Alone

I am alone.

Not lonely, just, alone.

     Sitting on the bed in my parent’s house – when did it become my parent’s and not mine? – with my mother away studying, my father out at work and me left here to mind the house, I am alone.

     Sometimes I enjoy it, sometimes I don’t.  I enjoy the freedom to stand in the shower that’s turned up just a little too hot, for just a little too long, languishing in the heavy flow of the steaming water.  I enjoy my malleable time, where everything’s fine so long as it gets done by the end of the day and then whoops I forgot and I can always do it tomorrow.  I enjoy the fact that I’m in a semi-detached stronghold with the cannons of middle-class bourgeois self-importance peeking over the crenulations of my memories of this place, so that when a cold-caller calls claiming to be compensating for a car-accident, I can comfortably say with a smug smile that thank you for calling but my family doesn’t own a car and no, thank you, I think I would have known if such a calamity had come to pass.

     I don’t enjoy it when it gets dark.  When I find myself watching for movement out of the windows, from the corners of my eye.  I don’t enjoy it when there’s a silence, and then a sound, out of place, leading me to question where I am and what I’m doing.  I don’t like it when I’m caught not knowing what to do, when asking for help by phone or by email would seem like a beacon blasting out an admission of helplessness.

     All in all, I think, I can’t help but relish this.  But then, I have to stop, reconsider.  I’m not alone at all.  There’s a boy, miles and miles away who can’t help but smile whenever I kiss him, on the tip of his nose.  There’s a girl, who’s not quite so far, who confided in me recently, worries about another friend in a chain of hope and goodwill.  And there are friends that I will meet soon, who are coming for fun and larking about  but who I’m sure will hold me up when such things are farthest from  my mind.  I realise that I could write and write and write about  the  people – who I know, who I’ve met, who love me, who  hate me, and who haven’t quite decided yet, but it all boils down to this.

I’m not alone.  I’m surrounded.

OK so I know you're supposed to tell people before any sort of long break in posting...

But this one was kind of unplanned.  Forgive me?
Either way, here's something I wrote and edited at the beginning of the summer to keep you entertained until I've processed all the things I've been writing without access to computers.

I see red.

                Mottled, streaked.  The sun behind my eyelids makes a strange pattern.

                I’m leaning on my hands, sitting back on a rough picnic blanket, bathed in sunshine.  We’re in the park, it’s crowded with families and friends but we have our own island.

                Twenty metres in front of me, there are dancers in the rapture of classic 40s music.  It would nice to be them.

                Behind me, to my left, a group with drums and tambourines, weaving intricate rhythms through the hubbub of chatter and laughter.  Next to them some people with discs and pins and other circus trappings.

                Footballs and frisbees fly and roll around, the gentle thud as foot connects with ball and the ring of calls to the other players cut through the air.

                A breeze washes over me, a welcome variety to the insistent caress of the sun.

                I open my eyes.

                There are five other inhabitants of the island surrounded by grass.  Three well known, two less so.  One is learning tarot, reading the fate of another not here. Two gossip, two read, and then there’s me.

                The tarot reader talks of gains and losses, apathy and faith.  The cards are hopeful, she thinks, head deep in a book that tells their meaning.

                The gossips giggle over a friend’s folly.  Deep in discussion and intensely interested in the other’s opinions and stranger’s situations.  I don’t know them well, but their talk is a portal to a parallel world of scandals and sweetness.

                The readers are intent, silent.  They are building fortresses of imagination around themselves, another universe that they will escape and destroy as soon as they shut their books.

                And I sit, and stretch, and see.

Procrastination - 5

41)      Find the powerpoints online of all the lectures I plan on doing today.  Then find all the notes.  Work out the appropriate order in which to do them.  Realise there’s not enough time left to do all of them and leave it for next time.

42)      Look at hilariously titled books in the library – end up reading a book on “cumaceans” and feeling ridiculously immature,.

43)      Doodle on everything.

44)      Unclog the shower.  Wonder how it got so bad.  Feel slightly nauseous for the rest of  the day.

