I really wanted to paint yesterday, it was weird. We all know I don't paint because I can't paint, and I guess I can't paint because I can't draw. Even if I had the talent, though, I had no inspiration. But just the same, I just really felt like painting. I got up reasonably early (early for a day off) and outside it was already pouring with rain. I knew it was going to rain on Monday, they had been saying so on the weather forecast all week, but I hadn't been expecting great sheets of torrential rain. It made me think of you Aussie bloggers, and how much you'd like some rain like that.
I don't think I'd been up long before I got a text from Nick asking if anyone was about and wanted to do anything. I told him I was about, and had been thinking maybe of sunbathing, or having a barbecue or maybe sitting in a pub beer garden in the sun. Maybe not the sharpest knife in the draw, he replied to tell me it was raining on his side of town. Like maybe I hadn't noticed perhaps? I think I replied with something along the lines of "That's strange" and then the conversation degenerated into his complaining I was in a funny mood again, and responding I am always in a funny mood. Although I am beginning to wonder if, like how people have problems with drink or food, I might have a problem with sarcasm.
For her birthday last week, my Dad bought my Mum an MP3 player. Not just a small MP3 player though, no, he decided what she needed was a 30GB video player. The options were limited to begin with, since what she really wanted it for was listening to the radio -- but there were smaller, simpler (cheaper) options. He had his heart set on one particular price range, and that was that. I tried having a discussion with my parents months ago about MP3 players, if they really understood what they did, if they had ever downloaded music in the past and if they would be able to work one. I didn't get very far with it, which is more or less self-explanatory since they bought one anyway.
Having ripped and uploaded all the CDs my Mum wanted, and then donated half of my own music collection, I think barely 5GB have been used. Of course, there was yesterday afternoon the usual frustration when -- surprisingly -- my parents couldn't work out how to use it and kept asking me. I had to keep telling them I'd never used that (or any, as it happens) mp3 player before and had no more idea than they did. They would forget this 5 minutes later and be whining at me again. My 2-year-old nephew can use the DVD player better than my Dad, at least my nephew knows to put discs away in their cases.
I ate Thai for the first time, recently. When I told people in work I'd not eaten Thai before they literally looked at me with wide-eyed and open-mouthed amazement. Where have you been? they would ask me, and I'd shrug. Last summer, Philippa the cute Kiwi girl, said she and I should go out for Thai -- but I never saw her a second time, and that was the end of it. There aren't any Thai restaurants in my neck of the woods, in fact I don't even know where the nearest one to me would be outside of London. I think it's not living in London that's the key to this, nobody has ever offered because it's not been something obvious to suggest. My friends sometimes go out for curry, but my requests that sometimes we might be able to go out for Chinese instead has always been refused.
But yes, the Thai. To tell the truth, I was a bit worried about it. Another reason why I probably haven't tried it before is sometimes I just get a bit weird about trying new things. It's weird, ask me if I want to go on holiday on my own, to a place I've never been before, where I can't speak the language, to stay with total strangers and try to learn to surf or something, and I'll readily agree. Yet, I get nervous about food. It wasn't just the food though -- it was the fact I had been in this job a week and a half, and I still wanted to make a good impression.
In the end, I ate pad Thai which turned out to be just a bowl of chicken and noodles and although it tasted different to Chinese food, it was good, and I didn't make a tit of myself. Speaking of such things, though, I wanted to share this story to reassure Steph she's not the only fucktard.
It was an ordinary afternoon in the office, I was minding my own business. A colleague came over to ask people around me if anyone had a light, he was going out for a fag break. One girl said yes, she had a lighter, in fact she also had matches -- and she didn't even smoke herself. She said she'd just found the matches. Taking my cue from all of this, I piped up with:
"Charley says that if ever you see a box of matches lying around tell mummy because they can hurt you."
Imagine an absolute silence. People stop what they are doing and quietly just stare.
"What?" I say, and then: "Mrrowrrowrrow!"
Hoping to prompt their memories by impersonating Kenny Everett's Charley did nothing for me, I incredulously asked them if they had never seen any of the "Charley says" public information films. It seems they hadn't. I emailed them this link to show them I really wasn't crazy. I don't know if they bought it. My friends tell me that only I would do something like that, but it seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time...
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