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.