Now for something a little bit different.

An email I received from a comedian recently said that to improve as a person and a writer, it's important to write every day if possible. Write in chunks, maybe aim for an hour a day and see what you get. Once you get used to this and putting a story across, you'll see that you've developed exponentially. For me, I'm doing that and then eventually the joke writing will come to me. I have moments of humour, and these often come from me acting...well, my usual self. So if I can take those moments, get them on paper and then make observations about life and what I see into amusing observations, I can fill my spare time quite happily.

So as you can guess, I've been writing a fair bit since the last post on here. Sometimes if I write something that seems worthy, I'll put it in here too. I'm thinking of this as being supplemental to my writing though. They're all saved away on my laptop in individual files, and I've been focusing on telling a story with each piece of writing. For some reason, I've been looking back at events in my life. I mean, they're all significant to some extent, but I figured that the easiest thing for me to write about and put across are things from my life. I can write about the colour of the sky or why we never seem to get much sunshine any more, but that's a different level of depth. It probably seems quite shallow and I can look rather egotistical.

I suppose everyone has an ego to some extent though, it's just a case of how we showcase it. Some people have a brilliant knack of being able to approach members of the opposite sex and talk to them with confidence, some know they're a genius and don't mind who knows it. There are hundreds of other ways of displaying your ego...I chose two relatively poor examples sadly, simply because my brain failed me. I like to feed my ego by writing a blog and coming back to it a few days later and seeing how many views it got, or posting stuff on Twitter and conversing with the world. It doesn't really help me too much, I seem permanently stuck on around 85 followers. Still, since I got rid of most of the robots, I like to think there are 85 people who see some of my bizarre thoughts occasionally and either go "Huh, that's interesting" or go "What an idiot. UNFOLLOW!" I'm in a bubble, and until it pops, I'll float around.

On a completely different note, I've stumbled across 8 Bit remixes of songs after someone did a version of the music for Joe Rogan's podcast (one of my favourite podcasts which I can't recommend highly enough) and I'm listening to a stack of them. As I said on Facebook and Twitter (there I go with the media whoring again...) if I put them on my iPod, life becomes one great big Super Mario game, and I can't think of anything more amusing and fun to pass the time.

I think it was the last time that I was in Sheffield when I managed to get Sophie onto Twitter. She doesn't seem to use it much, but her account popped up for some reason so I thought I'd ask her if she still used Twitter. Seemingly she does as she replied to let me know that she did, but only to stalk since no one is interested in what she has to say. Being me, I replied with "No one is interested in what I have to say, yet I still tweet...and blog.."

I suspect this is fairly true. I don't like to think about it though...it makes me sad.

Still not sleeping, but life's too short!

Evening people out there in Blogger World, I hope the world finds you with a smile on your face and some glorious weather finally giving us a slice of summer that we've been waiting patiently for.

This weekend, I was at Silverstone once again with my brother and Dad, this time for the Renault World Series meeting. The tickets for the actual weekend are free (which is a brilliant concept by Renault and ensures packed grandstands) and there's plenty to do. Overall, there were 10 races over the two days across five different categories: FR3.5, FR2.0 Euro, FR2.0 UK, Megane Trophy and Clio Cup. If there are any motorsport fans out there, they'll recognise the FR2.0 UK and Clio Cup rounds from the BTCC coverage on ITV4, but it's still a strange experience to watch people racing what are essentially glorified family cars around a race track. For what they are, they're still pretty quick and along with the Meganes, they provided some top action with plenty of overtaking.

The weather held off for pretty much the entire weekend barring some rain on Saturday night and a light shower early on Sunday morning, but even that wasn't enough to prevent the 2.0 UK guys from going out and racing on slicks. There are definitely some top names in there like Alex Lynn, who won both UK rounds on Sunday as well as winning the first 2.0 Europe round and finishing second in the second race. All in all, a pretty top weekend for that guy! If he keeps up with that, his career can go far and he could well find himself moving up the categories in years to come.

Though the racing action was pretty good throughout the weekend, I can't say the same for sleeping over the weekend. Unlike the GP weekend, I had some sleeping mats so I wasn't using the earth as my mattress, but my sleeping pattern was completely destroyed. Even though we were going to bed around 11pm each night, I found myself unable to get to sleep for at least an hour on all three nights, and then waking up a couple of times in the night...each time finding myself struggling to nod off again. There were a couple of times during Sunday where I was ready to fall asleep, and I'm pretty tired now...but surprisingly, I resisted the temptation to go for a nap earlier in the day and should hopefully sleep pretty well tonight.

