So seriously, it is as if the community is waving a great big stick at me, saying “criticize Singapore all you like, we enjoy reading you telling us about how silly people are over there; but criticize anything else, raise an opinion about anything else, and we will smack you with this here stick so hard that your, um, node gets nuked.” I can understand that over time, the general standards of E2 have been raised a lot higher than they were in years gone by – just look at, say, the daylogs written in the year 2000; pretty unremarkable stuff really. Okay, I am through with the rant - the stuff that was downvoted and eventually nuked of mine was pretty shoddy stuff, I admit. I'm sorry to all of those whom it was inflicted upon.
So I have been around for all of a month now (3.4 weeks and counting) and overall I am pretty happy with how things are going – the quality of the writing I am outputting, judging by the response, has been somewhat erratic, but then I am an erratic person by nature. I'll admit – there was a while there where I was eager to node anything at all. Other noders have often said before that the quality of their nodes goes down as they near the next level, and that is especially true when you are level 1 and you just can't wait to be able to vote on the big backlog of things that you have read over and over again since you first started reading things on this site.
For me, there is one reason why I wanted voting power – it is the same reason that I now want to be able to C! People. Or person as it happens. Well, not even person... I want to C! This: The 20 Minute Tide (ode to insomnia).
It was the first node I ever bookmarked; first in my browser, and then in my bookmarks on my homenode. I don't remember how I found it – probably suffering, at that point, from my usual insomnia, and browsing things on the topic of insomnia. I don't know how it has escaped attention all this time. Over more than 3 years it has only had 6 votes – and one of them is mine, given on August the 10th, the day I got my first ten votes.
“If I invent my own formats I'll always do it the right way.
but then what's the challenge”
I simply love it. Every time I can't sleep I bring it out again. I quote it during the day. I quote it in conversation. I speak the words to myself when lying there staring at the ceiling for hours and hours on end... which, up until recently, was fairly often.
About that whole insomnia thing. I fear I left that club – probably just before we got badges and an anthem too, knowing my luck. I joined another club; I joined the ranks of 'the medicated.' Bipolar, apparently.
“The greatest thing ever written was probably scratched into beach sand.
right before the tide came back again”
It is a long story what led to my becoming medicated... Let's just say that my “erratic” behavior led to me punching a good friend of mine in the face, breaking their nose in the process. I can't defend my actions – but I chose to try and do something about them. I sought help, and help I received. I can sleep now; I actually have a job now; I haven't broken anything in a sudden fit of self-righteous fury for several months now; I even dream now – I never dreamt before I started my medication, or at least when I did it paled in comparison to what other people describe and what I have now.
Had rather; it's fading now. I don't dream as much; I'm starting to need to take sleeping pills in addition to the other pills; I don't feel alive anymore– or at least in a fashion that I feel I should do. Above all, I am becoming disillusioned with everything around me – my lifestyle, this country (as those who have read my other work will doubtless have noticed), my friends, everything (not this everything, the other one!). I am starting to think that perhaps the medication isn't worth it, perhaps I need to start doing what I was doing in the years before I ever started taking it in the first place – battle my demons myself. This time at least I know what I am aspiring towards, the ideal "me" I want to become. At the end of the day, we all die alone – do I want to be remembered as being dependant on pills to keep me sane and happy and well adjusted; or do I want to be remembered as one who battled his demons on his own terms?
“If I had made my own time zone, my 20 minutes wouldn't be up.
in my own ocean the tide would never rise”
All quotes are from syntax_'s 'The 20 Minute Tide (ode to insomnia)'