This is getting repetitive

So yet again any semblance of a plan i had for the coming year has fallen through and I'm back to homeless, plan less square one. It's getting mildly frustrating and more than a little scary.
I was going to work the the union, then that didn't work out, then i was going to buy a house, but that didn't work out, so i was going to live with my friend, but now that hasn't worked out either. All this means that when my lease ends in August I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do.

This could be a freeing feeling, I'm now free to move anywhere in the world I want, do whatever i want to do, but instead i just feel more trapped. I really just want someone to tell me what to do. My brother is having fun travelling and being a bit of a drifter, and i can see the appeal, but it's not what I want to do. I love being busy, I love knowing everyone in the building I work in, I don't want to have to move somewhere new and start again, away from everyone I know. At the same time, there are no jobs in Brighton, and the only reason i was staying was to live with Lily. I could move to London, or San Francisco, or anywhere else I want. I'll be equally adrift anywhere i pick, so it really makes no difference.

On the brighter side, my dissertations are going well. I have an email interview with Dave Eggers which will constitute about 2000 words of my 8000 word English dissertation, so a quarter of my work about him will actually be written by him. An ingenious way of doing less work, I think. My film dissertation is still limitlessly depressing and fascinating, so that's fun too.

In my endless search for procrastination materials I came across this video, which is so beautiful and made me cry. I hope it brightens your day.

campaign trailing

The campaign is in full swing. Polling opened 12 hours ago, and I'm already dead.
Just in case you're curious, here's an outline of the day I've just had, and an outline for what tomorrow holds.

6:00am - Woken up by a txt from my friend in new york about how awful the title sequence for Mad Men is.
8:30am - Catch the bus to campus
9:00am - Give a campaign speech to a lecture hall full of students
9:05am - Eat a GIANT cooked breakfast with a couple of the other candidates
10:00am - 5:00pm every hour on the hour give a campaign speech in a lecture hall, in the minutes between, run around campus trying to convince people to vote.
5:10pm - Dinner and a pint with drama folk
5:30pm - 5:45pm - fall asleep at dinner table, surrounded by drama folk.
6:00pm - 8:00pm - Watch documentary in preparation for tomorrow's film seminar
8:30pm - Catch bus home
9:00pm - Midnight - make paper flowers to hand out along with flyers tomorrow. Watch the wire, eat, sleep.

Tomorrow, on top of everything I did today, i also have a 2 hour film seminar, an hour of rehearsal during the day, 4 hours of rehearsal in the evening, and a club night at an AWFUL club in town that i have to go to because all of the other candidates running for the position I'm running for are going.

The candidates debate and question time yesterday went better than i hoped, so that's a good thing, and the election is getting a lot of attention in the greater student body, so that's a plus. There are even videos of our speeches, and little vox-pop things so you can learn more about the candidates before you vote, to try and make it less of a popularity contest. In case you're curious, you can watch them here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlccgqtqzLQ and here http://www.youtube.com/user/sussexstudentsunion#p/c/9/cEI7JMzYE9M

At the moment, though i desperately want the job, what i want even more is for this week to be over. Remembering to stay hydrated, occasionally eat, and smile through the pain is proving difficult.
Only 2 more days. Two more exhausting days.

Cheat neutral

Around this time last year i saw this film at a press screening for a documentary film festival, and for some reason it popped back into my head so i thought i'd share it. I think it is kind of brilliant.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/filmnetwork/films/p004tm7g

Sorry i can't embed the video, its owned by the bbc so you have to follow the link to watch it.
That's all for now.

"The bible says a lot of things...ya know"

Simon just sent me this, and it made me laugh till i hurt, and do an intense fan girl squeal towards the end, a surprise i won't ruin for other geeks in the audience. The cast is amazing, the lyrics are funny, and it makes sense. Watch and learn children.

"Prop 8 - The Musical" starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, and many more... from Jack Black

Hope you have a bright Obama day.

Othello At The Brighton Fringe

Set in the claustrophobic world of modern politics, this contemporary take on Shakespeare’s classic play explores the invasion of privacy, and the devastating effect it can have on people’s lives.

By submersing itself in modern celebrity and paparazzi culture, this production of Othello proves Shakespeare’s relevance to the modern world once and for all.

Othello is Shakespeare’s classic example of the destructive power of jealousy and mistrust. Innocence is corrupted and trust is eroded as every relationship is drawn into a tangled web of jealousies. By exploring the idea that “tearing down privacy lets in chaos and lets out love,” this production looks at Othello in a new, contemporary, cultural light.

Sussex University’s acclaimed drama society is proud to present its third production at the Brighton Fringe festival, after many years of successful productions at Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

Dates & times: 18-22 May - 6pm

Venue: Brighton Unitarian Church

Price: £6/£5 conc.

