Kommilitone - Fellow Student

I’m so glad I went to university when I did. Seeing so many students around town, on the streets (walking, not so much in a prostitution capacity) and in my workplace, I’m truly grateful I wasn’t stuck living and studying with their kind. Almost all the guys prance around with their ultra-stylish, perfectly messy haircuts, clad in their ridiculous sixty-quid (cun)T-shirts, while their middle-England accents fail to mask their general thick-twatedness. I’ve overheard the most retarded of arguments between two parties, both clearly wrong from the outset, finally agree on an even more wrong common ground. Like most universities, UEA flogs department-branded hoodies, so you can, as I have, snicker loudly as a group of politics students fight over… actually all examples I’ve since typed and deleted were even less funny than Dane Cook, so I’ll simply say they were very stupid indeed.

While the guys seem a million times more irritating than they were in 2001, a much higher proportion of female students are looking dangerously vacant. Of course being a flagrant misogynist, I’m not against the idea of pretty girls learning stuff, but so many look and sound incapable of opening a packet of Farley’s Rusks, let alone shaking a baby and getting away with it. (It is possible the popular child care course syllabus has changed since I last constructed a topical joke about it, so apologies if the previous non-gag isn’t relevant anymore.) So the main point is if these girls were any more vacant, they’d be condemned and boarded up by the council for our safety. (I’ll add, in the spirit of parenthesis-bound real-time commentary that the previous sentence seemed the only way of shoe-horning in that non-joke - attempting to liken vacuous girls to empty properties. So apologies if it didn‘t seem forced.)

Anyway, unfairly ripping on today’s youthful idiots is just further proof that your own academic year is always the best there is. The preceding year groups are full of whinging moaners, constantly complaining they had it tougher without the Internet, Ipods and Hollyoaks, while the young’uns have it so much bloody easier with their faster Internet, better Ipods and Hollyoaks in HD. Oh, and jealously has nothing to do with it - it’s just they’re all bastards for being under twenty and having a real excuse for not having a proper job.

Vor|haben - To Plan

As I’ve only got about five more weeks to plan my departure from life here in Colman’s Mustard-Land (Norwich), you’d think I might try to use that as an excuse for the obvious recent drop off in these entries. And actually I did try for the first five minutes of writing, but it far too accurately portrayed me as a whiny, responsibility-shirking dickhead - totally unbefitting of someone running off to New Zealand for a year. Or two. Looking back at the archive, in previous months I’ve churned out up to thirty pieces, while I managed just four this
May, three in June, and a dismal two in July. On that form, this should be August’s only post. Why? Well the apparent laziness is one of the driving forces behind my exit from Norfolk - I’ve done tons more writing while travelling, and that’s the stuff that, unlike this compendium of triviality, can be sort-of relevant to other people. As much as I love writing pointless bollocks, I understand there’s not a gigantic market for it. Or even a small one. Not that I’m seeking to make a ton of money - just enough to feed, clothe, shelter and frequently inebriate myself. Integrating elements of random bollocks into a reasonably solid travel-narrative seems to be my best bet in the I dunno-term. Where I am right now is making me want to write less and less, which is genuinely scary for me. So, in order to stem any further decline in drive and (sort-of) creativity, I took the decision to give up my income, home and most of my worldly possessions in order to bugger off to the other side of the planet. I’ve been (quite foolishly) approved to work by Immigration New Zealand, so almost any job is a option. Except sales and marketing or surrogacy. Of course something writing-based would be great, but I’m not naïve enough to think it’d be easy to land anything like that. I’ll just see where opportunity takes me, all the while producing as much textual, and as little booze-based output as possible. Maybe that’s somewhere close to an acceptable explanation, if not, tough. I’m out of time and must hurry along with my vital leaving-prep procrastination. See you next month!