How do we break out of stagnancy?

Reading back my posts below, I apologise for how ridiculous and dull they can seem but in all honesty, I was sort of using it to just channel some of my boredom and I can barely muster a titter at them as they aren't that funny. They're ridiculous like the updates on other social media, including the classic 'I'm at a party and I've tagged some friends. Yeah that's right. Friends. Look, I'm even holding a drink so I'm fun in a 'I can part-ay' sort of way. Go on, keep flicking through my pictures and you'll see I become more inebriated as the night goes on which means I know how to have a good time' to the annoyingly cryptic 'OMG cannot blieve that jus happened!! some people need to get a life' to elicit sympathy from some close friends and the group of guys I term 'desperados' in the least Antonio Banderas-esque way, only for that sympathy to go wasted as the postee remains tight-lipped about his/her dichotomy to be mysterious. If you do that, you're not mysterious. You're annoying and a terrible human being. :) (I put a smiley face on to soften the blow. I only do that because of this major thing that happened to me once that changed my life forever).

Anyway, I thought about my situation at the moment and everything is a bit stagnant. Nothing really happens. It's work, then home. Work, then home. Excitement. Disappointment. Work, then home. I don't know if this sounds familiar or not, but by the looks of social media, people seem to be making a go of life in a much more effective way than me. Going out, travelling, meeting new people. I've tried to spice up life in my current surroundings but that's about as easy as arsehole surgery on a twerker (should have gone with the conventional 'fart in a wetsuit' but you gotta keep it current, right?).

So I've set some goals up for 2014 which I want to post so there's a constant reminder for me to achieve these goals. In no particular order:

Learn some form of martial arts
Get fit
Learn a new language
Make my first short film and be screened at a reputable film festival
Travel to at least two other countries outside of the UK
One life changing moment (non-specific I know, but it's the less annoying kind of mystery)

Anything you feel is worth doing, let me know and it might make the list but that's a pretty good start I think. The only way to break out of stagnancy is to force the issue. Otherwise, it's too easy to just do what you're used to until it's too late. Putting yourself in a 'fight or flight' moment might be the answer to it all.

Celebrations; what's the point?

I missed the recurring piece of advice on geek-infested forums when updating a blog: keep it consistent. The standards of my blog may have deteriorated like Never Mind The Buzzcocks has in recent episodes, but I've still a little more in me, blog-wise.

While the world is struggling with cash, newborn Blue Ivy Carter, daughter of Hip Pop couple Jay-Z and Beyoncé, has already put her own melody onto his new track 'Glory'. A kid who can relate to the lyrics of '7 Seconds' (Youssou N'Dour & Neneh Cherry) has beaten millions of aspiring artists and even more job-hunters. Hats off to the parents, they've done pretty good. And congratulations on their bundle of joy too.

I really have very little to say. My new year was filled with Jools Holland's excited hootenanny voice ('Jessie J and Cyndi Lauper are here, woo! Some country band from America no has heard of, oh yes! And an old dude will sing to my jazzy/country-style piano riffing, voila!') and a live broadcast of fireworks from London as I recovered from some bug that was going round. One of the main events that warranted celebration that I can remember attending was one of my more recent birthdays, which I really couldn't be bothered with. I had a dissertation pending and the looming thought of finishing education; no longer able to hide behind my extortionate student loan. So as a warning, I told my friends not to bother with a big party or anything fancy. They tried to talk back but reluctantly agreed. And so, triumphant, I went to town on the dissertation. I really wailed on it. If it was a boxing match between me and the dissertation, the referee would've broken it up or called it a knockout or the dissertation's manager would have thrown in the towel. If I was Manchester United and the dissertation was Accrington Stanley and my laptop was Old Trafford with the keyboard acting as the Stretford End... well, you get the idea. And so, the dissertation was almost done and my final year project presentation to a major corporation was completed in one fell swoop. All on my birthday. The load that was once perched on my shoulders had been flung against the wall, left to fester and pounce on another unsuspecting idiot with bucketloads of work left to do.

