Three's a crowd

It's been a big few weeks for me. My third set of social adventures. I can't really be relied on to get the specifics right, but it's pretty widely accepted that it had been three years since I had any sort of socialising with friends, and now I've had my third lot in a row! Also, I umm... bought three games at the weekend? OK no, I've stretched it too far.

I'm absolutely knackered now, but definitely worth it. It's so hard to express just how much things like today mean to me, for something that would normally be the absolute highlight of an entire year to just take up a single blog entry just doesn't seem to do it justice. I'm just very grateful that I have friends able and prepared to help me escape into some semblance of what the real world might be like, even just for a day.

So for today's adventures, it had been decided long in advance that today's OT session would be an outing out to a (very) local tea room for some drinks and shortbread, I just decided in my infinite wisdom that it might be nice to bring my lovely friend along to share in and make the most of what would be a pretty historic outing for me. Of course, it wasn't until the last minute that it dawned on me that the bigger the scale I'd made it, the bigger the potential fall, but it all worked out more or less for the best. The snacks and company were all good, and when I inevitably get grumpy and tired over the next few weeks I can have another wonderful achievement and step forward waved in my general direction as an example of the good kind of progress I'm making.

Plus, the outing wasn't all there was to today! Seeing as its become something of a meme unto itself that I always watch Eurotrip with friends, it seemed fitting to break it out, even if there were minor concerns over whether we'd be able to find a suitable scene to pause on should parents, OT or brothers walk in. Mieke is still ludicrously hot, Michelle Trachtenberg still can't act, and Scotty still doesn't know. It really is surprisingly good considering the entire premise for the movie (and, admittedly, the only reason I bought it in the first place) is apparently “holy crap Dawn from Buffy's got hot!”.

And we had one of my home-grown leeks from the garden in our tea. I'm struggling somewhat to weave it nicely into the narrative following the previous revelation (and since for some reason my mind's lingering on the image) so I'll just chuck it out there. Leeks are tasty.

Truth in Advertising

Firstly, the Pepsi Max “Asteroid” advert. Apparently, getting several of your mates to trick a girl into thinking that she's going to die in order to have sex with her is a perfectly normal, morally acceptable lark of a good time, and in no way creepy, profoundly wrong or bordering on rapey.

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.

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?