It Makes Me Sad…

Sometimes I’d get on the bus and for some strange reason, seeing as I don’t look anything like Mother Theresa, random people come up to me and try to strike up conversation. I don’t wear iPod headphones or listen to music, read the Metro all the time or put on make up (this is another topic I feel like talking about but maybe later) so I reckon I’m more susceptible to listening or just overhearing things I maybe shouldn’t.

Yesterday was a sad day though. I met a guy who kept looking for a job and was desperately searching the pages of the Manchester Evening News which is all over the place here, especially if you’re coming from the city centre. He kept mumbling about not being able to find anything and looks at me and says ‘do you have any idea what it’s like?’. I thought ‘umm, should I answer that?’. Whenever I get asked a rhetorical question I wonder if something bad will happen if I do, like when awkward conversation ensues and the other person tries to persuade you into going somewhere or doing something so I didn’t say anything, I just gave a sort of nod that said ‘yeah, well, I see where you’re coming from but can’t say I’ve been there‘.

He opens his wallet and says ‘this is me boy’ and shows a picture of a very cute looking baby boy with a huge grin on his face – yeah, I did think he was cute and I could tell the guy was proud of him. What I wasn’t expecting though was the follow-up to the story.

‘He was 1 month old when this picture was taken and I haven’t seen him since. He’s gonna be one soon‘

The conversation had taken a very strange turn already.

‘How come?’

‘His mum’s being a bitch and won’t let me see him, says this is her way of punishing me’

‘Blimey, I feel really sorry…but surely you can take some sort of legal action?’

‘Knowing her I’d end up with a restraining order and they’ll make them think I’m crazy. Besides, there’s no way to prove I haven’t seen him since.’

Few seconds of awkward silence..

‘I don’t understand though, whatever happened, it’s not the poor baby’s fault…and besides, if she doesn’t want him to know who his real dad is, kids don’t have any memory of anything from before they were three..punishing you by not letting you see your son is a bit cruel.’

‘Well she doesn’t have anything else to do, her reply to a similar question was “I have control of you now for the next 16 yrs and I’m going to put you through hell”‘

‘…‘

‘Says it all, doesn’t it? Left my job and my family, moved in, she kicked me out a month later and left me with nothing, admitted she just wanted to fuck me over and had no intention of ever staying with me‘

‘I can’t see how you get this strange pleasure from ruining someone’s life’

‘Could understand it if I didn’t want to be a father but I do…hurts being called the average man, you know’

Then I came home, read Hari’s entry called ‘The Change‘ again and felt somewhat down.

(names and some details from the story intentionally left out)

Manchester, So Hot Right Now

Three times yay for Rob who got a job in Manchester, following Andrew who’s already been here for a month now if I’m not mistaken. Suddenly, Manchester is the place to be!

(No, of course I’m not serious)

It’s Cool Time…NO, DAD, NO

 ‘Cartoonist’ on toothpastefordinner

See if you think this scenario is familiar: you go to a party or meet someone new, somewhere. Your friend introduces you to someone or you’re being approached by a new guy/girl yourself. You inevitably get to the ‘what do you do for a living?‘ question and that’s where things somehow go wrong. You tell them ‘I work in advertising‘ and you either get a ‘wow, that’s so cool’ reaction or ‘oh my god, how can you?‘ just put a bit nicely (or not).

I’m not sure how other people feel about this but I know for me time just stops at that moment. Very Heroes style, you’re stood there examining the look on their faces. You wave to check if time has indeed stopped for a second there and you can just move around and do rude things that they won’t know about. Then you sit and wonder what image they have in their heads. Are they picturing the creative that drives a red mini with stripes? That has an iPod and listens to ‘music that doesn’t even exist yet’ or has strange names? That wears a designer watch which looks nothing like a normal one but adds to the coolness. Does he sell retirement plans to cancer patients? Does he get all the girls in a club? Does she attract guys like a magnet because everyone thinks it’s ’so cool’? (For details see ‘Advertising sex life rankings‘ and curse or quit your current job, okay?) Does he or she go to Cannes and Portoroz for festivals and seminars and get shitfaced instead? Is he or she in some extension of his/her teens?

