You get an old-school Paint.net sketch today as it's cold, I'm tired, I've just written 3,000 words about Wolfenstein 2009 (read 'em here!) and I have to work tomorrow. Also I can't be bothered to go upstairs to draw something on the tablet, even though I will have to go upstairs in order to go to bed at some point. Look, it's the first day of the new year, cut me some slack, okay?
New years are, of course, times for new beginnings and a sense of refreshment and renewal. As I've commented on before, there's no real magical reason that the last digit of the date increasing by one should have any real sort of "meaning", but it always does feel like a nice time to take stock of one's situation and figure out how one might want to improve one's lot, if indeed one is in a position where one's lot needs improving.
My lot does indeed need improving in numerous ways, so while I'm not sure I want to say that these are "new year's resolutions" as such, I do at least want to set out some things I want to achieve this year:
I will recommence dieting and stick to it for more than two weeks at a time. Two weeks appears to be something of a mental roadblock for me, so if I can survive past that, I can probably go for a lot longer. The latter half of the year hasn't really helped with all sorts of commitments that make sticking to a diet plan quite difficult, but new year, new you and all that, so both Andie and I have decided: starting from our next food shop (i.e. once all the remaining holiday "treats" are out of the house) we are both going to make a real go of it, as we could both really do with making that effort — me more than her by a considerable margin, I hasten to add.
I will get into the habit of doing some sort of daily exercise for at least 30 minutes. This, initially, will take two different forms: using my under-desk elliptical machine to give my legs a bit of a workout and, once we have Sorted The Spare Room Out, which is a job for the imminent future, using the at-home treadmill Andie bought a while back, but which neither of us have used all that much because there isn't really a good place to put it. Sorting The Spare Room Out will involve rearranging it in such a way that said treadmill can have a semi-permanent place to live, and thus we will both (hopefully) use it a lot more.
I will go to the doctor and see if they can do anything about my knee hurting. This is a lingering issue that is probably related to my lack of exercise and my weight problems, but it's got noticeably worse over the last couple of weeks, so I figure I should get it looked at properly.
I will make time to play the piano for at least half an hour at a time on at least three occasions per week. Long-term I will extend the individual sessions and aim for daily practice, but I am starting with a relatively humble goal that seems achievable.
I will do at least one piece of creative fiction writing per week.
I will practice my drawing with the tablet.
I will plan and begin writing an Evercade-related project that I've been milling over in my head for a long time.
There are probably some other things that I want to do, but I think that lot is a good starting point. Specific, measurable, attainable and all that nonsense. My overall "life situation" in terms of work, money and suchlike isn't in a terrible place right now, so it's the more "personal" side of things that I need to work on and fix. And while the "professional" and "financial" sides of things are comfortable, it would seem like a good time to make the "personal" comfortable too, non?
Oh, also, happy new year.
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Yes, it's 2025! Hooray and all that. I'm sure all of you are winding down after the holiday period, and I suspect many of you are not relishing the idea of returning to work tomorrow. I know I'm certainly not — and I like my job. Still, at least it's only two days before another weekend, then we have to get properly back to the grindstone as normal.
Doubtless many of you are contemplating new year's resolutions, too. I certainly have been, even though I know they generally don't lead anywhere particularly productive. I am determined, though, to make this the year that I have a positive impact on my physical and mental wellbeing. I have been in a sorry state since the COVID lockdown years, and I want to get back to a state where I'm feeling vaguely human again.
To that end, tomorrow is a fresh start on Being Sensible With Food. I'm not jumping into anything like Slimming World or WeightWatchers or anything — just doing what the wife and I were doing before the holiday period, which is counting calories and being sensible about what we put in our mouths each day. I'd also like to make an effort to drink much more water each day, too; it is commonly cited that when you think you feel hungry, you're actually thirsty, and drinking plenty of water throughout the day helps deal with that very well indeed.
Only trouble is that the water which comes out of our taps is rank. It's always been kind of minging thanks to us living in a hard water area, but just recently it's really started reeking of chemicals, too. Actually, just recently it hasn't been so bad, but back in November or so it was barely drinkable. (Then we completely lost water for about a day and a half in mid-December, so that was nice.)
