Conan the Barbarian Giving Life Advice

Of Loopy Toys, Weddings & Derelict Beauties.

I've got a long work day ahead, which scientists have found to be 3 times shorter than a normal day yet goes by a rate that's 1.5 times slower than a mid-week dentist appointment, so naturally, I've sworn not to start it on the wrong foot. Allow me to properly procrastinate.

My friend is getting married later this week, and despite how much I loathe the institution of marriage and want to drag him out of it kicking and screaming for his own good while calling him barking mad, it's still making me go all whadabadabadoo for him. Although it's still a week off, I found myself obsessing about what I was going to wear, since my wardrobe consists mainly of makeshift fan merch and hand me downs that I embezzled from my dad, and it took four emergency messages to come to the conclusion that I need to go shopping. I'm rather clueless with girly things you see, and my first instinct was texting the groom who, unsurprisingly, was just as clueless about wardrobes as I was. It took a brief and very futile re-inactment of the opening scene to Narnia for me to realize I had to speak to a girl about this, so I texted three hoping to work out an average or a common denominator or whatever it is that makes girls' opinions legitimate. Hence, the shopping. I'm not excited about that part, although I am excited to see the look on my friend's face when he ties the knot, so it's worth the trip to the darkest pit of the hell that is the mall.

I spent the morning psychologically treating cuddly toys on a twisted German flash game online called paraplush, successfully cured three patients and was working through the mental knots of a particularly difficult stuffed penguin who made it personal by putting me on shock treatment twice when a power cut had me lose my progress and made me wanna positively cut a bitch. It's a sad game. Dumb humans, hurting things that can't fight back just because they can.

Speaking of which, I spent the evening with a friend last night, it was a night of shared head spaces, comfort zones and wonderful conversations, a much needed reprieve from all things fake and forced. I was too tired to keep up the conversation at many points, so maybe conversation isn't an accurate name for it. It was the first time I'd gone out since I got sick three weeks ago, but even then the stories - that's an accurate one-sided name for it - were interesting and unlike what people fart out and call conversation these days. There was another power cut, which brought this beauty to my attention:

It got me thinking, why are all neglected things beautiful? Is it because humans destroy everything they touch? A lot of optimists would interject and denounce the flagrant generalization I've made against their kind, so let me share a couple of other examples that'll prove the sample is unbiased before I get back to this.

Exhibit A: An architect friend of mine is basing her project on an old recreational park whose glory days date back to the 50s called the Merry Land. Now, it's not that safe to visit because it has more or less turned into a drug dealer's den, with most of the attractions in a state of disarray, breaking down for lack of maintenance. She's had a lot of trouble working there since it's a chore to go on your own and hope to leave the place with most of your possessions and your hymen intact, let alone with all of your blood supply - and, dare I say, organs - uncompromised. However, nature seems to have taken over, since no budget is spared for gardening, and now it looks like this:

Exhibit B: These shots are from a random corporate front garden that has seen better days. Albeit trampled and littered with its own refuse, this patch of shambles is artful chaos.

And last but not least, Exhibit C: I was waiting for the university shuttle bus one morning when
I came across this little miracle, a flower grew straight out the concrete. I don't know how this was physically possible, but it happened,and it was there for all who cared to see.

It's all around us, so let me make the connection for you the way it was subconsciously made for me. Is it possible that in choosing to care for things, humans ruin them? Funny creatures, humans are. But I digress.That accidental candelabra has more than meets the eye, you see. On the other side, where the picture doesn't cover, the glass of the bottle has been broken in by the heat, and is held together by the creeping mass of wax that built up over time. The candle, on the other hand, would break if you try to yank it out of the debris, and is held together by the bottleneck. Nature has a way of reaching equilibrium against crushing odds that humans still haven't learned, equilibrium that knows no compromise, as opposed to the ways of men. There are a couple of things to see for those who know how to look.

