...etc

I'm in the process of re-vamping and locking down my blog, as I realised that over the years this blog has been more my 'brainspace' than writing particularly for anyone. And it's not going private because I do want to be open about what I'm thinking and feeling, and keep RL friends informed about what I'm doing etc, and also, of course to communicate you all of you wonderful people on my f-list.

Comment to be added. :)

banner from lecollage; art by Sarah Joncas

Dear clouds,

May I remind you that it is cold, and that you have rained all week so you should really take a break now. Having soggy feet all day is just slightly distracting.

No love, Esmaraldo

First of all, things I need to do think week:

1. Buy train ticket to London- for my spaztastic trip to see serpentpixie and moonytoes. Really a Medical interview should not be this much fun.

2. Buy plane ticket to Dundee and then work out how to get to St Andrews from there. This is for my last ever medical school interview as I'll have had interviews at all the places I've applied to. This is scary. People are usually rejected by one straight away.

3. Revise Biology. A2 Module exam next week, and also an Olympiad paper later this month. It does not help that I feel like I've forgotten everything, not that I knew much in the first instance. We started on the regulation of glucouse today, which was what my Cambridge interview was mainly on, and I am even more amazed that they made me an offer as I knew so little during my interview.

4. Read Regeneration, Freuds essays on War and Taboo, Owen poems, River's essay on The Repression of the War experience (as we're about to start out English coursework, and I am so excieted about it as I'll be able try and link literature with biology).

5. Sort out digital banking for the joint holiday account. I've got all the details, I've just not tried to log in yet. But apparently everyone expects me to be responsible and collect all the money and pay for flights. I think perhaps J's doing the last bit, as she's the only person who knows which flights we're actually booking.

( Things I need to do before the end of this school year: )

( This summer I plan to: )

( Some general remarks regarding my view on life: )

apathetic whinings again. Garh. Why is school so frustrating. It's not that I already know everything, in fact, I really don't and I'm sitting in lessons with a permenant puzzled look on my face. But, I just don't get most things, and they won't explain it to me properly. And I've not reached a point yet where I shall go and search out the answer myself. I have looked in textbooks though and that doesn't help either. I do not want to just memorise a load of facts that I'm not even convinced are right. No. That would be boring and pointless. Not that my memory's particularly good in the first place. /end pathetic childishness

Perhaps I should try harder to make things more interesting. Why do they have to include dull modules in A-levels such as Statistics and Ecology? I want to be at Cambridge already damn it. But then, I also really, really don't as I have been warned that it can get to be an insane amount of work.

Anyway,

Will anyone be in London on the 29th of Jan? I have a UCL interview in the afternoon (but that should only take up an hour or so at most), so I have a day in London. Yay. Except I don't particularly want to wonder around on my lonesome.

Xilun has an offer, Jasmine has an offer, Matt has an offer (for Oxford), both Sams have offers, Shu has and offer, Jue has an offer, Milly has an offer, Claire has an offer (for Oxford) and I have an offer!

Almost all of my close friends who have applied to Oxbridge have offers!!

*is absolutely dazzled*

I am (hopefully, owing to examination results) going to read MEDICINE at CAMBRIDGE!!!!!!

*can't quite believe it*

Yesterday I was at the boy's house. We were in his room. We talked about the forces of history, of the retrospective and identifying a crucial moment in an era that has caused the world to travel down a certain path. He suggested that that moment had been 911. I suggested that perhaps it hasn't occurred yet, and that perhaps it could have occurred at that very moment. When we went downstairs for dinner, the news of Benazir Bhutto's death had broken.

Perhaps it is because I am a woman, and liberal, and I believe wholeheartedly in democracy and freedom of speech that her death resonates within me. The imagery used in the news reports of Pakistan now being on a knife's edge further emphasises the raw, crude emotions that have become unleashed. It is the imagery of bitterness and revenge, of the Old Testament’s an eye for an eye a tooth for a tooth.

The timing of her death is also timing of an unfinished life, with the intertwined unresolved hopes of the people. Other public figure deaths have never affected me this much, but then again, their lives weren't often so brutishly ended at such a crucial time in a Country's History. I wanted her to succeed. People stored so much hope and tenderness within her, and now the vessel has been smashed.

