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I am so lucky

A long time ago in a galaxy far far away? — no, but it was quite a while back…before Uni, before A Level…before even GCSE’s. I aced a test (cant even call it an exam) in music. The music department invited me to an ‘obscure instruments tryout’ (at this point, I’d never even picked up an instrument, and had no intention of ever doing). I ended up taking the double bass because it was impossible to commute with, and also because I didnt think I’d do well at wind instruments.

So I chose the bass, learnt it for a few months, and then chose to take Music GCSE. I then got invited to a youth orchestra, and tried out there for a few months before finally joining. Which not only got me a whole host of friends, it got both my brothers into Music (and the orchestra) too:

The first one tried out the percussion section just after I joined proper, and he’s still playing both bass and drums now, 7 years later.

Since I was also getting bass lessons there before the rehersals, which were cool in and of themselves (the teacher was a dude! and the other students were awesome and awe inspiring), my youngest brother chose to take up the French horn (another ‘understaffed’ instrument), and got lessons at the same time as me. He shot through the ranks, and is seriously talented, playing the horn in adult productions and teaching himself the clarinet. He’s going to South Africa next year with his school’s music department.

My first love was from the orchestra, the most perfect young trumpetist, she made me go crazy for a time. Still would if she’d wanted to keep my friendship.

And then came university, the wonders of student life….I didnt pick up my bass in first year, in fact stowed it at the orchestra’s ‘lair’. I ended up wanting to branch out my social status in second year though, and so joined the music society and associated orchestras. I quickly found that some of my (mathematical) classmates were also musicians….and swiftly gained an ‘appreciation’ for one of them…and ruined any chance of ever getting to know her.

After this though comes the successes. I’m currently friends with a few girls from around and about and have successfully contained my appreciation as to remain contemporaries. Lets hope it continues.

This last part contains those that I’ve never really known, but am glad to have known. Thats right. The citizens of the internet: I’m extraordinarily lucky to have found and befriended those upon the internet that I have done. I only regret being foolish and childish, and losing touch with those that matter most to me.

And the internet itself has provided a vast (but still limited) array of musical produce to consume, my ears are literally bursting from the however much music I’ve streamed over last.fm and my other media sources.

To finalize, music is amazing, and I’m extraordinarily glad I ever got to experience it properly from both ends of the spectrum and am even gladder that my participation continues.

A Dream

Yes another one…lol

It starts in the shops, we (me, dad and too bro’s) are shopping for random stuffs…we come out and walk out of the uni underpass onto the ring-road path. Walking along it my dad wonders out loud where we are, thinking we’re lost. though I know this place.

We catch a bus (coach like tbh), me and my bro sit together near the back, separated from the others somehow. There’s a group of under-dressed rowdy (probably drunk) women (students?) sat near us, being rowdy. I’m sat in the window, though maybe my place swaps around…

A girl appears next to me, nearer the window. She seems to have jumped over the back of the seat as her friends are snickering away at each other. She seems pretty friendly, though she’s busy doing something I’ve forgotten. She shuffles around as to get a better seat, pushing me and my brother along a bit.

She passes me her glasses to hold onto whilst she does something. They somehow end up being dropped down the top of one of the rowdy women, and then get back unharmed and with minimal damage to the social situation. I believe I contemplated asking for her email address but that’s all I remember….

I wish I could meet that girl, she seems awesome.

Well well well...

Its been a while, hasnt it…

And many a thing hath ‘gone down’ hehe.

For one, I got a job, spent two months walking to work through the English countryside and creating a Sonar program in C#.

After which I spent around a month doing very little, apart from screwing with my server so now it doth-not work.

And for most of that month (from the weekend that I finished work to about 2 weeks ago) my internet was down/flakey as hell. On the Saturday after I finished work, our phoneline got struck by lightning. Our phoneline magically gained a massive dose of intermittent static. It took 5 phone calls to my ISP, 3 of their technicians and 2 BT technicians to fix it. Eventually they replaced the ancient wiring between our house and the pole, and after that it was pretty much clean.

Whilst I was with no nets, I read a selection of books, including Alastair Reynolds’ epic in Relevation Space, and then the Old Kingdom trilogy by Garth Nix which I thoughtfully enjoyed. I then headed for the Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini, reading the last book, Brsinger, for the first time.

