I would say that it started out as a feeling, which then turned into a hope. But that would be one, cliché and two, taking song lyrics and pretending that I'm deep. I'm not deep, I just spout bullshit, but seeing as it's my bullshit it feels special to me. Really, it started out with a walk, a bruised shin, a bus ticket, an ant and a dead bird in the road. That's probably how it started out. Unless you really want to be deep in which case it may have started with the creation of the universe. But I'm not and I don't so bus tickets and dead birds it is.
I don't remember how all of it happened, that is one problem that I can allow myself to accept as true. I have a horrific memory of things. Thoughts, conversations, what I did, ate, drank, it all leaves me pretty easily. So I'm typing this after it has all been through my mind. I need to carry a notebook at the very least or maybe my palmtop. Then at least I could note down the basics while they whiz through my head. As it is I am at my computer composing my blog on OpenOffice because I dislike MSWord and the internet is inexplicably down. On the plus side spell checking is easier this way. So yes, I won't remember all the bullshit that I thought and that I thought was pretty mindblowing for me. Ok so it wasn't but like I said, it's mine so it's special to me.
I was walking to the bus stop. The walk through town isn't too bad actually. I do it often enough that I know the route and how fast I can generally manage it but at the same time I don't do it so often that I want to destroy the world caused by the boredom of the same route day after day. That actually is rather how going to school during sixth form felt. That walk was not one I enjoyed. Similarly the one from my uni house to either uni or town or really anywhere. They all generally followed the same route and after doing that with a full rucksack of tins and pasta from the weekly shop that was about an hour's walk it got dull very fast. But this, as often happens, is digression.
I don't know if I even thought of my through town. My back is sore and I wanted to get home and change my clothes. It was mostly the bus trip home but the cogs start turning before you get there.
Buses. I really enjoy buses. I know of a few people, at least, who don't. Who will pointedly refuse to use them if they can help it. But I love them. They're quieter than metros and less effort than walking. Cheaper than taxis and I can't drive, nor can I rely on my parents to ferry me around everywhere. Buses are just nice. I like to sit and think. Often I read, if the day is not a thinking one, sometimes I listen to music, sometimes I play on my DS, and I think you get the picture by now, but today I thought. I wanted to write that I thank :p.
Today was a thinking day. I had even put my book to the top of my rucksack in case I wanted to read but no, cogs were turning and things were thinking. So yeah, here goes, thoughts.
Firstly I've watched two films today, prior to the bus. One was I Am Number Four and the second was Beastly. Both have the Stormrider guy in them. If I had internet, by the way internet you suck and I was trying to remind you that through the use of italics but to no avail, I would look up his name. I could journey downstairs because we have the Stormrider film, presumably Daddy bought it because it was cheap and said action on it, but if I do that then I might lose my train of thought and I'm still too lazy to do things like that right now. Also food is nearly ready and I don't want to waste valuable typing time that I have just wasted explaining when I could have just got the DVD. Just how things work, eh?
Neither film was, let's say, a work of art. Nor were they particularly Oscar material, although with awards you never can tell if they will throw you a curve ball. But they were kinda cute and started the cogs. IAN4 had a female in it (the main cheerleader in Glee who gets pregnant, and if you tell me that that is a spoiler then sorry but it happens in like the first five episodes of the first season and they make a literal huge song and dance about it and I'm sure it is one of the lesser plot spoilers that I could give away). She is an ok character. Ignoring her back story the things that interest me most about her is that she takes photographs almost all the time (you later discover she develops the film at school and thus explaining how she uses all these bitchin' old cameras and can afford to develop about five films a day) and that she has a scrap book. Now I'll start with the obvious point; I would like to start a scrap book. This is easily solved. I go out, buy a reasonably priced blank book or even a specifically designed scrap book from somewhere like Paperchase, which does contain such items. It's filling them that I have a problem with. I'm always scared to make things permanent in specifically designed books like that. But say I get over that part and say I pick up a pen and get some pictures, photographs, objects, then what? What do I write? Hers looked interesting and therein itself lies a problem. I do not find myself interesting. Oh yes I can say things that are worth saying twice sometimes if only because they were amusing once or possibly touched upon things that were of interest but to be interesting? I don't even know where I would begin. Would I write where I wanted to visit and what I thought? Would it not then become like a personal blog? Although that would be really awesome in itself regardless of the fact that it could be then classified as a diary and I'm not a Dear Diary sort of person because I get bored easily. But maybe I'll try a personal blog. I guess I could try and be interesting once in a while :p.
