I first played poker in high school, I think – it was, and remains today, a deeply cool adult-y thing to do. It’s a tremendously interesting game, unlike anything digital or otherwise – even chess lacks the subtle joys of betting and bluffing your opponent. I started playing it again with a group of my friends at university last year, and after some beginner’s luck I soon found myself to be not very good, but I enjoyed it anyway.

I’ve never played for big money in a professional context – occasionally we’d put money in, and I did win once, but I prefer a laidback evening with friends to serious competition with strangers. I’ve been thinking about playing online at sites like PartyPoker, though; the idea of doing it in an online environment and being able to test myself at a level that suits me does appeal.

Playing poker last night reminded me of something else. Since I last posted here, I’ve started work at an opticians, and I’m really enjoying it. I’ve found out a lot about myself at my new job. There’s an element of sales to my position – it’s not hard selling and you’re only ever recommending what’s best for the customer, but I’ve found it a struggle sometimes to properly explain myself and to properly explain the product in a way that makes the customer want to buy it. If you push too hard, most people will – quite rightly – clam up and outright refuse. If you don’t push at all, you end up with a string of “alright” sales, and the customers end up with glasses that are okay, but not as great as they could be. (In particular, way too many people settle for going without reflection-free coatings. The camera in your phone has it, everybody in Germany has it, why wouldn’t you want it on your glasses?)

There are tactics. I’ve talked myself into a corner quite often, where I’ve tried to promote one option and wound up discrediting another, with the result that the customer goes for neither. You really have to play your cards in the right order, and at the right time – just like poker, you can’t get too greedy, or the customer will fold. It’s an interesting business, sales.

"...and you share digital information instantaneously on something called "Internet"."

I think the first ‘proper’ play I saw really opened my eyes to the power of theatre. It was Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind in Chicago way back in 2008, a series of two dozen audience-chosen mini-plays that run the gamut from creepy to hilarious to deeply moving and which really should be seen if you’re ever in the neighbourhood (I seem to recall the theatre is above a funeral home).

Since then I’ve seen a production of As You Like It at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, which was enjoyable, and Othello at our very own Stage@Leeds on campus. Last night, however, we decided to try something a little different – an original production called Lolz which, I confess, we attended based purely on the title and the fact that it was £3 for a ticket.

It’s a play about the internet – Google, eBay, Facebook, Twitter, email, instant messaging, lolcats, even Minecraft. What if the internet was a god? An enormous body of information, entrusted with every last drop of human knowledge – what would it do if it could think? Matthew Allen and Anton Krasauskas of the Skeleton Project wander haphazardly through a network of white circuit lines on the stage, pausing to offer us thoughts on the structure of the human mind and how social interaction has changed in this modern age. It’s funny, raising laughs over shared experiences with technology and some surprisingly niche and nerdy references, ending with frantic dashing about as the two redefine the white tape network they’ve built on the stage, building shortcuts and restructuring their world.

The only problem I had was with the speeches that the Leeds Student reviewer seemed to enjoy the most. Krausauskas came across as a bit preachy to me – it began to feel less like a play and more like a lecture. I’m a shameless technophile and I love the internet, so I’m always wary of people who say it’s a dangerous thing and that it’s turning us into idiots. It’s got its downsides, of course, but people have rallied against the dangers of the telephone and the printing press and even, in the case of no less a thinker than Socrates, the written word itself. So I take the cries that computers are dumbing us down with a pinch of salt.

Nescafe: implicated by Gaddafi

Of course, most revolutions tend to end in dictatorships. It’s one of the sad fallacies of humanity that the people who should rule never want to, while the people who lust after power are precisely the ones who should not be allowed to be in power. But some good might come of it. I love the idea of revolution, if not the practicalities of it.

And on the theme of revolution, my life is … revolting! I’m afraid to report that after a long struggle with Failure, my BA in Japanese has passed away peacefully after receiving poor marks in the recent exams. In all seriousness, I think this is the third and final time I’ll be thinking of packing it in. Even though I only have a year left, my Japanese just isn’t going to get any better. I gave it a year, and it’s not coming together, and it’s become a frustrating chore. This just isn’t what I want to do. Best to cut my losses and try for a decent English degree rather than a poor joint honours one. I don’t think doing English will be any easier – it might well be harder – but I’ll be able to concentrate on one subject, rather than the ungainly hodge-podge of joint honours, and it’s a difficulty I enjoy – a challenge, not the immovable mountain that is trying to learn Japanese.

