I remember being about 8, my younger sister was all of 5 and my other sister was barely even born. At the weekends (I can’t remember whether it was a Saturday or a Sunday) when we were all up and ready my dad would put his ‘The Very Best of Supertramp’ album on our huge hi-fi system, so so loud, we’d all pick an instrument to air-play and we’d just go mental! Dancing around the house playing our guitars, drums, pianos and singing to the songs, that would later become the songs to remind me of our childhood, without a care in the world about anything except whether or not dad would shout at us for singing the word ‘bloody’ in the song “Bloody Well Right” my sister would ALWAYs just do it and I’d not, just in case. Some things will never change.
And with that incredibly nostalgic post I feel that I need to post some childhood pictures for good measure.
Grandma holding my cousin Emma and I. Grandad holding my sister Jess and cousin Mark. I love the fact that not only do me and my sister have matching dresses but they are yellow and red matching dresses (with polka dots).
The ladies of the family (and my cousin Mark) around 10 years ago now.
My cousin Emma (in the pink) and I (in the navy) at the wedding of our auntie and uncle in about 1992.
One thing I have learnt this week (apart from that it most definitely is possible to eat 10 carrés of Monoprix white chocolate in less than 20 minutes) is that faking it might just be the way forward. Minds out of the gutter please, not that kind of faking it!
In language learning my strengths lie within the ‘receiving information’ side of the language; reading and listening. My writing isn’t even especially bad it is just speaking which is my major downfall. I’ve commented before in this blog how the reason is that I don’t feel confident enough and that I must get confident blah blah etc etc. However this week I have noticed some things that just make everything about my linguistic weaknesses disappear. I don’t have to HAVE confidence… I can fake it!
I’ve been doing a lot of listening and observing this week, mainly of non-native French speakers (just like me) trying to speak the language, and to just listen I could be fooled that they are much more amazing than me at the language, but if I REALLY listen I realise that’s not necessarily the case. Miss-conjugations, difficulties finding verbs, talking around the subject when nouns are forgotten and tense problems… that’s what I do!
The thing that separates me from these people (in my mind of course) is that I don’t fake the linguistic capability to mask my uncertainty – I uhm and ah until I find the exact way I want to say it or I rush in like a TGV and blabber everything and anything making it all muddled.
I think that if I really think about it and I take into consideration the things that these people do, adding simple phrases “bon alors” when I lose my TGV of thought, I could convince myself that I am in fact as great at French as I perceive the other foreign francophones!
Also, tonight, whilst l was sat in bed trying to get my sleep on (slight Cassidy reference there), I was thinking through some verbs and conjugations (I’m a language student, we’re allowed to do things like this for fun) and I came to the verb savoir (to know) and I started to think it through, I changed the regular first and second person singular forms of the verb from having an ‘is’ ending (sais) to an ‘it’ ending (sait) and felt uneasy I couldn’t even imagine trying to say “je sait” – just typing it makes me feel like I know nothing.
I know that’s a little trivial thing that may only interest my mind but along with the fact I catch myself thinking and mumbling to myself in French without even realising it I feel perhaps this is all a sign that I’m finally getting to grips with the language and that perhaps if I take heed of all that I have written above I’ll soon start to feel like I’m mastering the great French language!
Last night I had a pounding and stabbing earache in my right ear, this morning I was bleeding from said ear; my online self-diagnosis told me that either I was going to die due to brain complications or I had an ear infection.
I rang into my school to tell them I wouldn’t be in because I was ill and the secretary said, more than once, “entendu” which literally means ‘heard’ but put into context is ‘understood’. I wanted to make many a joke – “of course you heard, you’re not the one bleeding from your ears” however my French isn’t strong enough to be funny and I figured I’d get lost in translation somewhere and sound like my potential ear infection was in fact brain complications.
A quick trip to my doctor confirmed the latter, an ear infection. He prescribed me 5 (yes 5!!!) boxes of tablets and I went on my merry, partially-hearing way. Now, sat in my bed, feeling sorry for myself, surrounded by a wonderful array of boxes sporting long and unpronounceable names, and trying hard to understand Bones on the television without cranking the volume up, I got to thinking about what it would be like if I became deaf.
