Dear Person Standing On The Right Side Of The Escalator

Hey, it's funny how everyone else is just standing on the left side, isn't it? Leaving that convenient vacant pathway on the right side. It's almost as if it's vacant for a reason, isn't it? Almost as if people leave that side free so that people in a rush can get through.

Isn't it weird how sometimes you almost get the feeling that there are other humans in the world who have goals and chores and places to get to? Like, totally weird.

Ah well. Look at all this extra space on the right side. The perfect place to stand perfectly still and ignore everything that's happening around you. I mean, it's a space, it's empty, might as well put your body in it. Go ahead. Ooh look, an advert for hats! Rad.

See you fucking again tomorrow, inevitably.

Hugs,
Ciara

This has one day left on iPlayer and you should watch it now

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01x5k4n/under-milk-wood

Alas, I'm late on the mark for the second time this year. This new production of the damply lyrical, Welshly brilliant and brilliantly Welsh classic turned up on BBC iPlayer about a month ago then buggered off. A few days ago it buggered back again. You've a few hours yet to enjoy it.

If you've never watched/listened to/read/absorbed through osmosis Under Milk Wood, it's a shortish play for voices by Dylan Thomas, describing a day in the life of a seaside village. Cockles and milk bottles and that. Also bigamy, poison and death. The latter elements though are never heavy or self-consciously dark. It's funny, grim, stunningly beautiful and hungrily melancholy, not by turns but all at once. Just a phenomenal thing to listen to, really. Get a hot beverage and take it all in. I listened to it at dawn, not through a fussy sense of romance but through circumstance (it's humid as shit out here in Nagoya and sweaty sleepless nights plague me like flies); quite frankly it's the best thing that's happened to me in weeks.

This version is new, as far as I can tell, and it's mint. It has Joneses Tom and Griff Rhys in it. (Those guys are brothers, right?) And Charlotte Church, as a surprisingly well-casted Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard (usually more easily pictured as an angry old fishwife than, well, someone who looks like Charlotte Church). Michael Sheen kills the opening lines. The variety of actors and delivery styles, and the slightly stop-start nature that it brings really works for me, as it stops the stream of words from becoming lost in sameiness (something which I find happens with the well-known Richard Burton version, and a great shame it is too since the words are so bloody unbelievably ace all the way through). The only duff casting for me was that of Polly Garter, which just felt a little odd and out of kilter, but I'm willing to have my mind changed on that. I was a little skeptical at first of the standard "ooh look, they're texting and using Skype, look how modern we've made it!"-type stuff, but it doesn't detract or become cloying, and acts more as a vaguely interesting framing device than something which actually involves itself in the narrative.

Overall, I definitely prefer this to the Richard Burton version, which I know is beloved by many but I've never really connected with it. For me, that version relies too much on RADA-steeped actorly voice and not on the wonders of the language and the ideas. Burton cruises on the back of his impressive vocal chords, skating briskly through the lines without allowing for pauses, nuance, enjoyment. I'm intrigued to seek out other productions and see what they do with it, but for now I'd just like to recommend that you watch this, now, now, and then I'd like to take my computer off my lap because it's still this fucking humid and my knees are sticky.

Jihanki panki

Let's talk about vending machine coffee.

(Forgive the brusque introduction; teaching conversational English has led me to develop a vaguely synthetic directness in my speaking, causing my apparent personality to lie somewhere between impatient chatbot and badly-written movie policeman. Because almost all my students have limited English, my interactions in class need to be simple, with minimal language and minimal choice involved for the student. Ask me a question about my country. What's your favourite type of train pass? Tell me about your last vacation (also, my school teaches American English, leaving my kidneys to slowly eat themselves every time I say "vacation", "math" or - bite your tears back and say it - "candy"). This type of let's-not-beat-around-the-bush probing came rather unnaturally to me at first, since as a shy person and an Englishwoman my preferred method of conversation involves never making any direct requests, and preferably hiding behind some sort of furniture if any direct request is made towards me. Yet not only have I got used to it, but I've found it seeping into my interactions outside of class. Part of this might be good - I no longer come on a bit faint if I need to make small talk. It might be contrived and insincere small talk, but that's the essence of what small talk is. However, I'm not sure if I'll be happy to come back to the UK and have my friends discover that my awkward dorkiness has been replaced by a glaze-eyed smile and an insistence that they tell me what they like to do in their free time.

