Laura (one of my colleagues) and I were talking (quite a lot) today. We managed to end up talking about cancer, and I had said something along the lines of "I'm sure there are worse ways to die". The two of us were silent, both thinking the same thing, but neither wanted to say it. Eventually I gave in and said the word: "Aids". How weird that now, so many years after it was first waved in our faces, it's still a taboo subject. Even saying the word causes ripples of disapproval.

We then started talking about death, and I mentioned that Rat always says he wants to die of a heart attack because at least that would be quick. Quite quickly Laura found the conversation too morbid and we stopped talking, slightly uncomfortable at the situation.

Why, oh why? I hate living in a society when such things are taboo. I want to live in a world where you can broach a subject with anyone.

I understand that with certain people, certain subjects shouldn't be raised. My mum is racist - not seriously so but she's the person who would say something along the lines of "I don't have anything against blacks" (although I can't remember her ever saying those words). Even worse, she's incredibly homophobic (my dad is too, but he at least has hinted at reasons that could sensibly explain it). I have to watch what I say about these subjects, but that's more because I don't want to have an arguement than I feel the subjects totally unapproachable.

Why can't we all speak our mind? Even here, in this journal of mine, I find myself restricted. I don't want to offend anyone. Written words are so easy to be misconstrued. And so I keep my opinions out of my writing to prevent any comeback.

In another conversation today, I proved how totally out of it I am when it comes to music. I've probably mentioned it before, but I just don't understand all these music classifications. When I was at school you could safely categorise modern "popular" music into three rough genres (although there were, admittedly, subgenres): rock, pop and rave. Nowadays rave is just a small segment of the type of music that I still call by the all-emcompassing word "rave". I perhaps understand a little better now that Bon Jovi is not really rock, and that Guns 'n' Roses would probably be considered "soft rock" by todays standards. I'm aware of the ideas of "alternative" or "indie" music. But I don't know how you'd classify much of the music I listen to - emo probably, and how I cringe at that terminology. And put anything in my hi-fi that involves rapping, or some heavy beat beneath something other than rock, then I'll think the terms "rave" or perhaps "dance". I don't understand music genres I suppose. For me, music is either good music, bad music, or it's just plain noise.

And yet, but a piece of "classical" music on, or name a composer, and I could probably at least guess whether he was from the romantic, baroque, renaissance, modern or classical music.

Am I getting old? Is this what it's like to not understand "youth"? I'm open-minded in many of my opinions, and yet my taste in music is fairly closed. I'm eclectic, incredibly eclectic, but there are some things that I just won't even contemplate listening to.

As I grow older, lyrics are of increasing importance, and the weirder the better. Play some good 80s pop and I don't give a damn whether it's a soppy lovesong or if it makes no damn sense. But with more modern music, I want deep complicated lyrics that I don't understand. I want Anna to begin¹ to say something about the Karma police² coming to Save my Soul³.

Am I just so incredibly weird?

I'm going to finish pondering random things and go and make some food. I might make a more substantial update. Plus there is a meme I want to gank from theferrett very shortly.

1. Counting Crows.
2. Radiohead.
3. Jewel.

Today has been a day of design, disaster and inDulgence (yes, I'm reaching there).

After I got home from church this morning (around 11am) I sat in front of the computer. I stayed there until gone 2:30pm. I was sorting out an S2 style for my LJ. It's working now, although nowhere near finished. It doesn't look right on Rat's browser, and various things need tweaking to make them how I want them. But it's certainly usable.

The disaster was in the kitchen. I really don't know why I try. But then, I get bored of all the old things. I was doing a fish dish today. The recipe sounded lovely. There were two major problems with it though. It was far too lemony. And the fish was raw in the middle. It had been frozen and it wasn't quite defrosted fully. I had planned to cook it for a lot longer than the recipe said, but after an extra five minutes I checked it and it seemed cooked. Until we started cutting into it properly. I should just stick with bolog and curry. It's so hard sticking to a diet when you can't cook.

The indulgence wasn't quite indulgence. It's just that indulgence was the closest thing to a word beginning with D that was an synonym of pamper. And pamper was the best thing I could think of to describe putting on makeup.

You see, when I visited my parents just after new year, I decided to order some makeup. I'd chucked out a load of old stuff, and wanted some replacements in the unlikely occurence that I might want to wear some. I got three lipsticks (all of which are quite lovely), two eyeshadows, and an anti-ageing cream that came with the pack (it was a special offer). Of the eyeshadows, one I've tried on and although the colour is great I've had awful trouble with it. Firstly it's a liquid type thing, which meant it went on far too thick. I also have no idea how to put eyeshadow on nowadays - it just looked awful. The second eyeshadow I can't even get to work - I think there might be a seal I have to break, but I don't know how. I think this needs a serious phonecall with my mother tomorrow.

