4th Year

I wish I lived in the Golden Age,
Giving it up on the Broadway stage,
Hang with the rats and smoke cigars,
Have a break with Frank and count the stars ..

I love that song. It is a catchy little bastard. It's the one from the latest Heineken advert, which also seems to be doubling up as that songs music video, which apart from making me want to listen to it over and over again also makes me want a Heineken. Well played, advertising

I had my first seminar of my final year yesterday, which felt strange in a kind of 'beginning of the end' way, which although will be sort of sad to wave goodbye to will also be absolutely amazing, not just in the capacity of "I've achieved a half decent form of qualification", but rather that it marks the start of working in the real sense of the word, as opposed to playing the role of the student, which I feel is becoming a little cliched.

Today's my day off; I've been in the library since about 1pm writing up a report in German all about my year abroad and elaborating for somebody's benefit about how great it all was and how much of a wonderful human being it's made out of me. The bullshit gauge is currently hitting red and overloading, as I'm having a hard time not only with translating my thoughts into German, but coming up with thoughts worth reading about in the first place. I'm coming out with stuff like "my improvements in language come second to my personal development". Shit like that.

Tomorrow, wednesday, is my busy day, according to my timetable so this will invariably mean seeing more old faces, which is rather exciting, and being thrown a little more back into the swing of this year. I'm yet to find another module, which is really getting rather important now because the punishment for not signing onto one soon is an anvil hanging above me by a thread with the words "fail uni" daubed on the side. I've often lamented the numerous bureaucracies of university, but this one is the Beethoven's 5th of pure bullshit.

Internet distractions

Cause I love to live so pleasantly,

Live this life of luxury,
Lazing on a sunny afternoon,
In Summertime ..

The weather has got really shite of late, which I imagine is what's left of New York's recent tropical storm, except downgraded again to "very windy and with lots of spitty rain".

This week I've become nocturnal again. I managed this a few times in 2009/10, but this was at least 2 or 3 months into the academic year. This time round it's about a month before I've even started. I don't know if this is really "start as you mean to go on" material, but either way, it's really screwing with my head. I woke up at 10 past 6 in the evening today. I'd slept for 16 hours.

We had our internet installed last week, which I think is the main reason for me becoming nocturnal. The internet guy was a Geordie bloke, the kind that I only thought existed in anecdotes that people tell involving Geordie blokes, where they put on a propa Geordie accent to really accentuate the Geordieness. But no, they exist. It was mindblowing. He even said stuff like "why-aye" and "canny man". He finished with "gissies a ring on't morrow if there's summick wrong wi yer connection". Just beautiful.

So last night I downloaded and watched Black Swan and Million Dollar Baby. Black Swan was awesome and creepy in a way I wasn't really expecting, and although Mila Kunis is a very good actress in addition to being fucking gorgeous, she killed the film at the same time for me because every time she opens her mouth, it's just Meg Griffin again, which took any emotional whatnot right away.


Black Swan is supremely better than Million Dollar Baby. I'd heard good things, but it wasn't that good. It's sad and depressing, but that's about it. All it really proved is that Morgan Freeman, who is getting on a bit now, needs to make a film before he dies in which he plays a real, evil tosser. And not just the moody grizzled type like he is in Se7en, or a bit of a bastard like in Wanted. I mean a complete fucking prick. Because half the runtime of Million Dollar Baby is punctuated with Morgan Freeman's soft spoken black man narration to the point that you sit back and wait for the Shawshank Redemption music to begin. I'd write the 'bastard' film for him myself.

The best current working title is "Kitten stomper". Two hours of Morgan Freeman breaking into houses and catteries, incapacitating the owners, and then stomping on all the kittens. Helmed by Danny Boyle, this will be an excellent film.

"Ever since I was a little boy, I knew I just wanted to stomp on kittens. And I figured y'either get busy stomping, or y'get busy dying."

Yeah.

Now I'm gonna go to sainsbury's and buy something cheap and tasty for dinner. If they still have their '80 chicken nuggets for a fiver' deal on, I'm eating like a king tonight.

I'm a student again

I was born in the soul of misery,
And I never had me a name,
They just gave me a number when I was young ..

It's just struck me that it's been absolutely ages since I wrote on here, all the way back in Germany. I'm currently being bombarded on facebook with status updates that I posted in 2009/10, the ones of late all being me going "wow, germany!" There's a good deal of nostalgia kicking in. I miss that place.

Anyway, it'd be stupid to go into any detail about any of the zillion things which have happened, both globally and within my little carefree bubble, so I'll just list things that come to mind.

• LIBYA - so, the rebels finally took Tripoli, Gaddafi nowhere to be seen. The world now recognises a bunch of gun-toting muslims as the official government; Islam of course being a global cornerstone of tolerance and democracy. I will be taking bets in the next few days as to how many years of 'helping our rebel friends rebuild damaged country by funding them and giving them weapons' we see before we're at war with them.

• News of the World shuts down amid the phone hacking scandal. Murdoch senior is attacked with a pie. Questions arising - why did Rebecca Brooks keep her job when the entire rest of the company shut down? She must know some serious shit.
  

• A botched police operation which mainly seems to have involved the cops shooting at lots of the wrong things sparks riots in London, followed by uprisings of chavs in other parts of the country because the government can't tell them what to do anymore and to prove a point, we'll burn down the job centre because we don't have any jobs. Or something like that. This was probably the one time in my life that I prayed we'd taken a leaf out of Iran or Syria's book; how many people would have taken to the streets to put the front of Poundland through if there was a tank with live ammunition cruising around Croydon?

• Norway is introduced to something bad for the first time in 70 years after Anders Behring Breivik blows up a government building in Oslo before dressing up as a cop and massacring teenagers on an island. Followed a week later by a polar bear, less malevolence but still fucked up.

• The Space Shuttle programme comes to an end, with no alternative in sight for America to get back into space in the near future. Our new-found reliance on the Russkies begins somewhat tentatively as one of their new satellites crashes and a supply package to the ISS gets lost somewhere in the vacuum.

• My fourth year of university starts, dragging me kicking and screaming back into reality and the world of academia which I'm oh so fucking sick of by now. I don't dislike this lifestyle but after 16 years of reading books and being told I have to do things I don't really want to do, it really must be time for something new soon.

• Uni invariably means a new house, so this post is in partial celebration of finally setting up wireless internet, after a few teething problems. The new house is a bit in the ghetto and feels a little like Islamabad if you walk to the shop on a morning, but this is all a part of the big studenty adventure, right?

The only vaguely entertaining thing I can think of that isn't to do with shit that's been going on in the world is my trip to Sainsbury's last night. There was a guy in front of me, the very 'Leeds Uni Hyde Park guy', with a big long stripey cardigan and shorts with a bobble hat, because bobble hats are fucking acceptable now it's September, and he was paying all in change.

"£4.37", says the cashier.

"What, on the dot?" asks Hyde Park guy.

And the cashier said yes, even though I thought that had been a pretty stupid question and wanted the cashier to say something snide like "No, dickhead, I rounded it up to the nearest seven".

But he didn't, so I guess that was only entertaining in my head.