You're not really real

I don't actually exist. I'm a silly idea in everyones head. Mostly stereotyped, complexly and subtly varied. But always and predictably shallow. Way off the mark of reality. If they spend more time with me, it begins to annoy them that they got it wrong and they start to become rather aggressive. It happens quite suddenly. One minute we're having a perfectly amiable conversation, the next they're pissed off I said something I shouldn't have according to the imaginary me that exists only in their shallow head.

Not worth the trouble

I've been repeating these words in my head for several months. The first time I said them, I should have typed it up here, but for some reason I put it off. It's painful to write.

I say it every time I see or hear of someone, anyone, better looking, taller, bare legs, healthy skin, healthy hair, fashionable, trendy, with a decent job or career, a baby, in a relationship, married, doing well, getting on in life. And then there's me.

Not worth the trouble, not worth the effort.

Objects of Consumption

I don't know if it's London or just the world in general, but everything seems so utterly shallow. So much so, I've realised it's been slowly suffocating me these last ten years to the point of inertia and frustration. I'm not actually a person, but a set of the most shallow assumptions. Boxed, categorised, and well and truly fkd. It's always existed, but now there's no effort or will to see beyond this any more. People have no more time - for people.

We are collected and rate, consumed and discarded.

Thinking back on the conversations I've had with friends, I've just come to the conclusion that I'm really not like the majority of people I know. I don't think about others the way they do. I am completely un-shallow (is that a word?) to the point of being blind. Friends ask what type I'm into, what are you looking for, which celebrities do you fancy? I had to really think about how to answer these questions, because frankly, I'd never thought about it. I don't (consciously) have a type I go for and I don't follow actors or celebrities.

Most of the people I know are in their mid to late twenties, perfect age to gauge the dating scene. I'm 36 and pretty much past it, but looking younger than my age really doesn't help. Men don't seem to notice me as they did ten years before, I don't quite know what's changed. Maybe I'm just not fashionable any more. Or it could be the streaks of silver hair that I intentionally have never dyed as a mark of rebellion against this obsession with youth. Too bad people don't appreciate someone who goes against the grain.

As much as people try to be individual, it's all the same brand of conformity one way or another.  

Feeling like a disappointment

I actually wouldn't mind dying right now. Maybe in a single heroic act of some kind. Something that might give value to this rather pointless, aimless life of mine. I wouldn't feel this way had I left home long ago. And it should have been, according to society, long ago. London can be a nasty place. Families can be nasty too. Premeditated? No, just in nature. The sum of it's parts.

I should lie more. That should be a rule to follow in life. Being honest never got me anywhere. And it's easiest to lie when you haven't got your family around. Because they know the truth of course. So, think about it. Being who you want to be, weather it's a lie or not. Weather it's real or not, doesn't matter any more. It's all surface, just like the world. Try it and see what happens.

Clubbing

Posted by Mook:

I went to a club a few months ago for the first time since I was a student.
At the door, the bouncer was IDing everyone (club policy) and, after handing him my driver's licence, he told me, "wow, you look good for your age." I'm 29! Hardly bus-pass material...
In the club we stood and watched as mashed teenagers progressively got more mashed until they had the confidence to try and pull the objects of their lust.
This is the root of the binge-drinking culture - we're too shy/uptight to contemplate chatting someone up sober so we have to get absolutely mullered first.
For the first hour they shoot sideways glances at the one they fancy. Then they dance nearer, then after a while they try to infiltrate lust-object's dance-circle. Then they get told to fuck off, and the whole process starts all over again.
It's hilarious to watch, but funnier still when you're the object of desire. Low-self esteem is the driver - they simply *have* to pull - it's the only thing that will validate them as a human being. Without the prospect of sex they fail. It matters not how shite that sex is - they want to tell their friends a) I went clubbing and b) I pulled. That is all that counts.
After about three hours of a succession of 17 year old boys limbering up and desperately trying to get in my pants (how depressing that my age was actually a turn-on - I am officially an 'older woman') I got bored of the shouty non-conversations, the groping on the dancefloor and the inherent stickyness of every surface and left, relieved that I no longer feel the need to subject myself to that torture in the name of 'cool' -
1) queuing up for half an hour to use a toilet that has a) no seat b) no loo-roll and c) no lock on the door,
2) spending £50 on shite cocktails to have the guts to try and pull, and
3) feeling aching regret for not having done a large quantity of mind-altering drugs which might have ensured some enjoyment of the evening.
What is the point?

