mekong red.

I made plans to meet up with a friend and drop some stuff over at his house because I'll be gone for two weeks at the start of June. To help transport the stuff I enlisted the help of another friend, the same one with the new car, to drive me over there. I will say, he has gotten a lot better at driving in the weeks since I've seen him. It'll still be a while before I feel totally comfortable in the passenger seat.

It was the first time I had gone out since we won the league and I made sure to wear my arsenal shirt and lo and behold it had seemed we all came out of the woodworks. Multiple cheers, and a few let's go's as I walked around in public, we've got motion, that's all I'll say.

The drive was much longer than I thought and by the time we got there, it was two hours past lunch and I hadn't eaten anything besides a banana and coffee for breakfast. I was cranky and I wanted to just go home after dropping the stuff off, but my mood got even worse when I realised that the traffic turned what was supposed to be an hour car ride into a two hour one instead. What made it worse was that they did not want me to go home, and I did not drive the car. Off I went, spirited away to a random park where we parked the car, nearly crashing into the gate because my friend forgot that his stick was in reverse, and walked where our feet took us.

Trying to ignore the hunger pains and the regret of wearing my good clothes and white shoes, we walked away from the paved paths and into the forest by the river. With no semblance of a direction, we went past closed fishing spots, abandoned construction sites, behind the backyard of riverside houses. We followed where ever the path took us, through stinging nettles and thorned plants until finally, we realised we were getting further and further away from our car, deeper and deeper into the forest with no exit in sight and we had to make the choice of to either keep going, or turn back.

Yeah, I turned back.

It is true I had been procrastinating. Yet, on the very moment I had decided that now was the time to dedicate myself to completing these two job applications, cover letters and other annoyingly redundant questions all, the job listings evaporated in front of my very eyes.

Both lab roles, one for a cancer research lab and one at a known biomedical institute in London, the deadline was supposed to be tomorrow. I had kept pushing back working on them because I knew I could complete it a day before the deadline, yet ~poof

Gone.

For far too many occasions I- HOLY SHIT!!!!

ARSENAL HAVE JUST WON THE PREMIER LEAGUE. I CAN'T BELIEVE IT, WOAHHHHHH

Two hours of jumping around taking in the news, watching others online react and its really starting to set in, almost embarrassingly my eyes are watering real tears, but I don't care, I've waited for this, I've wanted this for so many years, and now its finally here. I watched the deciding match between Man City and Bournemouth on a random streaming website and saw it to its conclusion. I hadn't even realised the importance of what might transpire until the game was halfway done. As the whistle blew I really could not believe it. In an instant I messaged friends who supported Arsenal and even acquaintances who, the only information I know about them is our shared team connection, that we won. I did a victory lap around my room and maybe if I lived alone I would have went outside.

I used to hate sports. I really did. I would tune out conversations in class, I thought it was stupid, I couldn't understand why anyone would care about other people kicking a ball. It all seemed so dumb. The trick however, is that it is. And I love dumb things.

I remember when it started. In my last year of secondary school, in science class, two of my classmates on my lab table were arguing about football. Whatever they were talking about was both beyond me and so long ago that it's lost from me, but it seemed so fun. One of them an Arsenal supporter, the other Man Utd. We were friends, but we weren't close. I remember wishing I could join in, know the context, understand what they were saying. It wasn't until I finished school, did my GCSEs, that I watched my first game of football. Or probably more likely my first youtube video of football highlights. I chose Arsenal because I remember having an Arsenal shirt as a child and because of that, even though I didn't watch football if someone asked I would say I support Arsenal. I chose Arsenal because it was a London team, I chose Arsenal because the players looked like the London I know. I chose Arsenal because my friends chose Arsenal too.

I've seen us lose. So much. So so much. But even worse, I've seen us so close to winning. Its because of these ebbs though, that this victory is so sweet.

I've been a lot more productive recently ever since I realised I am just incapable of multi-tasking, and after foregoing the necessity to have something playing on a second monitor, I'm getting a lot more done just focusing on what I need to do. But also, by 'a lot more productive', I mean maybe an hour or two of meeting goals I make in my mind, like lets apply to a job today, or lets draw for today, or lets write today. I need a job man, I really, really do.

