So this is my 97th blog post. I'm going to write a post each day this week until Thursday when, if all goes to plan, I'll have written 100. Huzzah!
I have a favour to ask of you all then. Let me know what you want me to write about please, it would be really cool to hear your ideas. (Also, seeing as there are about three people who actually read this blog anyway, it'll be like a little party).
Until then however, I'll let you in on a little phenomenon that has dogged (or helped) me for the past few years. You see, I come from a city that has a 2:1 ratio of girls to guys, I went to a co-educational school (again full of girls) and my course at uni was about 80% girls, which is a big huzzah for all the sisters out there who claim that the legal profession is sexist. Put simply, I've always had quite a high proportion of female friends, and they've always tried to fix me.
Now, 'fix' implies 'broken', or as some of the ladies would imply, merely sprained. No matter what way you act, dress, romanticise or cook, one of them will come up with suggestions.
The best by far was a girl called Nadia. N is a friend from uni who I haven't seen since graduation. She is a tiny wee thing and used to be able to verbally browbeat me into submission, berating me with kindness until my viewpoint changed or I had adequately acknowledged her displeasure. We would go and drink mint tea, and she would frown, then cringe, then give a helpless laugh as I told her about my misadventures around college.
It still happens today of course, but I have fewer friends in London, so it's not as often. There's TV Girl, of course, who wants me to get into TV writing, and who tries to 'fix' that about me, there's VideoGirl, whom I speak with online, who I think might find me a bit of a downer sometimes, and there's Posh Friend, who recently met me in a bar with big news.
"I have two friends I want you to meet"
I enquired about the two, was told I should only ask out one. That's the way girls fix you. PF has taken up matchmaking recently, and is trying to get me to no longer be single, and doesn't like the type of girls I usually date. I think the combined mixture of years of me being single (or in and out of weird relationships) and her desire to see me mature a bit, coupled with, let's face it, boredom, does the trick.
I'm not complaining of course, because I love my friends dearly, nor am I making fun of anyone. It's just remarkable how girls can make a project of someone. Almost every girl I know tries it to some respect. It's a wonderful trope in the female being.
So, to you ladies out there. Do you ever try to 'fix' guys? I mean, is every guy a project, or are you happy for the men you know to be sad, single, stupid and scruffy?
Guys? I won't ask you the question, because you'll probably only get the answer wrong.
As ever, you can email all questions to radiogael@googlemail.com
Showing posts with label Late Night Thoughts. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Late Night Thoughts. Show all posts
Monday, March 8, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
From Anger at the Febrile State of a Saturday Evening to Nostalgia.
I'm sitting in the living room in my PJs at 01:07 with Spark listening to the radio. I had a bath about two hours ago and my hair's still fluffy. I just had a lovely cup of tea, and my stomach is warm.
All over London now, women in high heels and low cut black dresses are drinking too many vodka-based drinks and dancing to poorly produced music in wannabe nightclubs, more similar to germ-infested Thai sweatshops than bars. They drink as if they're afraid of something and then go home to vomit or fuck strangers, or claw the eyes out of other girls or pass out in doorways.
Men, or boys, in clothes-with-other-people's-names-on-them dance badly to poorly produced music and talk to each other based on arbitary and ill-defined social rules about how much they can drink or what person's name is on their boxers, the waistband of which everyone in the bar can see, or which celebrity they wouldn't have sex with or which gaudy piece-of-shit platinum and diamond-soaked timepiece they would like to buy. They drink as if they have something to prove, and then go home to vomit, to fuck strangers or to get into an argument to the point where there's almost, but not quite, a fist fight.
They are tired. They act like they've got more money than they actually do. They hate all but maybe 20 of the people in the club. They take thousands upon thousands of photos and they will wake up tomorrow and convince themselves that they had a really good night, despite the hangover, the cut lip, the STD, the Facebook photos and the broken relationships.
It's one of those evenings where I realise that the fact that I'm a boring shite is okay. I've been really down recently, and part of that probably has something to do with the fact that I, more often than not, am one of the faceless 'They' to whom I refer. We have all been conned into believing that the only way to live is to spend our money and hard earned free time gravitating towards alcohol, with an accompaniment of shite wannabe-music.
