I Really Want To Smoke

It's like 20 past midnight, and I'm sitting outside under the street lights and blogging on my phone. You know, nothing good ever happens when I blog on my phone. I wish I was legit travelling and had nothing to blog on but my phone, but that is not the case.

So the asshole I'm currently forced to live with due to "holidays" has managed to disconnect the router once again, and that really annoys me to no end. He technically did threaten to turn it off 5 times over the course of the night, but when it happens I still get really pissed, because all of a sudden, no internet connection. I guess it's not as bad as when I had school assignments due the next day, and he disconnects it. Fuck I hate that guy.

I really understand smokers now, I really do. You know it might give you peptic ulcers and high blood pressure and lung cancer, but when things get really frustrating, you just want to light a cigarette. I don't even smoke, and have never smoked, and currently I really want a cigarette. I just feel this nasty pressure against my chest, and I try breathing and it doesn't really work. For some reason I just feel that I'd be so much better if I could have a smoke right now.

My midnight wandering is half due to stress and half due to a childish tantrum. Not that anyone will chase after me or notice that I'm gone, which is the good thing. Once I calm down a bit more and stop craving for cigarettes despite not smoking, I can go back and pretend nothing's happened and get on with my life.

I have no idea why it is such a crime to be awake past midnight. I don't know why it infuriates that asshole so. I think he's just jealous because he has trouble getting to sleep and I don't, but I choose not to sleep and he gets terribly upset. Well, it upsets me that at age 19, during the holidays, I cannot decide that I do not want to sleep. Living at "home", I do feel as if I'm stripped of fundamental human rights sometimes.

Life is terribly tragic when you are outside, past midnight, alone under a street light. The sky has a reddish tinge for some reason; I think it might be because of the street lights. The stars are beautiful. I wish I didn't suspect that I'm currently a little depressed. It's getting a little cold, so I'm starting to feel a little helpless. I have this great impulse to get myself to the station, catch a coach to a big city and just be not-here. If I was a little more desperate, a little more sad, I'd leave in a heartbeat.

The night is beautiful, but right now everything seems a little suffocating.

My Blogging Frequency

I remember, once upon a time, when I tried to blog once a day, and then it kinda went to shits, and I can see in the past few months I've been blogging like, once every 3 days. Do forgive me, there's not much to write about. Well actually there is, but they're kinda personal- like, personal as in personal-but-not-about-me. I kinda put whatever about me on here, but I don't really have a right to spill other people's inner torments- but if I had to cut that much out of it there wouldn't be much to say.

"I talked to this friend about this thing which I can't tell you, but if made me feel a bit weird afterwards, but I can't tell you why it felt weird."

See that just wouldn't make sense at all, and it'd be like posting "OMG I WISH I HAD A FRIEND I COULD TALK TO" on Facebook, and when someone asks you "what's wrong" you go "I DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT".

I guess I'll talk to you about my day. I woke up at like 8ish, then I had to take my sister to school. I came home and was incredibly sleepy, possibly because I've been waking at 8ish for a couple of days despite sleeping at 3am, and I've accumulated a bit of sleep debt. So I came home and it was about 9, and I slept for 4 hours. It felt really good, and I think it made up for my sleep debt, except then all I did was read and play an incredibly frustrating game of LoL, and my ranking has fallen to the shits. As it turns out I'm on like the biggest lose streak ever, and it's incredibly frustrating. I guess I should stop playing for a bit because lose streak might make me play worse or w/e, but I...don't really care. Fuck my rank. I play terribly and I know it.

I kinda feel like I should go back to drawing, but I want a better drawing app on my iPad. The current one I have just doesn't cut it, except I can't get anything on iPad for free. I don't really feel like spending money either, because I haven't started working yet, and it wouldn't make sense to spend money when I don't have income. Anyway it's like 5pm now, and I haven't eaten anything all day, so I'm going to grab a bite to eat before carrying on with my hopeless "holiday".

The essence of the word "holiday"

Now that I'm "home" for the "holidays" it's become a job for me to apparently clean the house, do the laundry, take my sister to and from school and pick mum up after work. But that's all fine because I have no shifts for my Christmas job until like next week. Fuck my fucking life. In an attempt to overcome my perpetual boredom I turn to gaming, except some ASSHOLE switches the router off and then I lose everything. Like, what the fuck am I even doing in here. I just want to graduate, get my own job, make my own money, BUY MY OWN HOUSE SO I CAN TELL PEOPLE TO GET THE FUCK OUT OF IT. Argh shit like that makes me so mad, you have no idea.

