not.in.paris

Attn. school inspectors: before you start asking questions about what we’re doing and what we do in class, it’s generally a good idea to observe a few social niceties first. Explaining who the hell you are is a good place to start.

Attn. English teachers: anyone who has not learned to use a comma by the age of 14 is a dead loss. Please, teach us something else!

Attn. librarians: when I say ‘do you have a copy of such-and-such a book’, it should be clear that what I really want is to know whether or not you have a copy of that book in your library. I don’t know how you hear ‘please direct me to the children’s section’ in that sentence, but hey, I guess you could mishear me. Still, I don’t think that makes up for the way you give me a dirty look every time I walk in and return a book, or the way you give me a lecture every time I take one out about making sure it’s back on time, or the way you frown at me if I’m standing in the adult section.

Attn. whoever organises those school enterprise event things: I do not care about trying to move an egg with three bits of string, a paperclip and a tin of pineapple rings, or about any of the other insane activities you have concocted. I don’t give a damn about building teamwork. Just pick up the damn egg already.

Attn. whoever organises school sports days: the world would be a better place if you just let us all take the day off.  Seriously.  Sports days probably have the highest truancy rate of all days in the school year anyway, and that’s probably because many people’s parents will let them stay home just because sports days are a waste of time.

Attn. teachers who set essays due in the following day: has it ever occured to you that we may have other things to do? Has it ever occured to you that other teachers may have set us essays for the following day? Has it ever occured to you that giving us a few extra days when you won’t mark it anyway might actually mean we’d do it?

Attn. people who enforce uniform regulations: if my tracksuit bottoms with pale pink stripes on the sides are unacceptable, then so must be my makeup, my decorative earrings and my nail polish. Given that you have yet to ask me to remove any of these things, I don’t see that my trousers really matter that much.

Attn. health and safety people: Health and safety is the reason people don’t jump off cliffs. Health and safety is not an excuse for controlling people to the extent that they are not allowed to do even the most menial tasks, such as walking down the corridor to the bathroom, by themselves. And if wearing a blunt plastic hairstick is dangerous, a pen is a terrorist weapon and a drawing of a gun needs to be removed by airport security, then God help us.

And finally, attn. anyone who thinks a French twist is an ‘extreme hairstyle’: what the hell are you on?

This is, apparently, a picture of a ’spork’. A spork is, according to good ol’ wikipedia:

a hybrid form of cutlery taking the form of a spoon-like shallow scoop with the addition of the tines of a fork

(Seriously, did you know they were called ‘tines’? Did anyone know they were called tines? Pardon me for being common and lower-class, but until I was enlightened, I’d have called them prongs. Oh, silly, silly me.)

Wikipedia’s article continues with some interesting spork-related facts, such as the fact that they are occasionally known as ‘foons’ and that they have been made since at least the 1800s.

The point of this entry, however, is to celebrate the fact that I am one of probably only 4 people in the world (the other 3 being related to myself) to refer to this culinary implement as a ’spoon-fork’.

Don’t you just love being alternative?

I guess it’s time for our second week of summer here. Yes, you guessed it: I’m going to be a stereotypical Brit and talk about the weather for an entire entry.

About a month ago, we had one week where it was glorious and sunny. I went out and bought skirts, having thrown all mine away during the winter. I’d only just got home from the shops when it started to rain, and until yesterday, it kept on going and going and going. Guess that was our one and only week of summer for this year…too bad I’m not so keen on drizzle.

Then on Sunday, it suddenly became ludicrously hot and it’s stayed that way ever since. It seems like everyone but me is absolutely delighted about it…seriously, though, I don’t like hot weather. I don’t like it when it’s horrible and drizzly either, but there is such a thing as too hot and it kicks in at about 25 degrees Celsius. You know how it is in the summer evenings when it’s cool and shady but warm enough to go outside in short sleeves? That’s my kind of weather. I think I’d like it to be like that all the time.

I am sick of people recommending this book to me. It seems to be universally acknowledged as a great read that’s really deep and meaningful and thought-provoking etc. etc. Unfortunately, I am probably the only person on the planet who didn’t enjoy it.

The Five People You Meet in Heaven on Amazon.

I reserved this book from the library after hearing rave reviews and I was rather excited when it came through. Everything I’d heard about it was good, and the overwhelming opinion I got was that it was a book that offered new perspectives and ideas. Boy, was I disappointed.

The writing style got me from the first page. It was blank. I was expecting something deep and thoughtful and inspirational: instead, it was bland, boring sentences with no drive to them at all. It didn’t feel like there was any deeper meaning than what was written right on the page in front of me, and in my opinion, that’s because there wasn’t.