After getting back web-side I caught up with my feeds, which were OVER 9000!…only kidding, though they were probably close to 5k, with at least 2k of which being tech-news. And over 300 were comics, which was great, I laughed for a prolonged period

I also re-discovered Dragonmount and their spam boards, upon which I met some great people. Upon one of which this post was inspired and is dedicated to. Her nickname is Meesh, and her caricature a squirrel. She spammed with me, and I spammed with her. (Now I know what your thinking…but alas! Twas not so! :D )

We added each other upon MSN and became avid chatterers, both major WoT fanatics (obviously) and also great fans of fantasy fiction in general. Her in love, and in a LDR, me in not very much at all. She a fresh(wo)man starting courses in many interesting subjects, me a computer-science and maths second-year. Her interested in psychoanalysis, me in need of a shrink ( :P ). So yeah, we have been talking quite a bit for about a month and a bit.

Then she comes on today and starts saying stuff like “you’re awesome” and “its been great” and I am like…”shıt, she thinks I fancy her, or I am being overbearing or something”. It turns out that would have been a simpler situation, and at least one I would have experience in dealing with. Lets just say she has now got me blocked pending a time upon which she stops considering me a threat upon her welfare. That sounds so bad, but dont worry, it was I that suggested it. I cant help but feel responsible in part to this, due to my over-enthusiastic (maybe??) complementation of her…Ahh well, I am happy to wait as long as she isnt unhappy :)

Today

!I have been obnoxious. I have been rude. I have been hurtfull. I have hated and I have laughed at your misfortune. I teased you, and I insulted your family. I feel terrible for it. I want to apologise but you will only say I shouldn’t do, or that it doesn’t matter. I wanted to complement you, but I wouldn’t myself, I claim it is a weakness, and that even if I did, the fact that I insulted you makes this me just trying to excuse myself. I wanted to congratulate you. I await your reply. I wish to console you over your bad day. I need to ask you a favour or a question. I am paranoid. I am scared you might find and read my blog. I am annoyed at myself for being scared about you reading about me.

You are my friends. You are what I love and live for. You are the internet. You are all I have known and all that I know. You could do anything to me and I would allow it.

This was today. Hopefully tomorrow will be different, maybe like yesterday, but with less secrets and lies; maybe like today but without the insults and pain.

EDIT: Actually, I will apologise. Even if you say I shouldn’t have, it is worth it.

To whom it may concern

I am really really sorry for all that I have done. I wish I could take it back, but that would require something more than I have at present. I don’t blame you if you do not forgive me, my actions are inexcusable, but I hope you can if you are willing.

Much confusion.

Me

PS: but thats the last apology you will be getting >:D

OCD and me

Gawd damnIt. OCD used to be cool (well cool-ish). I got excused for sorting cards into order, and enjoyed washing up. But this morning (and over the past week) I have realised that my OCD causes far more problems than that, mainly (all) relating to girls:

Friends are awesome, especially when you are a REALLY shy geek/nerd that doesn’t enjoy the outside world and spends most of his free time on the internet. So yeah, I have a small contingent of friends, with a larger group of friends-who-don’t-talk-to-me-much and a few of these friends are female (:o). And this is where I start disliking OCD.

I would say I have been in love atleast a couple of times in my 19 years (and 1 day) on this here planet and have probably fancied my fair share of girls. But I don’t believe I have ever wished to go any further than that. That may be because I am to shy or too scared of being rejected, or even because I fear the inevitable split when my partner finds someone more attractive/entertaining/ enjoyable, as I guess my ‘gentelmanly’ ways and my devotion (which was possibly best summed up in a previous post THAT GOT LOST!!! and was the greatest piece of writing I have ever written :( )  would get old after a while, and my inability to keep my eyes from wandering.

So yeah, I have a few female friends. And I DO NOT WANT TO FUCKING fall for them..FFS. I keep telling myself, but nope, I obviously don’t listen to sense. I would far rather have friends. I think I quantised a few reasonable assumptions on why I do:

• They are flirty
• I am desperate (though I don’t wish to be)
• They are ‘leaving’ (to uni) and will probably stop talking to me or forget me all together, and that scares me
• They are already taken, and that makes it all the more thrilling…

So, I have done this a few times before. My friendship with a young lady going by the name of A was great, I had a ‘best friend’ for a whole year :D, but here is the problem. I was going to lose contact with her (she doesnt do the internet, has a very in-rl life) and so my ‘other’self decided to start obsessing over her (for the second time…) one of the major problems being: I don’t know if I think she is beautiful/attractive/awesome, or if its just the obsessiveness of it all.

Another example is this. As it was at the end of my schooling and so all the risk of loosing her was maximised (everyone leaving for uni and shiz).

