Metaphors & Similes

Right. This is it -- the last post in the blog I have kept (sporadically, at least) since I was about sixteen. Time for a change, I think, whilst I'm doing the whole moving-out-and-going-to-uni thing, I may as well ring in the changes here with a whole new site. So I've switched over to Wordpress, where I have more choice in the look of the thing, and where the layout is more suited to the incredibly simple blog-with-no-frills thing I've been looking for. On The Brink is its name. Over the next few weeks I'm sure it'll have changes made to it, and I'm planning to learn to get better at the whole designing with CSS thing so I don't have to rely on the pre-designed themes they provide. But that is where you'll find me blogging now -- and this, meanwhile, I will leave to sit here for eternity.

 

Thank you, and good night (sweet ladies, good night, good night...).

 

 

I have just realised the fatal flaw in my plan to do medicine: small-talk.

 

Specifically this scenario: I climbed into a taxi in Southampton the other day and obviously, me being About That Age, the driver started asking me what I was doing, was I going to university in the end, what did I want to do with my life. So I explained about the degree course I have planned to do, and how I hoped it would lead on to doing medicine, a fact which the lovely man then rather latched on to. He listed various symptoms and at first I thought he was just idly quizzing me; but then I realised he was hoping I was going to either back up or refute his doctors diagnosis of his tingling fingers and chest pains (ominous, I know, but they had discounted heart problems, and what do I know?).

 

I realised that this is something that's going to go on happening to me, more and more often, for as long as I still plan on or eventually manage to study medicine. It probably also happens to anyone else who admits they're part of the healthcare system, anyone involved in law, and probably most builders and plumbers and so on. People are going to expect me, from now on in, to know a lot more than I currently do. It's pretty awkward, to be honest -- I couldn't possibly advise this bloke and I wouldn't like to try, but when people are worried about something then of course they want a second opinion.

 

So it amused me this once, and I felt honoured; but it made me feel uncomfortable, that's all.

I think this shows one of the many reasons why I don't agree with organised religion. I simply don't get it. I don't understand how the Church can object to something like this and seen be seen as a reasonable body of people who have quite a lot of influence (nominal, if not actual as well) in how this country runs. That they're so homophobic that even those who do agree with priests entering into a civil partnership expect them to abstain from sex, as if that's at all a reasonable, moderate reaction?

I try not to be an emotional person, especially not on my blog, which is no place for introspective rants, is it? But this is a one-off, because I need to say it, shout it even, because I can't and won't say this to almost anyone I know because, well, what is the point, really? But I do need to say it sometimes, once in a while, and here it is.

 

This medicine thing. I've never wanted anything as much as I want this. It's something I can hardly describe, this feeling. I can hardly read medicine-related websites or books, university prospectuses and the like, or watch things like Grey's Anatomy or House (however unrealistic and unlikely the whole set-up of these shows may be) because it makes me almost want to cry with jealousy that I want it so much and there are other people out there living the life I want so much to live. It's crazy of me, I know, and completely irrational, which is a shame because I try so hard to always be rational. But I can't help this insane and completely pervasive desire I have. The only reason I haven't lost it  entirely is that I can't help but believe that I will get there someday, and someday soon at that. That I'll be so impressive in my first year at university that they'll allow me to move across, start again in my second year as a medic.

 

Until then, all I can do is all the things I'm already doing: revise as much as I can, get as much work experience as I can possibly fit into my life, and keep reminding myself why I'm doing all this, however much that might turn me into this weird semblance of a tearful and jealous toddler throwing an almighty tantrum, at least for a short while.

 

And talking of revision, off I go. I just had an exam today, and I have one tomorrow, and then that's it for the week until next Wednesday when it's three days straight of abject horror...

A mini-rant of my own, inspired by Flix's Chocolate Chat.

 

As a cellist on my way about the place you obviously attract a certain amount of attention, and well-meaning, friendly people often strike up the following conversation which proceeds literally word-for-word the same each time:

 

Well-Meaning Stranger: Gosh! [on seeing me and getting within conversation distance] Don't you ever wish you played the flute?!

Me: [obligingly] Yes, or the piccolo, they're even smaller!

WMS: I guess you could just sling it in your bag and go

Me [becoming increasingly aware of the weight of the cello on my one shoulder] Yes...[sighing relievedly on imagining the pure joy of carrying the most piercing instrument ever to have been invented in my bag...never mind, let's pretend for a second that this would be a nice thing to do].

 

No, actually, I chose to play the cello. It sounds lovely when handled properly, doesn't actually weigh that much, and has the most gorgeous repertoire you could imagine. Nobody chooses the instrument they play on the basis of convenience to handle on public transport, and the world would be a far more soulless place if we did. It's possible that I attract more annoying remarks than most because a) a strap on my case is broken, meaning that I have to awkwardly sling the thing across one shoulder, and (b), when I had to take the cello on the bus to college the driver was impossibly rude about it and completely obstructive, not allowing me to put the cello anywhere on his wretched bus and reducing me to tears! Thankfully the cello hasn't had to travel on public transport now for nearly two years bar one not-so-stressful train ride! 

 

I wish I played my cello more: this summer I have resolved to learn the Shostakovich Cello Concerto, something I tried to do a few years back when I was probably a better cellist, but never mind.... I'll also have a go at getting back to my old standard on Elgar's Concerto for Cello in E Minor too -- I'd look at this link first if you go to any because the Elgar is simply stunning and probably an easier work to listen to than the Shostakovich!

