My Mom remarked with surprise tonight that I appear to be developing a social life! I think she was slightly bitter because my Dad has been out and about quite a bit recently too, whilst she’s been stuck at home. I haven’t been up to anything terribly exciting, but I have just been out for dinner two evenings in a row, which is fairly unusual. My boyfriend came to Birmingham this afternoon so we had lunch together, then I popped back to work for a few hours whilst he went to the library and we met up again at the end of the day. He was in such a good mood that I even managed to convince him to come to Pizza Express with me, which was rather cool

Decidedly less cool, to put it mildly, was the phone call which we got in the middle of our meal. We had been invited to attend a party this weekend at the house of one of my boyfriend’s friends. We found out this evening that the party has now been cancelled, however, because tragically a friend of someone concerned has been killed in a motorbike accident Rather a chilling piece of news, and it feels rather callous afterwards to be brainstorming new ideas for what we can do this weekend instead. Though as my boyfriend said, in the circumstances it was probably a blessing that he was killed outright rather than left in a coma etc for days/weeks. A friend of my friend Anna was killed in a motorcycle accident while she was at uni, but he spent several months in a vegetable state before his family agreed to turn off the machines. Afterwards, Anna had a massive row with her boyfriend over his motorbike and whether he should get rid of it. He initially refused to, before being struck down by appendicitis. He got through the operation fine… in fact he felt so good that he decided to get up and about far earlier than the doctors (and Anna) told him that he should. The exact details of the story evade me now, but the upshot was that he disregarded Anna’s advice, contracted some sort of post-operative infection, and was in a critical condition in intensive care for about a week. Luckily he pulled through it, but it was after his own near-death-experience that he finally decided to stop motorbiking. And also to do whatever Anna says from now on, because she’s always right

Hmmm. Even when you don’t know any of the people involved and so can’t feel anything but a vague, general sort of sympathy, news like that is a horrible reminder of how tenuous this whole life business is. It puts some things, like the fact that I was depressed by the thought of potentially having to spend tomorrow throwing sponges at people whilst dressed as a penguin, into perspective rather. I’m reminded of a scene from a Robin Williams film which was a particular favourite of teachers at my school for showing in assemblies which were supposed to be inspiring. From what I remember, it featured him in a school showing a bunch of kids a picture of some guys who had been in the sports team a few decades back and had since been killed in the war or something. It featured numerous utterances of the phrase carpe diem, which I have ever since found rather cliched, but you get the point…

That said, one of my pet hates right now is people who are perpetually worried about random unforeseen calamities which might befall them. Worrying that everyone you meet on the internet is a weirdo with malicious intentions. Worrying that someone’s going to steal your credit card details. Worrying that you might get run over by a bus… I can’t comprehend why anyone would choose to be so paranoid, and a surprising number of people who are young enough to know better actually are.

In a separate and unrelated point, I would like to talk about vegetables. It may be that I eat green beans every Sunday. As a matter of fact, I do I happen to like green beans, as much as it is possible to like a vegetable, and they have certain characteristics which suit my personality and what I require from a vegetable. Now it may be that someone else prefers to eat brocoli every week. Is that how to spell it? Broccoli? Brocolli? Whatever If someone tells me that someone else is eating broccoli, my reaction is likely to be an emphatic “yuk!”. The reasons for this are that I have tried broccoli, I have confirmed that I dislike it intensely, and I would never wish to try it again because it in no way corresponds to my personal desires in relation to nutritious green substances. By voicing my personal distate, however, I am in no way trying to make a value judgement on broccoli, nor the persons who eat it. My interest in other people’s vegetable eating habits is severely limited, quite apart from anything else.

That is probably about as clear as mud, but mud is what I’m gonna be covered in tomorrow, so that’s not entirely unfitting

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 10:43 pm 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.