Thoughts from Scandinavia

Fun fact: In Sweden, Christmas celebrations (Christmas meal with rrlatives, opening presents, etc.) take place on Christmas Eve instead of Christmas Day.

On a completely unrelated note: here is a picture of the coast of Copenhagen, a city from which one can take a train to certain Swedish cities.

Oh and apparently I'm going to be an Electrical and Electronic Engineer, my fate is now fairly set in stone.

Have you ever thought that you would never have even thought of something? Or being somehting? The are things about me that I would never have imagined would ever be the case. For some reason, the past few weeks and coming back to Sweden have really made me start thinking about it. It stuns me to think that If you took 2012 me and showed him me now he probably wouldn't believe it. Of course I'm very sure that this is a literally everyday occurrence people becoming things they couldn't have imagined, but have you ever thought that? Have you ever thought, in a stunningly moving way, that you just couldn't've known who you were going to become. It stuns me to think...

Sweden's nice, or perhaps more precisely my Swedish step relatives are nice, because Sweden is current colder than anywhere I've ever been, so not entirely 'nice'.

I used to ask people 'what's new?' As a conversation starter a lot. So here goes; university applications are going okay, braces,  the idea of becoming an 'adult' in January is daunting.

Other than that, life has constants. School is school  (which means theres work), and friends are friends, (which means fun).

Hope to blog more, Benny out.

What do you want to be?

An odd phrase, 'What do you want to be when you're older'. Even stranger is the fact that we're bombarded by it throughout our childhood, despite the fact that it, and similar statements are, problematic, in more ways than one. 'What do you want to do to make a living?' Isn't it nonsensical that someone could make a living? Why couldn't someone just live. It feels as though people define each other by one's principle way of making an income, or the lack thereof.  An engineer, a lawyer, a doctor, a mechanic, a writer, who we are is simply our professions.

As I am coming into a stage of my life 'where what occupation I want for the remainder of my life' is a question with an ever looming due date that I am impossibly far from answering, I find myself asking some questions;

Do I want to be the type of person that goes to an office and engineers things all day?,

Do I want to be the type of person that goes to an office and lawyers things all day?,
Or do I want to be the type of person that goes somewhere else and does some other things all day?

My questionable grammar aside, the problem with any of those questions, is that they presuppose that having a certain profession means you are a certain type of person. That you are bound by your job to think in a certain way and doing certain things in your spare time, that engineers walk around with numbers rattling around inside their heads and that lawyers are sticklers for details and loopholes.

Luckily I realise this is horribly untrue, one can in fact be a lawyer as well as a  saintlike advocate for Indian independence , and I'm sure you could be other things as well as an engineer. However, it's tempting to imagine that the people who are best in their fields are going to be passionate about their field and spend time outside of work doing things concerning their field. A writer would read a lot of books right? 

Curiously, when I googled the meaning of the word profession so I didn't accidentally use it incorrectly, Google gave me two meanings;

profession

prəˈfɛʃ(ə)n/

noun

noun: profession; plural noun: professions

1. a paid occupation, especially one that involves prolonged training and a formal qualification.

   "his chosen profession of teaching"
2. an open but often false claim.

   "his profession of delight rang hollow"

I'll let you decide whether or not this has some worrisome implications about how people define one another.

And even if you what you do doesn't define who you are, you're still going to spend a big portion of you're life doing it. 

I just did it. I just unwittingly described the the occupation I may have one day as 'What I do', such a common phrase in English, as if my what I'm paid to do is the key thing in my life that I accomplish. And isn't it? My occupation will occupy a huge portion of everyday. 

Obviously these questions wouldn't matter if I really was passionate about something. Which is another problem, I can imagine myself being passionate about nearly everything. Which might mean I'm passionate about nothing, which still leaves me with the same problem.

This may all be just a convoluted way of complaining about the difficulty of choosing what I want to be, a problem that I am currently facing.

Along with the ongoing problem I think I have of thinking too much. 
Can you tell?

