Venom.

i need to work more.

if not i'll just think of that

and that

just

k

i

l

l

s 

me.

...

fucking divided. 

maybe i made the wrong decision.

right now i just want to 

r

u

n

and 

never 

ever

ever

e   v   e   r

look back. 

...

but like. 

yeah.

it'll just happen 

again. 

eventually.

'coz like.

there's nowhere

i 

can

go

anymore

that's safe. 

...

fuck.

Confidential.

Watch the sunrise

Say your goodbyes

Off we go

Some conversation

No contemplation

Hit the road.

A spiral-bound notebook. A white cover, dotted with pale pink, blue and green transparent bubbles.

The familiar bubbly handwriting fills part of the first page. 

Close your eyes. Recollect. Remember.  

And it comes back. Not in a flood, not in the way these things are usually described. Bit by bit. All the subtle little details, building up into a perfect replica of that particular time. 

The emotions. All memories are overlaid with a particular feeling. These are no different - a faint patina clings to them; the aimlessness, the lack of purpose, the overwhelming sense of inadequacy, the easy anger...the disjointed feeling of being apart.  

A breeze ruffles your hair. Open your eyes. 

This is it?

All that way, just to go around in one big dreary circle?

Questions within questions, you realize. 

Secrets within secrets...

You look down. Your fingers are curled around a rusted railing, one that spans the length of a dull grey breezeway. Beyond, one-and-a-half basketball courts. 

Beyond, everything you used to want. 

Before you realized how silly it all was. 

Desires within desires...

Secrets within secrets...

A grubby piece of folded paper, old, worn - frayed round the edges. Disintegrating.

Unfold it, and familiar thin, small letters cover each side. 

The neatest summary you'll ever get, of a year. 

Ah. 

Now you remember.

Look. Look at all that surrounds you. Everything that's here, now. See all that you have. 

See all that you want now, and how different it is. And how different it...isn't, really. 

Maybe someday you'll look back and realize how silly all this is. 

But the real question is...

How long will it take you, this time?

Truths within truths.

Secrets within secrets...

I know I don't know you

But I want you

So bad.

Everyone has a secret

But can they keep it?

Oh, no, they can't...

Cathartic.

I don't know how to explain it. 

How do you tell if you're doing the right thing? When your hands are moving mechanically across a keyboard, when your eyes are tired from thick chunks of overtly wordy text, when your brain is fuzzy from trying to extract meaning from seemingly endless dry meandering, when you're toiling, slowly, excruciatingly, up the discouraging rocky mounds of progress...

...that's how. 

Stay in perspective. 

Distracted. It's so easy to get distracted. 

It's so easy to forget. 

Forget why you're here, forget what it is you're working for, forget why you even want to be better.

And when what you really want seems so far away, when you know you're a few steps down the ladder from where you could be, it's so easy to get discouraged. 

It's so easy to feel lonely. 

It's so easy to feel lonely in this strange new place full of strange new people that you literally have no history with, no connection to whatsoever - nothing in common. Nothing at all. No friends-of-friends, no hey-you-used-to-be-in-my-tuition-class, no wow-you're-so-and-so's-cousin, nothing. Blank canvases. Sounds enticing, in a way. You can be whoever you want to be. Reinvent yourself. Wear whatever you want to, and nobody will think you look like a poseur. 

But then you think of the work. The tedious, endless, seemingly insurmountable struggle. 

And you can't help but feel tired. Tired at the prospect of making new friends, of sifting through the usual top layer of mere acquaintances and occasional lunch buddies to the deep-down, friends-for-life connections that everyone older than you has been telling you you'll make in university. Of having to work out who you can trust and who you can't. Who'll be there when you need them and who'll ditch you so they won't have to deal with your problems.

Instead of having your usual safety network of friends you can trust and rely on, you suddenly have to build up new relationships all over again. Which is no easy feat. Especially when you think about the work. All that work...

That's how it gets so easy to ignore the balance.