Probably most people think that and I just got a smile on my face when I read a post on Advertising for Peanuts (which got really nice these last months, is more honest and cool) : “Most of those working in the trenches of mundanity, I salute you” by Jim Morris:

“[...] it’s probably only one percent of us or five percent of us that actually do that stuff, while the rest of us are working on updating a cereal box, or developing a postcard mailer to executives at banks, or refreshing the website of a manufacturer of fasteners, or creating in-store signage at some donut chain, or shooting another sappy hospital commercial or a spot for energy bars or Endust, or putting together a sales kit to doctors promoting some new pharmaceutical product or working on some piece of a telecommunications company’s vast direct mail program or a new 4th of July promotion for frozen fish sticks or yet another banner ad for wireless headphones or . . .

None of which really qualifies, generally, as the cool stuff. “

It’s funny when people ask ‘So what ad have you done recently‘ in case they don’t ask ‘What does your job description mean?‘ and you can’t say ‘Yes, you see this is mine’ because it’s not yours entirely. If you say ‘we‘ suddenly it sounds like you did nothing. If you do say ‘Yes, I did this...’ then people are going to pass it on as ‘He/she did this, how cool is that‘ till you meet someone that happens to know you, on your own, haven’t done it and they give you the raised eyebrow.

It became so much of a cliché it’s not even funny any more. Next time anyone asks, I’m going to say I’m a student and therefore a full-time tramp, it might sound more reasonable and realistic to them and they won’t question it or give me the funny looks.

Mondays

I’m not very original when it comes to post names but ‘Mondays’ says a lot in itself, Mondays are those bloody days that shouldn’t even exist (yes, this is in fact why some weeks start on Sunday, I know it!). Mondays are essentially crap but they determine how your week is going to be.

You know they start bad when you’re sipping on your tea and you manage to spill it all over you because someone comes and sits next to you to talk and you have to move the cup away and then hit it as you swivel your chair around and splash, there’s tea all over you.

Mondays are generally cock-up days when you have to run after the bus, when your heel breaks, when your umbrella breaks, when you burn your toast and forget important stuff at home or don’t remember meetings. When you accidentally stick to the heated towel rack and go ‘FUCK THAT HURTS’ like a cow that just got branded. Yes, I had it happen to me and I guess you could call me a cow. Mondays are all that in one. Mondays are cruel when you remember you can’t just press the snooze button and turn on the other side and say ‘fuck it’ and pass out for two more hours.

It was on a Monday a couple of years ago when one of my friends ate something that his stomach didn’t approve of and spent his day in the silent room, moment which went down in history when he got 30 loo rolls for his birthday.

For me this Monday was source of awkwardness when I got this horoscope which made me shit a brick and got my hand moving in a spastic way I wasn’t able to find the X button on my screen to close it fast and make it go away. I never believed in something I couldn’t see with my own eyes but this made me wonder if the maggot living inside my brain like in Tim Burton’s ‘Corpse Bride’ suddenly abandoned me and wrote an astrology column:

Go ahead and make the move towards characterizing the most noteworthy of your week’s moments as ‘accidents’… and some folks will probably be easy-going (or self-centered) enough to groove with that clean-seeming explanation. You’re hosting an excess of twitchy high-strung energy, increasing your need to channel it somewhere (and fast!). So naturally, like a good-hearted but impish young child who’s devoured too many sugary snacks, you just want someone to play with. And, if you’re not carefully watching yourself, you’ll probably do whatever it’ll take to get their attention—including something so totally off-the-wall that it might even offend ‘em, even as they’re now wholly engaged in interacting with you. Now, was it really an innocent ‘goof’? Or was that slip-of-the-tongue your semi-conscious method for telling ‘em something you really wanted to say but didn’t feel you could? And because it’s now out there, won’t you have to confront the full situation head-on… which, in a certain sense, also feels like the very ‘play’ you were hoping for? Maybe that’s exactly why you ‘goofed’ to begin with—and that doesn’t sound quite like an ‘accident’ to me.

Suddenly, the desk was too small to hide underneath it.

How Am I Not Myself?

I remembered this phrase from I Heart Huckabees, the existential comedy. I’ve been wondering that myself these days and can’t seem to find the appropriate answer – a friend of mine challenged me to continue a blog entry of his on how women behave but I’m just the wrong person to do that. Instead, I promised I’d write this which is a rough transcript of a lot of thoughts from my notebook. So move along, nothing to see here (indeed nothing).

“No doubt about it, I’ve not been myself lately. In fact, I’m so unsure as to who or what this ’self’ is I started feeling sorry for whoever bumps into me at random as they always see a different side of me. I could just isolate myself from the rest of the world and journey on a trip to discovering my true self but spiritualism and self discovery just don’t cut it for me. I’m not sure I want to know who my real self is sometimes. I could identify a few of them and actually make them look like a Venn diagram. I reckon they do all have some common ground which is ‘myself’ but technically they’re so different from one another it becomes a huge blur and I just give up.

