Well, here comes another existential crisis....

This is getting rather repetitive.

I wonder whether its the fact that I've entered a new decade of my life, or because its January or because I've almost reached the half way point of my time at university and can no longer claim the fresher haze for the fact that I'm completely at sea.

Its more than not knowing what I want in the future or even what I want right now...its the full blown, cliché ridden 'Who am I?' debate ranging inside my head. My emotions are all over the place and I can go from lovely and caring to evil and vindictive in sixty seconds for no particular reason. I can't decide if certain things in my life are worth bothering with or if I even care about them any more, I seem to lost the passion for everything in my life that I had previously loved.

I need to start on applications and making important decisions about my future, or at least get on with my seminar work, but I seem to rather sit around watching the Tudors on iplayer and sit lazily contemplating the meaning of the universe and everything in it. This may be acceptable if I were a 18th century dandy composing poetry underneath my favourite oak on my country estate but not so much for a student sitting in a rented house in Birmingham, shivering because her boiler breaks twice a day.

Am I Dreaming of a White Christmas? No.

I personally would love a heat wave over Christmas. Of course it would mean that climate change has become irreversible and the apocalypse would be nigh but snow sucks- lets face it.

It may look pretty but really it is just disruptive and dangerous. It may look perfect when you settled and warm inside the house and don't have to walk down the steepest hill in Birmingham to get to uni every day. Being fairly unsteady on my feet at the best of times I've already fallen over spectacularly and hurt myself.

I know the idea of a White Christmas has a special place in the Western pysche but its a complete fallacy. It comes from the Victorian idealisation of Christmas, starting with Dickens and continuing ever since then up until the modern age with things like Christmas cards depicting Robins hopping around on snow kissed ground and every Christmas movie or TV special ending with all the characters standing up at the sky in starry eyed wonder like they've never seen it falling before.

The truth is that through out the twentieth century it only snowed twice on Christmas day and even though we've had cover in recent years all it does is cause chaos like the story of that pub last year where the customers got 'snowed in' for three days between Christmas and New Year and 'had to' drink everything in stock.

Ok, so that probably wasn't too much of a hardship.

I think the desire for a White Christmas goes back to wanting to be a kid again,especially around this time of year. Snow used to mean sledging, snow ball fights and days off school for most people so to combine this with Christmas where hopefully you don't have to go anywhere and your house is heated properly I suppose it's to recapture some of the magic. However, I've never met anyone where this actually works so why do we continue to put ourselves through it?

The first few Christmases I remember didn't involve a lot of snow. Although contrary to popular belief, Northern California is not that warm in December it was still pleasant enough to not be sitting typing with your hands looking slightly blue like right now (and the heating is turned up as far as it'll go)and although they have a bad track record with a lot of things; the Americans still do Christmas better. So to me, over commercialisation and sentimentatlity, watching the San Francisco Ballet doing the Nutcracker and random heat waves are what I call Christmas.

So maybe I'm a victim of Christmas nostalgia as well as the rest of the world but I would still appreciate it if I could walk outside my house without getting bruised black and blue or developing frostbite.

Christmas...there are only 24 shopping days left! Please shoot me now.

 

Don’t get me wrong, I love the build up to Christmas. The parties, the Doctor Who Christmas special, the fact that its the 25 days of the year when its socially acceptable to listen to Mariah Carey but as I get older and older I find myself turning more and more into a Grinch.

 However, it’s not because my heart is too sizes too small it’s more that the whole process has lost its shine.

I know you’re supposed to wake up on Christmas Day full of excitement and expectation but I’ve always found it rather boring. I’m grateful for the presents that I receive but I can’t help but think that I don’t really need them and my parents can’t really afford to give them to me. Maybe I’m just getting less and less materialistic as I get older but I’ve never really seen the point in gift giving if its just used as a mechanism to wrangle something expensive out of my parents that you’d be too tight to buy yourself. I always struggle to write a Christmas list for my family (my younger sister on the other hand has no difficulty) because I can’t really think of things that I really want. I have an Amazon/Topshop wish list as long as your arm but I can’t quite bring myself to actually request anything from anyone.  I’ve always thought that the satisfaction of getting something you want is partly how you get it and I’ve always liked buying things with my own money. Then again I’ve always wanted to be ridiculously independent.

 I do like giving gifts- to selected people of course. I’m not sure why really considering that most of the year I’m not a particularly generous person, maybe I’m just the embodiment of the mawkish cliché they always try to ram down your throat about the importance of giving at this time of year....I doubt it.

 Then there is the food. I’m a sort of vegetarian (sort of) and hate eating meat as does my mother so there goes the whole concept of Christmas lunch. I’ve never exactly been a big foodie anyway and on Christmas Day I’d be perfectly happy with a sandwich which probably sounds horrifically sad. I just don’t understand people’s desire to eat so much they feel sick. Having said that I do love Christmas cake and Mince Pies.

 Snow looks pretty whilst it swishing outside your window but in an old, badly heated student house frostbite isn’t so appealing. This time of year always depresses me because I hate how dark, gloomy and cold everything gets. It because its the metaphorical ‘death’ stage of the natural cycle so therefore everything is so lifeless and dull. I don’t see what’s so magical and cosy about that. Then of course there is the fact that the snow in Birmingham is so pathetic that it’ll snow overnight, melt during the morning and refreeze as ice as soon as it gets dark so someone who is of a more clumsy persuasion (i.e. me) will slip and break their neck. I haven't broken anything (touch wood) but I definitely have a few bruises.

