Being Yourself

Before I start, here’s a bit of a disclaimer: I do not condone any path in life that involves anything harmful to others, drug use, or any other nasty stuff like that.

Okay, now let’s begin.

I was talking to my friend the other day and he was telling me about how he compares himself to his friends who are in a relationship, and sometimes feels a bit rubbish because he’s not in one.  That got us talking about comparing ourselves to other people in general, the way they live their lives and the way we live our own.

I’ve always been my own person.  I haven’t really been a sheep at any stage, following others because they were doing something cool.  I didn’t do or wear anything unless I wanted to, regardless of it being cool.  And I wasn’t afraid of doing or wearing something that wasn’t cool, either.  (I have ‘My Other Car is a TARDIS’ on my number plates, and a badge that says ‘This is a Wug’, with a picture of a Wug on it.  So there are some examples for you).

I remember when I was 13, and my best friend had started drinking.  She would go off to a field near where she lived with kids our age and older, and drink alcopops which were easy enough to buy from the local off-license.  I remember not being able to understand how freezing your butt off in a field at 10pm just to have a drink could be even the slightest bit appealing.  My friend used to tease me about it, thinking she was much more of a grown up than I was.  Then she started smoking, and I remember our conversation one break time; she was telling me I should try it, and said, “You’re so boring, you don’t even know how to have fun.”

I don’t know how my parents did it, but I just wasn't interested in any of that stuff.

Far be it for me now, aged 19, to dictate to others how they should live their lives.  I offer advice when it’s asked for, but anything else isn’t really my business.  Now of course, we all have our little bitching sessions with our friends, and I can’t say for a second that I’m not one of those people.  And I’m not naive either, to think that I have never been the subject of other people’s gossip.  That’s just life.  But what I’m not prepared to do now, is to worry about whether or not I’m like everybody else.  I’ll do what I want, how I want, and I’ll take my own sweet time doing it, thank you very much.

Back to my friend - he was saying about how he was worried certain things would never happen for him.  I knew this feeling well enough to know that it doesn’t come out of nowhere, but rather from seeing other people moving at a faster speed than you are in certain aspects of life, be it relationships, education, work, getting married, having a family, or even just being settled in general.  And so I told him this:

There is no point comparing yourself to someone else.  You can’t possibly be the same as anyone else, because you are not that person, and they are not you.  You can’t compare an apple to a banana, because they are not the same.  You can’t even compare a red apple to a green apple.  Likewise, you cannot compare yourself to anyone else, because there is not another you.  Everyone does things in their own way, and in their own time.  As long as you are happy with how you live your life, that’s all that matters.  If other people have a problem with it, that’s their business.  

I was too scared to take the stabilisers off of my bike for a while.

I’m quite the nerd as well.  I like to learn, which seems quite alien to a lot of people, even those I go to university with (which I find completely bizarre as they’ve chosen to study - but then again, I’m not one to judge).  I get strange looks from some people when I say that I’ve completed an essay a week before it’s due, and people make remarks about the amount of background reading I like to do, or the amount of time I like to put into my studies - but that’s just me.  And I like me, for the most part.

I won’t lie to you, reader, it has taken a long time for me to make this revelation.  Some nineteen years, in fact.  I have of course compared myself to others in the past, especially if other people were out being cool, and I wasn’t, even if it was out of choice.  As a teenage girl I constantly compared - actually, compare - myself to the way others look, but I haven’t changed my style.  Although I did change my make up yesterday, so you can decide the relevance of that if you wish.  I’ve just been thinking lately, and especially after the chat with my friend, that there is no point being upset or annoyed about aspects of yourself you don’t even want to change in the first place.  Although it’s the longest thing you will ever do, life is still too short to be worrying all the time.  There are people who will accept you for who you are, and as for the rest - screw them!

This brings me to what I think will be my last point (although I hope you aren’t already thinking that I haven’t made one at all yet).  Acceptance: we all crave it, no matter how much we deny it.  You don’t have to enjoy being the centre of attention to enjoy a compliment every now and then.  Admit it - you want to be accepted just the way you are by someone, preferably someone you’re attracted to.  Right?  You don’t want to have to apologise for something someone else thinks is a flaw.  You shouldn’t have to. 

