I need to learn how to say “shut your hole you loud inconsiderate prick” in every language there is. It sucks to live so close to all these pubs.

Written by Colin Brooks on 21.11.09 at 12:54 am

Oh hai! This post is inspired by this week’s Topical Tuesday (Morning Madness)! Visit the Topical Tuesday website every Tuesday for a new weekly topic!

I’m loving these topic suggestions from Topical Tuesday. I know this is one of the topics that I suggested on the site but I’m getting the opportunity to write about things I wouldn’t normally write about on here. To be fair I don’t exactly have a routine for my mornings unless I have to go to the office or you know, do stuff in the morning. That’s when my routine/ritual kicks in. It takes me about 30mins to wake up and get out of bed (if I’m lucky) and then another 30 minutes to shower and get dressed. If I’m in a foul mood or haven’t slept much and feeling exhausted I can take a full 45 minutes in the shower and another 15 minutes to pick what to wear (yes that does add up to 1 hour). The next step is to fix my hair which normally doesn’t take me more than 5 minutes (if I’ve had my hair cut recently) but can take me 10 minutes if my hair is too long (the devil’s in the details, people) and it tends to grow very quickly or I don’t cut it often enough. Normally after that I run out the door.

Did you notice that I did not mention the words “coffee” and “breakfast”? That’s because I don’t normally drink coffee in the morning before I leave home and if I do eat breakfast I slow down too much and lose my morning buzz (in case you’re wondering, it’s the buzz you get from rushing to get ready like a crazy person because that snooze button is too easy to get to in your sleep). However, if I do have a bit of time I might have a bit of toast with jam or make myself a coffee when I’m done getting ready. I don’t normally eat until lunch-time but I’m trying to change that because as soon as I’m out the door I’m drinking coffee and sometimes too much of it (yes, I know how much is “too much” coffee as well as what it feels like and what it does to me – been there way too many times). Since I’m starting to get into a new routine where I go to an office to work from every day I’m trying to come up with a better morning ritual but I haven’t changed much yet. I think I may start packing breakfast as well as lunch with me from now on but isn’t that a tad overkill?

Written by Colin Brooks on 16.11.09 at 11:04 pm

Oh hai! This post is inspired by this week’s Topical Tuesday (Past, Present & Future)! Visit the Topical Tuesday website every Tuesday for a new weekly topic!

Thank goodness for Topical Tuesday otherwise I wouldn’t update this blog at all it seems! I have been stuck trying to write and I think I’ve lost my blog-mojo but I’m not throwing in the towel yet. I’ll keep at it until the server dies of old age. That’s right, I’m not going anywhere folks! In 10 years, I’ll still be writing and blogging and reading and dancing. I don’t give up the things I like so easily.

But let’s do things in order. 10 years ago… Wow, 10 years ago I was happy and oblivious of the world. I am certainly not old enough to know it all yet (hi dad – I guess that’s your territory, ey?) but when comparing myself to 10 years ago I feel like I didn’t know anything then. In a way I was better off. I had no worries, I was taken care of by my parents and school hadn’t even gotten hard yet. Yes, I was still in school, please don’t hate me for being born after you. It wasn’t my fault you know.

10 years later and I’m still in school. Only now it’s a different kind of school and I already have 2 degrees from it. Physically, I’m in a whole different place as I’ve moved away from my home town and Brighton feels more like my home than where I grew up. Although there will always be a connection with my original home town embedded deep in my heart and soul. I am living on my own (which is more than I can say for most of my friends from school of 10 years ago). I may not have a job right now but this will probably change very soon.

However, thinking about the future scares me. I don’t know what I want to cook for dinner tonight, let alone what I want to be doing in 10 years time. There is a very good chance I’ll still be at Uni, only then I’ll be teaching. It feels like the natural progression of things but I don’t know where I’ll be. I might have moved to a different continent. I might have moved back to where I grew up (I hope not because if I do, it’ll mean some bad things have happened). Otherwise, I’ll still be here, in sunny Brighton, cursing the seagulls and complaining about the humidity to whoever will listen to me.

