#oneaday Day 45: Happy Wordiversary

Apparently, according to my notifications anyway, today is the 16th anniversary of me signing up on WordPress.com. Indeed, looking back at my very first post it does seem that I started blogging on here on July 22, 2008.

Back in those days, I posted sporadically. I wasn't really sure what to do with a blog at the time, I just felt like I wanted one. It actually wasn't the first blog I'd had, either, although it's the only one that's survived this long.

I did, at one point, post an anonymous "Tales from the Staffroom" blog on BlogSpot that recounted my experiences as a classroom teacher, but there appears to be no trace of that left on the current Internet. There is an archive of it from as recently as 2023, but Google appears to have gone on a "Blogger purge" at some point in the last year, so the address no longer works on the current Web. This is a shame, but at least archive.org caught it before it disappeared.

At the time I started this blog, I was still working at the Apple Store as a "Creative" — that is to say, I was one of the people whose job it was to provide training sessions for Mac users on the use of creative software. Technically our job was supposed to be confined to lessons on Apple software only, but we inevitably found ourselves having to deal with customers using all manner of weird and wonderful pieces of software for their very specific needs.

This was partly our own fault — one guy on the Creative team was a Photoshop expert, so him happily covering that set the expectation with customers that we should all be able to cover Photoshop, even though several of us had specialisms in other areas — but also it just felt a bit mean to have someone just turn up, ask for help (which, nine times out of ten, was pretty simple, given that most folks who signed up for the "One to One" programme were new Mac users and often elderly) and tell them "no".

I enjoyed that job for quite a while. I had a nice group of friends and I was good at it. The pay was… all right, considering it was a retail position, and the freebies and staff discounts were excellent. Unfortunately it ended badly when the management of the store inexplicably went into something of a decline and started being unnecessarily harsh on the folks working for them. I ended up losing my job after standing up for a colleague of mine who absolutely was unfairly dismissed, but given that both management and the folks above them closed ranks, he was never going to get fair treatment. And, as it turned out, I didn't, either. Thankfully, I resigned before they could fire me, but it left an extremely bitter taste in my mouth with regards to all things Apple.

Anyway, I don't want to dwell on that too much because that's probably a whole other story I can tell another day. That was the context in which I was writing those first posts, though: I was, for a time, genuinely quite happy and satisfied with the way things were going. My life perhaps wasn't proceeding in the direction I had initially intended — after a nervous breakdown, I decided that classroom teaching really wasn't for me — but it was proceeding, at least. And having a blog was a nice breezy way to ponder on all sorts of things without any sort of real "pressure". I can't even remember if I'd joined Facebook or Twitter in 2008; I think I probably had, but social media certainly wasn't the all-encompassing force of shittiness that it is today back then.

It's interesting to look back and see things that no longer exist, such as PMOG, the Passively Multiplayer Online Game, where you earned experience points and other RPG-style benefits for simply browsing the Web. And it's also gratifying to see that so far as my tastes are concerned, some things never change.

You are, of course, always welcome to browse back into the archives via the dropdown in the sidebar. (I'm not sure where it is on mobile, probably at the bottom?) I'm not the same person I was back then — but every experience I've had, everything I've written about, has helped make me who I am today, for better or worse.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 44: What's Next?

Do you ever get the feeling that you're just sort of waiting for the next "major" thing to happen in your life, and that you're unsure exactly how you might go about triggering such a thing, if indeed it is trigger-able?

I feel this quite a lot. It's disconcerting. It's like a constant sense that I should be doing something, but I have no idea what. It's a feeling of unease that creeps up on me and whispers "Don't you think you should…" and then trails off before saying the important part of the sentence. It is, in short, just a general feeling of discontent.

Considering the situation rationally, I'm not sure I have any real reason to feel like this. I have a comfortable living situation, a good job, a loving wife and two wonderful cats. I have an enormous video game collection, likely more than enough to see me entertained until my dying day. I have creative outlets in the form of this blog, my website MoeGamer and my YouTube channel.

