As Natalie Imbruglia says:

Ignore reality, there’s nothing you can do about it.

WARNING: It has come to my attention that this post is getting very long compared to the majority I have written…pretty much ever, and so you really should make sure you’re set for the long haul. Especially considering the number of times the subject changes and then there’s the things that don’t seem to make sense, or at least not much, but I guess that’s just the way I'm feeling.

Song 1: Smoke- Natalie Imbruglia

Song 2: Lay Me Low- The Albion Band

Song 3: Tangled- Maroon 5

Lyrics 1: Misinformation is a weapon of mass destruction- Faithless- Mass Destruction.

Lyrics 2: Maybe,
You’re gonna be the one
That saves me.
And after all
You’re my Wonderwall- Oasis- Wonderwall

Lyrics 3: I can't lie
I can't tell you that I'm something I'm not
No matter how I try
I'll never be able to give you something
Something that I just haven't got- Meat loaf- Two Out Of Three Ain’t Bad

Quote 1: River: Sure, I got a secret. More than one. Don't seem like that I tell 'em to you now, do it? Anyone off Titan colony knows better than to talk to strangers. You're talkin' loud enough for the both of us, though, ain't ya? I've met a dozen like you. Skipped off-home early. Minor graft jobs here and there. Spent some time in the lockdown, but less than you claim. And you're, what, a petty thief with delusions standing? Sad little king of a sad little hill.
Badger: Nice to see someone from the old homestead.
River: Not really. Call me if anyone interesting shows up. - Firefly- Shindig

Quote 2: Old man dies. Young girl lives. That’s the way it should be. - Hartigan- Sin City

Quote 3: Jack Sparrow: No! No no no! Bad. You burnt all the food, all the shade. The rum!
Elizabeth Swan: Yes, the rum is gone.
JS: Why is the rum gone?!
ES: 1, because it is a vile disgusting drink that turns even the most respectable men into idiots, 2, that signal is over 1000 feet high. The ENTIRE Royal Navy are out looking for me. Do you really think there is even the SLIGHTEST chance they won’t see it?!
JS: But why is the rum gone?!
ES: Just wait. Give it an hour, maybe too, keep a sharp eye; you’ll see white sails on the horizon.
JS: (Mutters) Must have been awful for you Jack. Must have been Terrible! (Yells) Well it bloody is now! (Stops and spies Royal Navy ship) There’ll be no living with her after this. - Pirates of the Caribbean- Curse of the Black Peral

I’ve been in a funny mood recently. I haven’t been not ok, but then again I wouldn’t say I’ve been the way I used to be. Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe not. I haven’t decided yet. Have to see where this road takes me I guess.

It’s strange to think, but next week is my final week of being a fresher. That’s when my exams finish. Hell, I'm coming home next Friday. And yeah, it should be great, and I’m looking forward to coming home for the summer. Hanging out with people I haven’t seen for ages. But at the same time, I dunno, I think I'm finally beginning to see Birmingham as home too. It’s strange.

Hell, last time I was home and had to buy a ticket, I wrote the info under the heading “train home”. It’s like what Largeman says in Garden State, “Home is just a place that people miss.” And by the way, that is an AMAZING film. Seriously recommend it to people. Anyway, back to the home quote.

It’s an illusion really. I mean, the other sayings about home don’t really apply, do they? “Where the heart is”, “where you lay your hat” etc. Well, my heart is with me, so I guess wherever I am is home, but it doesn’t always feel like that. And as for the hat, well, metaphorically speaking cos I don’t wear hats… but even if I did, does that mean I have 3 homes? How does that work?! Surely home is just one place. And yet, sometimes it feels that I’m home when I’m with certain people. It’s not always the same people, and it’s not always the same place, but sometimes being with them makes me feel like this is home. This is where I want to be. Have you ever played that game? If you could be with anyone from anytime anywhere, where would you be and what would you be doing?

And it doesn’t even have to be an intellectual answer. Hell, sometimes the answer to the question is with the person who is on your mind at the moment. Just to say hi, or to see them. *shrug*. I dunno, like I said I’m in a strange mood. Guess if you wanna keep reading this you’ll have to join me in it.

