What else would it be about?

Yesterday Magic and I did a bit of a swap of abilities. I swapped:

1. Chili Con Carne
   
2. homemade tortillia chips
   
3. guacamole
   
4. Eaton Mess made with a massive pink meringue from a very expensive French bakery

With the Magics excellent expertise at all things nerdy and good and asked him to jailbreak my ipod touch.. I am now boundaryless from Apples oppressive hold. And I have books! Obviously, being a girl, the first book I put on my ipod was a Jane Austen novel.. But anyhoo. That’s not the point of today’s post.

Jailbreaking means you have to upgrade your ipod touch software, which wipes out all your toons and playlists.. so today I spent a bit of time re-making them, and naturally along with playlists named “Happy” (tunes to make me happy), “Dancey” (dance tracks to bop about to) and “Yee haw” (for shame, country and western type songs..), I also have the inevitable playlist called “Depressed” (which used to be called “Suicidal Rock Tunes”).


Boy oh boy, if you want to make yourself sad, use these songs (and have your boyfriend move to Europe forever).

AND whilst I was listening to this today, I realized that the sun is now definitely starting to go down faster and faster each day as we head, kicking and screaming and fighting with tooth and nail, into the darkness of winter. I hate this time of year.. Damnit.

The holiday is Finnish

I'm back.

Going on holidays is always a really weird time for me because there is always all this anticipation and excitement and brouhaha about trying to get organised and remember to book hotels and flights and pack the right number of socks, and then all of a sudden you're on holiday, and you're having a great time, it's all fun and holiday like, and then, BAM, it's over. Finished.

I have this strange sort of love/hate relationship with time. The old adage for when bad things happen of "this too shall pass" unfortunately also extends to the good times... I find the worst parts are when one minute you're on a plane, waiting to take off because it's delayed thinking "argh come one lets go, I hate these crowded seats" and then you stop and realise "in a few seconds this very moment will be over and in the past and when it's long gone and it's all just bits of electricity going on in my brain, it's this moment I'll remember" and before you know it, you're back in your bedroom, laptop on, writing about it. Fleeting, intangible moments, all in the past, all gone.... And the more you think like this, the harder and yet the easier it is to live in the moment, not wanting time to keep passing by without you at least trying to have a stab at it and wondering if you could be doing a better job of it...

Hmmm, I really know how to suck the fun out of holidays eh?

Ok enough midnight philosophising about how time seems to slip through my fingers and I can't stop it.

So how was the holiday? Bloody fantastic and bloody cold!

I will post many, many pictures soon along with highlights of:

• Dr D almost getting mauled by our over eager reindeer
• When a woman who drives huskies for a living puts a poncho on you, you do not say no
• Believing that my last moments on this mortal coil were to be spent in the dungeon of a Finnish shack in god knows where butt fuck Finland in the middle of the night
• Northern lights!!!
• I LOVE TOBOGGANING AND I DON'T CARE
• Webcams
• Tex-Mex. Why is all of Finland bloody obsessed with tex-mex?

Right now I'm off to bedfordshire, as we got in at 2.30 am this morning, and I've had a grand total of 4 hours sleep. And when you've used to afternoon naps on holiday, a whole full day of work seems too bloody long.

Which would you do?

Oh lord. Ever since seeing The Bourne Ultimatum last week, I've been a tiny bit Matt Damon obsessed. And popsugar has loads of red carpet pics of him (yes and of his wife) that have been keeping me quite entertained.

However, I found this today on geeksugar and gizmodo and holy crap, I can't stop laughing:

So my question to you is: Which would you do? Answers on a postcard. (Or comment). I defy to you look at either Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, lounging 'seductively' on their desks, nerd style, and not piss yourself laughing... Ooh baby, let me turn you on with my nerd talk. Oohh la la la.

