Tuesday

So, it's a Tuesday, and I'm not at work. I'm not even on holiday, I'm just not at work. It feels amazing. Of course, after this week my non-work days will be volunteer work-days, but that's different. Aside from the fact it's work I like doing, I'll actually be doing something worthwhile for a change. But for now, I'm going to be a lazy sod and just revel in the non-being-at-workness of it all.

Lazy-bugger lie in? Check.
Spent the morning in jim-jams drinking tea, reading blogs and webcomics? Check.
Obligatory piracy? Check. (Weepop! Records entire output. I should feel bad, but I think it was posted by someone who works for them. More twee than I can probably handle, but there you go.)
Actually at home to take delivery of my brother's birthday present (and a few presents for myself ordered at the same time)? Checkity Check.

Ah...I love days like this. Just knowing that I have the entire day to do as much, or as little as I want relaxes me more than anything else on earth.

At some point I will have an epic shower. At some point I will get dressed. At some point I may well do some housework. At some point I will finish my book. At some point I might be a nerd and play on the gameboy. At some point I might go to the grocery store. At some point I might go to the post office and mail my brother his new T-shirts, with a card and a letter to show him how it's done. At some point I might be seized by a productive fit and re-organise bookshelves. At some point I might list a bunch of stuff I don't need on eBay to try and supplement my now reduced income. At some point I might heave my fat arse over the exercise bike and sweat for half an hour.

Or, I might do none of these. I might spend all day right here on the sofa, dozing, guzzling tea and shortbread (Emma's mum's present from Aberdeen. It has to be good stuff if it's acknowledged as 'rather tasty' by an Aberdonian.) and working my way through the Woody Allen boxset I definitely didn't need. I might try and read a book in a day, which I haven't done in ages. I might try and finish the back piece of the cardigan my sausage fingers are fumblingly attempting to knit while listening to Radio 4. Or even Radio 3.


Or I might go back to bed. I probably won't do that, though. That would be a bit of a waste of this precious, lazy day.

At the risk of banging on about this too much, I need to empty my brain here too. Job interview in nearing 12 hours time. Only the remotest chance of me getting it, and more than likely I'll be £100 out of pocket going to Birmingham and back to make an utter tit of myself in front of important radio people.



Thank god they serve alcohol and cake on trains.

Dananananackroyd are the best live band in Britain. FACT.

Jesus, what an awesome fucking gig it was last night. First moshpit I've been into in ages, with appropriate bruising today from being pushed into one of their drumkits at the end. They look like utter twats, but they are something else live. That album is coming home with me today after work, no mistake.


Also: it seems I've managed to by two copies of HEALTH//DISCO - if someone wants to take one off my hands they're welcome to it.

Have spent the evening Spotifying the fuck out of La Roux. I kind of hate the current 80s obsession the music industry is continuing to have at the minute - I feel like it really needs to move on. La Roux is probably one of the worst of the most recent batch of offenders, visually and musically, and the first time I heard the proper version of her record, I wasn't impressed at all. Yeah, we get it. Synths are awesome. Whatever.

Then...somehow earlier this evening a memory fragment broke off and I felt the need to listen to what I remembered being a decent remix of 'In For The Kill' and the remix of 'Quicksand' which appeared on one of the many Kitsune compilations.

There it is - the magic K word. Kitsune are still just good and spotting awesome things, and I think that's half the reason I didn't want to fully write her off.

So, glorious Spotify, saviour of my sanity since the beginning of the year, purveyor of pop music without me actually having to download it and taint my iTunes play counts or Last.fm lists, provided me with originals and remixes to my heart's content. And then the hooks dug their way into my brain, and I just can't stop listening to the damn things. I've had such a weakness for daft synthy pop music since I fell in love with A-Ha in high school, it fundamentally is just the kind of pop I enjoy. Even if the lyrics are Lady Gaga-level stupid in places.