And yet something still doesn't feel quite right. I am dissatisfied. I am restless. And I think a significant part of my reason for feeling like this is plain ol' loneliness. While the aforementioned wife and cats are wonderful company on a daily basis, I do mourn past eras of my life when social activities feel like they came a bit more naturally and easily.

Going to a friend's house after school. Dropping by the coffee shop on the way to lectures with a university friend (and sometimes not quite getting around to leaving the coffee shop for said lecture). Evenings spent couch-surfing between numerous different friends' houses because my own house was a significant distance from where everyone else I knew. Habitually dropping by Hoffers Bakery for a roll and a cake, then settling in for an afternoon of multiplayer N64. Weekly board game sessions. Going out, like, anywhere.

All of those are things that are well and truly in the past, and were already going that way before COVID hit — and once COVID did hit, nothing ever really recovered. I've seen the people who are supposedly my closest friends maybe three or four times in the last few years. There are people online with whom I used to be extremely close that I can't remember the last time I heard from. There are people that I once thought would be "lifelong friends" that I feel have probably forgotten about me.

At least some of the blame for this can be laid at my own feet, of course. But honestly, my own efforts in these regards tailing off stemmed from growing frustration that I would often want to do something fun with people I liked, and for one reason or another, it seemed like that was never possible. Scheduling conflicts. Family commitments. Illness. Simply not being arsed. I got to a point where I felt like I was putting in effort that wasn't being reciprocated proportionally, and it just didn't feel worth it any more. That, in turn, did a number of my self-confidence, meaning that more often than not my brain just doesn't want to let me try and reach out to people for fear of them just rejecting me — or worse — once again.

As such, the end result of all this is a 43 year old man sitting in front of his computer in the dark typing about how he feels lonely to the maybe 5-10 people who still actually bother to read this site. Admitting you were lonely amounted to social suicide in my teenage years — you were a "Larry" (for "Larry Loner") — but now, it feels like an increasingly inevitable part of life in 2024. And it sucks.

I think that, more than anything, is why I'm dissatisfied. I want that "next thing", that amorphous "major event" in my life, to be the end of this horrible loneliness. But at this point, I simply don't really know how to make that happen.

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#oneaday Day 43: Regrets, But Not Why You Think

I had a few drinks this evening, and I am now feeling regrets. Not because I've drunk too much or are smashed off my face or anything, but because it just felt like a big waste of time, and it's a whole lot of "bad stuff" that probably won't help the weight loss.

I've been feeling a curious… absence of anything any time I've tried drinking in the last few years. The most I feel is getting a bit hot and flushed after a couple of whatevers, but I can't remember the last time I felt genuinely merry, tipsy or drunk.

On balance, this is probably a good thing, because being drunk tends to lead to doing and/or saying stupid things, but it's also a bit of a shame that drinking appears to have become an activity that I derive no joy from whatsoever, whereas back in my student days it was inevitably a central part of social occasions, and I have plenty of stories involving drunken nights out.

I attribute this to a few things. Firstly, I'm not getting any younger, though I know age doesn't necessarily preclude anyone from enjoying a drink or two to the degree that they feel they're affecting them. Secondly, I haven't been really fucking drunk for… probably at least ten years at this point, possibly more. I would have thought that would make my tolerance drop to rock bottom, but as noted above, I just feel… nothing, really.

Probably the most significant reason that I derive no joy from drinking is because I've seen what overreliance on alcohol can do to a person and the people around them, on more than one occasion. Thankfully all the people I have known with such a problem are all comfortably recovering now, but I still can't help but be reminded of the things I saw and heard when things were really bad.

In fact, I'd probably go so far as to say that I'm probably traumatised by such things. I hasten to add that nothing irreversibly bad happened to or was done to me by or as a result of the person who had the problem, but I will say that you should never assume the person directly suffering with alcohol-related issues is the only one who needs support. I went through some rather dark times of my own, and I suspect residual feelings towards those dark times have resulted in me drawing no joy from alcohol today.

