I really liked to chew on the tender bit of a straw that comes just above the joint between segments. You have to kind of peel away the grass-blade bit that is on the outside of the top segment to get at the chewy centre, but I didn’t mind. In retrospect, maybe people wouldn’t have derided me for it if I hadn’t also brought bundles of the stuff into the classroom to peel and chew… Maybe. Stuff like that.

“That’s not so bad.” you might say. “I did that kind of shit when I was in first grade, too!” might be your next choice of words. I was fourteen.

Now, of course, I’ve grown up and things are a lot different. Thanks to the lessons I’ve learned through my adolescence, I’m loud, obnoxious, gangly, socially paranoid, I talk at length about shit if you give me half an indication you might find it interesting, and I don’t do quite as much weird shit without thinking. I’ll think about doing it and then think better of it.

When I was a kid, I didn’t stand out like a sore thumb. Once, before my skin had hardened, I smacked my thumb with a hammer (by accident. I wasn’t that crazy). Most of the skin on the upper half of my thumb actually loosened from the flesh of the finger and hung around it like strips of tiny, pink baby-venison. That’s the kind of thumb I stood out like.

Laboured, overly verbose similes aside, I was a bit of  a strange one. The kind of kid who caused all kinds of upset and confusion in classes but rarely actually got into trouble for it because the teachers felt sorry for me. To this day, I’m convinced some of them must have thought I was a bit… Special. I was completely unselfconsciously doing these things never thinking about the fact that someone might find them untoward.

A lot of people thought I did it to be the centre of attention. It has all the hallmarks of someone starved for attention, after all. There might be an element of this in it, but I still refuse to believe that’s the whole explanation. See, as I passed through my mid-to-late teens I started craving the ability to not stand out. I tried my best not to talk loudly at length about whatever jumped into my mind or tell jokes no one got because they weren’t privy to my own though processes (Sometimes, I’d try to explain my jokes, which just made them worse). I tried not to let my enormous energy out. Sit on your thumbs, hold your tongue. Sit on your thumbs, hold your tongue. I wonder if I can do both… *bends* Ow, no. That was a bad idea. Why are they all looking at me funny?

Josh is Mags is Josh: He effectively proves I haven't learned by portraying me very accurately in 2011.

So now I hold my jokes back if I gauge the audience not to be right for it. I don’t go on at length about coffee if I’m talking to a Starbucks customer/ employee. I try to keep my volume down. If I see a table and think I could probably jump it, I don’t jump on top of it, thump my chest and go AAAAaaaAAaaaAAAAAA!!!!

So I suppose I finally learned my lesson. I don’t stand out as much, so yay!

But I haven’t. And I do. Maybe not like a bloodied stumb of pinkish venison (what the hell am I on?) but certainly like a regular ol’ sore thumb.

It might take five minutes. Ten minutes. It could even take a whole day if I’m being really good. But sooner or later I will betray myself. And if I don’t, I’m standing there looking at that table going “No, Magnus. Don’t do it. You’ll get up there and once you run out of breath or your chest starts hurting, you’ll notice everyone looking at you. Maybe one or two will laugh. The rest will think you’re an attention-grabbing dickhead. You’re better off not doing it. Just stand there. Stop shaking.”

So what have I really learned? I suppose nothing. I still stand out, and when I stop myself doing something, I stop myself for what might be the wrong reasons alltogether. What if I did go on the table, and someone joined in? What if it turned into a delicious Tarzan-fest and we all turned out to have a fantastic time? Because that’s what I want. I want people to have a good time. And if I sometimes fail and people think I’m an attention-grabber, maybe that’s worth it.

Acting Out: Me as Robbie Rotten in Lazytown

I suppose now that I’m an actor, I have an outlet. I get to dress up in crazy outfits and frighten, delight and excite children (and some parents as well) for my work. This is making me realise that the lesson I never learned wasn’t what I need to do to not stand out, it’s that standing out is OK. And if you hold back who you are, how are you supposed to find people who think and act like you? HOW?!

And as long as you’re not standing out just for the sake of it. I still feel offended when I see people who do their best to convince people that they’re “original” and “peculiar” when really they’re just looking to create a media storm. Not that anyone would do that!

Oh God, I just gave her more attention, didn't I?

(For the record, if you click the link on that picture, I find the latter of the five interpretations most likely.)

