Quiet Contemplation

Ah, October is almost behind us and that means that today is Halloween - that glorious day when droves of children decend on their neighbours in the hope that they'll be stupid enough to be suckered in to another "holiday" that's been amazingly misappropriated by money-grabbing corporations. The original meaning of All Hallows was probably distorted and reappropriated by the Christian faith when they tried to win over the Pagans, but for all I know it's all hoodoo anyway. Bring on tomorrow when it's November and I'll again forget to say whatever it is I'm meant to say when I first wake up to bring me luck for the month.

I'm sat here with a cup of tea, and Ladyhawke's album playing through for the umpteenth time (not including the track Professional Suicide, as it's the one track on the album I don't like much) and I've spent most of the day that I've been awake for contemplating a few things. It's weird, because yesterday while I was enjoying a comparatively quiet drink with a friend I made mention of how I'm quite glad that so far as I know I don't dream much - or that, if I do, I'm pleasantly oblivious to whatever my unconscious mind decided to explore the night before. I think far too much during the day, about things I shouldn't think about or about things that any sane person would never consider or be bothered by. When I'm asleep, none of that can bother me - it's like the mental mute button, if you like. I'm no longer bothered by thoughts about whether or not that mocking laughter was directed at me, or whether so and so was trying to take the proverbial about something about me at such and such a time... None of that gets to me when I'm asleep. I do, healthily I suppose, wonder at times just what exactly goes through my head when I'm asleep 'cause it'd be quite interesting to remember a dream or two and then see what it apparently "means". That's all they are, though, aren't they? Your subconscious trying to think things through in a manner that's somewhat alien to even ourselves, so it does it the best way it can - through analogy to the world we know and understand.

That thought lead me to another, which is that perhaps I really do need to get out of my head a bit more while I'm awake. I recently decided to open myself up to "branding", in the sense that I wanted people to label me with 5 or 6 adjectives from a predetermined list of 55, in order that I might see just how the way I see myself and how others see me overlapped. Yes, I'm sure some of you have realised by now that I'm describing the Johari window. I was somewhat surprised to learn that this was actually conceived as a legitimate cognitive psychology tool in the 50's, I just thought that was blurb from the guy who made the online version to try and make it sound good. Anyway, I set one up and so far I've had 18 responses - a lot of them made by "anonymous" individuals. In a way, I like the fact that people have been anonymous with their responses, as it means that I can't ask anyone in particular why they didn't pick a certain adjective or what lead them to the ones they did choose. On the other hand, I dislike uncertainty and not knowing things (one of the reasons I appreciate science so much) but in this case it's a mild irritation I'll have to bear. As it is, none of the adjectives have had a sufficient response to be deemed "dominant traits" though over the past few days both friendly and self-conscious have enjoyed some of the limelight of being referred to as dominant. Hopefully there'll be more input over the coming week, and perhaps I might get a better picture of how people see me. That'd be nice.

In the time since I originally started writing this, on Friday, I've been hit with slightly more revelations and some of them are quite good. The first one isn't so much a revelation, really, but more a thought that went through my head whilst I was sat in a take-away waiting for a kebab. I was sat with Nikki, and she was playing with her phone and discovering funky new stuff that she didn't know it did and being a bit excited about it, and I remember that the only thing running through my head at the time was how pretty she is. Granted this isn't something I've never said before, but sat in that take-away that day it just came back in force, just how I feel about her. I realised that I know exactly what I feel for her, that it hasn't changed and that I'm not sure whether it's going to any time soon. I've considered trying to just put it all aside, in a box if you like, somewhere that it can't get to me anymore. I'm not sure if I want to, or if I'm even able to do that. It'd also mean that I'd just be carrying around emotions that may very well cause problems later on, that I haven't properly dealt with or made sense of. I suppose I'll figure that one out one way or another.

Lastly, but certainly not least, I realised a few things last night. What began as a reasonably quiet drink with Nikki, since I have a bottle of southern comfort from work which I felt like sharing, ended up turning into a visit to a halloween house party being organised by the physics society. Now, considering that I know hardly anyone from my course aside from a select few unfortunate individuals, it could've gone a lot worse. Being the somewhat avoidant person I am, I expected that I might just end up stuck in a corner somewhere doing little except slowly drinking the booze we took (an 8 pack of Strongbow) and being kinda miserable as always. As it happens, I actually spoke to people I didn't know. That's like majorly unheard of. Might not have been quite the case that I just wandered up to random people and started talking to them, more that I just kinda talked to people with Nikki and people if they spoke to me a bit. Still, not quite what I was expecting to happen so maybe I am a little off when I expect everyone to just be arbitrarily off with me.

That's all I have for this blog I think, apart from sharing the fact I have still got the remnants of a hangover but it's been mostly cured thanks to liberal consumption of 7up and chicken balti. Lovely.