Just Dance: part 2

So let me get this straight. You've got a woman who's dazed and confused to the point where she admittedly "(I love this record baby but I) can't see straight any more", is disoriented ("whats the name of this club?"), her shirt is inside out and she seems to be missing her keys and phone?

She's been mugged! Telling her to 'just dance' is the worst advice you could possibly give, get her to a police station or at least an A&E!

Thinking

I've been meaning to update for the past week, but I've found it a bit hard to. I've said before that I didn't want to turn this into a diary and share every last detail of my life, but over the last week my thoughts have been a bit dominated by something personal that I didn't really think was appropriate to broadcast on here. I'm alright and there's nothing that anyone needs to worry about, I've just had an awful lot to get my head around and think about that's making it a bit hard to idly chat about anything else.

It's still been a 'positive' progressive week regardless though, another OT session, another outing, all went well and I continue to move forwards, whether I can fully comprehend it or not. Next week I start my new magic wonder pills, so if they work then I might just be able to measure my progress by more normal standards than my current skewed scale.

And I remain very thankful for my background noise, I don't know how I would have got through this week if I didn't have something I could sink my hours into while I try to process things.

Life In A Northern Town

It's the medium brother's birthday on Wednesday, so he's home for some bonus chaos! The bar has been set with his first story about his feuding room-mates – I'm not sure how you're supposed to react when you walk into the kitchen to catch the tail end of an anecdote that ends with “so she bought a paddling pool, but it got filled with beans so she threw a pineapple at her but it missed and broke a window”. Student life in Glasgow, apparently! Next item on the agenda: surviving the grandparents visit for his 'special day'.

So, the pope is about to make his first visit to Britain in almost 30 years, amid a storm of controversy. Meanwhile, Susan Boyle is preparing to perform for him. This is the country that produced Shakespeare and The Beatles, and apparently now the high point of our cultural achievements in 2010 is... some woman that sang on Britain's Got Talent. If only he'd arrived a week early we could have gone the whole hog and stuck him in Ultimate Big Brother. "Day 35, 9:15pm. Chantelle and Brian are in the garden, boasting to Benedict XVI about the footballers they've blown in the toilets at China White."

I had a thought. I have quite a lot of them during the days, but this was a particularly profound one. Imagine there's a girlband. Lets call them.. the Wednesdays. Now, 4 of them are really keen to do a sexy photoshoot in their underwear for FHM, but the 5^th one is shy and doesn't really want to. But the offer was only for the whole band to do it... that's a lot of peer pressure, and something pretty major to end up getting forced into! I'm sure there's some sort of moral to this story, but as usual I'm not entirely sure what it is.

And while we're on the subject! Imagine a pair of identical twins. One is shy, one confident and outgoing. The confident one does a Playboy shoot. Does the shy one get embarrassed that now everyone knows what she looks like naked?

I do realise that this makes me look like some sort of deviant sitting about all day thinking about embarrassed nudey girl scenarios, but its probably still better than what I've actually been doing. Hatching hundreds of Bulbasaur eggs relaxes me, ok?! And I'll be laughing when I see the benefit of my master race of superior genetic plant monsters. In 9 months. When the game I'm doing it in preparation for actually comes out.

Oh and the fact that my horse has failed to materialise on day 16 goes without saying, of course.

Clouds

When I woke up this morning, (as well as feeling distinctly un-like P. Diddy, because that's not even a thing), I was struck by a thought, something incredibly profound and meaningful that I thought would make an excellent blog entry. Unfortunately for me and the world... by the time I was awake enough to organise my tangled web of thoughts into something resembling words, I'd forgotten it. I'm sure it was nothing earth-shatteringly important, just... actually wait, this is my blog and its completely unverifiable, so no, it WAS earth-shatteringly important, on a scale of solving the energy crisis or bringing peace to all faiths. Which only serves to make my later ponderings about clouds all the more mundane in comparison.

Have you ever really thought about clouds though? Like... really thought? If you took the concept of an ever-changing sky in abstract, it would sound like something out of a sci-fi novel. The ground beneath their feet on this mighty new planet was uniform and constant as far as the eye could see, but when they turned their pressure-helmets towards the heavens the canvas above danced with colours and shapes, transforming seemingly at random through epic phases of clear and dark streaks and patterns, infinite in their variable majesty! We just never really stop to question something that is and always will be.

And of course it goes without saying that even after a fortnight, I'm still without my horse.

Now That's What I Call Pondering!; vol 76

I hate when I've got all these ideas, thoughts and concepts swirling around in my head, but its so difficult to try and link them into any sort of coherent thread. It doesn't really make for the best of blog entries to just list a couple of random things that I've been thinking about...

First off, to give you an idea of the sort of boredom I must have been suffering with to realise this, but within my lifetime we're going to see the 2000^th anniversary of the death of one of the most influential people in literally the history of the entire earth. I wonder if there's anything planned for it?

It's been a busy week it seems for everyone around me, just... not me myself. I suppose I went out, and that should be a good thing, but its mainly just been very dull that so much of my time is spent resting and recovering instead of actually doing anything.

Another little piece of beautiful chaos that amused me – the other day, my brother and mum went down to visit my gran, where they returned with 3 packs of “spicy mexican chilli” flavour crisps. Because (of course), one of my gran's friends had bought the multipack, but didn't like that flavour, so it makes perfect sense to give them to her to pass onto her grandchildren “who like that sort of thing”. I love the sort of logic behind that for something so trivial, that something so utterly meaningless as the packet of crisps I'll have for/with my lunch tomorrow has a nice little origin story behind it, it's own little tale to tell of how it came to gain its place in the world.

Unfortunately the car exploded on the way home, so oh dear I won't be able to go out in it this week! What a shame that is. Somehow, I'll cope.

A-level results were this week, and more people have got As and A*s than ever before! This of course is an indication of the exams being dumbed down, therefore providing conclusive proof that because they scored higher than ever, today's teenagers are even stupider than ever before. Flawless logic.

Do you think if I keep a tab for the web page of a computer part that I want open long enough, one of the admins of the site will take pity on me and decide to send me it? “If he's this keen on it, he really deserves it for being such a generally top bloke. I'll just fetch his shipping address...”

Apparently we're now up to Now That's What I Call Music volume 76. Way to make me feel old – back in my day, I had Now 35, on TAPE. Not only am I 41 volumes out, I'm also two generations of playback medium. Three if you include minidisc, but... really, who would?

The other day I was channel surfing, and, after I'd spent an hour on the Military History Channel (watching The Atomic Ghost Fleet of Bikini Atoll, which was both entertaining and educational), I ended up catching the video to a Ke$ha song that I'd never heard before, called Take it Off. I was about to say 'her new song', but to be honest, it could be a year and a half old and this was just the first time I'd heard of it, I'm not really in a position to know either way. I was temporarily surprised to find that it had a catchy beat but wasn't annoying, and that in the video she was dressed in a very classy outfit with understated, attractive hair and makeup. Ah, maybe she's branching out?... Or not. Since by the end of the song she had, naturally, devolved into screechy ear-splitting nonsensical lyrics, had torn most of her clothes, and was now 'artistically' covered in powder paint and glitter as she mimed cutting herself. I'm sure there's a moral of this story somewhere about expectations, but seeing as its after 1am and I was struggling to make myself coherent anyway I think I'll just call it a night.