So I turned twenty four on Sunday, and it was a good day indeed. First off, Liverpool beat Chelsea AT FREAKING STAMFORD BRIDGE to go top of the Premier League. A birthday present from the cosmos perhaps? Isn’t the universe nice to think of me? Then I went out with some friends in the evening. I mean it wasn’t the greatest night out ever, but it had some very memorable points. First off, I was refused service in a pub FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER!! How awesome is that? And the funniest part? It was because SOMEBODY ELSE didn’t have their ID with them. That is just too funny to me. We were told we couldn’t even stay in the pub because she didn’t have ID, so we were pretty much kicked out of a pub. That’s never happened to me either. She didn’t find it as funny as I did though apparently, and was very upset about it. If you’re reading this Jill, IT WAS DAMN FUCKING FUNNY!! LAUGH ABOUT IT DAMMIT!!

The good times continued from then on with the fun of seeing a few peeps that I haven’t seen for a while and getting to hear about the stories behind such epic mysteries as why Liz hates Russian people and seeing Matt and Mark make gay jokes with one another while Mark promised to take Matt to Paris. Can’t you just imagine them? A Kiwi and a Bear in Paris! It sounds like the worst rom-com ever made!

Based on all of that you’d probably think that being twenty four sounds pretty good, right? Well enter Monday. On Monday I had to relocate from my little annex to the freaking spare room of the house, and that meant packing up two rooms worth of stuff (and we didn’t have anywhere near enough boxes so we had to keep unloading them and then taking them back again to reload) and moving all of that, and all my other much larger belongings (like my bed and fridge freezer, which we couldn’t have moved at all without Matt’s help) in to the much, much, MUCH smaller spare room. “Less than half the size” is how it was described to me last night.

Now that it’s actually done it’s not THAT bad I suppose, but then I’ve yet to try doing ANYTHING in here. I already got told off last night because I moved around too much. My mum put a piece of crappy carpet down on the floor so that my chair wouldn’t make so much noise when I moved around, the problem being now it doesn’t move AT ALL. I can’t play music with any kind of volume at all either because the walls are too thin, hell I can’t even play X-Box 360 at night anymore without keeping my sister awake with the sound from the game (and let’s be honest, what the hell is the point in playing games with the sound turned off? All my headphones have been “borrowed” and never returned by the bastard who made me move in the first place, so I can’t even wear normal headphones, I’d have to use my headset and that’s ok to talk on Skype etc but it’ll be a pain in the ass to wear to play games).

And today, just to make matters even worse, it’s officially confirmed that he-who-shall-not-be-mentioned’s son is a fucking KLEPTOMANIAC! We all knew he stole money from us before – hell he’s stolen just about every penny from every pot that we’ve ever called “savings”, but now that he’s gone through all of that (and more than likely stolen money from the tin that me and my sister pay our rent in to because that’s been KNOWN to have been short before and of course nobody said anything) he’s taken to stealing money directly from people’s purses instead. My mother and sister are both missing money, and the latest incident was in broad fucking daylight while we were all home. One minute he’s watching TV, the next he’s going out and bam, at the same time the magical money fairies have come to my sister’s purse. What an odd coincidence, huh?

Of course nothing will come of it. I can get kicked out of my room after being practically a goddamn saint compared to that little son of a bitch and yet I can guarantee you nothing will happen. He’ll still wake everybody up at 1am coming in to use the toilet WHEN THERE’S A TOILET ABOUT FIVE FOOT FROM HIS BED and nothing will happen. He’ll still eat food and drink the drink that isn’t his and nothing will happen. He’ll still leave his rubbish and dirty plates/cutlery/glasses all over the house and nothing will happen. Nothing ever happens.

I’m sick of it.

Remember how I wrote about being sick of turning the other cheek? I did, of course, do nothing about it. I never do because deep down inside I’m actually a NICE person. And nice people get stepped on. I need more lessons in being evil but I promise you, oh loyal readers, this: I will have my revenge. And when I do? It will be a day to remember.

