Did I mention...

that I passed that Psychopharmacology exam? Yay me!

Perhaps there's something to be said for the divine power of prayer. Or the journal article on depression I managed to cram into my brain the night before.

Graduation ceremony arranged for 30th July. My own attendance at it might not be such an outlandish possibility after all.

Just glad it's over

I have not had the best of weeks this week.

Monday saw me go into the lab to test my drugs as usual. For the most part, I've moved onto testing their influence on animal behaviour. I arrived on Monday morning with as much preparation done as I could do for an procedure I had never done before in my life. In other words, I was expecting a little bit of support.

Unfortunately, my project supervisor doesn't really seem to believe in... erm... supervising my project at this stage of it. The students who had already done it were nowhere to be seen, and when I arrived at the animal lab for testing, the technician was of the opinion that as it was my experiment, he could just leave me alone to get on with it. So there it was. I spent about 15 minutes looking at the mice in their cages, psyching myself up to deal with the task at hand. Oh, and struggling not to pass out from the smell of the place, which is really rather rank.

Basically what is involved is that you have to 'expose' 12 mice to a 'unfamiliar environment'. The environment in this scenario is an open-topped tub with gridlines traced on the inside of the bottom of it, and two coffe cups turned upside down and placed on the base as well. Behold my carefully constructed plan below.

The idea is that you place two identical coffee cups in the positions marked on the plan, and then let each of the 12 mice explore their new environment for 3 minutes. Once the 12 3-minute sessions have elapsed, you begin the cycle again, allowing each mouse another 3 minutes to explore the same environment (for 'explore', you can read: Run up and down the box like a blue-arsed fly, shitting all over it).

Because there is more than one mouse per cage, and they all look the bloody same, you have to give each one of them an identifying mark on their tail so you know which one has been in the tub, and which one gets which drug by way of injection later. Let me tell you, dear reader, the marking of the tails is really quite a pain in the arse. By Christ, those little shits will wriggle, and given any opportunity at all, they will bite. Before I began the experiment, the technician informed me that he had been in the business for twenty years and had only been bitten twice, so that side of things wasn't really anything to be worried about. I must have been on a run of bad luck, because I was on my fifth mouse, during the first exposure cycle, when the little bollox managed to sink his teeth through latex gloves into my hand, drawing blood. I had been gentle with them and considerate of their plight up until then, but that was the watershed. After that, I was brisk and business-like.

It's at the end of the second cycle that each mouse gets injected. Mercifully, by the technician. Four will receive injections of saline (placebo) and the other eight will get injections of supposedly memory-enhancing drugs. Then they go back into their cages and chill out for the night. The next day you come along, change one of the coffee cups to a different one (the 'novel' stimulus marked above) and videotape each of them as they do their 3-minute thing in the tub again.

I was left on my own again, to work out the video camera.

The theory is that the mice injected with the memory-enhancing drugs will have better recollection of the environment that they have been put into previously. They should have greater recognition of the new coffee cup as an unfamiliar object, and spend more time exploring it. So far, this has been the case for all the mice, even the ones that got placebo. You also have to count the number of gridlines each mouse crosses during the 3 minute session, to determine if the drug has a stimulant or sedative effect, compared to placebo. I have yet to do the statistics on the results to show if the ones injected with the memory enhancers display a significant difference. I do know one thing though: This part of the experiment blows, and I have to do it two more times before I'm finished. The only thing that motivates me now is the sooner I get it done, the sooner I can get on my write up and work on getting as good a mark as possible.

I came in yesterday, to try and work on some animal tissue. That didn't even get off the ground. Still, there's always next week.

This morning I woke up (well, this afternoon, but I digress) and found a letter from a debt collection agency addressed to me. When I left the old house 6 months ago, there was some loose ends with regards to bills. The landlord took the gas bill and told us he would take care of it, and deduct the appropriate amount from our deposits. He didn't take care of it, hasn't returned my deposit to me at all, and he's not returning my calls (I left him a message on his voicemail today threatening to pay him a personal visit at his address in London). Somehow the fuckers at the gas company have found out where I live now and are pursuing me over it to the tune of £120. I'm getting well sick of this, and am going to try and take the buy-to-let monkey to court. What bugs me is why the gas company are coming after me rather than him. I'm tempted to go to court and argue my case, but it's hassle I don't need. And the bitch who left the house before the end of the tenancy seems to have gotten off scot-free. It really makes my blood boil. So now I'm assembling paperwork for an application for an emergency grant top-up when I really could be doing something else. Gah!

On the plus side, the pharmacy ball is next Friday, and I've managed to organise a tuxedo. Should be a laugh. The facebook pictures should be something to behold anyway.

This says how I feel...

(Nicked from BN2Beeyatches)

I had my first experience with Vista back in October, when I started back in my part-time tech-support job at the university. The influx of first years had begun, and with them their laptops, needing to be configured to connect to the university network. I just about had the patience to do it on XP (just), but on Vista? Bloody hell. Negotiating the 'innovative' interface gave enough cause to tear my hair out (if I had any), and why, when you try to launch an app or open a file, does it ask you if you are sure that this is what you want to do?

