A Whole Lot of Stuff Plus Some Bond

You can't see this but I'm typing onto a new monitor which is flat and doesn't resemble a space station. Thing is, it's freed up so much room on my desk and is consequently so far away from my face that I'm having to look at it through binoculars. Sigh.

Well this is the classic 'It's The End Of The Year And There Are Multiple Deadlines Looming But Instead Of Meeting Them I'm Procrastinating ... Well, Yeah, Procrastinating' post. Ah, good times. I've now been useless for about a week and a half, although it feels longer. And hey, it IS the end of 2012, so how's everyone dealing with all the crazies in their life who believe that come the new year, the four horses of the apocalypse are gonna charge around earth lassoing us all up like cattle? Also, on a hopefully unrelated note, anyone's atheist father just decided that evolution no longer cuts the mustard as a scientific theory? No? Just mine? Okay, then.

So since I last posted here 2 months ago, a lot has changed here on Walton Mountain, but my habit of starting every new paragraph with either 'Well' or 'So' is still going strong. Let's see,

• I turned 20, and felt it. Like, my teen years are officially behind me. I will never again get the chance to sneak into an 18 or use a fake ID or be featured on Underage & Pregnant. Unless I'm the kid's mother, of course, cause I'm now in that decade where you have to start thinking about careers and houses and bills and... urgh... contributing to the species *shudder*. You know what was really nasty? Around the same time I had to renew my passport and you know when it's going to expire? The day before I turn 30. THIRTY!!!! i.e., the day my life stops.
• I passed my theory test first time phew, which means I'm now an official theoretical driver, which I reckon in turn means I could take on the Matrix. Please place your bets.
• Uni is HARD. For the first few weeks coming out of the zombiefication of summer this was a good thing, but fast forward to week 9 or something and I'm just slacking along cause I've become a slacker. It's Lit Theory that's doing it. I love Victorian Lit and even though I haven't exactly kept up with my reading (hey, Victorian novels are long! It's like a fact and everything!) I feel confident enough in it. Maybe that's just in contrast to Lit Theory, cause man, I'm struggling to remember why I picked the damn course in the first place. I know it had something to do with psychoanalysis and feminism, but after a while you just get sick of everything being compared to the loss of the phallus and angry lesbians ranting about how much they hate men and trying to justify it. And then there's all the isms. Post-colonialism, deconstructionism, new historicism (is an oxymoron), pretentious pointlessism. The thing is, I wish someone had warned me that it's basically the same course they have in the Philosophy department called 'Philosophy of English' except apparently this is less 'esoteric' (dumbdumbdumb). I think on some level I knew this and that's why I picked it, despite the fact I have proven I am pish at the theoretical side of philosophy that involves Descartes and scholars arguing back and forth about God knows what in horribly constructed sentences with words like 'subjectivated' shoved in. There's a part of me that's really interested in philosophy and discussing concepts, but then there's another part that just finds it really frustrating because all it does is go around in circles talking about shit and never actually gets to the bottom of anything. RAAAAA. When I'm in a Lit Theory tutorial I have to periodically look down to remind myself I am on a chair and not in fact floating ten feet above the ground, because it totally feels like we start off tethered to the floor and gradually levitate and drift up toward the ceiling while smoking colourful carcinogenic substances from a hookah and waiting for the enlightening transformation. Except I'm Alice, and everyone else is a caterpillar. Well, except the two girls I was lucky enough to sit next to in the first tutorial and subsequently got grouped with for the rest of the semester. They're great and NORMAL and we all don't get the week's reading together which is hilarious on no breakfast. Alice & the Caterpillars sounds like a good band name too.