*insert evil laugh here*

That is all.

I’ve never been so angry in my life.

One of the two I referred to earlier as my “family” came up to my room a little while ago to collect something he printed. Apparently there should have been two pages and only one printed because the printer ran out of paper. The way he asked me why only one page printed was like I’d purposely taken the paper out of the printer. I looked over, saw the big red light on that indicates there was no paper and said it had run out of paper so he grunted and slammed the door shut.

This is a man who got an email from an email account set up for free by me on webhosting bought by me, on a laptop owned by my mother, via an internet connection paid for by my mother, using a wireless network paid for and set up by me, printing on a printer bought by me, using paper bought by me and the ink bought by me, connected to a computer that’s being used as a makeshift print server bought and set up by me in a room that I’m being kicked out of DESPITE PAYING MY RENT UNTIL CHRISTMAS and he has the NERVE to disrespect me like that?

I truly wish I’d cut off the internet earlier. I was so fucking angry I was shaking for about half an hour and finally went down to the house and vented a little of that frustration at my mother, who honestly didn’t deserve it. I am so fucking angry I can’t put it in to words.

That is all (for now).

I’m writing this because I’m trying to find somebody somewhere who can convince me that it’s a good idea to metaphorically “turn the other cheek”. I’m sure there’s somebody who believes in the concept, but me? Well let’s just say I’ve finally had enough.

I don’t want much out of life right now, I really don’t. It’s my birthday on Sunday, which should make it a good day for me. I’ll be twenty four years old and the annoying thing is having gotten to this age that my life seems to be taking giant steps backward. I admit that my future is still bright, and hopefully when I turn twenty five I’ll be able to look back at this and laugh, but my present is somewhat less so.

For the last several years I have provided my “family”, if you can call them that, with internet access, email hosting, website hosting, free printing, free computer support, free technical support with everything they can’t figure out for themselves (nothing that impressive, just things like wiring up the television, setting up computers, setting up the Sky remote control to work with the television etc). I did this not for any gain for myself but because I’m a nice person and I’m willing to share. That’s never really been the case from my so-called “family”.

There’s one member of this “family”, for example, who I have to hide pretty much everything I buy from because he’s likely to steal it. If I want to buy myself a pizza to put in the freezer even if I write my name all over the box I still find that it’ll get eaten. If I buy filling for sandwiches I’ll find that it’s been used before I’ve even got the chance to use it. If I (or my sister) buy cereal it disappears before we can eat it. Hell even the batteries from the remote controls disappear when his run out. This isn’t my idea of living with a family, and yet I’ve never said I word and I’ve always done my bit and provided the aforementioned benefits and now I ask myself why.

I’ve always paid my rent. It may not be that much but it more than pays for the electricity I use and the food that I eat, and when you live with your parents isn’t that really all you should pay for? I know plenty of people who live at home and don’t even provide that.

The way I look at it (and admittedly I may be biased but still) I’ve more than done my part and earned my keep, hell I’ve gone above and beyond what the other members of my family have done, especially the boundary-less kleptomaniac I spoke of earlier. And yet whenever the proverbial shit hits the proverbial fan it’s always me who has to suffer for it. This is far from the first time I’ve suffered and until I graduate and move far, far away I very much doubt it will be the last. And yet I’ve always turned the other cheek, I’ve always gotten on with it and I’ve always provided the same benefits. Well that stops now.

The benefits are revoked. No more printing, no more internet access, no more email and webhosting and no more technical support. If they break something they can take it to the computer repair shop and pay the guy £30 just to look at it, I’m done being nice in that regard, but now I ask how far I take this? Do I demand that they pay to move my Sky TV to my new room because I did, after all, pay to have it installed when I moved in? Do I demand my rent returned to me before I even leave this room, after all I did pay for three months. They may be giving me a different room but it’s considerably smaller (and not en-suite) so surely I should be given at least some of that money back before I even walk out the door?

