Oh and btw

You're not going to die from fucking Swine Flu.  Cancer, maybe.  Being hit by a car, maybe.  Swine flu - no.

I promise you.

GET THE FUCK OVER IT PLEASE.

kthnx xx

Babe says hello.

Oink oink.

Well bored

Seriously, fuck my boring life.

'Intro to Pol', I'm so unprepared for this exam it's amusing.  *Yawn*

I just ran into my garden to fetch my sister ('yalla bina it's late), wearing pyjama tracksuit bottoms, 5 inch heels (first shoes I could find), some sketty tank top and a hoodie.

I am hot.  So hot.  I'm so hot I wanna shag myself.

*Sigh* I jest.

Arrivedaci

But baby are you ever not?

What are you... Sarah Jessica Parker?

LOL.

¬_¬

I knew I should have gone out last night. ¬_¬
I missed a golden opportunity to do something I've wanted to do for a long time.


Grrrrr.



Must. Revise.

Song

Have you ever listened to birdsong? Early morning in the twilight hour (I think that’s what we call it). It’s organic, erotic even. But perennially peaceful. I love it. It’s impossible to recreate it humanly; listen to the trilling in the second half of the first movement of Spring, Vivaldi (I don’t even like baroque music as such), it’s stunning (yeah, I’m listening to it now), but it’s not a patch on the real thing. It’s so...natural. Organic. Frank. Our ancestors listened to it; our great grandmothers, our great, great grandfathers, all of them. I guess that makes it atavistic; pertaining to our ancient relatives. They would have known it as well as we know it (the sound of birdsong, I mean). Isn’t that comforting? Everything’s changing; it’s the techno World, 2009 baby. Go listen to Benga and Coki and Dubstep and fuck up your ears at Ministry and go grind your teeth at Fabric. But despite it all, we still hear the birds. Somethings never change; the World changes, but, it also stays the same. Shakespeare referenced birdsong himself, and, for no real reason apart from that I love this play, I’m going to quote him:
Juliet:
“Wilt thou be gone? It is not yet near day:
It was the nightingale, and not the lark,
That pierced the faithful hollow of thine ear;
Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate-tree:
Believe me, love, it was the nightingale”

Romeo:
“It was the lark, the herald of the morn,
No nightingale: look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder East:
Night’s candles are burn out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.
I must be gone and live, or stay and die.”

Now, I’m a Londoner, I couldn’t tell you the difference between a lark and a nightingale, my point is, it always remains.
However, (I’m just making this up as I go along btw, there’s no structure to this post), look at the word... birdsong. I almost think it’s the wrong word to use; song. Song is beautiful, but it is superfluous. We like music, we like songs, we like chorales and orchestras and chamber groups and R’n’B, but it is entirely superfluous. We don’t communicate via. music (you know what I mean..!) it’s not our primary way to speak to one another. Admittedly Gregorian and Benedictine monks use song to communicate with God (think monastic chants, or, Carmina ecclesiastica or something thereabouts), but in general we don’t use it to communicate. We use words, the spoken, not sung, word. Birds are different; they use birdsong as their primary means of communication, it’s their speech, isn’t it? Calling it song almost seems to degrade what it is; it’s an essential part of their existence. Or maybe I’m just being ridiculously digressive? Who knows. Tbh, who really cares?

Sound... we rely on it (no shit), but I think, we rely on it more then we realise. It’s more important than sight, much more important. You can look at someone, you can have lust for them, think of concupiscence, whatever whatever... but how can you love someone you can’t communicate with? Surely sound is thereof much more important than sight; we need sound to communicate do we not? We need communication to love. We need love to live.
However, I suppose we could counter this. The ability to write is one of the uniquities of being human; animals do not write, humans do. It is with the writings of the past that we’ve learned so much; the Bible, the Tanakh, the quran, the Magna Carta, hieroglyphics, the dead sea scrolls, old papal bulls, everything really, tell us so much. How could we know about the ancient Egyptians, without the hieroglyphics? Obviously, things like the Sphinx and Pyramids are hard to miss, but that’s not what I mean. How would we know there was a Tutankhamen, and Osiris and Amon Ra and Cleopatra, if it was not written down. We wouldn’t and couldn’t. So, we can agree I presume, agree, that writing is one of the cornerstones of civilisation? Even now, our political beliefs are influenced by writers such as Marx – The Communist Manifesto, Locke – Two treatise of Government, Wollstonecraft – A valediction on the rights of men, Proudhon – Property is theft!, Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Hobbes, et al. The fact is, we are shaped by the writings of other people. Our laws are codified in a constitution; they’re written down (well, ok, Britain doesn’t have a constitution but shush), you get my long drawn out point .