I've just realised the irony of the word 'wannabe'. It's officially a word, as it's in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it shall nonetheless always be a wannabe word in most people's estimation. 'Nonetheless' is good, as are most threesomes of any sort.
-
Spark is surprising me tonight. After having known him for almost five years, we've never sat and listened to hip-hop together. I don't mind rap, but I wouldn't be a fan of the newer stuff, and Spark's always hit me as an Acoustic man, but here we are, listening to Jay-Z while S bobs his head and I type. We are breaking ground on new territories in our friendship it seems.
Now he has put on the main song from Civilisation 4, Baba Yetu. This reminds me of that time we both lived in Virginia for a year. Mark sings along and does that thing he does where he sings a song in a different key or adds an impromptu harmony
I tell Mark that I've started writing about him when I had initially intended to have a wee rant about how culture dictates us to go and act like guffawing wankers in shitty nightclubs, "getting the cans into us" as S says. He tells me that my blog has gone downhill in terms of content if I'm using him as subject matter.
We listen to YoYo Ma playing Ecstacy of Gold from his Ennio Morricone album. It's simply beautiful and as the vibrations (from the bitchin' Bose bass amp that S bought last summer) creep across the floor and make the phlegm in my chest vibrate, the hair on my arm rises up and I've suddenly got goose-pimples. This really reminds me of the time we lived in Virginia. It was absolutely the best time of my life.
One of the guys in our apartment in the US had a huge computer screen and ran linux. He was a very good fellow, a scientist turned law-student, who was interested in Goethe, talked to a stuffed mascot of Nietzsche (whom we all called Saddam) had a copy of Milton's Paradise Lost (with the original Gustav Doré wood engravings) and played the cello. His name is John.
My happiest memory of the flat is sitting on a Saturday night, with a Dominos pizza the size of a cartwheel (a thin-crust pepperoni with green peppers) and a bottle of Coke, playing Civ 4 for hours on end and listening to Yo Yo Ma. The pizzas were always cut into a grid of squares instead of the traditional wedges, and we would eat it as if it were fine finger food at a champagne reception. It was great. People always talk about their perfect year, that was mine, a beautiful year.
I'm sitting in the kitchen now, it's 03:09, and I've been typing, listening to music and spotifying. I've collected the music we were listening to before Spark went to bed, and added a few more that'll help lull me off to (if not sleep) rest. Here it is, folks.
I just realised that I've been smiling for the past twenty minutes, even though I've been sitting on my own in the living room, typing my vague and innane thoughts and trying not to yawn. I might not go to bars or clubs for a while, they're starting to annoy me. Sitting with Spark tonight was really cool, perhaps that's something to do more.
-----
----
---
--
-
ps - we decided tonight that instead of 'poker night' or other man-things to maintain guy friendships, we're going to have a Pizza and Civ5 night when we're both lawyers.
PPS - this is the first post in almost a year, and almost 100 posts, with the tag 'PIZZA'. How the hell did that happen?
All over London now, women in high heels and low cut black dresses are drinking too many vodka-based drinks and dancing to poorly produced music in wannabe nightclubs, more similar to germ-infested Thai sweatshops than bars. They drink as if they're afraid of something and then go home to vomit or fuck strangers, or claw the eyes out of other girls or pass out in doorways.
Men, or boys, in clothes-with-other-people's-names-on-them dance badly to poorly produced music and talk to each other based on arbitary and ill-defined social rules about how much they can drink or what person's name is on their boxers, the waistband of which everyone in the bar can see, or which celebrity they wouldn't have sex with or which gaudy piece-of-shit platinum and diamond-soaked timepiece they would like to buy. They drink as if they have something to prove, and then go home to vomit, to fuck strangers or to get into an argument to the point where there's almost, but not quite, a fist fight.
They are tired. They act like they've got more money than they actually do. They hate all but maybe 20 of the people in the club. They take thousands upon thousands of photos and they will wake up tomorrow and convince themselves that they had a really good night, despite the hangover, the cut lip, the STD, the Facebook photos and the broken relationships.