So yeah. My plan for action is to get up early, kick off this process by weighing myself before breakfast, and taking care to record everything, ensuring I don't go over the calorie limit each day. I was actually doing pretty well with this before the holiday season hit, so I think it will be fine to get back to this. I just need to stick to it over the long term, which is where the NHS app that helps you track calories comes in. That aims to get you following the programme non-stop for 12 weeks to see what an effect it has, so my first and only resolution this year is to do that 12-week programme.
That is, as they say, a Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-based goal. SMART, if you will. From there, we'll see how it goes. I'm feeling vaguely positive right now, so time to knuckle down and get on with it.
If you're in a similar situation, where you want (or need) to achieve something to better yourself, best of luck with it. I suspect the year ahead is going to be challenging for many, but if you take care of yourself, that's one fewer thing to worry about, ain't it?
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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I'm writing on mobile and you hopefully know by now how much I hate doing that, so I'll keep this brief.
A very happy new year to each and every one of you.
We all know that, practically speaking, the turn of a new year is not particularly "meaningful" or important. But we, collectively, have ascribed a symbolic importance to January 1st and the beginning of a new year.
It's a time for fresh starts, new beginnings and, yes, resolutions. I'll get into those tomorrow, but for now let's just say that if you've been putting off some sort of Big Project, be it a creative work, home improvement or self-betterment in some way… now is as good a time as any to get stuck into it and start making some progress.
You may not necessarily be able to maintain momentum for the whole year, and that's fine. The important thing is to make that start, and the symbolic time of "rebirth" that is a new year is the perfect time to make that start.
I know we're all facing our own challenges, and folks in the States in particular are facing down a particularly miserable period in their history. On top of that, we have the scourge of AI devastating the planet and ruining the economy. It is, I'm sure, easy to feel hopeless.
But do what you can — just for yourself if for no-one else. You may not be able to make a difference to all the shit going on in the greater world right now, but you can make a difference for both yourself and those close to you.
Best of luck for another year of this shit. We're going to need it — but we've also survived this long, so what's another year?
It has been a strange few years, to say the least. Ever since the world went to pieces in 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic, things have not felt at all "normal" — even though for the most part, things these days seem to primarily be operating as they once were.
I still maintain that this isn't necessarily a good thing, as the threat of COVID most certainly isn't over, even if its impact is considerably lessened from what it once was. And I feel like society being forced "back to normal" too early likely made the whole recovery process more lengthy and difficult than it perhaps could have been. But, of course, there were plenty of additional considerations.
I feel like a lot of people have been feeling like 2023 will be a "better" year for one reason or another. There's no tangible evidence to suggest this will actually be the case — I'm pretty sure we've all been thinking "surely next year can't be as bad as this one" for as long as I can remember, even before killer viruses entered the equation — but I suppose it's an attempt to bring oneself comfort. After all, proceeding forward thinking that things are miserable and awful and only likely to get worse is not really going to help matters.
A new year doesn't really mean anything. Nothing magical happens at midnight as December 31st ticks over to January 1st. And yet it's as good a time as any to decide that you want to have a fresh start, make some changes, improve some things about yourself and perhaps escape from things that have been holding you back for one reason or another.
In contrast to some of the previous years on this blog, I'm in a relatively "all right" position life-wise right now, and so I'm not in a position where I feel like I need to make any particularly radical changes in my life in order to be something approaching "happy". I don't feel like I need to change jobs — I love my current job — and I don't want or need to change anything about my living situation, as my wife Andie and I are both in a good place; the excruciating rise in cost of living in the last year occasionally puts a bit of strain on our collective finances, but other than that we can't complain too much.
All this means that we — well, I, as far as this post is concerned — can focus on the relatively "smaller" things to try and sort out. Chief among these for me is my overall health and wellbeing; I want to do something about my weight, and do something that hopefully lasts, because I'm fucking sick of having this hernia and not being able to have anything done about it because I'm too fat.
Slimming World worked for me a few years back, as past entries will show, but when Andie and I went back after various personal circumstances caused us both to have a fairly drastic "rebound", we found that it didn't really work for us. Calorie-counting didn't really work for us either, and nor did self-directed Weight Watchers (or "WW", as they now prefer to call themselves). Last time I saw my doctor, though, they did say that they could refer me to a "health coach" to help sort me out, but this was dependent on getting a blood test to ensure that there was nothing major wrong with me.
