Diary of an up and coming sociopath

I’m not particularly inspired by this, but what the fuck, it’s pretty topical at the moment.

1. How are you planning to spend the summer?
I plan to do 3 things:
1) Spend time with my family and friends.
2) Earn some money, be it through a job, some form of freelance computing-related business, or selling all my worldly goods on eBay.
3) Try and write a book\website\script\game while I’ve got some free time.

This, incidentally, is pretty much my manifesto for every holiday. Generally speaking, none of them get adhered to in any way. I suffer from a lack of motivation which impedes all 3, and I tend to end up sitting in my room on IRC, watching cartoons at 4am and waking up in the middle of the afternoon.

2. What was your first summer job?
That depends. I worked with Dad in his office, which was some low-intelligence office-monkey type things, for a few weeks. Of course, for my first job it was quite demanding. 12 hours days, for one thing. 6am to 6pm. It nearly killed me, but then it also made me enough money that I didn’t have to get a job over VIth Form.

3. If you could go anywhere this summer, where would you go?
God, how uninteresting am I? I would go home. Whether that’s Oxford, Leamington, or Jupiter. I don’t care where I am or what I’m doing as long as certain conditions are fulfilled, being that I have access to my friends, my comics, my DVDs, my books and my PC. I’m not a big “Holiday” person. Where else can going abroad take me, except away from what I want? I don’t feel any specific amount of frustration with my situation that I need a break from it every now and again.

As far as holidays go, I have, for the past few years, not bothered going to an actual holiday destination, instead saving my money and time for Reading and V festivals. I consider those my holidays. I desperately wanted to go to Reading his summer, but the line-up was just too shit to bother.

4. What was your worst vacation ever?
This depends on the interpretation of “Vacation”. I haven’t got an individual holiday that was specifically bad. If you’re after a more general approach, the summer of 2000 was pretty much complete shit from start to finish for me and all my friends. Internal politics threatened to complicate and destroy friendships and affected us all in long-term ways. If there was any “vacation” I wouldn’t want to do again, that’s it. The one before VIth form. Not that it didn’t have its high points, of course, but god, every day was like a kick in the head. Everything that could’ve gone bad, went bad. If you distilled angst into pure calendar time, the summer of 2000 is what you’d get. Am I being clear enough here? It was like Dawson’s Creek on smack.

Nevertheless, I’m convinced it was a necessary set of circumstances to get us all where we are today. I wouldn’t want to erase it for anything.

5. What was your best vacation ever?
Individual Holiday? I dunno. Reading 2000 was a lot of fun, I have some good memories from there. Likewise V2000. Likewise (in fact, especially) Reading 2001 and 2002. As far as holidays go, despite the weather I’m quite fond of when Nikki and I spent a weekend in Cornwall just kind of kicking about, last year, and when I went with her and her family to Cornwall, a few years ago. Overall vacations? I’m pretty fond of Christmas, really. Any Christmas from the last few years would probably have me pretty damn happy. I love the food, the gift recei^H^H^H^H^Hgiving, and the weather. I’m not so big on Summer holidays, they’re too long and too hot and there’s no single focus about it. Weeks just meander towards the inevitable return to University/School. That’s not to say I’m going to miss them when they’re gone, since I am well aware that this is pretty likely my last ever “summer off”, barring unemployment or lottery wins.

So if nothing else, this entry has made me think about this summer. There aren’t many things to be packing in this time. A few Easyworld gigs at the start, a visit or two to Brighton to see friends, a trip to the V Festival to fulfill my quota of bands for the summer, and a birthday.

I don’t have any birthday plans as yet, which is sad because it’s my 21st and in some ways I’d like to be able to care, if only for mum, who desperately wants to make a big thing of it. I had the same trouble during my 18th though, I have real trouble getting excited about an arbitrary age limit. I don’t wake up feeling different in the morning, I don’t go to bed feeling different in the evening. I suspect strongly my 21st will feel surprisingly similar to the day before, and the day after.

For anyone reading who feels that I might include them in any birthday celebrations, I keep getting asked for suggestions about what Nikki and I could do, or more applicably to some of you, what she could pay for me and my friends to do, so if you feel you know me well enough to get a free trip/party/meal in honour of my birthday please do suggest something extravagant, because I’m stumped for ideas and seriously considering just taking the cash, in which case it’ll just be the standard c@rvery and DVD evening ;-)