It's one of those evenings where I realise that the fact that I'm a boring shite is okay. I've been really down recently, and part of that probably has something to do with the fact that I, more often than not, am one of the faceless 'They' to whom I refer. We have all been conned into believing that the only way to live is to spend our money and hard earned free time gravitating towards alcohol, with an accompaniment of shite wannabe-music.
I've just realised the irony of the word 'wannabe'. It's officially a word, as it's in the Oxford English Dictionary, but it shall nonetheless always be a wannabe word in most people's estimation. 'Nonetheless' is good, as are most threesomes of any sort.
-
Spark is surprising me tonight. After having known him for almost five years, we've never sat and listened to hip-hop together. I don't mind rap, but I wouldn't be a fan of the newer stuff, and Spark's always hit me as an Acoustic man, but here we are, listening to Jay-Z while S bobs his head and I type. We are breaking ground on new territories in our friendship it seems.
Now he has put on the main song from Civilisation 4, Baba Yetu. This reminds me of that time we both lived in Virginia for a year. Mark sings along and does that thing he does where he sings a song in a different key or adds an impromptu harmony
I tell Mark that I've started writing about him when I had initially intended to have a wee rant about how culture dictates us to go and act like guffawing wankers in shitty nightclubs, "getting the cans into us" as S says. He tells me that my blog has gone downhill in terms of content if I'm using him as subject matter.
We listen to YoYo Ma playing Ecstacy of Gold from his Ennio Morricone album. It's simply beautiful and as the vibrations (from the bitchin' Bose bass amp that S bought last summer) creep across the floor and make the phlegm in my chest vibrate, the hair on my arm rises up and I've suddenly got goose-pimples. This really reminds me of the time we lived in Virginia. It was absolutely the best time of my life.
One of the guys in our apartment in the US had a huge computer screen and ran linux. He was a very good fellow, a scientist turned law-student, who was interested in Goethe, talked to a stuffed mascot of Nietzsche (whom we all called Saddam) had a copy of Milton's Paradise Lost (with the original Gustav Doré wood engravings) and played the cello. His name is John.
My happiest memory of the flat is sitting on a Saturday night, with a Dominos pizza the size of a cartwheel (a thin-crust pepperoni with green peppers) and a bottle of Coke, playing Civ 4 for hours on end and listening to Yo Yo Ma. The pizzas were always cut into a grid of squares instead of the traditional wedges, and we would eat it as if it were fine finger food at a champagne reception. It was great. People always talk about their perfect year, that was mine, a beautiful year.
I'm sitting in the kitchen now, it's 03:09, and I've been typing, listening to music and spotifying. I've collected the music we were listening to before Spark went to bed, and added a few more that'll help lull me off to (if not sleep) rest. Here it is, folks.
I just realised that I've been smiling for the past twenty minutes, even though I've been sitting on my own in the living room, typing my vague and innane thoughts and trying not to yawn. I might not go to bars or clubs for a while, they're starting to annoy me. Sitting with Spark tonight was really cool, perhaps that's something to do more.
-----
----
---
--
-
ps - we decided tonight that instead of 'poker night' or other man-things to maintain guy friendships, we're going to have a Pizza and Civ5 night when we're both lawyers.
PPS - this is the first post in almost a year, and almost 100 posts, with the tag 'PIZZA'. How the hell did that happen?
Monday, November 30, 2009
Happy-go-fucking-lucky McPositive and the Curse of the Hairy Man-Bra
The Devil makes work...
Being the 70-year-old retired widow that I am, I’ve begun to have a bath a few days a week instead of a shower. Basically, I read in some important man’s magazine (like Elle or Cosmo orGaghappy Cumdumpster Cheerleaders something) that if you have trouble sleeping, you should have a bath.
Apparently, your body relaxes in the hour following a bath; your heartbeat slows, your blood pressure drops and you become sleepy. As I have pretty heavy-duty insomnia, I desperately try most old wives’ remedies and have started having a regular radox hour…plus, baths are fucking thrash!
