The Move Over

OK, I’m moving over to the new On The Brink. All my old posts should appear on there fairly soon, but all my new posts from now on will be up there. Enjoy!

I’m Not Sure If I’m Feeling Happy, Sad, Confused, or ‘Meh’, but it’s Definitely One Of Those.

I pepper my emails, wallposts, comments and so on with smileys and emoticons of one sort or the other, most usually a smiley, a really smily smiley, or a face poking its tongue out. As if my words aren’t going to get my tone across by themselves – as if I’m not competent enough with the English language to frame what I mean and how I feel in words alone. I don’t know whether this is because I’m so sarcastic the entire time that clearly no-one will understand when I’m not being serious, or whether I’m so terrified of my words being misinterpreted that I feel the need to grin manically throughout all these pieces of communication in a crazed, ‘please don’t hurt me’ manner, just in case I accidentally spark off some kind of Facebook/WordPress-based Third World War.

But yes, emoticons; they’re everywhere. And other than the odd novelty one, they’re all expressing one of a very limited number of basic emotions, corresponding roughly to the emotional gamut of an underdeveloped toddler, and not the range and nuance of feeling that you’d expect of early-twenties human beings. Happy, sad, confused, angry (perhaps) or embarassed. Sardonic, at a stretch, for those of us who grew up with MSN, and – what on earth is that meant to mean? This is something that’s always eluded me.

I feel I should object to this simplification of my emotional life into a small lexicon of heiroglyphs, but to be honest, I quite like them, scattergunned across the things I and my friends write to one another. Sometimes you do need to clarify that your tongue is firmly in your cheek ( ), or that your head is absolutely utterly and definitely not in the gutter, perish the thought ( ():-) ), or that you’re being a lot more sceptical about something than your words would suggest (^o), for some reason). Just so long as your words do suggest something. And if your communication is reduced to a series of emoticons and *actions* maybe it’s time you discovered skype, picked up the phone, or if your’e in the same vicinity as someone, actually went out and spoke to them in person? I’m fairly sure your face is capable of more than just or – though I’m sorry, you won’t sprout a halo upon being knowingly naive.

A Few Facts

Did you know you can get WordPress to proofread your blog for such gems as bias language, cliche and double negatives, as well as hidden verbs and a multitude of other sins of poor writing? Being arrogant and clearly a brilliant writer I am sort of of the opinion that anyone who needs these tools should probably not be keeping a blog, but there we go.

Meanwhile, slowly, thanks to my brilliant friend M from Brain Detour I am slowly getting myself set up at the brand new On The Brink. I’m keeping the name because I think it’s a good one and I still feel like I’m in some kind of watershed zone between adulthood and childhood and total idiocy, and I’m not sure that’s due for change any time soon! Anyway, from now on in you can check that and slowly it’ll acquire all the posts I’ve written here (I hope) and obviously brand spanking new posts of the genius and wit that you’ve all come to expect from me…!

This place will still be where I’m at for a little while because there’s a few things scheduled to go up over the next few days and I’ve yet to find a theme I’m completely happy with – I still want some day to design it myself and I’ve got some ideas about what it would look like if I could do anything particularly clever, but for now that’s not going to change. The moment I get my laptop back, however, I’ll be zipping straight up to my new blog and start hanging pictures on the walls and making my presence felt and it will be a thing of great beauty.

England & The Collapse

Reading Marcus’s recent blog entry, which you can find here, I had a few thoughts, which are actually not really any different from wot ‘e said, but nonetheless I’m going to shout them at you all because I am truly wonderful like that. Or not.

So, England. In reference to various local shows and such, or the whole folk festival thing, and as usual the fact that it’s summer turning to autumn and everything is just beautiful – I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot of late. Not, as Marcus said, the whole ‘bloody forriners and immigrants stealing all our jobs’ flag-waving BNP false nostalgia politicised insanity thing, but literally, an appreciation for a time when most of us lived in the countryside rather than the city, a love for how bloody beautiful this country is, honestly, look out of your window, drive out of your city, get into the Peaks or the South Downs or Dorset or Devon or the Fens and tell me this isn’t heartbreakingly beautiful, rain or shine, dark or light.

And the whole thing. The traditions, the Sunday roast thing, the fairs and the markets and the regional accents and the superstitions and the characteristics which define us as a group of people (not always necessarily positive but ours nonetheless), the strange regional surnames and foods and things, the weather, terribly English manners, all of it. The kinds of women that still run the fete, man the choir stalls, do the flowers at Church, set up choirs and orchestras and amateur dramatics and local music festivals in town halls, that invite underpriveleged city children to their country piles because everyone needs a holiday from time to time. Plums and damsons and oh! Jam! made from all these things. Blackberries. The smallest, newest allotment potatoes. It’s all still there, England, the way we idealise it, at least in bits: the carol service I go to every year (and no I am not going to tell you about it, it’s too special, I don’t want all of you showing up and ruining it for me). Get on a train or a bus to anywhere and just look out the window, seriously. I love this country, always have, and yes, I’m a dirty Guardian-reading liberal, but I want my flag back, I want to be able to call myself a patriot, and mean only good things by that.

