Social Interactions That I Don't Understand

I’m not a very good human being. By that, I don’t mean that I’m a bad person. In fact, I am morally rather middle-ground. I will contentedly drown a kitten, but I won’t film it on my phone. Rather, I have never been able to master the quotidian social interactions that collectively make us well-adjusted human beings. Things like:

1   Encountering Someone You Know in the Street

With the prevalence of social media, this can be a problem for anyone with a tendency to add on Facebook anyone they’ve ever briefly met at a party/bought a car from/ejaculated into. Indeed, it’s a problem that can sometimes be solved simply by crossing the road or vaulting into a front garden. The difficulty arises when through a quirk of geography a fleeting encounter becomes inevitable. My face begins a complex launch sequence of approximated appropriate shapes. First, I must pretend not to see them until the very last second to avoid staring intensely at their approach as if I plan to hit them with a thunderous clothesline.

"GOOD TO SEE YOU AGAIN."

At the moment of contact, my repertoire consists of an erratic nod as if I’m suffering from dropsy, a taut smile indicative of a wandering butt-plug, and a torrent of sweat that steams from my armpits like alfresco urine on a cold winter’s day. Combined, it’s possible that I suffer a small stroke upon every encounter.

2     Kisses as Greetings

What I formerly believed to be the exclusive jurisdiction of chick-flicks and wankers, this touchy-feely greeting has sporadically, yet firmly, muscled its way into my life. It raises so many questions: single or double kiss? Which side should I start on? Will the recipient smell the Chilli Heatwave Doritos I ate for lunch?

Are there people out there who think me rude for neglecting to press my quivering lips against their flesh and call them darling? For all I know I should be kissing my kitchen fitter, smooching the self-checkout supervisor, and puckering up for my... Proctologist? (Excessive alliteration is another social barrier I don’t understand). Of course, if I misjudge kissing propriety I risk the screaming disdain of women. Which leads me to...

3     Sex

I’ll keep this brief, due to its personal nature and the fact that I’ve had barely any sex to complain about (I’ll leave that up to my unfortunate partners). My record speaks for itself. The first girl I ever kissed proceeded to throw a pint glass at my head. All of the women who have ever been unfortunate enough to have me love them promptly hooked up with my best friend of the time. My last few dates have ended with frosty silence/drug abuse/accusations of homosexuality. Sex remains an unfathomable enigma to me, the machinations of which instil a terror great enough for me to exile myself to a life of loneliness, regret, and masturbation to increasingly bizarre forms of pornography.

4      Not Talking About How Much I Hate Myself

A slew of internet searches and randomly encountered dating profiles have told me that I need to have confidence. This flies in the face of my usual technique when I run out of things to say: draw the conversation toward some negative aspect of my person.

“Sorry, when I’m nervous I sweat like a panful of well-prepared asparagus.”

“Oh man, I’m really bad at self-deprecating metaphors.”

“Have you noticed this weird rash on my face?”

“I think I have Weil’s disease.”

This isn’t limited to everyday conversations. I do it on dates. I do it in job interviews. If the opportunity arose, I’d probably do it during sex. My personality is constructed entirely on a foundation of self-hatred. As to why I can’t help but spew it at others, perhaps I’m just trying to be funny. Perhaps I want to push people away. Or perhaps I’m hoping that, one day, I’ll be able to believe the people who tell me I’m not as bad as all that.

Games vs. Depression - Mini Doc What I Am In

I'm well aware that this isn't something I'd normally post here. But it's my blog, so what are you going to do about it? The above video is a mini-documentary about how video games can help people suffering with depression. I feature in the video as the 'expert,' a term I'm dubious about. I just about qualify as some of the video is based on an article I wrote a few months back. There's not a lot of research in this area, so I probably am as close as you can find to an expert, really.

Anyway, please check it out. Not just because I'm in it, but because it's a brilliantly made film full of sad and inspiring stories.

We need to remove the stigma of mental health issues, and talking about films like this are a brilliant way to do so.

Vapid Attempt at Generic Enhancement

Do you remember when Ozzy and Kelly Osbourne released a cover of ‘Changes’ which was possibly the worst thing ever? Just in case you don’t, here’s a reminder:

Now you’ve towelled the blood from your ears, I should inform you that this song is the official theme for this blog entry. The excruciating execution, half-hearted sentiment, and misguided intentions match the forthcoming content uncannily.