I'd never had a blood test before, so I was kind of perturbed by the whole experience. I don't like hospitals at the best of times — my mind has them permanently associated as "the place where people die", even though the rational part of my brain knows that this is a vastly unfair assessment to our hard-working healthcare workers — and the prospect of having mildly invasive procedures carried out on me was not helping matters.
This only got worse when they had a bit of trouble finding a vein on the inside of my elbow and had to draw from my hand instead, and as the whole process went on a bit longer that was comfortable I found myself having a cold sweat and feeling nauseated. Thankfully I didn't throw up over the nurse who was working on me, but my condition did cause enough concern for her to get me a glass of water and give me a moment to recover after she was all finished. Thankfully, the results of the blood test showed nothing of concern, so hopefully I won't have to deal with that again for a while.
Anyway, getting advice and/or referral from my doctor on what to do next was dependent on those blood test results, so now the holiday period is over I need to go back to them and figure out what to do next. I'm certain it will be a difficult process, but it's something that needs to be done, as not only is my hernia continually bugging me, but I'm having a lot of joint pains and suchlike also, and I suspect losing some weight will help all those problems.
Aside from this, I feel like I might need to shake things up with regard to friendships and personal relationships also. Over the course of… probably the last decade or so, really, I've been dismayed at how far a lot of people with whom I used to be very close have drifted away for one reason or another. In some cases this was down to lives going in different directions, in others it was down to misunderstandings and in others still it can be attributed to some seemingly being more willing to make a bit of an effort to maintain a relationship than others.
I can't pretend that I'm not at fault in some of these situations, but there are also plenty of cases where I have been the one who has been making an effort, only to get things either thrown back in my face or met with silent indifference. I won't go into specifics right now as this isn't about naming and shaming or anything like that, but when discussing a couple of instances privately with some more recent acquaintances, I felt somewhat vindicated when these relatively neutral "outsiders" (to the situation in question, anyway) confirmed my suspicions that yes, indeed, the things that I had previously felt were a bit out of order were indeed out of order.
It's hard to know what to do in cases like this, though. Do you just cut and run? That's probably the sensible thing to do; if you're the only one willing to make an effort, that's not a friendship, and it's really not worth trying to maintain something that isn't there. But at the same time you have to ask if you're having unreasonable expectations of people whose circumstances have changed, as your own have. In that instance, is it appropriate to "punish" them for just the natural process of your lives going down different roads?
There isn't really a right answer, but I do feel like in this new year I want to have another go at rekindling some of these friendships where possible. There are, I'm sure, multiple instances where I can still do more to try and fix things, but equally there are also plenty of cases where I'm sure the situation is beyond "help", for want of a better word. And that's sad, but it's also supposedly a natural part of life. I vaguely recall reading something the other day that suggested men of my age generally only have one honest-to-goodness friend that they feel they can rely on — and I'm certainly in this position now.
Well, just make new friends, you might say. But, well, social anxiety tends to put paid to such plans when you explicitly make them — although in the last year or so I have added a number of new people to my personal acquaintances through both work and online socialisation. So I suspect it's probably going to be worth cultivating those friendships further rather than continuing to make an effort in cases where I feel increasingly excluded.
But anyway. That's enough rambling for today. Because aside from all of the above, I'll also be making more regular use of this blog in 2023, too. With the general collapse of my enthusiasm for social media — coupled with the right hash Elon Musk has been making of Twitter — it's probably the optimal means for me to freely express myself and communicate with others. So if you're not already following me here, hit up the links at the side (or wherever they are on your screen) and stay up to date with me that way. This place is probably going to be the most reliable means of "seeing" me online from hereon.
Happy new year. And may your own "fresh starts", however small or grand they might be, bring you joy and satisfaction.
This is my last daily post on this blog, to coincide with the last hour of the last day of 2016. I'm not going to rule out posting on here again when I feel like it, but this is the last of my daily entries. I feel that the exercise has run its course, and I'm definitely satisfied with what I've accomplished over the last 2,541 days.
Why am I stopping now? Well, it's part of a broader plan I outlined a few days ago. I want to unplug and get away from the constant noise of online culture in 2016. It stopped being fun a good while ago — roughly coinciding with the rise of the outrage brigade who love nothing more than using their social media clout to shame people for enjoying "problematic" material — but it's also been becoming increasingly apparent that the reasons I've been keeping my social media accounts active for as long as I have simply don't seem to be the reasons other people keep them active.
