Hello folks, I should explain. The past few weeks our internet connection has been utterly crippled, meaning almost any attempt to do anything more complicated than stare longingly at Google was ultimately doomed to failure. However, yesterday the nice man from Virgin came along and hooked us up to a shiny new fibreoptic connection, so The Nerdcave is currently wired for speed.
So things have been pretty much unremarkable for the most part. I know I haven't done one of those 'what is happening in your life' blogs for fucking ever. this is because, honestly, I'm kind of bored of writing them. I go to start and my eyes just start to slide off the page, I open another tab and load up another site 'just for a few minuts' and then it's 2 hours later and I'm still no closer. My life's been pretty much ok. Christmas was good, New Years was a nice, wasted mess, my birthday was AMAZING. Yesterday I got to go to a screening of The Room complete with Live intro and Q&A with Tommy Wiseau and Greg Sestero and it was a grand old time.
For those unfamiliar with it, The Room is a film legendary in it's awfulness. As such, it's built up a cult following, and the Prince Charles cinema in Soho shows it something like once a month. This was the third time I'd been and was probably my favourite yet. The atmosphere at a screening like this is raucous. People are constantly shouting wisecracks and jokes at the screen, there are traditions and running jokes for everyone to join in on. We took over 500 spoons between us (you have to throw spoons at the screen every time you see a picture of a spoon) and it wasn't enough. Afterwards we went outside and watched Greg and Tommy throwing a football around wondering why exactly we were standing in the freezing cold in Soho at 9pm on a saturday watching two grown men throwing a ball to each other.
Other than that, work's been ok. I've started becoming surprisingly grown-up and motivated about my work lately. I've really been throwing myself into the new media, technologys, development side of things and getting myself kind of noticed by the head of service in the process. He's asked me to sit in on a conference call with some US-based software vendors on Tuesday and after a meeting on friday, I dragged him to one side to bother him about some stuff and he told me that he intended for me to be a big part of any new technology developments in the library service, which is nice. I'm starting to wonder if I'm actually starting to find my forte somewhere. It's a weird feeling. At New Years I got incredibly mashed and weirded myself out by having some very serious conversations about the future of libraries.
Well I can tell I haven't done this in a while, as this blog is a mess, so I'll just leave it here on an open question, me and TheQuestion were shooting the shit earlier about this whole sub-genre of 'Man with weird personal quirks and specialised skill helps proper police solve crimes' police procedurals. You've got mathematicians (numb3rs), lying experts (Lie To Me), crime novelists (Castle), psychics (The Mentalist), forger (White Collar), Neuroscientist (Perception) and God knows how many others. If you had to create one yourself, what would it be? Me and Adam came up with The Shit-Stirrer: reknowned fecal matter expert Robert Log is the head of his field until mysterious serial killer 'The Shoveller' drowns his wife and daughter in feces. After this he has a nervous breakdown and becomes pathologically obsessed with cleanliness, unable to even look at pictures of his once-beloved turds, until the resurfacing of The Shoveller' forces him to face his demons and work with the FBI as a consultant on a string of poo-related crimes.
First of all, do not be alarmed. This is something I do periodically to clear out the applications list and, paradoxically, try to make it easier for people to get in. The site's quietening down a bit in recent months and the applications list is getting so large and unwieldy that it's difficult for people to be vouched in. By clearing the applications list, I can ensure that only the people who are active on the site and want to get in are on the list, as well as making it easier to vouch people in.
So, if you've just had your application denied, apply again if you really want to get in
Also, if you want to get in, here's some advice
- Keep a relatively up-to-date blog
- Join groups that aren't sex groups and reflect your interest
- Post in these groups and on other people's blogs, talk to people, say hi
You see today is the anniversary of The People's Revolution of the Glorious 25th of May. For some of you, that might immediately set off a few buzzing lights in your head. For the rest of you, it's a Terry Pratchett thing.