Writing is the cornerstone of society, of civilisation even. However, a pre-requisite to writing is...sight. How can you write if you cannot see? There’s always dictation, but surely that would hinder even the greatest writer; how stifling! Without sight, you cannot see, if you cannot see, how can you write? Let’s look at John Milton; he wrote Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained back in the 17th c. His mission was, if I can paraphrase correctly, to “justify the ways of God to man”. He was also completely blind. And guess what – Paradise Lost is by all admission a horrible poem. It’s book after book after book of poor poetry. It’s written in Blank verse for one (compare to Shakespeare’s perfect iambic pentameter), it’s just not especially pleasant. It doesn’t roll of the tongue; Milton (imo obviously) overcompensates his inability to see by placing strange emphasis on the sounds of the poem. Obviously, alliteration, assonance, onomatopoeia etc... are all good poetic devices, but in moderation surely. Milton just seems to have thrown it in everywhere, with the effect that it’s a long, unengaging, epic poem, with little to sell itself. It doesn’t even rhyme. You simply cannot compare it to the great poets of English history; John Donne (A valediction forbidding mourning, and my favourite poem; The flea), Shakespeare, even the romantic poets like Wordsworth (though I think he was off his face on opium half the time).
This is a stanza from ‘A valediction forbidding mourning’;
AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

And this is a stanza from my favourite metaphysical poem, ‘The Flea’;
MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

The rhythm, the structure, it’s perfect. Take any Shakespeare quote you know, or any sonnet ‘shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’, and it’s guaranteed to be the same. Now, let’s take a few lines from Paradise Lost, book X:
Meanwhile the hainous and despightfull act
Of Satan done in Paradise, and how
Hee in the Serpent, had perverted Eve,
Her Husband shee, to taste the fatall fruit,
Was known in Heav'n; for what can scape the Eye
Of God All-seeing, or deceave his Heart
Omniscient.

Yawn. It’s stodgy, it’s fat, it’s boring, it doesn’t flow or rhyme. It’s practically a book.
It’s practically this blog,
It’s just prose,
Separated into poetic
lines.

It’s poor poetry, and the worst thing is how much of it there is. The key difference between Milton, Donne and Shakespeare? (Apart from the fact Milton pussied out of how bad his poetry was by blaming his ‘Christian muse Urania’, a “celestial patroness” who “dictates to me slumb’ring, or inspires/ Easy my unpremeditated verse”), is that Milton was blind, and the others weren’t. Clearly then, sight plays a massive role in how we write. Perhaps if Milton hadn’t been confined to dictation, he would have written a semi-decent poem instead of the soporific crap we got instead. Milton has a way with sound, but over all his poetry, to use internet parlance, was FAIL. The only good thing I can think of was that he coined the word pandaemonium, now, pandemonium, in reference to hell.
So what’s my point; sight is equally important? Sound is more important? I really have no idea, I’ve been writing this for ages, for absolutely no reason but my own self-gratification. Perhaps they’re both needed in conjugation? Sight is needed for writing, writing is required for our civilisation, however, I think sound is required for love.

I don’t know. I have no idea. This is all rather rambly. There’s no point to it whatsoever. I should shut up and go sleep now, shouldn’t I? What an utterly jejune ending; I’m sorry. I did warn you I wouldn’t be pedagogic.
xox

Metaphorical Music

Light As A Feather

When I'm Floatin Through

Readin Through The Daily News

Measuring The Hurt Within The Golden Rule,

Centimetres Of Ether I'm Heatin

The Speaker

Motivational Teacher With Words That Burn People

Seeing The Headlines Lined With Discord

It's Either Genocide, All The Planet In Uproar

Never Good But Rules Of Paradise Are Never Nice

The Best Laid Plan Of Mice And Men Are Never Right

I'm Just A Vagabond With Flowers For Algernon

The Average Joe Who Knows What The Fuck Is Goin On

It's The Hope Of My Thoughts That I Travelled Upon

Fly Like An Arrow Of God Until I'm Gone

I like this song, I only heard it by coincidence. I accidentally synced my iPod with my friend's and decided to merge our songs, rather then just overwrite it. I ended up with a load of Dubstep, Chris Brown, Korean pop (deleted), and this. It's quite a meaningless song, don't get me wrong, it's nothing new, I'm not trying to give it some esoteric message or anything, but I dunno, it's catchy.

