What are friends for?

An interesting read:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1396917,00.html

(yoinked from denari)

Personally I think I'm one of the people mentioned near the end who has a fair understanding of how my different friendships work. The majority of them I regard as 'acquaintances' - good-time friends, if you like. I rarely expect anything of them, and I wouldn't generally expect them to demand anything of me. This doesn't mean that I don't enjoy their company - very much, in some cases - but just that I classify them differently to those I count as true friends. The few in this category I would feel minimally guilty about calling at 4am if I needed to, and they're the people who can call me at that hour and have my phone ring instead of diverting them to answerphone.

I think I wrote some waffle about this in djlongfella's LJ recently, and possibly a while ago in elise's too.

Meh.

Various things worth of a 'meh' this weekend. Firstly (in order of disappointment levels), the shiny shoes referred to in a previous post, turned out to have a nasty manufacturing defect when they were unwrapped on Saturday, so I'm going to have to send those back. There's no mention of refunding my postage on the company's website, and also it says that all returns must be received within seven days of delivery, so we'll see what happens there. Turns out they were a size too large too (I was advised to get a size up in that style), so I'm asking them to replace with a different size pair. Hopefully this won't all lead to arguments. If it does, hopefully the fact that I run a fetish reviews website will give me a little bit of leverage.

Also firstly (in terms of expense and inconvenience) my iRiver died, completely, horribly, and suddenly, as I was coming up the escalator in Euston on the way out on Saturday. I'd been listening to it for half an hour or so, it reached the end of one track just fine, then instead of the next track it gave me about five seconds of garbled shite (sounding like a CD player on very fast skip), and then it shut up. By the time I'd got it out of my pocket, it had turned itself off, and it's refused to turn back on ever since. So I've got to send that back too - once I can figure out how / where to, their website is really quite crap.

Thirdly, my mood crashed quite badly, and irrecoverably, on Sunday. I'm not really sure why, it just seemed like I couldn't find my usual ability to ignore all the trivial shit that hangs over my head from day to day... the usual financial and health worries (plus I have some great ulcers right now, which does always tend to grind my mood down), plus being narked about the two shiny breakages above, just seemed to make me a really miserable fuck for the day. Which was unfortunate, as I was spending it with lunernia who I hadn't seen for two weeks, and might not see for another two. In the end we watched one and a third DVDs (I have now seen the first three episodes of The Office. I can't remember who recommended this to me, which is probably good fortune on their part. It's the most cringeworthy depressing crap I've watched in a fair while, and I'm sure that wasn't just my mood of the day.) and then I came back to London, feeling very alone. And also feeling very uprooted... I had a moment of panic as I realised I was on a train to London when I should be going home, then remembered that London is home, and found this a pretty unconvincing line of reasoning. I also couldn't figure out anywhere else that felt like home, so that was a bit crap. I slunk from train to tube to front door feeling pretty fed up with everything, really.

Eventually, I got to my bed and then immediately stopped being tired for a few hours, as you do. In the end I finished reading a long book and managed to get to sleep on that 'sense of completion' this sometimes gives. This morning arrived, and Monday 24th January failed to live up to its hype as 'most depressing day', as the weekend had pre-empted it somewhat. Nothing went spectacularly wrong at work, although I didn't get much useful stuff done either. I seem to be doing a lot of firefighting sysadmin stuff at the minute, which is tedious and doesn't give me any sense of achievement at the end of a day (although quite often it makes clients and bosses/colleagues happy, as the results are usually dramatic and instantly visible, unlike a bit of well though out software design and implementation).

Oh yeah...

One thing that was quite cool today, is that my dad is in a load of Australian newspapers. Apparently Kylie is suing Pete Waterman for a load of money ($1.08m) that he didn't give her in royalties for a recent 'best of' album... this fact brought to light by an audit done by my dad. His company gets quite a few name checks - google for kylie "de la haye" and you'll see a selection of them, although most of the actual articles appear to be on sites that require registration (The Age now has an account with user/pass freepress2005/freepress which I created so I could read the top link at the time I searched).

My dad is pretty pleased, although he did have a bit of a panic about the complete lack of content on his website :) I've stuck a temporary page up for him for now and we'll have a bit of a better look at it soon.

"Impress your girl with a huge cumshot!"

Okay, so I've been getting a LOT of spam lately with the general subject matter of increasing the volume of male ejaculations. Most of it has the quoted subject line, although there are variations. This has come (ho, ho) as something of a surprise to me, as it was something that had never really occurred to me as a potential area for personal development. I do know one or two girls who really like cum - they like facials, swallowing, etc etc, and okay, the more the better to them I'm sure. However, I also know one or two girls who really don't like the stuff much, and would be perfectly happy if it there was a lot less of it. These exceptional fringe cases aside, I would have guessed that the vast majority of people I know actually couldn't care less... but maybe I'm wrong! And so, a LiveJournal poll was born:

( *spaff* )