I can still remember the exact point and circumstances in which I received my first Terry Pratchett book. I was 11 and I had just left my primary school a year early as my parents had decided to move down to a nicer area in South London. Mainly for me and my brother so we could have a better education as the local prospects were, quite frankly, fucking dire. I had just finished my last day at my warm, familiar primary school where all the teachers knew who I was and liked me and it was small enough for you to conceivably know everyone there and I was moving to this great big imposing scary place where there was more than one class per year. My word! Imagine that! So I've walked out of school for the last time and I get into my dad's car (a Nissan Prarie we called Bessie, after the orange VW van my parents used to own when we were much younger that I barely just recall). I'm sat in the backseat waiting for my little brother to come out, legs kicking back and forth against the seat, and my mum passes me back a book that she's bought for me. No special reason, just because. She was the kind of mum who did that because she wanted to encourage you to read. It was The Colour of Magic, I had never heard of it before and I have no idea why my mum picked it. I remember that old Josh Kirby cover looking weird. Everyone looked so strangely lumpy and unsettling.
I didn't read it, I devoured it. I don't recall ever reading a book so (relatively for the other books I was reading) dense so voraciously. Even though now I don't even think that much of the book these days (early Discworld, in my opinion, doesn't hold a candle to the later stuff) it was a world of such strange wonder and irreverance. It was simultaneously affably dismissive of the prosaic 'fantasy' to be found elsewhere whilst being capable of incredible flights of imagination, with one portion of the book being set on an upside-down mountain set on a flat, disc-shaped world borne through space on the backs of 4 enormous elephants standing on the shell of an even more improbably enormous turtle. And it was all so incredibly, so utterly, so very English.
My mum finished the book right after me. I still wonder if she didn't actually buy it for herself and then assuaged her guilt by getting me to read it. And then she bought the next one. And the next. And the next. We carried on like that for years. Buying them as soon as the paperback came out, me reading it, then her, then asking what we each thought of this one, and was it as good as the last? At some point (I think it was around Lords and Ladies) we got too impatient to wait for the paperbacks anymore and before you knew it, we were buying them the very day they were released.
It was about the same time that my mum started remarking how very 'Pratchett' my sense of humour was and I started to realise how much I'd shaped myself around the books. There was something in them that sang to me. Not the plots or the characters or the puns or the gentle playing with language, but something underneath that. A pure, throbbing sense of humanity. For all it's sense of slightly exhausted cynicism, there was always that little glittering sparkle of faith and love for humanity underneath. It's probably for this reason that my favourite character is Sam Vimes, of the City Watch books. So much of his character revolves around the fact that he sees some of the very worst of humanity and he knows how incredibly easy it would be to cast aside all the restraints humanity places on itself and submit to pure Id, but also how very important it is that we don't. Pratchett writes about how vital it is that we all show some decency to each other, to put aside simple hate, whilst acknowledging just how easy and tempting it is to rail and scream and lash out at the world. It's something that I feel like I get.
Plus there's the obvious one. The Librarian. I'm not going to say he's the reason I started working in a library, but he certainly gave the whole affair a certain cachet. It was a lot easier working at a library knowing that some people out there saw a library, not as a dusty building full of books, but a mysterious portal to a strange world of dangerous knowledge. It imparted a somewhat grand sense of romanticism to the whole affair. and the knowledge that a whole bunch of people out there started wearing badges saying 'Librarians Rule Ook' fair warmed the cockles.
When I found out that Terry Pratchett had been diagnosed with Alzheimers it felt like being kicked in the gut. It was this horrible and sudden knowledge that some day this lifelong relationship, carried out anonymously and long-distance via a purchase at Waterstone's every 18 months or so, was someday going to end. It was like finding out about death all over again. And at the same time I felt so guilty. I don't know the man, why should I feel so bad?
But in a way, I feel like I do. I have an enormous sense of affection to him. Maybe I'm projecting what I see in the books onto him, but he feels like some of the best humanity has to offer. Quietly humble and decent. Softly-spoken but firm of mind. For God's sakes, when he was knighted he made himself a sword of meteoric iron. How damn cool is that? I can't help but feel that soon I'm going to find out that he's passed on, or he'll finally win his battle to one day legally end his own life with dignity, and the world is going to be a poorer place. But either way, he still leaves behind a legacy of around 40 books, with God knows how many spin-offs and side projects and all the rest. Books that I can almost chart my life by, a lifeline reaching back through my own adolescence.
I just wish it didn't have to end.