I want to affect some kind of a change in my life. I call this my Vapid Attempt at Generic Enhancement, or VAGE. A life of sitting in my room watching my waist expand, my fear of sunlight burgeon, and my bin fill with coagulated tissues isn’t agreeing with my current state of mind. It’s like being locked in a cell with the one person I despise the most. I’m trying to convince myself that I hold the keys to improving my situation – that after 135 job applications I still have the power to find work; that my career as a writer can still take off; that I can conquer what is, suitably enough, the catalyst for VAGE – loneliness.

Recently I attempted to solve this by re-establishing contact with a girl whom I dated for a short time last summer. At the time I blamed her for the demise of the relationship – it coincided with the onset of a serious bout of depression, and I believed that she used it against me. It was ugly.

Now I realise that it was far more my fault than hers. Although I was genuinely struggling with depression, I used it as an excuse because I get scared in relationships. My longest lasted 3 months. I’ve never been in love. The medication I’ve been taking wreaks havoc with my sex drive. I don’t know how to be with someone. I let this fear get the better of me and I looked for a way out.

I got it into my head that she was the answer to my loneliness. My urge to apologise was genuine, but I also believed that I could revive our relationship. She had been kind, understanding, and, something so rare for me, we clicked. So I was surprised when she didn’t reply to my message. I pushed it further, forcing a polite reply or two, but nothing more. I don’t know what I expected – anger, perhaps, or cold disdain. Perhaps a part of me expected her to fling her underwear over my face. In fact, she reaffirmed what I already knew – that she’s kind and understanding. But that doesn’t mean that she wants to know me anymore.

This is the problem with VAGE – like Ozzy and Kelly Osbourne crooning at each other, it makes me insufferably misguided and painfully annoying. It’s a kind of selfishness I can’t escape because, despite knowing better, I can’t shake the belief that it’ll lead to my happiness, just like I always believed that losing weight would fix my life. It might be the case that this girl would make me happy – in so many ways, I believe she was good for me – but that doesn’t matter. By pursuing these blinkered ideas of how to fix my life, I’m only going to bring pain to myself and, far worse, to others. And I want to believe that I’m a better person than that.

How to Grow a Depression Beard

There are many ways to deal with the cloying symptoms of depression. You might talk about it with friends or family; take your mind off it by going for a nice walk or punching a goose; moan about it incessantly on Twitter/Facebook/your personal blog. 

Here is a (totally serious) guide to an alternative form of therapy: growing a depression beard. There is no better way to inform the world of your depression than by growing an unsightly, pungent bush of hair. Ladies, do not feel left out. Remember - a beard doesn't have to be on your face.

Stage 1: Escape Puberty

The infancy of a beard is shrouded in uncertainty. Will it grow in ginger? Will you be mistaken for the Yorkshire Ripper? Legitimate concerns, all. The pubescent phase of the beard is commonly reached within weeks of launch, and this is your only chance to turn back. If you look like a serial killer who should be dressed exclusively in animal semen, I encourage you to persist. If it grows in ginger, I insist that you shave.

Stage 2: No Going Back

By this stage the headlong descent into being a dishevelled outcast is as undeniable as the whirlpool of treacled despair sucking you into its fathomless maw. Now is the time to dress only in black and practice frowning, weeping, and stamping on kittens. Just like Queen Victoria. That picture right there? That's me smiling.

Stage 3: Delusions of Masculinity

This is a perilous stage in the genesis of a depression beard. When it blossoms into full-bodied, glossy adulthood, you might begin to feel kinship with your facial atrocity. You might even start to like yourself. This simply won't do. Take a few minutes of every hour to remind yourself of your shortcomings - your underdeveloped triceps, your unevenly haired buttocks, your incapacity to love - until the onset of Stage 4. No one feels good about Stage 4.

Stage 4: Pube Face

Here, weary journeyman, your quest is at an end. You have reached the zenith of the depression beard. In fact, you are now more beard than man. Children flee from you in the street. Baby possums attempt to suckle your face. Your jaw is indistinguishable from your groin. You are now wearing depression upon your face. Never again need you explain your affliction - not just because people will guess with a single glance, but because all humankind will shun you from its dwellings. You deserve it. Freak.

