Life, as the old 80′s song insists, is what you make it.. which is a somewhat sobering thought as I look out over a rain drenched Abington Park.
There are many things that both friends and family will quote at you, in wordishly wise ways, and sometimes with a zen-like look on their face and voice; but however much you shake a stick at it, and this is probably age related (another year, another candle to burn), sometimes you just need to drop back, find your own space, crank up the music that defines your here-and-now and…..
…and? Well you’ll know what works for you, as for me, I am still mid “and…’ing”.
Is there a difference between Insomnia and just not wanting to go to bed until the wee small hours of the morning?
It’s not that I *can’t* go to sleep, if I was to put head to pillow I would more than probably drop off pretty quickly. It’s that I don’t feel like putting the head on the pillow in the first place!
I’ve been a ‘Night Owl’ my whole life, ever since the first time I was able to stay up late. Of course the flip side to this is the morning after… As has been admitted to in previous posts, dragging my carcass from the horizontal to the vertical is nigh on impossible REGARDLESS of the actual numbers of hours slept.
Not sure if this is just a latent psychotic streak on my part or just some sad loner lifestyle. There is something to be said for seeing the ‘virtual ship in the night’ when you notice others are also up; the sudden appearance of a facebook update and then silence afterwards, the ping of an email, the flickering of someone coming onto MSN (and then off again just as quickly).
More than anything tis just a time to reflect, chill out to some music, update a website, do some coding… and watch others wander darkly through the internet landscape.. See you all tonight?
The problem with blogging, apart from the obvious lack of skills in the subtle art of stringing words into a semi-cohesive sentence, is… is… well this! I know what I want to write about, I have a pithy title, a keyboard on which to make nice tapping noises with, favourite music playing in the background and a blank screen looking back at a blank mind.
I must have spent the best part of 4 hours+, with keyboard at the ready, looking at a conceptual “blank piece of paper” wondering how the hell I was going to start the brain splurge off.
Once the first sentence is down it’s pretty easy to follow up with the rest of the drivel. However last nights post was sitting on my screen looking back at me sullenly with its nice new title, but conspicuously light in the word count. A couple of cool pictures, yes… words, no. How to statrt?
Call me Ishmael…
Eh bien, mon Prince…
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen…
Unfortunately all a little “un-unique” and not really suitable as an opener for the post I had in mind.
Ah well the post did finally manage to find its legs and limp onto the screen, in a fashion, although the hour of its final re-appearance (2.05am) did make trying to shift my carcass to work this morning somewhat harder than it usually is.
Somewhat reminded of that scene from Blazing Saddles where Lilly Von Shtup is singing “I’m Tired”, not so much in the sense of being a “Goddess of Desire”, etc, but just the sheer sense of not being able to get the energy up to do anything of much use.
These past few weeks have been a manic blur of competing priorities, unrealistic expectations of what one person can achieve in a relatively short space of time, and this week just gone is something that just doesn’t want repeating. Headless chicken mode is a thing of wonder and highly amusing… when it ain’t you that’s the nogginless avian!
Won’t go too much into detail, cos… well… I’m too tired to string the relevant words together properly, and in my case that level of in-eloquence isn’t pretty – suffice to say; kids, injuries and a little measure of work. ’nuff said.
All of which is a rather round-about way of apologising for a lack of posts on my narcissistic little corner of the Internet. I will try better, honest… just let me chug a few cans of Red Bull whilst chewing coffee beans and Zolpidem!
..Should make the next post an interesting one (at last)!
It doesn’t matter how many karate lessons you take, the grade of your belt, the years of practise, blood, sweat n tears invested, extracted and demanded by your Sensei.. or even the years of accumulated experience gained through 40 years of what life has thrown at you. Nothing really quite prepares you for being attacked by a stationary pillar!
There was no attempted block, or retaliatory strike, as the aforementioned stationary pillar maliciously jumped out at me whilst I was looking elsewhere… the “KYAI” was also absent, although it was replaced with a kind of muffled “Gnnfff!” noise.
I now have a slightly sore head, a bruised arse (whence I landed), a cheezy look on my face and I’m thinking about taking my pride to A&E.
A reconstruction follows…
Also, if I do get a facial bruise, and Sensei asks anyone; I was attacked by 10 or 20 ninjas… or Sarah and her phantom belly button! (in joke, but once she reads this the outcome will be the same as 10-20 ninjas).
There’s a mental image running around my head that would speak far more volumes than any number of words could convey in how things are at the moment. Sometimes, and only sometimes, words are easy
…but not enough.. or way too much.
I’ve spoken before about how a song, a snippet of lyrics taken out of context, an image, or some other medium, provide a far more accurate and personal reflection of self at a point in time.
I won’t try and put into words what the mental image is, inoffensive as it is, as that seems counter intuitive. Maybe later, when I have some personal time, I will search for something that matches it on the big, bad, t’interweb… or, god forbid, put my artistic abilities to the test and actually translate from mental image to physical medium.
Until then I’ll share one of the ‘lyrics out of context’, that I mentioned earlier. It’s from a song by Madness and perversely it’s probably the one bit that makes the song sound darker than it’s actual intent – which is exactly the opposite;
Standing up in the falling down
In so much rain I could almost drown.
If I ever do manage to scribble the image down I’ll make sure to add it to the blog… maybe. However now seems a perfect time to plug in some headphones, hit ‘random’ on the playlist, and see if I can either create some new audible monuments or just lose self in the moment.
There is a certain laziness that creeps in when riffing off a quick comment. Unfortunately this laziness when armed with a keyboard is where trouble lurks, awaiting its chance to bite you on the unmentionables.
