UPDATE ON THE TOTALLY COOL EXCITING THINGS I'VE BEEN DOING (original) (raw)

I started this blog with the intention of writing something at least once a week. However in order to write a blog in the style of my peers on their years abroad I feel that I have to write about something vaguely interesting or new or entertaining or imaginative to justify the fact that I have chosen to write it down and share it on the Internet.
The hiccup here is that recently I have not been doing anything vaguely interesting or new partly because I have been more depressed than usual, partly because I don’t know many people in Burton who aren’t at uni and also partly because Burton is a boring shithole that I try and avoid at all costs. So I haven’t really been having a fantastic time.

If I were to blog every day it would probably consist of “struggled to get out of bed” “marathon watched The Office/The Simpsons/Twin Peaks” “played Harvest Moon: More Friends of Mineral Town” and I’m quite sure that you, dear reader, do not care about this. There might be a couple of entries such as “washed my hair today and then went back to bed and watched some more Twin Peaks” or “went to the pub” or “Bargain Hunt was particularly good today” but that would be as exciting as it would get and reading this back I am finding it intensely boring so I can’t imagine how you must feel.
HOWEVER I am a humanities student who a) suffers with mental health problems so finds it hard to work a lot of the time and b) also likes to spend her time getting drunk or sleeping, but still ultimately has to write an essay a week during term time. If there is one thing my degree has taught me, it is the art of taking a relatively small amount of actual completed reading and spinning it out into an extended piece of coherent writing with some point to it like some sort of pretentious bullshitty spider. I am going to apply that acquired technique here but for ‘completed reading’ please read ‘doing something with one’s life’. Hopefully you won’t print it out and hand it back to me covered with pithy comments or criticisms as my tutors are wont to do.
Today I went into Burton town centre. This is an achievement for me because going out into Burton town centre means that

• I have to go outside and going outside means that I have to wash my hair or brush my hair and take some care over my appearance. It also means getting dressed. This is problematic at the moment because it means getting up and not remaining in an inert bed-bound stasis pondering existential questions and feeling dead inside. At the moment I prefer the latter because it doesn’t mean moving.
• I have lived here all my life. I might run into somebody I know but don’t know well enough to feel comfortable talking to, i.e. somebody I went to school with but never really spoke to but still feel obliged to have the awkward “How’s uni/work/life? Well I’ve had to take a few months off because I’m a bit loopy and a lot of my time is now spent tending to an imaginary farm” chat because after all, we did spend seven years of our lives attending the same institution making awkward chat outside classrooms or gossiping about each other with our separate social groups. Phatic speech is not my forte, it never has been. If not, I will have to feign a distracted pensive look and scurry off and that makes me feel awkward and anti-social, which is what I am, and I don’t like to be reminded of it.
• I once went into Burton and saw a woman with a baby in a pushchair and a child who was about five. The woman was smoking. The baby started crying. She handed the five-year old the fag to hold while she tended to the baby. I also once went into Burton at 10am and a woman clutching a can of Tenants Super tried to crash a cigarette off me. This is an example of what one might see in Burton and whilst it is funny in the same way as watching Jeremy Kyle is, it is also very depressing and I am depressed enough most of the time.
• People in Burton like to talk to people they don’t know and whilst this is lovely sometimes I also find it very nerve-wracking. It reminds me that I am intensely socially awkward and anti-social and as previously mentioned, I don’t like that.

But I went, of my own volition, and I had a look round some charity shops and I bought some cheap books and a sketchbook and went to get a lighter from the newsagent and ended up with a red, yellow and green atrocity emblazoned with a marijuana leaf which I am going to have to throw away because it is incredibly embarrassing but I felt too awkward to say “I don’t want this lighter please can I have one that doesn’t make me look like a white middle class teenager who has just bought a Bob Marley CD and started smoking Windsor Blues in alleyways to look cool and piss off my parents”.
And whilst this may seem equally boring to you as what I said I have been doing I am quite proud of myself, which is why I have turned it into a blog post. I am now going to go and harvest my carrots and milk my cows. Goodbye.