I came home, with my shirt and trousers and other clothes too numerous to mention; dropped my bag off in my student house and walked towards my room. My phone buzzed in my pocket, vibrating like a... phone. So I pick it up and it was my mate saying 'Let's go to a sheesha place and relax; we've finished!' So I agreed and got picked up, still in those presentation clothes, which were starting to annoy me. I was too overdressed to be in a sheesha bar. I felt like a health inspector there, as if I was checking to see if anyone was smoking; it didn't feel right. And I didn't like the clothes I was wearing to be honest. Anyway, I wandered in and a few of my other mates were there. 'Oh, this is nice' I thought. So we all sat and I couldn't help but feel nervous. The others knew something I didn't. Like Sherlock Holmes, I was detecting certain things... like the giant birthday cake being carried by one of the sheesha workers. It couldn't have been more conspicuous. The only way it could have been more obvious something was going on regarding my birthday would be if someone shouted 'Happy Birthday Adnan; yes, you, sat in clothes too smart for this establishment' or if someone jumped out of the cake with a sash saying 'Happy Birthday and well done on completing your work' (the person in the cake would have to do a twirl so I could read all that). I gotta admit; a wave of 'oh I can't be arsed' swept over me and as the cake was still with the sheesha people, the elephant in the room was out. Funnily, another one of my friends, who was at the event, was to have her birthday the day after. She also could not be bothered with a big celebration at this time; in fact, she probably disliked birthdays and the attention more than me. So everyone was talking and laughing and joking; with me having to talk to everyone as there ended up being about lots of people in a very tight sheesha area. After a while, the cake came out to our crowd of smoke-filled enthusiasts; all singing 'Happy Birthday' to me. The girl who's birthday was the day after mine seemed relieved as she felt as though she had dodged a bullet; surely no-one would hold two birthday do's in a row? Well... she was half right. As the cake came out and onto the desk, she became thunderstruck; her name was on it too. Relief for me as another load on my shoulders had been halved. It turned out to be a great night with all the mates I'd want to celebrate it with. And then I went home and we did a little somethin' for my birthday at a later date.

That's one of the best celebrations I've been a part of. So who needs to see fireworks for longer than necessary in the cold weather in London? More to the point, who needs fireworks? There's a moral there somewhere. You've read this much; you might as well find the moral and post it in the comments.

Crikey, a month since my last post? Okay, let's talk radio.

Well, as the title suggests, I immediately clicked the new post button as soon as I saw the date of the posting of my previous post and posited that I should post a new post.

I'm currently presenting a new drive-time show on a community station which has been going incredibly well. At first, it was a slow start and it was like powering up the Amstrad - I had to give it about 10 minutes (in this case I wasn't playing Daley Thompson or Bomb Jack). But after a while, it started to flourish and all my shows since have been some of my best. So what sparked my interest in radio?

Well, there are a number of reasons. I had always been a fan of movies but never enough to call myself a movie buff. I loved and still love computer games, though perhaps not as much as I used to. But that was all a very passive, hypodermic-needle model, do-whatever-the-telly-tells-me existence. The very beginning of my foray into working in media was the Media Studies course at the college up the road. I had a great teacher and I found it much more interesting than the other courses. I took the course in my 2nd year and thus, I felt like I was more dominant than my classmates. I had a year on them at the college and to them, I was a guru, a sage, a master of mise-en-scene analysis; the progeny of media itself. The aura about me as I entered the classroom in an old hoodie and baggy jeans was always momentous; you could hear a pin drop. No-one really carried pins and I don't know anyone who does to this day, but should there have been a pin present in the classroom and pushed over from a place that would constitute the pin being in a dropworthy position, then yes, that pin would have made an absolute racket in the environment I created.

My love for the media, in it's broader sense, was strong enough for me to pick it as a subject at university, imagining that I would one day be a reporter like they used to have in the old days (see Boardwalk Empire reporters for reference to cool cliché) with one of those hats they used to wear with a label on it. Mine would say 'Entertainment Reporter' as I would approach someone noteworthy enough for taking notes in my little flippy notebook. I'd go there in a suit, which would be covered in a trench coat, buttoned enough to see the lapels, shirt and tie of the beautiful attire underneath. Sadly, these delusions of grandeur dissipated into the air they came from after one lesson of 'Journalism'. What a complete bore. One activity given in this lesson was: 'Write any news story you want. It can be about anything. Absolutely anything. It's got to be interesting and get my attention with the headline and well-written afterwards. Oh, and it has to be a breaking news story'. I'm para-phrasing but that was mainly it. So I thought for about 15 seconds, after which I had a 'Eureka!' moment. My article was as good as written. The opening lines of it would be something like: 'The Prince of Wales was attacked in a hit-and-run last night'. Now, I've got nothing against him; in fact, he seems like a good chap, but the whole point was to be interesting. After finishing the article and handing to the lecturer, she said 'No, not possible. You'd need to await confirmation from the royal family'. So she had technically lied. We couldn't write about anything. My lecturer couldn't even let down the wall of ennui long enough for her to crack a smile or even go 'Okay yeah, that's pretty big news. Well done'. But no, it wasn't. I slumped back into the chair which had probably been slumped into more than once by my predecessors.