 

And I'm not a big fan of piccolos, as you may have guessed, meaning no offence to any piccolists out there. As is often said by homophobes, islamophobes, and so on -- my best friend plays the piccolo!

I rarely dream, and when I do, the people who people my dreams are people I don't know, with brief cameos by people I do know if they appear at all. But I've been dreaming quite a lot recently.

 

Most recently I dreamt that I was a man, about my age, having a relationship with a short girl who actually really annoyed me, and also shopping for clothes in a charity shop full of a bizarre mix of really, really nice things and the usual round of old-lady clothes and nineties jeans. I was shopping for girly clothes, at that. I knew in the dream that I had been a girl in the past and that everything I was doing as a man was therefore new to me. It was weird.

 

Before that was the dream that I'd just moved into a council flat above a motorway with my teenage son. Weirdly I didn't seem any older than I am now. The flat was rather nice, actually, a bathroom, one small bedroom, and a huge everything-else room where I slept.

 

Other themes in my dreams are recurring ones of social abandonment and being despised by people of a far higher social status than myself, the occasional appearance of people I used to really like years ago saying that actually, they like me too, kissing me and disappearing again (even though the figures that appear in these dreams are people I haven't seen in ages and have no interest in any more), obvious and typical exam dreams, scary pregnancy dreams (usually involving freak chimera babies), weird and unsettling gatherings of people, and a horrifying sense of my own transience.

 

Meanwhile my sister and mother often dream, and almost always mainly about people they know. And my father, like me, dreams rarely, about strangers.

 

Does that mean I've inherited my sleeping and dreaming patterns from my dad? And does one dream more when one is sleeping really badly or are sleeping and dreaming unconnected in that respect?

Corned beef used to come in one of those tins with a key that meant you then peeled off a strip of metal just above the base of the can. This was a bit of a sweat, and maybe it was expensive to make them like that, I don't know, but it then meant that the entire tinful just came cleanly out of the can. But everyone's been complaining about those keys for years, so they've replaced it with a ringpull. Yes, that's right, your corned beef now comes in a ringpull can. And, incidentally, the ringpull on a tin of corned beef is really tough. It's like arm-wrestling with, I don't know, a super-strong squirrel. It's just VERY annoying. And then, of course, the beef is SO much less likely to end up on the dish in one block becuase you more or less have to excavate it. Which is a pain, because I like corned beef, and it shouldn't be this difficult to get to.

 

On another note, I did my first exam today and it went, well, better than my mock last night. OK to Good, not Brilliant. I thought it started half an hour later than it did, so I had to go and take it in another room with the other guy who was late, but thankfully they gave us full time.

 

The only problem was that I was starving when I eventually made it out, but then I went and bought one of the college's amazing white chocolate and macadamia nut cookies. Never has a cookie tasted so good.

 

Never has an entry been more pointless...!

Recently a friend of my mother's was talking to my mother and I and came up with the theory that I might be dyspraxic. I lack physical co-ordination and suck at all sports, I have no co-ordination, actually, in any other aspect of my life -- I'm always late and I am that really annoying friend you have who, when you all go to London for the day, gets stuck at every Tube station because she's rummaging about in her bag again for the tube ticket that everyone else just pulled neatly out from wherever they kept it and swept through the barrier.

 

But I am quite happy to accept that I am not dyspraxic, that I'm merely just slightly more chaotic than I would like.

 

I hate how everyone is so keen to diagnose everyone else with this or that syndrome to explain why their behaviour deviates ever so slightly from a given norm. So I'm bad at sports and hopelessly disorganised -- it hasn't made any difference to the way in which I live my life, I just have to make more of an effort than other people sometimes, and there's plenty of us out there to whom that applies.

 

I'm not saying that there is no such thing as dyspraxia, dyslexia, attention-deficit-disorder, or all the varieties of depression, say, from which it is possible to suffer, but I think we're allowing our definition of 'normal' to shrink, and the point on the spectrum that we define as 'having' or 'not having' a condition is slowly encroaching inwards. I don't think it's helpful to be given a label unless you very clearly need one, at least, not from where I stand. I would rather berate myself for my lateness and disorganisation and force myself to live up to other peoples' standards - because I can - rather than having that voice in my head going 'it's OK, you're dyspraxic, you can't help it', when I know that other people who really are could quite genuinely be insulted by my taking that attitude.

 

Not only that, but overusing all these labels surely makes society less rich and interesting because it shrinks the definition of normal, forcing us all into a conformity we don't and shouldn't have by overmedicating some, overcounselling others and belittling yet more.

So far, today, I have done none.

 

In fact, today, I have ambled about the internet, listened to the songs a friend of mine has written and put on his Myspace (they're brilliant, but I can't remember the URL so you'll have to just accept this), meandered around facebook, doing a couple of notes and playing far too much Scramble.

 

I have watched an episode of Grey's that made me cry, and I'm about to watch another.

 

I have eaten, and I have let the man in who mended our windows.

 

I have read all the bits of the weekend Guardian that I didn't read before.

 

I have gained a headache and a lump in the throat.

 

I have checked all the blogs in my Favourites at least twice to see whether anything new has happened.

 

But I haven't done any revision. There are days when I'm just not in the mood, and this is one of them. I think I'll do a past paper tonight, just so that I don't feel like an utterly hopeless human being.

 

I am in such a bad mood today.