Diary of an up and coming sociopath

Exam went okay. I will be pleased with a B-, but happy to have passed at all to be honest. It really hinges on my terrible terrible essay, which I still don’t know the grade for.

Likewise, tomorrow morning’s exam will be undertaken with no knowledge of coursework grades. In many ways it makes things a lot easier because I don’t have the pressure of having to do well, or the relaxation zone of having good coursework to buffer my exam-related efforts, so the exam is always approached at full pelt and lives or dies on its own merits. But it’d be nice to know how I’d done.

Tomorrow is my last exam and the end of my second year at Uni, assuming no resists, and to be honest I’m in a much better position than this time last term. Or at least it feels that way. Tomorrow should end the classic student/blog whinging about revision and exams. I purposefully avoided it this term (revision, that is, rather than whinging ;-) so hopefully it hasn’t been too grating and afterwards we can begin dicussing the finer things in life again.

Anyone who feels like they’re missing out on some extra doses of James can check out Nikki’s livejournal entries here and here. The first is her actual entry, and the second is a rewritten version she comissioned me for in order that I could show her how I make my seemingly dull and pathetic life become amazingly interesting and humourous, by doing it to hers.

There’s some good stuff in there too, I feel I outdid myself. Completists will most certainly want to have a read anyway.

By the way, I’m available for Children’s Parties, Weddings and Funerals. But none of that Bar Mitzvah crap.

Just taking a break from actual revision, so I suspect a post is in order (that is, necessary in order to stop me going back to revision before I absolutely have to). Yesterday I accomplished little. I was woken up early (relatively speaking) to take one of my idiot housemate’s idiot friends to the A&E place because she’d hurt her idiot ankle running in South Park. This confirms my long-held suspision that exercising is more trouble than it’s worth. Quite why I was more suited to the job of driving stupid people to the hospital than a fucking taxi, I don’t know.

At least this officially fulfills my humanitarian quota for the decade.

At some point in the day I noticed that the exams were actually the opposite way around to what I thought. It’s lucky I checked, otherwise I might’ve arrived at Wheatley 6 hours early, having revised for the wrong exam.

Today began the arduous task of converting 8 weeks of course material into a digestable form. I tend to analogise my way of revising as Heinz canned all-day breakfasts. It’s not really convincing as the real thing, but does the job cpnincingly enough, even though it looks horrendous. I’m adopting my usual revision technique of “Writing down everything that seems important, in as little space as possible.” So far I’ve converted 4 weeks of lectures into 2 sides of A4, by jettisonning anything that wasn’t immediately relevant to passing the exam. The technique works well usually, at least well enough to let me pass. Still, I don’t like to tempt fate, and this does look to be a seriously evil exam paper.

Hmm. Gone 4 o’clock already. That means in an hour or so I can get to cooking dinner, by way of procrastinating for another couple of hours. Now, if can just think up a way of filling that hour, under the pretense of “taking a break from revision” I can pretty much avoid doing any more until quite late at night. Probably until after “Fortysomething”, which Nikki wants us to have a watch of (given that it’s got Hugh Laurie in, I’m not averse to either) at which point I’ll only have a little time left until it’s necessary to go to bed.

Excellent. My Rimmerian revision timetable is therefore complete. Tomorrow should be much easier to accomodate because, if nothing else, I’ve got a huge exam in the middle of the day. Then a 9am exam on Tuesday, and then that’s it, I can officially become a summer waster until someone throws a job at me from the employment agency I’ve signed up with. Naturally, I’m already working on contingency plans, should that fall through in any way. Sperm donation, grave-robbing, the usual. Perhaps some eBay scam selling advertising space on my forehead would be a worthy way of drumming up some ill-gotten revenue.

If anyone knows anyone who wants to buy a kidney, I have a spare.

So, turns out Bruce Almighty was fun. Obviously it’s not winning any oscars, but it was good. “A fun romp” would perhaps describe it well. It was kind of the Anti-Bedazzled, similar remise, similar execution, similar moral message. Less Liz Hurley, but that was traded off by Jennifer Aniston and Catherine bell, neither of whom are hard on the eyes. I seem to have strayed into territory that’ll get me smacked about the head tomorrow, so I’ll bring it back on topic. Morgan Freeman makes an excellent God. As I expected, some sophomoric moments - the film would not have suffered, had the dog urination scenes been removed, but overall it was on the right side of intelligent. I feel the choice over Wrong Turn was justified.