(ps, when I say I’ve started having baths, I mean that I’ve started having a bath in lieu of my usual shower. I’ve not just learned how to clean myself or anything, it’s okay… also, when I say I try everything to sleep, that may or may not include using an lavender linen spray for my pillow – surely that’s worthy of a TMIT)
So tonight was no different. After my penultimate (37th) cup of tea of the day, I drew a ridiculously over-hot bath, brought in my laptop to listen to music (it sits on the toilet-I have a system, critics) and sang ‘I am what I am’ as the mirrors steamed up.
It. Was. Awesome.
Overheated Conor, listening to the Ricky Gervais podcast, drinking soda. Fucking bliss.
Anyway, there I was, listening away, soaking in the steaming water, and letting my mind wander when I realised that I was holding my razor. They say that ‘the Devil makes work for idle hands’, and that’s definitely true because, without realizing it, as I listened and chuckled away, I had sorta begun to shave my belly. Why? I have no idea, but for some reason I had subconsciously begun to shear my happy trail.
(happy trail = the little desire line of hair from a guy’s belly button to his man-candy)
“Okay, my right hand has, without recourse to conscious thought, begun the process of de-hairing my body. That’s a bit odd.” I thought, but I let it run.
Before long I was hooked. Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I can get absolutely obsessed with little simple things. Give me a tap and an empty bottle, and I can spend ages refilling and emptying it, like I was a six year old doing science. Within ten minutes, the Trail was gone, and the area where well-toned people have abs (what I call my ‘Guinness Baby’) was hairless, pale and looking somewhat forlorn.
I panicked. WTF? Grown-ups don’t do this do they? They don’t experiment with shaving themselves. I mean, all guys do it to some extent when they’re drunk, giving themselves handlebar moustaches and falling asleep to wake and realise they look like daft pricks, but I was sober. Perhaps the hours and hours of free time I have, the empty hours of insomnia and the listless days of unemployment, those 165 free hours a week have gotten to me? I mean, instead of working on writing, or practicing music, here I was…shaving my belly in the bath. What if my Mother called tomorrow?
[‘Hello Con?’
‘Hi Mum!’
‘How’s the job hunt going?’
‘Not the best Mum, it’s harder to find work than I thought’
‘Oh well, just keep at it..’
‘Okay, I will’
‘So, how are you spending your days, are you volunteering? Studying? Writing?’
‘No, Mum, I spend my days waiting for free internet and eating cherry bakewell tart then I buy the paper, have a bath, and shave my torso’
‘Oh, good lad, we’re so proud son.’
‘Thanks mum, I do try.’]
So I had a bald pink belly…what next?
Even as the thought manifested itself, my hand had begun to inch up my sternum (is that the word? Maybe thorax?) and was shaving shapes and patterns into the trail of hair leading to my tits.
So far so cool.
Before long, I had a white belly, a pink sternum and a sorta man-boob bra, made of hair.
Single file,ladies…single file. No pushing, please.
Anyway, by that stage I was legitimately fucked. Seriously. How could I ever risk anyone, anywhere, ever seeing the hair-bra? Not that I imagine I’ll ever be taking my top off (despite the obvious sex-appeal of the hair-bra) but on the off chance of one of the following two potential scenarios happening:
1) Being caught in a nuclear explosion and in the millisecond between the shockwave from the blast ripping my clothes off and my skin catching on fire, someone seeing the wispy, underwired home for my bosom, distinctive only because of the Casper whiteness of the rest of my torso. Even a nuclear holocaust deserves to be as non-socially-awkward as possible, right?
And,
2) A horse eating my shirt because, as I suspect, horses have a vendetta for something I did when I was young but can’t remember.
The hair-bra had to go.
Now, the razor was (as all guys out there will understand) near the end of the several-shave razor cycle; that very finite, but unwritten, time period during which a razor blade will go from Gillette to ruthless Guillotine, from multi-blade face-smoothation system to bona fide nipple remover. Anyway, it was fucking awful. It was pain dot com forwardslash holy fuck forward slash ouch.