This week is only 2 days old and all I can see is it stretching off into the distance without any perceivable end. It's like the extra hour we we had unceremoniously dumped upon us on Sunday has added an extra hour to every day, which, of course, has to be spent at work, not passed leisurely somewhere entirely more preferable. Like bed, for instance. I feel like I've spent the last 3 days looking at my watch and only ever encountering disappointment.

Control, or the Unfortunate Adventures of Helmet Boy

...or so my flatmate and I have decided its alternative title should be. OK, so it was mostly just me. Just watched Control, Anton Corbijn's biopic about Ian Curtis. Control is one of those movies, where, no matter how little you know about Ian Curtis, you will probably at least know how it ends, and that no matter what, it's going to be a pretty grim journey.

Normally, this isn't really a problem. I really don't mind grim films, or grim stories in general, but Control was one of our rentals from Lovefilm, and we were basically forcing ourselves to watch it so we could send it (and the rather awesome Bullitt) back together, as we can't find the spare envelope. So, Control was going to be watched even though neither one of us was really in the mood for a brooding black and white film about an unhappy man who eventually gave up on himself. The problem with watching a serious film when you're both really in the mood for a comedy, is that, well, you pretty much end up taking the piss. Which we did. Thus the Unfortunate Adventures of Helmet Boy was born.

It was all going rather well until that scene with Ian working in his job at the Employment Embassy (or whatever the daft name they had for Job Centre was) where he was arranging an interview or a job for a girl who was sat opposite him wearing a cycling helmet. I'm a simpleton, so seeing people going about their everyday life wearing protective headgear makes me assume they're just a bit of a nutter, and thus it makes me giggle a bit. The girl then has a grand mal seizure(I forget the PC term for it...tonic-clonic or something like that?) right there in the job centre, and the reason for the helmet became abruptly apparent.

This led to us posing the question: How would Ian Curtis' life turned out if he had followed this girl's sensible example and gone through life as an epileptic wearing a crash helmet? Would he have been such an icon wearing his safety-first headgear? Would sexy Belgian chick have seen past all that protective plastic and padding and seen the intriguing, tortured soul underneath it? Would Mrs Ian have lost her desire for him in the bedroom if he wore it to bed, just in case? Once all of these thoughts had quickly sped through my mind, pretty much everything that happened after that, all I could do was imagine how the scene would have played out if he were wearing a crash helmet at the time. Needless to say, a lot of the impact was kinda lost, but bits of it became incredibly funny.

That's not to say it was entirely lost, as I did, piss-taking aside, really enjoy the film. If anything, I'm half glad Control was also mirrored by the Unfortunate Adventures of Helmet Boy, or else I'd probably have been really caught up in the sheer helpless misery of it all and spent the rest of the evening feeling as grim as the movie was.

Cinema, ownership, and general dissatisfaction.

Just watched the History Boys for the first time, and enjoyed it. Not one I'd really be in a hurry to watch again, but then, I rarely do feel that way about films. The 5 year period I had where I watched almost no TV except when visiting other people's houses, the news and the odd one-off occasion (like Eurovision, for example) also kind of extended itself to films. I rarely go to the cinema, because I resent paying nearly a tenner to spend around two hours of my life watching a movie that I might not even enjoy. I don't mind so much if it's a film that'd be really expensive on DVD (anything subtitled, really. I love foreign films as much as the next pretentious twat but £20 for a movie is taking the piss.) and I'm less reluctant to part with my hard(ly) earned cash if the recipient is the Tyneside, but I think I make it to the pictures probably 5 or 6 times a year, maximum. I keep ticket stubs for pretty much everything I go and see, and I think I have 4 from last year. Heima, the Boss Of It All, Dark Knight, Pan's Labyrinth. Possibly one more. The thing is, I don't really like buying DVDs either - I just get no use out of them. With films, I enjoy them, but I almost never go back to them. I've got stuff sitting on my shelf that I've bought years ago, that I've never watched. Sometimes it's stuff I've picked up to make up numbers in a 'X DVDs for £X' deal, but mostly it's stuff I've seen before, I know I liked it, but I just never go back to watching it again. I realised it was a waste of my money buying DVDs.

