24th January 2005
Hi all,
Not all weeks are created equal. Sometimes you have good weeks, other times you have bad weeks. This past week certainly hasn't been a good one.
As a matter of fact only three things have amused me this week.
1) Palace beating Spurs 3-0.
2) Michael Smith singing "Superstition" on "Around the Horn" when asked what he would sing if he auditioned to be on "American Idol".
3) The kid called Elliott who appeared on the Virgin Radio breakfast show and was willing to admit he was a "messy, lazy, spoilt rich kid".
Indeed I could argue that there are clouds to those silver linings.
1) If he followed my advice I have wrecked a work colleague's accumulator, by telling him that Palace always lose at home to Spurs.
2) Michael Smith somehow didn't win for his Stevie Wonder impression. Furthermore there is unlikely to ever be a "Best of Around the Horn" DVD to re-watch this on.
3) It doesn't translate as well in written form and there's no clip on the Virgin Radio website.
And those were my highlights. Some week.
Everyone gets them sometimes. Some incidents are your own fault, some aren't. Or as John McClane was told in Die Hard 2, "You're the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time!"
The ultimate instance of just being in the wrong place during the past week was when it came to my turn to make tea at work, whereupon one colleague thanked me for a half-cup of tea. Offended? Yes I was, especially given that the person who made the comment makes the worst tea in the office. Has the phrase, "pot, kettle, black" ever been more appropriate?
Should I have been offended? Probably not. It just wasn't a good week to wind me up. I wasn't in the mood.
As if face-to-face contact wasn't bad enough then what about the good old phone? Yep, that was just as bad, a week full of grief and hassle. This culminated in a Saturday morning phone call with my parents which meant I had to let my toast go cold and watch Aki Riihilahti's appearance on "Soccer AM" with the volume turned down. If you tried to call me at the weekend that's probably why you didn't get to speak to me - I wasn't answering the phone. As I read somewhere, "You own your phone, your phone does not own you." I would add the condition, "Especially when people are just annoying you."
Could anything else go pear-shaped? Well your wife could always fall over, banging her knee and straining her ligaments. Of course you can happily play the helpful husband, who begins tearing his hair out when she refuses to rest it. As a visiting friend wraps it with a bandage and advises her to "keep it straight" you see her nodding in agreement while the aforementioned knee is forming a perfect right-angle. If you've seen "The Simpsons" episode where the FBI agents tell Homer, "Okay, your name is Homer Thompson," and he nods as if he understands then you can picture the scene (that episode is called "Cape Feare" and is actually my favourite "Simpsons" episode).
At approximately the same time Cookie decided to inch into a minute gap between the windowsill and the sofa. A gap which he couldn't back out of. Needless to say he had a sheepish look on his face, as if to say "Er, can you help me get out of here?" One of the bonuses of having a wooden floor is once you put pads on the legs of your sofa you can simply slide it out of place, in this case allowing Cookie a quick release. Of course I was still nearly tearing my hair out, getting just the right look for a full-scale Dr. Evil impression. "Why must I be surrounded by fricking idiots?"
The biggest idiot? Undoubtedly me, for showing an inate ability to get wound up about everything and the previously undiscovered skill of just annoying everyone. I remember my old friend Scott's argument that "People don't hate themselves because no-one purposefully does things to their own detriment," but it wasn't holding much water with me over the course of the week.
When you have a week like that it is probably a good thing when it comes to an end. Otherwise you end up staring at a screen, wondering why a court patch for "NBA Live 2004" won't work, or indeed why nothing seems to work. And you're thinking that on a Saturday night.
Apparently I was born a day early. It was announced on the news that supposedly January 24th is the most depressing day of the year. Seems like I'm following my lifetime habit of arriving somewhere a few days earlier than expected.
Have a good week!
Tony
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