I'm sitting at the table in my kitchen, watching my pasta cook and trying not to cry. Apparently, a watched pot never boils, but as the bubbles dance higher and higher to the lip of the pot, and eventually dribble down with a spitting shriek into the gas hob, I realise that proverbs are over-rated. I can't get off the chair to turn the gas down, so I watch my beloved penne go from al dente to pasta-puddle.
The reason I can't get out of the chair is because my legs have stopped working. They no longer do what ask them because I was mean to them earlier today. So now, I sit, morosely staring at my dinner spoiling. my stomach rumbling mercilessly.
I was back in Ireland last week, spending some time with the family and generally chilling out and at some point getting rejected AGAIN! Anyway, at some point in the week, we all went to the island where I half-grew-up and went swimming. In the Atlantic.
It was fucking freezing.
Because the water was essentially colder than the endothermic version of hell, we had to wear wetsuits. As I zipped mine up, I looked down and realised I looked like a lumpy pillowcase full of tits. Then when my wee bro, sis and I were swimming, I realised I was nowhere near as fit as I used to be. Seeing as the last time I did any exercise was in June 2009, I have come to terms with the fact that I'm now mostly made of molten cheese. So, in the vein of self-improvement, I went for a run this morning.
Here's the route I took...5 miles in total, including a workout at the Kilburn outdoor gym afterwards.
I returned to the house an hour later, lay on the floor, and tried desperately not to cry. The Guinness Baby is not long for this world, I tell thee.
-----
----
---
--
-
That seems quite positive right? Getting up at 5:45 to go for a run. Well it isn't, I came home from work and now find I can't use my legs. They've stopped working...
ALSO, my toes have become all blistery.
Now, if some of you might remember, I have a weird fascination with the 'Cysts and Pus' genre of youtube porn. I decided to film my own. My toes are really long (..ladies) and they're important, so when I went to pop the blisters I thought I'd add to the pantheon of Pus Porn. Yum yum.
Prob best look away if you're easily nauseated.
Now I'm lying in bed, in my jammies, trying not to sound like an old man when I move, dreading having to do my pervert shuffle tomorrow on the way to the Tube. Hopefully my legs will be gone when I wake up and I can get Spark to give me a piggy back...
So I've had far too much coffee today, and I'm just back from a job interview. Here's what maaaaad insomnia mixed with maaaaaas caffeine addiction looks like. All while dressed in a suit. Huzzah!
So I just wanted to put this up, as a means of thanking the people who were so helpful and supportive of me. There are too many to mention but Jay, Jen, Sara, Laurie, Mel and Lopez come to mind immediately, as well as the many others who were so kind, but who I can't remember. I'm incredibly lucky to have such good blog-mates
The next installment of My Video Life, this is a very short video I made with the other guys who were doing the music with me in that play I did during the summer.
Please excuse the rambling and giggling, we were all pretty exhausted.
London had snow today, and I've never been more thankful for central heating, or for thermal socks.
I was going through my video file today, and found this little video I made during my Man Adventures in France over the summer. I watched it and remembered the weather being so hot, us being so drunk, and the days being so long, that it very briefly made me forget how ball-numbingly cold it is here.
The glazed look is due to all the beer and wine that we were drinking. Excuse the beer belly.
Also, my Connect-i-cut galpal Spanky has gone on hiatus from her blog in order to finish off reading Breaking Dawn, so why not go over and catch up on her blog so that you're nice and ready by the time she's finished. Luvs it.
As you may (or more like may not, and don't care) be aware. I have been unemployed now for about a month, after the whole boss-getting-me-drunk-and-cheating-money-off-me thing, and I've been a bit...bored. Well, as a tonic to that I went to the jobcentre in Kilburn yesterday to sign on (free money = ka-ching!) and start as a 'jobseeker'. I hadn't slept in like 30 hours when this happened, so yesterday was fun.
Now first of all, the whole dole thing is depressing. Very depressing. They ask you a million questions ("Now Mr D, when was the last time you shat on a toadstool" etc etc) that make you think about how broke you are, then they patronise the fuck out of you. ("Can you read? Oh, you can? Good for you") in a manner that clearly says "Well, I have a job, I'm better than you".