As I say, it's a bit of a shame, because I always used to enjoy a boozy night out with friends, and indeed there are almost certainly entries in the depths of this blog's archives that outline exactly how and why I enjoyed such occasions. But for any and/or all of the reasons outlined above — plus the fact I rarely see "friends" in general at all these days, particularly post-COVID — that's just not something that is anywhere even vaguely near the top of my priority list these days.

Every time I've had a drink or two in the last few years, I've felt something like this. So I think it might just be time to say that enough is enough, I don't need or want alcohol in my life, and leave it at that. I guess that part of my life is passed.

Which, as I say, is probably a good thing, on balance.

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#oneaday Day 42: Melting

It is so hot here right now. The sun's gone down but it's still sweltering. Those who live in typically warmer climes often like to mock us here in the UK for complaining about the heat when it gets anywhere over 25 degrees C, but this is a country built on the assumption that your average day will be grey and miserable, probably drizzling slightly. Consequently, all our houses are built to trap heat and stay warm, even when you emphatically do not wish them to.

We made the wise investment of a portable air conditioner a couple of years back, and that lives in the bedroom, meaning that we can at least get some sleep in a bearable temperature. The rest of the house is festooned in fans, too, which help a little bit but not quite enough. There comes a point where all they're doing is blowing the hot air around a bit, which is better than it just sort of hanging there in that suffocating way it does, but not enough to really cool you off.

It's these kinds of conditions that make you wish you'd remembered to put some of your cans of drink in the fridge rather than leaving them in the back room, a room with a lot of windows which, unsurprisingly, gets very warm at times like this. (I have now put a bunch of drinks in the fridge, so at least in a few hours I can have something actually cold.) I tell you: warm Irn Bru Xtra is not good.

The one vague positive is that it's time for ice cream. Ice cream is a great delight and joy, and I sincerely doubt the words of anyone who doesn't say they feel at least a bit of the same joy they felt as a child when the ice creams come out. Despite owning a breadmaker and an air fryer, we haven't quite reached the middle class status where we're making our own ice cream; just a well-stocked freezer with a selection of both creamy and fruity treats is just the ticket at a time like this.

Now, my brain is dribbling out of my ears somewhat, so I think I'm going to go and have one of those aforementioned ice creams and do something that requires minimal thought.

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#oneaday Day 40: The Cat's Routine

One of our cats, Patti, is very set in her ways, to a degree that I don't think I've seen in any other cat. She has Her Routine, and we must adhere to Her Routine, otherwise she gets very shouty at us.

The Routine begins anywhere between 5am and 8am with her telling me (not my wife) to wake up. This is accomplished through a combination of standing on me, yelling at me and tapping me with her paw, inevitably with just enough claw extended to make it slightly painful, and inevitably somewhere that you really don't want a claw, such as my eyelid or lip.

Once I am up, she will continue to yell at me until I go downstairs and put some biscuits in her bowl, which she may or may not deign to eat. Around this time, I must also provide Oliver, the other cat, with some wet food, because he likes wet food and is a growing boy. (Patti should not have wet food, because she tends to throw it up almost immediately. She often ends up eating Oliver's leftovers, which is usually fine for her apparently delicate digestion to cope with.)

After this breakfast routine is done with, she will almost certainly disappear somewhere in the house for a significant portion of the day. It might be on the windowsill in our bedroom, it might be behind my desk in my study, it might be under my chair in my study, it might be on "her" stool in the spare bedroom. We do not know what she is up to during these hours, but we have determined that if she does not wish to be found, she will not be found. On more than one occasion this has caused a mild panic.

At some point during the day, she will emerge from wherever she was hiding and start hassling me at my desk. This usually takes the form of sitting between my legs and occasionally clawing my knees and thighs. To date, I have not determined what, if anything, she actually wants when this part of The Routine is unfolding. Sometimes she wants a refill of her glass of water — oh yes, both cats refuse to drink out of their water bowls and instead prefer to have a glass left for them: one in the living room, one on the upstairs landing — and sometimes she wants attention. Sometimes I swear she's just doing it to be annoying.

