Simon's Life

About me

I'm going to start this with something that should be fairly simple for me. I'm going to describe how I see myself. Due to things like my job, where I get given a list of things that need fixing/refining, it's going to mostly be things I perceive as flaws.

First and foremost, I am a Christian.

I am a 18 year old male New Zealander. Roughly 6'0.5" tall, weighing in somewhere between 80 and 90 kg (I'm guessing that. Last time I was weighed was when I was applying for my passport in 2008, with a mass of 80 kg). I'm about to start my first proper year of university at VUW, doing second year maths and computer science.

I have two cuddly elephants, named Blumpy and Sergey, and a sheep, named Fredrick. I also have a 15" 2.16 GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, a 8 GB iPhone, the VPS this is running off, a 17" CRT monitor that does get red input, a 1 TH external HDD, a 2 TB external HDD, a 2 GB SSD on my watch and 2 graphics calculators. So you could say I like my gadgets.

I enjoy football. I play as a keeper and support the Wellington Phoenix, the All Whites and, to a much lesser extent, Man United. I occasionally follow a game of cricket while I'm working as it can go on in the background and is easy to catch up on if I miss half an hour or so.

That pretty much sums up who I am externally. That's likely to be all I write about it as well.

I am rather strongly introverted, though I do have some social tendencies. As such, even though there's certain people I enjoy spending time with, I need a lot of time by myself. Usually this is fine and my reclusive nature means I get plenty of alone time.

There has been a couple of times, namely yesteryear's IOI and the recent stock taking we did, where I have been around people for so long that I end up too drained to be able to respond in a normal manner and I need to spend days recovering.

For some reason, the socialising I do over the Internet doesn't have this effect on me unless I'm already drained. I'm assuming that this is due to it being my most common method of being social. Outside of the internet, my social life is pretty much poker on Monday evenings.

I'm also generally lacking in confidence. This means I struggle to show emotions or affection for fear of something going wrong and having my rather low levels of confidence dashed. This fear also leads to not wanting to take risks and is the root of a more prevalent fear. The fear of being rejected.

I have a really strong fear of rejection. This leads to me being unable to organise events or spontaneous social things for fear of being turned down. I will also choose to keep the status quo, no matter how much I'd like something different, for fear of the rejection of the proposed change by other parties turning into losing what I already have.

On top of that, I'm unlikely to invite myself anywhere or invite someone to do something with me, even though I really want to, unless I'm already certain of their response. If you can be bothered going back that far, look at my trying to build up enough courage to ask Sarah to my ball. It took about ten tweets of fluffing around the question before I implied it well enough.

Beside that, I seem to have relatively good self-esteem and self-confidence. I know what I can do and usually don't need affirmation from others. I've gotten so used to a lack of affirmation that I can't handle compliments easily. They seem to make me awkward, especially if I can't just brush them off. Though I'm slowly getting better.

I am rather good at bottling things up and then keeping them secret. This site is partially an attempt on my behalf to let some of those things out in a more controlled manner.

For a nice sum up, I require a lot of time to myself. I struggle with emotions and affection and am lacking in confidence with regard to other people, even though I have reasonably good self-esteem and self-confidence. I have bottled a lot of things up over the years and am trying to realise them without exploding.