Flash Bang.

Seething, dear people! Seething!!

I was about to light an aged rocker the other night at work (the one where I'm a lighting technician with full creative license, not the one where I'm a slave to the customers' every want and need) and was told by one of their crew that I wasn't allowed to do this, or that, or even this, and not even a tiny bit of that. God no.

I love lighting, I love the set up, the co-ordination, the complete, unwavering, exhausting concentration and the technical stuff right down to the tiny details, but I cannot stand not being able to go wild with the lights (within reason, I wouldn't use lasers and strobe lights during a ballad or anything). My middle name is practically Flash-Bang, for God's sake.

[From LightingDesignOnline.com]

I had to stand there for four hours, flushing out the back of the stage with three colours in a cycle. No flashing drum-rise, no flooding out the venue with pink, purple and blue light, no filling the stage with a different colour from each side, pulsing to the music, just fading red, green and blue in the background whilst the front of the stage stayed white and boring. Hell, I didn't even get to use the smoke machine! The horror!

Muchos Grr.

Just wait until I get my pyrotechnics license and THEN they'll be sorry.

BOOM.

Pool Politics

I spend a helluva lot of time at the pool these days. It's free with the gym membership so I've got no excuse not to really. Forty lengths yesterday (the pool closed early, but I got time in before the toddlers came and yellowed up the water) and 160 today to make up for it, leaving me aching in strange places; the back of my neck, the sole of my left foot, my wrists.

Also absolutely starving. Not in a normal way, but in a way where I can feel some part of my digestive system tugging on my poor stomach shouting (in a Scottish accent) "We need more power!" but as usual, I've only had time to throw down a bowl of cereal or possibly something once resembling sushi (I loooove my sushi).

So I was swimming away today, counting down the lengths until I was finished for the day (not all that reassuring when you're stuck in the nineties, let me tell you) when three assholes drop into my lane.

You know the type, you've seen them in the street. The type of family that has a nice-looking, indulgent mum, and ignorant husband and a teenage son who's going the same way as his dad. The fast-and-furious lane is free to the highest bidder and yet they choose my lane (who I'm sharing with a nice lady in her forties) to start splashing about and zooming from one end to the other, blinding and dismembering all who dare to get in their way.

Assholes.

Mum is letting Dad and Son do whatever the hell they want, including crashing into Nice Lady. I stop swimming and give them The Evils, which isn't so effective when the receiving party is wearing goggles - you gotta have that eye contact or it's just one-sided and sad.

In any case, me and Nice Lady shuffle along to the fast-and-furious lane (what a larf) and eventually it's just me and the dad of the family battling it out.

I cannot swim in the lanes without starting a little fight with someone. It's totally possible that I'm the real asshole. Probable, even. Yesterday it was a superfit granny who hadn't taken her tights off before getting into the pool. Today it was Father Hole. 130 lengths in and I was still faster than the guy. He left the pool for the flumes a few minutes later, disgraced by an overweight 17-year-old with orange hair.

I came to one conclusion in the next seventy lengths.

Nicole Smith, Fat, Fast and Furious.

Bite me, bitch.

(Did you catch ma tweetin' last night? I ordered a taxi and ended up on THE party bus.)

Today at work:

*Woman slams kettle down on counter*

Psychobitch Ahoy: I want a replacement on this kettle.

Nicole: *bewildered* Have you got a receipt?

PA: No! I don't need one. Don't try to trick me, I've studied trading standards. I'm not stupid.

Nicole: Err. Right. Without proof of purchase I can't authorise it. It's company policy.

PA: I'm suing the company. This is the second kettle I've bought here that has set fire to my kitchen.

Nicole: Oh yes? It would be Breville that was sued. We're just the middle-man.

PA: No. It be YOU.

Nicole: (Me?) Okay. Fine.

PA: I'm suing.

Nicole: You do that.

PA: I'm not stupid, and I've got your name, Nicole.

Nicole: ..Nor am I.