And this next example is whats caused me to blog about this. ‘Tis current and ‘tis annoying. Miss C is one top notch gal. (I lost my train of thought around this point, sorry) An absolutely awesome friend. And now all I want to do is tell her how awesome she is, and buy her things…but I know I shouldn’t and don’t want to….fuuuuuuuuu. All I want is her friendship. She has a boyfriend, who I am friends with, and I don’t want this to end like the previous (aforementioned) incident. I am trying to keep my mind off her, and hoping that will knock me off my obsession. But gahh its soooo hard (not helped by actually blogging about it).

I just wish I could be less odd, just a smidgen, especially regarding this kinda thing.

Disclaimer: I don’t know how much of anything I ever do is related to me being quite paranoid.

Dreams

So, I had a dream last night. It had a girl called Corkey in it, and there was lots of other stuff going on too. I have since forgotten 99% of the content of the dream, but one thing still sticks. She comes up to me and gives me a hug. That was all, just a simple hug. But it caused me to shiver with elation, you know, like when you listen to some awesome music, or eat something so tasty you consider using expletives to explain it, THAT was what I felt. And that though has been stuck in my mind all day, I haven’t told her personally, as that’s kinda weird, and I am not going to bring it up in ‘public’ conversation as my friends will no doubt perceive me as even more of a pervert…due to the lack of explanability in a chat space. I don’t mind them thinking that, but the other, slightly hidden, quite shy, part of me thats also paranoid, would freak out, so theres no point.

That kinda thing, where the dream has caused me to think seriously about it, has happened 3 times recently. One was with James’s girlfriend. Let me lay down that dream too:

I was at a modelmaking convention, making models of something or other with a few palls/buddies/chums from school that, tbh, I was never serious friends with (more like just foafs :D). And we were moving around the arena to find a place to settle down. I sat down on a chair (it happened to be an office chair with rollers) and for some forgotten reason, got angry with my crew and stood up sharply whilst ‘raging’ at my collogues. Unfortunatly, just at that moment, James’s girlfriend appeared behind me (like often things do in dreams, just spontaneously change arena/position/etc. good old brain) and I banged my chair into her mid rage. I turned round to see her, and she shouted at me before I could shout back. It was only a ‘oh ffs Joe’ kinda jobbie, but it stuck, I woke up seeing her ‘storming’ off in the other direction. Its stuck with me since (which is a rarity for my sieve-o-matic of a memory).

The third was more or less WOW. It was another of those OMFG feelings….

I was FLYING!!!! Serious, I was there, it was me, in the air, over the roofs, around the trees. I just kinda started, from my garden. Just stopped being on the ground. It was awesome, truly mindblowing, the resonance is still with me. I actually got out of bed and nearly went and asked my mum if I had been flying the day before….it was that real.

Another little feeling thats stuck with me was a random moment. I was washing the dishes, and had got a clean/dry cloth out. I held it by the corner (still folded into 4, so there was a kinda loop where the fabric hadnt folded straight) and dipped the other corner in. Still holding the corner, I watched the water rise up the cloth. Then the feeling came, as the water moistened the corner I was holding, the fabric collapsed in on its self (due to the pressure of my weak-ass grip). It was a really odd sensation. I want to do it again some time. :D

EDIT: OMG, Another dream about flying. This time at uni, twas awesomer!!!

My Idol and how I lost his friendship

Yeah, I had an idol. His name was James, and he was the coolest geek in school. He had supremely orange hair, and was a geek through and through. He took Maths, Electronics, and Physics for ALevel (with an AS in Computing). He liked gaming, was one of the people that told me about CSS and the like, he came to a few of the LAN parties that I went to. And life was good.

But here’s the downfall. He had a girlfriend. She was my friend (well I had her on msn…) and we got on. Of course, I never wanted to date her or anything so destructive. Nope, all I wanted was a friend, that’s all I ever want. But my stupid piece-of-shit emotions or whatever decided that, no, I would big her up into an awesome beauty. Maybe that it was that she was forever out of reach, or exam ‘nerves’ or my incessant complements and her constant depreciation of herself, I have no idea. But I know that she is totally, like, so hawt its unbelievable. She wore a skirt and my fly button nearly popped off. I kept telling myself ‘I DONT WANT THIS SHIT!’ but myself doesnt listen to logic/reason.

So, I kind of idolised her too. She is rather smart, outstripping me (not too hard) by a long shot. She wants to become some crazy-ass doctor type (following in similar footsteps to her dad). For some stupid reason, she got rejected from many a university. To be brutally honest, those universities were utter fools. She was waiting on her last application, which was being treated by the university litteraly slower than a snail. And thus with her dilemma, talking about how my university had accepted me on all counts, and bragging about my few Scholarship offers was a totally foolishly foolish thing to do. No, more than foolish: COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY RETARDED!!!! But I did do, and there lies point 1 on friendships lost. She started crying. I am totally completely ashamed by what I did that night. I rank it as one of the worst evenings of my life. Ranked with the time I made my aunty cry, my mother cry and told my mother that it was all her fault…..but I digress. To the next point of epic fail. (yes, there is more).