But therein lies the embuggerance.
In slightly more entertaining news, work's been a bit mental recently. As you can imagine, working in a library at half-term is a bit of a nightmare, especially when you're on a council estate where parenting skills can be slightly thin on the ground. Still, it's not been so bad, we've arranged loads of stuff for the kids, we've had music workshops and drama workshops and had them running around pretending to be in the Second World War and pretending to be Fantastic Mr Fox and making healthy food and all of that jazz, but they've still been pains in the neck a lot of the time. A couple of them in particular swing wildly between being adorable and making me want to strangle them. They're obivously bored as they keep following us round and asking us for jobs to do. They're also particularly enamoured of my manager, Maddy and my colleague, Courtney. One of them told me the other day 'We're the little babies, and there's big brother Courtney, mummy Maddy and grandad Ben. And Ben and Maddy are brother and sister.' No, I don't know how that works either.
Also, they drew pictures of me:
EDIT: I'm fucking putting it in here so I can't pussy out. In two weeks time I WILL have scripted the first issue of the comic book I've been toying with for ages now. There's other stuff as well, but that's the one I'm going to mention for now.
* I'm currently on holiday. This is awesome and much needed. In a minute Secretary and I are going to pop out to see an exhibit about the history of mind-altering drugs. Should be interesting. Once she's done getting ready, anyway.
* If it can possibly be avoided, Do your very best to avoid working in a public-facing job in a high-poverty area, particularly public sector. It finds a new way to break your heart every day. The job was starting to grind me down a bit, hence the holiday. I feel refreshed now, however, and less gloomy than I have the past couple of weeks. This is good.
* My library won an award! Granted, it's just one of the Council's annual Excellence awards, but I'm still chuffed as my team worked their nuts off over the past year and a bit with the opening of the new library and I honestly believe we provide one of the best services in the borough. I get to go to an awards ceremony at the Croydon Hilton. I keep feeling like I should look up 'Croydon Hilton' at Urban Dictionary.
*However, I am kind of facing redundancy, have to reapply for my job etc etc blah blah blah. I'm sure I'll end up with a job, but the library service will be a pretty crap place to work next financial year. Currently looking at getting out with an eye towards IT training.
* I've avoided morbidity about my oncoming 30th by turning it into the mother of all parties. This is incredibly self-indulgent and perhaps a little egotistical of me but still, I'm kind of looking forwards to it now.
Other than that, I've spent the past couple of days falling in love with music all over again. Anyone who knows me knows I've always had a slightly idealised romance with music. I'm always chasing after that next big aural revelation, the emotional highs and lows, something to make me move like a crazy person in my chair at 2am. Lately I've let it stagnate. I haven't discovered anything new in an age and I'd just been listening to the same things over and over. This would not do. So the past couple of nights I've been scouring the Interwebs and spending far too much at the Amazon mp3 store and been much the happier for it.
I love Against Me! I've always been grateful to ex-member munch for introducing me to them. Some people say their last two albums have been a sell-out, I say they're big stupid poopyheads. I love the songs where they put down the politics for a moment and sing about a moment in their lives that clearly cuts deep. The lyrics are a little clumsy on this one but there's so much emotion it carries the song over you like a wave. This and Thrash Unreal from the last album are probably my two favourite tracks.
A new band I discovered. No real great revelations with their sound, I always associate bands like this with Chicago, probably due to The Lawrence Arms and Alkaline Trio to a degree.
TV On the Radio are a bit hit and miss for me. Some of their songs leave me completly cold, but when they hit, my God. This song has such an underlying air of menace and tension but still feeling incredibly sexy at the same time
WHAT?! NEW LAWRENCE ARMS EP HOLY FUCK HOLY FUCK HOLY FUCK GIMMEGIMMEGIMME
This one's for you Fuzzywizzle, alt-country buddy. Another new discovery. Raw, lyrical flair with a voice reeking of smoke and whiskey. Yes please.
I heart OK Go so much, I can't believe it took so long to actually buy their music. Each and every one of their music videos is like instant happy. this one is stunning and gorgeous and never fails to make me smile.
There's more, but I'll leave it there for now. Got to hold SOME things back, after all. Be happy.
