old english

What was I like around the age of 17 and 18? If you’re going to base an answer on the things that I wrote at the time, one might suspect I was Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye incarnate. The total number of methods I possessed for finding and expressing misery about the world is an amount so great that it rivals the total number of words that the Sámi people have for snow. I don’t remember being that unhappy. I can only guess that I hadn’t yet learned how to express cynicism in the wry,  gentle and subtle way that I feel it. Or maybe I really did think that I was goddam Holden Caulfield. That kills me. I was such a phony. Etc, etc. In any case, I have decided to compile a little (mostly non-miserable) collection of some of my old words for your amusement, horror and stimulation here, in an order that is not chronological, but is apt.

Old entries – 4.3.08

Don’t you love those lengthy sessions where you look back on your old writings and think “oh my, who is this devilishly talented person perpetually second guessing himself and describing a state of existential flux all over my screen? Oh, it was me!” Minus the extravagant self-congratulation, of course, although I do seem to come off more wordy and poncey (I love the irony of using a crap word like ‘wordy’) than I thought. It’s the combination of nostalgic bliss and epistemological distance between the present self and the past self (à la FutureMe), I think, that makes it so interesting.

 Dream – 31.8.08

I was in an educational institution building, something like a university, which was coloured entirely cream: cream floor, cream doors, cream walls, and the young people who filled it were dressed in equally bland colours, so there was nothing striking about the whole place whatsoever. Think of the colour scheme of the TV Room from the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, only less white and more cream, and you’ve got it. The ceilings were low, except where there were staircases, in which case there were really, really, needlessly high ceilings above them. From what I experienced, having not entered any of the rooms at any point, it consisted almost entirely of meandering corridors, all very narrow. The thing I remember most vividly is a piece of dialogue I had with this guy donning a closely shaved blonde head, who seemed to be my friend, as we walked leisurely down a narrow corridor among a moderate throng of people.

“If you had to choose between leaving the island and leaving the universe, and if you could never go back,” he asked, “which would you choose?”
“The island? you mean… the UK?”
“Yeah,” he said, smiling a little, as if he’d decided on that parameter only upon my prompting.
“The UK, definitely.” Surely having to leave the universe, never to return, was much more grave than having to leave the country. “I guess it depends on how you define the universe.”
“I don’t know,” he said smiling again, then pausing to think. “Robust. Small.”

At this point he started walking quickly ahead of me, as if suddenly realising he had to get to a class, just as I had started reconsidering my choice in light of his definition. I had slowed down to think carefully, and chattering people filled in the floor space between us. Picturing myself outside of the universe was difficult. I would have objective knowledge and understanding, I’d be able to observe the whole world, I’d be at peace. On the other hand, I’d be trapped and in torment: separated from the people I know, unable to actually achieve anything in spite of my knowledge, forever in nothing but darkness and despair. I came back to reality when my short haired friend began descending down a staircase at the end of the corridor we had been walking down, so I tried to push past people to get to the top of the staircase and call out to him.
“Well, maybe I’d leave the universe then,” I shouted, uncertain, wanting to talk about it more. But he didn’t seem to hear me.

DS reviews – 24.2.08

I tried to play Rune Factory, the newest Harvest Moon game which incorporates fighting and gels it together with farming. As a result, you have to do stupid things like plant crops halfway through dungeons, in order to gather ‘runes’ from them once they’ve fully grown, which is necessary to replenish your action points and thus proceed through the dungeon without dying. It’s very silly. The battle system is lacklustre and the serene farming atmosphere is ruined by big cyclops monsters. I tried Harvest Moon DS instead, then, and was shocked and appalled that a heck of a lot of it seems to be directly ported from Friends of Mineral Town on the GBA, graphics and all. Its only redeeming factor was being able to tell the jovial mayor in effect to piss off when he tries to teach you how to play at the start of the game. Then his character portrait becomes angry and he walks away. Presumably later in the game when you win a competition, as he’s about to award you the trophy, he instead tells you to piss off and gives it to whoever came 2nd.

31.1.08 – Zero tolerance

I got stopped by a police lady coming home from the city the other day for biking on the path which, she said, has been illegal since 1835 and can incur a £30 fine. I thought about how the expected response to such reprimanding would be “why aren’t you stopping people being beaten up and mugged instead of something as petty as biking on a path?”, and then I thought about what I’ve learned from sociology about zero tolerance, how it stopped New York becoming the capital of crime in the 90s, and so on. I was reminded of the time in high school when I think it was Scott and Seb who were told off by a patrolling teacher for quietly sitting at a bench using their PDAs, whilst out on the field there were people smoking weed, crucifying year 8s and god knows what else. I’m not sure who I side with. Lack of zero tolerance equals more crime, zero tolerance equals loss of liberties and a potential police state. What we can say is that zero tolerance didn’t and doesn’t work at Hellesdon High; it just results in teenagers with tucked in shirts and appropriately sized ties still slicing off each other’s limbs and whatever else.