Sometimes I feel bad about my unemployment but then I see people who I know and are competent, also in the same situation as me,(unemployed graduates) and then I go, ah so we're all in this hell together.

Last week, I called my local dentist and tried to book an appointment only to have to be told to register (despite registering like 5 months ago) and so I, on the spot, changed and went to the dentist and then was told to call on Monday to book the appointment. Finally, on Monday, I booked a dentist appointment for the first time in seven years. After 7 years I finally went to the dentist.

I really don't know why I was so reluctant to go. I braced myself for a scolding but as it turns out, this blog post you're reading? Yeah, it's written by someone with so called 'beautiful' teeth. That's right, 'very clean' and with 'healthy bone density' (but brushes too hard and needs to wear retainers (I also didn't tell the dentist they broke like 4 years ago)).

A lot of my anxiety about my teeth dissipated in an instant after I finally went. I don't know why I thought they were so bad. As it turns out, things are worser the more they ruminate in your mind, who woulda thought?

My attempts to find consistency in any endeavour seem to have been met with mostly failure. Trying to instil productive habits feel impossible when procrastination is so familiar. Nevertheless, we move.

On Saturday I got a call out of nowhere. A friend from university invited me and another friend to drive around in his new car that he just got three days ago. This other friend lives 10 minutes away from me and has been incredibly busy since he got a new job as a lab technician. As he asked the question I audibly hmm'ed as I thought about ways to decline or excuses to not go but in the moments of silence he decided for me and the plans became set in stone for tomorrow on Sunday. I said fine, and that was it. 12 PM tomorrow.

I was going to write a whole story about meeting my friends and driving but then after two days of trying to write it and not finding the motivation I realised I don't need to do all of that. Or any of it at all and so I deleted it.

It was a nice day, and a nice time. I underestimated how new he was to driving, and he stalled at a stoplight twice and made some real scary turns, but we survived. For now. We even got out of London and drove around listening to music and talking, no real direction in mind. Every now we stopped by some country-side road and took in the view. Someone had the idea to go to a pub and you could feel how out of place we were. This part of British culture I don't really engage in, and I almost feel reluctant to, this far out of a city in particular.

There was a poster disparaging Kier Starmer above the pub counter, but I couldn't help but believe that our reasons for disliking him were not one and the same. But maybe I'm too pessimistic of my fellow countryman? Yet the stares followed us all the way to our bench and then to our car. Who knows? Not me, I'm not staying long enough to find out.

Nearly three weeks since I came back from Vietnam and I have spent much of my time wasting it. In three weeks I had travelled across Vietnam, and in three weeks here, all my that time has amounted to is next to nothing.

In Vietnam I felt that I had overcome something great, yet here I feel like I had lost much of what I had gained and the worst habits I thought I had kicked in Vietnam, came back in full force back in London. I'm so tired of being lazy, but I'm too lazy to try to stop. I can manage small bursts of inspiration, insipid motivation to sate a desire to be more, to do more. I might draw on a single page of my sketchbook, write a couple lines of code or on my blog, peruse LinkedIn for jobs, but I can never truly focus on one singular thing at a time. Before long my mind wanders.

Too many distractions. The second monitor is a dangerous thing.

I am clawing back however, evidently if you see this, it means I had enough focus to sit down and write this for once, and recently I gave myself a quasi-schedule through a series of alarms on my phone. One great positive of Vietnam is that since coming back my usual wake up time is 6:30-7:00 AM, which I honestly think waking up in the morning does more for me than sleeping 8 hours of sleep. Of course I say that, but I think I would much rather prefer both. At 9 AM, 12 PM, and 5 PM a silent alarm goes off to start the day, to eat lunch, and to finish the day. Mostly I don't really follow it, but it does remind me that rather than scrolling or watching videos I should be doing something like say sending job applications, writing, drawing or just something that isn't feeding into my dying attention span. Most times I just keep doing nothing, but sometimes the guilt does force me to do some form of 'work'.

I wrote on a little piece of paper my current goals. Find a job, like a laboratory technician or a research assistant, for some experience and money and then 2027 pursue a masters. In what? Well, I've got a year to figure out.

Glad to finally write something after so long.