Hello again. Sorry about the break, but my tupping laptop packed in. AGAIN. This is the second machine in less than two years to go down the electronic plughole, and I’m not best pleased about it.
The first frustration is that my laptop may not actually be quite dead yet. It’s entirely possible that my complete lack of computing knowledge is preventing me from taking the right course of action to fix it, and I don’t really have the funds to keep securing outside help only to find that it truly is kaput.
The main annoyance, however, is the fact that I don’t really like my laptop. At all. Or, for that matter, any computer that isn’t controlled by a brightly coloured set of buttons and joysticks. I’m a big fan of my Xbox, but computers in general can 10001101010101010 right off.
My laptop was essentially an evil little box in the corner of my room, that distilled stress from the ether and printed it on a screen to ruin my life. Or a glorified typewriter, that as well.
I’m not good at the internet. I use it for email. I read online comics. I read about comics. I look at stupid videos on youtube. I watch pornography. I (occasionally) blog about the stupid stuff I think about and my own personal disasters. I use Facebook, although I’m pretty crap at it – I don’t really contribute to the community as a whole and then get sulky when I am ignored as a result. Apart from the first two and the final two, there’s nothing I really miss when I don’t surf the web every day.
So I spent yesterday trying in vain to fix my old lappy, stressing out hugely about an object that, even if I fixed it, would only serve to open up another minor avenue of stress into my life. It sounds like the simplest thing would have been to just smash the offending machine with a claw hammer and light a joint from its smouldering carcass.
Unfortunately life doesn’t allow this, at least at the moment. Maybe some day when I’ve secured my dream job (failed novelist), I’ll be able to use the computer on my terms, and use email in the same way I might a nice stationary set. At the moment the world clamours to contact me through the net, and I don’t seem to be able to make plans or learn anything new without resorting to computers. I can’t hand in my essays without typing them up first (partly because it’s university policy, party because my handwriting absolutely stinks).
But there’s a big upside to all this: I’ve got a sexy new Notebook! It’s what I uploaded all this crap with, AND I can watch pornography again (hell, I’m probably watching it now!).
I feel pretty sorry for my old laptop, banished to beneath the bed. It might still work, might have the resources deep inside itself: only it doesn’t know it, sort of like a washed out boxer in a Sunday special.
Still, I feel better now that I’m back on the grid, instead of more stressed out. It allows me to share my ponderous musings with the world, for one thing. And it’s difficult, knowing that there’s an avenue of communication you aren’t currently a part of. I’d better get used to it, I doubt this is the last technological jump I’ll witness in my lifetime, and I can’t be a crotchety old git forever. I’m only 23, for one thing. So internet, meet my new computer (I shall call her Christine). Hopefully we’ll have a good time together, until I spill beer on her, or drop her in the bath, or download a crippling virus trying to find naked pictures of Christina Hendricks.
Updated only when you aren't looking.
Tuesday 23 February 2010
Teapot
I have, of late, been puzzling two serious mysteries. They are related, and both are far beyond my mere mortal understanding. The first is:
Why can’t I find a teapot that just pours tea into the cup, instead of all over the table?
And the next, quite obviously, is:
Why won’t they let me road test teapots in the shop?
Now, these may not strike you as serious laments, but for one thing, I drink an awful lot of tea. I blame my caffeine addiction on my mother, who started me drinking tea at the age of, I think, 18 months. The older I get the more delicious and comforting a good ol’ cuppa seems to become, and now every morning I clutch at my mug like it holds the elixir of life.
I had assumed that when I left home for university the volume of tea I consumed would decrease (presumably replaced by alcohol). Instead, the opposite occurred; all the people I moved in with were serious tea drinkers, and the cycle of tea-making and tea-drinking soon became self-sustaining. Someone made everybody a cup of tea, and eventually someone else would feel motivated to make one by way of thanks. Finally, after seven or eight people had made you a cup of tea, you would suddenly be seized by guilt and make another round. With twelve people living in a flat, I wound up drinking roughly six thousand cups of tea every day.
A teapot, then, seems like a useful idea. Tea tastes better out of a pot, and you can put a tea cosy on it and maybe have another cup later. Plus there is something civilised and refined about pouring from a collective vessel into smaller ones. It makes you feel like a Japanese daimyo.
