Sometimes I think I must be the most anti social person on the planet, because being in close proximity to other people makes me soooo wound up I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but if I’m forced to spend a day entirely in the company of other people and with absolutely no time to myself, then I not only get incredibly grumpy but want to start screaming and hitting people

Mostly, life is okay. I found it difficult when I started work and realised that for eight hours a day my mind was going to be controlled by other people, but I’m kind of over that now. I mean, when you’re at school or university, no one controls what you think. You turn up to classes, but you don’t actually have to listen to them; you can sit and think about whatever you feel like. I initially hated work because apart from the odd bit of photocopying, what I have to do requires just enough of my brain to mean I can’t have simultaneous private thoughts, but does not provide me with any bit of interest whatsoever. I’ve got accustomed to that now though, and stay up later than almost anyone else I work with to ensure I do get some time for myself. Plus I always get a couple of hours of mental freedom whilst travelling to and from work, and that’s normally enough to motivate me to get up in the morning.

Today, however, I have had a day off work and spent it with my family. Now don’t get me wrong, I really like my family and I want to spend time with them. Perhaps I just got out of bed the wrong side this morning but they have nevertheless been driving me utterly round the twist for the past twelve hours because they have absolutely no concept of either silence or privacy.

I think silence, or the lack thereof, is what has actually got to me most today. It just seems like everyone in general, but my mother in particular, has been talking constantly all day and without meaning to be cruel, no one has uttered a sentence which was worth listening to

I spent the morning being dragged round shops to try on new suits, a process which I find deeply irritating. I hate shopping anyway, I especially detest trying things on but more than anything I loathe shopping with someone else who tries to order me about and control what I do.

Example. We walked past Jaeger. At this point we’d actually spent two hours looking at suits, I’d tried on at least twenty jackets plus five pairs of trousers and I was seriously wound up, yet making a valiant effort to be polite. I think I’ve spent way too much time with my boyfriend recently because I’ve spent most of the day fighting the urge to tell people to fuck off Anyway, we walk past Jaeger and let’s just make clear that this is not a place where I would ever contemplate buying a suit. Mom, however, insisted on going to look at their selection and instructed me to try one on. I took a look at the price tag, established the jacket alone cost 250 quid, and declined. She got uppity and said it was a nice suit. I said I didn’t see the point of trying on something I had no intention of buying. She said I might buy it if it fitted. I said I didn’t care whether it fitted, I wouldn’t be buying something that expensive. She then proceeds to give me a lecture about how mean I am with my money, how I must have absolutely pots of it, and how ungrateful I am for all the help she is giving me by taking me on this shopping trip.

We then went home to have lunch, which was a bread roll on account of today being a day of fast. I’ve just started eating part of mine when my Dad asks me to move so he can get to a newspaper. In the process, half my roll gets knocked on the floor. By Murphy’s Law it does, of course, land butter side down but I was so incredibly hungry I was quite prepared to eat it anyway. Before I am able to articulate a desire to do this, however, my mother has grabbed it and put it in the bin! I’m therefore left with half a bread roll on which to exist for the rest of the day.

Through lunch she then proceeds to talk complete crap and for half an hour after we’ve all finished eating, she continues to sit at the table and talk complete crap. She’s sitting next to me on the bench so I can’t leave the table until she both shuts up and stands up, and I don’t know if I suffer from some weird sort of claustrophobia but the sensation of being in effect trapped there and unable to get away to somewhere silent firstly made me want to scream, then made me want to hit someone, eventually made me feel ill and dizzy.

The afternoon was then spent with a thousand other grown adults who think that a fun way of passing a bank holiday consists of sitting in a packed church watching other grown adults prostrate themselves on the floor, then standing in a queue for half an hour in order to be allowed to genuflect and kiss the feet of a statue. In fact, out of all the things which one could object to about this proceeding, the one which upsets me most is the fact that kissing a pair of feet whilst genuflecting actually requires a certain amount of skill to get right and I am far too clumsy to carry it off with dignity

More profoundly, I can’t be doing with mass hysteria. As a small child I used to hate Good Friday because it generally involved me getting smacked, not just once but twice. The first time would be at lunch when I was presented with a plate of fishfingers, mashed potato and spinach. I eat neither fishfingers nor mashed potato nor spinach, and this is not a fact which is influenced by whether or not Jesus died on the cross to save me from my sins. Telling me that if he can do that, I can eat a plate of spinach is not going to alter the fact that if you put a spoon of spinach in my mouth I am going to be physically sick all over you. I am not choosing to be sick, it is just what happens. Jesus did, incidentally, choose to die on the cross. The two situations are therefore clearly not comparable.

