Veronica Mars. Plague.

It's the Cause Of All The Trouble's birthday tomorrow. I got her present ages ago - it's a hoody + 3/4 sleeve T screen printed with Veronica Mars crap. Or more specifically, Neptune High crap. But as I did the graphics myself it's a lot better than the junk you can buy online. She's a big VM fan.

I'd put up a picture but it's on my old mac and I can't be bothered to boot it up and reconnect everything.

I've been in bed for two days with some sort of lurgy. It's just a cold but it feels like flu - aching bones, headache, flem, snot, maudlin self pity. I'm such a weed - real people would have gone to work anyway and infeted their colleagues with disease, whether they liked it or not.

But anyway, I don't know whether I really want to go the shindig tomorrow, but having looked at all the options carrying on as normal seems the best bet. If I was still ill I could claim disease, but as I'm feeling a lot better even if everyone else believed me I'd know it was bullshit & I'd feel bad. Plus I could do with some fun.

My problem is that I always end up getting drunk and having a good time at these things - I can never maintain a proper demeanor of mournful scorn. The alternative version is that I get drunk, start having a go at people and make an utter ass of myself. Either way I never get to look like Dorothy Parker drowning her sorrows in gin and cigarettes, just some manic depressive nut case . . .

Haven't had a dream in a long time

I was struck to the lyrics to Let Me Get What I Want

Haven't had a dream in a long time
See, the life I've had
Can make a good man bad

So for once in my life
Let me get what I want
Lord knows, it would be the first time

I know exactly what that means. After a while you just give up caring about things, caring about ever achieving happiness, you just go from day to day, one foot in front of another.

And then something happens which gives you hope again. Somehow a modicum of animation enters your life again, you begin to believe that there's some point to it all, that maybe, maybe, maybe, this time it's going to work out, that it won't end in disaster again. You start to let yourself have faith again.

And every time that happens it's just that little bit more painful when that faith is disabused once again. Presumably there's only so many times this can happen. There surely has to be some cut off point where the well finally runs dry and it's over and nothing can ever get you going again.

I honestly don't know whether I want that day to have arrived or not. All I know is that I didn't have a dream in a long time, and that would have been by far the more sensible place to stay.

And I can't believe I'm ill as well. As if there wasn't enough wrong with me already I've got some sort of chest infection. My whole insides are slowly migrating there way outside. Actually there's only 4 other things wrong with me - compression injury in my left foot, ear infection, depression. And chronic flatulence.

Kill me now.

Shanty town art sell out!

I had the strangest dream about someone I don't really know last night.

I dreamt she'd moved to New York and was living with her boyfriend . . . so far so normal. But it wasn't really New York it was mystery Art Technology Metropolis, riddled with crime, overrun by the homeless. Her and her boyfriend built a beautiful shanty town like complex under a freeway out of scrap metal to live in.

Later, after they'd become famous for their wicked cool house, they moved out to live in a purpose built replica of the same place in an up market part of town that would give them better access to the ominously named 'Ants Causeway' that feeds the needs of the city's Super Citizens, who live in the sky above everyone else.

Now that's what I call a dream.

New Mac

My brand spanking new G5 turned up today.

Talk about a thrill.

Actually I'm not sure it's that much of a thrill. I mean, once you've got used to the Mac it's not like getting a new one lets you do anything particularly new and exciting. On the other hand it certainly looks the bill and Twin Processors, 4 Cores, 2GB Ram . . . there's a core geekness there that demands respect.

Plus I don't have a crappy plasma but a proper 75Mhz gigantic monitor that takes two people to move. Actually I'm going to have to get a crappy plasma if I want to use the second screen facility, but there you go, beggars can't be choosers.

---

My friend's wife got him a Wii as a surprise present. Talk about cossetting . . .

Bastard

School sports

Out of my office window, across the 6 lane elevated roadway, squeezed in between the prison and the tube line is a school playing field. Every afternoon I watch the little dots endlessly hoofing a ball from one end of the muddy windswept pitch to the other. Even a couple of years ago the sight would have made me shudder and settle into my seat with the warm glow of knowing that I'd never have to freeze my bollocks off doing that kind of nonsense and being expected to enjoy it at the same time again.

Now I just think - "Well, I'd rather be outdoors doing that then stuck in here with these morons".

In fact when I think of the effort I used to put into avoiding games at school it's a miracle I can still walk at all. On the other hand a youth spent sidling off for a crafty fag or lurking in the library 'reading' Stern or just ghosting into the background provides you with a much better set of life skills than rushing red faced and over excited onto a frozen patch of dog shit to exhort your peers to play up, play up and play the game for two hours.