On previous occasions when I've considered deactivating my Facebook and Twitter accounts — Facebook in particular — the thing that has always stopped me is the thought that "oh, people won't be able to get hold of me easily, since everyone uses Facebook nowadays rather than anything else." But over time it's become apparent that while everyone does indeed use Facebook, pretty much the last thing they use it for is keeping in touch with other people. Rather, the inherent encouragement of narcissism in modern social media encourages people to post everything about their lives — or rather, everything in a heavily edited, idealised version of their lives — in an attempt to make other people feel like they should be having more fun/sex/babies/delicious meals/strong opinions about Donald Trump. And while that occasionally leads to heated debates in comment sections, it very rarely seems to lead to good conversations.
Twitter comes at it from a different angle. I've heard Twitter described as being like going to a party where everyone is shouting things at the room in general hoping other people will come and join the conversation, and that's a fairly apt description. The particular trouble with Twitter is that its original selling point — its 140-character limit, intended to encourage people to "microblog" rather than post walls of text — isn't conducive to nuanced discussion and debate, which leads to particularly obnoxious behaviour when people of differing ideologies and/or opinions about which anime girl is hottest come into contact with one another.
In short, I've been finding social media to be more trouble than it's worth, so I'm unplugging from the noise in the hope that those people who do value my friendship will make use of other, more private and personal means of contacting me rather than everything being aired in public. And this blog comes under that header, too.
This blog has been valuable "therapy" for me over the course of the last few years, which have been, to say the least, rather challenging and difficult for a variety of reasons. I've faced many obstacles — some of my own creation, some by other people being colossal jackasses and my not really having any power to do anything about that — and, while I wouldn't say my life is where I want it to be in the slightest, I feel that I've grown stronger as a person as a result.
But I feel like I need to start a new chapter. Leave behind the past, and look forward to a hopefully brighter future. It's not easy to shed emotional baggage — not to mention the physical baggage that mental stress can leave you with — but severing my ties with the past, be they social media accounts or indeed this blog, feels like the right thing to do right now.
I'm not disappearing entirely, mind you; as I mentioned in my previous post, I still intend to keep writing weekly on MoeGamer, which will become my main place to write about games I've found particularly interesting or exciting, so I encourage you to subscribe over there if you like what I'm doing. And for more general writing, I'm starting up a weekly TinyLetter — effectively a small-scale mailing list — for personal notes to those of you who have been kind enough to show me friendship and support over the last few years. If you're interested, you can sign up for that here. (Those of you for whom I have email addresses already, I'll be taking the liberty of signing you up automatically at some point on New Year's Day; I hope you don't mind, and if you do, please rest assured that if you decide you don't want to receive my notes, you can unsubscribe easily.)
Aside from that, though, at this point in my life I feel like broader Internet culture just doesn't hold the value it once did for me, so out the window the unnecessary crap goes for 2017. I'm not encouraging any of you to follow my lead and I'm certainly not casting any judgement on those of you who still find value in social media and Internet culture at large; I'm simply saying it's not for me, and explaining where I'll be going if you do want to find me.
If you'd like to stay in touch more privately, please either subscribe to my TinyLetter — which you can reply to just like a normal email — or drop me a message via my Get In Touch page with your email address and/or any other contact details you'd care to share.
For those who have supported this blog for any period of time — be you lurker or regular commenter — thank you, good night, and I wish you a happy, healthy and hearty New Year. Here's to 2017 being a better year for everyone.
Happy new year! It's the beginning of another arbitrary division of time which we ascribe more meaning to than is strictly necessary. And yet, as always, it's difficult to resist the allure of thinking that "this time, things will be better".
2015 was pretty shit. Not just for me, but for a lot of people I know. And that sucks. I hate to see people I know and care about having a shitty time, but it does make me feel slightly better (if a little guilty) to know that I wasn't the only one dealing with difficult shit.
I don't know whether or not 2016 will be better or not. I'd like to hope it will be, but realistically I know that there's no reason it will be. I don't have anything in particular to look forward to, but at least I don't think there's anything I'm particularly dreading either. Compare and contrast with the start of 2015, where it was gradually becoming apparent that I was getting forced out of my job (albeit one I didn't like anyway) and where my own personal well-being with particular regard to my weight was at something of a low ebb, and the start of 2016 already looks a little more positive in comparison.
