Tweet Much?

Twitter is a funny thing. I’ve been a member since November and have even occasionally logged on but have not exactly been an avid ‘tweeter’ shall we say. I’ve never really seen the point unless you’re a business or newspaper promoting something or revolutionaries trying to contact each other when the government has closed all other methods of communication. I’ve always taken the ‘He who tweets is a...’ well I’m sure you can guess what goes there but I try to avoid profanity on the internet.

When I first heard about people who ‘tweet’, I always saw them as self-involved and pretentious, giving the world the most mundane details of their lives when it was highly likely that the world doesn’t care.

I personally don’t see the ubiquitous presence of technology in modern everyday life as too much of a problem. I don’t believe those dire warnings that instant messaging and email are preventing the world communicating face to face. However there is a limit to its usefulness if you really think about; sure its great to let your friends know how you’re doing every now and again but do they really need a blow by blow account of every menial part of every day of your life?

However over the past few days, I have found myself drawn in by this weird little world of cyber sound bites from people I don’t know. It’s odd how things could suddenly become addictive. Its a similar thing with Facebook, I didn’t join until the beginning of 2009 because I really didn’t see what the fuss was all about but now I check my Facebook at several times a day if I’m around a computer. There is no real point to it, it just has become a habit and I honestly couldn’t tell you why it is so...absorbing.

I do see the merit in Facebook as a way to keep in touch with your friends but with Twitter you are just one of a faceless mass of people so where is the social part of this type of social networking? You could see Twitter as another platform for posting a Facebook update without annoying your friends by clogging up their news feeds and looking incredibly sad as if you have nothing better to do all day except sit refreshing Facebook every five minutes. Yet still, have we got to the point collectively as a society where we are sad enough to spend our entire lives on Twitter.

Well, it remains to be seen if I can be converted. As I’m only beginning to use Twitter properly it may be a while before I truly understand its purpose. Still you can follow me on Twitter if you like at CJMortimer if you think I will have anything remotely interesting to say.

As for the people I’m following; the Guardian and the Independent, the cast of Glee and rather randomly the English language Twitter account of the Kremlin. I suppose I’ve never know what the Kremlin was up to without Twitter so I guess I should be grateful. Then again, I now know what the Kremlin want me to believe they’re up to when its likely that even most Russians don’t know the truth.

I should add that to the list of what Twitter is good for: propaganda.

Unasema Kiingereza?

I’m learning Swahili. Or at least trying too. In preparation for my trip to Tanzania at the beginning of August, I have been given a list of key phrases that I can use there over the course of 7 weeks. So far I’ve learnt how to say ‘thank you very much’ and ‘chicken’. Which I’m sure will become very handy considering I’m a vegetarian and ornithophobic. Still it’s a start.

Apparently the older you get the lower you’re capacity to understand new languages and although I have yet to turn twenty, I already feel like its harder to learn Swahili than it was to learn French when I was 11 despite Swahili being a comparatively simpler language. Of course I’m not forced to stick in a room learning Swahili with a teacher breathing down my neck forcing me to concentrate. Not that, that particular tactic my teachers employed worked during my GCSE French lessons though.

I got an A though so all’s well as that ends well I guess.

I have always loved languages though, even though I always hated double French on a Monday morning. To me they’re part of the mysticism of other cultures that always seem so much more interesting than the boring Anglophone world. They say you can’t truly understand a culture till you speak its language; it’s like some sort of code that once you break it, a whole world is unlocked and you can see things from the perspective of people who were previously alien to you. I’ve always been interested in other people’s cultures because they were so much outside the normal English world that I was stuck in. Maybe its part of the fact that I’m one of those people that spends their life wanting to be somewhere else; the grass is always greener after all.

Whatever the reason, I have always tried to buck the stereotype of British people abroad that we believe everyone can speak English- just at a few decibels higher than typical conversation. It is not an urban myth by any stretch of the imagination; I have seen it right in front of my own eyes and subsequently developed a slightly lower opinion of England as a whole. I speak passable French and Italian and a little bit of Japanese from studying it this past year but I wouldn’t exactly call myself a linguistic expert. Nevertheless, I have always tried to learn as much of a language as I possibly can before I visit a new place because I think not only is it rude not to, you miss out on the culture of a place a little bit by not being able to experience it through the eyes of the people who created it. Of course this is easier said than done and despite my best efforts its not going in. Maybe its because the nice weather has distracted me, maybe I’m just lazy but I can’t quite bring myself to sit down and wait for the words to go into my brain.

Not that necessarily they would go in. I remember in around Year 9, several of my friends went to Poland on a Music trip and they were given a one hour crash course in conversational Polish in which all any of them managed to pick up was ‘I like dancing’.

Lubię tańca, in case you were wondering.

Similarly I ‘studied’ Mandarin for a grand total of six hours during my Easter 2008 trip to China and apart from a few isolated phrases for greeting people, saying please and thank you etc, etc I can now only really say ‘I love you’ (Wo ai ni). That brings the number of languages I can say that in up to eight.
Of course, if I concentrate I will be able to master the sheet of useful phrases I’ve been given before I get to Tanzania but considering how tongue tied I get trying to speak foreign languages I’ll probably still get laughed at.

Either way, I’m screwed.

(The title means ‘Do you speak English?’ in Swahili by the way).

And so I face the final curtain...for the summer at least...

So here we come to the end of another year. A lot has changed. I’m writing this in my bedroom during my last night in student halls of residence before I head up back up North tomorrow.