The actual campsite, Silverstone Woodlands, was a really great site and far superior to the site I stayed in for the British Grand Prix in July. Now, I imagine that the fact that there were far less people staying at Woodlands for this weekend than the GP makes a difference, but the actual facilities were so much better. As a simple example, the showers at Woodlands are electrically powered, so there's hot water. That's the biggest thing: I had hot water to get a shower. The pub on site was brilliantly named (The Petrol Head) and offered relatively cheap drinks as well as the food van having possibly the greatest burgers known to motorsport fans. All in all, it was a pretty awesome weekend and I'll get the photos up onto Facebook within the next day or so. I'll hopefully get back to Silverstone next year and check out a couple of other events and maybe...just maybe, see some other circuits around the country. Of course, I'm looking at using the year abroad with uni as an opportunity to see a European race, either in Germany itself or going off to somewhere like Spa or Monza.

Now, on a slightly different note and a completely new idea, I know I've been writing a fair bit recently. However, I'd like to think that I've got good enough reasoning for doing that. I've been looking at some new ventures in the last couple of weeks and doing a bit of email sending because of this, and I think I'm getting some good ideas and tips from it. Now, you're probably thinking "Stop being so cryptic and stupid, either share your 'venture' or shut up." So I will...my long-term plan is to write a short set of stand-up material. I'm not planning or hoping to become big, but if I can write a short set and then start to edit that and perfect it over a matter of time, I'll feel I've accomplished something there. This isn't something that I'm going to be doing overnight though, and it'll probably take me a while to get there. But that's something for me to work on, and by writing for a good length of time each day (don't worry, I'm only posting on here every few days) I might eventually reach that line.

Anyway, we'll see how far that progresses with time. I'l keep writing each day, simply because it's something that I enjoy doing anyway.

"If you're stuck in your life and there is something YOU want to do, commit! That's the first step. Look at it and figure out what you have to do to make it possible and it WILL happen!"

Enjoy your week people, feel free to leave a comment at the bottom of this blog or on the Facebook link. Stay safe people and have a great couple of days.

Never try and outsmart your body...it'll never work.

A super-special short entry for my own benefit tonight. I went out earlier this evening to catch up with Hessie since she's in Leeds too. It's nice to get out and see some other people, talk about random stuff (and yes, it was random. Sushi pet shop should help clarify the level of bizarreness) and grab a drink.

Once we finished up, the words "early night" came up. I was feeling pretty tired from my irregular pattern and love of going to bed at 2am, waking up an hour or two later and repeating that through the night...and an early night sounded like heaven. So, I got sneaky and went to bed at about 10. I know...I'm not a very awesome person for going to bed at 10pm on a Saturday night. But I'm tired, and early nights aren't really my thing.

If I went to bed at 10pm, why am I writing this at 11:55? Seems I can't outsmart my body clock. My internal clock decided it was nap time and I could sleep for about an hour and a half and then woke me up feeling as fresh as a daisy. There's no particular reason...unless I hate myself. Which would be strange, since I'd think you have to be aware of your own self-hate to actually have such an emotion.

I'll do some writing for an hour or so and then go back to bed. If I sleep, I sleep. If I don't, I'll probably just bang my head against the wall until I 'sleep'.

Either way, I'm going back to sleep.

Lack of sleep and non-drying clothes don't make for a happy Thomas

Things have been pretty crazy since I last posted on here. I don't even need to go into detail about what happened, since we all saw it on the news (or first hand if you're really unlucky). A lot of crazy things happened and there's been millions of pounds of damage and stolen goods...but for what? I spent most of Monday night gripped to Sky News (I hate to admit it, but BBC were poor with their live coverage while Sky had one crazy guy filming reports on his iPhone and trying to interview looters as they go about their...well, looting), and a similar thing can be said for Tuesday night too. Who can forget the idiotic girl who, when asked what she was doing out, said "Getting my taxes".

It was pretty sad to see the riots spread across the country, and obviously I'm most saddened about things happening in Liverpool, especially since I've got friends who live in the areas where trouble was being caused. Thankfully, it looks like most of the trouble is behind us now and the country can pick itself back up, start to put the wrongs right and look to the future again.

