It's Good to be Stopped in your Tracks

“Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don’t want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you’re doing here. Believe in kissing.”
― Eve Ensler

I Tweet Therefore I Am

'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'" - George Orwell, 1984.

During Adam Ostrow's TED talk 'After your final status update', he mentions a website that predicts your next tweet by analysing your previous tweets. All you have to do is enter your username, and it will automatically generate what your next tweet will be. I find this idea of data analysis within social networking equally fascinating and terrifying in an 'Orwellian Nightmare' kinda way, so I figured I'd try it out.

And here it is, my 'next tweet' prediction:
Talaga? Tala GaGa!!!! Biggest Rickroll ever read. Pinkola Estes Who Run With TED.

Well, what can I say... the likelihood that that would've been my next tweet is probably about 79%. Keep hitting that 'get your next tweet' button for endless hilarity. Be careful, you could lose a few hours in the blink of an eye.

Some other notable 'next tweet' results:

Jeremy Paxman
Does anyone find me a pineapple? Back from the content of this sandwich.

Stephen Fry
A cunning new recruit: Bowels working? "Haven't been issued with a child, despite the FB Instagram!

Mark Zuckerberg
Never thought I'd be on Facebook soon! So many interesting people can have unlimited connections on FB.

Some of my other favourite predictions:

Today, my life is getting educated. drive-through daquiris?! oh yes. could go for your reply, Opteka?

Jeremy Paxman staring at a unique Galician-Portuguese word - Shelina is a thing.

You will have zebras, jumping off at things. Anyone been updated since 2009. Collective denial.

This one is deep... 
The moment you expect to feel jaded. it's really hard. but I got all up in my soul.

And this one might be my favourite... 
Oh instagram, I don't care if I like! tres moody and lemon slices on Mark Zuckerberg.

Especially liking the part about lemon slices on Mark Zuckerberg.

Well, after all that, I'm 100% fifty-fifty that modern technology is just a hairs-breadth away from destroying the human race entirely.

Dull is the eye that will not weep to see 
Thy walls defaced, thy mouldering shrines removed 
By British hands, which it had best behoved 
To guard those relics ne'er to be restored. 
Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved, 
And once again thy hapless bosom gored, 
And snatch'd thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred!

From "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" by Byron.

Optimism, Pessimism and Neutralism

Me
...it was a disaster, but its better than repeating the old mistakes.

Paul
But you feel better for it, right?

Me
better, and worse.

Paul
A no win situation

Kim
on the contrary, a no lose situation.

Paul
I admire your optimism [:-)]

Me
its not optimism, its... neutralism.

Paul
Haha im not sure if it's a good thing or not

Me
...it's neither good nor bad.



I'm starting to annoy myself.

Odd Things in My Inbox

This is probably one of the strangest emails I've ever found lurking in my Junk folder...

Hello my friend,

It is nice and joyful to found you on the Internet search. I thought is beautiful to make you a friend in this regard. My name is Luise Brown; Well I am a Canadian female. My friends tell me that I am a quiet person with a good sense of humor. I am always fair, straightforward, honest and easy going and I seek trust worthy friendship. I believe in giving and taking on both sides and I value faithfulness.

I like people for what they are and not for what they are not.

Find my profile; I will be detailed in my consequential mails and expecting same from you:

AGE: 27
Height: 174 cm 5' 6?
Weight: 60 kg 148 lbs
Waist: 24"
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Blond
City: Toronto.
Country: Canada.
Occupation: Admin.
Education: Ba. Management
Religion: Catholic
Marital Status: Single
Kids: No kids
Languages spoken: Fluent English & little Spanish.
Yours truly.
Luise.


Maybe I should reply? We're practically the same person afterall, except for the Catholicism.

Hm.

Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

Today, I went walking around the place I grew up. The fields, streets, and the parks close to the house I lived in for my entire childhood, right up until I went to university. I've been staying here a while now, but I've barely ventured out into the area immediately around the house, usually going further afield into town or to the gym.

I walked past a shop that I used to go to as a kid to buy a bag of penny sweets. A girl who lived across the street from me and I used to find copper coins and walk to the shop, sometimes sneaking an 11th penny sweet into a bag of ten. We would buy ice-pops in the summer that turned our tongues blue. I walked uphill along a road to a bridge. This was further than I ever went as a child, taking photos of the bare branches and the berries against the blue sky as I went. Cars passed by and people were walking their dogs, and a dual carriage way lay underneath the bridge.