When I worked in software testing, part of the pleasure of my daily grind for the first half of my tenure - about 2 years - was testing various desktop applications on various different versions of Windows. Most of the applications were themselves written by Microsoft, who dictated that they had to be tested on every version of Windows going. As a result, I built up my experience with - and subsequently formed an opinion of - everything ranging from Windows 95 to Windows XP. You want the definitive guide? Of course you do.

Windows 95: Superceding all versions of the Windows GUI before it, it was supposed to feature universal Plug n' Play. It didn't. Although lacking in features compared to what came after it, it was reasonably stable, although I'm sure you'll agree that when it comes to Windows in general, that's not saying a whole lot.

Windows 98: More unstable than a nuclear bomb primed for detonation. Microsoft quickly realised their mistake, and released...

Windows 98SE: A slight improvement on it's predecessor, and as far back as Microsoft were willing to go when testing their applications in 2000. Bought a PC with Windows 95 on it and didn't feel like upgrading a mere 5 years later? Too bad. I have fond memories of frantically trying to locate various device drivers at work because this one came with f**kall as standard.

Windows NT Workstation and Server: A widely distributed (in market terms) business OS, it still wasn't what you'd call the first choice for setting up a stable network. One of guys I worked with who generally tended to work on distributed applications described its day-to-day status as 'up and down like a whoor's knickers'. Other than that, the interface was about the same as Windows 98SE.

Windows Millennium: The follow-up to 98 SE it was universally derided as one of the most bug-ridden unstable version of Windows out there (PC World called it the fourth worst product of all time). I ran this on my own PC for a while, however, and it did generally tend to behave itself, though I never really used it for much, and it wasn't what you'd describe as overflowing with features.

Windows 2000 Professional and Server: In my opinion, the first time Microsoft started to get it right. As a client OS, whether you were a business or home user, Win 2000 did the job adequately, and as far a I can see, is the most stable of all the client operating systems Microsoft have released to date. The Server edition didn't have too bad a track record in most of the places I used to work. Also the last of the operating systems that didn't require online activation, thus making the installation of pirate copies a breeze. Mystifyingly, it holds only something like 2% of the current Microsoft market share.

Windows XP: Never one to operate by the adage 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it', Microsoft ploughed on. This followed shortly after 2000, and has most of its features (with a few extra unnecessary bells and whistles), but not a whole lot of its predecessor's stability. Oh, and it's ugly. It's seemingly shorter boot-up time compared to Win 2000 comes at the inconvenience of waiting around for over a minute while it hourglasses post-login. Sneaky little trick, that one. I tried to get away from XP when I came over here, but a computer I was given for free 2 years ago had XP installed, and most of the computers in the college did too, so I was forced to get used to it. Not the worst, as long as you don't try and work quickly with it: that confuses it, and it promptly hangs.

Windows Vista: As far as I've seen, a complete rip-off of OS X. All major features have been regrouped (like, what's with the bloody Network Connections section? It was fine as it was) and God forbid you try and install any of the leading anti-virus applications, that way lies tears. Prone to spontaneously shutting down on Dell laptops, which is a bit of a bummer when you're working on that essay that is due in the next day and you forgot to save your work as you went along (this happened to my flatmate). The update patches are already out in force. How embarassing...

So there you have it, folks. Burn yourself a copy of Windows 2000 Professional (in the next two years, before they stop supporting it) and off you go.

At last...

I am now officially in the firmament of Brighton's gay social scene, and move and shake with the best of them. What am I talking about? After four years, my picture has finally appeared in that coveted monthly glossy, Brighton GScene.

Spotted! On a night out, sir Denis Ryan esq.

Coincidentally, the picture of a man whose knickers I would very much like to get into is featured later on in the same edition.

This bloke has seriously got the broad-shouldered, inverted-pyramid, barrel-chested thing nailed. Alas, whenever I pass him in the local fleshpots, I am lucky if he even acknowledges me. Well, he'll have to revise his opinion of me now!

So there you have it folks. If you ever want me to deign to attend one of your social functions, I shall need at least one months notice, and even then I'm not promising anything.

Now back I go to my pedicure...

College

The exam is done and dusted and I really don't give a shit about when the result is out. As long into the future as possible, with a bit of luck.

I'd have liked a bit of a break this week, but last Friday I emailed my project supervisor to ask him if he wanted me to come in on Monday and pick up my work from where I left it before Christmas. Personally, I'd sooner have stuck pins in my eyes than go back into it, such was my frame of mind at that point, but I felt that I should at least pretend to give a shit. So I got in touch, asking him if I should come in this week. Secretly I was hoping that he - like most of the other supervisors - was taking a break for the next two weeks. "Why yes", he said, "Come in on Monday, but I'll be teaching for most of that time, so I won't really be around to help." Bollox, I thought.

Yesterday wasn't too bad, though I was stuck in there until 5:30, as per bloody usual.

Today is looking rather different. Have you ever worked with animal tissue, dear reader? No? You should be profoundly grateful...

Basically, a big part of my project involves working with parts of dead animals. It's not particularly nice, but the work we're doing could result in the development of drugs to slow down the mental decline associated with Alzheimer's disease, so I suppose it's for the common good. Well, for the common good of the human population. Less good for the playfully cute mice that end up donating their brains and internal organs to us.

