Andy's Blog

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?

Safer with a computerless keyboard?

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).

Apparently the short one-liner of a post yesterday is better suited to twitter and not a blog post, I wasn’t aware that netiquette had developed to such a degree.

As to an explanation….

..Somewhat more difficult.  I am sat here, in front of the keyboard, with a  thousand words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs running around my head refusing to attach themselves in any permanent form to the screen.  The backspace key is getting worn out and I’m afraid that the artificial intelligence within WordPress will just get tired of the relentless type-delete-retype-delete cycle and just publish anyways.

Where to begin and how to word this post without the spitted teeth embedding themselves into the paragraphs?

I dunno.

I value honesty above all else, and always ask friends to be frank and honest with me.  I have a particularly thick skin and most things will be taken as they are meant – I always thought it particularly stupid to seek someones honesty and then repay that with hurt pride after they have taken a difficult leap to provide you with that feedback.  Take it, deal with it, move on.

However the stream of ‘truth’ that came through over the Bank Holiday was a little too much, even for one as thick skinned and dense as myself.  Whilst I recognised some of what was said, and sheepishly say “guilty as charged” to others, the rest just seemed pure anger and nothing that I recognised.  The shutting of virtual doors afterwards leaves no room for response, and to be frank I don’t think I want to rattle those ‘doors’ to see if that’s even a possibility.

There comes a point in time when you think this is happening too often and I just don’t have the energy to weather this anymore.

I took it, the “dealing with” is being exorcised here, and now it’s time to move on, however sadly…

I am not quite sure how to start this week off, whether I already have in a purely theological sense, or how it will finish.

If there is one thing that sums up life at the moment, like a modern day version of the parable, it’s the game ’Parking Wars’ on facebook.  The point of the game is to shuffle your cars around, trying not to get fined and keeping ahead of your friends.

Personal pride seems to keep you shuffling these cars around, never-endingly, otherwise somebody could overtake you on the leader board.  There’s no other element to the game.. just keep moving.

Methinks a deletion of this app is on the books, I need to get a little more control of things.  This, and some other apps on facebook as well.  Actually I have already started the process in that I am no longer socially taggable.

Going round on the Bike this weekend gave me LOTS of time to think things through, do some personal assessment and generally clear cobwebs.  Unfortunately the Biking was at the cost of some chill out time with friends, but sometimes we seem destined to follow in the wake of others and ride the consequences of their decisions.

However, plans for the week are as follows;

• Finally get back to the Gym, after a week off because of the busted finger, and get back into the rhythm of early starts.  Doing weights BEFORE work definitely gets you more alert for what it throws at you.
• Carry on, *not* as usual, with Karate.  Unfortunately my elation, at getting a medal at the tournament, has encountered the rather hard object that is realism.  I seem to have hit a bit of a personal ceiling in my abilities, and unless I can push through that I am destined to not progress any further through the belts.
• As much as possible, try and fade a little more into the background.  My presence, to some, seems to be a source of discomfort and this is something that I never want to cause.  So it’s time to reduce my ‘presence’ and re-schedule my life.

We’ll see how successful I am by the end of the week.

..and the ‘theological’ reference?  Well I was informed, by the lights of my loin, that the school’s local shaman has proclaimed that Sunday is the start of the week.  I am up for being corrected, but my recollection of the Bible was that God rested on the seventh day and the God botherers thought; “Well if HE needs a rest on the seventh day, then who are we to do otherwise?” …and thus Sunday was born”.

So whilst my body whimpers on the Monday it, apparently, should really have been whimpering on the Sunday instead.  Please feel free to correct my delusions…

This week I am taking a ‘timeout’ from pretty much everything, including work.  The battery’s are drained from far too much that is currently going on, although Karate is not part of that timeout; everybody needs an outlet, somewhere to let off steam.

To be honest, one of the reasons that facebook was removed, apart from those stated in a previous post, was to retreat into the background rather than have a potential train wreck in a very public forum.  That, and just being plain tired and finding it difficult to maintain some necessary deceptions.

Blogging will continue as normal, this isn’t a full retreat into my shell after all, whilst trying to maintain some air of mystery.  Next challenge is to try and put on an air of normality at Senior Karate Class this Tuesday, which’ll be hard as some there are a better judge of mood than is sometimes comfortable!

For those of you not geek enough to know what the above actually means, it translates from computer speak to; “Life does not equal Facebook”

You would think, from the barrage of emails I have received, that my decision to remove myself from the facebook world was akin to jumping off a cliff with a pitiful wail of “Goodbye cruel world….”

