| A Meaningless Monument to Maniacal Mood |
[Mar. 5th, 2009|10:29 pm] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| | unspecified | ] |
| [ | Current Music |
| | deeply improbable, think dolphins at a rock concert | ] |
There’s a bird outside my window, and, in the distance, some form of machinery that is singing in C Major about a purpose that I’m sure I would recognize if only I could be bothered. I can’t, nor, I suspect, could anyone else in my situation, but these two sounds, organic and synthetic, you might say, reaffirm my existence. That’s what this blog is doing for you, as, if you didn’t know me, you would have no idea what has occurred since that last, gloriously happy voice post from Sydney airport.
It often strikes me how fragmented my life really is, and not just from this blog’s perspective. There are bits of it that stand out, that will have an everlasting impact on me, or on someone else, that will be memorable and valuable and special. And there are bits that are just me, living, breathing, being. This is one of those bits, as are most of the bits in which I blog. There have been a lot of those bits lately. Some people call them “going with the flow”, a clichéd phrase that sounds simultaneously hippy and unhappy.
Funny, how it’s the moments where I as a person am least important to the world in which I am able to write most captivatingly. Kinda supports the death of the author theory. My writing works when I am willing to accept that my text outweighs my own individual value. This is an oddly selfless notion for me to get my head around, but I would like to keep thinking that way, because hopefully, it will make what I choose to say here more relevant to you.
Is any of this relevant to you? I suspect most of you will either shrug at this point, or decide that it doesn’t have to be relevant if you find it entertaining enough. I’ll decide whether it engages you according to how many of you respond, but that’s the kind of measurement television executives and other such killers of innovation might make. I suspect it’s not very accurate.
Nonetheless, this blog, like most of mine, will probably subscribe to multiple demographics. This first part has been for those who are wowed by big ideas in sweeping sentences, those academic enough to be intrigued, though perhaps not enough to realize that I’m really not saying much. I’m about to move on to more lighthearted things, having been enthused by my momentum, so for those who don’t give a damn about all this, your bit is coming.
Am I right about the things that make me blog the way I do? Maybe it’s my disconnected state of mind that allows me to leap easily from one thought to the next, but maybe it’s just my scientific approach to blogging that requires it. Maybe it’s really boredom that makes me want to produce something I like, whose value is increased in my own mind by having nothing better to do. Pretension definitely makes things seem cooler than they really are, and it’s something I’m definitely guilty of. Unfortunately, I’m really bad at drawing conclusions about anything, and thus I don’t know what to make of all that I’ve just been thinking about.
Why do all of you blog? Do you blog when life is at its most interesting, or are you like me, the other way round? Do you start writing because you have something to say, or because you feel obliged to, or even just out of habit? Are these questions worth answering?
***
Yep, we’ve now left academic wank mode and have now entered… what? Thursday? Well, this is Thursday. I don’t feel welcome to it and nor should you. Any Thursday that welcomes you is severely failing itself. I think that I’d rather believe that I am in denial than that one of the days of the week, which recurs on a much more regular basis than I ever will, has lost its meaning.
Many Thursdays have seemed welcoming to me in the past few months, but that all ended on the Thursday that took me away from Sydney and brought me back to nothing much. And that’s pretty much exactly what they’ve been about ever since. Thursdays in 2007 were comparatively forgiving, as they at least gave me something I could transform into humor with the magic of my wit. Now all I have is the magic of severe boredom. Little did I know that my last Sydney voice post heralded the beginning of a long and oppressive chain of deeply depressing mid-week moldiness.
That’s exactly how I feel right now. Moldy. Yes, it is possible for a human being to feel moldy, don’t try this at home. I wouldn’t feel moldy if not for the fact that I’m stuck at home, with nothing to do. If only I had uni on Thursdays, life would be so much more worthwhile, and this blog so much better. I could sit in my lecture/tutorial, mercilessly making fun of everything and everyone just like I used to do in high school. Instead, here I am, making fun of myself. Wait, I thought we’d surpassed the wankage. Oh well.
So what did I do today? Well, I spent the first hour of my waking life wondering why my computer wasn’t on. It wasn’t on because I turned it off last night. It was the first witness to my crusade of charity, you see. I decided that it was necessary to be kinder to the world, and that to start me off on this quest, I would give my computer a night’s holiday. I gave up on that when I realized that if not for my kindness, I’d have been able to reach over, pick up my keyboard and unobtrusively Google a lyric someone put in their Facebook status last night in order to confirm its origin, which would then allow me to happily go back to sleep. Screw the world; it never appreciates anything I do for it.
After lengthy pontification on whether getting out of bed would wake me up too much, how cool telepathy would be and why life is so damn hard, I decided to screw the lyric too. The effort involved in doing that made me tired enough to sleep again, but just as I settled back to indulge my exhaustion, my father entered, ordering me to have breakfast so that I wouldn’t be in his way when he cleaned the house.
How unfair is that? It’s Thursday, and nothing but Thursday, and I don’t even get to sleep through it? Well, to be honest, I could have slept through it if I wanted and nobody would have been any the wiser after 9:00, but I am of the inconvenient belief that sleeping during the day is bad, unless you never got out of bed in the first place, in which case it isn’t day yet anyway.
Thanks to my own guilty conscience, and perhaps my stomach too, I got out of bed, and ate breakfast. I came back, was tempted to go back to sleep, but didn’t because that would have been too easy, and started this blog. After, of course, I read all the other blogs, reviews, news items and other miscellaneous sources of information my RSS aggregator had for me. This is a habit that has been encouraged by my journalism work at uni, though most of the stuff I read is music or otherwise entertainment related. Must get some good hard news feeds to look at…. Nah, can’t be bothered. It’s Thursday, they’d all be sad.
