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.

Football

I'm in a quite significant amount of pain today. It might be partially my own fault.

For his 12^th birthday, among other things, my little brother got a football. It was back in May, but we only just got hold of a pump so he's been keen to go out into the garden and play with it. Apparently its good for me to be doing this, I'm building up the amount of exercise I do, its improving my fitness! I'm not really sure though how much overall benefit I'm getting from standing in the same place for a couple of minutes and kicking the ball back, with the same leg. Maybe my right leg will get all toned and muscled from it and I can enter in bodybuilding contests, just always being sure to be seen from the one side. Or I could wear shorts on one side and a mirror on the other! Foolproof plan, now I only have to figure out how to do the same for my top half.

When I was younger I used to think I was pretty good at football. I suppose everyone likes to think they're good at the things they do really, but I was pretty fast and a good finisher, I scored a lot of goals. Its one of the things that from time to time occasionally bugs me now – I know fine well that I'd probably have never made it to any sort of professional level, but I never even got the chance to try and fail. Now at 23, even if I woke up cured tomorrow, I couldn't go and try out for a team – its about slightly more than just standing in the one place and returning the ball in the vague direction of a pre-teen goalkeeper, I'd have missed 6+ years of tactical, positional, teamwork coaching, its just going to have to be yet another thing I've let pass me by. Playing football generally involves those things, plus the ability to run around, let alone stand for 90 minutes at a time, so I don't think I can really claim to be any 'good' at it any more.

I got a call from a telemarketer yesterday. I was kind of hoping for some, to be honest, I figured that all I have to do is say a couple of 'quirky' things to them and that's a nice cheap funny entry for here. So, she asked me if I was interested in loft insulation. I replied no, I'd rather have some chicken nuggets. I was expecting that would throw her, she'd stutter and collapse under the weight of my sheer hilarity, but for some odd reason she was very professional, laughed and said she would too, she's starving, but back to this loft insulation. I was a bit lost at that, so I said I was sorry but I'd run out of sarcastic things to say and hung up. I felt really guilty about that. She was a nice woman, doing her job in a friendly way. There's a recession on, everyone's got to work hard, and she's probably on commission for the amount of loft insulation she sells people. Having a conscience about this kind of silly thing is a real setback to being a king of absurdist comedy. Hopefully the next one will be a pain in the arse so I won't feel so guilty about it.

I mentioned watching House in the last post – that's the latest thing that I've been recommended to get into, so many of my friends watch it that it could be a nice extra topic of conversation, a cultural reference point for me to latch onto around whatever is standing in for the metaphorical water cooler at the time. I'm not really sure it was a good idea by those friends to get me into that specifically though – now that I know how beloved he is despite being so sarcastic and grumpy, its reassured me that I've got a lot more leeway than I thought while staying on the endearing side.

Anyway, I was watching an episode guest starring Cynthia Nixon, and I was shocked to find that for the first time, I thought she was really attractive. I decided to share this revelation via text, stating that it must be because I find the character she's playing here much more attractive than Miranda in Sex and the City.

She was promptly revealed to be faking her illness, and diagnosed with Münchhausen's. I suck at women.

Welcome to my life

My name is David, and for a little while now I've felt that I might have some sort of story to tell.

When you're little, there are certain aspects of your world that are just... indisputable. They make up the fabric of your everyday life, and its impossible to conceive that some people live their lives in a different way. Maybe you go on holiday every year to Spain. Or Blackpool, or Florida, or in a caravan. Maybe you have no dad, a mum and dad, or two dads. A dog, a cat, a budgie, a thousand tiny lizards, but however it is there are just some aspects that you never challenge, they're how you live your life and its hard for your little brain to comprehend the vastness of the diversity out there. Sometimes you get a shock when you go to stay with your friend and they eat macaroni. But we never eat macaroni! The whole way they live their lives, it just... blows your mind. Then once you get older, you realise that there are no rules, that you can live however you want. The whole world opens up in front of you, with a billion paths to choose from, all under your own control. Some people go backpacking across Africa. Some hit the pubs, get to drinking and drugs and having a good time. And to some, all those paths that open up so readily for everyone else stay just out of reach, inconceivable to you, while you sit at your computer for 16 hours a day, make friends with local hedgehogs and talk to your sandwiches to amuse yourself. I'll let you guess what kind of life it is I'm leading.

I'm 23 now, and I've semi-joked for a long time that I've felt like I was having a mid life crisis. For the past decade, I've been standing still. I fell ill with ME when I was 13, developed agoraphobia that I've had to deal with to varying degrees of severity over the years, and pretty much dropped out of society when I had to drop out of school after my exams at 16. With failing health and about a 2% attendance record for my final 6 months I managed to ace the lot of them with straight As across the board, but the effort involved knocked my health back to a place where I've never quite managed to climb out of. So I've set about instead setting up a few cushions and attempting to make my stay here as comfortable as possible while I very slowly try and build myself a life raft to get off the island. Or a ladder to get out of the hole. I forgot which metaphor I was using. Either way, the 'setting up a few metaphorical cushions' tends to provide those around me with endless amusement, as my somewhat stunted teenage rebellion completely bypasses the ability to go out and get drunk and has to settle on ever so slightly minor things like putting on a welsh accent and telling a telemarketer that their call displeases me.

In the grand scheme of things, I dont really know what this will accomplish. In 20 years from now when we're accessing the neural network on our ocular implants, I might stumble across this old archive of what my life was like then and be proud of how far I've come, or reminisce about the good old days before the Oil Wars and how lucky I really was then. Maybe I'll get a few laughs. A few followers, maybe some new friends will find this and approve of the way that I'm attempting to go about things. Maybe I'll touch some poor, lost soul on a deep, spiritual level, showing them how life can keep going on no matter how many paths life blocks off in front of you.

If I touch that one, single soul... then this will all have been a gigantic waste of yours and my time. I'm hoping for a book deal out of this.

Welcome to my life. We'll be taking the scenic route. Enjoy the ride!