Or it would, if the bloody stuff didn’t just spill all over the worksurface. I must be on my fourth model by now, and that’s all they seem to do. It isn’t enough to just rely on the standard teapot shape, either, the last one I bought from Sainsbury’s betrayed me at the first opportunity.
Now, if you bought another product and it failed to fulfil its primary function, you would be well within your rights to complain and get a replacement. If you bought yourself a fridge and filled it with food, only to discover that the fridge was failing to keep things cold, you would understandably be annoyed. You’d get another fridge.
If the teapot just failed to pour out the tea, well, that’d be a bugger and I’d still probably want another one, but I suppose there are ways around the problem. You could get the tea out with a straw, and imagine how louche and bohemian you would look drinking out of a teapot! Can you imagine it? I certainly can’t, and it’s my blog!
But seeing as the tea actually does pour out, but all over the table, you’re actually getting a new, inferior function, that you certainly didn’t pay for. It’d be like if you filled the fridge with food it couldn’t keep cold and then when you opened it a boxing glove came out and smashed your face in.
The solution, obviously, is to test the teapot in the shop, but for some reason proprietors seem to have a problem with this. I can’t see why, frankly. I’m allowed to have a drive in a car before I buy it, just to make sure the wheels don’t fall off after I get out of the garage. Admittedly a teapot is less likely to plough off the road and kill me, but my point stands.
The moral of this story? If you get a teapot that works like it is supposed to, you should hang onto it forever and ever. Or send it to me in the post, as I’m clearly in desperate need of it, and apparently have little else with which to occupy my time. Well, as I said, I do drink a lot of tea.
Why can’t I find a teapot that just pours tea into the cup, instead of all over the table?
And the next, quite obviously, is:
Why won’t they let me road test teapots in the shop?
Now, these may not strike you as serious laments, but for one thing, I drink an awful lot of tea. I blame my caffeine addiction on my mother, who started me drinking tea at the age of, I think, 18 months. The older I get the more delicious and comforting a good ol’ cuppa seems to become, and now every morning I clutch at my mug like it holds the elixir of life.
I had assumed that when I left home for university the volume of tea I consumed would decrease (presumably replaced by alcohol). Instead, the opposite occurred; all the people I moved in with were serious tea drinkers, and the cycle of tea-making and tea-drinking soon became self-sustaining. Someone made everybody a cup of tea, and eventually someone else would feel motivated to make one by way of thanks. Finally, after seven or eight people had made you a cup of tea, you would suddenly be seized by guilt and make another round. With twelve people living in a flat, I wound up drinking roughly six thousand cups of tea every day.
A teapot, then, seems like a useful idea. Tea tastes better out of a pot, and you can put a tea cosy on it and maybe have another cup later. Plus there is something civilised and refined about pouring from a collective vessel into smaller ones. It makes you feel like a Japanese daimyo.
Or it would, if the bloody stuff didn’t just spill all over the worksurface. I must be on my fourth model by now, and that’s all they seem to do. It isn’t enough to just rely on the standard teapot shape, either, the last one I bought from Sainsbury’s betrayed me at the first opportunity.
Now, if you bought another product and it failed to fulfil its primary function, you would be well within your rights to complain and get a replacement. If you bought yourself a fridge and filled it with food, only to discover that the fridge was failing to keep things cold, you would understandably be annoyed. You’d get another fridge.
If the teapot just failed to pour out the tea, well, that’d be a bugger and I’d still probably want another one, but I suppose there are ways around the problem. You could get the tea out with a straw, and imagine how louche and bohemian you would look drinking out of a teapot! Can you imagine it? I certainly can’t, and it’s my blog!
But seeing as the tea actually does pour out, but all over the table, you’re actually getting a new, inferior function, that you certainly didn’t pay for. It’d be like if you filled the fridge with food it couldn’t keep cold and then when you opened it a boxing glove came out and smashed your face in.
The solution, obviously, is to test the teapot in the shop, but for some reason proprietors seem to have a problem with this. I can’t see why, frankly. I’m allowed to have a drive in a car before I buy it, just to make sure the wheels don’t fall off after I get out of the garage. Admittedly a teapot is less likely to plough off the road and kill me, but my point stands.
The moral of this story? If you get a teapot that works like it is supposed to, you should hang onto it forever and ever. Or send it to me in the post, as I’m clearly in desperate need of it, and apparently have little else with which to occupy my time. Well, as I said, I do drink a lot of tea.
