Thursday, April 8
Still Catching Up!!
I'm now writing about the Monday of last week (the 29th of March), because, well, that's where I left off last time. And yes, I know I'm still so very far behind in writing about shit that has happened! Don't moan.
Do you ever have those days where you have a big list of important things to do, but it all gets ruined by rolling over and going back to sleep for 2 hours after the alarm goes off? That would be my Monday.
Even though I'd finished classes the previous Friday, I had an overdue essay due in on that Monday, and I'd explicitly promised the tutor in the class on Friday that it would be in by the Monday at the latest. I'd planned to write it exam-style (i.e. without referring to notes and books whilst writing) in 2 hours and then email it to him.
Hence the oversleeping by 3 hours fucking up my plans completely.
I had to pop into the city centre to pick up my sister's birthday present (the new NERD album, which is incidentally very good), and also all 3 series of Family Guy on DVD. They were on sale in HMV for £11.99 each, which I thought was a bargain, considering the box set of all 3 is usually £60+. Money burns a hole in my pocket, I can't help it.
After a brief, and eventually unnecessary, detour to Victoria (the station, not some random woman), I got back home, booked a coach ticket home (to Melksham) on the Internet for Tuesday, and set about working my way through Family Guy series 1 with a couple of housemates.
Yes, I do fully realise that the 2-3 hours that I spent in front of the TV would have been better spent (or at least more productively spent) writing that stupid essay, but hey, it was Family Guy. You would have done the same. Damn the failure of my work ethic within minutes of walking out of my final class of the semester.
But, on the other hand, praise be to me for being the proud owner of the complete Family Guy series. Praise be indeed.
Oh yeah, one more thing of note happened during the daytime of that Monday: I received a phone call from a picture researcher at the Observer, checking if I was available for a quick photoshoot the next day. Jeez, I thought, just how big is this article going to be? Minor celebritydom, here I come!
That evening, I'd arranged to meet Girl in Covent Garden to go to this little place called Gardening Club. No, you don't need wellies and a spade to go there, just a willingness to get down and dirty (see, I'm in touch with 'the street', I know what words and phrases to use. I'm so down with it) on the dancefloor to some classic hip-hop and r'n'b tunes. I could cope with that, especially if Girl was there.
Before I met her though, I went with my housemates to this cool little pub in Hampstead called The Holly Bush. It's a great pub, very properly pub-like in that it has wooden floors, wooden walls, wooden tables, wooden benches and wooden chairs. Admittedly, it'd be fucked if a fire broke out, but it has a great atmosphere!
It was a rare experience actually, because all 7 of us who live together were out somewhere together. It's rare enough that all 7 of us are even in our flat together! I've no idea why this night was particularly special, I guess we just ended up all being around at the same time and in need of a beer.
I was the only one going out after, so I bade them farewell (street and poetry in the same post? I'm soooo great) and hopped on a Tube to Leicester Square. I was a little late by the time I got there, so I pretty much ran to Covent Garden, where Girl was waiting for me. I'm always late, I should try to break that habit of mine. I seem to find something that needs doing just before I'm about to leave, which makes me late every time.
Girl didn't mind (or at least didn't show irritance) me being late, and we wandered on in to Gardening Club. She looked fantastic, as she always does, and we pretty much got straight onto the dancefloor. This was a little weird for me, because I usually need about, say, 10 drinks before I feel sufficiently loosened up to shake my little ass. I guess Girl must have that effect on me, the intoxicating emotion of love (sorry, wandered off into Byron territory for a second there) overwhelms my usually stoic feet.
I don't know how it happens, but I enjoy every night and minute I spend with Girl even more than the last one. I constantly look forward to the next time I'm going to see her, and she's always on my mind. I know she reads this, but this isn't an attempt at a sucking-up exercise, it's the true way I feel about her. My problem lies in telling her this personally, rather than letting her read it here. Mmmmm, how I enjoy the slight anonymity that this blog provides.
We danced for what seemed like an eternity, but it still ended much, much too soon. I hadn't quite built up the courage to ask her back to my place, but I was saved by her informing me that she had a 10am train to catch on the Tuesday and hadn't packed yet. I would only have fudged the asking and thoroughly embarrassed myself, so that was in some ways a godsend.
I'll leave it there for now, because I'm off to get drunk tonight. I do do other things, but this week has seemed particularly alcoholic in nature, and I haven't even mentioned how I got incredibly wasted in Cardiff last Wednesday! But I'm not an alcoholic. I don't crave alcohol, I just need a quick drink to wake me up in the morning every day.