A SERIOUS NOTE TO END ON
This was, of course, a tongue-in-cheek take on depression. I should take this opportunity to thank all of my friends and family who, be it with bafflement, kind offers of help, or by simply ripping the piss out of me, have taken news of my depression with aplomb. In the past it has caused me to upset people, let people down, and sometimes kept me from being the good person I strive to be. It also led me to grow a horrific beard. To all those people, I apologise. The beard might now be gone, but to all my friends and family who are still with me, I thank you, from the very bottom of my heart.

The Fading of Friendships

This is not a treatise on the well-worn sitcom Friends, a program I can no longer watch without inexplicably vomiting bile from my eyes. It is instead, in keeping with this blog, something of a moan. Any long time readers will have gathered by now that I’m something of a malcontent.

It's still better than watching Friends.

While I’m loath to become one of those still-relatively-young people who whine about becoming old, with a quarter of a century behind me I do find myself stumbling into some of the social pitfalls of age. My chief concern is the gradual fading of friendships. 

Immediately after university friendships are shed like a malting cat rolling on a crisp white bed sheet, but the strongest connections remain intact. Far more troubling is how these connections are slowly rubbed out in the following years.

I’m somewhat socially awkward, not terribly amusing, and unfairly scathing of pretty much anything that other people like. Shockingly, I don’t make friends easily. This has made me all the more desperate to cling to the few that I already have. But, as friends relocate overseas, enter into serious relationships, and have children, it’s only natural that I become less important in their lives.

The problem is that not everyone can be successful in such endeavours. If we could all retreat into our marital microcosms, occasionally offloading our offspring onto irresponsible teenagers so that we could meet up and complain about how tired we are, everything would work out fine. But in any circle of friends, there’s the one person who can’t quite manage this, and as a result refuses to stop texting the others, inviting himself to their children’s bar mitzvahs, sleeping unnoticed in their sheds. They even make movies about that person.

Terrible, terrible movies.

You can tell where this is going – do I keep being the one to text friends suggesting we meet up, when really all I’m doing is holding them hostage? Or do I accept that they’ve moved on and back off?

One of my very best friends has recently been back in the country for three months. Despite his arrival in the midst of one of the deepest bouts of depression I’ve ever experienced, regular meetings with him for this short period have made me feel better, at least temporarily, on every single occasion. When he flies back to the other side of the world for at least the next 18 months, it’s truly going to come as quite a blow.

The only other thing that cheers me up is Grumpy Cat

I suppose all I’m trying to say is that my friends mean a lot to me, and, from a purely selfish perspective, I don’t want to let them slip away. I’m deeply lonely. But perhaps it’s time to accept that if I really care for them as friends, I should respectfully leave them to get on with their lives.

Caught Short in Shanghai

The subway carriage begins to stop, the momentum sending the puddle of yellow liquid streaming up the carriage. I jump out of the way but there isn’t time to reach my bag. The urine breaks around it, halting the flow so it soaks into the bottom. After a number of close encounters with bodily fluid in China, I suppose such an incident was inevitable.

It’s a faux-pas in travel writing to draw attention to Chinese toilets, those macabre pits of curious stains and dizzying odours. This great nation’s rapid industrialisation has yet to effect a change in public facilities. In many areas, including the capital Beijing, the street is good enough. Nappies are expensive, so Mother’s let their children resolve their business where they stand.

Not so in Shanghai, easily the most westernised city of mainland China. There’s even a Marks & Spencer. I had spent a few days here, and had all but forgotten the Chinese propensity to think of street as sewer. Crowding onto the subway I was quite prepared to forgive their idiosyncrasies, the elbows in the ribs as you board, the staring, the disapproving tuts as I set my oversized backpack on the floor and took position opposite the sliding doors for the long journey across the city.

The Shanghai subway is a marvel; clean, efficient, and navigable by tourists with minimum hair-pulling.

One or two stops later a family boarded, ranging in age from a toddler to grandparents, and spread themselves around the carriage. One passenger’s boxes of crab were shifted to give the child and his mother a seat.

