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Blogging is a strange business. People who blog, I sometimes wonder what we all have in common. The common perception of bloggers is that we're all sad, sad loners trying to gain attention through expressing their feelings and thoughts where no one listens to them in real life. As much as I hope it doesn't apply to me, to an extent that can be true. I don't know why I blog. I used to think of it as my emotion-venting mechanism, but over time it's transitioned into something less meaningful. Or maybe more, I don't know. What I write now, it feels more like me, immortalised on screen [for want of a better description] while when I first started out blogging, I felt pressured to write stuff that was enjoyable to read, that other people would want to read, which defeats the purpose of this blog being mine. I don't know what changed. It's possible that it took me a while for it to dawn on me that very few people read what I write, and the few people that do, I can almost definitely trust. In essence, I don't need to impress anyone, so I don't have to write what feels unnatural, so I do it more because it's part of me now. Why do you blog, if you do?

But about the title - there're a few people I want to read this, and I'm stumped for how to get them to do so. Short of thrusting the link in their face and demanding that they check it out, there's no way of really doing it without opening it up to the possibility of being seen by loads of people that I don't want to. It's hard to not look like you want the person to check it out when in fact you do want them to check it out but you don't want it to come across as desperate, so you try and be subtle about it but having a blog isn't the most usual of things so, unfortunately, there's no way of really getting someone to check it out short of thrusting the link in their face and demanding they do so. Of course, there's always Facebook, but that's essentially thrusting the link in everyone's face and demanding they all check it out, which reeeeeally is not what I want. I'm way too much of a bitch.

Speaking of which, I can reactivate my Facebook on Tuesday. It's probably going to be the biggest anticlimax ever. 

I'm weirdly excited about Eurovision. I wonder how unpopular England will be this year. It's astonishing how Graham Norton can still be so optimistic about it. We've already been, and I can safely say that the Russian grannies were better.

Semifreedom!

Went into Ipswich with Alien today - we went into the shop that is way too cool for the likes of me, that sells dreamcatchers and sixteen-person bongs and that kind of thing, to get my tragus pierced and, despite providing a student railcard [an official document including my date of birth and a passport photo] to prove that I'm over sixteen, they wouldn't accept it as legitimate ID. So the girl said that I'd have to get a parent on the phone in order to get one. In retrospect, I don't know why I didn't give her my sister's number and hope for the best, but she rang mum and asked her for my age, told her what I was after, and had no choice but to ask me kindly to leave the premises after mum went and said that she'd "really rather I didn't get any more piercings than I already have". Grr. Acquired a stretcher instead though, so I'll rebel in another way. Which do you think is less ugly? A tragus ring or a massive earlobe that flaps in the wind? Rather I didn't, tchuh. They're my ears. Other than that of my mother, the attitudes of some people towards body modifications pisses me off so much. Eww, why would you want loads of piercings, they're disgusting - imbecile, don't look at them! Get back to wanking over your One Direction poster, fucking bigot.

[NB - Ben, I'm not referring to you because, unlike some others, you're not going about expressing your disapproval in a way that makes me angry. And I know you prefer Justin Bieber.]

Anyway, yeah. Other than the tragus mishap [which really didn't enrage me very much at all, I'm making it out to be way more annoying than it actually was], I had a thoroughly enjoyable day. We ate so much crap, and the feeling of victory after finishing whatever sweetmeat we were tackling at the time was matchless. We went and saw Dark Shadows which we agreed is pretty forgettable. Not that it's bad, just not brilliant. Still. The cinema was almost empty and we had a great time. And there's a relatively new shop in town that advertises as selling everything for a fiver, full of end-of-the-line crap from other clothing shops. There're no changing rooms or anything so everything you buy is a gamble, made more massive by the fact that I don't think they take refunds. Alien and I both took massive gambles and got a dress each, and promptly monopolised the toilets in Marks and Spencer to experiment and found that they're both great. Her's is particularly awesome. It's rainbow striped. She said she's going to wear it to Pride later this year, which is great. Ohh I can't wait for Pride! So then in our new dresses we headed to this enormous park, the kind so achingly pretty that you wonder how it can possibly exist in a dive such as Ipswich, and lay there in the sun for a while. It was so... contented. 

