Friday, April 28
Thursday, April 27
There has been few updates recently. This has been due to a combination of lack of energy, lack of time, lack of arsedness and... well, mostly lack of arsedness I suppose.
I haven't even been doing too many interesting things either. OK, there's been some, but I hardly have tales of debauchery and the like to regale you with. I can however confirm that this week I have been (supposedly) doing a Drawing elective. It has been hell. I attended 50% of the classes, because any less than that and I would have difficulty passing the year for reasons too complex to explain. The rest of the time I have been busy getting on with work I care about only marginally more. This has included the processing of 6 films and making contact sheets for 9. No, it's not been a good week.
My weekend was quite fun though. On Saturday I spent my second day with Alice, Andy's friend, who I'm doing my photography project on. I followed her around her allotment, documenting as she planted potatoes and red onion bulbs. I ate half a packet of Hob Nobs. Afterwards we had a big fire in the communal gardens of the housing co-op. I was meant to record this too, but the battery in the camera went so instead I just sat and enjoyed myself. It's been a very long time since I had chance to sit round A Proper Fire, Outdoors and Everything. Other people from the co-op were there too and all was good. There was even two hodgehegs in the garden next door who were, er, getting to know each other. They snuffled and I snuffled back. It made me happy. I'm hopefully going to go finish the photographs this weekend, as Andy was talking about having another fire for Beltaine, and trying to persuade more people to come.
I've been going to Relate too. Now the exercises I have to do have moved on to actually trying to insert things into myself. This is scary. This is the bit I was dreading. I don't know how well I will cope. We've done some visualisation of how it will happen, and that alone gets my anxiety up. I can only try it and see, I suppose.
21:27
Monday, April 24
Don't you just hate it when you're up far earlier than you really feel you should be, especially considering it's the holidays, and you reach into the fridge for the milk, but you're not really concentrating, and instead of that lovely milk, you end up pouring fruit juice on your Coco Pops? Don't you just hate that?
08:07
Monday, April 17
I have been spending the last week with Rory in his new house. It's very ace and I'm exceedingly jealous. I'm sure he'd be willing to share, but it seems a little out of the way for me and my every-day life.
I have to go home on Wednesday, something I'm largely dreading. OK, I'll get back to a decent sized keyboard and brilliant gigs to attend, but here I can ignore most of the problems I have in Leeds: the course, my eating, my weight, the lack of hugs, the loneliness, the huge pile of work which needs doing, the need for exercise, Relate, and so on. I'm very good at burying my head in the sand and very bad at actually dealing with things and getting them done. But I guess no one ever likes to have to come home from a holiday and get back to mundane life, so you could be right by telling me to shut up and put up. Meh.
Good things we have done in Belfast: been DVD shopping, watched DVDs, ate great chips, hugged, ate hummus, bought plants, drooled at girlies, saw ducklings, took photographs of ducklings, discovered the bloke on the front of the NTL Broadband install disc has a porno picture on his desktop.
18:50
Saturday, April 8
Holidays! At last! Not that it's going to be too much of a break, I have so much work to do, but at least I have three weeks away from all the bloody annoying people on my course and a week of hugs starting on Tuesday.
I was thinking about those lists I posted below and realised that there is a couple more items I could have included, so for completion purposes, here they are.
Top 5 Albums Which Changed My Life
5. The Magic Treehouse - Ooberman
This one isn't a direct influence, but through loving the album and searching Onelist for Ooberman-loving mailing lists to join, I found the mailing list on which I met Rory and other people and so it has definitely had an impact on me.
Top 5 Books Which Changed My Life
2. Five On A Treasure Island - Enid Blyton
The first Famous Five book and the one that got me into the series. I loved these books, and all the other crap - Secret Seven, Malory Towers, Babysitters Club, Saddle Club, Sweet Valley High, St Clares, Nancy Drew, Point Horror... I read the lot.
13:10
Thursday, April 6
In a desperate attempt to think of something interesting to blog, and to perhaps inspire bit more interaction, I was laying in bed last night trying to come up with the "Top 5 ### That Changed My Life." It was a bizarrely difficult task. I may have already read / listened to more books and CDs than the average family of 4 in a life time, but finding ones which have made a genuine effect on me is extremely hard. Is it just that I consume media which has little room for thought provocation? Is that I don't really engage with the items I use? Or something else I'm not thinking of? Well, for whatever reason, here's a rather slimed down version of "Media Which Changed My Life":
Top 5 Albums That Changed My Life
1. The Holy Bible - Manic Street Preachers
Obviously. This was always going to be there. Not only did I listen to it almost daily (religiously, you might say, heh) for a couple of years, but it found ways of keeping me alive and also challenged my ideas about music. Things I held to be facts about music were thrown away and never reconsidered. The fact that you can't change speed in a song? Rubbish! The fact that you should never leave a large amount of instrumental at the end of a song without including another line or two of lyric just before the finish? Nonsense! And all the people I've met through being a Manics fan, their effect has to be considered too. If one album could be said to have changed my life more than any other, it has to be this one.
2. Sounds From The Gulf Stream - Marine Research
This album, well,
Hopefulness to Hopelessness, made me realise that it's OK to believe many of the things that I do, despite them not being commonly accepted, or hard to achieve. And then there's
You and A Girl, which so perfectly sums up how I feel about
him. The whole album is wonderful, of course. But those are the two songs which have special meaning for me.
3. Nevermind - Nirvana
One of the first rock albums I ever heard, and again, often didn't leave my tape player for weeks at a time.
4. Suede - Suede
Another one of those first albums which wasn't chart dance or Take That. The first band I was passionate for (as Take That and Kylie Minogue don't count). Through Suede I discovered indie as a whole, I suppose they were like a gateway.
