And I've got a bit of a retrospective on my life in 2016, what with that trend going around on social media or so I hear. Wow. All in a week.
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| Week 7. |
Monday was such a good day. A rarity! Early in the morning I went for another RDV with my social worker. She's hands-down the best social worker I've ever had: she started with the fact that she's there to help solve any problems I have in relation to integration and making the job search progress easier. Stuff like accommodation, health, financing etc. It makes sense that it's her job but now it seems that previous social workers were purposely obscuring that to just get me out the door...
Anyway, since I'm doing OK with accommodation and have welfare right now, I'm only really looking for work. But she also said that I should start looking into taking a driving test. I've never formally learnt to drive but when I was a teen my mum taught me to some stuff but it's been like a decade since. Every other time I moved around so much and I never had time to get my license. I was really nervous to even ask because I assumed my French wasn't good enough to take the test but she said I should try a practice exam and if it's passable she'd set up the rest.
I'm actually super scared. Probably irrationally. I've seen and been in cars with people who were such horrific and reckless drivers, I still have no idea who decided they were fit for the road. Though I might get failed for driving too slow because I can't imagine doing something more terrible that causing a card accident. The stereotype of women being bad drivers always caused me to raise an eyebrow because of how absurd it is: I know of so few women that have been in accidents where someone dies and they are statistically safer drivers. Guys, on the other hand... Either way, I'm scared I'll freak out and freeze up.
After that I came home and we watched a little more of the Olympics, I'm excited to see the women's Big Air tonight. Tom called me up and I totally blanked that we wanted to play more Left 4 Dead 2 today! We got through Dark Carnival, Swamp Fever, and Hard Rain (which is my fave). I think I forgot to mention in my last post but I'm playing as Ellis, he is usually my main and I know the idea that he gets hit by the specials more is not true but it sure as fuck feels like it! Tom is playing Nick (he has a type, what can I say...). My brother always plays Rochelle and my sister always plays Coach.
Come evening time, we got mad at France TV because they keep jumping between events and so we missed the entire second run of Big Air. Like man, who does that?! They only have 2 official sports channels and at one point both were playing ski jumping! Also, the amount of ads and AI...dude... anyway, they luckily took it back to Big Air for the final run and Kokomo Murase was amazing! It's pretty funny to see that almost all the athletes are way younger than me (t'was a time when everyone was older than me, ah, the naivete of being a kid!) but the new generation is really good.
My sister and I also stayed up to like 3AM to finish this puzzle she bought at the second hand store. The seventh layer of hell is realizing you've been trying to stick three incompatible but identical black puzzle pieces for 15 minutes only to find out that the one you needed somehow fell to the floor and has been looking at you the whole time.
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| Sanity at zero. |
On Tuesday I had a monster migraine all day. Like it wouldn't take a fucking break! On Wednesday I finally fully updated CDwORLD. Imagine if I was smarter and knew Javascript or something and could somehow automate the process? Nah...
Thursday, we were hit by a huge storm. My windows were shut tight and still every gust nearly took them of their hinges and slammed them into the walls. Our roof shuddered and creaked and groaned. We could hear every single time the wind beat against us and the neighbours.
In the morning we saw that while our house was alright, our friends' house where we go to clean every week, took some hits. They have a kind of shade sail attached to the wall at the back of their house and the thing ripped off in the night and smashed holes in their glass door with the hooks. And the worst thing was that the entirety of the other side of our town, that's downhill, was submerged.
We've heard that our region can get really flooded, we had yet to see it though, and this was nearly apocalyptic. I mean, houses totally flooded and roads where we walked not even a week earlier totally under water. We're completely safe in town but it's weird to see. Even the main road by the farms is completely blocked.
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| Fuck it, welcome back Atlantis. |
Come Friday, it was almost my mum's birthday so I went out and bought all the stuff I needed to prepare dinner. Tom also came over in the afternoon, we were supposed to do some sketches for his OCs that he wants me to draw but got totally side-tracked by video games. We played some MW3 and moved on to Diablo III which we played for hours until we were so tired we only had energy for a movie. We decided to watch Final Fantasy Spirits Within because Tom hasn't seen it in years. There was some random ass council member that me and Mo were like: 'Fucking hell, this guy's voice is so recognizable! Who is it?!'. Well it was Keith David who's famous for like...every role he's done but we know him best as the Arbiter from Halo and Anderson from Mass Effect.