It's so easy to withdraw into yourself. To throw yourself into your work, to forget about friends and fun and just push yourself to become better. To finally, finally get where you want to be. 

It's so easy to look back at What Might Have Been and What I Could Have Done and feel regret. 

I guess that's why keeping things in perspective is so important. 

Stay in perspective.

It'll keep you going when nothing else can. 

Loss.

 

You see I got this critical conscience

A brand new black hole in the solar system

I dig my grave

But I just can't stand to step inside.

Sometimes it feels like all I ever am is angry. 

Without resorting to melodramatic cliches

or being overtly mysterious

or unnecessarily self-pitying

or skewing my perspective of the situation I'm in

I can honestly say:

I'm more dispirited than I have been in a very long time.

It's been a bad week. 

But sometimes a bad week in a foreign country 

when you're by yourself 

and aren't super close to the people you've met just yet 

and when you don't have any good friends close by 

or a place you can go where people will take care of you...

...things can seem rather worse than they actually are. 

I'm not giving up. 

But times like this, it'd be nice to feel less alone. 

 

And when they find out

They'll sound every siren

Break the door down

to find the baby crying.

You thought I knew

it's just not right to tell a lie. 

Ennui.

Whenever I am feeling particularly unmotivated - times when even staring at my Scarface and James Dean posters don't help, and believe me, those posters are nothing if not mired in motivationary goodness - I find that it helps to make a list. 

Aren't lists lovely? The feeling of breaking down a task into smaller, more manageable pieces, arranged methodically for convenience's sake. And the satisfaction of completing each task, of the quantifiable progress it demonstrates! And the joy of ticking off that last item on the list! The sense of tidiness, of responsibility, of a job well done!

...yeah, okay, long story short, I like organizing the things I have to do and completing them systematically. And this is what I am going to do here. 

Pia's List Of Things To Do For The Week:

-Finish up Property tutorial work

-Finish Tort tutorial work

-Get Eliot's birthday card. Mail it. [DAMN POSTAL STRIKE]

-Stop by the Vodafone store and get my phone-related questions answered

-Apply for a railcard

-Work out a budget for this month

-Work out what I'm going to make for dinner for everyone on Thursday

-Do laundry

-Pick up The Long Halloween and Watchmen And Philosophy

-Catch up with Contract, Tort and Criminal reading

-Figure out purpose in life (optional)

What'll keep me going along the way, you ask? Coffee, Resident Evil, and - as always - copious amounts of Batman. 

To the grindstone!

Haunting.

Ugh. 

Yes. Ugh.

London last weekend was fab, not least because I finally got to wander around Hamley's - verily, t'was the childhood experience I never had (but would have thoroughly enjoyed, I think). I've forgotten how crowded London can be, and, you know - sometimes you love that, sometimes you hate it.

And then there were the tubes. Ah, the tubes. I took the tube for the first time by myself (!!). People - especially people living in London - might say that's hardly a noteworthy achievement, but I say otherwise! Particularly since I had to change lines three times (I travelled halfway across Central London, bitches, while toting an overstuffed duffel bag, in trains that were so packed I nearly got shoved out the door of one), and after I emerged, blinking, into the (fading) sunlight, I still had to navigate my way to the 'burbs via the...aboveground trains. Which was rather daunting, after my considerable success with the tube - after much confusion, I found the train station and the ticket booths, and hurried to the platform only to see the train I was supposed to be on chugging smoothly away. 

Lesser minds might have curdled in despair! But I am not, nor have I ever been, of a lesser mind. 

Eventually, I got to the place I wanted to be, and all was well and good. So yeah...t'was a good weekend. There're still a couple of places left that I want to see, and I fully intend to drag Dex to all of them the next time I travel up from my comfy southwest city. 

The bonus of the London trip was that I did all my reading and tute work before I left, which left me with...a considerable amount of free time this week. I would do that more often, if the actual ahead-of-time completion didn't involve some daunting sleepless nights and very little leaving of my room. But yeah, I fully put the free time I earned to good use.