I have to phone mother dear anyway. She has a slight issue with her phone - in that there is no option for text messaging on it. Just an inbox. So I'll have to see if she's got anywhere with that.

Not looking forward to tomorrow. The first of five, full-days of working. It's going to be tiring!

I thought I'd better mention the film last night, since I've been trying to keep my journal updated on my movie watching. Last night we saw Infernal Affairs.

I really loved this film. Yet another fantastic foreign film. I'm glad that I have seen very few foreign films that have disappointed me. But then, I suppose that's because only the good foreign films end up being shown over here.

Okay, so this is going to be a fairly pointless and uninformative film update. But what can I say that doesn't give the game away. The film is a cop movie. It's about the battle between the cops and the Triads. It's about people being undercover. And it has a really cute guy in it.

Apparently it's one of three films. Infernal Affairs II is a prequel, whilst Infernal Affairs III is a sequal. I really want to see them all now. I wonder if they'll ever show the others over here.

.. and it was going to start with an anecdote about Rat. I was going to post it last night and forgot about it, then remembered earlier today, and now I have forgotten what it was again. Dammit, dammit, dammit.

Well, anyway, you know how I mentioned last night about the snow. Well, when I got home from choir (which was around 8pm) there was barely any snow. Just the odd flake falling down and that was more like rain. It was one of those evenings where you would seriously suspect to find the road covered with ice the next morning. How wrong I was.

Around midnight, just after we'd finished watching The Handler (which is now on at 11pm on either Thursday or Friday night), Rat thought he could hear some noise. Thinking it was our neighbour he went to the frontdoor and looked out. It was quite bright outside and so he came back saying that the light was on (she has one of these automatic lights outside her front door) so it must be her. A few second later he came back saying that he was wrong, and the cause of the "light" was in fact snow. At that point there must have been at least an inch of the stuff. I couldn't believe it. In four house it had turned from being slightly wet outside to cold and very very white. There was obviously more snow overnight and it was a little deeper when we headed out this morning.

Fortunately, the snow melted throughout the day so we shouldn't have to suffer icy roads or anything. But my feet are still frozen solid.

Today was deadly dull. Mainly because Carole was out of the office in the afternoon, and didn't come in until late as she'd had 6 inches of snow where she lived and it took her ages to get her car off the drive. I had work to do, but it was fairly dull work that also makes your back hurt. The sort of job you do in a quiet patch. But with no Carole the whole afternoon was quiet. Okay, so I avoided making one phonecall so that could have taken me from the monotony for a while.

Marino drove past me on my way to work and drove me to the office - I was almost there but it was nice to get out of the cold for a while. He chastised me for walking in such awful weather.

And then on the way home, whilst walking past M&S's car park a voice called out my name. It was one of the EOs from DEFRA - Suzanne, a really lovely lady. We stopped and chatted for a while, and then I headed off so that she could rescue her trolly from an on-coming car.

Rat received a phonecall this afternoon from our neighbour, complaining about the noise. For God's sake! It's the middle of the day. Not only that but both of us were at work at the time so it couldn't have been off. It had me worried for a while, because I thought that if she had her hearing aide in (and assuming our theory of her hearing things when she takes it out at night is correct) then she might have actually heard noise. I'm hyper paranoid about burglars and I was worried all the way home.

I hate being worried. The main reason being that worry gives me diarrheoa (which, incidently, I probably can't spell). I'm always ill before an interview, even if I don't feel worried about it.

I remembered the anecdote I wanted to mention about Rat. And it ties in nicely with the snow story. Basically, Rat buys a different paper every day, to read during his lunch-hour. On Wednesday he bought the Independent, which I then skimmed through on Thursday afternoon when I got home from work. The front page has a big thing about the threat of global warming - or more specifically a conspiracy theory that Blair is trying to dumb it down in favour of the threat of terrorism. So I look outside, on a day in the middle of Spring, and see the snow falling (well, technically I didn't, but it still fell). A few years ago it snowed on April 12th (which just happened to be on Easter Sunday that year - an interesting fact because the last time April 12th fell on an Easter Sunday it also snowed - if you think I'm crazy for knowing this you might be calmed a little when you discover the birthdate of my father). Anyway, the seasons are seriously getting fucked up. We have majorly hot summers. Mild winters. And then freezing cold and snowy springs. Whether Blair is covering something up or not, I think we have to seriously start thinking about what is happening to our atmosphere.