In the same conversation, I had continually congratulated her awesome beauty, as I usually do with my female friends. I don’t see the point in being secretive with my feelings, it just makes me feel more perverted than I already do. So yeah, I was making a point of how absolutely mind-blowing she looked. I took it one step too far. I think I was walking a thin line, telling people my feelings. But at that moment, I jumped off the frying pan, and into the flaming bare pit. Yes…I told her I loved her…completely stupid. Another fantastically dumb-arsed thing to do. I didnt expect anything of it, just confessing some (confused) feelings. But oh no, not only had I caused her to cry that night, I also told her I loved her. Oh but there’s more. Her boyfriend, James, yes James my Idol, was online, or reached by text. Yep, he threatened me with a beating. Which I totally agree with him about, I would have gone and asked him to beat me up if it didnt feel like I was just trying to escape the shame (and I wasnt a wuss).

And the third and final mistake of that evening was to argue with her. Yep, I argued too. See, probably due to her self-depreciating nature, she said sorry far far too much. So I started pointing it out and saying that she needent be, and stuff.. She said sorry that night, I pointed it out, once too many times.

The Time has Cometh

Indeed. I have a Java exam tomorrow. Hopefully wont be too taxing, but its at 9 am, tooo early zzz :D

Me and my friends had a nice weekend, we all went to the cinema and watched Night@Museum2.0. I have to say, Amelia Earhart was quite attractive… LOL. Then we got some pizza, ate it in Arcath’s garden, went to the pub for a few rounds of pool, a game of dominoes and some card games too. When we got back to Arcath’s we watched Black Sheep, a humorously silly film about a super sheep gone bad, and then we started watching The Greatest Game Ever Played from about half way through. It was a nice film about a up-and-coming golf player, or something, winning the American Open and beating the ‘greatest English player of all time’.

I also moved back to windows (BOOOOOO) cause I felt like installing SimCity 4 (SC4D, and maybe Supreme Commander. I installed putty and got to work on something or another. But it just wasnt that great, one term per program isnt enough. So I went and got Ubuntu for Windows (BOOOOO). I dont really like Ubuntu, but as it was relatively easy to install, I thought I might as well take a crack at it. Another annoying thing about windows, is that the stock sound drivers that came with my mobo periodically break svchost. Every time. No exceptions. I hope the ones from the internet that I just downloaded work without crashing.

I am in the process of re-organizing my web server, so that it looks nicer “behind-the-scenes”, and works nicer too.

EDIT: Update, I have sound working :D, and that Ubuntu for Windows (BOOOO) sucks ass, not even a virtual machine-like jive…

Why am I attracted to the opposite sex? I dont want to be… its a completely pointless venture for me. I would rather just have friends that friends that I am attracted to…. grrrrr

Letting Someone Down

I want to cry…. in fact I did start….but stopped soon after…cause soon after starting, my mother and her sister would have ended up questioning me as to what was up…. and I cant exactly tell them its their fault. Well most people probably could, but not me. I am far too shy to actually talk to my parents about anything serious. But the thing is, I would sometimes like to tell them stuff, but its just too hard, it really is…oh now I have started crying….

Its just not right, that I am scared of my parents, so scared in fact, that I cant even just go downstairs and put back the chocolate that I “stole” this morning for giving to a friend that I now cant reach cause I am too scare to leave the house, as not only will it raise questions like “ooooh, do you fancy her” and stupid chiding remarks like that.. but because my mums sister +family are here… leaving today (hopefully soon, but I doubt it) after an Easter weekend break. Considering the previous few times they have come round have resulted in some of the worst times of my life (I am swelling up just thinking about it) I am not particularly enjoying this weekend.

And I haven’t (really) even got onto the subject of this post yet. Its a pretty pathetic reason really, no I shouldn’t say that. All I wanted to do was take some chocolates that I had promised to a friend. This friend happened to be a girl. I consider her one of my best friends, seriously awesome, she is. So, I have some chocolatey cakey stuff all wrapped up in my room, waiting to take around to hers and stuff… but then, as its a bank holiday, there aint no buses to round hers. Oh, and my relatives are still here, which would mean …

WAIT, I am just making up excuses, I am terrible.

Simply put, I am sad cause I cant make myself leave the house to deliver some rocky road to a friend because I fear the jesting comments of my family and the disapproval of my mother at me not socialising with my cousins, who I dont even want to see.

Maybe I am just manic depressive, or maybe thats just another excuse