At some point between 10pm and 11pm, she will decide that it is time for bed. If we are in the hallway, she will attempt to lead us up the stairs. If we are not making any movements that look like they might conclude in the bedroom, she will hassle me (not my wife) repeatedly until I comply with The Routine.

Once in the bedroom, she will sit in Patti Spot on the corner of the bed, usually getting slightly in the way but not enough for me to want to move her, and sleep there for most of the night. Sometimes she will disappear for a while during the night — often to go and eat — but she is usually there in the morning, ready for The Routine to begin anew.

As set in her ways as she is, I could probably learn something from her. And, given that she's in the "yelling at me to go to bed" stage, that's probably what I should go and do.

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#oneaday Day 39: Breaking Point

Had a bit of a meltdown earlier. Thankfully, I managed to direct it inwards rather than at anyone else, and I successfully channelled its energy into tidying some of the shit up around the house. So that's something, at least. Now I just feel kind of drained and empty.

I'd been building to something like this for a while, and I suspect I'm not out of this particular funk just yet, but heading along to Slimming World this evening and discovering I'd put a bunch of weight back on was just my mind's breaking point. I was upset and angry at myself, more than anything, because I know that weight gain was entirely deserved — I've not been focusing on the things I've been eating as much as I should be if I want to see results, and I've gotten away with doing so for probably more weeks than I should have.

A situation like this is a good opportunity for a change, but the frustrating thing is that when such a thing occurs, I find myself wishing that I could correct the mistake immediately. But it doesn't work like that; undoing bad habits takes time and effort, and you don't necessarily see results right away. The important thing is to acknowledge that you fucked up, be at peace with the fact you fucked up, and then take steps to ensure that you do not fuck up again for at least a little while.

So I stopped at the shops on the way home and got some healthy eats that will see me through the next few days. We're in a bit of an awkward position food-wise right now in that Andie is suffering some sort of mouth malady (likely an abscess under a root canal she had done a while back) and can't really eat much. That means I'm generally having to sort shit out for myself, and if anyone has ever attempted to feed themselves well as an individual person, you'll know that most things tend to be sold on the assumption that you are cooking for two.

That means you inevitably end up with too much stuff, which either means cooking too much stuff and having leftovers — not the end of the world — or using half the ingredients and risking the other half going off. I think we've all been successfully conditioned to (rightly) recognise that food waste is a bit of a sin, so I always feel a bit bad when I have to chuck stuff out, but it always feels a bit… constricting when you know you're either going to be eating the same thing two days in a row, or having to come up with something creative to do with the other ingredients you have in the fridge.

Anyway, long story short: this upset in our normal routine has kind of disrupted me making an effort to watch what I eat. To be fair, I was already kind of falling off the wagon a bit before Andie's troubles happened, but the situation just sort of compounded itself. But I know that is silly, so the stuff I picked up earlier should last a few days at least, and be suitable for individual portions or making an easy big batch of stuff that I can portion out and have the remainder as leftovers as required.

You may think I'm overthinking this and I probably am, but that is the nature of my autistic brain and its thought processes. I am now doing my best to not sit here stewing being pissed off at myself, so I think some well-earned video games are probably in order.

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#oneaday Day 35: Lay Me Down to Sleep

I'm exhausted, physically and mentally. I think mostly mentally, but that in turn is making me feel physically exhausted. The world just seems to be such a frustratingly relentless parade of shit at the moment that just existing is tiring. So although it's not even 10pm at the time of writing, I think I might just go to bed after this.

Unlike times gone by, I can thankfully say that it's not really my life that has gone to shit as such, but I'm not sure that's any great comfort. At least if there is something wrong in my life — and plenty of things are, don't get me wrong — it's possible to take action and do something about it.

But when you feel like the entire world is just collectively going insane, and there's fuck all you can do about it? That's exhausting. Whether it's the constant enshittification of today's services, the ever-increasing cost of living or the utterly stupid obsession with AI — all three of which are related to varying degrees, I'd say — it just feels like the world is moving in an unhealthy direction, and no matter how much you say "hang on a minute" there's nothing that you, as one person, can do.