So when I got the job at Butlins, we decided to switch banks. After some research (Well, after Marit had done some research) we decided to go for the diametrically opposite of RBS: A purely online bank. We went with First Direct.

The transition process was… Less than smooth. Mostly due to RBS’s incredibly annoying service and a speed of execution that was so slow as to seem as if it was in complete quantum lock, it took over two months to go from sending our application to First Direct to an actual account number. Granted, some of it was bad communication from FD, but I’m happy to direct my anger at RBS instead.

Aaaaanyway! The whole point of this massive wall of text was actually not to tell you about the bank we were with and the bank we left it for. It was to tell you about the conversations I had with the customer service people at First Direct yesterday and today as we were going through the final stages of setting the account up.

Yesterday, I spoke to a man who seemed very happy to speak to someone who was portraying the villain in Lazytown. His surprise at my main role seemed genuinely enthusiastic, and that makes me happy. He also made my wife happy, by referring to our joint account as being shared by “yourself and Doctor Hartveit”. We both relish any opportunity to be viewed outside traditional marriage roles. For example, at our wedding ceremony, the lady wedding us said “You may now kiss each other” at our request.

Then today, I spoke with a lovely young (by the sound of her voice) lady who took my security details. When spelling out important words, she would use the phonetic alphabet. You know, Alpha Bravo Charlie etc. Like most people I don’t know it by heart, so I asked if she was required to learn it for work. “Yes” she said. I thought this was quite cool, but what she followed up with was even better: “Before I did, I would always have to make it up. Like B for Banana and stuff. Sometimes I fall back into it, though. I’ll always say Unicorn for U, for example.”

I don’t know about you (if anyone could actually be bothered reading all the way down here), but I thought this was a brilliant idea. Imagine an alternative phonetic alphabet with mythical beasts and other wonderful things! Aragorn, Basilisk, Cerberus, Dinosaur… The list goes on!

Over and out!

PS: Did you actually read the whole thing?! I am impressed with your tenacity and stamina, and I need to keep you around, because you’re probably the only person likely to read any book I might publish.

Jones and I were on the cusp of adult life. We had no job or education, and we were both determined to leave our dingy, mouldy apartments behind and make an impact on the world. We felt equally confident in our own potential and just knew that we could climb the social ladder quicker than the other.

So we made a wager.

Goals were set for how happy, rich and educated we needed to be to win. And, of course, each of us set our sits on the highest-paying gig in town: General Manager of The Factory. Exactly what they produced in The Factory and just how we were meant to quantify our happiness, we didn’t know. We didn’t care. We were young and determined to move up in the world and nothing was going to stop us. We shook hands and went our separate ways.

I struggled. A lot. In the start, we both worked for what I’m fairly certain is an illegally low wage at Monolith Burgers. For some reason, I was rejected for the position of clerk and was stuck flipping burgers. Jones was welcomed in with open arms and was soon the assistant manager. What he said or did to that mustachioed toad in the employment agency to get ahead like that, I would rather not think about, but whatever it was he was doing, it was working.

Within five or six weeks, he was making more than double my own wage and had already worked his way up to Socket City where he was peddling their electrical goods. I kept my nose down, tried to balance work with studies and failing to such a degree that I missed a couple of payments on my rent.

But then, about nine weeks into our wager, something happened. I read in the papers that the notorious purse snatcher Wild Willie had mugged Jones and taken all his money. When I saw him in the hallway of the Security Apartments we had both moved into when the housing market took a plunge, he seemed upbeat about the whole thing. “Eh, it’s only money, right?! I’ll work it back up within the end of next week, man.” he said and shrugged his narrow shoulders under his garish Hawaiian shirt.

However, life was not so kind.

It was all over the papers: “The Economy Suffers! Jobs Lost!” the headlines read. You always assume that it’s not going to happen to you, don’t you. You’re untouchable, right? But no. We both lost our jobs that week, not that I was all that sad about not having to flip burgers any longer. After wolfing down a week’s worth of Fries (the idiot at the counter asked me if I wanted Fries with that… How was I not allowed to flip burgers while he got to stay a clerk?!) I ran down to the employment agency. My tenacity must have impressed Jabba da Tache, because he offered me the job of assistant manager right away. The market was down so the pay was no better than before, but I was finally moving.