I had my chest waxed for charity last year. There wasn’t a helluva lot to remove I’ll admit, but the process was made bearable and fun by the fact that I was being toughish in public, and that it was for cancer research (and also because it was in the ‘nice’ spectrum of pain, like when I got my tattoo or used to get punched in boxing, that I’ll admit to actually liking – btw, no, I’m not a perv, you know what I mean). After the waxing, I had gone home to shave the remaining wax tears out of my chest and wash off the fake tan that the girl had rubbed over me (we really know how to raise money for charity the fun way in Ireland!)
This bath shave required a steel jaw, it was like strolling merrily towards the German trenches during the Somme. Dragging an ever-blunter razor across my chest and willing the hair to disappear, all the while waiting for that little slice that meant that I had cut off a nipple, and trying desperately not to clog the little balde-ettes with hair or dead skin. At the very least, it was a fucking great way to exfoliate…by removing a layer of skin.
So now, I sit, at 3 am, having just recorded a video. I’m trying to sleep but my belly and chest feel wrong. My only consolation is this: I’ve maybe potentially kinda sorta started seeing someone, and she’s great. I really don’t ever want to take my top off for at least two months now because of the pale stubbly itchy blotchy meringue of a mess that it will be, so I think I might as well strap the chastity belt on til February. I'll take it slowly, and hope to Christ that no horses come anywhere near me.
So yeah, tomorrow/today is Monday, and I’ve GOT to find work, and maybe hide the razor when I’m in the bath. Otherwise, who knows…maybe next time I’ll end up with Venus ‘oh baby you’ve got it’ silky legs, or a DIY bris.
Being the 70-year-old retired widow that I am, I’ve begun to have a bath a few days a week instead of a shower. Basically, I read in some important man’s magazine (like Elle or Cosmo or
Apparently, your body relaxes in the hour following a bath; your heartbeat slows, your blood pressure drops and you become sleepy. As I have pretty heavy-duty insomnia, I desperately try most old wives’ remedies and have started having a regular radox hour…plus, baths are fucking thrash!
(ps, when I say I’ve started having baths, I mean that I’ve started having a bath in lieu of my usual shower. I’ve not just learned how to clean myself or anything, it’s okay… also, when I say I try everything to sleep, that may or may not include using an lavender linen spray for my pillow – surely that’s worthy of a TMIT)
So tonight was no different. After my penultimate (37th) cup of tea of the day, I drew a ridiculously over-hot bath, brought in my laptop to listen to music (it sits on the toilet-I have a system, critics) and sang ‘I am what I am’ as the mirrors steamed up.
It. Was. Awesome.
Overheated Conor, listening to the Ricky Gervais podcast, drinking soda. Fucking bliss.
Anyway, there I was, listening away, soaking in the steaming water, and letting my mind wander when I realised that I was holding my razor. They say that ‘the Devil makes work for idle hands’, and that’s definitely true because, without realizing it, as I listened and chuckled away, I had sorta begun to shave my belly. Why? I have no idea, but for some reason I had subconsciously begun to shear my happy trail.
(happy trail = the little desire line of hair from a guy’s belly button to his man-candy)
“Okay, my right hand has, without recourse to conscious thought, begun the process of de-hairing my body. That’s a bit odd.” I thought, but I let it run.
Before long I was hooked. Maybe it’s a guy thing, but I can get absolutely obsessed with little simple things. Give me a tap and an empty bottle, and I can spend ages refilling and emptying it, like I was a six year old doing science. Within ten minutes, the Trail was gone, and the area where well-toned people have abs (what I call my ‘Guinness Baby’) was hairless, pale and looking somewhat forlorn.
I panicked. WTF? Grown-ups don’t do this do they? They don’t experiment with shaving themselves. I mean, all guys do it to some extent when they’re drunk, giving themselves handlebar moustaches and falling asleep to wake and realise they look like daft pricks, but I was sober. Perhaps the hours and hours of free time I have, the empty hours of insomnia and the listless days of unemployment, those 165 free hours a week have gotten to me? I mean, instead of working on writing, or practicing music, here I was…shaving my belly in the bath. What if my Mother called tomorrow?
[‘Hello Con?’
‘Hi Mum!’
‘How’s the job hunt going?’
‘Not the best Mum, it’s harder to find work than I thought’
‘Oh well, just keep at it..’
‘Okay, I will’
‘So, how are you spending your days, are you volunteering? Studying? Writing?’
