rosé (11.5%). Somehow this managed to take me into that special realm where shouting is the communication method of choice and actions have no consequences. Cue next morning with a throat that tastes like stale trees and an overwhelming urge to piss, and all I keep thinking is I'M ONLY TWENTY-ONE!

But then, maybe twenty-one is the age where things need to be toned down and "grown-up". After all, I'm well past the normal age for youngsters going out and getting off their tits on White Lightning and Special Brew. This particular generation seems to have been one in which the typical going-out age has declined rapidly. By that I mean that when I was thirteen, people didn't drink and party until they were at least twenty-three, yet now all the fourteen-year-olds are becoming fully qualified adults drinking everything, taking E and sprogging-'em-out like there's no tomorrow, all in the name of child benefit. In fact, it's got to the point now where I feel like such a failure at this age for not being a grandparent with liver failure. Instead I'm a typical student, supposed to be livin' it up and ting, getting wasted off my face and sleeping in 'til 2pm with a head that feels like one of them Masterchef contenders has taken a whisk to my brain to create a cannibal-scrambled-egg-special.

To be honest, though, I've been steering clear of the funny juice for reasons including lack of monetary funds... but you knew that already and quite frankly I'm sick of talking (writing) about being poor as I am sick of being poor. Not only that though; I've been a bit wary of certain drinks-of-choice that I don't really have a drink-of-choice anymore:

• Strongbow made it so I'd never have a healthy bowel-movement again; it's been months since I last touched the stuff and I'm still ejecting parts of my intestines what-ought-not to have been ejected anyway. Also it tastes bad.

• Bottles of WKD, VK, and other letters of the alphabet are supposed to be the staple of a student night out, but MMU Cheshire SU (more letters) hasn't got the memo about that. So while most Universities in the country flog 'em for a quid a pop, they end up robbing us of more pennies than a normal pint would. In fact, screw the country! It's like that in institutions the world over. Even in American fraternity and sorority houses, they're getting sugared-up and whacked-out for next to nothing in kappa-delta-theta (Greek letters).

• I'm even wary of the mix of vodka and any high-energy drink (for legal reasons I wish not to state any particular brands, but common ones tend to rhyme with Dead Dull, Contentness, and Asda’s own Blue Charge). This stems back to some pseudo-scientific rumour I heard a while back; since vodka (alcohol [a depressant]) slows down your heart rate and energy drinks (high in caffeine) make your heart go insanely fast, a mix of the two together causes the heart to get depressed and hyperactive at the same time, getting monumentally confused in the process, screaming, crying, giggling and ultimately not knowing what to do until it explodes in a fit of violent rage. Failing that, it reaches a point where it can no longer understand its purpose in life and takes a pistol from its breast pocket and fulfils its vow to "end it all" straight through the left ventricle.

So I've not been drinking for a while (except for last night, which, as you might've already gathered, is the reason for this bastard of a rant), mostly because I can't but also because I don't want to. I'm showing my age now (in this state of times, at least) by complaining about why anyone would ever want to wake up with a throat full of regret, the body of a sauna and a brain swimming in its own juices. That, plus I can't see the appeal in having your vital internal organs turn all bi-polar on yo ass.

Then again, if Charlie Sheen's taught us anything, they'd be bi-winning bi-taking-us-out-of-this-hell-hole.

X Factor For Foodies

And so once again, I have been suckled unto the breast of Reality TV masquerading as documentertaintment. The culprit; Masterchef.

It started in the 90s with a boring old man with a boring old voice, showcasing boring people cooking boring food, interspersed with boring chatter from other boring people. Unfortunately, it became apparent that viewers could only tolerate such boredom for eleven years, leading to the programme vanishing into the ether of non-existence.

Some years later, it got revived by an Australian man and a baked potato in glasses. Somehow, they managed to take the boring old show and make it new and mad, giving contenders twenty-seven different tasks including: making a two course meal with a maximum of four ingredients, working for three hours in a real high-class restaurant and flambéing a watermelon until it reaches the correct consistency akin to a SmartPrice jaffa cake. Naturally, viewing figures steadily rose (...probably. I don't have any actual evidence for this, but since I'm going somewhere with it you might as well just take it as given for now and argue with me later).