I get my manager, who relays EXACTLY THE SAME THING as I said. I go to check the displays and the woman follows me around.

PA: I'm suing the company. You'll hear all about it.

Nicole: You do that. Seeing as we're being frank I'll tell you. I'm not sorry because I've seen this before and I'm bored. Go away.

---

Gah. Stupid peoples. The great thing was that trading standards would have agreed. She didn't have a leg to stand on and she knew it, apparently. Bleeeh.

Trubble in ma hood.

I think I've mentioned my elderly insane neighbours.

My newest neighbours keep fort with a rottweiler, four budgies and two horny lizards.

One is using a raving, rent-dodging, fake-ID toting 70-odd bingo fanatic's old house as a drug den.

Two own a burger van on the A19.

One puts bricks in her plant-pots to 'hold the trees in'.

One is on the run from the feds.

And the final one is a bearded lady. I shit you not, she's all bristly.

The bearded lady has always labelled me, Cleo and Golden Balls (my bro) as trouble. She's never had a reason to, really. I suppose me leaving  (very very very) faint marks on her stretch of the balcony whilst rollerblading would've been kind annoying seeing as she likes everything to be squeaky clean, (but it was the guy at the end of the balcony whose wall I'd usually crash into that suffered most - knocked all the stuff off his bathroom shelf a million times over) but she has never had any solid reason to hate us.

If there's trouble, it's one of us. If the bin's overflowing, it's us, not the twenty three other families we share it with. The one time that Cleo scratched her name into the bricks on the stairwell, she came knocking. If she sees me going past her house (which I have to, unless I wanted to take an 18-ft dive off the balcony) she always tells me to move on, even though out of pure dislike for the woman I was practically running anyway.

Anyway.

The bearded lady has taken it too far ladies and gents.

She has now installed one of those little buzzer things that make a horrible whining sound that only dogs, children and teenagers can hear.

It's not like I can avoid the damn thing, I have to go to work, go shopping, meet people etc. and everytime I leave the house all I can hear is painfully high-pitched Oh-My-God-It's-Eating-My-Brain shrieking that makes my ears throb.

Stupid woman.

It was much easier when I was three and the neighbour categories fell as: Paedophile, Man Who Works In A Chocolate Factory, Nice Woman Who Nearly Killed Me With Peanuts, and Religious Nuts.

The Religious Nuts are still here as The Brick People (also known as the 'Jesus Rocks! Quarter'). They wrote me off for an atheist at the tender age of four when I saw Jesus on a cross in their house and said 'Jesus has got boobies, look!

I live with a deaf swine.

I was going to post about being stalked to death today but something far more pressing has caught my attention.

My sister is a slob.

A messy, smelly slob.

Whose carbon footprint is bigger than that of a T-Rex caught in a fire.

A deaf T-Rex at that.

I do not know how many times I have told her today - or any other day - not to be such an arsehole, but no. She still won't listen.

The last twenty four hours have been very painful.

Cleo! Can you not leave your goddamn crocs in the middle of the hallway? Why do you even wear those things?

CLEO! Stop leaving your clothes on the bathroom floor.

Cleo? Stop putting your crap in my room. It's MY room.

Oh for God's sake! Stop pissing on the toilet seat.

TURN THE FUCKING LIGHT OFF, IT'S THREE IN THE AFTERNOON.

Am I being unfair? Am I nagging? Am I screaming at her too quietly for her to hear?

Or is my sister just a complete arse, head and hole?

Normal service will resume on the weekend when Cleo's funeral is done with.

Moral of the story: Don't fuck with me or I'LL WRITE SHIT ABOUT YOU, BITCH.

There has never been a point in time where I have been technology's bitch. Ne-verr. This may be because up until the age of 12 I talked to computers. You know, just in case they could hear me (IT COULD HAPPEN).

I stayed up late on my 11th birthday too to see if Hagrid or Dumbledore or even fucking Harry Potter would come along and tell me I was a witch or a goblin or something.