On Saturday it was my mum's 54th. It's pretty weird... I remember knowing that my mum was like 35, like that was a fact in my small child brain and now it's 20 years after. Probably weirder for her. I made her breakfast in bed while my brother and sister went out to buy flowers and a cake so it would all be fresh. We had a lazy morning, she was supposed to have lunch with us and go out for a dinner and a concert with a friend in the evening but it was all sadly cancelled because of the flood. Instead I made cannelloni for the first time, lasagna with extra steps, I say. Forgot to take pictures as usual but we had a good time, just the family and Monique who is also family so...
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| Birthday! |
Lots of gossip about our small town and stuff. Nobody starts shit like small town public servants start shit, man. They'll make the drama if they can't sniff any out. Tom says as much too and I can see it.
Sunday was laid-back. I finished the Titanfall 2 fanlisting. It's my fave game of all time and while I'm not totally happy with the layout, it will work for now.
I read a real nice post by Rhys Wynne whom I know from 32bit about the 'Me in 2016' trend. He says he came across it on Insta, but I don't even go there, though I too have witnessed something like it on Tumblr. I think Key also made a similar post earlier in the year. Basically, it's kind of an exercise in looking back at where and who you were ten years ago. Ten years ago. Fuck off...No, really, fuck off!
So, I already started diary-keeping by then (thanks, past me), so I've got some insight into how I was doing back then. And how was that? Bad. One reason for it: high school. I was very angsty, very self-deprecating, very insecure, and agitated all through out my teens. If I had friends, best friends, I spent much time doubting if they even liked me (with and without reason). I knew teachers hated me and I was a chronic underachiever that sometimes had sparks of good work, maybe even excellence, that resulted in teachers praising me one day and realizing it was a false-positive on the indicator for any real future success the next. I was somehow both too honest and an oversharer and also constantly making shit up and never saying what I really mean. I was so mad at people who just follow the herd and would constantly fly off the handle with tangents about it but I was also totally misinformed about the world, too lazy and too stupid to learn new things or to look outside convention, and also a coward on most days when it came to standing up for something, and what brings me most shame, for someone when need be. I speak pretty fondly of music, movies, and games of that era or earlier because that and the 'art' I created were my only escape.
With all that said, I don't really hate or even cringe at the person I was back then. I was just a kid. And if I was a whole separate person from my 16/17-year old self I wouldn't want to let her down by also turning away from her. It's weird. It really feels like it's not me at all, but somewhere still she stays within me. I guess you should have love for your past self, even if your crime was being an unbearable teenager.
Here's an excerpt from early 2016 from my diary. First, a very bizarre set of sentences. Second, isn't it funny how memory works? I do not remember mourning David Bowie so severely.
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| January 2016. |
Last entry of 2016. Seems when school started everything went to shit fast and I didn't write until well into 2017. I guess if you're asking yourself: was I really that angsty in high school? The answer is always yes, without a doubt, yes. I think as sad as this little tidbit is it really summarized what I was feeling in 2016.
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| August 2016. |
Very hard to remember what exactly was life-changing back then but there's about three things that I can talk about that were so new or so important in my life back in 2016 that they did irreparable damage to my spirit:
1. First Taste Of Boozing
Late by some standards, illegal by others, the first time I got really fucked up was in 2016 when I probably already turned 17. We'd go to the supermarket with our group of friends of probably 10 people, we had kids as young as 15 in the group which is honestly really terrible but since it was a small school friendships and drunken nights out between grades weren't that weird. We'd pick up nasty beers like Coronas, and cocktails in bottles, and girly vodka with a barely-there raspberry or lemon aftertaste. Everyone threw in 100 RMB (that's 15 USD, 12 Euro, or 10 Pounds) or so into our little money pot and buy enough booze for everyone to have a good time all night. Don't think I've ever had drinking this cheap after.
Shamelessly, or with some shame, we would wait out a playground not far from a friend's house (and sometimes we had a friend who'd not even bother waiting, he'd place himself on the rubbery floor beneath a slide as some kids still had their fun on the monkey bars right above his head, after which he deigned us with a line that we would quote endlessly for many years to come: 'If you keep drinking, it's like the kids aren't even there'). We'd drink and drink and play games like King's cup, and maybe even Truth or Dare and eventually the couples would disperse, some just a meter away so the loud saliva-exchange was audible, and not very romantic in reality. The singles were left and maybe someone was so fucked up that they were barely awake, so usually I kept them face down because I'd be all on fire with paranoia after having seen the episode of Breaking Bad where Jane chokes on vomit in her sleep.
Other times I had another friend who I always suspected felt about things similarly to the way I did. Sometimes when the party wound down a little we'd still keep drinking, we'd drink till we were sick. A bottle of vodka between the two of us, drained. My dad isn't an alcoholic or anything but he drinks a lot so I was always thinking maybe I'll be someone who'll drink a lot too. Just to have fun.