The point of the blog

I can't sleep. It's not that I've been tossing and turning, and have just deciede I can't sleep. No, it's 1am now, and I've only just gotten into bed. I've stayed up and watched crap tv for ages, knowing full well I'm not interested in what I was seeing, but just dreading having to go to my bed. And I have no idea why. Why is it that I have this nervous, uneasy, twitch, that is making me feel, well, scared? And the wierd things is that I have no idea what I'm scared of. It's like having the Mean Reds. I know it's not the usual fear I get before I nod off, which makes me get up and check all the doors and windows are locked at night. No, this fear is just dense, heavy, and stodgy, like a wool blanket that's too thick and oppressive and holds you down and suffocates you. And the worse thing is that I know that writing things down is supposed to help you relax and make you feel like you're surrendering your problems, but it's almost as if typing these words out gives breath and life and substantiates this fear into existence.

What's wrong with me? There is nothing to be frightened of. Nothing is going on. So why is my heart racing? Why can't I relax and sleep?

This is why I own a blog. So that I can write all these things down, and later on, much later, when this fear goes away, or the feelings that I have day to day, or little events that go to make up a life, are forgotten and surrendered to the past, I know that by writing these things, these crappy, little, stupid events and thoughts, means that I will always have some record of it. Albeit, if only in the digital universe, to be made up of 1's and 0's and little bits of electricity.

Now all I have to do is be able to sleep, to start another day.

Argh it's late and I appologise for this post. I'm going to try to get some sleep.

Tower Depresssing

After coming home tonight from another shopping trip of house stuff (how much more stuff we can get in here?), C & I found a documentary called "The Tower, a Tale of Two Cities" on BBC1. This is based on an ex-council high rise tower, situated right on the river overlooking Canary Wharf, bought off Lewisham Council and has been refurbished and is now being flogged off as luxury apartments to wealthy city types. The whole idea of selling these apartements off is part of Lewisham Council's hope to regenerate the area, by brining in wealty people, which I guess means to just force poor people out. The documentary shows the juxtaposition of this brand "new" tower to it's sister tower, still a council estate, and still full of poor tenants, and the juxtaposition of these people's lives. Where one group argue about where to put their high def TVs, the other group battle with losing their businesses, dead beat fathers of their children, poverty and drug abuse. Showing these two completely different worlds, one ultra rich, and one ultra poor, living right next to each other, in identical towers, albeit for a splash of paint, is amazing, but also incredibly harrowing and depressing. It is especially interesting to me because the ex-flatmate and I used to live about 1 mile from these two apartments, and we watched them rip the guts out of the old council block, and refurbish it. So whilst there is an element of watching all these poor people's lives as they are being forced out of the area, and watching all the rich people as they come in, total naive of the area they are about to become a part of, I have to confess there is also an element of "oh look that's the pub across the road from the Asian supermarket" and "I wonder if you can see us speeding past in our car, doors locked, windows up so we don't get robbed?".

Tenants from the sister tower

The 'new' tower.

If you want to watch it, check it out on BBC1 at 11pm. I can't stress how good this documentary is. Well, by good I mean 'interesting, saddening, non life reaffirming'...

Afterwards though, I was so fucking depressed, that I honestly couldn't sleep, so to perk myself up, I had to watch some light, no brain content fluff, with lots of pretty people being upset about stupid things, rather than anything really life threatening like say, making sure that their daughters don't get raped on their way to school. Naturally that meant digging out an episode of "Sex and The City". Of course, being me, that completely back fired because in my attempt to make myself feel better, I ended up watching the episode where Samantha gets breast cancer. Just fucking great.

Barely Breathing

Some things should come with health warnings: cigarettes, alcohol, intravenous drugs, the Amelie soundtrack.

I've been listening to this for about a week non stop at work. I love Amélie (où <<Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain>>) the movie, MAIS la musique du film... Mon dieu!

Composed by Yann Tiersen, it is a great and quirky soundtrack, with haunting piano solos and very Gallic sounding, 1930's pieces, that work amazingly well with the film to help conjure up the dreamlike world of the main character, and I really do love every single track on the album.. But what I don't understand is how people can review this soundtrack as making them feel good, because all I feel is a sadness so thick that I can barely conjure up the energy to breath, and all I want to do is disappear to Paris for months on end, drinking café's and be by myself.

And here I go, hitting the play button again. Sigh.