‘No, Mum, I spend my days waiting for free internet and eating cherry bakewell tart then I buy the paper, have a bath, and shave my torso’
‘Oh, good lad, we’re so proud son.’
‘Thanks mum, I do try.’]
So I had a bald pink belly…what next?
Even as the thought manifested itself, my hand had begun to inch up my sternum (is that the word? Maybe thorax?) and was shaving shapes and patterns into the trail of hair leading to my tits.
So far so cool.
Before long, I had a white belly, a pink sternum and a sorta man-boob bra, made of hair.
Single file,ladies…single file. No pushing, please.
Anyway, by that stage I was legitimately fucked. Seriously. How could I ever risk anyone, anywhere, ever seeing the hair-bra? Not that I imagine I’ll ever be taking my top off (despite the obvious sex-appeal of the hair-bra) but on the off chance of one of the following two potential scenarios happening:
1) Being caught in a nuclear explosion and in the millisecond between the shockwave from the blast ripping my clothes off and my skin catching on fire, someone seeing the wispy, underwired home for my bosom, distinctive only because of the Casper whiteness of the rest of my torso. Even a nuclear holocaust deserves to be as non-socially-awkward as possible, right?
And,
2) A horse eating my shirt because, as I suspect, horses have a vendetta for something I did when I was young but can’t remember.
The hair-bra had to go.
Now, the razor was (as all guys out there will understand) near the end of the several-shave razor cycle; that very finite, but unwritten, time period during which a razor blade will go from Gillette to ruthless Guillotine, from multi-blade face-smoothation system to bona fide nipple remover. Anyway, it was fucking awful. It was pain dot com forwardslash holy fuck forward slash ouch.
I had my chest waxed for charity last year. There wasn’t a helluva lot to remove I’ll admit, but the process was made bearable and fun by the fact that I was being toughish in public, and that it was for cancer research (and also because it was in the ‘nice’ spectrum of pain, like when I got my tattoo or used to get punched in boxing, that I’ll admit to actually liking – btw, no, I’m not a perv, you know what I mean). After the waxing, I had gone home to shave the remaining wax tears out of my chest and wash off the fake tan that the girl had rubbed over me (we really know how to raise money for charity the fun way in Ireland!)
This bath shave required a steel jaw, it was like strolling merrily towards the German trenches during the Somme. Dragging an ever-blunter razor across my chest and willing the hair to disappear, all the while waiting for that little slice that meant that I had cut off a nipple, and trying desperately not to clog the little balde-ettes with hair or dead skin. At the very least, it was a fucking great way to exfoliate…by removing a layer of skin.
So now, I sit, at 3 am, having just recorded a video. I’m trying to sleep but my belly and chest feel wrong. My only consolation is this: I’ve maybe potentially kinda sorta started seeing someone, and she’s great. I really don’t ever want to take my top off for at least two months now because of the pale stubbly itchy blotchy meringue of a mess that it will be, so I think I might as well strap the chastity belt on til February. I'll take it slowly, and hope to Christ that no horses come anywhere near me.
So yeah, tomorrow/today is Monday, and I’ve GOT to find work, and maybe hide the razor when I’m in the bath. Otherwise, who knows…maybe next time I’ll end up with Venus ‘oh baby you’ve got it’ silky legs, or a DIY bris.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Quost with Lassie
Aloha,
I thought I'd post with Lasairfhiona, so y'all could get introduced...
I thought I'd post with Lasairfhiona, so y'all could get introduced...
(this is quite late, and I was very tired, hence the manic glint in my eye)
Enjoy.
x
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Late Night Thoughts - reversion
Tonight, as usual, I'm lying in my bed, exhausted, trying to relax and allow my mind to unwind. I can't sleep. My silly brain is doing its usual trick of zapping around like a bee that's high on E-numbers from drinking too much orange squash and so I'm reading and thinking of things that I will write tomorrow. Instead of working today (on the idea I have been developing for a few weeks) and actually putting some effort into the craft that I want to spend the rest of my life doing, I've been fucking around, surfing the net and looking for 'obscure porn' on youtube. While this might be vaguely interesting or funny, I'm feeling what I often feel on these late nights when I can't sleep, that I've squandered a large portion of my life that I'll never get back.