It will be interesting to see what next year will bring.

Give something this christmas (an improve your own vocabluary in the precess!)

http://www.freerice.com/index.php

Each time you get a word right, you donate 20 grains of rice through the U.N. The money comes from the advertising at the bottom.

About FreeRice
FreeRice is a sister site of the world poverty site, Poverty.com.

FreeRice has two goals:

Provide English vocabulary to everyone for free.
Help end world hunger by providing rice to hungry people for free.
This is made possible by the sponsors who advertise on this site.

Whether you are CEO of a large corporation or a street child in a poor country, improving your vocabulary can improve your life. It is a great investment in yourself.

Perhaps even greater is the investment your donated rice makes in hungry human beings, enabling them to function and be productive. Somewhere in the world, a person is eating rice that you helped provide. Thank you.

Watched 'I'm not there' with the boy yesterday. I think I've only just come to understand it, after discussion, introversion and relfection.

The trailer also helped. Wished I'd seen that before watching the film so that I could have framed the scenes better within context. The film is a breathtakingly poignant portrait of Bob Dylan nonetheless, and it resonants deeply with fragmented personalities.

All I can do is be me,
Whoever that is.
-Bob Dylan

He is everyone
He is no one

Such an interesting film. And yes, it has distorted time, and edges. The boy is a Historian so chronology interests him.

We had drinks (plum wine) at a cute Japanese cafe beforehand, which I so hope I can find again as it was amazing. They sold second hand books on the side, and the had The Autographman, and White teeth, Memoirs of a Geisha, and other equally as significant books.

However said boy fiddles with absolutely anything and is incredibly indecisive (which I am also so it makes things a chore sometimes/often)

arrived home for some very difficult self analysis with chaosgwir and I think we made good headway. I tend to confuse sexual feelings with emotions too much.

This entry will probably make sense to very few people. Oh well.

I want to write a thesis on I am not there.

*reminds self that you are a medic*

I have just got a text from the boy to tell me that he's got an offer of AAB to read History at Oxford (it might possibly have been History and Politics, but he was applying for slightly different courses everywhere so I am allowed to be confused)

I am so happy for him!
(or basically I am excieted because this may mean that I get to stay at Oxford and witness the Hollinghurstesque debauchery)

I am so deep. YAY.

I don't think I've mentioned him before, but as it's associated with a very random and long chronology I don't think I'll explain it all of it tonight. Basically ran into him randomly on the street manning a no to id cards stall with a friend I'd made even more randomly in Cambridge.

PS: I wish Cambridge would hurry up and send their decision damn it. I have to wait till the 2nd. And it occured to me tonight that the wait's rather like being pregnant- the worry of a misscariage is constantly on the back of your mind.

Felt very grown-up yesterday going out with friends for a movie, then dinner, then drinks.

Except of course we watched The Golden Compass, and then had a brief interlude in a graveyard before going to the pub.

The film was very meh. I loved the acting, but the direction lacked heart. It was a bit - 'we must get through all of these plot points before the end of two hours'. However, I the use of the daemons to express the more primal and truer natures of human relationships was nicely done. I did feel myself getting bored with the traveling ship scenes and fighting scene though, and instead of admiring the special affects I was trying to work out the programs that they'd been created on.

The graveyard was cold. I think it was something that I realised in that instant that I'd always wanted to experience.

Today consisted of a biology test, a chemistry test, some horrendous integration that I just barely understand (though add trig to it and it gets me every time), freezing bus rides, phoning alkairis to have dozy conversation, 'zoning into the interwebs' ie, having little recollection of the webpages I browsed this evening, answering a text message from a friend to tell her the name of a DVD she should get her younger sister, eating dinner with mother, and having a glass of some utterly disgusting red wine.

Interesting moment when my mother got in today:

She: So have you had anything to eat today?

Me: Yes, I just had the (and here I'd meant to say sweat potatoe, but instead I mixed up a syllable and said...) rat.

It didn't help that she thought I'd been serious.

