Backwards birthdays

Don't you hate it when you wake up in the morning feeling like... wait, wait, stop, I've done the Ke$ha joke before. Start over!

It's been a full 7 years now since I dropped out of school (and, by extension, society), and yet in my half-asleep dazed state this morning I still managed to whimper “but mummy, I don't WANT to go to school, I'm tiiiired!”. I'm just never going to be free of it, am I? I'll be 83, dreaming about that damn school bus. Assuming science doesn't find a cure for dreams by then, that is.

The framework and background time fillers have, as predicted, been slightly lacking this week, so I'm very fortunate that I've been able to be amused by some of the apparently backwards happenings around me, starting with a lovely parcel I got on Tuesday! See, I always thought that you were supposed to RECEIVE presents on your birthday, instead I've been sent a lovely bonus one from Alex before I've even sent hers! My parents seem to have got the whole birthday concept a bit wrong too, considering that they got a nice watch for the wrong brother. He might well need it now he's a big senior at school, but isn't a watch meant to be a 21^st sort of present? Maybe they thought if there were watches all round I'd feel left out, so just decided to prioritise the littlest son. Ha, now he knows how it feels!

You know, I'm not entirely sure I've got the right message out of watching House. I'm sure the writers thought they were getting across a responsible message about the dangers of painkiller abuse, instead I seem to have taken the view that it took him 5 years to have any adverse effects from them, therefore a month or so of scoffing them like smarties isn't going to do any damage. Actually come to think of it, the “being mean to a girl for an extended period of time until she finally admits she wants you” moral of the Cuddy arc has worked out pretty well for me too.

Oh, and for all who laughed under your breath about my hatching Bulbasaur eggs last entry? Calm nature with perfect HP, Defence and Special Attack IVs, making it one of the best in the world on the day that its revealed grass drain moves have received a power boost for the next gen. HA.

Teardrop on the fire

I think I mentioned in one of my earlier posts that my latest timesink has been working my way through the complete run of House on DVD. If I didn't, then... my latest timesink has been working my way through the complete run of House on DVD. I had been most confused by the theme tune though – from about series 4 onwards, the theme actually alternated every couple of episodes, usually it would have the same generic little instrumental theme that plays out over the credits at the end, but every so often it would revert back to the proper, official licensed one (Massive Attack's Teardrop). In fact... it was every 4 episodes or so. One per disc.

I can only surmise that somehow, in some sort of screw up of epic proportions, somehow the team behind the DVD compilations managed to accidentally lease the wrong amount of licences for using the official theme. “How many discs is this series on? 6? Yes Mr record company licensing department man, we need to use your sample 6 times.” Not only that though, instead of it just being on the first episode of every disc, or every 4 episodes, the real theme is on the episode on every disc that is most key to the series arc progression – the episodes where the main characters die, hook up, get fired and so on. So not only did they manage to mess up the theme licensing to start with, but to try and somehow minimize their mistake, they'll have assigned some temp to watch through the series and decide which episode per disc would benefit the most from the gravitas the haunting, first-choice title music would provide it. Another example of beautiful chaos... or maybe just my overactive imagination filling in some unnecessary blanks.

It's really not been helping my mood over the past week or so that I've finally found a downside to how irresistible I am to all known lifeforms, in that certain members of the insect world find it appropriate to express their feelings via biting me. While I appreciate the sentiment, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. Next time, stick to buying me chocolates please, it'd itch a lot less.

I did have my week/month made though by some lovely cuddles from our neighbours kittens. Any other time and snuggling some baby animals would probably have made the whole year, but socialising has bumped you down to second, kitties! They're normally so timid and skittish that they just run away, but just when I needed it most and was at my most miserable they decided to come cheer me up, just to help me get through another day. Of course the irony now will probably be that they've given me fleas, but still, worth it until the next round of itching begins.

Football

I'm in a quite significant amount of pain today. It might be partially my own fault.

For his 12^th birthday, among other things, my little brother got a football. It was back in May, but we only just got hold of a pump so he's been keen to go out into the garden and play with it. Apparently its good for me to be doing this, I'm building up the amount of exercise I do, its improving my fitness! I'm not really sure though how much overall benefit I'm getting from standing in the same place for a couple of minutes and kicking the ball back, with the same leg. Maybe my right leg will get all toned and muscled from it and I can enter in bodybuilding contests, just always being sure to be seen from the one side. Or I could wear shorts on one side and a mirror on the other! Foolproof plan, now I only have to figure out how to do the same for my top half.