I think in retrospect if I was to ever jump of a cliff I would try my absolute hardest to make that funny “waaahoohohoooo” noise that cartoon characters make – what a way to go… and be remembered

Actually, the reason I decided to remove myself from facebook was pretty much the opposite of trying to remove myself from life, more to try and re-engage in it.  I don’t think it was only me, but I started to find that;

• I was spending an inordinate amount of time just flicking back to facebook, almost unconciously, checking what people were upto, moving my cars in parking wars and numerous other little games that I would be invited to.
• It ‘seemed’ that I had started living my life in one line status updates at a time.  A case of life imitating facebook, instead of the other way round.  This also led to an absolute glut of maudlin status updates!
• More importantly, and the main reason why I decided to remove facebook, I was starting to use facebook as my main source of information about friends and family, rather than actually just speaking or visiting them.

This last point was the more important to me.  It was proving too easy to just see how a friend was, post a witty or consoling one line comment under their status update and feel that somehow you had done your bit as a friend, etc.

I think it’s time I picked up the phone a little more, or even better visit those friends I haven’t actually seen for a long while – to tear myself away from the computer and to engage with life a little more than I am at the moment…

Radical eh?

I think it is probably time I gave people a rest and stop disturbing people relentlessly so I am in the process of removing my facebook account (how hard is that!), as well as removing one of my MSN accounts.

The MSN is ridiculously easy to do, however the facebook account is proving a REAL pain!  Deactivating it really doesn’t do anything, everything stays on there but you can no longer sign onto it… how is that deactivated?

Ah well, the work continues!

I seem to be doing an awful lot of waiting these past few days, but in a true digital age this waiting seems to be on several different media;

• Waiting for a work colleague to finally get back with the information you asked for several days or weeks ago.
• Waiting for a friend to appear online, in either MSN or facebook, to have someone [in]sane to talk to and relieve the boredom of you waiting (see above).
• Waiting for a letter to drop through your door with news that will be either good or bad.
• Waiting for Friday and the implications that this may have.

On the plus side I didn’t get a beating at Karate last night from my friend, for some cheeky banter last week.  In fact I had a fairly good class which is in stark contrast to last week.  However as my friend said;

I have a long memory, just you wait….

I find myself, almost unconsciously, wandering back to facebook to check out what my listed friends are upto, moving my cars around in Parking Wars, building up my castles in the Knighthood game, updating my profile and uploading more pics.  She-who-must-be-obeyed is starting to feel like a facebook widow.

As some of you may know, I am an iterate IM’er (Instant Messaging), and facebook also allows you to IM friends when they come online – hallelujah!  …or as I am beginning to wonder “uh-oh”.

IM’ing for me is a simple, and cheap, way to chat to friends and gets over some of the inate shyness that is, unfortunately, built into my DNA (which is one reason why I don’t use the phone on a constant basis).  However I am beginning to wonder at what point does IM’ing friends start to become, for them, something coming close to stalking?  The unfortunate element of IM’ing is that you don’t know what the person is doing or feeling at the time you send a cheery little “hello” down the line to them, and people (despite beliefs to the contrary) will always try to remain polite, especially to friends, whatever their mood.

So I think, from now on, I shall try and keep my IM’ing to a minimum and only on a as-needed basis – unless of course I am IM’d first.  Maybe I am overly worrying about a non-issue, but that is a side effect of having too much time on one’s hands during the wee hours (I go to bed WAAAAAY too late).

So if you do find yourself being pestered one too many times, a “feck off” is always taken in the mood it’s given . What’s more worrying, is the following reply given by a friend when I brought it up with them;

coooooool, i have my own stalker….wicked !!

Am on the countdown, in hours, to the official start of my hols for this year!  Not sure I am going to be able to dial in at all during this little break, as we will be in the back of beyond in Spain – in splendid isolation in the hills around Madrid.

Plenty of grounds to go cycling in, our own private pool to splash around in….. and probably no wifi that I can hack into to be able to check in on my facebook progress or update my blog whilst bored… EEEeeeekk!!  For the more mentally balanced amongst you this may not present any kind of problem, but for this technofreak – it is.  I’ll be like a junky without his fix.

Looks like I should be coming back a wee bit fitter than I left, and finally get the boys and myself fully trained up in Saifa and Bassai-Dai.