Words.

Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.

Buddha said that, and he was wise enough to get his own religion, let alone followers or minions. In fairness I only know about that quote through Civilization, but still. Words. Boyzone sang a song about them that was probably a cover, and is now annoyingly firmly implanted in my head. The pen is mightier than the sword. One of my favourite words is “fractal”. No real reason, I just like the way it sounds. Its funny, I don't particularly like the word 'blog' in and of itself, but some of the words that I've shared on it have maybe gone a little distance towards healing some things. Also, Ke$ha apparently doesn't like it when you use too many words, she prefers umm... physical deeds to the talking about them, to put it nicely. So I've heard.

Anyway, out of the minuscule amount of feedback I've received (HINT HINT HINT COMMENTS HINT) it seems that my lighter hearted posts have gone down better than my attempts at being deep and meaningful. Maybe I ought to dial back on the pretentiousness and stick to my zany adventures with telemarketers and hedgehogs, adjust the browmostat from high to low.

Anyway, to continue with the tenuous theme, today's word of the day in the house is “crispfinisher”. That's my brother's new name, and should any of my readers have contact with him in the near future, I expect you to address him as such. I feel it's relatively self-explanatory as to how he earned it.

I really do have that stupid Boyzone song stuck in my head now. Maybe I'll put it on on youtube to get back at the crispfinisher. He deserves no less.

Gardening (with Miley)

Well, on the list of 'things I didn't want to do today', phoning Amazon customer services to deal with the change in my bank card was one of them. So was getting poked in the eye, leaving the house and buying a Miley Cyrus CD (its a really long list), but fortunately for me the only one that I have to do is the Amazon one. I suppose the day is still young though, there's plenty of time for the other ones to sneak up on me.

Talking of Miley Cyrus, in a flawless segue, yesterday my little brother was hovering around in my room playing on the Wii, so I decided to play a very mature little joke on him. I put one of her songs on on Youtube and said wow, this is great isn't it, do you like this? The plan was that when he said yes I could jump out and say HA YOU LOVE HANNAH MONTANA... but unfortunately he said that he didn't like it and asked me to put it off, and got back to his motion-controlled table tennis. Abject failure, and as some sort of karmic reward I had a horrible, screeching version of “Can't be Tamed” stuck in my head for the rest of the day. I suppose I deserved that.

It's been 3 years since I saw any friends, so he's pretty much the only social company I have. I have a theory that we're actually pulling each other closer to the others mental ages, so he's 12, I'm 23, and we're probably mentally meeting roughly in the middle at about 15 just now. I'm very excited though about the prospect of seeing a lovely friend soon, I just have to try and remember what it is that regular people do together! Even the last time I saw anyone, it was a romantic visit, so I have doubts over whether I can entertain a visitor when the schedule doesn't include making out. I'll let you, dear readers, be the judge over whether that's a good thing or not.

Anyway, back to love of the brotherly variety, and yesterday we ended up with the house to ourselves. So naturally, the thing we got up to was... well, actually it was pretty much what you might expect, we pretended to be sumo wrestlers with my mum's gym ball and ran and bounced off each other at high speed. But that's not the point, the point was that after we'd done that and rolled around laughing on the floor for a bit, we did something actually mature and went out and did some gardening! In fairness it might have just been an excuse for him to play with the hose, but still it ended up a nice different sort of afternoon planting lots of leeks and tasting strawberries. It's little unexpected detours like that that really help me to smile about things again, even if I did spend all last night feeling ludicrously ill afterwards. Yet another message from the universe I think, help me out with some sort of metaphor about eating the home-grown strawberries of life?

Reminiscing in the rain, pondering as it pours

I thought it was meant to be summer? While London bakes in 30°C, I don't think its stopped pouring with rain here for about the last week. In some ways that's not so bad – I've delegated my garden watering duties to god, and he seems to be doing a pretty good job of it. A saved 3 minutes per day to sit on my arse and play Pokémon is worth sacrificing our summer for!

I actually went out in the deluge yesterday. I'm not entirely sure why yet again, this seems to be happening a lot to me lately. Maybe I have some sort of brain slug that's slowly trying to take control of me? Step 1 get a blog, step 2 get soaked... step 3 world domination? If anyone notices any changes in my personality (like being nice all of a sudden), alert the Pentagon, there's no telling what Zyglexz is going to do next!

Yes I named my imaginary brain slug. Sue me.

Anyway, back to reality, and although I hardly went far, I ended up out for 45 minutes. Things just... got awfully loud inside the house. At times, when I was under some trees, with the rain coming down steadily on the soft forest floor, it tapped into some sort of memory, as if I was almost there at something, if I just focused a bit harder then I'd uncover some sort of long lost link back to something I didn't even know I'd lost. Unfortunately when I tried to focus a bit harder and move on, instead of spurring on my impromptu quest to recapture my soul I somehow managed to get a Ke$ha song implanted in my head instead, where it remained for the entire rest of the walk. I saw a deer, which was nice, but when I got back all I'd really achieved was a thorough soaking necessitating a complete change of clothes, some more leg pain, and the lingering feeling that I'd been teased with something just out of my reach that I know fine well I'm never going to be able to comprehend.

Oh, and a psychotic desire to strangle anyone who claims to either brush their teeth with a bottle of Jack, or that “they know we got swagger”. THAT DOESN'T EVEN MEAN ANYTHING.

40% of my posts to date are now tagged with being about Ke$ha. This is a worrying start.