Thankyou, Dana

In a moment (alright, during an extended period) of madness I deleted this. Then I realised it felt a bit like - well, not like losing a limb, but definitely an eyebrow. So here it is, the return of the eyebrow. Minus about ten entries, but whatever.

Things are a bit odd.

I don't really feel like myself at the moment. Which is far less dramatic or interesting than it sounds. Head's all over the place and for the first time in my life I have insomnia, and basically never sleep except when I'm not meant to: in Kew Gardens, at Poetry Unplugged (oops), outside the Turkish shop in Penge. Dad is loading me with herbal remedies. The physio reckons improving my posture will solve all my problems. The funny thing is I don't feel stressed, and certainly not about exams. I just...

I know what the problem is and don't want to say, which makes this a bit of a non-entry.

I also want to read some chick-lit. Any recommendations?

It's all gone a bit J. Alfred

On Tuesday I had a hospital appointment (a check-up) and slept in. Went, sat around, read Heat magazine, unexpectedly found out I had a broken toe, got stranded waiting for the bus in the wasteland that the hospital is situated in, which was depressing. Afterwards I COULD theoretically have made it into school for English, but I thought, "No. No. I'm going to go into town and buy a CD." And walking into the shop, it was deserted and some guy was picking his nose and they were playing Vienna by Ultravox and that was it really, it was All Aboard The Misery Express for the rest of the day. The rest of the week was spent Trundling Along In The Horse-And-Cart Of Melancholy until on Friday evening I suddenly wrote two psychotic poems in one hour and then sat there for ages questioning my sanity. Do you follow?

I've lost my drive, my mojo, my VA-VA-VOOM. I've forgotten how to look forward to things. Everyone else will be in the library at school planning their gap years or their summer holidays or weighing up university options - this place has NIGHTLIFE, that place has a PIRANHA TANK IN THE LIBRARY - and looking so driven and excited, and I'm just sitting there chewing my face off trying to remember why I applied to Arghbridge in the first place. On Monday I was supposed to teach Greek to year 7s with a girl in the year below called Rhiannon, and they asked us to "say something about ourselves" first. I started to say "Errr there's really nothing interesting about me" but then Chadders leapt in with "Annie has an offer to read Classics at Cambridge and Rhiannon hopes to follow!!!!" and the year 7s blinked as one, Rhiannon gave a nervous smile and I actually wanted to throw the board rubber in his face. That's not a normal reaction, is it?

Sorry, this is so uninteresting. I'm just another overexamined teenager feeling the pressurrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrre.

Just watched Unreported World which Mum recorded for me. It was about Russia, and its basic premise was "Putin is a BAD MAN, look at how miserable everyone is!" - the guy travelled to all the backwaters of the country, to these villages where there's no gas and the people don't have anything to do except sit in their freezing hovels and drink themselves to death. Nothing I didn't know before, sadly. What was more interesting was my Great-Aunt's reaction to it (incidentally, she's a firm supporter of Stalin and won't accept any criticism from him because "life was better then"). She was, er, slightly incensed.

Her: "It's all RUBBISH. You BRITISH just LOVE to criticise us, don't you? He just went and deliberately found the most pathetic Russians he could so you could all sit here and say, "Oh, how terrible it must be to be Russian" - what's the POINT in sending resources to those places when there's only about five people living there?"
Me: "That's still five people though."
Her: "They can move somewhere else then!"
Me: "But they don't have any money."
Her: "Yes, because they SPEND IT ALL ON DRINK INSTEAD OF DOING THEIR JOBS AND BEING GOOD CITIZENS."
Me: "Well, that's because they don't have anything else to live for."
Her: "What about GOD?!"

And then later:

"Putin is a good man. He has done so much. Russia is a great country, Anichka, don't you ever forget that."

So there you go. I can sort of see her point, but Russia is Suicide Country No.1...OK, I just checked and it's actually second to Lithuania. Still - it kind of shows SOMETHING isn't right. On a related note, I was blathering on in my Russian lesson on Thursday (using bad grammar etc. etc. etc.) and saying something about how, "Russia has experienced many problems recently" and my teacher rolled her eyes and gave this weak smile and said, "Russia is always experiencing problems. That's just the kind of country it is."

