The Real World

Well, the first two days of my placement are now complete and I'm tired but loving it!

I had almost forgotten what it felt like to be a 'productive member of society' because I have had so much trouble finding work over the past few years.  It's a good feeling to be doing something that people can clearly see is useful.

This isn't to say that I'm not useful the rest of the time, it just feels different when you're studying or staying home to look after sick relatives or fruitlessly pursuing a job search that has long since become a farce.  Also, it is rather a lot of work to pull yourself out of emotional doldrums when you're in a holding pattern that consists of doing the same thing over and over again, sometimes in the vain hope that the results will change.

The other side of this coin, though, is the stress that comes from me being fairly sure - based on no reasoning whatsoever except social phobia - that I'm going to do something to completely stuff up and get kicked out or something similar.  This, however, I will not focus on, in fact I'm hoping this is the only time I'll have to acknowledge it at all - just the once to get it off my chest.

Not Perfect

Although I like to think I have tremendous amounts of patience with others, I'm not so good at the whole patience with myself thing.

Usually this isn't a problem and in fact it is often quite a good thing because it helps me to motivate myself to work on necessary but unpleasant tasks when I'd rather be doing something else.  At the moment, though, it is definitely a problem and this is because I see all these other blogs from people who have been blogging for a very long time and my first reaction tends to be "ooh, so good, why can't I make interesting and easily readable posts like them?"

The answer being, of course, that they have been blogging for a very long time, usually several years, while I have been blogging for a little over a week now.  That doesn't stop it from being extremely frustrating.

I don't particularly like showing work to anyone until it is perfect and because of that I often don't end up doing anything with it at all, this is one of the reasons I started blogging, so that I can get used to putting stuff out there that maybe isn't as polished as I'd like because it doesn't need to be perfect for this forum.

However, I'm not doing particularly well at this, I don't find it easy to actually post entries.  The writing is fine, but the posting is not as easy.  This post I'm writing now is on its third fourth draft, and I have spent far longer than I intended to.  Somehow, even though I am inflicting a fairly labourious editing process on myself the posts still feel pretty stream of consciousness which feels good because I haven't done much stream of consciousness writing and its good to know I can do it, or at least kinda fake it.

So yeah, I'll keep blogging, and try not to spend as much time editing as I do writing it all in future.  Mainly because while I'm not so good at patience with myself, I'm even worse at quitting things before I'm done - even when I probably should.

Also, bonus points if you knew the title was a Tim Minchin reference, because that song rather sums up how I feel about the blog so far, "Its not perfect, but its mine."

Hello World!

Okay, so while I'm not actually a computer program, this seemed like a suitable title for my very first post evar. This is by way of explaining that various references are likely to occur more frequently here than in Sunnydale so those of you who have something against obscure homages (but, you know, pronounced alliteratively) should, um, probably stick around anyway because, er, coz i says so, yeah!

Now that that is out of the way I should probably spend the rest of this post telling my reader(s) - I'm optimistic - all about me and why I'm blogging. Instead of this and possibly in an attempt to maintain the supposed weirdness suggested by the title I shall rant about how all the good URLs for blogs seem to be gone.


So here's how it all went down. I decided I should give in to peer pressure and maybe start a blog, now fast forward something like two and a half years, so I started a blog - tadaa. I signed up and everything was going really well until I got to the part where I was trying to work out what a good name for this would be. I figured putting loquacious, verbose or sesquipedalian in there somewhere was probably a sensible warning, but predictably these were all taken - as were many different variations on this theme. My next thoughts were along the lines of verbalism, which means to say very little in very many words. This still caused me trouble because the only URL along these lines that wasn't already taken was ihavenothinginterestingorusefultosay which was far too long for me to remember, let alone try and get other people interested in .


Given that I was having so much trouble I decided to have a think and come back to it. This brought with it the realisation that although I want to be as brilliant a wordsmith as Shakespeare, or at least Dr Seuss, that this is unlikely and I shouldn't worry so much about what it is called. This lasted about as long as it took me to return to trying to come up with a title. I should probably point out that the title itself was a problem in and of itself, but in order to remember the URL I wanted it to actually have some sort of connection with it so I played around with a wide range of themes including ramblings, confusions and randomness, none of which gave me any love. It was about this time that I started thinking about what I'm actually going to put in here and realised I have no idea, probably something about films I watch and books I read, almost certainly stuff about a trip to America I'm going on in January. Generally I figured it was just somewhere that all the stuff that gets me called weird if I say it to actual real people (as opposed to my, in all probability, imaginary readership) could call home.

Thus the Home of Weird was born. If you're wondering how I can possibly say that all the good URLs are gone when I have managed to snag this nifty one, I will point out that I'm pretty sure I got the last one. Some sort of smug victory gif would seem appropriate here but as I don't have any smug victory gifs I shall instead just write "Ha Ha!" and leave you to provide the Nelson Muntz image associated with it using your imagination.


And that is the story of my blog so far, post one and already I'm getting all meta by blogging the story of my blogging, this either bodes very well or very poorly for the blog as a whole. If anyone knows which then be sure to let me know.