Friday 5 February 2010
Worryman
It’s been following me for years. Sometimes I feel like I’m outrunning it, sometimes it’s breathing down my neck, sapping my strength. Sometimes I almost forget about it, so small and manageable does it seem. But it never seems to go away.
There are three components to my insomnia. The first is largely self-inflicted, and involves a continued disruption of my natural sleep patterns. It occurs when I drink to excess, and exchange sleep for a few hours of stupefied unconsciousness. It occurs when I take drugs, and find I can’t sleep at all for what feels like a fortnight. It occurs when I make the conscious decision to stay up all night playing Mass Effect 2 (worth it!) and find the dawnlight creeping spitefully around the blinds on Monday morning.
The second is a biological and possibly hereditary component. Sometimes it just takes ages for me to drop off. I’m not exactly exhausted, but I am pretty tired, but I just lie there dozing for hours on end. Sometimes I wake early for no reason I can find, and doze for hours until my alarm goes off (at which point I hit snooze and fall deeply asleep). I require good sleep hygiene. My father suffers from a similar complaint, as do some of my brothers. It can be managed by regular, timetabled exercise and what could be broadly termed cognitive behaviour therapy (I refer to it as “not fucking around anymore and sorting stuff out”). It could be a LOT worse. I am always grateful that my insomnia is not linked to a more concrete and less manageable cause like clinical depression or pain-related conditions.
The third and most irritating cause is my anxiety, an admission that upsets me on several levels. To begin with, it’s a massive bugger. I mean, seriously Brain, can we not come to a better working arrangement here? I’ve got a job interview tomorrow. I need sleep in order to perform well at said interview. Acquiring said job will give me better access to funds with which to procure goods and services we can both enjoy. Help me to help you. What do you mean we’ve discussed this before?
I also don’t like the fact that my anxiety keeps me awake because it’s a wussy condition I try to not to give credence to. I do not, let’s make this absolutely clear, have any major problems in my life. I have a good standard of living. I have a loving family that consistently support me and a group of amiable friends, a small cadre of which I would happily die for. I do not appear to have any major medical conditions. I am of average attractiveness. I have Mass Effect 2 on my Xbox. Life, in short, is sweet.
And yet… it’s been following me for years. A nebulous cloud of half-formed worries and associations, sometimes gaining a toehold in my mind, sometimes relegated to the fringes. Again, none of them are particularly grievous. Bills left unpaid. Important forms lost. Friends and acquaintances upset. Love lost and unlikely to be recovered. The vague feeling that, at some point in the near future, I’m going to get in trouble about something.
It’s bollocks, innit? It really is all in my head. And yet there seems to be some gap between my hearty rationalisations and the feeling in my gut. Even though I know this stuff isn’t important, it still keeps me awake at night. It makes me hide from my responsibilities, and shy from acquiring new ones. It makes me moan constantly to anyone who will listen. It fills up my blog with self-indulgences when I should be writing funny lists about parties and stuff.
There is, however, a bright side. Sometimes it goes away.
Occasionally I emerge from this ridiculous cloud, always unscathed. It happens at key turning points in my life, those moments when you get the feeling that this could be it, this could be the fresh start the marks the beginning of everything else. From now on, you will be a new man. You will pay those bills on time, you will file every letter. You will be virtuous in thought and deed and not watch nearly as much porn on the internet. You will visit your gran regularly and find a nice girl and cease telling pointless lies to everyone you meet.
It doesn’t last. I fall back into old habits. I let things slide away from me until they begin to swarm and amalgamate, returning to me bigger and more menacing than they even seemed in retrospect. I let it happen because I’m lazy, and because, perhaps, I’m not the person I think I ought to be yet.
The potential, however, is there. The potential to make it all stick this time, to make the next big change mark the start of my adult life. When problems will be assessed, analysed and finally crushed under the mighty engine of my self-belief and maturity. When I wake up early every morning having slept the sleep of the just and look life right in the face even as I kick it in the nadgers.
Inspiring stuff, eh? Unlikely too, but it’s nice to have a goal. And the main thing, as we’ve already explored, is that it’s no big deal anyway. It keeps me up at night sometimes, but I have a good standard of living. I have a loving family that consistently support me and a group of amiable friends, a small cadre of which I would happily die for. I do not appear to have any major medical conditions. I am of average attractiveness. I have Mass Effect 2 on my Xbox. And I have you, dear reader, and next week I shall be funny again. I promise.*
*Author's note: may not actually be funny.