2015 wasn't all bad, of course. I got married, for one thing, and that was pretty great. I met a bunch of new friends, too, and developed my interests further and deeper. I successfully got through what was quite possibly the second work-related nervous breakdown I've suffered in my life and out of the other side mostly intact. I lost nearly six stone in weight (though have probably put a bit back on over the Christmas period — we haven't been terribly strict!) and feel noticeably better about myself.
So I guess I should be feeling all right about looking forward to the new year. There are still lots of things I'm worried, anxious and upset about. But the only thing I can really do about them is keep on pushing forwards and hope things work out for the best in the long term. After all, that approach has got me this far, even if I'm not exactly in the position I thought I'd be in at the age of 34 when I was younger.
Happy new year, everyone. May 2016 be a good year for you, and if you, too, suffered a mountain of stress and other shit in 2015, may it soon be nothing but a distant memory. Thank you all for your support and kind words over the last 365 days, and here's to many more good times and pleasant chats as we slide inexorably into the future.
I intended to write something a little earlier (i.e. ahead of the Big Change to 2015) but, well, that didn't happen, so here I am at twenty past midnight trying to think of how to bid farewell to 2014 and welcome in 2015.
When I look back at 2014, I see a year that was somewhat mixed. It was a significant (and good!) year in that I bought my first house with Andie; it was a bad year in that it was the year I had to give up on what had previously been a lifelong dream of working in the games press.
Thinking about it, these two things are probably the two single most significant things that happened in 2014 to me, so let's contemplate them in turn.
First, the good, then. After renting places to live ever since I left home for university in 1999 (with the exception of a return to my childhood home for a few months in 2010 after Bad Things happened), finally owning my own place (well, sharing it, anyway) is a good feeling. It's one of those things I felt like would never, ever happen, and I couldn't see how anyone could ever do it. But fortunately a combination of circumstances saw both Andie and I in a position to be able to pool our collective resources and acquire a very nice house that isn't falling to pieces or anything.
There's a lot of work for us still to do — both the front and back garden need some significant "sorting out", for example, and neither of us quite know where to start with that, so I'm still extremely tempred to just "get a man in" — but we're in a position where our house is not only habitable, but actually (I feel, anyway) rather pleasant. We've hosted several guests, both for day visits and for lengthier stays — we have a spare room, which is a pleasant novelty after only ever renting two-bedroom places in the past, and we also have a sofa-bed downstairs to host further guests if required — and none of them went away with ebola or smallpox or anything, and they still talk to us, so it must have been all right for them.
In 2015 I don't know if anything significant will happen with the house. I'd like to get the garden sorted so it can be a space we can enjoy rather than feel faintly embarrassed about whenever we look out of the back window. I hasten to add that we didn't let the garden get into a bad state; the previous occupants obviously hadn't paid it much attention, so it was already a bit of a shambles when we moved in, and we haven't really done anything with it to sort that out. That's a job for this year, then.
So that's the house.
What about the other thing: the giving up of a lifelong dream? Well, it's sad to think about, but as I've noted on these very pages before, the games press of the 21st century is not the games press that I fell in love with as a youngster. Websites are not magazines, and the art of writing for the Web is very different to the art of writing for magazines. It's been a significant shift, particularly in the last few years, and I don't feel it's a shift for the better, either; I used to love getting in a variety of game magazines each month, reading them from cover to cover and then looking forward to what might be in the next issue. Each magazine had its own distinctive identity, and everyone covered different things in different ways, because they all only had limited space and thus had to prioritise what they were going to allocate pages to.
Nowadays, the games press is much more homogeneous. Certain sites do still have distinctive identities, but it's a far cry from the uniqueness of magazines. Clickbait rules supreme, with provocative articles making increasingly regular appearances in an attempt to get eyes on pages and ad revenue rolling in, and long-form, experimental or simply humorous work is on the way out. That's not to say it doesn't exist at all any more, of course, but it tends to be more on the enthusiast side of things rather than the professional press.
