Keep On Going..

If you're going through hell, keep on going...

Pretty much the definition of my life at the moment. I'm not always sure I like my career path, my degree, sometimes I'm not even sure I like myself. I suppose the last point comes about because of the first couple and the simple fact that nobody mentions that the above statement is only for use in the short term.

Hell is an OK place to visit every so often in life, its not a good place to live. Hell for short periods can teach you valuable life lessons and you come out the other side feeling like you've learned something. Long periods of time spent in hell and you get lost, it isn't a straight line along which you can 'keep going'. If you aren't careful you'll spend the rest of your life wandering around in hell lost for the exit point.

You need to be able to recognise when you should probably have found the exit already, and if you haven't now is probably the time to start changing things up a little bit. Its ok to turn around at times like that. People so often frown upon backtracking in life - a sign of weakness or being too fickle - very rarely do people point out that sometimes that is best for the person. However the direction you turn does not necessarily need to be back the way you came.

It also isn't something you need to find on your own. Its ok to admit to people that you feel like you are in hell. More importantly it shouldn't simply be greeted with a response like 'suck it up princess'. Sure everybody does a little time in hell, everybody doesn't wake up dreading their life or their work or some other particular THING  days after day.

Maybe you just need a new way to deal with it, or a new way to overcome it, or simple an alternative to what is currently on offer. There are people out there who will help. Friends, colleagues, family, psychs or counsellors.

Whatever you do don't make the mistake of thinking everybody lives in your hell. Everybody experiences life a little bit different and different stresses get to different people. For instance I stress out completely from answering machines 2 is my limit for a day and getting in trouble makes me beat myself up to the point where I hate me (at least for an hour or two). If you feel like you are in hell ALL THE TIME there could very well be something wrong though. Take a look at your life, if you want to do it over coffee with a friend at home, and really think about whether hell is worth it, whether your projection is actually directed to get you out of hell or if you've got lost in the dark and need to turn around.

Overdosed again

Isn't it funny how you often find you can't resist some habits even though they invariably lead to pain, heartache, and general feelings of dissatisfaction? I mean I've commented on my addiction nature before now. This is more the unfortunate side of having that personality. Well that and naturally being attracted by a specific genre regardless of medium.

I am addicted to romance. Unfortunately that brings to people's minds so many connotations of hopeless romantic and completely unable to differentiate reality from fiction and all those other 'stupid female' concepts. Even more unfortunately is that at times like this, when I reach the point of overdose, I'm pretty much proving many of those preconceived notions. I hate that because I don't as course of habit presume life will happen anything like it does in the books - I'm not sure I'd want it too - anybody who likes romance novels are necessarily the way to go with you life hasn't read enough of them. At the same time when I'm lonely I wouldn't mind some of the attention some of the characters in the books draw.



Now I'm normally a very good romance reader/listener/watcher even writer at times. I get swept along with all the feel good moments and laugh/cringe at the use of cliché. I am a huge person for the romantic cliché. I know so many people who think I'm silly for liking romance because of the clichés. In actual fact I think they are some of the best bits. Of course she is his secretary who knows everything about his life and yet he sees her completely asexually until the company Christmas party. Of course she is remarkably outspoken, clumsy and an uncommon beauty. I don't mind this - I love knowing the story progression by heart so that I can be completely swept up by the details.

So why am I suddenly not amused? Unfortunately it happens when my own love life is failing hopelessly. Yes I do begin to find myself wishing for the story, the fairytale. That doesn't make me like the genre though it makes me hate it and find it depressing. I really don't like it when my brain suddenly decides the romance stories are real. I feel it start telling me that everybody has that except me. Damn it but can I see that when I look around as well. So many of my friends are in relationships. Certainly every guy I've ever had a crush on is currently in a relationship (well except for the current one).

More than anything I hate having to USE the word crush. I feel like a 13 year old kid not a 20 year old who has been out of home for 4 years and seen 3 friends married and many more engaged. Yet what else do you call liking a guy who doesn't see you that way? I feel like all those secretaries in the M&B Sexy novels, only in the words of 'He's Just Not That Into You', I am the rule not the exception.

So at the moment I feel like a have an emotional hangover at the end of any chickflick I watch or book I feel. Even my music occasionally makes feel that way - country music has a large romance component to it (how else would you get such cliché song titles as 'Sleeping single in a double bed'). Everything is reminding me of the fact that I don't know how to have a real life relationship. The only romance I've ever known was found between the covers of a book.

How do you tell a friend you would be interested in being more than friends? Particularly when you are reasonably sure they could never see you that way. Hell, I've had the conversation in the past and completely destroyed my friendships. It has stopped being worth it. I don't have enough friends to risk friendships for relationships where the odds aren't good. As he has said quite directly (we were discussing beating around the bush vs direct approachs and this has been hopelessly removed from its surrounding statements to make it seem so much harsher) 'if I liked you you'd know'. It wasn't said to mean 'back off' but damn if I can't extrapolate. Friend zone it is.

