In The Waiting Line;

'Cause like, it's where I'm at, yeah? Musically. Emotionally. Medically. Academically. Take your pick. 

Hello Blogosphere :D! *waves* I think that is one of my favourite words, along with discombobulate, which is totally discombobulating in itself, because every time I say it Meejin thinks I’m making it up. I’m not man, it’s in the freaking dictionary and everything.


Anyway, I should actually be catching up with the forty-odd lectures I’ve missed (i.e. chosen to sleep through, go out with friends over, or listen to Kermode & Mayo’s Film Review instead of), but as soon as I went on Moodle (another favourite word, despite what it actually represents) I wanted to pull a Sleeping Beauty and not wake up for a hundred years or so, and even then only on the contingency that a very handsome prince be the alarm clock.


So here I am.


If I fail my exams, I have no one to blame but myself, which is precisely the way I like it. In the name of being concise, missing lectures is a bad idea, full stop. See, there it is. A full stop. Some of them I omitted from life because I never learned anything at them anyway, some because attending them would mean hanging around the West End or town for upwards of three hours, and some because I chose my mental health over my academia. Which is a rule I always go by, but sometimes the thing that will help my mental health is forcing myself to go out and do something constructive. Some I missed because of migraines and because I have no will power and one I missed because of a phantom doctor’s appointment. But whatever the reason, in retrospect, it is not a good idea to miss a lecture if it can possibly be avoided. Which in most cases it can. You know, people always say retrospect is a great thing, and I am a great advocate of that hypothesis, but do you know what’d be an even greater thing? Time travel. Being able to take your own advice. Being able to split yourself into four and send three of you off to study for uni while the fourth you sits back and munches an apple and dallies the time away making Tom Sawyer proud.


Alright, enough blatherskiting. Let’s get down to business;


In the name of being concise I’m going to run through several things I could probably write essays on if I was crazy enough.


Religion and I have not been on good terms this past week. Not any particular religion I hasten to add, but religion in general. My mother is religious and my father is not, and apart from that they are complete opposites and I am their mutant off-spring, having no happy medium or equilibrium. Read into that what you will. Anyway, because of that, I’ve been brought up in a necessarily open and sometimes conflicting environment, with panoramic views on life and the world. Which is great in so many ways and I would never, ever trade it for anything, but can be rather confusing in other ways. Confusing in a good way though, I guess, because I’m kind of spiritually desolate—my parents have driven the minivan out into the middle of a desert, opened the door, flung me out and said find your own way home—and that gives me a kick up the arse to explore and discover. Right now I don’t know what I believe. I’m kind of going with the flow. Theism versus atheism is such a diverse issue it deserves an in-depth post, which I’ll get around to sometime when I feel impassioned about it again, but suffice it to say that right now this and this and this and this are the main antagonists. Never mind the fact my mother has taken to coming home whenever there’s been a disaster somewhere, and expressing her fears about The Apocalypse, since it’s 2012 next year. ON A FRIDAY NIGHT. F-R-I-DAY NIGHT. Nuff said. Maybe this is the Libra in me, or the humanitarian or whatever, but one thing I hate and cannot tolerate about religion is the arrogance. All this ‘one true god’ palaver. It makes religion an elitist group, membership only, in competition with other religions, this big arms race trying to convert more than their rivals, and all hidden behind this insufferably condescending pity for anyone who doesn’t believe or has different beliefs. I’ve always had beef about this ever since I grew a conscience—what about all the other religions out there? Do they not count for anything? What makes this one absolutely stellar and the others total farce? I mean, fucking hell, religion is supposed to bring people together, and it does do that, but under what circumstances? Who wants to congregate to patronise and pity? Who wants to rally and cast aspersions on other belief systems just because they’re not the same as ours? Why does everyone have to be so homogenised? Why are we so afraid of this ‘other’? It seems increasingly to me that religion is all about power and about being proven right, indicated in the quantity rather than the quality of the following and the teaching. I know this all will make me sound extremely anti-religion, but I’m not. I think, like anything, it’s great in the right hands, and a total fucking disaster in the wrong. In 2008 I and around ten others, plus teachers and our resident priest, joined thousands of people flocking to Medjugorje, Bosnia-Herzegovina, on a week-long pilgrimage. At that time I was religious out of habit, I guess, but it was one of the best experiences of my life, even if it didn’t fortify my theistic beliefs. No, it was so fantastic because it reinforced my belief in people pulling together and having faith and coping with life and everything it throws at you. Whether the beliefs are real or not in the end doesn’t really matter. On the whole I agree that compared with non-denominational schools, Catholic schools, or any religious schools, definitely have a tangible aura of community and family that you can’t duplicate without the same theocentric ethos. But one major criticism I have of those schools is that (in my experience, anyway) the students are taught solely about their own religion, whereas non-denominational schools are exposed to a whole variety. I think that’s a major problem right there; that superiority and total ignorance is indoctrinated from the age of five until the age of eighteen in some cases. And so after that, when you’re out on your own, you’re either going to get very confused because you know nothing about anything other than your own religion, or you’re going to stay habitually ignorant. I don’t like that. It’s like when people put a stick in a pot so the plant grows up around that instead of just letting it grow whatever way it wants. On the other hand, this era of exploration right now sometimes makes me feel like I’m right up against the ceiling when I’m lying in bed at night and my mind’s all floopy, because I’m not really a member of a community. I miss that about going to church. That togetherness. Obviously there are thousands, millions of people like me who are kind of wandering about, but that’s not the same kind of togetherness at all, because there is no common ground. We’re all just floating around aimlessly, hoping to stumble across some epiphany we can anchor ourselves to just to be a part of something. I don’t know. In the words of Meejin; “God made us smart enough to know there’s an answer, but not smart enough to know what it is.”


