Worship me, for I happen to have been born on this day

Today is my birthday, and I am officially now 28 and Very Close To Being Thirty.

I can't believe that I'm 28 already and I'm not particularly happy about it. When I was young I thought 28 seemed like an eternity away and just sounded so OLD. I also didn't used to start sentences with "when I was young". Saying that though, I kind of have two opinions on it. I don't like my age when written down any more, but I feel perfectly happy with where I am and wouldn't want to change it. I just looked back on my post from my last birthday and found I wrote almost exactly the same thing last year too, so I shouldn't complain really.

I have received lots of nice birthday wishes by text and on Facebook and Twitter (and even in person, shock horror). It's funny how you get special treatment and presents simply for having survived another year. I could be a horrible person (I'm not, I'm lovely) and I'd still get birthday cards. What is it that we celebrate exactly? "I like you, and am therefore pleased you were born, so will mark this day with gifts"? It's nice anyway, and means everyone gets a special day during the year apart from the Queen who gets two and the people who were born too close to Christmas for it to really warrant two presents and who has enough money to buy two presents at Christmastime anyway, their parents should have thought about that when they were busily getting knocked up in March.

I probably won't be doing too much for my birthday today, what with it being a school night, but I've got birthday cake and doughnuts to eat at work (paid for by me, tsk) and we'll probably have a nice meal tonight. I'll save the proper celebrations for the weekend when we've got friends coming down and we'll be going to cowboy-themed Wild Fruit (insert Rawhide-music whip cracking noise here).

I'm off to contemplate my third doughnut of the morning now.

Public masturbation

Why do boys these days walk around wearing jogging bottoms with one or both hands shoved right down the front? What are they doing down there? And more importantly, why does no-one say "excuse me, can you stop tugging yourself off in front of Ladbrokes please"?

I see it all the time now, it's like it's trendy or something. I just saw a boy walking with a group of four girls, just casually chatting, and clearly clasping his cock while doing it. I just don't get it! Why doesn't it trouble the girls? Why don't they squeal "uurrrrrrrrr he's touching himself Lind", and run off to find a grown up (they were fairly young). I don't know, maybe they've all got love eggs shoved up themselves or something, so they think the boys deserve an equivalent.

It's wrong anyway. In my day if you wanted to have a wank you did it in private. Or at least under a coat.

Letter to a Christian Nation

I was just reading these quotes from Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris that someone sent me the link to on Twitter (thanks @Sheamus!), and the last bit really made me laugh so I thought I'd share it with you.

"The president of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said that he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ridiculous or offensive."

I hope he was writing about George W Bush rather than Barack Obama. I can easily imagine George Bush talking to his hairdryer, and the hairdryer being his intellectual superior.

Such a nice neighbourhood

I'm a bit disturbed by this article in the Argus saying there was an attempted armed robbery on my road on Saturday. What a lovely area I must live in!

I was out at the time so I missed all the excitement, and fortunately it was a robbery in a shop rather than an individual being held up in the street at gun point, but it's still a bit scary. I actually hate the shop in question, it's an eyesore, so I don't mind if it gets robbed particularly, but obviously I'm quite keen not to get shot by fleeing gunmen.

It's never been the nicest road to live on, I have to say. It's close to town and lots of people walk along it on their way home after nights out, so that brings with it a fair bit of noise and the occasional bit of trouble. I've seen several fights in the time I've lived here, including one person who had their ear cut off ("my ear's gone! my fucking ear's gone!" cried the young man in question), and a gay couple who had a rather savage fight that featured belt-whipping, repeated in-the-face kicking, and then an attempt to bite a finger off. A charming couple with a bright future ahead of them, I'm sure you'll agree.

I'd never called 999 in my life before moving here, and in the last five and a half years I must have called it about six times.

So anyway, it's obviously not that nice an area really. Maybe it's just as well we're planning on moving this year. We had a meeting with a mortgage man at HSBC on Saturday, which was quite exciting in a boring financial sort of way, so now all we have to do is start looking for flats!

