A thought on how essentially helpless we all are

This is just a few notes on a thought I had whilst in the bank this afternoon. I was setting up something I'd never heard of before called 'standing orders' which essentially means that money will be taken out of my account each month in order to pay the rent. This is obviously a good thing but I had (and still have) no idea what is actually going on appart from me being made poorer and being allowed to live in a house. All I did was sort of profer a piece of paper with some numbers on and the bank person tapped at her keyboard and said it was all sorted.

This lead me onto the thought that in many aspects of life we're essentially helpless because we have no idea what's going on or how things work. It's the same thing that happens when you go to the doctor or when you have something repaired.

In a bizarre way it's sort of nice to have this strange sense of detachment. You can almost pretend that it's magic that things just happen for you when you need them. The only thing I can say to that is that it is clearly a mark of extreme privelege which we must all be exceedingly grateful for. I certainly know I am; so here I say thank you to all the people who know how to do things that help me bumble my way through life. Cheers guys!

Rediscovering Who I Always Was

This thought has only recently struck me and it feels like a kind of mini-revelation. It all came about because of comments over lunch that I laugh more and seem to have developed a loud distinctive laugh. However I have always had a loud and distinctive laugh. In secondary school it was noted how I rocked back and forth when I laughed hysterically and also how I had different types of laugh.

This lead me to the sudden realisation that coming to University is not necessarily about discovering who you are but about discovering for yourself who you've always been. It's taken this long for me to even start laughing the way I used to thus showing that perhaps I'm finally starting to feel more comfortable and at home in these surroundings.

University is a very stressful and alien experience but I think this is as it should be. Coming to University is about becoming again the person you used to be but in a totally new environment. It's about proving that you can be that person on your own and out of your comfort zone.

This, for me, is the mark of independence and I believe that I will be truly independent when I can behave exactly the same at home, with family and close friends, as away from home.

A Short Thought on the Parallelity of Chocolate in a Chocolate Croissant

Just a short thought today. Both ends of the croissant made it look like the threads of chocolate were parallel but they sort of converged in the middle. It's not that I'm disappointed, I just thought that the chocolate distribution would be even throughout.

Just a reminder that appearances can be deceptive. Also I think I just made up 'parallelity' but quite like it so am sticking with it.

-Additional thought that occurred whilst writing- It is quite an odd thing to blog about given the political turmoil that the country is in at the moment but that's just what I was thinking of at the time, apologies.

Nicknames

I had this thought a few days ago but due to moving from home back to uni I didn't have a lot of time to do anything and so I thought I'd jot a few things down here now. Being back at uni now means that I have less time to properly contemplate things and as such musings will probably be a lot shorter. However being back in itself gives me much more to think about. For example nicknames.

I never had a nickname until I came to university. In my sixth form year book in the space allotted for nicknames I used one that occasionally my parents have used and maybe the tower captain at bell ringing once or twice and all it was was a shortening of my name. In essence this is probably a definition of a nickname but I don't think it should really count. To me a nickname should say something about you and it should be given to you by friends because they have got to know you and have perhaps picked up on something that deserves notice. It may not even highlight a trait you have, it could be an entirely new name that people or you yourself have made up. I have also discovered that nicknames can develop and through that take on a meaning that only you and a handful of others understand, thus making them all the more special.

My point of all this is to say that nicknames (in my opinion) should be, to some extent, personal and they provide a great way of linking friends and cementing a group that can't be touched by the outside world. To me being given a nickname is also a symbol of acceptance, a way of a group of people saying that they want you to be a part of their circle and giving you a special place in that circle. Therefore, although I may not really know who I am, I am at least accepted for whoever I might be and that is perhaps more important than the actual knowing.

Who Are We?

There's a song in the musical 'Les Miserables' sung by Jean Val Jean where he says, "Who am I?...I'm Jean Val Jean!" The song then rises to a crescendo to finish with him singing "Who am I? 24601!" Thus declaring to Inspector Javert and the rest of the world that he can no longer hide and he must face who he is and his criminal past. When done well this song is one of the highlights of the musical and if you've not heard it then you are missing out, even if you don't like musicals.

