Drained

My feelings towards modern technology have taken a downward turn. I awoke yesterday morning to two text messages I'd received overnight. This is notable considering I never get messages unless EE decide they suddenly want to offer me tickets to a gig, stand-up show or other miscellaneous event I'm really not interested in. It's got to the point where feeling that little vibration in my pocket invokes a sense of anger and weariness within me, where normal people may feel elation.

Considering the barrage of marketing messages I have to contend with attack me during daylight hours, I was mildly surprised to see that two things had tried to alert me between the hours of 11pm and 6am. My slowly waking mind raced (well, as much as a slowly waking mind can race) wondering which of my friends or family had felt the urgency to get my immediate attention at such an unspeakable time.

My blurrier-than-normal eyes and drained-from-early-starts mind did their best to work together in the early morning dawnlight and focus their dwindling energies on the phone display. I'd soon discovered that the two messages had arrived within an hour of each other, both from an automated number. The first read something along the lines of thus:

You've now used 80% of your monthly data allowance. Whoa, steady on there, and such.

Less than an hour later, something like this was sent:

You've now used up all of your monthly data allowance. Why not give us more money so you can keep fuelling that excessive downloading habit you seem to have there? After all, your next month's allowance doesn't start for another couple of weeks. Ha!

I found the content of these message to be quite odd. Not because they'd were written like that. They weren't, that was just me capturing the tone of smugness. What I found odd was that I hardly use much mobile data, if ever. I don't trust it enough. Data usage is difficult to measure whilst you're out and about dealing with other real world events. And I like measuring. I like knowing. It took me years to finally agree to using a monthly tariff instead of pay-as-you-go because I liked that I could hear a robotic lady voice telling me I had a specific amount left to spend. I could do the maths and plan my future phone use accordingly. But data is difficult to measure in spontaneous moments and I tend not to use it often.

In my quest for answers, I managed to discover that a single app on the phone had gone rogue and, much like an obnoxious teenager pirating every film and TV show that ever existed during the small hours of darkness, stayed up all night inexplicably abusing that connection in the background.

In the background.

Background downloading.

And not even anything useful. Just a browser I'd closed from the screen but hadn't properly closed down and exited the entire app, probably refreshing itself every couple of minutes so the ad banner could keep changing and marketing lots of stuff to me, which I couldn't see anyway because (a) it was off the screen, and (b) I was asleep.

Never mind the fact that I usually do all I can to prevent background apps running and eating data. I know it happens and I like to think myself cleverer than the evil technology makers and a savvy saver to boot. However, in my one moment of long-week-with-little-sleep induced tiredness, the devil got into my phone and rendered it useless for the next two weeks or so.

Of course, it's not useless, it's still a phone that can make calls and receive text messages. Heck, it can even use Wi-Fi to access the web. It just can't get data whilst on the go. Trouble is that's what phones do these days and without such an important feature it might as well be considered useless. Imagine, for example, that all spoons were integrated with a pencil in the handle. Now imagine that pencil bit breaks and all of a sudden you resent the spoon for its inability to make notes and the fact that the only thing it's good for any more is eating soup.

Having had the allowed data mercilessly leached from the device totally behind my consciousness - my over-processed, under-rested consciousness - I've been forced to come to the conclusion that the planet Earth is, in fact, an ageless vampire, constantly sucking the life out of everything and not really giving much of a damn. All the while, in this world-as-uncaring-vampire scenario, I've been playing the role of the emotionless and expressionless girl who can't act but still wins awards anyway. I so desperately want to believe the world actually has the potential to be a good place and I also hope that the world will love me in return, only to realise that the cold, harsh world doesn't really have the capacity to love me and is only really interested in draining me of my life-force and mobile data, most likely through the big vein in my neck.

Sadly, that analogy doesn't totally fit. I never win awards for having an unchanging, mopey face.

Projects

Three birthdays ago, I made a list of things I wanted to accomplish with my life. I turned 22 and the idea of numerology stepped into my brain, making me believe that the number 22 was special because it consisted of two twos and because I was born on a day designated the 22nd of a month by ancient people.