And The Collapse. In other words, what happens when the world ends? Some kind of environmental crisis. All the bees die, the world heats up too much, we run out of oil, and suddenly, that’s it, civilisation is over, and only a smattering of survivors pick through the ruins. This idea terrifies me. I partly want to be there to see how I’d cope, but in the main I am terrified, and I want no part in it except to try and stop that from happening. And stop it won’t. Here is George Monbiot debating with Paul Kingsnorth on the matter. One way or another, things are going to change, and it will be change for the worse.

What really, really scares me, and what makes me feel pre-emptively pretty guilty, is actually the idea that one day I’ll have children, and first of all, I’m bringing them into a world that is ending, and secondly, what if they live to see that end? Either way it’s not much to give them, is it – a world in chaos, or a world that has collapsed altogether? How can I possibly live with myself bringing children into such a world? But of course I’m a human being, it’s the genetic imperative, and the idea that the world might end in their lifetime somehow makes that even stronger – I want to have children who, as adults, will make it through, will start to build a new civilisation, and who will hopefully do it far better than our ancestors managed.

Better still I’d rather that they didn’t have to do any of those things, that they would grow up to go to nice schools ,wear nice clothes, have nice bicycles, eat tea and teacakes, play football, do ballet, ride horses, learn to grow things they can eat, and cook the things they grow, and bring their own children up in time playing cricket and listening to the songs you only really hear now in village halls on a Monday evening lisped out by six-year-olds, ancient songs of love and longing and journeys and deaths and lives, I imagine them singing those songs at parties at dusk with a bonfire and good ale, a simpler, more sustainable life; I want the world to be somehow sorted out for them so that they live in a way that can be kept going for centuries, that is beautiful. 

Oh hell, I’m emotional today. Apologies.

New Header

From Towersey. Image by Tasha Cartwright and all credit and such is due to her, so please don’t go stealing it nor nuffink, OK? Enjoy.

Oh, yes, and.

1000 comments to date. It seems like a milestone of some kind. That is all.

No, You’re Not Naive, You’re Right.

Here are my thoughts on drugs. I would have thought of a more interesting start to this entry than that, but I can’t be bothered. I’ve still got onion tears from cooking and I have some things to say and you know my writing’s never been that pre-meditated anyway, if pre-meditated is what I mean.

Drugs. When I was younger I tried weed a couple of times – in fact for a few years my only smoking experience had been weed rather than plain tobacco, and that only changed when I got to university. Sometimes it made everything really funny and lovely and wonderful, but most of the time it made me feel sick and paranoid and unhappy, and it always made me nauseous and sleepy before it was done with me. I always said I wouldn’t try anything harder – and in fact I never did – but the truth is that of course if someone had offered anything else to me I probably wouldn’t have said no, out of foolhardy curiousity and a total lack of care for myself and my mind and what it might do to me. Like a lot of teenagers I wasn’t the happiest and so of course I had a tendency to the wilfully self-destructive. So if I’d been offered acid or E or something I might happily have given it a go; but it never arose. At least, not at a price I could afford.

Then I got all grown-up and reasonably happy and swore off weed altogether from a few months ago (having smoked it once this year and no more) as well as all other drugs and when I heard about a friend’s experiences on Speed I was surprised she’d even taken it. Now, I think, there’s something slightly childish about the whole drugs thing. Oh, look at me, I’m experimental, I’m going to fuck with my mind. Isn’t this daring of me? At least among the middle-classes with whom I grew up. I have no way of judging people who live lives that they would do anything to mentally exit from time to time. When I was less happy I would have joined them and that’s not childish so much as just bloody stupid in the long-term.

Basically what I’m confusedly saying is drugs are bad. And they’re not big, and they’re not clever, and judging people for not taking drugs seems utterly nonsensical, damaging, and cruel. I am far happier inside my head now than I think I could ever be outside of it, I have no real desire to hallucinate that my walls are talking to me, and I don’t like having emotions that aren’t connected to what’s happening to me. And the thing is, I don’t understand how that doesn’t apply to everyone. And if you feel the need to get out of your head you should be really thinking about why that is, and doing something worthwhile about it – work out what is wrong, what you can change, who you’d be happier being, rather than just sticking your head in the sand and running away to a place that is from what I have heard actually inevitably no better than the real world.

These days I don’t take drugs – at least not recreationally. Not that that’s much different from before. What is different is that nothing would convince me to do so. I drink, yes, and I’m trying to drink less. I don’t smoke. And I’m far happier being sober, with friends, finding something really hilarious because it really is hilarious, than I think I ever could be after ingesting something which alters wholly who I am and how I experience everything.

And I haven’t made this decision because I’m naive or uptight, and nor have any of the millions of others who would agree with me. I say this because I honestly think that you middle-class, middle-England disaffected bored and underchallenged teens are frankly a bit pathetic for *not* agreeing with me. But I’m far too nice to say so, at least to your faces.

(And I’ve seen it ruin lives, but I don’t tell tales; so don’t you dare call me naive).