Anyway my day wasn't exactly productive, but it wasn't counter-productive either. I kinda did the laundry, but I didn't take everything out, so I'll finish that tomorrow. Then I just played games and read my book. I'm like 70% through The Fault In Our Stars, which is the John Green book with the biggest hype, and so far I'm not feeling it at all. Basically it's about this girl who has terminal cancer, and then she finds herself a boyfriend who is really handsome and witty and charming, and as I read I'm like "yeah I don't believe guys like that exist- they can be witty and charming but there is no way they can look good at the same time". Reading the novel is quite fine, but again I get the feeling that John Green is pining for something greater, but the book just doesn't make it. Green incorporates all these magnificent quotes from famous authors into his works, but it just doesn't give off the same vibe when they are delivered by his characters. For some reason the protagonists just seem like teenagers who try really hard to be cool and sophisticated and give off this "I belong in the metaphysical" feel. Yeah, my problem is that his characters don't seem real. They are merely the embodiments of the adult perception of a teenager, and the "teenagery" flavour is far too strong. There is no flesh and bone about them, and they are mere tools to deliver deep lines and quotes which don't contribute much to the book, because you would require way more sophistication to understand to quoted lines than the novel itself. They just seems so.... out of place. Like he only put them there so that his book could have deeper meaning and be more than an adult portrayal of teenage.

I sound like I have nothing but criticism for John Green's works, eh? Do consider that I've read through them with incredible speed, and I don't consider myself a fast reader. That at least shows it wasn't painful to read, and the story certain wasn't boring. My primary complaint was that it tried to encapsulate more than it could handle, and everything is bursting at the seams so nothing makes much sense. Other than that it has been okay, because I've never read anything like it before. It does reinforce the fact that I really don't like the genre though... it's not exciting enough for a work of fiction, and if it were a work of non-fiction, then the characters seem too insignificant.

I should probably stop digging into Green's works. If he read this he'd probably be really cut, since an author invests their heart and soul into their works, regardless of how crap other people think it is. At least now I can safely say I HAVE read John Green, and that I didn't really like it, and the genre really wasn't my thing. I guess nothing interests me but fantasy. I should read more, but my "holiday" is really kinda crumbling and my life is about to go to the shits, so I don't know/ We'll see.

John Green = Overrated

As you know the only genre I really like is fantasy, so everything else I read is pretty much because other people have read them, and I want to have decent conversational topics. I've moved on to John Green's works- and no, he doesn't write stuff like Twilight or Fifty Shades (proving to you I read more than terrible romance/erotica). He writes... young adult fiction, I guess it'd be called? That's kinda vague, isn't it. Well from what I see he writes about teenagers in their teenage angst.

I read through Looking for Alaska quite quickly- and it's about this girl called Alaska Young who is supposedly "Clever, funny, screwed-up, and dead sexy". I expected this delightfully charming character- but sadly I have to say I haven't liked a female character since Elizabeth Bennett. I thought Alaska was quite bland for what she was supposed to be, and I found her to be a bit of a whore, and a bit of a moody bitch. I guess her moodiness was meant to be part of her character, but she certainly wasn't charming. The protagonist did say she had large boobs... I mean, I guess that's charming enough, but I didn't except that to account for being clever and funny. The only thing I liked about her was her name- Alaska Young is a beautiful, exotic name. That was pretty much it.

For the entirety of the novel, I felt as if the author tried to grasp at grand themes but lacked the literary prowess to back it up. I mean themes aside, it is really important for the actual words themselves to leave an impact. They didn't have to be fancy or complicated- I just wished they were more impressionable, because right now I can't really remember anything much of the novel. I was thoroughly confused why the protagonist professed to loving- like, actually loving, Alaska. I mean I guess to him she was charming, but as a reader I thought it was more teenage stupidity than love. Like I would believe Bella loved Edward Cullen, but I was not entirely convinced that Miles Halter loved Alaska Young.