Leading us to this year. And keeping with mainstream trends, the show's gone all upmarket and wham-bam-pizzazz on yo asses. Gone are the heats of contestants you'd see once every three weeks as they rotated and ultimately progressed further on. Now the show follows a much more simple linear style of taking on a shitload of amateur cooks, only to tell 95% of them to fuck right off, and for those lucky few (twenty to be precise) to make it to the boot camp kitchen, only for another ten get the butcher's knife in the neck and the ten survivors get to live another day to cook for their lives. Within the first two or three episodes, they manage to cull a sizeable crowd to a mere handful, then allow the others to keep going and going until they inevitably get picked off one by one over the course of the rest of the series. Ultimately, the whole thing ends up looking like the X Factor for foodies, except without the public involvement, the whooping crowd hollering over every vaguely positive comment and the face of Simon Cowell.

I suppose, to draw another parallel (since this is the BBC we're talking about), it's very similar to The Apprentice; a show which I found myself becoming a slave to over the course of my initially lonely months in Halls of Residence. Basically, we're shown the lives of people who want to "make it" in their chosen sector of careerdom and follow them as they undertake increasingly brutal tasks that would force any normal person to throw their hands up in the air, scream, cry, swear, shout and shit all over the place and tell the masters of this cruel show of puppetry exactly where to go, leaving with as much dignity as they can muster from within themselves after all the torture they've been put through. Although, naturally, having cameras around makes all the difference.

The thing with it is, though, that up until now it hadn't quite dawned on me the cruel nature of what this programme has become. Yes, it deeply saddens me to admit, but I have been conned once again by "Reality TV" in believing that this was a simple cookery show (which is, quite frankly, a style of programme I enjoy watching [it puts me in the mood to cook and makes me feel like I can do it, so much so that if this whole writing jig never takes off I could seek solace in the kitchen of a greasy spoon {no I'm not doing the whole brackets thing again}]), when in fact it's been lying to me and feeding me the heart-warming, life-changing, "journeys" of the contestants (I must stress that the notions of contestants' journeys are now copyrighted by Simon Cowell, no infringment is intended by this mere, simpleton peasant of a blog post). Furthermore, it's done that thing where I feel even more competent than the people inside my tellybox, yelling at the bloke with a severed finger for not laying his tomato slices out properly and telling him I could do it better.

It only occured to me during tonight's episode, the vegetarian special, in which the only vegetarian competitor felt she could excel but was criticised by real people (by "real" people I mean people who aren't actually judging a televised competition, but merely passing comment on the food they've been given) on one single dish. This lead to a montage of upset-face, the scraping of uneaten food off plates and "I really thought this was my chance" soundbites... probably with Röyksopp playing in the background; I can't be too sure of the music. And the reason I don't remember the music, is because I was actually moved. I'd been drawn in, captivated by this woman's love of cooking and utter dismay at the idea of failure and the feeling of her life crashing around her into tiny pieces of circus tent. (Oh yeah, they were cooking for circus people inside a tent, did I not mention?) Anyway, it's not all bad. She made it through to next week's show in the end so life isn't one giant apocalytic chasm just yet.

Although this brings me onto the true realisation of the con-liness of the whole thing. All through the programme we'd been informed that, in a special double-elimination twist (trademark Cowell), two of the contenders would be washing pots and being banished into the realms of nowheredom once again. And so came the big reveal. One contestant down, another to face the chop. If I were a betting man (and if they actually took bets on the next Masterchef evictee within that little 30-second silence that comes after "the next person to leave the competition is...", which gets accompanied by a montage of slow-zooming shots of petrified looking faces), I would've thought the second person to go would've been the bloke who said "there's really no room for mistakes at this point" straight after he dropped a bowl of flour all over the floor making his shoe look like a snowy-capped mountain in the middle of a Christmas postcard. Unfortunately, however, he didn't get the boot, or the chop, or any other metaphorical device you can think of. Instead, we were told that since all the others had done a good job, they all get to stay on another week.

Now, I don't like Simon Cowell at the best of times, but at least whenever he calls a double-culling he sticks to it rather than use it as a device to ram the fear of God into people just so they can cook you some better food. (What actually happens to the food after the judges take a single bite of it, anyway? Is it divvied out between the rest of the production staff, or simply thrown out? Surely not in these times of Comic Relief we're in. Couldn't they just stick half an aubergine-stuffed haggis and a bowl of ravioli in a doggy-bag and ship it off to Ethiopia? I dunno!!)

So that, my friends, is how you turn the phrase "I just watched Masterchef" into over a thousand words. If only I could write that much this easily when it comes to actual work I should be doing.

All in all, however, not only has it managed to make me feel somewhat diminished that I have succumbed to the powers of "Reality TV" once more, but also (as is common whenever I watch any kind of cookery programme) I'm now stupidly hungry and have the overwhelming urge to cook something extravagant and beautiful to look at and a delight to eat. Problem is I'm still living on a student diet and, thus, the height of my extravangance amounts to instant noodles, two minutes in the microwave.

