Handling critique

Handling critique is a skill. It's all very well to dish it out, but taking it is just as hard.

I need to have a daily reminder that tells me what's going on, what's going wrong and how to fix it. I also need one to make sure I do that.

You know what? I think I'm going to make myself one. Where's that phone gone?

Critique

You need to sort your life out son.

For too long, you've been resting on your tattered laurels. Complaining about how hard life is, but doing little to change it. 'My job sucks,' change it. 'My computer sucks,' fix it. 'I don't have time to do the things I want,' make time.

Stop being a little bitch that is controlled by circumstance and put what you got to use.

Take the opportunities you have and make them into something. Nothing is coincidence. Learn from experience. It's there right in front of you.

Monday

The move to London brought with it one slightly inevitable outcome. The working week.

Coming from Cornwall, where things are generally done differently to the rest of the world, I was brought up on work schedules that didn't work on the five day week method.

After a Saturday night of catching up with friends and seeing Russell Brand at the Royal Albert Hall last night, Monday doesn't have much hope of achieving much in my long term memory.

Like a morning of depression over a comedown cup of tea, my life is a cycle of boom bust, much like the world's financial system.

I don't like it.

Bring back the days of working six days a week, where enjoyment is stolen in the hours between work and sleep. Designated leisure time doesn't agree with me. I want to feel shit for having a shit time, not a good time.

Well, that might be achieved now. I'm having a shit time and I'm feeling like shit, for it is Monday.

Sat in a pub again

When you spend the formative years of your life with an alcoholic member of your family, you can't help but be aware of the spiraling path of doom your own drink is taking you down.

Because of the clocks going back, I find myself sat in a pub in victoria an hour earlier than I'd like to be.

Fuck that.

I don't want to be sat in a pub. I am because it's the only place that has comfy seats but doesn't have a miserable bitch that says things like, 'These seats are for display purposes,' (take that Marks and Sparks).

I'm also here because my girlfriend's sister decided to crack a shit about me staying at her place (my girlfriend's) too much, at 8 o'clock in the fucking morning. This was about 3 hours after i'd come in and gone to sleep. 3 hours sleep is not enough sleep.

Knowing that my friends were out drinking with me, I knew they wouldn't be awake enough to appreciate a knock on their door (their door, an hour away in the east end) so I decided to try and sleep the rest of the morning off on the circle line.

It's not very comfortable.

And so i find myself in a pub in victoria station, with a 3 pound breakfast in my belly and two hours to kill until the united/liverpool game and another hour after that when my mum is coming into town.

How do I not be the fuck up, pissed son?

The balance

When you're surrounded by people that treat you like shit, both customers, employers and fellow employees, it's hard to know at which point you should give a shit.

I can understand that one of the biggest problems in today's society is that no one gives a shit. After all, it is all a bit shit.

But the fact is: because no one gives a shit (about their job, society or anyone else) it all turns into a big steaming pile of shit.

Take my example of tonight's work. I worked with people who didn't give a shit about their job, which made my job twice as hard to do: my job serving people drinks who don't give a shit about me.

How the fuck am I supposed to give a shit about that?

For my fellow workers and customers seem to be comfortable with the situation. I just need to find the balance of not giving a shit and keeping my job.

Explaining the name

Don't see this as me being condescending, for it is quite hard to do so when you are on the lowest rung of the (white, male, middle class and English) ladder. I'd just like to shed some more light on the name of my blog, ok?

Assuming that you've got the dictionary reference in the header, you'll have deduced that what I have isn't very much.

To be precise, at this moment in time what I have amounts to a crap job in the service industry, a degree that has so far left me five figures in debt and no place that I could call an abode.

Due to my on going battle with technology, I can't even write this on a laptop (I left it in a ditch in Cornwall), which means occasionally you'll find horrendous typos where my t9 has chosen the wrong word and I haven't noticed it. For reference this is called a Timpo, badly named after its inventor. Me.

Which leads nicely to the next part.

My surname is Horner. A name synonymous with curds and whey.

Unfortunately, stocks in curds and whey have been down in the last two centuries, which means every time someone asks my name it's misheard for 'Horn', 'Warne', 'Warner' (and so forth) until I drop the line, 'Like Little Jack...'.

So there you are, a bit more detail than you could ever have wanted about the name of a blog you came across by a guy you never would have wanted to meet.

I can get on with blogging until my thumbs fall off now.

Don't blame your tools...

Because, as we know from the proverb, that's what bad workmen do.

The answer then, must be to do as good a fucking job as you can with the crap you've been dealt with. No?

This is an attempt to keep a regularly updated account of my doings using a rather restrictive tool: a sony ericsson mobile phone that has rubbish web browsing capabilities, in which i have to write in a tiny text message like text box and where i have to add html code to do simple things like drop a line for the next paragraph.

I'm not blaming my tools, I'm just letting you know how bad they are.