In Bed

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

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

 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

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

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

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

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

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