Swallowed the Sun – part 2

I thought that I’d crank out the final part of Swallowed the Sun for you guys:

 

His main problem was assuring her that it wouldn’t take her long to forget him. When it first happens, heartbreak is the most painful affliction that any man or woman can possibly experience. It feels like it will last for the future, and therefore that any future will be bleak and undesirable. All he needed to do was convince her that in time, it would heal. That’s the thing about time – it heals anything. The only problem with time is that it takes time – there’s never any immediate respite, but when that respite comes, it comes suddenly and it is complete.

The thing is, the short process of moving on can only begin once she accepts that it’s over – that there’s no going back… of course he wasn’t too convinced himself that he didn’t want to go back himself. To be honest, the only thing between them was an hour’s drive. It wouldn’t have been a problem at all if it wasn’t for the fact that he wasn’t allowed to visit her on a regular basis. Seeing her had, apparently, been a one-off, and there couldn’t be a fulfilling relationship between them anymore. He desperately wanted her as his friend – a world without her would be a world not worth waking up to, but when she’d convinced herself that he was punishing her on purpose for her brief, drunken indiscretion… how can you reason with a person like that? Part of him knew that discretion is the better part of valour – that he should just leave her alone to cope, because she’d cope easily. But he couldn’t bring himself to abandon her. His love was such that every second was brimming with guilt, because she was heartbroken over him… even if it wasn’t his fault.

As he sat on his bed, emotions still burning strong inside him, an idea occurred to him. The issue was that he could either ignore her completely, or talk to her. Either way, she would be left unfulfilled and destitute, discontent with the situation. But what if he had a third choice – a way of removing himself from the picture without inconveniencing her, without hurting her. He walked to the bathroom and pulled open the cabinet and, sure enough, was a plastic bottle full of paracetamol. His trembling hands struggled to open the bottle as smooth plastic slipped beneath sweaty palms. Taking a jug from the counter and filling it with water, he tipped the entire bottle of pills into his hand, pills spilling into the sink. Without a second thought, he brought his hand to his mouth and tipped his head back, dribbling them between his open lips, before swallowing them, downing the jug of water to ease their passage. Then, his hands steady with new purpose, he walked back into his bedroom, lay down on his bed and closed his eyes.

 

I’ll leave you tonight with two songs, courtesy of Youtube.

Want not, Waste not

When we, being humans, want something, it’s we believe that having it would assist us to improve upon our current standard of life. Clearly this could either be a small improvement from something not that important to us, or a large improvement from something very important to us.

The only issue with this is when something, or someone, is very important to you, and you think that by having it – or them – your life will be improved greatly, but you are mistaken, and your life won’t be improved as much as you think it will if you have them.

I think that hope is the first step on the road to disappointment. For example, I hoped as I lay here that I’d have been able to write what was going through my head properly. However, clearly this isn’t the case, and consequently I am disappointed.

I give up.

It’s Impossible to Know (a.k.a. “Love – Probability & Pavlov”)

 

It’s impossible to know why we feel what we feel. Human emotion is one of the least understood components of our existence, but it’s the most prevalent aspect of our day to day lives. Apart from the socially retarded among us we all feel emotions of some form during the whole time we are awake.

Ok, so you might argue that you can say of the girl you love; “I love her because she has fantastically large hair, a silly grin every time I tell her I love her or that she’s beautiful; because we share the same interests and have similar senses of humour; because when I hold her there’s an added warmth that I feel deep in my stomach, of love for her, and pride that she’s mine, and inexplicable happiness, all rolled into one” but there are hundreds of warm, large haired girls with silly grins and similar interests. Why pick this particular girl?

I think on one level, it’s simply probability – out of the 7 billion or so people in this world, a single, ordinary person such as me may know about 180 girls in year 13 at AHS, 80 or so in year 12 and a handful in year 11. Say around 300 overall. Out of these 300, around 150 will already be taken by other guys, leaving 150 available for general consumption. Now comes the probability – big hair, silly grin, all the same interests and a similar sense of humour? This might leave around 15 – 20. Let’s be honest though, out of those 20 fitting our criteria, there may only be around 3 interested in us. Now, girls being girls, none of these three will actually tell us how they feel – it’s left to us to work it out, and we’re only really likely to succeed here with one of these girls. So, out of all those people, we end up with one girlfriend: one perfect other half who gives us everything we need, and to whom we give everything they need.

But still, this doesn’t explain what actual feeling there is to link these two people. To try and achieve this I will bring us to Pavlov.

Pavlov was a Russian physician and psychologist (September 14, 1849 – February 27, 1936) widely known for describing the phenomenon of conditional reflexes.

As most know, a reflex is a response to a stimulus e.g. you see a cyclist coming towards you on the pavement, and you move out of their way. Conditional reflexes – Pavlov’s specialty – are reflexes with which you are not born, but are conditioned into. Pavlov proved this with dogs – he surgically opened up the stomachs of these dogs, so that he could monitor the amount of gastric juices produced. These gastric juices are produced when the dog smells or sees food, to facilitate digestion. What Pavlov did was ring a bell, set off a metronome, blow a whistle or a number of visual stimuli when he fed the dogs. Then, after a number of weeks, he started to ring the bell without any food present. What he observed was that the dogs still produced gastric juices even while the food was not present. In short, the dogs had been conditioned to associate bells and whistles with food so that the bell and/or whistle produced the same response as the presence of food.

