Let me put this into perspective. I’d never had a migraine before, so my first experience with one- three days after I started the medication- was comparable to an Amish housewife eating a Hoffman and spending the night at a trance party for Furries.

I thought I was fucking dying.

Iron deficiencies, early onset Parkinson’s, brain tumours and meningitis all played out in my hypochondriac imagination before I considered the innocuous little white pills I’d been popping. I started taking them to rectify a seemingly small hormonal imbalance*, not suspecting they had the power to make me to feel like I was on deck during the climax of ‘A Perfect Storm’.

* I’m not going to give the gory details about said imbalance, but for the record: No I didn’t grow (more?) balls and no, my elbow didn’t split open into a second vagina. Thanks for asking.

The doctor who prescribed the hormone insisted that I may experience ‘mild’ headaches as a result of water retention when I phoned her, in tears and mere minutes away from cracking my own skull open in order to pour my brain into the office freezer. ‘Mild’ headaches? I drank a full bottle of J&B on my 26^th birthday  (spread out over the course of an evening, I’m not an animal) and that headache was still better than what I was waking up to on the ‘Hormones from Hell’ diet.

Last night, after two weeks of waiting for the meds to work their way out of my system, I finally felt the vice grip of the chronic, yeah, I’m going to say it, chronic pain lift. After countless painkillers, three doctor’s visits, R1 000 on blood tests and two near-total emotional melt downs, I could look at the light in my living room without crying. It felt awesome.

For six weeks, I had forced myself to attend (minimal) social engagements with a thin smile and waning patience. I had missed gym, cooking, shopping, laughing, reading, playing, chatting, hanging out because I was too tired, too sick, my head hurt too much, and I had to lie down.

For six weeks, I dragged myself through every day at work, propping myself up every couple of hours with painkillers- all of which strictly warned against prolonged usage (I did mix them up a lot, so I think that makes it better), came home and collapsed into bed just when most people would be getting ready to enjoy their evenings.

I didn’t start off depressed, but living the life of a depressed person will start to wear on even the strongest psyches- which I don’t have.

While I’m beyond elated at the idea of being able to go back to ‘normal’ again (something I never knew I would miss so badly) I did learn a lot during this time.

1. I have more respect, sympathy and understanding for people who live with chronic pain as part of their daily lives.

Even when I was confused about the source of my headaches and nausea, I had hope that there was a light at the end of the tunnel. If you know someone quietly suffering from any kind of prolonged physical discomfort, go up to them right now, give them a cupcake, and thank them for not punching you in the mouth until your teeth fly out like hunks of bloody confetti. Because god knows they’ve wanted to.

2. Some doctors are like the internet’s proverbial honey badgers. 

In that they don’t give a fuck. We all have days where our jobs make us feel like we’re working at a sausage factory- where we’re just churning shit out at a steady pace for the sake of it- and GPs are apparently no different. If a veritable stranger takes just ten minutes to diagnose you and dish out schedule eight drugs, that person is no better than a scientologist- and should be treated with mistrust and disdain.

3. Health care starts and ends with you (or me, I forget who this article is aimed at).

Doctors can listen (or not), poke, prod and prescribe, but you need to take responsibility for your body and your symptoms first. I trusted a doctor I had never met before, and she gave me hardcore hormones (although she still denies the strength of the medication) within minutes of hearing a highly abridged version of my medical history. She might have made a mistake, but I fucked up. I took the pills- and kept taking them. I didn’t question her or her prescription sooner and I let it get so bad that I considered pulling a Jonestown on the office Kool-Aid (sorry dudes- we’re all good now).

A lot of medical professionals will tell you not to Google diagnose yourself or the side effects of the meds you’re on, and maybe they’re right. But in my case, I just wish my scepticism had kicked in sooner rather than later.

In the next month or so, my comparatively happy-go-lucky life partner and I will be, once again, packing up our action figures, comic books and our two fluffy, scatter-cushion-cats and heading for greener pastures. This will be our second move together and my 5^th in almost as many years. I’m looking forward to it like the spiders behind my washing machine look forward to a face full of Doom.

There are lots of things that suck about moving. But between the packing, the sorting (which my OCD tends to really enjoy), the listing, the organising and the notifying-of-change-of-address, nothing is quite as bad as the initial house hunting stage. I would rather scrape the mildew off my bathroom tiles with my teeth than have to painstakingly arrange the sad parade of disappointing viewings that I have come to associate with house hunting again. But what can you do? 

