I think venting isn’t the right term to use, it’s more me just, well, dumping my thoughts (as the tagline of my website would suggest). So, back to my point of where to start. I think it’s best to start with my relationship with my girlfriend just to put her mind at rest. Don’t worry lovely, there’s nothing wrong ;P.

Lately there’s been stress on either my or her side and so it’s not been the best of times but as far as my relationships go, the bad times are still the best relationship times I have had (apologies to any past relationships). I’m not sure if that makes sense. Basically, nothing is wrong with our relationship but there is some stress floating around that is leading to small arguments but the frequency of which is getting noticeable. With this said, the stressful period should hopefully be over in the next week or two (for the both of us) so then that can go back to being awesome rather than amazing.

Next would be my job I suppose. For those of you that don’t know, I work as a Higher Apprentice at Visa Europe in IT. The thing is, so far I haven’t really enjoyed it. When I finished college, all I wanted to do was go into a full-time job which I could be passionate about. I was thinking either networking (not social) or IT support as both of these involve the things I am most passionate about: Technology and problem/puzzle solving. Then, I stumbled across this apprenticeship and I was like:

Awesome, let’s go be an IT Apprentice and do what I love all the time, it will be amazing!

(With this said, I didn’t actually know what the apprenticeship entailed until about a fortnight – a month into it). So I got through all these stages and ended up getting the job. So yeah, that happened. And as I went through it, I found myself getting bored because there was only so much work that they could give me because that’s all they had to give me. I had University work and Diploma work (both parts of the apprenticeship) to do but there is only so much of these I can do before I start to think:

I’m at work, god dammit. Give me some work to do!

Now that I’m in network support, the place I really wanted to be, it’s not so bad. I mean, it’s boring at times and I have “enough” work to be getting on with but it’s really not what I thought it would be. I suppose, I still am not a network engineer and have nowhere near the level of qualifications it would take to do the  interesting stuff but I just find myself getting bored. This is slightly depressing for the fact that it’s what I have wanted to do for a few years and now that I am finally in a position to do it, I am still doing mediocre work and after working there for 6 months, I will have to go and do two more 6 months placements that I have no interest in before I even have the chance to specialise in it. This is what sort of annoys me about the apprenticeship. Like I said, all I wanted to do when I left college was go to full-time work and be able to do something that I enjoy. When I was going through College, I did not like it but I managed to get into the mindset of

Only 18 more months of this and I can do what I really want

And now I am back in that position and have to try and adopt that mindset again. I never wanted to go to university and yet here I am, doing university. Whenever I get asked how work is going and stuff, my stock answer is “Yeah, fine thanks” because everybody knows “How good of an opportunity this is” and “What an amazing position I am in” but I think that I prefer the prospect of the job than the actual job and that’s what everybody else sees, the prospect. They are not actually doing the job whereas I am.

As I touched on university there, it reminded me about another thing I wanted to talk about. All my friends have moved away and are at university. That’s fine. I started doing the whole YouTube thing a little bit into my apprenticeship to make new friends and I did and they were awesome. Problem is, I’ve stopped doing the whole YouTube thing and thus, lost contact with them which is not fine. I will still speak to them occasionally but they were/are genuinely nice and interesting people who shared an interest with me. I miss it and want to get back into it but can’t because of the reason why I stopped it in the first place. Lack of energy. This leads me back to work (apparently the root cause of this entire “rant”). When I get home, I am tired and have very little time to do things before I have to go back to sleep. I therefore end up trying to fit lots of things in because I feel like I am missing out on stuff otherwise or wasting the time I get by mindlessly watching videos or TV. This ends up with me going to bed around 1ish because I don’t want to waste the time but then I have to get up early again and therefore tired when I get home again. Maybe if I just went to bed early one night and forgot about missing out on things, I could fix some of this. I don’t know, worth a shot I suppose.

Anyway, there is a wall of text.