I won't lie, I'm a little concerned for my pals in America right now, because they seem to be staring down a bit of a no-win situation when it comes to the upcoming presidential elections. On the one side, you have Trump, who is just an outright fucking maniac, and on the other, you have Biden, whose age is starting to make people question his suitability for the role. Given the choice, it seems like picking the old man is the sensible thing to do, but America never seems to make things that simple. After all, they already elected Trump into office once; while most people would probably agree that was a terrible idea, I have a strange feeling that it might happen again.

And while I feel a certain sense of solidarity with others online expressing similar concerns about the immediate and medium-term future, I also feel very alone. Ever since COVID hit, I've felt completely isolated aside from being with my wife, and it's done a real number on my self-confidence and self-esteem. I feel like I could do with some sort of support network when I'm feeling like this, and I just don't have one. Worse, I don't really know how to go about putting one together — or indeed reassembling one that I maybe once had.

I always used to think that as you grew older and became more of an "adult" that things would fall into place and become more straightforward. And perhaps they did for previous generations. But for me, right now, each passing year just feels worse and worse, like a sense of comfort and stability is just slipping further and further away. The world has been a place that I don't feel like I quite fit into for as long as I can remember. And in recent years, that feeling has only been becoming more and more pronounced with everything that's been happening.

If only it was possible to just completely disconnect from the bad things in the world, and spend your time surrounded by people who care about you, and whom you care about too. I guess I should feel lucky that I have my wife and cats, at the very least; some people don't even have that.

I'd apologise for the maudlin post, but I made it clear back when I started all this shenanigans again that it was going to be a form of "therapy" for me. And that means getting this stuff off my chest once in a while. I'm sure you understand. Perhaps you even feel the same way. I unfortunately cannot offer any advice or comfort if so, but know, at least, that you are not the only one feeling that way. Not, I suspect, by a long shot.

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#oneaday Day 32: Lies, Damned Lies

A lot has been made about the supposed proliferation of "fake news" and, regrettably, because discussion about it started around the time of Trump's last ascendancy (and to quite a significant degree from the Trump camp), not everyone takes the concept entirely seriously. But it's definitely something that happens, and it's making the Web less and less useful.

Earlier today, a member of a Discord I'm in posted a link to the following tweet:

The screenshots are of Windows Defender supposedly finding a plain text file containing nothing but the text "This content is no longer available." to be a piece of malware — specifically a Trojan called Casdet!rfn. Obviously a plain text file is not malware, so this is ridiculous, and thus Microsoft must have made a silly mistake and we can all laugh at them, ho ho ho.

I tried it.

Windows Defender did not find it to be malware.

I Googled it and found several outlets reporting on this "story", including some that really should know better (looking at you, Tom's Hardware) — and not one of them had seemingly put in the minimal amount of effort required to verify that this was actually a thing. In other words, none of them had done what I did above: recreate the situation by composing a blank text file, putting the words "This content is no longer available." in it and then scanning it with Windows Defender. A two-minute job, tops.

No, instead the most rigour anyone put in was to look at the replies to the Twitter post, which are fairly slim in number, making me wonder exactly how this misinformation had spread in the first place. The tweet in question has nearly 700,000 views, though only 800 of whatever the Muskrat is calling "Retweets" this week, suggesting the majority of its minor virality has come about through situations exactly like the one I describe above: people sharing it via means other than Twitter.

Now, I don't blame the chap on Discord. He was just sharing something he thought was funny. I don't even blame the original Tweeter, because it's entirely possible that this was true once and it was quietly fixed in a Windows update. But I do blame all these people, and Google.

Not only for reporting on this without doing the absolute bare minimum of fact-checking, but for not correcting these stories if indeed it was once true and now is no longer correct.

Either way, the result is the same: a lot of misinformation gets spread very easily, often by people who have no ill intent. It's not the fault of the people who share this stuff — although I personally would check any sort of claim like this before resharing it myself — but it absolutely is the fault of outlets authoritatively sharing this as "news" without doing any sort of research beyond looking at a few Twitter posts.

