Three's a crowd

It's been a big few weeks for me. My third set of social adventures. I can't really be relied on to get the specifics right, but it's pretty widely accepted that it had been three years since I had any sort of socialising with friends, and now I've had my third lot in a row! Also, I umm... bought three games at the weekend? OK no, I've stretched it too far.

I'm absolutely knackered now, but definitely worth it. It's so hard to express just how much things like today mean to me, for something that would normally be the absolute highlight of an entire year to just take up a single blog entry just doesn't seem to do it justice. I'm just very grateful that I have friends able and prepared to help me escape into some semblance of what the real world might be like, even just for a day.

So for today's adventures, it had been decided long in advance that today's OT session would be an outing out to a (very) local tea room for some drinks and shortbread, I just decided in my infinite wisdom that it might be nice to bring my lovely friend along to share in and make the most of what would be a pretty historic outing for me. Of course, it wasn't until the last minute that it dawned on me that the bigger the scale I'd made it, the bigger the potential fall, but it all worked out more or less for the best. The snacks and company were all good, and when I inevitably get grumpy and tired over the next few weeks I can have another wonderful achievement and step forward waved in my general direction as an example of the good kind of progress I'm making.

Plus, the outing wasn't all there was to today! Seeing as its become something of a meme unto itself that I always watch Eurotrip with friends, it seemed fitting to break it out, even if there were minor concerns over whether we'd be able to find a suitable scene to pause on should parents, OT or brothers walk in. Mieke is still ludicrously hot, Michelle Trachtenberg still can't act, and Scotty still doesn't know. It really is surprisingly good considering the entire premise for the movie (and, admittedly, the only reason I bought it in the first place) is apparently “holy crap Dawn from Buffy's got hot!”.

And we had one of my home-grown leeks from the garden in our tea. I'm struggling somewhat to weave it nicely into the narrative following the previous revelation (and since for some reason my mind's lingering on the image) so I'll just chuck it out there. Leeks are tasty.

Two's Company

I've said it before, that when things go well and are nice (and normal!) for me, it's a lot harder to write a blog entry about it. It feels a bit like I'm degenerating into a “wot I did on my summur holidayz” style entry to just list a bunch of nice things and to say that all of them made me feel nice and happy. But the fact of the matter is... it did. I had a lovely week where I could just be myself and have some very basic fun and company with the things I do, complete with lots of laughs and hugs and pokes.

I'm always overly focused on being able to cross things that I feel I've missed off of some imaginary life list, so I'm happy to be able to have a couple of them as well as my nice memories. In my ongoing task to actually see all the films whose cultural impact I'm aware of, I can put a tick beside Alien, and it was a lot of fun to put on I Know What You Did Last Summer after midnight, with all the lights out in the dark. And I'm probably a little late on this bandwagon, but man... back in the day, Jennifer Love Hewitt was HOT.

Its always hard though afterwards to get back into the regular boring old pattern of resting and boredom, so I've been amusing myself by combing the depths of the internet (alright, I've clicked links off of maybe 5 sites, but still) to try and find bonus digital deals and pre-order in-game content for my current and upcoming games. It makes for quite an eclectic list, across 4 games of varying genres:

• three sets of armour

• two stealth black cars

• a 10mm pistol

• a water flask

• an ipod dock

• a psychic fire-mouse

• 10 doses of poison

• a horse (neigh)

• a decorative rock

• an XL broad machete

• a set of golden guns

• and a map of Central and South America.

I've not even played The Sims 3 for about 3 months, but it at least keeps me amused surfing around trying to find free stuff for it. I'll no doubt go back to it in a couple of months when the next expansion comes out, so I'll appreciate all the more then that I used 10 minutes of my boredom in July to get that limited time offer in-game Ford Fiesta. Plus, one of the games (that I got most of the militaristic bonuses for) was rated today – Fallout: New Vegas. As per usual, I've preordered my brother and my copies from different sites so that we could collect all the different bonuses between us, it just worked out quite well that I was into shooting and he was keener on stabbing. Next we just have to work on making sure that he doesn't play it in front of my parents, considering the aforementioned classification granted it an 18 rating, for strong violence, gore, drug use, language, and the best of the lot... implied sexual conduct between the human player character and robots.

Hopefully being the best big brother ever grants more perks than will be taken away, (along with the right to judge suitability) by angry parents.

On this day in 2010

So, David Cameron has just had a new baby.

In a few years, no doubt she'll grow up and ask, Daddy, what was going on in the world when I was born?

To which he'll say, well, Daddy was running the country, and we were trying to co-ordinate international aid for a massive humanitarian crisis in Pakistan.

(after which he will no doubt clarify "Pakistan is what we used to call the glowing radioactive dead zone before the war with India".)

Then imagine her surprise when, later in life, she decides to look up one of those websites online that lets you see what the headlines were on the day that you were born, only to find "Woman Puts Cat In Wheelie Bin".

The night before the morning after

Apparently I'm 5 years old. I couldn't sleep last night because I was excited about santa my friend coming, so at 3:30am instead of lying in bed staring at the ceiling I decided I was going to do something productive. Thus, I wrote my to do list:

TO DO LIST: ₢ 3.30am ^{note: (that's a clock. Its even pointing to the right time! I don't know where I'm going to be able to find something to represent a bee later on though.)}

1. Jet (will solve self)

2. Paypal! Tshirts.

3. NOT THE BEES

4. ARGH MY EYES

5. Seek filter for letter idea. See if crazy.

6. Comes after 5.

7. Solve World Hunger. (potential avenue of investigation: crops that grow horizontally. Plant up side of buildings to save space.)

