Night out in Bedford

I 'went out' for the first time ever in Bedford last night, with my work colleagues. It was surprisingly pleasant. I say surprisingly because I had some trepidations regarding some of the younger members of staff, namely two young technicians, who behave like immature brats and treat the dispensary like a playground. Needless to say I was always the wall flower in playground situations when I was little, so this work environment has not been the most therapeutic. But reading a couple of books on Buddism has actually helped me view this situation differently. I now think they're just a bunch of kids, and I'm the self suffering grown up they sometimes pick on but only in the way small children try to bully their parents. I used to be really hurt when they didn't say hello to me in the mornings, but now it actually doesn't bother me. Who'd've thought? Although I'm aware this goes against the Buddist principle of letting go of delusions of duality, ie. me vs them, but this works, so who the fuck cares?
Having said that I was infinitely relieved when I found out my new pharmacist friends were coming as well, and a good time was had by all. We had dinner in Dragon's, a large Chinese restaurant which does the typical white folk buffet thing, and the whole place was fairly bustling. Twice that evening the lights went dim and a Chinese waiter with cheesy grin walked out with a little cake and a tiny 99p for 100 candle on it amidst dubious renditions of 'Happy Birthday'. One of them came to our table, much to our surprise and equally to the surprise of the receivee, Moya, a technician who had arrived late and sat at the end of our long table with us pharmacist lot and I guess kind of expected to be ignored for the rest of the evening. She ended up blubbing in front of us, and there was much picture taking with phones.
I had two glasses of white wine with my MSG loaded buffet food (which all came to the shocking subtotal of £16), and by the end of the evening, a very respectable 10pm, I was absolutely reaking. Even my mum could smell it when she picked me up from the train station at 11.30 that evening. I have to say, finishing a night out at 10pm and being picked up from the train station by my mum is very quintessentially ME. As is yelling at her afterwards for having recorded over Grey's Anatomy with Ugly Betty, after having asked her to record it for me in the first place. I'm such a fucking ungrateful bitch, I totally deserve to have no messages on my voicemail.

My cousins' blogs

My attention has recently been drawn to weblogs that two of my cousins have. I can now keep updated to events and thoughts in their lives without ever having to speak or e-mail them directly. In comparison to their blogs my blog is positively overly pretentious and poncey. Which is probably because I am overly pretentious and poncey. I wanted to tell them I have a weblog too, but I didn't want them reading all this stuff I write and thinking less of me. Especially when I talk about the fact I don't have many friends and how it hurts me when people never call or ask me out, and I feel ashamed of this fact. The Buddism books have actually helped me reevaluate this though, hopefully, but this is a digression. And now I'm thinking maybe I should have an alternative weblog, where I don't talk about heavy shit like that. Maybe I could call it 'superfluency' or something. It would be nice to have one blog I could share with people I know.

One funny post for Comic Relief
I was having a browse through some of my favourite weblogs, and saw on petite anglais that Troubled Diva is compiling a book on funny blog posts from UK bloggers for Comic Relief. As eager as I always am for any kind of recognition, I had a trawl through my own posts. Because, you know, I think I'm funny, and I think I can write pretty good; surely, surely, there'd be one, one, post that I've written somewhere that I could submit. But to my utter amazement I found that all my posts were serious, with only mild undertones of dry humour. What do they call that... an epiphany? The opposite to an epiphany? Not only that, Troubled Diva has a massive list of blogs that have linked to his site re funny posts for Comic Relief, but has now stopped adding people to it, so I can't even get credit for linking to his site. Oh well, back to crocheting then.

ln 1 = zero
I've tried to step up my studying for the upcoming FPGEE (foreign pharmacy graduate equivilancy exam) this week, and for the first time in months tackled the mathematical equations. Some of the questions involved 'ln' ing and 'log'ing, and I was amazed at how much I've forgotten, such basic principles that I'd lived and breathed throughout my late teens because Maths had been one of the only subjects I'd been fairly competent at. I found myself looking at my old university notes at stuff that my 20 year old self had written down, such as [ln 1-ln 2= ln 0.5] and [ln 1- ln 2 = - ln 2] with utter incomprehension. Initially, that is, and then as I forced myself to think, the old principles came out like faint echoes. It was like stirring up really old sediment at the bottom of a pond that had lain untouched for decades. One decade, to be exact. It's funny how shit like this happens when you least expect it, something that you're certain is dead and buried comes back 10 years later and head butts you.