TL:DR

• I have a girlfriend still, it’s going well if not a little bit of a stress patch
• I do not like my work, it’s not what I expected but have to finish it, I suppose.
• Do not like education
• Miss friends

As many of you may know, I started a new work placement in Networks about a month ago. My new placement is in Basingstoke and I live in South-West London. The travel is a, give-or-take, four hour round trip and I work 9 – 5, this means that when I get home, it’s about 7. I tend to go bed around 11/12 so this gives me about 4/5 hours of R&R. This would be fine; had Diablo III now recently been released.

Pretty much from the second I get home, I am sat in-front of Diablo III and haven’t had the.. willpower? to bother to do anything else. The most I accomplished was when I had a powercut the third day of release (it was not fun), I re-ordered my underwear drawer. I was close to going out but then the power came back on and I was right back at that computer. Call it sad or whatever, but I’ve been waiting for this game for half a dozen years!

A lot of you may be shocked by the amount of time that I spend doing “work-related things” such as travel but to be honest, it’s not all that bad. It’s a bit depressing waking up at 6AM and thinking “I’m not going to be back here for 13 hours” but it’s okay. I’ve managed to live on around 6 hours-ish sleep a night and then just sleep in on Saturday but it does get me occasionally. Mainly when it takes me longer than expected to get home such as if there are bloody signaling errors on the trains. What is a signaling error anyway? I’m going to google it…

[Some amount of time passes]

Okay, so what I take from that is somebody messed up. It’s human error and it makes huge delays for commuters. Bastards.

But yeah, when I am delayed, even by like.. half an hour, it pisses me off to no end and I end up staying up half an hour later to compensate. It’s just because I feel like time is being taken away from me and when I only get a few hours at home, it’s a lot.

However, with so little amount of time at home, it really does help me appreciate things such as Diablo! Usually, I would sit there for days, play a game non-stop and get bored of it fairly fast. When I can’t always play it, I just find myself wanting to play it more, as you would expect. I suppose it just goes back to what I was saying in one of my other posts about delayed gratification.

So – that is where all my time is going and being spent, just in case you thought something tragic had happened. Well, in my girlfriends eyes, it has, Diablo was released.

So, £5 for 5 days. How did I choose to use this money? Did I think carefully about how I could best approach this, buying ingredients for filling meals that would keep me going at full energy for the whole week? No. No I did not. I have bought the following so far:

• 1 loaf of bread
• 1 tub of butter
• Oven chips
• 5 packs of chicken noodles

I currently have £1.43 left which I intend to buy another loaf of bread and a possibly snack for Thursday/Friday. I think the best way to describe this is “I’M HUNGRYYYYYY!!!” This really wasn’t the best approach I could have taken by far but I’ve chosen it now and there’s not much I can do about it!

So far, I am really not liking the feeling of worrying were the next meal is coming from, so to speak. I’ve always had food to eat and money to spend on crap I don’t particularly need and when I was in Sainsbury’s yesterday, buying 5 packs of 18p noodles and a bag of value chips, it hit me. I don’t usually eat a lot to be honest but I’ve found myself feeling more hungry because I know there isn’t as much food as I would expect available to me. For lunch today, I have a toast sandwich. No, not a toasted sandwich. A toast sandwich. Bread, butter, toast, butter, bread. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad, but once it’s gone, I’ve got one more before a filling dinner of Chicken Noodles. Yummy. I do regret not buying something snacky though or even squash. It’s just all so bland!

This is not going to fun. I’ve already started to plan my midnight meal on Friday!

