Eriq’s Blag

I had my first day at Comm-Tech today. My first task was sorting through the massive amount of RAM modules that they have in an attempt to make some order of them. This wasn’t as tedious as it sounds. The only irritating part was that there were quite a few that didn’t give any clear indication what size they were. I also removed a couple hard drives from computers. This weekend we’re house sitting for that “uncle” I mentioned. Tomorrow we’re going to a place called…Tiggywinkles. It’s a wildlife hospital that has baby critters including hedgepigs. Unfortunately it requires that I get up early on a Saturday morning…urrrgggghhhh.

I went to bed at four and was woken up at eight on the dot by screaming children outside my room. The dining room is the next door over. After giving up on going back to sleep. I got up and went to breakfast. I made the mistake of saying I wanted tea. I don’t like tea. Then I noticed the orange juice. My mom said she’d be back later and we’d go to the camera obscura that overlooks the Avon Gorge, but that didn’t happen. I played TFTwo until Trung went to sleep. Then sat around for a while before looking for a towel so that I cold take a shower. I got in the shower and tried to close the door, but it decided to fall off its rail so I tried to put it back on, but it didn’t work. I ended up closing it and hoping it would fall on me. Then I sat around some more. Eventually, I went looking for my mom, who decided to come looking for me as well. We went to lunch at a cafe. I got a tuna melt and a ginger beer. Again, ginger ale is nothing like ginger beer. I came back to the hotel and started working on a model that I’ll likely never finish. Around six my mom came back we set out to meet my dad somewhere for dinner. That’s what I thought. Turns out we were meeting him at a reception after his conference. This put me in a foul mood because I didn’t want to stand around and wait for him; I had been working. We eventually got dinner at a posh restaurant called The Shed. The burger was meh, but the chips were good. Still pissed, we walked along the harbor to find some ships my mom wanted to see. We eventually found them. They weren’t all that exciting. Though the replica sailing ship was tooling around the harbor with people on it. On the way to catch the bus back a group of teenagers passed us. One of them attempted to engage me by saying he liked my glasses. Maybe that’s some English insult, maybe they were just stupid. I ignored them. I found out that Fringe is back, but to watch it on Huku I had to install an automatic proxy finder cause it’s only available in the US and the proxies I tried didn’t work. That’s something to look forward to.

I have no clue. My dad got a desk which means I don’t have to put a shirt down on the glass table to play games. It’s kind of shitty though, cause there’s a wooden shelf where your feet should be.

Today we went to the Thames Festival which is essentially a large street fair along the Thames; go figure. There were a lot of people selling things that I wasn’t interested in like baskets that smelled like reed because they were made of reed. We arrived at a stage just in time for the last fifteen minutes of some sort of Korean dance/song/theatre thing. It looked Asian so I felt obligated to film it. I have about ten minutes after which I gave up. At some point I’ll upload it somewhere. After a lot of walking we eventually reached a section that was like the Santa Cruz County Fair, but didn’t seem quite so disgusting in general. I got a cheeseburger. It was pretty good. We walked a little further and found a man walking on a cylinder attached to an arm that swung it around while he walked on the outside. At this point we didn’t feel like walking all the way back so we caught a bus home. Just now while I was writing this, I managed to semi-brick my N810 tablet and had to restore it. It just finished and is booting. Shit, I have to find all my programs again.

I spent most of my time awake failing to comprehend the equations I was writing. Then I stayed up too late again playing games…

Slept four an a half hours. Got up and found the internet had slowed to a crawl. Pining google.co.uk took one hundred and sixty-seven ish milliseconds. I thought that it was a problem with the router again so I tried switching back to the old one, but that refused to work entirely. In short I couldn’t fix it meaning no TFTwo. Trung said he was getting tired of it anyway. That the lack of teamwork was making him lose faith in humanity. If that’s all then he’s lucky. We tried to come up with another coop game we could play. The only one we both could easily get was Synergy. At this point the internet started picking up and I was able to install Synergy in a few seconds. I then had to walk Trung though the steps necessary to get the server working so I could connect. When I finally connected my ping was over nine hundred. It wasn’t long before we turned on cheats because I couldn’t really walk let alone shoot anything without dying. We played for a couple hours until he decided the sun coming up was a sign he should go to bed. Then I took a shower. Then I floated lifelessly for a while until I got the idea I would Photoshop a TFTwo dispenser into a picture from the living room window. I needed to use Garry’s Mod to get a good picture of the dispenser and I thought that I could get an addon thatwould make the dispenser have a display. I ended up getting some other addons which I was then distracted by for a number of hours. I spent twenty minutes trying to back stab a manhack (an enemy from Half-Life Two) with the spy’s knife from TFTwo (I eventually got it). I never got around to the shooping. Finally, Trung and I played some TFTwo. There were some good parts, but it ended of meh.