When I heard that Joaquin Phoenix was in a film called It's All About Love I trembled. The title brings forth visions of Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, or other romcom stars. I wanted to shake young Mr Phoenix by the shirt collar and ask him what the hell he was doing starring in such a film.

And then I saw it. And my head very nearly exploded.

( Read more... )

How come that for once I have lots of random things to talk about, and LogJam is b0rked (I updated it at the weekend and it doesn't work properly with proxies).

Over dinner we started watching a program about the Romans - done by this really cool guy who is great at making things really easy to understand. However two things have really annoyed me. The first was that he said he found it strange that a Roman villa is more technologically advanced than a Tudor mansion. How is this any surprise at all? And if he's going to mention this he could at least explain why the Tudor's weren't so far advanced for those that don't know anything about how the Catholic church burnt and hid away lots of the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans, and how the Renaissance period was the discovery of such information.

The second thing that annoyed me was a little more minor, much like my dislike of the use of the term "hell" in Gladiator. Apparently the figure in the centre of a mosaic was the "God" Orpheus. Hmmm. Now, please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Orpheus half-muse (being the son of Calliope) and half, well, presumably human. That doesn't exactly make him a God. And if he were a God I'm sure he wouldn't have had half the problem with recovering Euridice. (Excuse me for any butchering of spelling but it's been a long time since I studied ancient history and mythology).

My other current stream of thought is back to Highlander. Horton was "explaining" why immortals are such abominations - saying humans should be free from them, and I was considering how good a thing it was that Horton never knew about Kronos as the latter would have soon "proved" the former to be right. That said Kronos would have killed Horton pretty darn quickly if they'd met.

But of course, that brings me to the "To Be"/"Not To Be" episodes, the final episodes of the series where they show what life would be like without Duncan MacLeod. A timeline where Kronos and Horton have met, and are at war. Of course, things are a lot different in this "world" and so things happen differently than they would have if the two had met in the normal timeline.

I'm really talking a load of unphilosophical nonsense aren't I.

The other thing I was thinking of was the worst death of the series. I think it has to be, without a doubt, the death of Phil Akin's character (who I think was called Charlie but my mind could be playing tricks on me). It was just so tragic because he found out what Duncan was at the very end. I cried bucketloads for that death. I can't remember what they played at the time, whether it was Dust In The Wind or Who Wants To Live Forever - I imagine it was the former. Both of those songs are hard to listen to without feeling at least a little upset.

I think I should be doing things, being productive, either online or off, but I'm still not really in the mood. The anticipation, the uncertainty. It makes it hard for me to focus on anything. Two and a half weeks. That's all I have left. It's scary. I'm truly afraid.

With all the personal excitement of last week, I forgot about the local community excitement. It's probably a good thing, as I managed to get more details on this today from Phil at church.

I think I need to start with a little explanation of the setup of our road and the ones nearby. You see, many houses don't have driveways and so there are little blocks of garages nearby to server residents with no obvious parking place. Our garden gate is only accessible by walking up the driveway that leads to the garages for our road, one of which belongs to us. Our road is a horseshoe shape, and the road that it backs onto also has a set of garages, which is roughly opposite the top entrance to our road. It is these garages in question that all the excitement revolves around.

It was Wednesday night and I was asleep. The bedroom door was opened by Rat and he said something that I cannot for the life of me remember but I have been informed was something along the lines of "there's a fire". I rolled over and went back to sleep.

I suppose it would be easier if Rat posted this as he was the one who saw, but since this is my journal, I'll give you my account of his account. He'd heard a noise he suspected was rain (rain sounds very loud in our house) but after a while looked out the window. To his right he could see a big plume of black smoke, and the flicker of flames. The sound he had heard was the crackling of the fire. It seemed to be coming from somewhere down the road, and he hung up to phone the fire brigade but on seeing that people were running up the road towards it realised that the fire brigade were most likely on their way. Eventually he went to bed and it wasn't until his journey to work that he saw where the fire had been. It was in said garages at the top of the other road - a fair distance from the house, which means that the fire must have been bloody huge to have been seen from here.

