Dreams of Torment

My dreams of the last week seem to be playing some kind of psychological game with me, like a gang of school bullies who've stolen my rucksack and are throwing it between each other, keeping it out of my reach. The first was on Saturday night, and left me in a bit of bad mood all day Sunday. The dream involved me receiving news that the job that I'd originally been turned down from had changed their minds and wanted to hire me. The job itself was a mesh - a hybrid - of all of the jobs that I've been to interviews for so far this year. The job that I was being hired for incorporated all of the good qualities from each of these realistically mundane roles and rolled them all up into one for me. It had the best pay, best location, best company benefits and best dress code! Lovely. I then woke up, and after a few seconds that harsh, gritty realisation that the job had been the fiction of my mind came crashing down around me in the bed. And there we have it, I was hard for poor old Stacey to get along with all day, because the job wasn't real and I felt like a failure for not actually possessing what was merely a figment of my unconcious imagination. Towards the end of the day I did manage to get over it - and myself - and cheered up.

Truth be told, my epic quest to gain full time employment has been put on hold for a couple of weeks, and with good reason. The good reason being that the light at the end of the tunnel, the finishing line is finally in sight... My degree is nearly complete! Yes, I am currently in the midst of my last ever assignment, and I can't wait to get past it. Not only will I be able to put that I am a graduate on my CV (which should bloody well help with the job hunt), but I also won't have to spend any more time trolling through textbooks and meeting deadlines on pure self motivation. I'm ever so close to the word count at the time of writing, after which I have only to edit and reference... Oh, and maybe send it off to Pete who wrote the same essay a year ago for a readthrough if he has time before my Thursday deadline (heads-up buddy!).

Elsewhere, there is some happy news on another job front, and that is that finally, after a total time of over a year racked up as a temp at her current job, Stacey has been awarded a permanent position! Congratulations are in order, she deserves it! Now if only I could catch up!

BEER MONEY!

Last Saturday, Stacey and I visited France for the day along with friends Tam and Andrew. The main purpose for any Englishman to visit said country was fulfilled during the day as several bottles of alcoholic beverages were purchased for low-low prices. On the ferry I picked up a tasty bargain in the form of 48 bottles of Budweiser (King of Beers) for a meagre £20. I already had two bottles of the stuff at home, meaning that I was among other things in life, the proud owner of 50 bottles of Bud! It didn;t take long for me to drink one (48 hours to be exact), and I was then left with 49. I've made mention on here before of the mild form of OCD that I feel I suffer, and believe every single person to possess in some form, and Stacey, remembering this felt that I should drink another to take it down to an even 48 bottles. I surprised her though by replying with the fact that I think 49 is a nicer number than 48. I can't explain any reason or rationale for this, it's just the way I feel about those numbers... 49 > 48 afterall.

I also picked up 10 bottles of French Lager for €2.70 - another great deal - and we all bought plenty of wine and some cheese, making us stereotypical English in France. After our shopping trip, Stacey drove us to Dunqurke and we parked up for a walk around. We found a bar/restaurant and decided to stop for a drink and some food. The waitress that came to our table didn't speak English, and after a bit of a struggle, we managed to order our drinks. The girls ordered Pepsi, while Andrew and me ordered whatever the beer was, opting for the mammoth litre glasses. These glasses of beer were bigger than our heads, and needless to say we were pretty drunk after finishing. The funny thing about this place wasn't the fact that the beer came in such large quantities that you could get pissed from 1 glass, no, you see after our struggle to communcate our drinks order, the waitress whipped away our menus before we could attempt to tell her what we wanted to eat. When she went to get our drinks, I grabbed it back from the nearby bar where she had put it, but when she came back with our drinks, she actually snatched it from my hands and took it away again. We thought that maybe food wasn't being served at that time and that maybe she didn't know how to communicate that fact to us. We were wrong though, as other tables ordered and were served meals of their choosing. She obviously couldn't be bothered with us bloody English not speaking her language. A nearby McDonald's therefore served as the antidote to mine and Andrew's drunkedness, a Le Double Cheese soaking mine up for me.