“How is this relevant?” I can imagine you asking as you sit there scratching your poor confused little skulls. Well think about it. What feelings do you love? Happiness, security, comfort, enjoyment… these are the feelings that really make us content. And, what feelings do girlfriends or boyfriends (in the case of James Lake) give us? Now you see where I’m coming from. The emotions we feel when we see our partners are merely conditioned responses related to our most basic needs – safety, subsistence and sex.

I don’t think Pavlov realised when he experimented on dogs that he would be setting down the basis for describing what love actually is. It’s sad to think that something as beautiful and fundamental as love can be explained in such simple, scientific terms.

But after all, we’re all just protons, neutrons and electrons.

Swallowed the Sun part 1

For Eoghan, because he asked.

He was confused. How could anyone feel this way, he thought to himself, and still be sane? She was in love, deeply in love, with him; and he was in love… but not with her. That’s not to say that he didn’t care about her, because he did – a lot. The main, inhering, problem was that he couldn’t trust her any more, after that incident at that party; the inherent problem being that she lived an hour away by car and so they couldn’t be together, even if that was what they both wanted.

What he knew needed to be done was to draw a line under their ‘relationship’. However, after too many terse, tearful phone calls, venomous reverse-psychology text messages and frantic voicemail messages, he couldn’t bring himself to deliver the final coup-de-grace, caring so much for her that he was loathe to break her heart. Admittedly he knew that this amount of hurt in the short term was better for her than prolonging feelings that weren’t actually there to be prolonged, resulting in a greater amount of pain for her in the foreseeable future.

But how to deliver that blow? Email? Phonecall? Letter?

The thought of how much he was breaking her heart sickened him. Deep in the pit of his stomach was a burning pain, like he had swallowed the sun, tears welling up in his eyes as he considered his bleak options.

 

To be continued….

Facebook Notes

As promised, my Facebook notes are published below.

Walking the Streets

 

The streets change at dusk. Once-familiar alleyways seem to be etched out in a foreign medium, thicker and less distinct as I wind my way out of the estate. Mercifully the rain has eased off, and although the wind bites viciously at my exposed face I can still thrust my hands deep into the pocket of my coat, struggling to find some last vestige of warmth hidden in its depths.
They say silence is the best prompt of speech, but here in the dark, I wouldn’t want anything to break it. The loudest sounds are my thoughts, screaming for attention as a lorry rumbles by on the distant main road. I’m fascinated by how my shadow stretches out in front of me, becoming longer and less distinct as the street lamp gets further behind me, before it passes the duty of providing me with my dark, doppelganger company on to the next lamp that I pass under.
A light drizzle of cold, dank rain sets in as I turn and head for home. Numb fingers work in vain to pull the coat tighter around me, closing it up tight around my neck as much against the cold as against the light smattering of water that’s currently robbing my skin of any temperature it had left.
Why is it that silence brings about a state of such introspection? The emptiness obliges your mind to fill it, and this inevitably is done with the thoughts you want to keep out of your mind as much as possible. Exams, coursework… everything suppressed becomes unsuppressed… thoughts about Her, how it could have worked out, should have worked out, needn’t have not worked out if things had been different, if things could and would changed.
No.
Not any more.
And it’s back to that alleyway now, charcoal grey on chalkboard black; a guttering street lamp casts a grim, yellow flicker onto the weathered concrete. In no time I’m past the shoulder-high nettle bushes and back onto the estate, a minute from home but far from dry. It’s a privilege walking in this place, at this hour: there are no lights in houses and you can imagine yourself as the only being in existence. But for now, as I slide my key into the lock and swing the door open into a house as dark and empty as the world I’m about to leave behind, reality awaits.

 

What’s a Crush to do?

 

There’s a song by Cute Is What We Aim For that goes “What’s a crush to do/When he can’t get through?”. It’s hard enough not being able to talk to a person you like, without knowing that they’re avoiding you on purpose. On top of that, it’s hard enough not being able to talk to the person you like knowing that She’s avoiding you on purpose, without this confusing circumstance whereby She told you that She fancies you and made you promise to talk to Her.
Man, I’d feel so sorry for any guy who had such mixed messages sent to him by a girl. The utter confusion of his predicament – does he call Her perhaps, staying true to the last definite things She said; or does he leave Her be, accepting with a sigh that She just doesn’t care. Furthermore does he have a right to be angry? Obviously somewhere She’s been less than fair to him – either by lying saying She has feelings for him, or by rejecting him after sowing false hope into his mind. I would think that all he would want is for Her to say why – it would either explain Her misdemeanors and all would be well between them, or it would give him closure and allow him a chance to move on.
I think the moral here is that sometimes it would be best to just bite the bullet and give someone an explanation rather than prolonging their hurt so that you need not face them. It’s all too easy to avoid someone in this day and age, but if we can deal with a situation before it becomes a problem then that must be to our advantage.
Good luck Ascott in house dance.

