Don’t cry for me.. November 12, 2009
Posted by AndrewS in life.add a comment
November 11th is, for me, a significant date. Certainly, armistice day is an important enough thing to acknowledge, but every time it comes round, I am reminded that it’s another year since I last cried.
I cast my mind back to the night of November 9th, 2002. The CU weekend away was in full swing, but I was not there, as I had decided that I didn’t have £40 to spare (I was in First Year, and finances weren’t really my strong point back then). It was for the best that I didn’t go, because that night I got ill. For the benefit of certain people who I know read this blog, I won’t go into the details of this illness but needless to say, I didn’t get a great deal of sleep that night. I was really not well at all, and it went on for a couple of days. By the end of it, on November 11th, I just broke down and cried and cried and cried in my room because I just couldn’t cope with the being unwell and not having my family there to comfort me (I must admit though that the girls who stayed either side of me in halls were terrific, knocked on my door to make sure I was ok and got me some coke). I got better soon enough though.
Anyway, that was the last time that I properly cried. Since then, crying just hasn’t happened, even though a lot has. I’ve had anxiety, heartbreak, rejection, disappointment, death of friends and relatives, loneliness, identity crises, bad blood with folks, illness, failure, acts of God destroying significant portions of my work, friends having issues and other things I won’t mention. But there were also happy things like friends getting married and having kids, graduating, passing my driving test, unexpected surprises, getting good results for my thesis, and other things that I can’t think of. In other words, I’ve led pretty much a normal life (with some good and bad bits that come with the territory of what I do).
It’s not a secret that I seem unable to cry. When I say this to people, they tend to assume that I’m just being a guy and that I don’t want to be seen crying, but I assure you that this is not the case. I feel emotions like everyone else, it’s just that there now appears to be a barrier preventing me from displaying them. I think crying, done in moderation, is a healthy thing as I can recall that once it was over, it provided some kind of finality to whatever it was that you were going through, kind of just getting it all off your system if you like. There are many times I have wondered if what I was going through would be less traumatic if only I could just shed a few tears over it, but as it stands I’m stuck with at most one at a time. I guess it’s not a major problem, and it’s not something I worry about consistently, but I sometimes wonder if things would be different if I could. There are some contexts I could maybe seeing it becoming an issue in, but those aren’t really relevant at this point in time.
But I suppose this will be another addition in my “questions to ask God after the resurrection” pile.
NB I’m not really looking for answers (or indeed, sympathy), my main motivation for writing this post was that I had a couple of conversations with people about this recently and I just wanted to clarify some things.
Speed Demon November 9, 2009
Posted by AndrewS in Driving.2 comments
Since I’ve passed my test I’ve really enjoyed driving. I try to be as safe as possible and stick within the limits but there’s one thing nagging away in the back of my head, and that is speed cameras. I am so paranoid about them you wouldn’t believe it. On Saturday I drove to Glasgow and back to see my friends Phil & Kirsty (not the ones of Location Location Location) and during the inevitible roadworks on the M8, there was a 40mph limit. No sign of cameras, safety vans or peelers with hairdryers anywhere, and certainly nothing warning me of them (though I understand now they are not obliged to warn you), but because I briefly (due to football on the radio) went up to 44 (the horror!) I have spent a bit too much time the last couple of days trying to find positive confirmation that there were no speed cameras (average speed, GATSO or otherwise, though I saw no flash) along this 2-mile stretch. I’ve yet to find any and it’s gonna drive me bats for a couple of weeks until I’m sure that nothing nasty is going to drop through the door.
I failed my test twice because of speeding, but this is making me go insane! What’s wrong with me??
The tenner 1/11/09 November 1, 2009
Posted by AndrewS in tenner.3 comments
It’s another round of quickfire tales from my life. Let’s not delay:
1) Driving in Edinburgh is a pain as you always seem to run into some jerk taxi driver who thinks that he’s above the highway code
2) I don’t believe I’ve ever met a Merseyside Red fan from Merseyside or a Moan U fan from Manchester. Maybe they’re all so vociferous to make up for their lack of geographical justification
3) With Rangers’ financial woes and Celtic under the cosh a bit too, is the time coming where the rest can challenge for the SPL this season?
4) Harry Hill’s TV Burp is the best thing on TV and if you disagree.. you are entitled to your opinion
5) Ferry trips to Belfast are expensive
6) Long thesis to write + deadline ages away = difficult to get motivated
7) At what point during his wife’s pregnancy does a man realise he feels the need to tell terrible jokes and completely lose the ability to dance? Only dads seem capable of such things..
The Democratic Unionist Party seem to have a policy where every member needs to state a new wacky policy that would be utterly ridiculed if one of the big UK parties came up with it. [look up Iris Robinson and Sammy Wilson on wikipedia]. This week: Gregory Campbell endorses the [soon to be illegal under EU law] death penalty!
