Eating an Apple can reduce stress
October 2011
Life is very hectic at the moment. My fiancée and I are getting a new kitchen built and this has involved the bursting of several blood vessels in my head trying to get idiotic utility companies to perform the relatively simple task of moving meters. We are also planning an extension to the office which is going to involve more haemorrhaging on my part having to deal with cockney geezers who will charge twice what they quoted, drink all my tea and block the toilet with turds that I will only be able to flush by breaking them up with a stick.I’m also getting married in a few weeks so there has been lots of wedding planning over the last few months. Mostly this has involved me nodding and agreeing with everything beloved says and then agreeing to buy dinner for 100 people. This has resulted in more internal bleeding from the brain department.
On top of that, I’m now racing virtually every weekend. I also write nearly 100 articles every year for businesses and Karting magazines and I’m also in the process of getting a book published. If that wasn’t enough, I’m also working hard trying to run a business, which over the last couple of years has largely been spent trying to convince people to stop listening to the media and assure them that the recession is just a figment of their imagination.
This is all jolly lovely and does give me a sense of personal satisfaction but it has left me feeling rather frazzled. To say I’m not tired and stressed would be a bit like saying Anne Widdecombe is attractive. In other words inaccurate.
It is only stressful because of the amount of time I’m spent doing stuff and the little amount of time I get to sit down and chill out. The activities themselves are not at all stressful. The racing is fun and it’s what I love doing. The day job is mostly enjoyable and relatively stress-free compared to most. The wedding is more exciting than anything and the writing is often quite therapeutic.
What makes the writing difficult is, given the amount of drivel I write on a weekly basis, I sometimes find it difficult to come up with things. Sometimes words just come to me easily but there are times when I can’t think of anything to say. As a result, sometimes I will submit work knowing that it is rubbish - like this one.
Sometimes I will come back to an article a few days later and have to carry out re-writes because I realise it is complete rubbish. Sometimes, however, I have to make changes because what I originally wrote was just too offensive and would probably get me sued.
For instance, I recently wrote a piece about some miserable, selfish, irritating, tax dodging prick who lives in the same street as my parents. He is one of these people who nobody really likes but barely tolerates. He always walks several paces in front of his poor suffering wife like he is some Arab King and she is just part of his harem. I ranted for over a thousand words about how he is a lying, hypocritical moron who once said something about me that was completely untrue and could have got me into a lot of trouble. In my fury, I may have got a bit personal about his upbringing, offspring and size of his genitalia and I may even have hinted that he might be better off not being alive. After much deliberation, I eventually decided to consign that particular rant to the bin, although I still stand by my conviction about most of it.
It mattered little because I have a stockpile of random rants that I can use as and when there is nothing relevant to waffle on about.
This month is a case in point. I haven’t had much to say of late which is surprising given the amount that has been going on in the news in recent weeks. Facebook has once again been pissing off the entire world by changing the layout of users’ profile pages and making it even more illogical than the previous set of changes they annoying and unnecessarily introduced last year. Apple’s Steve Jobs sadly passed away and now Blackberry are paying tribute to their rivals by holding a 3 day silence.
How a company with the resources, budget and technical wizardry like Blackberry can make such a monumental cock-up is beyond me. They do sort of have my sympathy because I know what it’s like when servers explode: Stressful. Having said that, if I had the resources, budget and technical wizardry of Blackberry, I would have hired a team of experts to ensure that this sort of thing can’t happen.
I know it’s probably more to do with o2 than Apple but my iPhone is seriously pissing me off at the moment. I mentioned a while ago that my contract expired and, since then, it hadn’t been working as well. It was slow, the internet connection was rubbish and people kept being put straight to answer phone for no reason.
Having got bored waiting for the iPhone 5 to be released, I went ahead and got an upgrade with an older model (because the phone was free and I’m a cheapskate). Because I had the last phone for over 2 years and never dropped it, lost it or flushed it down the toilet, I decided to forgo the insurance this time (again, because I’m a cheapskate).
Whether it’s because I’m now paying the bare minimum for an outdated piece of equipment and o2 are punishing me for being a cheapskate, this new phone is even worse than my last one. The internet connection is spasmodic to say the least, 3G is almost non-existent and people are still being put straight to answer phone. Not only that but it has crashed several times when my beloved fiancée has been talking at me about table decorations and button holes.
Now admittedly this last point is quite a relief but that’s not the point. If I wanted something that was going to crash all the time I would have bought a Microsoft product or hired Lewis Hamilton to be my chauffer.
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