This morning, another one shuffled off this mortal coil and we...erm...honoured her by taking out her uterus and suspending it in a solution, where each end of it was attached to terminals designed to measure muscle contraction. The idea is that you inject novel drugs into the solution, and from the response of the tissue, you get an idea of whether or not the drug will have a noteworthy effect if used as a psychiatric drug later. Unfortunately, the reliability of the tissue as this kind of indicator relies on its uniformity of behaviour, i.e. it should stay still in the absence of external stimulii and contract in presence of drugs with an established mechanism of action.

Right now, it's not staying still on its own at all. The ghost of its pissed off host must still live on in its uterus, because it's spontaneously contracting of its own accord, which shits up any chance I have of using it. Which means that I won't have obtained anything in the line of useful results today, and let me tell you, it was not an easy exit from my bed this morning, dear reader.

(Later)

I'm at home. The treacherous uterus yielded nothing. I decided to call it a day. I'll be back in there on Thursday afternoon to try again. The one catch is that I'll be teamed up with two med students who've never used an organ bath before, and it'll be my job to inculcate into them the joys of using it.

But overall, it's OK. I'm making reasonable progress. Not as fast as some, but that's because I'm very exacting (bordering on obsessive) when it comes to lab work, making sure everything is done correctly and precisely. Project work is a good way for the lazy to pick up marks, as it involves doing things more than thinking or learning about them. Most of the time you're just walking around a lab making up solutions and using pipettes to deliver volumes of them, without having to think too much about it. I'm liking this project, hell I'm in the middle of it, doing it, and I still think it sounds impressive.

Basically, it's about this neurotransmitter called Angiotensin IV. In the last ten years, there has been a lot of work done in certain areas of neuroscience, memory and diseases like depression and Alzheimer's disease, and it has been discovered that if you raise levels of this neurotransmitter in the brain, you get improvements in memory and learning. This is of interest in the area of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers, where deeply embedded memories remain untouched until the latter phases of the disease, but acquisitional memory (the mechanisms involved in making new memories) suffers earlier on. Raising levels of Angiotensin IV in the brain seem to be the obvious way to combat this.

Except you can't raise them directly. Giving someone a tablet with Angiotensin IV in it accomplishes nothing because its chemical properties make it orally inactive, i.e. it won't be absorbed through the wall of the gut into the bloodstream. Injecting it directly doesn't really work either, as it doesn't cross the blood-brain barrier that well, if at all. The only solution is to modify the molecule slightly, making it more likely to cross into the brain, but still act on the same targets in the brain in the same way. So I've been handed two different variants of Angiotensin IV, and my job is to run a battery of tests on them, assessing their suitability for the aforementioned scenario, and finally test it on laboratory mice, and see if they display any improvements in memory or cognition. Compared to some of the projects my classmates are working on, it's fairly rigorous stuff, but I don't mind. I like getting my teeth into it, and because it's a joint effort with other students on the course, if the research shows promise, we can publish, and our names will be under that of our supervisor. At the moment, the two variants I'm testing don't look particularly stellar, but as we're all working under the same umbrella, so to speak, so my chances of having my name on something worthwhile aren't much affected by that. There's also the bonus that this project work is heavily weighted in the award of my degree (close to 40% of my overall mark, if I'm not mistaken).

I like that I feel good about it, because there've been times - even before I started this degree course - where I wondered if I was doing the right thing. I'm still not fully reconciled to the idea of having to work 9 to 5 like everyone else, but I had to be pragmatic in the face of my flights of fancy, and as much as I'd like living a more artistically-minded existence, I value financial security just as much. I've always managed to do consistently well in science subjects, so this course seemed like a safe bet. I can say now, though, that I've no regrets. If you have to get out of bed in the morning and work for a living, then you may as well work for yourself, and get paid well for it. With this I have a chance of managing both, and actually liking the job into the bargain. Not bad, all in all.

It feels weird now that I'm nearing the finishing line. No doubt the next four months will be rather shit, but barring some major disaster, I should graduate. I won't cover myself in glory: Old habits die hard, and I still have the odious habit of mastering crucial concepts on the syllabus of a course for the first time mere hours before an exam. This, along with the odd stressful external circumstance, has kept me from breaking any records. There'll be no first class honours for me, not even in my wildest dreams, but with a bit of luck, I should get honours of some sort, and then get on with the business of pulling in the dough after that.

Onward ho...

Hooray!

On Monday January 21st of 2008, June Brooks gave birth to a healthy baby boy, whose name it has decided will be George. 9lbs-odd. You seem to have a knack for producing big bruisers, Brooksy.

A son for Dan and a brother for Luke, Jordan and Jasmin. An opportunity for a piss-up if ever there was one.

Psychopharmacology exam at 2pm!

Our Father,
Who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name,
Thy kingdom come,
Thy will be done,
On Earth, as it is in Heaven.
Give us this day, our daily bread,
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us,
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil,

Amen.

Hail Mary, full of grace.
The Lord is with thee.
Blessed art thou amongst women,
And blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
Holy Mary, Mother of God,
Pray for us sinners,
Now, and at the hour of our death,

Amen.

Glory be to the father,
And to the son,
And to the holy spirit,
As it was,
Now,
And ever shall be.
A world without end,

Amen.