The people who recommended John Green to me said that his works were beautiful and tragic and that it captures the essence of life. I'd love to disagree. It's tragic to a degree but it's only a very small, very personal tragedy. Usually you would expect these things to invoke more emotional responses than the broader tragedies- and by that I mean you would probably be sadder about your dog dying than about hearing that Typhoon Haiyan ripped more than 5000 people apart. Except- using my own metaphor, I failed to feel sad when my dog died, because it turned out it wasn't even my dog, and it wasn't really a dog.

As for his works being "beautiful"- well that is subjective, but I can see why people would say it's beautiful. The things it's trying to say, the underlying messages- they're certainly worthy of praise, but I thought the delivery was just sub-par. Green seemed to try to do too much at once, and in that short of a novel he didn't seem to do much at all. I know I can't just expect every author to be F. Scott Fitzgerald, but I thought it'd be something better than what I found.

So far I've only read Looking for Alaska, and you might say I'm being unfair because it's like his earliest work and I shouldn't judge an author by one book. Well tell me what you remember about J. K. Rowling apart from Harry Potter. Authors tend to write the same stuff, because going from writing poetry to non-fiction to literature is hard. I've read most of Jane Austen's works and I can safely tell you they are pretty much all about the same shit. Most of Tolkien's works are in fact based on Middle Earth, and I'm pretty convinced that John Green doesn't write much about anything outside teenagers and their teenage angst. 

That said, a copy of The Fault in Our Stars is on its way, and apparently it's the best thing John Green has ever written. I'm not entirely convinced that it's as heart-breaking as people say it is, because I suspect it only magnifies the feelings of the overly-sentimental, but I will do my best to read with an open mind. I will admit that I thought "Alaska is a stupid whore" the very page she was introduced, and I didn't really like the protagonist though I felt a little sorry for him. 

Anyway, my conclusion is that John Green is vastly overrated- and while I see the merit of his works being included in an English curriculum, if I were a student I'd probably wish the author never learnt to read and write. I do feel sorry for the people who have to study and analyse this stuff- to praise the author on anything other than theme would be the biggest lie ever, and sadly essays never end well with 1 body paragraph on theme. It's all my opinion, anyway, and it's not something I'd actively dissuade people from reading... I just don't think it's as good as people claim it to be.

Alright, I'm fine.

So packing is a chore and I'd say I'm almost-done except I'm not really done. As it turns out I just have a lot of miscellaneous crap left over, and I don't really know where to put anything at the moment. The only thing I've really achieved today is disassembling my bike and my heater- except I think I threw out the box I packaged my bike in, so that became a bit of a problem.

The bike has been an absolute disaster. Due to unwillingness to pay extra for assembly, and due to the fact that I didn't want to wait a week for it to happen, I opted to take the bike home and assemble it myself. I blogged about that earlier in the year- anyway I got a friend to help, it was fun but we really didn't put that bike together properly. The wheels kinda got caught in the brakes, it was super-hard to ride and life was just painful. At some point I decided that I'd prefer to walk to school, and that's what happened. Ever since then my bike's just been in the backyard, gathering dust and spider webs. Today I realized just how badly it had rusted, and trying to take it apart was kind of gross. I had a roll of toilet paper beside me, ready to wipe away whatever the fuck it was that was on the bike.

So taking the bike apart was a chore, and I didn't even take it completely apart because I didn't really have the tools for it, and I have no idea how I managed to put it together. I lost one of the Allen keys I used to assemble the bike. I distinctly remember putting it away in this little bag, thinking that I'd need it again and that I'd keep it safe. I found the bag, but the key wasn't in there, and I have no idea where the fuck it went. I mean, I'm packing my room, and I've been cleaning out everything, except it's still nowhere to be found.

That aside, it has also been really hard fitting all my clothes in one suitcase. It's a massive, massive suitcase, but still I couldn't fit everything in there. I realized that I didn't wear approximately half of the clothes I had, and it's probably because I hate doing laundry. I'm also not that fussed about clothes on most days, which was probably why nothing was ever worn. The tragic thing is that I've bought more clothes since I've moved out, so that's also been terrible for my whole "I have too many clothes" ordeal.

Anyway, I'll stop telling the cool story for now, and get back to cleaning everything in general. Ta.