Documentation obsession.

"We’re in a generation where, if you don’t document it, it didn’t occur." - Jesse Eisenberg

I’m obsessed with documentation. This mainly comes out in the form of photos. I know I can get annoying with the amount I’ll pull my camera out, but I love having that image that will evoke that memory that will just…be there afterwards (I also like the aesthetics of photographs, though I’m not good at taking good ones…but when a wonderful one occasionally appears through my camera lens it makes me wonderfully happy).

I also write blog posts and take dailybooth pictures and I’ve started making videos. And there’s facebook statuses. There’s a facebook app that, at the end of the year, you can go back and see all your old statuses and put them in images which you will then…well, have. I write facebook statuses with this in mind; thinking that at the end of the year, I’ll have that record.

Sometimes I take photographs or write statuses that completely share (or, as far as any experience can be shared) with those who see it. But sometimes I write or photograph things that mean something to me, but me alone (or me and people I shared the experience with); a quote, maybe, but a quote that has significance for what I’m doing or feeling at the time, or a photo of a landscape or object, but that evokes so much more with me.  

I also collect objects that remind me of things; this I’ve done all my life, literally as long as I can remember, but I have recently been doing it with a new kind of fanaticism and (some) attention to order. I love going through the things and thinking about things I’ve done and things I’ve seen and things I’ve experienced.

There are three key reasons why I’m so obsessed with doing this. First, I have this massive paranoia about…not doing anything with my life. I don’t mean, like, not really accomplishing anything (though I have that too somewhat…), but just about, being lazy and not ever really experiencing enough or creating enough or just having enough fun…I think because I am pretty naturally lazy and apathetic, and this is something I’m constantly working against. And my various forms of documentation are proof, to myself, that I have done things and am doing things.

I also just love looking at things and remembering. If things were good…or even if they weren’t good, but were powerful or important or significant…it’s nice to be able to somewhat relive those emotions from that time or experience. Clearly, there’s such a thing as spending too much dwelling on the past. But a little is just…it’s nice.

And finally…it helps me make some sort of sense of my life. With photos and fragmented pieces of prose and random quotes and video clips and leaflets and old tickets and old programmes and old newspaper clippings and many, many other bits and pieces I’ve collected…by sorting them out and having them to look at, it feels like I can make some sense of and have some grasp of what has past. You don’t know what’s coming, but you know what happened, and you can string it together to make some sort of flow. I’m a natural storyteller (I don’t mean I’m good at telling or writing stories, I just mean that my brain naturally works with and forms narratives) and understanding the narrative of my life makes me feel so much more…secure. Content. Real. Working out what’s happening in my life, backwards.

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards." - Soren Kierkegaard  

I don't feel like a teenager...

I’m eighteen years old. That makes me a teenager, right? Well, technically, yes, I guess. And in many ways I’m very teenager-y; I go out and I drink and probably the most important thing in life to me is hanging out with my friends and I spend way too much time on the internet and I fight with my parents and I’m still far more idealistic than an average person whose lived their life longer than me…but I don’t really feel like a teenager anymore.

Of course, this raises the question of what a teenager is. On my plane home from California there was a girl of about thirteen right in my line of sight. I noticed her because she’s was such a stereotypical young teenager; reading a magazine about Miley Cyrus and The Jonas Brothers, with a quiz on “how should YOU rock stripes?”, and adamantly staying awake for the majority of the flight despite the fact that it was an overnight flight.

And that’s defiantly not what I’m like.

But it could be argued that that kinda phase is more the pre-teen phase, that maybe for some gets carried over into early teenagerhood.

I guess I see a teenager as what I was from around fifteen to seventeen (when I was thirteen/fourteen…I don’t know what I was. I was very aimless and didn’t really have a life). You start going out a lot and start developing a teenage style social life based around drinking and parties, in my case you develop a tight nit circle of friends, you start learning how to dress and do yourself up so you don’t look like a complete mess, you have things with guys…you’re still very young and in many ways innocent, but you probably don’t feel it because you’re having all these experiences that are all new and shiny and exciting for you. And you are maturing. You’re starting to learn to view the world and people more complexly, you’re having to make some real decisions about the future (even if at first this only means what A levels you’re going to take). But you’re still, really, quite young.