Oh gosh, I hope I don’t turn out so grumpy.

Written by Colin Brooks on 09.11.09 at 11:28 am Add your comment

Oh hai! This post is inspired by this week’s Topical Tuesday (Is it Christmas Already?!)! Visit the Topical Tuesday website every Tuesday for a new weekly topic!

There’s Christmas and then, there’s Xmas. In my book, Christmas is time spent with family and close friends in a warm house with lots of seasonal treats and the general jollyness all this would/should bring. Christmas was very much like that as I was growing up and until my mid-teen years. A series of unfortunate events led to our not celebrating Christmas for a few years after that and when I tried to get back into it it no longer was Christmas but it had turned into “Xmas”.

I was older, living on my own and almost running my own life at the time. I wanted to have my own Christmas for the first time. What a disappointment THAT turned out to be. As you might expect, I spent a lot of money (that I didn’t have) and wasting time (that could be spent in more productive ways) preparing, planning, organising and building my own Christmas. I failed big time. I did not fail because things didn’t go according to plan (which as it turned out, they didn’t) but because I was caught up in everything but the celebration itself. I was running errands and not enjoying it.

I was looking at the lit up signs searching for the right stores and listening to the jingles but not the bells. I was experiencing Xmas: A fast-paced comedy where our hero (me) is stressed and panicking as the decorative lights he was planning to use on the Christmas tree, turn against him and he ends up trapped in them. I was reliving my fears of Christmas-lights (I was mildly electrocuted by a set of those evil things when I was about 10 years old).

Every year, I have been noticing that stores start decorating for the Xmas madness and selling Xmas products earlier that the year before it. Usually, I am oblivious to this as I stopped trying to celebrate the holiday after that first and failed attempt of mine all these years ago. I do however, like and try to have a bit of fun on Halloween. I have been able to ignore the Xmas crazies until now. Last week, while looking for Halloween-y stuff and doing other general shopping for myself I saw something new. A Halloween-themed shop complete with a window covered in fake web and floating witches and ghosts only a couple of shops away from a Christmas themed shop, again complete with a window covered in snow, fake presents wrapped in brightly coloured paper and a lonely Menorah in a corner.

I got angry. I was seeing spots but I soon caught myself laughing. Christmas was taking over Halloween! Yo, Jack Skellington, you’d better watch your back! Santa is coming to take over Halloween and your town. But no matter what happens, I’m still dressing up as you this Christmas (in your special Santa suit, of course) and I will be singing Kidnap The Sandy Claws in your honour. Maybe Tim Burton should make a film called The Nightmare Before Halloween now. Although it’d be less of a fantasy and more of a documentary…

Written by Colin Brooks on 02.11.09 at 10:53 pm

With this being Pink October and all, Topical Tuesday is focusing on Breast Cancer and this week we are sharing stories about people in our lives that have had to deal with it. Here is mine:

Unfortunately my story will have to be quick and not very detailed. Not only because I lack the time but also because I don’t have a lot of the facts. You see my family is not known for discussing things. We keep to ourselves a lot and generally only say things as we are exploding in the middle of an argument. Sometimes these outbursts and not only surrounded by the deafening sound of either of our voices (we laugh at the normal dB levels and while we never cause a scene in public, our indoor scenes can be heard within a 3 mile radius) but also very important information comes out making everyone’s brain to implode quietly.

It was only about 2 years ago (perhaps less) that my mom confessed the following to us (us meaning my brother and I). She thought she had found a lump in her breast. She had not discovered it when she told us, but a whole 2 years before that. She was too afraid to go to the doctor, to speak to anyone and generally to do anything about it. Which reminds me, I am SO much like her it is crazy. She did not see a doctor because she was afraid it might be cancer and she did not want to be treated for it. Before I hear any of you shout at the screen let me clarify: this was all very selfless of her and in her own twisted understanding of the world the “better solution”.

