Up All Night

I think I can safely say this isn't one of the high points in my short little life. Sat at my kitchen table at two o'clock in the morning wide awake and drinking Carlsberg. This isn't what I wanted, I wanted to be cosy and warm all tucked up in my nice-ish comfy bed. But clearly I'm not, and that's because I dabbled with the forbidden art of napping.

Earlier on today I gave blood. Not that unusual, I've done it a couple of times before, and I've always been feeling tickety-boo afterwards, save perhaps a little bit of light-headedness and my left arm feeling a bit colder than the rest of my body, but never before have I returned feeling as tired as I did today. You know that feeling when your entire body feels like it's going to just shut down whether you're laying down or not? Well, I wasn't quite that bad, but bugger me* I was knackered. Come five o'clock (that's 1700 hours military time Mat), I decided to bite the bullet and go to sleep. Before now, I've been able to sleep for fourteen hours straight with relative ease, but for some reason, my body must have finished making all the blood it needed, because it decided to wake me at eight. Not a problem, I thought, and I decided that I'd just go to bed at my normal time and wake up a few hours earlier. After all, it's an excuse to see the sun rise, isn't it? And I'm sure you've guessed, I didn't manage it. Six hours on from waking up and I'm still feeling like I've had a full night's rest, and that's just bloody unfair.

For those of you who don't know me personally (and that's a depressingly small minority), I am a very good sleeper. I can fall asleep pretty much anywhere and strangely I actually sleep better through thunderstorms, but this is most likely due to the fact that Britain's thunderstorms are about as threatening as week-old piece of celery. Regardless, the feeling of not being able to sleep is very alien to me, and hasn't occurred in many years, but affects several of my friends, most of whom cope with it very well. Unlike them, however, I am not practiced in the art, and the only times I can remember being up this late in the past twenty four months would be either for work or at a party where I should have been in bed hours ago. Suffice to say, this is pretty new ground.

Usually I welcome time alone, but recently I've had a bit of a lull in my number of shifts at work, so I haven't had the stress levels that I've become used to over the past few months, and it's just occurred to me that I'm not entire sure where this is going.

I could ramble on and on in order to use up some of the time I've got left before my body lets me fall unconscious and hallucinate vividly, but that's not the nub of what this post is about. No, this post is about a very serious matter indeed, and I need your full concentration to help me work out what it is, because I've no bloody clue.

Should have though about this a bit more before I committed to writing it really.


*Please ask first, I don't like surprises

Working Nine 'Til Five

I posted this a few days ago, but for some reason it seems to have disappeared. Most likely something to do with the fact that Blogger went down yesterday. Not one to complain, I thought I'd just repost it in its entirety. I knew there was a reason I made backups. Sorry, but the thousands of comments you all posted cannot be saved, and will forever be lost in the internet. Diddums.

Anyway, enjoy:

-

Tempting way to make a living. I've just got back from a shift, and despite my muscles being annoyed at me for standing up and my liver twitching because I haven't been drinking, I'm enjoying it. How long have I been at this job now, two months? I can tell you, it feels a lot longer than that. I may enjoy it, but let's be brutally, brutally honest; I'm doing it for the money. If I could have the same amount of money that I get from working for sitting on my arse playing Dragon Age II all day, I'd run there right now and hand in my resignation, but unfortunately it matters not how many sovereigns and silvers I collect from hurlock corpses, real money is worth infinitely more. But I digress, the main point I want to make is simple, and that is the fact that education does not seem quite as worth my time as working.

I am looking forward to university with every fibre of my being, but at the same time there's a part of me shouting "Stay at the hotel, if you become full time you may even get a manager's position in a few years time!" from the back of the theoretical crowd in my mind. Now a manager's role may be pushing it a bit, but all my bosses seem to be thoroughly impressed with my work, and it seems every couple of weeks I take on more and more responsibilities. I feel that despite the short time that I've been there, I've already left an impression on the place (or at least the staff), and it would be a shame not to exploit that and drain it of every ounce of life it has.

Of course, the path I will take (because it would be sheer madness not to) is university. With any luck in three or four months time I'll be living the vida local in Canterbury, learning all sorts of fantastical nigh-on non-existent words and their obscure classes, or giving an aardvark a skin graft. Then, the year after I'll be setting sail to Brussels to learn the ancient way of the sprout and gain disgusting amounts of weight with all the chocolate and child abuse*. Yet there's still that part of me that wants to cling on to the job I  have, and to make more of a career out of it, and live a normal, boring life.

Then again, I've just remembered that wedding reception we had where ugly, annoying people demanding terrible alcohol until four o'clock in the bloody morning.

...

I'm going to uni.


*Mildly obscure film reference. If you know it, leave a comment below