Dan Govan

I just shelled out £25 for another two years of Flickr membership. I wasn’t going to bother initially, after all there’s always facebook, but after two years of membership I’ve become accustomed to the perks. The unlimited upload isn’t that useful as I process all my pics before I upload; I could easily get by on with the limited 100 megs a month. However with the free account you can only see the 200 most recent pictures, and even then only at low resolution, so upgrading was a no-brainer. It probably helps that one of my pictures of a recent Portishead gig was used in some random music review. Or so they tell me. It’s in Croatian so it could be anything really. Perhaps it’s a Yahoo! plot to stroke my ego and have me pay them money.

Ideally I’d like to set up my website to display flickrd pictures on the front page, tucking the blog away somewhere else. At the moment not many people actually look at my favourite photos, never mind the larger versions, which is a shame.

Here’s another pic that was used, this time for a travel site. Or something.

Not sure I care enough about this blogging stuff at the moment. I think I need to rethink the whole idea. I used to blog primarily to avoid telling the same things to many people again and again. I hate repeating anecdotes. Six years later I find I’m much more inclined to enjoy telling the story, and much less concerned that some stories are forgotten and left untold. Besides which, few people actually check this site, fewer still that are not in touch through Facebook.

Then it became a personal record of how I am and what I’m up to. Which is much more valuable in the long run. Facebook for all it’s transparency doesn’t have much of a history beyond the photos. I should be relating my changing opinions on life the universe and everything in this interesting period of transition. After all I’ve learned a scary amount in the past six months, where nothing much happened in the six before that. In retrospect it seems that my life was very dull, for all that it was content, living vicariously through my ex as I was. I find the fact I was so happy doing so rather disturbing now. Although it requires much more effort to achieve the same level of contentedness overall, I think I’m actually happier in myself, which is a real surprise to me. And having to put more into living isn’t necessarily a bad thing, after all you reap what you sow and all that. Though I’m not certain it’s entirely good either. Maybe it’s just a thing.

I think I’ll shove this all into some archive at the back of the site, and use the front page to showcase flickr photos or something nice. That’s one thing that annoys me about flickr, the default display size for the photos is never enough to really see what’s going on…

Oh hai! I spent last weekend in Paris visiting Mikey. Here’s the pictures, with some commentary attached.

So I’ve been slack with things on here, big shock there. I’ve been meaning to add linklog functionality to this site for ages, and then I was contemplating moving the blog part off to a sub-page and replacing it with an updated random quote generator of old… But none of that is very high priority at the moment to be honest. It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and I need to clear the decks a little I before getting back into the proverbial swing of things this week. Hmm.

Another one of those resolutions in progress. Last year I gradually realised that I eat a lot of rubbish for no real reason. I tend to eat “just because it’s there” or out of habit, rather than out of any hunger or particular craving. When sitting down to dinner I will finish what is there even if it makes me uncomfortably full (after all it’s only polite). None of this would concern me but I had people commenting that I’d been getting a belly and suchlike, which was rather alarming. To be fair I tend to wear clothes were any belly-dom rather obvious, but still. So last year I began to take an interest in these things called “calories” and other such arcane shenanigans, gradually becoming more aware of what foods are good and which bad. At around new year I got a new set of (working) bathroom scales and found that things were getting out of hand so I figured it was time to see if I could make a change.

As it turns out, I really can. I’m kinda surprised how easy it was. Basically I’ve lost 10% of my weight in 2 and a bit months. Going from 78kg back to 70ish, which is around where I feel comfortable being. Which is nice. Being narcissistic in the mirror and generally tight clothing have both made a welcome return. (Not that tight though. I’m skinny not a student.) So here’s how:

• No sugar in tea or coffee. I drink a lot of these beverages and used to put in several spoons of sugar into every one. No longer. Sweetener if needed, but getting used to going without altogether as often as not is pretty good too. Obviously skimmed or semi skimmed milk where possible.
• Fruit for breakfast I used to either kip breakfast altogether or east a pastry thing and a full-fat sugar coffee. Apparently that’s not so good! Who knew? So now I bring in a few pieces of fruit, plus maybe porridge or a sandwich if I feel like it.
• If you can’t be arsed cooking, don’t. I get a relatively big lunch on south bank every day, either something salady or a wrap. I’ve stopped with those cheesy grilled sandwiches. So most of the food I eat is now much earlier in the day and cooked by people who do it better than I do, and with all that goodness dinner is very light and/or optional. Massive pizzas and troughs of pasta at 9 at night are now rare exceptions rather than the rule.
• Don’t eat it just because it’s there. If you don’t actually want a sweet, don’t take a sweet. That goes for everything, eat only what you actually want to eat. If I want a packet of chocolate biscuits I’ll still go get one obviously, why shouldn’t I? It’s just that I’m far more aware that if I eat all of them I WILL feel sick, plus the sugar crash etc. in fact I can barely manage half the packet now, where before I’d absent-mindedly chomp through the lot of them. Oral fixation much?
• Exercise I’ve been bouncing around my room a lot in an aerobic stylee. Not sure what the next step will be really. A gym maybe? Ugh.

There’s nothing draconian or even virtuous in what I’ve been doing, and no diet par se; I’ve just been exercising more choice. Just choice. It’s funny; I read Existentialism And Humanism by Sartre at Christmas and I think I took a lot of it to heart ;-).

So the last couple of months have been a lot of fun, as well as a bit of an eye-opener; being out four nights a week is hugely different from two or three. It's kinda slowed down a little now though, and I've got time to take stock and draw conclusions. Which I'm going to note down here, for future-me to peruse at his leisure. Waffle incoming.

I find good nights out are something you have to leave yourself open to, rather than something to seek out and count on or plan for. When it all comes together it can be a hell of a lot of fun, but then when one is banking £50ish, a good night's sleep and the possibility of losing the next day to a hangover, anything less than an excellent night out is a pretty shitty ROI. On top of that to have even a hope of a good night I've also got to have a few of what is a small handful of friends willing to make a similar commitment. Too small a handful, really, I'm way too vulnerable to key people dropping out of circulation for whatever reason. (Being hundreds or thousands of miles away seems a popular one at the moment.) I'm not really sure how to fix that, but I'm sure awareness of the predicament is an important step. Being able to teleport like in Jumper would be sweeet.

Nights out are all making memories with friends, and with acquaintances you make on the way. Take away that and you're just drinking for it's own sake and dancing to whatever (possible) rubbish the DJ throws at you. Personally I find going to new places really helps a lot, due to some combination of novelty factor and the event being easier to remember when it's the only time you've been there. I really can't be doing with going out the same places as last week or even the week before. By the same token going to the cinema every Orange Wednesday as I have been recently is much more interesting because it's a different cinema every time. I guess that means both exercises are pretty unsustainable, at least at the rate I've been going. But then I've been completely neglecting gigs and coffee houses so hey, maybe it's their turn next.

Also I finally understand the loathing people have for first day of the week: Mondays totally suck when you didn't sleep on Saturday night.