Okay, you will have to bear with me on this one because I have a feeling I'm going to have a hard time articulating myself with this.
Basically, I watched the film 24 Hour Party People last night and it made me aware of how out of touch I am with the world around me, in particular with arts and culture. One brief look at the play-list on my i-pod and you will be hard-pressed to find an album that was recorded less than ten years ago. So I'm 25 years old and I'm living in the past listening to the same music I was listening to in high-school. If you was to show me a list of the top 10 musical acts in Britain right now I probably wouldn't know who half of them were.
Just the other day I was watching a repeat of Have I got News for you on TV channel Dave and in the odd one out rounds a picture came up that I thought was Tim Wheeler from Ash but was in fact James Blunt. I didn't recognise him. I wasn't even that familiar with who he was. I had heard the name but I didn't know what he looked like and I wasn't sure I knew his music. After looking on Wikipedia I now know he was the guy who wrote that awful song You're beautiful. For a brief moment after finding that out I didn't feel so bad for being out of touch. You could even say I'm quite fortunate for being ignorant of the music of the musician James Blunt.
But I can't continue being ignorant of everything or else I'll leave myself open to ridicule. Very much like a childhood friend of mine who shocked us all in school one day when we found out he didn't know who Saddam Hussein was. He didn't even know about the Gulf war. We didn't know how he could not of possibly known something that I remember to be one of the biggest news events of my early childhood. For many years after if anyone one of us was in a disagreement or argument with this friend we would use his ignorance of the Gulf war crisis against him to shatter any credibility he could've had, reducing him to an object of ridicule. Anytime this friend would make a statement or claim we thought might be wrong we would say "but XXX (no it wasn't Vin Diesel, the XXX's are there to protect this persons name - not sure why though), you're probably wrong coz you didn't even know who Saddam Hussein was until we told you".
So yeah, I gotta get back on the hobby horse and get back up to date with what is going on in the world, but not just to avoid ridicule from my peers(though it's probably to late for that after that admission about James Blunt). It's important to me as an artist as well. Because what the film 24 hour party people made me realise more than anything, is that as an artist I need to know what the zeitgeist is and stay one step ahead of it, if i'm to accomplish any worthwhile goals I have for myself. Though to be honest I kind of knew this already. I think it was what the people in that film achieved artistically, and the cultural influence they had that inspired me most of all.
Wednesday, 2 January 2008
Tuesday, 1 January 2008
YAY!!! 2008 is here at last!!! Hurrah!!! (btw, the title of this post is dripping with sarcasm (incase you couldn't tell already))
Another Gregorian calendar year has passed us by and the Earth is in the same spot in space it was 365 years ago and is already moving on to complete the same cycle it has made roughly 4.54 billion times already (thank you wikipedia). The question I ask of course is why is this particular day so important over most others? Perhaps I'm being too much of a cynic as I could ask the same question of any holiday we celebrate each year, such as Christmas, or Easter, (which appears to land on a different date each year for some odd reason) or perhaps even my own birthday?
Okay, I am actually going to stop with that particular line of thought now. I haven't the time or the mental capacity to form a decent argument for how pointless it is to celebrate the ushering in of a new calendar year. Everyone has the right to celebrate what ever they want.
Would you like to know the real reason I'm starting this rant? There's a couple of reasons actually. The first reason I'm pissed off with New Year celebrations is because I didn't go out last night. I stayed in had a few drinks and went to bed at around 2am. Now personally, I didn't mind staying in, it was for the most part a personal choice. What gets me is the way other people are about it "oh, you gotta go out on New Years!" "Yeah, who wants to stay in on New Years" "Come out have a few drinks, it's a celebration"
Oh yeah?!!! Celebrating what exactly? There is nothing actually special about this day except the fact it gives us an excuse to have a celebration and we have celebrations all the time even when we don't have an excuse for a celebration and we just want to get pissed up! And I'm not against any of that, I just don't want to be hounded for choosing to miss this particular celebration out. There will be others and I will go if I can be bothered.
Another reason for this little moan is that this is also the particular time of the year when people decide to make some sort of change in their life, or start a new hobby etc. I am of course talking about the New Year's resolution. We make promises to ourselves that we all like to think we can keep but of course we usually end up breaking that promise and going back to our old ways until the next year comes around where try it all over again.
