Flatbeat
Currently Listening To: The Boy In The Bubble from the album "Greatest Hits - Shining Like A National Guitar" by Paul Simon
The flat hunting continues anew as I decided today to call up some folk on the student accommodation website. One place looks really nice and the landlady has had a lot of interest from "very nice people" (translation: "Nee fookin chance like meat") but I use my eloquent ridiculously posh classical english accent that I adopt when speaking to strangers and charmed my way into a respectable "if I don't hear anything by the weekend you can come and have a look" and since it is my express intention to plonk down the cash immediately emulating the gits who usurped our own flat placement that basically means "If they don't want it, it's yours". Consequently I have to hope that these people find a nicer place.
My accent is a remarkable thing. No one I know is similarly afflicted and it probably has something to do with my ability to mimic very well and my love of that accent itself. Perhaps I merely appropriated it for my own ends after I subconsciously decided that it was the nicest available to me.
I read one of the archives from this blog just now. It was from last christmas, December 13th I believe. It reminded me of a happier time and just how much fun I had in the flat during that period. It is with a more solemn outlook that I return to it this year, not quite the same euphoric optimism I felt when I embarked upon my first term of university. Events have piled up on me, accumulated in a vast body of oppressive sadness. I've always resented angsty blogs but I find myself in a grey microcosm who's boundaries only momentarily lapse when a song I like is played or I speak to my father or siblings.
The Lighthouse Family are working round the clock to lift my spirits.
Ultimately I feel that I shall do what I always have done, find some empty part of myself and bottle the sadness and frustration, mark it with some tarred paper scrap and store the vial in the part of me that I show to no one.
I also feel remarkably vulnerable at the moment, bound to my fate like a man strapped into a roller coaster, without means to alter its course. I am still reliant on my parents for money and things being what they are it is hardly an enviable tether. I can do nothing except keep my head down and study for the next few months, hoping that things will clear up as they have a habit of doing and that I will carry out my plan: of waltzing off the plane at Chep Lap Kok singing 5 o'clock World by the Vogues after I've received all my qualifications. Getting a flat in central and setting up practice and, meeting the girl of my dreams and raising a family.
My mother has this remarkably odd opinion regarding one's early life, that it is somehow wasted if you don't go out and sleep around before you get married, as if meaningless promiscuity is somehow a deep advantage to one's life. Its like saying you ought to buy small lattés when you go to StarBucks before you eventually go for the Gingerbread Latté Venti.
I might be completely insane here but I though the reason why people date is to find the one person they want to spend the rest of their life with, not with the deliberate intention of going out with that person temporarily. It makes no sense to suggest that one person has lived a fuller life because when he rolled the Dating Dice he took 7 re-rolls to win than the person who rolled it first time.
I'm not, by any means, implying that you ought to approach such things as dates with some sort of seriousness that dissuades you from going out with anyone who is not 'perfect enough' but to suggest that those failed rolls, the times when you didn't get lucky, are somehow to be considered a superior experience to finding the person that you love on the first roll of the dice is idiocy. It is a clear manifestation of all that seems so stupid and shallow about today's culture, where 1 in 3 marriages end in divorce and promiscuity is the measure of one's success in relationships. Some people need to get their heads examined.
Later
John
Posted by John Swaine at September 12, 2003 02:04 AM