That superstitious part of my brain likes clinging onto crap like that; it's somewhat comforting to cope with living when you're safe in the knowledge that the arbitrary positions of stars in the sky have some influence. It's nice pretending that magpies and black cats can bring changes in an individual's luck by their mere presence to that person. And it's fairly satisfying to hold the belief that those who have wronged you in some way will, at some point, be wronged themselves in some act of universal karmic retribution. It's nice to have that because the only other alternative is the reality - the reality of cold, harsh chaos.

Initially, the idea with the list (oh yeah, I'm back to the list now, sorry for the lack of seamless transition) was that once I'd actually gotten around to accomplishing something, I'd use it as the basis of one of these little waffles. The fact that I never actually finished a single one (including the last one, which was to finish dragging the list out to 22 items if I remember correctly) proves one of two things.

a) I've been extremely unlucky in getting personally set projects finished

or b) I've been extremely lazy in not getting personally set projects started

Because it's nice to live in a world of pixies, clovers and eyelash wishes, I'm adamant to believe that the first statement is true. Sadly, reality, in all its infinite chaotic shitstorm, tends to point me in the direction of the latter statement being more accurate. Despite possessing the knowledge, the believing and accepting portions of my brainspace still refuse this and have caused me to become conflicted - forever arguing with myself, trapped inside half a skull-ful of bone matter.

Ultimately, this has led me to a third-life crisis (assuming I'll make it to 75 and strictly not a moment sooner or later) in which I'm realising that all of my time up to this point has been wasted on thinking about doing things. Now that my youth has found the escape hatch and left the rest of me to sink with the submarine made of chaos and lifestuff, I feel as though I've been doing everything up until now completely wrong, and that the time for getting things back on track is long gone since I derailed years ago. Also I find myself inadvertently mixing metaphors. Apparently life's a train now, not a sub. Sorry for the prior confusion.

As time flows ever-onwards and the numbers of days and years I've accumulated keeps growing pointlessly larger, I somehow have to find a way to pick up the withered and fractured pieces of myself whilst watching every other bugger on the planet skip merrily on. Perhaps I could set myself a list of life goals, only to completely neglect it and spout off some more text-based self-pity and crap a few years later.

Until then, I'll just keep sitting here, in an upturned submarine, miles away from the nearest train track.

The Individual

This has taken a bit of a backseat in my life lately. Actually, if anything, this has been dumped in the furthest corner of the trailer hitched up to the back of my metaphorical life-mobile. You know, the life-mobile. Like the Bat-mobile only with less men in tights and more spiralling entropy. Anyway, the essence of this paragraph is that I haven't written here much for a long, long time. It probably shows.

By semi-sort-of demand, I'm back doing this, though how long I can keep it up remains a mystery guarded only by the gods of time itself, the ever-knowing, pre-determined path of destiny, a Magic 8-ball in the loft and the fictitious Ghost of Christmas Yet-To-Come. I suppose that if I do keep this up as regularly as I'd like to, there'll probably be more and more kinda-being-used-too-liberally-to-string-words-together-to-form-some-kind-of-adjective hyphens.

I've come across some real-life people in recent weeks who've spoken of this little mess of crap I've built here and it's transpired that many of those people feel let down that there isn't more crap here to distract them from their slow, yet inevitable, decay. Also, I suppose it's nice to look at someone else's crap and realise "hey, at least my crap isn't as crap as this guy's crap".

My crap (read "life" [read "the continuous string of time I spend existing"]) has taken me to various places over the last however long it's been since I did something here. Mostly it's work, where I spend my days writing enough words that I don't have many left in me by the time I return home and have to resort to a series of grunting noises and hand gestures if communication of ideas is required at all. Yes, I work in Writing now. I actually have a job that relates to what I've spent years of my life working towards. The only real downside is that I've neglected this thing, despite me initially setting the damned thing up to keep me writing, to keep the creative juices flowing and to keep the clichés and metaphors cliché-and-metaphoring. Ironic, really.