When I was younger I used to think I was pretty good at football. I suppose everyone likes to think they're good at the things they do really, but I was pretty fast and a good finisher, I scored a lot of goals. Its one of the things that from time to time occasionally bugs me now – I know fine well that I'd probably have never made it to any sort of professional level, but I never even got the chance to try and fail. Now at 23, even if I woke up cured tomorrow, I couldn't go and try out for a team – its about slightly more than just standing in the one place and returning the ball in the vague direction of a pre-teen goalkeeper, I'd have missed 6+ years of tactical, positional, teamwork coaching, its just going to have to be yet another thing I've let pass me by. Playing football generally involves those things, plus the ability to run around, let alone stand for 90 minutes at a time, so I don't think I can really claim to be any 'good' at it any more.

I got a call from a telemarketer yesterday. I was kind of hoping for some, to be honest, I figured that all I have to do is say a couple of 'quirky' things to them and that's a nice cheap funny entry for here. So, she asked me if I was interested in loft insulation. I replied no, I'd rather have some chicken nuggets. I was expecting that would throw her, she'd stutter and collapse under the weight of my sheer hilarity, but for some odd reason she was very professional, laughed and said she would too, she's starving, but back to this loft insulation. I was a bit lost at that, so I said I was sorry but I'd run out of sarcastic things to say and hung up. I felt really guilty about that. She was a nice woman, doing her job in a friendly way. There's a recession on, everyone's got to work hard, and she's probably on commission for the amount of loft insulation she sells people. Having a conscience about this kind of silly thing is a real setback to being a king of absurdist comedy. Hopefully the next one will be a pain in the arse so I won't feel so guilty about it.

I mentioned watching House in the last post – that's the latest thing that I've been recommended to get into, so many of my friends watch it that it could be a nice extra topic of conversation, a cultural reference point for me to latch onto around whatever is standing in for the metaphorical water cooler at the time. I'm not really sure it was a good idea by those friends to get me into that specifically though – now that I know how beloved he is despite being so sarcastic and grumpy, its reassured me that I've got a lot more leeway than I thought while staying on the endearing side.

Anyway, I was watching an episode guest starring Cynthia Nixon, and I was shocked to find that for the first time, I thought she was really attractive. I decided to share this revelation via text, stating that it must be because I find the character she's playing here much more attractive than Miranda in Sex and the City.

She was promptly revealed to be faking her illness, and diagnosed with Münchhausen's. I suck at women.

The Way I Am

I'm still not entirely sure on what the point of this blog was, or who I'm writing it for. So far I've tried to write as though I'm explaining things to an 'outsider', to someone living a perfectly normal life and drawing attention to the ways that make me and what I'm going through different. Really though, the type of people likely to be reading this are those who are in the same or similar positions. All my friends and contacts now that I've built up over the years are people in the same situation, linked together by a shared empathy and understanding that we've all had limitations placed on us and trying to find ways to express ourselves that let us break free of our shackles.

There are a million blogs like that out there, so what do I really think I'm doing differently? I'm an identical drop of water in the endless ocean, convinced that I can be a beautiful and unique snowflake. Maybe there was no real point to this at all, just an empty void to throw my thoughts out there into, tossing them into the abyss under the delusion that my echo will answer me back and we'll strike up a meaningful conversation.

Something I've noticed though with all the other blogs like this out there is just how defined by the illness they all seem to be. I was watching an episode of House the other day where one of the characters wondered, how would you introduce me? As a doctor, as black, as a car thief? I suppose I'm in the same boat – no matter what I might strive for or try to be or achieve, its almost always going to have to include this as a caveat. If someone asks, what does your brother/son/friend do, the fact that my illness is the reason for it is always going to have to come up within the first two lines. I don't have a job, I'm not at college, because... .The fact is that its not normal and that it needs an explanation for why my 'scenic' path as I've described it is the one that I'm travelling down, always pointing out that its not by choice and that really of course I'd rather be on a different one.

So I've pointed it all out, but what for, what have I really achieved by laying it out like that? I've not come to any conclusions, just made myself look smarter by drawing attention to the fact that I've noticed it instead of working on fixing it. Its a good technique, especially for debating or arguing – set out all your points in the form of a question, that way if you're proved wrong then you were only being wise and spurring on a thoughtful debate!

In the end though, who we are boils down to the sum of our experiences, and for anyone else out there like me who's travelling down a path that they can insist they didn't choose, it still doesn't change the fact that they're sauntering their way slowly along it anyway. This path I'm on has influenced everything about me, even down to my looks - I have long hair mainly because there was a period of time where I wasn't able to get out to the barbers, so had to just let it grow. I happen to quite like the person that I've become now (and my extremely cool hair) – I'm fully aware that its not 'the same as other people', but for the moment I've convinced myself I'm that snowflake floating down from the sky, waiting to change the world when I finally land. Everyone in the world will have changed and grown as a person over the last decade of their life, if I tried to rebel against an imaginary construct of 'the illness' and discard everything that its influenced me into becoming, then I'd just end up with the mind of the 13 year old that I was, playing Pokémon and wanting to push girls into the mud.

Oh, wait a minute...