The rain is hitting against the skylight in my room with such force that it's almost offensive, beating a tattoo as I lie here, cursing myself for wasting my life. Usually, I love the sound of the rain on that window, it's incredibly relaxing and reminds me of when I was younger, but tonight, it seems almost mocking. When I was about seven, I would lie awake listening to the rain and try to see if I could keep my eyes open for longer than the downpour lasted, playing chicken with the night outside. Needless to say I always lost.
Somehow the years fell away quickly, and now this bedroom is only a place I stay when I return home during the holidays. It's no longer 'my room', but rather the 'spare room'. In fact, the only thing that connects this room to my childhood is the view outside. The back gardens and roof-tops of all the houses of the neighbours around me, and the view of the river leading towards the sloping beauty of the city walls and the valley. It's weird, I vaguely miss the place when I'm away from home, and I love to be back, but there's always a huge part of me that wants to keep moving, an inability to rest.
I've noticed as well that when I'm back home I revert to who I was as a child. Most of my friends are the same, something for which I feel blessed, with (thank fuck) a few exceptions, and I feel that I am self-confident enough to relax in almost any social situation. Somehow, however, when I meet some of the people I knew in school, people I've known for years, I clam up. Me, who usually never knows when to stop nattering on, stands on the fringe of the 'chatting outside the pub' group trying to think of something to say, and realising that I've got next to nothing to say. Maybe I've become really boring, or maybe I've just grown apart from some of these people. The reversion is that feeling of being on the fringe of a large group that I've always felt, like being right back in my old school uniform. I know that it's reversion because it's a million times different to how I normally feel when I'm out and it proves to me that I must have changed, that I AM changed, irrevocably. I dunno whether that's for the better or the worst.
Anyway, as I'm writing this, trying to find words to describe what's jolting through my mind, I've suddenly noticed that the rain outside has stopped, and that by being awake, I've won the game I was playing with the night sky all those years ago. I'd give anything to have lost it though, it seems like a pyhrric victory.
I hope it rains again.
The rain is hitting against the skylight in my room with such force that it's almost offensive, beating a tattoo as I lie here, cursing myself for wasting my life. Usually, I love the sound of the rain on that window, it's incredibly relaxing and reminds me of when I was younger, but tonight, it seems almost mocking. When I was about seven, I would lie awake listening to the rain and try to see if I could keep my eyes open for longer than the downpour lasted, playing chicken with the night outside. Needless to say I always lost.
Somehow the years fell away quickly, and now this bedroom is only a place I stay when I return home during the holidays. It's no longer 'my room', but rather the 'spare room'. In fact, the only thing that connects this room to my childhood is the view outside. The back gardens and roof-tops of all the houses of the neighbours around me, and the view of the river leading towards the sloping beauty of the city walls and the valley. It's weird, I vaguely miss the place when I'm away from home, and I love to be back, but there's always a huge part of me that wants to keep moving, an inability to rest.
I've noticed as well that when I'm back home I revert to who I was as a child. Most of my friends are the same, something for which I feel blessed, with (thank fuck) a few exceptions, and I feel that I am self-confident enough to relax in almost any social situation. Somehow, however, when I meet some of the people I knew in school, people I've known for years, I clam up. Me, who usually never knows when to stop nattering on, stands on the fringe of the 'chatting outside the pub' group trying to think of something to say, and realising that I've got next to nothing to say. Maybe I've become really boring, or maybe I've just grown apart from some of these people. The reversion is that feeling of being on the fringe of a large group that I've always felt, like being right back in my old school uniform. I know that it's reversion because it's a million times different to how I normally feel when I'm out and it proves to me that I must have changed, that I AM changed, irrevocably. I dunno whether that's for the better or the worst.
Anyway, as I'm writing this, trying to find words to describe what's jolting through my mind, I've suddenly noticed that the rain outside has stopped, and that by being awake, I've won the game I was playing with the night sky all those years ago. I'd give anything to have lost it though, it seems like a pyhrric victory.
I hope it rains again.
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