Life Begins to End at 20

School prepares you for adulthood in the same way driving lessons prepare you for being hit by a bus. I say this because I'm turning 20 next week and that means that I've been adulting on a semi-professional level for two years, and I can honestly say that only about 10% of the things I learnt at school have had any practical use in the real world.

I can't remember how to do Pythagoras's theorem, I've never used long multiplication, I've never had to divide or multiply a fraction by another fraction because why would anyone ever need to do that, and George shoots Lennie. I still don't know anything about tax, I have no idea how to go about buying a car or renting a flat, and I still can't fucking speak French.

It's been four years since I left school and in that time I still don't know what all the fuss was about. Five years of glorifying people who got 10 GCSEs at no less than A* making younger kids aspire to reach this unrealistic frankly ludicrous goal, and two years of pressuring kids into getting the required grades to get into college. This was usually 3 Cs including English and maths, and 2 Bs in whatever, and it turns out you only need two; English and maths at a C or above. In order to get a real life job which pays real life money with plenty of opportunities to climb the real life career ladder, you only need two GCSEs. That's it. Two. And nobody at any point tells you that experience is the most valuable thing to have when looking for work which you will definitely have to do, so in the end, all that stress and all the revision and all the cramming was for nothing.

But it doesn't end there, oh no. If you do end up at sixth form college, you'll subject to two more years of "you must get into uni or will actually die for real."
College was better than school, but only in the sense that it wasn't school. It was just like school, though, only sometimes you had to stay until 4pm and you could call your teachers (now ostensibly called "tutors") by their first names, and you didn't have to wear a uniform. But you still had homework, bullies, senior members of staff who hadn't got a clue, and you quite often still had to ask to go to the toilet only to be denied because you were expected to be able to schedule your bowel movements. As for the whole grades thing, you're told for two years that you must get at least 120 UCAS points to get a place onto most bachelor's degree courses. Turns out that's bollocks as well, because I got A levels so poor they're barely worth mentioning on my CV, and I was told "Well at least you've got A levels." which is like telling someone with paraplegia "Well at least you've got legs." But even with my what are technically passing grades, I still managed to technically get into university. It wasn't quite what I wanted at the time, but I was at uni.

But of course I dropped out of uni and life subsequently shat in my soup and chucked me in at the deep end and now I'm 20 and I have no idea what I'm doing send help.

Being Terminally Ill Has An Upside.

My favourite thing about having cystic fibrosis is the fact that my digestive system is faulty in just such a way that I could, if I wanted/could afford to, eat KFC five times a day for a year and maintain a healthy weight. I mean, I'd have terrible teeth and skin, but I'd only be about 70 kilos which, I have to say, is a marked improvement on my current weight.

The reason I can do this is because the cells in my pancreas that produce the enzymes essential to digesting my food are permanently on strike, I am therefore prescribed pancreatin capsules which contain a mixture of said enzymes. However, solely relying on pancreatin to digest everything I eat means my digestion of essential nutrients is less effective than it would otherwise be were I not terminally ill. When my chemical structure was being made my genes decided to not do the thing that would allow my body to effectively absorb salt and fats, which sounds brilliant and yes, I am very thin as a result, but salt and fats are things that your body needs in order to be not dead, so without pancreatin I do run a risk of being malnourished while still stuffing my face because it'll come out at more or less the same rate it goes in.

If I become malnourished (and that is not a big 'if'), my lung function collapses, which takes my already shite immune system with it, opening me right up to all kinds of delightful infections which make me actually properly ill, cause me to lose my appetite (which is serious), and then I quite literally start wasting away. Because that's called 'decomposition' and it's what happens after you die, which is what would happen to me in this, the very worst case scenario. It's worth mentioning at this point that it would take time for that scenario to progress, although I don't actually know how much time so it may well be less time than I think. Thankfully, neither I, my mother, nor any of the medical professionals closely associated with my well-being have never, and hopefully will never, let it get quite that bad. Although I have been in hospital several times over the last fifteen years as a result of my own negligence, but I'll gloss over that.

MySpace and Bebo: The Vast Abandoned Cities of the Internet

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Souperiority

I imagine there's a huge debate going on that's been raging for some decades between scientists, linguists, and people who haven't got any friends about whether you eat soup, or drink it. I've been thinking a lot about this recently and I've come to the conclusion that I don't give a dog's arsehole. As far as I'm concerned, if it's thin enough to be drunk from a mug, you drink it but if it's thick enough to be eaten with a fork, you eat it. It's not a difficult concept.

I've always been a connoisseur of soup, so I know when I'm eating a bad one and similarly a good one. I can prove I know soups by making a damn fine lentil, a bloody marvellous potato, and a really rather splendid French onion. Although, anyone can make a good French onion soup because it's impossible to make a bad one. All it is is chopped and sauteed onions with beef stock, and if you make a fuckery of that then you aren't fit to live among society and you must be sectioned. I'm looking at you Heinz.