Band practice in the evening. Increasingly, I love going. 

If you can be bothered, listen to this. I don't like Russell Brand, but I had no idea he could sing. I could not be more surprised by how good he is. 

Title goes here

Ahh! I'm so bothered by the essay question at the end of the psychology paper I had today! I took one look at it and almost cried. Effects of daycare on infant development, damnit. That's all about social competence and aggression, all that stuff. The one no one ever remembers. Hopefully everyone else messed up too. Is that mean of me to hope? Probably. I regret nothing. Ugh, daycare! All I've learned in psychology is that everything that happens to you as a child results in a maniacal adult psychopath.

I'm watching The Drum, a film from 1938 on Film4 while I'm waiting for the first Men in Black to begin, and the unconvincing special effects in combination with the superlatively wooden acting is really quite charming.

At least that exam was the last one for a while. The next and last is on Tuesday, when I'll be sobbing over my paper because the thought of Simon Amstell doing a gig at the Northampton Derngate the night before will be prowling my mind and kicking me where it hurts most with golf shoes.

On the other hand, I completely didn't realise that Wes Bentley is in Hunger Games! I feel a million times more inspired to actually watch it now. I read the books and enjoyed them but, I don't know, maybe just not enough to want to go crazy over it. Cough, Artemis Fowl forever. But yeah, Wes Bentley as Seneca Crane [whose role in the story I never really got, but I don't care because I've heard he has a cool beard] - that's cool, right? His performance, his flawless performance in American Beauty made me want to be a better human being. Enormous appreciation for Wes Bentley.

Read this

Just talking about anything other than school...

Since reading Chicken Tits' latest post, I have found something else to add to my list of foods that I would, in a second, kill a person for. Joining chicken korma, ham and pineapple pizza, a hog roast and barbecue wings: chicken fajitas. OHMYGOSH, I want. January 1st, 2013, bitch.

Hopefully going into town with Alien on Thursday. Hopefully getting my tragus pierced. Ahh. Thinking about it now is making my stomach churn. It genuinely blows my mind, that humans choose to pierce their skin. No other animal feels the need to punch holes in their face! Why do we do it? Why, why, why?

It'll be great when my brother's home. I feel anxious for him to be back, though I'm also worried that I'm pinning too much hope on his return - in that kind of, everything will be okay when he's back way when, really, other than having my brother home, nothing will have changed unrecognisably. 

According to an online doctor I am 41% OCD. Seems legit.

Listening to Wilco's Summerteeth album like an obsessive crazyperson, because its concentration of genius, amalgamated into a soup of delicious with incredible lyrics and melodies and everything else musical that I don't know about, turns me on.

Just because no one cares, here is a list of people with voices that transcend anything else this planet has ever churned out:

• Nick Cave
• Jack White
• Jennifer Holliday
• Jeff Mangum
• Jeff Tweedy
• Antony Hegarty
• David-Imar Herman Dune
• Edith Piaf
• Freddie Mercury
• Rufus Wainwright

And another thing...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ7C_ZoMMkk

Universities

Beginning to really panic now, for a few reasons:

1. I want to study Creative Writing at the UEA, which is the most competitive of its kind because it's, kind of, the best in the country;
2. I am having doubts as to whether or not I am capable of getting onto that course;
3. I need to stay near East Anglia;
4. There are no other decent universities in East Anglia. Well, there's Cambridge, but let's be realistic.

Ugh... How do potential medical students do it? I have a friend who wants to be a doctor, and she's the cleverest person I know and yet she was telling  me that if she doesn't get straight As then, no compromise, no med school will take her. She can't afford to let herself down and, thinking about it last night, I realised that I can't either. UEA requires a minimum of AAA at A2 and after my disastrous language paper yesterday I'm wondering if I'm at all suited to any kind of English course. It's unfair.

Why couldn't I have been an astronaut? It would have been so much easier.

Friday

I just made a rectangle. It's yellow.

ARGH, goodness me. Four exams to go. 

