December – A Month of Ups and Downs

Well, I told myself I was going to be truthful in these monthly blog posts, and December kinda sucked. It’s not all bad news though, and I don’t have much interest in retreading every single thing that’s gone wrong this month. We’ll just touch on the highlights – the disastrous general election won with ignorance and misinformation, and complications with my new little nephew causing a lot of worry. He’ll be fine, but not without help from the NHS. Good thing we’re trusting the Tories with that again.

But I have a nephew now, which is fantastic news! Certainly not all doom and gloom this month. Christmas was a thing, which was enjoyable despite everything. We had my niece over, and it was fun to relive the magic of Christmas through a child’s eyes once again. I also went to see Star Wars Episode IX with my friend Reece, and had a blast. It’s unsurprisingly a divisive movie, and it does have a lot of flaws, but I enjoyed it for what it was. I was also reminded of the importance of sharing creative ideas, after a particularly motivating conversation about our respective story ideas shortly afterwards. I think my biggest flaw as a creative is that I let ideas play out in my head until I get bored of them, without any outside perspectives weighing on or encouraging me to actually make the stuff that’s in my head a reality.

Oh, also, Trump got impeached, which was delightful. For all the good that did.

Touching on the election quickly, as I’ve not said much about it since the results came in. It’s caused me to do a lot of thinking about the nature of people, as well as the dangers of existing in an echo chamber. I have attempted to follow and listen to right-wing people in the past, but I’ve always grown too frustrated by their lack of empathy or ignorance regarding the needs of the common individual. And yet, going into this election, I was actually cautiously optimistic that Labour would actually win, which was clearly not the prevailing sentiment. It was a painful but necessary reminder that no matter how things may look on the surface, there is truly only one way to take the temperature of the general public: the vote itself. And incredibly frustratingly, the majority of people seem to believe biased newspapers and listen to millionaires telling them that it’s a tough old life, but that the reward is muddling through it with what you’ve got. And never mind the climate change, best not to worry about that sort of thing.

Anyway. Political segment over. This month I’ve also finally had the chance to play a Halo game (and I love it), I enjoyed watching the first seasons of The Umbrella Academy and The Witcher, I bought nine (nine!) Switch games with a Christmas gift card, bought myself Planet Zoo and relished in finally returning to a Zoo Tycoon style game, and attempted vlogging again. It did not go well. Oh, and I discovered that I quite like turkish delight.

But hang on, there, Kristian. Never mind the end of the month, it’s the end of the year! Where’s your summary of 2019? It’s the end of the decade, too! Where’s your summary of that? Well, let’s save that for a second blog post. I’ll combine them, probably. And I’ll write it tomorrow, maybe. Last month I said that having all these deadlines was reminiscent of uni, so in true university fashion I’ll be handing in my work on the day of the deadline. What better way to round off the decade?

Graduation – The Day and the Future

Last Thursday, I graduated. And it was pretty great! I wore a suit and a robe and a funny hat that made me feel like I was balancing a dinner plate on my head. And whilst what I said last week still holds true and I perhaps didn’t feel as accomplished or worthy as some of the other people at graduation, I still had a damn good time and did manage to muster some semblance of pride in myself. It was wonderful to see my uni friends again to compare congratulatory hats, and overall it’ll probably go down as one of the best days of my life.

The craziest thing for me was that I wasn’t nervous. At all. And that’s kind of a big deal for me, because I’m the kind of guy who does get nervous about these things. When I first showed up and didn’t know where to go for a minute, I was a lil’ insecure, but that’s mostly because I don’t like looking lost and alone. And then my hat started to fall off mid-ceremony so there was some anxiety about it deciding to venture off to pastures new mid-handshake as I was on stage, but a quick re-adjustment whilst still sat down took care of that potential calamity. And besides that, it was smooth sailing. I don’t think I’ve felt confident at any public event in my life but something kept me calm, and I think it was the knowledge that I belonged there.