But is that really enough? Why should I just stop there when I can go further? If I’m made to suffer for the actions of other people why should I not inflict suffering on to them? Why should I stand for having to live by one set of rules when others live by a different set? When my batteries run out, why should I pay for new ones? When I want food why should I buy my own? I hold in my hands the power to take revenge oh-so-sweet on the person who’s forcing this change upon me, why should I bite my tongue? Why should I not do unto others as they have done to me? I’m not a Christian, I don’t believe I’ll be rewarded for any of this when I die, I’m just a nice person. I’m considering having that come to an end.

Somebody needs to give me a valid reason to bite my tongue and not give as good as I get. Why should I not respond to insults with insults? Why should I not respond to cheap shots with other cheap shots? Why should I not do exactly what I want to do just as others are allowed? I think it’s time I find out how the other half live…

That is all.

Ok, so this one is going to sound rather selfish to a lot of people but bear with me here, this is a rant about ME versus the world after all, and I’m sure a lot of people are feeling similar things so let’s all group together and be depressed as one.

So this rant begins like this: why is it that the government are such complete assholes?

I ask this question based upon two recent events. Event number one was my just watching of the television. The BBC put together a video package of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and their rise to power in 1997, and several dozen times since where they swore that we wouldn’t return to a system of “boom and bust”, i.e. that the economy would grow steadily and we wouldn’t be experiencing a high followed by a low followed by a high followed by a low followed by a… well, you get the idea.

The presenter then immediately turned to the chancellor and asked him to explain why it was that we were in economic crisis if there would be no boom and bust, and the chancellor, having just watched the video, claimed that they never said there wouldn’t be a downturn. I think the presenter had a more toned down reaction than the one I had in my head, and this is why I’m not on television: I would have laughed and then hit him in the jaw, which is to be fair exactly what that idiot deserves. They promised there’d be no “boom and bust”, and when there’s a bust they claim that they never said there wouldn’t be one?!

Is it just me or are politicians better at keeping a straight face and blatantly lying to the camera than they are at actually doing their jobs? I seriously think that we should take this guy and just kick him out of his job, take away his pension and tell him go queue at the job centre every Friday for his £45 a week just because he’s apparently too stupid to be left in charge of our money. And I mean this with every fibre of my being.

They cocked up, and then they tell us they never said they wouldn’t? WE PAY THEM NOT TO COCK UP!! That’s like paying somebody to fix your car and it breaking down with the exact same problem a few days later and the repair guy telling you “well I never said it wouldn’t break”. In that case of course you can go to court and sue the mechanic for being inept so tell me, can we get together as a country and sue our politicians for the same thing? Of course not, because if we did much like in the “Cash For Honours” scandal, the courts would mysteriously find that even though the government acted wrongly they didn’t actually do anything wrong. Wouldn’t you love to be a politician?

I seriously want to start my own political party. I’ll call it “The Common Sense Party” and will only allow people to join who can look in to the camera and NOT LIE! People would love it and we’d secure 95% of the votes, because not being lied to ALL THE TIME is such a lovely concept.

So is giving money to people for them to spend.

This is my second major gripe with the world at the moment. Every month people are forced to pay taxes to the government, which we assume is spent on things like school teachers, doctors, hospitals, cops, firemen, road works, unemployed people and all the other happy things that keep our worlds ticking over. Right? And I have no problem with that. Hell it’s a great idea, when it works. And every month we’re also forced to pay money to the local councils, which we assume goes to pay for garbage collection and… um… well, they must do something else for us. Those annoying leaflets perhaps? Adverts telling other places how awesome our place is maybe? I’m sure they do something with the money…

The point is however that when we give the councils money in the form of council tax we expect that it goes to make our lives better. We think that by giving the councils this money it helps the world around us tick on. What we don’t expect is to find out that the Kent County Council reportedly have more than ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY MILLION POUNDS saved up in foreign banks.

Let me put that in numbers for you: £170,000,000.

