Pretty things, and the logic in hiding them.

Interestingly yesterday was Wear It Pink Day.
From what I can establish this means we should have all worn pink, and donate money, to show our hatred for breast cancer.
Well, I half took part, unknown to me.

Obviously I didn't donate money, as I was unaware that the day existed, but I did wear something pink. Or at least partially pink.

I had some brash multi-coloured underwear on. No, not a frilly G-String as I know some of you assumed. Just some boxers.

But it got me wondering: why did I need multi-coloured underwear?

I mean, moving past the frivolous singular reason why someone might see your underwear, having pink/yellow/white/blue boxers in a stripey pattern doesn't do a whole lot of good for anyone.

It's the same thing as these girls shoes I sometimes see with a pretty, flowery pattern on the in-fucking-side. Why? To reward your feet for carrying you around all day?

I mean I can see the fun in wearing obscure/humorous/attractive socks, because at least when you take your shoes off people can see them. But the inside of shoes?
Surely someone has to be taking a very serious interest in your shoes to see it.

Failure, and how I am not one.

It's answer A, by the way.

Lunch breaks, and what you should do with them.

At my internship. Second day.
This is my lunch, and I'm writing. You'll understand the irony* in just a second (look out for it: it has a 1) before it).
The internship is fun. I spend all day doing two things:

1) Writing.
2) Researching about what I'm going to write about.

One of things I have to research after lunch is the correct usage of the phrase "all year round".
Is it:

a) All year round
b) All-year-round
c) All year-round
d) All-year round

If I can't come back to you by 5 o'clock and tell you, then I'm afraid my life is a failure.

*I may have made this point before. I forget. Ask most people what irony is, and they will struggle to tell you. They usually resort to an annecdote. For example, they'll say "it would be ironic if a man was to write a book on how to avoid bankruptcy, and then go bankrupt the following day" or "it would be ironic for a someone devotes their life to arguing buses are much safer than cars, to then die in a bus crash". Note the Alanis Morrisette song "Ironic" for many other examples.

But that's not irony, my friends. Irony is saying one thing, and meaning something else. Through common usage, however, irony has come to mean this, sort of, incongruity between what we think should happen, and what does happen.

Bravery, and how I sometimes have it.

You ever noticed it's much, much easier to be brave if you're the only one who is going to be. Riding into the equation comes the issue of spiders. Cue annecdote:

Some time ago I was watching a movie in the dark round Joe's. The only light was from the TV flickering with each scene occasionally illuminating the floor. I could see something scuttering around in the dark near my feet. I ignored it, I assumed it was a little spider. I say it in the order of my eye a few times, then perhaps 20 minutes later there was a prolonged "bright" scene, acording a clearer view of the room.

So I get a clear look at the spider. And it's pretty fucking big.

I announced this fact, much to the immediate dismay of Nicki, who stood on the sofa throughout the proceeding scene. We turned on the light, and my suspicions were confirmed, it was big. One of the bigger spiders I've seen in England. It was quick too, one of those kinda stop-start scuttering spiders.

I should say at this point I'm not afraid of spiders, but I am not their biggest fan. And that's kinda the point. If that room had been full of arachnophobics (like Nicki), I could have gotten that spider, I could have picked it up and gotten rid of it.

But it wasn't a room of arachnophobics. Joe and Tom, especially Tom, were not remotely afraid of it, and for some reason that made me slightly more afraid of it.

I don't know if this is a common occurance. Are we braver when we have to be?
Certainly from my experience playing basketball I can tell you that I am a lot more confident on the ball, and more likely to dribble and drive if I feel like one of the better players. I don't know. Maybe it's just me.

By the way, apparently, between 50-60% of women in England suffer from arachnophobia, and between 10-20% of men. Now why is that? Seems strange.

Lyrics, and reasons you shouldn't judge me for putting them on my blog.

Jimmy Eat World. I feel a lot of the time that Jimmy Eat World have a song that describes how I'm feeling. Like the song I'm gonna put up. I don't think you should assume it describes how I feel at the moment, 'cos that would be revealing stuff about my personal life, and that would just leave me looking stupid/embarrased and you feeling bored.

Just accept that whether or not it's how I feel at the moment, I have felt like it at some point in my life, maybe when I was a little less mature, and understood a little bit less about how I percieve the world, and how I am percieved.

I mean, I don't empathise with all of it. I don't know who Heatmiser are, for example, and it's a little bit melodramatic for how I have felt in the past. Some of it is relevant though, I think. But I dunno, I think the music actually makes it better. It's a great song, and if you don't like/know it, then you should.

It's called "Kill":

You're just across the street
Looks a mile to my feet
I want to go to you
Funny how I'm nervous still
I've always been the easy kill
I guess I always will

Could it be that everything goes around by chance
Or only one way that it was always meant to be
You kill me
You always know the perfect thing to say
I know what I should do but I just can't walk away

I can picture your face well
From the bar in my hotel
I wish I'd go to you
I pick up, put down the phone
Like your favorite Heatmiser song goes:
'It's just like being alone...'

Oh God, please don't tell me this has been in vain
I need answers for what all the waiting I've done means
You kill me
You've got some nerve but can't face your mistakes
I know what I should do but I just can't turn away

So go on, love
Leave while there's still hope for escape
Got to take what you can these days
There's so much ahead
And so much regret
I know what you want to say
I know it but can't help feeling differently
I loved you
And I should have said it
But tell me
Just what has it ever meant

I can't help it baby
This is who I am
Sorry but I can't just go turn off how I feel
You kill me
You build me up but just to watch me break
I know what I should do but I just can't walk away

Rainforests, and how I did not save them.

I went leafletting (hmmm, can leaflet be a verb?) with Nicki. I've never been leafletting before, it was a brand new experience.

I established two things:

1) There is one very good type of letter box, which is easy to use, and never annoying. And very few houses have it.

2) Small dogs are much more angry than big dogs.

Do all little dogs have Napoleon Syndrome? (which, by the way, is poorly named, because Napoleon was actually around average height, perhaps slightly taller). Whether they do or not is fairly inconsequential; whether they were angry because I was bigger than them, doesn't really matter.

The bigger dogs don't mind so much. They'd usually just stare at you, and maybe bark, but the little ones come right up to the door yapping angrily.

We did a great job though. I feel our hard work is very likely to have penetrated the collective psychi of the Southwick and Portslade photographic art community, in it's hard, penetrative leaflet way.

It does, of course, cross your mind that: how many people will take one fleeting glance and throw it in the bin, therefore wasting our collective time and the rainforest.

Many, I would imagine.

160, and why you cannot text anymore characters without spending an extra 10p.

Ever wondered why SMS text messages are limited to 160 characters?
I'm not asking whether you care, just whether or not you've wondered.

I've read a few theories, and they are all fairly boring.

A popular possibility is that Freidhelm Hillebrand, a German communications researcher who conducted a personal study on the length of average sentences, figuring that even complex sentences tended to be shorter than 160 characters. He and his team set out to standardise the new medium of mobile phone communication, and as texts were not expected to be anything like as important and succesful as they have become, this fairly massive decision was taken quite easily.

I have also heard that GSM (the universal code that phones communicate with) texts are limited to 256 characters, but 96 of them are used up with the information of who has sent the message, who it is going to, and other background information. This leaves 160 characters for your message.

Another argument is something complicated to do with something called the Protocol Description United (PDU) and the Digitial Coding Scheme (DCS).

I'm not in a good position to tell you which is correct. I just read things, and write them. I'm a writer, after all, not a frickin' scientist.