Gym bunny

Well it has been six weeks now that I've been going to the gym, and I've diligently managed to go twice a week without fail. It is getting harder and harder to drag myself there though, which is a bit worrying. I'm alright once I'm there, it's just the having to get up at 6.30am and pack all my gym stuff the night before and things.

I have seen some small changes in the six weeks. I've got slightly musclier arms and shoulders, and a bit more muscle on my chest. Not loads though, and that's probably part of the problem. If I don't see a huge improvement quickly then I lose interest. I could go more often and for longer and that would help, but if I'm having trouble going twice a week then how will I manage to go three or four times?

I also haven't seen Mitch Hewer looking absolutely gorgeous on Skins for a while, which is what finally gave me the push to start going to a gym in the first place. It's such a weird thing being gay, you can see someone who's stunning and you really fancy them, but at the same time you can hate them just a bit for being better looking than you. So you get a weird swirl of admiration, lust and jealousy all rolled together. I suppose it doesn't work the same for straight boys, they'd hardly see a hot girl and thing "cor she's gorgeous, I wish I had legs like that".

So maybe the answer to my lack of gym enthusiasm is to stoke up my jealousy good and proper in order to restore my drive to go. Friends and neighbours can do their part by sending me pictures of attractive men with good bodies. Ready? Go!

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Resignation guilt

Resignation guilt is a terrible thing. That's the term I'm using for the feeling you get when you leave a job, and you feel really bad because it's like you're leaving your colleagues in the lurch, and you think things won't go well without you there to do them.

It's been five months since I left my last job, and still I'm being compelled by resignation guilt to help them out and sort out problems. I really should have moved on my now. More importantly, they should have bloody moved on and learnt to cope without me, and they shouldn't be asking me for help. What if I'd gone to a different organisation entirely? Or been eaten alive by crazed lobsters in a freak diving accident? They would have to find a way to cope then.

I was lured yesterday into popping back to my old job "for a coffee", in my mind to talk about some of those things that you only know from experience and that I wouldn't have written down in the copious handover notes I left. In actual fact, not only did I not even get offered tea, coffee or even a frigging glass of water, I instead spent an hour and a half fixing the website that my woolly-brained replacement had broken and then training her to open a file in Excel. I actually had to use the words "Click File, Open. No, OPEN."

I suppose it's my own fault for agreeing to go, I should just tell them I'm too busy. The longer you use a crutch, the more your muscles waste away, so I'm probably not helping in the long run by doing things for them. But it's not nice to see your hard work being swept down the drain by ineptitude, and the reputation for efficiency that your office used to enjoy being transformed into a general sense of bumbling along from event to event and if no-one dies that's counted as a success. And it's also not nice to think of the people you used to work with being stressed as things fall apart around them. Only certain people of course, I don't care at all if some of them are discovered to be inefficient flappy numpties, in fact it's long overdue.

In part I probably also like the feeling of "look I'm so clever and you can't cope without me", which is not entirely unpleasant. If they were breezing along much more efficiently since I left, that would not be at all flattering.

So what do I do? Be strong and withdraw my support, and ignore the choking noises as the 'sink or swim' situation inevitably turns towards the former? Perhaps it's for the best... The population of stupid people could do with a little thinning out.

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Rainbowfish boy deserves to die

Also, I forgot to mention that we saw rainbowfish boy YET AGAIN on Saturday night while we were on our pub crawl. Chris was already quite drunk so chose to shout at him in the street, something along the lines of 'oo oo, we know you!! we see you everywhere'. And what was his response? "Yeah yeah, you know me because I work in education" and he kept walking.

What the hell is wrong with him??? He's so RUDE! We see him like twice a week in various pubs and clubs and the supermarket, I'm fairly sure we know friends-of-friends, and it's not like we HARASS him or anything. We've just seen him so often that we've tried to acknowledge his existence and occasionally say hello, as it seems only polite. But he's not having any of it.

So I am officially enacting the Pyramid of Hate. I'm telling all of our friends what a wanker he is, then they have to tell all of their friends, and so on until eventually everyone in the city will hate him and he will collapse under the weight of people glaring at him in the street. Let it begin.

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Hangovers 3 - Healthy livers 0

This Easter I seem to have chosen to eschew the traditional activity of eating chocolate eggs in favour of massive amounts of drinking, staying up until 4am, and then crawling around the next day going gaaarrrrr. It has been a very enjoyable, sociable weekend but I feel I need a bit of a detox to recover from it.

On Thursday after work we went to the pub to see some of Chris' teacher-type friends, had a couple of drinks, then went to another pub, and then went off to Dynamite Boogaloo. It was packed in there and very good fun. Chris snogged a kiwi girl, lucky her, and then we ran home in the pouring rain at 3am.