I dunno. I think I'm beginning to hate exams. Things always seem to go wrong around me and exams. I mean, look at the past few years: mock GCSE’s- great uncle died, and was told the real reason my mum had moved out in the September. AS levels- The night I finished then I was told that my parents were separating. For good, no turning back, this is the end of my family as I knew it. A levels- the whole being disappointed about uni, then running round looking for places to live and then moving away from everyone and everything that I had grown used to. Hell, up until my dad moved out I had lived in the same house for 14 years. So yeah, exams and I don’t have a good track record of late.

Yet saying that the exams I've had so far seem to have been ok, well, except 1, but even that one I managed to get a fairly decent answer out for the first essay, it’s just the second one that seemed to crash and burn.

Maybe if I hadn’t gone to uni I would feel different. I dunno. I came, so unless someone has a device where I can go visit an alternate universe and see how my life was if I hadn’t gone to uni, I guess I will never know. People say that ours is the only reality of consequence. So yeah, there may be other alternative universes out there, where the choices we were presented with had different outcomes, but we have to live with the choices we made. Otherwise we live in a world of “what ifs”. And let’s face it, that’s never healthy for anyone. We have to live with the choices we’ve made. Well, ok, we don’t, but it’s better if you do, not look back and try to change things that you really can’t.

I don’t really like the mood that that last bit has set, but at the same time I think it’s important. So I don’t think I'm gonna delete it. My mind is in a weird mood recently. Haven’t been eating properly again. Might be worrying, not sure yet. Its not that I'm not not eating, just haven’t been eating regularly I guess. *shrugs* I doubt it’ll get very serious. After all, I’ll be home in a couple of weeks. Being around others seems to help regain some semblance of normality. Just have to keep an eye on myself. Never thought it would affect me again, but then things in life are never set are they?

Apparently I haven’t been around much recently, especially in the house. The thing is, I have, I just haven’t been downstairs much, which is where the main conversations take place. It hasn’t seemed important. I mean, if I'm not at uni in an exam or at tkd… or shopping… I'm at home in my room revising for my next exam. Our house doesn’t normally seek people out for a conversation very often, so if there’s no-one around when I'm getting the odd meal or heading in/out the door, they don’t see me.

So it was a surprise earlier when I was in my room revising, and heard a knock on the door. I figured it was Cyril, our French exchange student, cos he normally asks me for help understanding some terminology etc, but it wasn’t. It was Janon.

Out of all my housemates I probably speak to him the least. I don’t have anything against him, its just we just don’t often talk. So anyway, figured there was something house related he wanted to talk to me about, but there wasn’t. He was worried about me cos he hadn’t seen me for the last few days. Wanted to make sure I was feeling ok. It was nice, realising that people did actually realise that I lived there, and that I hadn’t been around much recently.

And now for something completely different…

I have totally lost my remote for my CD player. And it’s actually getting annoying now. See, before, it didn’t matter so much. I didn’t listen to CDs much, hardly ever to the radio, and so it was just on standby. However, the default for the LDC is for changing colours; and its fine when its day and it’s on or even just on standby, but at night the changing colours make it notoriously difficult to fall asleep. And I need the remote to fix the colour setting onto one colour. And to put Cds on shuffle. And repeat… and hell, it’s nice not having to get up to change the volume, just little things that I didn’t notice before. Ah well, I'm sure it’ll turn up when I pack up my stuff. So maybe I haven’t totally lost the remote, but it is currently in an unknown location. Or something.

Gone back to the exam thing again. I suppose I could put this back where I was talking about it before, but I can’t be bothered to be honest. Anyway, this is the time that everyone is furiously revising every last second that they can for their exams. But for some reasons, despite knowing that they are important and everything, I just can’t get stressed out about them. And yeah, I guess that’s good in some way. But in others its not. Cos if I'm not stressing about them, I feel less inclined to revise for them. Oh sure, I’ll revise, but not to the extent that everyone else seems to have to be. Maybe that means my understanding of the subject is better than others. Maybe not.

