Disordered Thoughts and Curmudgeonly Ramblings
I had a really rough week mental health wise – feeling anxious, not sleeping well, all tired and stressed from not sleeping well, the works. I decided to have an early night on Thursday and was prepping the pills I take before bed (yes, I have reached that age) when I noticed that the paracetamol tablets I’d been taking weren’t just paracetamol…
They were paracetamol plus caffeine.
*sigh*
The old depression is absolutely killing me at the moment. I’m dragging myself into work, but spend a lot of the day just dully staring at the screen trying to remember what I’m meant to be doing. Not good, not good at all.
In any case, I have some complaints…
Westpac – it’s pretty impressive that you were able to find, let alone hire Bonnie Tyler for your latest ad, but seriously, what kind of maniac would play Total Eclipse of the Heart at a wedding? It’s a song about a relationship crashing and burning! You might as well play Deutschland Ă¼ber Alles at a Bar Mitzvah!
Treechange – I hate that word. I don’t know why I hate it, I just do. With a passion. If you ask me, Sigrid Thornton has a lot to answer for.
All over the news this morning is an artist in Queensland who’s using roadkill and maggots to make paintings. Any fool who thinks this is newsworthy has obviously never hung out with artists.
The Twelfth of the Twelfth Twenty-Twelve – Oh woop-de-do. Some numbers have lined up. Let’s all strip naked in the street and party. If we used base 8 or something this would be a day like any other.
That’s it. Maybe some caffeine will cheer me up.
Having the kind of anxiety and depression riddled day where simply being conscious hurts.
There’s only one solution. The Pixies.
There. That’s a bit better.
I’ve been feeling so run down this last week that I’ve pretty much been neglecting everything – both online and offline. I didn’t even make it to the local dawn service yesterday – something I normally never miss – because I couldn’t drag myself out of bed.
On the subject of ANZAC Day, this photo of mine has had over 9,000 hits today, all of them coming from various utility pages on Flickr. I guess they must have put some kind of gallery up, but damned if I can find it.
Hmmm, over 9,000?
Sorry đŸ™‚
The old anxiety/depression is hitting me hard this week. Mostly because I’ve got a number of really important jobs to get done at work and all of them are taking far longer than they should. It’s a struggle to get out of bed each morning because I’d much rather hide under the covers and call in sick. But hey, what can you do?
On another subject, I’m no great fan of this…
But can’t get enough of this…
I’m clearly insane!
Apathy is sad.
I have a list of things to do as long as my arm, but can’t seem to get motivated to do any of them.
I just sit around surfing the net and watching TV.
I think it’s some kind of psychological hangover from my failed holiday – the brutal come down from all excitement and anticipation, combined with anxiety about the amount of money I’ve lost.
I hope I’ll snap out of it soon, but in the meantime you’ll all have to forgive me for being a dull, inactive, inattentive bastard.
Blagh.
Been feeling totally dull, blah and pointless of late. In an attempt to do something approaching worthwhile I spent much of yesterday uploading the photos from my 2009 trip to the UK for Ali and Mat’s wedding to my Flickr account – which I’ve been meaning to do since the day I got back over two years ago.
The vast majority have no titles, descriptions or geotags – but I’ll work on it over the next few weeks. There’s also one day’s worth of wandering around Leicester left to go up, including my exciting and action packed investigation of the Medieval Packhorse Bridge!*
(*Not guaranteed to be exciting or action packed)
Those should go up this afternoon. In any case if you have an abiding interest in amateur photographs of unidentified English buildings, fields and street signs, please consider my photostream!
Back to work…
What would we do baby, without us?
In an attempt to fill up the vast, rolling plains of airtime that have recently opened up with the onslaught of newly launched digital channels, the various TV networks have been pulling anything they can grab out of their archives, dusting it off, and throwing it on air willy nilly. As a result shows that haven’t seen the light of day in decades are now turning up randomly all over the TV schedule, often in back-to-back double episodes or in odd timeslots such as 5:00pm Monday to Wednesday, followed by 12:20pm Thursday, then 6:30am Saturday for the early risers. It’s historic TV madness!
One of these shows that has been dragged kicking and screaming off the shelf is that old standby Family Ties, the show that launched Michael J. Fox to stard0m and ensured that we’d never get to see Eric Stoltz drive a Delorean. Ah, the memories! The maddeningly catchy sha-la-la-la theme song! The curiously craggy face of Michael Gross! Ubu the dog with his frisbee! Good times…
But the thing that struck me most forcibly during a recent viewing was a scene that showed just how right L.P.Hartley was with his lunatic ramblings about shadowy umbrellas, hooded eyes and the past as a foreign country where they do things differently (and how!).
So, the titular family are sitting around in the kitchen when Alex (played by Marty McFly) gets a phone call from a girl. From the half of the conversation we hear it’s clear that this girl has managed to obtain tickets for some event. Once off the phone one of the parents (honestly I forget who, they’re pretty interchangeable) asks if said tickets are for Barry Manilow.
A joke of course – clueless parents totally out of touch with the music young people are into, assuming that Barry Manilow is somehow cool enough that their son would be clamouring for tickets. But no. No canned laughter rings out. The Manilow comment is passed over without comment, the actual joke is that the tickets Alex is so excited about are to a lecture by a famous economist.
The only logical conclusion is that in the early 80’s cool kids went to Barry Manilow concerts! Or at the very least TV scriptwriters thought that cool kids went to Barry Manilow concerts. Madness!!
Ancient TV aside, the old black dog has been stalking me quite efficiently recently, to the point that I’d very much like to spend my days curled up in a fetal position, weeping quietly under my bedsheets. Unfortunately it’s been too hot for that, so I’ve had to pull myself together and come into work instead. I’ve been doing my best to deal with it by subverting my angst into fantasies of extreme violence against everyone who has ever crossed me. This is startlingly effective but hardly qualifies as a long term treatment plan. I did manage to get my bike fixed however so I’ll try some needlessly aggressive bike riding instead and see how it goes.
That’s all for now folks!
Monday I got sedation on my mind
Monday morning. My mood can best be expressed as follows…
uuuuuuurrrrrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhuuuuuuuuurrrrrrr
Despite taking Friday afternoon off, and doing nothing all weekend I feel like I want to crawl back into bed and sleep for several years. Obviously the depression flaring up again. Bah.
Ryan Pequin – Three Word Phrase