"Oh we're so very precious you and I,
and everything you do makes me want to die,
Oh, I just told the biggest lie."

In response to loveshaken over at 2amtomorning , who asked:

to what extent do you think the soul exists, if it does at all?
sort of paraphrasing here, but is it just a useless (meaningless) word and used in a general sense & for sweet talk? something immortal that provides solace after death? something that is as real as the mind and body & one day it will perish? something else all together?

if you believe in the soul, what defines yours? what keeps it 'alive'?

This set me off on a massive thought bubble. This is the outcome of said thought bubble.

Its really difficult to talk about the existence of the soul without being immediately judged as "religious" and written off as such. In the same way that its almost impossible to talk about spirituality without being called a spiritualist, or even to use words like spirituality without people making an assumption about your character and what you mean. Our words have been tarnished with the things they have been used by some to mean, and thus we have no language with which to express ourselves subjectively.

But this subject, the question of the "soul" is one I've thought about a lot out loud for the last six months and in my head for my whole life before that. I feel the need to issue a disclaimer here that I totally wish wasn't necessary to make, one that I hope will stop any misunderstandings and assumptions like those mentioned above. I'm not religious. I was raised half Catholic (my mother- the whole trappings, church once a week and a school run by monks) and half Quaker (on my father's side) but I do not believe in a God in the sense of a monotheistic beardy bloke in the clouds who watches us all and gets annoyed, and I don't believe in a soul as something that goes to heaven or hell when you die. I don't follow any organised religion.

When I was a kid I couldn't figure out what makes us different from animals. Sometimes humans seemed like animals to me, eating, sleeping, mating, killing each other, but finding excuses for our hormones and biological impulses by saying we were evolved, of a higher mentality.

The idea of a soul has been around, as far as I know, for as long as written record- it didn't just appear when people wrote the Bible, the Koran or the Torah. I think what people have been trying to get at with this word, is an essence, something which is above the material world, the thing that makes us all more than hands and feet and eyes and ears and organs, and I'm not talking about personality or morality or any of that. I've been searching for months as to what I think about this matter, and on top of that, how to explain those thoughts with this impossibly limited language and the connotations attached to the words. I was discussing it with a friend the other day, struggling, groping to express myself, and he said,

"I was walking down the street today and it was miserable weather and everyone looked grey, and generic, and listless, and there was this guy, kind of ageless, maybe 40's or early 50's, clearly quite drunk but just keeping himself to himself, not an out-and-out bum but not neat and immaculate either, a functioning alcoholic, and he wasn't looking at anyone and he looked physically totally mundane but there was just this light, emanating from him, and he glowed brighter than anyone else on that street. It had nothing to do with his physical presence or the alcohol he'd imbibed or anything. The only way I can explain it is that I could see his soul, or his aura, or whatever, and it just filled up the whole street. Thats what a soul is. Its that light in people."

I believe that theres some sort of intangible stuff going on here, and we don't have the words or the science to explain it, yet- but we all know deep down that it exists because we all feel it. And maybe its us momentarily tapping into some kind of higher unified consciousness, and maybe its just our atoms reacting to each other, maybe theres a soul hormone or a soul node in the brain... I don't know. But I know that I believe in a soul.

As for what nourishes mine, I'll have to let you know when I figure that out. At the moment it appears to be staying the hell away from newspapers, television, shopping precincts (malls), and for the time being politics, and hanging out in nature. Also writing and reading and listening to music. I think when you find the thing that you're passionate about you can feel your soul lift up. Mine's been pretty poorly ill at the moment, and I'm just letting it recover.

God, this sounds like a lot of hippy nonsense, I know.

P.S. I have recently come to the conclusion that I do not believe in a soul mate as in "the one", the single person out there who fufills every criteria of your perfect mate and is going to be totally flawless and come along on a white horse to save you from mundanity and loneliness. I think the fact that this concept is so often rammed down our throat in fairytales, films, books etc is one of the reasons we hae such high divorce rates and unhappy people. It stops you accepting people and loving them despite what possible "faults" you may think them to have or traits they lack. For a start, no one else is going to come along and solve all your problems. No matter how much you love someone there are always going to be parts of your life that are not permanently perfect. Secondly there will always be moments when your relationship is not perfect and aspects of the other person that are not perfect. The soulmate thing sets unrealistic and impossible ideals and demands on people, and makes people waste their life waiting for that fairytale moment. It is perpetuated in the media we consume because it keeps people unhappy, and it keeps people wanting. Thus they continue to spend money.