• Life has been weirdly framed by fairy-tales lately. It started with me renting and then buying The Company of Wolves, and then devouring the source material, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, this gorgeously sumptuous delicious anthology of fairy-tales and legends with a twist (kind of like Coke with lemon). You know when a book or a film or a piece of music just seems to describe a piece of your soul or something? (If that sounds totally loopy, sorry, I'm a little tipsy right now.) And then I decided to go as Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween, a proper one not a slutty one, and I even ran into my own wolf, who was dressed as nothing and/or James Bond, because the most dangerous wolves are hairy on the inside. And then that seemed the perfect way to teach a kid about concepts and symbols and connotations in literature. And I decided to do my mid-term Victorian Lit essay on 'The Lady of Shalott' because I'm completely enamoured with and haunted by that poem, and this led to me and my mother dissecting it at the kitchen table until the wee hours of the morning. And then I watched Pan's Labyrinth (I know, a thousand miles behind as usual) and Freeway in which Reese Witherspoon knows how to say motherfucker. A lot. Tangled up somewhere in the beginning of this is a European English-dubbed version of Snow White my dad recorded off the tv when I was little and once I remembered it I had to find it. You know how vague things from childhood that resurface all of a sudden have this urgency because you think you have a limited time to remember before it submerges again and is lost forever? Youtube sorted me out, and I rediscovered the least annoying and most endearing version of Snow White I've seen yet. The relationship between Snow White and the Jester is really sweet, and the dwarves wear these little suits reminiscent of E.T.'s neck. Let me know if you've seen it! Apparently when I was little my favourite Disney movie was Snow White & the Seven Dwarves which I don't really get because MAN is her voice irritating. And the Kristen Stewart version was just...dissatisfying. I swear you could have shaken twenty minutes out of that thing just by deleting shots of her pulling her patented angsty face over and over again. (Can I just note here that I'm actually a fan of K-Stew, just not of that film and the subsequent adultery that came out of it?) I think part of my coolness toward Snow White is the fact that I don't really get it. Like, this is my understanding: the evil stepmother wants to be the most beautiful woman in the land, and when her mirror tells her that Snow White is the fairest, she wants her dead. So far, cool. But what redeeming features does Snow White have in order not to be killed? I'm not saying she should be killed just because she's beautiful, but she has lips red as blood, skin white as snow, and hair black as night. That's her whole shtick. Therefore her redemption is her beauty... WHAT? How can her redemption be the same thing that the queen's being condemned for? Fair enough the queen's sinning through extreme vanity and jealousy blah, but her vanity is kind of pitiful and desperate because she's clinging onto her beauty whereas Snow White is just this stupid naive little TWIT who sails through purely on her looks and befriending furry animals and baking pies. I don't. Get. It. Can anyone explain the merits of the story to me? I'm sure there are some. Personally I think the story would work better if Snow White was actually Mousy Brown or Sarah Plain & Tall, but whatever.
• After an unwelcome dearth in the cinematic aspect of my life, me and Maz, Maz and I, decided enough was enough, our friends suck, and so we took ourselves off to see James Bond. Different as we are in our tastes, we seem to have a mutual interest in Smart Action Thrillers. P.S., spoilers ahoy! So Bond is Amazing and Scottish and Albert Finney Bourne Connection YAY! And Bond girls are impossibly gorgeous. And death by komodo dragon ouch. This sequence disturbed me because aside from the fact I have a pathological problem with sympathizing with Bad Guys, and that my imagination runs away with me, I have also seen documentaries on these large scaly beasts and recalled that their jaws are so crawling in gross bacteria that one bite apparently paralyses prey so that dude was ALIVE when he was EATEN by a KOMODO DRAGON in a CASINO. Bad bad bad way to go. The cinematography was STUNNING. Javier Bardem is SCARY. Glen Coe is GORGEOUS and NEAR. And the whole Jason Bourne/James Bond debate is STUPID because they exist in two totally different universes. Don't lie, you know it's true. Also, I think I initially wanted to see this because Sam Mendes was directing and I've been in love with him ever since American Beauty. Such a good choice. Also-also, I now do this thing in movies where I like cruise the credits to see if Thomas Newman's scoring, and to my surprise and delight, he scored this. That man gets around. Since I haven't seen much of the Bond oeuvre I can't really comment, but I thought the whole Oedipal theme between M, Bond and Silva was fantastically messed up. And the homoeroticism just made total sense because I've always thought of Daniel Craig's interpretation of Bond as bringing that element to the table. Like, for me Bond is so closed off he's almost asexual, but finds more emotional comfort in homosexual activity and uses women as distracting instruments