that girl you just called fat, starves herself for days. that boy you just called stupid, suffers from a learning disability. the girl you just called ugly, spends hours putting on make-up, hoping people will like her. the boy you just tripped over, he is abused enough at home. there is a lot more about people then what you think. put this as your status if you are against bullying.

This is a paragraph of text I found on a social networking site not too long ago. It really shows a depth of emotion to any intellectual who reads it, sadly enough all of those damned bullying mongrels, who treat people like garbage on a regular basis, will not feel ANYTHING FROM IT. Even this post that I’m writing right now wouldn’t have any effect to them. Personally, bullies are the uttermost lowest forms of life, they are putrid, careless, and always, always, use the stupid “What are you going to do about it” excuse when you confront them.

Fracking nonsense.

Those that bully others, are weak. If you have to expel whatever it is your going through in your life onto someone else, then you are weak, you mentally can’t cope with your own problems, nor compute empathy towards the person you are expelling the misery onto, and you consider yourself tough because you do so. Tormenting, stealing things and not giving them back, hitting people, whatever it is that you do, to make you feel “better” in your life, your only way of dealing with your problems, is to be a bloody inconvenience and pain to other people.

That, is weak.

The strong ones, are the ones that day after day, put up with your crap, absorbing every word, every stupid, thoughtless comment, every unintuitive “What are you going to do about it” lines. These people, not only cope with their own problems on a day to day basis, but yours to. Your “clever” and “tough” method of getting better is ridiculously primate, definitely not tough, your just passing the pain along because you can’t cope. 

Tough isn’t standing in your group, spitting out insults and stealing the ball whenever it comes your way, tough isn’t picking on someone that you know stands no chance against you physically. You never see a group of mouthy little idiots, that normally pick on other people, going up to the big group of rugby players and stealing their ball. And if ever a ball from the rugby players rolled nearby, you wouldn’t pick it up and just hold onto it, you wouldn’t throw it over the edge either. Oh no, of course not. Because you aren’t tough, you’re the stab of a needle.

I find it interesting, that when you were hanging out in the area, all by yourself, whenever the ball rolled astray. You didn’t pick it up and throw it further away, and you didn’t sit there and hold onto it either. Of course not, because you aren’t tough. But low and behold, when you’re sitting in your group of “friends” suddenly the ball rolling your way is a big deal, you grab it, pick it up, holding it within your unmanned ligaments, your film without a director, and then you toss the ball away, smirking happily, looking to your “friends” for acceptance. Peer pressure? Honestly? That isn’t tough.

I tell you to give the ball back, you say, “What are you going to do about it?” 

I say, “I shouldn’t have to do anything about it, you should just give me the ball.”

You throw it over the edge, the only one laughing in your group, I laugh sarcastically, and say, “Oh yeah, just as funny as the last hundred times, idiot.”

Oh, too hard of a line for you to handle? You resort to the most pathetic excuse for bullying in existence; you start trying to torment me about my clothing, in particular, my shoes. How ridiculous, did you know that in KINDERGARTEN I had a similar problem, people bullying me because I wasn’t wearing the same shoes as them, the same t-shirt as them. It seems to me that you bullying dimwits don’t mature conversationally, or intellectually for that matter. Or should I say, it seems to me that you poo-poo heads don’t grow up, your brains are dead.

The paragraph at the top. That wasn’t written by just anyone. That was written by someone that is bullied on a day to day basis.

“But how do you know this Ben?”

You could call it a stubborn guess, but honestly I believe that without the motivation, that emotional tug towards the topic, that understanding of how it feels, you wouldn’t write something like this. I don’t know anyone who could just write such a powerful paragraph without any motivation. That paragraph has motivation, most likely this person was bullied, and probably is bullied still. Because alike me, ranting our problems to the internet, we don’t get heard. The people that do these things don’t read this stuff, they don’t care. Where as you and I can feel the anger of the writer coming through, that stern second last line that cuts you, it’s pure anger, but at the same time it’s desperation for it to be heard and understood. Screaming for the people that bully, to stop.

“there is a lot more about people then what you think.” 

