The Other Place

Since I still use my livejournal account--for comments and polls--I still visit this place now and then and look at all my old stuff. I was just looking at this post from nearly a year back, and I think I still feel the same way I did then about a lot of things. The parts about America and London in particular stand out, because I recently did something very similar to what I described there.
I left Uni at York back in July, and moved back in with my parents here. Now I liked York a lot--it's very much my type of place, and I'd even considered trying to get a job and stay there before Uni finished. I'd thought about taking a trip back down--possibly to see friends--a few times since I left. Then, just after christmas, I suddnely decided I would go. I booked a day return ticket on the train, and got myself something to watch on the way. I took the hour-long journey down on the 31st December, spent a few hours looking in the shops, wandering around the city centre, got something to eat, and then I took the train back again. I didn't have any reason to go, I didn't have anything to do when I got there, I just did it. I guess I just get restless.
One of theses days on an impulse I'll end up buying a plane ticket somewhere and get completely and utterly lost in a foreign country with no idea how to get home.

So, today I'm going back home for easter. but for now, I need something to fill the time until this evening. I have a choice to make.
Do I finish One Hundred Years of Solitude, or do I sit down for a Dead Like Me marathon?
It's a difficult decision.

On the one hand, I really shloud get on with this book.
On the other hand, it's Dead Like Me. And it'll be a preparation for next month, when they're finally releasing season 2 on DVD (hurrah!).

Decisions, decisions....


Edit: Dead Like Me wins. This was a great show--what happened to it?

[Forum post that felt a little too close for comfort to post on the forum. Posted to livejournal because this place is a little further removed from the rest of my online life.]


BSc project report due on Friday. Up to date lab notebook due tomorrow. (Today. Thursday.) Final data collection happening... tomorrow. Over the entire day.
Up til 3am tonight, and I still haven't gotten the first part of my work done on this notebook. I have a Serious Problem re: procrastination. And yet I can't seem to take it seriously.
Because I've trained myself to just let everything slide*. To not care.
That used to be an advantage. Or seemed like it. Not so now, when I actually need to worry, to take it seriously, to engage.
When it comes down to it, I'm just not cut out for... life.
How the hell will I ever cope, if I can't turn away from what I'm doing for even five minutes to do something more important?



[*I could explain, but you'd misunderstand. Preconceptions.]

http://anotherplace.wordpress.com/

While you wait for AnotherPlace to relocate, or for me to resume normal blogging on this journal instead, here's a music video for you to enjoy.

Anotherplace, the blog I've had hosted on buildtolearn.net for the last couple of years, is no more.
The host, after a year or more of unreliable service and 6 month+ silence from the owner, has shut down all hosting services. Since I only visit buildtolearn.com when something goes wrong, I didn't know about this until today, when my site was down and I went there to see what was up. As a result, I had no warning, and could not make a backup of my recent posts.

It's not all bad news, of course. I do have a backup from the last time the site was down--which, I'm happy to say, was only a month ago. If I am able to find new hosting, expect to see Anotherplace return to action. For now, however, it is gone.

Keep an eye out for updates, which I'll post here (this lj has been going to waste anyhow).

Recently I've been possessed with the most absurd ideas about travelling. I have barely enough money to pay my rent, and I have no reason at all to go anywhere, but I feel this odd urge to just get up, hop on a train/plane, and go somewhere. I think it all started with London. I've never been to London. (Well, that's not entirely true - I've been to London once, as a school trip. From King's Cross we went straight to the tube station, and after getting off the tube we crossed the road to our destination, where we stayed indoors for a few hours. We returned by the same route. You can probably understand why I don't think of it as visiting London.) I have no idea what I'd do if I went there. There's nothing in particular I want to see, nothing I particularly want to do.
You know, what probably interests me more is the journey. I like travelling on the train - I enjoy it. Just sitting doing nothing for an hour or so. Watching the countryside pass by. (On the other hand, I get very impatient/irritated if the train has to slow down and/or stop for whatever reason. Really gets at me, that it's just sitting there and there's nothing I can do about it.)
Another odd travel fantasy that's been in my head recently - America. Not any particular place in america, just the concept of america itself. I don't exactly want to go there as much as I want to have been there. It even got to the point where I looked at flight routes, prices, etc. The latter too high, the former too indirect. (I'd have to go to an airport in London, amusingly enough.) I just have this image of flying over, spending a day just... looking around, I guess. Just being in America. And then flying back home. Of course this says nothing of the ten hour flights, the ridiculously jacked prices for a return ticket within a week of arrival, and the fact I'd be left with very little day to deal with, no idea where I was, and no fucking clue what to do with myself.
I just find it really odd that there's this... compulsion, with no real motive behind it. I can't understand it.