It was at this point I realised I’d been standing there with my bike for six hours thinking about sociology, and as such caught pneumonia and have now been hospitalised.

18.1.08 – The Long Day Wanes

… Now the year is laid out before me, stretching out like Stretch Armstrong, complete with his big fake charade of a grin. I still feel singed and confused from last year, i.e.: little over three weeks ago, subsequently meaning that I’m reluctant to set my sights on something new. Well, being me, I’m naturally reluctant anyway, especially when what I’m resigned to doing is getting a damn job. I’m a little bit worried about what sort of effects the next 9 months or so are going to have on me when you consider that most of the things I can conceivably do, like getting a job, are just to kill time. If there was a film of my life, this section might be represented by a scene of a translucent clock filling up the screen, spinning quickly through minutes, hours, days, with a calendar eventually fading in behind it; its pages being blown by a wind that makes it rustle through the months, all the while with me, behind these see-through layers, standing in the middle of Gentleman’s Walk or somewhere in real-time, but all the people and the sky would be in time with the clock and the calendar.

Actually I’d fire the director if that happened. It would be one fucking self-aggrandising and clichéd film if it went like that, like in Garden State where Zach Braff sits on the sofa looking pensive while everyone else is partying around him speeded up, and you’re just thinking “jeez, at least get drunk and quit congratulating yourself if you’re going to be depressed,” right? right? right!?

some time

It’s awkward to reconcile with an inanimate blog. How do you kiss and make up with lipless bytes?  You lipless bastard, blog. First you delete my pre-travelling entry in June, then you have the nerve to give me the cold shoulder when I try to give you a forgiving hug. You don’t even have a shoulder to give me either, let alone a cold one! I am not best impressed. Perhaps I was naive to expect love from you. You’re unfriendly, lipless and shoulderless.

Aww, let’s not fight like this. Let’s let bygones be just that, hey? Just don’t delete my draft entries again and I won’t point out your lack of limbs or erogenous zones – that’s a sweet deal.

A lot has been going on since I last had a reliable internet connection to dare writing about it online. Exams, for one, have been conquered, and by conquered, I mean failed. I was that person who gets up and leaves the exam hall after half an hour, making you wonder why for a second, before you remember that you still have an exam to do, while I smugly strut out, cigarette at the ready – lucky, an arsehole. Not that I didn’t give it a punt. I did  nibble at revision, reaping twiglet dividends: I passed the advanced Java module – the only module I did pass. Strange, considering I failed its smaller brother, the basic Java module. Well, I suppose it’s a suitable note for me to leave computer science on – a sense of vague comprehension in an ocean of high-voltage confusion. I poured water on the motherboard, but the RAM still works.

A week after my last exam, Lucy and I were in Cardiff Airport. Destination: multiple. ETA: a month. Inter-buttock area: moist. We had no specific plans for any of the places we were going to, aside from spending a week in a villa up a mountain near Malaga, the inevitable exploitation of Amsterdam’s legalities (spoiler:  no prostitutes) and attending an Irish-Finnish wedding in Helsinki, the journey’s non-violent coup de grâce. Everything in between was slapdash and haphazard – maybe out of stubborn idleness, but stubborn idleness which was justified by the desire for spontaneity, the rawness of unanticipated experience, and just to see where caution landed when you threw it into the wind. Even if caution did fly back and hit us in the face like a wayward square of soiled toilet paper. It never did do that, though. We were bricking it on many an occasion, but the end result was always most pleasing. Conveying the multiple-rainbow array of felt emotions associated with travelling when someone asks me “how was it?” is next to impossible.

More comprehensive writing on these travels will emerge sometime; I’m yet to decide what form it should take. Doing a travel blog at the time wasn’t reconcilable with the aforementioned urge to experience things at a foundational level, without this kind of scenario running through my mind, and the lack of real downtime to do it in properly made it impractical anyway. I have a wealth of sources to draw from: scribbled notes, unusual souvenirs, photos, videos – all in plethoric amounts. Going gonzo and retelling it semi-fictionally is  always an appealing option. Time will tell. Or: I will tell, in time.

personality politics

Every time an election comes around, I’m surprised at how much a party leader’s personality influences people’s political leaning. Obama, the charismatic speech generating machine powered by his misguided though well-intentioned voters, is a typical example of nice guy, mostly unchanged politics. Now, here, on this side of the pond, we have:

Gordo & The Labourers, who have taken the utopian socialist future shtick, oddly, considering The Labourers haven’t had a frontman who is actually left-wing for many a moon and that socialism is the devil in the political world. The original planned manifesto artwork can be seen here.

The Nick Clegg Experience! He gurns, he leaves his webcam on whilst carefully analysing pornography, and he’s playing an intimate gig at an Asda near you very soon. He represents a frustratingly centrist party who don’t have the ‘nads to actually be liberal; more liberal than the Tories and Labour, granted, but then the Scottish National Party are more liberal than the British National Party. Still some way away. The fact he plays the “vote for me, young people!” card also grinds one’s gears. “Young people” are not a continuous political consensus; exactly the opposite if anything.