Where was I going with that? Oh yeah, despite this being the most trying time of the year, it’s the time that I’ve spent the most on Cds and DVDs. And being reading books. And I know that that probably isn't the best application of my time, reading the Dark Materials trilogy, or watching films, but like I was saying, it doesn’t seem to be bothering me. Hell, in all the time I've been here I’ve read 6 books fully, and 4 of those have been within the last month.

Virgin should really, really stop having a sale. I was looking over my finances earlier… this month, scrap that, from the 1st to the 18th this month I’ve spent over £100 on Cds and DVDs. And yet I’m still in the level that parents set with me at Easter as to what overdraft would be ok when I came back. So I dunno, maybe it’s a good thing, maybe not. Though at the end of the day what I chose to do with my student loan is my problem. Sure, there are things that I SHOULD spend it on, like fees and rent and food, but at the end of the day it’s my choice.

Though of course when Judi sees what I've been spending it on she’ll probably lay into me more than my parents will. It’s strange, some people are always afraid of the parents, they totally underestimate siblings. But sometimes siblings can hurt you more than parents can. And being the eldest, it feels like it shouldn’t be happening to me, y’know? I should be able to look at them and say “well actually, you can’t control what I do with my life”. And yeah, sometimes I can do that. But the thing about siblings is that they know what buttons to press. They know what subjects are sore subjects, where your weaknesses are. In some ways your own siblings can be your worst enemies. Anyone else feel like that?

Just re-read this post. And I seem to be doing nothing bit bitch. So sorry about that. But apparently that is the mood I'm in at the moment. I dunno. Maybe it’s my way of trying to stay in the loop. Because if you create some of the news that people are talking about, you feel wanted and needed, not just some random person that people know.

I've been feeling a bit like that recently. It occurred to me when I was talking to my mum that this was the first contact I'd had with either parent since the 7th. And yeah, that may not be long to some people, but 2 weeks of not hearing anything from them sorta made me feel isolated. Course, me staying locked away probably didn’t help that feeling, but then again hindsight is 20/20… and just what the hell is that meant to mean anyway? 20/20… 20 what? And over 20, or out of 20, and why 20 in the first place?! …I did say my mind was in a weird place before didn’t I?

So yeah, going back to what I was saying before, I haven’t been speaking to my parents much. And that’s a weird concept for me. I used to call them or they used to call me 2 or 3 times a week. And that phone call yesterday, bar a 5 minute on Saturday, was the first time I’d spoken to her in 2 weeks. I know some people who are at uni with me who call their parents everyday, and I'm not talking about the ones who moved hundreds of miles either. Some people, due to the way our uni assigns halls, live in Birmingham but live on campus, and yet they still call their parents everyday.

And that’s another strange thing to me. People from Birmingham, attending a university in Birmingham, will move into halls for the first year, only to move back home for the second and possibly the 3rd year of study at uni, whereas people who have moved hundreds of miles to attend are left looking for houses off campus. And I know I've mentioned this in previous posts, but I figured it’s important at the moment. See, people are STILL looking for accommodation for next year. In a way I guess I'm lucky, cos I’m staying with my landlord, just moving house. So I don’t have to run around looking for a place to live like I did last time. I had it all sorted out in January.

But there WAS a point to all this… Oh yeah. People move away from home for what, 8 months or something? What does that prove? You’re still in the same city, you can catch the bus home whenever you like to see parents and yet they still claim that they’re setting out on their own. What constitutes setting out on your own then? Surely moving out must be for more than a few months and then living back at home for the rest of their uni life doesn’t count?

Maybe it’s not the moving. Maybe it’s the reason for the moving. People going to uni, marking a new chapter in their lives. But then what about the people that chose not to? Just because they chose not to go to uni doesn’t mean that they’re not setting a new chapter in their lives. Internships, apprenticeships, hell even employment must count for more than just moving out for a couple of months. Because then they’ve taken responsibility of their lives, of their earnings. So surely they have more of a right to say that they’ve set out on their own, even if they do still live at home.

