Diary of an up and coming sociopath

It’s been another of those packed weekends. The kind that take me away from my PC and into the murky depths of the outside world. The kind that leave no room for the important blogging aspect of life. It seems that I’ve left many an issue unattended to, so I’m just going to fall back on the timeless expanded-list device. Here’s what you need to know to keep up with my life of late.

1. Promotion! Remember that job interview I had the other day? I got the position. I will be, from the 8th of August, a Travel Category Developer. My days of product matching purgatory are coming to an end and I’ll soon be able to do a job far more suited to my many talents. I hear this one may even involve the use of some actual technical knowledge. It’s a big step towards advancing my career as a web developer (which as we all know is just a stopover on my way to comic-writer superstar.) I get a pay rise of £2,000; a pension; stock options; a permanent contract! I also will move desks soon. Training begins tomorrow.

2. Wedding Reception Fun. On Saturday we went to a wedding reception at some zoo north of London, just off the M1. I won’t lie. I can’t stand weddings, nor wedding receptions, and this encompassed roughly everything I hate about them. Paul and Relly’s I could stomach, because I knew the people and actually cared about being there, but the same was not true on Saturday. It could’ve been worse, but frankly it was more or less what I was expecting. It was at a zoo, though, so despite nazi-like zoo employees keeping people herded in the vicinity of the function room, there was a chance to see the free-roaming wallabies, which was quite cool.

3. Paul and Relly’s Anniversary With our typically relaxed attitude towards navigation it was quite fortuitous we made it there at all, but on Sunday Nikki and I attended the anniversary party of the aforementioned couple, at Relly’s aunt and uncle’s house in some village near to Windsor. It was good to see Paul and Relly again since we don’t get the chance as often as would be nice, and we’re usually relegated to conversing over MSN for a good 6 months between each meeting. We spent a good portion of it trying, as a group, to use an electrified tennis-raquet thing to destroy a wasp but it tended to cause more danger than the wasp itself as people tried to duck out of the way of being electrocuted and kncoking over people’s drinks. Paul showed us a couple of new magic tricks, which I think indicates that his need to display them isn’t being fulfilled at home. That could become a serious problem for a marriage about 30 or 40 years in.

However, given that it’s the first anniversary, there isn’t a huge problem with magic tricks just yet. Apparantly the first anniversary is “paper”, so I suggested buying a ream of decent cartridge paper. Apparantly that’s a dumb gift and we got like a candle or something, but you could tell they were secretly disappointed when I was explaining what they could’ve had. 500 sheets of the really good stuff, that’s what I was pushing for. The thick stuff you can print your CV on and be proud of it. The Wikipedia entry for Wedding Anniversaries suggests that in future years I can get even more inventive, though I’m concerned that in 14 years I’ll have to come up with an ivory-based gift. That’d be difficult even now, but in 14 years it’ll be debatable that ivory will even still exist. I may campaign in the interim for 14 years to become the Tungsten anniversary. Can’t go wrong with a bit of Tungsten in 2018.

I’m slightly concerned by the German list though. It suggests that on your 12 1/2th anniversary you can look forward to parsley, if you make it to 33 1/2 you’ll get the vegetables and garlic to go with that, at 28 you get the twin joys of Fire and Mercury, two of nature’s most favourite killers, and if that doesn’t finish you off your 100th anniversary is your “heaven” anniversary whichc suggests to me that they acknowledge how old you are and give you a brief spot of euthanasia to push you over the edge.

I’m sensing that I’ve become sidetracked. Back to the issues at hand.

4. Defrostation. After coming back from the supermarket today (I took some time off to recover from driving up and down the country over the last few days) Nikki, Josh and I decided to defrost the freezer because it’s been getting quite ridiculous. It took some really quite violent attacking and a lot of boiling the kettle, but we successfully cleared it out and packed it all back up without having to let it all melt for a day. I feel like we’ve reclaimed a lot of space in there. This is the kind of thing people neglect to tell you you’ll be doing once you get your own place. By contract, I spent the afternoon thrashing Josh at Street Fighter 2 and 3, which is more like what you expect to be doing when you move out of home, then we spent an hour smacking our respective bitches up in San Andreas, which is the first time I’ve played a new-wave (as in, 3D) GTA game.

5. MOT. Impact Car Care in Ealing. They passed the car, and they were accomodating of my situation with regards to dropping the car off and picking it up. I recommend you use them if you’re in the area. I found myself woefully unable to find opinions online of MOT places which wa sa problem because I just moved here with no knowledge of who might try and rip me off or anything, but having used them I can say to any prospective searchers that my experiences were all positive.

6. Latest Tube Terrorism. Didn’t affect me hugely this time, though it did mean Nikki had to duck under a police cordon to get into my workplace when they taped it off because they decided a bike with a bag on it was a potential threat and sealed off the road. I brought Nikki upstairs and sat here in the office while I finished up work, then we made haste, and remained unexploded.

I wondered recently how all 4 of the would-be bombers managed to escape. I was thinking that in the same situation I’d like to think I’d have to testicles to at least try and stop them from running off in some way. Like say, Spider-Man would. It later occured to me that Spider-Man’s entire career is defined by the criminal he didn’t stop, so in retrospect I’d probably have to let any bombers go the first time, so I understand now how they managed it.