One Woman, One Banana, No Pants.

It sounds a lot worse than it is, believe me. It’s about the crazy things one expects people to do whilst drunk – in this case, harass people with a banana, or take your trousers off for no reason and run about like that. All things my cousin has been known to do.

She and her friend C came to stay last night on their way Elsewhere, and we went to the pub, and had round after round, and whilst me and C were hysterically tipsy, K was wasted. However it’s worth saying first that we had a wonderful time. Everything was funny, everything was beautiful, and we realised more and more why we feel such a close bond as cousins in a way that none of our other cousins can quite match. We are terribly lucky to have one another and it was one of those occasions that just made us both realise how important family can be even if you don’t feel like you know one another. Because we hardly know each other, it’s true – and yet deep down, in some strange way, without having to explain or understand it, we do. Unconditional love, y’know. Urgh, I sound hideously emotional; lashings of apologies.

I also resisted the temptation to smoke and sat on my roof talking for hours about everything with C. This morning, a hungover goodbye to them both, and now I’m home again, in bed, with a good book.

One Of The Great Things About The Last Few Days…

…is that being in my boyfriend’s house whilst he’s been at work has given me the chance to feel ever more at home here and to get to know his mother better, which has been lovely. I really like her and admire her and I hope I haven’t made too bad an impression on her – she’s one of those people that sort of makes me shy, which is odd, and I’ll chalk that down to admiration; I think she’s the kind of person I’d like to be some day which makes me all meek and mild and Please Please Please Like Me.

I’m trying not to make myself too much at home – accidentally I invited a sixth person for supper; now there’s a situation and a half, to be explained, or not, in due course. Oh, hell. Audiofantastics much required, for those of you (precisely one of you) who knows what that is, but not until I’m not busy. Tomorrow, then, perhaps. Help.

Can I Just Be Very Cross For A Little Bit?

I have just bought a filofax and this makes me very happy. It also makes me feel like being more organised, so this morning I have carried on the losing battle against my clothes (too many, they can’t all fit in the wardrobe, and I’m about as capable with hangers as I am at flying planes, i.e. Not At All, but thankfully hangers don’t tend to threaten lives). So this morning I went through and added to my diary all the things I have to do that I can remember off the top of my head; I also made a to-do list (oh, filofax, I love you, you with your tick-boxes and dividers and there’s a space for my pen and cards and odd scraps of paper that who knows I might need to remember at some point and things like that and Oh You Are Wonderful May I Marry You Please?) – and then I decided to finally go online and look up my timetable for the next semester.

Firstly it took me hours to find my records on the site, which you would have thought would be quite obvious because after all, they’re a handy thing to have to hand, surely? But no. Honestly I trawled round the site for half an hour, following a wild goose chase of links hither and thither all over the internet, and finally I found this list, and which modules were occurring on which semesters, and so on. And so then I found the Timetable page, which lists every single module occurring within my faculty, so I had to sift through those to find my Semester One modules. Then of course even though you may have a lecture in one place on one module every week for a whole semester, every time a different lecturer is giving the lecture it has to have a separate entry in the timetable thing, when given the structure of the course I really don’t mind who is talking, I only want to know when and where.

So that all took a while to transcribe but finally I was onto my last module, and my filofax timetable was very neatly and beautifully done with all the information I could ever need about my future whereabouts right at my fingertips. Wonderful. The last two modules are both heavily practical – each has two afternoons in labs per week. So far I haven’t been such a fan of labs, so this didn’t strike me as great news especially given that they’re not my only lab courses; they’re just the most labby. I’m sure I shall end up really enjoying them – hopefully the actual practicals will be more challenging this year and I fully intend to do all the relevant reading. Anyway. Two afternoons for those two modules in labs per week: and for Anatomy of the Human Body those afternoons are Wednesday and Thursday; while for Experimental Approaches in Physiology and Pharmacology those afternoons are Tuesday and Wednesday. Yes, that’s right. I definitely have the right weeks and the right days and the right times. Different tutors, different rooms, different whole buildings, either, so that I’m supposed to be in two laboratories in separate areas of the city simultaneously every single Wednesday from term until Christmas.

And before you go berating me for choosing silly modules, I’ll say now that every module in second year Biomedical Science is a core module i.e. I have no choice about what modules I do. So some brilliant person has actually planned our lives like this. You really don’t have to be that bright to see how that just isn’t going to work, surely?

Anyway, I’m sure it’s not really anyone’s fault as such and I’m not cross so much as frustrated. On the other hand, it doesn’t look like I have anything on Friday’s after about 12 and for the first six weeks I don’t have to be in on Mondays until 11am. So unless they shift one of those lab sessions to a Friday afternoon (and I tell you now I am praying for that not to be the case) I can get out of the city on any weekend I please – and we all know where I’m planning on going when I can.

Now I’ve just got to wade through the site and try and work out when my tutorials are going to be… I never worked this out last year so I missed many of them. Currently I can’t access my university emails because they’re switching email provider, so continued Superwoman-levels of organisation may have to be postponed. Meanwhile I think it’s time for a cuppa.