Red Dwarf | draliman on life

The Best Medicine – Never Happy

July 10, 2013 draliman 18 comments

Weekly Writing Challenge: The Best Medicine – This week, write about whatever topic you’d like, but go for laughs.

Write about whatever I want? I can do that! No bother. Not a problem.

Wait a sec though – “go for laughs”? Well, there’s the rub. Humour is so subjective, and I’m not the funniest fella at the best of times. Tell you what, I’ll shoot for “mildly witty” and we’ll see where we end up.

The title of this post – “Never Happy” – is perhaps not a promising start. I don’t know about you, but to me that doesn’t scream “side-splittingly riotously hilarious” (try saying that three times fast). It sounds more like I’m going to have a rant, or maybe I’m going to wax lyrical about something that’s really getting me down.

So what, I hear you ask, am I going to complain about? I’ll give you a clue – I’m British.

That’s right! It’s the weather. That’s not what you guessed? Pretend you did! I’ll never know.

I’ve complained about the weather before (British, remember?). It’s too cold. It’s icy. It’s too windy. It won’t stop raining. Here’s a new one for you – it’s too hot!

“Never Happy” by DraliDoodles (TM)

Let’s take a quick Haiku-break.

Hostile sun blazing fire
Melting roads and hearts and minds
Air con broken

Hope you enjoyed it.

As I drove home this evening the thermometer informed me that it was 26 degrees C. I’ve just used the marvel which is Google and it informs me that this equals 78.8 Fahrenheit! I know what some of you are thinking. “That’s not very hot!” Well, it is to me. It appears that “too hot” is as subjective as humour.

My office is eco-friendly. We don’t have that planet-destroying toxic chemical-fuelled air con. Oh no! We have some sort of “comfort cooling” air recycling system. Today it managed to get the temperature to a not-so-comfortable 28 degrees C. Way to go, eco-friendly comfort cooling air con.

I didn’t wear shorts, but I did break out my trousers with the detachable legs. Detachable legs! What’ll they think of next? I was going to post a picture of me wearing the trousers with one leg removed so you could see the flexibility, but I thought that some of you might be reading this while eating dinner. I worried that the sight of my pasty-white leg might cause a case of the “tummy upsets”. So, no picture.

I also looked in my drawers for a light-weight T-shirt. It’s been so long since I’ve needed a light-weight T-shirt that it had mould on it from sitting in the drawer for years.

Mould!

And to add very serious insult to injury, it was my Red Dwarf T-shirt!

My poor mouldy T-shirt – please be OK!

I do hope the washing machine can work its magic.

It looks like I’m Never Happy.

Very sad.

Categories: My Life Musings Tags: air con, DPchallenge, DraliDoodles, heatwave, Red Dwarf, weather

Letting it Happen

March 17, 2013 draliman 3 comments

Today I shall attempt the impossible! Two prompts, one post! To quote BBC’s Red Dwarf (from the episode “Holoship”):

RIMMER: I shall undertake both tasks simultaneously if it’s all the same to you.
PLATINI: Mr. Rimmer, that is impossible.
RIMMER: Nevertheless, I shall attempt it.

Prompts for the Promptless by Rarasaur: “Wu wei, or non-doing, is a Taoist practice involving letting one’s action follow the simple and spontaneous course of nature rather than interfering with the harmonious working of universal law by imposing arbitrary and artificial forms. In other words, it is the action of non-action.”

Daily Prompt: Comfort Zone – “What are you more comfortable with — routine and planning, or laissez-faire spontaneity?”

A panda, whose name may or may not be Wu Wei. We’ll probably never know. (Picture JP Fischer, Wiki Creative Commons.)

So let’s just forget for a moment that “Wu Wei” is an excellent name for a panda. Let’s look at “spontaneity” first.

I’m about as spontaneous as a brick. Not one of those bricks which suddenly and without warning spontaneously decides to become part of a house. No, this brick just sits there letting life happen around it. It’s a Wu Wei brick, you might say.

Most of the time I’m a bit like the Wu Wei brick. I let things happen around me and just go with the flow. The world revolves around me and I sit happily in my little bubble.

Of course, I live in the real world. I work, I go shopping and so on. That part of my life is ruled by routine. Everything happens on a certain day at a certain time, even, to a certain extent, what I eat and when. That sounds really boring but it works for me. It keeps my anxiety level down. If I have to do something which breaks my routine, I try to forget about it until it’s time to actually do it. That way I don’t obsess about it.

“Safe in my Bubble”, part of the DraliDoodles(TM) collection

This sounds like I always have everything planned out. As far as my routine goes, that’s true. However, I never plan every detail of everything, because then it’s too easy for something to go wrong, and that would be “bad”. I’ve booked three days in North Wales in June, my first holiday for five years. I have a room booked and I have a route planned to get there, but once I’m there I’ll just let the mood take me. If I planned everything, I’d panic if something happened to change my plans.

So, to summarise I’m a semi-Wu Wei routine-driven partial-planner.

Wu Wei-hey!

For all you art fans out there, I’ve talked to the DraliDoodles team and they’ve given me some details! They tell me that “Safe in my Bubble” was rendered using a black ball-point ink-distribution unit on a canvas of dried compressed pulped wood. It was digitised using “a cheapo Canon scanner what we got off Amazon”.