Andrea #1 can do almost anything you ask her to. She’s gullible and weak sometimes. If you ask her to be faithful, she’ll never leave you till you die of old age, granted you’ve been interesting enough at a certain point in life. She won’t mind moving around from one flat to the other, from one city to another, she won’t sulk for being on the train for four hours to see relatives or anything else of importance. She wants to have her own home and not move out of it but won’t complain if she can’t get it. She’ll love the insecurity because it’ll keep her curiosity tamed – seeing new places will be enough of a consolation for not being able to settle down anywhere. Andrea #1 won’t mind extra work, extra hours if it keeps things balanced and everyone happy. She won’t spend it on shoes either because there’ll be priorities and there’s enough inbalance from moving around so much, she doesn’t want to make it worse. She may long to spend it on something for herself from time to time just to be a bit superficial but there’s a lot of thinking going on around.

Andrea #2 will hate housekeeping, cleaning, washing, ironing. The bed’s going to be unmade for ages and the dishes are never going to be clean. She may even be too lazy to cook but always finds something to talk about with just about everyone it’ll take up most of her time. It’s not that she doesn’t want to do all these things but she just gets distracted on the way. She’ll listen to just about anyone and find their life stories, frustrations and problems fascinating and empathise with them. She might even stay awake for ages trying to understand how others work while neglecting her own self and she’ll want to know the reasoning behind your actions. She’ll want to know why and how you got to the conclusions you have and it won’t mock you for it because it sounds fascinating. If you don’t remind her that the dishes are all dirty and the furniture’s all dusty she’ll approve of you, most likely. She’d much rather spend the time she could have used to cook dinner talking to you, watching DVDs, playing records and doing other interesting things and just order take-away or something instead. If you ask her to go on a road trip the next day, she’ll never worry about what happens to the house but will have everything ready in less than five minutes. It’s all new and exciting!

Andrea #3 is moody and an emotional rollercoaster. She has satirical moments, she’s cynical and can be quite a mental challenge. If you don’t like being intellectually stimulated you might as well leave her alone. She’ll never take you seriously unless you’ve challenged her to an argument – it’s what she wants in the end. If you give up the battle before it’s even started you won’t end up too far with her and she’ll forget you quicker than she can snap her fingers. You might not know why you’re doing it but for some reason you feel like you should and could play along. Andrea #3 is not prejudiced in any way and can’t be easily impressed. She might even forget she wanted to do something really important and suddenly not care at all about it. She’s a highly independent individual. She’s being honest and if you’ve joined in the game you’ve entered the honour system. She’ll tell you where she’s been and who she was with if you do the same. Don’t do that and you’ll be repayed with secrets or lies about the places she’s been to. If she doesn’t question you, you shouldn’t question her either. She’s a vengeful person so if anything or anyone have been unfair to her, she’ll create a bigger war and defeat the very thing she was heading for along with any other competition on the way.

Andrea #4 can be well-mannered and the kind of girl you’d love to take out to an expensive restaurant or to meet your friends and parents. If you play nice, she can be friendly towards anyone and they won’t forget that too soon. She’ll have no trouble putting her life into order, she’ll always look after herself and dress like Posh herself and show interest in anything from concerts to art galleries and dance classes. She’ll bake you a cake on your birthday or surprise you with something that never would have crossed your mind. Being feminine and sophisticated is all part of the plan, as well as sleeping in a satin gown and always having wine around the house. She’ll encourage you to have some as it’s all part of the glamorous image she has in her head. Mention a trip abroad and she’ll love you for it.

Andrea #5 can be very broody and will get excited at the thought of having a family and other things people are so scared about. Chances are she already thought about what your surname would look like next to her name. She won’t force her kids into doing things she wouldn’t do. She’ll be protective but not too restrictive. One day she’ll give in and do anything they want only to be somewhat mean and absurd the other day. She’ll worry about a lot of things, from grades and how school is going, if the homework’s done, if everything is in order, if everyone is ready at the right time and sometimes panic if things aren’t going according to plan. She’ll try to make both her husband happy and the kids quiet as hard as it may seem sometimes and she won’t give up on the idea, as bad as things get.

So, where is the real me?“

If…Then!

