One A Day, Day 32: Writer’s Unblock

Look at me, blogging in the middle of the day like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

Writing’s a funny thing. If you’re a writer, you’ll know the feeling you get when it’s a “writing day”. I’m sure this is different for everyone, but for me I know it’ll be a good day to write if I find myself composing introductions to articles in my head while I’m doing other things. Because, after all, getting started is always the hardest bit, right?

So now I’ve written the article for which the introduction popped into my head while I was at the shop buying milk. No, you can’t see it. Yet. As introductions go, it wasn’t anything particularly groundbreaking or astounding, but an introduction it was nonetheless, and from that starting point I could continue on to write the rest of the article.

I don’t write like we were taught in school. I remember when we were first taught “how to write an essay”, with encouragements to plan things out beforehand – to plan your introduction, to plan your conclusion, to plan each paragraph using a “point, example, explain” structure (which one English teacher memorably referred to as PEEing all over your work) – and thinking “gosh, that sounds like a lot of unnecessary work”.

By the time I was writing essays for school, I had already been writing for my own pleasure for some years. The box of 5.25″ floppy disks which is currently sitting in my living room accompanied by the Atari 800XL with which they are used contain a couple of disks worth of my “Cyril the Dragon” stories, which were vaguely hallucinogenic tales that only a young child with an overactive imagination could come up with. If I ever get the cable to link the Atari to a PC working, I will be sure to publish some of that juvenilia on this very site for all to admire. To get to the point (maybe I should have planned this paragraph) – these stories were unplanned, written purely by sitting down, starting typing and seeing what happened next. As the product of a young child’s imagination, you can clearly see the influences on the things which took place – mostly video games, some television, some books, some comics, some things which had actually happened – but most importantly, I hadn’t actually planned it that way. It just sort of came out.

Writing in this way is actually quite a relaxing experience. Those who study this sort of thing call it “freewriting”. Technically what I’m doing right now is almost freewriting – the only thing setting it apart from true freewriting is the fact that I’m going back and correcting mistakes. True freewriting is where you sit down with a piece of paper, don’t look at it, don’t listen to anything and just write, without stopping, for a set period of time, then only look at what you’ve written once your time’s up.

Some seriously odd things can come out. For a Creative Writing module that I did as part of my degree, we had to do this every day for about a month. Some days, the beginnings of stories came out. Other days, my internal monologue came out onto the page. Other days, I wrote about how I was feeling, or who I was thinking about, or my aspirations for the future. None of them were great pieces of writing, but they were interesting insights into what was going through my head at the time. I don’t think I still have the pieces of paper on which I wrote them, which is a bit of a shame. Perhaps I’ll try it again sometime, though.

In fact, that sounds like tomorrow’s blog entry is ready to go already. Expect tomorrow’s entry to be even more gibberish than usual, in that case.

One A Day, Day 31: Out of Sync

I should probably start writing these things in the middle of the day, as my timings are getting all out of sync. Yesterday’s post ended up being dated today, largely because it was written at about 3 in the morning. I was also a little sozzled on gin, so I apologise if it wasn’t the most coherent rant in the world.

I wasn’t drinking alone, I might add. I’d spent the evening over at my buddy’s house having a curry, playing some board games and drinking the aforementioned gin. We discovered gin a week or two back and decided that it was, for now at least, our tipple of choice thanks to how easily it went down, particularly when accompanied by some ice, tonic and lemon. It’s a lovely summer drink, too. Not that it’s particularly summery right now, though the sun did come out for a bit today.

I was a heavy drinker back in university – weren’t we all? – but over the years my tolerance for alcohol seems to have dropped quite a bit. I have vivid memories of many bizarre nights at the university bar accompanied by luridly-coloured cocktails and obscene creations involving unholy combinations of absinthe and Baileys (actually not as bad as it sounds… though your liver might disagree). We also had one particularly amusing and unpleasant night where we decided to invent our own cocktails… or at least attempt to. They weren’t terribly successful, with the most memorable one of the evening being one we dubbed “The Brown Sauce”, so named because of its resemblance in taste to HP sauce. No drink should taste of HP sauce.