The second part, and the one that I can not do anything about even if I tried, is that these films, about teenagers in schools doing school things, make me wish I had done more in school. I feel like I did it all wrong. Not in the sense that I got particularly bad grades or I didn't have any social life because I at least passed in those, not in flying colours mind you but passed and that's the main thing there. No I watch these programmes and films and I read these books and I think 'damn, I wish I had been like that'. I'll back up a minute though because I am by no means saying that I regret how I did at school. I have a policy of specifically not regretting the things that I have done, even if I feel bad for them later. The bad feeling isn't regret, it's more likely guilt. But all actions can be learned from and regretting them wouldn't help me to learn from them so I accept them as a part of life. So I don't regret how school went, I just wished I had been more awesome. I still wish I was back at school. I want to be learning maths and science again. I want to be doing homework and trying to study for exams. I want to have a bag full of books with notes written in them and text books with information in them. But I can't go back to then, unless we get time machines but even then I would be the wrong age, so really I should try and apply this to the now. Become the person that I wish I had several years ago. But that in itself is a tricky thing. How do you become that when everything seems so pointless most of the time and time itself just seems to wander by without caring that you haven't got up yet or that you are wasting a couple of hours playing a game or browsing the internet? How do you get round this when the very concept of being proactive is like a knife in your face because come on, it's a horrible word! It implies doing things and that requires energy and caring... that's what these films do to me! Damn you films for starting these cogs a-turning. Damn you and your people who are better simply because you've created them thusly. I wonder if I could sue them for emotional stress, you can sue people for everything else these days.
I told you, bullshit. I can go for days. Get me on a bad day and I may not say a single word to you but get me when I'm good and man I can talk for hours with just an occasional nod or an mmm to keep me going. Once I get going I enjoy going and I will keep doing it until I stop. The natural stop. Where everything is said and nothing needs to be said any longer.
So yes I bruised my shin, oh wait I didn't even check it. I think I'll check it to find out if it is bruised. Hurt like a... well, like walking your shin into a metal pole. A simple misjudgement of space and you can enter a small world of pain. Chance. Tricky bastard.
Just a little one, (in the process of typing that I banged my opposite knee, guess it was feeling less loved and wanted attention) but because it's on my shin it's going to hurt pretty bad for a while. They're nasty to bruise.
The bus ticket was important. It still is important. They bother me and I can give you a pretty good reason. Development. Ok, again, let us digress here and explain this. I've already written one and two thirds of an A4 side of paper so I may as well keep going. I am not against development. It's generally a good thing. But then they make things or change things that didn't need to happen. It's the progression of time verses technology. Maybe change was the wrong word. It is the exponential growth of technology from the last twenty or so years. I will use myself as an example because, that is what I should know best, and against that I will use the modern day culture I see all around me. About ten years ago I was starting high school. I'm going to count the years to make sure, ok nine but three tier system means that my high school started in year nine instead of year seven. So let's say ten years ago I was just entering high school. I think I had a mobile phone but it was, even in those days, pretty sturdy and well built. Simply put it was a bit of a brick. A nice looking brick with polyphonic ringtones (oh the luxury!) and I spent approximately £10 a year on credit. I had a Game Boy color from a few years back but I didn't carry it around school in case I lost it. I used a CD walkman that sometimes skipped when I was walking if it was joggled.
When I finished my last day of compulsory education at the age of sixteen I recorded the events with a camera. That used film. That required developing later. Ok. I've pushed this point before but seriously, technology is out of hand. I've seen children at about the age of eight with a smartphone and an iPod. They have no concept of money. And that makes me feel like I'm a million years old! I know, I sound like someone's grandparent. I do believe that kids should have mobile phones because they are a fabulous way of contacting people, but they don't need the high end phones with a contract of £30 a month. It's, I would say it is ridiculous but actually I'm just kind of scared of it. They whole scenario of how things are in that regard is terrifying. We are a species of waste already, and people just keep making more things to outdate the old ones. I mean I'm hideously materialistic but all of this is scary. I fear for where our culture will take us. I genuinely do fear for the next generations of people. But that is not a bus ticket.
As you know, because I told you so earlier, I love buses. From where I live there is only one type of bus that I can get. I call them green buses because that is the majorative colour that they are (although technically it's more of a turquoisey blue green colour but I still call them green. I think they have more green than anything else but I can't see one to confirm that, damned memory). So these green buses are the bus provider that I've known the longest. Another provider used to share one of the bus numbers that I use and they would be known as either the reds or the oranges depending on your colour preference, but since there isn't another red or orange it is fine with either, but they stopped a while a go. Actually thinking about it it can't have been more than about four years. Time passes mysteriously. Actually they weren't the same as the red or orange ones that I know of, that is why I was getting confused (I just looked the bus up and they are red and blue not orange, orange are the other ones so forget them). Ok so to clarify, because I think even I would get lost in all of that there used to be a red/blue bus but now all there are are greeny buses from round here. Regardless of the colour they both had the same shape tickets and they were both made of the same paper. Essentially the same ticket with slightly different information on them. They are so familiar and so wonderful because it was a part of my childhood, going into town with my mama and having this ticket to get there and back again like a Hobbit's tale but easier and less work on the legs.
