Ever since Hyperham moved in, life has pretty much been a non-stop whirlwind of relaxing on the sofa watching Dave, running around London, trash-talking each other and endlessly re-arranging stuff in the flat without actually deciding on anything. And tripping over socks and cables. It hasn’t helped that we’re also in the midst of some redesign projects at work, and I’ve volunteered for more late nights elsewhere (exciting details to come later!)

and I am *exhausted*. Sleep has never come so easily in my life before – hell, some nights, we’re in bed snoring away by 10pm. Especially at weekends. Which has severely cut into my social media time… Yet, people keep commenting that I look healthy and happy. Which sounds rather bizarre to me, because I’m usually looking at them with weary lidded eyes.

This week alone, we’ve got two guests from overseas to entertain, a cinema screening with free whisky, a leaving do and a long night ahead for this week. Oy vey.

And yet, I must also show Hyperham the glory that is the United Kingdom, especially now that Spring has arrived.

However, when I try to go down this street in Tywyn and then move forward, I am magically transported through some mysterious blurred tunnel to another place in time and space. Also known as the back alley. Then I’m transported back.

Such a shame I can’t seem to find a way to tell Google how to correct their mistake. Unless there is a teleportation tunnel operating in Tywyn these days…

At first, it was little minor skirmishes – she loves loads of pillows, I’ll just settle for one hard pillow. She likes her mattress soft and pliant, I like it hard. She tends to leave things all over the place – whereas I leave things in an organised pile of mess. Instead of asking me to allocate her some drawer space, she complained to my friends that she didn’t have one drawer. So I emptied a drawer for her, and as far as I know, she hasn’t used it.

Then I came home after a particularly hard day at work to find she’d rearranged the furniture to split the room in half, and create a relaxing space and a work space. I did point out that the original layout had been specifically designed to meld the relaxing and work spaces together and to create an open feeling that would be welcoming to guests. At which point she fixed me with a stare and challenged me as to how many people had dropped by in the last two years. Pwned.

The feeling gradually crept over me that something was *wrong* with this. I couldn’t put my figure on it – then I realised. Thanks to the rearrangement, things had not been allocated their proper place. Everything had been piled onto the coffee table, so consequently you couldn’t put coffee on it. Instead you put coffee on one of the remaining bookshelves – the bookshelves on that had been temporarily moved to a spare side table. The papers on that were temporarily on the sofa.

Things were not in their rightful place. This is wrong.

I should have tried to relax. But I just couldn’t. We were watching an episode of House - top marks for drama, but really, the patient-of-the-week had been involved in a side-on collison with a bus, her heart had stopped, they’d cracked open her chest to see what was what, her lungs had been pumped full of a freezing solution to induce hypothermia, her kidneys were shot to buggery, and yet they were able to revive her for one long last farewell before she died – and I just couldn’t relax. Even mild surfing on the Internet wasn’t doing it. It wasn’t until we embarked on an organisational orgy that I was finally able to relax. And then it was time for bed.

Now I’m wondering what other mild mental malladies will be sparked by the ongoing co-habitation wars…

It’s amazing how the mere addition of American accents and standing studio sets make it seem more polished, more ‘other’ and more glamorous. Which takes away the original charm of Spaced in that it was rooted in an earthly reality we could all recognise.

Worst of all – the American version of tortured artist Brian has somehow become Jim Belushi with an easel. It’s pretty much the same dialogue, but he seems less of a sweet, likeable tortured artist and more of an escapee from a fraternity who’s convinced himself that being arty with an easel will get him ladies. Though all he’s gotten so far is Marcia (at least that plotline stayed).

The interludes also seem bizarre to the point of pointlessness. Why have a disappearing tram?