Still, it was no Dumb & Dumber.

Afterwards, Nikki and I went up to Borders, the hip and happenning late night hang out for geeks and weirdoes. I finally got myself a copy of Dante’s Inferno. In fact I got the whole Comedy, for £13. I guess that’s my chance of getting the Animatrix gone then. Ah well, Daredevil’s out soon, so that’ll be my “July” DVD. The Animatrix will be around another day. One thing I did find amusing was that I finally found out where, in Borders, the graphic novel section had been moved to. Under the stairs. Very fitting for the geeks. No wonder I couldn’t find it after thy rearranged.

That’s all folks (he said, worried about infringing on copyrights…) There’s nothing more to talk about until tomorrow. Er. Later today.

I’m not particularly inspired by this, but what the fuck, it’s pretty topical at the moment.

1. How are you planning to spend the summer?
I plan to do 3 things:
1) Spend time with my family and friends.
2) Earn some money, be it through a job, some form of freelance computing-related business, or selling all my worldly goods on eBay.
3) Try and write a book\website\script\game while I’ve got some free time.

This, incidentally, is pretty much my manifesto for every holiday. Generally speaking, none of them get adhered to in any way. I suffer from a lack of motivation which impedes all 3, and I tend to end up sitting in my room on IRC, watching cartoons at 4am and waking up in the middle of the afternoon.

2. What was your first summer job?
That depends. I worked with Dad in his office, which was some low-intelligence office-monkey type things, for a few weeks. Of course, for my first job it was quite demanding. 12 hours days, for one thing. 6am to 6pm. It nearly killed me, but then it also made me enough money that I didn’t have to get a job over VIth Form.

3. If you could go anywhere this summer, where would you go?
God, how uninteresting am I? I would go home. Whether that’s Oxford, Leamington, or Jupiter. I don’t care where I am or what I’m doing as long as certain conditions are fulfilled, being that I have access to my friends, my comics, my DVDs, my books and my PC. I’m not a big “Holiday” person. Where else can going abroad take me, except away from what I want? I don’t feel any specific amount of frustration with my situation that I need a break from it every now and again.

As far as holidays go, I have, for the past few years, not bothered going to an actual holiday destination, instead saving my money and time for Reading and V festivals. I consider those my holidays. I desperately wanted to go to Reading his summer, but the line-up was just too shit to bother.

4. What was your worst vacation ever?
This depends on the interpretation of “Vacation”. I haven’t got an individual holiday that was specifically bad. If you’re after a more general approach, the summer of 2000 was pretty much complete shit from start to finish for me and all my friends. Internal politics threatened to complicate and destroy friendships and affected us all in long-term ways. If there was any “vacation” I wouldn’t want to do again, that’s it. The one before VIth form. Not that it didn’t have its high points, of course, but god, every day was like a kick in the head. Everything that could’ve gone bad, went bad. If you distilled angst into pure calendar time, the summer of 2000 is what you’d get. Am I being clear enough here? It was like Dawson’s Creek on smack.

Nevertheless, I’m convinced it was a necessary set of circumstances to get us all where we are today. I wouldn’t want to erase it for anything.

5. What was your best vacation ever?
Individual Holiday? I dunno. Reading 2000 was a lot of fun, I have some good memories from there. Likewise V2000. Likewise (in fact, especially) Reading 2001 and 2002. As far as holidays go, despite the weather I’m quite fond of when Nikki and I spent a weekend in Cornwall just kind of kicking about, last year, and when I went with her and her family to Cornwall, a few years ago. Overall vacations? I’m pretty fond of Christmas, really. Any Christmas from the last few years would probably have me pretty damn happy. I love the food, the gift recei^H^H^H^H^Hgiving, and the weather. I’m not so big on Summer holidays, they’re too long and too hot and there’s no single focus about it. Weeks just meander towards the inevitable return to University/School. That’s not to say I’m going to miss them when they’re gone, since I am well aware that this is pretty likely my last ever “summer off”, barring unemployment or lottery wins.