Online listing portals like gumtree and private property have definitely made the process a lot easier. Now you can find, contact and arrange a meeting with your psycho soon-to-be neighbour or landlord in a fraction of the time it would have taken using print media.

So there’s that.

But even with all the modern convenience of ‘shopping online’, one can still find oneself touring the 2-bedroom from hell with one’s nose blocked against the thick ammonia-laced odour of cigarette smoke and stale urine.

Because people are bastards, and a person’s true bastardly nature is best exposed when they are trying to sell you something- like a 12 month lease. Perhaps they think that when their unsuspecting viewers arrive on the property in question, they’ll be so overwhelmed by the acrobatic skills of the performing roach circus in the bathroom that they won’t notice they’re being lured into an open-plan toilet with fitted cupboards.

So to save myself, and possibly others, from the pitfalls of house-hunting (which is something of a misnomer, ‘cos I only live in a flat), here are my tips to get past this first, agonising step.

1.      Look at the pictures.

Really look at the pictures. If anything looks blurry, out of perspective or has been uploaded upside down, think again. If these people were really proud of their property, they would be showing you its best features- not hiding them. If the image gallery features a close-up of a cat, a lamp, or a realistic looking baby doll, you should start running.

 2.      Ask a lot of questions

Have you had a bad experience in the past with the landlord not meeting maintenance obligations? Do you have a problem with noisy kids? Would you prefer your neighbours to not throw flaming dog-shit through your open windows when you play your Kate Bush records too loud?

Before you even set up that viewing, pin the owner down on the phone first and do your pre-interview there. Go through your list of deal-breakers so you know what to expect by the time you get to the viewing. Do not do this over email- you need to listen for any wavering or hesitations in their voice that mean they’re trying to trick you.

 3.      Investigate the area before you get there

Back somewhere during move number 4, Happy-Go-Lucky and I were looking for a place in an unfamiliar area. Because we were driving so slowly, we were pulled over a cop car and thoroughly searched before we were allowed to move on. The ‘po-po’ then helpfully informed us that we were in a ‘bad’ area. No kidding. Don’t believe the owner when they say they’ve ‘never had a problem’. Maybe they haven’t. Maybe that’s because they live across town.

 4.      Don’t be nice

Until you’ve signed the lease, you don’t owe anybody anything- especially not your time and your feigned enthusiasm. If you get to your viewing, and the ‘cosy 2 bed flat’ you were hoping to see has been transformed into a double garage with an actual skeleton in the cupboard, you don’t have to stretch a fake smile across your pissed-off face while you try to sputter out how it’s ‘not what you expected’, and then tell the dishonest proprietor how you’ll ‘think about it and call them back’. Be straight up and tell them you’d rather stare directly into the sun until your eyeballs shrivelled up than see another inch of their dirty hovel.

Yes, it’s time consuming finding a new home and yes, you will think about living in your car at least once during your search, but perseverance and above all, preparation, can ensure that you only have to traipse through a bare minimum of condemnation-worthy domiciles before you find your next nest.

I believe that if you looked at the right pictures and asked the right questions, you can save yourself a lot of time and nasty surprises when you get to the viewing. If you are surprised, then you’re either not preparing properly, or you’ve been duped by an unscrupulous renter.  

And in case of the latter, yes, it’s perfectly acceptable to go back at night and toilet paper the shit out of that mangy dump. 

‘Paralympic Athlete Shoots and Kills Model Girlfriend on Valentine’s Day’- the story basically writes itself. If it was on DSTV’s Box Office, you’d order it- and so would I. And that’s because, without wanting to take anything away from the seriousness of a young woman’s shocking and untimely death, it’s the most entertaining and least frightening thing South Africans have had to deal with in a while.

On Monday, 5 miners- poor, unglamorous people working in unexciting, blue collar jobs- were shot and killed at Amplats following Union clashes. 5 People- dead. But we don’t know their names or the exact circumstances that each man died under. And we don’t really care that the catalyst for the conflict arose from Amplats announcement that they will not be able to save 14 000 miner’s jobs. We don’t really care about the impact on their lives, or the impact on our own economy as the mining industry implodes under the weight of hundreds of years of exploitation, not really. Not when there are celebrities on trial.

