Hunger & Sickness

Up until a friend mentioned it to me recently, I’d never even heard of 'The Hunger Games’ books, or the movie. In fact, it wasn’t until he had mentioned it that I noticed the film was being advertised everywhere. The media was completely saturated by hype over this film. So, as usual, I figured I would ignore it and let the hysteria subside before I even bothered to find out what it was all about.


But that was before I got sick. For the last four days, I’ve been curled up in bed with the worst cold I can remember having in a very long time. On the second day of lying in bed feeling sorry for myself, it was my birthday. My 30th birthday, actually, but let’s not get into that, because I’m still very much in denial of my age. My sister in law gave me three bookss a birthday gift – the ‘Hunger Games’ trilogy. She told me that she’d just read all three of them in the space of a week, and that they were great and I absolutely had to read them.


Now, I’m not very good at having time off work. I find it hard to relax, because I feel like I’m shirking responsibility. So I figured reading one of the books would help distract me from that, even if I wasn't entirely motivated to get into them.

So I set myself up on the couch under a comfy blanket, and started reading.


Now, I know that when a book gets hyped the way this one has, you often expect it to be kind of predictable and mass market gratifying. And maybe that’s what it is. Maybe it was the sickness that made me emotional and moved me more than I would have otherwise been moved; but I have to tell you – any book that can make me cry only two chapters in has got something going for it. Sickness or not. I could not put it down. Over the course of that day, I read everything except the last chapter - and I only stopped there because I had a dinner obligation that I couldn't get out of (sick or otherwise). I spent the entire dinner thinking about the book, and hanging to get home to finish it off.

I finished it at about 10pm last night, and honestly, I have to say that thinking about that book kept me awake for hours. I was so, so tempted to get up and start on the next one. An now, i'm here at work, and while I have a mountain of work to catch up on, I kind of wish I had brought the book with me so that I could get started on it while no one is looking.

So I guess you could say that sometimes (and only sometimes) the hype around these things is probably justified.

To all the men out there

Never, ever underestimate the value of putting the toilet seat down.
I work in a building full of men, and constantly having to put the toilet seat down drives me crazy. it does, however, make me truly appreciate that I married a man who puts it down after use every single time.

So for all you know, putting the toilet seat down could be the difference between a good relationship and a great one.

Just don't underestimate the importance of this small task. That's all i'm saying.

Sleepless Monday

Right now I’m functioning on a total of around one and a half hours of sleep. After a weekend of fitful and restless slumber, it’s left me a lot more weary than I would normally feel on a Monday.

I feel a little like I do when I’m slightly drunk, only not in a fun way. My brain is having trouble forming thoughts as succinctly as it would were I well rested, and I’m experiencing that same odd behaviour as I get when intoxicated which means that all of the simple words have eluded me, and I can only speak to people as though I were first running my thoughts through a thesaurus. A limited and poorly edited thesaurus, that is. But missing is the buzz of good humour and the warm, lovey feeling that envelopes me when alcohol is to blame.

The other thing I’ve noticed is that I’m feeling things more intensely, the way you do when you’re drunk. The trifling little day-to-day nuisances that I usually ignore are grating on me; I’ve laughed a lot harder at any jokes I’ve heard that was really warranted; and for some inexplicable reason, hearing about a friend’s weekend has made me completely and utterly melancholy.

As fate would have it, of course, there is no chance of getting to bed early tonight as the recent resignation of a co-worker has left me with so much work to do that overtime is inevitable.

I see in my future a large quantity of overdue work projects, copious amounts of coffee (and other caffeinated beverages) and ultimately, an imprint of a keyboard on my forehead.

A Bit of Perspective

It really puts your own life into perspective when you find that your co-worker is quitting because right after he was left jobless by a company that went into administration, his father died, and the stepmother he’s been living with is selling the house, so he’s soon to be homeless and he wants to go and stay with his lesbian mother and her long-time lover in Wales because he’s getting divorced, and his soon to be ex-wife has found out about his girlfriend (whose soon to be ex-husband wants to kill him because he blames him for the break-up of their marriage) and things have turned nasty, and now he really needs some time away from everything.