Of course, the issue with a Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing is that there aren’t exactly many job opportunities waiting for you when you step out of the sanctuary of purpose that is university work. As I discussed last week, I’ve found a surprising level of meaning in the job that I currently have, and it’s only proven to me that my path in life is going to stray from writing for perhaps a little while, while I sort things out. There are many aspects to each individual, and whilst I’ve dedicated an entire university course to writing over the last three years, that’s not the entirety of who I am as a person. It’ll always be a core part of who I am, though, and I’ll continue to express myself via blog posts and other little writing projects before I reach a time in my life when I start to dedicate more time to it.

 

Graduation – A Three Year Retrospective

In 2 days, I graduate from the University of St Mark & St John with a 2:1 Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing. So, that’s a thing that I’ve done with my life.

When I was in Year 2, my teacher Mrs. Salt set us a task; write a story. Any story, about anything. And as far as my memory can stretch, that was the first time I’d really been asked to do this, though I’m sure that I’d written before. And apparently, what I wrote was, for a Year 2, somewhat exceptional. My memory is, as you might expect, somewhat hazy, but I recall much fuss being made about it, recording it on tape and having it shared to other teachers and stuff. This was the first thing I’d really excelled at in school, and to me, it was just something I enjoyed doing anyway. So from there on out, I kept doing it. It become sort of… my speciality.

As a side-note, here’s what I remember of Year 2 Kristian’s work of fiction: It was about a woman who dived into a pool, continued diving, and emerged into a kind of a floating island paradise. It encompassed more than two whole pages of what I believe was A5 paper, so not a whole lot by adult standards! It sure felt like a lot at the time, though.

Anyway, fast forward a decade or so to my GCSE’s and I’d often have gone through phases of writing stories throughout my life. The natural course was to take English Literature as one of my three A-Levels, as one of my only academic strengths, and when it finally came down to deciding what to do with my life past that point, I looked back throughout my life and unsurprisingly chose the one constant thread of productive ability I’d developed. Creative Writing stood out to me from the outset as a course that would not only be familiar territory, but be actively fun to pursue. You don’t need a Creative Writing degree to be a writer, but it would certainly help me hone those skills and integrate them further into my conscious lifestyle. Wouldn’t it?

Well, I don’t regret choosing it. I met some amazing people and learned some amazing things. My skill in writing undoubtedly improved, even when my motivation did not. The course provided many sources of inspiration, pushed me into writing what must now be the majority of my fictional works, caused me to pursue other writing projects such as this blog, and taught me that many – maybe most – writers are as directionless and perturbed by life as I am. Which was something of a comfort.

I expected two things to happen by the end of university: One, I’d enhance my writing skills and come out the other end ready to write a novel and kick-start my writing career. Two, I’d develop as a person, both socially and philosophically, and emerge from my third year as an adult who’d forged new outlooks on life that thwarted my anxieties and other issues. But, much like the short-term solution of student loans, I’ve finished uni worse for these things than when I’d entered. Okay, I’m a better writer now, but I’m nowhere near ready to start a novel… and the second expectation was incredibly off the mark. If anything, I regressed.

The naked truth of it is that I chose to pursue this Creative Writing course because it seemed like the natural progression that rewarded a short term distraction from the uncertainties of adulthood in return for 9 hours of my time per week. 6 starting from the second year. As a course that was primarily driven by self-improvement, the uni allocated very little in the way timetabled lectures, and this allowed the lowly-motivated and easily distracted students (see: me) to treat the course as almost a second thought. Don’t get me wrong, I worked hard for my degree, and so did the others on my course. But personally, I failed to develop as a person and as a writer due to my ability to procrastinate and feed my brain’s ever-hungry reward centre.

I wrote a blog post at the start of the year essentially outing myself as not being ready for life and exclaiming that this year would have to see me making some big personal changes as I transitioned out of student life and into the ‘real world’. And since I finished uni those many months ago, I’ve developed more as a person outside of the course than I did in my 3 years there. In finding a job and settling into (temporary) financial insecurity, I’ve found myself becoming more confident and willing to do things that I’d have previously shied away from, due to it being outside my comfort zone. I’m still an unorganised bundle of neuroses with bouts of laziness and fear of living, but I’m managing it much better now. Things that once bothered me are now common practice. I feel more confident when I’m out and about because I finally got a damn haircut and look less like a teenager by the day. And I’ve surprised myself but completely changing my lousy work ethic around, and changing from wanting to do as little as possible to feeling lousy if I go too long without being productive… which is kind of the way it should be, whether that be self-driven productivity goals, or simply meeting responsibilities at work.