Fucking Truth Say or what.

Early Morning Conversation

I chickened out of chickening out. I went to my friends birthday when I decided I wasn't going. I also spent way too much on a present that, quite frankly, she didn't deserve. What an idiot.

Anyway, I persuaded my other friend Becky, who otherwise would have been there by herself, to stay for the pub after dinner. She usually does a quick getaway. Having decided she was having a good time enough to stay over at my place, we went home and stayed up until 5am just talking.

This is the same friend who loved American Sniper. The subject came up and remembered I had my favourite book, Packing Inferno - The Unmaking of a Marine, on my bedside table. Giving it to her to look over, I wasn't expecting much of anything from her. She really isn't the type for deep or topical conversation beyond her own life. It went something like this:

Becky: Is it good?
Me: Best thing I've read.
Becky: Really.
Me: You can borrow it if you want.

She flicks through like she really cares. I expect nothing from her. I'm looking over at my DVDs, and think to myself, she has no interest in me or what I like. Most of the conversation is about the people at the party. We really have nothing in common but enjoy each others company. A feeling of complete loneliness comes over me and I realise that I have no one to share my music, films or books with. Things that I love. It's almost like I'm not a person, just someone to unload onto. Why isn't she curious or interested in the things I like? It feels like a rejection.

I know there are friends of different kinds. The ones that you bring to this gig/show and not another. The ones you share that new song and not the other. The people that I know just don't share any of my tastes. I really need to make some new friends who I actually have something in common with. It's getting to a point where I'm feeling like a freak.

With nowhere to hide, Google-age friendship will tear us apart

Your fingers hovered over the slot, clutching the 10p piece, anticipating the sharp, impatient beeps. But even as you dialled, using the payphone on the wall outside the gents’, you knew the call was futile. If your friend was coming she wouldn’t be at home; if she was at home, she wasn’t coming. As the smoke of strangers’ cigarettes saturated your clothes, you knew the evening was ruined. 

Friendship once meant jeopardy. Friends would regularly lose each other, sometimes for ever. You met someone at a party, then misplaced his scribbled phone number — left it in your jeans in the wash, drunkenly thrown away with your ticket as you ricocheted off the night bus — and that was it. Or a longstanding friend moved schools  or houses, you omitted to exchange details, and you never saw him  again. Friendships were as fragile as memory.

Now no one is ever lost, let alone for ever. No one spends an entire afternoon failing to meet a friend at the Notting Hill Carnival, or a night hunting for a Cricklewood party in the rain. It scarcely matters if you botch your goodbyes: there are no goodbyes, not the terminal kind, since if you want to, and even if you don’t, you will all meet up later in the egosphere.

Yet although we can never go missing ourselves, something else has been lost, something to do with honesty. The frank, motiveless exchange of confidences with a person you trust has become an exotic rarity.

These days everyone has hundreds of friends, with all of whom we indiscriminately share everything, while sharing nothing in the old, private way. That is what friendship used to mean, a bond defined partly by its exclusiveness: us against the rest. Tensions or fall-outs are now marked not by screaming bust-ups but by silent, sterile unlikings and unfollowings, the deletion of phone numbers from electronic address books, all the recrimination visited on miniature avatars rather than breathing people.

Our friendships are hollowing out. They are so much easier to service now, just the odd, curt text message or reply-all email. Physical meetings are less central, and less sacrosanct, the negotiability of the details somehow making them more likely to be cancelled altogether. Phone calls, previously a disembodied second best to flesh-and-blood encounters, are the apex of intimacy. Even they have become discretionary: importunate friends can always be switched off — we will call them back later, definitely we will — offings that we all receive as tiny acts of violence but nevertheless inflict.