The selves

Do you sometimes feel like you consider yourself three different people?

The past you. The person whose vast inadequacy has created every problem you have ever made. Who though mistakes has caused all the unnecessary sufferings you've had to suffer. The one you blame for not considering something or doing something in particular. Yet at the same time the person you wish you could improve the most, to change to create a better today. And at other times, sometimes, in those brief nostalgic moments the past self is the self you wish you could be again for no reason but that the past was better, and you want to feel that wonderful past all over again.

The future self is the self you aspire to be. The self living in an almost Utopian future, doing things without mistake, living life without hesitation and is the culmination of the best aspects of oneself, a version that has shed all the faults of the past. The future self manages to do this through, by definition, not existing as of yet.

The present self is the least thought self. It's the one you may think about the least, for it is the self that does, whereas the future and past selves one thinks of often"what will I do", "what should I have done". The present self is the one that is always doing, and solving, the one that must deal with the problems that can no longer wait and must act in the situations one cannot ignore. It is also unknowingly the thinker itself, considering the past choices and the future possibilities.

But in truth the present self is both selves combined, at all points doing things has happened are happening and will happen. The only thing separating all three is degrees of knowing. Knowing what you have done, having an idea of what you're doing, and not knowing with any sort of precision what you will do.

I'm reminded now of the fact that light isn't instantly and takes a moment to reach your eyes before you can see the world. Maybe this way of thinking isn't right, maybe you can only ever know anything about the past self, about what you were doing.

Maybe this doesn't mean anything at all, maybe someone just felt in a really bad mood and decided to write all this.

Maybe

Not my week

This week of coming back to school has been a week of relative catastrophe. Nearly every single day something bad happened to me. Allow me to list them.

1. This week I started school again after two weeks of holiday. Unfortunately I forgot that we start on Tuesday and arrived at the bus stop in-front of my school on Monday morning initially confused because of the lack of students anywhere. Then I did a massive face palm because I realised I had one more day of holiday.

2. On Tuesday I had a a Chemistry test that I didn't do too well on because I had to leave early for...

3. A guitar lesson which I should've practiced more for.

4. At my school we have something called activities where at the start of the term we choose what activity we want to the term before do and then we do them for the last two lessons on every Tuesday. In order of preference I had chosen, Karate, Climbing (on the school's climbing wall), Literary events and Community Volunteering. Somehow I got stuck with Cookery, which I only found out that Tuesday when I was told what ingredient I should've brought from home for the Cookery session later that day. Even worse the teacher running the cookery class had a reputation for being generally bitchy and mean. Luckily after she raged at me for five minutes she let me go talk to the person in charge of activities and get reassigned to climbing.

5. On Wednesday. I forgot to wear my tie. In Glenunga ties aren't particularly important but here not wearing a school tie is really serious so I the half an hour between when I arrived to school and when lessons started, in a panicked state trying to scavenge a tie from the numerous lost property bins around the school. Eventually I had to ask my Head of House (because all the ties have house specific colours) if he had a spare which thankfully he did.

6. Later that Wednesday I had fencing club which ends at half past five. Just to be clear, the fact that I had fencing wasn't the problem, it was what I did afterwards. So after fencing I changed , took my PE ad and went to my locker to get my schoolbag. I packed my schoolbag with my books and et cetera and then walking down to the bus stop about five minutes away down a hill and just as my bus was coming, I realised that despite the fact that I packed by schoolbag, I didn't put it on. So I had to walk backup the hill to the school and get it, wasting ten minutes.

7. I then walked back down to the bus stop where I waited for a bit thinking "good thing I have everything I need to bring home now, including that really important form that I'm supposed to give to my parents and hand in tomorrow...."  needless to say I didn't and for the second time that same afternoon I walked up back to my locker then back down to the bus stop. Wasting a total of about half an hour of my life to stuff I forgot in my locker which turned to a about nearly an hour  because of the increased time I had to spend waiting at the bus stop for the next bus. Please note This was after a 90 minute PE lesson which involved a timed 800 metre race followed by a very intense fencing lesson.