A second issue - and one you're no doubt being frustrated by right now - is that my need to constrain my speech may be causing somewhat nauseating floridity in my written communication.

Soz.

So to return to the beginning, let's talk about vending machine coffee.)

   

What can be said about this...substance? 

I'm not sure you can call it a drink. I'm struggling to identify appropriate words for description, but I'm pretty sure I'm on safe ground with "liquid". As far as I can tell, Japanese industry is built on jihanki (vending machine) beverages. It is the secret weapon of the Japanese workforce; the magic which reanimates the bodies of office workers after their third successive night of drinking, long after they should really be a crumpled heap of business suit. Toyota, Hitachi, Toshiba, all built and oiled and refreshingly spritzed with coffee-in-a-can. It comes hot, as well, which when I first came here seemed like a scientific achievement on par with the polio vaccine. I didn't know, of course, that having your tongue burned to numbness is the ideal way to serve this coffee, in the same way that blinding yourself first is the ideal way to enjoy a video of a lamb getting a vasectomy.

The purpose of jihanki coffee is to drug yourself. No salaryman drags himself to the office after an all-nighter and downs a can of Emerald Mountain Blend because he enjoys the bouquet. Caffeine, sugar, adrenaline, most likely some sort of meow-meow-esque club drug is in there too. When you take a sip, your heart clones itself and sends the clones rushing around your arms and legs. Your whole body beats like a bassline. You can bypass your exhaustion and function well, at least for a couple of hours. Thus after a sleepless night, despite the odious taste, one drinks it through gritted teeth (which is rather counterproductive since it just spills all over your shirt). 

I'm not sure how to describe the taste, but "sugar-glazed horse turd" approximates. A lot of these beverages have 'Blend' in the name. This is a mistranslation. There is no 'blend' in the taste. With every reluctant sip the flavours form an orderly queue and visit one's palette in neat succession: first a mouth of bland dirt, then aberrant bitterness, and finally a tooth-bleaching, venomous sweetness. You could set your watch by them. And I say "the taste" using the definite article, because there is only one taste. Five thousand million brands and types, and every single one tastes the same. Some are dark brown, some are light brown; they are merely different shades of the same evil wallpaper in the devil's chemical palace. 

In case you couldn't tell yet, this coffee is not very nice. (I've had one which was almost passable, from the Tully's brand, but have not been able to find it since. Most likely I imagined it in a fever dream). And yet in spite of all this, I feel like when I return to the UK, I'll miss it. Of course, heroin addicts probably feel like they miss heroin. But I don't know if back home, I'd be able to find any energy drink or dodgy steroid which packs quite the same punch, or can turn you from dead-soul-in-a-skin-suit to efficient human being with quite the same no-nonsense briskness. Plus Red Bull doesn't come out of the vending machine warm.

Well holy moly, if it hasn't been over a year since I posted.

Things have changed a little up here, in my smoky mountain cabin. For starters, the aforementioned cabin has been lifted by a couple of burly removal men and plonked over in Japan. Mad, that. Don't ask me how I got here, I'm not entirely convinced it's actually happened yet.

I'm not much of a "hey, look at me, I'm doing a cartwheel!" type, except when I'm drunk. (And when I'm drunk the people around me also tend to be drunk, and doing (metaphorical) cartwheels, and their (metaphorical) cartwheels tend to be a lot louder and more impressive than mine so in reality the equilibrium hasn't really shifted.) I'm much more along the lines of "well, I'm over here playing this muted squeezebox if you're interested." So it's not really in my nature to publish my thoughts, and if I do I tend to regret putting out something that came out of my brain, that actual other humans can read at their leisure forever. Nonetheless my desire to claw back what little knack I had for writing, and my need to clarify my entropy through graphemes and phonemes and all the other 'emes that other people handily invented for my porpoises, compels me to post this diarrheic catharsis for everyone to skim like ice dancers, shrug and mutter to themselves that that weird bird they knew from school has got even weirder, even if she did manage to stop wearing ill-fitting shoes. Fortunately I have actual content in my life right now, so there should be too many pictures of restaurants and trading card emporiums to have to write about any feelings or whatever it is humans call it when they watch Gilmore Girls and shed water.

I will, however, tell you my feelings on the hangnails I have right now. The air is very dry here and I am having a lot of feelings about these raw hangnail nightmares I am having.

