Sunday: Word up!

It’s the last day of The DOTY Project trial, marking and/or celebrating lesser-known occasions as listed by daysoftheyear.com. It’s been a fun and varied week and I wish it were carrying on for at least another seven days, as that would cover Chocolate Cupcake Day (yum!), Hagfish Day (ewww!) and Caps Lock Day (SHOUTY SHOUTY!). Still, the full project will start on 1^st January 2012 and continue until 31^st December, covering all 366 days of that leap year.

It was a nice way for me to end the week as I’m a lover of words and the books that reference them, and today just happened to be Dictionary Day. But it made me think how only three years ago, when I started writing my first book, I invariably used printed versions of these resources, from a traditional dictionary and thesaurus to a rhyming dictionary, dictionary of phrase and fable, slang dictionary, dictionary of synonyms and antonyms and even a dictionary of art terms. These days I get all of this information online as I’m writing, saving myself time and paper cuts but not fully appreciating the secondary point of a dictionary: the browse factor.

It’ll sound sad to many people, but I used to love flipping through the pages to find the word I needed, only to first read a dozen other entries that caught my eye. Listings the likes of lollapalooza, ragamuffin, zigzaggedly, bucolic, magnanimous, prosaic, ephemeral, asinine and phantasmagoria; strange forms that would not so much leap off the page as pull you into it. Then there’s one of my all-time favourite words: interrobang.

An interrobang is a nonstandard punctuation mark that combines the question mark (sometimes called the interrogative point) and the punctuation mark (known in printers’ jargon as the ‘bang’). If there were ever a political party that held the addition of this symbol to all computer keyboards as one of their policies, I’d be crossing their box in a flash! I was going to paste an interrobang into this text as it’s easily found online, such as on its Wikipedia entry, but just in case someone has a browser that doesn’t appreciate boldly peculiar punctuation, I’ve added it as an image. Isn’t it beautiful?

Anyway, I feel I’ve gone off on a tangent. To celebrate the day I spent a while skimming my Collins English Dictionary (Seventh Edition 2005), digesting the definitions of bedim (to make dim or obscure), saturnism (another name for lead poisoning) and kaka beak (an evergreen climbing shrub), among others. I then visited Dictionary.com and played Word Dynamo, achieving between 77 and 100% in various games. (I admit that I got the meaning of uropygium wrong, but I did get bumptious right.)

But halfway through the day, another occasion was added to the DOTY website for 16^th October: Steve Jobs Day. Now, I can’t say that this took me by surprise because I’d already read about it online, but suddenly I had to come up with a way of showing my respect for the recently departed innovator, co-founder of Apple Inc and one of the true forward thinkers of recent years. Still, I didn’t have to ponder over this for long, as it gently hit me that I was typing on a Mac, listening to music through iTunes whilst charging my iPod. I’ve been a Mac man (that sounds like a game character) for over ten years and could never be persuaded to use anything else at home. So, though quick and simple, I posted this tweet on my Twitter feed:

#stevejobsday, remembering the man who made one lower case letter a symbol of our time: iMac, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, iPad. Steve, iThankyou.

And now I reckon it’s time for me to wrap up this post and say farewell to The DOTY Project, but only for seventy-six days as that’s when the full version begins. How exciting / thrilling / intoxicating / electrifying / invigorating!

Check out #dictionaryday and #stevejobsday on Twitter and see how others around the world are marking these occasions.

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Dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.

Samuel Johnson, Lexicographer

 I want to put a ding in the universe.

Steve Jobs

Saturday: A bridge too far (to fit into my day’s schedule)

It’s the sixth and penultimate day of this writing project. I’ve been doing really well, managing to mark quite difficult editions such as Tuesday’s, when I had to temporarily come out of the closet despite not being gay. Today’s, Bridge Day, should have been an easy one because I live in Hull, which has the Humber Bridge very close by. But then life rarely is easy, wouldn’t you agree?

Daysoftheyear.com explains that the inspiration behind the occasion is the gathering of over 200,000 people to watch base jumpers plummet from the New River Gorge Bridge in Fayettevilla, West Virginia. My plan was far more simple: visit the Humber Bridge with my mam to have a walk along the foreshore and take some snaps, or maybe even go up and admire the view from below the steel cables. Instead, I spent the morning at my grandma’s before taking some photos of a work event at St Stephen’s Shopping Centre (specifically, a stilt walker wearing a big red wig), and then going home to sleep off the hangover after Friday’s heavy night out.