9) Saying “no offence” before you say something does not mean that the thing you say is not offensive.
10) Apparently, because I’m not in a long-term relationship, I can’t possibly understand the opening bits of “Up” (I haven’t seen it, so I don’t know what it’s referring to, but clearly I’d be wasting my hard-earned cash). Darth Vader’s never been my father either, so maybe I’m missing a trick? I’m not easily offended, but this did rattle my cage a bit.
The Seventeener 11/10/09 October 11, 2009
Posted by AndrewS in tenner.3 comments
These are a new style of posts because I’m struggling to find time these days to say anything here. The format is thus: the blog will have a title such as “fiver” “sevener” or “tenner” and will be [appropriate number] of brief statements or anecdotes that I’ve learnt/ thought about recently (if anyone reads the “The Game” supplement in The Times on a Monday, which I thoroughly recommend, it’s pretty similar to Tony Cascarino’s Fiver in which he does similar things), in no particular order. I’ll try to avoid using “The Fiver” if possible as that’s already the title of a (very funny) satirical daily e-mail about football provided by the Guardian (which is where I get the phrase England’s Brave John Terry from) which I also recommend signing up to if you like that sort of thing.
Anyway, to business:
1) Food hygiene courses at church are a good idea, until you go home and realise that your fridge might as well be a bacterial red light district
2) I don’t like it when “podcasts” in my iTunes has a large number beside it
3) I wouldn’t mind so much if meerkats went extinct. Car insurance commercials are inherently terrible, verging on evil
4) God doesn’t call everybody to be extroverted, and being extroverted is no better than being introverted. It can be quite hurtful when people try to change the way you are
5)I’d recommend the PS3 to way more people if I didn’t have to update the software on the bloody thing every time I turned it on
6) England winning the World Cup might not be such a bad thing, as at least then some of the media will have things other than 1966 to talk about
7) You know there’s too much pr0n on the internet when googling the names of simple weights and measures brings up things you probably don’t want to see as search results. My guess: if you can google it, there’s probably pr0n of it
8] It’s really funny to annoy Star Wars fans by telling them George Lucas made a mistake when he had Han Solo say he did the Kessel Run in 12 parsecs, as they will defend it to the hilt, coming up with nonsense theories instead. Strangely, they don’t feel the same about Jar Jar Binks
9) It’s really sad when people [myself included] knowingly put themselves in a situation where they know they can comprimise their beliefs, but won’t accept any criticism of it, because no matter what you say it’ll come across [to them] as judgemental
10) The business model of our stair cleaning company is laughable
11) It annoys my flatmates when I watch TV with my laptop on at the same time, so I’ll probably not be doing that any more
12) FIFA is (finally) better than PES for the first time probably ever
13) I’ve never met anyone called Strothers, and I don’t understand why my name is consistently mis-spelled this way
14) Finding the intended meaning of a passage in the Bible is a tough task, but well worth it once it’s found
15) The only thing about X Factor that’s real is the public vote. The sob stories might be true, but they are being exploited
16) People in a relationship bring up that I’m single and they then reel off a list of names of single girls that I know, preceded by “what about…” [does anybody like it though?] Being on an arbitrary list is not something I look for in the opposite sex. Being single isn’t a disease
17) There’s a storm coming. But storms are good because they relieve the heat
Comments welcome. Please indicate the number of anything you’re commenting on. Cheers!
Best spam ever September 23, 2009
Posted by AndrewS in spam.1 comment so far
If you take away the fact that most spam (of the “we will send you money if you send us some first” variety) is sent by crooks and people you wouldn’t want to associate with, it never ceases to amuse me (hey, you aren’t going to be able to stop it completely so you might as well laugh), because of the poor English, the complete ridiculousness of the scam and the fact they often claim that much praying led them to your e-mail address (all canonical gospels miss out the bit in the Lord’s prayer that talks about starting up one’s computer and turning on the e-mail harvesting software).
And besides, no-one else sends me e-mails calling me “Dearest One”.
But today’s e-mail (which in a mysterious turn of events ended up in my hotmail account and not the usual Uni one) had possibly the best introduction I’ll ever get. It went a bit like this (I’m leaving some of the less amusing bits out, and this is honestly not just because I stupidly deleted it):
Dearest One [see?],
I greet you in the name of our one and only Gracious Lord Jesus Crist. You may be suprise that I contact you, pleased not to be alarmed [waffles about not being a crook and people thinking he wants to sell "viagara"]. I am honest individual and do not wish to sell viagara. Viagara is from the devil, and the Lord will surely cause all viagara sellars to committ suicide.
How are you?
the rest is a bit uninteresting, it’s just a bog standard offer of $30 million to become “business partners”. They don’t state what the nature of the business will be, and are “egerly awating [my] reply”
They will be forever disappointed. It’s a shame because I wanted to thank them for giving me a good laugh. I wasn’t aware there were inter-spam wars, or that vi@gra was particularly evil.
