No longer as truthful as should be deserved, some names, places and events deliberately vague to protect identities that aren't mine

Sunday 29 August 2010

That Friday Feeling

Sorry for starting posting and then stopping again.  Work is keeping me busy and tired.  My hours are constantly in flux so I'm finding it hard to develop into the shift pattern of sleeping, but eventually it'll all calm down.


So Friday was kinda awesome.

Firstly, although I got into work 20 minutes late because of queues at the bank, I by chance got in 5 minutes before the boss did, so I was still able to cop off at my normal finishing time and make out like I'd worked an 8 hour day instead of a 7 hour and 40 minute one.

Secondly, it was one of the first days I ever got back and didn't just want to crash out straight away.  Annoyingly, I couldn't find anyone to go out with either, so my night just fell apart into doing nothing, but it was doing nothing with energy, which is an improvement from where I had been.

Thirdly, I got a text from Terence saying he'd had a really awesome date the day before, and had been grinning all day, and whatever makes one of us happy makes the other one happy, which is why he sent me a random text with information like that in.  On top of that he got the job he's been for recently, so he will actually have some money and such with which to live his life now :)

Fourthly , my day was actually relatively productive, mostly due to the high I was on from the fifth thing that happened (though it happened 2nd in order chronologically if you wanna get technical), as detailed below.

The fifth bit of awesomeness that happened was about 20 minutes after I go into work, I was all set up working on my laptop and working my way through the MagicQ manual as I need to learn the lighting software for this venue and I get no training on account of stealing someone else's job so they're not that keen on being helpful or cooperative unsurprisingly.  The lunchtime tour group comes in and starts eating.  The tour guide obviosuly knows the bar manager quite well, but I'm not paying attention and am slightly round the corner so I can't see anything really anyway.

Both tour guide and manager head back past me towards the kitchen.  I look up to say hi and be polite, and the tour guide (who speaks german btw, nathan will appreciate this) is actually really cute, germanic looking, muscled, tight blue tshirt, looks early to mid thirties, eyecandy win!  that at least perks the day up a little bit.

But it gets better... as he walks past and I say hi, he looks at me, says hi with a huge smile on his face, then turns to the bar manager and says "Who's he, he's handsome".  I break out in a huge grin, well that's an ego boost.  I then catch him during his entire time here making sure he adjust where he's standing so he can sneak glances at me and everything.  It's kinda cute.  When he gets the chance he comes over and flirts with me for 20 minutes.  Flirting amongst us includes talk of lighting design, which isn't as wierd as it sounds, as he sings on stage aside from tour guiding.  But alas not everything can go on, he is a tour guide after all, and so once the lunch is finished he must be off and such.  I'm elsewhere just as they're finishing up, so I figure I won't see him, but once I come back from the job that I was doing for 10 minutes, I find him waiting by where I was working.  He invites me out for a drink the next time he's here.  He's off around Scotland and the US for the next month, but is here the whole of October.

Yeah it's that aries thrill of the chase thing, I always love the new getting to know people period.  If I was hotter and could get away with it I would be some form of serial dater.  I know that it can't go anywhere, and I'm not looking for, and Chris might not even want me to go for a drink with the guy 'cause shagging with alcohol is fine, but the fine line of a date is something entirely different.  But that's not really what I care about. What I care about is the grin that I had on my face for the rest of the day, cause some guy had thought I was hot and said it in front of the people I work with, that he asked me out for a drink, that I got to feel really good about myself on a day when I thought I looked like complete shit (being a techie, there's no point in making an effort to dress up for work, you just end up covered in paint dust or in the dark anyway).

So yeah, that made my day all kinds of awesome.


Work aside from that is going okay, some good some bad.  I'm making friends which is good, and every night I get to watch girls in spanky pants kick their legs up over their head.  The above incident with the tour guide (his name as michael, but as chris pointed out, he will just forevermore be Hot Tour Guide, henceforth HTG, unless I get chatted up by another one, in which case I might have to start distinguishing by nationality) seems to have melted the iceheart of the bar manager, who spent the rest of the day making teasing comments to me about how much the guy liked me - like I'm complaining!  I plan to submit a massive new tech budget at some point - I'm trying to keep it under £5k.  We need twice as many lights, as they're only each area with 2 parcans, which if you've seen the area, just isn't going to work.  So that's a grand gone easily for some S4 Pars.  One day I'm going to rip out all the DMX, XLR, Ethernet and Powercables and rewire the entire tech room.  Will probably have to volunteer to come in on a Monday and Tuesday for that one...


Carnival tomorrow, the biggest party in the whole of Europe.  Hopefully it doesn't rain like it did all day today (which I was unaware of until 6pm, that's the problem of spending all day underground, you know nothing about what's going on in the outside world).  Last year when I went to Carnival I got to know Joel really well, so well in fact, someone asked us how long we'd been together; we'd known each other about 2 weeks by that point, ahem.  And after that night, I knew him in the biblical sense too.  Gotta love those friends you've been all too familiar with in the past.  Who knows what could happen this year...

Sunday 22 August 2010

Facsimilie

This post will make instant sense to half of you, the rest of you will have to fill in the not-entirely-cryptic blanks.
 
Having spent a few weeks going through the motions one way, I'm not going through them the other way, and no, that's not related to bowel movements or any other form of peristaltic action.  Rather than 'you don't know what you had 'till it's gone', it's more a situation of 'it can never be like it was'.  Now, that doesn't necessarily preclude it continuing, or even getting better, but it still results in a rather unfortunate and indeterminate 'awkward' period.  I don't react the way I should do; I don't want what I'm supposed to, and when I'm faced with it, I appear very aloof (points for use of aloof in a blog post I feel), mostly because it feels so inappropriate in one way or another.  And this is at a time when what's needed of me is the exact opposite.  I need to demonstrate extra-ordinary reactions, I need to be that much more proactive than usual, but I'm not... I just feel numb.  Because of my actions, or because of the way I had to process the fallout of my actions, and all I can currently do is hold on, going through the motions and mitigating further damage in so far as I can manage for the moment, until such point as things change.

