Modern Family

… in which I write a fairly boring blog post, rambling about a TV show I’ve been watching a lot of. You see…

This week, I have been mostly watching – MODERN FAMILY.

Well, this weekend, really. I’ve watched the entire of the first season because I have no life and it was really, really good. Which was nice, because I love comedy but I am also a total snob and there is so much stuff that calls itself comedy that I simply can’t get on with. It’s as if there’s two extremes where you’ve got completely silly comedies like Father Ted which I love, or more serious comedies (as comedies go) like The Office which I also love. Then you’ve got comedies that take elements from both, which I love. Then you’ve got about five thousand other shows that get the balance all wrong and they simply don’t work at all.

Modern Family, though, works. It’s probably because they really do have a little bit of everything as the comedy goes. There’s fun wordplay, there’s physical comedy, and the form is perfect. With it staged as though it’s a documentary, the characters are allowed to be aware of the cameras and so there are constant little uncomfortable glances towards them whenever something embarrassing happens. It’s brilliantly cast, too, there’s really no weak links. There were a few crap episodes but usually there are three concurrent stories and so even when one story isn’t really going anywhere, there are another two that are working.

Anyway, I’d never heard of it a few weeks ago and now I find myself desperate to see the second season. Partly because I really want to watch some more, partly because I really need to know what happens. Instead I’ll just have to read some episode summaries on Wikipedia or something and end up spoiling it for myself when I do finally get around to watching some more. Sometime around the time hell freezes over and I can afford to buy some more DVDs.

The reason I’ve been watching it is that one of the writers is coming to teach me how to write a sitcom, and the whole experience is Modern Family based. So, by Thursday I have to come up with a storyline for an episode, which seemed hard enough to begin with but now it turns out that I basically need three storylines, which hopefully somehow come together at the end, because those were the episodes which worked the best and so clearly that’s what I’d like to come up with. I have a basic idea of something that Manny can get up to (if his character hasn’t completely changed in the interim) but after that, nothing. Oh well, I’ve got days yet. Days.

Until then, I’ll go back to Frasier. A sitcom that manages to be completely different to Modern Family and yet similar enough that Modern Family felt almost instantly comfortable. Which I guess is about as perfect as a sitcom can get, next to Frasier.

Metronomy

Last night I went to see Metronomy. Well, sort of, Metronomy were there and I was absolutely there for that single reason, but it was actually Two Door Cinema Club headlining. And Tribes and Azealia Banks were on the bill too. More on her later.

The evening started with a trip to an independent videogame store, because I had no idea it was there and I can’t remember the last time I saw one. It was full of DVDs. Okay, not really, there were some games too including some bizarrely excellent and rare games that you don’t expect to find on the high street. All of the Atelier Iris games on PS2, and Grandia II as well, amongst others. Weird.

Then, pre-gig, we went to KFC because we were hungry. If they make as much effort cleaning their kitchen as they do their toilets, I kind of wish we hadn’t. There was also the most persistent beggar I’ve ever encountered. Normally when you tell someone you have no change they move on. He hung around and despite repeatedly telling him that she had no change, demanded that my friend open her purse. “Have a look, have a look,” he said. She didn’t, so he seemed to get bored and move on – only to return about four minutes later and ask if we had any change, having completely forgotten that he’d asked us already. Brixton, ladies and gentlemen.

Azealia Banks was up first, with a set that made me feel so, so old. Seriously, is this what the kids are in to these days? She was a bit much. The sound didn’t really seem to be set up for her style, and so all I could hear was the word “nigger,” over and over again. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever heard it used so many times in such a short space of time, and when it wasn’t that it was various other swearwords. These words were clear as day, whatever else she was saying, well, I have no idea what the context was at all. Then she performed what appeared to be a tribute to Amy Winehouse, but performed the one song that Amy Winehouse didn’t write and so it turned out to be an accidental tribute to The Zutons. Meaningful.

Tribes were next, and I remember so little. My main thoughts were “hmm, I know this song, but where do I know it from?” They were, well, they were unspectacular.

