BETAMAXNOMATES
'All she can do is dial and yell...'20041204
Don’t get Your Fallopian Tubes in a Twist
I’m off today - which explains the smell.
Ba-dum tssch! (Joke reproduced courtesy of the young Neuro’s biological progenitor, God rest his soul)
I’m resting my soul today. It took quite a hammering this week, gangbanged by a pack of charity-ravishing autistics - if you’ll forgive the needless crudity of that analogy.
Work is really taking it out of me on an intellectual and emotional level. Physically, it’s ludicrously undemanding: essentially, I’m paid to eat, sleep, watch TV, and go for the occasional walk, stuff I would do on a voluntary basis at home. The only difference is that there’s a bunch of incoherent, dribbling spastics roaming about the place.
But that’s no way to talk about my family.
Anyway, to offload some of this surplus energy I’ve been hauling around, I’ve started going to the gym (pronounced to rhyme with ‘time’ AFAIK, having never actually heard the word said out loud - much like ‘caste’ which, only yesterday, I learned has a silent ‘t’ and a long, soft ‘c’, with the end result being hard to enunciate without some spitting).
I’ve been gymming it on and off (mostly off) for the past year or so. Currently, my physique could probably be best described as lean, though hardly mean, and green only in the extremities. I’m working toward ‘buffed’, though ideally I’d be looking for ‘strapped’, I’ll settle for ‘stacked’, or indeed ‘jacked’, if not ‘bumped’, or ‘ripped’ if, and where, possible.
But that’s enough from Muscle Monthly for now.
Seriously though, muscles: what’s the deal?
They look weird and are probably very heavy. Most confusing is that, when worked to optimum size, they actually restrict movement. Powerlifters and bodybuilders complain of reduced reach in their arms and often find walking difficult due to their thigh muscles chafing together.
Funny that too much exercise might actually render you less active - constant motion tending toward a state of inertia (any physicists out there in Internetland back me up on this?) - that the more strength a muscle develops the less able it is to, you know, do stuff.
In short, it’s reasonable to extrapolate from this that all exercise is lethal and a hazard your health and should be banned.
At least this is what I plan to tell my ‘fitness consultant’ Gavin, who, judging by his suspicious paunch, may already be have heeded this warning. Gym culture is so bizarre and I would write more about it had not the great A.A. Gill done so already in Vanity Fair, in an article I read this afternoon whilst tripping on the treadmill, pumping very little of anything to the strained strains of ‘Pump It Up’.
Don't you know, pump it up! You got to pump it up! Don’t you know, pump it up! You got to pump it up!
Yes, this, my friends, is the sorry state of dance music in 2004.
Cynics will say it has always been thus: meaningless vocal samples endlessly looped over thudding, repetitive beats. And to a degree they’re perfectly correct, but it was never this bad, was it? And I happen to like a lot of repetition in music and am quite partial to the trusty 4/4 thud.
The fact is, it works. You can pick up the same rhythms repeated in turn of the century recordings of African percussive rituals and Chicago house 12inches from the early 80’s; humankind found it’s groove, the planet is dancing and throwing it’s hands in the air like it just don’t care.
It’s just that recently producers seem to be caring less than before. Electronic music in the 21st century is running dangerously low on innovation: glitch was just a blip, blip just a glitch. Electroclash was fun for about five minutes, but hearing the sounds of the future in 1984 ten years on was too much of a time-warp mindfuck to have any kind of longevity, and just showed how a scene with nowhere to go is now starting to run out of nostalgia.
If you haven’t stopped reading by this point, you’ve probably stopped paying any serious attention, so I’ll slap my face, shut my mouth and learn my place.
One thing before you go though. I thought it best to tell you that, with some reluctance on my part, I have reinstated my musical web presence. Nothing uploaded yet, simply because I can’t think of a decent artist name. If anyone’s got any ideas post them comment-wise so I can reject each one fairly.
Hey, way to plug myself there. Why, thank me.