Ignoring for the moment her own, previously high-ranking involvement in the mining industry, Dr. Mamphele Ramphele also launched a new political party in the last week. Considering both Moody’s and the Auditor General’s mostly unfavourable judgements about the state of our nation, the corruption, the crime, the poverty, the neglect of our learners, and the increasingly frequent rate at which the current government blatantly insults, accuses, robs and abuses its citizens, we should be at least a little bit interested in the reforms she proposes- and how she proposes to achieve them. But the election’s still a long way away, right? The trial is happening right now- and it’s happening on every corner of the South African social landscape.

And then there are the rapes. With approximately 154 a day, one of the highest instances of child and baby rape (I choke back bile typing those words), and the occasional crime so shocking that we remember just how completely fucked up these statistics are, it’s clear that we have a major societal issue that’s going to require more than just wearing black on a Friday, or sharing a Facebook status if it’s ever going to be corrected. There are probably drug dealers in Mexico currently chopping off heads like they’re popping zits, watching the news from South Africa and thinking, ‘man, those people are fucking sick’.  And you know what? They’re right. We are.

It’s human nature to latch on to the Pistorius case, because it’s like a long, local episode of Law and Order. And that show is fantastic.

We’re interested in every detail of this crime so far removed from the violent, brutal reality of the common, garden-variety South African murder, because( unless you are a close friend or family member of either the defendant or the victim) we know the outcome of this trial will never affect us. Oscar Pistorius isn’t going to break into our homes, rape and shoot us. He’s not going to build a giant compound with our tax money and he’s not going to steal textbooks from Limpopo students. This trial is the soap opera of the news at the moment and, shocked and disappointed though we may be, we’re relish the chance to indulge in the escapism that comes from following it while pretending that we’re just ‘interested in the news’.

Having our hard-earned tax money squandered, watching the youth who will inherit the county struggle by without the support they deserve, and hearing about another woman or child being brutalised- knowing that she could have been our mother, sister, best friend, girlfriend or wife- these are all things we cannot escape. The Pistorius trial is a roller coaster for those invested in watching, commenting and judging it. Each new fact is like an unexpected dip in the ride, causing another rush of excitement and adrenalin. But, whatever the outcome of the trial and whatever your own personal feelings about Oscar’s innocence or guilt, he is just one man and this is just one story and it, like all the others I mentioned earlier, will slip from the front page and from our consciousness as soon as it loses its ‘traction’.

Even as the Pistorius ride climbs towards its final plunge and inevitable conclusion, we would do well to remember that it will end, and when it does, all the stories, the realities that actually do affect us, will still be waiting.

Many of the complaints I’ve seen about the way people use Facebook are based on the user experience, which up to the last half of 2012, described my full understanding of the service.

Between the humble bragging and the over-sharing, it basically boils down to the fact the everyone you’re really friends with only says things that are touching or witty, and everyone you are pretending to be friends with says that are stupid or pretentious. How odd, our social sensibilities are the same online as they are off it, only on Facebook, no one can tell you’re still wearing pyjama pants at two in the afternoon or examining your nose pickings.

All of the irritations and emotional angst I’d experienced thus far however couldn’t prepare me for what two weeks of community management over the December holidays has wrought on my soul, however. All the time I’d been using Facebook as a regular user, I’d never aware of the nefarious powers at play using this platform as a means to slowly accumulate unimaginable wealth and woo political favour. I have discovered a quasi-criminal underground and it’s got Santa-babies for avatars.

Our unnamed client was targeted by one, or perhaps many, ‘voting syndicates’ that operate on Facebook in order to incredible prizes, like in our case a R1 000 rand shopping voucher at a local hardware chain! That’s right, R1 000 at a local hardware chain. Did you just crap your pants? I thought so. After being warned by ‘fans’ of the page that our competition was an easy target by one of the psychopathic members of a voting syndicate herself, I was left to deal with a deluge of angry private messages by other serial-competition enterers* on how we had handled the first winner.

*Sidenote: I know you entered other competitions because I run other pages. I remember your name, I know where you live and I’ve seen where you sleep. Boo.

Best of all, I had to deal with this tirade of hate over Christmas. A week away past my 30th birthday (this is where the sad music comes). When I should have been relaxing, contemplating my goals and preparing myself for the next decade in my life, I was sitting in my cramped office at home, eating up my personal bandwidth answering message after raging message. For a R1 000 gift voucher at a local hardware chain. You’d have thought we were giving away the cure for AIDS.