It seems that my writing skills, and its slovenly attributes, change dependant on where I visit when armed with the aforementioned keyboard;
Blogging: For some reason I can never seem to post a small snippet of what I am upto quite like the talented Mr Fitchett is able to. A veritable torrent of letters, words, sentences, bullet points and paragraphs gets splurged onto the computer and then gets edited, re-edited, moved around, edited some more, updated, deleted, polished and buffed to within an inch of its life.
The end result is no more eloquent than when it began, but it does probably reflect more what I was trying to get over in my own unique way… most of the time. There being some notable exceptions apparently.
Twitter: …and in what can only be considered the extreme opposite end of the scale; being forced to voice an experience or thought in 140 characters or less gets you to consider VERY carefully what you want to say and the best way in which to say it. Of course, as with all things, this can go somewhat awry.
It seems to be in the ‘little’ area between those two extremes that I come unstuck. The quick reply often done without thought is where unmentionables get the nibble I spoke about at the beginning of this post (way, way back – I did say I tended to splurge on a bit).
Unfortunately, to a greater extent than I should really be doing, you rely on the person reading these unthought out replies to understand what it is you were trying to get across. Hence, what you thought was a critique of yourself becomes criticism of another which is on the perverse spectrum of where you wanted to be.
Sometimes when a sentence begins with the word “I”, that is where the heart of the sentence lies.
Time to be less flippant online methinks and begin watching, not so much my P’s and Q’s, but my Q’s and M’s and all the combination of letters between the two (look down at your keyboard to understand).
Popularity is always a nice thing, however it’s a little unsettling when the people you’re popular with are only after your blood. I tried interesting them in my body, but no joy.
It also seems a little strange that being negative is an absolute positive, at least in the minds of the aforementioned Vampires that I appear to be so popular with.
You have to hand it to the National Blood Service, they know exactly which buttons to press to get my full attention, and the lovely female Gaelic lilt on the end of the phone certainly pushed the majority of them; so, on the 9th March, I am off to give my usual armful of red go-go juice.
Truth be told though, I hate needles… Really, really *HATE* needles! So the thought of voluntarily going to a place where I’ll be jabbed and drained is somewhat of an anathema to me (I think I may have ‘intimated’ in previous posts about my slight squeamishness).
But, seeing as the Blood Services website tells me my blood (O-) is ‘very special indeed‘, it would seem churlish not to gift them some of it for the greater good; especially after such a nice compliment. Usually when people tell me I’m “special”, I get the distinct feeling it’s not in quite the same way I imagine they mean.
Another reason I go is precisely BECAUSE I hate needles so much! I am hoping that one day all these visits will finally get me over this little phobia. It’s this vein hope (get it? get it? vein, rather than vain… forget it!) that I also volunteer to do Kata at each Karate Tournament that comes along. One day, maybe the one coming up on the 27th February, I won’t be my usual mitigated disaster and complete it without looking like I have swapped feet with my 8 year old son!
It’s a hope, however vein or vain, and until it’s realised I’ll just have to be content with being “special”.
Never blog an hour or so before you decide to throw up and get a bad case of the vertigos. Not that it was a conscious decision, but the resultant blog post was a lot more depressing than I had originally anticipated or meant.
Ah well, I shall leave the original blog post up for posterity’s sake, no censorship here… and now if you don’t mind I am off to go and call for Ralph and Huey down the large white telephone.
It’s true, I have reached a kind of prolonged brain-fart. The brain is whirring around, as much as it ever does, the fingers are itchy to put something down in words, but all that comes out is some slightly stale air.
As much as I want to jot down the daily doings of me, in some kind of narcissistic ‘dear diary’, the truth is that not an awful lot of interest happens. Life certainly isn’t in any shape or form as life-and-death as Ann Frank’s, or as tally-ho-trousers-down-and-up-the-constituents as Alan Clark’s.
So I find myself, during lunchtime at work, again within one of the music pods, sitting in front of this blog wondering what the hell to write down? Life, as I see it, is pretty much consisting of the following;
Work is work. I work in a Bank designing computer systems, how exactly exciting do you think that can get? Of course, the slightly annoying element of me being no longer required come 31st December does cause some concern… but 31st DECEMBER?! That’s like a lifetime away! (feel free to point me in the direction of this post in 2011 and rub my face in it if things don’t entirely work out the way I hope)
Karate is still providing the source of me getting beaten up in various, and intriguing, ways by multiple peoples. Just as an aside a new lesson has been learnt; do NOT do leg exercises at the Gym just before a karate lesson later that evening. The results are not impressive and the scowling by ones Sensei is something frightening to behold.
Home-life is home-life. Trying to resolve the latest home based dramas; house, heating, repairs, family arguments, money, etc, etc. is starting to feel like work. In the spirit of holding my hand up though, this is no different than anyone else. However the feeling of just throwing the arms up in the air with some of the new drama’s and say “Fine, I give up, have it your way!” is just too strong at the moment.
Sleep is not sleep. ‘Nuff said.
Go back to step #1
In my actual verbal self I am a person who doesn’t mind not having something to say. I am completely comfortable, when I have nothing of interest to say, in saying nothing at all. I don’t have the gift of the gab or have a hundred and one amusing anecdotes with which to regale friends and colleagues alike, and as seen from the above there’s nothing of note to bore the poor person I happen to be with about.
I just wish I had the same control when it came to blogging, although why blog in the first place if that were to be the case? Here’s as good a place as any to dump any brain-fartage and it’s not as though anyone reads the thing!
There, “ramble” done and dumped onto the t’interweb along with all the other rubbish that inhabit it. No violence (or at least none seen), or porn (that would be too terrifying a vision to dwell on) or conclusion to this post….
…just a faint stale smell, depending on how long after I posted this you read it, and a slightly relieved feeling on my part to expel it albeit somewhat publicly (which is very rude).
