New year, new start, new me = new $#*!.

I've scratched my head and I just can't figure this one out.
It's the start of a New Year. It's January (thus cold and officially the most depressing month of the year). People are in ever so much debt due to Christmas and probably not-quite-met-expectations New Years Eve celebrations. And some smart arse came up with the idea of making:

"New Years resolutions."

I ask one thing of you. Would you consider it apt to ask a baby to make plans for their life at their birth? Why, of course not. Ignoring the logistical factor in that they cannot speak, let alone speak anything of any sense, they are in a fragile and vulnerable state coming to terms with the start of their life. They need a bit of experience and age first. And it's effectively synonymous with NY resolutions. We're at the beginning of a new year, unaware of what is in store for us, and yet so many feel obliged to appeal to common practice.

Every year we create a long list of false promises. And why? Why start off the year on a bed of lies or unachievable aims? This is consumerism at it's best; companies play on your willingness to buy into recreating yourself, and you bet they can sell you just about anything from food to clothes to makeup to holidays. Because your life just wasn't worth living last year.

I'd much rather play with time and create my own periods in which to achieve my aims. And as far as I'm concerned, my New Me Resolutions don't start until the sun's shining bright.

Desperately seeking a boyfriend. (Lol, jk.)

Last time I checked I have been single for, approximately, 6 months. I am  aware a certain proportion of you will have gasped already. Take a second, breathe and relax. Yep, that's right: 6 months. 
182 days. 
4382 hours. 
262974 minutes. 
Granted it does sound a lot longer in minutes...

You will undoubtedly question why I'm informing you of my single life progress, almost as if it bothers me and I keep freakish tabs on it. And for those that pondered, no I didn't sit here and work out the days, minutes and hours. Google helped me. I don't have that much free time on my hands. 

Well I guess there's two reasons for bringing it up. First of which, I'm extremely excited about Bridget Jones' Diary 3 coming out (the topic matter relates). My second reason, which really links to my excitement about Bridget Jones, is to ask the world dearly to stop asking about my 'love life'. Maybe not the world, but you'll know who you are if you're reading this. Yes, you.

You'd think I were a spinster, locked away in a rural house knitting and my only company being my cat and the postman that delivers the post once a fortnight. I'm a girl. I'm 19. I still take pride in my appearance. And I leave my house on a regular basis. There really is nothing to worry about. I know I joked about being 80, single and living with cats in a previous post (click here to read it), but I almost feel the need to emphasise the comedic stance of that post.

I know so many people that have this overruling desire and aim in life to constantly be on 'boyfriend lookout'. People that can't survive without a co-dependent in their life and, well, I think that's sad. 

I used to think being in a relationship was the coolest thing in the world. It gives you a bit of routine, it gives you someone to talk to on a regular basis, it's what I consider to be a safe state to be in. And of course I'm not saying I don't ever want that again, I just have come to realise there's more to life than making the bed after a boyfriend that never helps out. Hahaha. What a stereotype. Of course I am JOKING - some boys are very well house trained. You get my jist though, I've just got some new priorities in life.

So far in my 4382 hours of free time I have decided some goals and changed my outlook towards achieving them. For one I'm setting aside my twenties to do the things I want to do. And maybe that will mean for a portion of it I don't want someone tying me down. I'm not saying they would necessarily stop me doing what I want to do, but if I've got someone who's not permanently fixed (as opposed to family) close to me it'd would only add to the factors of how I could talk myself out of taking risks and going places.

I also quite want to learn a new language. I loved French, and I still do, but due to (boring) reasons I couldn't continue it as a wild option at uni. So maybe I'll polish that up. Maybe I'll learn a new language. I have always loved everything Scandinavian so it'd be cool to (emphasis on the try) learn Swedish or Norwegian. 

So I hopefully won't end up like Bridget. I'm a firm believer in 'never say never'. If the right boy comes along, I'm yours. I'm just not rushing into anything for the sake of it. CBA for all that pointless emotional malarchy.