There are three components to my insomnia. The first is largely self-inflicted, and involves a continued disruption of my natural sleep patterns. It occurs when I drink to excess, and exchange sleep for a few hours of stupefied unconsciousness. It occurs when I take drugs, and find I can’t sleep at all for what feels like a fortnight. It occurs when I make the conscious decision to stay up all night playing Mass Effect 2 (worth it!) and find the dawnlight creeping spitefully around the blinds on Monday morning.
The second is a biological and possibly hereditary component. Sometimes it just takes ages for me to drop off. I’m not exactly exhausted, but I am pretty tired, but I just lie there dozing for hours on end. Sometimes I wake early for no reason I can find, and doze for hours until my alarm goes off (at which point I hit snooze and fall deeply asleep). I require good sleep hygiene. My father suffers from a similar complaint, as do some of my brothers. It can be managed by regular, timetabled exercise and what could be broadly termed cognitive behaviour therapy (I refer to it as “not fucking around anymore and sorting stuff out”). It could be a LOT worse. I am always grateful that my insomnia is not linked to a more concrete and less manageable cause like clinical depression or pain-related conditions.
The third and most irritating cause is my anxiety, an admission that upsets me on several levels. To begin with, it’s a massive bugger. I mean, seriously Brain, can we not come to a better working arrangement here? I’ve got a job interview tomorrow. I need sleep in order to perform well at said interview. Acquiring said job will give me better access to funds with which to procure goods and services we can both enjoy. Help me to help you. What do you mean we’ve discussed this before?
I also don’t like the fact that my anxiety keeps me awake because it’s a wussy condition I try to not to give credence to. I do not, let’s make this absolutely clear, have any major problems in my life. I have a good standard of living. I have a loving family that consistently support me and a group of amiable friends, a small cadre of which I would happily die for. I do not appear to have any major medical conditions. I am of average attractiveness. I have Mass Effect 2 on my Xbox. Life, in short, is sweet.
And yet… it’s been following me for years. A nebulous cloud of half-formed worries and associations, sometimes gaining a toehold in my mind, sometimes relegated to the fringes. Again, none of them are particularly grievous. Bills left unpaid. Important forms lost. Friends and acquaintances upset. Love lost and unlikely to be recovered. The vague feeling that, at some point in the near future, I’m going to get in trouble about something.
It’s bollocks, innit? It really is all in my head. And yet there seems to be some gap between my hearty rationalisations and the feeling in my gut. Even though I know this stuff isn’t important, it still keeps me awake at night. It makes me hide from my responsibilities, and shy from acquiring new ones. It makes me moan constantly to anyone who will listen. It fills up my blog with self-indulgences when I should be writing funny lists about parties and stuff.
There is, however, a bright side. Sometimes it goes away.
Occasionally I emerge from this ridiculous cloud, always unscathed. It happens at key turning points in my life, those moments when you get the feeling that this could be it, this could be the fresh start the marks the beginning of everything else. From now on, you will be a new man. You will pay those bills on time, you will file every letter. You will be virtuous in thought and deed and not watch nearly as much porn on the internet. You will visit your gran regularly and find a nice girl and cease telling pointless lies to everyone you meet.
It doesn’t last. I fall back into old habits. I let things slide away from me until they begin to swarm and amalgamate, returning to me bigger and more menacing than they even seemed in retrospect. I let it happen because I’m lazy, and because, perhaps, I’m not the person I think I ought to be yet.
The potential, however, is there. The potential to make it all stick this time, to make the next big change mark the start of my adult life. When problems will be assessed, analysed and finally crushed under the mighty engine of my self-belief and maturity. When I wake up early every morning having slept the sleep of the just and look life right in the face even as I kick it in the nadgers.
Inspiring stuff, eh? Unlikely too, but it’s nice to have a goal. And the main thing, as we’ve already explored, is that it’s no big deal anyway. It keeps me up at night sometimes, but I have a good standard of living. I have a loving family that consistently support me and a group of amiable friends, a small cadre of which I would happily die for. I do not appear to have any major medical conditions. I am of average attractiveness. I have Mass Effect 2 on my Xbox. And I have you, dear reader, and next week I shall be funny again. I promise.*
*Author's note: may not actually be funny.
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