Drat and bother!

With an exam on Tuesday coming, I'm anticipating a lovely weekend ahead of me. Being my final year, one would expect all cavalier tendencies to go flying out the window, to be replaced by a new, previously unheard-of diligence, wouldn't one?

Well, one would, if one was talking about anyone other than me. The screams of despair remain the same. Although I must say that sitting down for a coffee with a few classmates the other day, and finding that they had done nothing either, and cared even less, was comforting. Why floundering isn't so bad when you're not the only one doing it, I'm not so sure, but hey.

In other more important news, Tom's bar, the one I frequented only recently, has closed down. It appears that this particular opportunity is lost to you, Mz. 'Flee, but do please dry your eyes. I'm sure another kamikaze businessman will come out of the woodwork to attempt another similar venture soon. It seems to happen a lot around here.

I'm also starting the organisation of a trip I hope to go on this year: The Great British Bear Bash of 2008 in Manchester, at the start of May. Ah yes, if I exercised this much forward planning with regards to my degree, I'd probably be looking at a first class honours by now.

And with that, back to the study of the psychopharmacology of cannabis I go. From a purely theoretical standpoint, of course.

A Sex Entry

... for those of you with a fragile disposition.

Schwarz, a bar in Brighton I went to a while back that opened my eyes somewhat, came a cropper when Legends hotel was refurbished. The basement was converted into a disco that turned out to be more successful than its dark, sleazy predecessor. It turns out that people prefer to dance to tunes on a trendily designed floor rather than have filthy sweaty sex with random strangers. Who knew?

It wasn't long before the gap in the market was spotted, of course, and a new bar called Tom's sprung up, with the same theme in mind. I was put off going for quite a while. Due to the current legal requirements for running a place like this, private membership is necessary, and at the start they were charging quite a bit for it. However, they recently stopped charging for it altogether, and in recognition of that section of their customer base, the New Year Financially Fucked, entry was free last night and tonight.

I went last night. It was more or less the same thing as Schwarz. You have to watch your step on your way to the bar, otherwise you might trip over the guy on his knees servicing another guy, and in the darkroom, conversation as a prelude to sex is almost discouraged. One of the barmen was wearing a snug-fitting vest and had the body - especially the biceps - to pull it off. I wanted to pull it off. His vest, I mean.

After moving around a bit, getting to know different men (fnar fnar), I hooked up with a rather nice chap, and we headed back to mine. He was a bit nervous about holding hands in public, saying it wasn't worth the hassle, but I told him I knew Kung Fu, and if anyone gave us any shit, I'd collect one of their eyes. Mercifully, my misplaced faith in myself (I failed my most recent Kung Fu exam) wasn't put to the test.

It was about 4am when we got home, and I was exhausted after the long day (the earlier turbulence-ridden return flight I endured that day was not good for my nerves either) so we collapsed. We woke surprisingly early, but rather than get up and be productive, we spent most of the day in bed, getting it on.

The only problem is, now I sit here wide awake with my body clock gone to shit. What's a boy to do?

Go to the Bulldog, maybe?

Rant Inevitable

It's not like it should be any surprise to me, but this year I've really realised how there is absolutely nothing in my hometown for me any more.

I left Mallow with great hopes when I was 19, bound for Trinity College, in Dublin. For reasons that are too long to go into right now, that exit didn't go well, and rather than cut ties with the auld dump, I kind of stayed in touch. I was in limbo for my early twenties. I had left Mallow, but had never really settled anywhere else. That changed when, after a two-year break from Dublin, I returned at the beginning of this decade, and that was it. Things went well, I settled, and knew then that I would never come back to live in Mallow for any length of time. In spite of the odd spell on the dole, which saw me return home as I was broke, I stuck to that plan, though I maintained contact with a few people I had gotten to know in the area since I left secondary school.

I got a great send-off from both my Mallow friends and Dublin friends when I went to Brighton, and while I've seen the latter group consistently over the years since I left, it's been a different story with the former. I can't complain too much, I've moved on, and only see them when I'm back in Mallow. Deep down, I know that we're not an important feature of each other's lives any more and that's fine.

What's frustrating is that when I'm back in Mallow, I'm more reliant on them than they are on me, or so it seems. Most of them don't go out any more, having either got sick of the social scene down here (fair enough) or because they've found long-term partners and now seem to be preparing for a life at home (eye-roll!). Then there are people who I simply have nothing to say to anymore.

I saw all of this coming this year, but circumstances worked against me. My parents asked me to come back the day after university finished for christmas because they were celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary and wanted me there for it. That was fair enough, especially as they paid for my flight home. I was given some leeway with the flight bookings, but very stupidly chose to return on Friday 4th, rather than booking to come back before New Year's Eve. I'm regretting that in no small way now: I went online about a week ago to see how much it would cost to change them, but by then it would have been about £150.

Most of this is stuff that I'm used to, more or less, but what's sparked off this moan is that I've just rung around to see if anyone I know is going out tonight for New Year's Eve, and no-one can actually be bothered to do anything. I'm ranting because I'm in a situation I don't have much control over, and it sucks.

