the end of a (soap op)era

The apathy has reached fever pitch.

There's loads of stuff I need to be doing - coursework, revision, placement applications, interview preparation - but I just can't seem to summon up the energy or enthusiasm to even think about maybe considering the vaguest possibility of perhaps making a start on any of it.

It's been a funny couple of weeks. I managed to get my evil hand drill CAD assignment completed a whole day before the submission deadline; it wasn't perfect, but by this point I'd had enough of it.


Frankly, it was all rather too much effort for far too little reward; the Design Embodiment and Materials Selection module only carries one sixth of the credits for the whole year, the actual design part only makes up 50% of the marks for the module, and only half of those marks come from this assignment. Sigh.

A few days after handing in this hideous time-wasting piece of crap, I went off to Wales for (former housemate and splendidly hairy friend) George's stag day/night/shenanigan. I got the feeling that it was going to be a long day when at half eight in the morning we found ourselves in a supermarket car park, with George dressed in gorilla outfit being forced to chug a bottle of beer...

The actual day itself was spent at Go Ape, falling out of trees and flying about on ziplines. I have quite an affinity for such simian capers, and found it to all be rather good fun, if a tad cold and wet. The evening was a more tedious affair, and was pretty much a textbook stag do. Overpriced meal? Check. Rubbish nightclub? Check. Hideous stripper? Check. Bride (also on her hen night) phone up in drunken rage and cancel wedding? Check. Manage to lose groom dressed as a caveman in the middle of Cardiff at 3am while all this was happening? Check.

Of course, everything is more or less back to normal now, and the wedding is on again.

In other news, The Boy has decided to move out, and from sometime next month she will be living with her fella Rich and all his bits of computers. I think I shall miss her... she's been my partner in crime for a good year or so now, and it's been fun getting into all sorts of mischief with her. And not just the sexy kind of mischief. On the plus side, her place will be taken - for a short while at least - by the very splendid and worthwhile Charlie Cat.

And in other other news, my car got stolen at some point on Thursday night. The first I knew of this was when the police phoned to say that they had recovered it in Horfield, and so now I owed them £105 plus VAT. At present they still have my car; I don't know where it is, I don't know when I can get it back, I don't know if it's drivable, I don't know if it's repairable, I don't know if my stuff is still in it... and I've got an interview to get to on Wednesday. It's like these bastards weren't thinking of me at all when they nicked my wheels.

I have, however, found a solution to my predicament. I am drunk.

likes: tinitus, fizzy sweets, neatly organised shelves dislikes: mass murder, things with more than four legs

Metal Terry is not, as his name might suggest, made of metal. But he does like metal (the Slayer kind, as opposed to the carbon steel kind), and he is called Terry. He is also notoriously flaky, which is why last weekend Sam, The Boy and I went to Newport to see Every Time I Die without him.

But first there were the obligatory support acts. First up were Blackhole, an enthusiastic bunch of kids from Hemel Hempstead; they smashed out a decent set of aggressive punk ‘n’ roll tunes, pausing only to beg us to buy their merch. They were actually quite good.

Less good were the next two bands, Drop Dead Gorgeous and Scary Kids Scaring Kids. Mostly it was an hour and a half of tight jeans, fashionable haircuts and unintelligible nasal whining. The kids went wild; we went to the bar.

In theory it should have been Every Time I Die next; but what we actually got was a thirty minute prog epic of a soundcheck as they tried to get their rented equipment to work. Eventually they either sussed it out, or more likely gave up and started playing anyway, and the next hour was spent sweating, shouting and getting kicked in the head by crowd surfers. They were awesome.

I awoke the next day with ringing ears and numerous bruises, made myself a cup of tea and checked my emails to see if there was any news from Safetech Engineering (the consultancy firm where I would be spending a year on industrial placement). And there was! The news was that one of their clients had just lost a £550m contract, and that the basic upshot of this was that I couldn’t have a job anymore.