The girl speaks sense

All the things you start off with in life are given to you by somebody else. Your birth may be the start of your personal story, but you're thrown midway into a different and developed story. You have to be brave and try to start again. It might be a little scary. Not many people say ‘let’s start life over and do it again the way I want to.’

 

The paralysis of life

Who are you?
Are you in touch with all of your darkest fantasies?
Have you created a life for yourself where you can experience them?

I'd like to say this happens rarely, but it's becoming more and more frequent that I wonder about my life. I lead a somewhat straight forwardly simple life - this isn't to deny its value however - and sometimes I wonder, am I doing it because I like it, or because fear gets in the way?

Undoubtedly for me the scariest part is not in asking such a question,  it's the fear of getting an answer. I don't really want an answer. Time is on my side. I'm young and independent and free. The one thing I do know though, is that I don't want to wake up middle aged asking myself the very same question.  

I want to experience the deafening sound of water crashing down Angel Falls, I want to lounge in the Blue Lagoon geothermal spa, to see first hand the Aurora Borealis and I want to spend time abroad learning a new language.

Possessing such a list isn't greed, and it surely should not be considered to be too expectant. The stark reality is that seeing life through a television screen, or scattered across pages of a magazine doesn't satisfy my appetite.

My hunger is growing and I yearn for reality. 

I'll 'have it all', please.

Say, for example, you hear a really crazy and shocking statistic, well it normally sticks in your mind because it's really quite out of the ordinary. So I'm not quite sure how I managed to bypass remembering the outstandingly low and, to me, disproportionate figure that only 3% of the young female population aspire to be a boss. THREE PERCENT?! I hear you say/cry/weep. Yep, you heard me right, it genuinely really is that low. (According to my bible of all sources, Grazia magazine.) 

I went to an all girls school, and I would go so far to say that I think my feminist stances are causally related to my educational upbringing. I'll never forget being told "you are the women of the future". So in that sense I'm a real pro-women-achieving-the-top-of-their-career-and-having-the-bestest-and-most-perfect-family-life type of person, a modern-day feminist some might say. I'm no bra burner, but I most definitely advocate the position that women should be financially independent. Love doesn't always last, just saying.

I'm not necessarily saying that the whole 'having it all' idealised scenario is achievable for every person, primarily due to subjective life choices and unexpected babies and far from perfect financial situations. The list is exhaustive. However, I think the key difference in current society is that while you may not want to be top of your career whilst balancing home life and everything that goes with it, you have the choice. Choice. The word that suffragettes once dreamed of, and 'tis now a common place reality for females. 

In my Political Philosophy module I recently learned of a term stemming from Utilitarianism known as 'adaptive preferences'. (Utilitarianism, in it's most basic decision-making form is 'the greatest good for the greatest number' - google it if you wish to know more, it's interesting stuff). Anyhow, adaptive preferences are the result of  a situation whereby people who cannot achieve a desired goal gradually lose their desire for it. This may be the case that you forego your career to have a child and then front the "well I didn't want a career anyway" card. Where everyone is thinking, well actually.. you kinda did. Of course, this could be true vice-versa where you miss out on the chance of having children in order to climb the career ladder. Adaptive preferences are based around how it would be disappointing to live with an unsatisfied preference, perhaps of 'having it all', and so in order to deal with this disappointment it is a way of persuading oneself that the unattainable goal was not worth seeking in the first place. 

Naturally, this got me thinking. The philosophical, and thus hazy, realistic conclusion that I came to is that I think many people live their lives in denial of their primary goals, for many reasons. Life gets in the way of the big dreams you start with, and if you're not careful it can pop every dream you had. Naturally not everyone's goals in life are to achieve managerial status in their workplace but everyone has a dream they aspire to and I think it's really important, more so in the face of these tough economic times, to keep the dream going and to strive to 'have it all' in your own personal interpretation of what 'all' is to you.

