Happier Times
After yesterdays blog I went and painted miniatures for a little bit, and that seemed to make me feel a lot better. Then people were here, but then they went away again and I had a nice relaxing bath, and watched a few movies.
And then it was today, which has so far been relaxed almost to the point of pointlessness.
Oh and in happy news the travellers went away about lunchtime today! Now they're somebody else's problem!
Waste Of Paint
It's my Dad's sixty second birthday today, and talking to him this morning to wish him a happy birthday really made me question the path my life has taken.
When my Dad was the age I am now, I was already 12 years old, and my brother was 10. He had a house, a mortgage, a good job and a decent wage. Me? I don't seem to have achieved anything. Some of that is probably down to choice; I wouldn't describe myself as proactive or ambitious anywhere other than on a job application form, but the rest? I just don't know what the hell I seem to be doing with my life, and what's worse I don't seem to know how to make it any different.
When I was a kid I never thought about what sort of job I would have, but I always imagined that I'd somehow be making a difference to the world. To be honest I thought I'd be using my fabulous intellect and education to be solving the worlds problems, and that my opinion would be listened to and respected by people who made BIG decisions. Instead I'm sitting here, slacking and under-achieving to the point that I can barely affect change in my own life, and with an unidentifiable something wrong in my brain that stops me going out and spending time with my girlfriend for fear of what it'll do to me.
I've always had this unfulfilled urge to create inside me, some peculiar part of myself that needs to be expressed artistically, but which I have always repressed due to my total and utter lack of artistic talent. I'm starting to think though that talent isn't what's important. I'm starting to think that getting that artistic expression out of me no matter how childish, naive or just down-right pitiful it looks might be what's important. I think that maybe what's important might just be the act of expression itself, just trying.
Will I ever change? I doubt it. I seem to somehow always remain stubbornly myself, no matter how much I might dislike it. Maybe there are small changes, and perhaps they're adding up to something worthwhile over time, but right now I can't see them.
Oddly this post wasn't supposed to be all misery and self-pity, 'cos I've had a pretty good week. I've been as healthy as can be expected under the circumstances, had a decent week at work, and have received good assesments of my job performance. And somehow all that has turned into sadness. Weird eh?
The Love of Money
Another week, another grumpy blog! Todays rant will be on the subject of money, or more tellingly it's absence.
It's not really a rant as such to be honest, I'm just fed up with all this struggle! Things were supposed to get better when I got back to work, but they sure don't seem to be. I mean here we are, two weeks before pay day (give or take) and I'm completely out of money. All gone. And I'm damned if I even know WHERE it went. I suppose if I think about it I bought a couple of DVDs and some comic books when we went to London last week, but is that really enough to wipe me out completely, cos it bloody well shouldn't be! It's bad enough that I resent the way I'm being treated at work, without all that resentment not even being enough to put food on the table!
Thing I don't get is, this is the most money I've ever earned in my life (pitiful but true), there's two of us earning now, and yet the money just doesn't seem to stretch! It's almost enough to make me chuck the whole bloody thing in, it really is. What the fuck man, what the fuck?
Blah, rant over.
Y'know I really don't remember what we got up to on Monday last week, nothing amazing I don't think 'cos Ronnie was pretty wiped out from having her flu and being at work all weekend. The working week was mercifully brief as I felt like shit for most of it, although I seemed to be almost miraculously normal on Friday, which was just weird. Hopefully next week will be a bit easier. Ronnie was off work Thursday and Friday partly 'cos she was sick, partly 'cos her boss had pissed her off, but mainly (on Friday) 'cos we've had a load of "travellers" turn up out the back gate and set up camp there. I'll admit right here and now that I don't like being suspicious of somebody just 'cos of their lifestyle, but their very presence here has put everyone on edge. So far, however, they've been okay, and actually seem to go to bed before we do! That said, I'll be happier when they've moved on, just like everybody else...
Well there we go, that's the crappy state of my mind this bright and sunny Sunday morning. I need something, some guidance, some equilibrium, some... Star Wars maybe? Hmm....
A Matter of Life and Death
I've been thinking about my Gran all week for some reason. Well, not for "some reason", it's not exactly rocket science to work out that it's almost a year since she died, so I suppose it's not entirely unexpected, it's just... well, why now? Why haven't I really thought about her so much for the rest of the year? It's not just her either, it's her and Grandad, and he died twenty odd years ago, and that makes me think about clearing out their house, and ultimately I think that's what I'm thinking about: what's left behind.
In particular my mind just keeps wandering back to that morning when we cleared the house, and the moments when me and my Dad were clearing out Grandad's old tools and just talking about stuff. And I can't help thinking that somebody else is living in that house now, that house that'd been in my family since it was built, that house that we'd had so many good times in; the Christmases, the Sunday visits... things the new people, whoever they may be, will never know. I don't know what I'm trying to say here, if I'm trying to say anything at all. All I know is that whenever my mind is left to it's own devices it inevitably wanders over there, and I sit and think about taking those bits of wood out of my Grandad's shed and it makes me miss them.
Over the past few weeks I've also started to notice that the company I work for now, is essentially, a Bad Corporation. I'm already heartily sick and tired of trying to explain to people why the pensions they've invested in are worth less than the money they put in, or how we've managed to make less for them than they would've received from merely putting the cash into a halfway reasonable bank account, or in some cases just taken all their money and used it all up. That's making me wonder what I'm doing there, and even if it's possible that working for such a business is what's making me ill; after all, Righteous Livelihood is one part of the Eightfold Path and I'm not convinced there's anything even slightly righteous about what I'm doing right now.
And I have been ill this week, to the point that on Monday Ronnie took me into work and esentially said that if they wanted to be so bloody stupid and short-sighted as to fire me then they could, 'cos I wasn't capable of coming in to work in this condition. Which was pretty cool! The boss relented and let me have an "emergency holiday" which was... well, it wasn't really kind of her, 'cos they know damn well that there's something wrong with me and that so far it's controlled rather than treated. It's only because I have this ridiculous special probation that they have to go to such lengths. Still, it's only for another month now, and then I'll be a bit more difficult to fire.
We took a trip into London on Friday, 'cos Ronnie wanted to go to Camden Market. In fact she's been wanting to go on a trip there for about as long as we've been going out, but this was the first time we've been able to afford to go. It was a fun trip, even though I felt like death for a large portion of it, and I was wearing massively inappropriate boots too! But it was a nice warm day, and there was plenty to see and do; I even went to a comic shop I haven't been to in about 15 years, and bought lots of comics! When we got back we wobbled off to the Verve and hung out with our mates for a bit, before we finally had to head for home and feed poor little Archie, who'd been left by himself all day! Still, it was nice to be able to go to London and not have it try and kill me for a change.
Ronnie's at work today, doing her last ever shift at the Falcon! Yay! I've not been up to much so far, just wobbling about doing laundry and washing up. And watching Tron, which was cool. It's funny, 'cos these days I don't see it so much as a movie about little people living in computers as I see it as a metaphor for belief. Which I'm fairly certain isn't what was intended at all, but that's what I see: a world that exists purely in the high technology which is nonetheless populated by beings of faith. I don't know what, if anything, that means, but that's what I see. Oh and light-cycles too!
Wonder what we're gonna do with our day off tomorrow?
