Oxford life. Thirtysomething challenges. Music leanings. Anything really.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Sheesh. A week since the last post
So much to say..... Here are soundbites of random life in Andy's head.
1. Hurricanes in the USA are normally exciting thrills. Smile at the thrill of the wind. Giggle at the silly correspondents pointlessly getting blown around. Goggle at a few broken houses, and spare a thought for the few dead (but the final number would normally remain below one's personal OSTAPDT ("Oh s**t, that's a proper disaster" threshold.)
Katrina wasn't like that. And as it gets worse, it blows the mind in so many ways: the scale, the lack of support, the class/race split of the suffering, the fact that it's the bloody USofA.
2. What do all the media people do for water, shelter and transport? How come they're not crying out for help, and powering their transmitters?
3. I've started my life as an IT Trainer. It's going good, although today I felt like the instructor in The Office, unable to keep an uninterested class focussed. But, if you're teaching Intermediate Excel (formulas, IF functions, lookup tables, etc) and you have to spend half an hour explaining what a greater than sign is, you know you're in trouble.
4. I shot a personal best at Disc Golf on Wednesday. Some days I can barely throw a single good shot. Some days I throw one good shot for every ten. On Wednesday, I couldn't miss a thing. A very pure, simple, pleasing experience.
5. The PB was shot as lightning flashed around us: an amazing evening to be out on South Park, watching the tumultuous skies roll around. We did cower under cover for a while after something got struck extremely close to us. It's all fun and exciting until someone dies!
6. Britain's greatest comic, 2000AD, has Judge Dredd, a great dark sci-fi comic strip about urban life in the future: dense, chaotic, difficult. Way back in the early 80s they ran story lines about Futsies: sufferers of Future Shock Syndrome. Following a summer of relentless news, mostly bad, do you find yourself feeling like a Futsy? The predictions are coming true: disintegration of the USA, terrorism in the UK, Iraq heading to civil war, it's crazy.
Do you remember that period in May and June? We had an election. Oh how we cooed and grumbled about the heavy issues around the election. Then we had Wimbledon. Ah! How dramatic was the succession of Andy Murray as England's favourite tennis player. And then we got the Olympics. Brilliant.
The next day it all began to unravel.
However, I'm off to Oxford's Botanical Gardens for a September night-time party. Now that's got to be a good thing.
1. Hurricanes in the USA are normally exciting thrills. Smile at the thrill of the wind. Giggle at the silly correspondents pointlessly getting blown around. Goggle at a few broken houses, and spare a thought for the few dead (but the final number would normally remain below one's personal OSTAPDT ("Oh s**t, that's a proper disaster" threshold.)
Katrina wasn't like that. And as it gets worse, it blows the mind in so many ways: the scale, the lack of support, the class/race split of the suffering, the fact that it's the bloody USofA.
2. What do all the media people do for water, shelter and transport? How come they're not crying out for help, and powering their transmitters?
3. I've started my life as an IT Trainer. It's going good, although today I felt like the instructor in The Office, unable to keep an uninterested class focussed. But, if you're teaching Intermediate Excel (formulas, IF functions, lookup tables, etc) and you have to spend half an hour explaining what a greater than sign is, you know you're in trouble.
4. I shot a personal best at Disc Golf on Wednesday. Some days I can barely throw a single good shot. Some days I throw one good shot for every ten. On Wednesday, I couldn't miss a thing. A very pure, simple, pleasing experience.
5. The PB was shot as lightning flashed around us: an amazing evening to be out on South Park, watching the tumultuous skies roll around. We did cower under cover for a while after something got struck extremely close to us. It's all fun and exciting until someone dies!
6. Britain's greatest comic, 2000AD, has Judge Dredd, a great dark sci-fi comic strip about urban life in the future: dense, chaotic, difficult. Way back in the early 80s they ran story lines about Futsies: sufferers of Future Shock Syndrome. Following a summer of relentless news, mostly bad, do you find yourself feeling like a Futsy? The predictions are coming true: disintegration of the USA, terrorism in the UK, Iraq heading to civil war, it's crazy.
Do you remember that period in May and June? We had an election. Oh how we cooed and grumbled about the heavy issues around the election. Then we had Wimbledon. Ah! How dramatic was the succession of Andy Murray as England's favourite tennis player. And then we got the Olympics. Brilliant.
The next day it all began to unravel.
However, I'm off to Oxford's Botanical Gardens for a September night-time party. Now that's got to be a good thing.
// posted by Andy @ 6:06 pm 