of release. And then there was that shot in the last third of Bond's parents' gravestones and his mother's name is very pointedly foreign (was it French? I can't remember) and I took this as suggesting that Bond's predilection for impossibly gorgeous European women is bound up in the loss of his mother at such a young age...which again ties in with the Oedipal theme...and Silva laughs when he notices the graves, as if he knows. My mother on the other hand took this to mean that Bond and Silva were long-lost brothers, so. Anyone have any thoughts? And do people think Daniel Craig is in fact the best Bond? I know a lot of...ahem...middle-aged people think he has nothing on Sean Connery because that guy is the epitome of 60's cool, or in the case of my mother they also thought Daniel Craig looks like a pug or a monkey or something. I can't say whether he's the best Bond or not because I haven't seen all of the films and I've never read any of the books, but I do think he is the best Bond for our time. I think the key thing about the character is that he evolves with culture, he isn't still stuck in the 60's. He absorbs cinematic and social movements and reflects them back out to us. I don't think people would embrace the character as much nowadays if--and I'm sorry to harp on about this, but it's true--Bourne hadn't come along and set new standards for the action genre. I actually saw Casino Royale before I was ever aware of Bourne and the most vivid thing I remember is feeling in the cinema like I was the one being beat up because the violence was so gritty and visceral, in a totally amazing way. In the post-Bourne phase, Bond was actually allowed to get hurt, and when physical injury appears, it opens up a window for emotional injury. I think that's what our time needed, a hero who was also human. Now people are talking about how we've moved onto the post-Christopher Nolan Bond and maaaaaaan, am I excited for where the story goes next!
• I was out with the other two thirds tonight, and we were sitting in Wetherspoons sipping our cheap alcohol and wondering...when did our lives get so complicated? It's so nice that we're all going through kind of similar jackhole things at the same time because we can all relate and sympathize and advise, but it's just weird. I feel pretty content in my life right now, I feel like I'm over it, but the line between good and bad seems to be getting blurrier. Or, not even that, but like I'm leaving it behind, because maybe I have to explore the limits of my own character and I want to do a particular something to prove to myself I can do it even though it is wrong. But the thing I'm realizing more and more is that barriers aren't physical, they won't sound alarms if you run up against them, or repel you back like a force field. They are choices, and not foolproof ones; you keep making that choice every day, because there will always be temptations or distractions. I guess what I'm trying to say is that nothing is ever really off limits, and that is weird. Things seem so much simpler when you're a kid.
• I'm enjoying the hell out of Friday Night Dinner series 2. Every time I watch this show there's an influx in my vocabulary of phrases like 'SHIT ON THE SHITTING THING' and all its merry variants. Also, I fancy Jonny. He actually has such a sweet smile. It's like when Judd Nelson smiles in The Breakfast Club, it's so fleeting and you've been waiting so long to see it that it's astoundingly beautiful and kind of takes your breath away for a minute.
• I don't mean to sound like an arse here cause I'm genuinely curious and quite out of the loop, but when did M83 become popular, as in, Top 40 Radio 2 popular? I knew it was them (him? I don't know, this always confuses me. Formerly them and now him, I think) a couple of months ago when I heard the 80's tribute music in the background in work, and then I checked the other day and yeah, Midnight City by M83. Like, I remember saying to people three years ago that I liked them and they gave me funny looks like I was saying I had a thing for a chemistry equation or something, and even back then I felt like a doof for not knowing who they were before. I don't think they were ever particularly obscure or niche, but TOP 40?! Blows my mind. And now I feel really old. My favourite song of theirs/his will always be Skin of the Night because oh yum. I was thinking today of how I got into them, and I remembered it was because I was watching Donkey Punch on C4 one night (shut up) and IMing a friend who was also watching it at the same time (seriously, you'll break a rib if you don't quit laughing). I know my friend and I weren't the only losers who did this instead of actually watching things together in the same room. Anyway, during the... scene of a sexual nature, there was this really cool song in the background, like listening to the underground or something, and I HAD TO HAVE IT. Everyone right now is going, seriously, there was a scene in which people are all kinds of naked and a girl gets punched in the back of the neck and DIES and you paid attention to the SOUNDTRACK? Yes, that is correct. The song--a remix of Don't Save Us From the Flames--was unbuyable so I made my friend download and send it to me and thus an M83 fan was born. I guess this is kind of redundant now since everyone probably knows who they are, but if you like John Hughes movies and feel nostalgic about the 80's chances are you'll like M83. 