45)      Learn BSL. (badly)

46)      Reorganise your friend’s DVD collection.  Not even your own.  SOMEONE ELSE’S

47)      Sit on the sofa in a pile with your friends, talking about anything and everything.

48)      Stretch out ALL of the kinks in your back. ALL OF THEM.

49)      Have silent rants in the library at your friends about that girl sitting near to you who just won’t whisper.  No seriously, do you have trouble grasping the concept? I THINK THE LIBRARY MIGHT NOT BE THE RIGHT PLACE FOR YOU.

50)   Make a list of all the things you do to procrastinate.

Procrastination - 4

31)      See how many blog views I have.  Blogger tells me all about your operating systems and where you’re from.   I KNOW WHERE YOU LIVE. (only to the country though)

32)      Make a Google Plus account

33)      Try to do everything you can do with a google plus account.

34)      Link my google plus account to my blogger.  Not be sure this is a good idea.  Unlink it a few days later to be on the safe side.

35)      I DON’T UNDERSTAND GOOGLE PLUS OR THE INTERNET.

36)      Spend forever choosing exactly the right music to revise to.  Then change my mind.

37)      Dance like a silly. I tell myself it’s exercise.

38)      Sing along to music, realise I’m singing the words of the lecture I’m reading in time with the music, wonder if it helps, then realise said words have lost all meaning to me.

39)      Look up all of the lyrics to what I’m listening to.  That way at least my procrastination is accurate.

40)   Stick things on my wall.  Like tickets, receipts, leaflets...you name it, if it can be stuck using white-tac then it’s probably up there somewhere.

Procrastination - 3

21)      Plan all the things I’m going to do after my exams.

22)      Plan all the things I’m going to do over the summer.

23)      Plan what I’m going to wear to every event I could possibly go to.

24)      Plan my next five meals.  In great detail.  Then end up cooking something else because I wasted all my time planning and I don’t have time to do anything fancier.

25)      Think about how exactly I’m going to tidy my room.  And then not do it.

26)      Contemplate cleaning the kitchen.

27)      Unblock the sinks down in the kitchen.  Well, slightly.  I think.  I’m kinda terrified  that my attempts at unblocking will end up in a worse problem later on.  If they do : I’M SO SORRY GUYS.

28)      Play Mahjong/Solitaire/Spider Solitaire/Freecell. As in, the games that come free with the computer.

29)      Look up things on Wikipedia.  Then follow links.

30)   Reorganise my Bookmarks bar on Google Chrome.

Procrastination - 2

11)      Giggling over the things in the weird and wonderful world of Ann Summers.  Particularly the reviews of sex toys.  People say really the weirdest things.

12)      Searching things in an incognito window  that I knew that I didn’t want to search, that I knew would leave me feeling weird and losing faith in humanity, but thought that I might as well look up “in the interests of thoroughness”  And no, I won’t tell you what I  searched.  Believe me, it’s for your own good.

13)      Looking up symptoms that I have on medical websites.  I’ve found that since starting my medical course I tend to either come to the conclusion that it’ll sort itself on its own, or that I have a brain tumour/gallstones/some sort of heart conditions/most mental disorders.  Never underestimate your own ability to hype things up in your mind.

14)      Mourning what could have been.  What I could have been, what I could have become, what doors are now closed off to me. 

15)      Looking up things that I could do other than medicine.  Currently the plan is wait tables or an equivalent until I have the money to start a patisserie.  I will bake and cook and sell my knitting and other crafts and I will write in my spare time.  Either that or sexy librarian.  Or maybe switch to a palaeontology degree.  In all seriousness, I really like dinosaurs.

16)      Doing my make up/my nails.  This is made more ridiculous by the fact that I currently live in a house on my own since everyone else is at with their families.  THERE IS NO ONE TO SEE MY BEAUTY.

17)      Play viola.  Try to get better at the bass.  Sing.  Not really relevant at the moment because the house is too cold for my fingers to do what I want them to.

18)      Decide to go to the library in the afternoon.  Get ready for the library – this involves showering, packing your revision, putting on appropriate clothes, packing different revision because you don’t need to cover what you’d originally decided on, finding snacks to take with you and filling a water bottle, repacking your revision AGAIN.  And then oh look the library closes in an hour not that much point going after all.