Sadly, this is what "news" is these days. Get a good hook for a story that might be the slightest bit clickable and/or shareable, then write it up (with at least 600 words for SEO purposes, of course) and just make some shit up in the middle if you need to. Doesn't matter if the story is true or not; by the time people have clicked or shared, the article has done its job, and it doesn't matter if anyone twigs that it's bollocks or not.

In some respects, I'm sad that I'm no longer working the games journalism beat. But in others, I know that if I was still a newshound, I'd likely be gently encouraged into this sort of odious practice in order to get the numbers up.

I had more integrity and rigour when I was covering stuff for GamePro and USgamer. I'd find stories, research them myself and report on them only when I was good and sure that there actually was a story there. And I didn't have to make a big deal out of doing that at the time, because that was the expectation for someone working a News Editor position.

Now? Engagement above all. Who cares if something is true? Numbers go big, suits stay happy. Fuck the actual audience who might want the publications they read to be reliable and trustworthy; they are, after all, the least important part of the whole equation these days.

If you're looking for the Web as it once was, then I'm sorry to inform you that This content is no longer available.

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#oneaday Day 30: A Milestone?

Is 30 days a milestone? I guess you can look at it that way, depending on if you consider nice round numbers a milestone. You can also look at 30 days as "about a month", too, so I guess it's significant from that respect. It's a long way off the 2,541 daily posts from last time around, of course, but that all started with baby steps, too. And then it just kept going.

Now and again I like to hit the "Random Post" button on this site to jump to one of the myriad posts in the archives. I often find myself surprised how often it throws up the same things, given how many of them there are, but computerised randomisation is, as we hopefully all know by now, imperfect.

That gives me an idea for today's post. I'll hit Random a few times and see what I think of what shows up. Are you ready? Then let's begin.

First up, Day 693 from first time around, and a post named Endings. In it, I contemplated the fact that I had just finished L.A. Noire, a game that I enjoyed a lot at the time but which I have forgotten almost everything about since. I pontificated on particularly effective endings that had stuck with me over the years — particularly downer endings. And Conker's Bad Fur Day was one that stuck with me, due to it coming after all the foul-mouthed ridiculousness that had come before.

I still agree with this. Conker's Bad Fur Day ends absolutely perfectly. It's a huge bummer in a lot of ways, of course, what with our hero losing his true love, but it also provides something of a sense of "reality catching up with him". The strange journey that Conker goes on over the course of Conker's Bad Fur Day starts silly and cartoonish, but gets darker and darker as you progress through things. By the last few sequences in the game, things are still silly, but there's a definite sobering undercurrent. The World War II-inspired sequence may have you fighting against teddy bears, but it's still World War II, and a lot of people get hurt and die.

The ending of Conker's Bad Fur Day is as much a signal to the player as it is to Conker. "Wake up," it says. "The time for play is over. Now it's time to get back to the grim reality of life." Sobering, to be sure.

Next up, post 850 from first time around, entitled Diablolical [sic]. In it, I lay out how I'd been having a good time with the then-newly released Diablo III, and that I didn't have as much of a problem with it being "always online" as the rest of the Internet seemed to. And that's because I recognised that Diablo III, far more than its predecessors, was actually an MMO. A well-disguised one, yes, but still an MMO.

I actually stand by this assessment, though my opinion on Diablo III itself has soured somewhat for a variety of reasons. Firstly, after playing it a bunch, I realised that its setting and unrelenting grimness was just plain boring to me. The world of Diablo is a world in which there is no hope; one in which you defeat the Big Bad of the hour and there's inevitably an even bigger bad lurking just around the corner. And once you've beaten all the Big Bads, they all come back, because that's what Big Bads do in Diablo-land.

