gingerchris.co.uk

What the fuck? You lot were paying attention to the plot?

I paid an insane amount of money to get this hosting renewed. I keep meaning to find a cheaper host, but then, as I’m sure you’ve noticed, I end up entirely forgetting I have a blog until I get strongly worded e-mails suggesting that paying my overdue hosting fees and keeping my kneecaps intact are somewhat linked.

As most of you know, I do a joint degree in English and Journalism. Therefore, with both an elevated writing ability and an on-the-pulse awareness of the poignancy of the internet and media, you’d be forgiven for thinking I was the perfect blogging candidate. As it turns out, however, doing a Journalism degree also subliminally instils you with a self-preservatory hatred of new forms of media that may eventually make us dreamy-eyed, would-be journalists redundant and force us to get a proper job.

Guess what new form of media is endangering the employment of dreamy-eyed, would-be journalists?

So blogging and journalism go together like Alistair Darling’s hair and eyebrows, but that still doesn’t excuse the fact that I haven’t updated this in some time, and since I’ve just paid for more hosting, I suppose I should embrace my foremost front of self-indulgence. Various things have been going on in my life, none of which are particularly interesting but are going to be explained in horrific detail anyway.

Firstly, my entire working week has been punctuated with the graveyard shift on the University’s student radio station. Every Monday, Jonathan and myself embark on the horrendously structured but cleverly titled Now is the Winter of Our Discotheque. At 10 o’clock in the morning, we’re in the unique position of having more people in the studio than we do listeners.

So far the show’s been a complete disaster. Jonny’s lack of technical prowess, my rubbish banter, and our collective disregard for the station guidelines have made it sound less like a radio show and more like a team of has-been 80s pop stars communally defecating onto a microphone for an hour, occasionally shouting out an Ian Huntley joke just to ease the tension.

The guidelines state that we’re not allowed to swear, disrespect other University organisations or tell offensive jokes. All of these rules were broken within the first ten minutes of our last show, when we effectively said, “The Uni newspaper’s fucking shite th’ day - as bare as Jade Goody’s heid”. We’re essentially the Johnathan Ross and Russell Brand of student radio, except, inexplicably, we seem to be getting away with it.

On top of student radio, I’m also wiling away what little creativity I have left on Semitone Smackdown with my partner-in-crime, John. The project, which is basically an unashamed plagiarism of Adam and Joe’s Song Wars, sees John and I taking suggestions for a song topic, choosing the one we like the most, and then going away to write a song each on the subject. We come back a week later, reveal our songs and let the public decide which is the best. The winner gets bragging rights, the loser gets a slight blow to their self-esteem.

So far, the score is 2-1 to me. It was always a concern that I may have had an advantage, based on the fact that I have slightly more internet minions at my disposal. However, the voting has been mostly fair and even, which is pleasing. Despite the stress garnered on the day the songs are meant to be finished, which is also usually the day my song is started, I’m highly enjoying it.

What I’ve found most interesting is the different interpretations of the subjects, coupled with our entirely different musical styles. The contrast on the day of upload is astronomical, especially when you’ve spent the last week subjected to only your own music. The first topic was an introduction to the concept, in which John and I wrote songs about each other. John went for a nice, jaunty little tune listing various inanities about the person I am:

I, on the other hand, assumed that we were meant to write an epic, gay love song. And did so accordingly:

I would implore all of you - even those of you who aren’t YouTubers and vehemently detest its whimsical, circle-jerking nature - to keep an eye on the channel. It’s one of the few ongoing projects I have going that I’m consistently pleased with (except for Taxidermy week - that wasn’t a good week). This week, John and I are writing songs about the Chuckle Brothers performing heart surgery. Enough said, surely?

On the whole, I’m in a good way, thanks for asking. I’m doing things I enjoy, I’m being a little more productive and creative and I’m becoming more confident in both my academic and extracurricular endeavours. I’ve come to accept my oncoming twentydom, and the blow has been lessened slightly with the promise of a karaoke bus for my 20th. So far, 2009 has been good to me, and I’m cautiously optimistic that as the year progresses, I might finally grow up a little bit.