Talking to Phil, who lives two next door but one from the garages, said that the flames where humongous (he was out there, almost ready to get a neighbour's hose when the firemen turned up). It was so hot, and the flames where so high, that they totally melted the satellite dish that sat on the eaves of the house behind it. He said he was worried because the flames had gotten incredibly close the the eaves of the house - which would not only have meant a fire in the roof of his neighbour's house, but also his own since they are semi-detached.

He's also friends with the people who own the garage, which had recently been used for storage of furniture and other belongings while the owners were having their loft refurbished. A lot of memories, irreplaceable items have been lost. And why? Well, there is no certain answer, but arson is suspected. Kids hang around these garages, and only a few weeks ago the garage two doors away was broken into (I actually saw someone putting a new door on it today). We live in one of the nicest areas of the city, and yet still, these things happen.

It's certainly been an eventful week. I just hope next week is much smoother, for everyone all around.

And while I'm here I just want to thank all the lovely people who keep commenting on my journal, especially while I've been depressed about the whole work thing. I really appreciate the comments even if I don't respond. I haven't felt much like responding to anything.

If anyone is interested, I've just spent absolutely ages turning my composition into a midi file, by individually sticking every note onto a stave on the computer. It was tough work. But the result can be found here. It's a midi file, so you'll need a midi player to listen to it (something which I personally seem to be lacking, grrrr).

I wrote the piece in 1995 whilst doing GCSE music. I call it "my composition" because it's the only decent thing I've ever written. It's actually called Fun and Games. The reason for this name is that each bit played by the right hand (it's a piano piece) is then passed to the left hand while the right hand plays something new, continuing until both hands are playing something that is (almost) identical to the beginning of the music. A bit like "pass the parcel" I suppose. I'm not sure if all the timing is working perfectly well in the midi, I might have to work on it. Anyway, if you listen to it, let me know what you think.

Edit: For some reason the file doesn't seem to be saving right.. so the uploaded version isn't all of the piece!

Edit 2: Okay, it might actually be working...

I've never liked any root vegetables, except for potatoes. I think I can quite categorically say that all the vegetables I like grow above ground (again, with the exception of potatoes). Broccoli, cauliflower, sprouts, lettuce.. okay.. so radish are found below ground too. Let's exclude salad vegetables from this.

So, if this is the case, why have I just spent the past hour or so cutting up such items? I've cut up three sweet potatoes (which I don't know if I've ever had, but I think have had in casserole and never especially liked). One swede, which although smelt lovely I know for a fact that I've never liked. And I don't even know if Rat likes (he never commented when I said I'd bought one). When I rang mum up to check how to cook them she went on about how they're nicest mashed - which hopefully is the reason I don't like them as I also hate mashed potato despite loving potato. And then finally I chopped up three carrots - a vegetable I find bland and boring unless in coleslaw.

The fact is that if you are going to cook a veggie-slop then you need to have vegetables. And preferably vegetables that bulk it up (as the onions and leeks and garlic soon get lost in the tomato). Just having potatoes in a veggie-slop is quite boring so I normally include carrots too since I don't hate them with a vengeance. On Friday I decided that I'd try something new. I picked up a bag of sweet potatoes rather than normal ones to try. And then I found this bag of winter vegetables. Leek and carrots and onions (I have hundreds of onions but still) - how perfect. Shame it also came with a swede. Well, waste not want not as they say. So yes, I'm going to try sweet potato and swede in today's masterpiece. And if it tastes foul we have cod and bacon and chicken and all sorts as backup.

I actually think it's going to be really nice. I've grown out of my inability to eat foul things (except for baked beans which I'd rather not touch with a giant's bargepole let alone a normal one), being able to eat peas and curry now. I'm happy to try new things, as long as they don't smell bad, and don't look even worse.

But it's been damn hard work. I think I'll need to be doing some knife sharpening very very soon. I wonder how many calories you lose from cutting up swedes and carrots and potatoes? Probably not enough to make any difference, but enough to make my fingers ache! I also really hate the fact that my hands now smell of vegetables - there's little point in washing them as I'll be doing more chopping up shortly - and the water is freezing.

My new, favourite catchphrase of the week, by the way, is Wha? I just thought I'd say that.

I'm thinking I should email some of my friends to let them know my new email address...

Un-cut because, well, I feel like keeping it un-cut.

Which LOTR extra are you? by Thursday_Next
Username
You are	an Elf of Rivendell
Your weapon is	magic
Your main talent is	Elf-Dwarf diplomacy
Your fate is	a long happy life in Gondor
Created with quill18's MemeGen!

Fairly perfect. Shame the long happy life in Gondor can't be spent with Faramir. *sigh*.