I've not been writing enough recently, or at least I'm not writing the stuff that I want to be. The final semester of university (or at least undergraduate) is starting to swallow up all of my waking hours, with very little time for myself in between library sessions. Tonight, therefore, I am happy to say that I have found a moment to sit down and relax with a beer and some good television - finally got around to watching last weekend's Musketeers!
Of course I can't be working all of the time. I have pretty good staying power and focus when I want to, but I am also a pretty astute procrastinator when the right distraction comes along. Tonight I want to tell you about another trip down memory lane that I took this week. It seems that every post that I write just now it looking in my past, but I suppose that's what an impending end does to people.
I was in the library - more or less any story I can tell about myself just now is set there - getting on with some work when I received a notification on Facebook telling me that I had not posted on my Ramblings of a Teenager page for a while. No shit Sherlock. OK, so it's probably my fault that I have not taken it down but it's still there and serves as a reminder that I once was quite a prolific blogger in my day - check me out, eh?
Then there is the actual blog page itself. I've not been on there in a long, long time but all of my posts (all 136 of them that is) are still there in all their glory, just waiting to be dipped into at one's pleasure. And that's what I did. For about half an hour yesterday I read through about four or five of my posts from various points in the active life of that blog - I was surprised at what I found.
First of all the quality of writing at times was awful. Admittedly this is probably still the case, but I've come to accept that my writing on here is not always stellar. It was a shame that I thought I was so brilliant back then when I quite clearly wasn't. Whether it was poor proof-reading (those skills have improved massively in the last couple of years) or just because I was trying too hard, some of it just looks a bit amateur.
Aside from the self-deprecation, of which there was a lot back then as well, I was pleasantly surprised to find out how optimistic I was about starting university. My mind wasn't damaged by over-thinking everything and I even - somewhat naively in hindsight - thought that I could put my lack of confidence to the side for the purposes of starting out my journey into the big wide world - at least that's how I saw it then. It's amazing how one's perceptions change in just a few years. At the end of my freshers week I was disappointed that the week had not been the time of my life, but I was keen to get started. I was bursting to go to my first lecture and to read my first case. Little did I know.
So that was nice. Another thing that pleasantly surprised me was the jokes that were dispersed amongst the teenage angst and clumsy attempts at subtlety. I had to stifle laughter a few times as I skimmed through some of the posts, which, in turn, made me quite happy. I'm not saying I was ready to give up everything for a career as a stand-up, but my cheery and youthful brand of comedy certainly placed a smile on an otherwise dour face. Maybe others wouldn't agree, but I guess if you can't make yourself laugh...
So that's me. I've changed a lot since then and I don't see myself changing back. Whether that's a good thing or not I don't know. One question I had for myself before I finally snapped out of my bout of procrastination was whether the me of that time would recognise, or be able to associate with, the me of today.
People always use a line that really bugs me: that you have to 'stay true to yourself'. When I came to university, I came to change and I've managed that quite a few times over - that's about as 'true' as it gets. However, some of the things I've done over the last few years have been, what I consider to be, out of character for me. Maybe if I read through a few more of those posts I'll be able to re-capture the better parts of younger me again - it would be nice to meet up with him once in a while.
Thanks for reading as always. I'm not going to make any promises about future posts because the next six weeks are going to be full on at uni. I'll maybe be back here soon.
Martin.
