10:58am and the day is basically over.

(Warning: this entry does not bring out my good side.)

I can tell today is basically not going to go anywhere. No plans, should therefore be reading or something - The Secret History, or the book of Russian poetry I bought a few weeks ago, or something out of the pile of Books I Have To Read For School. I've come to terms with the fact that I probably won't get round to reading Caesar because he's intensely boring and I can't get through a page without wanting to sleep, even when I read it aloud in the slightly nasal voice I always imagined Caesar would have (don't ask me why). There's other things as well, a pile of books Mr L gave me, and a tonne of books to do with my individual assignment for history that I promised myself I would read and maybe even take notes on. OR I could do something else. I could write a poem! I started one last night, but then realised that as I was writing it the only thing that was going through my mind was whether or not it would sound good read aloud at open mic, and it hit me that I was deliberately writing a very open-mic-ish poem, and I wasn't sure whether I liked this and got confused and stopped and watched All About My Mother instead. That's a point, I could watch a film. Or I could call someone. Or tidy my room. Or get dressed.

There are a million and one things I could be doing, but no, instead I'm spiralling into a pit of self-diagnosis on Google, reading articles I don't understand about voltarol emulgel, biting my fingernails, calling my dad in Russia ("Do you know if aromatherapy can help?" "No." "Oh, OK. Um. Bye then.") and basically driving myself up the wall and let's not even go into what I saw on Google Images.

There are some days when you wake up and you may as well have "I AM A NEUROTIC MESS PLEASE DON'T TOUCH ME" worn as a sign around your neck. Today is one of those days.

It's just...(OK, I don't want this blog to be a whingefest and I promise not to go on about this too much, in fact I will shut up as soon as I've typed this, but) the last time I wasn't injured in some way, be it the Back Pain Of Last Summer or the Ten-Month Foot Problem or the current Random Knee That Really Has No Business Being Strained, I Haven't Done Anything That Could Possibly Have Led To A Strain, For God's Sake...well, it was May 2006. I've been in some kind of pain - yeah, OK, MODERATE pain, I'm aware that I'm not DYING, thanks - for over a year. And it's getting boring.

I'm bored of worrying about which gel to use when, or if such-and-such a pill is going to have funny side effects, or if wearing a certain pair of shoes is going to leave me unable to walk by the end of the day, or, or, or, or, OR.

And yes, you may point out, "But Annie, have you not noticed that the more you worry about this kind of crap the worse it seems to get? That actually about half the problem seems to be that you could probably get a First from Oxford in Making Mountains Out Of Mole-Hills, that NOBODY ELSE is as obsessive as you are about it, that the real problem is not voltarol emulgel's inability to fix your knee, or the fact that your back might - MIGHT - be getting worse again, or anything else, but that you choose to sit here and panic about stuff that hasn't happened yet? Annie, don't you think it's time you got a grip?"

And you would be absolutely right.

And it wouldn't make any difference.

"It was nice meeting you," said the tree.

Just got back from work, which was SO quiet and SO dull that for the last hour all I was doing was standing by the radio, switching from rubbish Xfm to rubbish Heart and having the will to live sapped out of me by Hard-Fi/Daniel Bedingfield/Hard-Fi again. Oh, and after that I went to Body Balance (which is a kind of yoga/pilates/T'ai Chi class that makes me feel all stretched and zen and lovely), although that was a bit of a stressathon today because I've strained my knee a bit and I kept feeling paranoid that the stretching would make it worse, and also I hadn't shaved my armpits so there was a bit of a Welcome To The Jungle moment every time I did a sun salutation. Why am I telling you this?

A writer called Marie Phillips is about to publish her debut novel, Gods Behaving Badly, which imagines what would happen if the Greek gods and goddesses all shared a house in modern-day Hampstead. So in the book Aphrodite is a phone sex operator, Artemis is a professional dog-walker, Dionysus is a DJ who runs a nightclub called Bacchanalia and so on, but they're still gods, so Apollo is apparently responsible for global warming and Ares spends his time trying to figure out how to stir things up in the Middle East. In the middle of all this is woven an Orpheus/Eurydice-style story. It all sounds like hilarious stuff, and although I have to say the extract I read from the book was a little bit disappointing - it was kind of bland and one-dimensional, to be honest - maybe the rest of it will be quite good. In any case I'll hopefully get my hands on it.

