Doctor Who groove

I made the mistake of buying all my favourite tracks from the many Doctor Who soundtracks last night. I say 'mistake' because now I keep wondering around with the tunes in my head(or in my ears, as the case may be), daydreaming of potential Doctor Who stories, instead of revising.

Not that I really need reasons for not revising, I tend to be very good at failing to study without these creative excuses :) I really need to find a way to concentrate for the next two weeks. Two weeks, and this is all over. Wahey.

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.

Bedrooms

Between the hours of 7.30 and 8.30am this morning, I played the bongos, and sang to my make-up-applying, hair-straightening sister about school dinosaur invasions, and the wisdom of leaving your hair spiky so you can convince everyone that you are in the Cullen family, and make them all run away. I also came to the rather shocking conclusion that I actually like sharing a room. If only my parents had known this 14years ago - I'm sure it would have saved a lot of hassle in working out who went where.

Home

After six hours of train journey, mashed up with heavy suitcases and steep station stairways, I am home, and I am happy :) Just spent the evening watching Coraline (which I LOVED), posing for some strange but hilarious real-people-comedy-fight DS game of Dan's (who is slightly devastated that he has not quite grown taller than me yet), eating healthy and sugary goodness, and generally being slightly crazy :D My family are awesome. At the same time, after a week of seeing uni/ church/ choir friends, a wedding and general nostalgia, I'm realising just how difficult it's going to be to move away from my uni town - to the point were I spent half an hour on the phone to my mum a couple of days ago going through the various ways in which I could stay.

Here is home, and so is there. Manchester, where almost everyone I grew up with still lives, also feels like home sometimes, but not as much as it used to. In an ideal world all these parts of my life would be in the same location, but I'd probably appreciate them less then. I guess I'm lucky to have more than one town in which I feel loved :)

The inconvenience of not being made of lined paper

Today I was in a funny mood, so I took in a walk in a park, which is what I tend to do when such odd moods take me. During said walk I counted seven topics which I could blog about, because my head has been full of the type of deep ideas that only appear when you have so much schoolwork to do that you have no time to concentrate on them. I remember feeling bizzarely nostalgic for the endless museum outings that my parents used to take us on, most of which I found incredibly boring, and then I missed certain people I had grown up with, and grandparents I had lost, and even felt a strange fondness for my old school, which, let’s say, isn’t something that happens very often. And there was some all-encompassing point that I came to about all of this that felt slightly brilliant at the time (though it probably wasn’t), and now it is gone. It’s like it’s knocking around at the back of my brain, but I can’t quite reach it. This is probably a sign that I’m getting old.

The moral of the story: I need to have some kind of notebook and pen surgically attached to my hip.

New-look blog

I've been meaning to give this blog a makeover since the beginning of the year, and being in the mood for some procrastination this afternoon, I've just got round to it. I'll probably change it all again before you know it, and perhaps that's a good thing. I still like writing on here, though Dailybooth and Youtube vlogs make it a little less of a priority than it once was. It was only ever really about movies for the first two posts, so I felt it at least needed a name change. I'm not quite sure what the blog is for any more - I'm not exactly reading a lot of books at the moment - but it'll probably continue to be filled with my random typings when I am feeling in random mood :) And I feel there should be more photos.

The term is over, but I'm around for another week here as my friend is getting married this weekend, and the uni libraries are so much better than the ones at home. The dissertation still has a way to go, I haven't looked at the other piece of coursework that's due in after the holidays, and I have three exams on very different papers in the second half of next term, so there's going to be a fair amount of work to do over the break, but at least some of it is pretty interesting. And I'm planning to re-read the whole Lemony Snicket 'A Series of Unfortunate Events' series, so that should be fun.

Hmm, it grows dark, and there are 101 other things I was meant to be doing this afternoon. Goodbye for now.

The book blog

I had all these grand ideas about blogging every time I finished a book, but (as ever) this hasn’t happened . . . what you now have is a catch-up blog, written at 00.43am on a day that I had technically declared off, but had still intended to do more with than I actually did in the end. Oh well. Perhaps we all need to have do-nothing-at-all days.

This is more to keep track of what books I’ve been reading than a review opportunity, especially as I’m pretty tired. I hope I don’t miss any books out here. If I suddenly remember any, I’ll add them in next time – this doesn’t necessarily have to be in order.

1. What I talk about when I talk about running – Haruki Murakami.
My favourite author is a very unique, and very reclusive man, and this is probably the nearest to an autobiography that we’re ever going to get out of him. So I enjoyed it for all the little anecdotes about his life, and his usual wise words and unusual ponderings, but this was a book primarily about his relationship with jogging, and I don’t have a huge interest in running, so I didn’t find this to be one of his best. Seeing as he’s the world’s greatest author (ok, imo) it was still better than 99% of the stuff out there.

2. Her Fearful Symmetry – Audrey Niffenegger.
I’m hoping to review this on my Youtube channel at some point in the near future, so I don’t want to go into a lot of detail here . . . safe to say that it was very different from what I was expecting. The supernatural element was unexpected (although if I had bothered to read the blurb it wouldn’t have been), and it wasn’t up to the standard of ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ – but that TTTW is about as perfect as a book can be, so that was no surprise. There were a lot of things going on, and a lot of great ideas, but it felt like she had perhaps been rushing for a deadline, and hadn’t quite got the balance between them right. And most of the characters were a lot more difficult to sympathise and empathise with this time round. Having said that, as a study of the complexities of female ‘friendships’ it was very accurate, to a slightly terrifying degree. I liked how you were never quite sure who you were meant to like and who you weren’t. And the whole storyline about the agoraphobic man and his wife was beautiful – I only wish she had saved it for another story, it would have simplified things.

3. Robin of Sherwood – Michael Morpurgo.
It breaks my heart that this book is out of print. It is wonderful on so many levels, and should be a classic, not something that you have to hunt out on Amazon second hand book dealers. Review on Youtube.

4. Dead Until Dark – Charlene Harris
Umm, yes, Vampire chick-lit. But very well-written vampire fiction, which makes it ok, right? :) This is the first out of the novel series that the TV show ‘True Blood’ is based on, and as the show is one of my TV guilty pleasures, I thought I might as well try out the books (my cousin has the whole series) . . . . this is basically X-rated Twilight. Ok, that is way too harsh – this was published a few years before Twilight, and contains too many similar plot-features to be ignored (vampire-human-werewolf love triangle, telepathy, first-person narrative of unusual heroine, who longs for her hunky, gentlemanly, very old vampire boy), so Twilight is basically the tweeny fanfiction of this. This was actually pretty different from the TV show, it wasn’t quite as . . . shocking, and there’s a whole main character and her storylines that make up a major part of the show, but didn’t appear in any way in this novel. The book was much more focused on the central couple, rather than being an ensemble metaphor about equality like the TV show (which is one of the reasons I like ‘True Blood’ so much). But, for all its differences, I still enjoyed the book, mainly because the central character, Sookie, is brilliant and feels very original, the writing was pleasantly quirky, the murder mystery elements played well, and it was genuinally scary in places. The TV show really managed to capture the characters well. My cousin says this book series actually gets better as it goes along (again, opposite to Meyer’s Twilight), so I might have to stick with this one . . . not something I should really admit to, though :)

I’m sure I’ve read more than four books this year, but I can’t remember any other titles . . . anyway, I really need to step up this reading if I want to make 100 by the end of the year. You’ll hopefully hear more from me soon :)