And then the main event! Well, the main event if you were me. Enter Metronomy, who begin with Some Written and then go on to The Bay, which is unofficially the best song ever recorded. If the world had blown up at that moment, I wouldn’t feel like I’d have wasted my life at all. They carried on, and I sang along to every word because I’m a nerd, hopefully in a volume that was audible only to me. When they played You Could Easily Have Me, I made up my own words to sing along to because that track doesn’t have any. Okay, I didn’t do that, I’m not that much of a nerd. Biggest reaction from the non-me parts of the crowd was for The Look, a song I sent to my dad the previous evening whose reaction was something along the lines of “that’s not as bad as I was expecting it to be!” I’ve no idea what he was expecting, but it was probably something… heavier.

Metronomy left, I was a happy boy, I need to go and see Metronomy again.

Two Door Cinema Club played their set and they were great too. Not as great, obviously, but their album has been on my amazon wishlist for a year and they did nothing to suggest I should remove it. A pretty light show.

A good night.

Gigs. I need to do them more. I do not need to review them more.

METRONOMY!

Christmas

In a shock twist, I’ve gone home for Christmas. Home is a term I seem to give to whichever place I’m not in at the moment, so now that I’m here I feel like I still need to go home back to London. I don’t know if this means I’m always at home or I’m never at home. Never mind, I’m sure I’ll get by anyway.

Today is Christmas Day. You may not have been aware, they’ve been trying to keep it quiet, but Christmas Day it is. I like coming home (the other home) for Christmas because the alternative is sitting in my room on my own and while I’m fine with that, it feels like if I’m going to see family any time, it may as well be nice. Plus, I’d only make myself chips or something for dinner and having a proper Christmas dinner is somewhat better. I eat lazily when I’m on my own. Here, I shall eat nicely for a day. After that, it’s anyone’s guess. I could probably cook far better than I do but when I have time to cook I have no money to buy nice things, and when I’ve got (small amounts of) money I’ve got no time, insomuch as a person with no job and no social life can possibly be considered to have “no time.”

My phone is next to my netbook, I just tried to use it as a mouse. This has no relevance to the tale at hand.

In case you hadn’t noticed, there is no tale at hand.

Christmas isn’t really the same any more, even though I’m at home. There used to be so many of us here, and we were all here together at the right age. We’d excitedly run downstairs, open presents for what seemed like hours and then make three trips upstairs with armfuls of spoils before realising that we were hungry and having a bowl of cornflakes. Now there’s nobody here, and so I woke up this morning, laid in bed for an hour before having some cereal and then opening both of my presents in less than thirty seconds. I am a man and thus hard to buy for, so I get enough shower gel sets to last me two years, and chocolates. I am not complaining, I really love chocolates.

Myself, I am ace at gifts. I’m one of those people that can pick up on a subtle hint and remember it, so something you wanted in March will suddenly turn up at Christmas and you will be amazed and love it. I bought a friend a little thread box she saw in Bentalls a few weeks ago that had a lovely little pair of scissors within. She’d just picked it up and mentioned how much she liked it, then moved on, and I doubt she had any idea I was even paying attention. HA! I always pay attention!

I sometimes pay attention.

I pay attention just about enough.

I put the box in an empty Pop Tarts box and she was convinced for far too long this morning that I’d bought her a box of Pop Tarts for Christmas. This is awfully amusing.

Probably not for her, she may have wanted a nice Chocolate Pop Tart for breakfast. Bang out of luck.

Elsewhere, my mum got a Catchphrase DVD game because she loves it. My step-dad got a box of Christmas pudding flavoured fudge because last year he went through half a box of fudge in about three minutes. Other people have presents that haven’t been given yet because I haven’t seen them to give them presents yet. Still other people have presents from last Christmas that they still haven’t opened yet. Bizarre.

The End

And so another working year comes to an end, and I barely worked any of it, to be honest. I mean, I did work for university, but I don’t really get paid for that unless you count in a you-have-to-pay-it-back kind of way. That’s not the kind of getting paid I like, to be honest.

The last job I’d had was at a toy shop in Kingston, I was a Christmas temp there last year and so by Christmas Eve, I was gone. They didn’t offer to keep me on not because of my sheer awesomeness, but because my uni schedule makes organising jobs awkward. That goes for any job, so I just avoided them in a fit of laziness and Fallout 3 until this Christmas, where I went to work at a toy shop in Kingston. They were glad to have me back, due to the aforementioned sheer awesomeness, and so back I went.