Secondly, it's hard to get the various revelations about working conditions at Blizzard Entertainment out of my head. I'm not about to go on a big crusade about it or anything, but given that the Diablo series is already one I'd been feeling a bit "ehhh" about since the very beginning, knowing that some of the staff at the developer are shitheads makes it a lot easier to just go "fuck it" and never play anything from them again… particularly as all of their last few releases have some combination of loot boxes, battle passes or predatory "free-to-play" monetisation. So yeah, fuck Blizzard and fuck Diablo. Diablo III is still an MMO, though.

Next up, an earlier post: number 303, from 2010, in which I ponder the nature of Panic Stations. Specifically, through some exceedingly heavy-handed masking, I outline the things that cause me a sense of irrational anxiety, even when I know they're not anything really worth getting het up about. 2010 was before I'd really sought any sort of help for mental health, and well before I'd been diagnosed with either anxiety or Asperger's, but I still recognised anxious feelings in myself — and my brain's tendency to blow things out of proportion.

This post is one I should probably return to now and again to remind myself not to get so wound up about stupid things.

Finally for today, an even earlier post from 2010: number 57, Look into the Eyes, in which I talk about the Derren Brown show my ex-wife (who was, at that point, just my wife) and I had been to see at the Mayflower theatre in Southampton. I really enjoyed that show, and both of us had a lot of time for Derren Brown. I feel like we don't see much of him these days; I wonder what happened to him? Looking on Wikipedia, it seems he's still active, but I guess the changing nature of how we look at media these days makes him less visible — I don't watch "TV" any more, for example, and that tended to be where I saw him the most.

All right, that's enough looking back for one day. My cat has just been sick and the other cat is eating it. I think that's as good a cue as any to just go to bed.

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#oneaday Day 29: Dream Education

I had one of those dreams that it's difficult to wake up from this morning. It was a variation on a dream I quite commonly have, which involves being back in some form of education, knowing that I'm not doing something I should be doing, and not being able to make myself sort that situation out.

The most common form this dream takes sees me back at secondary school, knowing that the school's music groups (typically the orchestra and concert band) are rehearsing and that I should be there, but I am not going. My old music teacher Mr. Murrall is standing outside the music block looking disapprovingly at me standing some distance away, often with my friends from the time, but I can't bring myself to admit that I've made a mistake, and that I should go along and resolve the situation.

Last night was a little bit different, as it revolved around university. I had just moved into a new flat — not any of the flats I actually lived in during my time at university, but something my mind dreamed up — and was settling in, but I realised I had no idea when term started or if I should have been going to any lectures. Any time I thought "I should look up when term starts", I was distracted from doing so, and I became more and more convinced over time that I was missing significant parts of my course. But, again, I couldn't correct the situation.

Education-related dreams are, unsurprisingly, usually interpreted as being something to do with learning, and variations on the theme such as those which I describe above are usually tied to various forms of anxiety — often imposter syndrome.

If I'm being honest, I can tell where some of those thoughts are probably coming from. The recurring dream about not showing up to orchestra rehearsals is likely due to how I'm aware I don't make nearly enough time to practice music these days, and should probably do something about that. I think I want a new piano, though; our current one is fine apart from a few seriously dodgy notes in the octave below middle C, and unfortunately those notes appear to be some of the most frequently occurring in almost everything I want to play! New pianos are expensive, though, so you can probably see where some of that anxiety comes from.

As for the imposter syndrome side of things, I've definitely felt that before. I'm not sure I'm feeling it a lot right now, because in my current position I feel like I'm valued and that I contribute something meaningful — although thinking about it, there are still aspects of the daily work life that do cause me anxiety, such as having to deal with the social media side of things. But I've definitely felt it in the past; feelings that I "don't deserve" to be where I am, or that I'm worried someone will "find out" something about me that I don't want to be found out — exactly what, I'm never sure, because I don't have anything particularly shameful to hide.

I suspect, as someone with a natural undercurrent of anxiety flowing through me at most times, I will never be completely free of these dreams. I actually don't mind them all that much, as they sometimes have an interesting, nostalgic element to them. I do wish my dream self could break free of whatever is holding him down and resolve the problems at the core of those situations, though… that way I could just enjoy being back at school or university!

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