Jamie Clark’s Posterous

I actually kind of like travelling. I especially like the journey - sometimes more than the place/attraction/person that we've travelled to see. As I'm blessed with lacking the ability to drive a car I almost always find myself in the backseat. The only stress is deciding what to watch/listen to on my iPod and I can watch the world go by. And side note: I actually like buses as well. I like waiting for them (providing they show up at some point around the time they're supposed to) and I like watching the other people. And I like reading the Metro too.

But I have a condition, and this condition can sometimes ruin the enjoyment of a journey for me - as it did yesterday on my plane home from my holiday. It can only be described as "arse-cramp" and it's horrible. Once it takes hold it's impossible to sit comfortably, and nothing I do to try and take my mind off it seems to work.

What's strange is I haven't yet figured out a correlation between the journey and the condition. Originally, I thought it was related to the length of the journey, ie. the longer the journey the worse the arse-cramp, but I've been forced to abandon this way of thinking. Back in June I sat on a plane to New York for 7 hours, and coming home I was sat for 8 or 9 hours due to turtles on the runway. Neither of these flights gave me any trouble.

So I have a new theory, I've already mentioned that distractions don't seem to ease my pain, but I do wonder whether boredom is the cause to begin with. For example, on my flights to and from New York I had my own little TV from which I could pick and choose from countless TV shows, movies and music albums. So I lost myself in The Simpsons, Yes Man, Top Gear, the US-version of Life On Mars, the first ten minutes of Seven Pounds and The IT Crowd, amongst others. On my flight to Menorca I watched The Simpsons, Lead Balloon and Top Gear with everybody else. But on yesterday's arse-cramp flight back all that was on was Piers Morgan.

And this theory stays strong when I think about the situations I find myself in before the cramping attacks. I'm usually bored of the stuff on my iPod (or I've left it at home) and the car window offers nothing but a continuous stream of boring motorway and the chance to watch boring people in their boring cars get from one boring place to another in their boring lives.

So that is my conclusion. Sitting in a moving vehicle is just fine. But as soon as you as boredom to this mixture it's miserable. You're frustrated because you're not at your destination yet, you're bored and now arse-cramp has decided to join the party. And if you're really unlucky, Piers Morgan will be on.

Another video from my trip to New York last month. The job cuts must've really hit hard in the world of children's TV, as Spongebob, Shrek and Elmo took to the streets to steal money from naive kids and their parents.

Whilst we were in New York, we stumbled across a Nintendo World store - I never even knew it existed. It was filled with tons of cool stuff, but my favourite bit was the displays filled with retro Nintendo gear.

Such gear included a prototype NES, a Famicom and an original Game Boy that had survived an explosion in the Gulf War! And it was still working away playing Tetris!

         

As promised, here are a small selection of photos from my recent trip to New York. There were far too many to upload them all (I tried to upload them to my Flickr, only to be told I'd gone over my monthly limit - by 300MB!) so I tried to choose a decent mix.

All were taken with a Fujifilm F200 EXR and were taken by a truly useless photographer. Seriously, you should see the number of blurry shots I have. I guess I good camera can't make up for my lack of ability.

             

It's been nearly a week since I got back from New York and I haven't posted anything on my blogs about my trip, so I figured I needed to remedy that now. This can work as a good test to how well the video functionality works on Posterous too. How will it handle my super-raw, unedited flip video movies?

I'll post up a few pictures later as well.

This was in Washington Square Park - my sister's beautiful, peaceful shot was ruined by the man running through. Still, made for an amusing video.