It was a bit different this time, though. Instead of working a late shift as I did last year, this year I worked a full on night shift. It was full time and paid at time-and-a-half, so is probably the best paid retail job I’ll ever have in my life. £666 (seriously) for two weeks work. Then another couple of weeks of nights on top of that, and a month of late shifts (at normal pay) leading up to that. Not really that bad for a few month’s work.

The important thing, though, is that I enjoy the work. Admittedly for nearly ten quid an hour I’d probably agree to work at most places right now, but it’s nice to get paid that for something you like doing. Okay, it’s retail, and people look down on you for having an unskilled job like that (including, hilariously, one moron who actually worked with me at the toy shop) but if I enjoy it, I don’t really give a shit what’s thought of me.

The work isn’t difficult unless you’re a total idiot (step forward, one particular colleague) but there’s a lot of it, and keeping busy is what I most like in a job, which I guess is why a toy shop at Christmas is so perfect. The last week has been pretty crazy, walking into a near empty shop at 10pm and having to have it as full as possible by half eight when it opens, because people need their toys on the last week before Christmas when they suddenly realise that their children are expecting presents this year. It baffles me. Why are you shopping this late? You get warned about Christmas a good three months before it happens, you really should be sorted by now rather than walking in to a shop on Christmas Eve and wondering why there’s bugger all left to choose from. “Here, son and/or daughter, here’s all the presents that all the other children didn’t want. Like a LEGO Chromastone.”

I’m rambling, and I’ll stop. It was fun, the people were mostly great (aside from one person who barely said three words in an entire month, and one who was shit, and one who was just an awful, awful person.)

Next Christmas I’ll have finished uni, so who knows where my life will be.

Interview

I once had a surprise job interview. That is as completely ridiculous as it sounds.

I was very desperate for money and/or death and money seemed to make more sense so I was applying for all sorts of jobs, regardless of whether or not I actually wanted the job or thought that I would be any good at it at all. I wasn’t applying to be a surgeon or anything, but there are skills I don’t have like “people” ones, and so there are jobs that this generally would rule me out from. Jobs like working as a market trader, and yet there I was, finding myself applying for a job as a market trader. Specifically, for a little pretzel stall. Also of note is that I really didn’t want to work in any kind of fast food based retail. Again, there I was.

I sent off my CV with some kind of cover letter (“what an exciting opportunity to join a growing brand!”) and I waited to be given an interview. The next day, the phone rings, and the woman introduces herself and lets me know where she’s calling from. “Excellent,” I think. “I’ve got an interview, stage one complete.” I hunt around for a pen so that I can write down the time and place of the interview because presumably it won’t take place on a market, and then I wait for details of my sure-to-be-successful interview.

“What skills do you think you could bring to the role?” she starts.

“What the fuck?” I reply, in my head. Generally when you’re going to give someone a job interview there’s a procedure to follow, isn’t there? Step one, let someone know you’re going to give them an interview. It’s harder than you’d think to answer questions like that without having prepared for them first. What skills do you even need to work in a pretzel stand? How am I supposed to sell myself without lying when I know full well I’m going to be crap at the job? These are things that need more preparation.

So we go through her list of questions, her completely oblivious that she’s made a bit of a mess of this, me completely aware that I’ve made a mess of it. As if to ram the point home, she ends with the traditional “have you got any questions for me?”

I don’t have anything to say to her, and so I say “I don’t, no.” We say goodbye, hang up the phone, and I realise that when she asked if I had any questions I said “I don’t know.” Brilliant.

This all happened around four months ago, and unsurprisingly I never heard back from her. Until today. Today, I get a phone call at about four in the afternoon while I was asleep, and I ignore it because I assume it’s my alarm. When I realise it’s a phone call, it’s gone, and so I check the number on Google and find out who it was. Four months. This whole process was a disaster from start to finish.

I like to think that, as the 39th choice from that set of interviews, they’ve now gone through the other 38 candidates and have finally got around to me. I’m thinking “no, thanks.”

The West Wing

This contains spoilers. Don’t read it if you haven’t watched The West Wing, because you should be away watching The Fucking West Wing.

