Speed of thought typing.

Don’t feel like writing much today.

Had a good day at school.  Managed to get to the end having accomplished most of what I set out to do, and with decent reasons for not accomplishing the remaining bits and pieces.

Finally managed to spend a whole maths lesson sat with the group I wanted to sit with, while the remaining groups got on with what they were supposed to be doing.  For a class as needy as mine that’s a remarkable achievement.

There will also be a parachute challenge taking place sometime soon.  How to get an egg to survive.  Need to find a high place to drop these parachutes from, and a pile of resources.

I want your money

A plea for funds.  I’m running the world’s first ever kilomathon on the 14th of March, to raise money for Birmingham St Mary’s Hospice.  There’s a just giving page for donations.  I expect you all to go and have a look, and then try and come up with a reasonable justification to refuse my request.

The world’s first ever.  I’m looking forward to being able to say I was part of history.

Coat of Arms

Having read this post on All The Dumb Things, I got to thinking about what I would put on my own personal coat of arms.  After much shouting at my computer (it’s most high tech drawing program is called paint), here are the results:

Locust Coat of Arms

The large yellow fallen E shape is a classical heraldic device used to signifiy the oldest son of a line.  Technically speaking my shield would have been the same as my father’s, with the E shape added.  Different shapes were added depending on the relationship between the head of the household and the son/cousin/brother, and their place in the inheritance queue.

The bats in the top right corner represent (apparently), an awareness of the forces of chaos.  I well aware of the forces of chaos.  They’re in my head.

I’d like to think the quill was obvious.

The brick shapes are something called a billettee.  These are supposed to represent letters, and are a symbol for the collection of knowledge.  It would be nice to think I’ve accumulated a small amount over the years.

The hourglass is similar to a tattoo I have on my shoulder.  I never feel like I have enough time left to get everything done.  The fact that I’m rarely sure what ‘everything’ is is immaterial.  I still don’t have enough time to do it in.

Now I just need a motto.  ‘I came, I procrastinated, I was angry’ translates (according to the internet) as ‘Ego venit , Ego cunctator , Ego eram iratus’.  but I thought that ‘I came’ was simply ‘Veni’.  Anyone able to hgelp me out with this?

Curious mental shift.

Sat on the sofa, holding my thoughts up to the light for inspection like so much dirty laundry.  Threadbare reasoning fleeing under the solar flare of attention into insubstantial wisps of cobweb justification.  Turning the searchlight inward is a typical behaviour pattern for me.  Frank acknowledgement of the results is not.  To lay the results of my thinking out on the proverbial chopping block:

I’m bored, and I don’t know what to do about it.  Mainly because I’m not entirely sure what I’m bored with.

When I say I’m bored, I don’t mean with my relationship, with the segments of my life that exist outside of the necessities of functioning as a modern human being in the 21st century.  I have a wonderful girlfriend, who I appreciate with new eyes in this new decade.  Every day she never fails to make me notice the beauty in the universe I’ve turned my face from for far too long.   It’s an important point to make.

Boredom and frustration figure as separate colours in the emotional spectrum to me.  Frustration is characteristically spiky and antagonistic, prone to possession annihilation and expletive strewn ranting at targets of opportunity.  Boredom is more of a diffuse glow through the brain, a pearlescent curtain that seeps through everything, dulling the colours, blurring the edges.  It leads to apathy and blankness, inertia and a huddling around the comforting dullness of familiarity.  Old books, older thoughts, engrained thought patterns and processes that fail to truly examine the reason for the boredom.  Quite often it pulls towards the internet, where abandonware and wikipedia offer a way to slip back into the hobbies of the past, when I was convinced that life would evenntually arrange itself in such a way that I would emerge from the throng successful.

Having acknowledged the existence of boredom, my focus shifted to the reasons behind it.  Once the personal relationship angle has been examined and discarded, the remaining possibilities are still myriad and elusive.  Pinpointing boredom.  Roughly akin to nailing evening mist to a wall.  I have to admit to a certain lack of motivation and interest in my professional life, but no appealing alternative offers sufficient financial compensation to make it possible.

So where else could the malady lie?  Perhaps in a certain lack of achievement I feel within myself.  But surely that would produce annoyance rather than boredom?  It’s also not a new or unusual circumstance for my brain to find itself in, whereas the feeling of boredom has crept up in the last few months.

Not knowing the source of the boredom is making dealing with it extremely awkward.  It obviously required further study.

Curses

Read Dreams from my Father.  Now fail to see the point of writing at all.  Mr Obama is somewhat more talented in that direction than I am.