English language today couldn't have gone much worse. I'd rather not think about it. I've been spending the evening watching The Office and drinking Dr Pepper because it's easier to do than confront the fucking annoying amount of work I've got to get through this weekend. Despite that, I'm still crazy-grateful that it's here. Two days of hugely limited freedom, but it's still freer than school. The last few days have been a little traumatic. But, I have relearned how to moonwalk. My life > your life.

Seann Walsh is so nice. Just practicing some casual voyeurism, it's fine. And he is ROLLING ON THE FLOOR.

Two chunks of chocolate left. I feel victorious.

Talk to him, please talk to him, talk to him talk to him talk to him.

Hundredth post!

How surreal. 

That's all I have to say, it's really not that big a deal now that I'm here. Bit of an anticlimax, really.

A guy in the band I'm in had a baby yesterday evening. Well, his wife did. They've given him an unusual name. Inigo. It's really quite beautiful. He sounds like a winner. Got me thinking about what I'd call my child, if I was to have one now. Not that I've been thinking about it for years or anything, because I'm a bit of a creep. I like Lazarus. And Ezekiel. And Evangeline. And Lenore. [After the poem, not the fabric conditioner.]

HRAH. Exams. Two down, five to go. Biology on Monday, English lit earlier today. Biology couldn't have gone much better. I'll be disappointed and surprised if I don't do better than last time. Still, I AM SO RELIEVED that lit is done. It didn't go as well as it could have, but the poetry question was quite nice. "Compare the ways in which Heaney and Sheers write about love." I blathered on about parental love for five sides of A4 because I'd done well in a practice essay on something similar a couple of days ago. 

Not going into school tomorrow, thank goodness. Giving my hand some recuperation after that beast of an exam earlier. My wrist sounds like a cement mixer. 

I'm going to take a nap, and then wake up in time to watch Sweeney Todd later. I miss Johnny Depp in the good ol' days. Edward Scissorhands. Finding Neverland. Sleepy Hollow. He's been in nothing but these shitty, kooky films since Public Enemies and it saddens me greatly.

Simon Amstell at the Northampton Derngate next week and I HAVE AN EXAM THE NEXT DAY, DAMNIT.

Did you know, James Morrison has done an acoustic cover of Coolio's 1995 "hit" Gangsta's Paradise? I almost choked on my cereal. 

T minus twenty hours.

Biology, ha, hahahahaha, ha, I know nothing.

I messed up a little bit, leading. Well, kind of. Everyone was really lovely and supportive though, which makes an enormous difference - and the [better] guitarist from the band came along and backed me up, for which I am so incredibly, indescribably grateful. I think I might have actually cried if he hadn't been there.

Let's think. Tomorrow is biology in the morning, and I have English language revision after school, so in the time between what should I do? Hmm. Probably literature, that exam is on Wednesday. Daaaaamn. Seamus Heaney is going to be the reason I fail my A levels. 

Someone told me something interesting today. There is a natural order in which we describe things, from which if we deviate it sounds wrong. It's called an "adjective hierarchy", for want of something better, and here is the order:

1. Opinion
2. Size
3. Age
4. Shape
5. Colour
6. Origin
7. Material
8. Purpose

It makes sense, when you think about it. In the unlikely event you bother attributing eight adjectives to a single noun, here is how you might describe Boris Johnson:

Boris Johnson is an entertaining, portly, middle-aged, humanoid, white-British  politician.

That was probably a bad example, I can't think of anything for "material" other than just "human". But it does make sense. Describing him as middle-aged, British, entertaining, a politician and portly just sounds wrong. This is what the whole of English language is to me - finding out that that thing you've been doing for years but never thought about actually has a name and a crapload of rules that, now you're aware of them, make you really self-conscious. I find myself deliberately flouting the maxims of conversation just to see how it messes with people I'm talking to, and I totally notice when someone's trying to assert their power with the language they use and I know how to crumble their authority and ahhh, it's so cool. 

I need to stop yanking my hair out.