I dunno. That probably didn’t make a lot of sense. Maybe it did. It sorta does to me, but as previously mentioned my brain is in a weird place. Maybe that’s why this post is so long and going in the direction it is. Hell, I haven’t really said what I've done since the last post, but it’s been pretty much the same as the last week: revision and exams. So there hasn’t been much to talk about on that aspect.

It’s strange to think how much I can write in 2 hours. I didn’t realise I had so much to talk about. Hell, I should have put a warning at the beginning of this post. Maybe I will. If there is one, you know that I eventually got around to editing this, and putting a warning at the top. Cos really, there was some other things I was gonna say earlier, except I forgot them, and now its something like 90 minutes later, and its only just resurfaced in my brain. And I guess I could put it here, except then it wont make any sense whatsoever. Ok, so reading that probably made no sense whatsoever, and you’re all trying to work out what it is that I added, and why I kept this paragraph after doing the edit I mentioned a few lines above. Guess you’ll have to keep wondering.

So, I’m moving back home in a couple of weeks. Going to be fun, come back on the Friday to go out to Rocky Horror with people on the night, and then mum has rented a car for the weekend and we’re heading back to pick up all my stuff. Which means that I have to have basically everything packed up ready for when she comes down to pick me up. And yeah, that would be fine. Except when my parents dropped me off and help me move in and everything in September, they thought it would be best of they took all the boxes back up with them. Meaning I now have to go round asking for spare boxes, and get them back here to reassemble them to put all my stuff in.

And let’s be honest here, I have a heck of a lot more stuff now than when I did in September. I mean, I have a full uni years worth of work, not to mention all the course books, and then there’s the non-uni stuff too. Like the odd new clothes that I have, and yeah, ok, they should fit into my case and all, but it's stuff that I didn’t have when I moved in that I have to find room for. And don’t even start me on the number of DVDs and CDs I've bought. Actually, saying that, I haven’t bought that many Cds really. Bought more DVDs than CDs. But I still have to find room for them.

And then there’s the timing issue. When will I have time to get all this stuff packed away? Ok, yeah, I have a few days off next week sure, and I could pack away some of my stuff then, but that isn't the end of the term, not really. I still have to keep things out that I’ll need for the days after they’ve been packed. So its not like I can pack up everything the week before hand and then have it all ready for when mum comes down to put it up in the car. I mean, for started there’s my bedding! What am I meant to do? Sleep under a coat until I’m finished?! Somehow I doubt that’ll happen! And yeah, maybe I’m over reacting, and yeah, maybe I’m reading too much into this. But then that’s what I seem to be good at.

It was pointed out to me the other week that I am very self critical. And the thing is, I can’t deny it. It’s true. I am extremely self critical. And I don’t really know why. I don’t think I used to be, at least not to this degree. But saying that I don’t know exactly when or why I suddenly upped the degree. Heck, I don’t know if it was sudden, or if it was gradual. But no matter the cause or the degree, I am very self critical. And that can quite often get me into trouble.

Not always, and the degree varies, but I have been known to cause great trouble with some people because of my self-critical nature. Maybe I should look into that, see if I can start being less critical. But then I wouldn’t be me. It’s strange. Sometimes I need things like that to make me realise… I dunno. Something. It changes. Depending on the circumstances. But that’s life I guess.

I heard something quite fitting the other day about life: Status quo: Latin for the mess we’re in. Kinda liked it. Because yes, life can be a bitch, and hell, I spent the majority of this post bitching in some way or another I think, but at the end of the day we still have to live with it. And really, this is the point the first statement of the post makes. “Ignore reality. There’s nothing you can do about it.” Because we can whine and complain and bitch about life, and how unfair it is, but at the end of the day, this is reality. This is what we have to deal with. And, and the Trunchball said, “There’s nothing you can do about!”

It’s strange the lessons that we can learn from kid films and books. And hell, sometimes not kids films and books. It seems that everything these days have hidden meanings, if we can read between the lines long enough to find them. Though saying that, I still not sure what the lesson from this, or hell, most of my other posts have been. And hey, if you’re still reading this, I salute you. Seriously. I am extremely impressed.

Right, eventually I think I’m going to end this now. You can all wake up now.

Here ends the lesson.