WHITE WHINE

Its too fucking warm for October.

This is the time of year when things usually start to start going wrong. (They tend to pick up slightly around Christmas time with festivity and jollity and "we-should-totally-see-each-other-more-lets-not-leave-it-twelve-months-again-this-year-ity,"), before becoming entirely awful in January and this should be accompanied by relevant weather. Things like arctic wind, drizzling rain, frost and ice on my car in the mornings when I'm late to work. I should be wearing my black coat (incidentally, the most expensive piece of clothing I own at a reduced price of £140) and dark navy scarf, and trudging along the deserted sea front promenade, watching seagulls fight over discarded kebab boxes and chip wrappers while acting like the brooding artiste figure I am not in reality. Who I think I'm impressing, I don't know.

I've made this Pavlovian connection in my head due to a number of past interactions and relationships taking a nosedive around this time of year, usually after a too-quick Summer of relaxation, socialising and broken plans and promises. This has never been quite the biggest of deals, as I had tended to view life as a raft I had no control over and took things as they came. This laziness, in part, was due to (I now realise) not truly caring about the person I was with. This year is different. This year, I am with the first girl I can honestly, truly say that I love. A person that I cannot imagine ever not being close to, but conversely this makes this seasonal fugue (depression?) so much harder to cope with. Whereas previously I could switch off and seek solace in staying in and avoiding the world with the assistance of computer games and takeaway food, now I cannot will not. The last thing I want to do is bring this person down with me, but I also can't face not being with her and not making her smile or laugh or feel safe. But I'm afraid I will do this.

Most of all though, I hate having these feelings for no damn reason. I'm not some tortured fucking artist that uses these emotions to fill notebooks or sketchbooks or even desktop folders with polemic political rants or photoshop fuckery. I just sit here, chain smoking cigarettes and listening to the overly loud washing machine forcibly vibrate out of its cubby hole and half-heartedly worrying about various elements of life.

A list of things I don't like:

•  I don't like how when my fridge broke down, it was replaced with one with no freezer compartment. The previous freezer compartment one was only as large as a family size box of cornflakes, but it least it was present. 
• I don't like how the old, broken fridge was left in my tiny, undersized "garden" by the landlord's handyman. 
• I don't like my landlord's handyman's family, who happen to live above me and slam my front door and shout and stomp around. 
• I don't like how my next door neighbours (a Chinese takeaway place) cannot conduct a conversation in Mandarin without screaming at the top of their lungs. 
• I don't like the animal that lives in the dead space between my bedroom ceiling and the roof and how it is active and scratching and restless between 11pm and 3am each night. 
• I don't like how I want to move out but cannot afford the deposit on a new place, so am stuck over-paying rent to a landlord who doesn't return my calls. 
• I don't like being close to 30 and still working a shitty data entry job for a pittance because I haven't found a new job. 
• I don't like not finding a new job because I haven't put the effort in to do so, and therefore all my whining on the subject should be mute. 
• I don't like that I kept from my girlfriend things about the girl I was seeing previous to her, when I didn't know I would feel like this about her (my girlfriend). 
• I don't like inadvertently making my girlfriend jealous or upset as a result of my own stupidity and lack of forethought. 
• I don't like feeling posthumously jealous of boys my girlfriend has been with way before I even knew her. 
• I don't like reading her blogs from three or four years back, detailing her struggles in getting over a boy she had massive amounts of feelings for. 
• I don't like feeling that despite what she tells me, I don't cause this level of longing in her. 
• I don't like the hypocritical unfairness I display when I ask questions about a guy she used to sleep with and get upset and indignant when I receive the answers. 
• I don't like me a whole lot. 
• I don't like writing this, as it is an embarrassing pity party. 

Whine whine whine.

What happened to the me that liked cracking jokes and making up rhymes and stories? What happened to the thousand project ideas I had but never wrote down because "I'll remember them"? What happened to the semi-serious plans of writing stand-up sets or raps or maybe both?

I fervently wish that I could hibernate from November to February (maybe wake up from 23rd-27th December) and be done with this goddamned pitiful sense that life isn't as full as it used to be. Fuck it, man up. End. 

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

The thing about change is that, from a logical standpoint, you know you go through a curve of feelings before you are necessarily comfortable with whatever the thing is that has changed. And that's all fine and dandy, and I can understand that. However, logic doesn't necessarily fully come in to it, especially at the point where you aren't quite sure if you're having a shit time because you actually are, of if you just think you are. I'm not even making sense with this sentence, but essentially, how do you know how you feel about a certain thing? I have no idea whether my feelings are actually true or if I'm just being a big emotional entity.

Oh, I know about the Kubler-Ross stuff, and how change becomes accepted eventually, but what if the thing you accept is going to be horribly bad for you in the long run. What if that? But maybe, just maybe, that is acting a little irrational and over the top. The thing is, I'm not normally that bad at change. I consider myself fairly good at rolling with the punches (not literally, I'm rubbish at fighting), but there's something about this thing. In the words of countless parodies of Star Wars, "I have a bad feeling about this".

OK, enough beating around Kate Bush. These are the facts:
I have a new job. I started Monday. It is an outgoing call centre job. Currently, I hate it.

But will that change? The only way I can currently see this properly changing would be if I grow to accept it and become stuck in a role that I don't enjoy but happen to make some money on. But I don't really give a shit about money (well, I do, because I like takeaway food and that), but should I really commit to a not just slightly disliked, but legitimately hated job, at the expense of my own wellbeing and happiness? OK, maybe, but I don't want to.

Or, to look at it another way, perhaps I just need time to get in to this thing properly. I'm not going to go in to details about what it consists of, but it is certainly not something I see myself doing. People say that needs must, but do needs really must? These aren't rhetorical questions, I would genuinely like to know the answer.

The problem is, when you open up to this level of self-analysis, you have to be prepared for the question - "what do I want to do?". And the answer to that is never set in stone, but I am like 98% sure that I want to work in the games industry, for peanuts if necessary, but doing something I actually love and enjoy. Then, like a proverbial stacked domino, comes the reasons why not:

I don't have the necessary skills -> to get the skills I need, I would need to retrain -> to retrain needs an investment of time and money -> i'm already way past University age and have little to no capital -> I should get a job, temporarily, to earn this money -> I don't enjoy this job, I should do something I actually enjoy more.

Man, that circle is more vicious than an un-licensed rattlesnake/pitbull genetic experiment. I think I need to do a plan, with pro and con listings and all of that jazz, but that takes effort and everything. If only I had some kind of incredibly talented, intelligent and pretty much betterthanme girlfriend to help with this. Oh wait, I guess I do. Maybe life ain't all bad after all.