So if nothing else, this entry has made me think about this summer. There aren’t many things to be packing in this time. A few Easyworld gigs at the start, a visit or two to Brighton to see friends, a trip to the V Festival to fulfill my quota of bands for the summer, and a birthday.

I don’t have any birthday plans as yet, which is sad because it’s my 21st and in some ways I’d like to be able to care, if only for mum, who desperately wants to make a big thing of it. I had the same trouble during my 18th though, I have real trouble getting excited about an arbitrary age limit. I don’t wake up feeling different in the morning, I don’t go to bed feeling different in the evening. I suspect strongly my 21st will feel surprisingly similar to the day before, and the day after.

For anyone reading who feels that I might include them in any birthday celebrations, I keep getting asked for suggestions about what Nikki and I could do, or more applicably to some of you, what she could pay for me and my friends to do, so if you feel you know me well enough to get a free trip/party/meal in honour of my birthday please do suggest something extravagant, because I’m stumped for ideas and seriously considering just taking the cash, in which case it’ll just be the standard c@rvery and DVD evening ;-)

It’s not been a particularly eventful day, but it’s probably for that reason that I’m feeling the need to do an update right now. That, and there are a couple of things I need to remind myself about.

The main one is that I might conceivably have found a job for the Summer. Josh and Sam have referred me to the providers of their jobs, and it’s quite likely I could get in at C&G with them. It’s quite a cushy assignment, and if it works out then I’ll be quite pleased. Not so pleased at being there 9-5, but for the cash I reckon I can handle it for a few weeks at least ;-)

Earlier, I had to decide between taking Nikki to see “Wrong Turn” or “Bruce Almighty” tomorrow. On the one hand, there’s a film with the man who was in the greatest comedy of our time, “Dumb and Dumber”. And was also in “The Cable Guy”. On the other hand, there’s Eliza Dushku, the hottest female to come out of Buffy, in a straight horror film about inbred cannibals. It was a hard decision, but the fact that horror films are rarely scary for me, coupled with the fact that inbred cannibals and Eliza Dushku appeals to me, rather than Nikki, meant I decided to treat her to Bruce Almighty. I say “treat”, it has the potential to be pretty sophomoric, though I’m quite amused at the premise. I’ll see how it goes tomorrow.

Last night I had another dream. I’ve been remembering quite a few recently, which isn’t entirely unusual, I tend to have brief periods where I remember lots. This last one involved Josh and I going to the comic shop in Stratford to pick up our new comics, and Josh having £240 worth to pick up. Plus a £60 limited edition Spawn figure (”the Redeemer”) that he was trying to leave until Christmas, but he was made to buy. At first, we thought his box of comics was the weekly shipment. I bought my normal stuff, plus Lenore #10 for Nikki, which had a blue cover.

By comparison, last night Tom dreamt Bedbugs were going to cut off his skin so they could take all of his blood.

And, well, that’s about all for today. We went to Tescos, as ever. We watched Big Brother, as ever. Nikki did revision and I contemplated the ceiling, deep in procrastination. Now I’m being aurally assaulted by Macy Gray on the Graham Norton show. Such pain. I’m wondering if it’s a good thing that I’m looking forward to the Friday 5 because it’ll give me a chance to rant and ramble, possibly both. There really should be more exciting things ;-)

For a change, I’ve decided to fill out one of those dodgy “poll” things that get spread across livejournals like SARs at an Avril Lavigne concert. I’ve aimed to do short answers for a change, if only because in this case the scope of the questions far outweighs my ability to write more than about 3 words for most.

THE FRUITS OF YOUR LABOR (things you can’t live without)
Something important on your desk: Notes Nikki wrote me.
When you sleep you wear: pyjama bottoms and, if it’s really cold, a T-shirt.
If you could afford it at the moment, you would buy: Spain.
Something you don’t have a lot of: Ideas.
If your house was burning and you could only save 3 items what would they be: My Hard Drive, Flywheels (the only original transformer I have) and the glass bottle of coke I bought the day Nikki and I went to see Coldplay. Insurance can cover the rest.