Whew, rant over.


Okay, in the course of writing this I accumulated some bad news, which puts a damper on the good news I had, so I’ll do bad news first, and good news at the end to cheer anyone up who’s gotten this far.


So, bad news is, a kid I’ve known since I was almost five killed himself the other night by jumping off the Erskine Bridge. I was never close to him, but growing up together sort of engenders this mutual understanding/acceptance/implicit friendship thing. I am inexplicably sad about this. I can remember him so vividly, and I’m now regretting the offer he gave to every girl in primary seven at the Leavers’ Dance via his John Travolta lookalike friend, that he would kiss them. I just want one tangible memory to be acutely upset over. He had these amazingly twinkly blue eyes, the kind that wink really good and never succumb to the sobriety of age, and a totally mischievous face, and in one of the few moments a teacher actually got through to him and he co-operated, our whole disparate music class joined together to sing a song he composed the lyrics to on the spot. The Granny Song. I have it written down in a big old diary somewhere. It’s probably been rendered in my memory, but I remember it being this amazing moment of unity that everyone could feel but verbal acknowledgement would ruin. And you can never recreate it, and that’s what makes it special. It’s just everything coming together at once and being this beautiful little golden capsule of time. I remember when his mother won £300,000 in the lottery and they bought a house in Spain and I remember that he had a white Alsatian with blue eyes named Sasha and that he loved her and I think the most crushingly sad thing is that he won’t ever get the chance to do whatever it was he said he wanted to be doing in twenty years’ time in our primary school Yearbook. (It should be noted that I did go in search of said Yearbook and nearly pulled a hernia trying to find it in the dark recesses of my cupboard, but ultimately failed. This is most disturbing as my room is almost anally organised.) I don’t think death has ever come in this guise before; it feels very...personal. Anyway, we’ll miss you and we love you and we won’t forget about you, and wherever you are now I hope you’re happy. I’m crossing everything for you man.


I am so lame at speeches.


Anyway!


Now for the good news. Meejin has fulfilled one of her three goals for this year (in order of priority, low to high; learn to drive, pass exams, and find a potential husband). And ahead of time too! An unprecedented feat! He makes her happy, and she deserves that. Hats off to Cupid! (Aimee, I’m looking at you, man.) And a virtual toast to the happy couple—Meejin and Kelvin Bridge! (Note: some names have been changed for reasons threefold: 1) I have a predilection for code names, 2) I like to mock people, 3) I have an obligation to Meejin, and to myself if I want to keep all my fingers and toes, to protect the innocent and keep lecherous minds away from certain social networking sites.) Go, be merry and gay!

In Other News;
- On the upside, I got Windows 7 back. On the downside, my hard drive and lots of photos are AWOL. Rosie: 1. The System: ...Also 1.

- RoseBerry and I are getting on famously, and I’m kind of in love with the fact she has a spellchecker.


- I am sick to the back teeth of literature. A rant is forthcoming.


- My mother is the best mother ever because she bought me (okay, I ordered it, but it was her money and her offer) Viola in the Spotlight!!! I am a child, let it go. In fact, you know what, damnit, I don’t have to defend my love of YA fiction. I LOVE YA FICTION, SO UP YOURS. Ahem. This brings the total TBR-during-summer-when-I-get-my-life-back (or, more likely, a-part-time-life) count to... lucky number thirteen! Not including Richard Bach's Illusions; The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah. Oh yeahhh. And, scrutinzing my Amazon Wishlist, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that number doubled.


- I wrote a poem about the experience of an epileptic fit, as vividly as I can recall through my amnesia. People always ask me what it feels like, and the only thing I can ever come up with is Like there’s glitter in my brain. Hence the title.

Simple pleasures are the best!

I...I completely failed at being concise, didn't I?