I was thinking about making sure that Christmas is spent abroad in future, to avoid this kind of thing happening again, but that's a bit like cutting off my nose to spite my face. Unless you're attached, your family are probably the best people to spend Christmas with. From now on, I vow simply to spend at most one week at home for Christmas itself, and make sure to spend New Year's Eve somewhere else.

Back to Brighton on Friday. Bring it on...

A reflection.

Recently, whenever I bring back to my house a man hot'n'beefy, I always feel that I have to warn them in advance about the state of my bedroom. My place of sleep is quite exasperating. No matter how often I tidy it - at least once every six months, for christ's sake - it always seems to revert back to its ground state: that of a complete and utter pigsty. A San Franciscan who I had (back) recently commented 'Ooh, this is glamorous' when I invited him into my boudoir.

This time around, the guy I had back didn't really care. I was in the Bulldog, having met Mizz 'Flee, and I was ogling as usual. We had paid £1 to go upstairs to the sex party organised by Brighton Orgies, but it was shit, what with the two of us being the only ones there.

As an aside, brighton-orgy.co.uk is the most amateurishly-run operation I have seen in a long time. The weekly e-mails are amongst the most poorly written I've ever seen ('cut hear' instead of 'cut here', when you want to detach a coupon, for example), and the London excursions that the bloke tries to organise every week end up being cancelled due to lack of interest. So far the private house parties have been titled 'Subs for top', 'Under 30s' and 'Over 40s'. What happens if you're active/versatile and in your 30s, like me? The organiser seems possessed of a bit of neck, but without the brains to match.

Eventually, my eyes settled on a rather fit beefy cub. Unfortunately, an ex-fling of mine had fixed his eyes rather unnervingly on me. I escaped outside for a smoke only to find FBC outside as well. We got entangled, I departed Mizz 'Flee (awfully sorry, Dahling) and headed home.

It was decent enough, though I found out soon enough that I wouldn't really ever be falling for his mind, and when he left the next morning, we said our goodbyes without any plans to meet up again. Still, the rough and tumble wasn't bad, though I could have done without spilling poppers all over myself while we were in bed. Yuk!

Home saturday. Sex life on hold for 3 weeks.

Operation Soho

...appears to have gone tits up.

It has not been a particulary inspiring few months on the employment front. As I mentioned previously, the application process for hospital vacancies began a while back, and neither of the two interviews I had yielded any fruit. West Middlesex Hospital told me that for the four vacances they had, I was ranked fifth amongst all the applicants. I can't decide if that makes me feel better or worse. Then began the clearing round a month ago for vacancies unfilled. It would be reasonable to assume that because I missed out by only a hair's breadth on the first round, that I would be a safe bet on the second round.

That has turned out not to be the case. I got turned down for all four without an interview. I can't work it out. The only thing I can think of that could be wrong is that one of the references I gave on my application isn't coming through for me, and once I get the contact details of the hospital pharmacists, I'm going to e-mail them and ask them for feedback on my application form.

So, no hospital in London. Most likely no hospital anywhere. Now and again, hospital vacancies pop up during the year as new posts become available, or people fail to take up ones that they originally committed to, but hoping for one of those is a gamble. If I hang on too long, and I get nothing there, then god knows what will be left on the community pharmacy front when I start applying there. It's like playing a game of chicken, in a way. I'll wait until after Christmas before deciding on a plan of action, I think.

I'm not too despondent. Everyone who graduates from pharmacy walks into gainful employment of some sort. The question is, will it be the kind I'm hoping for? In the long run, it doesn't matter. Once I'm licensed, a year after I graduate, I can pretty much get work wherever I want. The only thing that could limit me is if I only scrape my degree (shit shit shit!). It would have been nice to do my pre-reg in a hospital all the same, and seeing quite a few people in my class get one isn't exactly doing wonders for me right now.

I'll definitely be making a beeline to London at some point. My night out last weekend in a central boozer near - ahem - Soho bolstered my resolve.

Sicko.

I've had my moments in the past where I've doubted Michael Moore's methods. One sided arguments, hysterical ranting, and distortion of facts have all featured in his documentaries, but when I was watching this, an examination of healthcare in the US, I came to a realisation.

Most socially concious left-wing documentaries (can they even be described as left-wing, really?) don't have the broadest of fanbases. Naomi Klein, as much as I like what she does, can't be described as a household name. Sales of Joel Bakan's book The Corporation aren't exactly up there with the Holy Bible. It's to be expected, but that kind of notoriety is what's needed if the kind of change propounded by them is to take place. People will read these people's books -myself included - and think 'Gosh, don't we really need to do something about all of this?', try and convert a few people, change our voting habits and our shopping habits, and then leave it at that. Hardly the basis for a mass revolution.

The thing about Michael Moore is this. He is the megaphone for all this activism, and he genuinely does have an effect on how politicians and CEOs operate: Witness how the Bush administration tried to have Fahrenheit 9/11 banned just before the presidential election, and - in this film - how one insurance company decided, after exposure on this documentary, to pay for the medical treatment of a small child, having previously refused.