Florida sister's birthday
It was my sister's birthday yesterday. My sister lives in Florida, and I haven't seen her in possibly more than 6 months. I don't especially miss her, and she probably doesn't especially miss me, but we'll chat on the phone the way sisters do. I thought about sending her a card or a present, but I decided not to because I didn't see anything which looked like anything she'd like, and I'm too old for the buying any old crap as a present for the sake of it. But I thought calling her on the day would more than make up for it, so I did, unfortunately I got the answer machine, so I left a message. I spoke to American Bill after that, expressing guilt on not only having not gotten my sister a birthday nor a Christmas present, but also at having just given my other sister more money for a wedding contribution (by the end of June I'll have two younger sisters who've gotten married before me). So I asked him to phone my Florida sister later on to wish her a Happy Birthday on my behalf, a verbal telegram, if you will. And to my mild surprise
he agreed. Does that mean it's love? But he did end the phone conversation by claiming to need a nap, which is how he's ended the last couple of phone calls, so perhaps not.

Gilbert and George

I went out with the Art club again last night. I can't imagine my life without this new discovery of mine, or rather, I'd rather not, social black hole that it is. It was a Late at the Tate night last night. You see, I really can't do late at the Tate with any of my friends, just the mere mention of going to an art gallery on Friday night would have them looking at me like I belong to the Weller Wing of Bedford Hospital. I was all prepped up for the night, I even bought my train tickets from Bedford in advance. And despite a cold which started up a couple of days ago, I caught the 5.51 fast train which got into St. Pancras at 6.30, at which point I emerged from the station dismayed to find that it was raining in London, and I was umbrellaless, and sporting long flared jeans and pink non-waterproof suede shoes. To my surprise it still took me over half an hour to get to the Tate, briskly walking over the Millennium Bridge from St Paul's as the thin rain drizzled from above. The sky was a tumultous blue purple, and the Thames a mettallic shade of mauve. St Paul's stood white, regal and silent in the London night, and from miles away its lit up dome can be seen amongst the modern spacey buildings which have sprouted up and crowded around it, a signature reminder of London's architectural past. The view of the London skyline from over the Thames at night is definitively iconic and is one of my absolute favourites, it rocks me every single time.
When I got to the Tate at 7.15, the Grand Hall was dimly lit, possibly because it's normally lit by daylight, but it just made its central display, the three Unilever series slides, look, well, really cool, actually. The atmosphere was buzzing, and it was nice to not have throngs of people milling around gettin' in the way. The Gilbert and George ticket was a whopping £10, another thing my friends would never do, and off I went. The first Gilbert and George thing I'd ever seen before this exhibit was the short film projection of the two of them, standing one behind the other amongst foliage in Victorian like suits staring motionless into some view off camera against a backdrop of Charlie Chaplin piano music. That was also at the Tate Modern, and not really realising who they were this time, their distinctive images came back to me when confronted by their art work. Which always has the two of them in it, which is their thing; and I have to admit they've pulled it off really well. I suppose I'm fairly open to artists self portraying themselves in their artwork, I love Frida Kahlo. And then ofcourse there's Alfred Hitchcock and M.Night Shyamalan - although not quite the same context.
The exhibit took us through their work starting from their beginnings, fairly innocuously with large pencil and paper drawings, of the two of them in quaint English settings, pubs and such. Then they moved onto photography and colours, then became a bit more controversial by portraying photos of graffiti of words such as 'cunt' and 'fuck'. Then kind of half way through the exhibit you could kind of see where they'd lost the plot and had huge wall height photo art with technicoloured pictures of spit and poo and stuff. And they also shed their hairy suits and posed in various risque positions in a nude, with their dwindling penises and testicles on show. And whereas before their gayness was only a kind of subtle undercurrent, it was now patently obvious that they are flaming queers. I commented on this then, and James stated that they were in fact well known man and man; it seemed that these pictures could have been an expression of the fact that they wanted to ram that fact down our throats. Possibly. It was not easy viewing and left my stomach queasy.
Then their art quietened down a notch, with only occassional references to pictures of spunk, the suits came back on, thankfully, but now their aging had come to the forfront. For the first time I wondered which one was Gilbert and which one was George, a question I asked a couple of other Artclubber, to find that they did not know either. Perhaps this was also their intention, a dual brand, inseperable to the end, not knowing where one began and the other ended. A real love. I couldn't get over how much the non-bespectacled one had aged, he had started off being the more strapping of the two, but was now grayer, podgier, and shorter than the other, who seems to have managed to look exactly the same all this time.
It ended with the art work becoming more involved with computer managed manipulation, and the grand finale of Evening Standard titles all revolving around the terrorist attacks last year, which brought it all up to date. So despite the really dubious section in the middle, it was pretty good, but only recommended if you appreciate that kind of art. Their dual image is definitely striking.
It was a good evening, I was surprised when I got to the end of it and it was nearly 9pm. James gathered everybody up to go out for a drink, most probably at the lovely Youngs pub by the river; but even though my nose had dried up and behaved itself, I didn't want to risk sabotaging a quick recovery by staying out late and went home.