On the plus side, Daisy somehow seems more real with an American accent, because in my head a flighty not-sure-what-to-do young woman seems more real with an American accent. Having said that, it’s very hard to see her miming a gunfight with such fabulous gusto as what happens later in Spaced…

Nothing like being scanned for fingerprints and asked if I was involved in a Canadian drink-driving incident in 1994 to make one feel welcome when entering the land of liberty and freedom. Looks like I’ll have to pay an extra $10 for the privilege soon…

Through the conversation – which principally centres around the difference between horror films from the East versus torture porn from Hollywood, and how Eastern films have absolutely zero problem jumping from genre to genre in the blink of an eye – we also discover that:
- he and his girlfriend got so coked-up last night that she stormed out when he berated her for being unable to open a fridge door
- she’s attempted to make amends the day after by serving him ribs
- wearing a scruffy striped shirt and long coat is enough to make me look like a “City boy”. Which I wouldn’t mind so much if I hadn’t spent the last 20 minutes mildly discussing film, and I patently do not have the style or money to carry off the City boy look.

Honestly, if you want to provoke conversations with a stranger, carry an American around.

Fast-forward to tonight, and I ended up watching the live episode of EastEnders. Bear in mind I haven’t watched an episode of EastEnders since 2006, during my Year of Hell (the Evil Ex loved watching any soap opera) Within ten minutes, I was hooked again, against my will.

Spoilers lie deep within…

During that time, I watched enough of it to follow the whole Stacey/Bradley saga. and y’know, the character was ridiculously easy for me to emphasise with – I mean, he was a slightly nerdy Doctor Who fan who kept doing the right thing even while everyone else was throwing shit around him.

and now they’ve killed Bradley. You swines!

This is possibly why I don’t watch narrative drama any more – I do get ridiculously sucked into drama, once I get into that initial hook. And once I’m in, I’m hooked. But now I’m living with an actress who loves narrative drama – staying away could be tricky…

It’s a fascinating test to see how the web has changed my brain – but it’d also be fascinating to run the test again when I was at home, in a more relaxed environment, and not under (my own) pressure to do the test quickly so I could get on with the rest of the day’s tasks…

But I do have a quibble with their defining of my web characteristics as “solitary” because I don’t choose social networking sites as an authoritative area of content. With the search topics they gave – relatively serious things on health and diet – I wouldn’t trust a social networking site to give me that information any more than I’d trust my friends. I might ask them for anecdotal evidence in conversation, but if I’m searching for something, then at that point I want considered content. If I wanted an opinion on Lady GaGa’s show, then I’m more inclined to ask around social networking websites.

Derek Griffiths, btw, was the amiable black host of many a childrens’ TV show back in the 1970s and early 80s. I feel like my childhood has just been urinated on. But I can’t stop watching it…

Unfortunately, it’s done the same thing as many recent Google product launches – it hasn’t brought anything new to the table, aside from the sheer gargantuan amount of data it stores about me. And the only reason it has so much data about me is because I’m pretty much wedded to Google, thanks to their still-superlative Gmail service (tabs instead of categories for email! It’s the future, I tell you!) and consequently, me adopting every other Google service there is, including their mobile phone system.

Which of course has its consequences. Within an hour of using Buzz, I found 10 people following me who were total strangers, who I’d never heard from before. This happens a lot more on Twitter (and to a certain extent on Facebook), but because those services don’t touch my email, it doesn’t seem so sinister. But with Buzz integrating with my email account, it does. There is a suggestion that these strangers found me via Google Profiles and that I ought to switch it off – but I’m quasi-reluctant to do that since otherwise, I could disappear off Google search results. (Then again, my name isn’t exactly my brand these days)

The huge flaw, of course, with integrating social networking so tightly with email, is that everyone’s email boxes are already groaning under the strain of spam, newsletters and the other ways people are trying to reach us via email. Adding another system to your email just adds to the risk of people declaring Inbox Surrender and leaving email alone entirely.

Ultimately, it’s hard to see why Google made another attempt into social networking, after the days of Orkut. They’ve built a new private members club opposite the most popular pub in town, spied upon everyone going into the pub to try and connect everyone, and then … just opened the front door – only letting in people who are members of the club. No special offers, no enticements, no new jukebox in the corner, nothing. There’s nothing in Buzz that isn’t already on other social networking sites – and of course, nothing that beats their main enemies, Facebook or Twitter. and ironically, they seem to be quite swamped – picking up blog posts and Twitter feeds from other areas of my digital life seems to take a day.

But like the famed Hotel California, once I’ve checked in, I can’t seem to leave…