This isn’t a rant and it’s not directly aimed at anyone – the line just came up on the song as I was listening to it and these thoughts crossed my mind. They may not be particularly deep or insightful but I thought they should be shared – behind them lays a good moral.

Biology now, and anaerobic respiration is the name of the game, with such well-known players as oxidative phosphorylation, lactate dehydrogenase and flavin adenine dinucleotide (FAD for those of you who don’t closely follow the Respiration Premiership) squaring up to attempt to win the crown of “Most Pointlessly Complicated Name Ever”.
Thrilling stuff. Gripping, almost. As you can tell I’m riveted by this, concentrating so hard that nothing, not even Facebook, can distract me.
Half an hour is left on the clock as we turn to the End of Chapter Worksheet. It’s the biological equivalent of extra time, with no clear winner decided after 60 minutes. A diagram displays to me some of the stages in glycolysis, standing out from a worksheet so vividly, vividly peach that it actually assaults my eyes. Time stretches out in front of me like a rubber band; likely of snapping if stretched too much. I find myself checking the clock ever thirty seconds in the vain hope that the next five minutes will be somewhat quicker than the last.
Mocking voices from my classmates reading over my shoulder. No, I wasn’t drunk when I wrote the note that proceeded this one – note the eloquence of my writing, this ease with which the words flowed from my fingertips like an unstemmable flood of rhetorical, metaphorical water. Also noteworthy is my ability to use verbiage of many syllables when more succinct words would suffice, and my clever, brash and witty use of irony to underline and accent important points I made.
The clock has run down now, the final whistle is blown and a result has been reached – no one really cares how complicated scientific terms are, because if you can’t remember their spelling or meaning, you’re probably not studying a subject where this is necessary.
So, a marvelous 80 minutes is wasted, and another 3 classmates think I’m either deep or strange.

 

Ave, James

 

If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to draw your attention briefly to the first note I ever wrote – “What I’m Worth”. Not so much my final grand total of £2465, but to the comment that James Alexander Lake made right at the very bottom, informing me that he would pay £2465 for me any day, and calling me cheeky.

It’s been a few weeks now since James Lake so bravely stood up in front of our year group in assembly to “throw off the shackles of sexual oppression”, as he so eloquently put it, and admit to being gay. Although I am not sure how this news will be greeted by his long term girlfriend, I, for one, applaud his courage; not only because he has now confirmed what many of us suspected for a number of months or even years, but because to speak so openly and brazenly in front of this specific group of people, 360 of the most cold, unforgiving age group on this earth, is nothing short of heroic. And that’s what you are, James: a hero for oppressed homosexuals, locked away in their closets, afraid of ridicule and rejection by their peers.

But why oh why should they be afraid? I’ve never understood why it is that we as a generation view homosexuality as something to be laughed at, discriminated against, even sometimes killed for. I’m not accusing anyone reading this of being a homophobic murderer, but I’m pretty sure that in that room was someone who prefers men to women, and yet won’t admit it because he is afraid. This, people, is why James is to be applauded and appraised for his audacity.

Around 4% of the general population are homosexual. This corresponds to around 14.4 pupils in that hall; around 4 teachers at AGS or, indeed, 50 pupils in the entire school. On top of this, having an older brother increases your chances of being gay by 33%, for each brother. I have two older brothers, and whilst I’m sure that they’d find the fact that they’ve now increased my chances of being gay to 6.7556%, they’d still find it weird. I’m not gay – I may not have a girlfriend but that’s not for want of trying, I swear. So there are around 50 boys and young men, our peers or even younger brothers, who don’t have to look at the High School when it comes to picking their partners. So why do we not know of them? They shouldn’t be afraid of telling their friends, but they are.

I think that when it comes to placing blame, it lies in part with popular culture. Television, music, cinema, art, even our parents, long for us to be straight. It may not be on purpose; in fact, it most likely isn’t, but from a young age we are instilled with a utopian image of what society and the people within should be. But dictionary.com defines utopian as “given to impractical or unrealistic schemes of such perfection”. By definition, therefore, it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to conform to these idealised personalities. At some point men in society are going to have to stop and say to themselves “yes, he may be my friend, but he’s gay, and I’m just going to accept that he wants to kiss me” and somehow find a way to say to him “I’m sorry but I don’t think of you like that, can’t we just be friends?” If we could say that, instead of “Oh my god, what a weirdo” and shunning them, wouldn’t that be marvellous?

Just for a brief and off-the-record point; James, I did not ‘hack’ into your Facebook, you left yourself signed in on my laptop and I hope you learnt your lesson. I didn’t change your gender so much as correct it, and in terms of dumping your long-term girlfriend for you and joining you to “hot gay and single” and other such groups, I’m just giving you a friendly push in the right direction. You prove my point here in this photograph of you at a gay pride march.

So, to conclude this into a valid point, I think that we, not just as a group of people but as a society, should at least think about this. This is a time of great change – the 21st century is still young and so are most of the people in this room. Just think – if you were gay, wouldn’t you want to tell people and still be accepted?