Not too much, though. I brought this year in while howling Don’t Stop Believing and gracelessly dancing on a bed in Derby with glowsticks and a cheap, Maplins strobe light. If all goes to plan, I intend to see it out in more or less the same way.

Stop wearing these.

I mean it. You look like an utter fanny.

Fucksake.

Last night was a friend’s 21st birthday, and being the loyal friend that I am, it was only natural that I would abandon him at midnight for a bunch of people I had just met an hour before and hit a cheap club. Once we had decided that we had spent enough time pulling our moves on the dancefloor, gradually repelling those who found our repeated pelvic thrusts to Blondie “distasteful”, one of our newly banded group invited the rest of us back to his flat for high proof bourbon and low conversational standards. There, we watched various YouTube videos of people falling over and news reporters saying naughty words until 9 o’clock in the morning. We all decided to head to McDonald’s for a bit of breakfast. We ate heartily and obnoxiously, and knocked over a pile of food trays on the way out. And there, outside the Golden Arches, after spending the last nine hours discussing all aspects of life and the universe and our inner selves, we promptly and apathetically parted, never to see each other ever again.

Three of my neices - Caitlyn (9), Emily (6) and Kacey (3) - were sleeping over at the house last night. I know this because I chased the little shits out of my room, arms flailing, when they came in and tried to steal my guitar, knocking it over in the process and breaking a string. After enough rage had been unleashed upon the poor girls, I left the house to the sound of crying children and stressed parents.

I came back to the house this morning, sleep deprived and precariously balancing on the unpleasant, groggy grey area between “drunk” and “hungover”. I staggered into the kitchen, gave my mum a cold, reclusive grunt to let her know I was in, and then made my way upstairs for some much needed slumber.

At the foot of my bedroom door, however, lies this:

A notepad. I don’t remember leaving this there when I left the house last night, and complete exhaustion inevitably leads to confusion. I bend down and cautiously pick it up, open it and take a look at the first page.

To you cristerfur,

hear is an note pad for you
youse it whell

Lots of Love
Caitlyn Emily KAcey + papa

It appears that “papa” was roped into this token of good will against his own. But spelling mistakes aside, Caitlyn’s attempt at a formal letter was well received. And, in true form as her father’s daughter, she managed to make things right between us without even apologising properly.

Not being able to articulate their ideas as well (or as illiterately) as Caitlyn, Emily and Kacey were given their own page at the back of the book, where they could express their sentiments freely. It simply read:

I love those little wankstains.

Recently, more or less all of my time has been taken up with iminlikewithyou, a cutesy display of inhumanely addictive arcade action. The entire site looks as if it’s been coloured in by a four year old and then glossed over with cellophane and kisses. Anything taking up more than eight pixels of your monitor has been given big, loving eyes that blink away at you in modest glee.

I’m not sure whether it’s childish graphics that keep me coming back, but I’m now spending all of my nights determined to get to the next level. It doesn’t even have the dignity of being addicted to, say, World of Warcraft, which is infinitely undignified in itself. World of Warcraft players are addicted to battles, armour and strategy. I’m addicted to colourful blocks and simple puzzles with patronising, smiley faces on them. I’m essentially a fully grown male playing in the children’s section of a dentist waiting room. That’s right. I’m either retarded or a paedophile.

Having said that, though, it’s the small joys that are making this newly-developed addiction worthwhile. Take “Draw My Thing”, a game on the site that is, in its purest form, online Pictionary (i.e. a plagiarised version of iSketch). Play it as it’s meant to be played and you’ll be spending hours gawping at your monitor repeatedly typing in generic names and phrases. But approach it with an air of creativity and inventiveness, and you’ll probably find yourself grinning like a fanny the whole night.

Having said that, though, if you play it as it’s meant to be played, you’re probably more likely to actually win the pissing game…

I went to London a couple of weeks ago. You probably already know that I really like London. It’s not a particularly unique statement of the self, of course, because everyone really likes London. Spending a weekend in its all-encompassing, omnibenevolent arms makes you realise how uninteresting and culturally stale Glasgow actually is. Not to mention that walking about in the centre of London in the middle of November makes you realise how shockingly shite our Christmas lights are.