The reason this gets me down is not nessecarily a hatred of this particular tradition, it's more that it brings into focus my own personal failures for this past year. Coz I don't wait until New Years to make a new resoloution to myself. I make them practically every day and continously fail to stick to them. And even as I'm writing this right now I am thinking that it will be different this time. All the things I need to get done and want to get done I am gonna do and I'm gonna stick to it too. This blog for example, I started it yesterday with the promise to myself that I will write in it everyday as a way of keeping me writing regularly (and perhaps improve my terrible grammar and sentence construction). So even if I do no other writing on that day I can still say "well at least I wrote in my blog" (providing that this doesn't become the only writing I am doing).
So, here's to a new year, a plethora of new resolutions, and no more broken promises.
Okay, I am actually going to stop with that particular line of thought now. I haven't the time or the mental capacity to form a decent argument for how pointless it is to celebrate the ushering in of a new calendar year. Everyone has the right to celebrate what ever they want.
Would you like to know the real reason I'm starting this rant? There's a couple of reasons actually. The first reason I'm pissed off with New Year celebrations is because I didn't go out last night. I stayed in had a few drinks and went to bed at around 2am. Now personally, I didn't mind staying in, it was for the most part a personal choice. What gets me is the way other people are about it "oh, you gotta go out on New Years!" "Yeah, who wants to stay in on New Years" "Come out have a few drinks, it's a celebration"
Oh yeah?!!! Celebrating what exactly? There is nothing actually special about this day except the fact it gives us an excuse to have a celebration and we have celebrations all the time even when we don't have an excuse for a celebration and we just want to get pissed up! And I'm not against any of that, I just don't want to be hounded for choosing to miss this particular celebration out. There will be others and I will go if I can be bothered.
Another reason for this little moan is that this is also the particular time of the year when people decide to make some sort of change in their life, or start a new hobby etc. I am of course talking about the New Year's resolution. We make promises to ourselves that we all like to think we can keep but of course we usually end up breaking that promise and going back to our old ways until the next year comes around where try it all over again.
The reason this gets me down is not nessecarily a hatred of this particular tradition, it's more that it brings into focus my own personal failures for this past year. Coz I don't wait until New Years to make a new resoloution to myself. I make them practically every day and continously fail to stick to them. And even as I'm writing this right now I am thinking that it will be different this time. All the things I need to get done and want to get done I am gonna do and I'm gonna stick to it too. This blog for example, I started it yesterday with the promise to myself that I will write in it everyday as a way of keeping me writing regularly (and perhaps improve my terrible grammar and sentence construction). So even if I do no other writing on that day I can still say "well at least I wrote in my blog" (providing that this doesn't become the only writing I am doing).
So, here's to a new year, a plethora of new resolutions, and no more broken promises.
Monday, 31 December 2007
Introductions
I'm starting this blog because I'm supposed to be a writer but I've lost all my motivation and creative flow. My plan is to try writing in this thing everyday until I make some sort of habbit out of it. Hopefully this short introduction won't take me too long to write but it probably will. Writing stuff like this makes my head hurt and it's because I'm out of practise. I find it difficult to get any kind of flow going and my internal editor keeps making me stop and go back through everything to make sure it makes sense and isn't boring - but it only serves to make everything more confused and even more boring. FUCK BOLLOX I HATE THIS FUCKING WRITING THING AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGHHHHH!!!!!!
(This first section you have just read is in fact the last thing I wrote on this blog, except for this sentence I am typing right now. )
So, who am? Going by the title of the blog my name is Dan, though I wasn't always named so. The name on my birth certificate says Daniel Patrick Aaron Sheehy; so good my parents named me three times (in case I lost two of them perhaps?). In the course of my 25 years on planet Gaia I have been given various names and titles by different people, one of the early popular ones was "Desperate". Perhaps a little suprisingly this was a family nickname and was used most often by my dad, Mick Sheehy, as well as various other uncles and aunts. By Desperate they are of course reffering to the famous pie eating cowboy Desperate Dan of The Dandy comics. They were not trying to say I was someone in a constant state of urgent need or desire, though I was practically still a baby at the time and would have needed frequent attention and supervision so the nickname was accurate (and in many new ways it is now too).
Throughout my childhood I would go by the name Daniel or its various shortened versions such as Danny, Dan, Da(?), D(?), depending on what each particular person who used my name felt like calling me. Then I hit highschool where my new P.E. teacher made a fuss over my surname as he called out the register for the first time. Obviously this wasn't the first time my surname would recieve attention as having a surname that makes me sound gender confused had exposed me to much ridicule already, but to be honest the insults were always shit. The best the kids in my primary school could come up with was "Daniel, are you a boy or a girl today?"
