I just went on another mini-rant on Myspace. I like to do that every so often just to remind everyone how much I hate it even though I won’t delete my account in case I miss out on something Very Important and Significant. I won’t of course – it’s fvcking Myspace for God’s sake – but I can’t take the risk. Here’s the rant:
Myspace profiles fit to blind you.
What. Is. With. Them? They take about twenty minutes to load and when they do, you’re presented with enough material to ruin your eyesight completely for the next five years. WHY, WHY do people put ten different videos and 50 different pictures on their profiles? What is the purpose of this? And WHY does everyone comment with a picture that’s big enough to fill a screen all by itself? Can people not articulate anymore? Do we need to fill our lives with amateur and ugly Photoshop graphics in order to express ourselves? I preferred Myspace three years ago when people just had basic profiles to play with.
Although I use the term ‘prefer’ loosely.
This site just gets stupider by the day.
And it’s true. It reminded me again, of course, that I’m getting old and intolerant. I don’t mind this of course – I want to be the most cantankerous person in the entire world by the time I’m 70, after all – but I do think about it occasionally. Then I saw Daisy Garnett’s (whoever she is) piece on why she doesn’t go dancing anymore and I found myself agreeing with nearly everything she said, particularly this bit:
So why don’t I do the same [make an effort] – or even a fraction of the same – in order to go dancing?
Well, there is a long answer and a short one. The short one is that I’m 34 years old and I don’t feel like it very much. It’s too tiring. I’m too busy. ‘You’ve grown out of it. Big deal,’ one woman says when I have a moan. ‘End of story.’ But it’s not as simple as that. I don’t have children, and though I work full time and it sometimes feels as if I work incredibly, annoyingly hard (what? More work?), the fact is, I don’t. I’m not a doctor or lawyer. I don’t run a business or look after small children or the elderly. I’m a freelance journalist. I find time to watch television and go to the theatre and go on holiday. I haven’t grown out of lots of other things. I still show off, still take things too personally, still over-compensate for some things and flake out of others, still take too long to get to the point, still like crappy teen flicks and chewy sweets. It’s just that I no longer seem to be able to summon the energy to go dancing.
Seriously, of all the ‘jobs’ I could have, this one (sitting on my behind all day reading books and writing things down) is about the easiest one. I can get up and in whenever I want (or not at all if I feel like it) and I can leave for home at 2.00 if it takes my fancy, yet I’m exhausted all the time. I don’t go to bed later than 11.30, ever, so I always manage to get a good night’s sleep, yet I wake up with heavy eyelids and a body that seems to weigh 100 stone as I drag it out of bed. There are times at the weekend when I could think of nothing worse than going dancing, or even going down the pub for a few pints, particularly if the option is tea and a sofa. I don’t understand how the people Daisy describes – doctors, lawyers, parents – do it for I only have myself and my pretend job to look after and it still wears me out. Like Daisy, here, I do mourn the passing of my wilder days. Although I could never see a way back to them now.
tenderhooligan 
Hmm… puzzling, but maybe not so. What if you were to make yourself get out of bed at 7 or 8 from Monday to Friday (and on the weekend, too, if you could manage it) – turn it into a routine instead of doing the sleep-in one day and not another. I reckon your body would cease to feel like 100 stone. Also i believe there is a lot to be said for trying to get as many hours of sleep as possible before midnight. Of course, in a real [adult] world, it’s impossible to hope for three or four hours’ sleep before midnight, but even two is good. It works for me. I try to get to bed by 10 or half-ten and i rarely have a problem rising at six or thereabouts. This is the case even on weekends – i just open my eyes and i’m fresh; no alarm. Then again, i’ve always been an early riser.
You are so right about getting sleep before midnight – my mum always said that. I think that my sleep pattern is fairly regular: I try to go to bed at the same time and get up no later than 8.
At the weekends, though, I sort of feel like I deserve a lie-in, you know. Even if it is bad for my routine.
I might try to really regularise it for a while to see if makes any difference. I think I’m just a tired soul, really!
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