So, after three hours of that, I walked home, and decided to stop in the bank to open an account. The lady who I was dealing with was a beautiful Iranian lady called Shihraz, and she had a wheelchair. I didn't even notice this, as she was busy telling me about the Super Deluxe Multi Omni Hyper Gold-plate Account. I'm not sure how, but we began chatting about how it would be great to be wealthy, and me, trying to be funny, suggested that she could pimp out her wheelchair. That did it, forgetting the account, we went into a fifteen minute conversation talking about how great she could make her wheels, with platinum plating, sub-woofer speakers, bling. The works. It was the best bank-trip ever, and she's my new bff bank buddy. She spent the whole time giggling, and is the best bank person I've ever met, so I'm opening an account there.
Also, I did a shift in the pub last night..while almost crying with tiredness....fun.
-----
Yesterday was also a great day for me (tiredness and unemployment aside) because, the ever-cool Novelista Barista has given me an award. Ironically called the Coffee Cup Award I'm very honoured for the recognition and would like to thank NB for her words, she's very kind! Also, as a complete coffee addict, it's very gratifying to know that my future massive heart attack will be caused by something that I love so much.
Now, the porn thing. As part of my attempts to find work, I applied to loads of radio stations and voiceover companies; hoping against hope that someone would pluck me out of the ether and give me a prime-time breakfast slot. Well, they didn't. The only people who got back to me were a specialist fiction company.
Here's what happened :
(ps - by looking at the screen, I'm not trying to be intense or anything, the script is on screen at the time of recording)
So yeah, I've accidentally become a sex-worker. The pay's not atrociously bad, and I can dress like an unshaven bum but...here's the question...does that technically make me a form of hooker, or is it okay for me to do that and keep my head on high?? Responses please. Also, my laughably bad attempt to sound sexy is bound to return to haunt me at some point. We'll see...
Anyway, I hope you're all well, what've y'all been up to?
I've been talking quite a lot about how much I was looking forward to my weekend on the high seas. By 'high seas' I really mean the River Maidstone in Kent. After four days of boat fun and frankly ridiculous amounts of alcohol being consumed by a plethora of whacky characters, I'm currently sitting on the leather mega-sofa and watching Hannah Montana with the little cugina and cugino.
The last post I wrote about the boat was the day we took it from Chatham to Maidstone in anticipation of the Maidstone River Festival, but since that day the weather had been a bit 15yr old goth about it, swinging its mood about to the straining beats of Cradle of Filth and scratching 'I hate my parents' into arm with a penknife; sunny to monsoon and back again.
We had a big build up to the festival, enjoying the sun (my back having been burnt to a cinder a few days earlier) and relaxing as best we could, until THIS happened...
we had to wait until Friday evening until we could go down to the Holly Louise and begin drinking...and drink we did. It was quite obscene. We bought a great many cases of budweiser, cider, little dumpy beer and tonnes and tonnes of food. On the first night alone, we drank about a million bottles of suds. Highlights of night 1 include:
1) Being grabbed and kissed (tongues de rigeur for her clearly) by a 45 yr old lady who said my accent "made her want to have sex" and who asked if she could keep me. 2) Her friend telling me that it was the THIRD time she had done that to randomers. 3) Me sitting with a group of (actually) lovely people and then out of the blue being hit on the head by a 15lb chill-box of seafood. Some lady was having a domestic and tried to throw the heavy entirety of her product from a high wall onto her ex-boyfriend. It was heavier than she thought, fell short, and it bounced off my head before bursting open on the quayside. Ouch
and
4) Meeting some nice young hipsters who were dressed up as pirates. One of whom (who had tried, unsuccessfully, to dress like Jack Sparrow) told me it was the greatest outfit he'd worn in his life.
We all eventually passed out, excited to see what the festival day brought.
The Saturday can be summed up as follows:
That's right, it was Hammer Time on the boat, we are all phenomenal dancers, and we were having a great time.
BUT...