Speaking of music, my current Playlist of Life is:

Sea of Love by Cat Power which of course being the awkward creature I am I heard first in a gay Belgian film called North Sea Texas (it's adorable) instead of in Juno or whatever else is inevitably more popular than that.

White Horse by Taylor Swift because it's grown on me.

Ho Hey by the Lumineers who my friend in uni just saw and now I'm well jell!

We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together by Taylor Swift which reminds me of the joke Meejin told tonight: Taylor Swift waved at a guy across the street and he didn't wave back. The new album will be out next month. IT'S FUNNY CAUSE IT'S TRUE.

Skyfall by Adele because...is a reason really necessary?

Ride by Lana Del Rey because Simon Mayo is a genius and I love how it's kind of melancholy and how she reminds me a little of Kate Bush near the end with all her high notes.

Titanium by David Guetta ft. Sia because I am a thousand miles behind everyone else.

And The Bourne Ultimatum soundtrack <3. John Powell can come score me any day. I don't even know what that means. 

What's everyone else listening tooooooooooo :)? My mother had SmoothXMAS on all day, so I'm in a pretty holly jolly mood!

Hope everyone's well and not succumbing to frostbite/exam stress! 

A Not-Summer Post

Oh my holy goblin, it's been so long since I wrote a 'personal' blog post I've kinda forgotten how to do it O_O.

I did have another version of this all typed up and ready to go, but it felt a little too personal, plus it was long  and largely incoherent (I'm just as shocked as you), so it's been absorbed into my diary instead. It was my first day back at uni today, and I was in for a total of forty minutes, which was sufficient enough time to completely freak out, Lose All Faith in Self, and feel defeated before I'd even begun. I suppose it didn't help that I'd had very little sleep, no breakfast, it was raining, I was cold, a guy in a lilac hoody practically walked through me, and etc. A couple of days ago, on the other side of summer, I had this kind of affected superstition that if I didn't do a 'My Summer' post then summer wouldn't officially end and everything in it would kind of bleed into the next chapter, like this:

But like I said, the intended post was too personal, maybe because I was panicking and when I panic I tend to spill my guts a little too messily all over the keyboard (ew), and I was super tired and just really not in the mood to do anything except watch The Horse Whisperer and go to bed early. And you know what? On the other side of summer, it is so obvious that bookending that period of time doesn't change things one iota. A few days ago my friend and I were browsing through some old photographs and we kept noticing how the seasons were very well established. The summers were hot and sunny, the autumns were rich and gold, and the winters were icy blue and mystical. Of course, retrospect is a deceptive thing, and probably those pictures were taken on days when the weather was particularly paradigmatic, but still. The weather has definitely changed over the past couple of years; the seasons kind of blend and smudge together. And I guess that's the way life is too. No matter how many little traditions or exorcisms I perform, like chopping off my hair at the start of term, or setting goals by the expiration dates of bus passes, I cannot compartmentalise the things that happen and how I feel about them. As much as I am resistant to the let things flow/come what may philosophy, it is probably healthier and more natural than to stanch and divide and suppress. I think. I can't force myself to jumpstart the getting over it process if I'm not quite there yet; that would be deleterious in the long-run. The restless part of me is impatient and eager for it to begin, but for the wrong reasons. Since I seem to express myself better in images, I suppose what I have to do right now is wade out into the water, and let my heels sink into the sand, and let the waves flow over and around me, and keep standing up. I'm not sure why these images are always to do with the ocean. I'm also not sure why in my head it is night time and I'm near an old harbour and I'm wearing torn raggedy scraps for clothes. Must be the Victorian Lit course seeping into my brain already. But yeah, I guess not actually being ready to move on.org is why I've been having these conflicting thoughts of "I want to move on because I don't want to still be here when I'm 21" (prescriptive) and "but I also don't want to move on, because that means it's really over and I can't...hope about it anymore, and I'm not quite ready to let go of that yet" (descriptive). I guess I'll be ready when I'm ready and the impatient part of me is just going to have to deal with that, because better this than dragging all that crap around and dumping it on someone else's lap. Or something. I think I'm still in the shell-shocked stage, but I've grown accustomed to being shell-shocked...does that make sense? 