Not that I’m not young now. In some ways I’m way more aware that I’m young than I was when I was fifteen. But that’s because I have far greater perspective than I did when I was fifteen.

But take a fifteen year old and a twenty one year old…and I would defiantly group myself with the twenty one year old. In the past year I have grown up a lot; I’ve had to deal with stuff that I could not have at fifteen, I’ve done things I probably would never have been awesome enough to do at fifteen. And I’m still making decisions about my future, but now those involve money and relationships and jobs and really long term plans and looking after myself.

And that’s a big one.

Looking after myself.

I really believe that you should and mostly will always have people in your life who will help you out. We are not totally independent creatures; we work together and look out for one another. But how that works, for me, at eighteen, is very different to how that worked just a few years ago.

Because now I feel like a part of a web, and an equal part of it; I have loads of people who will help me and look out for me, but I’m not…well, a child. Clearly when you’re young you are responsible for the things you do…but less so. And you’re looked after. I was pretty “mature” at fifteen, but I was still very much looked after. And although now I’m still financially supported by my parents, the dynamic is very different. I’m not just a helpless kid anymore.

I’m still very, very young.

I’ve done loads in the past year but in so many ways I’m still very inexperienced.
Hell, I still don’t know how to cook.
But I don’t feel like a teenager anymore, not really.
I still go out and drink and do “teenager-y” things, but what twenty year old doesn’t do those things?
I feel like an adult.
A young, sometimes very silly, adult.
But an adult none the less.

Experimentations with weed.

Written on 3rd/4th August on the plane home from California.

The weed laws in California are wrong. Whatever your position on the drug debate, they are wrong. Because, as it stands now, you can only get weed as prescription medication. But you can buy a prescription, perfectly, legally, in a shop on the street, so, essentially, weed is entirely legally accessible to anyone with the money, but, because it is “medicinal” it is not taxable, and if it were, it would greatly help California’s financial situation. Either we decide that weed is a dangerous substance that people should not be allowed to consume, and thus should make it more inaccessible to people, or we decide it’s safe enough/people have a right to choose, and make it entirely legal, in order to bring in tax revenue; right now, in California, weed is entirely the wrong amount of legal.*

Though I may think that the current California policy on weed is flawed, none the less it made California a good place for me to try the stuff for the first time. As an asthmatic, I chose a lollypop over smoking, and over pills, as I thought with a lollypop it would be easier to regulate the amount I was taking.
I went through the standard “I don’t feel anything” phase, before it started to feel kind of nice. I felt…floaty, and happy. I tried to move my arm and found that, despite the floaty feeling, my arm had actually turned into a piece of lead. But that was OK. I felt relaxed. That was good. Then I found myself getting sleepy, partly because of the weed, I’m sure, but also because I was just really, really tired. There was some Red Bull on the table, so I drank that, and with it came a burst of energy, which found me tap dancing in the middle of the room, to the amusement of my friend.

This was followed by a sudden craving for tea…and while I was sitting there waiting for the water to boil, I started to feel strange.

It was like there was a…duality in my thinking; like whatever facet of my brain takes in my surroundings and controls my basic functioning was high. It was relaxed and sluggish and only somewhat aware of what was going on. But behind that, another part of my brain, I guess whichever part thinks about things deeply and solves problems and things like that, was functioning far more normally.

And so I started to feel trapped.
My inner thinking self was caught inside my high exterior. And what got increasingly clear was that I couldn’t just shake it off. When I’m drunk, I know that I’ll pretty much always be able to sober up, at least somewhat, in an emergency. With weed, I didn’t think I would be able to.

This reminds me of somewhat of Evanna Lynch’s blog post for the HPA about how being trapped in a body bind is her greatest fear. I would probably say my greatest fear is more about being totally out of control of whatever situation I’m in; but the idea of being trapped in a body bind would fall into that category.

And that’s sort of how I felt on weed. I felt that if something bad happened, I would be helpless. And even though there was no reason something bad would happen…I just felt trapped, because I could see no way to get out of the state I was in.

So then I started to panic. Except that I couldn’t really panic, not fully, because my body would do nothing but just sit there. So it was just this one part of my brain struggling to panic by itself, with the rest of my body and some of my mind refusing to join in. This was not helped by the realisation that my friend was also high; I mean, clearly, I knew he would be, but I suddenly started to really notice it in his behaviour, and then it occurred to me he was probably as helpless as me…so he wasn’t, well, as there to look out for me as normal (this, I should point out, was in my mind; he was no where near as high as me, and largely still competent...he was high enough to be strangely facinated by a small patch of spilt tea on the floor, but yeah; no where near the place that I was. But in the state of mind I was in, his amusement at the tea was a cause for alarm).

