Gender recognition issues, apparently May 4, 2007
Posted by krisN in Happenings, Life.2 comments
As I already said on Friday I came to school dressed as a pirate. Now, of course there were no doubt loads of things said about me either to my face or behind my back and I don’t really care as to the nature of these comments or anything like that. What it is that has kinda stood out to me is when I heard a kid refer to me as a “pirate woman”. Firstly we should probably consider the irony of that statement coming from a pre pubescent squeaky boy with long hair. Err yeah. Perhaps with the costume on his poor little senses just got overloaded and he mistook me, in a male pirate costume, for a woman…in a male pirate costume? Mhhmmm… Perhaps the stranger part of this is that when he saw me again yesterday he said to his friend something about a pirate woman again. Now here is where I’ve got to start having doubts about what I shall now dub gender recognition. Really, I’ve not had people doubt my gender so obviously since I was little and also had shoulder length hair, which, to be fair, would probably throw people off. Back then I found it very hurtful but now its just odd.
If my slightly-in-need-of-a-shave facial hair wasn’t enough to point him in the right direction you would think my not particularly feminine clothes may have helped. Or maybe my quite broad build. Even though I can tell that this was generally quite stupid of him I can’t help feeling a slight blow to my masculinity. After all, I think most men don’t exactly like being mistaken for the opposite sex. There isn’t really much of a conclusion to this, its just quite strange…and funny.
Yarr Mateys! May 1, 2007
Posted by krisN in Happenings, Life.1 comment so far
Well lets see, last Friday I went to school dressed as a pirate. Now, you must understand this is by no means a normal thing, it’s not normal for me to decide “why, today I think I’ll be a pirate”. No. In fact for me it was quite a big thing really, finally facing head on my self consciousness. I enjoyed it. Sure, there were maybe some things I could have done differently but unlike most things in my life I really don’t have any true regrets.
The response from people was really great, most people just said it was awesome (or some variant) with a few saying I looked stupid or whatever. I can happily say that I have no care for the opinion of the latter, I laughed at most of them actually. It’s a shame I don’t have any pictures of me in the costume, it was a really good one actually, unfortunately my camera decided to go missing so I couldn’t get any. It’s a nice feeling, being able to laugh at people in that way. When I was younger I didn’t have that, I couldn’t laugh at myself, not at all. I actually think it almost destroyed me, it wasn’t until I realised how this works (and that actually laughing at myself can be pretty funny) that I recovered out of the shithole I was in at the time. I don’t know who said it but I remember hearing at some point someone said “if you can’t laugh at yourself you really can’t laugh at anything”. So damn true.
Spreading the “malarky” April 21, 2007
Posted by krisN in Gaming, Happenings, Life.2 comments
I haven’t been posting mainly because I’ve been working on a website, the intention of this website being to allow kids in my school to play games on the school computers. The school’s internet is filtered by the ISP and its pretty crap really. Lots of times I’ve been trying to do research for something, King Lear for example, when I click a link to a site only to find it is blocked for being “pornographic” or for being a “hate speech” site. It really, really isn’t. What is perhaps stranger is some ways of getting round the filters. One way I used a while ago that seems to have stopped working now is to use Google’s cache, that used to work quite well until recently when it is very temperamental. Another odd one is sometimes clicking a link to a site will enable you to see it but if you type it into the address bar it won’t. It’s all very odd.
So, this site has been set up to get around the measures in place to enable people to play games at school. I’ve put a lot of work into it to make it nice and easy to manage and it also gave me something to try and do using PHP and MySQL. The basics of it are layed out, all that is left to do is to make it look nice, which may or may not be easy, I don’t know. It would be quite cool if the word got out and soon all IT lessons were turned into chaos with teachers unable to prevent kids from playing games. I think that would be pretty awesome, a socialist uprising to take over the school.
Or not.
We can all dream, can’t we?
Link to the site: here. By the way, the reason I have used the word malarky everywhere is to avoid saying the word games, as that will result in an automatic block it would appear. According to the firefox spell checker that isn’t how you spell malarky, it should have an e after the k. But that spelling is stupid so I’m changing it to mine.
The lovely smell of new carpet April 11, 2007
Posted by krisN in Happenings, Life.add a comment
So the new carpet arrived and was fitted yesterday. My mum almost burned out the engine on the vacuum cleaner due to the amount of it seemingly not attached to the carpet itself. Now the whole house has a rather indescribable smell, other than it smells exactly like the new carpet, strangely enough. It’s very nice to have this new carpet, one thing that is rather a shame though is the floor underneath the carpet. To try and smooth out the area on the floor which had previously been a wall separating what used to be the small dining room and my bedroom my mum had chipped away at it and then proceeded to apply filler to it. The only problem is that she got it quite far from flat. There is in fact a quite definite lump across the middle of the room, its visible but more importantly I always feel it when I walk across. Obviously there is nothing that can be done, I’m just going to have to get used to it.
But it just feels so icky, having a lump under the floor.
Ew.
And in case you hadn’t realised, it is most definitely NOT a lovely smell. Maybe something to do with this pounding headache, either way I’m going to stop writing here and have a lie down.
“We should be outside frolicking” April 9, 2007
Posted by krisN in Happenings, Life, Thoughts.2 comments
“We should be outside frolicking” he repeated.
Again, everyone took it as a joke but in reality he was right. We’ve had a week of beautiful weather and managed to spend as little of that time outside as possible. Too drawn into progressing the generations on The Sims 2 to bother going outside. It’s possible that a slight change of wording would convince us of the truth in the statement.
“This is what summer is going to be like, just us festering here in the sideroom”.
Not exactly how he said it but it gets the message accross. Really, if its this warm and sunny now I can’t imagine how bad its going to get. And of course, we should be outside, enjoying the nice weather before it gets so hot that heat becomes an excuse. I always go up there with the intention of arriving earlier than usual, with more time to do other things, yet I still always manage to get there at around the same time. I don’t know how it happens, some sort of intrepid laziness that forces me to stay in my house up to a certain time.
What we really need is another expedition, another walk through the countryside surrounding the area we have lived for years yet never explored. Some might say 16 is too old for such escapades but not me, even having said this it did only happen once although I dream of it happening more. Perhaps one day I will finally break out of this and get on with things, I don’t know when that day will be, probably when I really think I have nothing better to do. Could be a while, what with the prospects of internet piracy.
