Weird dream

I've had some weird dreams before, but last night I had definitely one of the weirdest (whether it tops the one where I turned into Elisha Cuthbert though, I'm not sure). Started off with me sitting in a circle of people, at night, who were allegedly South Park characters (they weren't, they looked like normal people, but I was under the impression that they were South Park characters). Anyway, I started talking to someone, saying that South Park characters were clichéd and it was easy to predict what they were supposed to be, so he told me to point out the suicide bomber. I told him it was easy, and pointed out my suspect. My 'friend' just laughed at me, saying something along the lines of: "Don't be ridiculous!" He then started jeering and antagonising the South Park character who I suspected to be a suicide bomber, despite my protests. Eventually a bright white light appeared on him, emitting a high-pitched shrill and glowing brighter and brighter as my acquaintance's taunts persisted. "Oh well," I thought, "we're all going to die, but at least it will be painless." A few seconds later he had indeed exploded, but rather than dying a quick, painless death, I was half-blinded by the bright light and made very uncomfortable by the excruciating heat as I, along with the rest of the group, was thrown into the sky by the force of the explosion, or more specifically, thrown into outer space.

As I floated out helplessly, I prepared myself for an eternity of limbo in the void of space. Fortunately, before I had worried about it for very long, I reached the edge of space. And it was solid. With a ledge. Quite a large ledge in fact, which went all the way around space and jutted out about two metres. So I sat down on the ledge and ushered all the other victims in, then wondered where we went from there. After a while an armoured buggy type thing made its way past us, reminded me of one of the robots from Sonic in style. Took a while for it to hit me how perculiar it was to see a buggy literally being driven around the edge of space, but once it did I thought for a while how it could have got up there. The answer soon became obvious - wormholes! - and if the driver had got up there via a wormhole, a wormhole could also be our way out.

I alerted my companions to the possibility of an escape, and they followed as I chased after the armoured buggy. I took out the driver to hijack it and they all clambered on the back as we found ourselves with a choice of wormholes, 1 and 6, both leading to parallel dimensions. For some reason I knew that 1 led to a bad dimension, so we opted for 6. We found ourselves at a desk set indoors but open to a tropical environment behind us, welcoming us to this new dimension. A man behind it handed out our new IDs. I got Hitler. We were then whisked away to an hotel, very small, almost like a villa. The pool was in a lovely setting and filled with a beautiful girls, so I slid right in :D. I found myself at the deep end, despite the fact that all the girls were at the shallow end. Obviously they couldn't resist by boyish charms however, and a black haired beauty in a light blue/turquoise bikini wade over to be. We started talking and she unstrapped her bikini top, before my mum appeared at poolside. I told the girl that it was my mum, so she did her bikini back up and I swam off :(.

The relevance of this dream is twofold. Firstly it shows that my mum ruins everything, even in alternative realities. Secondly, it turned out to serve as a prediction for what I was going to read about today in 'A Brief History of Time', which bizarrely turned out to be wormholes. Which was very freaky :o.

A poem

A little while back I promised someone that I would post a poem here. In one way I lied, because I didn't actually have any intention of posting the poem I was writing at the time, but in another way I am now fulfilling that promise. A bit different to the poems I usually write, they're mostly emotion fueled and depressing, this is more descriptive. Wrote it about 4:30 this morning whilst lying in bed and got it down on paper when I woke up. Insomnia's a great inspiration. It's called 'Counting the Rain'.

I lie awake to hear the rain
Attempt to pierce the ground in vain,
Until the last drop from the first.
I even count the pitter-patters,
Not that I'm convinced it matters,
That would be beyond perverse,
But just to lose track of what does
It's always helpful to focus
On something mundane, I have found.
Not that my perspective's clear,
But I am sure that I don't care
How many raindrops hit the ground.
Eventually it frees my mind,
And my thoughts follow not one line
But along many they do tend.
In fact by when I'd written 'rain',
Although it may seem near insane,
I'd written all before the end.
By twenty-six I'm getting scared,
My mind's becoming sleep impared
And gradually I'm losing count.
Fast heart, damp brow, fear fuels the fear
That maybe, perhaps, I do care
How many raindrops hit the ground.

A shit day (you'll appreciate the humour of that title towards the end)

Been watching the highlights of yesterday's V Festival on C4 and I have to say that I am shocked and appalled. It was advertised as having two headliners for each day of the festival, yesterday's being The Strokes and the Pixies, with the latter, along with Muse on Saturday, being one of the only bands that I was actually considering going down to Chelmsford to see. I decided not to go in the end, and was naturally quite pleased when I found out that C4 were showing highlights of both days of the festival. What happens? Not a second's coverage of the Pixies. What the fuck's that all about?! People want to see the best of the festival in the highlights, surely that involves showing the headliners? Not only that, but they're one of the biggest bands of all time. Absolute legends. To make it worse, when I tuned into Virgin Radio's 'live' coverage of the festival to catch the Pixies' set, they were just playing back Keane's from earlier in the day. Why, why, WHY?! Do these people think that kids today, or whoever was listening/watching, are that unappreciative of great music that they don't want to hear/see a band that hasn't been around for a while, hasn't released any new stuff or maybe even they've never heard of?! If that's really the case then it's an absolute travesty; if not, it's still a travesty that the media is so stupid so as to think that it is the case! Either way, I am very pissed off by today's events.

