I need to tidy my room

I need to do many things, after yet another reasonably unproductive day. But tidying my room would produce the most visible results whilst taking the least time, so I'll probably do that.

The length of this post speaks volumes. What couldn't she type?

Dailybooth

I follow a few people on twitter who have Dailybooth, so I've taken a look at threads and profiles over the last few months, but I finally got round to taking my first picture today. Who knows how long I'll keep it up before I get bored, but for now it seems like a fairly harmless way to procrastinate, and a bit more creative than a lot of the things I waste my time on.

Purple

I have a new laptop, and it's purple. I'm sure there has never been a laptop of such purple beauty (except all those other laptops from the same section of the Dell website). It has cool games, an in-built camera with great microphones, a huge memory, and powerful speakers. It is also so frustrating to type on that it's already had me near tears twice.

This is the third time I've tried to type this blog post. The words disappeared without warning twice. The screen size has changed twice, 17 new tabbed browsers have appeared, and it has asked me if I want to search the internet on three occasions. On Word, the margin lines kept moving of their own accord. Often all these things happen at once. And I really don't know what I'm pressing to make this happen. The keyboard is bigger than I'm used to, but I can't be hitting buttons that make such changes that frequently can I? It's a great looking computer with fab features, but looks like the old typing will be suffering for the forseeable future :-s

To-Do Lists

As ever, I wrote myself a to-do list today, did the interesting tasks and ignored the less exciting. So the silk scarf is finished (and, whilst far from perfect, is a lot better than I feared it would be), geography quizzes have been taken (I'm trying to improve my terrible lack of general knowledge), and Radio 4 has been listened to (just discovered a three-part adaptation of 'The Spy Who Came in From the Cold' up on the iplayer. One of my all-time favourite books. Omg, I love the BBC :D). And the work is not :-s Oh well, still a few hours to go I guess.

Being creative

Oooops . . . very near to another BlogFail there.

Today was fairly lazy and uneventful. I slept in late, watched 'Starsky and Hutch' with Mum (who I think enjoyed it, despite her initial horror that it was a comedy and not a 'proper remake'), spent too long on the internet, watched some more DS9. Then I watched 'On Thin Ice' - they finally made it to the South Pole, but only just in one piece. The friendship between olympian James Cracknell and tv star Ben Fogle continues to confuse me, and once you'd thrown doctor Eddy it gets even stranger. It's amazing that they didn't die. What bizzare group dynamics. Mainly because two of them are both so intimidated by James that they can't do the necessary thing - rugby tackle him and force him to slow down - and his crazy behaviour puts him at risk time and again. When Eddy did take charge things seemed to get better. I did feel bad for James after his breakdown though - one that seemed about 30years in the making. Here's hoping that the James/Ben relationship will be less hero/worshipper and a bit more a balance of equals in the future. Made for great TV though! :)

And I've been working on painting a silk scarf for most of this evening. Pretending to be creative is very stressful. The pack that it came in provided many cardboard stands which have to be stuck to the table, with the scarf secured to them with pins, so it doesn't touch the table-top. But these cardboard stands are fairly useless, and keep unfolding themselves, so have to be readjusted every couple of minutes. And I've got 5 or 6 splodges where the colour has run to somewhere it should not be . . . nightmare! I think it's meant to be relaxing, but it really isn't. This is why I don't do the artsy/crafty stuff very often. Ah well. Hopefully it'll look ok-ish in the end.

BlogFAIL

So . . . I forgot to post anything yesterday. Oooops. I ended up being out for most of the day - Dad was travelling a couple of hours away for work, so me and Mum caught a lift with him and looked round some shops. When I got back I ended up watching trashy TV for most of the evening . . . and me and Paul watched the whole of the computer animated series about the duck and the alligator (Sitting Ducks?). So much funnier when you're older, lots of sentences can be taken diferently . . . we reckon it's all about being gay in small town America.

So today I read 'Interpretation of Murder' by Jed Rubenfeld. I bought it yesterday because it was cheap, and I remember it being really big a few years back. It's a fictionalised version of Freud's visit to New York in 1909, where the murder at the centre of the novel has been invented by the author, but a lot of the dialogue, people and other events are historically accurate. The 'notes' at the end go on for pages, as most of his research was gained from letters and newspapers and the like. Anyway, Freud appoints a follower of his teachings to help the police investigate a vicious murder and attack. I was originally a bit hesitant about reading it because I thought it might be a little boring and . . .Freudian, but it was fantastic. A total page-turner - after reading the first 50pages last night I read the remaining 450 today. It was a little grisly in places, and it was Freudian, but it did explain a lot of his theories in a way that made sense to me, and it didn't necessarily agree with them all. The mystery is incredibly complex, and weaves numerous characters, jealousies and corruption into it, but although there is almost no chance that you will solve it, it does ultimately make sense!

