*waves hand sheepishly*

Yeeeah. So I couldn’t even come up with a real title. That in itself sums up what this post is about. My absolute lack of any kind of blogging… er *thinks of a good word*… skill? I don’t know.

Anyway as you can nicely see through my bare archives I’m terrible at keeping up with this blogging malarkey. I always have been, ever since I first starting doing it however many years ago. In fact many times I’ve started up a blog, written some crapola about crapola and then deleted it. Rinse and repeat as necessary. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve done that because I would look back at it and think ‘yuck! What the hell am I writing? DELETE AND FORGET!’.

That was until, well the first entry on here (that you can actually see). I don’t really know what changed. Suddenly I could read through my ramblings and not cringe enough to want to delete it. (Oh, I always cringe after I’ve written something. Always.)

However no amount of less-cringe-worthy moments were ever enough to keep me  regular at posting not-so-crapola crapola. I don’t know why.

Actually that’s a lie. I have a theory.

You see most people who happen to own a blog, when things get crazy/hectic/out of whack in their lives they write about it. And so within said out-of-whackness they continue to post away. I however don’t do that. Ah no. When things start to get a little interesting I completely forget that this blog exists and never even think ‘oh, this might make for a decent post’. Nope. Nada. I tend to post when everything is all calm, rested… *cough* boring *cough*.

Between this post (The Hibernation - see? I already wasn’t blogging consistently) and this one (Firefox 3 – Download Day) in 2008, I lost a friend to suicide. Which happens to be my most recent post when I finally wrote about it one  year after she died. Now I wrote that post almost a year ago now and guess what? FUCK  LOADS (excuse my language) has happened since then! And I don’t mean just from that post, I mean from when my friend died. So where’s the bloody posts saying so?

Admittedly the months after her death were… weird. Not one of my greatest times but definitely not my darkest either. However my life took certain paths and eventually I got to place where I’d genuinely never been happier. That felt weird. But however weird it felt – it feels great now. This amazing happiness I’ve never quite experienced before is still going strong and I love it.

I just kind of wish I’d written about everything as it happened and could then actually see from my words how the happiness came to be. The things I should have written about include, but aren’t limited to:

  • My exams – which went awful. Having a friend die two weeks before exams start isn’t exactly good timing. Especially attending her funeral rather than attending an exam (my choice entirely).
  • My results – 3 months later the results of said exams came and they were poor. University was out of the picture for September which was gutting as I was already one year ‘behind’ everyone else.
  • I spent the summer working my ass off at my job (simple shelf-stacker at a supermarket) and when September came around I was taken on as full-time staff (although they didn’t change my 13 hour contract to a 39 hour one – bastards!).
  • I started an application for uni for September ’09 and then essentially had a ‘friend’ talk me out of it (that’s how it felt anyway) and was talked into moving in with her for sometime around the summer once we both had enough money.
  • February came. As did a text message to my phone which said that this ‘friend’ had a place at uni for next September. Oh wow! Exciting stuff! WAIT ONE MINUTEWTF? Why did she have a place when I hadn’t even applied for one and had since completely missed the deadline to get in to uni? As such our ‘friendship’ completely broke down. I felt very very stupid. (I should point out we are friends again now).
  • At this time I got depressed (not as in full on depression) or more should I say frustrated at work. Here I was in a dead-end job I didn’t want for the rest of my life, yet no options for anything else, and feeling like I had no friends (so not true!).
  • Then May/June time I started hanging out with a couple of people from work I had gone out and got drunk with once in February. Happiness starts here. Suddenly I had a group of friends I could open up to, who I enjoyed spending time with and we went through quite possibly the most accelerated friendship ever to happen in the history of mankind! Those two girls and that one guy are now some of the closest people to me. In a way they are a kind of family to me. They are all four years older than me but you wouldn’t tell from looking at the way we act together.
  • Late June I decided ‘what the hell’ and sent off an application for uni. Understand it was very late and chances of getting a place where limited but not impossible. I had to go for a Science Foundation Year because of my crappy grades.
  • Less than two weeks after applying I got an unconditional offer from the University of East Anglia. All I had to do was accept it and the place was mine – no questions asked, nothing more needed from me. So I took it.
  • Work was much easier for the next three months as I knew I wasn’t staying there after September. All was merry and happy.
  • As the crunch time came I was having more and more doubts about whether I really wanted to go to uni or not. I had a job (an asset in a time of recession), amazing friends and was happy. Did I really need anything more? Thankfully I saw sense and didn’t back out of my decision but, my, was it hard leaving. I had three leaving-dos the last of which was painfully emotional. I was moving from as far West as you can go in England to as far East as possible. I was dead scared of losing my friends (as it would feel like I was losing my family) but they assured me that would never happen.
  • So as of the 20th of September 20o9, I have been a student of UEA, Norwich. I’m two years older than I ‘should’ be and when I start my ‘real’ degree this September I’ll be three years older than some of the students on it. But so what. I’m finally here. And guess what? I didn’t lose my friends from back West. Nope I now have them as well as some of the most amazing people I’ve ever met in my life. The friends I’ve made here at uni are most definitely going to be friends for life.
  • Happiness grows exponentially here and continues.
  • ‘Course now would be the time I list everything that’s happened at uni but blimey that would take six million pages to write and that still wouldn’t cover everything! No, that’ll be material for posts yet to come.