Then there was the university orchestra’s trip to Poland, land of super-cheap drinks. One bar did this thing called (if I remember correctly) a “six-shooter”, which was exactly what it sounds like – six shots of some bright blue shit for about a pound. More cocktails were invented there, too.

Nowadays, drinking’s a relatively rare indulgence for me. Drinking the amount of gin we did last night is something that none of us involved have done for a while (at least not all together). It was fun, and it made my pathetic losses at both Agricola and Ticket to Ride matter rather less. Of course, at roughly 4am I found myself regretting quite how much I had drunk, but at least I was mercifully hangover-free in the morning.

Hmm, that totally wasn’t where I was intending this post to head. Oh well. It’s late and I’m actually sitting in bed right now, so maybe I’ll save something more coherent for tomorrow when I’m a bit more awake.

For now – good night!

One A Day, Day 30: On Chavs

The “chav” is a curious phenomenon. Those of you reading from across the pond will have heard me use it as a term of derision frequently. Perhaps you’re already familiar with the sort of person I’m talking about.

It’s difficult to pin down exactly when they appeared as a distinct subculture. There were pain in the arse kids who always got into trouble while I was at school, but I don’t think any of them were actually involved in “gangs”. I have a vivid memory of hearing the word for the first time, however, seated on the top deck of a bus with my friend Cat. There were some kids sitting a few seats ahead of us who were using language that would make a trucker blush (including the memorable out-of-context phrase “fuckin’ pancakes” that we overheard, much to our amusement) and Cat referred to them as “chavs”. I’d not heard the word prior to that point, but it quickly became apparent that this was an established word to refer to this distinct group of people – tracksuit-clad, baseball cap-wearing, mobile phone-toting (nowadays, with shit R&B music by their idols N-Dubz blasting out of their tiny speakers) zit-faced teens with greasy hair and a predilection towards underage drinking and smoking along with abuse of strangers.

The reason I feel like talking about them right now is the fact I caught a bunch of them outside my living room window tonight. I say “caught” – “heard” is more accurate. Outside our window was a group of three guys in hoodies making a hell of a racket. At first I thought they were arguing about something, but looking out of the window revealed the ugly truth: they were “rapping”. I could tell by the stupid arm movements the lead chav was making, and the fact that his two cronies were standing around with mobile phones – one playing music from its tinny speakers as a “backing track”, the other filming the whole debacle.

The result of this sort of thing generally looks something like this:

The weird thing is how seriously these idiots take it, despite looking like absolute morons. There are gangs all over Southampton who use the social networking site Bebo to promote themselves and hurl abuse at other gangs, with the sort of spelling, punctuation and grammar that would make Lynne Truss fall down dead immediately.

I’m in two minds about this sort of thing – neither of these opinions are particularly good things. In one sense, I find their efforts to be like “genuine” gangs from, say, New York to be extremely pathetic and childish. I’m no fan of the criminal lifestyle anyway, even in films and other media (though I have played me plenty of GTA in the past), so to try and emulate it just seems dumb.

Secondly, and ironically given what I’ve just said about them being laughable and pathetic, I find groups like that rather intimidating. Being a rather mild-mannered gentleman myself (at least when I don’t have a keyboard in front of me), I don’t like confrontation, and I certainly don’t like having abuse hurled at me by people I’ve never met. A lot of these kids seem to thrive on both of these things. Having worked in schools where these kids are starting to develop these traits, I can say that it’s not a pretty sight. I realise that by saying this I am allowing them to “win”, achieving exactly what they want to achieve – intimidation of those who are not “in” on the… whatever it is. A joke? But the fact remains – these are not people you’d choose to hang around.

Part of this is probably the media biasing us against them, of course, but I don’t think the depiction of them in the media is particularly unfair, having had one experience some years back of being chased into a shop by the “Bassett Boyz” accompanied by a couple of friends. Our offence? We were walking down the same street as them. We hadn’t said anything or done anything – we were simply on their “patch”, which made us targets. Luckily we managed to get away unscathed and with nothing stolen, but the staff in the shop were obviously well-used to intimidation from these children – and they are children, worryingly – and did nothing, not even calling the police. Thanks a lot.