It's words that hurt the most

My clothing was slagged off by a pikey yesterday. That's right, MY clothing was critiqued by a fat, toothless, street-drinking pikey woman in a dirty grey jumper and joggers. What the hell??

We had just left the house and had unfortunately to walk past one of the groups of drunks that are always sitting near our house on the way to the car.

"The one on the left needs skinny jeans!", crowed the fat boiler, to the delight of her equally disease-ridden companion who promptly laughed at said boiler's witty remark.

I had perfectly nice trousers on! And they went with my outfit and everything! They were from Primark I admit, but she didn't know that.

Of course I couldn't think of anything clever to say in return, so just kept walking and suffered the ignominy of them chortling behind my back.

I should have pointed out that she needs to get some front teeth and lose about 300 pounds before she comments on anyone else's appearance, fat cow. The audacity of it!

Guy Pearce is really rather hot

I watched Memento yesterday and it reminded me of what a cutey Guy Pearce is. Look! Look how cute!



He's actually a bit hotter in Priscilla Queen of the Desert I think, probably just because he's quite a bit younger, but he's still got that lean muscly thing going on even now he's 40.



I hope I look that good when I'm 40.

Anyway, Memento was really good, although you have to concentrate if you don't want to get lost as the story is more or less told backwards. Guy Pearce plays a man on a mission to find his wife's killer, which sounds straightforward enough except that he has a form of amnesia that prevents him from storing any new memories. It's well written and very original, and it leaves you talking about it for a while afterwards as you try to piece everything back together in chronological order in your head. I highly recommend it.

One last picture, this one was too good to pass up.

Aren't weddings supposed to be fun?

Sigh, OK so here is the latest on my brother's wedding, that I couldn't be bothered to write about yesterday because it was too depressing.

Mum now has a borrowed dress and a hat to wear, which is good because she was freaking out about finding an outfit. So is she feeling any happier and maybe looking forward to her son getting married? No. She's now able to turn her attention instead to freaking out about how she's going to manage the day, and how long she'll be able to stay for, and how she'll get home afterwards. I think the root cause is most probably that she went to a dress shop at the weekend for an hour and then it took her two days to recover, so she's obviously now thinking how is she going to manage a whole wedding.

Dave isn't being particularly helpful, but I do understand why. He's feeling a bit pissed off I think that not only is Mum not doing anything to help for the wedding (because, admittedly, she can't), she is actually being a hindrance and creating more stress for him, by asking for constant reassurance and checking of things like where she can go for a rest during the day, where she can eat her meal, etc etc. She is quite good at making things about her, even when you think it is something that most certainly is not about her.

She's like that though. Take when she found out I was gay - one of the earliest things she said to me was "I don't think you've thought about how this affects me", and then she bought this stupid book called Stranger In The Family - How to cope when your son is gay. It was all about grief, and the mourning that a parent feels for the life they thought their child was going to have and now won't.

Fuck. Off. Mourning?? I wasn't bloody dead! Just because she chose to make lots of assumptions about my life, it's not my fault. I never promised to marry a nice girl and have lots of babies. And a parent's assumptions actually make their gay child's life rather more difficult, as you then feel like you're doing something wrong by not conforming to them.

Anyway, I'm getting off the point. Mum is getting stressy and demanding attention, and Dave is getting pissy and refusing to give it, so I end up getting my ear bent by both of them. I don't recall signing up to be family conciliator and I'm getting a bit fucked off with it lately. I want to go to my brother's wedding and enjoy it! But I won't really, I won't be able to relax until the evening probably, once Mum and Dad leave, which sounds AWFUL but it's true.

So there you are. And we've got about five and a half weeks to go. I'm sure someone will go into meltdown at some point before that. I'm slightly concerned that Dave will be short with Mum on the phone, she'll take offence (partly on purpose, as part of her attention-seeking tactics), and then Mum will say she won't go at all then if she's such a trouble and we'll have a whole family drama.

But whatever, fuck it, I can't fix everything for them. I'm getting exasperated, can you tell?