Baked beans: the return September 18, 2009
Posted by AndrewS in Flat life.2 comments
For some reason WordPress decided it’d be funny to post my last post about baked beans without any text. Hilarious. Anyway, the gist of it was thus:
I’ve now been a student for seven years, and one thing you learn as a student is how to give baked beans a bit more zing. So after many failed experiments (I can confirm that garlic, smoked salmon, dill, brown sauce, soy sauce, prawns, mayonnaise, salad cream, beef stock, English mustard, French mustard and American mustard have no place in beans on toast. I don’t know what I was thinking when I tried some of them.), I am pleased to share what I believe is baked bean Utopia with you. Please be aware that it is not suitable for vegetarians (apparently Worcester sauce has anchovies in it) or people intolerable to lactose.
You will need:
One tin baked beans (small or large- not important)
One tablespoon of Worcester Sauce
A pinch of basil
Two slices of bread (I prefer Kingsmill Love to Toast, but there are some varieties of brown bread that are really good for this too, although it’s even more satisfying to make your own!)
Butter/ spread
Marmite
Hard cheese (like cheddar or red leicester: Brie is so-so, edam, emmenthal and gouda just don’t have the right texture)
For the beans: Open tin, place beans in saucepan, add the Worcester sauce and basil, stir for 3-4 mins while heating on a high-ish heat.
For the toast: Toast bread as normal, but spread on it to taste, add a thin layer of marmite and a couple of slices of cheese is more than plenty.
Finally, place the toast on a plate and smother on the bean mixture. Sprinkle some grated cheese on top and add some pepper to taste.
Bon appetit!
District 9 September 17, 2009
Posted by AndrewS in Film.add a comment
If Science Fiction that makes you think is your thing, then go see this! It’s really very good..
[sorry for the brief review- I didn't want to spoil it at all!]
Scapegoat September 10, 2009
Posted by AndrewS in Uncategorized.1 comment so far
Blue: Jonny Foreigner cheating
Orange: Bad refereeing
Yellow: Overpaid players don’t care about playing for England
Light green: Ashley Cole
Purple: Player who makes defensive error
Light blue: England’s Brave John Terry
Dark Green: Bad tactics from Fabio Capello
Lime Green: England beaten fair and square by a better team (no scapegoat)
[of course it might be that none of these apply and England win the thing. Fair play to them if they do.]
Subjects of my friends’ Facebook status updates September 6, 2009
Posted by AndrewS in Uncategorized.3 comments
Blue: Narcissism
Orange: Teachers talking about being on holiday
Yellow: Anchorman quotes
Green: Pranks caused by people leaving themselves logged in on someone else’s laptop
Brown: Stuff I actually want to know!
[ please be aware this is just a joke and I actually (mostly) enjoy facebook status updates!]
Inglourious Bar Stewerds September 3, 2009
Posted by AndrewS in Film.2 comments
I remember when I was in Prep School (age 11-12) that the other boys would often ridicule me because I hadn’t seen any films rated 18 (and also 15, but that’s not relevant to the point I’m trying to make here). This was largely because I went to bed at a reasonable hour, there was no way on earth my parents would take me to see one at the cinema, and at the time we had one TV in the house, so there was no chance of me watching one without my parents finding out (and, if I’m honest there weren’t any I particularly wanted to see). Clearly, this ridicule was part of the Alpha male behaviour one can usually find in pubescent boys at posh schools. But I digress.
I’m in my mid-twenties now and I’ve only seen two 18-rated films in the cinema (because of lack of interest and the relative rarity of them these days): the first was Wanted two years ago which I only saw because there wasn’t much else, and the other is Quentin Tarantino’s mis-spelt World War II film Inglourious Bar Stewerds (I’m not one to use naughty language. Well not on the internet anyway).
There are two strands two the story: one is of a Jewish girl in France who seeks revenge on the Nazis (particularly the vile Hans Landa) for killing her family, and the other is of a group of soldiers (the titular Bar Stewerds led by Brad Pitt), most of whom are Jews (apart from a psycopathic German defector) who also seek revenge. And a lot of people die on the way, very violently. But this is Tarantino we’re talking about, and he’s not one to skimp on the blood. Or the historical accuracy (but of course, that’s not the point. Don’t go and see it if you want a history lesson). Or brevity. It’s a bit long, but that’s not to say it’s boring: the talky bits take the heat off the violence (although they usually end in it). If you do find it boring, you can keep yourself entertained by watching without reading the subtitles and working out what is being said in French/ German/ Italian. Or admire Brad Pitt’s moustache or wait for the exciting dénouement.
Anyway, as films go, it’s alright, I enjoyed it but I don’t think it’s worth waiting to turn 18 for.