The commotion began as we cleared the city. The mother started shouting, and the grandfather lunged across the carriage to thrust a restaurant menu into her hands. The toddler had left his seat and was having his trousers hastily removed. The Englishman in me insisted that I not stare, but this was China; staring is the national sport.

The restaurant menu was deposited beneath the boy’s posterior. It caught the primary transaction, but nothing could be done about the accompanying stream that puddled on the carriage floor.

Passengers scurried to clear their possessions; suitcases, laptops, boxes of crab. Positioned by the doors I thought myself safe. Until the train began to brake.

The urine surged for me like fire along a trail of gunpowder. My backpack could not be saved, the urine pooling around it like a yellow moat. As the train stopped and the doors opened to let in some welcome fresh air, I picked up my bag and stared pointedly at the family as their child’s effluence dripped from it.

They didn’t even look at me. They hurriedly gathered their things, and, leaving behind the pungent contents of the restaurant menu, ran for the doors. A teenager at the other end of the carriage let out a guffaw at my expense. And then the train moved off, the acceleration sending the urine hurtling in his direction.

This Blog is Filth II

A few months ago, after vaingloriously deciding to follow traffic to this blog a little more closely, I wrote an entry telling of thefrightening and sordid things I learned about what people search for on the internet, and expressed my dismay (or, if you will, secret glee) at the search terms that land people on my blog. Well, this entry is going to do exactly the same thing. Not because I’ve totally run out of fresh ideas (ahem), but because these internet searches have got infinitely worse. Don’t believe me? Read on.

All men are obsessed with ladyboys.

Shortly after I arrived home from a trip to Thailand, I wrote an entry about an unfortunate evening in which I was molested by ladyboys and my desire to continue living, and ability to achieve an erection, was extinguished forever. Naturally this entry became far and away my blog’s most read, and still receives over 150 views every week. This, I have gleaned, is because men are colossal perverts. There are simple searches for ‘ladyboys,’ which I choose to delude myself are simply people innocently investigating the phenomena in order to best prepare themselves for an encounter, like carrying pepper spray or a 12-gauge shotgun. I choose to believe that several searches for ‘Me and my ladyboys’ are from fans of an obscure 90s sit-com I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing. And then there’s the search for ‘advice ass-stretching for my ladyboy.’ Sir, my advice to you is not to stretch your ladyboy’s ass. She’ll only want to return the favour.

Gay men turn to the internet for guidance

I’m no expert on homosexuality, but if watching Eastenders has taught me anything, it’s that coming out as gay can be difficult. Several search terms have revealed to me that, just as when I have an embarrassing rash/boil/seething wound I wish to keep private, closeted gay men turn to the internet for guidance. Some of these are ambiguous, such as a search for ‘Emotionally stunted virgin.’ As an emotionally stunted virgin for many years myself, I understand that it occasionally crosses your mind that you might be a virgin because you’re, in fact, trying to hump the wrong gender of person. I truly hope that my entryabout the time a male classmate molested me in primary school is helpful to the person who searched ‘Boy in class felt up my leg.’ As for the man (for I have no doubt it was a man) who searched ‘Are there showers in Wormwood Scrubs?’, I implore you to research other ways of engaging in sexual congress with men. Your idea is going to result in some serious tissue damage.

People are... I just don’t know anymore

I enjoy my humour close to the bone. I am very rarely one to take offense. But I also consider myself, by and large, a decent human being. So even I, increasingly frequently, feel the urge to break down into tears at some of the searches that land on my blog. At the tamest end is ‘George Lucas Paedophile.’ Now, it’s my belief that George Lucas is little more than an animated sheep’s stomach stuffed with dismembered kittens adept at raping well-loved film franchises, but the accusations should end there. Sliding down the scale there are men who seem bizarrely proud of their simple fetishes, such as those searching ‘wife never wear panties’ (your wife is almost certainly cheating on you) or ‘she play with my urethra.’ Then there are the searches for which I can’t even bring myself to joke about, such as ‘pubescent girl like to show off breasts’ or ‘Small act of naked girl fingering.’ Truly, truly this blog must be filth if these searches are bringing people here.

And as for the person who searched ‘masterbating circlle of men hamster [sic],’ I think you should look up the soggy biscuit game. It’s kinder to animals, and you’re less likely to end up with an infected bite in an unfortunate place.