Lost and Found

Last night before I even got into bed I checked my phone; I had received a tweet.  I replied.  I thought I’d just check the news feed to see what’s going down.  After that, I thought I’d check Tumblr.  Nope, nothing there.  Since I was at my phone I felt there was no harm in checking Facebook too.  Just a quick look, y’know.  Thirty minutes and a lot of Facebook stalking later, I decide to charge my phone.

I read my book quite a while.  I got up late that morning so I know I’m not going to be ready to sleep for a bit so it’s not till about 1am that I abandon the book and go to turn off the light.  Before I do, however, I wonder if I should just check what is happening on the blogosphere of Tumblr, again, just the once.  I do.  I then check Facebook and last of all Twitter.  I settle down to sleep.  At 1:30am I hear a noise from my phone which means I’ve got an email.  I know it’s probably Groupon.  I just check to make sure.  It’s Groupon.  I settle down to sleep again.

 At 2am I get a noise from my phone and a vibration this time.  It makes me jump and immediately I want to see what it is. It’s a message from my cousin, she’s finished her shift late and she just wanted to know my parents’ email addresses.  As soon as I start reading it, I feel a bit stupid.  Why am I bothering to let these little things stop me from going to sleep.  Surely I can last just 8 hours without looking at my phone to see what’s going on in the world?  Plus I am aware that Facebook has a setting which now shows when and at what time a message has been read by the recipient.  No sooner have I finished reading, I get a message back from my cousin, “Why are you awake?!” and I feel like I’ve been caught in the act.  Caught red handed obsessing over Facebook notifications, tweets, retweets and ‘favourites’.  There’s obviously nothing wrong with not being able to sleep.  But there is a certain ridiculousness in feeling a compulsion to check ones phone all the time.  

I don’t think I’m the only one who does it either.  You name any place where you have to wait around; doctor’s surgery, bus station, queue for the bank-all of these places are hot spots for browsing twitter, checking what your pictures look like, seeing what other’s look like and just general perusing.  In fact, there are few places which aren’t hot spots for this. New technology and the introduction of smart phones means that general internet browsing on one’s phone is quick, easy and simple. 

Being so connected to the whole world wide web at just the touch of a button is amazing.  You can check train times, see what the weather’s going to be like later that day, book a holiday, buy your mum a birthday present, check your bank balance, order a pizza…the list of what you can do is endless.   My fear is that we are so switched on to the larger world around us, that we find it increasingly hard to switch off. 

I was going to try an experiment where I don’t use my phone for a whole day.  As luck would have it, I can’t find it this evening at all.  It feels hugely frustrating.  For one, it is in this house somewhere, I didn't leave the house with it all day.  Secondly, I keep thinking of all the potential messages and phone calls I'm missing (classic lost phone anxiety, it always turns out you have two missed calls from your home phone from when you called it to find out where you’d left it).  Maybe now I have lost my phone, I shall regain a piece of my sanity.  I urge you all to give it a try for a day and tell me how you got on!

Orthodontists Are Sadists

Sometimes I really do believe that all orthodontists are sadists. Not only that, but I also feel I could be the victim of the cruel practical jokes of my orthodontist.  I can just imagine them as soon as I leave the room, Mr Morris and his dental nurse letting out raucous laughter as, yet again I take their latest ‘crazy idea’ seriously.

On Tuesday I was given little rubber bands to attach to my braces.  Rubber bands.  RUBBER BANDS. My mouth looks like a game of Cats Cradle. And you know what, to top that off, I have to put them on myself. None of this brace business which you put up with and eventually your orthodontist takes it off*. These I actually have to apply myself.  It’s like it’s not enough just to inflict the pain. No, no - they want you to inflict the pain yourself onto yourself! As if all they've really been waiting for is this final test to see if they've actually broken you enough to effectively wire your own mouth shut with stretchy elastic bands.

Mr Morris, my orthodontist, had two free hands, a big fuck off torch to see into my mouth with, a prodding tool and tweezers with which to apply the bands to my braces. Alone in my bathroom trying to get a better view in to my mouth with my phone torch in one hand and a band applicator in another, I knew I was going to be at that mirror for a while. This was going to be no easy task. No sir. I wrestled with the twangy elastic and eventually I managed to apply the elastic circles to the metal work already adorning my teeth, carefully avoiding my recently stitched gums. Of course, there were a number of occasions in which I accidentally let go of one end of the band and it pinged back into my mouth with great gusto like it would do to Jim Carey in some comedy about a man with a brace. It’s one of those moments where you know it’d probably be kind of funny if it wasn't happening to you.