I don't know what else to tell you. There's an apartment. It's nice. There's food. You can eat it. There's Japanese people. You can talk to them (mainly to apologise for whatever Shinto god/train etiquette you've just massively offended). There's a job. I get money and talk to humans and make them talk back to me.

There's a good three months' worth of stuff to catch up on so I'll be steadily dripping that onto your thirsty tongues, dear readers.

Do You Even Post?

If you're wondering where I am - and if you are, you have only yourselves to blame for not lowering your expectations of me enough - I'm working on squeezing out the last few drops of enthusiasm I have for the law, in preparation for my final coursework deadlines (three weeks away) and my final exams (six weeks away). I've also rediscovered that when I'm not forced to, I actually like learning, and have taken up a few online courses which I am only slightly regretting (I know how to do quantum mechanics, right?). This takes up a fair amount of my time, and therefore the blog suffers. Soz.

My other current focus is exercise; a daily dose of the famed '30 Day Shred' video by Jillian Michaels. To be honest, I'm not making the best out of it since I'm not pairing it with appropriate diet -  I generally don't eat too badly, but I'm at my mum's house at the moment and a cupboard full of snacks you didn't have to pay for is a seductive mistress indeed. However, I am rather enjoying the primitive pleasure of strength training. It's not exactly hardcore, but no matter how piddling the little purple weight is there's a lot of satisfaction in lifting it. And putting it back down. And lifting it again. And knowing that if you just keep doing that, over and over again, you will somehow magically get stronger. Then you can lift a slightly bigger purple thing!

This new fascination with meatheadery has caused me to get perhaps unduly excited about Pain and Gain, featuring real-life Mr. Potato Head Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson:

I have no idea what this film is about, but I know I need to see it immediately, hopefully in a cinema which will permit me to take my weights in with me.

I have watched this trailer many times and am none the wiser. Granted, I have only just started getting into working out, so maybe there's some sort of bodybuilding shibboleth I'm missing out on which would make the plot seem more straightforward to me. But here's what I can glean from it:

• At the beginning of the film, Mark Wahlberg is hit by a car, as karmic punishment for lifting too much, or possibly not lifting enough.
• This has a profound effect on his life and the things he feels confident in doing, such as doing sit-ups on roofs and running from SWAT teams that appear for no reason.
• All of this is a true story.
• Salad is for poor people and this makes Mark Wahlberg and the guy from Monk angry, which is a shame because if they find their nearest Pret a Manger they'll find out it's just not true.
• The Rock is going to change both of their lives, which we know because his entrance is accompanied by a homoerotically throbbing bass in the soundtrack.
• Mark Wahlberg looks fat when he's underwater. This is possibly yet another factor which is contributing to his anger, and hopefully something that The Rock will know how to solve for him.
• The way to get over being angry about salad and looking fat when underwater is to beat people up and take their money, but only if you put on a morph suit first. The victims will not mind this because Mark Wahlberg will give them a 'protein shake', which I presume is slang for a sexual act.
• A shirtless man taunts a woman on a lawn and someone drives a speedboat. 
• The crew finish their last mission by walking slowly away from an explosion, and get over the inevitable hearing damage it has caused them by going camping together.

Is this what life has in store for me if I continue to train? I do hope so.

Review

This weekend, leaving my doomed dissertation in a cloud of dust, I scampered off to the cinema in search of escape, if only for an hour or two, from the great yawning chasm of a pain-laden life which can only end with death. Also, pick 'n' mix. I like the little ice-creams best.

For the first time in a while, myself and my partner (for I am a cowboy) chose to see something we hadn't heard any reviews or recommendations of. We had seen the trailer a lot, first a handful of times about eight months ago and then a handful of times more recently. I'm not sure whether the original intention was to release the film a while back and then it got delayed, or whether we're small children who are just supposed to get really, really excited about films with planes in them, but nevertheless there does seem to have been a fair bit of pushing of this film, which from what I can recall from the multiple adverts is called Drunkplane.