I think I may finally have solved my inability to write consistently and often. I've realised that though I only write a fragment when I sit and try to write before becoming distracted, I can without difficulty move from one fragment to another, completely unrelated. By doing this, I might be able to produce several hundred words at a time, writing numerous stories at once. It could be the door into writing longer, singular works.

(Posted here because Anotherplace is offline)

At the beginning of this term, we had a little scare about a mouse. One of my housemates - the one who spends the least time here - had a lot of food in one of the lower kitchen cupboards (and also left bread in there over christmas, but that's a different matter), and one of us happened to open the door to his cupboard and noticed that it stank. It didn't take long for us to realise that the cupboard was covered in mouse shit, and a lot of food had been nibbled (it seemed especially fond of the Kinder Maxi bars and Orange KitKats). Anyway, all the food was quickly moved out of that cupboard - and the one next to it - into one of the higher ones. Someone managed for a relative to mail one of those humane mouse traps over to us. A couple of days later it arrived - they stuck some chocolate and peanuts in one end of it, and put it in the cupboard. Before the end of the evening we checked up on it and lo and behold we had a mouse. Two of them set out to deposit it at the park, and that was that (other than washing the cupboard, which followed summarily).
Seven weeks later, I'm getting myself a drink of water, and for some reason I look down at the floor near the oven - and there it was, a little brown mouse, looking right up at me. It dodged back in between the oven and cupboard, and after telling my housemates I'd seen it, I stuck some cheese into the trap (I was out of chocolate, and my cheese was going off anyway), and set it up. The next morning the trap was closed and when I picked it up something rattled about inside - I thought I'd caught it, but it turned out the cheese had come loose and was rolling around inside. I set it back up, and left it. Tonight, it's about 1.30am, I'm about to go to bed, and I decide to take a quick look, and I find the trap full. When I turn the light on and walk over it starts scrabbling at a little gap in the top of the trap. At this point I'm not sure what to do - do I go to bed and deal with it in the morning, or should I get it out of the trap as soon as possible? I eventually decide on the latter, pull on my coat, pocket the trap, and head down to the park. A couple of shakes and the mouse emerges, stops for a second, then darts off into the night.
When I got back, I set the trap up again just in case. It's empty this time - the mouse seems to have eaten every last bit of the cheese I left in there.
I'm hoping this won't happen again any time soon.

An unanticipated encounter with a near-life size inflatable Triple H has resulted in a shallow gash along the back of my thumb. I'm in some discomfort as I write out a post for AnotherPlace on pen and paper.

For the last week or so, every time I open a new tab I automatically start typing "goog" into the address bar... even when I had a specific website in mind when I opened the tab. It's weird, and it's getting to be a little irritating.

Almost a year since I last posted here. Why the hell am I reviving all my old blogs?
Strange looking at this stuff. Seems I don't write the same way at all now than I did a year ago - and it's also made me realise I've stopped saying 'meh'. Wonder when that happened.
Reading this, it seems I posted a lot more about day-to-day and personal stuff here than I did on Xanga or AnotherPlace. Maybe that could be a purpose for this place? I've been wondering how to confront the contradiction involved in trying to turn AnotherPlace into a more general article-based site while continuing to post about everyday life stuff. Too complicated? AnotherPlace for books, reading, writing, etc; Xanga for links and random crap; here for everyday blogging? Maybe. I'll be considering it, anyway.

I've not been updating here - mainly because I have another blog on Xanga I've been posting to. That, and the fact that no-one reads this thing. Meh.

I still can't believe I deleted my website. I mean, it's been two years, for gods sake, get over it! Gah. Thinking it over now, I kinda did it on a whim, and that was irresponsible of me. To shut down, to completely destroy all the content I put so much time into writing - and I wrote everything except the site itself. Every page, every detail, every news post, that was me. Only later on did I begin to get a little help with things; an unknown reader of the site started doing Episode Guides, and a couple of forum members were writing news updates. I regret it now. I'd written some pretty good content, if I do say so myself, and i didn't just take it all off the net - I removed all of it from my computer, every last bit. Even the stuff I was halfway through, another piece of exclusive content I'd been putting a lot of time into. By the time it happened, I had a fair amount of regular visitors, and I shouldn't have just shut the place down without warning. I think I was just bored; numerous problems with the forums, the part of the site I enjoyed running the most, had left it horribly inactive after it's fourth or fifth reinstall, and i was getting sick of not having any posts to respond to. I feel as if I've been trying to get that back ever since - it didn't take me long to set up another site, just forums this time, and try to get a good community going. It didn't work out. Sites came and went, and noone posted. Meh. It doesn't bother me so much now. I've found other places to go.
This morning I got an email from Eamonn, who ran forums on the same subject as my site until December 2003 when they shut down, informing his former forum members of a new site. It just reminded me, is all.