Yes, I really found a rat in the sewer, skined it and then roasted it in the oven for food evethough there is a fridge full of normal food.

Who knew Chinese could be full of such pitfalls.

My sore throat has progressed to a head cold. So now I can't breath, feel as if I have balloons in my sinuses and my eyes are continually watering from the irritation. Thank you so much bacteria! well, at least I think it's bacterial.

So really, I am not a all up to facing the huge pile of work that has built up both from me feeling crap and from missing school for the interview, and I'm missing more school tomorrow to collect an anthology/poetry thing tomorrow. Go away pile.
(maybe if I repeat it enough times it will go away)

I can not get over how clogged up and drowsy I feel. If this gets anyworse I will soon be drugged up too.

Anyway, what made my day today- my awesome friends' (admittidly very,very,very late) birthday present, Clinical Medicine by Kumar and Clarke. A huge brick of a thing that I had to lug around for the afternoon, but it seems to have everything I'll need to know up to 6th year in an integrated sort of way. It's apparently one of the set texts for Manchester, and it will be very useful for brownie points for Cambridge essays, so it will be loved where ever I end up.

(if only it could make colds go away)

My throat feels like it's been rubbed raw with sandpaper and then had vinigar poured on top everytime I swallow.

That is all.

I got your letter in the post fools_trifle. The illustration was so cute. ♥ I haven't even started thinking about Christmas cards yet!

My father was a bit like- why do you have mail from Denmark? You've never been to Denmark. Bless.

Yesterday, the night before my interview, my mother was all like- why don't you have any sensible shoes? I replied that I have very comfy shoes and very cool converse sneakers but yes, nothing conventionally smart or wearable with a suit.

She then began to insult all of my sweaters. They were either too low, or, 'you really ought not wear layers underneath (my usual method for compenstating with the lowness)'.

The result. I have been shopping. And in the process has found a replacement for the pair of jeans that was incredibly outworn. Although, I still don't think I have what my mother would call sensible clothes. And no shoes either.

I need to buy train tickets tomorrow, so I'll buy shoes and stuff then I guess.

Also tomorrow's the day where I'm giving my 'talk' on my research project. I think I know something about it at least.

I am now 18 btw.

and I think only in my family can my mother pick up the blue inconspicuous bottle (not the absinthe that chaosgwir bought me, of course) but weak wkd stuff, ask me 'is this juice?' and then proceed to drink a glass of it, without noticing the fact that it had vodka in it.

Clearly my parents trust me too much.

Since I have just finished quite a major piece of work, ie a big nasty science write up for my BA CREST gold award (okay, I should be working on the poster now, but anyway), I thought I'd do something which I don't do that often anymore, and actually go on the internet, in the proper sense. Well, in the old sense of the word. The internet used to mean to me a community of people, artists, writers, real life and internet friends, but over the past year I seem to have detached myself completely from it and now seem to be slightly bewildered with 'the masses' that seems to have joined in.

Perhaps I've just grown up. Perhaps I've just changed, but the internet provides far less of an escape than it used to.

In other news, I have officially applied to University. *blinks* Yes. I have the UCAS confirmation letter in front of me on my desk, and I know I have two emails from two different admissions tutors in my inbox.

I'll soon be independent, well to some extent anyway. This is probably a good thing as my parents and I have moved past the emo teenage stage now, and I'm just meerly irritated that they're a little inteferring from time to time. But that is because they are parents.

They still seem to trust me an extortionate amount...which is quite strange considering I'm sure they'd be shocked if they knew half of what I've done.

I feel a bit weird and isolated at the moment, and I'm not really sure why. Noises have been made that I am tiring myself out with 5 subjects, but I don't think that's it. I'm more listless, unmotivated and passive. There's a bit of lack of direction. I am going to go to the nursing home next week to get away from the weird vibes at school.

Perhaps I have become so absorbed in science, theory and ideas that I have lost sight of what should be the most important- people.

I've just had a look at my interests list. It's not that applicable anymore, as in I haven't explored many on that list, and there are now huge areas that aren't represented. Such as electrons. Energy. the brain. everything.