I don’t know where I fit in narratives anymore.

I’ve been reading articles and essays about how everyone presumes that real life follows standard story structure. There’s the three act model, antagonist, protagonist, and all those other useful writing tools. The problem is that they don’t apply in the real world.

I’m getting ahead of myself though. The point I’m trying to make is that I’m finding I don’t know how to interact with people at the moment. I get a sense they’re trying to apply a narrative structure to things, but I don’t know how a lot of these narratives play so I don’t know what I’m meant to do or say. This is leading to a lot of confusion and head scratching on both sides as things don’t play out like they’re meant to.

On the up side it does mean where I’ve been cast as the antagonist I’ve been able to shrug that role off and continue as normal. On the down side, it’s also meant I’ve had missed opportunities as I’ve not grasped what role I’ve been cast in and thus how I’m expected to act.

It’s frustrating to say the least, I’m left feeling weird and strange as I don’t seem to know what it is I’m meant to do. Is it just me who gets this feeling they’re expected to play a role and when they don’t people look confused, or did I simply not get my copy of the script?

Answers on a postcard please.

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Again with the embloggination!

Today I must confess started with a wibble and not in a good way. Bean has decided that sleep is evil and must be avoided at all costs. This is being expressed as not going to sleep very easily and doing all he can to cry, wail, and try to fight visiting the land of nod. The flip side of this is waking at 4AM and deciding to fight sleep then too. This of course means that myself and Mrs.Misadventurer are having an interesting time of it.

I don’t know about any of you, but I find that a lack of sleep gets to me very quickly. I become confused, irrational, and downright paranoid. Hence, this morning starting with a wibble.

The wibble in question is around what to do next. I’m focussing on Bean at the moment, which is the right decision for me. However bills still need to be paid. and I’m not quite ready to start doing webcam shows from home to make ends meet. So I’ve been stressing about what to do and fixating on crashing and burning, ending up living in my car down by the canal eating garbage.

A mere 30 minutes and 750 words later I realised my problem. I was focusing on the wrong future.

When I had my motorcycle lessons, one of the most frequent lessons was ‘look where you want to go, the bike will follow’. This is true for life, look at the wrong thing and as sure as eggs is eggs, that’s where you’ll be. For me, this is the living in the car analogy, when instead I should be looking at any number of the bright shiny possibilities like starting a café, writing a book, and discovering the secret of Monkey Island).

The point I’m trying to make is that it’s too easy to become focussed on fear. Remembering that they’re only a possibility and I have the ability to avoid them completely or to mitigate them is an important exercise.

Hopefully this will be interesting or of some use to others. For me it’s a placeholder to remember to do it when things look tough.

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I’m back again! You’re going to have to bear with me as I’m going to be doing my utmost to write every day to get back into the habit.

Preamble done, let’s get on with the main event. I talked yesterday about seeing the world through Alistair’s eyes. At the moment I’ve a strong suspicion he’s convinced that the world is one large point and click adventure. Don’t believe me? Let me go through the evidence.

• He’s constantly looking around, it’s like he’s moving the cursor over everything he sees to assess if it’s clickable or can be picked up
• He’s always crawling at a fast pace from room to room as if he’s missing something elsewhere, or maybe like he misclicked on the location and has to keep returning to where he’s meant to be
• Everything he picks up must be checked if it can either be combined with another object or will interact with it in some way.
  • Notable examples:
    • Putting things inside things in case they interact
    • Pulling things off shelves in the hope it triggers a secret doorway or event
    • In Yo Sushi on Mother’s day, he ran the baby chopsticks (they’re a thing!) over every item he could reach and looked annoyed when they didn’t combine and no events were triggered
    • My teeth. Quite often he’ll grab my teeth in the hope they can be pulled out of my skull and used elsewhere. As much as I keep trying to persuade him that my teeth aren’t the wind up kind, he still wants to pocket them and try to use them later on
    • Trying to take the contents of his toy chest with him. The stacky cups might interact with the cat if he does it in the kitchen

It goes on, I watch with interest as so far only the Fisher Price piggy bank actually yields results and triggers an event. Sometimes I wonder if it’s more like twitch plays pokemon, maybe I should get Bean a foam Helix Fossil and see if he consults it from time to time in cases of extreme doubt and indecision.