I went with down on the coach with Liam, world famous internet celebrity, known for his fun sense of humour, charming demeanour, and his astonishing resemblance to Doctor Who. Most bus journeys are booked with a burst of spontaneity and a lack of foresight, this one was particularly memorable for its hasty organisation. It was only at 10pm the night before we left that I received a timely phone call from Liam, modestly suggesting that we actually arranged the tickets before we left. The hour that followed was a glorious, over-the-phone slapstick comedy, in which we both wrestled with the National Express website, trying to agree on a decent time in between bouts of enraged screaming at the website’s inaccessibility. We were unfathomablyconfused by the concept of “funfare tickets”, which were slightly more expensive than normal tickets. Unsure as to whether the funfare bus had a ball pit or face painting, we decided to go with the safer, cheaper option of normal tickets.

Our eventual bus journey, like all bus journeys should be, was preceded by a few hours in the pub with a packet of peanuts and five or six pitchers of Cheeky Vimto. With a minute and a half to spare, we wallowed onto the back of the coach, giggling and hiccuping. We gracelessly sandwiched ourselves between a gaunt, quiet man who watched us make our way to the back of the bus with increasing worry, and a gargantuan woman who spent the whole journey yammering into her mobile phone about how she was moved onto a different coach, presumably because she had already eaten the coach she was meant to be on.

Despite our seating arrangement, it was a pleasant journey. We had irreverent conversations, shared a couple of jokes and got a wee bit of sleep. All was going well, until we arrived at the first service station. We wallowed off the coach, exhausted and in desperate need of food. Hunger and sleep deprivation had already elevated the tension. As I excitedly pointed out to Liam that they made toast at this service station, I was greeted with the razor-sharp response of: “Well, that’s fucking fine for you who only eats toast, but maybe the rest of us want something more nourishing”. Silenced, I sheepishly took my two slices of toast, sat down at a table, and wept.

We ate, and we were cheerier. And before we headed back off the rest of the hellishly long journey, we went into WHSmith to buy sweets and juice. While waiting inthe queue, Liam and I were separated by our bus driver, who had decided to pick up some sort of erotic magazine before heading off to London. I was served, then the bus driver was served, and then finally Liam was served. By the time Liam walked away, content with his armfuls of chocolate, we walked out of the service station just in time to watch our big, National Express coach, with all our stuff on it, drive away into the distance.

We scurried around the place, not knowing quite whether to laugh or break down and cry, trying to find someone who could help us. Eventually, Liam ran over to an Irish bus driver with a completely indecipherable accent. After fifteen minutes of trying to explain the concept of enunciation to the gentleman, he said that he would let us hop on his coach to Birmingham, and then take another one to London, just in time to pick up all of our stuff. We reckoned it was a flawless plan.

Within ten minutes, we were sitting on the floor of this new coach, like a pair of stowaways, trying to desperately balance ourselves while the bus bounced around like any bus driven by an mad, incoherent Irishman should do. It was at this very tense moment that Liam looked up at me, with his trademark supressed rage, and said…

“Chris, we should’ve got the fucking funfares.”

Haven’t updated this in a while. I’ve let you all down, but more than that, I’ve let myself down. I had hoped that by this stage in my life I would be living the veritable, man-about-town dream worth blogging about on a regular basis. But so far, my life is less “Sex and the City” and more “Croissant Crumbs in the Lecture Hall”, and whatever few hard hitting issues I deem blogworthy are subsequently lost and forgotten in all-night essays and Facebook F5-marathons. I’m of the belief that quality and frequency are inversely proportional anyway, so fuck it.

In fact, it was only in a Journalism tutorial the other day that I was reminded that I still had a blog. While we were moping around on various news websites, taking note of word choice and emotive language and other such pish, our tutor enthusiastically asked the class if any of us owned a blog.