I fear the socialising time of my life has come to abrupt stumble, though, as I'm effectively living an adult whilst stuck with the mind and soul of a child. I like to play with interactive televisual softwares. I'm often thanking the gods for making Netflix a thing. I enjoy the idea of socialising and the individual people who make up such company. Chances for satisfying any of these are rare, meaning I often feel as though I have a frustrated child being stifled within me, which doesn't exactly seem to be the best sentence to be writing on the Internet.

As part of my rare outbursts, I recently visited Manchester for less than 24 hours, in an attempt at rekindling some social fires. For the most part, it worked, but as the imposing adult life dictates, they didn't last for too long before the train dragged my inner child away, internally kicking and screaming. I was, however, introduced to the city's Chinatown district during my brief stay. Of course, "district" is a bit of an over-stretch, where in fact "three streets or so" is probably more accurate. Still it's more extensive than Liverpool's Chinatown, which is really one street, and Chester's Chinatown, which is really a Wok&Go.

The inner child now hates the rest of me and the outside world for limiting its potential for fun. The inner child also wishes for me to communicate to you that it feels extremely lonely. I keep telling it that it's not special, though, and that compared to the other billions of folks out there, it's pretty normal. Everyone's just as stifled and lonely in their own ways, and that they all just have to make do. It's around this point that the inner child sticks its fingers in its ears and screams, thus allowing me no chance to reason with it like an adult.

This is rambling. See, this is what happens when I suddenly come back to this with no set topic or focus on what it is I'm actually typing purple banana lamppost. Let's try to sum up, shall we? I'm a child. I'm actually an adult. I'm lonely in the wider world. So is everyone else. I'm not special. Time will eventually kill us all. I like Chinese food.

Balls In The Air

Juggling was never really a specialty of mine, which is weird because I went to juggling club in high school. Oh yeah, my high school ran an after school juggling club, run by the maths teacher who wasn't the old man or the Indian woman everyone struggled to understand; it was run by the other woman who, evidently, juggles. It ran in the same vein as other extra-curricular, after school events, like chess club, drama club, art club and trying to make friends with absolutely-anyone-through-some-kind-of-shared-activity-club. Naturally, I dabbled a little bit in each of those too.

The aforementioned juggling took place in the temporary drama space provided by what was essentially an open plan static caravan parked in the field. The interior walls had been painted so black that what little light came through the windows was instantly killed off before reaching us and the carpet was evidently comprised of gravel and string. The main door also suffered a broken hinge, allowing me to give a very convincing performance one time, when my drama group decided to re-enact a typical soap opera. This ended with me being fake punched in the face and falling backwards, bouncing off the door and playing dead on the floor. And for those 20 seconds in between me 'dying' and the rest of my acting troupe looking sheepishly at the class sized audience and mumbling "that's it", I managed to make a trainee teacher genuinely think her teaching career had just crumbled to bits. I digress.

I'm bad at juggling. Maybe I should've just opened with that.

Doing multiple things at the same is, well, let's say "difficult, but not unmanageable". Actually, let's not say that for the sloppy use of a double-negative. But you know what I mean. So much to do, so little time, yadda yadda death. Having a hectic lifestyle means I'm a) tired all the time, and b) officially a grown-up. Incidentally, I haven't used my Nectar card for a while; I have far more grown-up-ly duties to attend to.

I work a weekday 9-to-5, office-based lifestyle these days. Also it appears I like hyphens. Look-at-all-these-damn-hyphens! See? Anyway, back to reality, I've been keeping a lot of metaphorical balls in the air lately and often dropping them when I feel like I want some free time to, you know, look at rocks or something. In all fairness, the office work isn't even bad. I read stuff then write stuff. It's like my normal life but more topic-specific and less rambl-o-matic like this thing usually is. Also, I don't get to use as many hyphens. You know, unless it's necessary.