But to reiterate on what has been, for many of you I’m sure, a surprisingly pessimistic blog post – I regret this university course not at all. Whilst I may not have grown as a person specifically at uni, it still put me on the course I’m on now, which is onward and upwards. It’s also given me the tools to subconsciously appreciate fictional works even more for what they do, which is an exponentially growing source of inspiration for my own writing pursuits. And I won’t bullshit you and say that I’ve got big plans on that front, because right now I’m still in life-transit, still outside of my comfort zone whilst travelling to the next one. I have a whole load of issues to deal with, whether they be emotional, financial or life-development, and if writing has to take a backseat until I’m in a more settled environment, then that’s fine by me. I used to have these dreams of being a young prodigy of a writer, but as I’ve all too slowly learned over the last three years, writing is 5% talent and 95% damn hard work – something that the Kristian up until now has been awfully bad at.

I’ll miss university all the same. The friends I made there I saw precious little of due to our sparse schedules; the lecturers were always kind and helpful, and I always found myself anticipating lectures… even if they did sometimes send me to near-sleep. It has been the last great bastion of certainty in my life, and leaving has been, and will continue to be no easy feat. But it’s time to move forwards now, I think, and develop the parts of myself that have been sorely neglected.

 

Further reading:

Movie – Wish I Was Here (Should be on Netflix.) Specifically, Adrian’s conflict between his ambitions and the call of reality. Also, Zach Braff.

Vlog – Unfollowing Your Dreams by Charlie McDonnell. Specifically, how it’s okay to alter the course of your life’s initial charting.

The Flaw in Flawless Futures

I’m coming to the end of my Creative Writing course at university, and as people coming to the end of things are wont to do, I’ve taken to looking back over the course and wondering about the past, the present, and the future. So, in other words, yes, I’m procrastinating from finishing my coursework.

I don’t know about you, but whenever I look a few years into the future I picture myself as a different person, who has undergone some kind of fictional character’s development and matured into the flawless final product of who I was meant to be. And every time I set myself up for this, and every time I simply end up looking back to the start and laughing at how similar I am to the person who started this chapter of my life.

I’ve changed, of course, grown in various ways. Just the other day I unearthed my old alternate Twitter account, in all its dreadfully unfunny glory, and realised that I’d stopped posting to the account just before starting uni. Surely, thought I, this had been a project of a teenage Kristian. And I suppose it was, but I’d have been verging on 18 at the time. So yes, while some parts of us don’t change, other parts do, and it’s my belief that over the last few years I’ve grown more reserved in my personality. Perhaps too much so. But that’s straying into autobiographical territories.

I remember when I went to my course’s open day. This was a few years ago, so my memory is somewhat patchy, but I remember meeting my lecturer, wandering the campus, hearing about the course and thinking that this was my introduction to adult life. This was where I’d grow my wings and become truly independent, forge stronger friendships than ever before and really come in to my own as a writer. By the end of my third year I’d be self-sufficient, no longer neurotic or uncertain of myself or grappling with the edges of my mind. And this may come as a surprise to you, but my predictions turned out to be less than accurate. They were, in fact, the same predictions I’d had when I started sixth form, and even when I started secondary school. I remember sitting in the grand hall alongside hundreds of other kids and thinking, this was it, this was a fresh start, and by the end I’d be a refined, perfected person.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not crying, “Woe is me!” in this blog post. I just find it interesting how the future can appear to one as a solved problem, and all one has to do is get to the other side of it. Even now, as I prepare to leave the educational nest, I can’t help but have this vision of myself in a few years when I’ll have a good job and a place to live, standing on my own two feet and maybe starting on a few books, finally able to be happy in my stability and become this mythical figure I’ve always dreamed of.