Like the depth.

NEED A DISPENSA HERE!

Knife fight.

Playing with the AI.

Mission failure. Yesterday my parents went to a flea market and saw a Russian fur hat complete with hammer and sickle insignia. I wanted it. However, I was not with them. My mom said that if I wanted to get there before the crowds did, I should get up early. I got u earlier and then we went to a different flea market…and got bagels. Then around one we actually headed for the flea market I thought we were going to. When we got there there were barely any stalls and no sign of Russian hats. We asked a man selling other types of hats and he said that there was a Russian man who had a shop on a dead end down the road, past a crossroad. We looked and looked, but missed the crossroad. On the way back we asked an antique dealer. Apparently the Russian man killed himself three or so weeks ago, but someone else had taken over his lot which is only available on Saturday when the full market is. I returned home hatless and defeated. I want that hat.

Almost a week here and I still haven’t done much. Went shopping for food again today, but mostly swore at the router which has apparently decided it’s going to fuck off whenever it wants. There’s another one here, but I can’t test it until I get the password for the DSL. A new wireless DSL modem/router would cost forty-five pounds (seventy-five dollars). I managed to eat an entire box of Cadbury’s Fingers in pretty much one sitting. I’m going to get fatter this year, but maybe it’ll help when winter hits. A tech company that my dad recommended me to sent me an application for an internship, but the PDF wasn’t a form you could fill out on the computer and send back, not exactly promising. We also don’t have a printer so I can’t print it out and send it. My dad says he plans to buy a printer tomorrow. We’ll see.

I haven’t posted in a while. I got bored and didn’t have much to say. This summer has been pretty dull to boot, but I am at a new point in my li-oh, who the fuck an I kidding? It’s going to be the same shit I’ve been doing for the past four or five years, but in a different location.

I didn’t apply to college. Yeah, probably a mistake as I also didn’t find anything productive to do in my year off. Instead, I’m moving with my parents to England for seven months. In retrospect this is possibly the worst thing I could do without trying very hard (I could probably fuck up more if I actually put some effort into it). Seven months, in a small flat, in London. Oh sure, it’s London, the once center of the verse, but I’m also spending with my parents and I haven’t changed at all. I generally don’t make friends unless they’re people that I see every day for something like school. I can’t go up to someone and say “hey, you want to go mock people because they’re stupid?” Other people can do that, but unless I know the person, I’m generally shy. I guess I have very low confidence.

I know I have very low drive. I have no purpose, no idea what I want to do in life. I’ve grown so cynical that I have trouble enjoying life. If I’m not distracted by something I become depressed, because I feel like I’m wasting time. I blame that on school; there’s always something that you have to do. Vacation? Sweet right? Fuck no, you get reports projects, all at the same time as if every teacher assumes that you’ll have nothing to do over a break. I don’t but that doesn’t mean I want to spend it doing school work. The problem with this cynicism is that the only purpose to life I can see is further the human race and seeing as I’ve had zero luck in that area, what else is left for me. I know it’s mean to my friends, but sometimes I feel like I have nothing, that I need something more. I keep hoping that something will come along and change my life, give me direction something to live for.

My little projects help, but they only last so long. I eventually run up against a wall that I can’t overcome either because I just lose interest or I have so many things that I want to implement I end up bogging it down and it becomes unusable or I’m just not capable of doing what I want, I don’t have the skill or the knowledge necessary. When my ideas work I’m overjoyed; I actually get giddy, but just the opposite when they fail. That project was all I had at the time and now that it’s done or failed I have nothing. I try to come up with something else to work on, but nothing seems plausible or it just doesn’t interest me. What do I do then?

I wholeheartedly believe that ignorance is bliss, maybe that’s not true and of course this is me believing I know something others don’t. The religious believe in an afterlife, I don’t. By some huge cosmic coincidence you live (maybe there’s something out there, but all sources point to no) and then you die. You cease to exist. You are nothing. Most people who practice religion must know in the back of their minds that this really is it. Why else would they be afraid of death? Why are we afraid of death at all? Am I? I don’t think so, only a painful death, but not the aftermath. As I see it there is nothing and that’s what scares people because it’s impossible to wrap your mind around the idea of not existing. How can you imagine non-existence. Try and think about it, when I do I have those “who the fuck am I?” moments. Similar to “what the fuck do these sounds have to do with their meaning” moments.

