It's funny -

I'm sure no one envies me, and yet I consider myself unbelievably fortunate. University? - pff, maybe later - and yet my own skepticism doesn't compromise the excitement and fear and whatever else is being felt at this moment by everyone waiting for the first day of uni. And so it shouldn't, of course - but I think the reason I'm in such distraction by the impending Year of Complete Isolation, is that I just don't understand why everyone's going. I mean - I've had to explain my reasons for not wanting to go. I suppose you could say that I'm worried that my friends - the overwhelming majority of my friends - are going off to university with no clearer idea of why they're going than I did six months ago when, amid revision and UCAS and all that bollocks, it kind of just occurred to me one day that I didn't want to walk this path being laid for me.

When I'm feeling particularly fluffy, I like to compare it to a pasta machine, with "it" being this big, ugly, proverbial SYSTEM that everyone likes to throw around and exploit and criticise - present company included, naturally.

Try and take me seriously for a minute. I know it's hard.

As I said - this SYSTEM is like a pasta machine. A pasta machine that primarily makes tagliatelle. The windy thing on the side of the pasta machine turns; this, within the context of the SYSTEM, is the passage of time. It turns, and churns out string after string of tagliatelle - and the tagliatelle is delicious, and edible, and everything that it should be, "and the Lord said that it was good" blah blah - but then, from nowhere, a lump of pasta-dough doesn't want to be tagliatelle. It wants to be a bow-tie, or a curly ribbon, or a shell, or a loopy-loop, or a windy tunnel. The pasta machine, unable/unwilling to accommodate the wishes of this nonconformist, rejects it; it gets caught in the workings, slows everything down, gets put on the receiving end of a thousand disapproving looks and exasperated lectures, all of which the pasta has heard before, until the words "You'll like it when you're tagliatelle" become the bane of its existence and it is left with two choices: to force itself to mould into tagliatelle, or to leap headfirst out of the pasta machine and pray to God that they'll land safely. 

That is what it's like, admitting to everyone who ever said, "You'll do well at university" that, eheheh, I don't want to go. First, the silence, then the questioning, then the unhelpful advice, then the "Oh, well, you can always change your mind". Thanks, lady. Further invalidate my autonomy, why don't you.

Without turning into some neo-hippy/hipster in vintage clogs and a fifties housewife petticoat, fuck the PASTA MACHINE.