Obviously the rest of the world at the moment is devouring or has already devoured Harry Potter (I wonder how many blog entries have mentioned the damn guy this weekend? Gazillions probably), and I'll have to do the same at some point. Dad is in Russia right now, where apparently they're selling copies of HP in English as well as Russian, and not for very much either, so I've asked him to bring me a copy. Gotta know who dies and all that, although I expect it'll be coming to a t-shirt near me soon.

In other news...well, Dom and I are going out. As in, Going Out - yes, with a capital G AND a capital I. It seems so surreal considering...everything. I mean, three months ago seems like three years ago, and, er, yeah - I'm not sure I want to explain. But I'm very very very happy at the moment. (Except he's currently buggered off to Cyprus. But I've been promised a postcard.)

And I'm sprucing up old poems and editing stuff to send to the Foyle Young Poets competition - this is the last year I can enter so I'm firing everything I can at them, so to speak. (Now there's an image in my head of me literally firing poems at the judges with a gun or something...) There's something weirdly satisfying about spending ages doing nothing except looking at a poem, tapping a pen on the table, moving a comma, changing one word, then looking at the poem again...It feels simultaneously like the most productive and unproductive thing in the world.

Xi

It's just this squiggle I can't write,
not yet. Uncertainty is bliss.
This pause: no life-change, no great insight -
it's just this squiggle I can't write.
These underrated words: could. Might.
Who knows? For now there's time, there's this.
It's just this squiggle I can't write.
Not yet. Uncertainty is bliss.


Yuck. Triolets just don't do it for me. I wrote that yesterday while very tired, and knew straight away that it would be one of those poems I would never have time to go back and work on, but I felt I should preserve it somewhere so I've preserved it here. Really, how can you say everything you want to say in eight lines - actually five lines, two of which repeat themselves - without sounding all simpery and twee? Poetic twee. I can't do it. And I disagree with myself completely on "Uncertainty is bliss" - uncertainty is not bliss, it can be liberating and exciting sometimes, which I think is what I meant, but "bliss" is the wrong word. But if I change it, I'll have to change the sixth line too - to what? To be honest, there's no time to work on this. It's going in the MIGHT POSSIBLY SALVAGE THIS ONE DAY IN THE DISTANT FUTURE pile. Moving on.

Greek. I knew I would like it, but I didn't know how much. It's fantastic. Really, really intense (the teacher, Theodora - when someone figured out her name meant God's gift, Eve, a woman in the class, went, "OH!!! OH, that's BEAUTIFUL!!!!" and Theodora blushed a LOT - anyway, Theodora said we would be at intermediate level by the end of the course, so...we're moving pretty fast). It's a mark of my geekery that all I'm doing lately is declining nouns and putting accents over words and actually enjoying it. And I like the routine of it too: getting up, getting the train and tube to UCL, going down to the little classroom; being in the classroom with the four other students (all of whom are older than me - there's a Latin teacher, a postgrad and undergrad in English, and an older woman called Eve who's "just doing it for fun"), and all of us ploughing through the Greek, translating hilarious little stories - "Dicaeopolis works all day and groans and says, "O Zeus! Life is hard!!!" - and then eating lunch somewhere, doing more Greek, highlighting stuff, underlining stuff, and then lectures in the afternoon. The day before yesterday there was one from Peter Jones, author of Reading Greek and Reading Latin and a book I've got called The Intelligent Person's Guide To Classics, which must be the ponciest book title ever, but it's a great book and he's AMAZING. And yesterday there was a lecture by the UCL guy Stephen I've-Forgotten-His-Last-Name-Dammit, which was also really good.

So, Greek - as brilliant as I expected, and more.

In other news...tomorrow is...well, I suppose tomorrow could be called the first date. Which seems RIDICULOUS, considering how long this has all been going on, but it is officially, I suppose...er, that. I don't really know how I feel about this. Excited? Scared? The usual, then. One half of the brain going "YAY! OMG YAY!!!" and the other half thinking, "He is soooo going to come to his senses tomorrow." Hmm. I'm going to stop talking about this because I don't think I can be fully articulate.