I didn’t even manage to leave the house in the afternoon to visit the nearby freight railway bridge. The tracks run past the end of my terrace and the footpath tunnel, less than five minutes’ walk from my front door, boasts some vivid community paintings. But instead I snored away the afternoon and early evening, waking when it was too late to visit a poorly lit area where you could rightly expect to have your wallet or liver forcibly removed.

Still, I wasn’t willing to let my lethargy breed apathy, so I built this humble little bridge on my living room carpet using a few books, one of them being Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge. Mehehe!

I think now I’ll watch Iron Man on DVD. You might ask how that’s relevant, to which I would reply that the villain is played by none other than the top-class actor Jeff Bridges.

Check out #bridgeday on Twitter and see how others around the world are marking the occasion. I hope the weather was nice in Fayettevilla.

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Quick fact: The famous painting of the Forth Bridge will soon come to an end due to the application of glass flake epoxy paint.

Read more at the BBC website

Friday: You must be yolking!

Ah, Egg Day, delighted to make your acquaintance. I must say that I love everything you stand for. You're a food enjoyed by all, from toddler to geriatric, king to convict, and you always remind me of the sun, even when you're not served sunny side up.

After a rather challenging week, with Native Americans, homosexuality, teddy bears and facing fears, daysoftheyear.com is giving me a real Friday treat. I bloomin' love eggs: fried, poached or scrambled; with pepper, ketchup or brown sauce; as part of a greasy fry-up or in a protein-rich sarnie; boiled with soldiers or transmogrified into an omelette; and regardless of time of day, location or hunger levels, I can't get enough of the little tinkers!

Without even realising I began the festivities at 1am, when I returned home from an unscheduled night out and prepared, then demolished, a fried egg sandwich on wholemeal bread. No wonder I dreamed about chickens all night.

Arriving at work, I was elated to find that a colleague had made me a gift. His name's Eggbert and I've been told he's meant to look like Hitler. I guess he has to resemble someone, right?

As part of lunch I planned on buying some Creme Eggs and eating them in a variety of ways, demonstrating the effectiveness of their marketing campaign, but the newsagent didn't stock them so I ended up with a transparent bag of what looked like Cadbury's Mini Eggs. They turned out to be Peanut M&Ms, but they were mostly egg-shaped.

I was tempted to get caviar from Tesco but decided that fish eggs were one step too far. Plus I had no idea which aisle they were down and would feel pretentious asking a member of staff, only to be told to try Waitrose.

I'm going out for the night now but I've managed to read Egg Story before leaving. Never heard of it? I urge you to buy a copy! It's only three quid and even if you're not a fan of graphic novels there's an 87% chance you'll love it. Trust me, I know my egg-themed graphic novels better than any man living.

Right, I'm off. Make sure to get some eggs down yer gullet!

Check out #eggday on Twitter and see how others around the world are marking the occasion. Messily I hope, that's the best way!

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He that would have eggs must endure the cackling of hens.

Proverb

Thursday: Feel the fear and poo your pants anyway

Today is Face Your Fears Day. It should have been an easy challenge really, at least in terms of planning, though perhaps not so much in implementation. However, this morning I found myself truly stumped, and as the day progressed I remained just as clueless.

Checking the corresponding page on daysoftheyear.com, it gave the following suggestion:

‘Take a moment to consider what your life might be like if you conquered some of your greatest fears.’

Sage advice and very inspiring, yet still I couldn’t plot a single course of action; this really was hugely frustrating.

I think my problem is that, though far from being a tough, unflinching person, I’ve conquered numerous fears over the last decade or so. When I was a kid and teenager I thought I’d never get a job, study at university, move out, have a girlfriend, tell anyone about my writing, speak in front of an audience or even go to a club, all because I was so scared of life. Very silly, granted, but also incredibly incapacitating.