Thursday and Friday were okay, but the first half of my week was thoroughly depressing.

Benny out

Practice makes lazy

Since the 7th of November last year I've been getting guitar lessons which is an interesting new experience since I haven't learnt an instrument since a year of piano lessons when I was five. I've forgotten most of what I did when I was five, piano lesson included so I'm basically learning something entirely new for me.

I've made some progress, I'm not that good at recognizing which not is which on sheet music (although I can PLAY all the notes in first position on guitar , I just can't differentiate which note is a B or a C or etc. without stopping to think first). Something that's really changed between November and now is that when I first started practicing I used to get ridiculously frustrated when I made a mistake that I've gotten right before. I'd get honestly overly upset when I had done a section of a piece well before and instead got that part wrong that one time and didn't play the piece perfectly even though I had been practicing for hours. Nowadays though I just get over it with the the right attitude and a thought to myself along the lines of "oh well, if I keep practicing I'll get it right eventually". Which at first was a good thing but now that attitude has gotten to the degree where it's a bad thing and I just become lazy and don't really practice enough.

My guitar teacher is nice about it though, despite the fact that I'm sure I never ever do enough practice Mr. Onion (no that's not his real name, I'm using a pseudonym because this is the internet so I don't want to use real names of people who don't know they're in this blog ), never gets annoyed about it.

What grade am I at this point? Grade nothing, because I haven't taken any music exams yet, but by the end of this year (school year, which here, ends in like August) Mr. Onion says I'll be able to do Grade 3 or maybe 4 and that I could probably do grade 1 and possibly 2 now but what's the point if I can just go straight to a higher grade exam later on. He doesn't know I can't really read notes though, because it sort of never really comes up as a problem sine I can play the notes, it probably would change his view on what grade I'm capable of but oh well.

Benny out

edit: I'm going to ignore talking about how infrequently I do these things form now on, because it just gets in the way of what i want to talk about.

New

Wow, it's been awhile. A long while.

I used to use the question "Wat's New?" a lot as a conversation starter. It's a loaded question.

Most recently I read Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Finally. After it's been released for my entire life. I have to say, it's pretty damn good. Now, more than ever, I wish I had read the book first before seeing the movie. I think because I've known about a lot of things in the HP franchise a reacted differently to a lot of things, like brooms or wands or  the very word "Hogwarts". How random is that word? Hog warts. Of course now when I read the book it seems normal because I've known the school in the Harry Potter books was called that for my entire life.  I can't ever have that experience of reading it as something entirely new and having no preconceptions about it. Especially important plot lines that I already know about like who was trying to steal the stone or what the mirror of Erised showed you which I think spoiled it. If you haven't already noticed by now I'm writting with the belief that the movies deliver the experience of a Harry Potter book in far inferior way than the actual book, so even though I would have been introduced to the name 'Hogwarts' in the first time I watched the movie, it's not as effective if I had read the book first.

Thankfully though there are some things I have forgotten about HP, I've read the second book now, (yes that's how long it takes me to write blog posts) and I had no clue at all that Ginny was the one who did it.

Another reason why reading the first books feel weird is that they're about a bunch of 11 and 12 year olds that I know will eventually date and marry each other. Which is just really weird foreknowledge to have, especially since Ron dislikes Hermione a fair bit in the first book.

Benny out

NEW YEARS!

I can hardly believe an entire year has passed. So many things have happened so quickly, yet here we are, still alive after the 21st of December.

This year I've moved to Bristol, gone to Sweden, gone to London, left one school and joined another. One thing I've started thinking is how unimaginable the future is, how with a thousand years I doubt I could've have imagined that the year I experienced actually occurred.

Now to get away from deep introspection. Fun fact about me, I cannot blow a balloon. I don't know why not, I just can't. Sometimes the air escapes from my lips and sometimes I just sit there holding a balloon to my face while my lips are taut around the balloon,  my cheeks are puffed out like blow fish while I blow as hard as I can into the balloon. It's very, very infuraiting.