The second smack generally came at 3pm when I was informed that Jesus was now dead, and I refused to cry. Actually, I did genuinely used to be totally distraught by the story of the crucifixion, but I refused to cry on demand. This lead to me being described as unfeeling, hence the punishment… Yeah, but the point is I did not feel the need to cry in church this afternoon. Moreover, I do not comprehend why any of the other grown adults in the building should have felt the need to cry. Those who were might have benefited from a quick slap to jolt them out of their hysteria.

And without meaning to be irreverent, is it not completely pointless to cry over the “death” of someone you know is about to come back to life?!

After church we went home and all sat in the living room and failed to read while my mother talked. Seriously, I swear I.ve spent two hours with a book in front of me today and I’ve managed to read a mere twenty pages. Every time I got halfway through a sentence she’d make some inane remark, generally along the lines of how nice it was that we were all sitting in the same room, causing me to lose my place in the rather abstract German and have to start again at the beginning

Yes. So I’ve spent most of the day wanting to scream and ended up expressing a desire to go to bed before nine thirty just so as I could go to my room and shut the door and be on my own. I feel a bit better now, though not thrilled that there are three days of bank holiday to go. It makes me realise how much I want to leave home.

I used to absolutely hate the idea of getting married when I was younger. Well, for “getting married” you can read “living with someone” if you prefer, it’s just that I’ve always thought in terms of marriage. Living with someone is not what I have ever wanted out of life, is not even what I want out of life now, despite the fact that it is what I am going to do, hopefully sooner rather than later. Sometimes you can’t get what you want in life so you have to try to come to terms with what you’re going to get; I believe they call it compromising But whatever you want to call it, it has always filled me with a sick sort of dread. The idea of having to live with some guy never appealed in general, but what terrified me most was the fact of not having my own bedroom. That’s not a comment which has any sort of sexual connotations at all; just that for me, the only chance I had for privacy and time alone was the time between getting into bed and falling asleep at night, and the idea that I wouldn’t even get my own bed and thus that there would be absolutely no time for me to call my own sometimes made me think I would rather die than get married

When I say younger incidentally I mean roughly up to the age of 22. I suppose some of the problem was that I wasn’t thinking about life in a very mature manner, and a great deal of the rest of it was that I had a very clingy boyfriend with no interests in life and whom I felt I could never escape from. As in literally, I couldn’t even go to buy a bar of chocolate without him coming too. It felt very suffocating at times

On days like today then, when the idea of climbing a mountain and being a hermit seems genuinely rather appealing, it somewhat surprises me that I’ve met someone who makes me feel that living in the same house as him might not only be possible, but even somewhat enjoyable. The idea of actually wanting to live with someone is totally novel to me and I periodically feel shocked when I find myself actually wishing I had someone in the bed to use as a hot water bottle. There are only very few occasions where I have found sharing a bed claustrophobic; certainly they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Is this the power of love?! Nah, that possibly explains why I’ve agreed to do something so heart breaking as live with him outside marriage, but my decreasing aversion to simply sharing a living space with someone is just due to the fact that whilst probably not disliking company quite as much as I do, my boyfriend at least understands the point that privacy matters…

Sigh. I shall probably delete this rant in the morning. It’s excessively negative and has a great deal to do with my lack of food intake. When deprived of three meals a day I am prone to get exceedingly grumpy Tomorrow I will eat extra food and try to cheer up. But just for now while I am still officially in a bad mood:

Aaaaaaaarggggggh!!!

I’ve wanted to do that all day, I feel better already

Tags: lack of food

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 22nd, 2008 at 12:50 am and is filed under Random rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.