Some would chastise me for that cynical last paragraph and say that such ideas are optimistic. And hey, fair play, they, you know… are. I’m supposed to be an optimist myself. But I know me. And it’s not that I don’t believe in myself or anything like that. It’s more to do with the idea of always being the same person at your core. Even if I do find my own place to live, get a good job, start becoming a writer and all these other excellent things, I’ll probably always be neurotic, uncertain of myself, less interesting and less remarkable than I’d like. And that’s okay, because that’s what makes me, me. If these things do change, they’ll happen slowly, over many years and in many small, undocumented little skews to my personality as I grow in the world. Maybe you only ever get what you want when you stop wanting it. When I was a kid, I’d hear a group of friends in their early twenties chattering excitedly about one thing they all enjoyed, and I dimly remember wanting almost nothing more than to be that age, with those enthusiastic friends and conversations, and the independence to go wherever with them, whenever. And I have that now. And I should be more thankful for that.

The biggest issue in my life right now is stability. I need a job. I need my grades. I need independence, and safety of mind. I need other things too. But I’ll always overlook the problems close at hand, towards the idea of a perfect me some years off. And this isn’t some magical revelation that’ll solve all my problems and give me a whole new perspective in the world, because that’s not how the mind works. It’s merely… an observation.

Prospective Retrospective Perspective

The other day, I realised that I could lose myself for hours in r/AskReddit, reading people’s stories on various things. It’s actually a pretty great place to go for writing prompts, I’d wager. But it’s also great for some perspective, at times. The other day on the website, for example, somebody asked users over fifty what the greatest decade of their life had been so far.

Hardly any of them said it was their twenties.

I mean, obviously I know that life goes on after university, but the wall of uncertainty is, at least for me, so large that it’s hard to see into the future. Job interviewers will often ask you where you see yourself in ten years, to which I’m sure many people’s honest answer would be “You think I’d be here if I knew?” Depending, of course, on whether it was their dream job or not.

The thing is that many young people, like me, don’t typically dedicate much thought to old age. And I suppose that by the time I’m in my twilight years, I’ll have either forgotten all about this blog or have no means of access to it; if I do, I may have great intrigue on discovering what twenty year old me thought of the world with such great naivete. I’d be tempted to put a silly message to my future self here, but that kind of stuff usually never ends up being read, anyway.

I find that Reddit thread greatly inspiring. It’s reminded me that even if I screw up now, I have an entire lifetime to put things right, no matter how wrong, and to readjust. I also find it somewhat worrying, however, to find the odd comment saying “Life has been a downhill spiral since my twenties”. Obviously, life is a different experience for everyone, but I’d desperately like not to be that person. So I guess that I’d better make that the challenge of the present before it becomes a lament of the past.

Oh, and sorry for the blog title. I couldn’t resist.

Ancients as Moderns, Moderns as Ancients

Sometimes, when I’m staring out into the grey abyss of rainy Britain from the confines of an overcrowded bus, I think to myself… Romans stood here.

I stare into the sea of black umbrellas and people gazing eagerly into their smartphones, latecomers scurrying into their bus stops and think, Romans, real Romans with real swords and shields stood here. The only barrier between these two outstandingly different realities is the passage of time.

I think that when we think about Romans or Greeks, or Vikings, we consider them in a kind of fictional way. We don’t doubt that these peoples existed and that they did what they did, but how often do you stop to think about the fact that it happened in this place? From this race? The brave and the foolhardy lived by codes of honour and conviction of faith. The King reigned over all and, let’s be honest, those times aren’t exactly missed. Democracy may not be exactly what it says on the tin as of late but there’s certainly no preferable alternative, at least not that I can see.

It never ceases to interest me how we view our ancient history. We are of the same race, of the same lineage. Humans were and are capable of that kind of cruelty. But civilisation and technology, evolving in the ways it has, has encouraged communication above all else. In this regard, I believe the Internet to be one of the most revolutionary inventions in the whole of human history to date. In the wider perspective of time as a species it’s still very much a new phenomenon, and I think we’ve yet to see just how it will effect humanity in the long run; for better or for worse.