And now I'm going to devolve into bullet points recounting life over the past few months cause I'm a waster:

·         The summer was begun by returning to North Berwick, this time with Meejin's little sister who I kind of want to adopt because we both love movies, she makes organised dance cool, and has the common sense that neither me nor Meejin possess. Which is an asset when you're going to stay in a demonically possessed house for five days. Except she was leaving after three. When we arrived at said house, the attic was lying open with the pulley stairs kind of hanging down into the hall. On the last night Meejin and I discovered that not only can we run for twenty minutes straight along a beach, we can also do it again five minutes later when we think we are being stalked. Seriously, that town is just Wickerman creepy at night. And here's a tip from me to you: 'zinc', when placed appropriately, is a v. good word in Scrabble. Thank me later ;).

·         I went to the cinema six times to see five different films; I spied Kevin Bridges in an ice cream parlour; Limmy came into my work and I bought his copy of Se7en; I took many driving lessons and clipped off one hubcap; I went on four ostensible not-dates; and read exactly eight books. I also did so little that I had time to enumerate what little I did do. Neat, huh?

·         Meejin spontaneously appeared at my door one evening and we ended up gutting my room until two thirty in the morning. It is frightening how much crap I had unknowingly accumulated. I can now see my desk once more, and my floor is no longer the site of the Two Towers (of DVDs).

·         I am embroiled, or partaking, or something, in A Situation. It is an indication of my lack of self-esteem that it took me most of the summer to recognise this fact, and from the outside I could justifiably be accused of being a bitch for appearing to allow it to go as far as it has. But I had to really know it before I knew, you know? Anyways, I never would have thought I'd be involved in something like this and while I'm surprised at myself, I feel intrigue rather than guilt. I'm not quite sure what that says about me but if I scrutinize anymore I will be struck permamently cross-eyed. If nothing else, it is interesting research for a book that I never could have gotten second-hand. Which got me to thinking, how far are writers willing to go in the name of research?

·         Speaking of writing, I done practically none, and I think I might expand on this later because I rarely talk about it to anyone, in reality or virtuality (is it bad that I totally smiled at that word?). To cut a long story short, I reckon this dearth of creativity was due in large part to...

·         ...my experiencing something of an identity crisis. In fact, crisis is the wrong word because it implies immediacy, and this is a sprawling languorous thing which is still going on. (This would be one of the things I was attempting to contain in summer.) The only way I can explain it is that I really really wanted to write, and I knew what I wanted to write because I'd planned it all out, but when it came to actually writing I just couldn't. There were other niggling little things like setting, format, the overwhelming choice of words in the English language, but the centrifugal problem seems to be that I have forgotten how to write like me. And I'm not quite sure how to fix that.

·         The Eglish teacher I had for four years in high school moved to Thailand with his family in August, and I'm feeling increasingly...not sad, just kind of oh about it. I kind of can't begin to describe the nebulous significance of his presence in my life, and how he always believed in and supported me even after I'd left school and I was no longer his responsibility. In a selfish way, because so many aspects of this summer have felt unfamiliar, and I'm embarking on something now even more unfamiliar, it kind of feels like I've lost an ally or a pillar of support. But mostly I'm just happy he's getting this amazing opportunity, and I hope his new students appreciate him as much as we all did.

·         And then this is the really frilly bit of news at the end of the bulletin: I'm taking on a couple of students to tutor them in English for Reasons which are mostly but not all to do with money. Also: there are some weird fuckers on Gumtree.

And here are some pictures to commemorate:

(This is what a not-date looks like.)