In this, Moore basically examines healthcare in the US - or lack thereof - and compares it to that in other countries. It all comes down to health insurance. If you don't have it, you're fucked. If you have it, but contract a fatal illness that the company can somehow weasel its way out of covering, you're fucked. The latter is what happened in more than one case here, and in the film, the presentation of footage of a person alive and well who would subsequently go on to die, because the emergency life-saving surgery he needed wasn't covered by his insurance company, isn't just sad, it's chilling. The one thing I loved was the naming and outright shaming of the companies involved, lawsuits and libel cases be damned.

After that, it's trips to Guantanamo bay for free healthcare for 9/11 workers and comparisons to Canadian and European healthcare. The NHS is portrayed as being a flawless model of socialist medicine, which was ...erm...something of a creative leap on Moore's part, but then again, it's by way of comparison. The price comparisons betweeen the cost of medicines in America and in other, supposedly lesser developed countries was something of an eye-opener though.

The one thing I was surprised by was that at one point in the documentary it looked as if there was going to be a shift in focus onto the pharmaceutical companies, but the opportunity was allowed to pass. Time constraints, maybe? Who knows...

Anyway, there you have it. Go see. I personally found it to be more stimulating than Fahrenheit 9/11 in some ways. The one thing I was surprised by was that on its opening night over here, my flatmates and I had no problems in getting tickets to see it. It seems that people weren't exactly beating the doors down to see it. Maybe I've overestimated Moore's box office appeal. I hope not...

Facebook.

I joined Facebook a while back. I didn't feel under pressure to do so at the time, as only a few people I knew had mentioned it, and I didn't realise that upon joining it I would find just about everyone I ever knew in life has a profile on it. Which it seems they do, not least most of the people in my pharmacy class.

For some reason, this site has mushroomed way beyond Bebo, Hi5 and other networking sites in popularity. I'm kind of liking it, though still getting used to the friend requests from people I have never met in real life (Though some of them, such as Oscar Soria, have interesting profiles about political activism and meeting Naomi Klein, which is cool).

Of course, where there are mass gatherings, there will be bears.

Such as this throbbing vortex of hotness

And this one

And this one

And... Oh, you get the picture.

There are also groups you can join, such as ...erm... Facebook Bears, and Bears Cubs And Their Admirers, and...

...

Other groups, such as ones for appreciation of cinema. I've joined that too!

Still, the whole concept on online networking is looking interesting for once, might stay with it for a while. All people have to do is stop getting me to install all the crap extra applications...

Update: Jesus, just how much shit can come out of this website? Werewolves, vampires, zombies? Constantly being poked by people? Survey questionnaires? Give it a rest!

Control

Anyone who's into moody alternative rock knows the story about Ian Curtis. He was the singer for a band called Warsaw, who later changed their name to Joy Division. They released one album called Unknown Pleasures to critical acclaim, started to become popular, and were poised to go on a tour of America. Things were scuppered, however, when Curtis was unable to cope with personal problems, and killed himself. The band had accumulated enough recorded material, however, to release 'Closer' posthumously, which makes everyone concerned with it regard it as Curtis' personal suicide note. It was after that that the band decided to carry on, renaming themselves as New Order. Sound familiar?

A few things about this film:

a) The actors in this film looked almost exactly like their real life counterparts. You think Val Kilmer looked like Jim Morrison in The Doors? That likeness has nothing on how much Sam Riley resembles Ian Curtis.

b) The film didn't deify Curtis in the way that many journalists and artists are irritatingly prone to doing. It presented him as flawed, struggling to deal with the circumstances imposed on him in a less than ideal way.

c) In spite of the fact that the film makes Manchester (and Macclesfield in particular) look as grim as shit, it still comes across as interesting, and somewhere I wouldn't mind visiting.

The film was based on the book written by Curtis's widow Deborah, Touching from a distance. I never bought it, but read through most of it when it was on sale in a bookshop near where I lived, years ago in Dublin.

I didn't have much sympathy for Ian Curtis after reading the book. He came across like an egotistical prima donna, and an unstable father figure to boot. The latter is where I draw the line: Once you have children, your live is no longer your own and you have a duty to other people (the main reason why I will probably never opt for parenthood). He didn't really seem to care about his wife either.

But of course flicking through a book doesn't give you the proper picture, and the film helped put his life into perspective a bit more. I didn't know about the extra-marital affair, and I didn't know about how his epilepsy only started to figure in his life at the same time as his band were starting to take off. His appointment with a neurologist was interesting. Standard guidelines on prescribing didn't really exist back then, so Ian simply had a bucket of anti-seizure medication thrown at him, and told to get on with it. I've seen people struggle with an ongoing course of Carbemazapine, one anti-seizure medication. Curtis (if I remember rightly) had three to deal with, as the doctor adopted a sledghammer-to-kill-a-fly approach. This was where he started to get my sympathy.

All things considered, I can now kind of appreciate where it all came from. He had problems imposed on him - some of his own making, some not - and finds it too much to bear. He gets married at an age that would now be considered ridiculously young, and then decides to have a child almost on a whim. I get the feeling if he waited and got his head together, he would have made a better fist of his life, but instead he goes ahead and takes all this responsibility at a time when he should be cutting down on his stress levels. He has an affair with a woman, and then falls in love with her, and finds himself unable to finish it, in spite of his wife issuing him with ultimatums. Top this all off with the fact that he's not exactly swimming in money, and you have some idea of what he's going through. And so he decides not to hang around.

