Success

What can be defined as success in life? Money, friends, the bell curve? Some old (and therefore wise) philosopher once said "success is those who mourn your death not the money you leave behind". Frankly that's a load of bullshit. Success is more than people to mourn you. Die young and people will be sad, does that mean you are successful? Die old and all your friends are gone, no-one to mourn you, no tombstone for the last man in the world (heck unless the last man was a tombstone maker it's unlikely for the last 2-100000 to get one) does long life mean no success? But say you ignore this and take the mourning at face value, surely it is preposterous to measure success in tears. Wouldn't it be better to say success is measured in laughter and smiles, tears wiped away, happiness given to others. Success is changing something for the better, be it the world, someones life, or just a minute of it. Success is what makes a difference for the better. Who we helped in life, not who comes out of the woodwork to claim inheritance.

Choices

It’s funny what ends up making a big difference. In my town there are 2 colleges I could’ve chosen to go to. A big one with a uniform, that all of my friends and almost everyone from my primary school was going to, and a smaller one (student population wise) with mufty, that my best friend was going to. I chose the smaller. I don’t know why but I never even considered the big one. I guess even at this stage I wanted to be different I didn’t want to be another of the uniformed crowd. And of course my ‘best friend’ was going to the smaller one. I still don’t know if this was the right decision, but it made a big difference, the people, the places, the experience, all could have been different. My ‘best friend’ and me had a wee bit of a fallout and he managed to alienate me completely from almost everyone in year nine, my awkward personality and misunderstanding of basic social concepts managed to do the rest. He then went and stole my girlfriend before (not a moment too soon but several years too late) getting himself expelled. It was sometime around this point that I lost the majority of my naive belief in human nature.
I was that kid, the awkward one at the back of the class. The one that managed to alienate himself even further from his peers by being a complete know it all. I’d like to think that I’ve stopped that now. Well maybe not like. I’ve been moulded through bullying till I am just another clone, worse a defect, conforming partially while still holding a semblance of rebellion. Maybe I’ve learnt to be more ‘human’ but if what I’ve learnt is ‘human’ it’s a category I’d rather be excluded from.
Over the following years I managed to build up a sort of resilience. Ignore the bullying and keep to myself, never letting anyone in for fear of rejection (it only worked for a while but that’s another bitter story). I feel pathetic writing this. I don’t know why I do it. That crazy part of my brain just takes over some times. Forcing words on paper (or pixels) with deep meaning that I’m not permitted to see. Sometimes I wish that I could just understand myself. Though maybe that would take some of the fun and adventure (spot the euphemism) out of life.

Are you inspired?

It seems to me that inspiration comes at the strangest times. I can struggle for ages to find an idea of what to write for an english internal or (more importantly) my blog. Then suddenly when I am furthest from my computer or just about to go to sleep an idea will hit. Of course my brutally scientific mind says that there has to be an explanation for this. Maybe as I am about to sleep I have less time to pick an idea to pieces and the ideas just seem better. Of course I can never test this by looking at these ideas while awake because I have this annoying habit of forgetting them. As Douglas Adams so beautifuly puts it
"And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea was lost forever."
Of course I'm not debating any problems of world wide concern, as far as I know, but I still get that feeling that at some stage I had the answer. I had the solution to all (or atleast some) of my problems. And poof. Gone. Forever, well, maybe forever is an exageration maybe "for a very, very long and painful time that 'tends to infinity' " would be more accurate. But these ideas, strange though it may be, give me a glimmer of hope. Surely anything I had and lost I could get back again.
I hate the fact that even I do not understand what I am saying (or maybe what I mean by it) I get so lost in metaphors and euphimisms that I can't figure out what I mean.