"The Gulf War Did Not Take Place"

Jean Baudrillard, a French philosopher and sociologist, once made the profound statement that "The Gulf war did not take place". Some thought it genious, others dismissed this as a sensationalist headline grabber sparked by a continental philosopher searching for the truth and reality. Because naturally philosophers are solely tormented people in the search for truth. If, however, you read past this simple statement, you would realise that Baudrillard wasn't actually denying the validity that the event happened, instead he was making a bold statement about the contentious issue of interpretation. That is, Baudrillard questioned whether the events that took place where comparable to how they were presented through the means of media.

For those of you who know me personally and whom have read my articles prior to this one, you will know I have a keen interest in reality television and the frightenly blurred relationship that it creates between fact and fiction. I learned of Baudrillard and his views in my Media class when I was at school, and I would say he has definitely influenced my outlook on life and made me cautious of the powerful entity that is the media itself.

With relation to the Gulf war, Baudrillard put forward the notion that it was a media spectacle, rehearsed much like a war game and then played out to the public as a simulation. The war itself, including the real violence and real bloodshed, was lost in the heavily shaped electronic narrative. That is to say the news reports and other forms of coverage were so heavily edited and focused on dangerously shot hand-held video clips and boasting of their supply of missiles that the nature of the war itself dissolved. The media stood in the way of communicating the truths of the war, as opposed to adding to it.

Whether or not you agree with Baudrillard picking of such a contentious topic to use as the example to put forth his theory, it would be hard to dispute how much the media shapes, influences and distorts our lives. I for one believe it's a sad reality that newspapers and their highly one-sided political bias shape our views of politics. If we don't know the whole unbiased and unedited truth about politics, then surely it's a dangerous situation to vote for someone or a party to gain political reign of our country that you know so little about.

Naturally you would want to deny that the media is a replacement of reality, but that is exactly what Baudrillard believed and I advocate. Consider your use of social media: you de-tag the photos you look bad in, you upload the ones that you look nice in, you write comedic and captivating statuses that make you sound interesting and you 'check-in' at 'cool' and 'hip' places - because that shows your friends and followers that you too are cool and hip. So you might not do all of that, but you're guilty of at least one point I guarantee. (I used to be jealous of compulsive Instagrammers, until I attempted to 'join the club' so to speak, only to realise it would take far too much time from my day trying to edit photographs to make me look artistic and effortlessly cool.) We ourselves are guilty of shaping our own lives through the media, and the media does this in turn to us on a much larger scale.

Next time you're watching the news, or reading the newspaper just think of how fictional and contrived the "news" really is. Because after all, reality cannot be replicated or reported, only distorted.

The trickery of time

It's been a little over a month since I last graced this blog with a spray of thoughts formed together so as to attempt to make sense of my bizarre stream of consciousness. I bear no real excuse, except the time old cliché of being so busy I am yet to catch up with myself. That, and perhaps a pinch of the old case of 'writers block'. Well it's all about quality and not quantity, right?

Here's a thought...

Many things in life are defined through an evident transition from one state to another quite different. Yes/no, never/always, open/closed are but three examples. Seasons, however, possess a unique quality in that they appear to seamlessly fade into one another; for I do not go to bed on a glorious summer's day and wake to crisp leaves lining a street of stark, stripped trees. And yet, in contrasting myself entirely it really did feel that way today. The heating switch was firmly flicked to 'on' - and no doubt will remain so until February, if not March - and my wardrobe, full of summer clothing, managed to belittle me into feeling foolish for not reacting quicker to stocking appropriate autumnal attire. And that's what's so very fascinating about time; it appears to pass by so very quickly, and yet every now and then it surprises me with its ability to prove how silently it can work.

So with Autumn now enveloping like a thick duvet, the time has come to drown myself in seasonal clichés. The fire will soon be lit, the countdown to Christmas fast approaches and nights will be spent wrapped in my feather duvet escaping in books and watching the abundance of new series that grace our televisions this very time every year. Oh Autumn/Winter, I love you.