emphatically static
I have stuff to say, but for now I am content with driving traffic elsewhere. If you haven’t seen delineate recently, I suggest you browse around for a bit. All recent pictures are from the UK. Sometime soon, there will also be a candid people photo; Something socially stunted me doesn’t often do.
Click around, gasp in awe and excitement, comment, worship my skill, get addicted… . You know you want to.
I was scrounging through PhD Comics to find the strip that best represents my current sentiment.
And I did!
It is normal I tells you. What I’m going through is normal.
I’ll keep this short, and informative. I leave early tomorrow morning on yet another trip, to Austin, Texas. This is hopefully the last time I need to be away from home for the next few months to come. I kinda miss my bed. Anyway, in case you aren’t of the assumption Texas is some hick state with their large vehicles (with ornamental horns no less), cowboys and a weak spot for steak, here are some fun Texas facts:
» Rodeo is the official state sport of Texas, though High School Football is more popular.
» In Texarkana owners of horses may not ride them at night without tail lights.
» It is illegal for children to have unusual haircuts in Mesquite, Texas.
» In Texas, it’s illegal to put graffiti on someone else’s cow.
OK, I’ll stop now.
I’ve gotten to see and experience the most interesting things during the course of this trip. Some examples follow.
» I got to spend some time with the first ever open lesbian couple I’ve known. Though they are intelligent and funny and fun to hang out with, this is not nearly as exciting or interesting as porn might make it seem. Speaking of porn, apparently there are courses for such.
» Of course, I got to see men in skirts. (And yes, a skirt by any other name is just as funny.)
» I got to handle a bagpipe. Now I, personally, can play a few other instruments, but this one is hard as hell to get going. This wasn’t just any bagpipe either, this bagpipe was played for the queen.
» I got to stay at a hotel metres away from one of the blasts, just 3 days before said blasts. Of course, I often took the “route with the blast” on the way to and from said hotel. It’s quite humbling to see the same areas reduced to rubble. (There are no pictures of the devastation, because each time I walk up to the area and try to take out my camera, my stomach knots up.)
» I got to see (really rowdy) riots—as in people protesting to have their voices heard during the course of the G8 summit. I saw numerous shops and such boarded up to minimize vandalism as the mobs walked past.
I did scream along with them for a while, as some of the stuff they were fighting for really was worthwhile (but they didn’t seem old or smart enough to realize it),
but broke away as I recognized the possibility of spending the night in a Scottish jail.
The only thing probably worse than being in jail at home, is being in jail in a foreign country.
» I got to spend a couple of days at what is probably the toughest city in the world, Glasgow. Forget New York, this is where it’s at — if you fancy getting arbitrarily mugged. There is no concept of “bad neighbourhoods” and “good neighbourhoods”, it’s all bad. This is one place I will never ever return to, ever.
» I got to roam around Trinity college, in Oxford, where the likes of Isaac Newton worked. That was pretty humbling too. But being asked by the guide, “Are you a scientist? In my 20 years of doing this, no one’s ever asked me this sort of stuff before” felt good. I’m a “scientist”, yay.
» I got to see people being cruel to cute little pink animals.
I’m finally home. I’m leaving again in 3-4 days to Austin, but at least I’m home for these few days. And it feels so good. I spent half my day lounging in my bath tub and the other half in my bed — the operative words there being the two ‘my’s.
The journey home was mostly uneventful, which is good. There were some near ruinous delays and much necessitated running around, but that’s nothing new.
<side story>
One of the first things I noticed on landing in London was that the people there, in general, are less attractive. A couple of weeks later, another friend who showed up there commented the exact same thing on entry. Being the awful people that we are, we proceeded to—on seeing a relatively hot woman pass by—check her out, and if we both agreed, add her to the count of hot women we’d seen.
A week or so later, we reached 20. Which is pathetic, considering over 6 million people, for instance, use the tube to get around each day.
This little game is actually rather hard to stop playing, and I continued on even as I was waiting to check-in to my plane. Within 4 minutes, my count had crossed 50.
Boy was I glad to be getting home.
</side story>
(Anywho, for those curious, it’s girlfriend and not friend. And they live together and not not live together.)
