Tom Talks | Amounting To Something

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a fear. I have a fear that has kept me up for so many nights, as I’ve laid there in my bed with tears running down the side of my face. I’m not ashamed to admit that this thought has scared me and still does, so much .. I can’t bare to think about it, but seeing as it’s all I’ve been thinking about for the past hour .. then what better way is there to share it with you all than to put it on here.

It’s like a confession session. Sure you want to stick around? aha

This fear, as the title suggests, is the fear that I will never amount to anything. For years, as I’ve gone through secondary school, then 6th form, and now I am coming to the end of my time at university .. there has always been this question that everyone has felt the need to ask me. “So what are you going to do after?”. The thing is, I got off lightly by being able to say, “Oh, just carrying on with education for now” .. I could leave secondary school for 6th form, leave 6th form for university .. but now I’m at the last junction on the road of ‘life preparation’. I have no choice now, I have to choose what I’m going to do. This is where my fears come in.

I won’t lie to you all, I have no idea what on Earth I am going to do. I’m near the end of the degree I’m doing, whether I will pass it or not is another matter, but I’m near the end nonetheless. I currently have a weekend job, and a rather painful one at that. I don’t want to be one of those people that have a degree, and then just become a manager in the store they were working at before they started it. I want to do something with my life, something worth while. Yet, I have a problem, I can’t seem to find that ‘something’ that I want to devote my life to yet, and for the time being, I don’t see the epiphany arriving anytime soon. I am so scared that I am going to just drift from job to job, never really amounting to anything in my life .. and letting down all the people that have encouraged me to do so much more. For those of you that don’t know, I’ve got a HND in music production, and I’ll hopefully have a degree by May .. a BA in Music Practice and Production. Now I know what you might be thinking, ‘what the hell can you do with that anyway?’ .. and you’d be asking pretty much the same question I’m asking. I’m lost, I really don’t know what to do.

Teaching. Everyone falls back on teaching when they don’t know what they want to do. Whilst it would be a good job to say I have, I can’t say I’m that great with children. I get so nervous and I feel so awkward around kids, my mum reckons I used to be good when my brothers were little .. I used to be good at interacting with kids. I guess that comes down to the fact that I was a kid at the time. I’ve grown up, I’ve become more wary of what people think of me and one of the side effects of that is my inability to feel comfortable speaking to anyone I don’t know. I don’t know what it comes down to, but I’m quite a nervous person around people I’ve never met, and although I’m told constantly ‘it’s alright Tom, you’ll probably never meet them again’ .. in my head, that doesn’t matter. The fact is, I’m useless in those situations .. I’m what I guess you could call, ‘socially awkward’. I don’t like big groups of people, I don’t like talking to people I don’t know and I’m not overly good around kids. Teaching? Yeah, I’d say it’s not for me .. aha.

I do music practice, and I don’t like getting up on stage in front of people. Go figure.

When I say ‘amount to something’ .. I don’t mean, be famous or anything like that. I just mean, not let people down .. not be a failure. I want to make people proud of me, for what I’ve done and not just because they feel they have to say it. I just wish I knew how to do it. I’m in a rut in my head where I can’t think of a way out .. I’m in a dead end job, I’m in loads of debt from a university degree, and I can’t think of anything I’m going to be able to do with that degree. I just want to find some kind of direction, but I don’t know where to look.

In the end, this is how I want my life to pan out. I want to live with my girlfriend, I want to get married, I want to have kids, I want a husky, I want to have a loving family and a loving household like the one my family brought me up in .. I don’t want to let everyone down by not being able to achieve that, all down to the fact I could never find a direction for my life. Yes, I’m only 20/21 .. but the fact is, if I can’t find it now, when I’m young and ‘ambitious’ .. then how will I ever find it? I just want to be ‘somebody’, not ‘anybody’.

I realise this may come across as a bit depressive, but it’s just one of the many things that keep me awake at night. I am so scared that all of this education and what not, has been for nothing. I did the course at university because it was something I enjoyed, but in the real world .. I guess none of that matters. It’s not about what you like to do, it’s about what you need to do .. to get by. I know that my family will support me regardless of what I end up doing .. and likewise, my girlfriend ..

I just want to amount to something. I want to make you proud.

Tom.

Tom Talks | Clarification

I know what you’re thinking ..

Twice in one day? Someone’s eager!

And, if you mean my blog .. then you’d be right!

I just thought of something that wound me up the other day, and I felt the need to have a late night rant about it. You’ll come to find that I tend to rant very late at night, must be something to do with the early hours of the morning that I find appealing for a ‘rant time’. Anyways, the topic I want to talk about is .. clarification.

