Chaos Show: BACK IN ACTION
June 2008:
December 2008:
August 2009:
So it's 2009, and I simply have no excuse to belay myself from the world of internet blogging any longer. Rather than looking for excuses to post, I'm running out of excuses to not post. The things I despise about putting one life's up for viewing under a public eye, especially one as uneventful and as typical as mine (and a public eye so accustomed to anonymity and by extension Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory), have not changed, and I'm not particularly pleased about the freaking CULT of internet drama that seems to surround the entire userbase of livejournal like the stench of an open sewer around creamy durian flesh.
Of course, the very act of writing about my life is supposed to reflect positively on me, and I'm no doubt sure there are a ton of cracked psychoanalysts who will frantically subscribe hook line and sinker to the therapeutic properties of writing out the day's trials and errors. Be it far from me to suggest otherwise, but I have discovered that writing about myself promotes unnecessary self-analysis. I second-guess everything I write, I bitch and piss and whine and moan about every little thing, and I don't see this changing anytime soon - exactly why I find the act of writing about my life an utterly aggravating work of futility. The history of my livejournal posts are racked up with a series of unflinchingly desperate aptitudes for support and emotional tethering, floundering about for any positive influence in a storm, drowning in a September sea of whining that could, if left unchecked, surely put to shame anything an entire fleet of black-hole powered Event Horizon starships could generate.
But somehow there are readers who, finding potential schadenfreude or sympathy in similarity, continue to check back. (I won't labor under the illusion that my journal makes interesting reading: here's to changing it.)
So here's to a new show. Hopefully stocked with such crowd-pleasing, vapid, intellectually dead material such as ultra-violence, opinions and thoughts on visual entertainment, audio recordings of copulation with animals, and what is occasionally referred to in the vernacular as "dead baby jokes".
After all, if you can't make yourself feel better by reading about a cross-cultured socially maladjusted just-graduated NEET with what amounts to a degree in *literature*, your life must *really suck*, and I have the greatest of sympathies for your plight.
We're back in business.
It's been an interesting few years, educational in many ways, although perhaps not the ways my professors at the University of York had intended. I learned that education is a privilege, not a right, and not at all necessary for the professional qualifications examinations and assessments are supposed to bestow. I was every bit a University student, ducking lecture hours, snoozing all hours of the day and working all hours of the night, marathonning visual entertainment and drinking until I couldn't feel feelings. The "college experience", so to speak, although I have to remark that my social life didn't seem to improve any.
Perhaps 'improve' is too strong a word. I've never had many friends, preferring the established regular contact of a few individuals who have decided I'm worth their time or are demented and slash or drunk slash doped to the gills enough to consider my company a sufficient advantage in their entirely too plausible plans to re-enact the 5th of November Guy Fawkes incident. I don't mind those people - in fact, I treasure such friendships, and find mixups in my lowbrow/highbrow humor extremely therapeutic. Be surprised at the familiar reassurance and comfort that can come from a round of exchanging jokes about female troll parentage and bestiality, neither requiring a measured or well thought out response beyond "no, your mom". Such camaraderie is a blessing, especially when I am both unwilling and unable to seek what would pass as a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. The truth of this statement is still called to test time after time; there's this inherent vulnerability that comes with being human where we're always wondering after the *if*, despite our efforts to excise it or subsume it into something marginally more rational and less needy.
Or maybe I just refuse to use Facebook. Either way.
The other camaraderie was one of alcohol. Social drinking in the UK is common, and not at all detrimental - unless you're drinking alone, in which case you're an alcoholic on the fast track to depression. Drinking has always been a social activity, and even though most weeks I was too broke to hit up one of the many bars York is possessed of, my tolerance remained high. Which I proceeded to test in the last few days before leaving; drinking something that contained absinthe when I was already in danger of falling over from a grand total of no less than four pint cans of cider, one of beer, a good third of a 2 liter bottle of rum and coke, two shots of sambuca aniseed liqeur, and half a pitcher of gin and lemonade. It is worth noting that I do not like cider or gin, but there are points in one's life when you could really rather do with a nice chemically-induced stupor, and that was one of them. I was more concerned with getting as wasted as I could in the least amount of time possible.
It was a mark of how stressed I had been in the last few weeks that I consumed so much liquid of the wit-fuddling variety. The month of July had not been kind to me; the stress of worrying about how much my Anglo-Saxon course (which I did terribly on, as I had suspected) was worth and whether or not I would fail combined with the continued pressure of having my parents visit for graduation. I was lethargic, grumpy, and snapping at people, moodswinging like a slinky in the M.C. Escher room from panicked highs to marijuana-like lows, fondly remembering my first year.
Drinking is good. Getting *drunk* on the other hand, is supremely stupid. Suffice to say that I did not wake up in the best of moods, and notably before leaving the house I had shared with two similar socially deprived ilk all year next day I forgot my laptop, travel documents, and phone, and as a result broke back in during a fit of desperation by dismantling the back gate and putting a brick through the living room window. It was a hell of a way to go.
I will miss York. Not the place in particular, even though the local atmosphere of the city itself has still found itself a place in my heart. The people, the aura of student mentality that permeated the entire campus, the hypocritical slackers who would pretend not to care even though they spent untold research hours in the library, and the hours stolen every Sunday night with a small society of friends MST3King the absolute hell out of anime. Those were the days of my life, and although I do regret the decision to study English Literature for three years, I will not regret these days I deluded myself into believing were endless.
Endless they are not. So here I am, back in HK, living out the life of a Not currently engaged in Employment, Education, or Training. The hunt for a job has begun, and I don't relish it at all, especially given that I have no skills to speak of. And this does mean regular LJ updates wherein I detail particulars of life in living particularly, and flex what writing muscle I have left. After all, writing to keep me sane has been another failed endeavor. I'm already bonkers.