If they have THAT much money saved up, exactly what is it for? Can somebody please email me with a breakdown of what that money is being saved for, and indeed email me with a breakdown of exactly what people who pay their council tax are paying for, because I’m assuming big chunks of the money they get in goes to pay them, and another big chunk goes to Iceland to boost the saving accounts that now no longer exist due to the banks going bankrupt.

Most importantly of all answer me one more thing: WHY IS NOBODY FURIOUS ABOUT THIS BUT ME!? Why is nobody fuming that these people have taken our money and invested it abroad and we’re seeing precisely NOTHING happening because of it? I have a good mind to go and make an appointment at the council tomorrow and ask for a breakdown of what they get in and what they spend out, because I seriously want to know what this money is for. If they have THAT much money saved up, why are we still giving them more? Isn’t that enough for them to give us all a nice break on our council tax, or a refund of some kind in time for Christmas? Wouldn’t that be lovely? But no, somebody somewhere decided that it’s a good idea to have A HUNDRED AND SEVENTY MILLION POUNDS saved up. Thank you whoever you are, I want you in the queue behind the chancellor tomorrow morning at the job centre.

So here’s where this little rant gets selfish, because with people throwing hissy fits and not wanting to lose money and selling off all their shares and the world stock markets crashing (which in itself is just retarded, why are they allowed to mass sell all their shares? Shouldn’t there be some kind of rule to STOP this happening because it’s causing a never ending loop where everybody is going to sell everything and nobody will buy and the stock market will never recover all because a group of idiots would rather have a few extra coins in their piggy banks at home than ride the DOWN part of the stock market having enjoyed the UP part for so long, I bet even with the money going down they still have more than they started with) this means that mortgage prices have gone up and here’s me, a poor little student who hasn’t ever gone crazy, who has only ever borrowed what he knows he can pay back and who has been sensible now suffering alongside everybody else. How is that fair?

They say that life isn’t fair, and boy are they right. Hey “they”, whoever you are, want a job as the guy at the council who makes decisions on spending money or the chancellor? Those jobs should be freeing up pretty soon.

Seriously though, somebody tell me how this is fair. My bank royally screwed me over and haven’t even had the decency to respond to my nice letter I wrote them telling them I was upset that they screwed me over and asking what I can do about it. Apparently whoever read that letter probably realised they had screwed me over and decided to shred it so that nobody else would see. Which sounds pretty much like the banks anyway! If they fuck up, just hide the evidence and eventually everything will be ok. Well that’s how we got where we are. And I know people are losing their houses (hell I might be one of those people soon since my mum and stepdad are struggling to pay the goddamn mortgage, even with increasing my rent and screwing me over) and I feel bad for them, and if it happens to someone I know I have a mattress on which you can sleep, but I want to know why just because OTHER people have fucked up I have to be made to suffer for it! It pisses me off.

And I want to know why my whole family expects me to get a job just to help them out (because apparently the times I’ve helped them out by lending them money in the past have been forgotten – although I’ll admit if it were JUST my mum I were helping I’d try my best since she’s helped me as much as I’ve helped her, but still) when I’ve paid £3,500 to do the final year of my degree, I’m about to be buried in assignments and I’m trying my best not to let the fact that if I don’t do well on said assignments the rest of my life will suffer because I’ll get a lower pass on my degree and thus probably not as good a job affect me as it is, the very LAST thing I need right now is to have to get a job just so I can pay EVEN MORE rent.

All I want from life right now really isn’t much. I don’t want to go on holiday to exotic lands (like my sister, who got herself in debt going to Australia for seven months and now plans to pop over to South Africa in January for a few weeks). I don’t want to buy expensive televisions and gaming systems (well ok I do but I know I can’t afford them). I don’t want to gamble thousands of pounds in the hopes of making thousands more. All I want out of life is to go to University and get a good degree (preferably a 2.1 or a 1st just because my best mate only got a 2.2 and I’d love to get higher because it’d be funny (hey Karl!! *waves*)) and have enough money left over to buy a few pretty things, buy some comics, buy some video games and get drunk occasionally.