ARKHAM ASYLUM! HELLSYEAH. 

The game was awesome, oh so very awesome. A bit trying, in parts - Batman being Batman (i.e., refusing to kill anyone, not even the Blackgate goons who loudly claim to want to put his head on a stake), you can't just storm a place and start shooting thugs down, GTA-style - no, you have to take them down silently, one by one, making sure the other guards don't see you do it. The boss battles are pretty cool - Sandman's was fully the most mindfxcking, while Poison Ivy's was maybe the most irritating, Killer Croc's the most nerve-inducing, and Joker's the most...well. I'll leave that for you to find out for yourself, shall I?

The game's actually based on Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On Serious Earth, a graphic novel which you should not read at night (believe me, I know). The graphic novel's actually vastly different from any other graphic novel out there, Batman or otherwise, because the art style's completely different - dark, moody, vaguely abstract, with some extremely disturbing scenes. So, storyline-wise, it's basically the Joker taking over Arkham Asylum, and Batman trying to stop him - and encountering some of the inmates along the way. Of course, to flesh out the gameplaying experience, a lot of new stuff is added to the story. 

It's definitely engaging, but my personal favourite was the Amadeus Arkham (the founder of the asylum) side quest - his journal entries are left all over the walls of the asylum, and you can collect them to piece together his story. And to collect the final journal entry, you need to find the spirit of Arkham. Again, this is based on the graphic novel - but they changed the story somewhat, cleaned it up a little, to make it less haunting and creepy. Can't say I'm not grateful. 

There's also the Riddler side quest - you have to find Riddler trophies based on riddles he gives you. I didn't complete this, because there are 240 freaking trophies to be found. And I wasn't that free. Plus, once you've completed the game, you can play as the Joker. Or you can do challenge maps by the different villains. Dex proudly claims to have completed all of this (Riddler quest in-freaking-cluded), but that's only 'cause he played the game during the holidays, so he had more time, so it's different. 

Hmph. 

The game definitely deserves props for its sexy graphics, though (not literally - well, unless Poison Ivy or (ugh) Harley Quinn turn you on - dammit, I loathe Harley Quinn). The graphics are seriously awesome - sharp and very, very detailed. The voice acting's awesome too - all the villains were spot on. And getting Mark Hamill to do the Joker's voice was genius - he totally nailed the Joker's voice and crazy laugh. Batman himself sounded refreshingly human - no guttural-animal harshness here, nope. His dialogue was all right - sometimes he sounded downright badass, a couple of times he just sounded a tad...too heroic.

Plus, there are fun little details in the game - if you so choose, you can go around the asylum and the mansion searching for interview tapes and unlocking character bios. The interview tapes are scattered all over - there are typically five per villain, and each tape features an in-asylum interview between said villain and a doctor, which is a useful way of providing some backstory. 

So yeah, all in all, a pretty awesome game :) Only for those with lots of time to kill, though - especially during the fiddly take-them-down-silently-one-by-one scenes. Not to mention the uberly difficult boss battles - Poison Ivy's particularly finicky. 

Well, this should make up for a whole week or whatever it was of no new posts, shouldn't it? Bye for now, then. And happy Halloween!

Incongruous.

"You're an ant," said she,

"Say what?" said I,

For she had interrupted my

contemplation

of the dreary evening sky.

"You're insignificant," she claimed, "like a spider!"

"Am not!" I declared

For I wasn't really scared

And so

I dared

To defy her. 

"You're nothing!" she screeched,

"I'm something!" I yelled

She prattled and preached

- that crotchety old leech -

about the crazy

views

she held.

"You do squat," she said, "I know,"

"Yeah, right," I said

briefly wishing she were dead

Before wondering

If she was right in the head.

"Listen," I looked at her

"can you please go?"

"You're a waste of space," she replied

Her tone was snide

But I simply

let it slide.

She turned away

having wrecked my day

tripped; fell into the quay

and died.