5. Well, I actually couldn't think of a fifth which has had a life-changing effect. There's many I loved, adored even, but no others I can think of which have truly changed the way I was going.
Top 5 Books Which Changed My Life
1. Principles of Wicca - Vivianne Crowley
I believe this was the first Craft book I read and as such had a huge effect on me. It's a very good book I still refer to and I recommend it highly.
2. Yeah, I could only think of one. Crap, isn't it?
Top 5 2 Magazines Which Changed My Life
1. NME
Back when it was still worth reading, of course.
2. Plan B
This magazine has helped me discover so much wonderful music it has to be here. Further down the list than the NME as it's only been out for a short while whereas I read the NME for years. Doesn't mean it's in any way inferior though.
I was also going to post the top 5 websites but arsedness has failed (they're Tony's Manics Page, B3ta, Yahoogroups / Onelist, and Ebay, anyway) and I think I'm starting to scrape the barrel a little. But it made a change from whinging for a while at least. So now comes the interactivity. What are your top 5s? What books / music etc am I missing out on?
23:03
Wednesday, April 5
It's nice to know that the weather in Britain is so predictable. Every year, without fail, April will see the most bizarre weather known to mankind. Yesterday, for example, saw a combination of sun, cloud, hail, snow, and more sun. Make sure you carry your trusty umbrella with you everywhere! For it may be bright and shiny like the Bahamas through the window, but given 20 minutes, it'll be guaranteed you won't be able to see anything through that window due to fog, or a hailstorm, or some other such anomaly. I guess it's also nice to know that the British are so predictable as to constantly talk about their weather.
So instead I'll talk about college. This morning's lecture was dire. I'm not even sure what it was about. Radical architecture, or something. Luckily it finished early and is also the last lecture of the year. Hurray! Afterwards I went to talk to Christian, head of the second year, to discuss the issues I've been having with the course. He says he thinks I'll respond a lot better to the second year as they tend to push us more, but also more into an open space for us to fill as we wish, not as directed by them, which is scary, but also necessary. I think for now I'll just assume I'll be staying on as it'll cause me a lot less stress and anxiety. If I could put the energy I've been putting into worrying about the course into doing the course instead, all might be much better.
There's even good news on the Photography front. Emily and Morag both said they couldn't help me with my plan of following someone around for 24 hours to document their day, but Andy suggested I talked to his friend Alice instead. We met up last night for a drink and I think it could work. She's a very ace person, the kind of person I want to be, really. She works at
Archway but also has her own allotment (and uses it too!), has been politically active but not so much now, knows loads of ace people, and is just generally friendly and huggy.
We met at the Angel but ended up going down to
the Common Place. It's somewhere I've been wanting to go ever since it opened, but due to my inhibitions and lack of friends, have never made it. It turned out that it was the night of a gig I was interested in seeing anyway, and what was even more surprising was that David and James were there, working on the sound desk. I had a bit of a chat with David, in between him fiddling with cables and staring into the middle distance, and managed to extract a couple of hugs too. I also managed to scrounge 3 free digestives from the bloke in the cafe, which made me rather happy. I left about 10 though as I was tired and had to be up for the stupid lecture this morning.
I've arranged to go take photographs of Alice next Tuesday. I can't do the whole day though, as I'm flying to Belfast at teatime. So I'll stay with her for the morning and then come home. I'm going to be going back in a fortnight or so, on a Saturday, to finish the shoot. We're going to pretend it's a Wednesday, as that's the day she only works in the morning. If you're confused, don't worry, we are too. I just didn't have any free Wednesdays so this was the next best solution. What matters though is not whether or not it was all shot in one day, but more if it looks like it was shot in one day. And as we're doing it in April, it doesn't really matter if the weather's completely different on each day, because that's what April's like. All thought out, you see!
Tomorrow's photography session is either going to be on lighting or darkroom techniques, both things I need to learn about, so hopefully it'll be interesting. Friday is when my Typography module finally begins. We've been instructed to come along with a kitchen utensil of our choice. We also have to hand in the Critical Studies essays then. Oh, to be free of it! And then I might be rounding the week off with a gig by
Data Panik. It all depends on the health of Robert Dane's bum, it seems. And no, don't ask.
17:08
Monday, April 3
Nothing much has changed or moved on since the last post. I still don't know what to do and time is running out in which to make a decision, if it hasn't already done so. I found a course which looks quite interesting at the University of Ulster, which obviously Rory is encouraging me to apply for. I'm not sure if it would be a good idea though. Moving so far away is a big step, and as I've mentioned a million times before, I don't like change. I'm worried about us then becoming an "Us", instead of a "Sarah" and a "Rory." "Let me be who I am but be it with you." There's so much I'd have to leave behind, both physically and metaphorically. I was going to say "all my friends" but I only really have Simon, and I've been seeing him so sporadically I may as well be living in a different country instead of down the road.
There's other courses I have my eye on too. The one I was originally interested in in Birmingham, one in Brighton, despite my phobia of Brighton, one in Edinburgh and one in London. I just don't know what to do. I need an online test which asks questions like "How many hours of classes do you want to attend a week?" and "Do you want more theory than practical work, or vice versa?" and "Do you want to work for a client?" and so on. Then it could show me what course I was best suited to. I don't like having to be an adult and make the decision myself.
The diet's going OK. I'm trying to cut back on what I eat and aside from Thursday when I went out with my parents, I've been doing reasonably well. As long as you ignore the recent resurgence of Hula Hoops. I go to Belfast a week tomorrow for All Teh Hugs. This is Good. It's all I have right now.
11:35