So in the ways it has structured and supplanted our friendships, technology has undermined them. There has been a gain, but it is a queasy and equivocal one. The past is back: the ancient, pre-internet history we never expected to see again, miraculously recoverable, peopled by the resurrected dead. We can find the unintentionally severed friend, the bully who wronged us, or — more unsettlingly still — the friend or ex we wronged. And they can find us.

The internet is a personalised zombie show, the phantoms parading before us on a whim and a click. This is the paradox of Google-age friendship. Our close relationships are now more remote. The dead liaisons we’d rather forget have sprung back to disconcerting life.

A piece by AD Miller in the Evening Standard which is very well written and speaks of something lost that I've felt for many years.

It's a week from a friends birthday dinner and I decided about a month ago that I wasn't going to go this year. I'll make some excuse up about a cousins wedding or birthday who I haven't seen for years.

It's always the same each time, the same people (her main group of friends) who know each other much better than they know me. I only see these people at this dinner each year, so it's a weird exchange of acquaintance. It never goes beyond that and I and they have lazily excepted this. Not that I set out to, but deeper friendship just never happened.

Millers piece made me think about how lazy people have become about relationships, about making the effort, about making the most when you do meet people. It seems everyone relies on Facebook these days to almost carry on the beginning of a potential friendship without really having to actually physically be together. They almost can't be bothered to make the effort when they do meet you because they think they've now 'got' you on social media. They collect people instead of having a genuine friendship. Like Miller says, you can never be lost, they can always find you, so why make the effort to establish a friendship when you will always be 'available' in the egosphere.

I, unlike the rest of humanity it seems, am not on any social networking site. Therefore I don't exist. I think this may be the main cause of why I haven't established friendships with these people. Meeting people in person seems to be almost secondary to Facebooking people now, the internet has become the main way to 'make' friends.

I've fought this since Facebook became what it is today, and now I feel I have no choice but to become one of those people with their head bent over their smart phones, in silence, in a group of 'friends' who are all doing the same. Do or be dead to the world.

Beckys Favourite Film: American Sniper WTF?!

Becky told me last week when we went bouldering, that American Sniper was the best thing she'd seen for a long time. I was more than a little alarmed by this, no the words are 'fucking shocked'. I've known her for years and she is not one for action/war films, she is a glutton for chick flick and comedy. But I guessed it may have been her boyfriend who wanted to see it, and yes it was. I have two things against it: 1) Bradley Cooper, who I want to punch in the face. 2) It looks like a load of tinsel shit for gun loving paranoid nut jobs, or Call of Duty fans.

The film is based on Chris Kyles autobiography. There seems to be a lot of these Navy Seal types coming out with publishing deals, and a nice little industry of turning those (often badly written) books into even more badly written films. What else was I to expect?

With great reluctance, all this means I now need to see this fucking film. Thanks a lot Becky!

I've been following a line of personal research and learning on the Iraq war for pretty much the last two years. Sometimes obsessively so. I've tried to read between all the rhetoric, the extremes and the heightened emotions this subject always seems to bring out in Americans. I find it all very disturbing how otherwise rational people get so worked up by things they haven't seemed to think through. Many Americans seem unable to think objectively, they seem to be ruled entirely by emotion. Just look at the comments section on any of the reviews for this film, it is filled with people who exist to wholly stamp anything they deem as critical. Why do they take it so personally?

Talking of emotions, I'm guessing this is where the film really shines at heart wrenching manipulation of the highest degree. This is probably how Becky decided this was a great film. This is why I also hated Saving Private Ryan, not the content of the story, but the gushing sentimentality to the point of cheese. It was patronising to me, and I've read that some veterans who were there weren't too happy either.

Becky and her boyfriend would probably not be interested in watching anything other than films that are overall reassuring. So it shouldn't really surprise me that she liked this. We'll have to see...