Mr Morris assures me, they’re helping to support the plates that are holding my jaw together, but I’m not so sure. I think I am one of many poor, poor orthodontic patients who are taken in by these jokers. I can picture them now in their dental lair trying to think up the next ridiculous invention they can create to cause their willing patients pain, misery and humiliation. I only hope I'm out of braces before they think up the next one! 

Oh and by the way, thee bands have altered the way my voice sounds. Because of having my jaws clamped together by elastics, ironically I sound as thought I'm speaking through gritted teeth. Funny that.

*It is possible, you might be able to get them off with secateurs. I have considered this.

It's nearly four thirty and my tooth's hur...oh wait.

It is day 6 of my recovery from corrective jaw surgery. Thus far I have had my fair share of highs and lows. In some ways, I enjoy having time off work concentrating on recovery. This really limits the amount of things you can and can’t do. I now get made a lot of cups of tea; my meals are prepared for me; I’m not allowed to over-exert myself doing things like taking the dog for a walk or doing any housework/tidying up. To compliment this, here is a list of things that it has now become perfectly 

acceptable to do...

1.       Stay in my pyjamas, all day.

2.       Sleep more than 12 hours per day.

3.       Watch wall to wall TV

4.       Ask people to get your dinner for you.

5.       Ask people to pass you things that are not within reach or require getting up to get i.e tv remote, magazines, laptop charger, cup of tea, salt etc.

I have also come to enjoy keeping abreast of current affairs. I hear the news at least three times a day and I’m on twitter all the time. When you have all the hours of the day to google everyone’s names, politics seems a much easier subject to stay on top of. The nice thing about this is that it can make you feel connected to the world going on around you. When you’re at home with no one but the dog to talk to for most of the day, it does make you feel like the whole world is just carrying on without you. 

So, the above highlights the positives to being in a state of recovery. Now to the low points. One of the characteristic lows of the following two weeks to corrective jaw surgery is that you’re bound to come out the other side initially with a face swollen to the ‘size of a football’-as the ENT consultant nicely put it. I very luckily skipped the football phase, am passed resembling a Nick Park plasticine creation and have moved onto a Geoffrey Palmer state of affairs.

My face is also incredibly sensitive and tender and sleeping is quite difficult. I can’t eat anything that is remotely chewable so I’m eating soup, porridge and scrambled egg. This is generally fine but yesterday I chose to watch the food channels. I don’t know why, I knew it would be torture.  I predictably became quite bitter watching Nigella Lawson tottering around throwing dinner parties and Nigel Slater going through the his fridge, cooking leftover meals. I’ve have had to leave the cooking channels to their own devices for a couple of days. After a summer of eating deep fried and battered foods in abundance at Edinburgh Fringe, I see the next couple of weeks as a kind of controlled diet which it will be impossible to break without risk of screwing up my jaw forever! 

Blogging Experiment!

It is begrudgingly that I write; not with ease.  But since my optimistic 2012 New Year’s Resolution to write a blog every week has fallen short somewhat (my output to date being 2/40 posts) I felt like I really should put pen to paper, or finger tips to keyboard as it were. 

So I’m writing.  This is it, this is what I want to do.  This is what I tell everyone is where my real passion lies.  When people ask me in my boring-as-hell day job, if I’d be interested in a permanent position within the boring-as-hell company I say, “Well this is temporary.  You see, I’m really interested in writing-being a journalist!”  This is all fine until someone asks what I write.  Then things all get a bit sketchy.  I have all the intention, all the thoughts of what I could write.  I plan to do so much.  But when it actually comes to the physical writing itself…therein lies the rub.  Writer’s block of course! Yes, since my last flash of inspiration, back in January, which produced the sparkling entertaining and seriously underrated “Top 5 Whistling Songs” (that’s right fellow bloggers, read it and weep!) I have been living in the shadow of every writer’s worst and most feared enemy: Writer’s Block.  Symptoms include increase in appetite, baking (these first two go hand in hand), sudden intense interest in twitter, royal news, Gilmore Girls on E4 (until it moved over to channel 5’s '5 Star' which, fortunately or unfortunately depending on which way you look at it, I don’t know the Sky channel number for), current affairs, long winded sports (snooker, cricket, golf), watching Bargain Hunt, deciding to learn a new language and instigating and being at the centre of an unnecessary number of Spring Cleans.  You can, I’m sure, understand the torture these last 10 months have been for me, living with Writer’s Block. 