Every face in the Aunt and Uncle's friendlist wriggled out of the wood work to come visit. They're the sort of couples who, in their FB messages to the other couples, feel obliged to refer to each other as 'good friends' or 'true mates' etc so that they can convince themselves that they don't spend the entire time bitching each other out horrendously. So when they found out that S&D had a hugely exploitable boat in the River Festival, guess where they went. I'm not saying they are bad people (for they WERE very nice) but just that their idea of friendship is ridiculously out of whack. There are a few of them who are amazing though, the sort who I see in the house most days, or who come to all the events, such as my Aunt's best friend Ola, or Leigh, the wee 18yr old guy who used to practically run their old pub. They're the sort that contrasted so much with these boatmoochers and it was really cool to hang out with them.
The day was beautiful, the sun was splitting the stones and I was ridiculously hungover and slightly sore from the head-fishbox contact. We sat out all day, with interludes where I sat below deck to read my current page-turner (which is excellent, though a bit jingoistic and overtly British for my Hibernian tendancies) and tried to catch up with my correspondences (because nothing is as nice as a handwritten letter is it?) during any lull in the festivities.
Anyway, by the time we had started to rock out to the Hammer Time shuffle, we were (again) more sauced than Mr Tabasco when he thought that his nachos needed a bit of oomph and got his ingredients out, and there were no signs of it stopping any time soon.
At one point, between the Hammer shuffle and the later drunken torpor, we painted a face onto my uncle's belly. That's what we did. It was a lot of fun. We called the little belly-lady Stella, and she became our mascot.
What was also a great deal of fun was when uncle D then went and started chatting to some of the cops who were patrolling the quayside. For about 20 minutes he had a lovely conversation about all things boaty with the bobbies on the beat when I snapped this photo, making him look like a schoolboy being scolded...
For parts of the day, all the kids (of the moochers and the nicers alike) for some reason gathered around me, and treated me like a human climbing frame. As it got dark, we watched from the deck of the boat as loads of people in their tricked-out watermobiles ambled past, it really was nice:
Soon, all the little sprouts jumped up on the fore deck with me and soon we were playing the 'let's scream really loud at all the boats' game:
It actually was a lot of fun. There also was a massive fireworks display. All the couples stood on the boat hugging each other and being all cozy and it was one of the few 'dude, you need a girlfriend' moments I've had in a while. It was very romantic, me and my budweiser.
All in all, it was a really good evening.
Sunday was pretty much a 'we're hungover and don't want to do anything' sorta day, and when we sailed back upriver to Chatham, it was pouring with rain and we were all sorta sick of the sight of everything around us. We moored at Chatham, had some dinner (a massive meal at Nando's that left me feeling positively pregnant) and the whole bunch of us squeezed onto a small berth to watch Twilight. I'm a wee bit in love with Kristen Stewart, so it was all good. The only bad thing about the evening was that the skies opened with a vengeance and at 5am this (Monday) morning, a huge drip of icy rainwater started on my head.
So, as I said, today I am exhausted, drained and (despite my bad storytelling) really happy to have such a great weekend. Life on a boat is a lot of fun, but it was important to try and get some time to myself so that we didn't all end up tearing each other's throats out. I found that a book and some writing stuff went a long way. The pros are obvious; the fun, sense of adventure and the chance to learn a new skill, but there are cons (apart from me haha) it can be a few days between getting showers, most boats are not laptop friendly, and you can get a bit cramped.
Today, we've lazed on the sofa and aunt A just made the most magnificent cottage pie. Now with a cup of tea and a strong case of shiprock (where you can feel the boat moving whilst on dry land) I'm almost ready for a lot more fun...in a few days. - -- --- ---- ps: One of the people I met this weekend, who has known S&D for years because of the river festival is this guy below. Pete, or 'Popeye' as he likes to be called, is a bit like the male lead from a 1970's softcore porno. In the photo below he is as he was the entire time, wearing a pair of short cut-offs with no underwear...tasty. The entire festival he entertained a gaggle of women of varying ages, and his entire day seemed to consist of kissing the cheeks of young maidens and punctuating his speech with words like 'my darling', 'sweetheart', 'lovely little one' etc. Now, I use some of those endearments from time to time, but I really don't want to end up like this guy...a walking STD. Although a lovely man, he was very clearly in the 'sex pest' category of the charming spectrum. Ew. Isn't he gorgeous ladies? What say you to a slice of popeye? (Yes that is a hoop in his ear)
Anyway, that's what I got up to this weekend. Hope y'all had fun :)