Besides, what five-star meal can you make from baked beans, corn flakes and half a rotting onion?

The Internet Is Just Mean

Once again, I've found myself pondering "why, exactly, do I wish to pursue a future in Writing, when I never allow myself to do so?" and come to the same conclusion as I have done for last insert-inexplicable-amount-of-times-here.

"I'll do it later..."

Well "later" isn't good enough, me! You'll do it now!

This came to me during a brief morning period in the shower (technically it was before I showered, but I decided not to say that because a) I couldn't be bothered typing it [except I just did in these brackets, well not these brackets but the brackets surrounding these brackets {more brackets!}], and b) I wanted to sound like a normal person, like I do normal people things, such as cleaning myself whilst doing the nudey-boogey-woogey singing out of time, tune and language to one of Shakira's numbers en español. You know, like normal people).

Unfortunately, I feel I have not much to push these letters for considering the amount of dead space in my brain that's been left by the mass amounts of nothing that's been filling it up. I've not started reading anything new, Deal Or No Deal's still shit but compulsory and the amount of takeaway menus pinned to my noticeboard has risen from one to three, whereas the amount of actual takeaways I've order remains static at zero.

Even worse, I managed to suffer a case of Writer's Block yesterday (although not so much a "block", more of a Writer's Head-On Collision with a Crash Test Wall Where the Dummies Fly Through The Windscreen at Infathomable Speeds Helpfully Slowed Down So Normal People Can See the Hilarity at the Hypothetical Gruesome Deaths of Mannequins [too wordy? {more brackets!!}]). Whilst being told to draft out a short story from a single picture - a fairly simple task, n'est-ce pas? - I found myself spending the first eleven minutes of twenty gazing into the abstract swirlyness of nothing, another three minutes trying to think of a story based on it, and the other six writing what was, in fact, much closer to a shite poem than shite piece of prose. The only thing that could've made it all the more fun is if I'd been told to continue it, work on it, redraft and present it in a mere seven days. Naturally this is what happened and now I have six remaining to do it. But of course, I'm not doing it. Instead, I'm on here moaning about how I'm not doing it (whilst also moaning about how I'm not writing anything [the fact that I've been writing all of this is completely irrelevent in my head {BRACKETS!!}]).

My days of late have been filled by none other than that Satanic bitch called the Internet. I find it thoroughly amazing how something so non-existent can be so distracting. It's essentially the virtual equivalent of a cat batting around a ball of string that's actually made of nothing, even though what constitues as "nothing" does not technically exist considering everything is made of something. But that means if "nothing" can not exist, then "nothing" is nothing and, therefore impossible. Thus "nothing" must be made of something, otherwise it cannot exist. However, "nothing" is just a concept; it does not exist except for in the minds of theologians and philosophers through means of vowel- and consonant-sounds originating from the letters H-I-O-N-T-G-N, which, incidentally, is the sequence I used to get "nothing" on Countdown the other day for seven points.

But yeah, fuck all that. The Internet is just mean. It makes me refresh Facebook every twenty seconds just to see if anyone I remotely care about has decided to say anything of any relevance to my existence or for my own amusement. Of course, this is never the case, so all these seconds of my life are collected up and wasted, thus feeding the monster that is, in fact, this. My further exploitations into the "World Wide Wha...?!" include me having happened upon amusing articles that actually broaden my mind as a reader/writer combo, stumbling across heavily-pixellated (or low quality [brackets?] {MUTHA-FUCKIN' BRACKETS!!!}]) YouTube adaptations of the first half of the songs intended for this year's Eurovision Song Contest (possibly to be followed up by witty/polemical piss-taking writing for the amusement of, amongst others, myself [that is, if I ever get round to feeling like getting round to it {do I even need to mention this any more?}]), and remembering a place someone told me about on this 'ere Intermaweb, which I would normally write about and rip into for it's notoriety, shockingness and downright wrongness for its existence. However, Rules 1 and 2 prevent me from speaking of this.

Basically, what I've been trying to say in all those paragraphs is that I can't be bothered writing, unless I force myself to and just let my brain free onto the page. But this isn't really a page. This a segment of virtual non-entity, which does not technically exist, yet cannot be considered "nothing" as it is in fact something: an amalgamation of letter symbols presented in a way for your actual existent eyes to look at, and your actual existent brain to understand.

Actually, you're better off forgetting everything you've just read for it doesn't actually make sense, is incohesive and I don't feel like being taken away by people in white coats who've had an anonymous phone-call about fears for the state of my mental health. I can assure you I am perfectly sane with a firm grip on reality... until I get on the Internet, that is.