In some senses, chavs are the antithesis to the British stereotype of being reserved, polite and speaking with perfect enunciation. Perhaps they are a sign of a rebellion against the “status quo”. But they’re certainly not a change for the better.

Still need some convincing? Go pay the St Mary’s Mandela Boys (who claim to “rule” Southampton) a visit, and check out the comments, posted by kids who are still at schools in the area. To sound like an old man for a moment (which I frequently do anyway) – is this really where we want youth culture going?

One A Day, Day 29: Netbook ’em, Danno

I bought a netbook today – specifically, an Asus Eee PC 1005P. Why that one? Well, it seemed to have a number of decent reviews around the Net, was reasonably up-to-date specs wise (though it could possibly do with another gig of RAM) and was reasonably priced.

A while back, I was under the impression that netbooks were particularly pointless. I even remember a number of us fairly mercilessly laying into our buddy Luke for picking one up – though this was largely due to the fact that at the time he bought one, netbooks were very much in their infancy, no-one really understood quite what they were for, no-one really understood Linux (which was all you could get them preinstalled with) and, of course, we all worked for Apple at the time.

Nowadays, they’re a different beast to what they were. This machine – which I’m typing on right now, in fact – runs Windows 7 Starter (with the opportunity to upgrade to Home Premium) and seems plenty quick enough to do most things on the Internet. The 10-inch widescreen is a comfortable size – not too small to be illegible, yet compact enough to be endearingly cute. The speakers are on a par with most laptops – i.e. shit – but they’re plenty loud enough to be able to hear the soundtrack on a video.

The reason I bought this was so that I actually have my own portable computer to take with me to PAX. My wife has a MacBook but I would only be able to pry that out of her cold, dead fingers – and I don’t particularly want to kill her purely for the sake of having something to blog on in Boston. We have several laptops in the house right now – my wife’s old ThinkPad (complete with that dumb “nipple” pointing device), a Sony Vaio laptop that switches on if it’s in the right mood (which it usually isn’t) and the MacBook – and now this.

Every time I buy a new computer, it strikes me how far things have come. This thing that’s sitting on my lap right now is about ten times more powerful than the first desktop PC that I owned, yet it’s an “entry-level” machine with “limited” use. Hell, I remember being excited the day we upgraded our 386 to a 486 DX2 66MHz – finally we were able to run DOOM in high detail mode.

I’ll be intrigued to see how well it handles various tasks. It’s certainly more than fine for email and web browsing – I’m going to be seeing if latest Squadron of Shame mission Machinarium will run on it as soon as it’s finished downloading. Reports will inevitably follow on Twitter.

One A Day, Day 28: Customer of Size

“Many of you reached out to us via Twitter last night and today regarding a situation a Customer Twittered about that occurred on a Southwest flight. It is not our customary method of Customer Relations to be so public in how we work through these situations, but with so many people involved in the occurrence, you also should be involved in the solution. First and foremost, to Mr. Smith; we would like to echo our Tweets and again offer our heartfelt apologies to you.We are sincerely sorry for your travel experience on Southwest Airlines.

As soon as we saw the first Tweet from Mr. Smith, we contacted him personally to apologize for his experience and to address his concerns on both Twitter and with a personal phone call. Since the situation has received a lot of public attention, we’d like to take the opportunity to address a few of the specifics here as well.

Mr. Smith originally purchased two Southwest seats on a flight from Oakland to Burbank – as he’s been known to do when traveling on Southwest. He decided to change his plans and board an earlier flight to Burbank, which technically means flying standby. As you may know, airlines are not able to clear standby passengers until all Customers are boarded. When the time came to board Mr. Smith, we had only a single seat available for him to occupy. Our pilots are responsible for the Safety and comfort of all Customers on the aircraft and therefore, made the determination that Mr. Smith needed more than one seat to complete his flight. Our Employees explained why the decision was made, accommodated Mr. Smith on a later flight, and issued him a $100 Southwest travel voucher for his inconvenience.

