Seventh

I am very tired today. LAst night we made the decision to go to bed much earlier than normal. We picked up dinner on the way home, to minimise time spent running around doing stuff, I took down/hung up clean/wet clothes, and we jumped into bed around 8.30.

At which point by brain kicked into high speed.

Two and a half hours later I was still lying there, staring at the celing in the dark with my girlfriend snoring next to me and the cat pawing at my nuts through the quilt in an effort to make me more suited to her comfort needs.

I'm sure we've all spent time thinking about what we would do differently if we had the chance to go back in time, live life over. I've done it from time to time, but have always been firm in the conviction that I wouldn't change a thing - the mistakes I've made in the past have shaped me just as much, some might say more, as my successes have. I have no doubt that my life now could be better, but it could also be a hell of a lot worse.

Try telling that to my subconscious mind last night though. For some reason it grabbed on to the fantasy of me being able to go back in time, kick the 'old me' out of my head and take his place, retaining my current memories and personality. Try as I might, I just couldn't shove this idea out of my head; images and scenarios came unbidden into my mind, on after another in a non-stop torrent that left me feeling more awake than I had been at work all day.
Eventually it became too much. The cat jumped off the bed or something, and my girlfriend partially woke up. I seized the chance to kiss her gently and tell her I couldn't sleep and had to get up, in case she heard me moving and got a fright.

I grabbed a glass of milk - been having nasty heartburn the past few days - and then sat down to play WoW with the sound off. By 1.30 the howling in my head had subsided somewhat, so I crawled back into bed. After another 30 minutes of ceiling investigation, I finally managed to drop off.

Of course, we both slept in this morning.

Yay.

Posted by snakemeister @ 7:43 am EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

Sixth

Feeling twitchy today. I've taken too many Pro Plus - a kind of caffeine/energy tablet - and my hands are trembling constantly now. I should be glad I don't have to paint for a living.

I am at work just now, and there are things that I should be doing. Indeed, things I should be working on, but my thoughts refuse to settle. One of my co-workers is out and about, possibly working on a task we should be doing together. I have a rough idea of where he is onsite, but I just can't bring myself to go find him.

The caffeine currently thundering through my system, and I do mean thundering - if I sit still and listen, I'm sure I can hear the sound of a thousand tiny caffeine-powered hooves rampaging along my veins and through my endocrine system - has skewed my decision making processes, thrown my balance out of whack, and left me feeling as if I am floating gently above my seat. I have missed this feeling more than I realised.

A fe short years ago, I was a ravening caffeine addict. Declarations of this kind are common amongst the IT workplace and the gaming circle, and most are little more than a habit, something that goes hand in hand with the job or hobby. My addicition was truly that.  I suckled on coffee the way an infant will suckle at his mother's breast. I swallowed the afore-mentioned Pro Plus with coffee regularly during the day, wildly exceeding the recommended dose. I had to have a coffee immediately before I went to sleep at night. I woke in the mornings with a pouding headache that I told myself was due to my lumpy matress and cheap pillows.

I lived my life at a bizarre fever-pitch of activity, the hours at work blurring one into another with a delightful bizzing noise, probably the sound of the synapses in my brain burning out, one after another.

I don't know how many of you have seen, or even heard of, the movie Trainspotting. There was a poster produced for the film that displayed the "Relinquishing Heroin" monologue. I picked a copy of said poster up, crossed out "Heroin" where it appeared in the text, and scribbled "Caffeine" in its place. I was delighted with what I thought was a firghtfully clever piece of post-modernist humour. I would sit, read and re-read it time and again, buzzing gently while I wondered if it was worth my while crushing up some Pro Plus and dissolving it in Coke.

Eventually, I had to do something. I was sleeping 3 hours a night if I was lucky, and my work was suffering badly. I was pulling sick days with a frightening regularity, and had been warned more than once about it by my manager. Of course, caffeine is not a particularly dangerous drug, nor is it particularly addictive. Giving it up wasn't too difficult fortunately.

A while after that, I discovered Ecstasy.  But that's another story.

Posted by snakemeister @ 6:34 am EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

Fifth

Dear God its hot just now. 

For all of you not in the UK - and I believe thats most of you - we are currently suffering under a heat wave.  On the global scale of things, I am well aware that there are places which face worse conditions on a regular basis, but these things need to be looked at relatively.
Most people seem to be taking it in their stride, basking in the sun when they get the chance, but still having the de-rigueur grumble about the shambolic state of our public (and private) transport infrastructure.  I however am doing neither. 

Im fortunate that my girlfriend and I drive to and from work, so do not have to rely on buses or (shudder) trains.  Also, I have never been a sun-worshipper - I am not suited to it.  I am tall, fair-haired and sport more than my fair share of freckles.  I dont tan; I just go red or burn for a few days, and then return to my usual Snow White tan.  I am genetically pre-disposed to a career in IT, and I thank my Gods each day that I have found my way into said career.

Melanin levels notwithstanding, I do not flourish in the heat.  I get grumpy, I sweat far more than anyone else around me, and my thoughts concurrently gain the consistency of sludge.  This causes me to become even grumpier.