I don't mind the friend zone - it doesn't effect my feelings towards a person at all. Certainly it means they talk to me and interact with me. Its only when we aren't together that it becomes a problem. Knowing I have no claim when I sure as hell would like one and knowing they have a claim they'll never want to stake over my emotions. Mostly though it is simply the thought that I will lose out in the end. Being in the friend zone means you will lose out when they do get into a relationship. I live waiting for that moment - it undeniably comes along every time.

My favourite times in life are when I'm not interested in any particular guy. I can read romance to my hearts content without these terrible feelings. I'm rarely if ever lonely. I don't find myself wasting hours on nothingness. Unfortunately going from where I am now to back to being not interested in a guy would be unbearably painful. So I'm stuck between a rock and a hard-place emotionally. What I hate the most is that it makes me sound like such a superficial, self-absorbed girl. I want there to be more to me... but I just don't know where to find that (dear heaven not in my studies).

The Day the Laughter Died... lol

I'm not sure... I can't be because of the delightful space fillers of modern internet speak which have ingrained themselves into my most intimate of thought patterns... But were people more likely to laugh or to cry in past decades than they are today? The ever increasing dependency upon technological forms of written exchange... be it SMS, email, MSN or similar has created a whole additional spectra to our written language. The world recognising that these new forms of communication are leading to some very significant changes in the English language. In the not to distant future it wont be remembering to dot i's and cross t's but remembering to capitalise I (the personal pronoun) and spell wat, I mean wHat, with a wh. However it goes far deeper than that.

SMS language is seen to be characterised by the shortening of words or the exclusion of the obvious connectors or prepositions. That is one part of it... the fitting of the most information in the least number of characters is essential at 160 to the text. However a whole additional aspect of the language is the expression of emotion. Humans for thousands of years has used facial expressions and body language to add even more information than the spoken word was capable. Now it seems there is a need to get around that; people bridging the final hurdle in attempt to make the internet communication seem more like true conversation than an exchange of written word.

This leads into the creation of a whole stew of acronyms... the lols, rofls, :(, :)... and so forth of conversation exchanges. It may seem odd that I through in the non-word typed expressions widely recognised as emoticons when I've stated clearly I'm talking about language. Emoticons were created to graphically represent facial expression in text based symbols. They have more in common with the emotion acronyms than the acronyms have with other shortened words. The acronyms have a more lengthy expression but essential represent some emotion condition of the person using it.

The most well known and probably most frequently used emotional acronym in my own experience is probably 'lol'. Most people will be able to tell you that this modern day acronym stand for 'laugh out loud'... I have heard older references of it, one I know is in the movie Sleepless in Seattle (where a letter is written to include quite a bit of modern acronym language), as 'lots of love' but that seems to have died out with the expanding use of the language. There are a number of jokes or quirky one-liners out in today's world about the insinuations of the acronym 'lol' and how people who use it are probably not actually laughing out loud? Probably a typical reply to such a remark would be lol.

Lol... To my I read it and say each of the letters individual 'l.o.l.' but to many it is actually read as a word in its own right lol... Which i must admit is what it has become. Lol, from personal experience only, is used where something is considered to be mildly amusing to a person. A number of other expressions escalate from there such as rolf, lmao. Possibly depending on a person the emoticon :) sits beneath the lol on the scale of one's expressed mirth. However is its acronym 'laugh out loud' applicable? People would be highly unlikely to have laughed outright and to respond with a simple lol right? Well you can't be sure... How about this question though, they aren't laughing now, but if they didn't know to say/think 'lol' how would that have responded to the stimulas (whatever it was)?

That is a point I think is of significance when looking at this whole new world language, emotion speak. People today have a whole host of emotive laguage at their disposal and quite instinctively just like they do with the rest of their language they use it to catergories and analyse. The language adds a whole host of purely emotive meanings enabling them to label the feeling they feel upon hearing a corny joke for the 50th time as easily as looking at a table and thinking 'table'. There is no getting around the thought process it is subconscious even before a person realises they are doing it. There is also no way of going backwards, no way of looking at a tree blankly and wondering what you would call that... its a tree!

I wonder if by giving people these new words we aren't being striped of some of the more simplistic responces to amusement. I doubt laughter will ever be banished or anything as drastic as that but do people laugh as often, as easily, as openly, as they used to? Or has terms like lol and the need to express it in a written form removed some of the instinctive responce to humour or sadness or fury from the everyday person? I'm not sure whether this new language is making people any better at expressing their emotions... or worse.

I am one of the thousands probably millions of people who find lol crops up in their internal thoughts even when not involved in internet conversations or communicating via text. Sometimes it just passes by I'm not even aware that I've done it. Others it bugs me... I feel like I'm more addicted than I ever wanted to be to internet speak. Outside that though it intrigues me I know how I'm responding to something because of the thought emoticon or acronym but what would I have felt if I hadn't had that there ready to come to mind? Would I have laughed instead?