I was taken by this chaos and the two revelations it's given me, so I've decided to make my own little reminders. Recreating chaos beats the point, I admit, and they'll take time that I'm more willing to invest in inanimate objects than plants, that I can't keep alive if my life depended on it, or humans, that I can't understand if my life depended on it. This is my little project, they'll take a couple of months to turn into the their own unique shambles of neglect, but they're worth the wait.

There are two more little perks to this project, other than being a tangible notification for the revelations I had about human nature, that'll come in handy in days to come: The Baileys bottle was a gift from a friend who's made entirely of good things and had a little stunt that took a lot of effort and care to plan. The second is that these will put a smile on my face during the numerous power cuts to come as our governments struggles to be a government. Here's to the little things.

I watched How to train your Dragon recently, and it's by far the best animated movie I've seen in a while. It's got vikings, dragons, a message against violence and lots and lots of flying. It deserves a rant of its own but it won't do it justice to spoil it for other nerds, like myself, who need this custom bundle of happiness. Go watch it!

Of Headless Chickens, Nearly Headless Nick & Overall Head-Shaming.

This post has been a while in the oven, and true to the metaphor it took too long for I'm helpless in the kitchen. My friend's been pushing me to get back to writing from the heart, and a couple of days ago I stumbled upon an article about Terry Pratchett, one of my favorite authors and a full-fledged SciFi god, and found out he lives with dementia. You don't get too many excuses with that in the back of your head. Tis the season to be jolly and all that falalalala.

I got a little confession to make, I ran away from an injection last night. And no, I don't mean it metaphorically where I got all giddy then tightened that upper lip and took it like an adult homosapien, I mean I bounded across the room and threatened to bite then got bribed into it with candy, and it wasn't even legit candy, it was sad millennial candy that took the form of a diet pack of biscuits and a light beer. I got another little confession to make, I am 21 years old. Growing up sucks, it does, and I'm starting to think all those other people who look like they've got it together are undercover CIA operatives, or a race of clones that have always been that old.

And what the hell is up with nurses? Angels of mercy my sorry ass (quite literally, my ass is sorry), they descend on you like demon monkeys and pin you down to the nearest bed then poke at you with such zeal, an inter-dimensional observer might mistake them for banshees. When did they get so vicious? This is not the rant of someone who's merely butthurt, my dear readers, I'll have to take one of those every night this week and right now it feels like I was shot in the ass with a fire-thrower, and it's bad enough that the stupid shot I'm taking has to be mixed with anesthesia because even the pharma overlords admit it's napalm goo. I've come to fear the daily shot as pathetically as Barney Stinson once feared his slapsgiving quota, for pretty much the same reasons.

And much like the repercussions of Barney's one-time bet, all I can do is wait for an impending giant Marshall-sized hand every night in horror, which has made my plots to kill the nurse more creative by the minute. I've pledged to cut the harridan's butt, stick it on her face and gouge out her eyeballs with ginormous needles. I've taken an oath to turn her intestines into hospital chow. She ain't getting no hannibal gourmet treatment, nu-uh, slimy backdoor cuisine she was and slimy backdoor cuisine she will be. I've sworn that by the time I was done with the waif, she'd wish she were nearly headless Nick as she haunted the halls of the cafeteria. I could go on, but it sounds less friendly and a lot more personal as I go along and the TV show references dwindle. Do nurses sleep? (Read: Can nurses be killed in their sleep?) Stay tuned.

However, just when I thought that this growing up thing doesn't quite run up my alley, I turned down a paid internship at a call center for an unpaid internship at a feminist organization. It was one of those light bulb moments, when you tune out the lady on the phone and weigh your options amidst the all-singing all-dancing pots of noodles that'll make up most of your meals from now on, past the fields of paperwork where you picture yourself running errands dressed up as a German maid, up the have you lost your bubble gum drops creak and into the screaming goblins in patchy little suits dancing around your social life. It lasted for a couple of seconds and then I informed a surprised lady the CV in my outbox is heading at the back of another white collar's head. I'm doing it clean-for-Gene style, changing the system from within the system.

