If having an alcohol problem means that a person’s alcohol consumption interferes with his work or personal relationships, then I probably never had one when I used to drink, but I appear to have developed one since I stopped drinking. I am very much looking forward to leaving this island. The picture is not particularly relevant, but I like it.

The Idiots (the Lars Von Trier film)
Wild Strawberries (the Ingmar Bergman film)
Biffy Clyro
The Big Dirty and New Junk Aesthetic (albums by Every Time I Die)
Billy Idol’s Greatest Hits (the less said about this the better)
The Distillers’ Coral Fang album
Tegan and Sara’s discography
The Smiths ‘best of’ album that Eoin Winning kindly lent to me
Ben Folds
Generation Kill (watched the series again; it’s my favourite show ever)
Borderlands (Xbox 360 game)
Tuning my guitar down a whole step

I also returned to veganism and got a job. Well, a Christmas job. But it would be pretty sweet if I could keep it on after Christmas, which is a minor possibility.

That’s about it. Stay Frosty.

…

Looking back on it, blogging here has been a mixed bag. In the early days I posted reactionary political opinions which I’m thoroughly ashamed of now, but thankfully they were mostly washed away when I moved to my own domain. On the plus side, I did meet a very good friend through my early forays into the blogosphere; he’s probably the nicest admiring internet-stalker you could ever hope to encounter.

Recently I haven’t wrote a damn thing however. The only people who read this are friends or people lost in the Google-vortex. There’s nothing of value on this spot, I’m just another new-media vandal clogging up the intertubes with my bullshit half-assed opinions of stuff I know nothing about. This is no way for a man to spend his time. I expect that the only interesting things I ever post here are the kind of things that a sensible person would shy away from posting, and for that reason I hereby announce that cianboland.com is going on indefinite hiatus, effective immediately. Go rot your brain somewhere else.

(Disclaimer: utterly inebriated post, but the sentiment still stands. One of my best friends does med, and he’s one of the nicest, most considerate guys I know. And everyone in my class is really nice too. I genuinely feel bad for dropping out of the course, because
all the other students in it are so goddamn nice. Seriously. Med students, in my experience, are a terrific group of people, and my only regret is that, well, that’s more a personal failing than anything else… But yeah, med students are jolly good folk).

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I’m probably going to go disfigure myself with some dumb piercing tomorrow. Speak now or forever hold your peace, those who think it’s a stupid idea.

Go. I promise to be bound by popular consensus come the morning. Or I’ll just do whatever I feel like. I don’t know. Regardless, let’s have some debate.

What kind of piercing should I get? I think that a nose ring like this looks pretty cool, but so far the reception to such an idea has been positively hostile. So again, I put this issue to you, my dear readers.

To pierce or not to pierce?

Update: Here’s the picture. Yes, I know that just because it looks good on someone else does not mean it will look good on me. Still, all drunken assertions aside, I’m quite keen to get this done.

This is what YouTube was made for – Scar from The Lion King singing Richard Cheese and Lounge Against The Machine’s cover of ‘Down with the Sickness’ by Disturbed. Awesome.

…

I don’t know why I write this stuff here, but I’m even more confused as to why anyone reads it.

You’re all weird.

Written in Greek, Philogelos, or The Laughter Lover, dates to the third or fourth century AD, and contains some 260 jokes which Beard said are “very similar” to the jokes we have today, although peopled with different stereotypes – the “egghead”, or absent-minded professor, is a particular figure of fun, along with the eunuch, and people with hernias or bad breath.

“They’re also poking fun at certain types of foreigners – people from Abdera, a city in Thrace, were very, very stupid, almost as stupid as [they thought] eggheads [were],” said Beard.

An ancient version of Monty Python’s dead parrot sketch sees a man buy a slave, who dies shortly afterwards. When he complains to the seller, he is told: “He didn’t die when I owned him.”

Beard’s favourite joke is a version of the Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman variety, with a barber, a bald man and an absent-minded professor taking a journey together. They have to camp overnight, so decide to take turns watching the luggage. When it’s the barber’s turn, he gets bored, so amuses himself by shaving the head of the professor. When the professor is woken up for his shift, he feels his head, and says “How stupid is that barber? He’s woken up the bald man instead of me.”

I thought it was amusing anyway.

Fortunately I didn’t. Instead I dyed it purple, but it came out pretty much black, which isn’t a bad result, all things considered. Apologies for the camwhoring, but it’s useful here for purposes of illustration.

I’ve mentioned to a friend how I often step out of the shower with new hair and think something along the lines ‘Ah, here’s to the new me who won’t fuck everything up’. It’s dumb, and I’m fully aware of how dumb it is, but I definitely got a blast of that earlier on when I exhumed all traces of that scummy orange colour from my hair. It’s been about a year since I had a full head of dark hair and, apart from bouts of serious videogaming, drinking and film watching with my best friends, it’s been a rolling disaster of a time.

So here’s to the new me, that is to say the me of one year ago, before the stupid red hair, stupid dead-end relationship, stupid bourgeois notions of respectability and obligation, and the unfathomably stupid decision to embark on a medicine course (that I’ve long since dropped out of). In the parlance of our times, fuck that shit.

The vegetarianism can stay though; I still think it’s disgusting to eat other animals. Apart from that, it’s as if the past year never happened; starting from right now, things are going to be different. Existentialism ftw!

Last night I got drunk and disgraced myself, not for the first time. So I’m giving up alcohol, at least for a while, for the benefit of everyone, especially my friends, who end up having to take care of me when these things happen.

Sometimes this happens immediately after parting ways with someone, and sometimes it happens right in the middle of conversations, where I’ll start to see myself talking to the other person, and starting thinking something like “listen to this fool…” about myself. It’s kind of like having a roaming free camera on a video game level, except it’s real-time real life and I’m a character and nothing interesting is happening.

These things don’t happen very often, and the don’t worry me, but I’m a little curious to hear if anyone else ever experiences something similar.

… I would opt for this one.