So I eventually got round to radio and I loved it. The live dynamic and small team meant that I didn't have to rely on too many people to get it right. I was in my element again. Presenting, producing, editing; you name it, I did it. And successfully. I even got great feedback from the Creative Producer of Global Radio for my advert, which was an advert to sell a radio. To sell a radio on a radio advert was tough but this man said that my idea would be good enough for their stations. And I have since worked on a more freelance basis and it's certainly picking up.

But now it's just getting it to a full-time job. And I tell you, it's blummin' hard.

Mohammed Adnan's '2047'

I told you. I told you I'd add 36 years. Just an example of the psychic power I'm going to be employing in this post. If you've got a bit of a phobia about all things ghostly and supernatural, then I'd recommend you keep reading as there's nothing of the sort anyway.

It was a bit of a crap day in June and clocks were broken. William Churchill was tapping the beat of a song called 'Same' by The Unchangeables, a band of identical quadruplets who all played instruments manufactured by Simple. After a little while and a lot of boredom, William got out of his room, running past the newspapers strewn across the floor like someone had used the Daily Paper as confetti in some sort of extravagantly plain wedding. The words 'Cloning is the way forward, exclaims clone' was on every page of each paper. William got out of his cubic flat, only to see more cubic flats line across the way, each flat spaced equally apart.

Rain pattered on the ground outside. It did not pitter. Just another example of the many changes that had occurred in recent years. The pavement outside had become uniform to reflect the homogenised society we now lived in. The bell would be ringing soon and people would be walking out of their houses and towards the work factory where all administrative duties and computer-related business took place which kept the cog of society grinding slowly to churn out the little meaning given to the lives of the people inhabiting the town. All the stores around were either delapidated or on their way to being so. The work routine was organised by the mayor's Work Policing Unit, who ushered the people towards the factory and stormed into the houses of those had not left and fished them out.

William looked at his calculator watch, which had now been termed 'retro' in 3 different generations. It read 2.20pm. He looked up and saw the train station he had been running towards. As he got in and approached the platform, stopping before the 'Mind The Gap' warning, his train pulled in, scraping the rusted metal and letting out a screech which mirrored his yearning to leave. He got on the train and as he did so, he could see others doing the same; eagerly hurling themselves onto the train to escape the grimness. Ennui lived in splendour here and William had had enough of his company. As he bustled his way past the crowded train, many of whom were looking towards the heavens as if salvation had engulfed them, the train began to move. William found a nice floor spot where he could sit and see a window. As Slough passed him by, he'd return to normality. Nothing had really changed in the last 36 years anywhere else. But Slough just got worse.


I bet you were thinking that this was a glimpse into some washed-out future. However, everywhere is pretty much the same or more vibrant, except a few towns here and there. They're just stagnant. Let's be honest; things aren't gonna change that much in 36 years... are they?

Would you like anything else with your oxygen canister and chicken pizza?

This was a great article and a topic of discussion on the drive time show I present on local radio: http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkies/Pizza_restaurant_to_open_on_Moon (article courtesy of Orange News and the Daily Telegraph). Weird news and odd tidbits I can get my grubby mitts on usually slot themselves firmly into my show, otherwise I'd be blabbering in a stream-of-consciousness sort of way which would make listeners switch off and to listen to the sound of lawnmowers as that would probably make more sense.

So, after broadcasting the news on radio and leaving the station, I sent an email to the PR department at Dominos pizza with the following:


To whom it may concern,
 
As a fan of your glorious pizzeria, it concerned me that you may be opening a store on the moon:http://web.orange.co.uk/article/quirkies/Pizza_restaurant_to_open_on_Moon?pg=2#newscomments

With the current economic climate, it might be a bad move to build this store on the moon due to lack of customers and no financial return. That no oxygen thing might be a problem too. Plus, I'm no mathmatician but £13.4billion sounds like a lot of money. I could buy lots of pizzas with that.... oh, and solve a big chunk of an economic crisis.



However, if this is true, do you do home deliveries? I'm craving a nice margherita pizza. And as I am currently looking for employment, is there a job application I can fill out?


Thank you for your time.




Yours faithfully,


Mohammed Adnan


Thinking that I wouldn't get a reply, I still refreshed the page, hoping that I'd get a response of some sort to answer some of the, quite frankly, pertinent questions regarding a home delivery from the moon and if I could work in outer space as a pizza-selling assistant.


And I did. And kudos to Dominos, they humoured me and replied with the following:

Hi Mohammed

Thank you for your email.

We’re over the moon you liked the idea but I’m afraid we can’t take credit for this story as it came from Domino’s Pizza in Japan.