Serenity



Chris is not a console gamer. he never had one himself, and unlike the rest of our generation, seemingly neither did anyone he was friends with as a child.  In fact it's kind of pityingly funny to put a console controller in his hand, be it PS3, Xbox, N64 whatever.  "What's fire?!  Wait, Left 1 AND Right 2 AT THE SAME TIME?!?!  Z BUTTON?!?!  Where the hell is the z button?!  UNDERNEATH?!?!"  I blame his lack of console gaming as a child for Chris generally having issues playing any kind of FPS genre game.  Anyone who played goldeneye as a kid (or indeed still does, for let's face it, that game is a genuine classic), learnt how to aim, shoot, jump, and maintain camera angle all at the same time by necessity.  And equally, I find that regardless of what console you play/ed above others, you can generally adjust to a different console with relatively little difficulties; there is always at least one L and R button, the z button, if it exists, is always underneath.  The trackpad is usually movement, if there's 2 of them, the other is camera angle, and the fire button is almost always the button nearest your right thumb.  Simple.
 
Chris criticizes the need to memorize strings of button presses to execute special moves, as this doesn't happen at all on computers really.  Fair point, though I reckon that's a skill you learn through playing consoles naturally.  And I think it allows for more flexibility than a PC game, you don't need to have certain spells or moves readied all the time, you can cast a heal simply by remembering what button sequence you need, and the most commonly used actions often have rather memorable sequences anyway.
 
Despite only owning a wii (and also technically a PS2), I love console games.  For one thing they're social, sure, you can play Starcraft 2 on battlenet with someone, or even have an Unreal Tournament LAN party, but a few hours spent playing Halo, or Goldeneye, or Mariokart, encourages so much more social activity, is so much more active, something to do with actually sitting next to each other and sharing the same screen.  Especially when there's 4 of you and you have to squint to find your own quadrant and what's happening in it.  I could quite happily spend a Sunday afternoon only half getting dressed in the most comfortable, loose fitting clothes I own, ordering pizza 'cause nobody can be arsed to cook, and blowing the hell out of each other with rocket launchers or dune buggies.  And I have to accept that Chris probably won't be one of those people, no matter how many times I try and get him to find the z button
 
So if anyone wants  to be my dossing-around-the-house-buddy, let me know.  Though for the next few months, 'Sunday' might have to seem suspiciously like 'Tuesday'

The bitch is back


Fear not, I have not abandoned you all, just not much has been happening, or at least not much that I've wanted to tell everyone.  I'm still stuck at my parents,  5 weeks and counting.  The country is dull as hell, and being at my parents is increasingly wearing, and limiting of my earning potential.  On the upside, I have somewhere to live from September; a 2 bedroom place with Chris and one of my flatmates from last year next to Victoria Park (about 15 mins walk from Bethnal Green tube station), it's really really pretty and the move in date can't come soon enough as far as I'm concerned.
 
I sort of have a respectable day job now.  It's technically an undefined role at the moment, and I'm sort of stealing someone else's job as part of it, but things are in the works.  Now I just need to get paid so I can actuallly afford the rent for the new placee, instead of it all be whittled away on commuting fares.  It's shift work, which sucks, but I get 2 free meals a day out of it and its teching, plus at the end of it it'll look hella awesome on my CV.
 
My body is still playing up, it kinda  has done since the US for some reason, no discernible reason, and I've even been into A&E twice to no avail, but everything my body feels like fucking up currently is doing, the only reprieve I'm getting is that the hayfever season is largely over for me.  But skin, sleep, digestive system, hormone levels; all screwing around going up one day and down the next.
 
 
I wrote in my last blog post that my parents and I have never had a lot of trust for each other on certain matters, and that got me thinking.  My parents consciously or unconciously know I'm a rather compulsive liar, especially where they are concerned, and I've been telling them half truths and outrighht lies since I could talk.  Equally, my trust in my parents was shattered a fairly young age due to various affairs and the like.  The big showdown with me and my dad at 16 happened because I'd lied to them about something relatively trivial and they refused to let it go and I refused to back down because I'd lied in order to obtain some privacy.  My parents, like me, or rather the other way round, whilst being respectful enough to not enter my room when I'm out  or the like, have a tendency to snoop if given half an opportunity, so as much as there is of my private life that is actually private from them, that's only been achieved by a secret agent spy level of elaborate cover stories and plain not talking about certain things ever in their presence or any presence that might stand half a chance of getting back to them.
 
We have this rather bizzare relationship to each other where we trust each other on a superficial simple basis, but where anything of import is concerned, it's not so much that we don't tell each other, just that we're highly suspicious of what we do get told as we know its not even 1/8th of the story.  Ah well, in 2 weeks I shall have moved out and be in my nice shiney new house in London once again.
 
 
I got a job, this is the one that I mentioned a while ago that I said I couldn't discuss much.  It's working as technical staff at the Medieval Banquet by the Tower of London.  It's not well paid and my week runs Wednesday - Sunday, which means I get no social time (though in fairness, I do finish in time to head out to either Vauxhall or Dalston Superstore just as they're geting busy), but I get to pretty much define the role myself and choose my own hours within certain restrictions.  That and once I've finished, I get to put that I was PM of a London tourist attraction on my CV :D  No doubt you'll all read about me bitching/praising it in the months to come.