More Healthy

Well I feel better today. More like my old self. I guess 3 days without alcohol or cigarettes does that. Actually I'm dying for some of both, but am holding firm. Absolutely no getting pissed, at least for a while. Let Mr Liver and Mr Kidney have a little holiday. More healthy food tonight by the way. I'm keeping a log again. I'll bore you with it later.

All I need now is to get back to the gym :(

Quinoa. Again

I've been cooking hippy food again. Today's recipe : - tomatoes, red onion, lemon, corgette, garlic, ginger & garlic. When that's cooked down add a chopped up piece of white fish (hake in my case) and the pre-cooked quinoa mixed in.


Looks vile doesn't it?

Clouds in the sky, Emotional, Vomit.

Shot this from my office window a while back. Can't remember why it's taken me so long to post it . . . but there you go.

Friday was, predictably, a bit grim but I managed to put a very good face on it. Which begs the question - when you're really pissed off with someone is it better to maintain your poker face so they never know or let them what they so richly deserve . . . given that neither reaction will change reality one iota.

Spent the rest of the weekend getting unfeasibly, unbelieveably shit faced. Had 6/7 pinits of strong lager on Saturday afternoon watching the rubbish rugby and then went to Rowan's in Finsbury Park for some all night bowling. It all starts to get very hazy, probably somewhere around pint number 11 or 12 . . . can remember meeting some funny Ukranians called Egon & Igor, but after that it all starts to get a bit patchy. Think Els had to walk me home . . . also have the distinct impression that I might have done some crying on her shoulder . . . urk.

Have a very vague memory of falling arse over tit attempting to bowl at some point. You may be wondering why I didn't get chucked out, but honestly that sort of idiocy is pretty much expected at Rowan's. To be entirely frank it's not an enormously classy establishment ;-)

Suffice it to say that yesterday was just awful. Honestly about 6 o'clock I thought the game was up and death was finally going to claim me. And I didn't much care just either. The best thing that can be said about such a mind melting, gut strangling, paranoic, dizzying, sweating, shivering, hyperventilating, DTs-tastic hangover is that at least you have something to think about other than 'Les affaires du coeur' as our French brethren would say. Even if that something is working out how to swallow the piece of dry bread that's been stuck in your mouth for 5 minutes and not pass out at the same time.

Ack.

Icelandic Comic Genius

Should You Be Laughing at This by Hugleikur Dagsson? Undoubtedly not - he needs to sort his head out, and clearly so do I. At one point I had to close the book and look out of the window trying to breath and curtail the hysterical sobs of incontinent laughter. These are a couple of the tamer ones - you have to buy the book to get, as Daisy Steiner would have said 'The Good Shit'.

Waxy Build Up™

My ear is now so completely bunged up I'm completely deaf. Why this happens I don't know but my left ear has been giving me gyp in one form or another since I was a teenager. Anyway, it's very irritating. On the plus side the Tube is a strangely calm and surreal place when you can't really hear anything. As a general rule announcements on the tube are incessant and delivered via a staccato and incredibly loud PA system on trains, on platforms, in the station by drivers, platform staff, control room staff and pre-recorded announcement. The instructions and advice contained therein is frequently contradictory, and it generally makes tube travel fairly testing. If however the have Waxy Build Up™ like me the whole palaver is reduced to some sort of background mumble "A wubber wubber a wub wub a wub wubwub in wub directions"

But it doesn't really make up for the inconvenience of having to have the telly on max volume like some deranged septagenarian and of the washing machine is on as well I can't hear what my flatmates are saying at all. On the plus side it means I can ignore people with impunity at work ;-)

And the other problem are the ear drops I'm taking to try and get rid of the stuff. They're incredibly smelly so not only does it make your ear smell or Cerumol, (who goes around smelling ears) but pretty soon you start to smell of Cerumol as well, and of course due to the whole interconnectedness of the ENT network, pretty soon everything starts to taste of Cerumol. Which is not good.

Tasty!

Mimi's frozen fucking hand . . .

I'm going to the ENO on Friday to see La Bohème of all things. Now normally I could cope with that without breaking a sweat - La Boheme may be a bucket of sick (with added sugar) but it's harmless and it's still The Opera, so always a good night out, even if it's not the ROH, which, being a crashing snob I much prefer. Excepting Tristan & Isolde of course which is shit.

Only problem is that You Know Who is going to be there as well. First time I'll have seen her since the Skiing incident. It won't be that uncomfortable because, frankly, there's not really much opportunity for interaction at the opera - G&T before kickoff, glass of filthy muck and a gasper at half time, quick pint after the final whistle. But it's going to upset me all the same.

Goddammit!

Why do I get myself into these ridiculous messes?