Our current lecturer and tutor for Journalism is, in an astonishing break from past lecturers, an actual journalist. The difference is clear. Where previous lecturers wallowed their way around clumsily-constructed Powerpoint slides, he glides through his concise and structured presentation - which he e-mailed to the entire class the previous night - armed with a sharp tongue and a laser pointer. Where previous lecturers desperately and blindly grasped for any semblance of a punchline to their mundane stories that were regretted half way through telling them, he is no less than a walking compendium of witty and endlessly rehearsed anecdotes and impressive namedrops. He’s been a journalist for as long as I’ve been ginger, and in that time he’s amassed countless awards and the earnest respect of his fellow peers. I’m choosing not to disclose his name, partly because it would be unprofessional, but mostly because I’m almost certain he Googles it on a daily basis.

Having tried to attract the attention of this colourful character for several weeks now, I raised my hand, hopelessly trying to stifle my enthusiasm with a false, casual apathy that ultimately made this simple action look like a tragic physical disability. “Oh really?” he says with genuine interest. “What’s your blog about?”

Before I have time to try and sound impressive, my mind naturally responds with its preset answer to this question. “Basically, it’s just me tossing off into a text box.” A few guffaws are shared around the class, and I naturally assume that my self-deprecative answer would be sufficiently dry enough to evoke a good response. But no. Instead, he solemnly responds with “Just watch your language. Don’t forget where you are.”

I’m not even going to bitch and whine about how I got told off for using a fairly inoffensive metaphor, or how journalism is largely acknowledged to be rife with profanities most of us are yet to discover, and that it should be his job to desensitise us to it. This isn’t about any of that. This is about my attempt at righteously proclaiming my existence, once again, being met with defeat.

And yet, minutes later, he starts asking the class for analyses on word choice, emotive language and other such pish. And while I’m already drawing up a formation of a blog entry about this incident, he looks at me with raised, expectant eyebrows, looking for an answer. And, for the very first time since the beginning of the year, says “Sorry, what’s your name?”

I’m trying to find a moral to this story that’s a little more elegant than “if you want to get noticed, swear”. But to be honest, it’s not an easy task. Apart from anything else, I’m distracted by the fact that the sentences in the last paragraph all started with “and”, and I’m trying to work out whether it makes me a poor English student or a rebellious maverick of language.

Before I finish, I’d like to draw your attention to Natasha’s recently established blog. She’s made the move from MySpace to a “proper” blog, thus fully uplifting the MySpace Triumvirate - an order of vaguely acquainted friends-of-friends who, back in days of yore, mutually wanked over how fantastic they and each other were - to “proper” blog status. Having been thoroughly entertained her simultaneous condemnation and celebration of popular culture for a good while, and having properly met her only last month in a display of bumbling social awkwardness (see: “good chat vs shit chat“), I welcome her late entry to the world of “proper” blogging and suggest you go massage her ego a bit.

She’s only on Blogspot, though. Me and Davie are both living it up on Wordpress. Get with the times, hen.

My masturbatory style of writing, coupled with the sheer triviality of its content, makes this blog a fairly inaccessible read as it is. Therefore, if you don’t really care about studying English, you might want to skip this post. I wouldn’t blame you. After a couple of weeks of doing Romanticism and Modernism at Uni, I would hastily close the window at the mention of studying English as well.

Having said that, I’m pretty sure about two thirds of my entire readership study English. Hello, both of you.

When you go to University, you don’t really realise that first year is the most despicable, deceptive ploy that you’re likely to face in your entire academic life. You’re too busy stealing an infinite amount of mugs and pens at the stalls during Freshers’ Week. You’re having all-night parties, following the all-evening poker games. You’re sitting in the Union, having copious amounts of cheap drink practically thrusted into your hands. You’re sitting in the library writing essays in the clothes you slept in, hoping that a lack of sleep and a murderous hangover will somehow make the essay you’ve just started read better when you have to hand it in in a couple of hours. You don’t have time to sit back and think about the future. Of course you don’t. “They” don’t want you to.

Above all else, you’ll be sitting in a lecture, with a big can of Relentless, thinking to yourself “Hey! This subject’s pretty interesting!” And that’s you: a naive, first year student, conned out of your wide eyed enthusiasm for your chosen subject. You fell for it. Hook, line and sinker.

