A few things I've learned about life so far. (aged 24)

Inspired by an amazing blog post from http://zenhabits.net/ , I have decided to make this another one of those highly amusing blog posts that you come across in various stumble travels. They make you laugh, they make you think, you may even comment on them, but will you remember them? Probably not.

So why am I doing this?

Because it's a blogging tradition. And I know that to get noticed in the blogosphere you're supposed to buck the trend, but I like this tradition. So here goes.... a few things I've learned about life so far! (aged 24)

1: Morning is less of a time, and more of a concept.

This is actually one that the rest of my house mates are trying to change my thinking about, but the only way that that is going to happen is if I quit my job. I work such crazy hours (in general, I am never home before 5 am. If I am, it's been a good night), so I go to bed in the morning, and wake up mid to late afternoon. For me, it is not officially morning until I've gone to bed and woken up again, regardless of the time.
I don't think that I'm alone in this.

2: Time is so easy to waste.

There are a million and one things that I should be doing, even right now. It's one of my two or three nights off work. I should take advantage of it and go to bed early. I know I won't. I'll be either stumbling around on the internet, or I'll be giving myself cramp in my arm by playing the Wii again for God knows how long. Or maybe I'll get a phone call and decide to piss thirty quid up against the wall by going out and drinking.

And the thing is, today's been quite productive already. We had a band practice earlier, wrote another new song, and we even managed to film some of the practice and meeting (Next week, the footage will be up on the blog: We have a few software gremlins to iron out, and after that we'll be fine). We've probably secured our first gig (a headlining slot, but more details as they come!), and we've set the agenda for the next week. Check us out, we've been uber organised.

And because we've been so organised and productive, it is ironically leaving me more free time. Any projects I have to do are ongoing (like the blog), I have some phone calls to make, and I have to change the layout of the blog. The calls are to friends, so that'll be easy and fun (even if it is for gigs), the blog, though time consuming is also fun, and ties into stumbling, which is easily one of my favourite things, and the layout can be redone in a couple of hours with help from Mike (there's some HTML crap we need to do apparently).

So what am I going to do with all of my free time? I dunno. But two options involve a screen, and one involves drinking a lot. Neither involve an early night.

3: Money is so easy to waste.

I own seventy pairs of trainers. Fact.

How did I manage such a gargantuan number? Oh sure, I've only thrown away about seven pairs of trainers in my life. And yeah, I am nostalgic about them. I can look at trainers and remember what I was doing that season I was wearing them (I wear shoes to death, it usually take a season).

That said, since I moved to Cardiff, and found TK Maxx, I reckon I buy three or so pairs a month.

I'm also addicted to T shirts too. I have thirty or so T shirts. I contrast this figure with the number of shirts I own. (Five; and they're all for work).

This is all crap that I won't have in maybe a few years time. But if there's a sale on, how am I supposed to resist?

4: Hangovers get worse the older you get.

When I was younger, even despite being the lightweight of the group of peers that were my drinking buddies, I could still put away a frightening amount of alcohol. Of course, back then, drinking was a means to an end, and that end was the end of sobriety. We had no pride in what we were drinking. If it got is wasted, we drank it.

The hangovers then were horrific, granted… the difference between now and then is that back then, all that I’d need to recover from that hangover was a lot of food, a little bit more time in bed, and about four hours out of direct sunlight.
Now, the hangovers I get are deceptive. I wake up feeling fine, to the point where I fool myself into thinking that maybe I’ll even go for a walk. So I swing my legs out of bed, and head to the kitchen. By the time I can see the tiles, I realise I have disturbed the carefull crafted equilibrium that my body had been constructing for me to aid my recovery. In disturbing that process I have made things much worse.

There are lines in front of my eyes. My whole body aches. My tongue not only feels foul, but it’s sore. I have no coordination between any of my limbs, and thus stumble into furniture with rapidity and ease. I fight off waves of nausea that threaten to turn into projectile vomiting. And the worst part is the thudding sub migraine headache that is jackhammering through my head, with a layer of sickly acidity just underneath it.

This is all bad enough, but as you get older, your ability to metabolise alcohol hit its peak and then started degrading again. My liver has all but said “sod this, I’m off. I don’t get paid enough for this.” As a result, a hangover that six years ago would have lasted four hours now lasts three days. That’s nine times as long.

5: Getting dumped gets easier... and more frequent.

I don't think that I'm a particularly difficult guy to go out with. I may not be the most attractive guy in the world, but I'm not the ugliest (that award still apparently goes to "Beaky" Stevens of Milton Keynes, a man whose grotesqueness is so legendary that I have heard of him in Cardiff). I don't think that I'm all that riddled with personality problems, I earn enough to take a lady out with enough regularity as to ensure that the "we never go anywhere," argument never happens. I'm an ok dresser, my politics are fairly liberal live and let live, I'm maybe a touch opinionated, maybe quick tempered, but I think overall, I'm fairly easy to date.

That said, I get ditched quite easily.

My latest ex promised me the world. One of the most serious (and I mean serious: There were raised voices and items thrown: Cushions) arguments we had was about whether or not the dogs would sleep indoors or outdoors. Apparently, this was just how things were meant to be, and we were going to remain together no matter what.

Then she moved back to Cork.

I'm not bitter. She couldn't find a job in South Wales, found one back there, tried the long distance thing, and it didn't work. Oh well, it happens, and yeah, I was gutted, but I'm ok. I'm in a new relationship, and Sarah's amazing. I feel a bit mean, because I kept her waiting while I got myself Ok'd and ready to date again, and was waiting while I was still doing the long distance thing.

What I don't understand is how I went from being the guy she couldn't live without to the guy she needed to leave behind. And how that happened in the space of a month.

The last really tough breakup I had was when I was eighteen. She was all kinds of wrong for me, and still I kept going back. She broke up with me three days after my birthday at a train station. (funnily enough, my last ex dumped me at the same train station. I'm beginning to hate trains...) and I cried and listened to the greyest songs I owned. I did stupid things like start fucking around with other women hoping she could somehow psychically feel me doing it. I wasted hundreds of pounds getting blitzed on anything strongly alcoholic. I cried a lot. I wrote ream after ream of awful poetry, and hundreds of songs about being alone and unloved. And suddenly, after half a year of this shit, I was Ok.

I was single for a grand total of a month before getting with Sarah. Of course, I grieved, and I cried, and I listened to sad music, but maybe because I was doing long distance and learning to live like a single man anyway, and maybe because this didn't end horrendously like the breakup I had at eighteen, I had finished mourning after the first week. The second week was comforting. And the third week was beginning to party again. By the fourth week, it was New Years Eve, and that's when Sarah and I got it together. It means we have no excuse for forgetting our anniversary.

Maybe I had a decent breakup. Or maybe being dumped just isn't such a drag anymore. Because it's happened a lot.



Well, there you have it. Like an intricately woven tapestry, I have knitted myself into the grand tradition of blog posts with lists about life in general. I hope you enjoyed it. Tomorrow will hopefully be slightly more worldly stuff, grand political satire, biting discourse on the banalities of the net, or fuming about music or gaming. Hell, it may even be about the band.

Whatever it is, I'll see you all tomorrow!