By now, of course, in tears, I told my boyfriend about the competition SNAFU and asked him to start working on a new monthly budget going forward, one based on his salary and whatever I can afford working in an falafel van at local soccer games. As a social media manager who actually really likes doing social media, he opened my eyes to the dark world of organised Facebook voting. He pointed to the top names of the ‘haters’ on the message board and told me that he recognised their names from brands whose pages he had run locally.

All of the people getting upset about who had nabbed the first prize, and accusing the winner of being a cheater, were members of voting syndicates themselves. One look at the very long lists of corporate sponsored ‘likes’ on their profiles revealed that they had about as much brand loyalty as most avid Facebook users have self-esteem. I mean really, nobody actually ‘likes’ Telkom, right? And if you did, why would you tell your friends. The better half then asked some questions which put things into perspective:

“During the competition, how many likes have you gotten and how many messages?”

“2 800 and 6.”

“And how many of those six people do you think were genuinely interested in the very specific financial service your client provides.”

“None.”

“Okay.”

Okay. People are assholes. You only have to be a person to know that this is true. I’m not entirely sure of the legalities of voting syndicates, or their inherent moral wrongness. I have friends on Facebook that I only befriended because of an existing business connection. Or because I was just very surprised that they weren’t dead yet.

(And of course, there are my real, true friends- like anyone who reads this blog every 4 months.)

I’m not even sure how to check if someone is in a voting syndicate- for all the issues you might have with Facebook’s privacy measures, it does keep you pretty safe from companies if you’ve got the right settings- and I don’t know that checking isn’t crossing some kind of line. Also, the dazzling, coveted prize that has driven these loonies to drooling lust is, let’s recap one last time, a R1 000 gift voucher to a local hardware chain.

This is less than 100 pounds sterling, 100 euros and will leave you with 100 American dollars and change for lunch. It’s not a fuck load of cash. Ocean’s 11 aren’t planning a heist on the page for it any time soon. And even if it was a lot of money- you can only spend it at a local hardware chain. Unless you are a professional tradesman or a serial killer, there are only so many paint samples and tubes of superglue you actually need.

I have learned though, that the reason I’ve never won anything is because I believe in chance.  And that if you are joining voting syndicates, stalking small companies for competitions and then sending aggressive, abrasive emails to community managers (who, let’s face it, are NOT that high up in any company’s food chain and probably don’t have the power to actually do anything to help you) then you are an asshole and I recommend you do the following, in order:

1. Get a job

2. Get a life

3. Get fucked.

Oh, and don’t forget to like my page on Facebook.

Which brings me, albeit via a rather bitter tangent, to the question that squeezes guilt out of every spare moment spent playing Call of Duty, or willing my tomato plants to grow with the power of my mind. When is it okay to pull the plug? When is it okay to walk away from a project, not because there’s a creepy, thieving dirt-bag on the other end, but simply because it doesn’t inspire you anymore? Because, like so many attempts at cooking brinjals properly in the past, what started out as a good idea has now come to disgust and haunt you with its grotesque inadequacy and also, possibly, violent diarrhoea.

I’m speaking of my personal projects here, actually just one in particular, a pudgy novella whose flowery muffin top is now spreading over the 7 000 word mark with no sign of getting prettier with scale. It’s the most I’ve written for one story in a while- at least since last year’s abysmal attempt at NaNoWriMo, which left me with a 12 000 word monstrosity, which had to ultimately be humanely put down like a mangy dog. I have now reached what athletes and construction workers refer to as ‘a wall’. I feel that I can go no further along this same path for fear of smashing my own face in with frustration. I’ve reached that dangerous state of a project where I’m starting to honestly believe that scrapping the whole thing and starting again from scratch would save time and effort and result in a far better piece of work. It will also mean that this half-baked Franken-project will never be reach completion and bask in the warm apathy of my friends and family.

It’s very possibly a case of ‘the grass is always greener’, where after a period of time, any project that is not the project you are currently trying to finish looks far better in comparison. But with life being as short as it is, is it better to persevere on a project that you’ve come to hate, or to run towards that green, green grass? My art director has a saying, which helps us overly precious advertising Prima Donnas to build a bridge and get over conceptual rejection, ‘the only thing standing between you and the big idea is your current idea’. This makes sense in the fast paced world of marketing, where every day is spent chasing manic deadlines and the next gin and tonic. You can’t afford to ponder and pontificate, in fact you can barely even afford to pay attention. Brainstorms are like Joburg’s summer monsoons- fast, fierce and unforgiving- cutting down anything superfluous and leaving behind only the elements strong enough to survive. Then again, that’s advertising. Unlike a labour of love, a professional project has deadlines and bottom lines to ensure its completion. Should either of these be omitted, any brief would lose much of its urgency, and appeal.