In other news . . . my new laptop arrives on Tuesday. I'm already excited!

I just spent the last hour or so 'following' Harry Potter actors' twitter accounts, and reading their old tweets. Beyond sad.

Paul got two things in the post today that made him very happy - the first being a Poe Bust wallet from Karen Kavett (yes, I am jealous! It is very awesome indeed :) ), and the second being Wii Sports Resort, which I think I'm gonna head downstairs to play now.

Until tomorrow! x

And onto the film . . .

I saw 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince' today. To be honest, my thoughts on it are still a bit of a jumble. It didn't help that I got very little sleep last night (mainly due to the crazy brightness of the streetlamp outside my window. It's getting to the point where something must be done. Hammers at the ready!), so I was a bit confused before I got in there.

I remember really enjoying the movie whilst it was on. Largely because it looks gorgeous, everything is so well lit, some of his simplest shots are absoloutely breath-taking, characters literally glow . . . and, as anyone who knows my film taste well will tell you, I'm often won over by movies that look pretty, almost regardless of plot. It was funny too, and seeing it with the siblings meant that we all sniggered at the wrong moments, and shrieked hysterically at anything intended to be humorous. And the acting of the whole cast has improved by leaps and bounds - I think David Yates must be brilliant to work with, as even the more minor characters have lost their awkwardness. It was nice to see the girl from Basil Brush playing Katie Bell. And, as everyone has been saying, Alan Rickman was fantastic, but Tom Felton was extraordinary, giving new depth to a character who is complex enough in the book, often with no lines.

But I'm wondering if reading the book the day before the movie was a mistake. I'm very glad I watched the film aterwards and not before, but a longer gap between the two would have been a good idea. Noticing all the differences from the plot, big and little, got in the way of appreciating the film for what it was, and I left the cinema in one of those die-hard 'they got it all wrong' moods, which I've never had with Harry Potter. I think the big 3 for me were the constant references to the cabinet from a couple of scenes in, when it's meant to be a big mystery; the missing out a whole chunk of story about the Muggle world/PM/ Ministry of Magic; and the absence of large sections of Voldemort backstory (surely what this film is meant to be about). Other additions/omissions (Tonks+Lupin, Bill+Fleur, Dobby, the crazy Burrow Attack) were sad, but more understandable in terms of pace, though you wonder how much extra stuff they'll have to cram in to the final two-parter just to make it make sense. Other minor character develepment things were frustrating though - most crucially, as far as I'm concerned, the switch of 'he'll kill my family' with 'he'll kill me', which seemed to partly undermine the symapthy they'd built up for Draco. It's the pointless little word swaps that make me annoyed with the screenwriter. And, now I'm looking for it, I can see what is meant by Steve Kloves creating his own, far less believable, versions of J.K's characters, largely by reassigning lines. Oh, and I was frustrated that they kept so much teenage romantic angst in at the expense of more important parts of the book.

But that's enough complaining. As a film it is fantastic. It does everything a good family flick should, it's funny, tragic, scary, exciting, it shows teenagers in a fairly realistic light, it has characters that you care about deeply. It gleams with quality in every aspect (apart, perhaps, from the script), and it looks so good that you'll want to wrap it round you like a blanket and take a nap, or eat it or something. I'm already wanting to see it again.

Snape, Snape, Severus Snape

I read 'Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince' today. I'm seeing the film tomorrow morning, and although I'd claimed that I had no time to read it, and that it might be fun to watch the film first (and therefore enjoy it as a film, without knowing all the twists and turns beforehand), a whole host of youtube reviews was enough to change my mind. The conclusion seems to be that the film, despite some of the best acting and most stylish directing in the franchise, leaves out a number of fairly crucial plot elements (such as the explanation of horcruxes), and continues to not allow room for much character develepment. Slightly worried that I might get to the film only to not understand it, I plunged into the book with a day to go.