Not that there would be any need for him to look out for me, even then I did know that, but still, right then…I was scared.
I had some tea before going to take my make up off. I wanted to sleep. If I slept, I’d wake up the next day feeling normal. I wanted that. Seeing myself in the mirror, I realised that my eyes were red. It looked pretty horrible. As did I. I’m not the vainest person you will ever meet, but I certainly have a vain streak. I don’t like seeing myself looking bad, but normally I would just shrug it off. Right then, it disgusted me.

One thing I’ve discovered about weed, or at least me on weed, is that I can’t tell how far away sound is coming from, so I could heard voices, from presumably outside in the street, buy it seemed to me like they were in the room. I knew that they weren’t really, but it was a bizarre experience.

I was also really, really tired. I was taking long blinks, and Everytime I blinked I’d fall asleep for maybe half a second, before waking up. It was insanely disorienting. The real world around me was becoming increasingly dreamlike too, and not in a good way. Everything seemed surreal and angular and distorted.
I got into bed. I slept. I woke up feeling completely exhausted and spent the day with whatever the weed equivalent is to a hang over.

I’m glad I tried it, for everything. It wasn’t, mostly, a good experience, but it was an interesting one; I was curious, and now I’ve somewhat satisfied my curiosity. It’s not had, like, a lasting negative impact, and I look back on it mostly with interest rather than negative feelings.

I’m still pro the legalisation of weed, and people being able to use it if they want to. But I’m not sure if I’m pro me using it. Maybe I just took too much. I’m a small person, and there was a lot of stuff in that lollypop. It was nice at first, after all. But a similar nice effect could probably be achieved with alcohol. So for a bit, at least, I think I’m going to stay away from weed. My eyes look best when they are blue, black and white.


*My friend pointed out that I was somewhat wrong about this:

"although it's true that marijuana isn't taxed in the way alcohol and tobacco are (although it should be), it IS charged sales tax when it's sold medicinally. So there is SOME state revenue generated this way that wouldn't be if it were still illegal."

Conventions: a simpler way of life.

Being thrown back into the real world after the most amazing two and a bit weeks of Buffy’s high school and Disneyland and Comic Con and beach time and road trips and cultural and shopping trips through San Francisco and Vidcon and meeting Stan Lee and chilled out LA times in California…being thrown back into reality has proved quite a shock.Thinking about things I have to do and sort and make happen is proving somewhat overwhelming to me at this moment, hence the fact that I’m awake at 2:30 in the morning (that and jetlag), writing this and sorting my over a thousand pictures (yup) from the trip.

The two focal events of my trip were the two cons; comic and vid. They were both really, really amazing in entirely different ways. I find myself missing them for all the obvious reasons involving awesome people and awesome events…but I also, in the current OMG I HAVE SO MUCH TO DO fog, find myself missing the general con…way of life.

Vidcon only went on for two days, but even that was enough to be more than just event, and become something of a temporary style of living, while comic con was five days long so…yeah.
At conventions, the problems you have to solve are simple; how do I get to this event? How early will I have to stand in line to get a good seat? Am I programmed out? Do I want to deal with the hell that is the intersection to the nearest road with restaurants or face the inedible food here? (applying only to comic con; the food at the vidcon hotel was lovely).

Being entirely “relaxed” isn’t always relaxing…it makes me think to much about future big life stresses. But the stresses and need to organise and need to problem solve that a con brings…they keep those thoughts at bay, while not being overwhelming themselves. Because if my problem is what time I should go and stand in line for a panel…well, I work it out, and do it. No big life consequences, no long term effect or regret, just problem > solution.

Which is so, so, so nice.
It reminds me somewhat of theatre; during a play, you don’t worry about big life shit, you worry about x person getting on stage at y time.

Life could never stay like that forever, clearly, it would get boring, clearly it would end up seeming meaningless, clearly I would get tired of Captain Americas pushing past me…but right now, I’m defiantly missing the simplicity…part of my current “I miss everything about California and do not want to be in London right now” mood.