*scratches head* I’ve been rambling haven’t I? And I haven’t even covered anything that I wanted to.

Right, well here’s my point. I want to start keeping this thing up to date (again?). The way I use the Internet has changed a lot (another post to come) which I think adds to why I don’t blog anymore. Not only did I stop writing, but I also stopped reading the blogs I visited everyday. I want to change that.

So here’s to some awful rambling set to continue, and me stalking your site once again. Sound good to you? :-D

Posted from Norwich, England, United Kingdom.

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A Year Ago Today, Life Changed

A strange title I know, but I’m not too sure how else to put it!

Sunday 25th of May 2008 was a day I knew would eventually come, but dearly wished it not to. You see I was fortunate (in some respects, in others unfortunate) that the deaths of people around me all happened before I turned 3 years old. So I had no memory of what it was, what it felt like and really rather sadly, who the people were that died. (The latter actually used to get me upset as a child). Last year changed all of that.

I’d had a couple of beers Saturday night so woke up on Sunday morning pretty late (10am I think). I hadn’t checked my email since early Saturday evening and so when I checked some time around 11am I had a real shock.

A message from one of my friends who lives down London way (where I used to live) messaged me on Facebook to say that one of our friends had died on Saturday and she wanted me to know.

I’d been terrible at keeping in contact and no one had my mobile number or email address so Facebook was the only possible means of contact at the time. Something I’m not proud of but have changed since.

As anyone would I was… I don’t know, lost? Everyone was writing R.I.P. in their statuses so I did too but then it started to settle in my brain a bit more. That and I was desperate to talk to someone about it, to question it and there just wasn’t anyone there!

Late afternoon-ish time I couldn’t stand to be at home. I couldn’t listen to music. I couldn’t sit down. I couldn’t eat. Nothing felt right. So I went for a walk and looked for anywhere remote enough for me to be left alone. I eventually did find somewhere but it didn’t help. I honestly thought perhaps the whole thing was a joke, how could it be possible? Really?

Anyway I walked home and drank many many beers. When it was 11pm the only phone number I had been able to find on Facebook was rather cruelly, the one belonging to the friend who’d died. I didn’t hesitate. I thought if anyone can tell me the truth surely it’s the friend in question?

I rang but when the other end picked up there was silence. Calling out ‘hello? Hello’ repeatedly to no answer left me to hang up.

Then the number rang me. It was my friend’s mother asking me if I knew the number I was ringing and I said ‘yes… I’ve been told [name here] died… I just didn’t believe it.’ At which point she had to tell me it’s true, bursts out into tears which causes me to do the same. I stammered countless apologies because I felt like a complete and utter fool to make her go through doing that.

I somehow managed to sleep and the next morning the friend that messaged me originally rang me and we chatted for well over an hour. A strange conversation like I’ve never had.

Thankfully I wasn’t due in to go to college that Monday as (rather unthankfully) my final exams had started. At which point I didn’t care about my exams anymore. What did a piece of paper mean compared to the loss of a friend’s life? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Her funeral was two weeks later, on the day of one of my maths exams and I had to fight my college to let me off the exam and travel down to near London. I knew that if I was to have any chance of being able to get through this strangeness, it would have to start with the funeral.

The day of her funeral and wake was… unbelievable. Horrible. Terrifying. Just so effin’ wrong. Just seeing a wooden box being carried… in the hearse… at the crematorium. Uh. Really really awful.

Although technically yesterday was the 1st anniversary, I think today and for the next coming years will be the hardest because it was the day I found out and my feelings and thoughts towards so many things dramatically changed.

I realised that for the whole of my life I had always put education first, before anything. Including before friends. When you’ve had a childhood and teenagehood like mine it’s easily done. But for the past year I’ve switched my priorities. Putting all your efforts into education means nothing if you have no one to share your life with.

The next step for me is to waken up to the fact that her death was suicide. Currently in my head I view it that my friend was taken from this world and not that she took her own life. To think about just what she did do, is something I really can’t face. It would mean being so effin’ angry with her, and angry is not something I do. Especially not on my own.

Will I ever face up to the reality of it? I’m tempted to say I doubt it, but who knows. I have huge difficulties in dealing and realising things that happen around me, as I’ve grown into just accepting whatever happens. I still have yet to face the fact that I moved out of my childhood home and my parents divorced which was some 7/8 years ago.

Maybe someday I’ll find the right guy to spend my life with who’ll be the one to help deal with all of the crap. And if no guy turns up I’ll be more than happy with a cat or two. ;-)

Twitter posts from a year ago:

Oh. My. God. Just found out one of my friends committed suicide. :-( I don’t know how to think/feel/act.Should I be doing something?

I’m drunk and a mess. I rang my friend’s phone to be told that she did indeed overdose yesterday. I can’t deal with this right now. :’(

desperately wishing to be with my friends right now. Why do I live 75 miles away?

I can’t do it. I can’t blog about how I’m feeling. This is just too hard.

Huge kudos goes to Vixx & Sarah. :-D And Pumpkin Princess of course! (Kitty, Dita).

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