As it was, it really didn't take me long to read. All credit to J. K Rowling - it was a really gripping novel, I havn't read like that for a long time. I think it may be my favourite so far - I know a lot of people see it as a 'filler' book without much going on until the last few chapters, but I like it when there's a bit more space to enjoy Hogwarts for the wonderful place that it is, and to watch all those teenage personalities clash and change. It was great to see Draco become a more complex character, and it's got to the point when all the 'minor' Hogwarts students seem to be real people too. Dumbledore was as mysterious, charming and heart-breaking as ever. And I continue to be totally fascinated by Tom Riddle. My favourite part of the series is probably the Voldermort back-story, and I still have a strong attachment to the 'Chamber of Secrets' (even the film), so I've been excited about this one ever since I heard what it was about. If J.K. ever does more spin-offs some extra Tom Riddle would be much appreciated, thank you. Her writing style also seems a world away from the first novel - I'd always seen her as a fantastic storyteller, but perhaps not a great writer, but I loved the way she wrote this book.

Then, of course, there was Snape. Here it is probably best to explain that I have a complicated relationship with the Harry Potter series. I went to the type of faith school where one or two teachers were strongly against the books and that meant that very few of us read them - as a phenomena it largely passed us by. We were aware that a lot of people were talking about them, but Hogwarts hysteria didn't grip our school like it did almost every other. I didn't pick up the first book, therefore, until my youngest brother and sister (then nine, now thirteen) became obsessed with them. I'm struggling to remember if I saw the first few films before the books or afterwards - I think it was all roughly in the same couple of months. And I really like them. But having missed out on them at the age when they would have been really influential, because I'm the type of girl who does get swept up into these worlds, and because I'm from the generation who grew up at the same time that Harry, Ron and Hermione did, it's always been a little bittersweet for me. I've never had that level of devotion to them, I've always started reading the novel knowing 90% of what was going to happen, and the people I see in my head as I read are the actors in the films.

Which makes analysing characters like Snape in this book so difficult. I love Snape. He is probably my favaourite character. But I worry that a lot of this is because he is played by Alan Rickman in the films, and I love Alan Rickman. I'm also concerned that a lot of how I felt in this book was affected by how much I knew about the next one. I liked Snape in HPB, I felt his pain, sympathised with his predicament, and found myself increasingly frustrated at Harry for being totally oblivious. But for readers at the time, those who had queued up all night to get the book on its day of release, who then read it within 24 hours, did they feel like this? J.K. seems to spell it out, but does she really? Would I have found it 'obvious' from the first chapter if I didn't already know how it all ends? Would I, like Harry, have felt furious and betrayed by Snape? I wonder. Oh the confusion of The Girl Who Got Left Behind. :)

On Haruki Murakami

Much of today was spent finishing 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' by Haruki Murakami. Like every Murakami book, it has probably crept into my mental Top Ten Books list. Sometimes I worry that one day my whole list will be Murakami. He is widely regarded as one of the world's greatest living authors after all. Luckily his books are also so strange, surreal and unexpected, and so infrequently have a plot that can be explained in less words than the book itself, that within a week I'll have forgotten almost everything about it. Within two weeks I'll be wondering what I ever saw in it in the first place. And so there isn't a single Murakami novel in my actual Top Ten Books list after all.

It's difficult to explain, because Murakami is an author unlike any other I've come across. Admittedly I've read a lot more children's and YA fiction than books aimed at adults, and he's the only Japanese writer I've ever heard of. Perhaps there's loads of other people out there writing in his odd style, and I just havn't read enough books. Still, with Murakami it feels less like you're reading a book, and more like you're feeling around a labyrinth in the dark. I never have any idea what will happen next. I know that can be said about many well-written books, that twists and turns are often exactly what makes a novel so enjoyable, but rarely can you say it and mean it literally. In most books there is a plot that can at least be vaguely set up on the blurb on the cover. Four children and dog discover treasure in a cave. A murdered girl looks down from her heaven and narrates her family's experiences. A family of girls long to find suitable husbands. Not so for Murakami. In Murakami books things just happen, often with seemingly little relevance to the 'main plot', if such thing exists in his book at all.

Take 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'. The blurb tells almost nothing. A man's cat disappears, this unsettles his wife, then his everyday life unravels as a series of strange things happen. An odd summary for a book which is over 600pages long. But to tell anything else really does give the plot away, because there does not appear to be an over-arching plot, at least not until the end, so every little thing that happens is the plot. The 'start' of the mystery at the heart of the story doesn't occur really until 200pages in, so even referring to that would be giving too much away. Characters come and go - soothsayer sisters, elderly generals, evil politicians, complicated teenagers, insightful fashion designers and their mute assistants - and much of the book is made up of their letters and long accounts of their life-stories. At the same time, it doesn't feel like he's writing these things at random, just that the meaning of them is just beyond our grasp.