Which brings me to another little rant that's been giving my Adam's apple a run for its mortgage claim, that internship at the call center was sent on our university e-mails, and I got a call from their HR department without actually applying for the position. I seem to be the only student who thinks this wonderful opportunity is downright preposterous, and here's why: For a stuck up private university that manages to flush down the life-savings of thousands of middle-aged blokes every year, you'd think they'd get us a better chance in the big bad world than a call center, don't you think? They're begging for people to work there, that job is at the bottom of the food chain, taking in people out for a quick buck only to have them run out at the first taste of a fat paycheck. I get it, it's an entry level job that a dimwit could do, it inks the first blot on many blank CVs, it channels students into the unquenchable monster that is the call center business and nobody minds a little extra money in the summer and a good excuse to stay out of the typically miserable middle-eastern house on a 9-5 basis. It's win-win situation for all those involved, but honestly, you'd think they'd have it in them to set up a couple of internships at some decent start-up corporations with that big-ass name it pounds on the educational scene, or NGOs even, but nooo. Why should they use their contacts to start up their own students? What's worse, the kids are excited about it. They all got sparkles in their eyes when they opened that e-mail, they all eagerly applied and signed off three months of their precious summers into a contract that'll have them say 'Hello, how may I help you?' so many times, they'll forget they never learned how to help them in the first place. Stellar service.

It's shit like this that gets me wondering how it was that dogs never got disillusioned about human nature if they've got good instincts. Dogs can tell if a person means malice. They're irreplaceable on drug busts, they dig up bodies and can find their way back home from miles away. Hell, dogs can smell cancer, google it. Yet, somehow, they still think we're dope.

Some things never change. Humans are on the top of that list. The fact that humans confuse me is a close second, and it regularly roundhouse kicks the former and sits cross-legged in first place when they change sometimes, or make you think they did, only to have you find out much later that they never did, but you keep it in first place nonetheless because in a convoluted way that proved its claim.

Case in point: the government recently gave a statement that the clock is to be set forward an hour for daylight savings for a month, then set back in Ramadan to ease the fasting, then set forward an hour again for the aforementioned reason. That conveniently confused people for a couple of days, especially that it was released on a Thursday night. The funniest to behold was Saturday morning. Dad and I were sipping coffee at the window as we watched a bunch of freshmen realize a little too late that they've missed the university shuttle bus. First they patiently waited for 30 minutes, doubting themselves a thousand times and making a dozen calls to mommy and daddy to update them about their Geo-locations. Then they spent 15 minutes furtively looking at each other, waiting for someone to make the first move, checking if they're the only idiots around or somebody else did something wrong so that they could march saint-like into doom with the comfort of not having fucked up alone. Then there was a lot of walking around and running up and down the streets like headless chickens as a couple of initiative souls scouted the streets for any sign of a magical orange school bus. Then came the sedan procession; and it was the same scenario with every poor kid, the parents would show up, seem to be yelling at their kids who in turn seem to be defending themselves that "they just didn't know but that's okay because look at all the other people who didn't know too!", parents would scowl and look around the street in superman poses then lead the freshmeat back to the car by the back of the neck and drive off into the bus route.

Dad and I don't remember laughing so hard in a good while. The only creature in the vicinity that wasn't thrown off balance by the government change of the people's sense of time - sounds omnipotent when put that way - is our neighborhood 5:20 morning songbird. I've mentioned him in older posts, but I'll write about him again all the same. Dad noticed him first, being the hopeless romantic that he is and always has been. Every day at 5:20 am, this songbird, who always stands on the same branch, would always wake up before all the rest, and would always wake up all the other birds. He became an inside joke to dad and I, since we're both diligent night owls, but not in the sense of a conventional inside joke, but rather about how he draws a smile on our faces every morning in the same way one would smile at an unanticipated act of kindness by an asshole or at a rude joke quipped by a child at the expense of a great injustice. We'd always wonder if that bird knew how important he was, we'd always think what would happen when that bird eventually dies, and we'd always get into an argument about how maybe every bird is different the same way every human is different and that other life-forms aren't necessarily lesser than mankind and how maybe it's not all down to genetics after all, which would always get us talking about how maybe life forms exist that we don't understand and we'd trail off until dawn breaks and the songbird's tune gets drowned out now that he's successfully bugged all of the others out of their carefree slumber.

