One Doth Protest Too Much

Unless you’ve been living in a bubble for the last week or 2 you’ll probably know about the occupation of the land outside the London Stock Exchange/St. Pauls Cathedral. Now I’m not even going to try and defend how some of the city suits have run the situation as you can’t deny they’ve fucked up somewhere and boy have they fucked up! The real question is what do the occupiers think they will achieve by simply sitting on a bit of land for a while?

They have a 9 point demands list but none of them have proposed a genuinely workable solution for these problems. Let’s face it, most of the protesters there don’t have a clue about how economics really works. There’s not some magic wand someone can wave to fix it all. Most of the solutions they’re proposing are leftist ideals which don’t work in the real world. Communism only works on a very small scale as there will always be one person who ruins it and skims off the profits. The facts of life are that there will always be some people richer than others.

Another small point to raise is that if the bankers are the tossers that the protesters are making them out to be do they really think they’re going to give even the slightest fuck? All the protesters are doing is causing a mild annoyance by getting in their way slightly. As far as the bankers are concerned all they’re doing is having a bit of a sleepover.

So what should they be doing instead? Well for starters if some of these kids protesting put half as much effort into their education then maybe they’d be closer to being part of the 1% and maybe they’d have some kind of influence on these matters. My family is nowhere near what you’d call rich but I’ve managed to get myself a fantastic education. Once I’ve finished my masters I can choose to move onto a PhD or get a real job. There’s every chance I could end up living a very comfortable life. For those of you complaining about how the cost of university is extortionate may I remind you that even at £3k a year we’ve had it so easy. In the USA it’s fully down to the individual to fund their own degree and the same goes for many countries around the world. Once you complete your degree you will be in a position to get a job that pays enough to pay back your student loan. And if your degree wasn’t good enough to get you such a job then why on earth did you do it in the first place. Honestly some of these so called “degrees” aren’t worth the paper they’re written on.

The second thing that seriously grinds my gears is that many of the protestors are from a middle class background. How did they get to live such a comfortable background? Well I’d imagine it’s something to do with their parents being the banker types. So why not complain to mummy or daddy about how they’re being so horrible to the poor third world children instead of causing a nuisance to the general public and costing St. Pauls Cathedral £20k a day? Now that’s not to say that all the protestors are like this. In fact most have good intentions if not a real grip on the realities of life. Conclusion: sometimes it’s just better to get on with your life and make sure your life is worth living. Do what you can to help others but don’t complain too much because wankers will always be wankers.

Fate and Fresh Starts

I wouldn’t say I’m the biggest believer in a “higher power” or anything else along those lines but sometimes certain events do make you question whether this it’s a bit narrow minded to assume once we’re dead, that’s the end of the line. I don’t want to turn this into a massive theological debate because it could quite easily end up as long as my dissertation. From my last entry you’d get the impression that my last relationship was all doom and gloom and I was better off not being in it at all but did it have some worth? Surely everything has some kind of benefit even if heavily outweighed by the negatives?

Two things in particular about the relationship stick out that make me think that maybe it wasn’t about falling in love but simply just helping me move along the line. For those of you fortunate enough not to have gone through a set of final year engineering exams let me explain how bad things actually are. Imagine having to recount the entire story of Lord of the Rings after reading it just once. Now imagine being asked what colour underwear Gandalf was wearing when the ring was finally destroyed. That’s the kind of level we’re looking at. Hell doesn’t even begin to describe it. Now throw in the fact I was under extra pressure due to the fact I performed miserably in my second year and had to make up marks in order to get a good grade. There’s no doubt about it, I needed some kind of outlet to de-stress myself or I could quite easily have self-imploded.

Now this is where the supposed “fate guided harlot” comes in. Would it be stupid to suggest that fate allowed me to go out with her to calm me down? I began dating her at the end of May, just after I’d handed in my dissertation and just as I was about to hit full on revision mode. It started off great and to deny that I enjoyed how things were at the time would be a complete fallacy. In the early stages it was like something out of a crappy Hollywood rom-com but perhaps without the Christmas scene. Honestly you could write a film about it. There’s no doubt about it if I wasn’t enjoying my relationship as much I wouldn’t have done as well in my exams. I barely scraped a 2.1 in my degree. Without that degree I’d be sitting on the scrap pile with all the other people begging for jobs but I got it and the world is now my oyster.

Part 2 is how I got my job. One day she had an audition for some crappy Disney thing. To be honest I wasn’t really paying attention, I’m a scientist and the arts aren’t something I generally take seriously (apart from music). This was when things were definitely on the wane so I was trying to be nice. Anyway it didn’t go to plan and as such she was in an abysmal mood so being the good boyfriend I suggested meeting up for lunch to see if I could calm her down a bit. The audition was in Angel so I said I’d meet her round there. Two years ago I had a job DJing in a bar which was around there so I said let’s go as I knew they do great pizzas. As it happens my old manager was still working there and he mentioned how he was putting on a live music night but needed a bit of help. At uni one of the things I’d done was to put on events for the radio station so this was right up my street. With a bit of bargaining I persuaded him I could turn the night into a success. True to my word I’m now a couple of months in and the night is going fantastically well.