So what do I do? I don’t want to go to college. I can’t get a girl. My ideas are transient. Oh and to top it off, I’m paranoid. Not aliens and the government and tinfoil hats, but I can’t shake the feeling that my friends have problems with me, but choose not to tell me and instead talk about it when I’m not there…oh wait. Not all of them. Some of them I know honestly love me even if it would be “gay” for them to say it. And then there are those who I know are my friends, but i can’t tell if they’re telling the truth or are trying to not hurt my feelings. I can’t tell if it really is them or if it’s me. It eats at me. When I get nervous I pick my nails. Or if I think too much.

That’s another problem I have. Sometimes I just can’t stop. All kinds of stuff going through my head. Math, people, quotes, “that would be a cool picture”, “what if I tried using that equation?” Maybe I have mild aspergers. Sometimes I talk too much, but I don’t think that it. I just have trouble condensing stories, because I feel that every detail is important. Isn’t that how you’re supposed to tell them? It just ends up boring people (xkcd). This wasn’t even going to be this long, but then I started writing what came to mind.

I haven’t done anything amazing. I’m not really good at anything. I’m just good at a lot of things, most of which are useless. I played Ultimate for four years I stopped getting better after three I was ok and knew what I was doing, but I wasn’t a star. Not that I tried that hard.

I guess I haven’t tried very hard at a lot of things. I didn’t try to get interested in college. I don’t try to read books. I haven’t tried hard to meet someone.

As I said, I’m not the kind of person that can just go up and start talking to someone. The idea of trying to hook up with someone that you don’t know at all, but that you are physically attracted to seems wrong to me. Which I figure is my problem. I always try to become friends with girls that I’m interested in before trying to make a move. And who am I kidding, I don’t make moves. I just sit there, pining, forever. And then when I do move, it’s just weird. I don’t know if it’s the way I go about it or if it’s that I’m just not attractive mentally of physically. The last girl that said she liked me was someone that I had never met in person. It wasn’t a completely random creepy meeting on some forum thing, her sister is my friend. When we finally met, she decided that there wasn’t a place in her life for me. She claimed that school had suddenly picked up and that what with school, family, horseback riding, friends, lacrosse she just didn’t have the time I deserved. Somehow, I never fully accepted that. Then there was the girl that I like on an off for two and a half years. Yeah, I fucked that up too. Three times. Not so much fuck ups, just nothing.

I haven’t had a regular sleep cycle in five or six years, maybe longer. Pictures that my mom dug up show me around twelve with dark circles. They became a permanent facial feature. I don’t think that they’re leaving any time soon if at all. I think I have insomnia, maybe mild. First I don’t want to sleep, back to that needing to do something with my time or else it’s wasted. And then, there’s the knowing that once I get in bed, I won’t be able to fall asleep for at least an hour unless I’m utterly and completely exhausted. Sometimes not even then. I can easily fall asleep working on homework, my body uses it as a form of self defense, but once I actually get in bed, I’m wide awake. My mind fills with thoughts that I can’t make go away. Sometimes trying to daydream works, but it’s become harder and harder to do so on commands. These days I wake up dehydrated with a headache and bloodshot eyes. Doesn’t really help attract the opposite sex.

Not that I even meet girls. I spend all my time in my room. I would have friends if it weren’t for school. The only other place that I know people from is JRTechie and I stopped going there a long time ago. It doesn’t even exist anymore. I started this blog back when I was working there the first time. And now everyone is leaving. We’ll keep in contact over Facebook, but it won’t be the same and we’ll slowly drift apart until we don’t talk to each other.

So what do I do? I go to England. What do I do there? I don’t know. Tourist activities? I hate tourists and I hate the idea of being one. I want to go back to Lewes, I want to go to Ireland, I want to try and find my friends from seventh year. The girl that I had a mutual crush on, but nothing ever happened, because I was in sixth grade, what the fuck can you do. I got a laptop so that I can keep playing TF2 with Trung and Ravic. I’m not sure what else…

From the first day there to sometime in March I’ll be writing.

Are you happy now? I know I’m not.

It’s that time of year again…school starts tomorrow. Still odd to think I’m a senior and it’s depressing to know that it won’t make a difference. Though seeing all my friends again will be nice; this was possibly my least social summer to date.