When I came back to the apartment building, I was beaming. I knocked on Jones’ door to give him the good news. When he opened the door, he seemed his normal self. I asked if he got a job as well, but he said he’d stopped at the door and decided “you know what? I am going to enjoy some time off”. After all, he pointed out, he was way ahead of me in the wager. I tried to point out that currently, he was nowhere. Without a job and with no money, he couldn’t even eat, let alone pay his bills. He shrugged me off, called me a stick in the mud and slammed his door shut.

With Jones out of the way, and me figuring that he would probably be back on the market again as soon as he felt his stomach growling,I was speeding along. I used his downtime to take every chance I got and really working on getting that degree in engineering. With every new job, I would turn up at Jones’ door with a bottle of champagne. But every time, he would look worse and worse. He let his facial hair grow into a wild bushel, which is extraordinary as I previously wasn’t even sure he had any facial hair. He hardly ate at all, but would snap the alcohol I brought out of my hand every time I came by and start swigging it. He confessed to me that he still kept going to the employment agency every day, but for some reason couldn’t face actually applying for work. He would step inside and immediately turn away and spend the rest of his day staring out into nothing in his apartment.

Once, while I was watching him drinking himself into a stupor on an empty stomach, there was a heavy, agitated knock on his apartment door. Seeing that Jones was in no state to answer, I opened the door to find the landlord. He started to shout something, but seeing that it was me and not my friend and competitor-in-life, he only stood there gaping for a second, his face as red as the bricks in the wall at The Factory where I now worked as assistant to the engineers.
“Where’s that cretin Jones?!” he finally asked me.
“I have no idea.” I said, surprised at his ire.
“What are you doing here then?!”
“He must have left his door open, I figured I’d stay until he came back so he wouldn’t get robbed or anything.” I lied effortlessly.
“Oh, well… When he comes back, tell him to come see me in my office.”
“Yeah, sure thing doc!” I said and slammed the door in the landlord’s face. I was not at all inclined to send my friend anywhere near that massive, seething hulk of a man. As I turned my back to the door, Jones gurgled from the sofa.
“Whowazzit?!”
I sat down next to Jones and couldn’t help but notice that his Hawaiian shirt had lost its lustre and was going threadbare.
“How long has it been since you paid your rent, Jo?”
In response, he simply looked at me through red, watery eyes which were now deeply set in his emaciated, sullen face. Looking at this husk of a man who was only too recently so full of life and potential, I forgot all about our wager. I started to take out my chequebook.
“Tell me how much you owe.”
“N- No!!” Jones said, fumbling the chequebook out of my hand.
“You’re killing yourself!!”
“… ‘s not th’point. Y- yooo cannn’ helb.. me.”
I couldn’t watch this any longer. I picked my chequebook back up and walked to his front door. With my hand on the door handle, I paused. I turned around and wrote out a cheque for five hundred dollars.
“D- ddjon’t!!” protest Jones feebly, clutching my bottle of champagne and writhing in in his filthy sofa like a wronged child.
“I’m leaving it here.” I slapped the cheque demonstratively on the table by the door. “Do with it as you will.”
“Th- Thuh wager!” he sobbed.
“I don’t care about the wager… I care about you.” I turned, opened his door, and left Jones blubbering behind me.

Time wore on. My cheque was never cashed, and I couldn’t bear to knock on Jones’ door when I was promoted to General Manager at The Factory. The next time I saw him, I was on my way to buy a hot tub at Socket City when I was witness to a tragic scene outside the employment agency. Some naked man was being shoved forcibly out the double doors of the agency by the bulky man who works there. Despite the emaciated, nearly skeletal frame and the dishevelled state of his hair, the bright ginger hair, massive nose and lack of a chin was unmistakable. It was Jones. I put down my briefcase and ran over.
“What’s going on?!”
“This loon has gone far enough!!” the ‘tached Terror shouted at me.
“What’s he done?!” I asked, fully aware of the fact that he had probably taken exception to the complete lack of clothing (but surprising presence of a massive fig leaf). The man looked stunned that I could even ask him such a question, but forged on, holding Jones in a choke-hold. He didn’t struggle.
“This kook has been coming here for months now, turning and leaving without speaking to anyone! I knew there was something up with this dude, and now he’s here! Like- Like this!!”
“He hasn’t harmed anyone, though, has he?! I mean, look at the fig leaf!” The employment agency man pushed Jones away from him and looked about to slam his giant fist in my head. Thankfully, the situation dissolved as police arrived and ran at Jones. Dazed, Jones was shoved unresisting into the car and taken away. I picked my briefcase back up and walked on, vaguely curious where the police station could be, as I hadn’t ever seen it around town.