Perhaps that’s the ticket then- to treat yourself as a supplier and assign a time and budget to even the most intimate work- and to treat both as seriously as if you weren’t just having a minor schizophrenic episode. ‘Tis better to have finished and sucked, than never to have finished at all’, or something… So it goes that what started as an uninspired, unstructured blog post has come full circle and given me both the inclination and the means to get back on the word horse and ride it all the way into the fictional horizon, where we’ll both explode in a divine super nova of mixed metaphors. Let no more time be wasted in procrastination, I have a novella to write!

I’ll come back and finish this post later.

Usually, when I start feeling a bit bad myself like this, I’ll pick myself up, dust myself off, and go out and get really ridiculously, stupid drunk. But not today. Today I thought I’d focus instead on what has gone right in the 358 months I’ve been alive… And then go and get drunk.

No, life hasn’t turned out as planned, but it has turned out pretty good in the greater scheme of things. Here, for your boredom, is a list of the things in my life that bring me joy and happiness as I enter my third decade of life.

1. When I about was 15, I really, really wanted to marry Charlie Sheen. And now I’m really, really grateful that I didn’t. #winning.

2. Although I haven’t fulfilled my ambitions to become a supermodel, a UN ambassador or a guitar-solo superhero, I am grateful to be gainfully employed by an awesome company, and that I work with people who, on some days, are almost as cool as I am.

3. I have a very sweet boyfriend. While he may not be a movie star, he will walk down an empty street with me, in the middle of the night, to find appropriate hiding places for the small mammals our cats haven’t quite managed to kill. And he understands the life-or-death importance of my morning caffeine injection.

4. I am grateful for my cats, the unconditional love they inspire from me, and the overwhelming indifference they reward it with.

5. I have a flat, which I have successfully furnished and, occasionally, entertain visitors in. (This entertainment usually consists of them watching me play Playstation, which is very exciting and also quite bitching.) My home is my mansion, my castle, and my sanctuary- all two, wonderfully cluttered bedrooms of it.

6. I have amazing friends. The guys and lady-guys who offer to personally destroy my enemies and burn their houses down, without me ever having to ask.

7. I am close to my family. Literally, like 15 minutes away. And they don’t mind that I still visit just to watch TV, empty the contents of their fridge into my belly and occasionally use their clothes drier.

8. I am healthy. I am doing more exercise now than I did throughout my entire high school career and, although I still really hate lunges, I’m starting to see the point of the bastard-shit things. I quit smoking 5 years ago, and although I sometimes forget that after 3 glasses of wine, I know I’ll never buy another box of Marlboros. Unless, of course, the world does actually end this year… because when the sun starts exploding and systematically frying all life on Earth like a giant pan of screaming, bleeding pork sausages, who’s gonna care about emphysema?

9. I’m not scared. I mean, I am, of things you should be scared of- like crime, the loss of civilian freedom and big, hairy spiders, but I’m not scared of the other people’s impressions, or my own limitations anymore. Both are usually in my own mind and I find it best to ignore them equally.

10. I get to get older. As all those poignant pins on Pinterest will remind you, many are denied the same opportunity. It saddens me to remember the friends who will be eternally preserved in my mind at the same age they passed away, but it also makes every new memory, experience and wrinkle that I get to have seem special and precious, and something to be grateful for.

And it makes me realise that I better hurry up and start ticking shit off my ‘before I turn 40 list’ in a blue-arsed hurry.

I hope you don’t mind my over familiarity, but during the many, many weeks of unrequited correspondence from me to you practically begging for the payment we agreed upon, I feel like we’ve grown close enough for us to toss around a couple of pet names.

Anyway, while we’re on the topic of tossing, toss pots and all things toss-related, let me diverge for a moment to discuss the matter of sucking, and how aptly you excel at this. When first we met, I thought of you as an accomplished, reputable businessman. Needless to say that your summation of me was likely the equivalent of ‘Word Monkey’ or ‘Typing Slave’, and that’s okay, because there are no real human beings when it comes to doing business- just suppliers and payers. And then, of course, there’s you. Precious, special, darling, little you. In case you have not yet choked on the sarcasm I’ve been plastering this rhetoric with, I’m implying that you are mentally challenged.