Flowers for Algernon - I read that book a few months ago, finished it on the Central Line one day during another delay coming from Mile End and had to stop myself crying (yeah, I cry from fiction, I fail). I feel like Algernon sometimes, but Algernon post-regression. Actually, no, I don't feel like a mouse. I mean the protagonist - what was his name? Google tells me he was called Charlie Gordon, and Google in infallible.

Charlie Gordon - people always focus on how he loses his intelligence; he was a genius but he becomes a retard, literally, his IQ goes from 300 to about 60. It's the archetypal, meteoric rise; he starts as nothing, he becomes a God, and he falls again. Yeah, you're probably WTFing right now, but bare with me. People always focus on his intelligence, but I always thought that was just one part of the story; it's not just his academic ability that he loses, but his emotional IQ too (is there a word for that?). He starts off really ignorant; he never knows that everyone is laughing at him, then, he gets smarts, gets more clued up, becomes more...self aware I guess. Etc etc etc... the point is, he reaches this point of acceptance and enlightenment, and his emotionally pretty good, then, he regresses... and ends up as a cretin again. How does that relate to me?

I used to hate my parents. They drove me crazy, they were so annoying in everything. My dad...everytime he used to act silly it would piss me off, everytime he would act serious it would piss me off, my mum's overbearingness, etc etc etc... I even 'ran away' when I was 15, Admittedly, this was a simply spending a night sleeping at my friends, but meh, point is I hated my parents. 16, 17, nothing changed. Then, drop, kaboom, parents split up. Everything changed, everything was different. Literally, I felt like the World dropped beneath my feet. I was in shock and the first day I cried so much my eyes swelled up. It was strange, horrible, worst time of my life. I hated my mum. And I mean hated her. I loathed her, detested her, she repulsed me, and I told her this everyday. I screamed and ranted and rebelled and went crazy, and the thing is, no one even cared. They were too wrapped up in their own lives. My dad was descending into alcoholism (this is a guy who never drank before this. Ever) , and my mum was a bitch who had dumped my dad after 20 yrs of marriage. How could she do this to him? How could she be so evil?

I told her I hated her everyday, didn't speak to her, not an amicable word passed between us, I just bottle everything up and told no one. I didn't even tell my friends; they didn't even realise my 'rents had split up for sometime after. Long story short, I ranted, rebelled, cried, swore and drank, but I got over it. A yr down the line and it was just... whatever. With my dad gone, surprisingly, we ended up getting along better. With just my mum and my sister around, it was, I don't know. It just was what it was. I was happy; stopped ranting, moaning, swearing, shouting and drinking, and I matured and grew up. Everyone does it, I did it then. I was fine, happy even. I had friends and life was sweet (within reason). Everything was calm, and there's nothing wrong with that.

However, nothing every stays the same, right? I don't know, I regressed. The moody, grumpy teenager from before is back, and it's me and its now. Suddenly, I can't stand my mum again. I pick fights with her over nothing - I can't stand her. We scream at each other everyday, I resent her and I can't stand her. I love her, but I loathe her too. And she knows it, because I've told her often. She thinks I'm a bitch, and a horrible person, remember, she said I was 'corrosive'. She said everyone who ever knew me/loved me; hated me. And she was right; she was speaking about herself. She loves me, of course, but she doesn't like me, and the feeling's mutual. It's so fantastically claustrophoic in this house, and the thing is she's not controlling at all. She just doesn't care; she knows what drugs I've done, that I stay out all night, that I drink like a fish, but she doesn't care. She couldn't care less tbh. It's not that she doesn't love, but she has her own issues; her boyfriend, her job, her other daughter, everything but me. And I guess I resent it, and I can't stand her, and looking over at her right now and I just feel annoyed at her. Just, general, annoyance. I pick fights with her, because I cba to even really talk anymore.

I miss the happiness, or at least contentment, I used to have. I think this just stems from living at home too long; I'm 19, I'm so bound here, I need to escape. I long to. Just get away and leave. Etc etc etc... Like Charlie, I was an emotional idiot, I grew up, matured a bit, but now, it's backwards. I'm like I was when I was 17 :\ ARGH, the 2 of them (my mum, her boyfriend), they're so stupid, they're so xenophobic. I just took a break from writing this to tell them to stfu (there's a programme on BBC1 about Muslims, que the 2 of them chatting about how Muslims are taking over the country, all Muslims want to kill us all, and irony of irony, my mum's boyfriend just made some disparaging comment about the Middle East. I just looked at him (if he could read my thoughts it would be:"Are you fucking stupid? I'm half Arab... stfu you idiot"). And you know what...they just called *ME* ignorant. See, this is why I can't stand them. The 2 of them are equally as stupid as each other. I need an escape.

