Love of Lights

As I have a passport from (in the eyes of the Great West) a meagre, lowly country, my travel opportunities are limited by needing a visa for nearly every country I go to. I'm English, but by paper and blood I am not, which overrides all else. To me, blood doesn't matter, to most of the world it does; but what ubiquitously does matter is papers.  While, by paper, I have the right to live in the United Kingdom forever, I am not British. I do not belong to Europe. And this makes it very difficult for me to travel freely to other European countries. My friend and I (like most people at some point in their lives, I think) have plans to travel Europe, and she has cancelled other opportunities recently in order to save money for these plans that we have. Unfortunately, being un-European by paper, travelling across the continent is more expensive and more troublesome for me. Travel is one of the few things I hold most important for an enriched life, and so it disappoints me greatly t...

I've come to realise what has been making conversation difficult for me in the past. I used to look at conversation as two humans in interaction; one with a repertoire of words and interests, and the other too. They come together and either meld well or they do not. However, I think I've been looking at it wrongly. A conversation, more than two separate entities throwing and exchanging words, is one singular experience with two proponents. When a conversation is initiated, it should be a joint effort to be interesting and avoid awkward silences. When a conversation goes downhill, something I need to consider is that it's not only going downhill for me, but for them too. An awkward silence is not just awkward for me, but it is a shared phenomenon. Upon entering into a conversation, you become one with the other and share an experiential tie via language. It helps to look at it this way because it aligns with the function of conversations. The function of conversation is t...

I'm still finding it difficult to accept the current romantic culture, in which the male courts the female or else condemns himself to a life of loneliness and unspoken loves. I'm also finding it hard to identify the point at which I should  be telling the girl I like her. At the moment I'm still working with the 'when you not knowing kills me more than the possibility of rejection' model, but it seems that the fear of the possibility of rejection has always been stronger ever since I told the last girl I liked her and was (essentially) rejected. I need to turn 18 and drink. Everything is easier with the aid of a slight haze. I won't be an alcoholic! Just a tactical drinker. (P.S. A note on tactical drinking: An alcoholic drinks for the sake of drinking; he has an addiction. The tactical drinker drinks to aid his purpose and occasionally for recreation. The tactical drinker always considers two things as he holds a drink: "Is it for recreational purpo...