(I’ve started saying “why not” a lot after hanging out recently with a bunch of crazy ozzies who’d go about doing the most retarded things, usually after gettng drunk, by prefixing said activity with a “why not”. Though amusing being an observer, this should not be attempted at home.)
Why not?
I’m just going to go ahead and say it. I mean, I am going to admit what is bothering me. It is so freaking multifaceted, I don’t even know where to start. For one, I look around, and most people I know are “happily settled”, or nearly there.
Just what do I mean by that? — I mean they have their fancy real jobs, the 6-figure salaries, the strong relationship with the hot member of opposite sex, the chic wardrobe, and all that sort of thing.
That’s it isn’t it? What we’re all striving for in some form or the other through whatever paths we’ve choosen? The quest to get to a point where we’re—in a “happily settled” sense—finally contented?
And then, I look in the mirror and see me. An aged, incomplete shell of person who hasn’t in any sense “made it”. No real job, no money, alone, not really all that intelligent or learned… you get the idea.
Of course, this gets worse, much worse.
I’m a pretty critical and judgmental person, and when I see people, I don’t see them, or where they are in life, but my idealization of where I presumed they’d be — extrapolating from what I saw in them as potential. This makes it suck so much more, because in my minds eye, I’m the “cool one” who should’ve made it. The exact same folk I’ve mocked and derided for being less intelligent, educated, or capable, are the ones who seem to be making it.
No fancy diplomas, no eons in fancy schools, no inherent-godlike-intelligence, they’re not even particularly fit or attractive, nothing. And yet they drive in that fancy car to that fancy home from that 42nd floor office with that hot woman in the passenger seat.
What gives?
Finally, my absolute “fear of the real world” has resulted in taking refuge for eternity in school, further fuelling my social ineptitude. There is a clear difference between being a student, and defining your life around being a student. My attempt at escapism has resulted in me crossing that line a long time ago.
It’s strange how you need to be on a break and really far away from work to get a clear perspective on how much everyone’s grown, and how static you’ve been. You and your numerous diplomas in plaques.
Which returns us to the web log’s catchphrase — emphatically static.
The darshan in Manchester completed, I finally wobbled back to London late the next afternoon. As much as I like the charm and passion of “smaller towns” (I’ve even forgiven their excruciating accents), it feels good to be back in a real city. If there are two kinds of people in this world, there are small-town folk and city folk—and they don’t ever really mix.
As much fun as everything’s been so far, there have been some things that’ve bothered me since I’ve gotten here.
First, what is the deal with the lack of thrash cans everywhere? It’s like this is some concept that’s eluded this geographic region almost completely, and they’d rather employ some odd guy (or woman) to walk around behind people and pick stuff up after them rather than buy a god damned BIN.
That’s not so bad however, as you soon get used to the concept of leaving stuff arbitrarily strewn about, and let someone else pick up after you. You soon realize it’s actually quite handy. And then, as you’re walking toward one of the few existing thrash cans, you begin to miss that guy.
Moving onto more relevant things, I’m seriously bothered by the fact I don’t understand the nature of the relationship between my friend and his “friend”. Technically, in all references, she’s a friend. But in actions, she seems like anything but. It’s not like they’re living together or anything, but only barely. For all practical purposes, they’re around each other every non-working moment—from shopping, cooking, hanging out, and a lot more whose details I will not get into. And it’s not just that, when they’re referring to stuff, it’s always “ours”. As in, the kinds of things I would call mine, like “my couch”, I often tended to hear “our couch”. That’s oddly disconcerting.
(Mind you, I’ve only been around them for less than a day in total. This might not be terribly informed.)
It’s not like it matters in the least, it’s just so annoying that I fell I don’t know something I probably should’ve been let in on. It’s just not the sort of thing that comes up in polite conversation, you know, “oh, so are you sleeping with her?”—doesn’t really roll off the tongue easily. It can’t even be interspersed unnoticed into otherwise innocuous conversation.
These sorts of things rarely concern me in the least; I don’t know what my problem is.
Actually, it’s quite clear what my problem is. I’m just not in the frame of mind to admit it to myself—let alone you.