This is actually true.

But that's beside the point. I was an... imaginative child.

Anywho, for whatever reason, computers love me, and I love them... mostly.

I have this one computer which I got for my 12th birthday (I rock a laptop these days) and it's now home to every "The Sims" PC game that was ever released.

Every. Single. One.

I have a lot of time on my hands.

And I happen to be in love with The Sims.

Except I can never play it properly because my computer is s-l-o-w. And now The Sims 3 has been released (don't judge me. No, seriously, stop it) I'm in a pissing crisis, yo.

Something HAD to be done.

(NOTE: I've been saying that for four years.)

So after suffering a mini-meltdown over compatible parts and other technical gumph witnessed by my BFF Main Gay.5 who is just an absolute computer bastard because he knows everything, I headed down to the local suppliers.

Enter "Man", formally known as Computer Jackass.

He was the kind of guy who thought he was better than everyone else because he had a shiny badge on his shirt and SO WHAT, HUH? SO DO I! SEE? IT SAYS BON JOVI ON IT AND EVERYTHING.

He slimed up to me, actually ADJUSTED HIS FUCKING BADGE and asked if I was lost.

"Erm... yes. I'm looking for a RAM memory board, 1GB, DDR?"

He takes me to a stand I must have missed.

"I'm afraid we don't have any of those."

"Is this not it?" I ask, picking out exactly what I needed.

"Umm, yes. That's £49.99." He tells me.

FIFTY FUCKING QUID?!

"Why?" I toe the edge of a spaz attack. "It was £35 on the website."

"Well yes..." He says like it was blindingly obvious. "But that doesn't cover installation."

"I can install it myself, can I have it cheaper?"

"Are you sure you know what you are talking about? Because we don't do refunds."

I'm slowly seeing redder and redder.

"Good, because you won't be seeing me again." I snapped.

And then he gave me the look. The look like I'd kicked him in the balls the week previously.

= HOSTILE.

He huffs and says "I'll take you to the till." And storms off. A victory dance would have totally appropriate right then.

I owned that bitch.

And better yet, my computer runs smoother than a baby's butt.

You better believe that babies' butts can run. My sister's did it once, it landed on my foot.

I don't like Mondays.

Have you ever been unable to think about what you're meant to be doing today because your mind's too busy going 'wrarrggghhhh' to do anything else other than more wrarrggghhhhing?

Hmm... No? You don't know how lucky you are.

Today saw the first and second proper performances of a play I'm doing for my drama GCSE called Teechers which is beyond terrible after the 47th take, but hopefully you'll never have to see it.

Ever.

You lucky, lucky people.

Anyways. I spent four and a half hours in the drama studio getting a verbal beating from various 'superiors' - self-proclaimed or otherwise - and was slowly getting very very angsty, nervous, miserable and unquestionably the most dangerous of all, I was hungry. It was 2pm by the time I got to the youth centre for food - eight hours after my meagre breakfast.

Fucking ouch.

Maths arrived too soon. I've been hassling my head of year/slave to let me skip the exam for ages and we've reached a mutual agreement with it but DEAR GOD WHY OH WHY do I still have to go to those lessons? You can only count numbers, silly, how the hell am I supposed to know what x + y is?

Aaaand then Miss dropped Le Bombshell.

You know, the C word.

Yeah. Coursework.

Turns out I'd completely forgotten about a some last-minute piece of work. And it was due in last Friday. And I'd completely forgotten. And I wanted to live. And I had too much to do. And-

Part of me just... snapped.

Though after twenty or so minutes of hiding/crying in the toilets, I discovered that I wasn't nearly as far gone as the teachers.

They have fucking motion detectors in the toilet. It wasn't long before the 6"7 PE teacher came along to evict me.

Emotionless bastard.

The short of the long of it is that I ended up in ...The Inclusion Room... for the third time ever.

*SHOCK HORROR*

And then! AND THEN!!