This semester, by the way, is quite exciting so far, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that I’m mostly doing creative writing stuff rather than journalism stuff. Journalism was initially intended to be my income while I wrote something very clever, published it, got famous and then never had to work again. But you get to pick some elective subjects to go along with your degree, so, having been particularly unimpressed by last semester’s journalism work, I decided to see whether their writing subjects were any good. One is fairly non-specific, basically just an excuse for you to write a hell of a lot. The other is called “Great Books: Creative Writing Classics” which is a politically correct way of saying “literature”.
The latter of these seemed somewhat more frightening, as literature is stereotypically taught in quite an inflexible way, but the first thing the lecturer did was to quietly condemn the high school English method, which was very much a relief. That’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy high school English, my teacher was very engaging and did things her own way, but in school, there is too much demand for a right answer, which I think is the wrong way to go about reading.
Anyway, and yes I know, that was a tangent, the first book we were asked to read was Beowulf. I found this quite terrifying because there are many translations, and some are a lot better than others, but I quickly learnt two things that were comforting: that it didn’t matter what translation you read as long as you read it, and that the Seamus Heaney translation, which almost everyone recommended, actually looked very friendly. I learnt this by reading an excerpt available online.
Here was where I came to grief. Finding a copy of said translation that didn’t need scanning or shipping from the US has been very difficult. That was the next thing I attempted, for about the fifth time, to do this Thursday morning. I am supposed to have read Beowulf by tomorrow morning, in preparation for the lecture, and if not for the difficulty involved in locating it, I would have. Ironic, that the one time I want to do uni work before the night before, I am stopped in my tracks by a simple problem.
Surprisingly, through little more than desperation, I did finally find a copy. Yay, I thought, now I know how to carve away today. But woe was me, it was not to be! For in coming, it had to travel a dark road. And thus it took ten hours in the download. Excuse me, I just burst, unprovoked, into poetry. It seems these days I often do it, then pretend I can’t stop… making of myself… a… real… tit?
Um… yes… so I now have it, and intend to read it tonight, upon having finished this blog. But this morning, I did not, thus perpetuating my lack of anything to do, and increasing my frustration at my situation. In protest, I decided I was going to boycott technology and go meditate, which I then did, in the sun, until I decided that I was more likely to fall asleep than be enlightened. That seemed too enjoyable for my taste, so my technology boycott ended, and I came back to continue this blog, still having found very little of any substance to write about.
I’m not really sure where the next few hours went. I know part of them must have been spent on my blog, part on searching for a more speedy Beowulf/watching the download travel very slowly and part just on mucking around, but none of those seem like things that could occupy me for a long time, and yet I have not a clue what else I might have done.
The next thing I remember was my brother coming home from school. He was obviously bored because he set out immediately to irritate me, mainly by chewing on lollies far too close to my ear. He succeeded for a brief time before we both found one another too inconvenient to be bothered with and decided to co-exist peaceably. Actually, I think it was because he wanted my money. He always wants my money. Family is like that.
My dog arrived, and we played with him. Whenever Brother Sam would stop paying him attention, Zak would leap out, standing on two legs, and put his arms on his chest. Several times, he almost failed to reach and fell over, but each time he just managed to save himself. He eventually settled down on my stomach, something that he very rarely does, but under Sam’s guidance was bribed into, just this once. Zak is a special kind of family member, because he doesn’t really want anyone’s money, but he does want my bed, and tries to get it every night, then barks at me at three in the morning. This makes up for it.
I was actually so bored that I wanted to go for a swim for no other reason than because I could, but I was advised against it by Brother Sam, who then unhelpfully left. I tried to blog more, but, having been doing it for too long, was bored even by that. So, I abandoned all my principles and went to sleep. That was the best bit of my whole day.
I woke up to eat dinner, which was bad because my dream was a good one, but nothing good can last. Dinner was good too, until I ate it, thus proving my very revolutionary theory. By this point, I had Beowulf, and intended to start reading it then. This idea, which seemed to validate my patience, or perhaps my lack thereof, was crushed by… American Idol. I’m not sure why I watch Idol, it’s probably a masochistic thing. It provides something in common with at least a fraction of the family, so I grudgingly trudged out of my cave to watch it. It was…. Entirely uneventful.
I survived that, and decided that this year’s top 12 really isn’t going to be as good as last year’s, or even as the last Australian Idol, which statistically is quite unlikely. Go Australia. I came back here, and since then, I have blogged, because I have so little to do on Thursdays that I can spend lots of time on that sort of thing, and so little motivation that I need to.
That, I suppose, brings us to the here and now. I have decided that if I read Beowulf tonight, I won’t like it, or it will be broken, or I’ll fall asleep, or I’ll screw up my sleeping patterns and be awake all night. Yep, the editions of sleep in that sentence triggered happy impulses in my brain, sounds much more appealing. I’ll read Beowulf tomorrow morning, which is admittedly cutting it just a little close, but I’m sure I can do it, because I’m cool like that, and tomorrow will be Friday.
This is the final paragraph. I can’t write final paragraphs, therefore it will suck. But apparently I’m depressed and dysfunctional enough to have enjoyed writing this. Though I wish I was still in that last voice post, when Thursdays didn’t suck. No, I wish I was earlier still, in a hotel room in Sydney, when everything seemed vivid and meaningful, or in a taxi, when I didn’t know what I was in for. Yep, this is a really bad final paragraph. Still, I’ve made the best of one of the blank bits of my life, and that’s something to do I guess. I hope you found something worthwhile in it. Seeya next time I have nothing to say. |
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