You’ve read about these situations before. Southwest instituted our Customer of Size policy more than 25 years ago. The policy requires passengers that can not fit safely and comfortably in one seat to purchase an additional seat while traveling. This policy is not unique to Southwest Airlines and it is not a revenue generator. Most, if not all, carriers have similar policies, but unique to Southwest is the refunding of the second seat purchased (if the flight does not oversell) which is greater than any revenue made (full policy can be found here). The spirit of this policy is based solely on Customer comfort and Safety. As a Company committed to serving our Customers in Safety and comfort, we feel the definitive boundary between seats is the armrest. If a Customer cannot comfortably lower the armrest and infringes on a portion of another seat, a Customer seated adjacent would be very uncomfortable and a timely exit from the aircraft in the event of an emergency might be compromised if we allow a cramped, restricted seating arrangement.”

Thus ran SouthWest Airlines’ apology to film director Kevin Smith. I say “apology”, but it’s not really, is it? “Customer of Size policy”? What the fuck? Since when have we needed a “Customer of Size policy”? According to SouthWest, 25 years ago. I’m in awe. And not in a good way.

Mr Smith, of course, regularly refers to himself as a card-carrying member of the larger gentlemen’s club. But, as he pointed out a number of times on Twitter (in between fits of apoplectic rage), he didn’t even meet the criteria for the “Customer of Size policy” to require him to be removed from the aircraft, in that he was sitting in his seat and he had got the armrest down.

“[I was] not just ANY paying customer,” Smith wrote on Twitter. “[I was] a paying customer who fit between the arm rests & was able to buckle his seat belt w/o an extender. TRUTH!”

We’re constantly being told that obesity is a “problem” – and it probably is, from a health perspective. However, implementing such dumbass and discriminatory “policies” as these is a sad sign of the times, where paperwork and tickboxes rule all.

Here’s a thought, SouthWest Airlines: If you’re so worried about the fatties getting on your planes and the comfort of your other passengers, why not get some bigger fucking chairs and space them out a bit more?

Oh, right, because you wouldn’t be able to squeeze as many passengers on, would you? And that would be terrible for your poor little profit margins, wouldn’t it? Poor baby.

Smith, as he is wont to do with most things, has handled this situation rather publicly via Twitter and even through a special edition of his podcast (which is a hilarious listen generally, by the way) – all of which is probably giving SouthWest’s PR department a collective heart attack.

Well, good, I say. Smith has enough public following for this to be raised as a big deal, no pun intended. Imagine how mortifying it would be for a member of the public to be removed from a plane due to their weight. Yes, it could potentially be uncomfortable for someone to have to sit next to a chubster – but the problem wouldn’t be there in the first place if airlines didn’t pack everyone in like cattle.

I’m off to bed now. Fat power.

(I feel like Yahoo! News writing nonsense like this about celebrities. But I think blogs are a far better place for this sort of thing than a site that purports to be about actual “news”. That’s a rant for another day, though.)

One A Day, Day 27: Sportsmanship

There was a football match in my city today. Southampton vs Portsmouth. These two are traditionally great rivals, and everyone jokes that there’ll be “rioting” after a game between the two of them, as if that’s a perfectly normal thing to expect to happen after a sporting event.

I didn’t encounter any particular problems myself, but there sure were a lot of people wandering around to and from town, plus several local shops had either put up signs refusing to serve alcohol, or closed completely, citing the football match as the reason. As I walked through town in the middle of the day, there was a constant police presence, with officers on foot walking around the pedestrian area in the middle of town, while cars and vans raced around the major roads of the city, sirens blaring.

As I saw all this I had to think to myself “why?”

I know people get attached to their sports teams. This may be for personal reasons, it may be just something you’re interested in, or it may be a sense of loyalty to where you come from (although the last one is rather rarer than it used to be, with many people choosing to follow the clubs with the most money rather than the ones nearest them). It may even be a completely arbitrary decision.

The thing I don’t get is this: what is it about supporting a team that makes people get into such a state that a police presence approaching that required for a terrorist incident is necessary?