Tickets can be bought online at:
http://www.brightonfestivalfringe.org.uk/ticketing/webextra.aspx?ev=907

This is my big directorial debut, and it's shaping up to be a pretty awesome show. I've been working on it since November, and it's taken over most of my life, but hopefully it will all be worth it. Now i just need people to come. We were in The Independent this Saturday, which is amazing, and will hopefully boost our audience numbers, but i still want more!
Please buy tickets, and wish me ridiculous amounts of luck.

The build-up to today

If you ever needed proof that The Daily Show was amazing, this is it. A video charting the rise of Obama, which i thought i would post right now, the day he becomes president. Have a great day.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Barack Obama: Path to the Presidency

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

On a related note, this made me laugh alot.


On the back it said "Make sure you call him Mr. President"

Yes We Can!

Finally, over 4 years after that story being written, it has an ending. And not just an ending, an amazing, awe inspiring, audaciously hopeful ending!

I stayed up until 6 in the morning watching the BBC coverage at East Slope bar with hundreds of other students, and it was the most fun, exciting and stressful night of my entire life. I didn't stop crying for roughly 2 hours after i found out Obama had won, i was that happy. I only got 3 hours of sleep last night, but i've been skipping around all day grinning at people like a mad thing.

Another good thing that happened today, which makes me rank November 5 2008 (because in England the votes came in on the 5th, i'm not a stupidhead who got the date wrong) as right up there on the cool day scale, is that i made a proposal to the drama society to direct Othello for the Brighton Festival. Brighton is England's largest arts festival, considered Edinburgh's little, but quickly growing sister, and my proposal was accepted! Come May, members of the general public and theatre going community will be able to watch a play I directed! I'm so excited i could scream, but i won't because the walls of my room are paper thin and i think Paul is trying to watch a film next door.

anyway, that's all i wanted to say. Life is good.

If you're not smiling already, then here's a postsecret that made me laugh.



Also check out today's a softer world comic, and put your mouse over the image, and think happy thoughts.

Sleep to dreamier sleep be wed, Pt. 3

The people called Americans continued to sleep. As we mentioned earlier, they existed in a collective nightmare, which was shaped and guided by their highest-ranking leaders, including the most creepy and - overtly, comically - evil-like person to hold high office since - well, the comparison is difficult. Who would compare, in a democracy at least? Would Thatcher rank this high? (Discuss.) Anyhow, this particular wretched person was named Cheney (Dick), and though everyone knew he was a bad man, there was a large group of the sleeping Americans who chose, apparently, to think of him as cute-bad, as opposed to truly bad-bad. That is, they knew that while in Congress he had voted against the honouring of Martin Luther King Jr and Nelson Mandela, and for logging the living shit out of every forest known to man, and against pre-school for disadvantaged children and about a thousand other things that seemed reasonable enough to reasonable people. But still they thought, well, yes, he is quite creepy and very evil-seeming in every conceivable way, but isn't he, somehow, so evil-seeming that he's actually kind of cute? Sort of like David Bowie in Labyrinth or Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet? You know, that kind of evil that's so ridiculous that you almost like the evil-doer, because they're so willing to go out and camp it up? This is what the sleepers of America thought about Cheney, who kept them living in a constant nightmare from which they could not awaken. He and his little friend, who looked like a turtle, told the Americans that the nightmare was a dream, that chaos was safety, that blood was gold, that their feet were actually their mouths, that leprechauns were hippos and that cookies were shrubbery. And so many sleeping Americans thought it all so ludicrous that they kept sleeping, as waking up would surely deprive them of such rich entertainment. Meanwhile, the other half of the American sleepers, those who wanted to awaken from the nightmare-dream, were trying like mad to awaken the sleepers and thus awaken the collective body of Americans. All had to awaken at once! And this was very hard, for everyone was very tired. What would it take, the wanting-to-awakens thought. How to rise from this state of near-coma? They kicked and screamed to no avail. They rang bells and threw cold water on the bed. But, in the end, do you know what did it? What woke up the willing sleepers and allowed the nation to rise from this red-black slumber? Neither do I. This story needs a good ending. Please send help.

Hopefully in a couple of hours we'll get the ending the story deserves. If not I'll just stop being American, because there's no point.