MORALS
If there were no side effects, you would enjoy being addicted to: I always imagined if I was going to be addicted to anything, it’d be opiates of some kind, but then there’s a lot to be said for psychadelic drugs. Of course, I wouldn’t actually enjoy being addicted to anything.
A time when you purposly hurt someone emotionally: I wouldn’t.
A time you accidentally hurt someone emotionally: I don’t want to talk about it.
One person you have killed in your thoughts: Hmm. It’d probably be easier to list people who I haven’t killed in my thoughts. There’s at least one person who’s getting violent deaths every day at the moment though…

FRIENDS:
Three traits you look for in a friend: Geekiness, humour and a lack of pretension.
Who makes you laugh most often: Tom or Mike
A friend who you can tell anything: None of them get to know everything.
A friend you can got to for advice: I don’t need other people’s advice.
The best piece of advice you had been given: Never eat yellow snow.
Two closest friends: Who can say? Nikki’s on the highest tier of friendship, and then there’s a whole bunch of people after that.
The friend who uses most of your energy: Nikki. ;-)

EGO
Your 3 best qualities: Patience, Tact, Morality.
Your 3 worst qualities: Jealousy, Pretensiousness, Disinterest.
Describe your ideal self: I am he.
A compliment that makes you blush: I don’t get compliments.
You are embarassed when: I am forced to speak in public because people like work I’ve done.
The greatest physical pain you ever endured: Wisdom Teeth coming through.
The greatest emotional pain you ever endured: Can’t think of any specific example, but it’s no doubt Nikki-related.
Moment you are most ashamed of: I have no shame.
Your best physical feature: My brainmeats.
Who/What makes you happy: Nikki, Knowledge, and the usual. Comics, Books, Music.
Who/what makes you sad: Nikki being sad.

EMOTIONS
Emotion you hide most: Most of ‘em.
The emotion you tend to experience most: Ambivalence or bemusement.
The emotion you are feeling most lately: Weariness, apathy, or boredom.
You have a huge amount of guilt regarding: I avoid guilt. My last instance of guilt goes back to when I was about 5 and I had to come home from school early because I was ill, meaning my dad couldn’t see me in the school play. We performed it twice in one day, Mum came to the first in the morning, Dad was going to come to the second in the afternoon when he was done with work. I was ill, so he couldn’t. Probably he wasn’t especially bothered, but it’s clearly affected me.
When you are angry you need: To be isolated.
When you are sentimental you need: Time to think.
When you are in love you need: Nothing else.

MEMORIES
One of your most peaceful memories: Listening to OK Computer in the dark.
One of your most scariest memories: Getting lost, for about 4 seconds, in Wellesbourne market, when I was like 5.
One of your angriest memories: It’s not for public debate.
A memory that makes you laugh: Nikki managing to mishear the lyrics in a song off the Romeo and Juliet soundtrack as something entirely nonsensical.
A memory that makes you happy: When Nikki and I both found out we got in to University.

LOVE
Something someone can say or do that you find attractive: Be self-aware.
Something someone can say or do that you find unattractive: Smoke.
Two physical things appealing about people: Stomach and lips.
A personality trait you find appealing: Sarcasm.
Your secret passion: I have little passion.
What you enjoy most about having a committed relationship: Having something bigger than myself to concentrate on.
Have you ever cheated on someone? Only I know for sure ;-)
Have you ever been cheated on? Only she knows for sure ;-)

FINALLY
If you had more time alone you would: Construct elaborate fantasies about mass murder and global reform, then forget it when I went to sleep.
If you had more patience you would: MORE patience? If I had any more I’d be a doormat.
If you could change one thing about your physical appearance what would it be: I would have wings 20 feet across, and the physiology to support that.
If you had no committments what would you be doing: Roaming the globe in search of adventure, killing those in my way.
If you could have one super power what would it be: Head explody!
If you could start all over…. I’d make the same mistakes in the same order.

If nothing else, Paul and Relly will be able to appreciate and share my disgust with this.

It’s (the Poet Laureate) Andrew Motion’s attempt at a Rap for Prince William’s birthday. It’s fucking indescribably awful. You know when you’re 9 years old, and you write poems in school, and they’re the most amateur pathetic shit that ever spewed forth from a pen? Well, it seems things come full circle, because this guy is supposedly one of the best poets in the country, and this “rap” is some of the most amateur pathetic shit that ever spewed forth from a pen.