Other things that happened today - went out for lunch with my family. That was fun. Supposed to be to celebrate my AS-Level results. The fact that I don't really care about them and didn't want to go out was apparently irrelevant to them. I think they were more concerned by the fact that we had a free meal at this Chinese restaurant and they wanted to get the most out of it. (Waitress spilled a drink on my mum last time we went there. Served her right for being a miserable bitch. "I think they've forgotten one of our starters. Oh no, it's the end of the world!" Blah.) Anyway, we decided to go to a different branch of the restaurant that we went to initially, because they were less likely to spill drinks at a different branch or something. Got to the restaurant, no tables for half an hour so we went for a walk. Wasn't too bothered about that because they don't take bookings at lunchtime anyway. About 25 minutes gone, we started walking back, and my mum decided to stop off at every shop along the way. The concept of restaurants giving your table away if you're not there at the designated time seemed completely foreign to her. Eventually got our table, and my mum, despite being the lightest eater in my family, went straight ahead and over-ordered massively on the premise that it was a free meal (it wasn't actually a free meal as I said earlier, we had £100 credit, but used wisely that could have got us two meals!). My dad and I, the big eaters in the family, just sat there in anticipation of how much food was going to get wasted. The food did get wasted. I got a stomach ache. Went to wait in the car while the bill was paid. Waited 40 minutes. Why did it take my parents 40 minutes to pay the bill? Because it turned out that our £100 credit wasn't valid at that branch of the restaurant! So I was basically sitting in the car, in agony as my stomach started to get really bad, while my parents tried to blag a free meal worth £90! For a little insight of what that involved, I phoned my dad after about half an hour and all I could hear was a load of screaming and threats by the management to call the police. So that was nice.

Got home, spent 40 minutes on the toilet... probably shouldn't go into the details of that. Suffice to say, I felt much better afterwards :). Then watched Arsenal dominate Middlesbrough, before seeing Boro getting a 3-1 lead! Arsenal's hopes of equalling the unbeaten streak of Brian Clough's Nottingham Forest side lying in tatters, at home, potentially a disastrous, morale breaking opening to the season and their defence of the title... suddenly a smile is beaming across my face. All of the day's trials are forgotten, I'm actually happy, laughing... within minutes Arsenal have narrowed the deficit to 3-2, and eventually go on to win the match 5-3. Still, a temporarily cheering moment :). Sadly, the next thing I dedicated a serious portion of my time to watch was Jeepers Creepers, which was utter shit.

"Daddy, there's something I've got to tell you..."

I'm gay. Haha. No, not really, but I couldn't resist. It just seemed to follow on. No, what I really had to tell my dad is that I think I'm depressed. This is how the conversation went:

Me: "Dad, I think I need to see a doctor."
Dad: "Why?"
"I think that I might be suffering from depression."
"What do you mean, 'suffering from depression'?"
"I mean that I'm depressed."
"Well why do you think that you're depressed?"
"Because I am."
"No you're not."
"No, I am."
"No you're not."
"No, I am."
"Okay then, we'll go and see a doctor this week."

As can be seen, my dad didn't take it very well, displaying classic denial symptoms. He seemed very uneasy with the news. Personally I think that the reason for this is twofold. Firstly, I'm kind of the level-headed one in the family, don't really let anything get to me. Revealing that I'm depressed shows that I'm not impervious to what the world has to throw at me, and I guess it's a bit of a shock for him, and in a way a little threatening. Bit weird I guess for me, the son, to be playing that role in the family, but I do. Secondly, my mum's on holiday with my sister this week, so I intentionally told him now because I don't want her finding out (she tends to blow things about of proportion). This means that he'll have to do his first bit of parenting since the days of changing nappies, which is a daunting task for anyone.

To be honest, I expected him to take it better than he did, although the timing of it didn't help. I was eating dinner in the kitchen, just finishing off, whilst he was cooking something for himself. The plan was that I told him then got out quick, leaving him to finish his cooking. Then by the time he'd finished eating it, he'd probably have forgotten that the entire conversation had taken place. As it was, every time I tried to tell him he just said: "Hold on a minute." By the time he was actually ready to hear what I had to say he'd naturally finished cooking and sat down opposite me at the table. This meant I had to go way further than I'd wanted to and be subject to the whole bloody Spanish Inquisition in my very own kitchen. He then went on to suggest we went up to see Watford (the football club) together when the season starts (we haven't been to a match in two years) and told me to sit down and watch some telly with him (the equivalent of "Let's have a conversation!" in a normal family). So yeah, he seems to be acting kind of strangely, but at least I'm finally going to see a doctor about it, and hopefully this is the beginning of the end. The beginning of the end that isn't a downwards spiral towards suicide.

On a non-depression related note, Viral's dad has finally admitted defeat in his mission to change my name. For those of you who do not know the story, Viral is a friend of mine from school, whose dad has always insisted on calling me Ben, probably as a result of Viral and other friends affectionately calling me "Benji" when he was within earshot. Not realising that this nickname is in fact derived from my surname, he naturally assumed that my first name was Ben. Despite being corrected by myself, Viral and numerous other friends on many occasions, he has remained adamant (there's a pun there...) that he was not wrong, and nearly always provided a response along the lines of: "Adam, Adam, yes, of course. So, Ben..." Today however, this all seemed to change. After Viral typically managed to lose 27 sheets of Oxbridge maths questions, his dad phoned my house to tell me that he was out shopping in Harrow and to ask me if it would be okay if he popped in on his way home to pick up the maths sheets for copying. Incredibly, during the ensuing telephone conversation, he managed to refer to me as "Adam" at every calling, without fail. I suspected that as this was a telephone conversation that he may not have actually been aware of who he was talking to, but upon arriving at my house he managed to get my name right with identical consistence. Amazing.

Something profound

There are two types of hate amongst people: the hate one feels for another person because of who that person is and the hate one feels for another person because of what that person does. The first of these is an evil, a sickness, a disease. The latter is essential to human existence.