I don’t hate Christmas at all, I guess I’m just incredibly jaded about the whole thing, as each year passes it just gets further and further away from the fun and excitement of Christmas when I was six or seven. Of course, when I was six or seven I was celebrating Christmas in California where there was a lot less chance of slipping on ice.

I have no idea if this post makes sense, its late and I can feel a cold coming (another thing I hate about this weather). Maybe I should give this stream-of-consciousness style another think.

Who said Plagarism never paid off...

http://www.redbrickonline.co.uk/news/compensation-payout-for-lost-exam-papers/

http://www.birminghammail.net/news/top-stories/2010/10/28/compensation-for-university-of-birmingham-students-as-exam-papers-are-lost-in-the-post-97319-27555292/

Seem familiar. I actually think its quite flattering really. 

Bonfire Night...

...I haven't written for a while, its been a hectic month and this is a few days out of date but oh well.

I've always found Bonfire Night a little bit peculiar. Not necessarily in a bad way but I do think its odd that thousands of people gather on mass to cheer and celebrate an effigy being burned. Yes, I suppose its a celebration of the triumph of democracy over religious extremism but it is still a bit weird if you really think about it. Its a recreation of a incredibly horrific death and considering as a  society we get in a moral panic if someone tries to potray it on TV after the watershed, it seems weird that such a practice is viewed as a perfect family event.

I'm not saying its a bad thing or that it should be stopped, its actually quite enjoyable (even though its far too cold) and I love the fireworks. Its merely an observation...and I highly doubt that celebrating the fact that parliament didn't fall its going to be too popular for people after the past couple of years in the media that MPs have had.

I also think there is so amusingly British about celebrating failure even if success would have through the entire country into anarchy.

Note to Self: Stop Navel Gazing.

I've had a funny few days. As I have been welcomed to the world of a second year Arts student I've found that instead of finding my free time liberating, I have simply found it boring.

I know I should be doing something productive and go apply for more part time jobs to heal the gaping wound in my bank balance that Tanzania inflicted but once you get stuck on the boredom and procrastination path,its hard to get off. Especially considering, not only will no-one employ, they won't acknowledge that I've even applied for a job. Of course, this is partly due to everyone looking for any kind of employment and our modern job market where you practically need a MA to wait tables.

In my relentless hours of sitting around doing nothing, I've had time to ponder my future and realise just how screwed I really am. I have no idea, really, about what I want to do with my life; I thought I did but now I'm not so sure and even if I ever do it is highly unlikely that I'll ever get it. I probably will not have the money or the luck. All I know so far is what I don't want and it is looking like all that I'm going to have to settle for. Which is frankly just depressing and almost encourages me to do something incredibly reckless and follow a stupid romantic fantasy of leaving uni to run away to Paris, get a job as a waitress and ride around the Left Bank on a moped with a hot Parisian artist.

Because things like that always happen.

 

 I also got to thinking about this whilst I was watching the new series of the Apprentice and although the kind of crap they came out with defied all previous examples of proverbial prattishness, you have got to admire their tenacity.

I highly doubt I'll ever have the courage to introduce myself as 'Caroline Mortimer- The Brand'; of course I'd never have the stupidity either but that's a moot point. Maybe they are the kind of people that get ahead in life (though I have no idea in that case why they want to work for Amstrad) and I should try taking a few more risks so that my future will look a little less bleak.

I really need to get a life.

Cavegirl reporting...

For the past week I have been living in the Dark Ages...metaphorically speaking of course. Despite being equipped with electricity, ridiculous amounts of free time and a functioning laptop I lack the vital necessity of the internet.

 Its weird how much we rely on the internet and utterly fundamental to our lives it has become. I am not even a particularily technology dependent person; I do not have internet on my phone (or I do but I have no idea how to turn it on), I could go a week at a time without using the internet in Tanzania without batting an eyelid and I didn't get Facebook till just before university. Yet despite this, I find my self going ten minutes up to uni several times a day because I can't do anything on my laptop except watch the O.C. ad nauseam.

I can't use Skype; so I can't call my parents (terrible I know), I can't use Spotify properly (I can only use the music that is already on my itunes- what is the point of that) and my automatic file backup won't back up without an internet connection. Whenever I used this things before, I didn't even know I was connected to the internet necessarily.

It wasn't till I was five that I even used a computer for the first time, I was about nine when I worked out how to use the old style dial-up internet, was around eleven before we got broadband and almost nineteen when I got my own laptop. Its amazing how in the past ten years our entire lives have begun to revolve around being connected to the outside world 24/7 and how cut off we feel without it. I have, on several occasions, watched old TV shows and films where characters are trying to find something or work something out and in a moment of huge stupidity, wondered why they can't just google it.

I'm not saying our dependence is a bad thing because it a sign of humankind's progress but I do wonder sometimes how I've got to this point where I cannot cope without being connected to the web constantly. I had a life before Facebook and was perfectly capable of managing my social life yet now I resent having to text people to meet up. I hate having to walk 5 minutes up the road to the library to check my emails and I've had to go cold turkey on my iplayer addiction.

There is much point to this post I suppose, its more a sense of reflection on how sad and pathetic I am to be so dependent on something that I probably could live without and did so up until a few years ago. Its amazing how something so much in the background and disrupt your life so irrevocably when its gone.