Nevertheless, at the age of eighteen I started working at Morrisons and began my History degree at Hull University; the following year I moved out and continued the student lifestyle of getting drunk and dancing like an idiot four nights a week. I’ve had relationships over the years and finally, in 2008, I began sharing my random fiction and poetry with an ever-growing audience, with a collection released in 2009 and many public readings and some press and radio interviews soon following. I’m even really good at killing spiders these days, which I admit is cruel but a boon for a lifetime arachnophobe; plus I can eat in public, having felt unnecessarily self-conscious as a youth.

So I spent hours scratching my head and kicking myself for drawing blank after blank. There was nothing feasible that sprung to mind, nothing short of doing some impromptu and highly lethal bungee jumping from the nearest block of flats. But then, when it looked as though I might have to give up and declare the day a write off, it hit me like a ton of Lego bricks: I have an intense fear of writer’s block.

I’m currently 60,000 words (most likely 60%) into a novel and have been for almost six months. This scares the hell out of me, yet I know that I’ll finish it because it’s extremely important to me. I even get annoyed when I can’t think of a Twitter post, yet I never allow my feed to go without an update for more than 24 hours. So the threat of failing this project simply because I couldn’t think of what to write was the push I needed to face that very fear. Nearing the end of today's post, I am now relieved and delighted; and I hope that you, whoever you may be, managed to overcome a fear too.

So, shall I go clubbing or just eat something in public? Decisions, decisions.

Check out #faceyourfearsday on Twitter and see how others around the world are marking the occasion. (Most probably with shrieks and screams.)

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The only thing we have to fear is fear itself. That, and flying Nazi robots.

Franklin D. Roosevelt (adapted by Richard Sutherland)

Wednesday: ‘Bearfaced’ cheek!

Well, this is a pretty simple one, hence the relative brevity of the blog post. Today is Bring Your Teddy Bear to Work and School Day. Yep, seriously, I swear that daysoftheyear.com are purposefully trying to make me look like a total tool. Still, I can’t quit when I’ve already baked cornbread and temporarily come out the closet just for the sake of this project, so now it’s time for Teddy Potts to be treated to a day trip.

Teddy Potts was my childhood teddy bear; he’s now thirty years old and sits atop my wardrobe, gathering dust like a… dust-gathering thing… a feather duster maybe? Anyway, he sits up there, covered in my discarded skin flakes, obscured from view by various bits and bobs that have been bunged up near the ceiling out of sight, and has done since I moved into my house over five years ago. So it was actually rather sentimental and nostalgic, lifting him down from his corner and taking him to the office, not to mention quite bizarre.

Arriving at work, he peeked out of my bag for the first few hours before finding the courage to climb onto the desk and read a few emails. He got to see the workings of a marketing team, have a brew in the kitchen and even breathe in the many scents of the gents’ toilet. Come 5.15pm, having done his job, he joined me on the walk home via a salon for a haircut, all whilst hiding inside my satchel.

So that’s it really. He’s back on top of the wardrobe now, happy to gather another year’s dust until the next edition of this special day. But I’m sure he’s refreshed from this experience, or at the very least he’s had a good airing.

Check out #bringyourteddybeartoworkandschoolday on Twitter and see how others around the world are marking the occasion… although I doubt there’ll be many tweets, as it takes up 37 of the 140 allocated characters!

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Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear.

Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair.

Fuzzy Wuzzy wasn't fuzzy,

was he?

Unknown author

Tuesday: Where oh where is that closet door?

This morning saw the start of the second instalment of the daysoftheyear.com project and already I felt daunted. Yesterday was Native American Day so I’d bought a dreamcatcher, listened to Jamiroquai (good enough), read up on relevant facts and legends and even made cornbread for the first time ever. I’d assumed that day would be hard to celebrate in Hull but it actually turned out quite well. Then the sun rose this morning and I was faced with a much more demanding challenge: Coming Out Day.

Yep, you read it right, Coming Out Day. How am I supposed to do that if I’m not gay? I guess I could pretend but then surely that would go against everything this day stands for: understanding, acceptance and respect. Whilst sipping my coffee before setting off to work, I considered doing a constant impersonation of Bruce from Family Guy. However, I then realised that aside from this also not being in line with the meaning of the day, I’d probably have an office stapler thrown at my head for being annoying.  