19)      DRINK ALL THE WATER.  I have started drinking more water than can possibly be necessary.  I don’t understand why.

20)   Make coffee.  Drink coffee.  Remember why I try not to drink so much caffeine.  Try to sit still and fail.

Procrastination - 1

     Why do we procrastinate?  What is the point of it all?   There’s a part of me that thinks that maybe it’s part of my brain’s way of giving itself some time off, so that it can...I dunno...do some sort of background processing.  If I’m being honest though, I think it’s just my innate laziness.

     I really am one of the best people I know at procrastinating.  Maybe that’s just because I know me best, but I do genuinely believe that I spend more time procrastinating than a lot of my peers.  Heck, I’m so good at it that I find myself procrastinating during my procrastinating.  As in right now, I should be revising.  I have some pretty major exams in a couple of weeks.  As in “I need to pass these exams so that I can stay at Medical School and follow my dreams” sort of major.  However, here I am, writing this.  Not only that, but after allowing myself to start writing this (the idea’s been in my head a few days), since I’d fulfilled my initial (albeit low) expectations of what I’d complete today, I thought I’d do half an hour on this.  And yet, after letting myself start, I found myself looking at possible laptops I could buy a sentence or two ago.  Now, I should be looking at them at some point - my laptop currently rattles when I hold it the wrong way, is losing its keys and occasionally freaks out for really no reason.   Much though I’m rather attached to it, I think this might be the beginning of the end.  I don’t want to be left suddenly without my portal to that wonderful and disgusting place that is the internet. However I consciously told myself that I’d let myself get a laptop for my birthday.  My birthday is AFTER my exams, so I can fantasise about laptops AFTER my exams.  But do I?  No.  I decide the time to look at them is during the time that I’ve allowed myself in order to do something else that isn’t revising.  It’s like some sort of meta-procrastination.  It’s not the first time and it’s getting pretty annoying.

     Recently, I watched Jenna Marbles’ video on Junk FoodConfessions.  Now aside from the fact that she’s pretty damn awesome, I want to be her friend and I have really an awful lot of respect for her for doing what she does, I thought that I’d take a leaf out of her book and start writing down all the things that I do to procrastinate.  I’ll publish this after exams, and maybe it’ll help me to stop doing the things I shouldn’t be doing and start doing the things that I should be doing.  I’ll put it up in instalments, so that you can fully appreciate it all. 

So...here goes. 

1)       Checking  facebook, stalking anyone who I haven’t seen/talked to recently.  Facebook has since been deactivated, which is way harder to keep up than it should be.

2)      Going on funnyjunk/icanhazcheezburger and not only looking at top uploads, but looking at the newest uploads and then ending up comparing the two and looking at everything twice because I saw everything in top uploads when it was in the newest uploads.  Also getting really annoyed at a lot of internet peoples.  Let’s not go into why.

3)      Looking at pretty dresses.  Again, something I justify to myself on the basis that  I have a ball  coming up and want to get a new dress for, since I don’t think I  have anything quite formal enough.  However this ball is months off.  I have time.

4)      Obsessively finding new webcomics  and reading their entire archives.  I’ve done this for enough so far that  I’ve added 7 new comics to my list of things to regularly check.  That’s just the ones that I particularly liked.   And some of their archives went back over 5 years.   THAT’S A LOT OF STORYLINE NOW IN MY BRAIN

5)      Doing the above with blogs/tumblrs/fanfictions.  

6)      Reading over old skype/facebook/email/text conversations with my friends.

7)      Feeling bad about what I said in those conversations/realising that the friends were actually being kinda harsh.

8)      Trying to reconnect with old friends (this happens at random, if you feel we need to reconnect and I haven’t tried it with you, it’s nothing to do with you, more like to do with when you’re on facebook/skype and how long for)

9)      Skyping everyone I know.

10)   Watching youtube videos about things that are irrelevant to me  and that I don’t care about. SO MANY MAKE UP TUTORIALS DESIGNED FOR PEOPLE WHO LOOK COMPLETELY DIFFERENT TO ME IN THE FIRST PLACE.