Carrying out all of the tasks that procrastination requires me to, I should theoretically have something to write about.  William Styron’s character Stingo, a young writer in New York in the novel ‘Sophie’s Choice’, bemoans his inability to write, “I had the syrup but it wouldn’t pour”.  I feel like I have the components to make the syrup potentially…it’s just the small question of making the syrup and then pouring it.  

I’ve been brutally honest readers.   I’m not entirely sure what I’m doing here or if it’ll be up to scratch but I’m going to give it my best shot for the remaining weeks until New Year.  My technique is going to be to put a list of different subject topics into a hat and then draw them out each week to decide what to write about.  Any suggestions are more than welcome as is any feedback both positive and negative but most importantly constructive!

Review : Young Adult

I watch the television and see the vision of loveliness that is Charlize Theron in gold, looking pretty damn cool as she struts down the catwalk to utter the words, “J’adore” for the Christian Dior perfume Christmas Ad campaign.   I then go into a darkened room in Soho to watch the film Young Adult, to see Charlize in a completely new light.

When offered the chance to see a screening I suggest someone else in the office picks for me.  They pick Young Adult.  I don’t know what it’s about so I have a quick scout on IMDB.  The poster looks like a Legally Blonde-esque film about a ditzy blonde.  I read the synopsis to find out that it’s built around twenty-something woman who returns to her home town to re-kindle the old flame of her high school love.  She looks like the typical Elle Brooks.  It looks simple, unchallenging and maybe even to have echoes of one of my all-time Julia Roberts favs, My Best Friend’s Wedding!  For all it's Hollywoodness and lack of substance, reader, I happen to love that film.

What I got instead was a confusing and flat depiction of a college queen, Mavis’s, breakdown and subsequent disillusion with reality.

We see Mavis’s daily routine; waking up fully clothed after a heavy night, make-up smeared down her face sometimes lying beneath her date from the night before.  Her dog walks over her sleeping body.  Her room, an obvious metaphor for her life, is messy and and unkept with clothes strewn everywhere. 

She goes back to her hometown after receiving an invite to her ex-boyfriend and childhood sweetheart Buddy’s naming ceremony of he and his wife’s baby boy.  Whilst there, she befriends an old school acquaintance in a bar.  The rest of the film is spent watching her desperate attempt at winning back her former love with in-between scenes of her discussions and contemplations with her new found friend.

The film proved thought provoking, challenging the American ideal "Aint no place like home".  It managed this well, going against the Hollywood conventions of the chick-flick that I had wanted to see.  Each of the main characters, Mavis, Buddy and Matt are examples of American high school stereotypes,  the "prom queen", the "the jock" and the "nerd" which are revealed in this narrative as having moved far out of these roles since leaving school. 

My main problem with the film, however,  was that it seemed like it was trying hard to be powerful and meaningful but when it came to figuring out the meaning or uncovering it’s greatness, I found it flat and empty.  It came to no real revelation or truth and there was no moment of realisation or understanding.  There was the vague sense that we were meant to be laughing at the awkwardness of the situations the main character found herself in.  Its attempts at black humour seemed to fall on their ass as the punch-line just created an awkwardness which left me thinking, “was that meant to be funny?”. 

As it happened, despite coming out of the cinema disappointed, I was sat next to a guy who laughed the whole way through.  It did cross my mind that I could have been sitting next to someone planted by the film company to fill in all of the awkward silences with laughter.  

top 5 Whistling Songs

The humble whistle is a fun pastime for many people.  Taking the place of humming or singing, it often the unsung hero to a boring day or mundane task.  The hobby shot to fame when whistling superstar Whistling Jack Smith whistled his way to success with the whistling hit, 'I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman'.  With the benchmark being set by Smith, the music industry changed for good, with hundreds of artists including a whistling solo or two into their work.  Here are a few favourites for whistlers of all levels of ability to enjoy!

1.  Big Chief - Professor Longhair
An upbeat tune, this one's great for an experienced whistler who can hit the high notes and also keep up with the fast pace!

2.  A Woman of the World - The Divine Comedy
This is probably best for those starting out in their whistling career.  It's slow, easy and the whistle solo is reasonably short; you'll have to tap your feet along to Neil Hannon for the remainder of the song.

3.  Young Folks - Peter Bjorn and John
A popular song for young whipper snapper whistlers!  With regular playings on Homebase adverts, it's unlikely that you've been able to escape this song's far reaching grasp.

4.  Raid the Radio - General Electriks
Also a catchy number, this one's repetitive chorus makes it a great song for those whistlers wishing to practice technique.

5.  Sitting on the Dock of the Bay - Otis Redding
A whistling CLASSIC! The high pitch makes it tricky to master however once learnt, whistling along to this little hit could make you the bell of the ball!