It makes my own problems seem kind of trivial. It’s a good bit of perspective for a Friday.

It doesn’t, however, make me feel any less annoyed about the fact that his quitting has just increased my workload. So I guess when people tell you ‘what you need is a bit of perspective’, you can just tell them to get stuffed. And that is much better advice for a Friday.

Recommendations for a successful start to the week

•  Don’t bring a milk drink to work, then drink it ‘shortly after arriving’, only to realise once you’re done that it’s actually been sitting on your desk for 3 and a half hours.
   
• Don’t follow this milk drink with a spicy Sri-Lankan curry for lunch.
   
• No matter how tight your budget may be, never consider single ply toilet paper a valuable money saving idea.

You want a what now?

I’ve posted before about the ridiculous things that one finds themselves typing daily when you deal with playground equipment.; Mis-spelling things to make them sound more ‘kiddy’, my dyslexic fingers turning regular words like ‘sun’ into ‘sin’ – conversations with customers about squeezing balls (of the kind that you put in a ball pit, that is).


But there is another thing that I find myself typing numerous times per day that you would never expect someone at a playground company to be typing. Something that seems to be more the kind of thing an employee at an erotic publisher would type.

‘Cock’.

I type it at least 20 times a day. Hundreds of times each week. Cock, cock, cock. And why? Why on earth would someone dealing with playgrounds be typing ‘cock’ all the time?

Streamlining.

When designing playgrounds, often you want to put in a ‘cockpit’. And when you’re doing this multiple times a day, typing the word ‘cockpit’ becomes time consuming. So you streamline. You chop the end off of the word, until you find yourself typing the word ‘cock’ more frequently than an a cybersex junkie.

I often thing that if ever a phone tap was placed on my work phone, an unwitting listener might easily think they’d tapped into a phone sex line, what with all the ‘cock’, conversations about ‘balls’ and today’s lengthy discussion with a customer about fixing his 'knob'.

Leaky Sponge

People say that children's brains are like a sponge, soaking up information anywhere they can find it. If that’s really the case, then I feel sure that at some point early on, someone picked up my information sponge and wrung it out a little.

Often, very basic information about the world and how it works seems to have trickled its way out of my brain and been left somewhere in a puddle of abandoned information. And I’m not just talking about the kind of information you never use, but also very basic things that you learn at primary (elementary) school. Things like basic multiplication tables and long division; why there are seasons and how electricity works. Want to know what 8 x 8 is? Don’t ask me! 245 minus 73? Hand me a calculator then!

It’s a very strange thing to find that you’re lacking in basic skills like these, especially if you’re not a stupid person. I may not be able to do long division, but I can design a playground that meets four different kinds of legal standards, fits into a small space and know exactly how much it will cost all in the space of about 20 minutes. I can read an entire novel in less than a day. I can use just about any computer program you put in front of me, and have it mastered within an hour. So why on earth do I have to think so hard about things I should have learnt when I was five?

Perhaps it's just that since I've been a nerd from the day I was born, I’ve come to rely too much on digital devices to provide these kinds of answers for me. Calculators and computers have made that part of my brain that deals with basic maths obsolete. My brain has decided to expunge all the information that it didn’t really need to hold on to, and as a result all that is left is a mind that has a firm grasp on vocabulary and technology, and little else. It would explain all those other blank areas in my mind where things like ‘history’ and ‘geography’ subjects should reside.


Is it too late to reverse this kind of knowledge loss? Can I bring it all back? And is 30 too old to be learning things that could be taught to me by my eight year old niece?

When you feel low

When I'm feeling down, and it feels like there is nothing that can cheer me up, there is one place I can turn to. One thing that never fails to make me smile, no matter how often I see it. And though you might expect it, it's not something deep and meaningful. It's not something that puts my life into perspective. It's a movie. A cheesy movie. It's Bridget Jones's Diary.