But I don’t have enough money for the video games, the pretty things or the getting drunk bits. I do, however, have the money for the comics, so let’s be happy about the small things.

Hell the small things are all there is to be happy about. And if not for the idiots who have power and keep fucking it up for the rest of us right now I’d have an extra £250 to my name because I WOULDN’T have had to borrow it off my mother and sister just to survive back in August, and that would mean I’d have more than just one game that I like and be able to afford a few more fun comics to read and a few nights out to celebrate my upcoming birthday. Thanks HSBC; you total cunts for screwing me out of the £250.

And thanks HMV for screwing me out of £15, for which I shall never use you and your evil stores again.

So yeah, I’m poor but then I’m a student, I’m MEANT to be poor. I’m not meant to have to worry about my parents losing the house in which I live. I’m not meant to have to be pissed off about not being able to get the same finances as other people. I’m meant to get drunk, read comics, play video games and go to lectures. Is that really so much to ask?

Apparently so…

To anyone who read this and was upset that it may not have made total sense I’m sorry, but I needed to vent.

That is all.

Ok, so I just got done watching WWE RAW from this Monday. I tend to watch it live (or at least semi-live, on a half-hour delay so I can skip most of the annoying adverts) but I had Uni on Tuesday and there was no way I was going without sleep.right

So yeah, you know if I’m talking about WWE RAW on my blog then it’s bad, right? But this week it was amazingly bad. They forced the whole Jackass thing down our throats to a ridiculous degree and had them plug their website about fifty times. Yeah, we get it, you’ve got a website. If I didn’t care the first ten times, why would I care for the other forty?

Plus they had “The Boogie-Man” and “Hornswaggle” on RAW again. For those who don’t know, “The Boogie-Man” is a guy who comes out from under the ring in red and black face paint and pretends to be the man for whom he’s named. Hornswaggle is a midget (political incorrectness ftw) who they parade around because someone somewhere finds him funny.

If that wasn’t bad enough they continued this Cryme Tyme vs. Miz/Morrison thing AGAIN, and this time Miz/Morrison just pretty much reused every insult they used last week. Obviously they couldn’t be bothered to write anything new. Wonderful entertainment right there. Then we were privileged to see “Kelly Kelly” and… um… the girl who sings really badly as her gimmick (I do know her name, I just can’t think of it right now, but then that could be because I’ve repressed the memory of most of her stuff. She’s not even good looking!) joining them for a six-person tag match. Yawn!

Batista and Shawn Michaels had a match, but that was so long and dull I wound up fast forwarding through most of it.

The little facts told me that RAW was the most watched “entertainment program” on US cable last week for the third week in a row. I can only assume it was a very short list of “entertainment programs”.

They announced that it would be The Undertaker vs. The Big Show at Cyber Sunday, just further reason not to ever buy a WWE PPV since that’s YET ANOTHER match from last month that they’re doing again this month. Remember when after a PPV match happened people would move on in to different feuds to keep things interesting? Vince McMahon doesn’t. They also showed the footage of Big Show beating down Undertaker again, because the seventy-five times they’ve showed that weren’t enough apparently.

You think I’m exaggerating, don’t you? I’m not. They show that footage every ten minutes on Smackdown. I kid you not…

They played the “text this to that” bullshit for people to vote who they think should face certain people, and of course it’s only available to “US cell phone subscribers”, once again screwing the rest of the world who also watch the show live out of the ability to do something. But then I’m getting used to that by now, WWE’s competitions are always to US only. Not even Canada, who also watch the show live. And yet they expect the foreign fans to pay even more than the US ones to come and see them live? They can take a long walk off a short plank for all I care, I quit buying WWE PPV’s quite a while ago due to the crap with all their offers being to US citizens only.