All in all the evidence is mounting up that Alistair’s interface to the world consists of a floating cursor, a bunch of verbs at the bottom of the screen and a small inventory window. So far the action words seem to be ‘TAKE’ and ‘USE’ with the occasional qualifier of ‘ON’. Oh, and of course there’s ‘DRIBBLE’. ‘DRIBBLE ON DAD’ seems to be a favourite, closely followed by ‘SHOUT AT/FOR FOOD’. Oh yes, he’s discovered food my be ingested to recover health, though ingesting the food using the current interface is tricky.

I’m not sure what the outcome of the Bean point and click experience is. I wonder if he’s currently still doing the tutorial level. All I know is that he can be kept entertained for a while with a collection of random objects, last night saw him checking if inserting his birthday cards into the grate of the old fire (blocked up, don’t worry) would yield treasure (it didn’t). It did keep Mrs.Crater and I smiling and gave us the rare opportunity to sit at the dining room table and actually have a meal together (the first time in ages!).

All of this said for combining objects, when Leah presented Bean with a freshly made Temple to Cthulhu made out of Lego Quattro, he immediately set about dismantling it into its component pieces. Is he an investigator seeking to destroy Cthulhu and its minions, or is it simply that the Temple to Cthulhu registered as inert on his display and needed to be broken down? I’m never going to know, by the time Bean is talking he’ll have forgotten all of this and moved onto a FPD (first person dribbler) engine.

Whatever the lack of results might do to the rest of us, it doesn’t deter Bean. If anything he seems more motivated to try new things out, and of course if myself or Mrs.Crater say ‘No’ when he goes near something, then that’s *bound* to do something interesting, right?

All I know is that it’s great watching him play, there’s a sense of purpose there and I can see he’s obviously trying things to make sense of the world. All that said, when I find that he’s trying to combine honey, a lump of cat fur, two brooms and one of my long coats into an outfit to get into somewhere interesting, I’ll know that I was right and there’s a method in the madness!

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I’m flailing a bit at the moment and after a conversation with Holly she suggested I dust off my writing fingers and write.

So, here’s the first part of *something*. If you like it, do let me know, if you have suggestions for where it should go, let me know. Actually, do the latter, I like the idea of an interactive fiction thing starting…

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In any other scenario, this would be sane!

What the fuck am I doing?

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It’s been a while since I’ve updated. I’ve had things to say, but choosing where to spend my energy has stopped me putting fingers to keyboard. I’ve been wanting to spent more time with Mrs.Misadventurer and Tiny Misadventurer, and less time online. I’ve sort of achieved this, but I feel completely out of touch with my friends.

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Seven years seems to be the limit in the legal worlds. Would the same apply for the world of relationships?

What if after 7 years all limitations were removed and you could speak your mind and perspective on previous relationships? How would it change going into a relationship knowing everything could be bared 7 years after ended?

I think the idea is equal parts horrific and fascinating, however one thing does remain waiting 7 years before talking about an ex might take away the bitterness and urge to assassinate their character.

Normal programming will now resume…

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I had no idea that office supply and stationery bloggers existed!

I thought I was jaded by what the internet had to offer, instead my eyes are opened and my heart has swelled to find that I’m not alone in my love of office supplies.

It all started when this post popped up in my feedly feed. Since then I’ve been seeing just how deep the rabbit hole goes. I’m only just coming up for air now after reading all about the different types of pen and paper out there, and raising the fist of comedy anger and frustration that doane paper is not readily available in the UK.

It gives me hope that the internet gives a home to folk like me, those who love office supplies and other niche things, giving us the space to share our love of it with the world.

If anyone wants me I shall be jotting ideas in my moleskine cahier using my staedtler triplus fineliner pen.

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I’m planning a month free from social media in September.

It seems Facebook is changing our brains and not in a good way, this article alerted me to some alarming things about Facebook, and as Ruby Wax has already pointed out, it’s not like our poor brains can cope with modern life as it is.

For one month I’m going to disable all alerts, uninstall the apps, and remove myself from these two social media tools. I’ll still be blogging, and I’ll keep LinkedIn as I need it for work. I’m undecided about G+, I don’t find it as distracting as the others, and the folk I have on there don’t tend to post much, and I don’t find myself habitually dipping in ‘just to see what’s happening’. This is open for review if I find myself using G+ as a substitute, then it too shall find itself on the banned list.

What’s prompted this is a serious look at social media and the fact that it just doesn’t make me happy or productive. I think we have become slave to the tools we have created. What started as a good way to keep in touch with distant friends has now become a constant distraction. Facebook opens me up for criticism, and for hours wasted clicking through links, pictures, and seeing the inspiration porn that’s being shared that day. I can plot the movement of memes and concepts as they shift across my friends list.