*Digression*

Bleurgh

God I write about a lot of boring shit. ><

Soliliquoi

I’m listening to Oasis right now, I suppose it’s the inspiration for this.

“So all of the stars, have melted away. But try not to worry, you’ll see them some day… just take what you need, and be on your way, and stop crying you heart out”.

I like that last sentence; stop crying your heart out. Stop. Oh, oh, guess what’s playing now “Roll with it”. Another cool message <>“You gotta roll with it”

Whoever knew the Gallagher’s had such wise words? It’s so simple really, but so… pertinent? Is that the word? Oasis… first group I ever saw. My dad had free tickets (ha, dodgy connections I suppose), to I think Party in the Park and he made me go with him, one sunny afternoon in London. I was too young really to care about Oasis, or bands really. I was rather introverted as a kid, rather too much. I was in a bubble that music didn’t really penetrate. I was happy, I suppose, or did I just not know that I was unhappy?

Primary school, oh ho ho we’re going way back here. I went to a crappy local primary school where no one spoke English as a first language, in one of the most pathetic areas of West London. But it didn’t matter, because of course when you’re a child those things never seem important – you’re not poor if you don’t know riches. Affluence is meaningless if you don’t know about your own impecuniousness. It wasn’t a bad school for us, it was just…school. It was a concrete jungle, but what did we know about the countryside? The teachers were ok I suppose, bar the anorexic teacher we had in yr 4 who would regularly faint whilst teaching us about adjectives and multiplications.

But that doesn’t matter. I remember being in Key stage 2, there was beef btwn Israel and Lebanon (well, there was always beef, but it seemed to break out at this point), and suddenly it became Holly vs. the Arabs. Which is rather ridiculous when you think about it… me; against the Arabs? Whatever..

But it was what it was; I was ‘Israeli’ – scum. I was a bitch. Moreover, I was a ‘Jewish bitch’. They knew I wasn’t really Jewish… wtf how could I be? I went to Sunday school ffs. They knew I wasn’t, but I guess they just wanted something to pick at. I have no idea why; I wasn’t especially strange. I didn’t smell. I wasn’t ugly. I was pretty normal. It was one girl who escalated it; she was beautiful with amazing hair and everyone loved her, and I was just a bit lanky and tall and not very pretty. We were the best of friends sometimes; our mum’s were close, and yet, at other times she’d be my enemy. I used to love the days she wouldn’t come in, because then I would be popular. No one disliked me particularly, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t desperate not to go to school or anything like that, but she made things horrible for me. She was so sweetness and light too, and I just didn’t stand up for myself very well. Once she hid my book bag. And once she kicked my coat. And she used to get everyone to call me ‘the Jewish bitch’ (oh, I should point out, she was Muslim…). Yeah, this isn’t some epic ‘I was bullied’ anecdote, but it was what it was. My mum asked me outright if she was bullying me, and I told my mum she was. So my mum went to the school, and the teacher (IDIOT!), got me, my mum, her mum and her together in the fucking playground and asked me outright to my face if she was bullying me. How could I answer with her right there in front of me? What a ridiculous situation to put a 10 year old in.

I’m not bitter, I honestly don’t care, it’s just interesting. I had a friend in primary, who was a bit odd, but cool as well. She was very… I don’t know the word; she didn’t give a fuck, and she still doesn’t. We meet up sporadically and get wasted together, but we run in different crowds and have different interests so it’s a bit limited. She’s much more of a go-getter than me; she’s not going to uni but she’ll be fine whatever she does.

The only other person I speak to now is a really cool guy from my class; I say cool in the sense of he was the Pokemon boy who was the class joker and super smart at maths, he’s a bit of an AZN rudeboi now, but he’s cool. People used to call him ‘burnt toast’, which , frankly, was hilarious then and now. Why were we so race-obsessed? Anyway, he goes to ‘Shottingham’ and apparently his friend thinks I’m fit. (Btw, there’s no point to any of this crap but pure nostalgia). Me and him, and maybe 2 or 3 others, are the only ones I think who made it to uni. The rest… God knows. I’ve seen few of them on FB, and, quite frankly, they look like Chavs. But I hate that word, and I hate that generalisation. I’m sitting in a Council house right now as I type this, so I’m hardly in a position to be a snob. I hate that generalisation, but I’m still snob enough to use it? Meh what does that say about me?