Judge me if you will, but hear me out; it's not the romance story that does it for me (though that's nice too). It's not the mischievous sexiness of Hugh grant, nor the inexplicable attraction of Colin Firth. It's not the image of an awkward, relatable woman finding love. No - it's the fight scene.
It's the greatest fight scene of any movie ever made. It's ridiculous, it's crazy, and it's so real that it makes me laugh out loud no matter how low i'm feeling.

When life is feeling like a bad drama movie, the only thing to cure it is romantic comedy. You can switch off your brain and let the images of two very proper English men trying to have a fist fight pull you out of your slump.It works for me every single time.

So before you judge me - try it. When you feel like crap and nothing appeals to you, watch the movie. I guarantee it won't fail to make you smile, even if only a little.

Hell Pants

Many moons ago, deep in the fiery pits of Hell, a disgruntled fashion designer plotted his revenge upon a world that lacked appreciation for his vision. Perhaps his time in Hell was a result of some dispute with a woman. Perhaps she was cellulite-ey, with thighs like oak trunks and an arse like a balloon full of cottage cheese. Perhaps, as he burned for his sins, he came up with the perfect revenge upon this woman. A revenge so sweet that not only would its malevolence affect this one woman, but all women the world over.

That Hell-dweller schemed and plotted, and with the consent of a gleeful Devil, he gave the world leggings.

But leggings alone were not enough! He needed to do more! So he foisted upon an unsuspecting world the desire for all women to wear leggings, regardless of her body dimensions and fitness levels. The shinier the better! And to cap it all off, he instilled the desire for these women to wear those leggings not below skirts or under dresses; but as pants.

And thus, the world became a little bit worse, a little more grotesque, as people like me and you were forced to be privy to this affront to our eyeballs.


And so it will go, until the day that Hell freezes over and the spell that has been cast upon the Earth is broken - and in a shattering moment of clarity, millions of women look down to realise that while they thought they were looking good, they were in fact sharing with the world the most intimate details of their bodies by essentially going pant-less.

That day cannot come soon enough.

Breaking the Stereotype

Contrary to the age old stereotype of the evil mother-in-law and her hatred for her new daughter-in-law (and vice-versa), i'm lucky enough to have a really fantastic relationship with my Mother-in-law.
I think that it may have something to do with me being the same age as her daughter, but being slightly distanced from the family because of that lack of childhood years spent together that means we relate well to each other. We can talk; often about things she wouldn't talk to her kids about.


Today, we all gathered at her house to pack up all her belongings, clean everything from top to bottom, and move her and her new husband into a house they recently purchased together. We rose early to get everything done, and slogged our guts out to finish packing boxes and load the mixture of trucks, vans and trailers we had collected to facilitate the move.

By 2pm, all of their worldly possessions were packed and mobile, ready to leave their past and head to their new home. Settlement on the new house was scheduled to happen at 2pm, so we were expecting a call at about 10 past to let us know that we could move everything in to the new place. At 2:10 on the dot, the phone rang. As my mother-in-law took the call, her happy grin slowly became a frown, and shortly after, she dissolved into tears. Somewhere along the line, something had gone wrong. The solicitors had the wrong paperwork, and the settlement couldn't go ahead.

I couldn't help but be upset myself as she crumpled into tears on my shoulder. She's a tiny little thing, small and petite, with not a scrap of fat on her, so as i hugged her, i was put in mind of hugging a tiny little sparrow. She felt fragile to me, and it made me glad that i was there for her - because if I were her own daughter, that fragility would be hard to bear. Parents are supposed to be the strong ones, and I think even as we get older, we find it hard to come to terms with the idea that our parents aren't infallible.

So tonight, my Mother-in-Law and Step-Father-In-Law are sleeping at my place. All their belongings are sitting outside my house in trucks and cars. And I know it could be a few days until they get everything settled - but that's okay with me, because while it may not be the expected reaction, i'm really very glad to have my Mother-in-Law in my life, and to share my home with her when she's trying to sort out her own.