And this signifies making time for friends around busy schedules, 

not the fact that we are Total Losers.

I may have had a total slo-mo writing summer, but I was the co-creator of this.

Also, this is the sound of life right now:

Thanks for reading :) x

Back By Popular Demand!

Well, less of a demand and more of a prompt. And a growing sense of undocumented life events building up. And unreplied-to emails... *points to self* I suck. Man, it's a good thing overdue blogposts aren't like overdue library books or I'd be looking at a hefty fine along the same lines as Meejin's (£10.35). 

So.

Life has been rather charming recently. I’ve met some really inspiring people and lovely seeing-eye dogs called Milo and experienced lots of quirk with cherries on top. Sure this year has thrown some curve balls, but everyone is dealing with them with lots of fortitude and optimism and moxy. I like it. I like this year’s vibe. I was going to try to describe it in words, but I’d be describing a picture that I could much more easily show you, so:

(I like piers.)

Anyway, I apologise in advance for the total lack of cohesion in this post. It’s just as though I inhaled the heavens and spat the stars back out onto your screen in the form of a paragraphed summary of Life, right?

So, second year drawing to a close this week (yikes) means exam season is right around the metaphorical corner (fuck). And I SURVIVED Reading & Writing Week. Reading & Writing Week? you ask. Yeah, you know, the twice annual 5-day extravaganza wherein I misplace my sanity, have multiple meltdowns and generally end up sitting in a corner, rocking back and forth, eating my hair? What can I say, it’s a tradition. But I lived to tell the tale, so it’s not all bad. Also, remember when I compared double English to running a marathon with weights, and the added onus of Classics to a fat man on my back whilst I ran said marathon? (Just nod.) Well, happily I am still running the marathon and either through endurance or littering I have ceased to notice the weights. The fat man that is Classics is still on my back, but he has awoken from his slumber and now tells me interesting facts about Imperial Rome in an Italian accent, so it’s all good.

Another dollop of good news is that my formerly ill Nanny is no more! Ill, that is. Turns out her brain has super spongy powers and like sucked all of the leakage back in. And after a looooooong hospitalization she’s finally been allowed to go back home. Catch is, she has very bad (read: zero) short term memory, so after 75 days of my dad and uncles reciting over and over WHY she was in hospital in the first place, she still can’t remember, and they have gone slightly doolally. Ironic, eh? One good thing that came out of that whole episode was that my uncle came over from Australia for a month and he’s kind of legendary to me. The highlight of his trip had to be getting to second base with a marble statue of some naked chick in the Art Galleries (picture to come).

Know what’s really nice about life right now? That every time I run into someone from high school one of the first questions that comes up in the conversation is ‘SO HAVE YOU BEEN WATCHING THAT KEVIN BRIDGES THING?!’ And then we jump up and down and squeal and generally gloat over the fact the guy went to our school (both if you’re one of the St. Mary’s crew like moi!) and that our little town and our little school which no longer exists has national recognition. Seriously, everyone is so proud to be Scottish right now, and more specifically Clydebankian.

And now for magical bulletpoints because I’m bored of trying to paragraph my nonsense:

v  I have given up Coke for Lent, and possibly for life.

v  Lying in bed with someone at 3am whilst dancing to Mambo Number 5 is one of The Funnest Things Ever.

v  I officially began reading The Hunger Games in a hotel room in Coventry*, and so far I love it! It’s kind of nice to be on this side of a phenomenon as opposed to the other more feral side that comes with the bastardization of something you are unhealthily possessive of and obsessed with love passionately *cough* Twilght.

v  Because uni turns me into a vegetating zombie for 22 weeks of the year, I have taken to renting lots of movies so that my vegetation time holds some approximation of purpose. The highlights so far have been United 93, The Road, Tyrannosaur and Peeping Tom with a special shout-out to A Single Man.

v  Also, I think I have become a little obsessed with Wolf Creek. Texting your nocturnal friend during all hours of the day about it seems to suggest so (sorry David). In fact, I have to confess, I am watching it even as I type. BUT IT IS JUST SO DAMN GOOD.