I have re-presented it here, despite the excruciating pain it takes for me to read it.

Better stand back
Here’s an age attack,
But the second in line
Is dealing with it fine.

Better stand back
Here’s an age attack,
But the second in line
Is dealing with it fine.

Eminem he is not. Don’t even get me started on rhyming “gone” with “crown”. I know it’s half rhyme or assonance or some crap, but I can’t stand that device above all others. It necessitates the person reading the poem to mispronounce one of the words in order to make things sound even half decent. Ugh.

I vomit better blog entries than this rap.

Yesterday, I heard a cover of “Mad World” by Tears for Fears, done acoustically (on guitar) on a CD Nikki owns. The lyrics are really amazing, and have been haunting me all day, so I downloaded the original, and I find it just staggering how badly 80s synth can ruin some of the best lyrics I’ve heard that aren’t Radiohead.

And I find it kind of funny,
I find it kind of sad,
The dreams in which I’m dying,
Are the best I’ve ever had

I mean, this is clearly utter, utter genius. Sheer poetry on every level. And the original just plain blows.

The same goes for Easyworld’s cover of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence. Stripped down and with the lyrics in their most vulnerable form, it’s a delicate and penetrating piece of music that sounds brilliant and is overflowing with emotion. Listen to the original and it’s suddenly some kind of upbeat, forgettable disco record. The lyrics are kind of drawled in the background while you’re assaulted by the Best Artificial Noises of the 80s.

Of course, I’m probably on some kind of Acoustic compilation overload, since I’ve also become horribly attached to Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”. Maybe this is some kind of Radiohead backlash, now that I consider it. I’ve been drumming their last 4 albums into me for months and suddenly it’s different to hear things that are just a singer and guitar. These songs do lack electronicness in huge amounts.

I guess that’s all I’ve got to say on the subject. General musings rather than artistic deconstruction. It’s been an uneventful couple of days so I won’t bother with the excruciating details this time around. I do, however, have many recycled plans for tomorrow, so who knows what I’ll update with next?

So Friday night, we went into Oxford to buy the new Harry Potter book for Nikki.

The queueing at Borders wasn’t too long. Obviously there were hundreds of people lined up and a strange person who kept mishearing our conversation and interjecting with irrelevant points pertaining to nothing like what we were discussing, but even so, things were smooth. Except once we were nearly in the door, Nikki noticed that people buying the thing from Waterstones were getting a special bag (!) So we went to Waterstones and queued up again. Took a little longer this time, but nothing too bad.

Being where we were, on the main throughfare of Oxford City Centre, there was a fair amount of drunk people laughing and shouting in unoriginal ways (approximately 97 hundred people came out with the original shouts of “Harry’s the one who dies!” or “You fucking sad lot”). Ordinarily I’d have described these people as uneducated and unintelligent, but the problem was they were mostly University Students, and we were queueing up to buy a children’s book, so I remained silent on the issue…

There was, of course, the highlight of some stupid goth girl (and her friend) running out of Waterstones with her book shouting “AAHAHAHA! IVE GOT TEH BOOK AND YUO HAVENT!!11″ and then five seconds later, she dropped her purse and spent the next 5 minutes on her knees trying to collect up all the change, while the people queueing laughed at her. A rare moment of Poetic Justice.

Yesterday, I walked up into Oxford, checking out newsagents on the way in hope of finding one that sells Mint Crisp ice-creams, but nothing so far. I was looking for a new book to read, and was hoping to find a copy of Dante’s Inferno, but it didn’t seem to be readily available. I saw one hardback version that was prohibitively expensive, and I’m starting to wonder if I should look in the foreign language section for a translated version, or if I should be looking under the name of the translator for the author or something. I suspect I’ll just buy it off Amazon. On the way back, I bought a Calippo which numbed my mouth in an overly Orange way. It was that or a Mars Ice-Cream. I think I’ll get the Mars ice cream next time, if only for variation’s sake.

Hmm. Suddenly I sound like Josh’s fake blog again. That whole project he did has made me really self consciou about mentioning products of any kind ;-)

Yesterday night, I was wasting away with nothing to do when David asked me for help getting his printer sorted, so naturally I obliged. 3 hours later we managed to get things in working order and I finally got around to doing the vegetating I’d missed out on.