Let me try and explain this a bit better. When I was younger, we had a rule in my house that you couldn’t have dessert unless you finished all your dinner (unless you were a guest and it seemed that my brother’s friends didn’t like to finish dinner – Yes, Jade, I’m looking at you!) This angered me because I am not a food person. I don’t really enjoy food and have a very small selection of foods that I do eat. For example, I have a memory of my mum making pizza for me and my brother when we were younger. I do not like pizza. I didn’t finish it and my mum said that I couldn’t have dessert until I had finished it. I really wanted dessert (even though it was like a choc ice or something) but I refused to finish the pizza. Later that night, I stole a choc ice (sorry Mum). This rings true in my current lifestyle also. Now that I’m earning, I’ve gotten into a tendency of purchasing stuff that I want when I get paid, not really thinking about what I may or may not need the money for later on that month. This didn’t make it very easy for either my girlfriend or my parents to shop for me when my birthday/Christmas came around because I had bought everything that I wanted.

Okay, so what I am trying to say here is that there are two types of people in this world (in respect to this), People who do not wait and obtain what they want asap (stealing a choc ice after not finishing dinner) and those people who go through things they dislike to obtain the thing they want (putting aside money for the thing that you want until you have enough dispensable cash to get it safely). And I, up until about two months ago, was the type of person to get what I wanted asap (within my means obviously. Not stealing it). I then started to realise that this wasn’t exactly the best idea. The biggest thing was that I built a new computer for just under a grand. I was really pleased with it and glad with my investment but then realised I didn’t exactly have any money left for the rest of the month and the pleasure was short lived – sure I still enjoy my PC but I don’t think I quite.. What’s the word.. appreciate it as much as if I had saved up for it. I am now trying to change this. Instead of going out and buying my two new monitors (£350 a pop), I am waiting. I am going to be redoing my room and clearing it out. As a reward to myself, I am going to buy these monitors afterwards.

What I am wanting to know really is what sort of a person are you? Do you get what you want asap or do you wait and plan? Why do you do what you do and how is it working out for you? Let me know in the comments.

The Butterfly Effect Theatrical Poster

Aston Kutcher. If not, go watch it, it’s a great film.

It’s also based around an aspect of chaos theory, the butterfly effect (also, as Wikipedia tells me, called sensitive dependence on initial conditions). I really like this theory and think about it from time to time in relation to loads of things.

For those of your who are not aware of the butterfly effect, it’s name derives from Edward Lorenz who gave the example of if a butterfly flapped it’s wings on one side of the world, that however long later, a hurricane would be created due to that change in the wind. Put simply, every little thing puts something else into motion.

The main reason why I like this theory so much is because of how much I like the thought of time manipulation. If you have watched some of my YouTube videos (this one in particular: http://youtu.be/MsPxaC3sk44), you will know that if I could have any superpower, I would like to have the power of time manipulation. This, to me, is the most publicised  affect of time travel as well. The theory that if you changed one thing in the past, that it could potentially change everything.

Now, the reason that I tend to think of this quite a lot is because of complete strangers. The most common thought process that I go through whilst say, sitting on a train is about what effect I have had on somebody else’s life. Have I made any sort of impact on the person sitting in front of mes life? I don’t know if that sounds like I want to be idolised or “to have left a mark on this earth” or not but that’s not quite what I mean by it. So I will go from what effect I have had on somebodies life to what might have changed if I wasn’t there, sitting in that exact seat, in that carriage, on that train. Then I start to think of what might happen if either I had not made this train or the person I am currently and by now probably scaring the shit out of with the constant – staring at.

Another reason that I like this theory is because it gives significance to the seemingly insignificant. Take an ant. An ant, to us, may not seem that significant. If it dies, it dies. But what if it was wandering along a path and a child stops to look at it wander. If it had not have been there, that child could have be walking along then walked into the road and got hit a car. I realise how morbid that sounds but I’m just trying to make a point here.

I was talking to my girlfriend about this theory and she brought up quite a good point actually that I hadn’t thought about. People tend to think of this theory quite a lot anyway just not by that name. If somebody dies, they tend think about “What if”. These what if’s can be endless and can lead to very nasty places to be and sometimes to self doubt where self doubt should not be. What I am trying to ask with all of this is, how many of you have these thoughts sometimes? About how if something was different, everything could be different type thoughts? Let me know in the comments.

