Fall Out 4 in My Dressing Gown

Sometimes the words seem to fall from my finger tips, it’s as though I have little involvement in the process at all; I sit, I type and the story practically writes itself. Sometimes I appear to float through my working day nothing hinders me and all runs smoothly whereas other times everything annoys me, everything is difficult and my back aches.

On Monday with aching back I had inspiration; so I sat on the sofa with many cushions for support and typed away on the lap top. The story didn’t quite work, the story would have made a good poem, the poem turned out to be rubbish; never mind perhaps I will return to it sometime.

On Tuesday and Wednesday I played Fall Out 4, but got stuck in a lengthy cut scene just before bed time.

On Thursday I arrived home with books from the library and minimal back pain. I had lesson inspiration and sat on the sofa underlining passages, jotting down ideas and making lists. By Friday evening the inspiration had waned somewhat but I made some progress and developed my ideas further. I went to bed with plans. I visualized the next day, the Saturday morning kitchen table, piled high with books and notes and progression.

It did not rain on Saturday, the sky was blue, the morning was bright, all the signs were there for a productive day and yet I completely couldn’t be arsed. My inspiration, my motivation, aspiration, get up and go, my entrepreneurial spirit, my drive, my passion, my sense of purpose, had; during the night utterly dissipated and it took several hours before I even managed to get out of my dressing gown.

I thought I’d get on with it after lunch, which I didn’t. I did nothing. I wasn’t down, or depressed, or tired or run into the ground. I just couldn’t be bothered and yet I’m awfully uncomfortable with that.

Society is constantly telling me I should do things. Those facebook photos with the pictures of nice skies and the like are telling me not to lose one single day, to DO IT NOW, to get up and smell the coffee, the roses, and so on. I should have been walking on the beach, baking a cake, making a thing, working a manuscript, listening to music, practicing Yoga, even casting a spell, yet I couldn’t even be bothered with my Sims.

Friday night I was reading about Belbin's theory of team types, yet another archetype thing, some people are innovators, some are coordinators you know the how it goes; and I couldn’t but help think; as I always do with archetypes, that depending on my mood, I am any one of those types.

From one day to the next I can be  the type that cannot be arsed. I can be the type that spends all day in a dressing gown, I can sit in my shack in Fall Out 4; gaze onto the partially cleared street I’ve created and not even bother with one single quest.

And that’s OK because the next day I can be a go getter again!

Likes and Guns

I liked a thing on facebook. It was Obama, wearing a dunce’s hat and repeatedly writing Criminals Don’t Register Guns on a blackboard. I liked it because I found it vaguely amusing. It conjured images of pro gun lobbyists lecturing the well educated and thoughtful Obama and that amused me; because they are right, criminals don’t register guns; neither do they dress in black and white stripes or carry swag bags.

Incidentally I like Obama; I understand that what I see of him is a carefully crafted media persona, however he strikes me as an intelligent, well meaning, principled individual, with very little power to make any real difference.

I don’t like guns, though I guess I appreciate them, they are sunk fast into popular culture; Sarah Connor had a massive stash of them in Terminator 2, they were in The Avengers with John Steed and Emma Peel, they’re in paintings, photos, songs and I have a great selection of them in FallOut 4.

I thought about it and came to the conclusion that NO ONE needs a gun. No one at all. But that’s not going to happen because of The Criminals. The arguments always the same; no point in banning alcohol because production will go underground and The Criminals will take charge, like what happens with drugs.

So I get to wondering about those law breakers. In the case of guns I’m wondering how many criminals use guns. There are lots of laws and you don’t necessarily need a gun to break the law, think of for example; identify theft. Then I’m wondering what constitutes a gun crime, daft I know; until you realize that when the definition of what constitutes a knife was adjusted the figures for knife crime fell in the UK.

I’m thinking if you had a gun then I should have one too, just to make it; balanced. I’m still not sure how I feel about guns and I’m usually an all or nothing kind of girl.

It seems Obama is proposing only minor adjustments to the gun laws but minor adjustments very much annoy me; for example, no smoking in enclosed public spaces, in bus shelters, in cars, before long in your own garden shed, if it’s that bad why not ban it altogether? Make the selling of tobacco illegal, don’t make minor adjustments. Oh you can’t do that because of criminals. We certainly give a lot of consideration to those criminals don’t we? I don’t like that we do that.

I guess that’s the problem with the liking thing, I’ve never been very fond of the word like, it’s sort of insipid, not one thing or the other, who wants to be liked? Loved? Adored? Worshiped; even bloody hated, but not liked.

Tomorrow I will post on Facebook that I’ve written a blog about Likes and Guns; some friends will Like it, that doesn’t mean they will read it, just like my liking that facebook thing doesn’t mean I’m pro gun, it doesn’t mean I’m anti gun. The like button doesn’t mean anything at all.

Leaves Falling

I got disheartened; no one much reads the blog and that makes me feel like a mad woman shouting things at a bus stop. Indeed on occasion I am gripped by the desire to shout at the bus stop mostly; “How much of my life have I spent waiting for bloody buses?” and other stuff like that.

With it being a New Year; I thought I should be disheartened no longer, take on the advice of my friend “If you build it they will come” and just keep going and shouting.

Until this morning I had no idea what I was going to blog about; perhaps I would discuss the book I’ve finished reading, maybe dissect how edgy I feel about mindfulness or even just go with the New Year’s resolutions thing. I might put together my own reflection of the past year, narrow it down to December, in particular this past two week holiday; one of the wettest warmest Decembers ever in the history of weather, one in which there seemed to be tragedy after tragedy.

A Christmas period during which, people in this country, in this day and age, in these sophisticated hi-tech modern day times, were actually flooded out of their homes; with water. We haven’t worked out what to do about heavy rainfall and raising rivers (I’m going to say it again): In This Day and Age! Those poor people.

There was that tragic accident at The Costa coffee shop, Christmas Eve wasn’t it? And that man, who drowned in Cornwall, on New Year’s Day; trying to save his dog. The list goes on you only need to read the news to see that a lot of people died, in various tragic ways.

This morning we got a phone call from my father-in-law, my husband’s grandmother had passed away last night. She was very old, no one expected her to go on forever, no one does do they? Half an hour later I got a phone call from my mum; my uncle’s partner died in the early hours of the morning, she had been ill for a long time and now her suffering was over.

Who wants to read about people dying? It seems wrong to ignore it though, it wouldn’t be right to blog about, for example; my cooking successes and failures not today, no this death thing is, an all too frequent event, met with “How awful” and “I’m so sorry.” Because what else can you say?

I’d like to be able to turn this around, to say something about the cycle of life or put together one of those inspirational quotes that appear on photographs of sunsets, but I just keep thinking about the trees; the landscape changes about them, new roads, mended pavements, different people passing by and every autumn the leaves fall.

Yes, you say here is the metaphor; the tree comes back to life in the summer. Maybe, but we can’t stop the leaves falling can we?