Please could you tell us if you are based in the UK?

Kind Regards

Tanya

What a great reply. Great pizza and great staff. And I think this news story has sparked my next story because to eat on the Moon is perhaps a future pursuit, should we run out of space to build more restaurant here on this green and blue planet. I understand that George Orwell wrote '1984' in 1948. Whether that number came from him swapping the latter 2 digits and setting his heart on that, I have no idea. However, if I did it in this year, 2011, it'd be pointless, because my depiction of the crumbling future under the scope of an oligarchical dictatorship would be of me writing this blog. Instead, I'm going to add 36 years, just like Orwell did to portray the society under the control of 'Big Brother'. I could be a sort of Winston Smith character who rebels. So my next post is storytelling? Great.

My old radio

Hello all, I'm back again. I was getting all nostalgic from listening to some of my old radio pieces I did at University and thought I should upload some of the best bits on here. Even now, this makes me laugh. I was at doing my breakfast show stint on the university radio station, which went by the name of Cheeky Rainbow. We produced 3 pieces like this every day and it took the best of 5-6 hours to do all 3 pieces. All in all, including a 3 hour breakfast show, it took an entire week to do a really good show, and it still remains the best week of radio I've ever been a part of. Enjoy!
(All rights of 'The Godfather' images and 'The Godfather' audio belong to Paramount Pictures)

Technological diarrhoea

The world is at our fingertips, technologically speaking. It's technological diarrhoea. It runs and it's everywhere. There are now millions of rooms in the world occupied by electronics. On the bus, a person is either listening to their mp3 player, browsing the internet on some new phone that predicts the future or is looking at electronics shops pass them by as they head towards a gadget store (with The Metro newspaper and a handbag on the seat next to them, occupying an entire seat on the bus so you can’t sit down. What bullshit. You loaned some money from a bank for a seat on the extravagantly-priced bus; that handbag and crap should be moved so you can sit down. I hate it when people leave their bags on the seat next to them. Did they pay another ticket price for their bag? No! So move it out of the way or I will sit down on the bag and who knows what sort of relationship will be explored between the contents of your bag and my backside... maybe this is something for another post).

We have so much now. I am the proud owner of an iPhone as well as a laptop and yet, when my laptop takes five minutes from pressing the power button to a fully funtioning operating system, I go insane. I enter this incredible fit of rage where I start shaking and like some sort of fucked-up clairvoyant, I can see myself breaking my laptop in half like something out of a Record Breaker’s feat; where people would be applauding me and I would look on, smiling and waving, throwing bits of laptop into the crowd for people to fight over as I strut off stage with the unmistakeable swagger of someone tearing up a computer. Do I not realise the miracle occurring? Silicon, metal, wires, electric and some other unidentifiable stuff is allowing me to find out what’s happening everywhere in the world and I can’t wait five minutes before having psychotic visions of a broken computer. With this foldaway bit of tech, I can find out if a bunch of gormless gorillas are prancing around in an open field anytime soon or when the next Rolling Stones concert at Hyde Park will be (same thing).

‘My BlackBerry is shit’ is a perfectly valid statement and when the soundwaves of those inevitable words bounce off the walls inside my ear canal, I nod in gleeful agreement, with an expression reading ‘You should have got an iPhone, but you tried to be different in the hope of looking cool and you ended up with a phone that looks like someone pounded an old phone into a metallic waffle’. A difficult expression to read, I’m sure you’ll agree. But you are now capable of speaking to someone through airwaves and hear them clearly. Before mobile technology, if you dialled from the landline and said ‘Meet me in the town centre in half an hour’ and you went at that time; if they didn’t show up, you just had to go home. Out of breath, you’d ring that person back and say ‘why didn’t you meet me in the town centre?’ ‘Oh I got sidetracked, I tried ringing you back but you’d left at that point’. An entire day wasted. Nowadays, you can ask people 'what the hell is going on?' through a bit of metal. And that bit where people say ‘Ok, I’ll send him a message. Argh, I can’t get any reception. Why? Why can’t I get reception? Come on, come on, come on. There we go. Bloody hell, that took the piss.’ What did? The whole five seconds you had to wait before you could beam an entire piece of text to someone in another place? What would you have been doing instead? Saving someone’s life from a burning building? What else would you have done that has angered you so much in that small space of time? I’m sure you understand what I’m getting at now, so next time you use a bit of technology, be a little patient. It’s unbelievable.

‘WHY ISN’T MY PHONE CONNECTING TO THIS WIFI?! THIS NORTH POLE IS SHIT!’ is the next line I’m waiting to hear (when I'm in the North Pole next).