Records, I like having ownership of. I go back to them, over and over. I love looking at them together and each one is the key to another memory-door, from where I was, and who I was, at the time I first heard the sounds contained on each disc, and over, and over, and all the times I've listened to it since then. Some of those albums were epic quests, procured after years of searching. Some were bought on a whim because I'd heard of them and knew 'they're supposed to be good', or because the record label that released it has been consistently good. Some were bought purely for having an awesome sleeve. (Les Savy Fav triple shower-cap edition vinyl of one of their albums. Bought at the Sub-Pop Mini Mart just outside Pike Place market in Seattle, 2000. Apparently worth a bit now.) I don't regret buying any of them. I'm sure there are probably a fair few in there that I haven't gone back to very often, but I carry the music with me, even if the disc is at home. On endless mixtapes, in the pre-iPod days, and now literally. Even metaphorically. I probably haven't listened to, say, 'Wake Up!' by the Boo Radleys in its entirety more than twice. But can I sing the chorus of 'Find the Answer Within'? You bet I can. Can I remember a line from a movie I've seen twice? Nope. I can cobble the plot together, but films just don't give me that same emotional connection, no matter how much I enjoy them.

I do enjoy them though, and thanks to Emma's freebie 3 month Lovefilm subscription, I'm getting to see all kinds of films I've been wanting to see for ages, but haven't been on TV or offered by people who have bought them. I don't know why it never occurred to me to sign up sooner, renting is a perfect solution for me - I get to see the films, for a flat rate per month. Job's a good 'un.

Tonight's movie was, as mentioned previously, the History Boys. A tale of a group of grammar school boys in the 80s, all busting their arses to get into Oxbridge. While I was able to suspend my disbelief to a certain extent, there were 2 glaring problems. 1: Howard Marks is an Oxford don. It just can't be that hard to get in. I find it really hard to believe that they needed to know that much stuff. 2: No way are teenage boys that relaxed about homosexuality. I know the 80s were a more accepting time, but really? Was it that OK to be openly gay in an an all-boys school? Would they really not care about being fondled by one of their male teachers because they liked (fondling aside) his lessons? Really? I did enjoy it though, and the fact that Russell Tovey was in it was a nice little extra, and softened the blow that Being Human has finished. I did predictably, because I'm enormous sap, shed a tear at the end. Not because of the sad twist, but right at the very end - the little epilogue for each of the boys. It wasn't even for the one who joined the army and was killed in action, it was for the camp boy, who'd spent the entire film full of heartache for his classmate. I got upset because through everything, he didn't get to be happy. He ended up where his teacher did, repressed, and surrounded by things he can't ever have. Though his character seemed to feel like this was neither happiness nor unhappiness, that not-shit-but-not-awesome-either life just struck a chord with where I am at the moment, and the prospect just upset me - that's just not what I want, but it's where I am right now, with no discernable route out. I'm neither happy nor unhappy, but should I really settle for it? Am I even capable of bettering my situation? Is that kind of a life, really OK?

On the one hand my frustration wants to fight - to challenge and chase and hope that something will eventually come up. But on the other, I'm still a realist at heart - I've never been better than average at anything I've ever done in my entire life. I have no striking or distinguishing qualities in either looks or personality than can give me a real edge, I'm just...averagely average. If I'd been called something like Helen or Sarah, it'd be a wonder anyone ever remembered my name. With all current job markets as competitive as they are, and me without much experience, do I even stand a chance? Have I missed it already? That month I spent trekking back and forth to various hospitals trying very hard not to think about pretty much anything was a month wasted, and I'm at a loss as to how I can regain that lost ground, if I even had a chance in the first place.

So, at the end of another working day, and a Sunday evening film, I'm disheartened and dissatisfied, but with a small glimmer of hope, in that I've finally relocated my motivation to get back on my diet, so perhaps my motivation to start harassing prospective employers will come back too.