When I ran out of episodes of Frasier to watch, I turned to a box-set of The West Wing that I’d had sitting with my DVD collection for something like a year or more. I’d bought it because it was a mere £39.99 which for seven series of a show was pretty cheap, I felt, and so highly regarded it was too! Then I didn’t watch it, because it was seven series long, each series lasts about fifteen hours, and that was quite the investment of time. And it’s daunting, too, it’s all about them politics and things and there was a pretty real chance that I wouldn’t have any idea what was going on.

That turned out to be the case, in the end, and yet it doesn’t even matter.

So Frasier ran out, I needed something to watch, and wondered about The West Wing. By now I wasn’t only daunted, I was worried about its relevance. The world has changed in the 12 years since it was originally broadcast, and it struck me as a show that wouldn’t age well. I was told, though, that it was just as relevant now as it was then. That was good enough for me, and so I plunged right in.

It was amazing.

All of it.

Well most of it.

There are a few really annoying things, like characters just completely disappearing with no explanation when a single “yeah, Mandy left” line would have sufficed. Mandy didn’t matter anyway, but when you write one of your main cast members out after four seasons maybe you should, I don’t know, acknowledge it?

Martin Sheen as the president was also really hard to take – at first. I wasn’t at all convinced but the more you get used to him in that position, the more believable he seems to become in it. Weird.

Josh turns, pretty much, into a total idiot in the last two series. This was also a bit rubbish. He gives up at every turn, gives terrible advice and the only thing that keeps Santos on track is shown as being outside Josh’s control. Aside from starting the campaign himself, he has almost no positive effect at all. This after spending the first five series largely as a hero.

Aside from that, it’s pretty much exclusively excellent. For a show largely about complex political issues to frame them in a relatively simple way was brilliant. I still don’t know basically anything about the US political system but it gives you (even as a moron) enough information to understand everything that’s going on.

I can’t be bothered to witter on and on about it, but I did rather love it and there’s now a gap in my life where it used to be. I laughed. I cried. I’m such a girl.

I need to find something else to watch, now.

Lunch

I didn’t get much sleep last night. This was an error. I had to be up at 7am to shower, have breakfast, knock a jar of coffee on to the floor, scare someone half to death, spill boiling water on my foot, and then sweep up some coffee before ironing a shirt. All this while browsing random pointless reaches of the internet in an attempt to fully wake up ready to face the day. Admittedly the dropping of coffee/spilling of hot water wasn’t exactly planned for, but still my alarm was set for seven in the AM and so a sensible time to go to bed would be, say, for example, maybe something like eleven the previous night? Maybe midnight? A not-very-sensible time to go to bed would be say, for example, maybe something like four in the morning. That would really be very unsensible indeed.

And yet there I was. Tuesday is the big day. I’m not getting married, it’s just the day where I have stuff to do through pretty much all of it and end up writing this blog at a quarter to midnight and ramble instead of making any real effort, because all I really want to do is download Corpse Party and go to bed. I leave the house at eight thirty in the morning, and a combination of work and university (not in that order) keeps me away until almost eleven. I miss all of amazon’s Black Friday deals. If I had a son, I would be disappoint.

Being out all day causes problems with regard to food. Not real problems, just pretend problems in that I can’t really afford food and yet still have to buy food to eat lest I die. I’ve returned to Boots’ lunch deal, which I used to eat basically every other day or something a few years ago and then totally stopped. Imagine my surprise to discover that it has increased in price from £2.99 to £3.29. Was there an online petition about this? I’m certainly going to be contacting my MP. Anyway, I went along with it anyway because the stuff I wanted came to £6.60 and so it seemed a bit silly to moan about 30p when I’m saving half the price anyway. Boots have Christmas sandwiches. I’ve never had a prawn sandwich before, and had literally no idea that they were Christmas-linked, but there it was in a three-pack (and I like three-packs) with a turkey/stuffing  sandwich and a brie/cranberry one so I was buying the hell out of that. It turns out that prawns aren’t so bad. Imagine my surprise (because I don’t feel like you imagined it enough last time) when I discovered that the amount of prawn in “prawns” is only 98%. Yeah. Go figure. So, a bunch of sandwiches, a foul looking smoothie with broccoli and spinach and garlic and all sorts of nonsense in it that tastes amazing, and a chocolate brownie. Lunch won.