Also, when you consider the sheer population rate in each country, the idea that there's only one person out there to suit you becomes even more ridiculous. If there was only one person in the world who you're meant to be with, what are the chances they'd be born in the same country as you, let alone the same city. What are the chances you'd actually meet them? If we're talking probability its much more likely there are hundreds of people who would suit each one of us, of whom we may meet say 100. Butof course this notion is far less romantic.

When I was seventeen I believed I'd met my "soulmate", in that my boyfriend was so similar to me it was unnerving. The other half, the male version of me. This is what ended up destroying us. He had all my faults, too. At seventeen I didn't like myself much and I definitely didn't want another me hanging around, drinking too much and acting like a dick. When we broke up I thought I'd never meet anyone like me again, but since then I've met a few, and the person I was then is not the person I am now, and the person he was then is not the person he is now. How do soulmates fit in with us growing up, changing?

Anyway, I'm veering wildly off the point, sorry. I just sort of went off on one there...

So, what does everyone else think?

Maybe its the years that have passed, they say that times a great healer,
or maybe its because that haircut makes you look like a homosexual
(and not in the good way)
but I saw your photo on my friends list today,
and all I thought was
why the hell'd I go and get so drunk over you?

I have a feeling I'll be smiling for the rest of the day.

I've got writers block today. Ideas keep drifting through my head like clouds, but if I try and capture one, focus on it, illuminate it and expand on it, it wriggles free and disappears like a greased up pig.

Somedays, I wake up and I want to be a boy pretty much more than anything else in the whole world.

Today was one such day.

When I was a kid I thought I controlled when it rained.

When I was a teenager I was so damn jealous of children, and I didn't feel like I controlled much of anything at all, and that suited me just fine.

But there were days when I would have given anything to feel that invincible again, to feel the power of a thunder cloud on a sunny day.

Some days you're not supposed to achieve anything. I have whole weeks that feel that way. Some days nothing goes right, and you feel like the whole world's against you. And some days only exist to teach you something.

Today only existed to teach me that Somerfields value tinned cream of tomato soup is disgusting, and although it is sweet enough that it could possibly be used as a passable dessert topping, its not worth the fifty pence you save and I'd rather go hungry than attempt to eat it as a main meal again. Survey says: I need a job, fast.

Last week, Alan and I made burritos. It was adorable. One of those couple-in-an-advert moments. Well, it would have been only it was about eleven at night and we'd only just got in and wanted to go to bed so we were rushing it, and all my housemates were clustered in the tiny kitchen trying to eat or wash up, so it was pretty cramped and sort of killed any cutesy romantic moments that could have been. The refried beans looked like pedigree chum and smelt like it too, and Alan's cold taste test confirmed thats not where the similarities ended. I didn't ask how he knew. I'd never eaten burritos before but in my head it was one of those cultured things to do, making Mexican food with my boyfriend in my own kitchen in my own house (well, the house in which I rent a room, but in this day and age, close enough). One of those things that proper grown ups do, and if I did it that meant that I was one too, or would at least appear to be. One of those things that would cancel out the gnawing immature facts that I don't have a job and I spend all day reading comics and writing on my livejournal and that I still, despite countless attempts to explain by various friends and concerned associates, do not entirely understand just what the fuck a casserole is. Because I could tell those people, tonight I made Mexican food with my boyfriend at my house. That right there is the sentence of an adult, they'd think.

We made far too much so I stuck the rest in the fridge, and I've now been eating the leftover refried beans for a week, because I'm too poor to waste it. I don't even like refried beans. They're not as bad as the own brand soup, sure, but they're not exactly a delicacy. At least Orwell could afford to be poor.

Some drunk girl's yakking up all over the bus. For once, it isn't me. She slurs to the driver that it's travel sickness. Anyone else and she's be left at the side of the road like a christmas puppy. But she's young, maybe seventeen, and pretty so the driver simply pulls up at the nearest services and takes her inside to the toilets to get cleaned up. They're gone a long time.

I was young,
I was stupid,
I was naieve,
I was foolish,
I was fucked up,
I was on drugs,
I was in love.