Then there's the growth of YouTube. This has been happening for a few years, but I feel that 2014 is the year that YouTube really became a significant threat (and yes, I use that specific word deliberately) to the written word. YouTube, or so Google says, is one of the world's top search engines, despite not really actually being a search engine. People are increasingly turning to video instead of the written word for all manner of things — help and advice, criticism, first looks at upcoming products, comedy — and the narrative that is constantly being pushed is that If You're Not Doing Video, You're Doing It Wrong. I disagree fundamentally with this, but that's something to discuss another day, I feel.
As for my own career, then, well, I just burned out. Being unceremoniously informed by email that I no longer had a job just before my birthday and right as Andie and I had finalised arrangements to buy our house was the last straw: I was sick of being jerked around by a cynical, unstable, manipulative, bullshit industry that treats its employees like shit unless you're one of the few people lucky enough to become a recognisable "personality". I was sick of having jobs that I enjoyed but which I was in a perpetual state of wondering if I'd still be in work each morning. I was sick of the feeling of being "gagged" from writing about interesting and unique things in favour of the necessary clickbait bullshit. I was sick of seeing the increasing number of games journalists and critics who appeared to genuinely loathe their audience, and of being criticised for being enthusiastic about the things I was passionate about. And I was sick of a "career" which had seemingly no structure for progression, training, growth, advancement, whatever you want to call it. So when I was shown the door, I didn't even try and find a new position in the games press. That was it. I haven't looked back. And while I won't say I'm exactly in a dream position right now, the stability of a regular paycheque sure is nice.
So what will happen on that front in 2015? Who knows? There are many different paths I could follow from here. I mentioned the other day that I've been taking the time to train up my own skills and make myself a more attractive proposition for any potential positions that might appear in the future. And I intend to keep doing that; I enjoy learning, training, bettering myself — it's just finding the appropriate opportunities to 1) keep the things I've learned in practice and 2) being able to apply them in a professional situation.
But that's something to worry about another day. For now, it's New Year's Day, and it's time to relax and chill out for a bit. I hope the end of 2014 was good to you, and that 2015 is better still to you.
This isn't any reflection on our gracious hosts Tim and Sophie, of course, who not only laid on a sausage-tasting session (no, that's not a euphemism) for us, but also cooked an immense amount of beef and other goodies, but to the fact that we all, as a group, found the moment of that single digit changing on everyone's calendars to be somewhat underwhelming.
Is it cynicism? Jadedness? World-weariness? I don't know, really. Perhaps it's the fact that staying up until midnight isn't really a novelty as a "grown-up", or the realisation we've all had at some point of the fact that a new year doesn't magically mean a new beginning, a fresh start or anything like that.
I mean, sure, the first of January is as good a time as any to say "right, I'm going to get [x] sorted out" but I'd be interested to know just how many people do successfully manage to get [x] sorted out and who are quite happy to maintain the status quo, continuing to allow [x] to do its thing as it's always done.
I don't have many things I'd like to do massively differently this year. I'd like to pick up on the exercise again, even though every time I engage in it I feel like it's an increasingly futile gesture. I'd like to start drawing a few stupid little cartoons on this blog again — not today, though, as it was a busy day; tomorrow perhaps. I'd like to pick up work on my game again. And I'd like to continue learning Japanese.
These are all relatively simple, small and attainable goals. I'm not going to make any grand gestures or promises that are impossible to keep — no "I will be thin in 2014!" bullshit, for example — but I would like my life to continue in a reasonably positive direction, even if my own messed-up brain occasionally gives me days of distressingly dark thoughts.
There's plenty of possible good things to look forward to in 2014, at least, but I shall spare you enthusing about things that may or may not happen for now because… well, they may or may not happen. But we shall see. I'd like to be positive. I'd like for it to be a good year. But I'd settle for it simply to not be a bad one.
Happy new year, everyone; may your 2014 be adequate for your needs.
We've reached that peculiarly barren time of year — it's no longer Christmas, but it's not quite New Year either. Some unlucky people have to go back to work for a few days — Andie is one of them — while the rest of us bum around, twiddling our thumbs and wishing we had more presents to open. (Actually, we will have a few more presents to open on New Year's Day, which is nice. I think I know what mine will be, and if I'm right I'll be very pleased with it.)
I feel a bit frustrated by the holiday season at the moment. I miss the "magic" it used to have when I was a kid. I'm not sure quite when it stopped being exciting and fun, but it'd be nice to get that back.