Yesterday was prizegiving at school. I won the Ancient Languages Reading Cup, an adorable little goblet I could actually drink out of, and it has my name inscribed on it at the end of a list of previous year 12 ancient language readers. Prizegiving was boring as hell as usual, the only funny bit being when we had to sing God Save The Queen and all the language teachers refused to sing it, and Mr M The Poncy Plato-Quoting Drama Teacher stood there with his hands in his pockets, wearing his best "I am a rebel I am above this kind of crap" scowl. The food afterwards was rubbish too.

It meant I was so tired when I got home that I didn't do any Greek homework, and so I have to go now and will be scribbling it all down furiously on a train packed with commuters. Woohoo.

A flashback

12-year-old Immy: "Would you ever ask a guy out?"
12-year-old me: "What? No WAY. No, I'd be so embarrassed - how do people do that? I could never do that!"
12-year-old Immy: "Yeah, me neither. Can I use your strawberry gel pen?"

Hmm. Well.

So much for that.

I aaaaaaam the one and only

Didn't write anything in the past week, not because nothing happened, but because (yesterday's strawberry and raspberry picking extravaganza aside) it was all extremely boring. This may have had something to do with a lot of people I know disappearing to Snowdonia to wade through mud for educational purposes (one of whom was the person mentioned in the previous entry, which is why that issue is still kind of unresolved and I have NO idea what's going to happen now, and am scared nothing will, but ANYway). In the meantime, we all stayed at school for Activities Week and, yeah, they tried, they really tried to make it fun. But when the rest of the school is on various trips and there are literally about TWENTY of you left, well...being trapped in the place becomes even more unbearable than usual.

There was first aid, and a "world trade game" (let's not even go there), and a "World Cinema Day" which was actually quite good because I got to see Pan's Labyrinth and a Japanese film called Kamikaze Girls - one of those films that are frothy and insane and pure escapism, and made me want to wear a frilly dress for the rest of the day. But, you know, I could have watched films AT HOME. There was a treasure hunt around London which I refused to attend. There was a German-born WW2 survivor who came to talk to us, only it turned out he was a little bit too senile - he remembered with amazing clarity his stay at some hotel in Frankfurt in the 60s but couldn't remember anything about the actual war. ("Did you feel afraid leaving Germany?" "Well, I don't know, I was only about four at the time.") It meant that I felt bad for feeling a bit, erm, bored, because he'd obviously had a tough childhood, but...

And of course, Personal Statement Hell. Ugh, personal statements. There are some people who've been taking it oh-so-seriously, like Oliver who's practically written a thesis on himself, and there are others who just haven't, like Alex whose statement contains the phrase "orgy of maths" (and he refuses to remove it), and Alistair who (for ancient history) has written, "I am Alistair son of Hector. I like dead people, deader people and really really really dead people. I also like swords." I've fallen somewhere in between. But I'm just so, so,

SO

bad at writing about myself. It's the one thing I can't write. It's why at least 3/4 of the poems I write aren't about me, and the ones that are are always the hardest to write, and are always the ones I'm terrified of showing people. It's really annoying actually. I've always wanted to be able to write really raw, personal poetry, something that when you read it you just KNOW it's me. That's kind of like...that's my goal with every poem I write. I always want it to be really clear that it's from MY perspective, not anyone else's. But then it never quite works because they're hardly ever about me, they're about...well, people in comas, and people with ginger hair, and people on crash diets, and then "literary" crap, writing about literature - The Tempest, The Master And Margarita. My current poem-in-progress, the first stanza is about Ovid, being in exile, writing his Tristia, and while it's fun to write and I think it works OK as a first stanza, well...it's not ME, it's just me pretending to know what it's like to be in exile. And really, who wants to know what I think about that when I clearly don't even know what I'm talking about?

I mean, obviously everything you write is written from your perspective in some way, it's got YOUR stamp on it, but I still just really want to be able to write loads of poems that are just fully me: my life, my world, things that have happened to me. Maybe I'm not that kind of poet (hahahaha - "poet"). Maybe I just haven't lived enough. Yet.

Anyway, so, personal statement. Can't do it, for similar reasons. I would much rather talk about something else than myself, which is why the PS is currently full of crap about How Ovid Is, Like, Totally Amazing And Like, Yeah, OMG, but doesn't have anything else in it, really. Apart from one disgusting paragraph where I manage to compare myself to Virgil without meaning to - MUST REMOVE THAT ASAP.

Tomorrow is my last day of school. Everyone else stays behind until Friday and for that I laugh at them, but as for me - it's Greek Week!!!!!