That was a terribly clumsy sentence. But do you see my point?

Surely if you enjoy watching football you enjoy watching football. Many people I know who do like football are perfectly normal people who have never been in a fight. So why all the police? Why do I hear shouting morons passing by my window on the way to the stadium? (Incidentally, the only noise I hate as much as people chewing is drunken football chanting.)

Perhaps one of my trans-Atlantic readers could shed some light on this issue. Does this sort of thing happen with American football games? I get the impression that the “local loyalty” thing is a much bigger deal in the States.

One A Day, Day 26: One Week To Live

Well, that’s that. For now, at least. I’ve reached the end of my penultimate half-term at the school I’m working at and the deputy head came in to thank me for doing a “great job” with the class I’m lumbered with. She also apologised for me not having the support I should really have as a new primary teacher, and for the “challenging… to say the least” behaviour of the pupils. Jane pointed out to me tonight that however bad it feels to you when you’re in the middle of a bad situation, other people inevitably think you’re doing a better job than you think you are. She put it better than I did, but it’s late and I’m tired. She’s probably right – it’s just hard to remember that sometimes.

So, what now? I have a week to burn. It will probably go by much too quickly, but here are some of the things I intend to get done:

Do some writing – both on here, on BitMob and possibly a return to Helium, an interesting site for aspiring writers.
Do some music – I have the piano scores for the Persona 3/Trinity Soul and Persona 4 soundtracks, so I may try and record those. They’re easy-ish arrangements so shouldn’t take too long.
Play some Mass Effect 2 – I love what I’ve played so far, but have only really had the chance to play in short bursts with distractions recently. I’ll hopefully have the opportunity to spend a bit more time in the company of Commander Shepard and company.
Play some Star Trek Online – I reached Lieutenant Commander level last week, which meant I got the chance to pick up a brand new ship. I went for a Science vessel which looks a bit like Voyager and is named the U.S.S. Penetrator, after the Syreen vessels in Star Control II. (My character is a Syreen, thanks to the excellent character editor allowing the production of blue-skinned Amazonian women – albeit ones in Starfleet uniforms – as player characters)
Play through Machinarium for the Squadron of Shame. I know next to nothing about this game, and am looking forward to trying it.
Go fiddle with Gowalla and Foursquare some more – I really dig these apps and find them an interesting idea. They’re a good reason to go out and just explore the area around you. Foursquare finally works properly in the UK, but I’ve been using Gowalla for a while now so have gained a bit of “loyalty” for it. I’m interested to see what – if anything – Foursquare offers over and above Gowalla.
Wander into the forest and take some more photos – I enjoyed my wander around the deserted New Forest landscape the other day. I want to find a more “wooded” bit though – despite being technically “in the forest”, the part I went to didn’t have much in the way of trees.
Have a coffee and a catch-up with some ex-workmates.
Remind Jane regularly that she has an essay to write. (Yes, it’s still there. Get off here and get on with it.)

That’s my plan, then. It seems like a sound one to me.

One A Day, Day 25: CLICK II: Click. Phweeeeeee!

Here’s the photos from my little wander off into the New Forest the other day. Last time I posted an entry full of photos, my page views spiked up to 70, from averaging around 30 a day. Evidently people have no attention span for writing but O HAI PICTUREZ!!

This is a bit of a cop-out, I know, so if I can be arsed I’ll write something more later. I am tired though, so don’t count on it.

One A Day, Day 24: Any Other Day

There goes another day. There are now two days remaining until the half-term vacation and a well-earned week off for me. I can’t wait. I wish I didn’t have to go back after said holiday, but at least there isn’t that long to survive after it – and then the joy of PAX.

Naturally, since I’m nearing the end of one of the more unpleasant chapters of my life, now is the time for the shit to hit the fan. The school is expecting a “progress inspection” from the inspectors who judged it “shit” in the first place (I’m paraphrasing, of course) and that will inevitably involve yet more lesson observations. I’m half tempted to not even try, and let them get a real look at what the kids in that school are like. Why should I put myself out preparing a full-on fancy lesson plan when it only gets judged as “inadequate” by the local authority anyway?