Cameron did it unsuccessfully, and continues to do it unsuccessfully, with “web cameron” and the like. The less said about David Cameron, the less my burning urge to desecrate the massive campaign adverts every tory twerp appears to have planted across the country threatens to flare up (which would make me a censoring hypocrite).

As one can observe from the political compass, they are now the length of an ant’s antenna away from becoming UKIP (i.e: backwards racist pooheads, evident in almost any section of the UKIP wiki article). Interestingly, Labour are more right-wing and authoritarian than Obama was; the tories are more right-wing than John “bomb bomb Iran” McCain.

If anyone should vote for any of the three main parties, it should be for the Lib Dems – in spite of the nasty things I said, they do seem to be making positive progression towards greener politics. But Green they ain’t – my vote will still rest with them, as everytime I do the political compass test I find myself in the Gandhi-esque region of heavy liberalism and leftist economics, something I know is accurate.

… still don’t know what’s so important about the heads of the parties, though. I don’t even know who the leader of the Green Party is as I write this, other than knowing that she’s a woman. As one awesomely-first-named Zeev Mankowitz apparently said: “people don’t believe in ideas, they believe in people who believe in ideas.”

an ode to scratching

There’s an itch on the inside of my skull that only my brain can reach by morphing itself into the form of a finger. Not to worry! I can assure you it’s not cancerous. It is, however, terminal. It’s a writing itch that I intend to give a slow, deep scratch via this medium – a blog.

Why now? In honesty, I have been harbouring an uncharacteristic neglect towards written expression recently. Writing is, after all, something I’ve always wanted to do, at least in some capacity.

Let me explain.

In September last year I began a degree in Computer Science at the University of Kent – the third degree I’ve started since I was 18 – and old habits died hard about two months in when I realised that mathematics and machine logic are not my forte. Yes, I like to fool myself into thinking that it’s not because I’m incapable or mal-adapted to the sciences, rather because it’s not my niche. It’s a great thing that disillusionment and alienation followed, as they often tend to in such situations. Filthy optimism! The sexy kind of filthy, that is. Being a disillusioned alien always leads to something greater; clarity, a little revolution in your mind. I learned in the least roundabout of ways what it is I wanted to do. More on that later.

So, ascending from my youngest age to my current age, my desired career has changed thus:

• author
• journalist
• author/journalist
• indeterminate writer of words
• perpetual gruntwork-level employee who sustains self until existential crisis occurs
• programmer of sorts who after some years gets bored and starts writing on the side
• ???
• profit

In some ways, I have fulfilled that sixth career path to the fullest and can give myself an honourable discharge* from it. I have done some programming and I have started writing on the side (although it’s taken me until now to find the motivation) … Hurrah! Let’s pretend it’s all okay!

Now, I can make a safe turn on the rat race motorway and move onto a greener pasture. One that looks like this. Where I can rear some sociological cows, before drinking their Weberian milk, eating their Simmelian beef and making Marxist Doc Martin rip-offs from their leather hides. I couldn’t make philosophy and/or english work for me beyond A Level at Leeds and/or Bath Spa, in spite of the feeling of grandeur being on the Leeds campus gave me or how happy Chenglin Deng looks on the Bath Spa homepage (that is pretty much all Bath Spa has going for it). On the other hand, with sociology I’ve had recurring hunger pangs for a dish of the aforementioned Simmelian beef ever since I became, erm, a sociology vegetarian. Marxist boots are in fashion, too. I’ve taken a sneaky seat in sociology lectures at Kent and envied those sitting there, bored, reluctantly going about doing their wild module in the subject, perhaps, whereas I’ve listened, enthralled, wanting to know more; wishing to be studying it and contributing to it at a proper, academic level. There’s no need now to write an eloquent poem about why I think sociology is where I belong; it’s a wee bit intangible anywho. Misguided decisions are habitual for me, but even when I’ve faltered in the past with education choices, I come away with knowledge and experience which turns out to be priceless, in spite of nagging feelings of failure. So, even if all my sociological cows do die – which I’m sure they won’t! – I will be happy to feast on their germ-infested corpses. Or maybe make lots of dodgy knock-off Doc Martins and sell them to hipsters.

The cut and thrust of it is this: I’ll do my computer science exams which begin in less than a month, get 50%, then get on my giddy way to the second year of sociology come September. Failing 50%: go into first year. Simple instructions, hard to execute.

Apologies, you, for a meandering article ascertaining to personal circumstances, especially for a first entry. If you’re a vicarious reader, or less hard-going on me than I am, you might have enjoyed this. I hope so! Come back one day! It will get better. I fear the itch inside my skull may actually be a rash; oh well. Here’s to scratching.

*Has anyone ever come up with a joke about honourable discharge, respectable semen, and respectable seamen?