I don’t own any gay pride badges (which is fair enough, being straight) so I cut a triangle out of a pink Post-it note and popped it on my jacket pocket. I knew that the pink triangle was a symbol for gay men but had no idea what its origins were, so I quickly checked Wikipedia on my phone during the bus journey to work. I was amazed to discover that it had originally been used as a Nazi concentration camp badge to denote homosexual men, whereas a black triangle signified that a woman was a lesbian. This is probably common knowledge but I had no idea, so already I'd learnt something.

Now, this is probably terribly cliché and obvious, but I listened to Electric Six’s ‘Gay Bar’ on my iPod a few times. Their album Fire is an old favourite of mine, having seen them perform it live at Hull University. Plus you just can’t beat the track's lyrics: “I’ve got something to put in you, at the gay bar, gay bar, gay bar!” Sheer rhapsodic genius.

The rest of the afternoon, however, was a total failure. I couldn’t think of anything that would mark Coming Out Day without making fun of it, or which I had the guts to do. I couldn’t even muster the courage to visit WH Smith’s to buy a copy of Gay Times. Plus I’d lost my pink triangle, no doubt somewhere between Greggs and Poundland, which was most annoying because all of the Post-it notes at the office are yellow.

I finished work at the usual time but was due at a marketing event in Grimsby. Arriving home at 9pm, I felt disappointed that I hadn’t really achieved anything for this day and wracked my brains for a solution. Suddenly leaping to action, I decided to be a man. A gay man, that is. A gay man via social networking! Accessing my Facebook account settings, I scrolled to ‘Interested in’, deselected ‘Women’ and clicked ‘Men’. Then, with a deep breath, I saved this simple change. However, Facebook didn’t make a big song and dance of it on my profile, so I complemented this with the status ‘Richard Sutherland is now interested in men.’

At 11pm I’d received one question, five comments and three Likes, not to mention a proposition. A mate pointed out that no one had suggested I'd been fraped, which was a very good point. Oh, and all of the sidebar adverts were inviting me to go on a date with men in uniform; how very kind of Facebook to cater to my new tastes so promptly. 

Having returned my sexual orientation to its original setting, I feel I can retire to bed a better person. I woke this morning having no idea what it’s like to come out. Now, despite it lasting only two hours and being solely online, I feel stronger, more liberated, and have a sudden interest in whatever Gok Wan has to say about hot pants.

Check out #comingoutday on Twitter and see how others around the world are marking the occasion (chances are a fair few of them feel like a weight’s been lifted from their shoulders).

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Mine is a Shakespearean love: all the parts are played by men.

Gay saying

Monday: A time of smoke signals and teepees

Today wasn’t just the start of the week, it was the start of ‘The Week’. For these seven days I’m marking and/or celebrating whatever daysoftheyear.com tells me to, and today just happens to be Native American Day. Well, in South Dakota.

But the thing is I don’t live in South Dakota, I live in Hull, England, and there’s not really any Native American culture round these parts. Or I don’t think there is anyway; hang on, let me just Google it again… Nope, nothing whatsoever, nothing with effective search engine optimisation at least. So I was on my own as I set out to pay tribute to this special occasion, but that’s good because I could let the day take me where it saw fit.

Being on the ball for once, I’d already bought a dreamcatcher and hung it above my bed. Unfortunately it must have fallen down during the night and I’d rolled over and crushed it, making it look like I’d wrestled a chicken in my sleep. However, I hadn’t had any bad dreams, despite the drawing pin that was lost somewhere within the sheets, so it still counted as a success.

On the way to work I listened to Jamiroquai’s ‘Black Crow’, which I think is a Native American themed song. The band name certainly is, referencing the Iroquai tribe, and to be honest that’s the closest I could get on the Number 15 at 8:30am (knowing my luck there was probably a Sitting Bull lookalike upstairs playing Angry Birds).

Skipping ahead a few hours, I read a bit about the day’s inspiration online. It was just bite-sized facts over a banana and cup of tea: not exactly a relevant food, but relevant food for thought. Did you know, for instance, that Native Americans make up 1.5% of the US population, and that over 87,000 of those 4.5 million members live in New York? That’s pretty nifty info to find out, no matter what day it is.