It’s interesting (read: of interest to me, and even then only barely) how blog entries can evolve and mutate, monstrously so. I had planned on writing a bit about my first week at work. Instead, all I’ve talked about it gyms and dance music - a gay marriage made in heaven if ever there was one.
Tomorrow, I’ll start discussing the Ukrainian election scandal and end up prattling on about interior decorating and how to look ‘hot’ in ‘cool’ December fashions.
So then, a pottering, potted, potholed, potheaded history of the past five days.
Monday:
Met first client, sat on ass, watched Trisha, went for walk, pub lunch (paid for), watched Judge Judy, ex-tenant deemed to be liable for damage caused to landlady’s poolhouse.
Tuesday:
Met the three other clients, two of whom I accompany to the city day-centre, a place I could only describe as, for want of a more extreme word, a madhouse - cuckoo, crazy, twirling finger round the ear, wacko - but in a good way.
Highlight, for me, is visiting the art room, and being fascinated by the obsessively geometric drawings made by some of the clients, as well as the more, how shall we say, expressionistic work by one client in particular, showing armies of nude figures with hacked-off limbs and what looked like heavily bandaged faces with with dead animals strewn at their feet.
Memo to Mom: not one for the fridge door.
Wednesday:
Take the tards swimming.
Later, a client has seizure in Liffey Valley, vomiting on himself and collapsing to the floor, a trick I once tried (unsuccessfully) to skive off work.
Thursday:
Find out one of the clients wants to kill me, feel disturbed but also strangely appreciated.
Friday:
See Monday.
And Saturday, that’s where we came in.
It probably all sounds very boring but has actually been one of the most profoundly challenging weeks of my life. I’ve been struggling to process a lot of the, like, feelings and stuff I’ve been experiencing this week and have jotted a few notes for a minor essay on the nature of empathy and the question of pity: if any y’all has any information I could be stealing, send it this way.
Anyway, tomorrow I’m being paid double time to spend the afternoon at some function thing in a parish hall somewhere, wining and dining with the parents of our clients.
What my father, God rest his soul, might have called a ‘handy number’.
God rest your soul, everybody.
Ba-dum tssch! (Joke reproduced courtesy of the young Neuro’s biological progenitor, God rest his soul)
I’m resting my soul today. It took quite a hammering this week, gangbanged by a pack of charity-ravishing autistics - if you’ll forgive the needless crudity of that analogy.
Work is really taking it out of me on an intellectual and emotional level. Physically, it’s ludicrously undemanding: essentially, I’m paid to eat, sleep, watch TV, and go for the occasional walk, stuff I would do on a voluntary basis at home. The only difference is that there’s a bunch of incoherent, dribbling spastics roaming about the place.
But that’s no way to talk about my family.
Anyway, to offload some of this surplus energy I’ve been hauling around, I’ve started going to the gym (pronounced to rhyme with ‘time’ AFAIK, having never actually heard the word said out loud - much like ‘caste’ which, only yesterday, I learned has a silent ‘t’ and a long, soft ‘c’, with the end result being hard to enunciate without some spitting).
I’ve been gymming it on and off (mostly off) for the past year or so. Currently, my physique could probably be best described as lean, though hardly mean, and green only in the extremities. I’m working toward ‘buffed’, though ideally I’d be looking for ‘strapped’, I’ll settle for ‘stacked’, or indeed ‘jacked’, if not ‘bumped’, or ‘ripped’ if, and where, possible.
But that’s enough from Muscle Monthly for now.
Seriously though, muscles: what’s the deal?
They look weird and are probably very heavy. Most confusing is that, when worked to optimum size, they actually restrict movement. Powerlifters and bodybuilders complain of reduced reach in their arms and often find walking difficult due to their thigh muscles chafing together.
Funny that too much exercise might actually render you less active - constant motion tending toward a state of inertia (any physicists out there in Internetland back me up on this?) - that the more strength a muscle develops the less able it is to, you know, do stuff.
In short, it’s reasonable to extrapolate from this that all exercise is lethal and a hazard your health and should be banned.