What really gets me intrigued is when I hear little things that the history books don’t tell you, things you’d never have expected of a Roman that ties them to contemporary cultures. For instance, ancient graffiti, rife with colloquialisms and rid of the stuffy conventions of high society we’re so often presented with. “Aufidius was here. Goodbye.” Smiffy woz ere 08, anyone? The presentation of the message may seem absurdly different to us, but it’s essentially the same; two human beings wishing to make their mark on the world by painting messages on walls confirming their presence. It is a small link, I’ll grant that, but for me I was immediately that apart from that infernal passage of time, the ancient and the modern are closer than we think.

A thousand years from now, how will we be viewed? For us British, will we be viewed as Elizabethans again? Will we be confused with the earlier era of Elizabethans in textbooks – should they still use textbooks – and cause frustration? Will our ways be considered barbaric, our lifestyles unhealthy, our society archaic? We like to think that the emergence of digital databases and the like will document this period of history better than before, but I’m sure the Egyptians thought the same about writing and books, and look how mythical they are in our eyes. Or my eyes. I cannot see through your eyes and I think you’d be rather annoyed if I stole them to give it a try.

I wonder what elements of our lifestyle that we take for granted will be treated as old and deeply flawed? I personally believe – or hope – that the idea of growing up educated for the purposes of working for a pittance until death will, by then, be viewed as a horrific treatment of human life, one which bred existentialism and quashed creativity and freedom. Of course, one can never estimate what such a large passage of time will hold for humanity. Perhaps we’ll all be dead. Perhaps we’ll have dispersed among the stars and races, and the idea of “humanity” as a collective will vanish. Perhaps this will be the peak of our evolution and a thousand years from now we’ll all be Romans again.

When presented with the question as to whether you’d visit the past or the future when given a TARDIS, most people seem to choose the past. I believe I’ve detailed my reason for choosing the future.

Weekly Updates!

Hello there, everyone! I’m about to announce a really bloody brilliant and/or somewhat terrifying idea which will ultimately end in either a surge of productivity or a quivering heap of disappointing failure! I am talking, of course, about the rather unoriginal but still harrowing idea of WEEKLY UPDATES, which you have most likely already garnered by the less-than-subtle header, therefore rendering this opening paragraph, ah, completely useless.

Let’s face it, I’ve been rubbish at updating this thing. I won’t make excuses but I do feel obligated to tell you it’s not out of a lack of interest but instead, partially the lack of knowing what to write in a blog with no set subject matter and partially, (most probably mostly) due to the fact that whenever I consider voicing an opinion, I fear that a thousand winged demons will descend on me telling me that I’m wrong and pretentious and smelly.

You’ll have to excuse the runalong sentences, I recently marathoned some Zero Punctuation and as such, everything I write has, in my head, taken on the voice of Yahtzee, the show’s host. His rampant disregard for oxygen when ripping into games leaves me thoroughly amused. Probably not the best writing tactic, though.

Speaking of video games, I will additionally be updating my almost-untouched gaming blog, 32 Bit Brain, with a post every week. The blog posts for Perpetually Perturbed will be appearing on Tuesdays, because nothing really happens on a Tuesday. The blog posts for 32 Bit Brain, however, will be appearing on Thursdays, because nothing really happens on a Thursday, either, but it’s a little bit closer to the end of the week, the fabled time for video game happenings in a working gamer’s quaint abode.

One issue which you may be thinking is that if I force myself to write blog posts every week, then the material within those blog posts will also feel forced and uninterested. And I’ve taken that into consideration, due to the fact that the lack of motivation to write blog posts has resulted in this barren wasteland in the first place. But worry not. I’ll simply write a blog post whenever I feel like it, or in batches, and release them over the course of weeks. In theory, this pushes me to exercise and enjoy my blog writing in a flexible creative manner, whilst also poking me and telling me to actually do that thing wot I like doing.

So… let’s see how this goes!