Sleep to dreamier sleep be wed, Pt. 2

The people called Americans could not, it seemed, wake up from this nightmare wherein their two highest-ranking elected leaders were so clearly the wrong people for their positions, so ill-meaning in every way, that the situation defied even Nixonian standards of White House-based nefariousness. The most fiendish player in this nightmare, as we were explaining in the last instalment, was the vice-president, whose name cannot be uttered here for fear of upsetting children and plants and clouds. Suffice it to say that he was more evil than the designers of Happy Meals or the makers of smokeless tobacco, and the Americans dreamt dreams of him, constantly and without end. The Americans as a group were asleep for many years and were experiencing wretched dreams full of exploding children and men beheaded on TV, of ever-present fire and screaming and eyes everywhere wanting murder. The Americans were trapped in, it was thought, one collective red-black dream, and the only way they could awaken from the dream was for most of the dreaming Americans to choose to wake up. But the problem - the very strange problem - was that half of those dreaming chose to remain in this dream. (Did we say dream? Have we been saying dream? It was a nightmare, of course. A nightmare unlike any other, a nightmare that felt like the wearing of a lead cloak without holes for air or sight.) So while about half of those sleeping wanted to awaken, the other half watched, indeed, lived in, this very upsetting dream full of flames and blood and said, "I think this dream is OK", or "This is the best dream to be dreaming right now", or "It would only get worse if I chose to awaken". This was, of course, very frustrating to those who wished to wake up. Those who wished to awaken stirred and turned restlessly. They grabbed the covers, they opened windows, they moaned and coughed and kicked. But nothing, it seemed, would work. The sleepers slept and slept and even, sometimes, nodded and smiled when they watched and listened to the two men leading their nightmare. The two men would say to them, "Have you enjoyed the nightmare thus far? Because if you love the aforementioned exploding children and endless fire, we have more so very much more! - of that, to come."

Concluding part comes tomorrow.

Sleep to dreamier sleep be wed

I'm reading this out at Write Club this week, because it's the night of the elections, and because i want as many people to know the true extent of Dave Egger's genius as possible. It's in 3 parts, Here's the first:

There was a group of people, called the Americans, who once had a very vivid nightmare, simultaneously. The nightmare, which lasted many years, was nightmarish in many ways - but one notable facet was that in this nightmare the vice-president of their country was someone so outwardly and cartoonishly evil that his existence seemed ludicrous and wholly unbelievable, even in a nightmare. In the history of nightmare-villains and movie-villains and villains drawn with crayons by troubled children, this man stood above them all, though he was not very tall. Or maybe he was tall, but it was impossible to tell, given he walked very much like a hunchback, his head set deep into his shoulders and favouring one side. This way of walking seemed suspect, but it was nothing compared with the way he spoke. He spoke out of a small and dark corner of his mouth, in a way that was so comically fiendish that it seemed a put-on. If an improvising actor, asked to conjure a bad man or perhaps a minion of Satan, conceived of such a way of talking, his acting coach would say, "No, no. Pull back. Way back. We're doing the vice-president here - not Marty Feldman in Young Frankenstein." But this was indeed the way the vice-president spoke and walked. And his laugh? A mirthless thing, a chilling "Heh heh heh" (again, emitted from a dank corner of his mouth) accompanied by a forced shaking of his round fleshy back. Yes, yes, a fleshy back that was, like the rest of him, always sweating. Or it seemed always to be sweating, every inch of him, oozing with oil and perspiration and, perhaps, small brown-black worms that would leave and enter him via his pores, their bidding known only to him. Was he impervious to death? He seemed to be. Over the years of this nightmare-life, God had tried, four or five times, to kill this man, by striking his heart. But each time the man's heart was struck, the vice-president laughed his rat-rat-tat laugh and shook his fleshy back, mocking God in much the same way that vampires mock certain crosses, or, say, anal leakage mocks olestra.

I'll post part 2 tomorrow and part 3 on Tuesday, before i go to the bar to watch the elections broadcast live. Should be a long night!

Photo-negative

What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage,
including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage
daughter?

What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?

What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?

What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe
disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his
standards?

What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair
while he was still married?

What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to
pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable
organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five?(The Keating Five
were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989,
igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and
Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)

What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

What if Obama couldn't read from a teleprompter?

What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included
discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?

What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many
occasions, a serious anger management problem?

What if Michelle Obama's family had made their money from beer distribution?

What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?

You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected
reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close
as they are?

This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes
positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities
in another when there is a color difference.

Vote for change.

It'd be more funny if it were less terrifying...

Maybe if we keep laughing at her she'll go away. The woman honestly believes that Jonah lived in the stomach of a whale, that the earth was made in 6 days, and that dinosaurs are only there to test our faith. It's a choice between laughing or hiding under the bed...



if i didn't already love the daily show, this would do it.



and finally, if those changed your mind and you want a new candidate then why not try this one?

"Suicide carried off many, drink and the Devil took care of the rest."

It seems the French do everything better, but i suppose they have been cultivating an air of superior, aloof discontent since time began, so i guess protesting comes naturally.

Even My Llama is for Obama

I got a facebook message today from Barack Obama telling me that he had won the democratic seat for the Persidency. It wasn't on msn today when i signed in, i've yet to see any press covering of it, which i find highly odd, but i did find a link to a video on youtube of his victory speech, and it made me cry. A lot.



It's been a long time since i felt in any way proud to be an American, but Obama, and the American people's support for him have brought back that sense of pride.
Now he just has to win the election.

Vote For Change.