Shit.

The only other stuff I had in the pipeline was CERN (to whom I recently re-applied, having only been selected as a reserve candidate first time around), and MBDA (a bunch of missile-toting warmongering fuckpigs). I wasn’t particularly optimistic of my chances of getting into CERN, and didn’t really want to work for MBDA, with whom I had an interview the next day. Would I be able to sell out my principles and accept a job in the defense industry?

Probably; but it’s all academic since they didn’t offer me the placement anyway. I’d feel happier about this if I had another placement to fall back on, but I’m still not too dismayed at not being able to spend a year at MBDA. It was a slightly surreal interview day; everyone there was really enthused by missiles, even the girl from HR. They all seemed completely desensitized to the final application of their products, and either didn’t realise or didn’t care that they basically get paid to kill people.

The next night I got my brain flushed out by more live music. This time I was accompanied to the good ship Thekla by Charlie Cat and The Boy. Pilgrim Fathers started things off; I’d never heard of them before, save for a paragraph in the “ones to watch” section of Rock Sound magazine, but they were damn good in a kind of folky-doom-sludge-psych kind of way. Gay For Johnny Depp were over-aroused and quite excellent, as ever; not that many of the cooler-than-thou indie crowd cared. And then there were 65daysofstatic, a band who have always been about a million times better live than on record. Not that they’re particularly bad on record – it’s just that their skittish drum ‘n’ bass ‘n’ indie seems to have a bit more oomph when witnessed first hand.

But it's all little more than a brief distraction, sadly. This week I have to go back to real life and start scrabbling around desperately for a work placement...

laziness is next to godliness

It’s been a busy couple of weeks of getting not very much done.

Not that I don’t have things to be doing; I should be ploughing on with such absorbing bits of coursework as the 3D CAD rendering of a hand drill, and then maybe a bit of Fourier series analysis of heat transfer through a three dimensional material…

But frankly, procrastinating is a far more appealing option.

My rekindled love for timewasting seems mostly to stem from Friday last week, when I got so drunk that I a) managed to make my life just a tiny bit more complicated for myself, and b) turned up to work the next day almost three hours late and still drunk. My family came to visit over the weekend, thus obliterating any hope of sobriety – I am fortunate enough to have a family with a good sense of humour, that likes to get drunk and play board games. We did a lot of eating, a lot of drinking, watched some banger racing in the arctic climes of the Mendips, and in my case managed to get threatened by a ginger cage fighter. Good times.

Of course, drinking isn’t the only great way to waste time – let’s not forget about the toy soldiers. On Tuesday Matt came over, and we built little houses for our little men.

Behold!!!

Seriously, if you were a toy soldier geek you’d be going nuts right about now. (stupid well-adjusted normal people… mutter…….)

And then there is the shiny shiny sexbox 360 that Mr Dozer has decided to plonk in the living room, for no readily discernable reason. So now, if I’m not drinking or playing with toy soldiers, I’m racing cars and blasting zombies, and wondering if maybe (in the apparent absence of any kind of self-discipline) I should cut my own thumbs off so that I can’t play the damn thing anymore.

Back in black (t-shirt)

Ah, the long awaited post. The technical difficulties I was experiencing just after Christmas have now been resolved; in fact, they’ve been resolved for quite some time now, but I’ve been far too busy/lazy to write anything.

Until now. Except, I’m still quite extraordinarily lazy; so instead of anything of literary value or worth, you’re going to get a brief review of the last three months of my rubbish life.

If you’ve some deep-seated aversion to bullet points, I suggest you look away now.