You see, her thinking was something along the lines of: “What if it is breast cancer? What if I have to be treated for it? I don’t want to cause any problems for my family and especially for my children who cannot be distracted right now.”

Yes, that is my mom’s thinking and be careful what you say about her because I WILL cut you. In other words she would rather die from it, than get into a fight with it and be “a burden” (as she put it) to the rest of us. “We were more important than her”.

Apparently after a while of worrying and stressing over it, she decided to tell my dad and she went to a doctor. It was nothing. Nothing serious, at least. No one else knew. I didn’t know. My brother didn’t know.

The truth was blurted out during one of our epic fights (which are always over the silliest of things) and in the time it took me to process this information, while being completely still and silent, I aged by at least 3 years.

I want to say this to every woman and man out there. If you think you have found a lump, do NOT hide it, DO go to the doctor and whatever you do, do NOT think that it cannot be fought and defeated. Losing my mother would cripple me. Losing her because she tried to “protect” me would destroy me. Losing her to something that can be fought would make things even worse. Whoever you are, there are people who want you in their lives and who need you to be strong for yourselves before you are strong for them.

My mother was lucky to not have breast cancer but not everyone else is.

There are about 300 men diagnosed each year in the UK, compared with more than 45,500 cases of breast cancer in women. (Cancer Research UK)

Written by Colin Brooks on 06.10.09 at 11:52 pm

My life, your life, her life, our lives. Why, for whom and at what cost. Selfishness, arrogance, looks, beliefs. Poverty, money, freedom, contracts.

We built it all for you and me and the ones to come. We inherited most of it and no matter how much we try to fool ourselves we are but specks on the shoulders of giants. Hell, we’re not even specks, we’re tiny little freckles. [...]

The rest, I backspaced.

I wrote a long blog post about the human condition and our civilisation. It was peppered with cynicism, pessimism and depression. I will not post it. At least not now.  Instead, I’d like you to watch a touching if not inspiring short film that in spite of all the clichés it uses, it manages to tell a story with an end. Much like everyone’s story has an end and not a “they lived happily ever after”. This is what is important here, the universal nature of the end and not the timing. This short film takes a recurring nightmare that I’ve been having for more years than I can remember, and makes it romantic by adding a second person to the story. Of course in the dream I am also the reason why things are ending but this is unimportant as well. the film is 12 minutes long so it won’t take too long to watch. I hope you enjoy it. Unfortunately it won’t let me embed it here in HD but you can watch it in High Definition on the Vimeo website so just follow the link under the video.

This is the film I would make if I ever had the chance.

Forever’s Not So Long from garrettmurray on Vimeo.

Written & Directed by Shawn Morrison. Produced by Garrett Murray. Starring Garrett Murray and Marielena Logsdon. With Debbie Friedman and Matt Urban as The Anchor. Original music by Robert Andersen.
Grand Jury Prize Winner: 1 Reel Film Festival
Best Short Nominee: Hoboken International Film Festival
Official selection: Hoboken International Film Festival, Flickerings Film Showcase, DC Shorts Film Festival, 1 Reel Film Festival.

Written by Colin Brooks on 05.10.09 at 9:16 am Add your comment

After a year of absence, topical tuesday is back! Unfortunately I don’t have the time to be blogging right now so I can’t participate this week but this week’s topic has been posted for everyone else:

Topic :: #22 Health Care
Health care has been in the headlines quite a bit recently.  In the United States, the government is getting into what has been, until now, a completely private sector.  Now, the government wishes to require that every person have health insurance – or pay a penalty fee.  In the United States, in any event.  Health care is also been in the news in other countries as well.  Bring us your opinion on Health Care.  For your country, for what the government of the United States is proposing, whatever resonates most soundly within you.  Do you think the government should have anything to do with Health Care?  Should it be government mandated?  Or should it remain in the private sector?

So go on, get writing and spread the news!