However I didn't want to discuss the relative merits of 'Les Miserables', I wanted to talk about that line in the song, asking, "Who am I?" Mainly because it has been running through my head all day and I've been whistling it a lot, but it has caused me to think.

I seem to ask that question of myself an awful lot but haven't ever really come up with a definitive answer. I haven't found my crescendo yet, if you see what I mean. My problem with this is that I've lived for almost 19 years and have no idea who I am and am only just beginning to be able to answer that question.

I'm sure I'm not the only one either. People say you go to University to discover who you are and that's fair enough because it's a good place where you can finally be yourself and relax. However I don't think this should be the case, we should be able to find out who we are a lot earlier than that. I know that humans take a really long time to reach maturity anyway but I don't think that we should be finding out who we are just as we set out into the world on our own.

From my experience the problem lies in trying too hard to fit in and being afraid of people and I don't know as to whether there's anything that can actually be done to change this so that future generations aren't as stuck. There probably are many fortunate people though who are born confident and unafraid who can look straight at the world and know where they want to be in it. Good for them to be honest, maybe more people should be like that. Maybe more people are like that than I'm actually aware of. I wouldn't know I'm still sort of afraid of people.

As for that question, "Who am I?" I'll continue to ask myself and continue to slowly discover as I move through life. I hope that you reading this are able to answer that question for yourself and if you're any younger than 18 and can answer that question, you're one of the fortunate confident ones, congratulations.

Thoughts From a Sofa

I've been meaning to start doing this for a while, so here it goes...

We got a new living room suite today. It wasn't a particularly momentous event, a man came, picked up the old one and dropped off the new one. If I'm honest it's only new to this family, I don't know who owned it before but they seem to have taken good care if it.

Anyway, there was of course the ordeal of moving furniture which I'm sure would be straight forward with most families but here it just seemed to be my brother telling me to keep out of the way and that I wasn't helping apparently. I could feel the tension building, especially when the delivery man had gone and we discovered that the new suite was slightly bigger than the old one and isn't very comfortable. It seems to be a sort of menacing presence in the room. A dark, green, leathery presence. Mum definitely doesn't like it and it seems that she's quite unhappy about the whole situation as well. Asking why Dad didn't measure it properly and how the whole room should be cleared out and we should just start again. I sometimes find it difficult to know what to do in these situations, i.e. when mum seems to be a bit depressed.

I like to think I try to look on the bright side and find something good to say but today I failed. Possibly because mum's bad mood is catching but probably because the suite is big and uncomfortable and I can see it causing hassle in the near future which I am definitely not looking forward to.

As usual the family has dispersed to separate rooms and life goes on. I don't know what anyone else is doing and I don't really want to know. We don't talk much in this family to be honest but it seems to work for us. We save our words for when they'll mean more and we'll want to hear them. I also think that we're avoiding confrontation (I know that's the reason I'm not in the living room right now).

The unusual thing that has come out of this whole episode was the thought that popped into my head quite unexpectedly in the middle of it all. "I can't have kids", not as in I'm uncapable but as in I shouldn't. I think it's because I looked at the way our family functions under stress and how I fit into that and I realised that I don't want to pass that situation on to future generations. I expect that all families have bad points, it would only be natural; but my urge is to avoid those points and so logically I feel that I shouldn't have children.

I don't know if I'll hold to this view forever as I am still fairly young and many things could change but I will admit that it's not the first time I've had the thought that I'm not suited to dealing with family life. I'm not particularly saddened by this thought, if anything I'm glad to be finding out more of who I am.

That's about it for my first thought really and it seems to be a bit vague and rambling but I'm not going to apologise because I'm not telling anyone that I'm writing a blog, therefore if you're reading this you brought it upon yourself. Although I expect I will have many more thoughts I doubt that they will be turned into regular posts but we'll see if this is going to be something I will stick at or whether it will be a brief fad.