So yeah, October can bugger off. The whole month has skipped by without me getting much of a chance to input words into this 'ere white space via the data highway. Well, I say that. Actually, I don't say that; I'm not sitting here talking to a keyboard. What I mean is: Well, I type that, but the truth is I've had a couple of chances to update over the last four weeks but the working lifestyle thrust upon me lately makes me want to spend every free moment I have sleeping. The problem I face with this is that falling into such a work/sleep routine makes me loathe the other people who live in my house for the fact that they get to actually live in the house, whilst I treat the place like a very personalised hotel with albeit pretty shit cleaning staff. What follows here, therefore, is a brief list of things I've managed to get done over the last month that I can vaguely remember. My apologies in advance for the amount of shitness to come in this post.
The childish side of me has reared its ugly freckled face over the last few weeks following the release of Pokémon X and Y, rendering a lot of my designated sleeping time moot and causing me to fall victim to addiction like countless alcoholics and smokers before me. I blame Uni - more specifically the people at Uni - for making me this way. Up until about a year ago, the last time I'd so much as thought or even cared about the Japanese gaming franchise was, as far as I can remember, in the pre-Internet era for me. This is the best recollection I can make considering my memory in times without Internet is rather sketchy. I also feel I should point out that I first gained access to the online realm in 2002, so we're going back at least eleven years here. However, Uni does weird things to people, forcing you to mingle with a multitude of weird and wonderful people with one collective like-minded childhood.
Somewhere in the mire of young adults who seem to have shared cultural aspects of my youth, stories and jokes have been shared creating an air of nostalgia. This fond nostalgia has convinced me to revisit older aspects of my childhood in a move generally labelled in the geek community as "retro". However, when the good people of Japan announced they were continuing the seemingly never-ending franchise with yet another game with the same premise in which the same sequence of events occurs but now with updated graphics and shit, I just knew I'd have to honour this collision of a long forgotten childhood and updated technologies by spending 35 quid and countless hours of life on it. The inner child has now taken over and takes pride in the accomplishments achieved in the game despite the fact that the difficulty level of the whole thing is so considerably low, not even an ant could limbo under that stick.
I mentioned smokers earlier in this and that reminded me of something else that's occurred in my life-sphere lately, thus making a seamless transition from the last paragraph to this. No, I'm not suddenly smoking now: it still smells like the dust from behind a long-standing pile of bricks being burnt and I don't quite fancy the idea of standing outside for ten minutes at a time whilst winter approaches. My smoking story emanates from the fact that a large portion of my work time is spent behind a kiosk counter meaning that I can now identify most brands of cigarettes or loose rolling tobacco by the design of the packaging, despite never touching the contents myself. It also means I can hum the little jingle produced by the National Lottery machine whenever a winning ticket or scratchcard is rewarded at will.
In a twist of events, though, a considerable portion of the locals in my area come from one of three groups: Polish migrants, Spanish/Portuguese/possibly Latin-American migrants, and native English locals probably inwardly complaining about the number of foreigners 'round 'ere. In my embracing of all the peoples of this world, I don't differentiate between people who originate from elsewhere, just as long as nobody's rude to me I'm happy to serve the human race in all its forms. Unfortunately, however, there comes a point where a certain amount of basic English-language skills may be necessary to partake in a transaction involving what variety of tobacco-related product one would like to purchase. Usually the name of the brand is enough but one of my most recent customers was unable to produce such a name for me to look for, providing me with only the description "Smoking Kills" in spite of the fact that virtually every type of tobacco is brandished with "Smoking Kills" as a kind of standard issue governmental warning.
Never a dull moment there really. And before the whole Internet descends on me to jump down my throat becoz I is bein' a racist, I'd like to point out that as a worker in the retail sector, my only gripe with humanity is rude people. As a matter of pure fact, I've dealt with several native English people who gruffly grunt as a form of communication and several non-native English folks who are just peachy and pleasant regardless of their level of speaking the lingo. Now that I've dug myself out of that hole, you bunch of web-space dwelling, accusing bastards can jog on.
