Pah, I'm just in a sulky mood because I'm so tired today. It's 'good tired' again though, that mystical state where apparently the pain doesn't hurt quite so much just because I've properly earned it through 25 seconds of activity, instead of the standard type where its unfairness makes it less worthy and hurt more. I had a fairly nice evening yesterday – we dug up our potatoes, which among other benefits meant for a tasty tea! Unfortunately, potatoes are heavy. Therefore, wrists, back, legs and shoulders are all utterly killing today, and contributing greatly to my picking holes and reading hidden meanings into innocuous things. It was nice at the time though, since my voice outside managed to attract my regular kitten friend after his daily cuddles, and his interaction with fierce, protective (lol) Lucy the dog was quite adorable, as was Lucy's attempt at playing fetch with the remnants of a shattered frisbee. Still, complain, grump, moan!
Normally it'd be better for me to phrase the following as a question, to deflect some of the potential insanity of it off of myself and see if I could see if I'm the only one who thinks this, but seeing as my audience is... rather reduced from what I'm used to, I suppose I'll have to risk seeming mental for the sake of my art. The clue is in the title – adverts.
I really don't know if its just me or if this is something that people in similar situations to me will feel too, but when I'm in the sort of mood where I'm predisposed to grump, certain 'out there', irreverent adverts seem to really get me down. I've surmised that its probably because they are deliberately attempting to catch attention by being out of the ordinary, from being an intentional tonal shift from the banality of everyday life, but with my own issues with being disconnected from 'everyday life', they just make me feel like they're an extra degree of separation away from me, that I'm missing out even more. Things like travelling home from work on a water slide/roller coaster and swapping shirts after a meeting are supposed to draw a laugh because they're taking an easily identifiable, mundane situation and adding a semi-believable or wishful twist to it, but to me, I'm not even catching the initial hook to recognise how that's NOT what happens in reality.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm assuming that probably if the greater London area got taken over with personalised water slides, I'd end up reading about this bizarre new trend in a BBC News article or see it humorously referenced elsewhere, see the arty, bleached out photos on other blogs highlighting how it represents society's need to embrace the inner child within. But to me, all it is is just another layer of fantasy to add to how amazing the outside world is with all its sights to see and experiences to take for granted, so mundane in and of themselves that we need to add the unbelievable to them to sell our shiny products and services.
When I was much younger and (almost) worry free (curse you, fire alarm!), day to day school life was boring, but the exciting, once a term adventures of a school trip out into the big wide world was an incredible, exciting monument to look forward to. Many of my readers though never even managed that baseline though, so might only identify with my next bit, later in my life, when even making it to school was a hardship in itself, when the school trips stopped being so wonderful and ended up just being an extra slog through something supposed to be special, that felt all the more poisoned for how draining it ended up being. Both the best and the worst times of my life were events that should have been glowing, nostalgic memories to look back on and miss, and it feels all the more isolating that things intended to be so special could become so poisoned by this invisible construct of an illness around me, to leave me separated from the rest of the world by that extra degree.
Some of the things that I've found hardest of all to deal with have been my desires to 'reclaim' what I've lost, and had to try to come to terms with the fact that the time limit on them has expired and passed me by, for practical, physical or even societal reasons, that the rest of the world expects to be firmly shut away behind me in my past. Things that have no value in and of themselves, but represent steps into the world that frankly, at my age, are no longer appropriate or possible to take any more. The memory of sneaking your first beer to many people will be a fond moment to reminisce on, the mistakes made trying to step out into the world along with it, that at 23 with a valid ID just will never apply to me. On that count, I can honestly say that I don't particularly miss it, but the fact that it's passed me by is something that I can never get back, and some of the hardest hidden things to deal with hold an equal lack of genuine, real-world weight. Despite what Zac Efron and Matthew Perry might have to say about it, I'll never be 17 again and there are certain things that I'll never get to do period, let alone do over.
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