It’s been a while. Quite a long while, actually. But new years call for new things, and one of these new things is my decision to actually go through with what I plan. It’s no secret that I am somewhat… lax in finishing what I start. No, that’s a lie. I’m a magpie that keeps finding new things to want to do, and as such things I loved at the time fall by the wayside. That’s why I’m depicted as a rainbow in the webcomic on Second Sphere¹ – you’ll never find the end of the rainbow. You’ll never see the end of my stories, though they may be beautiful in their time.

So I figured it was a good idea to change that. Reading back through things I’ve not finished I considered how I would have felt had I been the reader, and not the writer. And I realised that I was betraying people who looked up to me. And that’s bullshit. So no more.

So, back to blogging I go. The three ideas of the title break this article into three sections. The final one won’t be pretty.

Fair warning.

Possession

In the early days of December, my relationship with Kate finally laughed its last and she began moving out. She’s not quite done. She still has to collect the fridge, and presumably she wants her George Foreman Grill – she was pretty keen to get it back from her ex when we moved in together. That doesn’t bother me, because, for reasons that shall become clear in the second section, I just want her out of my life and I’m willing to cut back on anything I have to in order to make that happen.

Plus the grill is, you know, hers.

But I also owe her quite a lot of money. Well, I owed her quite a lot of money. Now I just owe her quite a bit of money. There’s a difference between a lot and a bit, and I’m not sure whether that difference is actually quantifiable, but in this case the relevant quantity is the tune of about £1500. In order to get this cash ² I pulled a favour from my Dad ³ and that dealt with the majority of the remainder, but I still had a bit to go. I’m not going to my Dad again, so this means I need to sell things. And… I’ve kinda grown attached to the valuable things I’ve accumulated over the years. But with a heavy heart I decided “fuck it” and put up every single one of my guitars for sale on Facebook (I didn’t want to have to sell all of them, so I figured that was safer than eBay), because no matter how much I love my guitars getting her gone is more important than all of them and everything they represent to me. Someone’s interested in one, so that’s good. I sold my Wii and my DS at CEX (I may do a post about that at some point in the future) and put the cash straight into her bank account.

That was last weekend. I’ve been thinking more as time’s gone on since then and I’ve realised that, of all these things that I have, there’s so many of them that don’t get used. I have far more guitars than I need. Far more DVDs than I ever actually watch⁴. Games I don’t play. Clothes I don’t wear. So I concluded that they had to go. Even the things I’ll get little or no money for, because that’s not so much the point anymore. The point is waste, the point is clutter, the point is hoarding stuff for virtually no purpose.

When am I ever going to watch Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason again?⁵

I think we all have more things than we need or use. I think we always have. I’m not entirely certain of the point. When I was a kid, my friends usually had dozens of VHS tapes. Dozens. I’m not sure I even had ten⁶. This didn’t occur to me when I was small, at the time if I thought about it at all I’d just have considered it in terms of having less (which is ludicrous but anyway). The point is that I am sure that these kids (and their parents, as it wasn’t all Disney and nonsense) barely ever watched what they had. So what was the point of owning it? So many of my friends have simply colossal DVD libraries. Seriously, when was the last time you even watched a classic like Fight Club or Pulp Fiction or The Matrix? I bet the vast majority of you own them. What are they doing? Just sitting on your shelf? Gathering dust, waiting their turn ‘til you remember you own them and give them a watch, turning off halfway through to do something more enjoyable?

Is this particular quirk not the pure reason rental shops exist?

I’m not digging at people who own lots of DVDs. I’m not even getting rid of literally all of mine. I’m keeping Fight Club and I’m keeping Pulp Fiction⁷ because I do love those movies. I may want to watch them again, and the insurance is good to have. But I don’t love Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. It’s just taking up a space on my shelf, making everyone think I’m gay.⁸ So it can go. Along with Braveheart, Sweeney Todd and the Jurassic Park trilogy⁹.

Joining these DVDs will be guitars and Warhammer (that one’s got to be a subject for another post, this one’s bloated enough as it is). Clothes I barely wear (unless they’re just madly situational) will be going to the charity shop.

I don’t know if this has prompted anyone to realise that they own many things they don’t need, but I’d like to think it might.

The Stupidity of Settling for Second Best

Back to the breakup. Or rather, the relationship that precipitated it. I’ve not really talked about it openly before, but it’s had a profound impact on the way I act with everybody recently and I feel I should at least offer some thoughts on the subject. I’m not going to bitch about Kate. I’m not going to do that because it’s uncalled for, it’s unnecessary and sadly it’s not really true, despite how I may have made it seem to her at the time. It was my fault I felt the way I did¹° and she knew it. So I’m going, instead, to do what I do best.

I’m going to talk about me.

The piece of advice I shall impart to all gentlemen and boys (and ladies and girls, as it totally works both ways) is as follows:

When you know what you have is second best, do not allow things to become serious. Fling all you want, but don’t let it become any more.