Wheels are in motion, and I’m reasonably certain that this time there’s nothing to stop me – I’ve got the marks, and I should get funding for an extra year. This gives me the rest of the semester off. A kind of sabbatical, if you will. Sort my head out. Get a job. Do some writing. Here’s hoping it goes well.

I’m reminded of something that happened to me when I went to visit my friend (who shall remain unnamed) in Sheffield a few weeks back; we’d had an exciting evening not bothering to queue up for Corp (which is possibly the Cockpit of Sheffield?) and instead headed down to DQ (which I imagine is Wire, or something) for Halloween. After sleeping on a sofa about half as long as me under somebody’s coat, we awoke fresh and early, the stage was set for a comfortable afternoon on lazing on the sofa at my friend’s brother’s house halfway across Crookes and playing Halo 3.

First problem.

My friend’s housemate had work. No problem! We’d play a few games of Halo at my friend’s brother’s house, then my mate could drive him to work.

Second problem.

My friend’s other housemate phoned us. He had spent the night elsewhere. The previous night, my other friend and I had borrowed his keys so we could get back. Hence housemate 2 was standing outside the locked door of his own house in the blustery Sheffield winds with no way in. Would we kindly return to the house, he asked, and let him in? No problem! We’d drive back to my friend’s house, let housemate 2 in, then take housemate 1 to work, drive back to my friend’s brother’s and play some Halo 3. Plan!

Third problem.

Car didn’t start. Bonnet up, oil-stained hands poking around. Man from a window shouting at us if he could help. Two housemates becoming increasingly uncomfortable. Phone calls made. My friend, being the sort to just hope for the best rather than prepare for the worst, had no sort of breakdown cover whatsoever.

Not a problem! Stu ended up sprinting for thirty minutes through Crookes to get to his house and let housemate 2 in, while housemate 1 had to run to work, presumably ending up a) late and b) sweaty, which is not the best state to start work in. But, y’know, the car started eventually. The next day. We still don’t know why.

I ended up with a slightly-bonkers set-up with my netbook on my left, plugged into my radio streaming Japanese TV; Anki open on the left half of my desktop monitor for flashcards; and JDIC open on the right half of my monitor for looking up words; and a remarkable program called Synergy which lets you use one mouse and keyboard on two PCs as if my laptop was just another monitor. Another monitor and an iPhone somewhere in there and I would truly be a self-facilitating media node.

It is [hot/cold] because it is [summer/winter]! I hope you are well. n years have passed since I graduated from [university] and now I am living in [place]. Things were [difficult/bad] to start with, but then they became [easy/good]. I am working as a [occupation].

The truth is, I need to ask a favour. Because of [reason], could you do [request] for me? It’d be really good if you could.
Give my regards to your [wife/husband].

Then you throw in some 「もっと早くご連絡しようと思っておりましたが、遅くなり、申し訳ありません。」 (“I thought I’d contact you quickly, but it became late. My deepest apologies.”) or 「桜の美しい季節になりましたが」 (“It has become the season of cherry blossom’s beauty.”) and the killer 「仕事応募の為、身元保証をご提出して頂き、有難う御座います。」 (“For bestowing on me the honourable submission of a personal reference for the benefit of my job application, my deep thanks.” written with ridiciously showy-off kanji that will probably make the marker either shake their head or admire my pluck).

So I revised that while listening to some amazing jazz (I find it the perfect revision music because it’s sort of soothing and exciting all at the same time, and there’s no words to distract you) and went into the exam this morning, wrote a half-decent letter, and finished neatly before the end.

A future classic, surely.

Walked back listening to Classic FM on my phone because I deleted all my MP3s while upgrading to Android 2.2. It was Chopin’s beautiful Romance Larghetto, which really went well with the drizzling rain. Listening to a lot more radio, these days, which is nice. Sometimes you can get a bit fed up of having so many MP3s always available.

So I sort of picked up that what proper students do is study a few topics in depth and then apply that knowledge to the exam. A cursory glance at past papers revealed that a) sex and b) authority were likely to come up, and I find those two subjects far more interesting than ‘time’ or ‘pastoral’ or ‘nature’ and the other themes on the course. So I flicked through a few books and made notes and went into the exam really having no idea what I was going to do.