But that's not all it is.

Celine Dion & The Raven

In the space of two and a half hours, I have had a brief stressathon about absolutely everything in the world (see below), eaten a whole cooking apple, felt sick (naturally, cooking apples are the fruit of Satan and not for eating, that's why they're called COOKING apples), walked around the house digging my nails into my hands and singing along to Dexys Midnight Runners, tried to read Edgar Allan Poe for English, felt even more sick (because EAP is annoying and The Raven is stupid), fallen asleep curled into a ball and woken up half an hour later with Celine Dion in my head. Remember her song, A New Day? No, neither did I until just now. Did I dream about Celine Dion? I don't know.

(Last night I had a dream that I ended up at Durham, only because there was no room for me in the college I had to live in a hut. Then it turned out that Charly was at Durham as well...somehow...and she lived in the hut with me, and for some reason all we ate was cottage cheese.

Premonition?)

State of life, currently, insane. All I need to do is get through this next week. This involves:
a) NOT getting stressed out over the horrible, horrible history coursework that is blatantly not going to get handed in on Friday
b) NOT getting stressed out over whether or not I have [insert random imaginary stomach condition here]
c) NOT getting stressed out over the 3rd.

Oh, the 3rd. The 3rd, the 3rd, the 3rd. I had a mock interview with Mr L on Monday that went badly, really, really badly, so badly I couldn't look at him properly the next day; I have a suspicion he told Chadders about it because Chadders came and gave me a long "reassuring session" on Thursday and now both the Latin teachers are treating me like a bit of a headcase...and then I had a second mock interview yesterday with someone who may or may not have been Mrs C's dad, which went incredibly well - I mean, I actually said things that made sense, using real words and everything, and afterwards I got really nice feedback and was told I had "a really good chance". So the real thing could genuinely go either way.

Does it matter? No, it doesn't/Yes yes yes it does. Not sure what the right answer is.

ARRRRRRGHHHHH I AM LOSING ALL SENSE OF PERSPECTIVE. This isn't like me.

It doesn't help that Glavshit has truly lived up to his name recently and been an absolute bastard with regards to history coursework (a long-winded, badly phrased question on the comparison between Tsarism and communism in Russia). Having spent all term going through the course at a snail's pace and giving unreasonable D grades to everyone except William, he decided we had to write the first, only, final draft of the coursework in one week - NEXT week. Which is massively inconvenient timing and oh, he knows it and is delighted. I won't go into the grisly details but the past week has been a haze of arguments and despair, with no real result except he now really hates me and Immy, and knows we hate him. Not what you'd call a good working relationship. My policy this week will be to do as much of the work as I can without actually killing myself, and whatever gets handed in on Friday...well, he can just deal with it.

I'm going to have a bath, drink some milk and read the Metamorphoses.

Or Mum's Easy Living magazine, so I can pretend that life is all about buying wine glasses and making casseroles.

Really bad news/really good news

1. Osteochondrosis. That's all I'm going to say about it.
2. Foyle Young Poets 2007. Me. The last poem I entered. Crash. The 'afterthought' poem I only entered for the hell of it.
Oh. Em. Gee.

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.

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!!!!!

Honey sandwiches at dawnbreak

And then it was the end, and suddenly there was a heck of a lot of free time. (Let's not mention A2 courses, personal statements, uni decisions, prefect duties or other thingamajigs, eh?) Today was, as I always knew it would be, epic. There was me waking up at four in the morning because I'd gone to bed at nine the night before, and a few honey-sandwiches-at-dawnbreak (washed down with milk). There was a gloomy bus ride to the hospital a few hours later, during which I felt more and more ill and nervous, couldn't stop reciting Ovid's Amores 1.2 over and over in my head, and listened to two old women behind me talking about their hair.

