Adventures in strange lands: part 50 gazillion

Life is what happens while you're busy making plans. This was a line from John Lennon and, as I often say, he should know. Nothing says "surprise!" more than being shot by Mark David Chapman on December 8th, 1980.

I do have a point here. I planned to explore the world of Second Life and report back on my encounters. A quick update: the evening of the first day I was on there I ended up dancing (if that's what you can call a bunch of pixels jiggling around other bunches of pixels) at an indie club. I enjoyed 2 things about it:

1) The music was great.
2) The DJ took requests and was quite delightful.

I ended up talking to someone. This took me a while as I had no idea how IM worked on there. After a gap of 15 minutes, I finally worked out how to apologetically reply to a guy who had said hello. He seemed nice and offered me a sage piece of advice, which was: "Don't add everyone you meet as a friend. You'll end up with lots of friends you never talk to."

This is why I gave up MSN - too many people, not enough of a multi-tasking capability.

However, I did learn another thing. I asked how often he came online and he said he was a daily visitor, often sacrificing sleep. When I asked him why his 8 hours a night had reduced to 2-3 hours, he replied that it was because he had many American friends in Second Life and the time difference meant there wasn't a great deal of daytime in which to interact with them, so he stayed online until the early hours.

Anyone who even vaguely knows me knows that I take sleep seriously. It isn't just something done at the end of a long day; it isn't even just a fond hobby. It's a vocation. So, if I don't get quality sleep I can get a) grouchy and b) depressed. I used to find sleep interrupted by my worries and anxieties. When I finally realised I enjoyed sleep a great deal more than I liked worrying, I resolved to prioritise and to not stress at night when nothing could be done.

But I digress.

One reason I haven't gone on Second Life is that I don't want to get addicted. I have an addictive personality and I've already just gone through the joys of not smoking (3 weeks and counting); I don't need a new addiction. However, the other reason has been more personal. I made a vow when I started this blog that I wouldn't do the "oh, woe is me!" because woe is most certainly not me.

You see, things have been hectic here and of concern to me. But, I am not beseiged right now. I'm distracted, but that's expected. I can't make promises to reply to things and do tasks as my mind is elsewhere occasionally. My point is this; I had something of an epiphany. A friend here called me to ask if everything was going ok, aware of my recent problems. In that moment I was tempted to say, "Well, y'know, I'm coping, but I'm so tired and I don't feel up to going over it." However (and this was the epiphany moment, so get your epiphany hats on and prepare yourself to shout "EPIPHANY!". I think I just like that word. Epiphany, epiphany, epiphany...), I didn't feel any of those things. It was like an automated response. I am coping. Scrap that: I am not "coping", I am fine. I have a little philosophy (and it's not "I hate people", although that is still very true), which is that there is no point completely losing it until you're sure there is something to lose it over. This could also be denial, but it's working for me so a rose by any other name blah blah blah.

My real point is this: I am accustomed to playing the martyred victim. I am too familiar with that process. Society has a tendency to allow us this feeling of victimhood. I'm not saying there aren't genuine victims out there. I'm not going to argue semantics with a murdered corpse (particularly as it's dead and would make a lousy debate opponent). I find it strange, however, that I am either encouraged to wallow in self-pity by society (see: any accident claims advert) or that I should just bloody well cheer up, come on, why are you crying, GET ON WITH IT! Hence the martyred victim syndrome, suffering in silence and so on. Society's opinions are schizophrenic, to say the least.

My mother's culture is a prime example of the latter view, by the way. Nothing's wrong, always smile, laugh hardest when things are going wrong, I said LAUGH HARDER! I have nothing against a culture which encourages people to work through things and try to adjust back to life when ready, but that's not the stance of my mother's culture. In the Philippines, there's an overriding sense of carrying on as if nothing is wrong. They turn denial into an art form. This, of course, leads to repression on a grander scale than us stiff upper lipped Brits could ever imagine, let alone practise. One day, a few months ago, a priest completely snapped. He had been campaigning for a local school in Manila to remain open and decided he had found a perfectly sane way to demonstrate his outrage. He kidnapped the children on their school bus, parked it outside the town hall and held the children hostage with grenades and rifles. This is but one spectacular example, but you have to admit that it's a hell of an example. To further emphasise their incredible use of denial and enforced normality, the parents of the schoolkids passed ice cream through the windows to them. But then came the wailing and rending of garments. You think you've seen distraught parents? You've never seen a Filipino mother in action. I literally mean rending of garments and beating fists on the floor until bloody.

When they break, they break good.

Back to my original point: I am a product of this upbringing, so I don't know how much I'm in denial about the potential problems and stresses around me and how much is to do with the things my mother taught me about trying to get back to normal asap. This wasn't the only view in the household, of course. I'm not really going to go any further, but let me say this: my parents have very different ideologies when it comes to handling stress.

Weighing up both viewpoints and how they are reflected by society, I find myself detached. How do I feel right now? I don't feel anything. I don't feel like a victim. I don't feel like a survivor. What is there to survive? My culture encourages me to turn problems into dramas of daytime soap proprtions and then gives me conflicting advice on how to deal with them. Honestly? I really feel like this is just another moment in life that is less than perfect. I'm not wallowing in self-pity, but I'm not pulling up my socks, either (well, only once when I put them on in the morning). So, why write about it at all? Don't think I haven't second-guessed my writing as self-indulgent, by the way. The answer's actually fairly simple: I feel like I want to write because if I don't do something other than mooch around the house, I may die of boredom. Right now, this is all I can write about. Once it's cleared out, I can write about more frivolous things like AIDS and famine.

Until there's something worse, something concrete and fixed and with no discernable way out, I will continue to accept that there are some things I can get angry about and change and some things I cannot. Why tilt at windmills? I don't know if that's stoicism or defeatism or nihilism or some other ism. That's life. Normal service will be resumed shortly and we apologise for the delay.