What would sudden deafness do to me? Well firstly I’d be forced to learn a new language, not out of want but out of necessity. I can spell my name in sign language but I’m not sure that would suffice. Not only would I be forced to learn the language but so would many people around me, all of my friends and family. It would throw a spanner in the works of my life plans; how could I continue to learn French without the ability to listen? I’d no longer be able to switch the radio on to hear the top 40, go to a club to dance to the top tunes or listen to my beloved iPod shuffle on the way to work.
I know that sounds very materialistic of me but hey, this is a material world. Of course there are technologies nowadays to aid those who have lost, or indeed never had, their hearing abilities. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that I’m very thankful that I still have my hearing.
There’s something about the poems of Robert Frost that I just love. I love how his poems have meanings disguised in nature, I love how they’re easy to read and stick in your mind once you have read them. Definitely inspirational. If I were to get a literary tattoo then it would definitely be a quote from his works.
I find it really hard to understand how I have 41 friends online, on Facebook chat (where else?!) yet no one I feel I can really talk to. A conversation with any of these 41… o wait, no, 46 people now, would simply be one of those awkward conversations that go like this…
“Hi, how are you?”
“I’m fine, how are you?”
“Yeah Im good. Been up to much?”
“No, you?
“Not really.”
“Cool.”
Yeah, you know the type.
In an attempt to bring the world closer Facebook has actually torn us apart. Yes, I can’t deny how useful it is to keep in contact with people, especially for me whilst I’m abroad right now. Thinking really hard about it though – how many of these people could go out, sit with each other and have a laugh together, rather than avoid each other on facebook chat? The majority I expect! (If they can remember how to communicate without a keyboard).
I keep telling myself that I’ll go a week without it, but it never happens because that would be social suicide. EVERYTHING that I’m ever invited to is organised over Facebook – if I don’t receive an event invitation how will I know about it?! It’s shocking to think that someone could organise an evening out without having to go through the lengthy procedures involved in creating an event. If facebook just shut the server down (or whatever it is they’d need to do – I’m no computer genius) for a day (or a week if they’re daring enough to encounter millions of complaints) the world would be such a better place. People would go out and spend their lives seeing things and doing things, not relying on Facebook to tell them about those that are trying to go out and do things but find themselves drawn back to update their status and upload pictures.
“Unnamed person is enjoying their first few days on their first holiday in 3 years”
GET OFF FACEBOOK AND ENJOY IT, YOU CAN TELL US ABOUT IT WHEN YOU’RE DONE IN THE SUN.
I’m not claiming that I never use Facebook or that I’m not an addict, I know I am, I need Facebook, as sad as that sounds – and I know it’s the same for everyone else who has it. I just think that if Facebook didn’t exist anymore the world would be a much better place and peopled wouldn’t be spending hundreds of pounds to jet off to a sunny place only to find themselves Facebooking about it. Crazy as it sounds there are actually people out there without it and I’m almost 99% sure that they’re having a better standard of life… unless, of course, they’re all as equally addicted to Twitter or MySpace!
Dreams have always fascinated me, there are so many theories behind them, it’s amazing that we’re still so unsure about something so common. It’s also a little scary to think that! Dreams are normally difficult to recall and are more frequently recalled when the dreamer is awakened whilst dreaming. I must be awakened whilst dreaming most of the time because I recall my dreams quite frequently, how reliable these dream recalls of mine are is another story.
My dreams have always been pretty bizarre, but when put into the theory by Ferenczi that my dreams may be trying to communicate something that isn’t being actually said, they seem pretty logical. I’ve had the most common dreams; the chase dream (although there’s something about being chased by a sausage dog that turns into a dwarf when it get closer that masks the interpretation of anxiety and turns it into plain comedy! I’m not sure what the sausage dog/dwarf symbolises but they are meant to represent things in my life that I’m trying to escape from), the teeth dream (dreaming of being bitten apparently represents the biter having power over me – I should be more assertive)!
So the reason I’m writing this blog at 6:40am is that 40 minutes ago I was awakened by the shock of a dream. Normally I can fall back to sleep easily after being awoken from a dream but this dream really startled me and I’m finding it difficult to find a reliable interpretation to set my mind at rest. All I have managed to depict so far is that there is an aspect of trust. I also felt that there were characters in this dream set out from the start, I felt as if it was some sort of tv show and I actually saw characters (which never usually happens, normally the characters faces are never very clear) and they reappeared.