Someone very close to me said that I was corrosive; that everyone who got close to me ended up hating me. What an odd word; corrosive. Lets think of a new word; acidic if you will. I am acidic; I wear people down until they want nothing more to do with me. Apparently everyone thinks this about me – I guess you could dismiss this as just someone being horrible. But the person who said that said it 2 weeks ago – and it was my mother. Like thanks mum, truly. Way to help me achieve self-actualisation (not that I necessarily believe in Maslow’s hierarchy), thanks. I wouldn’t be bothered particularly, except, I suspect she’s right. I suppose I’m just not naturally a nice person? I really don’t know.

God I’m tired; I’m just procrastinating – I should be revising procedural justice but allow it, I’m too lazy.

I’m listening to ‘Butterfly Lovers’ – Vanessa Mae. I always wanted to be a violinist, I love the violin, I adore it, it’s one of the most beautiful instruments on Earth. I even dream about it. I had the chance to learn it, in yr 7, but I got moved by my teacher (I missed my lesson – they ran out of violins by mistake), and I got changed to the Viola. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Viola, but I yearn for my missing E string. Christ that’s lame. I’m the lone Violist; always a lonely desk. There’s never more than one; no one plays the Viola.

And even so, I never took it seriously. I could be grade 8 if I wanted, but I was too lazy. I focussed on the wrong crap in secondary school. I went to a Girls RC school, yes, think of the clichés. It was an ok school really, but looking back – some girls there had issues.

I had this one friend; we were close. We both liked Busted and we lived 10 mins away from each other. In year 9, she got the most retarded boyfriend on God’s earth. He was the ex boyfriend of a different friend of ours too. He was a complete and utter retard, he couldn’t even walk in a straight line. She became a goth, and they got ‘married’ in a grave yard on Kensal Rise in a satanic ritual. She dressed all in black, and tattooed the pentagon on her stomach. She ended up a bit of a slut who everyone laughed at, and didn’t do her GCSE’s. She was crazy and scary. Her mum was crazy too; she used to be obsessed with Eminem and send him fan letters all the time – she ended up killing herself, leaving my friend to find the body. Whilst this was happening, my friends (now ex) boyfriend got a pole and tried to beat up a different exes dad, only to get merked himself and end up in a Psych ward. I’ve tried to summise this story, keeping out the parts about this other Polish girl we knew who ran around telling everyone she was a vampire, and eating raw meat. You wanna know the funniest thing I’ve ever seen sober? A (normal!) Christian friend of mine put the Crucifix on the ‘vampire’s’ skin, as a pisstake. Vampire girl goes crazy…runs outside into the playground (in midday), starts screaming about the sunlight burning her (no, I’m not joking), trips, falls down a flight of stairs in the outside and broke her leg. Absolutely fucking hilarious tbh. Last I heard, she had a baby, and the other girl, I’ve no idea.

Not everyone was crazy at my school however, this is mostly up until yr 9. Afterwards, starved off male attention, we turned vicious amongst ourselves. There’s a girl who I’m good friends with now, her life was hell I think. She was lovely; plain Jane I guess to look at, but really intelligent. Now she’s at one of the best law schools in the country, and I should probably see her soon! She was lovely, but too intelligent, and she suffered. I was always jealous of her; where my family is a bit shit, she seemed to have this amazing family life, and she was much more in the cool clique. She was completely isolated for being intelligent, they made her life horrible at the time, they laughed at her, bitched about her, laughed about her… but I didn’t know. I was just jealous. I had 2 close friends at that time (real friends), but she had a whole clique, or so it seemed. There was no sixth form, so everyone split up for yr 12, which was the best thing that could have happened to either of us. She went to a completely different sixth form, but still, secondary school fucked her over and she’s in counselling to this day. Damn…what did that school do to her, to make her so sad she has to see a counsellor.

I’m lucky; the past doesn’t effect me like that. If I was raped, if I had an abortion or something terrible happened to me, it wouldn’t affect me. The present affects me, but, I have this ability to compartmentalise and it won’t effect me (I’m listening to Eminem – Lose Yourself, right now). The past never affects me; I look to the future toujours.

I don’t have a terrible past, but it’s certainly not rosy. You’re probably wondering (actually, you’re probably wondering why the fuck you’ve read so much and when will I end with the solipsism), where the last 3 yrs are. Meh, it’s late, and it’s slightly raw, so I cba to go there. Not right now. Not tonight. Not here and now and with this keyboard which has no functioning ‘S’ or ‘D’ key. I find it really hard to express myself through writing, it’s cathartic, but, it’s difficult. And especially when this keyboard isn’t working. Not right now. Not tonight. Not here and now.

xox