I don't drink anymore, not really anyway. Not because I think it's bad or something, I just had my fun. I make life hard for myself in other ways anyway, so I kind of resist even the invitation. But it really did change things back then, I think we were all so new and fresh and no on there (even the big-talkers, all those guys that had girlfriends in other schools and already lost their virginities supposedly) had actually been so out of control and had their mind shaken this hard before. A nice collective experience in easing up, maybe losing your mind a little.
2. Why Did You Think You'd Be An Engineer?
For strange reasons unknown even to me I thought I'd be an engineer when I was 16. Now, I think the truth is that some of this was rooted in my fear of being perceived as stupid. It was my number one nightmare: being a fucking moron. And if I was an engineer, which is something I only mildly enjoyed, nobody could possibly think that.
Dreams come true, so do nightmares. Or maybe you just stop giving a shit. I can easily admit that I'm a dumbass now, I'm not very bright. Or driven. But I'm no liar. And what I love is creative. I love to write and draw, and I'll probably never be good at it like I wanna be but it is what I do. And that was the year that I dropped my physics classes and moved on to the arts completely.
Our school wasn't really looking to make artists though so that wasn't really a great time for me either. I only stopped being so afraid in university. Lots of shit was still wrong and bad, but I wasn't going to lie anymore.
3. Don't Be Afraid
I think as a teen, everything scares you. Exhilarates you, because everything is so new. But also you're tweaking 24/7. I think my fears of myself where amplified like a siren, ringing without pause. I think it was pretty obvious to everyone that I was some type of queer back then, but it never stopped anyone from partaking in a little homophobic humour and such. I laughed, because I thought it wasn't about me. Kind of feels like nails on a chalkboard to think that they may have been laughing twice as hard knowing that such personalized insults flew right over my head too.
I've been ugly, in the social sense, since my early teens. Because I had something like acne and I was fat. Classic. Anyway, I hated myself for it. Like it was my fault I looked like that and that it was a fatal flaw. Guys, I'm still fat, I just don't care anymore. I also don't feel much for beauty these days. I guess I'm actually kind of lucky because as a kid fat-shaming and calling people ugly was pretty basic, like: 'you fat bitch, you're ugly!'. Now there's like 1000 dollar skin care routines, bad face ratios, the fear of reaching the decrepit and arcane age of 25, and some more eugenicist pseudo-bullshit that is presented like fact and gospel truth. I would not survive as a teen now.
Can't say I've been totally cured of all self-image issues but things are better, perhaps only because they were at their worst in 2016. As cute as the body positivity movement of the late 2010s was, it did little for me. Something else helped. I think I just saw what the world did to me and to millions of others and I saw myself now as just a little speck of dust in the unstoppable, all-churning, every-which-way encompassing machine and it really put shit into perspective. We're all gonna have no money and no time for anything. We're all gonna die, and soon. I don't care about your thigh gap, man.
I like photos of me from then. I'm not like Dua Lipa or anything, but I look cute. I think I'd think that even if I looked like a complete monster (which is what I thought back then). Beauty and sex appeal is cool and it's cool that we all agree that it matters, because nothing is funnier than a really hot person telling us mere mortals that 'everyone is beautiful and that hot people have insecurities too'. But it's still shallow. And shallow things aren't bad, but they are secondary.
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| 2016. |
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| 2026. |
So! Sorry for getting so damn moody again. But I can't really think back to then without facing the truth. It kind of sucked. Now sucks too. Most of time sucks! But since we're already here we may as well see what's after. It's good to get older, can't think of a single thing I'd want less than to be young forever or to go back in time (not in a cool time-traveler way but literally to return to the exact same past with the exact same future waiting for you). So, thanks in some ways 2016, and thanks, past me. You survived! Wouldn't be here without you.
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| The end. |
This Week I'm Excited For...
I have no idea. Everything feels like such a mess right now. I'm pretty excited to finish Red Dead and try some more Rockstar games. I've only ever played Bully, GTAV, and San Andreas but I never finished any of them. Maybe I'll just jump right into it and start with V. Or maybe I should respect chronology and start with III or something. Argh! Suggestions?
Song Of The Week...
Alice sent me so many great songs this week, but the highlight is Cyclone Fence by Rose Blossom Punch from their 1997 album, Ephemere. Totally moody and dark, the piano motif is so fresh yet nostalgic. Aaron Sprinkle, the vocalist, has a voice that is... I don't know why but it feels like the ideal hybrid of Doug Martsch and Jeremy Enigk. This is an insanely good song, Alice is literally the best at finding great songs no one else even knows about!