I'm joking, of course.
I need at least 3 to kick-start my day.
The fucking bastard whore cunt that is Launchcast just crashed my Internet Explorer and lost me over half-an-hour's worth of typing here. Thankfully, I the vast majority of it was just typing up some things that I'd written in my notebook last night, but I'm still very, very angry.
I swear a lot when I'm angry, can you tell?! Fucking bastard LaunchCast, BASTARD!!!
Wednesday, April 7
Meh. I'm Sure I'll Think Of A Good Title Halfway Through Writing The Main Post.
I was really, really intending to write something worthwhile here, I swear I was, but I seem to have lost my momentum for a bit. I've been busy over at ScreenSelect, sorting out my wanted list of rental DVDs. I'm planning to watch loads and loads and loads of films over the course of the next few weeks, and renting them by post is going to be much cheaper than getting them from Choices every day. Or, at least that's what I reckon. And ScreenSelect is offering a free 30-day trial to get me started, which is always a good thing.
"Free". Is there a better word in the English language? OK, so it's only a good thing when it isn't written "Free*", because the asterisk always implies some qualification to the notion of "Free", but the point remains that "Free" is a good thing to see.
I'm not quite sure why I haven't got the inspiration to write right now, because there's a hell of a lot of stuff that has happened recently that I haven't got round to writing about yet. Some of it is a little trivial and banal, but some of it is interesting. Honest! For example, the big argument I had with my Mum this morning, mostly about this blog. But that story shall wait till another time. I like to keep things roughly chronologically ordered, even if that means getting this far behind in my writing. I count 9 days behind at the moment, which is about average!
I'll get round to writing these events up at some point, as well as some little rants / thoughts on a couple of subjects which are bugging / amusing me at the moment. I'm still getting used to the shock of seeing hundreds of hits each day, rather than the more typical (pre-Sunday) average of 25... Fame, how amazing is it?!
I've even managed to get myself listed (with no effort on my part) in the Yahoo directory. You can see the list of recently added sites here. I tell you, politicians are going to start referencing me soon... Or maybe not. How about a minor TV celebrity? That would do.
Mmmm, egotistical. But yet so modest and lovable. Or so they (OK, just Girl...) says!
And on that rambling note, I will leave it for today. I swear that a more meaningful and event-packed post will surface at some point, honest!
Monday, April 5
Catch-Up 2 (70's Style)
After the non-exertions of last Saturday, I figured that I'd better do something with my life on the Sunday. Did I manage to? Well, sort of.
I did manage to leave the house in the afternoon, but unfortunately (well, ish...) it was only to the pub to watch the Arsenal - Man Utd game on Sky. What an incredible game though!! I know we only got a point out of it (fucking Man Utd), but it was such a great game to watch. i could go off on one and do a big football post, but I'll spare you all from that one. You'll thank me for it, trust me. When I start talking football, I find it difficult to stop. Very difficult.
After that, I rushed through some beans on toast (what? It's an important food group) and then had to practically run to the Tube station, because I was running late to meet Girl in Leicester Square. We were going to see The Passion Of The Christ at a cinema down there, but in the end we changed our minds and decided to watch Starsky & Hutch at the massive Odeon cinema on the Square. That place is so fucking big! And so fucking expensive too!
The film didn't start until a little later, so we killed a couple of hours in Rendevouz, the best cafe in the history of the world ever. It's a little pricey (well, it is on Leicester Square), but the money you pay gets you such lavish and tasty food that you forget just how much of a hole is now left in your wallet. We shared some waffles with ice-cream (*drools at the memory of pistachio ice-cream*) and a couple of hot chocolates, and spent an hour or so just being with each other.
I have to say that I absolutely adore staring into her eyes. I always feel completely at ease in a silence if I happen to be looking into her eyes. It must be connected with what I said in the last post about having a fascination with eyes overall. We seem to have these little moments a lot, where neither of us say anything, but the silence isn't uncomfortable. It's like in Pulp Fiction, where Uma Thurman's character says that little thing about how 2 people can show how comfortable they feel around each other by just "shutting the fuck up". I need to stop watching so many films, they're invading the way I think and write now!
I'm getting a little bored of typing now, so I might just leave it here for now, and do some more catching-up later or tomorrow. Who knows, I might be able by Christmas to write about something that happened that day, rather than a week or so ago! I always feel a little guilty when I get this far behind, because I have nothing new to offer returning readers for a week at a time, and then I smother them with so much writing and activity that it can probably feel quite overwhelming. Also, anything I write of note will get lost amongst the masses of text surrounding it.