Quinoa

I've finally found a way of preparing Quinoa that doesn't make me want to hurl. This is important because I've been gazing at boxes of the stuff for eons and have finally decided that I just have to get on with it and eat the stuff. It is, after all, one of God's Wonderfoods.

Quinoa Chicken Pilaf

1 Lemon
3 Red Onions
1 Red Pepper
5-6 Cloves Garlic
Chicken Pieces
1 Beefsteak Tomato
Chile
Olive Oil
Mustard Seed
Cardomum
Quinoa

Cut a lemon into quarters and squeeze juice into a foil bag. Add the leftover lemon pieces and 3-4 cloves of crushed garlic and a roughly chopped red onion. Score the chicken pieces and add to the bag sealing carefully. Steam in the oven until cooked. The time for this will vary depending on the size and quantity of the chicken pieces used ~ 30-60 minutes

Prepare a finely diced ratatouille of 2 red onions, 2 cloves garlic, 1 red pepper, 1/2 a chile (to taste), 6-12 green olives (to taste) & beefsteak tomato. Season with salt & pepper, black mustard seed & cardomum.

Prepare Quinoa in your usual way.

When cooked, shred the chicken. Combine with the ratatouille, cooked quinoa and left over onion pieces if desired. Season.

Something Tragic

I have 1 friend on myspace. And it's Tom Anderson.

Everyone has Tom as a friend. Tom has 162 Million friends and that makes me a big loser.

Actually I think it's kind of a weird picture to post if gazillions of teenagers and geeks are going to be looking at it. I mean what is he saying here with that enormous grin "Hi Guys - you don't know it but actually I'm naked from the waist down and sitting in a huge tub of papier mache made from the all the leftover $ bills I couldn't squeeze into my bank account"? And why is he rather coyly turning away . . . has he just written the word 'knickers' on that whiteboard behind him?

Maybe he's written "RM SUX DIX"?

Heh

Do we suppose that every morning Tom gets a long list of all people who deleted him from their friends list and then sends them wicked flame mail, gives their email address out to every spammer he can find and finally organises a denial of service attack on their blog?

I want to delete Tom so my homepage can be truly tragic . . . but now I'm scared . . . maybe he really does get a list and picks one person at random to consign to interweb hades. That's what I'd do.

He'll never know . . . or will he?

Damn you Tom!

Skiing

As you can tell my skiing trip wasn't quite the garden of eden I was hoping for, but at least the skiing was good, and, by and large, a cool bunch of people. You can see the pics here

But in the meantime :-

Artistic, like


Pan, looking about at his coolest. Tragic, I know.


The cause of all the trouble . . .


Mountains : very dramatic


The excitement of comedy food

Ugh

I'm never drinking again . . . until this evening I guess ;-)

Boring boring boring

So anyway, here I am on Friday afternoon in work and it's *SO* boring. I don't just mean a bit boring, but the proper match sticks in eyes, itchy feet, horror boring.

This is because I don't have anything to do really, I finished a work stream yesterday and at this stage of the project that's pretty much all there is - slogging through the grunt work - and there's no way I'm starting a new one. It's boring, but tricky, a lot of words and numbers to be constantly sifted and pored over. Dullsville.

A couple of colleagues have sloped off already (it's half 4) but as I'm going for drinks at 7 that option is not available. Normally I'd just go shopping but I'm trying to save money, and also feeling rather disgusted with the amount of crap I seem able to buy . . . if you look through your Amazon history and don't even recognise half the things it's not a good sign.

Anyway this post is as boring as I am right this second, so I'll leave it there.

Yawnsville

On a more interesting note, every single person I've spoken to guessed immediately who the person I've got the problem with was.

My question is : If it's that obvious to everyone else, why isn't it to her??

Change is good

Something has to give. Can't go on like this.

And an outward sign of this is to change how my blog looks, to remind me.

Something has to change. And how.

Maudlin

I've spent the whole afternoon listening to this :-

Sentimental wallowing much! But it's just wishful thinking - am not going to be anyone's cigarette. Well at least not the one I want to be smoked by. Analogy getting a bit strained here.

And then I started listening to Local Hero by Mark Knophler, God help me . . .

Fucking Mess

Long time, no post! I've been busy.

Well not so much busy as occupied. And on holiday. have done 2 skiing trips in 6 weeks. Not bad going and am now official Ski God. Actually not.

My Friend Who May Not be Named is still way better. But I don't want to talk about her. Suffice it to say that between the two of us we've managed to turn our friendship into a roiling train wreck which has left both of us battered and bruised.

Well it's left me battered and bruised. She has the interior monologue of a hermit crab, so probably feels just peachy.

It's a teapot full of lost opportunities and regret any way you look at it. Actually it's been a mess for ages except now the mess is articulated and can't be fixed. Well I can't fix it on my own anyway . . .

Ugh