v  My favourite lecturer for English Lit was giving only one lecture this entire semester so I was determined to go because he like, blows my mind. (It was a great lecture.) But at the end he shocked me by giving a valedictory speech. I couldn’t believe he was retiring and wouldn’t be there for Honours to inspire me about Victorian literature and Shakespeare and all those things I don’t really get but love to dig my teeth and my nails and my everything into! Paraphrased, he said ‘I’ve so enjoyed teaching you and watching you go from 1A to 2B and I wish you all the best in the future. And if I may be so unpolitically correct as to tell you my favourite book, I will tell you it is the Bible.’ And then my heart broke in two. Seriously, I think all 400 of us were choked up.

v  Speaking of, yesterday Dr Fox gave the final Classics lecture on the beginnings of Christianity in Rome, and I kind of had to restrain myself from jumping him the whole time. You know those people who just have natural magnetism? Yeah. Describing him will do no justice to his potent sexual allure, but FUCK. < And that’s all I’m going to say on the matter.

v  And last but not least, I have A Purpose in life. Starting in May I’m going to be volunteering a few shifts a week at the Save the Children charity shop in Partick along with Possibly Gay Josh & Gandhi and some others whose names I don’t remember but who are all SWELL. Also: tea.

So, that’s life recently, in a nut shell. The last thing I want to say is this: it’s an incredibly satisfying and liberating thing to be able to say that last year, and the year before, and for the tail-end of 2009 I was deeply, deeply unhappy (I liked the way Nicole Kidman said this in an interview relating to her part in The Hours!). But I’m not anymore. I had this strange notion that in order to be legitimately unhappy, I had to commit to it, or I didn’t deserve that description. Which is bullshit. People are changing all the time—that’s part of what makes them so beautiful, that you can never really define them. Sometimes they are happy, and sometimes they are really genuinely unhappy and they need help. Just because someone is able to pull through something shouldn’t diminish or invalidate whatever unhappiness they were previously experiencing. It seems like a really obvious thing, but it’s something I had to learn. I don’t feel indebted to that unhappiness anymore. I am ALLOWED to feel good, and I do :). And so should everyone.

*I fucking want a double bed.

Word of the day: smirr (it’s different from ‘drizzle’ – rescue the Scots language by dropping it into awkward weather oriented conversations!)

Catch yeez x

One With Everything On It;

'Cause this post is going to be a little bit like one of those pizzas. I figured I was going to do a post for each of the “toppings”, but then I got lazy and decided to do this for reasons threefold; 1) I am a woman, and women multitask; 2) none of the “toppings” could really make a satisfying “pizza” on their own; 3) I am about to embark on a mega-tight schedule set by the mother who will decapitate me if I do not stick to it, so this is like my farewell. When I come back (if I come back) I may vividly resemble a yeti. I’m just warning you.

Alright, onto the “pizza”. First topping is;

