Hello Stranger

It’s been a while and I’ve nearly forgotten what it’s like talking to you.

Of course now I remember why I stopped. The abject sense of failure coupled with lacklustre feelings of disappointment not dissimilar, I imagine, to biting into a sandwich of your favourite filling only to find that someone has replaced said filling with a teaspoonful of watery gruel, spiced up occasionally with the odd ball bearing. And, whereas that would no doubt be satisfyingly crunchy, it wouldn’t be as filling or, indeed, fulfilling as, say, eating the correct sandwich. Or writing a decent post.

Sadly, however, that doesn’t seem to be an option at this moment in time so may I proudly present to you watery gruel, with a delicate peppering of small metal spheres.

What I really need – and here I might begin to sound like a broken record, but a broken record with a good point at least – is inspiration; an idea. And Pan’s Labyrinth just gave me such an idea.

Now, I’m not a squeamish guy – I’ve watched one autopsy in detail and seen photos of many others; I’ve stabbed myself through the hand by accident; I’ve seen an horrific array of injuries and wounds and to be honest… it’s all been of interest to me rather than grossing me out.

So, you can at least begin to understand my surprise when a small scene in Pan’s Labyrinth, a film of Spanish origin, actually managed to make me flinch repeatedly. It was when one of the main protagonists, an evil captain of Franco’s army, grabs a peasant and begins to smash a bottle into his face. All par for the course so far, you may claim, but let me inform you that this wasn’t your standard Hollywood-esque let’s-imply-some-form-of-violence-then-play-the-sound-whilst-picturing-something-else, oh no. You actually got to see the nose being beaten flat, then inwards into the brain as the bottle thumped wetly into increasingly pliable flesh, accompanied by a rather gratuitous soundtrack of suitably unsuitable squelches.

        ”Speak to the hand, Bro”

Of course this isn’t going to turn into an unoriginal rant about the state of movies today and how they are warping children. In fact what I’m pissed off about is occurrences like the banning of Manhunt. Although not actually banned in the UK, it’s an offense to possess in Germany, New Zealand and Australia. The main controversy in England was that a 14 year old boy was murdered by his 17 year old friend, who was found at some point to have stood near a copy of Manhunt or (shock horror) possibly have plaid it at some point. However, can we please observe at this moment in time that Manhunt is rated 18 in the UK and, thusly, the murderer should not have been playing it in the first place. Also overlooked was that the murderer had previously seen a Chucky film and that the murder committed was identical to one in the film.

I think that someone will always find something to object to in anything. If you need further proof, please peruse at your own leisure the following “parenting” website:

Kids in Mind – Pan’s Labyrinth

There’s something fantastic about films – they’re all rated so that you know the minimum age of child that should be watching it. And, at the end of the day, if you don’t want them to see it, no one’s making them! I thought that perchance this was actually a website of seriously misguided parents overreacting to a situation that shouldn’t even concern them, but no, it’s much worse than that. If you happen to browse near the bottom of the page, you’ll find them wanting you to become a member of their website – apparently the best way to protect children is to increase Kid’s in Mind’s bank balance.

Damn, now I sound like some kind of socialist, anti-capitalist whiney teenager.

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.

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?

Hello

New blog…

 

…but no inspiration. Something short, then. Let me assure you, first of all, that at some point I will post on here my three noteworthy Facebook notes, as much to stop this blog being so disappointingly empty as to provide you with something nice to peruse.

There have been countless times before this where I have started an online blog or journal, promising myself to keep it updated on a regular basis… and then failed miserably to do so, even once.

So.

This is NOT going to be like that. Not least because I actually enjoy writing the kind of thing I hope to write here but also because Microsoft Word 2007 has this magic feature whereby I can write a blog post, nicely formatted, and it will post it for me, at the click of a button. At the click of a button! So, no matter where I am, even if I have no access to the internet, I can keep my fingertips busy and my creative mind ticking over. Hopefully this will rule out laziness as a possible barrier for updates – obviously this will become clear in the near future.

 

Time for a Spring Clean

 

I feel that this is a milestone in my life. I can finally get to sleep each night without picturing Hannah in my mind’s eye, and although I feel like no one will suit me the way she did, that’s ok. People suit me in different ways, and make me happy in different ways, and if someone was to be the same as her… that wouldn’t feel right.

But still, it’s time for a spring clean. I’ve thrown open the windows of my soul and let a light breeze clear out the stale air that had until now hung rather heavily in my mind. It’s fairly refreshing to be sitting here as I am, late at night all alone. For some reason, I’m incredibly optimistic about life right now. I’m not, normally, but I can’t help but feel like it’s all going to be just fine in the end. I just remember that the end will justify the pain it took to get me there.

Anyway, if you’ve read this far then I must not only congratulate you but thank you for spending your time here with me. I hope you look forward to the next instalment as much as I do, because this is going to be a rollercoaster – ups and downs, but damn good fun overall.