Sunday, March 01, 2015

Self-Reflexive

Most people regard blogging as a form of communication. I see it more as a form of talking to myself. Recently, I've been out of touch with myself, having been too busy writing about films on my other blog. This is still attracting a lot of interest from spam, although I have to admit that the quality of this has fallen off. Often it can only rouse itself to a one-word 'comment', and not even very interesting words. 'He'. 'The'. 'And'. One day, if I'm lucky, it might form a sentence. But I doubt if the sentence will say much.

I don't really see any distinction between real life and cinema - I agree with Mexican director Carlos Reygadas when he says that going to see a film is just living by other means. But sometimes it does seem that my life is being absorbed into film. The only Happy Valentine's Day message I got this year came from Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning, a film I must have 'liked' on Facebook at some point. They had 'shared' a video with me, which I didn't bother to watch.

You reap what you sow.

There is such a thing as real life however - I am reminded of this at work. Work is finally relocating. Where are we going? Somewhere called... Shit Creek. (And our NHS paddles, it turns out, have a design fault.)

Well OK then, not Shit Creek. The next best thing: Basildon. I spent the best part of a year living with the belief that we were relocating to a site just behind where I currently live – ah yes, happy days! Then that fell through. Now I have to live with the prospect of going to work in Basildon. Worse still, I may then actually have to go and work in Basildon. I mean, I'm sure Basildon isn't that bad a place; it's just that my walk to work is threatening to become unsustainable.

But it is becoming increasingly apparent that we can't stay where we are. Now the toilets in our part of the building have failed due to some kind of sewerage issue – or so they say. There is a rumour going round that this is part of a concerted attempt to demoralise us into getting other jobs and saving them the trouble of acquiring new offices: a kind of psychological warfare. Ben from Digital says he thinks the toilet we are now forced to use is haunted. 'Did you feel something when you were in there?', I asked; but he got a bit cagey after that.