Alone

I wrote this poem a while back but I really like the imagery in it so I thought I'd post it.

Staring at a brick wall.
Shouting out your name,
No-one answers.
From a street to an alley,
A town to a wood,
No-one's there.
A blank piece of paper
Filled up with words;
The endless scrawls
Of a forgotten world.
Am I here?
Can I not hear you?
Are you just not there?

A Stream of Consciousness

Be warned, this may not be the last post tonight...

So I've been writing out my thoughts and feelings over the past couple of weeks and I thought I would share it with anyone who can be bothered to sit through it. It's no Shakespeare, I just wrote what came to my head. And it's quite depressing so you've been warned...

K, so I’m feeling kinda weird right now. I just spoke to Kerri on MSN. Haven’t spoken to her properly since I got back from holiday we had a short convo earlier. We were having this normal convo and she asked me what I’d been up to. I said ‘nothing much, just skl stuff.’ Her reply was ‘Ha! Sorry I couldn’t resist!’ I thought this was kind of a weird reply I didn’t know what to say so I simple said ‘lol’ (the only way to reply when you don’t know what else to say.) Then she dropped the bombshell. ‘Oh yeah, I don’t think I told you, I’m not going back to skl’ I don’t know why this hit me but it did and it wasn’t that it was a shock. Having had it firmly in her mind that she wasn’t going back in June she changed her mind and said she was and I’d always thought well those thoughts can’t have just gone away. So I wasn’t shocked it was more that I felt that old feeling in my stomach that things have changed between me and her. We’re not as close as we used to be. Things she used to tell me she doesn’t anymore. Things she used to realise I was feeling she doesn’t anymore. I felt weird because we’d been talking for about 10/20 minutes and she was just telling me now. I’d have thought it would have been one of the first things. It would’ve been, if we’d’ve been having that conversation 3 years ago but now? Now it’s all so different. I feel like I’m in this rut. There’s Kerri on once side of this trench that I’m in and then there are my school friends. I don’t feel stuck in the middle I feel totally left out of both sides.

Reading is the spice of life

My reading list is growing ever more. Every day there seems to be a new book to add to the pile and in the case of Friday's English lesson, make that 6 new books.

1. Hamlet - Shakespeare (English Lit A2) (halfway through)
2. Twelfth Night - Shakespeare (6th Form Play Auditions) (halfway through)
3. Dracula - Bram Stoker (English Lit A2 Background Reading) (started)
4. A Million Little Pieces - James Frey
5. Villette - Charlotte Bronte (English Lit A2 Background Reading)
6. The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole (English Lit A2 Background Reading)
7. The Tell-Tale Heart - Edgar Allen Poe (English Lit A2 Background Reading)
8. Saturday - Ian McEwan
9. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas - John Boyne
10. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
11. The Wasp Factory - Ian Banks
12. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
13. The History of Love - Nicole Krauss
14. Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safron-Foer
15. Love in the time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
16. On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (English Lit A2 Background Reading) (started)
18. Persuasion - Jane Austen (started)
19. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen (English Lit A2 Background Reading)
20. No Acting Please - Eric Morris (started)

Beloved

I'm currently reading Beloved by Toni Morrison for my English Literature A Level and I just read a really beautiful piece of description in it:

Denver stopped and sighed. This was the part of the story she loved. She was coming to it now, and she loved it because it was all about herself; but she hated it too because it made her feel like a bill was owing somewhere and she, Denver, had to pay it. But who she owed or what to pay it with eluded her. Now, watching Bekived's alrt and hungry face, how she took in every word, asking questions about the color of things and their size, he downright craving to know, Denver began to see what she was saying and not just to hear it: there is this nineteen-ear-old slavegirl - a year older than herself - walking through the dark woods to get her children who are far away. She is tired, scared maybe, and maybe even lost. Most of all she is by herself and inside her is another baby she has to think about too. Behind her dogs, perhaps; guns probably; and certainly mossy teeth. She is not so afraid at night because she is the color of it, but in the day every sound is a shot or a tracher's quiet step.
Denver was seeing it now and feeling it - through Beloved. Feeling how it must have felt to her mother. Seeing how it must have looked. And the more fine points she made, the more detail she provided, the more Beloved liked it. So she anticipated the questions by giving blood to the scraps her mother and grandmother had told her - and a heartbeat. The monologue became, in fact, a duet as they lay down together, Denver nursing Beloved's interest like a lover whose pleasure was to overfeed the loved. The dark quilt with two orange patches was there with them because Beloved wanted it near her when she slept. It was smelling like grass and feeling like hands - the unrested hands of busy women: dry, warm, prickly. Denver spoke, Beloved listened, and the two did the best they could to create what really happened, how it really was, something only Sethe knew because she alone had the mind for it and the time afterward to shape it: the quality of Amy's voice, her breath like burning wood. The quick-change weather up in those hills - cool at night, hot in the day, sudden fog. How recklessly she behaved with this whitegirl - a recklessness born of desperation and encouraged by Amy's fugitive eyes and her tenderhearted mouth.

So I'm going to write a book

Yeh so today I decided I wanted to write a book. Don't ask me why, it just came to me and I decided to do so. I think I'm mainly doing it because it's just struck me that after study leave I still have 2 months left of school oh dear god help me! So to get me through that I'm going to write a book. It's not going to be a proper novel, more like a collection of short stories, but at the same time it's not just a collection of short stories. You won't understand what I mean until I've actually finished it. I've got ideas for it and I've started writing some of it. I've also decided to keep it interesting and different it's going to be multi-cultural and include diagrams, pictures and photographs. I guess I've always liked the idea of writing a book but have never actually got round to it so this is me getting round to it as it were. So there we go, my achievement this year is going to be to write a book!

Too many books?

Having decided to attempt to tidy up my bookshelves today, I realised I have run out of space. Shocking seeing as I only bought 2 new bookshelves less than a year ago. So I asked myself can a person have too many books?

Most books you can fit into 3 categories:
Books you will read more than once
Books you will never read again
Books you begin to read and give up halfway through

So what do you do with those books that belong in the last 2 categories? Do you keep them thinking 'Yeh, I'll read them in ten years time.' or do you get rid of them, probably for half the price you bought them and therefore losing about £4 for every book you sell. If you keep them you're only going to have to buy more bookshelves for any new books that you buy and say you buy a new bookshelf every two years, thats about...£1050. Quite expensive. So if you sell those unwanted books how much would that be? Well say you buy 25 unwanted books per year, and when you sell them you lose about £4 of the original price so thats...£7500 less off.

So, the result? You can never have too many books because it's simply too expensive to bother getting rid of all the ones you don't want. Just keep buying new bookshelves every couple of years and you'll be around 6000 quid better off by the time you're placed in the soil.

The hairs on the back of your neck...

I have lately found myself obsessed with song lyrics. So I felt the need for a list. It's a work in progress...

'Memory seeps from my veins, let me be empty and weightless'

Angel - Sarah Mclachlan

'holy scriptures of the shopping mall'

Jesus of Suburbia - Green Day

'If life is cruel then someone lied'

I Love It When We Do - Ronan Keating

'If you're a heart without a home. Rebel without a cause. If you feel as though you're always stranded on the shore, like a thief in the night let me steal your heart away'

Heart Without A Home - Westlife

'Take a picture of what you think love looks likein your imagination'

Colour My World - Westlife

'I sit and wait, does an angel contemplate my fate?'

Angels - Robbie Williams

'Remember every new beginning is some beginning's end'

Welcome to Wherever You Are - Bon Jovi