In first year, as well as Journalism, I got the option to pick three additional subjects. I went with Politics, Sociology and English. Of the three, English was the most exciting and engaging subject I could’ve hoped to take. I don’t get enthusiastic about many things, but every lecture was a blast. We studied the stylistic Scotticisms present in an episode of River City and we analysed the metric structure of Kelis’s Milkshake. Dr. Hope and Dr. Fabb, whose names alone filled the hall with childish glee, were dynamic and passionate about their teachings. They could’ve spent the lectures clubbing seals and we’d still be a bunch of pathetic sycophants.

And it wasn’t just the lectures that made the year worthwhile. In tutorials, we would sit about discussing Jeremy Kyle instead of doing any work. When a tutor finally came over, asking us about our deconstruction of the text, we would just sit back smugly and say, “We reckon that the poet’s taking a post-modern approach, and the poem is therefore essentially meaningless.” The tutor would then nod, smile and congratulate us on our good work. The entire year was nothing short of beautiful.

So alongside Journalism, taking English was the obvious choice. Of course it was. If first year was that interesting, surely when you take it up a notch it’ll become even more engrossing? Enter Romanticism and Modernism, the core subject for second year English. With a reading list that looks like pseudo-intellectual pornography, and a lecturer not unlike the Ben Stein economics teacher from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Romanticism and Modernism has singularly succeeded in destroying every enthusiasm I ever had for English.

The first lecture was spent studying Wordsworth. In fact, it physically pains me to tell you that we spent the first lecture studying that… fucking… Daffodils poem, that has now become a self-perpetuating parody of itself. We spent forty minutes listening to monotonous mullings about the poem’s meanings, most of which were just paraphrased versions of the text rather than actual analytical accomplishments. What made the whole lecture even worse is that when the lecturer eventually read out the immortal line, “A poet could not but be gay”, nobody giggled. Not even playground humour, on which I have so steadfastly relied in the past, could save me from this oratory equivalent of Chinese water torture.

Breaking point came towards the end of the lecture, when our academic afflictor was content that every word had been unnecessarily clawed at to the extent that there was no meaning left. He then paused, stood proudly, and finally announced, “This poem is a good example of Wordworth’s Theory of Poetic Diction.”

Well bugger me sideways and call me your mum, Professor. What are the fucking odds that one of Wordsworth’s poems would be a good example of his own theory?

Last night, I didn’t sleep at all. My sleeping patterns, as is the norm for most people with free time and the internet, have been distorted into an unmaintainable flurry of involuntary power naps and 3pm “breakfasts”. During what will be affectionately looked back on as my Summer of Inexcusable Unemployment, this wasn’t really a problem. But now that University has started back, it’s time for me to get back into the unfamiliar swing of actually having something to do.

The initial plan was to stay up until about 3am, get some sleep, wake up early and use the remainder of my unfinished sleep cycle to lull me into a sweet slumber at a reasonable time. This was met with a few slight deviations, with each one spawning three more like it. At 3am, just as I was about to go to bed, I realised that I hadn’t printed up a timetable. At 3:10am, I realised that the online student area was shut down, and would only open up again at 5am. At 5am, I realised that I didn’t have any software I could use to map a timetable. At 6am, after vigorously wrestling with Google Spreadsheets, I realised that I was getting up in an hour, and would’ve been better just watching old episodes of Peep Show than going to bed. And somehow, over the course of the past few hours, I had developed a rather undesirable cold.

I missed the train I had intended to get, and had to jump on the next one, leaving me with a somewhat miserly ten minutes to get to my first class. As I ran through George Square, jumping over puddles, with my hair flailing in the wind like a Baywatch opening sequence, I washed down a couple of Lemsip Flu capsules with a can of Relentless. It was at this point, as I narrowly avoided being mowed down by a Ford Ka, that I suddenly realised exactly how much I had missed student life.

My initial plan to get my sleeping patterns back into sync had failed miserably. I got home at 1pm, lay on the bed, and slept until 6. And now, here I am, at 3:20am, attempting to re-sync my sleeping patterns for a second time.

I might just watch another episode of Knight Rider before I head off to bed…