Drunkplane stars Denzel Washington as 'Whip' Whittaker, a confident, sharp and talented pilot, whose charming exterior belies a dark relationship with alcohol, drugs and stupid unexplained nicknames. In the face of a sudden and disastrous technical failure which, in the hands of any other pilot, would result in the deaths of everyone on the flight, 'The Whipster' saves the day with audacious yet brilliant tactics (which involve being upside-down and lots of screaming from the co-pilot). He is lauded as a hero, until an investigation reveals he had alcohol and cocaine in his system at the time. Though his lawyer (Don Cheadle, who I can't help but adore since his bizarre turn in Ocean's Eleven) manages to suppress the result of his drugs test, 'Mr. Whippy' must now come to terms with managing his addiction, in light of both his new fame and the investigation which could put him in prison.

Though I enjoyed Drunkplane a lot, I was also a little bit frustrated by it. Like a cat that would rather play with a cardboard box than the toy it contains, it ignored the more interesting elements of its story in favour of the blander bits. The first twenty minutes depicting the crash are brilliant: entirely inaccurate according to any pilots who have seen it, but absolutely nail-chewing and buttock-clenching. This was followed by a vaguely interesting dialogue between hospital patients about death, which led me to believe that Drunkplane might try and venture into intriguing territory. Sadly it all got pretty standard afterwards. A few themes were touched upon - the nature of religious faith in the face of calamity, questions of morality and what makes a 'hero', the pressures of fame - but they were never properly addressed. Instead we got a cardboard cut-out relationship subplot, which seemed to serve no purpose except "we should have a woman in this film because boobs", and a rushed ending which took all the interesting and ambiguous bits from the film and threw them into a big big fire. There was a moment not too far from the end where the film seemed to say "to be honest booze and drugs are fucking ace and you should do them, because they fix everything". That, to me, would have been a far better ending - maybe not correct, but confrontational and surprising. The audience's reaction would have been to think "blimey, I wonder what that was all about. Maybe I should ask myself some questions about deontological dogma and the true nature of ethics". That would have been good. Unfortunately that seems to be too much to expect from Hollywood, because the film was of course wrong-footing us, and swiftly decided to steer back onto the straight and (inevitably) the narrow. Nonetheless I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a good time, but at a time like this when so many Oscar contenders are out in cinemas vying for your attention, I'd say you could make better use of your £8.40 (jesus) elsewhere.

Verdict: da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-DRUNKPLANE!

Don Cheadle isn't finding me funny. That's okay, I entertain myself.

Why I haven't done the DVD review I planned

Two weeks ago I ordered a package from a popular online retailer worth sixty quid and ended up never receiving it. I checked to see if it was at the local depot, asked my neighbours if they'd taken it in, had no luck, chalked it up as 'one of those things' and felt I had no choice but to order the same thing again, after sending the company (let's call them 'Large South American Rainforest') an email on the off-chance that they'd offer a refund. Today I read the response I got, which was quite friendly and informative. Apparently the driver had delivered the package to my address and left it in 'the shed'.

We do not have a shed. There are, however, some sheds in the allotment on the other side of the street. Unless the Timelord himself popped over to our street, in a new biodegradable Tardis made of pine, these are the only structures resembling sheds in the nearby area. I can only conclude that the courier left my items in one of these (presumably unlocked) sheds, on land that doesn't belong to me and has nothing to do with me, without leaving a note or telling anyone.

According to Large South American Rainforest's couriers, a package is considered 'delivered' if it is either posted through the letterbox, or "left in a secure location at the delivery address provided". Now, being a law student, I have a tendency to get overly involved in trying to pin down definitions of words. This is difficult with a descriptive term like 'secure' because it is not a matter of binary, but of degree. We cannot say at what exact point 'not secure' becomes 'secure'. All we can do is rate an object's security, say, on a scale from 1 to 10, where 10 is 'in a safe, in an armoured car, guarded by Mossad', 5 is 'on my doorstep', and negative 10 is 'in an unlocked shed on an allotment belonging to someone else and OH MY GOD YOU ARE SO STUPID'.

Unless, of course, you want to argue that the courier was trying to make the package so secure, that it was kept secure even from me. Maybe the courier was so aware of this package's value, he believed even the prospective owner couldn't be trusted with it, and so hid it in a place I would never, ever find it. Maybe I am both victim and criminal, in a tangled conspiracy that goes right to the top of the establishment. Come to think of it, where was I when Kennedy got shot?

At this point, you might say "Unperky, you have been watching way too much TV. Probably something involving mysterious, complicated crimes, such as the Scandinavian cult TV hit 'The Killing'!" Well, you'd be wrong. I haven't watched The Killing. I bought it on DVD two weeks ago and some fucker hid it in a shed.