Over at beeker ideas there’s this bit of information I’ve been chewing on for a few hours now: realists always sleep well. Not exactly to be taken seriously but it just made me think a bit about the phrase ”realists always sleep well at night“. If being a pessimist means the glass is half empty, being an optimist it’s half full, being a realist what the hell do you do? Say there’s water in it but can’t say how much?

Supposedly us pessimists sleep bad at night because we think about the next day and wonder if things can go wrong and we think ‘yes, they will, I bet I’ll have loads of work to do and I’ll get home late as always‘ or something like that. Optimists will probably be thinking ‘well maybe tomorrow I’ll have less work and finish early and come home and cook dinner for my family‘. Realists would probably be somewhere in between all this weighing the probabilities carefully: could my boss be in a good mood due to something (“Did he go out last night? Did we get nice feedback from the client? Does he have kids that get good grades in school?“) and will he let me go home or is he angry because one of my colleagues called in sick and I have to do twice the work?

It’s hard being a pessimist. It’s hard being a pessimistic woman. Or even realistic, it’s just as bad. Or sad sometimes! To worry or not to worry? How do I stop worrying that I can’t stop worrying? Will I die early? I worry that my flat mates hate me because I’ve been coughing all day yesterday. Why the bloody hell do I worry, I was coughing at four in the morning because I wasn’t sleeping. But they were. So they couldn’t hear it anyway! I worry about not remembering something really important to me. I worry that one day I’ll bump into a doorman that will ask me for my ID (they should but I don’t look my age, is it because I worry?). I’d love not to be like this. I can’t think things were meant to be even if my locus of control is external and I tend to blame anyone but myself when things go wrong. I’m worried that I’ve become a sort of perfectionist with things that are important to me – I worry about enough things so I don’t want to worry about the work I do. I want to sleep at night thinking I did the best I could and there’s no way anyone can hold anything against me. I worry so much I want to be released at least of a few things.

So us pessimists do sleep quite well at night. We just think that if something bad happens, we were expecting it anyway, because in the end we hope for the best and expect the worst!

Confessions of an Insomniac

I’m happy being this tired. I’ve not slept for four days now and it feels somewhat good, it’s a bit like being on some drugs except you’re only killing yourself by not taking any pills or sniffing stuff.

In a way it’s actually helping, when I’m really tired my brain is still working at normal capacity but I tend to care less about what other people say or think, especially the things which inhibit me from speaking my mind. Normally in a lecture I’d keep my hand down and shut the fuck up because everyone is just looking forward to doing whatever it is they want to do while deep down inside I’m interested and I do think of some things and I feel bad seeing (some) lecturers try to interact with an audience that looks like it’s going to fall asleep anyway, lecture or not.

But I kept it as a principle, I’ll never ask questions that involve long answers just as the tutorial is about to finish or when other people are snoring, I wouldn’t want to interrupt them, it’s just rude!

One of today’s tutorials felt a bit like some sort of drugs vision (for the deprived-of-sleep-me) where the lecturer was trying to have a conversation with us and everyone was quiet and looked a bit scared or just fucked off the one moment I did turn around to look at them. Shortly after I remembered I was sleepy and my cough had not disappeared by miracle. Probably the first two days of insomnia were good, the third was great and then an abrupt fall on the fourth, meaning today. I wanted to talk to the lecturer as he was slowly entering the realm of strategic planning and other things relevant to my interests but the time was up and after the few things I did say my brain was left to work on its own drifting from one topic to the other. Celebrity lecturer at University of Manchester gets paid £3,000 per hour, why is the University of Manchester paying him so much for 28 hours of work per year, where’s the loop hole, oh wait they’re building another campus too that costs £600m as they oh so love to remind us whenever we walk past it (“We are investing £600m in a new campus. Apologies for any discomfort caused etc.”)…Manchester University is huge! Terry Leahy visits Manchester Tesco stores and he studied at Manchester Uni… and then the bubble just bursts when you realise it’s time to go and the tutorial is over. And it feels a bit retarded to try to explain that to anyone (“Honestly, I was thinking of the tutorial!”) because they’ll think I’m crazy. Which I am!

I woke up about ten minutes later when I went down to the actual lecture and I remember him asking me something among the lines of ‘You seemed to understand what I was talking about, did it make any sense to you?’. Suddenly I felt bad for looking so sleepy and dozy and realised that my insomnia has gone too far and that I have to go to sleep now.

BrewDog Beers

I confess this isn’t my discovery, I was only introduced to them! But now that I’ve actually managed to take photos of the infamous labels of BrewDog Beers I decided to share them with everyone else. From what I’ve gathered they’re pretty hard to find so if you’re lucky enough to see them you should give them a try. If not you could always send me the money, I’ll have a pint and tell you what it was like!