When I went to pay my rent a couple of weeks later, I got a shock as I saw Jones at the till. Not the half-dead, emaciated cave man I had come to expect him to look like, but a clean-shaven, spritely young man in a casual suit.
“Hiya, Magnus!” Jones chirped. “Long time!”
“You have no idea…” I stammered back.
After paying my rent, I invited him out for lunch. Since Monolith is the only place in town that serves food, we went to our old employer hand had a chicken burger. I couldn’t help but remark the drastic difference in him since I last saw him naked and blubbering in the street. Yes, he was still thin as a rail, but he had life once more.
He told me that an uncle had heard about his arrest and had called Jones in his cell. After Jones told him the sequence of events, his uncle paid bail for Jones and wired him some extra pocket money to get him back on his feet.
I felt slightly offended that he wouldn’t take my money, but some uncle’s cash was apparently good enough, but I didn’t press Jones about it as I knew he still considered our wager to be on even though it was a pointless battle for him at this stage.
When Jones had been escorted back to his apartment from the police station (He hadn’t paid attention to the road so couldn’t tell me where it was) he had looked around his high-status but completely empty apartment. Empty, that is, save for a cheque for five hundred dollars that still lay uncashed on his table.

He had showered, shaved and run down to Q.T Clothing with a towel wrapped around him and the cash from his uncle in his hand. He bought a casual suit and got a job at the renting agency, and here he was. Paying off his debt and quickly regaining his strength.
“It won’t be long before I catch up with you and win the wager!” he said with a small laugh.
“I always wondered, though…” he continued. “What do they produce at the factory?”
In answer, I threw my hands in the air.
“Damned if I know!!” I shouted, and we both roared with laughter. As I left to go back to my job, thinking how happy I was to see him back in full vigour.

It didn’t take him long to spring back. Two months later, he was debt free and worked in The Factory as an executive secretary. By the time of our wager’s one-year anniversary, I had already reached our wager’s goals for job and education (having finished every single degree the university offered) and was well on my way to both the happiness and money goals. When I finally “won”, I met with Jones in the same booth at Monolith. He was vibrant. He was now an investment banker and made almost as much money as I did. His studies were going well, and he was heavily investing in the stock market, feeling certain that T-Bills were going to pick up any day now.

“Congratulations, Magnus.” he said. “I always knew you’d win.”
Imaged flitted through my mind: A young, ginger assistant manager at Monolith, a bearded and unkempt man with no future, an uncashed cheque, a naked man staring mournfully at me from the window of a police car. And then I looked into the bright eyes of this successful banker and stock broker. A man who had gone to the edge and come back fighting.
“No.” I said as I shook my head.
“You win, my friend. You win.”

A month and a week ago now I left Edinburgh to do four shows at the Butlins holiday resort in Minehead: Lazytown Live, Brainiac Live, Looneytunes and the Aladdin panto. Since then, we’ve rehearsed and opened the former two, and the latter two are coming up in the next month. Both Brainiac and Lazytown have been amazing experiences, with dedicated crews and casts and amazing response from the audience. Everyone’s been very complimentary about my work, especially as Robbie Rotten in Lazytown, so I suppose I’m doing something right. It boggles my mind a tad, though, as I’m the only one who doesn’t have to learn a single proper dance routine. All I do is character. Charlotte, who plays Stephanie in Lazytown, has particularly impressed me throughout. Also: Paul, our Sportacus, has helped me with cartwheels and handstands and is an all-round lovely guy and (as I recently discovered from his underwear) a massive Star Wars geek. Score!

I find myself missing the cast of the Brainiac shows in the other resorts since rehearsals. We had a great time and they’re all really lovely people.

ALSO since then, my iPhone has been stolen, meaning that my online video recording device is gone. It’s been two weeks since that happened, and due to various circumstances I really can’t be arsed to share it’s going to be another week or two until I have a new phone and will be able to make videos again. On the plus side: We decided to order the new and updated Macbook Pro at the same time!

I’m missing Marit so much these days. I can’t wait for April to roll around and I can go back to Edinburgh for ten days.

Once I have a phone and I have the time to make a video, I’ll get back on the Youtubes. ’till next time: Spread the peace and the love!