But in highschool we were grown up, and my name wasn't going to be an object of ridicule any longer it would become the name I would go by. On that first day in games after pointing out that I had "a good Irish surname", my games teacher Mr McKrakken (if we were clever kids we could've made something out his surname and called him squiddy or something) took to calling me "Sheehy-boy" (if he had been concious of its transgendered pronounciation I'm sure he would have been calling me Sheehy-girlboy. In fact my dad had a gym teacher who made quite an inventive nickname out of his surname calling him Middlesex). So being in a new school with loads of new people all the other kids would call me Sheehy for the duration of my highschool years, and eventually they would find their own variations of the name, such as Shepee, or peepee, or She-Ra. But when I left highschool my friends stopped calling me Sheehy and went back to Daniel and its various other variations.
Personally I used to alway introduce myself as Daniel, and always thought of myself as a Daniel until I came to university. But having to meet lots of new people and having to introduce myself over and over again I gradually started becoming Dan, but not just because it has less letters and one less syllabel but also because I don't like the way I say my name. Someone once pointed out to me the funny way I pronounce my name (well it was funny to him because he was from the north) and it never bothered me then but hearing myself say it over and over again when I came to Uni I became accutely aware of it, so I changed it.
I am a Dan now. Which works better for me because I feel I am in control of my name. Anyone who has a name with more than one syllabel in it will find that people will play with it and change it and try to shorten it but if you give them only one syllabel there is not much they can do but try to lengthen the name but they won't do that because they're lazy.
So do you know who I am yet? All I've really given you so far is my name which is no more than a title. But I'm gonna say that the introduction has been covered for now.
(This first section you have just read is in fact the last thing I wrote on this blog, except for this sentence I am typing right now. )
So, who am? Going by the title of the blog my name is Dan, though I wasn't always named so. The name on my birth certificate says Daniel Patrick Aaron Sheehy; so good my parents named me three times (in case I lost two of them perhaps?). In the course of my 25 years on planet Gaia I have been given various names and titles by different people, one of the early popular ones was "Desperate". Perhaps a little suprisingly this was a family nickname and was used most often by my dad, Mick Sheehy, as well as various other uncles and aunts. By Desperate they are of course reffering to the famous pie eating cowboy Desperate Dan of The Dandy comics. They were not trying to say I was someone in a constant state of urgent need or desire, though I was practically still a baby at the time and would have needed frequent attention and supervision so the nickname was accurate (and in many new ways it is now too).
Throughout my childhood I would go by the name Daniel or its various shortened versions such as Danny, Dan, Da(?), D(?), depending on what each particular person who used my name felt like calling me. Then I hit highschool where my new P.E. teacher made a fuss over my surname as he called out the register for the first time. Obviously this wasn't the first time my surname would recieve attention as having a surname that makes me sound gender confused had exposed me to much ridicule already, but to be honest the insults were always shit. The best the kids in my primary school could come up with was "Daniel, are you a boy or a girl today?"
But in highschool we were grown up, and my name wasn't going to be an object of ridicule any longer it would become the name I would go by. On that first day in games after pointing out that I had "a good Irish surname", my games teacher Mr McKrakken (if we were clever kids we could've made something out his surname and called him squiddy or something) took to calling me "Sheehy-boy" (if he had been concious of its transgendered pronounciation I'm sure he would have been calling me Sheehy-girlboy. In fact my dad had a gym teacher who made quite an inventive nickname out of his surname calling him Middlesex). So being in a new school with loads of new people all the other kids would call me Sheehy for the duration of my highschool years, and eventually they would find their own variations of the name, such as Shepee, or peepee, or She-Ra. But when I left highschool my friends stopped calling me Sheehy and went back to Daniel and its various other variations.
Personally I used to alway introduce myself as Daniel, and always thought of myself as a Daniel until I came to university. But having to meet lots of new people and having to introduce myself over and over again I gradually started becoming Dan, but not just because it has less letters and one less syllabel but also because I don't like the way I say my name. Someone once pointed out to me the funny way I pronounce my name (well it was funny to him because he was from the north) and it never bothered me then but hearing myself say it over and over again when I came to Uni I became accutely aware of it, so I changed it.
I am a Dan now. Which works better for me because I feel I am in control of my name. Anyone who has a name with more than one syllabel in it will find that people will play with it and change it and try to shorten it but if you give them only one syllabel there is not much they can do but try to lengthen the name but they won't do that because they're lazy.
So do you know who I am yet? All I've really given you so far is my name which is no more than a title. But I'm gonna say that the introduction has been covered for now.
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