What didn’t win so much, was dinner. Chips are cheap and easy enough to wander into work with, so I went to a van that sells chips in Kingston town centre. “Give me some chips, my good man,” I didn’t say, but I did say something that basically meant that. Then I watched as they dumped some frozen chips into some fat and stood there for five minutes watching them cook them. Where was the effort? Where were the potatoes? Dinner did not win.

Then work, blah, and indeed, blah. For some reason I thought it’d be fun to alphabetise one of the sections. I’m still not sure why but damnit if I wouldn’t do it again.

Hiking

I’m sitting at university on a computer using a keyboard that has no letters on the keys and with a font size of “quite small” so not only can I barely read what I’m typing, but I can’t even see the keys I’m using to type it. That I’m typing this largely mistake free is testament to how awesome a typerer I am. The fact that “typerer” hasn’t just underlined in red is also testament to how the spell check is turned off right now. I’m not really a very good typer. This has taken about two minutes (not miuntes) so far, though as a fairly poor workman, I’m more than happy to blame my tools. Not only is the shift key really sticky and making it difficult to type things like, you know, capital letters, but this workspace isn’t the most ergonomic I’ve ever been in. At home I can twist and curl up on my chair and still be fine to type. Here, my wrist has begun aching within fifty words. Rubbish. And it’s one of those horrible aches that I get whenever I try to play DJ Hero too, which was disappointing because I was really enjoying that game until it began to completely cripple me. I’d have doubled over if I didn’t have an ironing board in front of me at the time.

In case it’s not obvious, I’m rambling, because I can’t be bothered to write much else. It was one of those “get up, get to uni, get to work” kind of days, and so now I find myself with 90 minutes in which to write. It normally takes me much longer than this, because as soon as I get home I load Chrome and all my favourites are there and I check them all and I open Word and I check them all and I type ten words and I check them all and it goes on and on for infinity (500 words) until I’m eventually done, then I check them all and go and play Forza 4 or something. Or get ready for work. Whatever. Anyway, as soon as I get home there’s not much chance of this getting done so here I sit at uni where none of my favourites are and where even to open Chrome will take five minutes as it installs it from scratch every time I log on to a PC, for some reason. Technology is a wonderful thing.

Here I can get words written. Good words they are not, but, etc, etc. I’m at 429. There’s not much more to say. Well, there is a bit, but then I’d have no material (ha!) for the next time I needed a ramble. Instead, I’ll mention the real reason I’m here; to print a play out. A scene of one, anyway. Tomorrow it will be read out (poorly) by real people (myself included.) I don’t think I’ve ever had something read out by other people before. Exciting times.

(Well, not that exciting, it’s just in a seminar at uni, I’m not putting a play on or anything. Unless the lecturer is so blown away by my playwriting skillz with a z that she recruits actors then and there and books a venue. It could happen.)

In at the Death

There are days when I can’t be bothered to write. Days like today, where I wake up at seven in the morning to get to uni, finish uni at five and head straight to work, and don’t finish work until nearly ten. It was supposed to be nine, but upon arrival a subtle change had been made to the rota, such changes are always fun. So I arrive home an hour after I had planned to, and instead of having some dinner ready for around ten, I’ve just eaten dinner at eleven. I’m going to bed in a few minutes, and I’ve just eaten dinner. I couldn’t even tell you what it was, either, it was just some ready meal purchased in Sainsbury’s because it was reduced and because I knew in advance that I wouldn’t want to cook after work. It was alright, though, there was spaghetti in it, and bacon, and it has some Italian sounding name. I could get up and find out what it is but two things stop me. The first is that my legs ache. The second is that nobody really gives a damn what I had for dinner. I didn’t even give a damn, I only picked it up because it was reduced.