Friday was a day of rest, and then on Saturday I spent hours and hours in Harlow sorting out Chris' Dad's new computer until I was thoroughly sick of it. We decided to go out 'just for a couple' in the evening as Marc was down from Birmingham, so we went out with him and a student friend of his called Jordan. Jordan, NOT Josh as I kept calling him all night until Chris pointed out that wasn't his name, much to my embarrassment. Who the hell is called Jordan anyway? I can hardly be blamed. Nice boy though, but very easily led astray. He planned to go home quite early, but was quickly coaxed into a drink at the Bulldog, then the Star Inn, then Vavoom before he finally escaped our evil clutches outside V-2. Chris and I did the worst, WORST karaoke in V-2, to which there was much sniggering in the audience, and we didn't seem to get to bed until about 4 again. Shame about the karaoke, I thought we could sing Total Eclipse of the Heart quite well. I'm going to blame booze-induced tone deafness and poor acoustics.

The somehow on Sunday, despite only have had about 4 hours sleep, we managed to go to Wild Fruit. Oh my god I cannot believe how long I spent queuing there! Not to get in, oh no, that took about 30 seconds, but for the bloody cloak room. An HOUR we waited to put our coats in! A bloody hour! What the hell is that?? After that it was fine, very busy as it usually is, and we got lots of photos taken of us because of our general state of undress. We had gone as Las Vegas chippendales (yes I know I don't have the physique for it), as it was a Las Vegas-themed evening, which basically involved wearing collar and cuffs and not much else. You get loads of pretty boys at Wild Fruit, ones you never see elsewhere, so that's always fun. And then, unfortunately and unsurprisingly, we had to spend another 40 minutes to get our coats back. What a fucking joke! So the moral of the story is never, ever take a coat to Tru - just deal with the cold weather and catch pneumonia, the hospital treatment will take less time than queuing there.

So that was my weekend. So drunk, so hungover, so tired, but much fun. Work today seems like a peaceful holiday in comparison. 

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1,2,3 lift

I spent yesterday morning doing manual handling training, and slightly perversely considering I don't do much manual handling it was actually more useful than the colouring-in training of the other week. We learnt such wonders as how to push, how to pull, how to stand up, how to carry a hat stand back and forth, and how to break a small figure of a man lifting a bucket. Also I learnt that the material inside your spinal discs turns from wallpaper paste to crab meat as you get older; who would've thought? Sod B&Q, next time I'm redecorating I'm hollowing out a teenager's spine.

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So tired I could cry

God I am SO tired today. I don't know why, yes I did go clubbing last night but I've done that before and not felt this bad. I seemed to get drunk much quicker than I expected, and then I didn't sleep properly until about 5.30am, so I've only really had about an hour or two. So now I feel all dizzy and fuzzy and I keep knocking things over.

Last night was Boogaloo's secret pre-launch party at the Candy Bar. I'm not sure why they are launching next week but had a pre-launch this week, I think they must have just got their dates muddled up and are trying to brazen it out... It was good anyway, they played good music and £2 a drink is not to be sniffed at.

The venue was... OK. It's quite a bit smaller than Audio, so I could imagine it getting pretty packed out and hot. The odd thing was the unisex toilets, they were something of a conundrum: they were all cubicles (obviously), and each one had a Femgiene bin in it for the girls to pop their sanitary products into (urgh girls are so rank...) - so quite girl-friendly. But none of the toilets had seats on. So what are they supposed to do? Just hover over it or something? I expected better from a lesbian bar. Or maybe they took the seats off because they knew lots of boys would come to Boogaloo and they didn't want them pissing all over them.

Right, I can't go home for another 6 hours 10 minutes. How the hell am I going to cope?? Maybe I can prop my eyes open with paperclips (another use for paperclips! Health people, you know what I'm talking about...)

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Same-sex changing rooms

I understand the rationale for same-sex changing rooms at sports centres, swimming pools etc. Even though I wouldn't be particularly interested in seeing women getting changed, I certainly wouldn't want women to see ME getting changed because it would just be weird and their body parts don't match and you'd think "ur what's that bit for?". So it is traditional to divide up the sexes all neatly, and then everybody has 'seen it all before' and can be very mature about it and go about their business, and the most that the original inventors of them would expect would be a bit of body comparison from time to time, both among the boys and the girls.

But if you're of a hot boy-on-boy action persuasion, they're GREAT! And yes of course you're "not supposed to look", but yeah whatever everybody looks, it's human nature. And why wouldn't you look if you've got the opportunity?

So anyway, the point of all this is that my morning was livened up immensely by happening to be in the changing rooms at the gym at the same time as the boy from Registry I used to like. Very fortuitous timing, I have to say, and it gave me something to smile about on the bus to work.