I guess what I’m saying, just to tie it all up in a sentence is this: Stop apologising for who you are, never do anything that compromises who you are, and stop worrying that other people won’t like who you are.  If someone makes you feel like apologising, compromising or worrying, then they’re not worthy of your company, your respect, or even your love.  Like yourself.  Go on - I dare you.

Tai Sham.

If you're trying to decide where to go for a meal next weekend, make sure Tai Pan is not on your list of choices.  And, if it is, cross it off.  Twice.

I was fortunate enough tonight to go for a meal with some lovely people, two of which I haven't seen in a while, so a catch up was long overdue.  I had new shoes to wear, which of course put me in an excellent mood.  I was even picked up by my good friend Jack (thethoughtsthatcometolife), so the evening was off to a superb start.  Until we entered Tai Pan.

From the outside the restaurant looks promising; it has a nice sign.  Excuse the pun, but usually that's a 'good sign'.  The inside is smaller than I thought it would be, but pleasant enough.  The word organised comes to mind, which is a complement to how both the tables and buffet are set out.  Everything included in the buffet was clearly labelled which, as a pescetarian, was wonderful to see.  There's nothing worse than just sticking to things that are plainer than plain just because you're not sure what has meat in it and what hasn't.  All of the tables were set out nicely, with the typical paper pricing-place mats, finger bowl with a slice of lemon in it, menus and matching napkins on every table.  One thing that we did find strange was that the cutlery on each table consisted only of a fork and a spoon.  I wondered if this was a compromise between a knife and fork and chopsticks.

Jack and I arrived before everyone else, so went in to sit at our reserved table.  I soon learned that the reason we were dining so late (9pm) was because this was the only time the one round table in the restaurant would be available.  This had all been arranged before we arrived, however the gentleman who greeted us repeated over and over that he "didn't get the message" and that we'd have to sit elsewhere.  There was no apology, and he was actually quite rude.  Not the best first impression.  Jack and I were then asked multiple times about the people who would shortly be joining, which was fairly annoying because we had already stated that they were literally up the road.  Everything soon settled down when the others arrived and eventually we went to get our food.  Tai Pan has a fair range of food, with quite a few fish dishes as well as a large variety of meat.  If you're a vegetarian there isn't much, but personally I could eat egg fried rice all day long and not get sick of it.  I had the plain chow mien, egg fried rice, salt and pepper cod, calamari, vegetable spring rolls and sesame seed prawn toast.  All of this tasted pretty good to me, especially the cod.  The chow mien was a little on the cold side and the prawn toast was very thin and could probably have just been called sesame seed toast.  All in all though, I was pleased with the food.  The one thing I was disappointed about was that there was no teriyaki salmon, which I'd been looking forward to after seeing it on Tai Pan's menu online.  Typically, as this was a buffet I was full very quickly, but felt I needed to eat as much as possible as the buffet was £15.90.  Luckily we ordered after 21:15, which automatically entitles you to a 15% discount.  I think the wine was about £17 a bottle but I can't quite remember.  I had jelly for desert which I am always happy with, and an assortment of cakes.

While the food was nice, it wasn't amazing and I wasn't happy paying the amount I did for it.  I've had much nicer Chinese food at much cheaper places.  One particular place in Hayes Town provides impeccable service, which is Tai Pan's downfall and the reason I doubt I'll be returning.  As well as the mix up with the tables and the rude welcome, the staff at Tai Pan could not wait for us to leave.  They cleared plates, glasses and cutlery away as soon as they saw an opportunity to, which was annoying because I had to resort to stealing a spoon from another table - I probably did the next people a favour though, because the whole fork-spoon thing was pretty confusing anyway.  Then, before we had even got to desert, the staff started hanging around our table, sometimes four of them at a time, literally right next to/behind us, watching us eat.  There are mirrors on the walls of Tai Pan, so they couldn't even hover discretely.  They looked at us with such irritation and we were extremely cross that they were so eager for us to call it a night.  They even brought over the bill without us asking for it, to which we responded by getting more desert.  I have never felt so unwelcome or unwanted in a restaurant in my life.  There was not one smile and a severe lack of manners.  Customer service is most definitely not at the top of this establishment's priorities. 