Other than that, you get a good insight into how the machinations of a local music scene works. Their manager was desperate for someone with talent to look after, because nothing was going to happen for him of his own accord. I remember when I was growing up, my brother was a roadie for a popular local band. Their songs were good enough, but egos and in-fighting fucked it all up before they could even get a record deal, and they've all since moved onto sensible jobs, though not without having a laugh along the way. One thing I remember was the older musos hanging around them, people who had never made it themselves and looked just too plain grown-up to be involved with that kind of thing, but didn't really have any other options open to them. There were a few people in this film like that.

One other thing I knew nothing of was how Curtis used to work at employment exchange, and seeing him having to deal with people on their terms rather than his own was funny.

Lastly, I was always a bit dubious about some of Joy Division's music. I felt that they walked a fine line between atmospheric and turgid, and only really started to get things fully right in their incarnation as New Order. It was only in the last while that I realised that there were some undeniably good songs in the back catalogue of the beleagured former though, I can't take that away from them, and they certainly offered a blueprint from which just about every 90's miserablist claims to work these days.

The rugby is over

...it wasn't as good as last saturday, for the following reasons.

1) I had been out the night before, and had a stinking hangover on saturday as a result.

2) I organised it badly, trying to get into a pub in town 10 minutes after the game had started. Not surprisingly, I was turned away, as the pub had reached capacity. I ended up watching it at home, which of course wasn't the same.

3) England lost, so the prevailing atmosphere of good cheer was dispelled soon enough.

4) There weren't half enough close-ups of Lawrence D'Allaglio, reason enough to suggest he should have been substituted into the game earlier. If he had been, perhaps the result would have been different?

Oh well, at least I managed to locate the guy with the beard to some extent. He's one of these two here, George Chuter I think?

So that's it for a while. Setting my sights back on the bears again...

Jumping on the bandwagon

Saturday saw me sit (or stand, rather, in a pub into which we were all squashed like sweating sardines) through my first competitive team sport match in quite some time, England versus France in the Rugby World cup semi-final. Yes, dear readers, I was more preoccupied with the players than the playing, but hey, Lawrence looks as good as ever and I've noticed another player on the team sporting a hot beard, but whose name escapes me, in spite of a careful search over the internet.

I was kind of going for France, although Sebastien Chabal looks like an untamed gorilla. At the end, I got quite the land when England pulled ahead, and cheered loud and long when Lawrence appeared on camera, and the pub I was in erupted. An Irish pub, though there still wasn't any mean-spirited Anglophobia, and now I'm looking forward to England playing against South Africa next weekend. Beer, good cheer, and hot men on screen. What more could you want?

After that, I went to a 21st and got hammered, along with everyone else, and got to bed at 4am.

Roll on England versus South Africa...

John David Lake. RIP.

This entry was going to be a rant about what a dreadful shower of cunts Boots Alliance are (again), but then I came across something on the net that put things into perspective.

A chap in Kansas City who went by the name of John David Lake passed away on Wednesday evening. He was 50 years old. He is survived by his partner Tony and his dog Spud.

I never met him in real life. I happened across his online journal one day via a comment he left on someone else's, and was hooked. As a writer he was funny, and from the stories he told, he came across as a person who was funny in real life too. His blog was studded with gems about:

- Weirdoes he had to deal with at work
- Having crushes on his co-workers
- Feigning heterosexuality during NASCAR season
- Bluetooth device users
- Ogling hot men
- Video games
- Bad spelling and grammar (we very much shared the same opinion on this)
- Having to suffer a zit on his nose
- His dog Spud, and the conversations he had with him.

and my personal favourite,

An ode to toast

So with that, I direct you to go over to the blog entitled A Spasmodic Attachment and read. You will like it. Hopefully it will be left up there and not deleted. It would make for a nice epitaph for him, I think.

It made me think about other related things in general. No one in Mallow has any idea about my blog that I'm aware of thus far, and in common with a lot of gay men who grew up in provincial areas, most of the life that I've built for myself since I left is separate and distinct from my life in my home town. If, God forbid, I were to die, most of the people who would turn up for the funeral would be unknown to my parents, especially all the people I've come to know in Brighton. Is building a life for yourself so separate from your parents and where you grew up a good thing? I imagine it's par for the course for a lot of people.

When I was at Joop's funeral, I remember thinking about whether or not it would be a good idea to have the address of my blog given out to people at my funeral as a way of remembering me. It would probably cause a little bit of discomfort to some of my family, but in the long-term, I think it's a good way of remembering someone for ever. Like a mark that someone made while they were here, whatever it amounts to.

I've often planned a road trip across America, going from place to place, living in different cities, meeting different people. I thought to myself more than once that I would like to meet John, Tony, and their dog Spud in real life, to put a personality on their internet story. Now that story has taken a sad twist, and lost one of its leading players.

Oh, the power of the internet.

Farewell John. You were funny, you were a good writer, and you were hot. You died too young. Rest In Peace.

Friday night

The two hospital interviews have come and gone, and I can summarize them as shit (Brighton) and OK (West Middlesex). Then again, I haven't heard back from either of them yet, so maybe that's indicative of shit (Brighton) and shit (West Middlesex). Kings have spurned me without even an interview. Fuckers don't know what they're missing. I'm still waiting to hear from Central Middlesex, but I'm not holding out much hope.