The downside is of course that occasionally you're subjected to the sight of overweight sweaty heffers wheezing and getting changed that almost causes you to lose your breakfast. But you can't have everything and I think it's a price worth paying...

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A Shocking Fact

I just realised that yesterday I worked from 8.50 until 16.45, only stopping for lunch, and was so focused on my work that I didn't even register whether there were any seminars going on in the room opposite, and I didn't take a single go on Scrabulous! I am really quite shocked.

Lots of people have suddenly decided to send me ridiculously long and complicated tasks to do. What's annoying is that often their emails start with "could you just...", but what they're asking for will actually take me more than an hour.

So anyway, today I need to be More Focused on what's important in life - my view of hot students (just think, they could have been demonstrating hot oil physiotherapy massage in there yesterday, and I missed it), and Facebook. Luckily I have no pointless meetings today, yesterday I had two, so that should make things easier.

Oh and also, Mitch Hewer is so hot I want to batter him to death and keep his corpse in my freezer.

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The rage, the RAGE!

I have been bottling it up for the last two days, but can contain myself no longer. I am absolutely FURIOUS that Michelle Gayle wasn't selected as our entry for Eurovision this year and instead we're stuck with an unattractive binman with his trousers up under his nipples like he's about 60.

I just can't understand how it happened! Michelle clearly had the better song, it was dead catchy and it had a dance routine and everything. In fact my friends and I had already agreed we were going to learn the dance routine in time for the final, we were that sure she was going to win.

And to my delight Andy Knobhead got eliminated, quite rightly, by the judges in the initial rounds. And then in a shocking moment of ill judgment, Terry Wogan reinstated him as the wild card. Never mind, I thought, she'll still win no problem. It came down to a head to head between the two of them, all the judges said they thought Michelle should win, and then there was a bizarre reality-warping moment where Andy came out the winner! What the hell???

I wouldn't mind that much, but consider this as a proposition:
The Ukranian entry, called Igor or whatever, swans onto stage and they introduce him as a former binman, and then he launches into song, and you think "hang on, this is EXACTLY the same as Madonna - Express Yourself. You can actually sing the lyrics over the top! What did he do, find a CD of it in someone's bin and think 'I'll have that'???"

Because that's exactly the same as what we've done! His song is a complete rip off, the Europeans are bound to have heard of it, backwards though they are, and they're going to completely muller us for it.

So now I'm stuck with trying to find a different country to support this year. Ireland's out because they've chosen a stuffed turkey that looks like a penis to sing their song. So who am I going to support, the French???? Over my dead body!

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By popular demand

Apparently it is highly important that I record on here details of the highly enjoyable "staff development" workshop I went to last week. And I use the words "staff development" in as loose a sense as possible.

Now, not that I'm ungrateful because I got the morning off and a free lunch and four mini pastries, but what the HELL was that? It was entitled "Problems, decisions and creativity", which basically translated into 20 minutes on made-up 'left brain/right brain' theory, doing some lateral thinking puzzles that the trainer got out of a Christmas cracker, and the rest was colouring in!

I drew: a wizard, a mountain, a fireball, an old lady getting struck by lightning, a snake, and a new creation which I have named the Eleroo-utan-osaur - a freaky abomination against nature in ear muffs and glasses.

And the trainer will have got paid loads for that! I know how much trainers earn, and I've seen them paid £750 for a half day before. I think a far more useful creative exercise would have been to give us £75 each and see who finds the most interesting way of spending it. Mine would have gone on hiring a 19 year old blond stripper called Luke.

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Always read the label

Always read the label is very good advice and apparently not just something they say for the hell of it. My contact lens was irritating me on Saturday while I was at a friend's house, and so she helpfully ventured that her brother had some contact lens solution in the bathroom. Perfect, I thought, so off I went to rinse my contact lens and pop it back in.

Terrible stinging pain ensued as I put hydrogen peroxide directly onto my eye. After whipping the lens back out, flinging it away from me as though it had done it deliberately, and rinsing my eye for ages under the tap, I THEN chose to read the label. "Warning: Not to be used for rinsing" it said on the front. On the back it was a bit more specific and said "Only to be used for soaking contact lenses over night. May cause a slight stinging sensation if contact lenses are put back in after less that 6 hours". Slight? SLIGHT??

So I spent the rest of the evening with a very pink eye looking like I'd been used for animal testing.

Other than that, the weekend was very nice. It was nice to see Alice after her 5 months of South American gallivanting, I spent a normal day of enduring my Mum being ridiculously rude to my Dad on Saturday, and on Sunday I had a nice meal at Chris' and took his Nan to the shops.

Have been to the gym this morning and have now doubled the amount I can benchpress to a shocking 10kg!! Wow, that's awesome and I'm sure will come in very handy for... er... pushing very light things away from my chest.

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