Those kind of weeks

It strikes me that this term, my very last term of university, should be the one when I'm blogging and vlogging the most, yet is actually the one when I've been doing neither at all. This is the way of uni, I guess. There's other things that I would love to be doing too, like catching up with those friends that I've barely seen all year, and exploring the parts of my uni city whih I've never seen, and taking more photos, and remembering more memories . . . but at the moment there really doesn't seem to be the time.

Ok, I'll fully admit that this is largely my own fault :) This whole year has been really unstructured, with few deadlines until the beginning of this term. A sensible person would have therefore planned their whole year, carefully spacing out the work, so that it all got done, and they still had lots of free time to do what they enjoyed. I am not a sensible person. In the first term I did nanowrimo, in the second I did . . . what did I do? Watched a lot of youtube, made my way through some dvd boxsets, daydreamed a lot, was ocassionally slightly more sociable than in the last couple of years. I went home for Easter, and got ill instead of doing work. This left me with an incredible, mind-shattering amount of work to do when I got back to uni, so I, of course, procrastinated for two more weeks before starting it. Let's just say that the work did get done, but I sat, awake and eyes glued to my laptop screen, for the 48 hours before the two deadlines. Life gets a strange haze when you start tying to live off a couple of hours of sleep a night. It's not a lifestyle I'd recommend.

Still, though, despite attempts to stop getting distracted, and the supposed 'internet hiatus' that was never going to be even 70% successful,(almost types somthing potentially mushy/obvious but then doesn't), these final weeks need to be documented in some way. I'm still going to try and cut down on the amount of time I spend doing nothing at all online, but I think I might end the 'non-hiatus' in order to spend some productive internet time capturing some memories I don't want to lose. It's kind of the end of an era for me. Not just leaving university, although I have come to love the town, the handful of close uni friends, and the communities that the choir and the church have provided. I guess it feels like I'm entering 'the real world'. Even if I do end up studying further next year, there's no way that I can continue to pull the 'I'm really just a teenager who knows nothing, honest' smile and get away with it, and the likes of my dissertation supervisor will no longer keep on forgetting I'm not 19 years old. I'm not sure how I feel about this. It's not all looking wistfully at the past, though - the next few months hold some potentially exciting, happy, and a little bit scary stuff too. So I want time to speed up, and I want it to slow down, all at the same time. Life can be confusing somtimes :)

The last couple of weeks has been one of those sad-happy-strange times when all kinds of things that I usually keep separate in my head seemed to happen at once. Someone who I hadn't seen for years, but I'd known fairly well from school,a guy a couple of year's younger than me (who had spent quite a lot of time round at our house when we were kids because he was the same age as my brother, and our mums were friends) died after a long and brave fight against leukemia, which was really sad. It also got me thinking a lot about school, which isn't something I often do. I have a lot of mixed feelings about the school I grew up in, but this time I looked back and remembered how great a lot of the friends there had been, and how much I missed people. So, yeah, I'm going to make more of an effort to stay or get back in touch with them, and actually do that this time, rather than just say that :)

I went round to dinner with a teacher couple who I'd met during my gap year in Zambia, and who have now moved back to England, and to my uni town, no less. It was really great to see them - they were the people over there I felt I could go to if was having a crisis, especially as they have kids the same age as me. It was also totally surreal, especially as the amazing Zambian teacher I was classroom-assistant to was there too, in the UK for a fortnight to see some English schools. It's so odd when people you know from a specific country-context turn up in another one. So that got me thinking about Zambia, and how much I missed people from that crazy, wonderful little school too.

And then there's all these other random happenings, like my choir's 10th Anniversary do, and applying-but-not-actually-applying-as-I-haven't-yet-found-the-time for the Masters, and some insane-but-potenially-absolutely-awesome developments to my usually pretty average life.

I guess I'm just uber-nostalgic at the moment, both for the past, and for an imagined future. Life seems huge, too short, daunting, terrifying, exciting, wonderful, and almost too full of possibilities. And I haven't got my head around it enough to actaully write a blog post that is about actual things. But perhaps these feelings are exactly what should be captured in these kind of weeks.