...But I pwn Mechanics. Heh, it's departmental exams this week at uni, and I just came back from my 3 hour physics. The Mechanics section was simple, but I screwed up the Physics of Matter completely. Meh.

I now have internet in my room, so I'm making the most of my fast download speeds. Music and videos galore.

Well, today I arrived back at Uni to start my second term of Physics. Just finished unpacking all my stuff, and don't have anything to do, so thought I'd post this. Had my hair cut (at long last) today - feels strange to reach up their and not feel a full handfull of hair, heh.
The cast came off my wrist last week - yep, I'm healed. Almost. Still got some movement issues, can't bend the wrist as far as normal, and need to keep exercising it to loosen up the stif joint. Hopefully all will be well soon.

All is not entirely well at uni atm, however. Stuff I really shouldn't be bothered about (and sort of aren't) - well, I've mentioned my issues with talking to people, etc, and it's pretty easy to assume that last term I didn't really talk to many of the people on my corridor. For some reason one of them has this term taken to coughing loudly whenever he sees me, and earlier this evening they decided to prop a traffic cone against my door (you know, the pointless kind of thing people for unknown reasons believe is hilarious when they do it, but really is a bit crap as far as a joke goes). Meh. My theory is, since it's nothing particularly annoying I might as well just let them do it - eventually they'll run out of ideas, or get bored.

Hope you all had a good time over the weekend. I sorta did.
First I better say what I was given for christmas. I got Family Guy series 1 and 3 on DVD, box sets of Futurama series 1 & 2, and Return of the King Extended Edition. Also got Radiohead's OK Computer, City of Golden Shadow by Tad Williams, and Jak 3 for the PlayStation 2. Clothes, wallet, chocolate, gadgets. No underwear or socks, thankfully, and certainly no knitted sweaters.
We had turkey for dinner, turkey sandwiches on the morning when my aunt came, turkey sandwiches with our tea. Watched Shrek 2 in the afternoon, then in the evening half of Family Guy series 1.
Boxing Day we went to my grandma's as usual, had another turkey dinner (better than the one at home the day before, as usual), and sat around til tea, when we had turkey sandwiches again (but of course!).
Bank holiday monday I did nothing much, and the same today, 'cept we went out for a meal this evening.

Those adverts on TV for 'House of Flying Daggers' look pretty good - I'm thinking of going to see it at the cinema later this week.

Merry Christmas (in a totally secular sense).
Hope you enjoyed yourselves today.

When I say 'Regular updates are forthcoming', I mean it. And here's one of them.

I didn't go to the A-level presentation. A number of reasons, none of them adequate to excuse my not going. Instead, I went christmas shopping. Managed to get a DVD for my sister, bag and purse for my mam, and some CDs for my dad. One thing I must say - I don't think I've ever seen the colour green in such profusion in womens clothes stores. Green must be 'in' this season, or something.
As for yesterday, I did nothing. That's right, nothing. My, what an interesting life I lead. Off to buy christmas cards (just as soon as I can be bothered to get dressed).

Forgot again. Never again, I say - never again! Regular updates are forthcoming!

Anyway, lots to update on. Waaaaay back in November, I was being an idiot and broke my wrist - compressed radius, needed wires put in. Spent a week at home, then went back to Uni (it was my right hand, not my writing hand). Last week the wires were pulled out (ouch!), but I keep the cast on for another couple of weeks.

My time at university has been good, for the most part - enjoying myself a bit. Things took a downward turn in the last week; I won't say much on that, just that some people who know nothing about me made some false assumptions, and my poor confidence talking to people I don't know didn't help when I tried to convince them otherwise.

Now, I'm home, and won't be back to uni till Jan 10th. Tonight there's some sort of 'A-Level presentation' going on at my old school, which I'm going to - hopefully it'll be ok, but I haven't really been told anything about it apart from when and where, and the fact it was an 'A-Level presentation evening'.


As I say - Regular updates are forthcoming. It's an excercise in talking about myself which I hope will beneift me in the long run.