Everyone around me has been waxing on and on in the past few weeks about how fast the year has gone and how sad they are to leave, but I find myself in a strange position. As the year progressed it always seem to be going so fast but when I look back on September it seems so strange that it was only 9 months ago. It seems so strange that my whole life revolved around Harrogate a year ago when now Birmingham is as much my home as Harrogate is. Harrogate will always be ‘home’ to me as long as my parents live there but Birmingham is where I live and in the space of a few months it has started to become the answer to the question ‘where are you from’ when I’m not in Harrogate or Birmingham. When my parents leave Harrogate it may be the only place I call home, until I leave again and find somewhere else.

I think this is in part due to my upbringing and the fact that throughout my childhood I never stayed in one place long enough for it to be considered my true ‘home’ and also partly because of the ‘wherever I lay my hat’ nomadic outlook I’ve inherited that seems to be a Mortimer family trait, but now that I face not returning to Birmingham for three months, it seems oddly alien as if I’m visiting family for an extended period of time rather than going home. Harrogate has become a series of living memories; I visited my old 6th form for a reference from my former Head of Year during my Easter break when school was still in session and it was the most surreal experience of my life. Seeing everyone milling around, sitting in the places I used to sit, talking to the people I knew from the year below dragged up all the memories of the previous year of when I just to feel so comfortable and I was hit by the incredible feeling that I didn’t belong there anymore; this was my place but it isn’t anymore. When I returned to Birmingham, I was thrown into the stress of exams and didn’t really stop to think much about how much I’d gotten used to my surroundings, but after everything had ended and all I had was time, I began to reflect on how university life had become the new normal. I speak to my non-Birmingham friends about MOMDs, Gatecrasher and Redbrick forgetting they won’t have a clue what I’m talking about, when I was last in Harrogate I was frustrated that the local co-op was twice the distance on foot as the Costcutter here so I couldn’t run out for a snack and the idea that I don’t have to take any books out of the library or write an essay is practically frightening. It is weird how in the space of less than a year, my life is so radically different and I’ve barely noticed.

Perhaps this is why I’m sad to leave for the summer. I wasn’t that sad to leave Harrogate; I was one of the few people amongst my friends that didn’t cry, because it felt that it was the right time to go. I had lived there for ten years, longer than I’d ever lived anywhere else, but there was nothing new; I’d already seen everything, done everything and experienced everything I could there (to be honest I think I’d done that by the time I was 16) and it was beginning to feel like the waiting room I was stuck in whilst I waited for my life to begin. I’m not going to cry now that I’m leaving because its only for the summer but there is no excited anticipation about leaving Brum; I’m not done here yet. This is why I have mixed feelings about moving to Selly Oak and a few of my friends graduating. I’m looking forward to moving on and I feel myself getting sick of halls the way I got sick of Harrogate but I’ve only just got used to this new lifestyle, the fact that its changing again feels a little daunting. Next year will be different from this year and undoubtedly a year from now I will be sitting in my room in Selly Oak pondering how remarkable it was that I was only an innocent little fresher a year ago as my life is so different, part of me wants it all to stop and everything to remain the same for a little longer but the more mature, realistic side is looking forward to a new lifestyle.

Change is a fun thing and people react to it different, I would say I always handle it quite well; I’m not really one for tears and nostalgia, I don’t even have photos of anyone from Harrogate in my room; this is the first time when I’ve really started to look back. My life has certainly changed for the better and more than just my surroundings has changed, I’m closer to the mature, confident grown up that I pretend to be than I was when I came here...or at least I’m getting there. People think that moving and finding a new place to belong is abrupt and instantaneous but although your address may change over the course of a day, your affiliation to a place or the lifestyle you build around it takes time. It has a tendency to sneak up on you when you least expect it and before you know it, you can’t imagine living your life any other way.

So till September Birmingham...then we can back to raising hell.

Here we go again...

...So like many a self-important student with too much time on their hands before me, I have started a blog where I intend to ramble on about a variety of topics that I’ll pretend to be well informed on.

I have done some blogging in the past, never with much success, but I have always failed to feel much enthusiasm for it. It’s because I still recoil slightly at the thought of sharing so much personal information with people I’ve never met before, I even struggle to do that with the friends I’ve had for years. Blogging in part, is part of the beguiling internet trend in the last 10 years where people assume other people care about every facet of their menial lives or that they have a right to know about other peoples’. Then again, I’ve always been a notoriously private person. Also, I think what I’ve written in the past has been a little...flat. It has mostly centred around politics, a subject I’m passionate about but I still seem detached somehow because there is no flair or spark of humanity in it. Or something like that. Maybe I’m just not a very good writer.

I have always been a little reserved when it comes to expressing feelings or even alluding to the fact that I have them; I think it comes from the surprising amount of natural shyness and self-consciousness that I have been trying to get over for years. However, as of today I’m turning over a new leaf... or at least I’m going to try.

I don’t know exactly what I will write about, it’ll probably remain focused on politics but I might make room to ramble about my philosophical moments, but I’ll try to be more open and engaging and should probably start by explaining the title. ‘Pretty Vacant’ is a song by the Sex Pistols (though you should really already know that) and I did not choose it just to seem edgy and cool, there is a story behind it. I was told when I was a little girl that this song was ‘my song’ because it so accurately described me and my slightly ditzy nature.
‘We so pretty, oh so pretty, we’re pretty vacant’.

Parents can be so mean sometimes.

So that was something personal. Not bearing deep into my soul personal but it should give the internet population (or at least the small selection reading this) an insight into my character. It’s a start.