Philosophy; I had my Knowledge & the World resit on Monday, and I came out wanting to get on the bus instead of flinging myself under it, so I’m taking that as a good sign. I didn’t start studying until the week before and even then I didn’t study much because, firstly, my lazy-ass-self-deprecating ethos was “I didn’t get it the first time around. How am I supposed to get it seven months later?” and also because I was hoping that the theory of osmosis would kick in during the exam. To make me feel better, my dad spun me a yarn about me going back in time to kill Descartes. It was rather cathartic. I don’t have anything against the guy, it’s just that my brain is incapable of absorbing his philosophy. Anyway, I’m not picking philosophy as an elective in second year (uni seems to have turned me into one of those “path of least resistance” types) and this makes me kind of sad, because, I did end up loving it. I learned a lot about arguing and rhetoric, about historical beliefs and perceptions, about logic and how I don’t have any, about the origins of politics, and I got panoramic views of controversial issues like abortion, infanticide, euthanasia and animal rights. Maybe that sounds totally grim, but I found it really interesting. I’m going to miss the gorgeous Sir Charles Wilson building all the lectures were held in and the security man I made friends with who always listened to pop music on his crackly radio. I’m going to miss my seat! I’m going to miss the lecturers; Platchias the Greek cowboy and how we always ran into one another, the Pepsi Addict who never missed a chance to slag off Russell Brand, the Jack Whitehall lookalike who wore clothes you needed sunglasses to look at. I’m going to miss my second semester tutor who took a shine to me and called me Rosie Posie and who sat and worked out one night exactly the grade I had to get in my exam to pass the course. I’m going to miss that whole tutorial group, how I was the only one who was there every week and how I had my own seat that everyone respected and how we were like a weird family who had debates about retributive robot rape and polar bears eating their cubs (they goddamn well do, Dave!). I’m going to miss the malevolent glint in my tutor’s eye as he put the two Daves in one team with the full expectation that the world would implode and be swallowed in white. I’m going to miss the whole cast of characters; my friend Dave with the sapphire eyes, Nickelback Guy (who was actually more into Metallica, so he’d probably hit me for that), The Other Chick who it transpires works with Meejin and remembers the polar bears, Big Fat Johnny and our Whiteboard of Punishment, Dreadlocks and our discussions about my essay and his dreadlocks, Andrew Pretty Boy and his poser beanie and how he always held the door open and how we almost got run over on Great Western Road. I’m very much going to miss standing outside the old crumbly stone building on a Friday, inhaling smoke and God knows what else, standing talking to the guys and stamping the cold away. I’m going to miss non-coffee. I am going to miss being one of the guys and always arriving totally breathless because I had to run from the top of the hill and down and up and along. And I’m going to miss the fact they all appreciated my hat. I will even look back fondly on the final comment my first semester John Lennon tutor wrote at the bottom of my F-yielding Descartes essay: “This reads more like a blog post”. I didn’t have to learn that it was possible for me to fail—I already knew that. I learned a ton of other cool stuff. But it’s been kind of a lesson to other people in my life that I can and do fail, sometimes, and that’s okay!

Boy, this old bird sure does ramble on a bit, doesn’t she?

Seagulls in Suburbia; It all started a few months ago on an overcast Sunday when the mother, the father and the me were coming home from the weekly Tesco shopping trip and looked up in alarm at the loud squawking to see two seagulls atop our roof...going at it. Fast-forward to now, and there are a nest of them in our chimney. We are the talk of the neighbourhood. We have even become a bit of a tourist attraction. Some people dislike our gulls because they make a hell of a noise in the morning/at night/when strangers walk past, but the residents of our four-in-a-block have become just as protective of the gulls as the gull parents are of their chicks. Which is very. I for one like the sound of seagulls because I love the sea and when I close my eyes at night I can imagine I’m there and I can almost hear the waves whispering against the shore. During my gap year I took it upon myself to learn some enlightenment, so on my father’s recommendation, I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach and it’s now one of my favourite books. It’s just so beautiful and simple and inspiring. It has gems like this: “You will begin to touch heaven, Jonathan, in the moment that you touch perfect speed. And that isn’t flying a thousand miles an hour, or a million, or flying at the speed of light. Because any number is a limit, and perfection doesn’t have limits. Perfect speed, my son, is being there.” So, as soon as I learned there were three adorable little fuzzy seagull chicks living on our roof, I knew I had to name them accordingly. I watched their behaviour for a while, documenting their tentative progress in photographs, and decided that the boldest one should be named Jonathan. The other two are named Jonah and Joanna. I know this all makes me sound completely and utterly bonkers, but I don’t care. The seagull parents have long since accepted me as One of Them, and they no longer dive bomb me on my comings and goings. They are better than guard dogs. And it is rather funny watching women with prams and bands of small children run in terror down the street. Reminiscent of The Birds, I guess. Which is possibly another reason I so enjoy the seagulls being here. However, our neighbour across the street who is currently building the Great Wall of China in his front garden and has been doing so for the past ten years, does not like the seagulls so much and tolerates them through a tight grin, and has tried to conspire a plan with my father to climb up onto the roof and smash the eggs should the gulls return next year. I dare say he will be pecked to death before ever reaching the nest. The baby gulls have now begun to fly and soon they’ll be off and this is all timing in rather well with my ascendency into adulthood! Which leads me to the next topic...