Somehow this never feels frustrating or overly-intellectual though. Yes, there probably are deeper meanings to these books that I don't understand, but they are so beautiful, detailed and imaginative that it hardly matters. They can be followed because what he says on that very page is so enthralling that you don't necessarily think about what lies in the chapters before and ahead, you just go with his flow. Yes, the sex and violence are explicit, and these aren't novels that I'd recommend to everybody, but he does have a way with words.

One of his books that has been very near the top of the beloved Top Ten ever since I first picked it up is a collection of his short stories - 'Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman'. The random seems less random in short story form, and therefore is less of a distraction. Not only will you remember these 'plots', but they will gently inprint themselves on your mind. Man-eating cats, stone paperweights that move themselves, people who talk to themselves as if reciting poetry - he makes the surreal seem everyday and the everyday surreal. I'd reccommend 'Blind Willow', and his other short story collection 'The Elephant Vanishes', to anyone interested in trying a Murakami book for the first time. If you're wanting to plunge straight into the novels I'd suggest 'Norweigan Wood' (his first novel, which is probably slightly more 'mainstream' than most. He seems to get more surreal with age), or 'Dance, Dance, Dance', which is typical 'strange' Murakami, but is so obviously like that from the outset that it doesn't feel so peculiar.

I hope this didn't put you off. Murakami is a wonderful experience, but a difficult one to explain. I'm yet to meet a person who hasn't declared him to be one of their favourite authors after reading one of his books. He's internationally adored and, as far as I'm concerned, the literary genius of our times.

He also has a stunning website with incredible music.

Tomorrow will be an entirely diferent type of book - I'm hoping to read the whole of Harry Potter 6 in 24 hours. I was planning to see the film first, but then I cahnged my mind . . . and I'm meant to be seeing the film on Thursday. Oh well.

A blogging challenge . . .

It's decided. Unless I'm away, I'm going to blog every day for the rest of the summer. Why? Because I'm terrible at keeping a diary, and it would be nice to remember what I actually got up to over the summer break. And I like blogging, I just always forget to do it. So here goes . . .

This summer so far has been fun. Actually, the fun part is pretty much over . . . I went to Skye for a week with the family, which was great. I was then home or a day before getting a train down to Brighton (a very long trip, I read almost all of David Mitchell's 'Black Swan Green', which is an incredible, imaginative, moving book. It was the second time I'd read it and, like all Mitchell's books, I'd totally forgotten how good it was) for a church conference. That was good, plus there was the beach and plenty of graffiti photography opportunities which always make me happy. On the way back I stopped off in the Lake Districy for a long weekend with some friends from the sixth-form days, which was fantastic. It's weird how those two years of 'transition' at college, which most people overlook and leave behind pretty quickly, got me the only bunch of friends that I've really kept in contact with. It's insane that it was ive years ago when we first started Ridge. Madness. It really doesn't feel like that long ago at all. Despite me being he only one who took a gap year several of the rest are on four year/ foundation/ graduate courses, so hopefully we won't have too many people disappearing on us yet.

So now I'm back, and writing obituaries (my summer job. Unusual I know. But it's really interesting, if a little sad), and thinking about my dissertation . . . . I should hopefully get back to Manchester for a couple of weekends at some point, and one or two people are planning on visiting me up here in Glasgow, so fingers crossed the next couple of months shouldn't be toooo boring. Plus I came up with a list of '100 things to do this summer' (but could only think of 90). So far I've completed:

1. Write cards for old friends (postcards ftw!)
3. Start a creative writing journal (an actual notebook, not online as most other things in my life. Though I might start an online one too eventually)
25. Buy replacement flower-power bracelets (me and the sisters had matching flower bracelets, but they all broke this year. So we've got new new beaded ones instead).
47. Sign up for the organ donor register (after all those years of saying I would it took approx. 3 minutes)
58. Get back into a retro computer game (Tony Hawks 3 on the Playstation, oh yes :D)
59. Play a retro board game (The Game of Life. Twice.)

And so far that's it. Quite a few to go then. Some of them I'm looking at and already thinking that they're not going to work out. The heat-wave was very short-lived, so majorly out-doorsy plans may have to be scrapped . . . but it's waving off the boredom anyway.

In other news . . whilst I was away Dan (my youngest brother) did something to my laptop that made it go back to factory settings . . . or maybe he didn't and it just happened like he said. It's not the greatest of computers so it could probably have happened to anyone. But as it is, it happened whilst I was away, and a combination of guilt, a recent inheritance and my approaching disseration means the parents have very kindly ordered a new one. It has about six times the memory of this one, it's purple, and it has a built-in camera. Oh yes. Which means after all those years of saying I wanted to vlog I might actually do so . . . be afraid.