I need to find the writer of this. Although I’ve written a whole page of writing about my thoughts on bullying, their one paragraph has done far greater than I could ever hope to achieve in this post. For starters, my posts aren’t spread around social networks for everyone to read, this was. Because it simply is an incredibly powerful paragraph that got through to a lot of people. So read the paragraph, feel it’s emotions, follow it’s message, and send it out. To the world.

Just like the writer requested.

For those bullies out there that don’t bully because of their own social problems, and only because they’re bored, or because they “were only joking.”

You need to, more than ever . . .

. . . get a better hobby.

Thanks for reading yet again folks.

Ben,

Well, I’m actually able to write a post up! I’ve been disabled due to my eyes watering like a sprinkler system decommissioned by a box of C4 . . .I’ve barely been able to use or do anything at all for the past two days, I’ve had to stay at home, in bed, with my hand by my side like a wild west fight, waiting to quickly draw a tissue the moment my nose tries any funny business.

In fact the other day I made use of my iPod’s VoiceOver feature, basically the iPod tells you what you’re tapping on, when you open up mail it can read you the most recent mail messages, problem is it gives you no directions, you just have to randomly tap your finger on the screen in various locations until you hear the app or item that you’re after . . . very time consuming . . . and typing is a pain in the asssss. . .sssassin’s creed . . . 2 . . . good game uh, yeah anyways!

This post really isn’t going on the topic I’d hoped it to . . .

What I want to talk about in this post, is something I noticed probably two weeks ago, and it really bugs me. I call it Skillzial Discrimination . . . (Pronounced [skillz][ee][al]) I had to make up a word, because both social discrimination and racial discrimination have a “cial” word in their favour. So what am I talking/writing about? What is Skillzial Discrimination?

Everyone has different skills, talents, hobbies, and it doesn’t need to be explained to you by some pimple-faced blogger like me, it should have been covered in your pre-school education package, around the time they were teaching you your a b c’s they also taught you that everyone is better at some things than others. Jeff over there is good at maths, Michael is good at cricket, and Bingo the dog is good at running.

B-I-NGO! B-I-NGO! B-I-NGO! AND BINGO WAS HIS NAME O! Anyone remember that song?

But basically they told us that, although such and such may be better than us at one thing, we are better than such and such at another thing. I guess to make us feel better about not being as clever as the smart wonder-kid of the class, every class has ’em, the ones capable of doing just about anything . . . surprisingly I’m not making a reference to myself here . . . well, sort-of an ironic twist. The first school I went to there was a kid in my Grade 4 class that was doing Grade 8 algebra, I wasn’t the clever one of the class, and I certainly wasn’t sitting in second place either. When I moved down south, to a new school, I was then appointed the title of class know-it-all. I don’t know if the standard of education in the south just sucks, thereby meaning that the low-end of the up-end is the up-end of the low-end (that actually makes sense), or perhaps the drive south somehow made me cleverer, which is unlikely due to my choice of the word ‘cleverer’ in this sentence . . . maybe I was smarter than I thought in the first place . . . Whoah, just realised that I’ve basically started a biography . . . no no no . . . let’s get back to the main point of this post.

“But basically they told us that, although such and such may be better than us at one thing, we are better than such and such at another thing”

We’ll go from here . . . What this post is really meant to be attacking is the opinionated banter made about different skills and hobbies. For example! Someone who plays football in a team is considered more highly than someone who just casually plays football, someone who plays video games is considered less than someone who plays rugby, (this is generally, I know a lot of people that’d consider the video gamer higher than the rugby player) but the biggest line that I want to mention to show what I mean is this.

Someone who plays football, and is really good at it, playing for years, when someone brings it up in discussion it’s along the lines of, “You’re great, how long have you been playing for?” or “Your pro, what team do you go for?”

But someone like me, who makes videos, designs graphics, writes blog posts, the comment made to me would be along the lines of, “You have way, way too much time on your hands.”

I’ve never heard someone say to a football or basketball player, or anyone who plays sport, that they obviously have “too much time on their hands” when to get as skilled as they are, probably spent entire days at a time throwing a basketball at a  hoop or kicking a ball around. This never comes into it, but yet when people see the videos and things I produce digitally, I’m told without hesitation that I “have too much time on my hands” and that I “need to get out more.”