Written by Colin Brooks on 22.09.09 at 2:16 pm

Whenever I am with friends, write something in my blog, upload a photo to flickr or update my twitter account, I am Colin. Whenever I am doing coursework, read a scholarly book or write in a Word document I am someone else; I am a different Colin. I write and think in a way that none of my blog posts have ever been able to reflect. It’s somewhat understandable considering that I blog for fun and in order to satisfy my need to be creative and immature. This is not as easy to do when writing a paper which will be graded. Creativity is sometimes rewarded in academia and while it can be a gamble, I still try to be creative but leave the immaturity for when I’m drunk. I want to write essays and papers I am proud of and which I’d want to read as well. If I find them boring to read then I find them boring to write so I won’t but I digress. This is a story of both my personalities and how they sometimes like to clash at the worst possible times. In other words what some friends call “pulling a Colin”.

On Friday I hand-delivered an envelope to the University. Among other things, it contained the proposal and personal statement which I had been struggling to write for so long, two letters of recommendation and more details about me than what I consider to be necessary (thus deemed irrelevant and yet still required).

In its whole that folder or more specifically, its contents make up an application in my name which requests my being allowed to continue my studies at the University. Only this time I will be a research student. Should I be granted that permission and after I have paid the required “tuition fees” (ha!) I will be provisionally enrolled on a Master of Philosophy (MPhil) degree. This may not be exactly true as the website is not clear on this. However – and take deep breath here because this is going to be a long sentence – according to what I was told by the lovely and extremely helpful people at the admissions/school office of the faculty I have been studying under until now, should I successfully complete this degree, I will be transferred into the PhD degree I am applying for.

One of the problems is that our school is moving to a different faculty which looks like it works in a different way. A way that they’re still fine-tuning. Over the past 3 months their website was updated at least 3 times and every time it did, I noticed it because the applications deadline was moved. After the last time I checked it, I was preparing my application to hand it in a month before the start date, since the website listed that as the deadline. Fast-forward to last week and the website had changed again moving that deadline to 2 months ago. Right now, and should I be accepted, I don’t think I will be able to start on the October date but will have to wait until January. My only worry about that 3 month gap is money, as in I won’t have any. Anyway, I suppose I’ll have to cross that bridge when I get to it.

In the meantime I was thinking that my two writing styles (blogging and academic) and more importantly the two personalities that I seem to have developed need to merge or find some common ground to use before I go mad. As it turns out this is exactly what happened as I was handing in that folder. I was so nervous and excited that when I got to one of the admissions people in the office I stuttered, all the caffeine in my body rushed to my brain, causing me to lose every train of thought that was going through my head simultaneously at the time and I ended up forgetting half of the things I wanted to ask, while I used the word “like” so many times and spoke in such a way that it made me sound, well, pretty much like this:

“Hi, I have a 13-year-old girl living inside me and this is the time she decided to wake up and talk to you but I’d be so awesome as a PhD student and I promise to keep her in her closet, so when do you think you’ll be able to tell whether we’ve been accepted or not? – Okay, I have to go now because this little girl has ADHD – No-no, I’m fine, this is not my natural hair colour and yes I will call you next week – Thank you for being so nice, clearly you must have noticed the panic in my eyes already so please excuse me while I quickly turn around and walk out of here as if I just remembered that I left the gas on at home”.

I then proceeded to turn around, trip over the chairs and the table next to me, almost land on the lap of the person who was waiting behind me in one of said chairs and who was unaware of the crazy person in front of them and walked out of the office before I injured anyone with my clumsiness. I’m so thankful he wasn’t the actual person dealing with the research student admissions and that it would have to be sent to another office in a whole other building of a whole different campus. I have never found bureaucracy this convenient before.

Written by Colin Brooks on 02.09.09 at 7:54 pm

As of 2009, listening to Dirty Diana on the 31st of August feels weird.

Written by Colin Brooks on 31.08.09 at 7:02 pm

Yes, I made this (to submit to this week’s @SatScenes).
No, I don’t have anything to add. Just hoping for a good week ahead.

Written by Colin Brooks on 24.08.09 at 7:16 pm