Update for Everyone VIII: He who laughs have the last laugh

[Joe Haydn]

I’m sick and tired of being treated like sh**t by hospital workers who don’t know how to do their job. Screw IBS and screw this hospital even more.

[Joe Haydn]

This sounds almost like a self-parody, but a friend of mine literally bought me the New Oxford Annotated Bible as a Christmas present.

That's in Latin? I thought you were a good Catholic who read the Vulgate, not some heretical translator.

[Joe Haydn]

I just got back from a dance at my university where all they played was terrible rap club stuff, and like Morrissey in How Soon Is Now? I stood there awkwardly by myself. So I decided to go up to the DJ and asked him if he takes requests, which thankfully he did. I asked for Blue Monday and a few songs later it came on. I often dance alone in my room to music by New Order, The Smiths, and Pet Shop Boys, so to hear that iconic opening of New Order's masterpiece in a room full of people was enough to get me jumping. If only for a few minutes, I felt absolutely free - like I was really living, for once. Other people looked at me but I didn't care; in fact, I rather enjoyed it, but once the song ended everything was back to normal again. I was - I am - nobody, who knows nobody and nobody knows. I am cripplingly shy, autistic, diseased in the bowels, and friendless. That's who I've always been, for years now - an outsider looking in. The mere thought of going up to someone in the cafeteria and introducing myself terrifies me, though God knows I still think about it over and over again. If you're someone who engages in social interaction, has friends, and goes out and has fun - in other words, the normal range of human experiences - you really, truly, have no idea how lonely and alienating life can be. I'm seeing a school therapist on Monday and I hope and pray that, for once in my life, something good may come out of it. Lord knows it would be the first time.

[Joe Haydn]

As an incorrigible Anglophile going to live in London for two months, you get there expecting everyone to be walking down the street whistling songs by The Jam, when obviously it’s nothing like that and never really was, not even in 1980. As much as it hurts to admit, life isn’t, after all, just an Elvis Costello song (even if much of it might feel that way). And that can only be a good thing, I think; if life were just everything we already liked filling in our preconceptions about the world, then what would be the point? I had an absolutely lovely time seeing 80s bands like the Lotus Eaters and down the indie disco, where they played some of my favs like Orange Juice and the Weddoes, but when I go back again (as I’m itching to) I’ll try to see more of life than I’m familiar with. For as Johnson said, he who is tired of London is tired of life, and in London there is all that life can afford.