On another, mildly interesting note, this is my ninety-ninth blog post, which means that my next will be my hundredth. Now that's weird. I've been doing this for almost a year, I think. Wait. Is it? Can't remember. Yeah, almost a year, I was on study leave for my GCSEs when I started blogging and now I'm on study leave again but ahhh. Weirdness.

Here is a picture of my nephew and myself in my back garden.

Unending frustration!

Oh, okay, you're not going to give me mark schemes to your past papers, AQA website? FUCK YOU, AND YOUR MUM, WHO IS ALSO YOUR DAD AND YOUR UNCLE AND YOUR BROTHER ALL AT THE SAME TIME YOU BASTARD FUCKER 

I need those mark schemes! I need those mark schemes! Exam is on Monday! That is LESS THAN TWO DAYS AWAY and the internet is screwing me over like all but one of my ex boyfriends, which is so, argh, unnecessary. 

Furious. Outraged, Livid.. Incensed. Vexed. Infuriated. Seething.  Enraged.

Anxious trichotillomania is prevalent. 

I need to chill out. And stop being so damn horny all the time. It's annoying that my hormones have teamed up with my libido and decided to go gallivanting off into the crevices of my filthy mind ALL THE TIME and contrive to be more distracting than a house fire when I'm trying to revise here, guys. 

I'm leading worship solo tomorrow for the first time. Here is a conversation between Mum and myself earlier today:

  Mum: Are you nervous?

  Me: Not really. I have exams. I have bigger things to be worrying about.

 Mum: Yes, but there's no chance of messing up your exams in front of an audience.

Cheers, Ma.

There's a song my cousin mentioned on one of her blog posts a few weeks back, called Just Hold Me by Maria Mena and I'm kind of addicted. Listen to it, if you get the time. WhyYyYyYyYyY an' all.

Nighttime mincing

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etN5OrZNMuA&feature=autoplay&list=PLB401CD10B7A4D19D&playnext=2&shuffle=649991

ABSOLUTE FILTH

I was shocked and appalled. Kpop has reached a new slutty, bunny ear'd low - but damn it's catchy. Bo peep bo peep bo peep bo peep bo peep bo peep bo peep OH and all that.

Last night, at about half ten, I decided to go mental and went running around my village in the dark. My legs hurt but I feel like I've postponed whatever inactivity-caused disease I'm on my way to contracting. It was quite nice, really. Complete silence and darkness and the quiet adrenaline at knowing that I could be kidnapped at any moment and the enormous freakout when I nearly ran into someone else with the same self-conscious idea that if you go running when everyone else is in bed then they're less likely to witness you looking your worst. We exchanged a nod and carried on. I hope I keep doing it. Who knows, by summer I could be ripped. 

Oh for the love of everything pure and good, GET A ROOM

Seriously!

Imploding brain syndrome

It's funny how exhausting it is doing nothing.

Yesterday, Mum guilt-tripped me into going with her to this guy's house to do some washing up. "It'll just be an hour," she said. "I'll pay you, it won't be that bad." Bullshit, it was the most disillusioning, depressing, upsetting couple of hours of my life so far. This guy, he's retired, widowed, an alcoholic living in utter crap and it was like being shown a glimpse into the future I'd rather die than live to see. My fear of becoming old and decrepit has been reaffirmed and oh God oh God I don't want to grow up. Reality has taken a barbed club to my face and broken the rose-tinted glasses I've been naïvely refusing to relinquish since it became apparent that my mind was not growing up in synchronisation with the slow continuity of another number adding itself to the seventeen I've been getting my head around for, fuck, almost five months. Five months, is that actually real? Shiiit.

I nearly went out for a midnight wander around my village last night. Nearly. And again, just an hour ago, I stood, unlocked the front door and nearly opened it - and then it struck me, the immense likelihood of my bumping into the local Ripper and managing to get myself mangled and gouged and stabby stabby stab stab stabbed and of course it was a stupid idea in the first place so I locked the door again and returned to my knitting, my blanket and my cat, feeling sheepish but glad I wasn't being murdered. I had a complete change of heart in the four seconds it took to convince myself that I was, at the very least, going to fall down a manhole and drown in the haemolymph of a thousand squashed beetles, and that is because I have problems and my brain is growing toadstools.