Just thinking back on the time we’ve spent together brings a whimsical smile to my face, or maybe it’s just a rage-ridden sneer. It’s hard to tell through the red mist. I remember when you first ‘hired’ me to deliver three items of work for a particularly personal occasion to you. At first, I couldn’t understand why you would hire a script writer to craft such intimate pieces of communication, but in our subsequent conversations, I found both your minimalist vocabulary and your abstract grammar quite illuminating. See, now I’m calling you an idiot. Keeping up? Super, I knew you could do it.

How I slaved over those scripts, keyboard clacking and fingertips chaffing, living only on shots of espresso and the occasional plate of food, and driven only by my need to please you- and to pay for a weekend away at the end of the year. It was a labour of love. Yes, okay, love of money. I would never have thought during those salad days of our relationship that you would so cruelly betray me after I delivered my work. Why, I asked myself, weeping in the rain, tearing at my shirt and beating my chest like the heroine in an ancient Greek tragedy, why would you spurn me and refuse my love (invoice) when I had so freely given you mine. In reality there was a little less weeping, far less rain and I simply ate a packet of biscuits in lieu of ruining a perfectly good shirt. Dear shit stain- can I call you shit stain? Please excuse my wanton use of over exaggeration. It’s almost like lying, except that it’s not. When you promised to pay me every week for 2 months, that was lying.

In the weeks we’ve spent apart, I have thought of you often. I find myself wondering what you do in between denying my payment and avoiding my phone calls. Do you look at the work I so faithfully delivered and think of me? Does it bring you pain to see my pain, and also my increasingly serious threats of legal action against you? I hope so. It makes me feel that we can still share something special with one another- apart from our impending court date, obviously.

If I can leave you with just one thought, it’s this. I miss you, numb-nuts. I miss chasing you for feedback and responding instantly to your inane requests and seemingly endless revisions. I miss trying to decipher your half-formed sentences and garbled debriefs, and, most of all, I miss the money you owe me. I only thank god for the forethought, and the signed contract, that ensures that, while I may be out of your mind, I’ll never be out of your financial obligations.

Yours in legally-binding credit,

Jade

XOXOXO

I went to film school. That’s not something I usually tell people while sober, but I did, and I’m not. I have watched the triumph of some of my more talented, disciplined peers rise to levels of relative success in the film industry and I have sat back and nestled, ever cushier, into my role in advertising with no small amount of jealousy. Don’t get me wrong, I love my job- especially if you’re a colleague reading this, believe me, I LOVE my job, and I am grateful for the journey I’ve taken to get here. It’s made me the undeniably awesome and incredibly humble person I am today. But I have often wondered what my life would look  like if I’d had the balls, the financial freedom and moral ambiguity to fully pursue film making. Like for reals.

Going to the Michel Gondry Home Move Factory in Johannesburg last Saturday wasn’t something I was particularly looking forward to. As my friend and film school cohort, Dave, said to me as we waited for our postponed slot and our equally postponed lunch, I would have- at the time- preferred a nice lecture and a nap. Possibly simultaneously. We met our fellow movie makers while we were still smashing take-aways into our faces and, three hours later, sat down with them again and a bottle of Leopard’s Leap Sauvignon Blanc (Note to self: You eat and drink too much when you hang out with Dave) to watch the strange fruits of our labour.

I’m not going to give away too much of how, exactly, the project works. Suffice to say that it does. I don’t think I’ve had that much fun in a long time. I’ll just tell you that, much like the characters in Be Kind, Rewind, the participants are forced to conceptualise, plan and shoot a film in  feverish 45-minute spurts. My group and I went from being complete strangers to galvanising as a  team around more bizarre collection of ideas I think many of us will have ever had to deal with before. The time limits eliminated nit-picking, over-thinking and much of the arguing. There simply wasn’t time to disagree with Dave’s decision that all of ‘gang’ members should wear feather boas, or to stop me from squirting a pile of glitter glue all over our DVD cover, and so no one did.

You’d think that a project created on the fly with a group of unfamiliars would be an absolute, bloody abortion (another thing that Dave somehow worked into our 11 minute opus). And you’re right. Watching it for the second time today, the story is largely disjointed, the footage looks as though it was shot by an epilepsy sufferer at a rave and my performance consists primarily of me standing around, not sure of what the fuck I’m doing. But when we watched it the first time, we were delighted and surprised by the clarity of the narrative and the quality of the acting. It was at least 10 times better than I thought it would be while standing on the other side of the lens.