They have changed the tickets.
They are now like the buses that are actually orangey (and blue) and I dislike those tickets. They are shiny feeling and have a weird layout and are just different. So they are easier to read. They aren't long and thin and good as bookmarks! They are squarish and feel bad in the fingers. I think if they were going to change them that much they should have made them smaller. I've seen the size of the metro tickets in Japan (in a photo) (although I don't suggest using ones that small because that would be too easily lost) and even the size of the normal metro tickets are smaller. Why, if they had an urge to change them, didn't they make them smaller and this use fewer resources? Needless to say, it bothers me. More than it really should but it does and it is not something that can be helped. It is such as life.
This has all taken me rather a while to type. Unsurprisingly though it only took about five minutes to think of these things. And things have been lost in transit and in time, things that will never be found again but that is ok. They were meant to go that way.
Somehow I meandered into the territory of the concept of infinity but I can't remember if it was before or after the ant. I think it was probably after the ant. It was pretty something.
The ant was lost.
For starters it was on a bus. My first thought was 'ahhhhh fuuuuuuck and ant!' because I do not have a liking for them. In fact rather the opposite. I would rather they weren't near me. This one was near me. It was on the windowsill beside me, walking away from me. My second thought, therefore, was 'oh shit it was right beside or possibly on me'. I very very much dislike things, like insects, being on me, especially if I hadn't realised it was there. There is too high a risk of it being accidentally squished on me and I don't like touching dead things. (Incidentally I don't mind touching cooked meat or sushi. That's a different, more edible, kind of dead that, well, if I can't touch it with my fingers I probably couldn't put it in my mouth now could I? That would just be backwards and silly!) I especially dislike dead insects and flies and spiders and moths. Bleh! But this ant was not dead nor was it coming towards me so I allowed myself to watch it for a while. An unsual indulgence for me but one with a reward.
The ant was lost.
The significance is not that the ant was on the bus but that it was lost. Genuinely confused as to where the fuck it was. It scuttled along for a bit, I was about to use walk but those legs look pretty fast, about a centimeter or two and then stopped and then looked around. This continued about three times before Mr. Ant-chan decided to see what was at the edge of the windowsill and promptly fell off onto the shoulder of the man in front, possibly with flailing legs (the ant not the man). And from this occurrence I thought one thing.
In this world, even ants can lose their way.
Don't start taking this literally and pulling my sentence apart. I'm, for once, going to tell you that here I am being deep and meaningful in my bull. I mean the ant was actually lost because of how they work. They follow tracks that other ants have made on the ground and obviously this one had no track to follow but I'm also thinking mentally here. I'm finding myself becoming increasingly lost in everything. The modern world is swamping me and I don't know if I could answer any important questions on ideas and beliefs very satisfactorily. Why are we here? What do I think about religion? Which political party would I put myself under? What do I believe will happen when I die? (not in a 'my body with rot and feed the earth' literal way). Do I even think I have a soul? Where did it come from? Etcetera etecetera. You get the picture. I think of these things on occasion and I draw a blank. I've never really worked out what I believe in and what my ideas are on most topics. I know that some things are socially wrong like thieving and killing people.
But even that can get complicated because sometimes stealing something is right and some people are bad. But then what exactly is the scale on who is bad and who isn't? Who gets to decide what is right and wrong? One person's right may be another person's wrong and this is what confuses me.
I am lost.
I have very little sense of self. I can tell you that I am twenty-two years, nine months and two days old, give or take. I am fifty-four kg and 5'6” approximately. I have pink hair but am naturally brunette, have blue/green/grey eyes with a tiny bit of yellow/brown around the pupil. I wear a knot wring on my right hand, second finger and have, from the last count I remember, sixteen fillings. I can tell you who I am physically. But the self. My self. I don't know what that is. Are my likes and dislikes my sense of self? Are my thoughts, ambitions, desires, beliefs, are they all my sense of self? Experiences, memories? Is all of that what makes a 'self'? If someone is to ask you to describe yourself you either give a list of things you are or what you are not. What am I not? What am I? Who am I? This has all become rather too complex for such a brief, conversational piece such as this.
I am lost in myself, the world and nothing at all.