Happy New Years

Benny out

Nationality

So being an Australian citizen who was born in Indonesia, currently lives in Britain and has a mother who pretty much grew up as Chinese, I don't have the clearest nationality.

Obviously I look very asian and both my parents think I look more Indonesian than Chinese, but I speak neither of those languages very well. I also don't have an very distinguishable Australian accent and I certainly don't match any sort of British or English stereotype.

One thing I certainly do about my nationality is mentally align myself with Australians. One example of this is that whenever I talk to my family and compare Australia with Britain, when I'm talking about Australia I always refer to Australians as "we" and British people as "them". I do this without realising it, and I even find it strange when I try to talk about Britain as "we". Another example was on Remembrance day and my class was watching a documentary about the Battle of the Somme in World War 1, because I'm the sort of guy that watches History documentaries, I already knew a lot about the Battle of the Somme, I was a bit bored. Then the documentary started talking about the non-British troops that died at the Battle of the Somme, like the 23'000 Australian Troops that died, it also showed a clip of an ANZAC monument in France that commemorates them. Finding out about the 23'00 Australians that died at the Somme resonated with me a lot more than the 350'000 British that died.

So yeah I think I consider myself Australian, this post didn't really have a point but I just wanted to talk about that.

Benny out

For awesome

So today I had literally written and entirely different post for , but that can wait. For the last like 36 hours I think the majority of the Youtube I've watched was Project for Awesome stuff. So Project for Awesome is a giant Youtube charity drive where people donate to the p4a (Project for Awesome) fund, people also make awesometastic, amazing videos supporting their favourite charities, and people vote for the charities by going to the p4a webstie and voting on that video.

It's awesome and some of the stories in the videos are truly inspiring.

So Don't Forget To Be Awesome, watch some videos.

Benny out

edit: Goddamit, p4a has now ended, sorry about my terrible timing

END OF TERM!

Wooo! Holidays!

My term just ended!

And thus begins approximately three weeks of binge gaming with my brother.

And hopefully during these three weeks I'll actually blog! Hopefully, probably not though seeing my previous track record, and we're going to London for New Years.

Happy Holidays!

Benny out
 
p.s. Project for Awesome! 

FIERCE

So I was at Sunday school awhile ago (yes I go to church), and because I was new we played the whole two truths and a lie thing, and one truths I used was the fact that I fence. The guy leading the group said that it was an obvious truth because I had "a sort of fencer's fierceness".

Then I thought, what the exactly about me is fierce? I've been called a lot of things but never fierce. Did I just resonate some sort of fierce vibe? Were my rather mundane clothes fierce? Was my FACE fierce? Was I wearing particularly fierce glasses? Did my glasses somehow fear him with a sense of fear and dread that could only be described as FIERCE.

I'm sort of worried now that if I meet someone new I will accidentally make the wrong impression on them by being unwittingly fierce. Well, not that worried, I think my ridiculous face would quickly shoo away any misconceptions of fierceness.

On another note, today I had to make a video in a group about the terrible dangers of carbon monoxide (Which aren't really terribly dangerous unless you like, live inside a car's exhaust pipe or smoke cigarettes), and I realised how uncomfortable I am around my voice and face. I sound weirdly, weird. I've also recently figured out that my voice has considerably  changed since I was in Australia, I was talking to one of our family's friends from Australia over the phone and in the middle of the conversation I realised wth, this is not the same voice I talked to you with the last time I talked to you.

So yeah, that's my life recently.

Benny out

p.s. I'm gonna try to get back into regular blogging every mon wed and fri, but don't hold me to anything.

Lots of things

So I haven't posted anything for two weeks, lot's of new stuff!

I've been obsessed with a series of books called The Ender Saga, which are easily some of the best books I've ever read. I don't want to talk too much about them incase of spoilers and they're quite complicated, but I definitely recommend them.