I watched the cars for a few minutes and turned back, heading to the park behind my house. It has been repainted several times since I played there, it's now bright green and blue, but it was cherry red many years ago. I used to swing across the monkey bars until my hands calloused, and I could turn upside down easily. There was a girl (nicknamed the Kraken) I used to see there who would always try to stamp on my feet, so I stayed on top of the bars so she couldn't get me.

I remember running around the field in lime green cycling shorts with dirty hands, I must've been no older than 5 or 6. I remember playing cricket with some boys and a bat that was just too heavy, I remember waiting at the park with a girl called Janine and a boy called James for my dad to come and pick me up on a Friday night in the summer to take me to Cheshire for the weekend. Another girls brother had once fallen and hit his head on a bench there and was taken to A&E, and I often climbed the thick trunk of a tree behind the swings, only once slipping and falling out. I remember being older; sitting there with some high school friends, with older boys who smoked and looked down my top as they stood over me. We spent summer nights there and weekend afternoons, groups of boys on bikes, drinking beer and watching older kids smoke and flirting.

I sat on a bench, trying to adjust the manual mode of my Nikon so I could photograph the sun glaring out from behind the clouds. The same bench I'd sat on, holding hands with my first boyfriend. I'd once sat there at about 7am with tear-stained cheeks and blood soaking through my sleeves. The sun was bright but the air cold and I was about to leave, deciding at last minute to take a quick walk through the little forest area called the dell before heading home.



A flood of emotion hit me surprisingly hard as I walked down the sloping path between the trees, and so many memories over so many years came back to me in flashes. The time I'd borrowed a friends bike and the brakes failed and sent me headfirst into the bushes at the bottom of the slope. The time I'd met a friends ex-boyfriend there in the darkness, and we kissed up against a tree as a man with a torch walked his dog nearby, it was pitch dark and thrilling. The time when I was just a girl and I pushed a friend off the fallen log we were sitting on into some stinging nettles. A game of kiss chase, and one of the boys told me to only ever let him catch me, not the other boys. Countless treks to the end of this wooded area to climb through a hole in the hedge, to walk across the farmers fields and reach the stream, first with my sister when I was only 3 or 4. She still wore her school uniform and drank a can of Woodpecker and tapped a cow pat with her polished black shoe and impressively managed to escape the mess oozing from the crack. One summer, a group of four of us, two girls and two guys, playing on the rope swing over the stream. The swing came to a standstill away from the bank, hanging over the stream, and I had to climb up the rope to lift myself off it and lower myself down into the shallow water. The other girl stepped into a muddy bank and instantly sank up to her knee, and almost lost her shoe. We spent hours there in the sun, and went home in the evening filthy and tanned and weary in the way that only sunshine and physical exertion can make you feel. One of those boys was my boyfriend that summer, he was a year younger than me and cute and we broke up once the autumn came.

All of these fragments floated back into my mind. Whole summers distilled down and remembered in a single image, or several feelings lightly strung together with a fragile thread, much of the information drained away, blown away by Time like a fine gold dust. These brightly coloured fragments were all crowding into this tiny little place of nothing more than a few trees and muddy paths. Fragments of a life lived, almost identical to so many other childhoods across the world and yet completely unique, untold by the silent trees and the houses that watched behind garden fences. I felt so overwhelmed, tears sprang to my eyes behind my sunglasses.

And as so many times before, I walked away from the dell, heading for home. So many summer evenings heading home hungrily for tea. And all those people and myself, we came and went from each others lives. Some of them I know have children now, some of them I can barely remember their names. Most of them I'll probably never see again. I wonder if they ever remember those times, or think of this place?

I found myself wondering when I had last come down here. And what I was doing, thinking, and who I was with. I couldn't have known it would be the last time I'd be there, the last time I'd feel truly a part of that place, the last time I'd feel the interconnectedness of the people, experiences we shared, however insignificant, and the trees themselves who have stood there all that time and watched us, and stayed there when we went home for tea and the sun set orange against the bricks of our houses, and have been standing there quietly growing ever since, and have never said a thing. I don't recall the exact moment when those connection ceased to exist. But after that last time, the people left, and the place became empty, filled only with the invisible memories, crowding quietly and brightly between the trees in the sunlight, tugging at my heart.

the snow falling faintly through the universe

"A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
From The Dead, Dubliners by James Joyce