The struggle stems from my daily commute, which has frankly become more exhausting in temperatures that qualify as "positively Saharan" to a pale, ginger northerner. Being torn away from my bed earlier than I'd like often allows me to tap into my inner zombie as I shuffle about a bit and grunt at a self scanner when all I want is breakfast and it refuses to co-operate. In conclusion, work's going well, it's the to and fro that's tiring me out.

I know what you're thinking. This commute would be so much easier if you didn't have to rely on public transport. Come on dumbo, you're 25. Learn to work a car for yourself. Way ahead of you. I've been taking weekly lessons and am progressing positively. But much like juggling, there's lots of things to keep your eye on and think about (and then actually do something about) before gravity takes hold and makes a fool of you when those balls hit the floor. Except in this scenario, it's not balls but motorised heaps of metal. And should you mess up somewhere, it's not gravity making you a fool, but velocity making you dead. Stakes are bit higher up here. Perhaps I should've mastered juggling first to be honest.

Still, I managed to be alive enough to type this so I clearly I've been doing something right.

Hiatus

Once upon a time, I wrote weekly entries for this bit of internet right here. Having chosen the path of a writer, I needed some form of keeping my brain and typing fingers active. I also liked to kid myself that people would read this, I'd get noticed by some big city recruiter type - complete with giant cigar and monocle - who'd say "hey kid, I like your work, you have such a unique style, I can give you money" and so on, but you know, slightly muffled because of the cigar.

That didn't happen. Sure, people read the crap I put here, but mostly because I put links on Facebook as if nonchalantly dragging a free-standing cafe chalkboard into the vicinity of a neon arrow and strolling away pretending to look at the sky. Of the people who have read it, several have sprouted words of praise and flung them my way, which my brain doesn't know what to do with because I suddenly become overwhelmed with a strong sense of smugness I keep masked under modesty. These words are my life, sure, but in my eyes they're also pretty crap and anyone caught reading my words should pray to whatever deity they may believe in for salvation straight afterwards.

It probably feels redundant to say this in a space I've left neglected, once again, for a terribly long time, but I'm finding it a struggle to write. Okay, let me clear something up, I don't necessarily find writing to be the struggle, it's more the commitment; the commitment I made to myself that I'd stick with this so regularly. Take right now for instance. I literally just stopped mid-sentence after the second mention of "commitment" so that I could have an imaginary conversation with thin air and take a leak. I then had to force myself to pick up from where I left off when really I'd just rather go to sleep.

The actual writing aspect isn't the problem though. In my web-based silence, I've managed to secure a job that involves me typing words. Hooray, etc. I've also moved into a small room in the parental home, driven a considerable distance under the guidance of a man with the appropriate pedals on his side, and cried uncontrollably whilst curled up on a bare carpeted floor because a devastating bout of depression struck again. But they're all stories for a different time... probably. Except for that last one. I'll do that one now.

It's rare, but the feeling of absolute emptiness and carelessness (i.e. devoid of caring, not clumsiness) came worse this time, and there's no sure-fire way to kick start the damn feelings again. I even rolled around the floor thinking I'd rather feel sad than feel nothing. It's difficult to describe feeling nothing, you just stare vacantly ahead and let your brain recite every word it knows simultaneously, thus causing white noise in your blank head. I can't remember what got me out of it again, probably a song, or dinner. But even so, I ended up getting my wish and started to have my monotony replaced with constant sadness, which I suppose is some kind of a win.

I'd like to go on hiatus for a bit; not on the blog. Hell, I can handle the blog, although I've made an executive decision (I'm the executive of this blog, I've just decided) to switch "New Post Day" from Wednesday to Saturday. I work full weekdays now, I'm a grown-up, somehow that happened. But back to the hiatus, I really just want to fall off the radar for a bit.

I spent a week not posting to Facebook. Odd, because I've come to recognise myself as a bit of a status whore, just giving it away to the Matrix. It's also occurred to me, however, that I've become a bit of a clown. Any time I share something with the Facebook masses, it's usually some form of amusing observation, anecdotal aside or use of the word "bum" to make people laugh. And it works, evidently, if Likes are anything to go by. As for comments? Very few people speak to me these days and the loneliness of the virtual realm has started to set in. Like I said, I haven't made an update for a week, but nobody really seems to have noticed.