Beer family

There’s the Hop Rocker (“statuesque lager”)

“7002 years ago, a mystical and enchanted beverage was discovered. It was a nourishing foodstuff that played a pivotal role in many great ancient civilisations.

Today, in this hectic, monopolised grey world we live in there is no longer magic to be found in this bland, mass produced, cheaply sourced and watered down concoction.

At BrewDog we believe that the magic is still there to be extracted from this drink. All that is needed is the reintroduction of passion, love, care and the highest quality ingredients.

Everyone who shares in BrewDog’s vision will be able to escape from the monotony of modern day life and rediscover the zest, sparkle and spectrum of joys provided by nature and her wares that make life worth living.

Come and join us on a journey”

And the Punk IPA (“post modern classic pale ale”)

“This is not a lowest common denominator beer.

This is an aggressive beer.

We don’t care if you don’t like it.

We do not merely aspire to the proclaimed heady heights of conformity through neutrality and blandness.

It is quite doubtful that you have the taste and sophistication to appreciate the depth, character and quality of this premium craft brewed beer .

You probably don’t even care that this rebellious little beer contains no additives or preservatives and uses only the finest fresh natural ingredients.

Just go back to drinking your mass marketed, bland cheaply watered down lager and close the door behind you.”

Along with The Physics (“laid back amber beer”) which I won’t post because it’s worth discovering it on your own!

Why the bloody hell does it have to be brewed in Aberdeenshire?

This is not a sponsored blog entry really but it would be nice if you could show interest in it, they might become more popular and I’d get to drink more good beer so think of it as a win-win situation, great beer for everyone in the end!

We Know All These Tired Cliches

But we don’t know which is the funniest! And it’s right there!

PornForGirlsByGirls.com, discovered via scamp just made my day

Not necessarily because I’d fit in the entire description but because I know people (ehm, women) that do. And this is just great. God damn it, we need a bible! Chapter 9 – Chocolate, Chapter 10 – Shoes, Chapter 11 – Going Back to Mum’s etc.

Advertising and the News

This sounds like one of them university subjects, yes, I know, it actually is one!

I’ve been chewing on this for a few months now and I keep asking myself a lot of stupid questions which I’ll eventually have to answer in some kind of order. How do they affect one another? How can you use the news to build awareness?

When I first read these in my handbook I thought ‘hey, that’s easy’. Easy indeed, but giving a proper explanation isn’t as easy as it sounds. Seeing the list of core texts and additional texts for this module made my heart sink a bit but after a few weeks I started reading them for reasons still unknown to me. So here I am with a wider knowledge of public relations principles and practice, news understanding, advertising, promotion and ’supplemental aspects of integrated marketing communications’ still wondering what the bloody hell to write for this module.

Supposedly I have to look at how advertising affects the news and the other way around. The latter seems to have one universal answer that covers everything in a simple and effective manner: it could be a blessing or a curse! Take a look at the death of Heath Ledger and this Wikipedia article called “Anonymous” releases statements outlining “War on Scientology”. You might ask yourself what’s the link between the two. It’s this ‘anonymous’ that first found out Heath was dead, way before the news was picked up by any website really. In only a couple of hours from then, every newspaper and website was talking about Heath Ledger’s death, whether it was intended suicide or accidental overdose or who knows. Everyone and their mums found out about this and I reckon it’s too early to tell now how much this will affect Batman – The Dark Knight when it comes out. All the videos on YouTube and other news sites have been stirred, bumping old Heath Ledger videos from their anonymity to thousands of new views. In a way it reminds me of a joke: “If you want to be famous, kill someone famous” (somewhere on BoaSaS). In this case, if you want to be more famous than you already are, kill yourself. Sadly applies to a lot of dead people who seem to be more appreciated now than they were while alive.

Anyway, the topic seems so vast I can’t even start to fathom it. Advertising just to get the news’ attention could land you in a load of crap like a badly done teasing campaign and being on the news without your will could be as benefiting for your brand as it could be disastrous. Most of the time it’s disastrous but I think that’s because a lot of new products seem to fail and we’re only shown the disastrous part to it. Every time I do think of it the only thing that keeps coming to mind is the universal answer people give to the question ‘How many furniture brands can you name?’. Then it all makes sense in a strange way.

I’m so tired I want a cup of tea and to lie down for a bit.