Archive for the 'Angst' Category
Cry, cry, cry silver tears / This is the song, of wish you were here
What’s on the menu today? Well I thought I’d start out with a little self-referential flagellation, move on to a full course of emosity (a new word from across the seas) and finish off with a sprig of apathy. That’s enough menu analogy for now. There are very few ways of drafting a post like this without it seeming like a syringe full of angst to the eyeball, unfortunately for you dear reader, this is precisely how my brain works. (more…)
I’ll be there with you / Don’t worry / I’m sorry / Goodbye
When I joined my current company I very much came on in a junior role. I got a junior salary and did menial tasks to keep the other two members of our fledgling team on focus with the other more important jobs. Through perseverance and patience I gradually moved into a developer role working on content management systems, database design and the like. Throughout all of this I moved to a standards based markup process and even now, I derive much pleasure from elegantly marking up a design; the current designer is astoundingly skilled and I believe challenges me with every new design. Needless to say I was peerless in the most literal sense of the word and was able to set my own boundaries, unfortunately this utopia of job satisfaction was never going to last. (more…)
September Rain
I don’t really know what I expected from watching Evangelion again, now ten years since I first saw it. I somehow thought I would be immune to its subversiveness, that I had outgrown the way it digs into me like nothing else. I was wrong; but far from the perceptual epiphany I had the first time through, it has brought to the fore questions I’ve been asking myself recently but without really knowing it: the questions fundamentally concerning what I’ve become. (more…)
Don’t give it up / here comes the life
Talking about a relationship that went wrong is a difficult thing to do; either with someone or in writing it means exposing things that are personal and close to heart but most of all it’s about admitting that something went wrong. I rightly didn’t write this at the time of the break-up as it was too close, too raw to get any kind of perspective on. Now a year and a half later and I thought by now I would be over it and seeking out something new and different. Unfortunately it was one of “those” relationships that defined my lifestyle at the time rather than being an ephemeral side-plot to existence. (more…)
It took me all night, to get you, but I got you
I am writing this while particularly drunk; I am squiffy enough to at least pretend at coherent speech yet sober enough to use the <em> tags. I am under no illusions that this is a good idea, and the only thing standing between me and complete literary anarchy is the Firefox spellchecker. You have been warned.
Being inebriated allows for a frank honesty that I couldn’t hope to muster while sober. For instance, I can say now that clubs are in now way conducive to me meeting people. I believe I’ve said before that I rely on my limited verbal prowess to seduce you mortals, so when there is a bass-line that rattles your laces and more flesh than clothing, I’m out of my element. Saturday had (what I can only assume) were two very attractive girls gyrating in front of me and this elicited nothing but confusion from me (“They’re probably lost..”). Females are not a foreign concept to me, contrary to popular geek lore, I am not a fish out of water while speaking to the opposite sex; I may be an introvert but I like to believe I’m not a total social outcast.
Of course the dichotomy (why is it I can use that word while my reptilian brain is active?) is that the more I drink, the more social and the more confident I become, but the less garrulous I am. My white-hot, full-bore wit is lost when I can’t answer simple questions without immediately flummoxing for larger words or perhaps something more witty.
I cannot dance. I can mosh, although this is no great feat as a retarded jellyfish that has come in contact with an electrical socket can mosh. The idea of losing myself is foreign to me, and becomes more and more foreign with each day that I forgot who I am. I lament for my past passion, my anger, my fury at the world at large, at people, at commercialism and society as a whole. Instead I find it replaced with apathy and the counting of days. Nothing is new anymore, the familiar lull of routine and fluffy comfort of knowing what is coming next. I yearn for the days when I woke up and had nothing to do, when the highlight of my evening was putting a camera down my boxer shorts and equating squirrels to cheese.
I wonder whether the draw of regular money and the deeply-defined nesting instinct has stripped me from what I should be doing. I fear that I may continue to drink only to remember the feeling of what it was like to have a spark, then to remember that memory, and then nothing. Sometimes I think it might be a fortuitous turn of events to wake up and lose all memory of what you are. To be left with fragments of writing, bits of a life to piece together as the clean slate of you lives again. What would I think if I woke up and this was what I saw first? A rambling diatribe of unfulfilled dreams and directionless fury, a short journey to see what I’ve filled my empty life with: a steadily overflowing collection of other people’s creative visions.
Perhaps this was supposed to be a post on sexual tension, frustration and release, dark feelings of ineptitude or just the cursed words of a legally-insane madman. Perhaps this is the only way to gain a perspective on what the daylight me perceives as normality. Or perhaps I’m taking things far too seriously and this is just a brain dump of a fevered mind. Either way, I started this post with the promise I wouldn’t delete it or rewrite it and I’ll stick by that promise.
Turn a new page, tear the old one out
I am a medical drama whore. This is not a statement of purpose or the First Step, I don’t even count it as a confession, just a statement. This is a very recent development as, for those who know me, know how squeamish I am which opposes the medical aspect of the drama. I am the child who threw up in science when the video of a bull’s eye dissection was being shown, I was the one who held up their hands to cover the screen whenever something that was supposed to be inside, was on the outside.
But not any more.
It started with House, a sarcastic comment here, a blistering one-liner there and I was hooked. Realistically it started with Scrubs way back when, but Scrubs has long since hung up what medical credibility it had and focused on it’s superlative off-the-wall humour. Recently however, it’s been Grey’s Anatomy. I still keep up with House but with the recent storyline has eroded my interest very swiftly. I’ll admit I was shallow and that the Golden Globe award for Grey’s was what made me originally pick up the series but I’m glad I did. In an ambivalent kind of way.
The storytelling is superb, sublime characters, it did everything to deserve the award. But it took me until the end of the second season to realise just why I could watch so much of it at once: it’s easy drama. While it’s unfair to draw parallels with House, it illustrates the point. Wherein House, anyone could die, patient or doctor, there isn’t that same uncertainty or tautness in Grey’s. It may focus on the characters more than the patients but the same idealism runs throughout all the threads: it will always turn out alright. At all points, each character has an intricate mesh of emotional support so that when they break down someone will be there for them. Someone will go to the supply cupboard and cradle them, someone will always come to the bar when they need it, and their friends will always eventually help them out. It’s this warm and fuzzy cocoon of best intentions and good vibrations like an ongoing anti-suicide advert; that it doesn’t matter how far down the toilet your life goes, no matter how many times you brutalise your emotions, someone is there to pick you up.
With that thought, I began to wonder why I’d burned away my weekend watching it. I wondered why I’d cried at the sad parts and laughed at the funnies, surely I should feel something about being so intricately manipulated emotionally? I realised that I watched it for the patients. These flashbulbs of human lives, dense cores of stories; a sobering thought that, supposedly, the time you’re most alive is when you’re close to death. Every siren is a change in someone’s life and that it’s a good thing?
Grey’s Anatomy does a lot of things very well, at moments it can echo a common ache of transition from adolescence to adulthood, while other moments it can patronise you with a lesson in morals. As ambivalent as I am about it, my worries err on the side of implications and allusions rather than explicit statements. It’s flawlessly written and impeccably acted and that’s enough for me, the thinking and the inferences can come afterwards.