I’m still buying reduced food, even though having a job means I’m not nearly as poor as I have been pretty much all summer when jobs were like those hens’ teeth you’re always hearing about on the news. I’ve even been able to treat myself, though such has been my frugal nature all summer I barely even know how. I bought some juice. That was a treat. I hadn’t had juice in months because I couldn’t justify juice when water comes out of the tap for free. I had bought tea, though, in a slightly odd habit I forget to drink a lot of the time, and so I’ve had to develop a routine of having a cup of tea with my dinner otherwise I pretty much forget to drink entirely. It’s probably not exactly an ideal amount of fluid to consume over a day but at least it’s something. Fruit. I treated (tret?) myself to fruit. And a packet of Eclairs, the Cadbury ones that are sticky and not really compatible in any way with a pierced tongue but taste so nice that I can forgive them such trivial details. And that’s how I treat myself these days. That’s my life.

But anyway, my point is that some days I can’t be bothered. I had little free time today to get writing done and on coming home, worn out, my brain’s just not ready. It’s never really ready as the quality of other posts will confirm, but today it’s particularly unready. On days such as these I often consider missing a day, just not bothering. Then I think to myself that to do so would be a mistake, and that I’d really regret it in the morning (or as soon as midnight passes) after how long I’ve kept this up. On days when I can’t be bothered, I just ramble about inane rubbish. The words were never supposed to be interesting, just written, and this is still five hundred words, whatever the subject matter.

It was spaghetti amatriciana by the way, whatever that is.

One Year On

My first post in this blog was on the 26th of September 2010, which date fans (or anyone with a calendar) will tell you is one year ago tomorrow. This means that the post I’m writing right now (hello, me) represents exactly one year of writing five hundred words every day. I’m sort of proud of myself. Having mentioned last year that I was on the eve of starting my second year of a degree that I’d gladly recommend to nobody, I’m now writing on the eve of starting my final year of the same degree. I’ve opted to do as little journalism as possible in my (creative writing with) journalism degree, so maybe this third year will be more fun.

Last year, my blog started with a post that contained these words:

Five Hundred a Day, in which I write 500 words about something every single day until I die. But not really until I die* because presumably before then the written word will be replaced by some kind of technology where books are beamed into your brain by Dan Brown himself, whether you want them or not. And you won’t.

(*Unless I die next week, in which case this blog could turn out to be a massive success and I’ll hit my target. Even I’ve got enough willpower to last a week.)

That thing about lasting a week was a joke, but at the same time I truly believed it. I actually started this blog and bought the domain names something like 18 months before actually writing a single word, because I just didn’t have the motivation to do it. I assumed that simply writing those first five hundred words wouldn’t suddenly cause me to develop the motivation from somewhere so there’s no way it could possibly last. Weirdly, it did, and every day since I’ve managed to conjure up five hundred words for this blog about something.

I also wrote these words, back on that first day:

I’ll write some short stories, scenes, anything that comes to mind. When nothing comes to mind I’ll go to a random word generator and write something about whatever word it gives me. Even if the word turns out to be “catasetum,” or something.

Yeah, that turned out to be a total lie. In actual fact, what happens is I click a button to generate a random word and if an idea appears in my mind in the first few seconds, I write it. If it doesn’t, I generate a new word. Who the hell wants to read about catasetum, anyway?

Sometimes it’s been nice just to write about myself. It’s quite comforting to put yourself in a fictional situation, weirdly. To think of yourself as a character and evaluate your problems as that character rather than as yourself. I can’t particularly explain the effect, but there it is. Where? You’ll never know. It sounds a bit mentally ill, now I’ve written it down. Oh well.

Other things I wrote about on that first day included the fact that my face hurt, I can’t remember what on earth that was about, but you’ll be happy to learn that my face is okay now. I wrote that I had no money, and that’s not changed. I also wrote that I had nowhere to live. I’m good for a place to live right now, until December at least. They’re trying to sell the building I rent a room in as we speak, I’m currently unsure where exactly that leaves me. The street? I said I was 28, I’m 29 now. Probably didn’t really need to mention that.

There’s really not a lot that’s changed, it seems. I have rediscovered music, after a year or more of not turning the radio on. Metronomy, particularly, with whom I’m obsessed, but just music in general. I realise now why I amassed a CD collection with something like six hundred albums in it in younger days.

So that’s my entire year. I’m Matt, I’m 29 now, and I really like Metronomy.

Five Hundred a day. It was mostly rubbish, but it got written, and that’s all that I ever aimed for.