What makes your skill any better than mine? I don’t think that kicking a ball round all day is a waste of time, nor is throwing a basketball at a hoop all day, I’m not that arrogant (pfffft), but for people to consider my talents the effect of “too much time” then they should take a step back and realise that any talent, no matter what you do, is the result of “too much time.” The phrase “too much time on your hands” seems like it’s disregarding your activity, it’s saying it’s a waste of time. Why is it that all these sports geeks (Definition of geek: “A person with an eccentric devotion to a particular interest” thereby stating I can add ‘sports’ to the beginning.) think that making movies or writing stories is a waste of time?

What gets me even more, is the fact that, the people that say I have “too much time on my hands”, don’t even play a sport! They have no activities or hobbies other than going on Facebook when they get home or going shopping, and they tell me that I’m the one with large amounts of spare time!?

In my opinion, SPARE TIME is time that IS SPARE . . . IN OTHERWORDS IT’S NOT BEING USED. SO IF I’M SPENDING MY SPARE TIME MAKING MOVIES . . . THEN IT’S NOT SPARE TIME IS IT? (ALL CAPS RAGE?)

But my opinion doesn’t matter here, because the definition of spare time is apparently: “time available for hobbies and other activities that you enjoy” . . . which actually doesn’t change my point at all . . . when you’re playing football or whatever it is, that is your spare time . . . unless you don’t enjoy it . . . in which case it’s a forced activity . . . or school. = )

Anyways.

Chow,

Ben

(P.S. Don’t expect the 7 day marathon I was talking about! Later my minions! Later!)

Hello!

If you understand French to any degree, you’ll know that the title says “Been Away”, if you understand me to any degree, you’ll know that I used a translator to find that out.

The purpose of this post is to apologise for my lack of writing in the past few weeks, believe me this isn’t anthing to do with having a ‘writing-abstinence’, to put it simply I haven’t really had the time to post at all, but I have however been able to come up with many ideas, which you will see in posts in the weeks to come. Unfortunately my absence was partly to do with a ‘lovely’ thing called depression, and again, if you understand me to any degree, you’ll know that I’m not saying that it’s lovely but that I am indeed using sarcasm . . . but enough of these “if you understand x to any degree” contexts, and let’s get on with the post.

‘Twas two weeks ago, and all through the house, nothing was stirring, not even the house? . . . okay . . . no, it wasn’t quite that mystical. Two weeks ago I slumped into a moderate state of depression, I felt ignored, overloaded, stressed. All in turn played their part to ruin my mood even more, I began to feel tired, exhausted, from the sleepless nights of pounding my thoughts back and forth, as I tried to recover mentally. But to no prevail, if anything I was making the situation worse. I would go to school with hardly any enthusism, I sat down in home group as the rest of the class talked in their big groups, I angled my eyebrows downwards as the words ‘ignorant’, ‘pathic’, and ‘judgemental’ entered my mind, and soon was used to label each class member, one by one, with a 3 in 3 chance of being labeled as a participant in the careless debate.

Then, on Tuesday night, I was informed of a death in my family, my grandfather had passed away at 6pm.

I had thought that I was already on rock-bottom, but as the floor below me began to crumble, I realised there was more that you could fall, further down, the chances of recovering becoming just as dim as the light flare coming from the top of the hole, the cavern. What else could come of this? Would I sink into a state of limbo? Sleeping, no longer caring to any degree, no longer feeling anything or hinting towards my humanity.

But then began the recovery.

Sunday morning I rised to a change, I stared upon my room, conjested with clothes, homework, pieces of paper which had been tore up in disregard, my refusal of interest. Then, as I rose in my bed, sitting up and scanning the room with my eyes, I decided change. I cleaned off my desk, removed unwanted filth and then continued with the rest of my room. A large KNEX structure which I had built when we arrived at this house, was demolished in a couple of  hours, sigifying a psychological link, a connection, as though I was removing the stale life that I had once lived. You could say it was simply placebo, I believed that the clensing of my room was the clensing of my mind, but whether placebo or simply the excitement of something new, it worked.

Welcome back California! . . . no wait, what?

You can tell from my sudden humour that I’m feeling better.

So til the next post.

See ya!

Ben.