Window(s) Shopping

Oh the woes of student life. The benefits of having an overdraft are all fun and games until your overdraft runs out, and I have had to hide this fact from my parents for basically the last 4 months, living in the constant fear that they are going to bring up money/how much I (don’t) have/how much I owe them. When I suggested to my mother only last week that I thought it was actually rather impressive that I had survived all summer living out of my overdraft with no others means of income, I was met with a very scary pair of eyes and a tone of voice that in turn suggested to me that she was in no way in agreement with this, and terribly shocked that I was so thrilled with such a realization, no matter how willing I was to justify myself. I must admit, the confidence I had instilled in my argument was somewhat thwarted about three seconds into the conversation (if you could call it that).

Money doesn’t buy happiness. A philosophical piece of shit we are all familiar with, I believe. Money is everything. Money and lack thereof, is what sites like Facebook THRIVE off. Everyone has something better to do than Facebook. Unless you don’t have any money, in which case it is pretty much the only thing you CAN do. Possibly the only thing more depressing than window shopping and refreshing your Facebook homepage perpetually, is what my sister referred to today as “Window(s) shopping”; the worst of the worst. And I am a frequent offender. When I can’t afford free parking (see previous blog), I am confined to the house making lists of all the clothes I would try on were I in a physical, 3-dimensional world. I could probably draw you pictures of all the dresses currently stocked in Topshop, so many times have I looked at that page in the last week. I have reached my pinnacle now though. The “New In” sections are no longer new to my eyes, reminding me most cruelly of my failing social life. Today, I even thought about starting to read the seventeen books I’m supposed to have read by next Monday. Naturally, procrastination –the little devil- got in my ear and instead of actually reading anything, I made a list of all the books and how many pages they had to try and help me decide which one to read first. I have now read the first page of three separate books and promptly gave up. I digress. This is beside the point. The point is that I need to find a way to either a) get money or b) get over money. Money is only everything if you are too lazy to make it nothing. Unfortunately, I am currently too lazy to make it nothing, but admitting you have a problem is the first step. That’s enough for today.

"Free" Parking

Twice in the last week I have been subjected to the efforts of avoiding paying for parking. And rightly so, to a certain degree. It seems that to park your vehicle within a 5 mile radius of Bath’s city centre you must be prepared to part with half your life’s savings, desperately scrabbling around on the floor of your car, in any crack or crevice, door pocket or glove box, for the last of your change. And when you realize that money isn’t reproducing in the dark under the passenger seat, you are faced with an even tougher challenge than finding money in the first place; finding free parking. I know of three locations now in Bath where I can park for two hours, no return within one hour. Unfortunately, I have turned into such a stingy old bat that I simply refuse(/cannot physically afford) to pay for parking anymore, to the extent that I seem to spend my life driving between these three free locations waiting for someone to leave and for the perfect opportunity to snap up a well-deserved parking spot. Which of course, always happens in the end. I wasn’t expecting it to take me thirty-four minutes though. By the time I had queued in the rush hour traffic a good seven times nipping to and fro between my potential parking spots, I realized the money I would be saving from parking, I was spending in petrol, thus making my expedition terribly futile. And just as I was giving in, ready to return home, I swooped magnificently round the corner and everyone else who had been super-scrimping and parking for free, had decided to leave and then suddenly I was faced with not only one parking spot, but a whole selection to choose from. I have yet to decide whether I think such an excursion was worth so much of my time, effort and unfortunately money, but were I reading this dilemma in Aunt Sally’s advice column, surely the reply would be either to keep an eternal supply of change in the glove box, or perhaps to just walk.

(Anti-)Social networking

I am a student.

Thus, as a general rule, spending infinite hours “surfing the web”, in opposition to achieving (or even attempting) anything remotely productive, is a priority. Similar to everyone else my age that I have encountered so far in life, with the exception of perhaps two people, I am a dedicated Facebook user, and I expect if you know someone who knows someone who knows someone who I know, I have “stalked” your profile already. It is safe to say that, no matter how many times a month/week/day Facebook is changing its appearance, the daily routine of waking up, reaching for my laptop and logging into “fbook”/”faceyb”/some other ghastly nickname that no doubt I too have employed myself in the past, is proving increasingly fruitless and unsatisfactory. Therefore, when I recently received a “VIP invite” to join Google Plus, a project aiming to make “sharing on the web more like sharing in real life” (pah), I jumped at such an opportunity and created my profile, despite my many other commitments as a student. As a relatively new social networking site (as far as I am aware), only two of my actual, real-life, living and breathing friends possess a profile, so my news feed is somewhat sparse to date. I have been desperately searching out desperate D-list celebrities, hoping for street cred in being the first to become part of such an innovative social networking site, to add to my “circles”. Unfortunately, on realizing how I jumped with such enthusiasm to create yet another social networking profile, and delve even further into a virtual world, surrounded by pictures of people I would never meet, and status updates so carefully composed craving attention and, god forbid, maybe getting a “like”, I found myself thinking perhaps I ought to be reading, socializing with real people, perhaps leaving the house every once in a while. But then my counter argument, less logical and certainly much lazier, rescued me from such a ridiculous thought. Of course one day I will have to pull myself out of this virtual rut, perhaps encounter a living being, be forced to communicate through speech, not Facebook chat, and who knows, maybe I’ll even work out how to use a library that isn’t Google Books.

But until that day comes hurtling into my life with reasonable force, I am quite happy sitting on the sofa, blogging about how I need to stop social networking, with the world, virtual though it may be, at my fingertips.