Keeping up Appearances

Half-finished ideas for long protracted rants float lazily across the re-awakening frontal lobes of this poor sod, a blogger of advancing years and advancing paranoia about the world into which I stumble. Yes, I'm typing again. You see, I'd hoped this whole 'banks' thing would blow over by the time I left university, but it looks like the rich are still getting richer, and the poor are - would you believe it - getting poorer. You, of course, already knew this. So for today, let's just write this of as me trying to get back into the swing of things after allowing myself time off from writing for good behaviour.

Still Alive

So I'm pretty lazy. I mean, right now there are many things to comment on that are of personal interest to me, and by extension the people who feign interest in what I have to say. There's the whole News International phone hacking collapse, and the UK teetering on the brink of a known industrial lobbyist taking over the two main lodestones of British political sway, namely the tabloids and Sky TV. There's the ongoing patent war between Apple and everyone, in which they just lost their first major battle and now face losing their US (and probably UK) market share. Which I find hilarious because I work in IT and see on a daily basis how often Macs don't 'just work.' But really, it just seems to be a case at the moment of not having enough time at the moment to push my agenda on the world. Maybe this is why News International have been able to get so far in my absence, or maybe it's mid-day and I need to take the special pills that stop me thinking I'm more powerful than Rupert Murdoch (nobody is more powerful than Rupert Murdoch). I moved house you see. I know, tremendously inconvenient but then along with graduation comes the gradual bleeding of real life once more into my cozy existence, and suddenly I no longer have periods where I SHOULD be working but aren't, I just have moments when I'm either working or slipping further into David Cameron's pocket. So for the blog, this translates into me probably not updating much for the next ten days. There again, I might update more often, I just don't know. This is just to warn you that there will be gaps ahead.

God and Dinosaurs

Since i'm lazy i'm going to post a good deconstruction I saw on failbook and promise to post my next rant in a few days:
Source: http://failbook.failblog.org/2011/06/10/funny-facebook-fails-thats-probably-why/

We are all Tenths of a Percentage

Beginning with the recap on last post's guinea pig panic (which incidentally is a name I am copywrighting as a possible computer game / theme park ride / cartoon franchise), we have researched and listened to sample noises, and things seem to be turning out OK. A little nipping still continues, but ultimately they have now settled into the normal social order, established social dominance and are letting us pick them up. Sometimes. The beef of this three course post is that I am approaching the end of the degree now with the crushing inevitability of Justin Bieber's next single. So how do I feel? Well, worried and relieved in equal measure. On the one hand, I no longer have to have every spare moment spoiled by the realisation that I should be working on an essay, or reading some of the set texts, or not getting 100% gamerpoints in Assassin's Creed 2 (I'm not going to lie, it was the most productive part of the weekend). And of course, once I get a job out in the real world I can hopefully afford things again. On the flip side of course, there's always the statistics. Only 55% of graduates are getting into jobs these days, the rest of the country's fucked, every job application puts you up against hundreds of other people and rent; and living costs and most likely incidences of toffs buggering the poor are all spiraling upwards like the rapture we were promised on Saturday (which made a great excuse not to go out - sorry chaps, can't join you this evening, got a bit of frantic repentance to do). I'm babbling. It's the result of several weeks of long, sleepless nights and wildly panicked procrastinating putting off the end of the old and in with the new. Not just a literal apocalypse, but a metaphorical one too. And despite my best efforts backfiring or going ignored (e.g. voting Lib Dem backfiring and the alt vote getting shot down), I enter the workplace at an all-time low. So there is that. And in the middle there's me, a human being just trying to make a decent living. But then that's the trick to modern living - people aren't individuals anymore. We're all a tenth of a percentage, or a tick in a box, or a one/zero effect on the group so that computers can tally us up and come up with group dynamics to sum up what we want. It's easy to let slip a million people losing out from policy, because the human mind can't process it. Cameron and the government aren't evil, they just can't see the people losing out from their actions as an army of miserable individuals. The population who should be protesting in outrage can't see it either. Nobody can. I make ready to venture out into this world, and if i'm honest, it scares the willies out of me. Writing, as unrealistic a goal as it is, seems to be my best option.

Oh to be a Parent

I don't think I've worried this much in my entire life. In a stunning-to-nobody-except-me lack of willpower and abundance of cuteness, we now have guinea pigs. We were supposed to just be looking at cute pets but at some point looking turned into holding and now we have two female guinea pigs, named Widget and Ezio. Yes, Ezio is a boy's name. It's not our fault, we named the little ginger fool before she was sexed by the vet, so we now have a guinea pig with gender identity issues. Onto the worrying, however. I have since found out that guinea pigs will insist on establishing dominance within a cage, and they do this usually by nudging, mounting and occasionally nipping at each other's heels. However the worrying part of the advice is the part most often repeated: "Don't separate them unless they draw blood." Great. That's sort of like telling me not to worry about cooling my pc unless it blows up. I'm fairly sure having a bleeding guinea pig is better prevented than dealt with, though at the moment they seem to be establishing dominance by just hopping and chasing. Well, Ezio is anyway. Widget still seems fairly traumatised by the taxi ride home, where she was sat in the footwell with every bump and noise it entailed, and is refusing to vocalise. This gets me thinking about what a panicker I am. I'm one of nature's great worriers; if something can conceivably go wrong, it already has in my head. Hence, I am sat at work imagining the bleeding wreck of a guinea pig I will face when I get back later. Ezio will have picked Widget's eyeball out and she'll be in incredible pain, and I'll have to take her to the vets to be put down, and then I'll return to find Ezio has developed a taste for flesh and everyone I know and love is dead, and I don't even have the receipt because she ate that as well. If I worry this much about two guinea pigs, Christ only knows what I'll be like as a parent.