After the ant came infinity. I love the sense of infinity. Things going for ever and ever and evolving but essentially lasting forever. But what is infinite? I suppose numbers are infinite because you can write a number and half it and half it and half it for all time and still be able to half it again. But those aren't real things. Numbers aren't really real. Like words aren't really real. A cat is just a cat because we decided it to be but it could easily be a duck. Although that might confuse the ducks, or the cat if it tried to swim on a pond. Numbers and words are just something we made up to explain the things we see and experience. What about something physical? There is an issue with that no matter if you follow science or religion on the creation of the universe. The universe started somewhere, somehow, somewhen (so long as you follow one of the creation theories, I don't know about those who don't so let's just use those two ideas for now, God and The Big Bang). Both required a beginning, whether that was fiat lux or BANG! there was a beginning. Thus destroying any hope of infinity in the pure sense. Or at least what I believe to be infinity. Take the symbol. 8. Ok turn it on its side because I could look through the character map but they're the same picture really. There is no beginning and no end. It loops round on itself. That is infinity.
And what about the most concrete infinite thing that we can conceive? The universe. It is, apparently, still expanding (or it may have stopped now, I'm not sure how it is progressing at the moment) even though the universe is everything. Where does it expand to? Apparently they think it's going to shrink later. I don't really understand how that works because what about the space it took up beforehand? Where did that go? Did it just vanish from existence?
I kind of wish I was an astronomer, you know the science one not the horoscope one. If only so I understood these things.
I don't think there is anything concrete in this world that is infinite. Yet I love the concept. The universe is relatively infinite. The size is so huge (understatement), and contains everything we could ever know truly, and a lot of things we never will know ever, that it is as infinite as we can hope to achieve. Thinking about how huge that is, makes me feel pretty small. Not in a, I'm worthless sort of way, but in a humbling, ego reducing sort of way. At the same time while I am a speck of dust on a slightly larger (relatively) speck of dust in a huge black ocean full of glowing specks of dust and other specks of dust, some may even be tiny pebbles, I'm a pretty awesome speck of dust. I can do things. Humans can do things. We can create and destroy. We do better at the latter than the prior, sadly, but both are possible.
I love infinity. I love relative infinity. I love partial, incomplete, pure, unpure. I love the concept and the reality. Infinity is fabulous.
And from infinity I've realised I have one life. I don't see me getting a 1up or a restart button. This is it. I kind of want that as a tattoo. An infinity with a diagonal slash running through it. Showing that in the infinity of the universe and all of existence I have one. Just one. No more. I don't think I believe in reincarnation. Nor do I see it plausible to believe in heaven or hell. I just don't know where they would fit in, well anything. I don't mind if I am proven wrong. Heck that would be fine by me. I just don't think that believing in something past this is something I want to do. I don't want to live my life purely for whatever is to come. Nor do I want to worry too much about it. I'll take that when the time comes. I'll probably go to hell but hopefully a relatively mild area. But 'I'd rather go to hell, than be in Purgatory', to quote My Chemical Romance. The only thing that I don't think I could cope with is complete nothingness for the rest of eternity, although really I can't imagine hell being a very nice alternative. But I guess so long as I can look back and think 'well I didn't do everything right but I had fun and made a pretty good effort in life' then I think I can at least find solace in that wherever I end up, if anywhere. Mind you religion is a tricky concept (as really the afterlife is religion's deal). I don't know what I think about it. I don't have much to say on it aside from I don't believe in organised religion. I think I disappoint my mama on that because she would probably rather I was Christian, presumably CoE, because that is what she used to put on forms that requested it. But how can a multitude of people believe in the same thing when you can't prove it really exists. I approve of faith. I approve of people having faith in things bigger and higher than themselves because it helps them. I just don't know what I believe. Actually, watch Dogma on the matter. Kevin Smith has some useful comments on religion, ok so most of it is from a Christian perspective but that's just the plot. Some of the underlying stuff is pretty good. Also it has Alan Rickman in it so if nothing else that makes it worth watching. At some point I think I'll read the bible to see what the craic is. Maybe even try and get some translated other holy texts like the Koran and stuff. Read what these people believe in.
Infinity is wonderful, faith is wonderful, but at the end of the day it's only a concept. Like everything else.
The dead bird was just that. It was dead and smushed on the road. Life is short and brutal. Some more so than others. I guess that's where the previous came from. Or at least partially. The order is becoming wrong but that's what happens when you try to remember everything that ran through your mind. It just doesn't always come out the way it should.
So it started out with bus tickets and ants and birds with bruised shins and walking or maybe just with the creation of everything. But continues with the universe, life, self and the fact that eight year old children have iPods. I wonder if I'll work out any of this or forget it like many other things that I try to follow up with.
Maybe one day I'll go out on a limb and try and believe in something or at least, have an idea about it. Even if that idea is that everything is bullshit and pointless. At least it's something to work with.
I'm also considering going teetotal. But I think that's a different blog altogether. Five A4 pages of size eleven Times New Roman (bleh, what a boring font) is enough for now.
It's also 2:17 am on day two of writing this. Definitely bed time.