In my dream I was trying to walk home from somewhere, nowhere that I particularly recognised, it just seemed to be a route that a normal person might take whilst walking home from work or school. I saw a path that looked like a shortcut, it didn’t particularly look like a shifty place, however I avoided it and opted to walk along the path at the side of the road. The route then guided me downwards to cross a sort of carpark that was just under the ground, I crossed it and walked up the steps to a lighter part of the, now apparently multi-story, carpark. I passed a man on the phone who appeared to work there, he pulled the phone away from his ear and made a face as if the person on the other side was his nagging wife or child. I smiled politely and carried on trying to figure my way out of the building that I’d gotten into. I passed a man and a woman who also appeared to work there, the woman had short red (dyed) hair and they were both wearing navy blue jumpers. I approached them and asked them the way out and the man pointed me in the right direction. I headed off the way he pointed out and eventually got to the barriers that the cars would go through and the man and woman were both there taking tickets off the drivers – I asked the man if this was the way to go as I’d never gone out the same way as a car before and he said that I just needed to go up the steps to my right and I’d be out. I went up the steps but found myself in a room with a chest freezer that was about half the average size, I was just about to leave when I heard a noise so I ducked down. When I looked back up the man was sat on the freezer with a grin on his face and after a few moments he opened it and pulled out a large, weighty (I could actually sense the weight) plastic bag. In that bag all I could see was navy blue and dyed red… he’d frozen his co-worker and apparently I was next (although I never actually saw it as I awoke from shock).
What a disturbing dream! As I was writing about it something actually came to my mind and I may have found my dream interpretation. If I had taken the shortcut I had seen at the start of the dream would I have been safer than I was following my safer instincts and trusting other people to tell me the right way, rather than my initial impulse of the shortcut? Maybe my dream is trying to tell me that I should stop worrying about things (the shortcut being potentially dangerous) and not rely on others to tell give me direction in my life and me the truth all the time. It sounds like a plausible interpretation, right?
After my traumatic dream I cannot get back to sleep simply for the reason that I’ve never had a dream before that had set characters, people that I didn’t know yet whose faces I could see almost fully. This is why dreams are so fascinating. I have no idea what that could mean, maybe it’s a premonition and I will see that face in real life trying to make me trust them and I just shouldn’t. Maybe it’s a face I’ve already seen but forgotten. Either way, I’m worried if I close my eyes the final scene of my dream will haunt me, as I can still see it in the back of my thoughts.
It’s 7am, the church bells have just chimed for the first time today, maybe I will sleep now, knowing that it’s now daytime and people are rousing from their sleep and it’s not quiet, isolated night time anymore.
So, apparently “gingerism’s gone nuts” according to The Guardian, and all I can say is, can you really blame us? In my 20 years of life I have come across so many different forms of bullying and discrimination simply for being ginger. There was a boy who used to sit behind me in business studies and try to set my hair on fire with his lighter because he didn’t like the colour, there’s the silly childhood name-calling; carrot-top, ginger-minger etc, that get carried on through high school and sadly often into adult life.
The world goes mental and people are brought to justice for such acts as a result of racism, so what’s the difference? Are people trying to say that discrimination as a result of skin colour is much more important than discrimination as a result of hair colour? Now I’m a pretty laid back person, but one thing I get sick of turning on the television to hear comedians making jibes about gingers. Change the ginger joke to one about black people and people complain (and quite rightly) and it’s sorted out, or at least taken into account, but the above article is condemning us gingers for making complaints.
A few months ago there was an issue with a Christmas card in supermarket, Tesco. The card, which read “Santa loves all kids. Even the ginger ones”, has now been take off the shelves, which I think is quite right. After the news of that card I had many friends saying to me that they thought removing the card was a bit harsh and that surely I wasn’t too bothered by the card, I’m not sure why they thought I wouldn’t be bothered though. Change the word ‘ginger’ to ‘asian’ and the whole asian community would be in uproar (again, quite rightly) and the card would be removed and no one would question the removal of it.
The article in the guardian claiming that us gingers have thin skin as a result of both “criticism and ultraviolet radiation”, is written by an author who made the following disclaimer at the end “the author would like to rebut recent internet allegations that he is himself a ginger. He insists that any red tinge to his hair is merely a trick of the light and his short temper the result of being a bit tired. His actual hair colour is auburn”. People like that are just as bad as those that bash us. Those that claim they’re not ginger and cover up their true ginger roots (excuse the pun) by joining in the criticism for those of us that are proud and confident enough to admit to being ginger.