Always three hours seems like an impossibly long time, and the blank white pages stretch on forever, and you have no idea how to answer any of the questions. But the time and pressure and stress sort of squeeze something out of your brain and you start writing and before you know it, time’s up and you’ve done a half-decent job.

the face of a dirty, dirty man

My first question was:

9. Be judge yourself, I’ll bring it to the test:
Which is the basest creature, man or beast?
Birds feed on birds, beasts on each other prey
But savage man alone does man betray. (Rochester)

Does the literature of the period make us feel uncomfortable about being human?

To which I was like, you know Paradise Lost is all “humans are beautiful things but then it all went a bit wrong, look at the poor wretched things.” Then I threw Pepys in there, perhaps a bit too vigorously (it’s all too obvious that I just crammed Pepys because it’s full of extraneous detail about him, like his gallstones and what he does in church). Pepys is a fascinating character: a kind of lecherous prude, a man enamoured by the pleasures of the flesh but deeply ashamed by them; a man genuinely upset when his wife catches him fondling the maid but then who does it again the next day; a man who reads filthy French books and is all like “this is a disgusting book, but a learned man must remind himself of the sin of the world so I’ll take it don’t tell my wife yes a brown paper bag please”. He’s attracted to sex like a moth towards a flame, but when he gets there he burns up in shame. Finally I threw in Rochester to make the same point – humans are disgusting and we feel uncomfortable reading about it, but at the same time there’s a certain joie de vie, a kind of we’re-damned-anyway-so-let’s-party. And then something from Locke, which unfortunately I could barely remember.

Kind of the worst king there ever was, Charles II.

Then I twiddled my thumbs for a bit before embarking on my second question:

‘There were kings long before there were any laws. For a long time the word of a king was the only law’ (Sir Robert Filmer)

Write an essay on the relationship between law and Royal authority in the literature of this period.

Jackpot! Except I screwed it up by confusing Waller’s “St. James’s Park” and Denham’s “Cooper’s Hill”, but they are practically the same poem (except Denham can write poetry and Waller can’t). Still, I think I got across nicely that Charles is a king ruled only by himself and his own whims, with God his only authority,who allows himself to be fettered by law only for the good of all concerned. His temper is barely restrained, and if the commoners tried to restrain him further he would burst like an angry river and flood the country with destruction, as Denham put it. I could – should – have been harsher and pointed out that Charles II barely gave a damn about anything beyond where his next mistress was coming from, but I’m not sure where that would have fit into the essay.
So then I was went on to Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel” and explained how Dryden, rather sneakily, turns Charles’s promiscuity into a virtue, making out that having ten children by five different women is the sign of a powerful and deeply masculine man – ahahaha check out his tights there – and therefore how he don’t need no ‘law’ to have authority, but Dryden backtracks and adds ‘but he is also lawful because if not he could be a tyrant and Charles could never be a tyrant, except for that time his goons hunted down a guy who said something bad about him and cut off his nose, and all those times he pardoned his buddies for murder and rape.
And then some more John Locke, and the exam was done. That’s that for another year!

All monarchs I hate, and the thrones they sit on,
From the hector of France to the cully of Britain.
(Rochester, “A Satyr on Charles II”)

I mean to write a post on here about my experiences from my first few articles and tips for newbies like myself, so keep eyes peeled.

It’s 2011, the first year of the 10s if you don’t believe 2010 is in the 10s (which it is, as any sensible non-pedantic person agrees). Resolution time!

• Write a radio script! I realised that while writing a play requires you to get a director and a stage and actors, you can write a radio script and submit it to the Beeb and you might get feedback, if they like it enough, and if they really like it they’ll buy it from you for megabucks and make it into a radio play. How ace would that be?
• Join the theatre society! I wouldn’t really say I’ve always wanted to be an actor, but I do kinda feel like I need to do acting at some point in my life, when I think about it. I didn’t go to no fancy acting schools and I have only seen about three plays and my only experience with Drama is a term of Drama enrichment in sixth form, but someone’s got to be the extras.
• Have a shower! No, wait, that’s my plan for today.
• Start jogging (again)! I’ve been running on-and-off for three years now? I used to use the treadmills at TUFS, which was really convenient, but there’s no sense paying silly money to use the gym at Leeds when I have the beautiful wood near my house to run through.