On Friday, after humming and hawing, I decided that since I couldn't make the wedding in Ireland I was originally supposed to go to, I would go out somewhere else. I'd had my eye on a bear night in Vauxhall, in the Area club, as a certain DJ called Kevin Rolfe was playing, and his boyfriend was with him. Their stage name as a couple is The Beards.

I first happened across the online profiles of these two a while back, here and here, and was intrigued by the list of bands they listed on their web pages. I've always felt a bit put off by the music that gets played in standard gay clubs - too much mainstream fluff - and hadn't at that time met any other blokes, gay or straight, that had the same musical leanings as mine in quite some time. So I went digging around a bit.

These two organise a club night called homoelectric (be sure to click the link 'Why we bother' for a good read), and seem to be two pretty talented artists. This is another one of their sites, which features a rather funky electronic tune which has got very firmly stuck in my head (and in the head of the people I work with in college, as I keep playing it on my computer at work ha ha). On another of their sites, is a poem written by one about the other called 'You saved me'. To find it, click on the 'Word' button and then select the poem from the left-hand pane. It's worth the effort. There's also another piece 'Neil's Perspective' which features a turn of phrase that resonates with me, 'We are on loan to each other', which kind of describes the last guy I was with, as he had a boyfriend, and sums up how meaningless that kind of encounter can sometimes be, but that's for another time.

Anyway, the bear night was based around the launch of a book Bearflavoured, which as far as I could tell, was a collection of various artistic pieces seemingly - for the most part - by bears for bears. I found out afterwards that the aforementioned poem was included in the book as well.

So on Friday morning I rang Sarah Al, my drinking partner in crime, to find that she had just arrived back from a holiday in Egypt, and a rendez-vous was organised. After a few drinks we agreed that Sarah would come to the club with me (anytime the poor girl has been out with me lately, I've always dragged her to cruisy gay bars in the name of getting pissed, but she didn't seem to mind this time).

By the time we got out of the cab at the club, we were already pissed, but never ones to be bothered by a trifling detail like that, we went straight to the bar and continued on our bender. We eventually met The Beards (nice chaps) and chatted a while, and after that I checked out some men (the eye candy at London bear events always beats the Brighton ones hands down). Then I got talking to this guy, who is much wider in life than he looks in his photos. I've become acquainted with the american term 'fireplug', used to describe broad guys, and I like 'em.

After that, insanity flowered. Sarah and I danced on the stage, and when I went to dive off, I landed on a wet patch of floor and my legs went out from under me. I didn't so much land on my arse as bounced on it. Of course, in my drunkeness I felt nothing, and he who dances and jumps away, comes back to dance another day.

What is it about alcohol that makes you think you're a scolarship-winning candidate for a performing arts school?

After a while, the lack of sleep got to Sarah, and she decided to nod off in the club, for an hour or so, amidst all the noise. At least she was in a place where she probably couldn't be safer.

At the end of the night we got a taxi home, driven by this slightly..erm...politically opinionated guy, who ranted about The System all the way home. Thankfully the drive only took us about 10-15 minutes.

This morning I rose, cringed as the flashbacks of the night before hit me, and went home. Halfway back to Brighton, a family of screaming children settled in my carriage. I wanted to produce a machine gun and kill them all.

Now I sit here with a delayed-onset headache. Staying in tonight, methinks. 'Creep' on Channel 4 tonight, House of Flying Daggers tomorrow night...

BOLLOCKS!

The long weekend I was looking forward to next week in Galway and Dublin is not happening!

As mentioned previously, I was supposed to fly to Dublin next week, meet a few friends, and then head out to Galway for J's sister's wedding. One thing I was afraid of was that the hospitals I had applied to for my pre-reg would get back to me requesting my attendance for interview during the time I was supposed to be in Ireland.

They have done exactly that.

(What the hell is going on here? I'm sitting here waiting for the progression lists to go up on university website, and they keep putting up the ones for the first and second year classes first)

The first e-mail came through last Saturday (I hope these people don't make a habit of working at weekends, or expecting me to), calling me for an interview with the Brighton Sussex group of hospitals, for Wednesday 26th of September. On Monday, another e-mail came through, requesting my attendance for another interview on Thursday 27th of September...


(THANK GOD! The progression lists have just gone up for the third years and I've passed. But anyway, where was I...)

I contacted the hospitals and requested a reschedule. They politely refused. So now everything has gone pear tarte-tatin. Instead of going to Ireland for a good aul' knees-up and meeting up with my friends, I'm staying here and doing job interviews. I've done well to get to the interview stage, but getting into hospital pharmacy is a competitive business and for the interview I have on Wednesday, there are 21 applicants (whittled down from 50-odd) competing for 7 places. No pressure. None whatsoever.

Some people on the course have taken the time to fill out their preferences for their four hospitals on the online application site, only to have been turned down for all four without an interview (not to mention any notification, save for a small note on their online application). I can see how my application got me an interview, but I don't really see how I can make an interview get me a job. Fingers crossed it works out. I'll DIE if I have to spend a year in a community pharmacy.

So there goes my long weekend, and I'm back in College on the first of October. Oh the joys...