Then I got hundreds of post it notes and wrote NOT THE BEES, ARGH MY EYES, AAAARGH on them, along with pictures of angry bees, and stuck them all over my flat for my mum to find in the morning. Then I went back to bed.

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.

Popstars, photographers and fashion designers

There's a game that you can play in some corners of the internet, where you take this selection of scenes from The Wicker Man, and are challenged to come up with a unifying plot that could believably link all of the absurdity. I had a similar sort of moment tonight – is there any context I could provide to “Don't make me jump, I had a sharp thing up my nose!” that would make it make any sense at all? At least I amused my mum with that line out of context, she didn't appreciate that I was trying to see how the air could come out both ways when you used a football pump.

I've just had a typical regular week for me really; chatting away nicely to popstars, photographers and fashion designers. Its just a pity I haven't seen my model friend around this week or that could round off the set nicely!

I had another OT appointment Wednesday – a different one, but the goal was still the same, to evilly force me to actually leave the house and venture into the scary wild world out there. Things actually went pretty well, we've discovered a little tea room type place that I can manage to get to, so we ventured over there and checked the opening times. Next session is properly booked in that we're going to go there for some coffee and shortbread, so... quite a big step, I've been out the house but not really managed to actually DO anything while I'm out there since we moved, 5 years ago now (ish).

It might prove something extra to do next week, I've got some more lovely socialising! As per usual we've left the details a bit vague up to the last minute, but I should be able to have a lovely visitor staying for most of the week, who I'm sure I'll play lots of tennis with and go on 10 mile hikes and other reasonable, accomplishable activities. Its not at all like we've made plans to sit on our arses and watch I Know What You Did Last Summer or anything. Nope.

Truth in Advertising

Firstly, the Pepsi Max “Asteroid” advert. Apparently, getting several of your mates to trick a girl into thinking that she's going to die in order to have sex with her is a perfectly normal, morally acceptable lark of a good time, and in no way creepy, profoundly wrong or bordering on rapey.

Pah, I'm just in a sulky mood because I'm so tired today. It's 'good tired' again though, that mystical state where apparently the pain doesn't hurt quite so much just because I've properly earned it through 25 seconds of activity, instead of the standard type where its unfairness makes it less worthy and hurt more. I had a fairly nice evening yesterday – we dug up our potatoes, which among other benefits meant for a tasty tea! Unfortunately, potatoes are heavy. Therefore, wrists, back, legs and shoulders are all utterly killing today, and contributing greatly to my picking holes and reading hidden meanings into innocuous things. It was nice at the time though, since my voice outside managed to attract my regular kitten friend after his daily cuddles, and his interaction with fierce, protective (lol) Lucy the dog was quite adorable, as was Lucy's attempt at playing fetch with the remnants of a shattered frisbee. Still, complain, grump, moan!

Normally it'd be better for me to phrase the following as a question, to deflect some of the potential insanity of it off of myself and see if I could see if I'm the only one who thinks this, but seeing as my audience is... rather reduced from what I'm used to, I suppose I'll have to risk seeming mental for the sake of my art. The clue is in the title – adverts.

I really don't know if its just me or if this is something that people in similar situations to me will feel too, but when I'm in the sort of mood where I'm predisposed to grump, certain 'out there', irreverent adverts seem to really get me down. I've surmised that its probably because they are deliberately attempting to catch attention by being out of the ordinary, from being an intentional tonal shift from the banality of everyday life, but with my own issues with being disconnected from 'everyday life', they just make me feel like they're an extra degree of separation away from me, that I'm missing out even more. Things like travelling home from work on a water slide/roller coaster and swapping shirts after a meeting are supposed to draw a laugh because they're taking an easily identifiable, mundane situation and adding a semi-believable or wishful twist to it, but to me, I'm not even catching the initial hook to recognise how that's NOT what happens in reality.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm assuming that probably if the greater London area got taken over with personalised water slides, I'd end up reading about this bizarre new trend in a BBC News article or see it humorously referenced elsewhere, see the arty, bleached out photos on other blogs highlighting how it represents society's need to embrace the inner child within. But to me, all it is is just another layer of fantasy to add to how amazing the outside world is with all its sights to see and experiences to take for granted, so mundane in and of themselves that we need to add the unbelievable to them to sell our shiny products and services.

When I was much younger and (almost) worry free (curse you, fire alarm!), day to day school life was boring, but the exciting, once a term adventures of a school trip out into the big wide world was an incredible, exciting monument to look forward to. Many of my readers though never even managed that baseline though, so might only identify with my next bit, later in my life, when even making it to school was a hardship in itself, when the school trips stopped being so wonderful and ended up just being an extra slog through something supposed to be special, that felt all the more poisoned for how draining it ended up being. Both the best and the worst times of my life were events that should have been glowing, nostalgic memories to look back on and miss, and it feels all the more isolating that things intended to be so special could become so poisoned by this invisible construct of an illness around me, to leave me separated from the rest of the world by that extra degree.

Some of the things that I've found hardest of all to deal with have been my desires to 'reclaim' what I've lost, and had to try to come to terms with the fact that the time limit on them has expired and passed me by, for practical, physical or even societal reasons, that the rest of the world expects to be firmly shut away behind me in my past. Things that have no value in and of themselves, but represent steps into the world that frankly, at my age, are no longer appropriate or possible to take any more. The memory of sneaking your first beer to many people will be a fond moment to reminisce on, the mistakes made trying to step out into the world along with it, that at 23 with a valid ID just will never apply to me. On that count, I can honestly say that I don't particularly miss it, but the fact that it's passed me by is something that I can never get back, and some of the hardest hidden things to deal with hold an equal lack of genuine, real-world weight. Despite what Zac Efron and Matthew Perry might have to say about it, I'll never be 17 again and there are certain things that I'll never get to do period, let alone do over.