At least this is what I plan to tell my ‘fitness consultant’ Gavin, who, judging by his suspicious paunch, may already be have heeded this warning. Gym culture is so bizarre and I would write more about it had not the great A.A. Gill done so already in Vanity Fair, in an article I read this afternoon whilst tripping on the treadmill, pumping very little of anything to the strained strains of ‘Pump It Up’.
Don't you know, pump it up! You got to pump it up! Don’t you know, pump it up! You got to pump it up!
Yes, this, my friends, is the sorry state of dance music in 2004.
Cynics will say it has always been thus: meaningless vocal samples endlessly looped over thudding, repetitive beats. And to a degree they’re perfectly correct, but it was never this bad, was it? And I happen to like a lot of repetition in music and am quite partial to the trusty 4/4 thud.
The fact is, it works. You can pick up the same rhythms repeated in turn of the century recordings of African percussive rituals and Chicago house 12inches from the early 80’s; humankind found it’s groove, the planet is dancing and throwing it’s hands in the air like it just don’t care.
It’s just that recently producers seem to be caring less than before. Electronic music in the 21st century is running dangerously low on innovation: glitch was just a blip, blip just a glitch. Electroclash was fun for about five minutes, but hearing the sounds of the future in 1984 ten years on was too much of a time-warp mindfuck to have any kind of longevity, and just showed how a scene with nowhere to go is now starting to run out of nostalgia.
If you haven’t stopped reading by this point, you’ve probably stopped paying any serious attention, so I’ll slap my face, shut my mouth and learn my place.
One thing before you go though. I thought it best to tell you that, with some reluctance on my part, I have reinstated my musical web presence. Nothing uploaded yet, simply because I can’t think of a decent artist name. If anyone’s got any ideas post them comment-wise so I can reject each one fairly.
Hey, way to plug myself there. Why, thank me.
It’s interesting (read: of interest to me, and even then only barely) how blog entries can evolve and mutate, monstrously so. I had planned on writing a bit about my first week at work. Instead, all I’ve talked about it gyms and dance music - a gay marriage made in heaven if ever there was one.
Tomorrow, I’ll start discussing the Ukrainian election scandal and end up prattling on about interior decorating and how to look ‘hot’ in ‘cool’ December fashions.
So then, a pottering, potted, potholed, potheaded history of the past five days.
Monday:
Met first client, sat on ass, watched Trisha, went for walk, pub lunch (paid for), watched Judge Judy, ex-tenant deemed to be liable for damage caused to landlady’s poolhouse.
Tuesday:
Met the three other clients, two of whom I accompany to the city day-centre, a place I could only describe as, for want of a more extreme word, a madhouse - cuckoo, crazy, twirling finger round the ear, wacko - but in a good way.
Highlight, for me, is visiting the art room, and being fascinated by the obsessively geometric drawings made by some of the clients, as well as the more, how shall we say, expressionistic work by one client in particular, showing armies of nude figures with hacked-off limbs and what looked like heavily bandaged faces with with dead animals strewn at their feet.
Memo to Mom: not one for the fridge door.
Wednesday:
Take the tards swimming.
Later, a client has seizure in Liffey Valley, vomiting on himself and collapsing to the floor, a trick I once tried (unsuccessfully) to skive off work.
Thursday:
Find out one of the clients wants to kill me, feel disturbed but also strangely appreciated.
Friday:
See Monday.
And Saturday, that’s where we came in.
It probably all sounds very boring but has actually been one of the most profoundly challenging weeks of my life. I’ve been struggling to process a lot of the, like, feelings and stuff I’ve been experiencing this week and have jotted a few notes for a minor essay on the nature of empathy and the question of pity: if any y’all has any information I could be stealing, send it this way.
Anyway, tomorrow I’m being paid double time to spend the afternoon at some function thing in a parish hall somewhere, wining and dining with the parents of our clients.
What my father, God rest his soul, might have called a ‘handy number’.
God rest your soul, everybody.
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The fact that you have, according to your profile, been on Blogger since March 2004 suggests that you have or have had another blog. Probably with all kinds of fun exiting things that you've been trying to keep from us.
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