Now here's the punchline: That songbird now wakes up at 4:20, to the second. Knowing that, I'll bet an arm and a leg that having a face now makes your face flush.

So I Talked To My Idol Today...

Of Running At Things & Running Out of Things.

Whoever said we start at the beginning has never lived a day past 12. And that's the thing, there are no beginning or ends. You spend your whole childhood clinging onto ground and solid objects, people and memories, ideas and beliefs until you pick up a few digits and learn the hard way that growing up is an act of letting go. It's all a balancing act, you're bouncing on soap bubbles through space, bursting that one to get to the next, and if you're a second early or late you'll lose momentum and be stranded. In a weird way, grownups' power comes from how they acknowledge their helplessness, and children's helplessness comes from their sense of invincibility. It's all a balancing act, and not all of us can move as fast. I know I've always been a klutz.

This hasn't been a good year for me, in more ways than one. A lot of constants were shattered for me to learn that lesson, and I really can't learn it often and hard enough. But it has also been a good year for me, because there's truth in that, crippling hard truth that I can see and feel and work with, and possibly fail at, but it's there nonetheless. You can't fear what you know, even if you're just starting to know it. I came here to pour my heart out about all the good things that I'm looking forward to, because I haven't allowed myself to hope for things for a very long time, nor have I allowed myself to pour my heart out fearing the many times I started only to have someone eagerly take a pinata bat at it in full swing. I think I'm okay with that now.

I found out that I'm very sick today, and I'm not ready to talk about it yet. I don't think I will be, and I don't think that matters.

Today, however, was an excellent day. I spent it typing my fingers away at a job that I love, that

drives me absolutely crazy. I write up story lines for games. Starting up small still, but it makes me feel alive, like the sky's the limit, although it's really not. I don't have as much creative freedom as I'd like, it doesn't pay nearly enough to cover a decent bill, and it's a freelance project that will soon expire, one that I know I shouldn't get attached to, but I am, and I always put my all into it and it leaves me absolutely exhausted and empty, in a way that leaks my presence into my work only to have it slowly recharge as I sit back and call it a day's work, squishing the enter button real nice. I'm also looking at an internship in UN Women's rights branch over the summer, which I know will be as fulfilling as it will be time consuming and challenging. It intimidates me, and that's exhilarating. Don't get me wrong, I'm free of UN illusions, I even wrote my freshman paper - back in them glorious rebel days - on the neocolonialist vice that is the UN's true body of work, but it still makes a small change, even if that change is mere placebo effect, and more on the giving side than the receiving. I can't wait to start, all the things you learn when you're given all the gritty work, it's like reconstructing a machine's blueprints from its dismantled wreck. What do people do with themselves when they run out of things to run at?

I'm looking forward to these things, as much as I'm looking forward to a graphic tablet that I saved up for and will be getting in a couple of months. I'm not great at sketching, but it makes me happy. It's work that can frustrate me into untroubled sleep, one that I can spend hours learning without retracing on the clock. Isn't that what life is all about? Well who knows anyway, and who gives a rat's ass. I've never felt more at home than when I feel when I'm learning something that has to do with graphic design, running my ankle joints to shreds, playing piano or writing up a good heartfelt piece. 

It has always been these four things. Life is simple, all you have to do is find your things, then keep finding them in other things as they get taken away. 