At the risk of sounding all angsty, emo, attention-seeking teenager with black dreadlocks and lip piercings, it's really hit home how much I want to be cared about, and how much I haven't really been getting that recently. There's really no other way to say that (trust me, words are my weapon of choice) without drawing criticism, but I want to be open and honest. I also want an overflowing bank account and to be fed grapes whilst lounging with a wreath on my head, but the openness and honesty are the bits I actually have control over.

I'll do my best to keep this thing updated once a week again, but chances are I'll be keeping away from many other forms of social interaction, virtual or otherwise. I have issues I'd prefer to moan about rather than talk about; I'm human and I just need a break.

The Bubble

Yes, my general disposition over the last however shitting long it's been has remained one of dissatisfaction with the way life seems to pan out in the real world. It seems that all I'm doing with this blogspace is constantly trying to use different words to find ways of saying the exact same thing over and over, leaving this place fairly stagnant.

I'm on one of my depression kicks again, it seems. I've written about it previously as the sensation of feeling nothing as opposed to the sensation of feeling sad. I don't like to throw the word "depression" around though, especially as I've seen worse cases of it than my meandering existence. Besides, as it stands, I'm not completely in that state since I seem able to pick myself up out of it as easily as I can find something to distract me. Namely TV, video games and generally doing something that doesn't involve me staring forlornly out the window for hours at a time.

It's finally occurred to me that I've spent quite a while wrapped in a bubble of niceness for so long that I've failed to realise it popped several months ago. By the way, in this analogy, the bubble is my time at university. I've figured that because I enjoyed myself a great deal towards the end, I wasn't ready for it to be over when it was. Staying in the area with a couple of friends may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but in the long run (i.e. around about now) it's left me feeling as awful as my writing habits.

Those who stayed behind were a select few whilst several others left for better pastures, which isn't hard since the area in which I'm currently trapped is a less than desirable pasture. Of those ones who've stayed behind, I very rarely meet up with them due to conflicting schedules. All of a sudden, the uni bubble has disappeared and I've been thrust back into the real world I spent the best part of four years trying to get away from, and I've finally been forced to admit that all of those friends I made during university have become the very thing I swore they wouldn't become. "Just Facebook Friends".

Don't get me wrong, in an ideal world I'd drop every aspect of life and several others to see a lot of them again in a former uni-like capacity. But that harsh reality of a bubble-less existence is that, whilst I may still consider a bunch of those people to be some of closest friends in this life, my only real contact with them anymore is sparing... and virtual.

On top of that, I have to deal with the practicalities of life and resign myself to the fact that what I do for a living needs to be just that: practical. So what if I have a degree in the Creative Arts? Actually, so what if I have a degree in anything? So many people end up spending the more extended portions of their lives in a field not even remotely related to what they spent three years striving and stressing towards.

So this is me, just trying to adapt to real life once again. Turns out the journey of discoveries and other such fruity metaphors isn't over, just of a completely different nature. The uni bubble is gone and I've suffered the initial faceplant back into workaday normality. Now I just need to brush myself off and try adapting to this much bigger bubble called Life. You know, before that one pops for good too.

The Easy Option

I can't live alone.

I absolutely could. I'd manage. It'd probably be the easiest way for me to live the life of day-to-day dull and drudgery I seem to have going for me. Ideally, I'd spend the rest of this paragraph coming up with all sorts of situational reasons to back this point up. However, since I've reached a certain point of hopelessness, apathy and another word that means "UURRGGHHAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHH", I'm gonna use the words of someone else. I transcribe from the televisual text How I Met Your Mother: Season 7 Episode 21 - Now We're Even; author, Chuck Tatham.