There was the hospital appointment. I now have orthotics, which are, for a start, not as big as I thought they would be (I was dreading some kind of massive brick-like monstrosities that would only fit in the biggest of trainers or something like that, but they're pretty small really) - they're also quite comfy, like having cushions in your shoes. And I am now just a teensy bit taller because of them. So.

Then there was the bus ride home again, and I started making up a poem in my head - I swear, about 75% of my ideas for poems come to me on the bus, which is why no matter how much they suck, no matter how many times I end up on some crowded bus listening to a crazy woman singing Amazing Grace (this has happened) I will never stop taking the bus.

At home I started feeling ill. Steamed my face. Three times. Drank tea. Went on the internet. Tried not to think about a) Ovid, b) Cicero, c) any kind of Latin vocab/grammar. Didn't work. Read the OCR Mark Scheme for Latin AS-level. Suddenly wanted to cry.

And then all of a sudden it was 1:30pm and I was standing in the lobby, having one of those completely mindless small-talk conversations with Amy who was about to do her economics exam, and I was clutching some paracetamol thinking, "Should I take them? Should I? Am I being silly? Should I?" And I went up to Mr P who was the invigilator and said in a very tiny voice, "I don't feel very well" but he was running around with some woman in a red skirt so I don't think he quite heard me.

Then there was Hannah, who came up to me, wailed, "I don't know ANY CICERO AT ALL! I'm going to FAIL!" and ran off. I stood there, alone, and there were about 10000 year 11s who were about to do their history GCSE, and I thought, "Oh, those were the days - history GCSE, which I thought I'd failed and then it turned out I'd got an A* - God GCSEs were really not that bad...mind you if I told them that they'd probably crucify me...OHMYGOD I want to be sick."

Mr L (Latin teacher 1) came by and was all like, "Alright?" but I didn't really answer him because his face was sort of swimming in front of my eyes. THEN - HE came along. Thingy. Whatsisface. And I hadn't seen him since that night, and while there was a part of me that was kind of hoping to never have to talk to him ever again, there was also another part that was hoping that when we did get round to talking, there would be some kind of...difference. Like, some kind of acknowledgement, at least, of what had happened. But no. It was the biggest nothing of a conversation. It was all him saying, "What have you got?"

And me saying, "Latin."

And him saying, "Oh right. You OK?"

And me saying, "No actually, I'm a bit ill." And waving my paracetamol in an overly-cheery sort of way (why do I do that? why do I always act happier than I am?) and saying, "Immune system's decided to give up on me."

And him nodding. And then Boris came along and wanted to talk to me about the barbecue he's having at his house on Sunday, and so that was it. And I realised that yes, that really was it, we were just going to carry on as normal. Like, good-friends-who-just-quietly-resent-each-other. Yep, sounds like a plan.

Boris left, and I got very sad and sickly, and then Chadders (Latin teacher 2) appeared, and I must have looked like death in human form because he was very kind and reassuring and just generally wonderful. I felt better then, and he went off down the corridor on a cloud of godlike superior Latin knowledge.

And the description of the build-up to the exam has been longer than I was planning it to be. We went in. I forgot how to spell my surname for five seconds; that was a scary moment. Then we began (there were SO many people in the room - all the history year 11s, plus me and Hannah doing Latin, plus economics, plus drama, plus Alec who does Japanese - it was really claustrophobic) and my ill feeling cleared and just over three hours later it was all over. I don't want to jinx anything, so I won't say that, you know, it went well or anything, but...Well, the commentary paper was on two pretty easy-peasy bits (in the pro Milone, the bit where Cicero pretends Milo is waving his bloody sword and going, "Through me alone may justice, equality, laws, liberty, modesty, chastity remain IN THIS CITY!" Love that bit. And the Ovid was 1.7, the one where he hits her and pretends to grovel - SO much to say about that, and SO glad it wasn't smelly old 1.3). And then the essay paper...well, this year is the first year to do Ovid, so the Ovid question that came up was just the most simple, the most obvious, the most BEAUTIFUL question. There was actually so much to say that my essay ended up being a bit kitchen-sink-esque, but hopefully not in a rambly way. By the time the translation paper got handed out I was tired as hell, and the story was a bit doom-and-gloom, as usual (something adapted from Tacitus - the death of Otho, a real tearjerker), so at first I was a bit sluggish and confused, and then I got a grip and I think that was fine too.