They even started turning off the lights while we were finishing off desert!  Honestly though, how many restaurants close at 11pm on a Saturday night?  Even Pizza Hut is open until midnight.

Luckily for me, I went to Tai Pan with great people and we did have a nice meal and a good laugh.  Unfortunately, this was somewhat overshadowed by the shoddy service we received, and I would recommend getting your noodles elsewhere next time you fancy a meal out.

Why is it called Tai Pan anyway?  It looked like Chinese food to me.

"If you want to write, write it. That's the first rule." - Robert Parker.

Someone once said to me that to be happy in life you need to do the things that make you happy. 

That's not really true.

As far as I can tell from my eighteen years of living and my however many years of independent decision making, you have to do things that make you really sad/angry/hysterical/belong to the bottom of the social heap sometimes.  You can't just skip school, eat sweets, get dolphins tattooed around your belly-button in full colour or hit that girl in the face.  These things may make you happy, but if the end result is a fat kid with a weeping stomach wound that just keeps growing because the kid keeps getting fatter and is on the brink of getting her very own prison cell next to her parents who were put there because their child never attended any form of education, well...  happiness may not be on the cards for you.

Recently, I gave up on writing.  I stopped writing stories, which I used to love to do, and I stopped writing blogs.  Actually, the blog thing stopped because I felt I had nothing to write.  Then I got into my writing funk and the blogs never resumed.  I'm not sure what started the writing funk but I'm pretty sure it had something to do with this day that I was sitting at Uni and people were talking about what careers they wanted to go into.  Most of them didn't know, but some of them did, and while they told me I thought to myself, "you're never going to do that.  Seriously... you're never in freaking class."  So, although I do differ from the lecture ditchers, I started to wonder about my own 'dreams', if that's not too corny a word to use.  No it definitely is.  Ah, I'm going to use it anyway.

So I started thinking; what if I never get a book published?  I've always been pretty sure that I would, because I've never thought any different.  One day I was going to write a story, and have it published.  Over time that became a book that wasn't very well-known and got me no income what-so-ever, but it was still a book that I had written that would be on some shelf in some book shop.  When I think about it that way, I suppose my 'dream' was deteriorating for quite some time, I just didn't notice.  I thought it was just part of growing up and seeing the world differently.  I suppose it was, but since a friend encouraged me not to give up on writing (I don't need to explain, right?  You knew that by the end of this blog there would be an uplifting, happy ending and my love of writing would have been restored, right?) , I've decided that it's not okay to lose faith in dreams.  I have to say, I do believe that dreams should be something achievable - I mean, the idea that I will one day appear on Glee as the English exchange student with the amazing singing voice is a fantasy, not a dream.  I think it's important to recognise the difference between the two.   

Okay so... back to that happiness stuff.  I stopped writing because I thought that the outcome (not having a book published) would be devastating after a lot of hard work.  It would.  However, being in a writing funk didn't make me very happy either.  So, I had to choose.  I chose to stop being so freaking negative and just try to write a book (obviously... have you even been paying attention?) which makes me pretty happy now.  I aim for an outcome that will do the same.

In case you were wondering, there are some things I currently do that don't make me happy in the slightest, but I have to do for the end result.  For example, I get up at 6:30, four times a week.  I shouldn't be moaning, I know, a lot of you get up earlier for more mornings a week, but this is about me so... yeah.  This doesn't make me happy but I kind of have to do it to go to work/uni.  I have to do those things to earn money/get a degree.  I need to do those things so that I can buy things and one day... earn more money.  It's so sad that's how the world works.  I'm really hoping I'll just win the lottery one day.  Obviously I'm lazy at heart.

What I hope you will have got out of this blog: 'What If' is a really annoying thought, and should be abandoned at the earliest opportunity.

I've become a Gleek in about two weeks.  Amazing.
'And that's what you missed on' my life.

Ciao,
Tails.