I had to go to drama for the performance for the teachers and Tilda had my bag so I was hunting her down and my BFF Main Gay.5 caught me in the Quad and gave me a hug.

Innocent enough, right?

Apparently not. The Badger (Head Teacher) came along, stopped next to us and said 'We have a six inch rule here'.

A SIX INCH RULE?!! The cheek of it!!!

How on Earth are we supposed to continue the human race now that swine flu has STRUCK US DOWN with a six inch rule in place?!

I'll be honest, a six-inch limit doesn't sound like a whole lot of fun.

Aaanyways...

I did the performance with a crippling headache and only forgot one line, which is an achievement really.

But I have an oral to do tomorrow.

That's an oral exam by the way.

Yeah, my day's been full of that humour.

So sue me.

Despite the day being shitty beyond belief and a month of Thursdays (And I HATE Thursdays), I managed to find a bright side whilst sitting in inclusion.

"Well," I thought. "At least this makes good blog fodder."

Typico.

Pearl Harbour saw less bombing than this

[Warning: If you are averse towards swearing you might want to skip this post because I am ANGSTY, damn it! VERY angsty. I don't even swear that much, but the occasion really calls for it. (yush... I hear it's not big or clever...)]

[Also, parents: beware.]

[Furthermore, I will stop complaining about everything soon, I promise]

You want to know something that really bugs me? I mean something that REALLY bugs me, something that gets in my grill, raises my roof and all kinds of GANG-STA terms I have yet to learn?

I’m talking about fucking time.

Time is the epitome of all evil, I swear. Nothing irritates me more than having too much time, or too little time, or it being time to get up, time to go to sleep, time to go to school, or the bus not being on time.

It’s time to address this issue.

My most recent qualm with time occurred just this week, today actually, about five minutes ago if you must know, but I don’t have the time for such details at present.

Just this Monday, I was told that I had a week to do my statistics coursework. At the beginning of the week, that sounded like loads of time. LOADS.

But then on Wednesday or Thursday you look back on it and realise that a working week is only five days long (Ha. Hahaha... Whoever said that a working week stopped at the weekend was either a gym teacher or one of the elderly insane. Or both, we have four of those at our school.) and you have two days left to improve the coursework draft that was graded an E.

Then you start to stress a bit.

Now, last night I worked from the moment I got to school (8.30am) to 10pm, having had nothing but a pasta salad and a milkshake through all that time. Why? Because I didn’t have time to eat.

By 9pm I was tearing my hair out, I’d screamed into a pillow three times already and was dangerously close to snapping my beloved laptop in two.

And this is where the parents might want to listen up. Teenagers are all like this, it's best you're prepared for the worst. (ME!)

My family aren’t so much a family as an assembly of tragic fools, and that’s how we roll. My friends have this theory that I’ve had a really relaxed upbringing. They would be almost right. I was not brought up; I was dragged up, kicking and screaming.

So it would be perfectly normal in my house for me to storm into my parents’ room and commence the following conversation (Game: Count the swearwords, double points for the F-bomb):

Me: Permission to swear profusely?

Mum: Why?

Me: Because I’ve been fucking working for the last fucking thirteen pissing hours. I’m barely halfway through the stupid fucking portfolio, teachers are being twats, Nathan’s fucked shit up in drama by being such a suck up he should just go give Baguette a B-J right now and-

Mum: Nicky that’s sick.

Me: -and it smells of nail varnish, my sadistics coursework is due in in fucking two days and I haven’t done anything to bloody improve it and me and Joe fucked up the chemistry exam so badly that we have to do it again at lunchtime-

Mum: You didn’t say you had another exam.

Me: -my shoes exploded again and my stupid pissing bag broke and it really, really smells of nail varnish in here!

(QUESTION: World’s longest sentence?)

Mum: Riiight...

---

But it doesn’t even end there. The clocks go backwards or forwards or to Switzerland next week so I lose YET ANOTHER hour of my day.

Stupid time. Go die in a hole.