If you’re ginger be proud to be ginger. If you’re not ginger then shut up or put up with us complaining. Gingerism = racism.
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O the irony! After I posted this blog I logged onto my facebook and saw amongst many of the groups joined by facebook friends.
In the information box it states that they want members to keep comments less vulgar so they don’t risk the deletion of the group. What? Less vulgar than the group itself? Just think how many impressionable young people are hating themselves right now for having beautiful red hair.
I’ve been getting a bit mardy with a lot of things recently and I’ve realised that I’m a pretty grumpy person sometimes and there’s a lot about the world that I hate, so I decided I’d compile a list of things that I want putting into, what must be the most stupidly full room ever, Room 101. Yes the very same Room 101 of BBC fame, I’ve browsed a list of things that celebrities have previously put into Room 101 and thought hard myself and these are my final 5 major dislikes in the world.
• People that just can’t take no for an answer.
I hate hate hate when someone asks you a question, you respond with “no” and then they proceed to hassle you about it.”Do you want to go to the cinema on Thursday?” ”No” “O come on, it’s the best film, it’s got that actor in it, if you come I’ll buy the popcorn, Thursday’s a good day for cinema…” blahblahblah. STOP! I said “NO”. If I wanted to go, I would have said “yes”, if I wanted you to persuade me I would’ve made that clear. Pushy people annoy me more than anything else on this planet, I think.
• Lateness.
If you know you can’t make it for a certain time then don’t agree to that time. If you can make it for that time then be there, simple. Obviously there are situations in which it can’t be helped and are beyond our control like, for example, delayed public transport or an accident. However, I absolutely despise people who wait until the last possible minute, get there late and think it’s fine.
• People who have a very low comprehension of their own language and grammar.
If you can’t distinguish between ‘there’, ‘their’, ‘they’re’ then I’m talking to you. It’s not so hard. You learn it in primary school, you must know it to get into high school so why put it all out of your mind, create your own stupid language endd Talk lyk dis (‘and talk like this’ – for all those non-grammatically retarded people)? Let me help you out, or rather, let Ross from Friends help you out.
• The weather.
It’s just all horrible. The wind makes my face dry and sore, the rain makes me wet, the snow is just too impractical and the sun gives me sunburn. I think that’s all I need to say on that one.
• Annoying little noises.
My dad clicks his nails, my sister pops her chewing gum. Whatever noise it is that you make, just stop it. I’m aware I probably make some annoying noises but it’s always different when it’s ourselves. There’s nothing worse than being sat on a long train journey with someone clicking their pen constantly, or being in the library and having to endure the sound of someone tapping on the table or turning pages noisily. This also goes for hearing people’s music despite their use of headphones. The reason for headphones is so that everyone else doesn’t have to listen to your crap taste in music, dumbass!
Anyway, that’s it. My 5 Room 101 choices. This post makes me sound like a grumpy old fart but there’s definitely a lot I love about the world, so much so that it’d be hard to just choose five of those.
Last academic year was the best of my life so far. I lived in a house with 3 amazing and beautiful girls that I miss ever so much whilst I’m here. Today I’m having a nostalgic day, reading through an old blog created by me and one of the other girls. I found this and had to re-blog it because it defines everything I loved about last year.
Love defined by the GGs.
Love is sucking all the sour off Haribo for her because she doesn’t like it.
Love is letting her win even though the competitive streak is mutual.
Love is not minding curling her hair several times a day so she looks fab.
Love is joining the farm application on Facebook so she can get more money by sending trees.
Love is shaving her legs for her because she’s too drunk to do it herself.
Love is spending 24/7 together but needed to text each other constantly when out of the house.
Love is telling her you want something chocolatey because telling her you don’t is the wrong answer.
Love is loving her to pieces regardless of whether she’s being a tiny bit annoying.
Love is sharing. Sharing clothes, jewelry, boys, make up, food, gossip, love.
Love is her giving up her cuddly toy to cuddle for a bit when grogginess is apparent, even if she’s groggy too.
Love is her texting “Quick look out my window!x” so that she can wave from across the road.
Love is running all the way up the stairs on receiving said text to wave back.
Love is loving every moment spent together and missing each other when apart for even a day.
Love is spending all day together and still needing to text when out and about.
These girls are my whole entire world even despite the fact that we’ve been separated by life and necessity at the moment. I have never met and will never meet any other people like them and I miss them every single day with all of my heart.
