23/10/07
Scrabulicious -
Categories: Dear blog readers
It has been a whole week since I last wrote and in this time I have had two very nice gigs run by other people, one very nice gig run by me, one nice but very awkward gig because of the rugby, one parking ticket (not tax deductible, sadly) due to rushing to see Dave Chappelle at the Comedy Store (who wasn't great, sadly), several late nights, one pirate film viewing (that's an illegal film, not a film about pirates, sadly), a lot of mashed potato and an ear infection.
I realise that that sounds like my week has been mega cool and I bet all of you are jealous. Not least because of the ear infection. Ok, you may be jealous of that. However you will be jealous of the bravado which surrounded the discovery of the ear infection. During an appointment with my doctor for a regular diabetes check up (during which, unbeknownst to him, I would be testing the doctor's levels of patronising banter and constant leaning towards prescribing me everything he can for NHS bonus dosh) I happened to mention I had a cold and a blocked ear. Merely a cold I stated, and no, it did not hurt. Then he checked my ear and said it was infected. I felt super tough as I had demeaned the infection's status of illness. Point to me.
Most of my time in the last few days has been taken up by or my thought processes at least occupied by the Scrabulous application on Facebook. I have always enjoyed scrabble in a kind of ' wahey, its Christmas, I'm a bit drunk, lets play games that will cause competitiveness and arguments among family/friends', but combined with the addictivity of the Internet social networking site, the classic board game is as moreish as those bags of poppadom crisps from the supermarket (they are very moreish. Trust me. Tiny tiny poppadoms. Just amazing.) Facebook itself has sucked me in, like most people who are Internet capable and have friends or wish to pretend they have. It is the entire definition of doing something whilst actually doing nothing and the main reason I haven't written as much stuff lately as I want to. I wish Facebook would collapse and yet also I'm not sure how I would cope without the ability to carry out such banal activities as 'wall-posting', 'poking', and kicking the shit out of people's zombies.
But all these activities are nothing compared to the addictiveness of writing words with pre-given letters on a digital scrabble board while goading friends on the scrabble chat wall. Until this point I had not realised I enjoyed words quite as much. So far current faves (and high scorers) have been ' rewrought', 'quasi', and 'cordite'. Despite these however I have mainly lost all of the games I have played due to being beaten by tiny but powerful words such as 'zap', and 'qi'. This is a travesty that such small combinations can be more powerful than big words. It completely disproves the theory that big words make you clever. In fact it proves that less is more, small is beautiful and other things like that that I wish applied to more areas of life. Sigh.
What I need to do is stop playing it. Not only is it distracting me from writing, but also when I do write I am wrought with concern over which words in my writing would score more points and where I could place them within the joke. By this time next week, my gags will be dwindling, but you can count on the fact that they will all contain words with 'z' and 'q' in and be placed on triple word scores.
Small final thingy. We had decided that the kittens, Rosie and Bella, are now allowed all over the flat at night, leaving our doors open. Last Thursday as a result of this, I was woken at 5.30am by Bella licking my head and trying to eat my hair. Despite literally throwing her at the floor, this continued until I was almost in tears, desperate for more sleep. My girlfriend says that its a sign of affection, but I believe a sign of affection would be leaving me the fuck alone at that time in the morning. People say that getting kittens is just a step away from having a baby. If babies wake you up at 5.30am by licking your head and then chew your i-pod headphones in half while you sleep, then I already dread fatherhood.
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