I've mentioned before my curious inability to express genuine-seeming outward signs of excitement, surprise or anything like that, and I have a feeling that may be something to do with it. I love opening presents and getting cool stuff, but I hate the pressure there is to look pleased with what you got. Everyone who buys you something is almost inevitably looking carefully at your face to see if you smile, grin, laugh or look disappointed at the things that have been purchased for you, and given that I feel enormously self-conscious about getting excited or joyful, my reaction often appears to be somewhat more "meh" than it actually is. I generally do like presents, whatever they are — because I'm not an ungrateful twat who returns gifts that other people have bought for him — and I am always appreciative when someone thinks of me and buys me something nice. It's just sometimes a bit difficult to show.
Same with New Year's. Everyone builds it up to be some kind of massive big deal, so when the time comes to actually say "Happy new year!" to people I feel very self-conscious and stupid. It feels like a cliche to say it. Well, it is a cliche to say it, but surely there's no better time to actually say "happy new year!" to someone than at one minute past twelve on New Year's Day. Garrgh.
One day I might get over all these stupid neuroses. Sadly, that day is not today, so if you are, by any chance, hanging out with me for New Year celebrations at any point in the future, I apologise in advance for my seeming lack of enthusiasm about the year increasing by one.
We're off out to a party at my friend Tim's tomorrow night to ring in the new year. There will be sausages. And no, that's not a euphemism; the plan is actually for there to be lots of sausages. This is a situation I am absolutely fine with.
There will be one last post of 2013 before the new year — that will hopefully be before midnight, if I remember — and then it's onward to 2014 and great things. Or just the same things as usual, but with a different number in the "YYYY" section of forms.
It's coming up on 1am and I'm struggling of things to write here. But write I must.
Well, let's review how things are going. That's usually a good way to fill a day's post, as nothing especially interesting has happened today. Unless you count letting our pet rats out for a run around in the hallway and going to Yo! Sushi (not at the same time) as being somehow "interesting". I guess both of those are sort of interesting — I mean, I enjoyed them both — but really, you sort of had to be there in both instances.
It's coming up on the end of the first month of 2013, and we're still in that weird sort of limbo where it doesn't quite feel right to talk about the year being 2013. I mean, I'm not sure what I'm really expecting to "feel" different, after all, but a new year is always a symbolic sort of thing, after all.
This year has already started somewhat differently, though, because I'm in a nice flat in the city I wanted to (and indeed used to) live in. I'm close to my friends (geographically speaking, obviously) and have even had them over to visit more times in the last month than I did in the year and a half I lived in Chippenham, which is good and makes me happy. I feel like I'm in a relatively comfortable situation — I enjoy my job, particularly as I get to work from home; I have an awesome girlfriend who puts up with my idiosyncracies and shows an interest in the things I'm passionate about; I have two surprisingly entertaining pet rats to whom I probably attribute far too much in the way of perceived personality; I'm relatively comfortably off money-wise, having cleared a bunch of longstanding debts last year (though student loan is still outstanding and probably always will be, gah); and, to cut a long, tedious and fairly directionless list short, I'm feeling fairly positive about the future.
As anyone who has suffered with one of the various forms of depression and/or anxiety will attest, though, it's not always that easy to keep feeling positive, even though things are generally seemingly going sort of all right. It's easy to lapse into negative feelings or self-doubt, and wonder if the things you're doing are really the right things. It's easy to want to make big, grand gestures to define yourself and feel like your life is moving in the right direction, but at the same time it's difficult to either carry those things through — or even to know if they're the right thing to do in the first place.
I'm content for now, though, occasional lapses in mood aside. It's a pleasant feeling. I know I still have some way to go before feeling "better" — if it's ever truly possible to feel "better" from these sorts of issues — but I at least feel like I'm heading in the right direction. When I look back at some of the posts I made over a thousand days ago, I see someone who was desperately unhappy and struggling to make it through the day for much of his time. It's hard to let memories of bad times like that go, but I'd be lying if I said things weren't massively better than they were way back then.
Onwards and upwards, then. The end of January will see us take ownership of a new sofa that will hopefully fit up the stairs into our flat, have our Internet properly connected and subsequently feel like we're "properly" settled in.