I’ve come to notice that people aren’t very good at this sort of thing. Clarifying things isn’t some peoples ‘forte’. You are pretty much guaranteed to find evidence of this throughout everything you do in your day to day routines. It can be anything, you’ll wake up and get out of bed .. you go downstairs and whilst you’re making a cup of tea, coffee or what ever else, your breakfast or lack of in some people’s case .. you’ll put on the news. Now, name something .. a group of people .. that you are likely to see on the news .. 5 or 6 times out of 10? .. Politicians. What is it that these people do best I hear you ask .. divert from giving a straight answer.

Here’s a little game for you. When you’re near a television that has the news on, and a politician is being interviewed by the news journalists or the presenters, try and count how many times they get asked a question .. and then never answer it. I must state at this point, I’m talking about in the UK .. I don’t know about other countries, perhaps your politicians actually answer the bloody questions they are asked! So yeah, have fun with that game .. take a drink of something strong or something like that, you’ll be hammered by 10am!

Next, you’ll get your clothes on and go to work or school, or in my case .. university. These places are the worst for it, you can ask any question you like, and unless someone is really on the ball and knows how to do things properly .. you’ll just end up seeing them turn into some sort of social worm and wriggle their slimy little bottoms out of the situation. Always. For instance, we once asked what the word count was for the dissertation for our course .. the answer we got was ‘you should know this figure already. Don’t go asking other people from the years above you what the word limit is, because they won’t know the right amount.’ .. You know what, you’re right. They won’t know the amount if you gave them the same bloody answer you just gave us! Turns out, it was 5000-6000 words .. which was on the online teaching section of the website. Which, by the way, the lecturer we asked .. wrote. The mind boggles sometimes.

You leave where ever you’ve been all day, you get home and you think .. great, I get to sit down with a nice dinner .. this is going to be amazing. I love lasagne so much, I really can’t wait to eat this. Then you turn the news back on again. You begin to wish you hadn’t .. because it turns out all these companies couldn’t ‘clarify’ that the ‘beef’ in their ‘beef’ product .. was actually beef. The reason they couldn’t clarify it .. is because it wasn’t beef. It was horse, donkey and what was rumoured to be a host of other animals. What was missing? Beef. The one thing you assured us on the packaging, it was. Niiiiiiiice. I haven’t got a problem with it as such, because if it’s been going on all this time then I’ve probably eaten a horse, a dog, a cat, a rat and god knows what ever else .. the problem I have is that, it’s marketed as beef. We’re paying the price, because it’s beef. Don’t price it as something it’s not. And the packets, they need to ‘clarify’ what the meat ACTUALLY is .. not what it looks like.

Before you remember what you’re mouthing off about, you’ve scoffed your lasagne. Nevermind, you’ll just wake up feeling a little horse. I’m so sorry, I just had to!

But I feel I should do some clarifying of my own. And most of all, towards Luke. He felt a little bit like he had been left hanging from that last post, so I am here to make sure he knows where this is going aha ..

This blog is not going to be every day. This blog probably won’t even be once every few days. This blog will only have things posted when something interesting happens, or when I feel the need to type out endless ranting about something that ground my gears that day.

So there you have it .. a nice little late night rant .. hope you enjoy it!

Tom.

Tom Talks | New Beginnings

Well hello there .. haven’t done this for a little while, so excuse me if I’m a little rusty ..

I figured, seeing as my time is coming to an end at university and I’m going to be going out in to a world I haven’t yet had any experience of .. I’d start up another blog. Those of you that know me, will almost certainly know of the blog that I did about my life, every day for 550 days. I started that way back in 2011, March 12th to be exact. The reason behind that is because that lovely date is my birthday .. and for all those of you that are sat there reading this, and whom are ‘switched on’ as they say .. you’ll notice that March 12th, is reaaaally close.

That’ll mean I started my old blog, 2 years ago. Mental.

Needless to say, I ended that blog to concentrate on my university work. 550 days is a long time to be writing thousands of words on what I did during the course of each day, but I did it and I’d like to think I’m a better guy for so. But, seeing as all the university stuff is ending relatively soon, it’s time to start a blog up!

This won’t be an ‘everyday of my life’ kind of blog, it’ll be more about certain things that happen and that I want to talk about. It could be anything; the weather, how I feel, new music, an event that happened or even the boring bits like the current state of the economy .. aha, as if I’d write about that!

Stick around though, I’m sure there will be something eventually that you can have a read of and that you’ll actually like! And remember, as Craig Charles once said .. ‘if you don’t like it, spit it out.’

Speak to you all soon,

Tom.