I’m 99% sure if I could communicate coherently with my cat, he would slap me round the face and say (in a tradition 90′s black voice) “What yo’ talkin’ ’bout fool?! No I don’t want to be killed!” but as we can’t communicate with him, we have to “do what is best for him”. If I’m honest, I think the best possible thing to do for him would to be to treat him but then that brings up the argument of whether or not he is happy being treated or would he rather just ‘fall into sleep’. It’s a hard choice to make and I don’t think anybody really wants to have to ever make it.

See, my cat isn’t anything out of the ordinary. He’s been around since I can remember and previously belonged to my next door neighbor who sadly passed away and left the cat to us in her will. To be fair, before she passed away, he was more or less our cat anyway. He would spend the majority of his time round at our house and although we wouldn’t feed him, we pampered him. In hindsight, this was an incredibly mean thing to do because we took away the one thing that was maybe keeping the dying lady company but it’s not something I am going to loose sleep over. But anyway, as I was saying, he’s nothing out of the ordinary. He sleeps the majority of the day and wakes my parents up at stupid hours during the morning by sitting on their face or meowing loud enough to awaken the hamsters that are buried in our garden (they were dead, we don’t just bury sleeping hamsters in our garden. They were also ours, we don’t bury other peoples dead hamsters in our garden either). The thing is, I know that he is going to be missed once he gone. I know for two main reasons – among many. Reason 1: When I was told about it, I got upset. And when I think about him not being there, it puts a downer on my mood. Reason 2: When he doesn’t wake my parents up at night, they get really worried and scout the house to find him (he’s usually asleep on a chair downstairs). The thing is, I ‘know’ my cat. I know what he likes and where I can find him if he’s hiding. I know where are his favorite places to sit and the fact that if there is a piece of paper on the floor or a plastic bag, he will be sitting on that rather than a pillow. I know he likes to drink out the bath tap rather a bowl and that he can kick two shades of shit out of a dog. I think I’m just use to having him around and he’s basically part of the family.

This leads me nicely onto the subject of ‘Why does it seem worse when a pet dies rather than a relative?”. When I put this question out there, I don’t mean any disrespect to anybody. What I mean by “relative” is somebody who died of natural causes whether that be old age, an illness or whatever. I also realise that this will not be the case for everybody or every situation. Maybe I should rephrase the question. How about, ‘Why do people feel worse when they see an animal die than a human?‘. Yeah, I think that works better.

I am sure that many of you have your own theories on why this is and please, do leave them in a comment below (I would be fascinated to read your opinions) but here is mine: The way I see it, we see animals as things that us humans have to take care of; it’s the same for children. When we see an animal die for whatever reason, I think we find it hard not to feel something towards that animal (whether we ‘knew’ it or not) because the way we see it, it didn’t understand the reason why it passed away. It wasn’t smart enough to comprehend the meaning or reason behind it’s demise. (I went to go and say “possibility of death” but I feel that the wrong term because if I run into a bunch of pigeons, they fly away like their life depended on it (which it probably does) so possibility is not the right word) This rings same for children because they may not understand the reason why they aren’t ‘the same’ as other kids or whatever.

I think that this is why we feel so responsible for an animals death. I think we feel that it’s ‘for the best’ to put it down rather than let it keep living but then that also raises the question “Why is euthanasia illegal?” Is a human’s life any more valuable than an animals? Or is it just that we believe that humans have the intellect to understand and accept their reason for being ill and therefor deserve to stay alive. But I think THAT then raises the question: “Why is it acceptable to eat animals and not humans?” (Not that I promote cannibalisation or anything and I am also a meat eater).

I apologise that this has been quite a down read and not exactly the most structured thing you’ve read today but it was more just I was typing as I was thinking. If you have anything to add, please do leave a comment and I will be happy to discuss further my thought processes!

Do you have any questions for me for my next video?