"When I first moved into my new apartment, I was nervous. For the first time in my adult life I didn't have a roommate. But then it hit me. For the first time in my adult life I didn't have a roommate. If I wanna walk around naked, nobody cares. If I wanna leave the laundry basket in the middle of the living room, nobody stops me. If I bring home soup from the deli and leave it in the fridge for two days, nobody eats it. And if I do something collossally stupid, nobody ever has to know."

Okay, I probably would've done it much more British-y than that. I mean, like I'd bring soup home from a deli. But the fact remains that living on my own would be the easy option for me. If only it was, actually, an option. But it's not.

I can't live alone. I can't afford it.

Instead, I need to rely on others to contribute financially, just like I need to rely on others to write half my blog posts for me.

Progress

After wasting three years of my time in the pursuit of progress, I've finally managed to fall back into my old routine of going nowhere slowly. Whilst the two month gap between entries here might be enough evidence for any doped-up monkey with an axe through its head to come to that conclusion, it only occurred to me two days ago whilst I was in the middle of boiling pasta and realising I can't quite master the subtle art of incorporating metaphors into blocks of prose like I used to.

Over the last however long it's been since I last cared about the progession of time, I've been reacquainting myself with my old friend television. I've caught up with programmes old and new that I've either been meaning to watch for some time (Firefly, Happy Endings) or haven't seen in some time (Fawlty Towers, Friends), or have seen fairly recently but due to the sheer scale and complexity of the plot I've had to rewatch a couple of times whilst reading complete episode synopses just to make sure I can actually follow what's going on (Game Of Thrones).

It was during a recent rewatch of several Simpsons episodes, however, where the point of this ramble originated. Of course, it could be said that The Simpsons is a show that has stood the test of time, but all that really means is that its audience still finds the older episodes amusing. The thing is that as the show has gotten older, the audience has gotten older too, and "standing the test of time" is really just a fancy way of saying "I remembered this then and I remember it now" as some faint form of nostalgia. Essentially, the point that I'm dragging these words towards is one that struck me when laughing at minor gags that involved outdated technology; primarily video tapes and audio cassettes.

As much as I hate using other people's children as examples, I often find myself imagining how my young niece and nephew might hypothetically react to such comic gems of the 90s if they were to be subjected to these old cartoons at some point over the coming decades, which - to be fair - they probably will be... by me.

"Hey kids, come watch this animated show about a funny yellow family and all their friends and the super-hilarious situations and mishaps they get involved in."
          "But we already told you," they cry in unison, "we've had enough of you trying to relive your teenage years through our eyes, uncle. For Christ's sake, you're forty-two! Leave us alone!"
          "But this is a funny one, guys," I retort as I navigate the endless DVD menus to play one single episode without Spanish subtitles or a hidden audio commentary track. "Homer sings in a barbershop quartet and they put their songs on vinyl records. Meanwhile, Marge distracts the kids with Homer's voice on an audio cassette which gets garbled up and freaks them out."
          I can barely contain my amusement, speaking through gasps of breath and tear-filled eyes as I slap my knee at the joviality of it all.
          "We don't care about any of that," they still seem to speak in unison since my brain can't decide between them over which one I like more in this hypothetical fantasy. "We just want to read our laser-vision books in three seconds and go hoverboarding down by the grand carbon fibre statue of the almighty Global Lord Bieber."

The rest of the vision becomes hazy at that point, although I do know that the kids foolishly neglect to take their protective shin guards with them and that I cry into my palms watching that Simpsons episode whilst still being able to sing along with every word of "Baby On Board".

The reasons I default to using those kids in this hypothetical situation come down to a) familial proximity and mutual knowledge of each other's existence, b) the idea that they simply weren't around throughout the 1990s, and c) the fact that they're currently being raised in a world of iPads and high definition. At some point towards the end of my shared generation, those quaint notions of obsoleteness will themselves become obsolete, as the next lot of humans after us will fondly reminisce about mobile phone recycling and physical screens that were only confined to a 16:9 aspect ratio. And as they slowly say their goodbyes to our dying generation, they'll take comfort in the shared virtual world as operated by an imbedded brain chip.

So really, what point was there in me trying to progress anyway?