• Christmas/New Year: Was all quite drunken, and therefore bearable in the extreme. Mum bought me a nice coat that was entirely appropriate for a thirty year old man looking to make a career for himself in engineering; fortunately, she kept the receipt, and so I was able to callously refund it and spend the money on entirely inappropriate metal CDs. Ungrateful? Perhaps. I’m just not quite prepared to start dressing my age. My new year started with me mullering my left foot whilst capering about in a drunken manner at Matt’s house. The following three days were bleary and full of sweet, sweet painkillers. Nice.
• The Pub: From now on it shall be known only as The Pub – names have been changed, partly too protect the innocent, but mainly to protect the guilty. It’s working out okay: we’ve gone almost a whole month without anyone getting glassed. Living above a pub is a little bit like living next door to a house that’s always having a party. Mostly you just learn to block the noise out; and if that doesn’t work, you can always go downstairs and get smashed. The only other problems are mostly to do with the fact that it’s an old building, with a convoluted system of plumbing that has been added to and modified numerous times throughout the years; so whilst it is apparent that there is some kind of leak in the system somewhere, no-one can figure out exactly where it is or how to fix it. The basic upshot of this is that all the hot water disappears completely once per week, and standing underneath the shower is not entirely unlike being weed on by four kittens strung together just above your head. Despite all this, it looks like we’ll be staying for a while; Dozer has passed his three month probationary period, signed his contracts and is now officially landlord of The Pub. So as long as he doesn’t get caught doing something stupid, like sub-letting to his old housemates, or paying his bar staff in cocaine, he’ll be alright.
• Housemates: Much the same as they ever were, except we’ve now got a new one. He’s a ferret. He has cute whiskers, no sense of balance, and a musky scent so pervasive that once you’ve handled him you’re best off burning any clothes you may have been wearing. He does not have a name – suggestions on a postcard, please.
• School: Has been all a bit frantic, with lots of deadlines piling into each other in a most undignified manner. Still scrabbling about trying to find a placement to do in three/four months time… I’ve got an interview coming up with a company called MBDA, but all in all I’d rather not work in the defense industry; and whilst with a company like Airbus, to whom I’ve also applied, there is some grey area (since they make commercial aircraft as well military wotsits), MBDA make missiles, and guided missile systems, and that’s it. No grey area there, unless there are applications for guided missiles in other industries that I was previously unaware of, such as agriculture, dentistry or childcare. As Jeff “Hammer Of Thor” McDeath quite rightly pointed out, “there’s only two things you can do with a missile: blow things up with it, or have sex with it. And you’d have to be some kind of crazy twisted fuck to do at least one of those things”.
• Work: I put on my Big Gay Department Store costume, pull the right moves and make the right noises. They all think I’m great… though my patience was sorely tested in the run-up to Christmas, when we were given special scorecards with funny words and phrases (‘Christmas Pudding’, ‘Christmas Cracker’, ‘Amy Winehouse’, ‘Every Cloud Has A Silver Lining’, etc.) that we had to try to work into conversation with customers, to make everything more ‘fun’. Enforced Wackiness = Suck My Balls.
• Gigs ‘n’ that: Been to a few of those. On one glorious night I got to see Taint (legends), Kylesa (two drummers – bludgeoning) and Baroness (bearded prog-doom-space-rock). The day before that I saw Henry Rollins (ROLLINS) doing stand-up; and a few days after, Gay For Johnny Depp (homoerotic hardcore sodomites). I saw Earth a week or so later, a drone band most (in)famous for the fact that their frontman, Dylon Carlson, was the guy who bought Kurt Cobain that shotgun. They were awesome. And then a few weeks back, The Boy and I went to see Mea Culpa (shouty, and apparently now defunct) at The Junction, along with The Death Of Her Money (surprisingly good, although very derivative).

And that’s pretty much it, really. I might start to update a bit more regularly again…

…but then again, being lazy is much easier, so don’t hold your breath.

Update

I'm not dead, I'm just without intraweb at the moment. We moved house without too much hassle, but for some reason I can't get on to the wireless network in the new place...

Not that it really matters, as I'm far too wrapped up in revising for a maths exam that happens on Thursday to be able/bothered to post anything at the moment.

I'll be back.