I discovered an amazing app called RunKeeper (currently free for the pro version) which – get this – you set up a route, like run 0.5 miles then walk 0.25 miles and repeat three times, and then you pop in your headphones and listen to some banging tunes and a synthesised voice tells you when to start running and when to stop running and how far you’ve run and your pace and speed and stuff all in your ears automatically. And it tracks you by GPS so you can see exactly how far you ran, how high you climbed, and then overlays it on Google Maps.

It’s so weird. You know your forefather William Gibson told us how technology would revolutionise the world. And while we don’t have nanomachines in our bloodstream or skull-guns or brain-cyberspace interfaces yet, I honestly think the age of better living through technology is here. My phone tells me when to run for optimum fitness. My PC makes the screen warmer in the evening so I can sleep better. Then my phone monitors me while I sleep so it can wake me up at the right time. I know it seems like iPhones and smartphones and app ecosystems are overhyped, but it really is a revolution in the way we use technology. The future is now, people!!

Instead I narrowed it down to the future of youth in Japan – the big question being whether freeterism (flitting from temporary job to temporary job in your 20s and 30s, not settling into a career path) and NEETism (basically giving up on life and living in your parents’ house) has a viable future. But then I kinda got lost on that, so it changed again to the causes of this crisis in Youth Employment. This is important, because it’s what’s gonna happen here in a year when all the jobs are gone and I can’t get on the career ladder, although thankfully the UK is a little different to Japan.

Anyway, stick a conclusion on that, get it ring-bound, and that’s that done. In the meantime, I’ve been doing a few articles on HubPages to get my writing out there and hopefully earn a few bob from advertising. It would probably make more sense to write on this blog more, but I’ll try this in the meantime and linking here helps with the old SEO:

Best of Seoul: top places to go in the heart of Korea
Top places to go in sunny Seville
Hangover from hell: Climbing Mt Fuji
Malaga: Where to go in the Andalusian City of Culture
Top European spas: three of the best
Buying a title: can anyone become a Baron or Lady?
Tokyo on a Budget: Top tips to survive in Tokyo on the cheap

Anyway, Christmas is coming and I’m back at home. I’m writing my first play, although I don’t know anything about drama beyond a couple of Alan Bennett plays I’ve been reading. My plan is to join the theatre soc in the new year, become an accomplished AC-TOR! and then move on to playwright. Also, to keep on with this Beatles tribute band I’m in. And get a job. And pass third year.

Carter. I can't wait for the day he's throwing me out of a thirtieth-story window.

So what’s my day job gonna be? It’s slightly embarrassing because I know nothing is like the movies, but I think I can trace my interests in magazine journalism back to How to Lose Friends and Alienate People (Vanity Fair) and The Devil Wears Prada (Vogue). And I read an interview with Graydon Carter where he came across as … an interesting guy, and then I bought two issues of GQ and decided that I was definitely going to write for them some day, falling in love with the exciting cardigan-wearing jet-setting New York restaurant-dining world of the moderately wealthy. (“I always keep an overnight bag with me at all times in case I have to leave for New York unexpectedly” kind of people.) Unfortunately I have no fashion sense and no money, but I guess I can work a keyboard, and surely that’s good enough?

The Media panel was mostly about news and TV journalism, from which I brought away that in this madass age it’s important to be multiskilled – a writer one minute, a cameraman the next, then a presenter and an editor. I guess I could be good at that. My other dream is to work for the BBC in Japan or something, or Kyodo News, so it might be important to get involved with the student TV network here at Leeds if I can.

Excitedly, I asked John Sutton from the Liverpool Echo how I should get into magazine journalism, and there was an embarrassing silence when he asked me what sort of magazines I wanted to write for, and I realised I had no idea. But then he suggested lifestyle, and I decided yes, that was what I wanted to do, and he said just find out names, find a specialism, shadow editors and writers and relentlessly badger people until you get an internship and an ‘in’. Ins are important, I gathered. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, which is a shame because I’m shit at networking. But who knows? I might just email every single magazine in the UK next spring and see if I can do an internship over the summer. Top goal would be something like Wired UK – if nothing else, I guess I know about tech, and there’s always room for ‘weird shit from Japan’ in geek mags, right?

Meanwhile, life continues unabated. I’ve started research for my dissertation, and I’m starting to think I might actually write it after all. I’ve got not one but two language partners and I can feel my Japanese speaking confidence slowly building. Everything in my life feels just barely under control, like a clown juggling chainsaws on a tightrope, but for the time being he’s catching the chainsaws the right way up. Which I guess is all he can ask for, right?