I expect people are now going to think that I’m going to start talking about Kate’s sister, Lucie, as it’s not uncommon knowledge that I was interested in her first. I’m not going to talk about Lucie, because Kate’s not second best to Lucie in any way, I feel¹¹.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the girlfriend I had before Kate, Lauren Eve. Or Evee, as I called her.¹² When I met her it was like lightning. I knew I’d found something special, instantly. I didn’t have that with Kate, but I continued on anyway in my foolishness, figuring that Evee was a once-in-a-lifetime experience and nothing would be anything like the same. I could accept that. I could settle for average happiness, not perfection (or what I believed was it at the time).

It took lightning striking again, after the breakup, to realise how fucking stupid this was of me. How much of an idiot I’d been, hurting someone who did not deserve it, when I try not to hurt anyone at all.

Bottom line is, don’t settle for second best. You all had probably worked that out already, but if you hadn’t, here it is, I’m telling you. Have fun if that’s what strikes you, that doesn’t need to be perfect, but by Jingo¹³ if you’re considering moving in together stop right there and realise what it is you’re doing, because it’s likely that you’re going to seriously hurt someone further down the line. After the first lightning strike fizzles out if feels like you won’t get one again. But trust me, it can happen again.

Don’t settle.

Intermission

I’m going to let you guys have the footnotes now. Because if you don’t want to read the next section, you shouldn’t have to just to get to my anecdotes.

¹ Not because I’m gay. I’m not gay.

² Which, naturally, I didn’t have to hand.

³ I’m happy having an umbilical to him in the form of paying him back over time, I just want Kate gone.

⁴ Kate always had so many DVDs. That never made sense to me. One watch, then done. Massive waste, even to me.

⁵ To be fair, I’ve no idea why I bought that one in the first place.

⁶ This is “official” ones, not ones that are blank for recording purposes.

⁷ I don’t own The Matrix, for the reasons implied. I didn’t think I’d watch it that much.

⁸ I’m still not gay.

⁹ Star Wars stays.

¹° I.e. As if she was being a bitch.

¹¹ Sorry Lucie, in the extremely unlikely event of you reading this, I only mean that Kate was better for me in a relationship than you would have been.

¹² I’d already had a thing with a Lauren before. Didn’t feel right, and apparently she preferred it. That hasn’t stopped me dating two Kates, though.

¹³ I started saying this yesterday. I think I’ll continue.

Weaponised Rape

Okay, here’s the heavy, awareness-raising stuff. I’m a fundraiser. This means it’s my job to approach people in the street and make them realise the shit that’s going on in the world, and then give them the opportunity to do something about it. At the moment we’re working on behalf of the Red Cross, something I’ve done before, and these guys are, as everyone knows, somewhat of the Big Daddies in terms of disaster relief, warzone medicine and healthcare. But going over some of the information we’ve been given again, and looking deeper, I’ve learned some things that I’m appalled I didn’t know before. So, on the raising awareness side, I’m going to tell you guys.

Darfur’s a region in the Sudan. It’s wracked by civil war, and while there’s been unrest for decades the whole thing powder kegged in 2003. We don’t see it on the news, because the media doesn’t think it’s important. We already have a contract for oil in that region, so we don’t need to go in there and do anything. We don’t even need to report. We definitely don’t need to see.

And it’s difficult to see. It’s stuff that most folks don’t really want to know, but they know they should.

It’s more dangerous to be a woman in Darfur than it is to be a soldier.

The place is a warzone, so think about that.

The reason for this is the governmental forces have been trained and instructed to use rape as a weapon against the women of the peoples they don’t like in the area. If they’re not virgins, they can’t get married, and can’t perpetuate their society. Maybe that’s a backwards ideal in the first place, but that’s not the worst of it by a long way. We’re not talking one-on-one here. We’re talking about twenty soldiers. One woman. Over and over again, one after the other. These women suffer horrific physical damage from the assault as well as the emotional damage you usually expect from this particular violation. AIDS spreads, and there are pregnancies, too, breeding out the folks the government doesn’t like, causing the women to be ostracised from their communities for carrying a child not of their own.

You know how we have children’s hospitals? Or dental hospitals?

Out there they have rape hospitals. Full hospitals, just of rape victims. Rows of beds of these women. Go to one of these hospitals with a broken leg? They won’t help you. That’s not what they do. They barely have the resources to help the people they are established for.

There are very few places in this region where a woman knows she is safe, but one kind of place is a Red Cross camp. The Red Cross works in the largest refugee camp in the world in Darfur, called Gereida, which has a population just shy of that of Huddersfield. Oxfam aren’t there anymore, they pulled out because it was too dangerous.

This is just one of the reasons why I’m proud to do what I do. Supporting, and encouraging others to support, organisations dedicated solely to helping others and fighting atrocities in the darkest parts of the world.

Why have I told you this? Because if you don’t know something, you won’t do anything about it.

Thanks for reading, guys. Apologies for the mood whiplash.

Final Statement

As I said in the introductory bit, I’m returning to blogging and carrying it through. I’ll update every Friday, or more often if I get something I really want to get out there, but never more than a week will pass between updates. So watch this space, and I’ll try to make the next one more frivolous!

Kedge