Im something of an amateur writer you see.  Ive scribbled and twiddled at short stories, essays, haiku and RPG scenarios on and off for as long as I can remember.  Despite repeated urgings, I havent tried to have anything published, other than a few stories online.  Ive been trying to take steps recently to change this.
The Write an Article for 2O2P competition got me fired up again, which was odd given that Id never written anything like that before.  I have since tried to maintain the momentum I built up writing said article.  I had a particularly lucid dream toward the end of last week after a run through the Blackrock Depths dungeon in WoW - when I woke up the next morning I immediately started converting it into a brief fan-fiction piece. 
That was just before the heat wave really kicked in here.  With my thoughts settled comfortably into the previously-mentioned sludge like state, I have since been unable to work on anything.  This blog alone has taken a day and a half to even start writing, and has been full of mistypes and spelling mistakes galore.  I think Im partly to blame for this state of affairs though, my florid writing style doesnt lend itself to hot, slow days in the office where the arse of my trousers is slowly melting into the chair.

Oh yes, thats the other thing thats wrong.  Work is really quiet just now, so the days are sloooooow.

Posted by snakemeister @ 11:08 am EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

Fourth

Before anyone asks, I will NOT be going to see Superman this weekend - its opening today in the UK, you see.

To clarify - I am a huge fan of the original Superman movie.  I think Christopher Reeve was a criminally under-rated actor, and over-looked talent.  To anyone who brings up the age old question of how no-one notices that Superman and Clark Kent look exactly the same, I point them in the direction of the movie.  Quite simply, Christopher Reeve makes them two completely different people; from the way they talk, they way they act, even the way they carry themselves.  The movie has been around so long that its entirely too easy to forget just how good it actually is.  I implore everyone to go out and buy it at the next chance they have, and who cares if the clerk thinks youre just jumping on the bandwagon.  Spotty little gimp probably doesnt even know who Christopher Reeve was.

The other reason I wont be seeing the movie is that Ive never been a big fan of Superman.  This might seem strange, given the previous paragraph, and Ive struggled to reconcile the two in the past.  I can count on one hand the number of Superman graphic novels/trade paperbacks that Ive read, and most of those I picked up in the library.  Actual issues of Superman comics I have read will not be any higher number, trust me. 
Probably the main reason for this is money.  Growing up, we never had a lot of money (cue the violins please) so it was rare that I was able to indulge in comics.  Even if I did, the penetration of US comic books in the UK high street still had a long way to go, so issues of Superman were few and far between still. No doubt they were out there, and I could have found them had I spent a modicum of time looking in Glasgow or Edinburgh, but I didnt.  So there.
At some later date, I intend to look a bit deeper into the Superman mythos - something which has been done to death elsewhere, but still, Ill be doing it anyway.  In short though, I think theres something too American  Supes for him to really grow on me.

And no, that doesnt mean Im anti-US or an Americanophobe. (I like the sound of that, regardless of its grammatical accuracy)

So, to recap, I will not be seeing Superman Returns this weekend.  Nor, I suspect, will I be doing much of anything else that involves leaving the house over the weekend, as my girlfriend somehow managed to wrench/tear/pull a muscle in her neck/shoulder/back (Im still hazy on the details) in bed on Wednesday night (no sniggering at the back please) so she is essentially incapacitated, and as she has the only driving licence between the pair of us, our weekend adventures will be rather curtailed I think.

On the bright side, Ive just finished upgrading her PC with a new graphics card and extra RAM so that she can run WoW without it grinding to a halt whenever she takes a Bat anywhere, or enters the Undercity.  Hopefully her shoulder can handle the strain of her mad ganking skillz.

Posted by snakemeister @ 11:04 am EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

Third

I had a wisdom tooth pulled this morning.

Ouch.

Ive always been lucky and had pretty good teeth, despite having a patchy record when it comes to dentist visits. This has meant that when I do go to the dentist, its normally because something is wrong, and it hurts. The time previous to this, I was with my old dentist. I had barely sat down and started to explain how my gum was hurting when he joyously excalimed that I had to get a wisdom tooth removed because my mouth was "Getting a wee bit crowded back there".

Crunch. Ouch.

On that occasion I went straight back to work, never having had a wisdom tooth pulled. I was at my desk all of five minutes when I started slurring my words and dribbling blood all over the keyboard. My manager immediately sent me home, despite my protestations of fitness. It was only later that I realised I was being sent home as much for the sake of my co-workers as for my own health.

Anyway, I now find myself at something of a loose end. I have the house to myself (apart from the cat, but shes easy to please) and a stack of games to play, yet Im unhappy - and its nothing to do with the throbbing pain in my upper right jaw. I wonder what other gamers feel like in a similar situation - I have a unexpected few hours free of distraction in which I can enjoy playing games with no guilt whatsoever, but I cant decide what to do. I know that theres only a small window of time left to me, so do I skim through the games available and spend 30/45 minutes on each, or do I pick one and spend a few solid hours with that, and hope that I get some more time at a later date to do more catch-up?
Im very tempted to fire up FFX and spend a few hours getting back into it. I was writing about FFX a few days ago and I pulled out the strategy guide for it - battered and scribbled and re-scribbled all over - to check something. Since then, it has sat on the living room floor, drawing my eye when Im bored. During adverts I pick it up and leaf through it, reading sections at random. Ive got the bug, the itch. Ive not played FFX in about a year, although I did finish FFX-2 about 6 months ago. had it been any other type of game, I would probably have managed to come to an agreement with my girlfriend and be able to spend some time working through it again. Not an FF game though. She hates them with a passion, so thats out.

I have a horrible feeling Ill end up playing WoW for an hour or so, then just watch a video. Some day off.

Maybe Ill get lucky and my gum will get infected and I have to take a week off. I think I could deal with stomach-cramping nausea for a free week of game-time.

Posted by snakemeister @ 9:12 am EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments