misfits is kewl

I really haven't written a blog post for a while. Not that I think that it bothers you, but it slightly bothers me. So here I am. Hello! Today was quite a productive day, as I wrote a ten page draft for a screenplay for Film in my free periods at college, and then recorded a podcast with my friend Ben that we've been planning to make for about four months but have somehow never managed to actually arrange. Which is mainly my fault. Or, entirely my fault. Hopefully that should be uploaded sometime in the next few days, if I approve of Ben's editing and he doesn't make me seem too much like a tit. Last time I blogged I was freaking out about uni; since then I've recieved three offers, from Birmingham, Loughborough and the uni I want to go to most, Southampton. As you can imagine I'm pretty pleased about this. All I need to do now is somehow manage to get two As and a B. I'm screwed.

I just finished watching Misfits, and I'm surprised at how much I like it. PJ pointed out that as I watched Skins, surely it shouldn't be at all shocking that I enjoy Misfits, but I watch Skins fully aware of the fact that the plot is unrealistic, most of the acting is horrific and the dialogue sucks. There are just some beautiful moments in Skins, when they're not trying to be down wid da kidz etc etc (which is most of the time). Misfits is trying to appeal to the target audience too, but they're not cramming it down our throats as much as Skins did, and the plot's interesting enough that I don't particularly mind the stereotypes (nerd, chav, slag, jock, joker. It really is that easy). PJ just told me that by the time we're done with the plans we have for the next few weeks, we will have seen eachother every weekend for three months, with extra days added on inbetween. I feel like calling our relationship long-distance is a little bit of a sham sometimes when we get to see eachother so often, but sometimes the times you need a person the most are the ones when they're far away, and that's when distance sucks.

I'm clearly very out of practice with blogging. I'm very sorry, dears. Maybe I'll get back into the swing of things. Then again, maybe not.

hollyoaks is so shit

I keep writing and re-writing something in my head. It's something that should really be an e-mail to a specific person, not a blog post, which is why I don't want to post it here. But I'm also too scared to send the e-mail. I'm sure it'll get sent at some point when I'm feeling a bit braver. Right now I feel about three inches tall.

College is good. Actually having to do work is a big shock, though. I put the pro in procrastination, and everything always gets left until the last minute, but so far this week I'm actually kind of .. on track. Which is new territory. I'm sure that'll all change, as I'm taking Arts Award Gold (basically as much work, if not more, as taking another AS this year, but it's all independent) and I have a ton of coursework coming up, but my personal statement is almost done and will be finished tomorrow, as will the rest of my UCAS application. This is exciting stuff. Please please please let me in, Southampton, please.

When I was in the car the other day with my dad and PJ I dropped my phone down the side of the seat. I was obviously annoyed, but when I reached to get it, I also found the iPod that PJ gave me a few months ago and that has been missing for almost as long as I've had it. I'm so happy to have it back in my life, I've been using a shitty old mp3 player as my only source of music outside the house, and even that gave up last week and stopped displaying a menu or any other options. I'm having to sell my Frank Turner ticket for next month, which is so so shit, but I'm on holiday that week now. Generally life is okay, I was sick this weekend but I'm almost better now, and I don't have to wait long to see PJ again.

Oh, and I'm listening to Greg Holden's new EP 'Sing for the City' right now - which is why I'm probably not writing very well, I'm distracted - and it's utterly beautiful as his music always is, you can download it from iTunes.

to build a person

It's strange to think about all the things that make a person themselves. All the tiny little details of your childhood that seem insignificant but according to lots of psychologists define your character, the decisions that you make, the subjects you study, the moral beliefs that you stand by, the places you go, the people that you associate with. I always think that I spend most of my life making the wrong choices, saying the wrong things, passing up on opportunities because I'm too lazy to do anything about them, never living life to my full potential. Some of this may be true, but I can also see it like this; I'm at a college I love, my results this year were good and I enjoy my subjects, I've got a chance of getting into the unis that I want, I have some really good friends, a lovely family and a boyfriend that I love, and I've got hobbies that I really enjoy and am sufficiently good at.

Recently I made a choice that I considered to be a bad one at the time, because it's probably destroyed my friendship with somebody I care about a lot, but even as the consequences of this choice first hit me I also knew that, for once, I was certain that I had done the right thing. I've done a few things that I'm not proud of in the past, that have made me wonder what sort of a person I actually am, but this gives me hope that I'm on the right track.

Recently I also realised that the reason I like the second-hand cigarette smell is because my childminder used to smoke, so she'd always have the smell on her clothes. After thinking about this, I remembered a fun "game" we used to play in the car, where she'd run into the corner shop for a minute to buy cigarettes and me, my sister and her son would stay in the car. The aim of the game was to look out for the parking ticket man, and to run inside and get her if we saw him approaching. This story isn't very significant at all, I just find it strange the things that we forget, and the things that happened over ten years ago that still affect us today.

I had a really nice weekend with PJ, and I don't have to wait two weeks to see him again like last time, so it's all good. We saw Leicester uni, which didn't strike me immediately as being amazing but was alright enough for me to put down as one of my five choices. Right, back to my personal statement.

Days until PJ: 5
Days until I'm 18: 168

good times

Thanks for your comments on my last blog - the wanker boy hasn't been giving me trouble, probably because I've been avoiding him at all costs with the help of other friends in my class, so hopefully I won't need to kill him anytime soon. Normally I'd welcome killing him, but I'm having a good week, and I feel like it would dampen my mood slightly.

I was right, being back at college is awesome. My phone is still broken, so I have a terrible old  Nokia replacement for a while (and I've lost almost all of my contacts, gutted) but at least now I can contact people so I can have a college social life again. Today me and Jenny had three hours of free periods together (I actually had five overall including lunch, back to back, it was ridiculous) yet we managed to do about four paragraphs of work between us. It's all my fault for showing her textsfromlastnight.com, talking about H Samuel and doing uni stuff, because she kept getting distracted. I managed to get a bit more of my personal statement written, and I sent it off to my tutor to have a look at, which is good.

The reason I'm in such a good mood, as you may have guessed because I'm predictable, is that I get to see PJ for the first time in two weeks tomorrow and I'm pretty gosh darn excited about it. We're going to the Leicester open day on Saturday, I'm really hoping that I like the campus because I'm basically basing all of my uni choices on aesthetics and gut reactions (to be fair, I have to be there for three years, it'd be helpful if I think it looks pretty). I'm really excited for the new series of Peep Show too, and we're going to watch that Derren Brown thing to see if we get glued to the sofa. We're going to make sure that there are snacks within arms reach in case we get stuck, or it could end badly; we'd have to resort to cannibalism, and although PJ has the strength advantage I'm a pretty vicious biter. Or we could just wait for a member of his family to come and feed us, but that's way less fun.

I'm completely exhausted despite the fact that it's only 10pm, because I was up at 6.30am this morning and yesterday, and I don't get in from college until 5pm. It's pretty draining, the journey takes an hour each way and it becomes depressing after a while because I'm so tired and I just want to be at home in my nice warm house, but I can live through it for another a year. Anyway; I'm tired, so this blog post is relatively short, but I'm sure you'll live.

<3

Days until PJ: 1
Days until I'm 18: 171

back to college

My timetable is kickass. I'm so excited about it that I'm going to show it to you.

So Monday is awesome because I have the afternoon off, Tuesday is virtually pointless but I can go in late and have the afternoon off, Wednesday I have lots of time to do work/relax, Thursday is a fucking joke BUT it'll force me to do work as I can't go home, so will probably be my most productive day, and Friday I get to go in late. The thing that sucks the most is that "O" in a room number stands for "Orange", and the Orange area is the science tower and has a million stairs to climb to get to the third and highest floor. I have Psychology and now my tutor period on the third floor. Oh well, toned legs here I come.

The end of last week and this weekend generally sucked quite a lot. I spent more time crying than I did clearing out my room or doing anything for uni/college, but since yesterday everything is seeming better and less overwhelming. Because of my timetable and the fact that my piece of shit phone is completely broken, I haven't really socialised with college people in the past couple of days, but that'll change tomorrow. I managed to get onto the Arts Award Gold course, which is good news, because it means I can do a creative writing project which will help with my uni applications, and the tutors were besides themselves with excitement when me and my friend Moley told them that we took Arts Award Silver two years ago.

Over summer, I'd forgotten about one thing that never fails to irritate me in college. There's a person in my Film class that I was friends with for a few months at the beginning of 6.1, until I realised how irritating he is. I'm not just being horrible, either; every time I say something he says that it's stupid, if I mention any of my friends (he doesn't know any of them) he'll say that they're stupid cunts, he constantly takes my stuff, invades my privacy and my personal space, purposefully disagrees with me on everything just to annoy me, and is just generally a complete wanker. Yesterday I decided to start again and try to put everything behind me, but within five minutes he'd taken my work without asking me and started reading it and laughing at it, and said nasty things about PJ being on the confused.com adverts. Today, he kept pulling on my belt and refusing to let go, taking my Johnny Durham bracelet and refusing to give it back, and generally being fucking annoying.

Like the level-headed and reasonable human being that I am, if he touches me or says anything stupid again I'm going to go absolutely mental at him like I did last year, when he saw a letter from my ex boyfriend in my bag, listened to me telling him that it was private and he couldn't read it, and then took it when I wasn't looking and started reading it aloud to the people around us and laughing. I then tried to take it back and he ripped it in half. Just thinking about it is making me so angry I'm shaking a little bit. After that, I told him that he wasn't to sit next to me anymore, and generally he abided to that rule. For some reason this year he's decided that it doesn't apply to him anymore.

Anyway, college is good and now all I've got to worry about is getting my room cleared out and my personal statement written sometime in the next week. I'm freezing from walking home in the rain with no umbrella, so I'm going to go and have a bubble bath and read Frankenstein for English Lit tomorrow.

<3

Days until PJ: 3
Days until I'm 18: 173

these are not cleverly-crafted witticisms

Since catching up on all of hayleyghoover's blog posts last night, I feel compelled to write daily, witty, interesting blog posts that attract a small, fun community of blog commenters to give me life advice and cheer me up when I'm having a bad day. Obviously there are a few flaws in this plan; if I wrote daily I'd have nothing to say, I can't be particularly witty or interesting, and both of the aforementioned problems cause the latter.

The sad thing is that even now, sitting down to write this, I don't really have anything to say, mainly because I've spent the past week doing absolutely nothing. I can whine, definitely, but whining gets pretty dull. Technically I'm really busy right now - I need to clear out my room, do some college work, write my personal statement, decide which unis I'm going to apply to, and I'm working on a rough draft of a novel idea - but in reality I'm sitting here on Farmville, waiting for my Eggplant to be ready to harvest. In a way I'm going to be so happy when I go back to college, because I'll have some structure to my day and no excuse not to be sociable, but it's also going to phyiscally hurt me to drag myself out of bed every day at 6.30 am and not be back at home until about 5pm.

I'm supposed to be listening out for a knock at the door because my mum's getting something delivered today (and if I sign for it rather than sleeping/not hearing the door because I'm watching Family Guy this time, she's going to pay me a fiver) but I'm also using one headphone to listen to this song, which has completely taken over my brain for the past 24 hours. The problem with listening to something obsessively on repeat means that at some point you get very sick of it, and have to skip over it on iTunes for about a month until you can stand to hear it again. I want to make a video today, mainly about the four pots of Play-Doh that I was very excited to purchase the other day when I was supposed to be buying a new bag and coat for college, but that depends on my ability to keep my eyes more than halfway open as I didn't get much sleep last night and without eight hours I'm a complete zombie.

in defence of crying

I am a person who cries a lot. Emotional moments in films, when I get hurt, when I lose somebody, when I miss people, when I feel anxious, paranoid, scared, relieved, overwhelmed, happy ... the list goes on. A lot of people see crying as a sign of weakness, and I guess in some ways it shows that I don't have the strength to hold it in and put on a brave face, but I don't often try to do either of those things, because I see no shame at all in crying. I don't always feel better after I cry, but that's not the point; I don't cry to feel better, I cry because it's just how I react. I cry because when I feel emotional, especially if I'm also feeling paranoid or angry, it's like there's a piece of ice lodged somewhere between my stomach and my throat, and crying is one way of melting it down into more managable pieces.

If somebody gives me a hug while I'm crying, it makes me feel a lot better, but it also sets me off even worse because I'm so grateful to have somebody there for me that I get even more emotional. I can imagine that you're now thinking "thank fuck I never have to deal with Lex on a daily basis", but I'm not actually that bad; for something sad on TV I'll just shed a couple of tears, I won't throw myself prostrate to the floor and start howling. For a lot of people, crying is different, but for me it's always a release. I don't see it as a bad thing at all, it's just my way of coping. My family are watching Friends behind me and Rachel's just given birth to Emma, and I'll admit that I am crying a little bit. I don't really know why, but it hasn't dampened my mood at all, it's just emotional and very sweet.

What's not so sweet is that my mum is now telling the story of how as she went into labour with me, she was throwing up so much she thought she had a stomach bug, but it turned out just to be me! Thanks, mum.