And it showed me that, unlike the three years I spent stressing and suffering through my studies at AFDA, and unlike the moments of very real panic I feel in my day-to-day job, making movies with your friends, or making any kind of art- is fun. If I could help create something that we were all- well, at least that I was proud of, in under three hours, with people who don’t know even each other, imagine what I could achieve in three weeks, or three months, with people I actually like.

Much though I enjoyed the Home Movie Factory, I don’t know if it’s an experience you can ever repeat. Just like you can never have a second first kiss, or how you can never properly relate why someone falling down a flight of stairs made you wet yourself laughing, I don’t think you can ever make a Home Movie Factory Movie twice. The enjoyment is in the unexpected. That said, I recommend the experience to anyone looking for a great way to spend time with their more artistic, and less inhibited, selves. If I, like the kids in my Michel Gondry inspired Home Movie, had a time machine, I would go back and do the whole thing again in a heartbeat.

Here, without further ado, and for your viewing terror is sci-fi/kung-fu/mockumentary I co-created on Spring Day 2012:

The Kungfusion Project.

Please don’t judge me.

But, of course, hope- stupidly- springs eternal and you both promise yourself that this time, this job will be different. This time, their money and your brilliance will meet, serving each other perfectly in the single creative execution of a communication deliverable that will exceed their expectations, blow your talent-trumpet and leave all who witness it awestruck by the beauty of your synergy. Yes, I said it- synergy. Because you can write about anything if you get paid for it.

And within that sentence lies the origin of my three least favourite freelancing words: if you get paid for it. Because there should never be an if when it comes to paid freelance work, only a ‘when’, and if, like me, you’re clever enough to include your payment T’s and C’s in your quote- and insist all is signed off before starting the project- then the ‘when’ shouldn’t be a big issue at all. Unless you are actually writing for The Big Issue, in which case I think that’s more of a pro-bono project and you shouldn’t be asking them for cash. That seems wrong.

However, back to the ‘ifs’ and ‘whens’ of feasible clients. As a freelancer, I have happened upon many ‘whens’ that have remained conspicuously cash-free. Most of my regular clients are sweethearts when it comes to paying on time- even the big corporate companies that many freelancers bemoan as being burdened by bureaucracy and insensitive towards the needs of the starving ‘artists’ of advertising- pay on time. This is because most of my clients are responsible, reasonable people- which I am thankful for, because I really, really hate confrontation, particularly when it comes to money and other people not giving it to me.

I hate confrontation so much, that I would rather write an overly-long, rant-ridden blog post than phone a new, and now also potentially old, client to ask my three least favourite little words when it comes to dealing with clients:

“Where’s my money?”*

So while I work myself up into a tidy froth in preparation of yet another, tersely worded phone call, during which I will disingenuously ask about my client’s health and family before reminding him that the only reason I have his phone number is due to the single piece of contractual business we have not yet completed, why not think about any contractors that you, dear imaginary reader may have accidentally forgotten about. And then pay them FFS.

* This is technically two words and a conjunction, but ‘three little words’ made for a snappier title.

WHY?

Why don’t you just tuck it into that nifty hollow in your driver’s side door, or lay it carefully in the foot well of the passenger side, or casually toss it over your shoulder to irritate future backseat passengers. You can eat it for all I care. But why, why, why throw your trash onto the road which you, invariably, will have to traverse upon again, thus becoming a victim of your own aesthetic marring of this fine motorway that we all share. You selfish fuck.

Equally selfish are those who drop their waste as they walk, representing in intention if not  appearance the nonchalance of donkeys and horses who do similar in more rural areas.

I know that some will cry in defence of littering, “it’s a victimless crime”- but it’s also a worthless crime. I can understand robbing a bank, because you are trying to feed your family or your raging drug habit, and I even understand killing someone that you really fucking hate- because I’ve wanted to do that too. But littering? What does that achieve? A temporary reprieve from the burden of carrying your handful of disposables for a few minutes, sure, but in the long-term, who really wins? Not you. All you prove, to me and to all who see your vile behaviour, is that you are lazy, filthy and inconsiderate.

And, as I’ve mentioned, I’m actually more than fine with people killing other people who really, really piss them off…  like you, litterbug, like you.