The Manic PIxie Dream Girl thing that got mentioned a while back? I watched as it moved across facebook and the responses people felt they needed to make about it. Is this all there is? Someone spots an article or link, drops it into the social media pond then we all watch and react to the ripples? There’s a danger of a cultural homogeneity here, that for as much as a lot of my friends decry ‘normal’, are then defining normal by reacting in the same way to the same things.I want to find my own voice again. I want to tighten my circle of contact and focus on the outside world.

I discovered an interesting quote today:

“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

? Jim Rohn

I had no idea it existed, however by its very core and the way I feel in this always-connected age, I am a watered down homogenous pasteurised skimmed version of myself.

What I want to achieve is this:

• To focus on things I want to do.
• To actually get things done and stop procrastinating and looking for public support.
• To stop over sharing and vaguebooking and start dealing with life again headon.
• To change the average of who I am, which means pulling back from the vast ocean of people I know online.
• To read more and build on the ideas I have.

Not an unachievable list certainly.

I also hope that my sense of focus comes back. Whilst writing this I have found myself conducting conversations on Facebook and twitter, clicking around on my open tabs and being distracted by the next digital shiny thing in front of me.

And that’s it, a simple idea, a simple set of goals, and one crazy person doing it.

So long for the moment online, and I’ll see you soon in the real world.

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I’ve not updated for quite some time, it’s not that I’ve not had anything to write about, instead I’ve been thinking a lot about voices and where things are best placed. I’ve also held back from putting anything of import onto facebook due to the naysayers and their love of passing on ‘advice’. In fact online feedback is a tricky beast, in no short order let me go through some of the ‘advice’ I’ve received:

• On a post where I was starting to realise I was depressed, that I should consider myself lucky I could work at all from one person, and the advice that I should commit suicide and ‘bow out’ if I couldn’t cope with the world
• On several posts about work that I should simply ‘put up and shut up’ and that if I can’t cope with work then I should just go off and be dole scum
• On a post where I was talking about being fat and society’s reactions to this and my own struggle with the ramifications that I was a ‘whiny fat man’
• On not getting a job that I should harden up and not take defeat so personally

It goes on, I use writing and sharing as a tool to process my own thoughts and to ask for help as I can’t do it directly. In a lot of ways all I need to know is that I’m not alone, it isn’t me with these thoughts and worries. That if I am being irrational I can see it and do something about it. Comments and jibes like the ones above just make things worse. I am bearing my soul and trusting the people I know, and to have comments like the above returned to me reinforces my lack of trust in humanity. Did I mention all of these comments were from people I know and have called friends? It’s true. Some of the choicest ones come from ex-partners who know my weaknesses and use those against me.

I want to make the point of why I don’t write so much, why I am hiding from the world to a large degree. I’ve taken down the shield I had between me and the world down, I am raw and vulnerable and trying to learn how to cope with the world without being insensitive and disconnected from it. I don’t want to regret this action, I don’t want to have to put the defenses up and I certainly don’t want to pass any of my bad habits or experiences onto bean. If I do that, then I think I shall truly feel as if I have failed as a parent.

I was talking to a very close and dear friend yesterday about this. We took things to the illogical conclusion that there’s only one person in the world who is entitled to complain about their lot. This one person suffers in a way that no other human being has suffered or will ever suffer. We were facetious in our example, however if you look at the responses given above, the logical position of people seems to be ‘Well you are still about to y, x (the mythical uber-victim) can’t do that so shut the eff up’. So, I say nothing, I write nothing and instead meet up with close dear friends and talk instead.

I would like to write more, just at the moment I’m in a state of flux and I don’t feel I have the safe space to write about it online. Equally I wanted to write a little about why I find it hard to ask for help, and why I’ve been quiet. I write and share as I am (indirectly) asking for help. It hurts me to admit it, however it’s true. Yes I have medication, yes I have someone to talk to officially, what I’m doing is looking for support and to build a support network. I know I don’t want to be as cynical as to to start cutting people who hurt me out of my life, and yet I start to see that perhaps this is what I need to do.

Life is hard, and not everyone is as good at it as you. A kind word isn’t hard, and yes everyone does need a push every now and again. Just be kind with it, consider what you say to people and the effect it can have.

Choose your words carefully as they can do more damage than you know.

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