Ahh well, it's my own stupid fault for not making the time to write here. It's not as if I don't spend hours in front of the TV or doing fuck-all when I could actually be writing here. Meh, what's to do? I'm going to stop berating myself and go do something else (i.e. nothing) for a while. I swear there's some live water polo to watch on Sky Sports...
Catch-Up
Where did I leave it last time? Oh yeah, 'twas the night of Phase, the fateful Phase.
That Saturday (the 27th, I'm working a hell of a lot in arrears) I didn't hear from Girl, because she was working all day, and then went to Turnmills in the evening for an all-nighter. I resigned myself to collapsing in front of the TV, watching too much sport and basically lounging around all day. What, it was the first day of the Easter holidays, I was entitled to do fuck-all.
I was dragged to the cinema (well, it was more of a suggestion by me, to be honest) by Pete, one of my housemates, to see the new Dawn of the Dead film that evening. We'd watched the original 1978 version only a few weeks previously, and I'd read a couple of good reviews of this new one ("slick" was the word that kept cropping up, if memory serves). The film certainly lived up to these reviews, and made a good attempt at recreating the drama / suspense of the original. As the reviews said, it is certainly a hell of a lot more slicker than the original, and the special effects departments have improved since the late 70s, resulting in some very gruesome deaths this time round.
My particular favourite was the "poker-through-the-eye" killing of this fat old woman zombie. I have this weird fascination with eyes, for reasons that I don't understand. I love pictures of eyes in art, but they're also the only body part I get a bit squeamish about in films and on TV. I can watch any other body part get blown off or cut into without batting an eyelid, but with eyes I get weirded out. The definitive occasion for this disturbance coming to the fore was in a film called May, which I saw last year. It's a very slow-burning horror film, about this girl who eventually builds a Frankenstein-type friend. She realises that it can't see her, and so she decides to give it her own lazy eye. The next shot is of her, sitting on a chair in front of a mirror, with a pair of closed scissors in her hand. You know exactly what's going to happen, but it doesn't for a good minute or two. Eventually she screams and violently swings the scissors up into her face (the camera is looking over her shoulder from a little distance away), with a sickening 'squelch' sound. That is the only time that I can remember having to watch a scene of a film from behind my fingers. *shudders at the memory*
But yeah, Dawn of the Dead, go see it.
The funny thing about that evening was the amount of little scallies in the o2 centre. The o2 centre is a big entertainment complex in North London on the Finchley Road, and is about 5 minutes walk from my flat. It's got a few bars, loads of restaurants, a multiplex cinema and a Sainsbury's, and is a great little place. The problem with it on Friday and Saturday evenings is that it is full of 15-16 year olds, dressed up to the nines, but with nowhere to go.
They all hang round inside in huge groups, and it's very funny to walk through them, head and shoulders above them all, watching the young girls trying to show off themselves to the older end of the teenagers wandering around. You can tell that they think they're very cool because they're "out" on a Saturday night, but why bother going out at all if all you're going to do is hang around and do nothing? I swear when I and my friends were that age, we just grabbed a few beers from our fridges and went to each other's houses to watch videos and drink there. I really couldn't (and stil can't) see the attraction in hanging around, all dressed up with nowhere to go.
Teehee, stupid little scally kids.
OK, so that's Saturday dealt with. Now I'm only 8 days behind in my writings here. Next!
Observer Article
Wow. All I can say is wow.
For those of you who haven't read the article yet, it's available online here. You have to read through to the last section to get to the part about me, but it's definitely worth it, as it's a very good read overall. Kudos to you Simon, for producing such a good feature. And did anyone see the picture in the paper itself? What sort of pose was I in? Yes, I know that I looked a little silly in it. Meh. Oh, and I don't usually go for the rude-boy look with my chain outside of my t-shirt, honest! It must have fallen out or something.
My favourite little line from the article is this: "he wrote about his relationship with a fellow student and principal crush he calls Girl, and it has all the authentic fumbling uncertainties." So true. It really is a case of 'fumbling uncertainties.' But at least things seem to be going OK at the moment. Once I've finished writing this little post, I'm going to try to catch up on 10 days worth of events. I'm so far behind, I know.
First, though, I'd just like to take this opportunity to say thanks to the following blogs for linking to me:
- MyMarkUp.net (It's in a Scandinavian language, and I can't understand it, but it links to me!)
- Rhysisms (Another student-type, what is it with all of the spare time we have?!)
- Oblog (Yet another student. We should actually do some studying from time to time...)
- Screaming Yellow Fizz Bang (Strange name, cool writing)