I guess that's why people feel lost when their things are not within themselves, or that are other people's, or are other people even. You can't find what was never yours, how are you supposed to recognize an ever-changing blob? I felt lost this year because of this, I've lost a lot of people I cared about, they got swooped into their own soap bubble trajectories and I stumbled face first trying to follow until I eventually lost momentum. It's funny how grownups eagerly lose connection, I guess when you get so good at something, auto-pilot takes over and all of a sudden you're ugly Adam Sandler senior lying butt naked on the asphalt groping at your children's backs 30 years too late, the child part of me resents that.

Sophomore year is by far the most hectic I've had, although it has nothing to do with the work load, it's been trivial. Now that I'm on sick leave and have had to miss even more than what I already missed when I didn't feel like going because I thought I had better things to do, it's turned into a countdown to the apocalypse. We dine in hell, baby doll. Somehow, knowing all of that, I know I can handle it still. Although I recognize this time that other people pay when one makes mistakes, and it's usually the people one cares about the most, who also happen to be the ones who care about one the most. You just realize that a little too late, and it shits on your parade. You don't care that you can handle it anymore, you just start wondering why you ever made them go through that kind of shit and call yourself a dumbass while you're at it. It's no celebrating matter, there aren't any Barney Stinsons fixing their ties and theatrically dubbing it a challenge accepted as you swoosh in and spitball your rubble into a minty fresh work of art. You do it anyway, but there's no flare to it. Do people ever get the courtesy of taking risks out of their own time and buck? Are there always people tied to the bungee line, poking out at all kinds of awkward angles? I'd give you the world if I can, but I can't. Stop making me feel bad about it. There are so many things to feel bad about in this world, why do the people you love the most insist to be the magnetic core?

I guess the one thing I can't get over with all the change going on right now are the lack of handlebars. We all like to know they're there, even if we won't use them. Those handlebars are the people who want to hear about the good days and care about the bad days. They don't run away from misplaced verbs or serious talks. They're real and down to earth. They also don't exist. I'm not sure they ever did.

I drove myself into a corner again, might as well wrap up before I end up at a worse place, this one's bad enough. A part of me misses a simpler time, and a bigger part of me doubts it was ever real or just a huge figment of my childishly distorted, pink-hued imagination. Cheers, adults. I have no idea how you don't get seasick.

Strawberry Swing.

I don't understand why I'm not writing as much as I used to. I grew up having so much to say to the world. I guess you just get to a certain point of your life and realize that nothing you say or do will ever matter. That's what growing up is about, isn't it? Coming to terms with your insignificance and realizing that the cape you've been dragging around looks ridiculous.

It's been rough. Which I don't mind, what I do mind however is that I'm losing my sense of humor about it all. I'm having an odd case of incurable Senioritis in Sophomore year, which is apparently yet another widespread phenomenon that everybody somehow failed to mention in the college handbook. I've been eating nothing but junk food since January, and when I actually tried my hand at this whole grownupsy shopping for groceries and making myself a healthy meal deal, I ended up standing at the cash register looking down on a shopping cart filled almost exclusively with chocolate-based pseudo food. The only responsible choice I made was whole wheat bread, which was apparently a hard act to follow since there was nothing to spread on it.

The sad thing is that I don't even find this funny.

Another bit of news is that a while ago I took it upon myself to retreat into my bat cave and swore it on the old gods and the new that it'll take batman himself to get me back out again. The last time I made that decision I was 12, if I recall correctly, and it did take batman to get me back out, in the form of my dad, about 4 years later. During that interesting incubation period, I honed my hermit skills in the arts of dystopian literature and SciFi TV shows, became a self-sufficient misanthrope and emerged into the world a klutzy fumbling ball of oddments and eccentricities, with not a hint as to how humans work or how to interact with them, attracting the occasional lost soul with my formidable stash of geeky knowledge only to beat them off the threshold of my haunted house with a Nimbus 2000 when they confused me, which happened a lot. 

If only it were that easy.

And so many years later, at the golden age of 21, I'm back there again. And I wouldn't trade it for the world. Well to be perfectly honest, I would trade it, only for a better world, not this one. This one has humans, and they're horrible horrible beings.