Arghhhhhhh I am so sick of biology. Stupid subject. It all becomes irrelevant after GCSE. Phagocytosis, diversity index equation, competitive inhibitors, non-competitive inhibitors, transpiration alveoli spiracles Fick's law oral rehydration therapy oxygen dissociation B cells T cells base sequences exocytosis glycogen motherfucking hydrogen bonds inspiration expiration haemoglobin tralalalalalala what is this? Will any of it bring me happiness? 

Mum casually dropped a little bombshell earlier - both my brother and sister before me earned AAB at A level. Now I have to match or better them to not be a failure. AAB, damnit.

Anyone see Simon Amstell on Graham Norton on Friday? His social unease makes me so happy. I've figured that if you were to carefully place Anonymous and myself in a room with him and seal any exists then the concentration of awkward would be too much and the world wouldn't survive.

Something a little surreal that happened to me - I got a job, kind of, I think, maybe, I'm not sure, possibly. Waitressing for events that the company caters for. Which is mental, because, heh, I can't do that, heh heh, but I need money. 

I would kill for some chicken. I would actually kill a person for a fried chicken leg.
Speaking of which, Dad came home from work yesterday with a basket of doves, as you do. They really are pretty. Six of them, a month old and so cute. I can't get over how white they are. I saw my cat watching them earlier, and the look of "mm, lunch" was worryingly evident on his unexpressive, ugly face. I love him so much, the disgusting fleabag.
If you don't want to waste your youth on the single most infuriating, addictive game on the planet, don't click here. Don't make the mistake I did.
Pissing off the altos, oh how funny, get out of my head now. Or not. Okay, okay.

No, it's not cold, it's May. You don't listen.

It is indeed a melancholy realisation, that I can no longer be bothered to inflict a song or ponderous word at you with any kind of regularity.

Red red red red red. I wonder why it's growing on me at the rate it is.

Today's been pretty good. Curious and I bullied Alien into eating sweets at lunchtime, despite the vow she made on Tuesday to not eat gelatin for as long as she's a vegetarian. In retrospect, the guilt is immense.

Erratic thinking! I began to create my Mind Palace today, to sort my head into logical order and set it all out in a way that's easy to find, but then I remembered that logic brings me out in a rash and that any kind of orderly manner disagrees with me.

There's something happening between two friends and [assuming it doesn't go tits up] I'm delighted for them, but there's someone else who's completely oblivious and it's galling because I don't know to what extent he'll care or take it personally or sink into depression because what keeps happening to him is happening again and arrghhhh. Despite how great these other two people are, I feel terrible for him in advance. Ugh. I care too much. Or not enough, I don't know.

Anyway. Pizza. Band practice. Yay. I like that the band is becoming an increasingly significant part of my life, though I worry that it's for the wrong reasons. Ciao, anyway.

Bivouac

Just wanted to share that word with you. Bivouac. It's my favourite.

Tuesday

Tuesday. Tuesday is Tuesday. Happier than Monday. Not as good as Wednesday. I was born on a Tuesday. Tuesday's child is full of grace, laugh out loud.

Today's been tiring. There's someone I want to speak to about something that I know means a lot to them, but I don't know how to approach the subject without seeming like a creep. Looks like I'm never going to have a chance to talk to them anyway. Haven't seen them for weeks.

Everyone at school looks forlorn. I ask them how they are and they say that they're fine and they're not. I want to hug away their melancholy but I'd probably just replace it with my own.

Wore red today. It made me happy. Anonymous, in his typically homosexual manner, took one look at me and went "Darling, you look fabulous in your get-up." I love him so much, even if he is being a prat about giving blood.

There's still a hole in my arm. 

Check out the new format plaything I just found, oh yeah.

I'm off to watch Vicar of Dibley with Mum. Good luck in whatever short-term goals you have.

Dirty old river, must you keep rolling,

Flowing into the night?

People so busy, makes me feel dizzy,

Taxi light shines so bright.

But I don't need no friends.

As long as I gaze on Waterloo sunset

I am in paradise.