I finally got my posters up on my wall last night after having had them rolled up on the floor since I moved in. The walls were looking a bit empty and I missed looking at the posters. However, they decided that they didn't really want to stay on the wall, despite fresh blu-tac (well, white). On the plus, this meant that Amy Pond fell on top of my at 5am this morning, and I'd never complain about that, but the posters on the other side of the room fell too. And they made a considerable amount of noise in doing so.

They certainly didn't help with my night of sleep...and I probably spent as much time awake as I did asleep. I woke at about 3.30 and felt wonderfully awake; ready and raring to go with an early start to optimise productivity for the day. Then I saw the time, and for some reason, I just couldn't get back to sleep. Eventually, I had to take the unusual route of sticking the iPod back on for a bit...and I drifted off for a short time.

"A short time." Give it another hour or so, and I was awake again and going through the same routine. This time, I was kept awake by the bathroom door banging shut, opening itself and closing again. I know why that happened, because I left the window open in there. So after getting bored of listening to that for a while, I had to get up and close that...then lie there for another hour or so before getting back to sleep again.

My sleeping pattern hasn't been great for the last few years, but it tends to alternate between waking up once or twice in the night and getting back to sleep pretty quickly and then waking up pretty much every hour and being awake for a while. So while I'm in bed until 11am or so, I'm not asleep constantly until 11am. I can maybe cut out a third of my time spent in bed from being asleep.

I tried to wash some clothes yesterday. Not a big deal, right? Wrong. In the house/flat, there are two washer/dryers, one on each floor. Yet realistically, we've got two washers. The dryer doesn't work, and I tried every single function that included "drying" my clothes to try and get them to dry, but nothing really worked. They got hot, yes...but hot doesn't necessarily mean dry. So they're now all hanging in my bathroom with the window open to try and get the breeze to help the drying process which is why the bathroom door kept slamming. Oh, that's another point. My door still hasn't been fixed. The actual handle isn't attached to the door and we're still waiting for the landlord to come and do something about that and a couple of other problems in the house too. Thankfully, I can still shut it since I've developed a makeshift handle to just close the door over and shut it.

Anyway, that's quite enough from me. I'm off to educate myself further about the world of comedy. I finally saw a full Bill Hicks stand up set, and he was one incredibly funny guy. If you haven't heard of him, do yourself a favour and check some of his stuff out on YouTube.

Back to Leeds and (hopefully) to more productivity

This will only be a short entry since it's pretty late and I'm probably heading to bed once I finish typing this. Chances are I'll be back with a longer entry at some point over the weekend or on Monday.

I'm back in Leeds for a short while. Well, until I decide to go back home, which will be sometime before the 18th of August. So I'm looking at just under two weeks here, but those plans can change based on my level of interest and amusement. I came back up here for a few reasons, mainly because I'd left all of my books in my room and felt I needed to do some work and also because I wanted to FINALLY start reading Chris Jericho's first autobiography, get the rest of the DVDs that I'd left behind (most of which are wrasslin' boxsets which Emma keeps bugging me) and get a bit of a break.

It's strange how having lived independently on my own for the last year, I love being at home, but I do like having my own space and being able to get away. Of course, it means I've got to make ALL of my meals (though it means there aren't any arguments about what to have, unless I start arguing with myself. In which case, I really have gone insane and I'm beyond all help) but that's fine by me. I've got plenty of food here anyway, so that's not a major concern.

So I've come to Leeds with good intentions and the aim of doing some work and sorting things out, but the key is actually making sure I do these things and don't spend my time sat around doing nothing. I'm not a major fan of that anyway, I feel I need to try and do something productive with my time to make it worthwhile, otherwise I may as well be sat at home doing nothing...

I'm feeling a bit limited with my movement though, so that might well play a factor. I did a good job of messing my right knee playing cricket last weekend and that hasn't healed over properly. But my left leg is the main concern now, and it is something of a concern. Something happened to it on Tuesday when I was at the pub and it caused more pain than I've experienced with it...and it even meant I was unable to be the stubborn fool I love to be and accept a lift home rather than walking. Before then, it's never really been anything more than a bit of a nuisance, but it actually started to be a problem and I've found myself hobbling around almost constantly...which surely isn't good. So if it doesn't start to feel a bit better when I head back home, I'll look into getting that checked after I return from Silverstone.

With that, it's gone 1am. The decision now isn't so simple...do I watch Torchwood from earlier in the evening, go straight to bed or catch up with Deathsquad podcasts?

Torchwood and co can wait until morning...podcasts and sleep are needed. Good night world.