I forgot to mention about the previous one – the super-ironic thing about that “inadequate” lesson (which my colleague also taught and got judged similarly, remember) is that we were following the guidelines on the National Strategy Framework Bollocks Primary Policy Full Of Shit site, or whatever it’s called, to the letter. The lesson we delivered was straight out of the National Framework. And it was “inadequate”.

Stupid.

On a side note, I have absolutely no idea why that site gives you the opportunity to 1) comment on 2) rate and 3) share its contents on Facebook. It’s a huge pile of shit all round, so I urge you all to go there forthwith and troll the comments sections for each page as only the Internet can.

So what else is going to happen? Well, there’s assessments to give in (which I’ve nearly finished, but not quite – late evening tomorrow… gah) and then there’s a parents’ evening to look forward to at the beginning of March, at which point I will be counting down the days until I escape so I really have little to no interest in talking to those who spawned the mini-chavs in my care. Actually, there’s the potential opportunity for some fun there. There are plenty of kids in that class who need a good bollocking and don’t listen when I give it to them, so hopefully the parents will sort them out.

Or perhaps not; since I’ve only had four reply slips back so far (and inevitably, all of them want to come in the latest possible time slot, meaning I have to sit twiddling my thumbs for about four hours) there might not be much opportunity to discuss it, particularly as all the parents who have signed up so far are the parents of the few actually nice children in the class.

Boo! Rubbish.

One day I’ll stop ranting about this. Hopefully it will be the day I leave (or shortly thereafter).

For now, it’s survival. Nearly there, though it was touch and go today for a while – though I did apply for another job that I actually want (as opposed to when I applied for the job I’m currently stuck in, which I applied for because I had to – at the time, I thought I wanted to do this, and there wasn’t much else available) so hopefully that will come to something. I currently have three applications pending for different jobs, all of which I very much want. Hopefully one or more of them will find me sufficiently intriguing to interview and/or hire me. Time will tell.

Now I’m off to play some video games. Ta-ta.

One A Day, Day 23: Freak or…

I looked at myself in the mirror today and something occurred to me.

I don’t know anyone else who looks like me.

This may not sound like a blinding revelation, but in a world that seems to be increasingly filled with clones of people who either want to be in Jersey Shore, Hollyoaks or one of Katie “Jordan” Price‘s myriad pointless television appearances, it’s actually quite a nice realisation.

I mean, okay, I’m nothing special to look at. I haven’t cut my hair in ages and I regularly forget to shave when I’m stressed, so I currently look like a cross between, in my wife’s word’s “Cagney… or Lacey… I forget” and Brian Blessed. I mean, sure, I probably wouldn’t look out of place in a gutter right now, grunting and babbling in trampspeak with a bottle of MD 20/20 in one hand and a three-litre bottle of White Lightning in the other, but at least I’m unique. I remain unique even when I do bother to cut my hair and shave.

Part of this is, of course, due to the fact that I don’t know what to say to barbers. I have learned how to ask for two haircuts in my time on this Earth – well, three, actually, if you count “take it all off”, which I’ve never had the guts to do but am morbidly curious about trying sometime. I can ask for a “grade three all over” or a “grade three sides and back, short on top”. The grade three on top is low-maintenance. It just grows (at an alarming rate) – but I don’t have to do anything with it for several months. The other one requires hair gel, which most mornings I just can’t be bothered with.

That’s it, though. I could probably have cool hair if I tried. With the lion’s mane currently plonked atop my head, I could probably get it styled into something entertaining and poncey footballerish (at great expense, no doubt). But then I’d have to take care of it, and brush it, and get up early to make sure it still looked all right… No. I can’t be bothered with that shit. I’ll keep with my Cagney/Lacey/Blessed look for the moment and – here’s a deal for you – I will get a haircut and trim my beard to a respectable level when one of the following things happens:

1) I get a job interview for a job I actually want. (I have two applications for jobs I actually want submitted right now.)

2) My current shitty teaching job finishes.

Deal? Deal. Good night.