Opinions.

Venting. It’s something I need to do a lot. I’m a glass-half-empty kind of person so naturally I have a lot of things that irritate me on a daily basis. I was told recently that I need to be more of a glass-half-full kind of person to be more successful in life. That’s quite difficult in my current situation, with the ‘big dilemma’ forever looming... In the words of Dan Smith: how am I going to be an optimist about this?

“But Laura you vent all the time to us” I hear my friends call from the distance. Yes, that is true, but I don’t vent about everything. It’s those little moments where you see a tweet on your twitter feed that really makes you think “Why the hell would you post that” (I often say it aloud, to be honest) and you feel the need to vent about it to somebody on twitter but wait- the person follows you. You can’t exactly bring those little annoyances into conversation when you’re lying in bed at midnight looking at your twitter feed.

It’s not that I don’t trust people with my rants (well sometimes that is the case) it’s that I really don’t think they would care – I get annoying as hell when I start ranting about something, honestly. Especially with little disputes in groups, you can never know where a small comment could end up, usually snowballed into something much worse than intended.

Opinions are definitely something that are a lot harder to express these days, in my opinion (pardon the irony). Often I can’t get to the end of my sentence before someone tells me how wrong my opinion is (If you’d let me finish...). Obviously some people’s opinions are just fundamentally wrong. Literally one of my biggest bugbears is when somebody insults something/someone and then justifies it as “I’m allowed to have an opinion!” or when they start sentences as “Not being mean or anything but...” and then wow, what a surprise, they say something mean. What is the point? We get it, that’s your opinion. Putting a little disclaimer that the start isn’t going to make somebody less offended by something, you know.

Sometimes I just sit there in class or in public and just listen to the conversations going on around me and some of the comments just make me think “really?”. Often I end up staring into the invisible camera from The Office, wondering if the person thought about what they were saying when they said it. I am literally Tim Canterbury 90% of the time in some of my classes.

I can’t be the only one to often feel the urge to just come out and tell someone what you think of them, cutting out the dreadfully awkward business of treading on eggshells (it’s even worse when you’re inherently English). But of course, as always, you can’t do that! That one moment of madness can trigger weeks of even more awkward atmosphere. Maybe that’s the reason I’m so sarcastic all the time...

So, in an effort to be a bit more “glass half full” I am going to try and be more proactive! Look, I know I say this every blog post but this time I can absolutely guarantee you I will probably end up saying it next time, too. Just a warning.

It’s funny, I almost didn’t post this rant about not being able to rant about people as I guess this sort of counts as ranting about people. Well anyway, I feel a bit better after writing about it. It’s kind of like therapy and you’re all my collective stress ball. No. Wait. That sounds a bit wrong... I’m going to stop now.

Laura.