The First Time

It was the first time
I smiled
And it reached my eyes

I laughed, wholeheartedly
No emptiness
Full of life

Whispered beautiful
Declarations of love
Devoid of cynicism

Felt wanted,
Purposeful
- Loved

Fairwell to the Fairground

Life isn't about fun and games, those ideals spoon fed to us as children, as teenagers, are nothing more than  candy floss coloured, E numbered up, sugar coated lies. "Eat up it's good for you" the smarter of us are reassured whilst we hold these spoon-fed lies in our mouths reluctant to swallow it down like the rest. Eventually it starts sticking in your throat, the sugar coating isn't sweet enough, not convincing enough and the cheap taste of polystyrene seeps through. Bland, phoney, unappetising- that's what it's really like. And once you uncover that bland plastic taste underneath all the sugar coating, it'll never go away.

We compete to have the best, the most convincing sugar coating over our bland lives of polystyrene. Trying to forget that we ever tasted the bitterness- the truth behind it all. Everything becomes a competition, not doing something because you want it but because someone else does. Scrambling around on your hands and knees for the last scraps of sugar to coat the bitterness, engorging yourself into obesity just to escape reality.

It makes you feel fucking sick, sick to the stomach. Sick because there's no cure for it.

The University of Reality

It seems that every expectation becomes diluted when reality reaps its poison onto it, rotting all your dreams, all your hopes and all your wishes into an abyss of decay.  The dream of University has entered this abyss, it has been tainted by reality, and what a revelation! University is just another part of that corporate journey, leading you onto the 9-5 which in fact actually "doesn't exist any more, you'll find you spend all day and night at your job, so enjoy your spare time now"(says my lecturer Stephen Morton, wouldn't want to plagiarise now would we?)- and that's what we have to look forward to after the 3 year struggle we have ahead to procure either a 1:1 or 2:1 (which I've been advised we must get otherwise we WILL be unemployed). And I question myself again, is that it? Is that all I have to look forward to?

Foolishly, perhaps, I thought University would be something different- an eye-opening experience, and it has been, it has revealed all the grim realities about life that I hoped were not true: we are born, we are raised, we make money, we contribute to 'society', we die. But I still hope for more, I scramble around in the darkness looking for some form of hope... some may say this is childish but I refuse to believe that this is all I have to live for.

I wanted to meet people with passion who cared about something, people like me. But all I am is isolated, questioning how people can settle for this, can think that this is good enough. I don't want to be trained to be the perfect citizen, with transferable skills, lack of opinion and a willingness to do anything, charitable to some extent so that it looks good, but predominantly selfish: the idyllic robot of the corporate machine. I want to break free of this restraints and find myself not turn into another replica of the ideal.  I don't want to be a base creature, living off pathetic pleasures, I want to be more than that."It is better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied" after all. I'll remain unsatisfied if that's the cost- I just thought this would be different.

Nothing changes.

Being induced into University was more than reminiscent of the induction into A Level studies, and the induction into GCSEs before that and the induction into secondary school that preceded that. It's getting a bit fucking repetitive, don't you think?

 I feel pretty sedated by it all right now.

Teleological

Is everything just a means to an end?

Is life merely a succession of milestones that we pass and then die?

We all seem to be heading the same way. We start off with dreams and hopes and an idea that there's something out there worth living for. Then we go to school, we're fed ideas that we can be whatever we want to be: but can we? Can the 4 year old little girl who's already had a difficult start in life really become prime minister? The reality is that she can't and it doesn't take long for even her to realise that.

We follow the current and find ourselves at university, studying a degree that someone else has told us will be useful, meeting someone else's expectations but not our own. We graduate, resigned to the fact that our dreams have turned to ashes, with no flickering embers of hope left that we will somehow achieve greatness and we wonder 'now what?' We find someone, fall in love if we're lucky or just settle. The resounding ticking noise in your head gets louder telling us it's time to get married and start a family, or is that just the familiar noise of society pressuring us to follow the norm?

You plough on, you're not an individual any more you're a family, part of a unit. You've settled, 'this will do' says the voice in the back of your head whilst the 4 year old version of yourself screams that this is not enough.

 Is that really it?