So would it be outrageous to say that the girl who made my life a misery for a good month or 2 was actually there to help me begin a new phase in my life and not for the sake of love? Without the sequence of events that occurred with her I wouldn’t have got my good degree and I wouldn’t be in the successful job I’m in now (making a tidy wage considering I’m still at uni part time). Sure enough, less than a week after this meeting with my old manager the truth came out about this girl and we were split up. Was her purpose complete and therefore of no use in my life? This is all a bit too philosophical for my liking but sometimes when you sit back and look at what happened you can’t help but think. A few months have passed and things have definitely improved. There’s still a gaping hole in my life but that’s just the final piece in the puzzle. When you find it, that’s probably the time to finally grow up but that’s for another time and who knows when or where I’ll find it?

How Much Truth Is Too Much?

If you even remotely know me you’ll know how opinionated I can actually be. To say my views can be quite polar would be like calling World War 2 a bit of a kerfuffle. Inevitably friends of mine will read this blog because let’s face it, what random person would give much of a fuck about my life? Obviously that means I can’t be specific or name names in the nonsense that occurs in my life lest I cause a shitstorm in  a very real situation but I’ll need to divulge some things otherwise this blog would end up pretty empty. However if there is someone I simply don’t give a fuck about I won’t hold back because these are normally the people who’ve attempted to make my life a misery. That’s a balance I’ll have to find, you won’t be getting it all but let’s see how far I can push it without putting me in the dog house.

I’ve attempted to blog before but failed to stick at it. Last time it was mostly about football and although what I was writing wasn’t bad it did alienate a potential audience. For starters about 90% of girls probably didn’t give a fuck about Nicklas Bendtner’s abysmal goals to game ratio. And that’s me being generous. So why start again? Well for starters I need to release some tension every now and again. I’ve started a new phase in my life, I just graduated and moved away from what were the best friends I ever had and although I still see them fairly regularly I don’t really get the chance to talk about me to other people as much as I’d like to. So maybe this will be the outlet I need. Or maybe I’ll make a fool of myself. Who knows but it’s worth a shot.

So where to start? Well I think the obvious start is the events of the summer that nearly dug me into a hole (yet again). A bit of background on the situation: After a rather nasty situation with an ex I decided I wanted to learn from my mistakes. I was an arse to her (although there were circumstances that riled me into behaving that way) and frankly at 22 years old you need to grow up at some point. As fate would have it I ended up in a whirlwind romance. All was unbelievably perfect for about 2 months and then I came back down to earth with a very painful bump. This is where the old saying “if it’s too good to be true, it probably isn’t” comes in. With almost no warning she wanted out. I did my best to rescue the situation but little did I know there were much sinister circumstances behind it.

The premise was that she didn’t want to be in a relationship. If this was true then I’d have no problem, sometimes people just need space. However I was fed what can only be described as “horse shit”. Before we’d even ended it she had someone else lined up and I have a strong suspicion it may even have begun before we ended.

Those are the circumstances but the real issue was my reaction afterwards. The phrase “the shit hit the fan” comes to mind. What followed was an ill advised facebook rant and further rants at anybody who happened to be within earshot in the next couple of weeks. I was determined to make sure everybody knew what she’d done. And yes what she did was vile but sometimes I’ve got to learn to be more dignified. However I’ve always been one to wear my heart on my sleeve and I’ve always led my life based on my emotions. I think it’s what has taken me so far in life but it’s also my downfall at times.

What followed for me was a definite lull. Every other aspect of my life was great: education, job, family, friends, money but the one thing that betrayed me (literally) was love. I’ve got this awful habit where if things don’t go the way I expected I get unnecessarily depressed and get this false perspective that everything in the world is shit. Don’t get me wrong there are times when I feel alone but nowhere near as bad as what my head makes it out to be.

I think in this situation I was partly justified though. I’d never faced a betrayal of this kind before and that was what I was struggling to get my head around. There was one other situation (a story for another day) but it paled in comparison to what was done to me here.  I’m not ashamed to say there was a couple of nights where I cried myself to sleep. I just couldn’t comprehend it, why would she do this to me and how could she sink so low to treat another person like that? The simple truth was that she just lacked some basic morals. She had some definite issues but I’m not the scumbag here so I won’t be revealing them nor the countless things she’s said about people who think she’s their friend. Perhaps this should have been the warning signal to me. If she treated her “friends” like that why would I be any different?

And I think that’s the crux of it. Some people are just bad eggs. It’s not a girl thing either, I’m not so blind to think guys can’t act like dicks. The key is to filter these people out of your life. It also put previous relationship failings into some kind of perspective. Yes how some of them ended wasn’t great and a bit more honesty/humility wouldn’t have hurt however they weren’t even in the same league as what happened this summer. And that’s about that really. The lesson I learnt? Don’t be blinded by beauty and make sure the personality matches the outward appearance and then maybe I might be able to have a proper relationship. A bit of luck with timing wouldn’t hurt either.