I saw on Opera on a school thingy yesterday! I'm part of this thing called the Honours student program, which sounds like exactly what it is, smart students who get to do a whole bunch of stuff and yesterday we went to see an Opera called La Boheme. I didn't know exactly what to expect since I've never been to an Opera before,  but it was AMAZING! I don't know exactly what i liked so much about it, but it was so captivating. It made me care about all the characters and got me invested into the story, to the point I was incredibly stricken at the end when on of the main characters, Mimi, dies.

Of course the entire thing also had a social component which was really fun. Like watching about five dozen schoolkids try to eat sweets out of crinkly plastic bags quietly.

Benny out

Tiredness

Some mornings, I wake up to the sound of my droning alarm and think to myself; do I really have to go through this again? I realise that I didn't get enough sleep during the night, I realise that there were some things that I should've done, things I should've prepared for school the night before, but I just don't care. My bones feel like huge grey clouds bundled up into limbs, too heavy and unwieldy to move, and for what seems like the longest time I just lay there trying to drain away all the weariness I can.

But I get up. I get ready, pack my bag with the homework I did the night before, and I go walk through the heavy fog to the bus stop. I walk, despite the fact that deep down I don't want to. On the bus I try to shake off some of my weariness, I try to invigorate myself all the while thinking why do I have to be here? Do you ever feel that way? In the morning, feeling a mild disdain for a day which has already started but hasn't quite begun yet.

Please read this - http://bennysbritishblog.blogspot.co.uk/p/explanation.html

Songs I can't understand

So one of the things that happened to me this week is that my German class is moving onto music. I'm learning German at school by the way, probably something I should've mentioned before, can't remember if I have though.

To help us learn to talk about music in German my teacher, who by the way is German, showed us some popular German songs. She showed four of them to us and two of the songs I didn't like at all, one of them I sort of liked, Dickes B by Seeed, but the last one, Nur ein wort by Wir sind helden, I really really like. I haven't been able to get it out of my head which is incredibly infuriating because I don't even understand most of it!

I'm just listening to it on Youtube and I realise that I'm humming along with words I don't know the meaning of. It's also sort of embarrassing because I looked up the lyrics in English and the song is apparently about a really clingy girl who likes a guy...

Benny out

NOOOO!

The half term holidays are almost over! Not school! NOOOOOOO!

Although I often find school tediously boring. I've figured out that during school a lot more interesting things worth sharing happen to me. This became very apparent to me when I realised my last two posts were about Tetris and Youtube.

I need to do more things.

Benny out

Youtube

So during the midterm holidays I haven't done much except play video games and watch you tube so I figured I should share some of that with you guys.

Ze Frank: Video blogger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYlCVwxoL_g

Crash course: Educational channel by two video bloggers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yocja_N5s1I&feature=plcp

Numberphile
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZMnVd4ivKQ

Family Force 5: Some Music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH5hUULu4Nk

Rooster Teeth: Random comedy videos and video game stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncePIYlE7Hc&feature=relmfu

Danisnotonfire: Video blogger
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyPzVy_zrFM

Minutephysics: Educational physics stuff
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-QoutHCu4o

Vlogbrothers: The two video bloggers that make Crash course
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlGAeJ6SIWQ&list=UUGaVdbSav8xWuFWTadK6loA&index=13&feature=plcp

I think this stuff is pretty awesome, just wanted to share it with you guys.

Benny out

Tetris!

Right now it's the mid-term holidays for me (yes, my school has those because there are only three terms) I'm getting bore really oftem, and when I'm getting bored very often, I start playing Tetris.

I've discovered I've actually gotten a lot worse than I think I used to be which is very disappointing.

But I have, A CHALLENGE!

This is my Tetris high score. I'm wondering if any of you can, or have already beaten it.

Also I find Tetris boring when it's too slow I start at level ten, so I'm more wondering if any of you can best my score not my lines.

Benny out