you’re a dancer on thin ice

And you go dancing through doorways
Just to see what you will find
Leaving nothing to interfere
With the crazy balance of your mind
And when you finally reappear
At the place where you came in
You’ve thrown your love to all the strangers
And caution to the wind

It takes love over gold
And mind over matter
To do what you do that you must
When the things that you hold
Can fall and be shattered
Or run through your fingers like dust

‘Love over Gold’ – Dire Straits

—

People are confusing. Constantly calculating the effect of their words on you, on themselves, it’s hard to tell if they ever say what they really mean. Must we create these alternate-selves, these potentially perfect people in order to hide what we really are? And what is that? Small-minded, self-absorbed, cautious, fearful creatures whose lives are comprised of layers of fictions.

Words on the page are easier. They’re tangible, they’re there in front of you, they speak to you in ways only you will ever understand. They can never lie (unless you want them to), they don’t cheat (unless you make them). You read them, you control them, you tie them to you in ways only you and they will ever know.

Words, are whatever you want them to be. At least for the moment you read them in.

cathartic fix.

What do you do with all that pent-up anger, hurt, disgust, fear, ennui, pain and frustration when it seems pent up inside you and simply refuses to dissolve, either into the whirlpool of meaningless, repetitive activity that you plunge into, or the defensive pretence of forgiving and forgetting that you periodically indulge in?

The fatuous temporary measure in such situations: a cathartic fix.

Tack your tenacious emotions onto someone else’s successes and failures; find someone else to sympathise with, made entirely of words, pictures and camera angles. Forget your own actual troubles in the face of someone else’s scripted dilemmas. Once all of your emotions are dissociated from you, they’re easier to release. Your life isn’t falling apart, you’re not alone, you’re not the victim, you’re not the guilty party, you’re not anything but someone whose emotions are tied to whomever the limelight is on.

Most comfortingly, you’re not important, you’re nobody.

A cathartic fix is underrated. An hour or two spent crying over someone else’s problems seriously diminishes the proportions of your own pathetic little troubles.

Tried and tested fixes:

Grey’s Anatomy
The Tudors
House
Rome
F.R.I.E.N.D.S

Love, Actually
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Chocolat
Moulin Rouge

Harry Potter (1-7) – J.K Rowling
Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R Tolkien
Kartography – Kamila Shamsie
White Mughals – William Dalrymple
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Emma – Jane Austen

(I could go on forever with the books, but I’ll stop)

when you walk away, i hope it gives you hell

A self indulgent title, from a self indulgent song.  

Well then, I’m blatantly going to indulge myself, as always. Frankly, taking out a student loan is my primary fear at the moment. Even with a 10.75% interest rate, which is the lowest I’ve been able to find, it’s still a huge amount of money. And I’m seriously concerned about employment opportunities, what with the recession et al. Not that I’m an IT or a finance person the likes of whom are currently quaking in their boots or sitting around waiting for work. 

It’s at times like these that communism seems infinitely attractive. 

I think being the bigger person is so overrated. I’d much rather take revenge and be done with it; allow myself to feel smug and satisfied at having done to someone as they did unto me. It’s only fair. Tit for tat. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Of course, the fact remains that it’s merely destructive and will probably not be good for anyone in the long run but as Keynes said: In the long run we are all DEAD. 

Momentary satisfaction trumps all, at least for my purposes of vengeance. 

If you know what I’m talking about, and you have any ideas, do tell. I’m a little stumped.

ring in the new

Look, it’s a face-lift!

I quite like how it all looks now, even though I wasted a lot of time that I could have put to better use like, perhaps studying for my last exam tomorrow.

St Andrews emailed to say I’ve been conditionally accepted. Finally, finally, it seems like the year’s actually beginning.

I’m terrified it’ll all come to nothing, that I’ll be sentenced to doing more time in a place I need to get away from.

Powers that be, if you’re around, hear me now!

steeped in history

Somehow, I’ve always felt the past was a more beautiful place to be in. In retrospect, things seemed to have been simpler, people were less self-involved and life, though less convenient was more… lively. Or maybe that’s just my perspective of something that I can never truly experience. Anyway, I’ve been reading the biography of Georgiana Spencer, the Duchess of Devonshire in the late eighteenth century – and what a woman she was. Braving slander, ridicule and censure on a huge scale is something to be admired, especially when the cause is as worthy as hers was.

Incidentally, one thing I realised when I was reading the book was the importance of the lost art of letter-writing. The sheer volume of correspondence between people, especially around two or three centuries ago, is what shapes our understanding of how they lived and what they felt. Sure, they probably wouldn’t have imagined their innermost thoughts and secrets being divulged for public consumption on a large scale, but at least they left something for us to remember them by.

It got me thinking – what would people of future generations remember us by? Blogging sort of performs the function of letter-writing in this century, but it’s all online… who’s to say it will survive? Plus there’s something so wonderfully personal about letters – imagine exploring an old attic and stumbling across letters written hundres of years ago. Letters containing declarations of love, of news and gossip, of advice, of confessions and forgiveness… just reading them would be reliving someone’s entire life.

Maybe that’s a rather idealistic, Romantic view to take of it, but I’d like nothing better. Ah, for an old old crumbling mansion, fully equipped with squeaking wooden floors, chairs that sigh in the night, a wailing ghost in the cellar and a secret passage in the library!

I want nothing more than to live in a place that has seen history happen.