Seriously, who have they got taste-testing the soups that Heinz make? Homeless people? East African children? When it comes to making soup, Heinz get everything wrong. It's like they're going out of their way to mass-produce the world's worst soups. All of their soups, except maybe their cream of tomato, are bits of mushy vegetables submerged in tasteless slime. I've had better tasting phlegm. Whose idea was it to put cornflour in soup? You don't put cornflour in soup! Cornflour goes in gravy! Is soup gravy? No! It is not! Heinz, you do well with your condiments, you really do. You set the benchmark with your beans. But by the power of Greyskull, sort your soups out. Why, for the love of God, do you put chunks of what I think is supposed to be carrot in every fucking soup you inflict upon the general public? If I've paid for a pea and ham soup I expect to find a soup made out of split or fresh peas and with bits of ham in the soup, not a bowl of snot in which you've submerged lumps of all the vegetables you found behind Asda along with WHOLE FUCKING PEAS and cubes of some poor animal's rectum.

It's really fucking easy to make a large quantity of good quality soup. Waitrose can do it, Baxter's can do it, even I can fucking do it. So what the fuck, Heinz? Soup is really easy to make well if you follow a familiar recipe that works, it's when you start experimenting shit goes wrong. For instance, once I left some onions, some red lentils, and a bay leaf to simmer for ten minutes longer than I usually leave it and I managed to burn the soup onto the pan, but even that was preferable to Heinz's bullshit.

A bowl of actual bull's shit is preferable to Heinz's bullshit.

Well Fuck Me Backwards, it's Only a New Bloody Year!

Well how the fuck about that then? Another year, except with a new number in it, which replaces the old number! Look at that! Isn't that something?

Well I never.

Because my internet connection's a stupid bastard, it's incapable of doing two things at once, so I'm going to make this brief;

Some of you will have a good year, and some of you will have a shit year. That's just how life works. So I can't wish you all a happy new year if some of you are only going to go and have a shit one. It will make me feel bad, it'll make you feel bad. God will be angry.

Besides, it's the fifth of January. We should have got this new year's gubbins over with by now.

Dear-oh-dear. 

Get a Load of this Shit

Okay so on Friday at uni everyone on the course and I learnt a bunch of shit about the course we weren't told about because the guy who directs the course, a well disguised Welshman called Paul, wasn't allowed to by his superiors but totally told us anyway because fuck them. Myself and the one other guy who turned up on time that morning were happy to have this new information, but a bit annoyed that we weren't told this earlier but whatever. The other people, however, were "outraged" by this three month long misinformation. These people are so easy to "outrage" it's scarcely believable. Everything outrages them. Most of the time, they don't even know what the fuck they're outraged by. The printer runs out of toner; OUTRAGE, they can't listen to their shitty music out loud when other people are trying to meet a deadline; OUTRAGE, they're not allowed to eat fucking chips in the fucking classroom during a fucking lesson; fucking OUTRAGE! Jesus H Christ, get a grip you entitled, hair-brained fuck-ups.

This is what happens when you start a course occupied almost entirely by BTEC students (no offense to BTEC students who aren't cunts), because BTEC students are about as easy to engage as reverse gear with a gearbox that's missing reverse gear. I should have worked harder at college. Kids: work hard in college; save yourself the trouble.

I'm going for a shower now because I smell like warm stilton and corpses.

This Fucking Course I Swear to God

I have no idea who to interview. I can do the voiceovers soon, and I can also do the voiceovers for the radio assignment in one sitting. I have no clue what I’m doing. I’m not even sure about this idea anymore. I only did it because I’m sleep-deprived and it seemed like a good idea. It’s not a good idea; it’s a fucking terrible idea. Why did I think this was a good idea? Yeah, I’ll do a TV interview about TV interviews, oh how witty and original, good job, Sam. Why are these cunts so loud? Whose attention are they trying to get? There are, including myself, four other people in this room, and none of us give a fuck. You don’t need to talk so loudly and incessantly for such a long time, you had break time to do that shit. I can’t work with these loud cunts. I used to be able to work with over 20 loud cunts all being loud, because I could block out their noise, but that was the better part of a decade ago, and I’ve lost that ability. Could you not at least lower your voices, you’re all less than a metre from each other. You all think you’re the shit because you’re at uni; get real, shitlords. Okay one of them started singing then another one accidentally harmonised and all three of them made a loud fucking “woo” noise in surprise. You people are going to cost us all a fucking degree, do you know that you arseholes? Do you even care? I doubt it. You’re only here because you get a student loan and a grant which you’ve no doubt already spent on various pointless things you don’t need and going to Gatecrasher on a fucking Tuesday. I bet you’re all on overdraft. You’re supposed to be spending that shit on shit you actually need, and no, booze is not something you need, and if it is you have a problem and you need help. Oh God, one’s just figured out how gold-diggers work. There are two girls and a guy and the guy keeps making feeble, vaguely creepy attempts at flirting with them. One of the girls just referred to Kanye West as a “black care bear” and they all started laughing really fucking loudly oh god please get dysentery. Earlier, the loudest girl (who happens to be from Manchester so she has an accent as well) said it was an “outrage” that the printer was running out of toner. “What are they spending the money we’re giving them on?” Okay first of all: you’re not giving them any money, Student Finance England is; second of all: Birmingham Metropolitan College isn’t getting said money, Birmingham City University is. Now they’re fighting over biscuits. Seriously. Deep fucking joy.