And then. That. Was. It.

My other exams have generally been...OK. English seems like another age ago now, but I remember generally feeling a bit smug and pleased with myself afterwards (which didn't last long because I then went and made a tit of myself in the evening...) History was the worst, what with the suffrage paper asking crap questions about trade unions and then my art-and-culture essay on Russia being full of Mayakovsky and without any mention of Lenin - at all. I mean, Mayakovsky is slightly more relevant to art than Lenin, but still, Lenin is Lenin. Russian was Russian. I did it, but there were probably mistakes I didn't see.

But now I'm free, free, free, free. I can probably write poems again! (I'm sure the recent block has been exam-related.) And also, the latest issue of The Rialto came in the post today and it's full of good stuff. There's an essay on Auden, and some stuff about Fleur Adcock, and generally loads of good poems including this one by Julia Casterton, who actually died in March and so is given a special mention in the issue.

CONSIDER THE LILIES by Julia Casterton

I've been considering these lilies since they came out,
probably planted by my neighbour when she got bored with them in the pot,
staked up by John in two clumps beneath the pollarded trees.

As is usual with lilies, they're acting as if they own the place.
I water them every night my cooled-off bathwater.
Unlike the roses, they show absolutely no gratitude.

The hibiscus looks desperate for water, and drinks greedily,
but these lilies can take it or leave it alone. I am the supplicant,
pardon me for breathing. They breathe their cool whiteness over the whole garden,

calming it all down, easing the panic of the drought.
I go out to look at them shining in the night, taking it easy.
They boss the place. They never heard of Solomon or his glory.

Thinking systematically.

Number of days since Friday: 3.

Number of emotional headfucking problems reeling around in the brain before the sixth form ball: many.
Number of pieces of bad news received just before the ball: 1.
Number of solutions to this: 1. Alcohol. Lots.

Amount of fun had on the Dixie Queen paddlesteamer: a lot.
Number of times attacked buffet: 4.
Number of teachers caught dad-dancing to The Proclaimers: 3.
Amount of crazed dancing done: lots and lots and lots.
Number of pictures of me doing crazed dancing currently floating around the internet: thankfully only 1.
Number of times Tower Bridge went up for us: 2.
Number of terrible pictures of Tower Bridge taken on camera phone: 17.
Amount of alcohol consumed: good question.

Amount of time spent flirting drunkenly with someone I really shouldn't have: too much.
Consequences of this: disastrous.

Number of people who persuaded me to come to the afterparty: 4.
Verdict on afterparty venue: YUCK.
Verdict on afterparty music: YUCK.
Verdict on afterparty drinks: YUCK.
Amount consumed regardless: Erm?
Amount of time spent making the aforementioned flirtation even more complicated: about an hour, in total.
Number of solutions to this: 1. Drink. More.

Amount of dancing done to music I hate in the middle of a heaving mass of sweaty people: a lot.
Number of guys who attempted to take advantage of my distinct lack-of-brain: 3.
Number of times rescued by Harriet: 3. (Boy do I owe her one.)
Number of solutions to this: see above.
Size of ego by this point: non-existent.

Number of times I was made aware of how incredibly skanky this club actually was: 1000.
Number of gangs hovering in and then eventually outside of the club: 1.
Number of gunshots made at the club while I was at the window: 2.
Number of glass shards on cheek: 2.
My reaction to this near-death experience: non-existent.
Number of minutes it took me to realise it would be a good idea to move away from the window: about 5.
Final reminder of how disgusting the place was: then. At which point we left.
Time of arrival at home: 7am. Ish.

Number of muscles not aching for the rest of the weekend: like, maybe 3?
Number of minutes not spent hating self: maybe 4.

Number of thoughts about HIM: 398,762.

Overall verdict: oh fucking god, what have I become?