Popping out of the office around 1:30pm, I headed for Kathmandu, a cool independent shop that sells all kinds of exotic and tribal knickknacks. I was planning on having my photo taken next to the wooden statue of a Native American that stands proudly outside the shop, but instead kept on walking when the two fellas sat smoking outside and large amount of passing traffic gave me stage fright. Just call me ‘Flees from Everything’.

At home I cursed myself for not owning Pocahontas on DVD, so instead I popped Avatar on in the background as I baked some cornbread for the first time ever. Now, I’m not a kitchen person, in fact I can’t remember the last time I prepared a meal that didn’t end with the words ‘on toast’, but my cornbread turned out pretty damn nice! I got the recipe from this blog and added dried cranberries, as they’re a Native American food too. The result was a tasty sponge-like loaf, which included a portion of my five a day. Mmm-mm, wholesome!

Finally, I read a short segment in American Passages: A History of the United States (page 560), which explained how the Native Americans’ resistance came to a sudden end. I already knew this information from a history programme but it was still moving to read. Basically, the white man killed practically all of the buffalo, which were essential to the natives for food, shelter and clothing. However, the bit that was truly distressing was this:

…the cultural impact was even more severe. Buffalo represented the continuity of nature…

Simply put, we destroyed the foundations upon which their entire society, belief system and spiritual wellbeing had been built, all in the name of what we called progress. That put a bit of a downer on my otherwise fun day, but I guess it was an essential component.

And so there we have it, the first instalment of what I hope will continue to be a very fulfilling week. I think tomorrow might prove an even more demanding task and I honestly don’t know how I’m going to achieve it, but I’ll certainly give it a go. That’s the point of this project after all, seizing each day and finding out what it has in store. And like I say, tomorrow’s going to be a humdinger!

Check out #nativeamericanday on Twitter and see how others around the world are marking the occasion. I bet you I’m the only one that mentions listening to Jamiroquai on the bus.

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Treat the earth well,

it was not given to you by your parents,

it was loaned to you by your children.

Native American proverb

How to get attention, spice up your life and avert a midlife crisis in less than 400 easy steps

I’ve decided I want to start a new writing project. I’ve already released a fiction collection and I’m currently penning a novel, but I want to write something else regardless. (I’m a writer: I always want to start a new project, it’s in my nature. Whether I actually write anything down is another matter entirely.)

This project will be non-fiction. More to the point it will share a journey, but a journey for which I don’t have to do any travelling. Please don’t get me wrong, I’d love to travel but the odds are against me: I’m rubbish at saving money, I need a new passport, I’ve not even worked at eskimosoup for three months yet and I’ve got two other mouths to feed (albeit cat mouths, but they’re like mini black holes). So yeah, a journey that will enable me to enrich my life but which is low-cost, localised and long-term. Shouldn’t prove too difficult, surely?

Actually, yes it will. Of course it will. Bugger.

Then it hits me, the solution to my conundrum. There’s a nifty website called daysoftheyear.com (hence 'The DOTY Project') that gives information on… well, the days of the year. But it’s not the obvious ones like Christmas Day, Bonfire Night and Shrove Tuesday, it’s the lesser known ones that are quirky and extremely specific, such as VCR Day (how retro), Dress Up Your Pet Day (how amusing) and Hug a Plumber Day (how potentially perilous).

So what I’m going to do, and bear with me on this, is write a blog post every day in 2012. That’s 365 days, 365 blog posts, 365 random and possibly obscure things celebrated, marked or promoted. Oh, hang on a tick… Right, I’ve checked my calendar and 2012 is a leap year, so it’ll be 366 days. Challenge accepted!

In order to prepare myself for such a Herculean feat (he only had twelve tasks, I have 366!), I’m going to have a trial run the week commencing Monday 10th October. There are some real doozies that week, oh yes indeed. I won’t tell you what they are, although obviously you can check the website for yourself, but either way I promise it’ll make good reading. I prophesise that the whole project will be a rewarding journey, one of appreciation, experimentation and most likely a whole host of misunderstandings with hilarious outcomes. Stay tuned.

Oh, and just so you know, I’ve kind of already started. Today, Wednesday 28th September 2011, is Good Neighbour Day, and whilst walking down my terrace on the way home from work, I made a conscious effort not to dropkick any of the local toddlers, so I’m off to a good start. I do, however, have more pent-up aggression this evening than usual. What a difference a day makes.

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