There were, however, three highlights. Charlie Haas imitating Hulk Hogan as “Haas Hogan” was pretty funny, until he got squashed by that idiot Bradshaw. Santino Marella was HILARIOUS, but then his comedy is about the only decent thing on any WWE programming right now, and Chris Jericho took on CM Punk. If anyone hasn’t seen RAW yet and wants to know what to watch, just check out those three things on something like YouTube and save yourself the mental pain of having to sit through the rest.

Other stuff probably happened as well but whatever it was it made so little of an impression on me that I don’t even remember it.

In conclusion I leave myself wondering why it is I still watch WWE. Somebody help me out here, there must be a reason!

That is all.

On the subject of the election I have a few things I’ve been thinking about recently, maybe somebody can tell me I’m wrong, but exactly how is it that any of the world’s governments are actual democracies?

I got to thinking about this when I was discussing Iraq last week and I was, for once, on the pro-side of it. I basically just took that side because the guy I was discussing it with was making really stupid points about how we should just up and leave and let them fight themselves, which I don’t agree with. Although he did have some half-decent points – his argument based around the fact that if they want to kill each other why don’t we just let them so they stop killing us? – I felt I had to counter with the fact that one way or another we invaded their country and destroyed their stability, and whatever the motivation for doing so we can’t do that and just leave them to battle it out because whoever ultimately seizes power would be far worse than Saddam Hussein was on his worst day.

Ok, so moving away from Iraq before I get sidetracked, one of the biggest points about that that really irk is me Bush’s speeches about how he went to bring democracy to Iraq, and I ask you can a country that doesn’t have democracy really attempt to share it?

Now I’m not saying just America doesn’t – the fact is none of us do.

Every four years we get to choose who it is that will have power over us for the next four years. The idea of democracy is that we each get representation in government and we elect somebody who will fight for what we as a small community want on a larger stage, but that simply doesn’t happen. Every four years we don’t get to vote for the guy who will best represent us, we get to vote for basically one of two guys who are promising us things we know they ultimately won’t deliver on. And it’s always one of two – or occasionally you can throw in a few smaller groups/individuals who you also know damn well won’t ever get power. So how is that exactly electing somebody who will listen to us?

As soon as this individual takes power do they consult us, the little people, on the decisions they make? Nope. They make their decisions, they control every aspect of our lives and then in four years time they’ll come and beg for us to vote for them again, and ultimately people will because they’re sheep.

Democracy should be asking the people to vote for all the issues that matter. We should be consulted on the way things are done, every major decision – especially invading foreign countries – should only be done with the people behind you and it should be your job to sway the people to your side, not to do something against public opinion and then try to explain it away when you want to get re-elected. That’s not democracy, that’s dictatorship. All we do with our votes every four years is elect a new dictator for the next four.

So to all the people out there who say that their vote doesn’t matter, I actually agree. What’s the point in voting in a system that’s totally corrupt?

All politicians care about is getting re-elected in four years time and they’ll say anything and do anything to make that happen, and in the mean time what do they do? They stuff their own pockets with as much money as they can until it comes time to beg us to let them do it for another four years. And yes, I do fully believe that ALL politicians are like this, you can’t name a single one who will change my mind. They don’t care about fulfilling promises or making things better, they care about being in charge for another four years after this era ends and what they can do to better themselves in that time. That’s why they’re paid so much, that’s why they take so much of our money to spend on their own benefits and that’s why you don’t know any politicians who live with regular people. They’ve stuffed enough money in their own pockets to ensure that they don’t.

So what’s the solution? Well there isn’t one in my mind right now, aside from voting for the people who actually stand for something and not for one of the bigger parties. They always exist after all, just nobody hears about them because they don’t have billions to plough in to propaganda and marketing.

No politician is fit to run any country because by the time they get to the top they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a real person. They’ve forgotten what it’s like to be at the bottom of the food chain and to watch your money disappear in to the pockets of those higher in the chain than you are. They’re not fit to lead us because they no longer know what we want. End of story, end of rant.

That is all.