Also, my parents are in town. They’re leaving tomorrow morning. It’s been unexpectedly great to have them here. Don’t get me wrong, I always love seeing my family, but it was especially nice to have them over to watch my play. It’s probably the age-old need for validation from one’s parents coming back to haunt.

The parent-child dynamic doesn’t really ever change. When I’m my dad’s age, I’ll still be his kid, and he’ll still be my dad. I’ll probably still breathlessly be telling him about this new game I’ve been playing and he’ll still be looking at me as if I’m from another planet. We want to impress our parents, and our parents want to understand our world, but at the same time we do not and cannot ever fully understand each other. When my dad grew up, he’d play in the streets because a car would only pass every half hour, if even that. My parents were both grown people when Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong put their feet on the moon. They can remember a time when they didn’t have a TV. I can hardly even remember a time I didn’t have a computer. In fact, I can’t. We’ve had a C64 since I was four. My nephew was searching for videos on Youtube at three years old. We can never fully know one another across such chasms of culture, history and technology.

It’s a crazy, weird problem that isn’t really a problem once you think about it. Once we accept that we are different like that and that we will always be each other’s parents and children.

Anyway, so yeah. It was a great feeling that they would come to see my play even if it is just a half-hour children’s play and not even paid work. It’s nice you have the support of the people who brought you into this world, innit?

To the onlines I went, and I discovered that several sources agreed on stress being a factor in developing sores. None of the other possible causes seemed to fit my situation, so I guess it’s a bad-news-good-news sort of thing: Yay, I don’t have some kind of mutating super-herpes. Boo, this past half a year (and particularly the last few months) has been really, really stressful.

I already knew I was stressed out and overworked, but this gives extra evidence of such a state.
Oh well, two more weeks and I’m done… I hope.

ALSO, Mike Rooth ( @uncouthrooth on Twitter ) has offered to do a commision for me! I won’t tell you what it is just yet, but I’ll let you know it’s going to be made of awesome. Just look at this dude’s portfolio! He’s amazing! I can’t wait to see the finished product.

Right. Time to get back to work.

I’ve decided that once I finish university, I will focus on acting for a while. Even in my first year, when my friend Kerry told me he never understood why I didn’t go into performance of some sort instead of production, the seed of doubt was sown in my choice of direction. It made me realise that the only things that have ever actually made me happy during my life have been performance related. The years since that day have been kind of spent waiting for this education malarky to finish so I could go do what I wanted to do all along.

That’s not to say my education has been a failure or a waste. In life, there is no such thing as a waste. If you look at it the right way, everything we do has value in some sense. Admittedly, it’s hard to find the real value in having seen every episode of Poirot ever made or in playing Fallout 3 for hours on end, but it’s there. You just need to find out what you learned from it and how you can use that going forward.

I didn’t intend to make this post a cheesy motivational speech about “Achieving your inner potential”, so I’ll move on.

During the last few weeks, in the midst of all this craziness, I’ve auditioned for Fringe shows, had headshots taken (as you can see) and applied for a student equity membership. Equity is basically the trade union for actors on film and stage and all sorts of people in stage production. Without it, it’s hard to get work. I’ve also started tentatively looking for an agent.

I don’t harbour any illusions that I will “make it big” or anything like that. Fame would be nice and all, but mainly because it assures economic security for a while. Mainly, I just want to do something with my life that makes me happy. I take great pleasure in a job well done, be it editing, photography or sound design, but the process doesn’t always appeal to me. In fact, sometimes it plunges me into bouts of depression that rival everything else I’ve ever encountered. Lately, I’ve learned to get out of it without needing massive amounts of outside help, but it’s not pleasurable in any way. Acting is very straight-forward. You do your thing, and if it doesn’t quite work, you modify what you’re doing. And you know immediately if it’s not right, because you’ll either feel it or people will tell you.

Maybe it’s a pipe dream. Maybe I can never make a living off acting. I’ll find out, won’t I? I have an audition for The Edinburgh Dungeons in a little over a week, which means a paid, possibly permanent position acting. It’s minimum wage, but the operative word here is wage. And experience. I really hope I get it.

That’s how much. The site says “You’re confusingly hetero. Your friends know. Your family know. You’re probably the only one who isn’t sure on where you stand.”

I would say that this analysisation is fairly inaccurate, as I did get married to a girl and have had very little sexual contact with male persons over the years. Apparently, this thing analyses your twitter feed to see how hetero you are. Quite funny.

Slog #6