Nevertheless, I persevered, convinced that these great reviews must have some basis in fact. However, as I continued, I found that another thing that really annoyed me was that that there was no scope of change. The idea of the book is that when you die, you meet five people in heaven who explain your life to you. Because of this, I was expecting some gradual revelation, some thought, some sense of r as the things they were explaining became clear. However, nice as the stories were, they didn’t really seem to go anywhere. Far from explaining Eddie’s life, they were filling in the blanks. Did you know that the guy in the corner shop used to know your aunt? Did you know that your mum once went out on a date with the guy who went on to become your lecturer at uni? That kind of thing. That’s all very well, and quite nice in a way, but it doesn’t really get you anywhere.

I’ll admit that that could very well have been deliberate or purposeful - after all, he’s dead and so maybe it’s supposed to illustrate that nothing can change and that things would have been very different if Eddie had known these things during his life - but I doubt it was. To me, the book rang hollow: it was a collection of stories, vaguely tied together by one man, that had no greater bearing on anything at all. What a disappointment.

The amount of time I spend online depresses me.

It seems like my life alternates between ‘internet’ and ‘not internet’. Get up, go online. Do something else. Back online. Do something else. Back on line. Do something else. Back online…

I started using a firefox addon called MeeTimer a while ago, which monitors the time you spend online. It also has a function to deter you, by blocking tabs, blocking links…in fact, it works pretty well. According to MeeTimer, though, it’s only saved me 27 minutes so far.

MeeTimer has logged 75  hours of my internet activity. On average, I spend 1h 45min online every day. That’s 25min on ungrouped sites (i.e. sites I don’t normally visited and so haven’t allocated a specific group), 7min on communication (which comprises of gmail, which I use for email, and meebo, which I use for instant messaging), 20min on longhaircommunity, which is fast becoming an addiction of mine, 47min on livewire (eek!), which is clearly already an addiction of mine, 5min on miscellaneous sites (wordpress, postsecret, the library, bookmooch) and 4min on music sites (deezer and chilirec).

I keep trying to cut down, but seriously, I don’t know how much is normal (or reasonable) to spend online. Almost two hours a day is too much, but how much should I be aiming for? I know that most of the time clocked up is from livewire, so perhaps I should cut down on that. Thing is, though, that because I’m a moderator, I really should sign in every day, and it normally takes me about 20min just to clear my mail and topics and quotes and the mod forum and the modmenu. Perhaps I should try and cut down on that, or maybe do only that for a few days and not make any extra posts or whatever to try and bring the amount of time down. Whatever I decide to do, it’s pretty clear to me that something needs to change.

2nd prosecution lawyer very clear and feisty. She will make a good lawyer.

^^^ That’s me!

I’m taking part in the National Magistrates Mock Trial Competition, in which we have to pretend to be a magistrates’ court and act out a trial. As I said, I’m 2nd prosecution lawyer. Our school qualified for the regional final, but someone quit and so I stepped in to take their place. That meant that everyone else had done the competition before, but I hadn’t.

The regional final was on Saturday, in Southampton. It went pretty well: fortunately, both teams we were against made pretty huge mistakes (obviously biasing their examination-in-chief by saying things like ‘how responsible of you’ and trying to re-examine, which isn’t allowed in the competition), so that made us look pretty good.

Anyway…we won!

That means we get to go to the national final (!) on the 21st of next month in Leeds. We get the Friday off school to travel up by train and then stay the night. Then we’ll do the competition on the Saturday and come back down after.

I can’t wait!

I’ve got the blues.

Everything seems so pointless right now. I’ve been to school every day this week and have yet to succeed in learning anything. I’ve stayed late every night and I haven’t really enjoyed any of the things I’ve been to. To which I’ve been.

We’ve had tests that count for jack shit and we don’t even get the results. When we don’t have tests, other people do, so we haven’t even had any lessons.

Insert your own profanity here because I can’t be bothered to make up the remainder of the post. Here’s a pretty picture instead:

Summer has come. It’s hot. I wake up early in the mornings because the sun is streaming through the window, which is now left open at night because it’s so hot. I’m wearing a skirt. I don’t bother taking my jumper to school.

SATs week last week. Boring as hell. I think I did well on them. The only papers where I feel I didn’t do so well are the science ones, and I still think I did okay. I don’t particularly care.

We have CATs this week. Had one this morning (missed IT and PE! hooray!) and I have the other half on Wednesday. There’s absolutely no point to them. Seriously, how can they possibly need any more tests to predict our grades? They already have 3 years’ of work, plus all the tests we’ve done in those years, and our year 7 CATs, and our SATs. If they haven’t got a decent idea how we’re going to do by now, then they must be effing stupid.

I went to photography today and messed around a bit with a photo of the piano I use in my lessons. I think it came out pretty well: I took the photo by putting the camera at the side of the keyboard on a timer and then putting my hands on the keys, then made it greyscale and fiddled with the sharpness and blurring. I’m pretty pleased with it.

Well, I had a mediocre weekend.

Friday, I went out to dinner with Spanish club. It was pretty cool. We went to La Tasca. There were 8 of us in total, including Miss, and she deserves to be included because it wasn’t like going out to dinner with a teacher at all. We chatted and ate Spanish food and put our hands through the candles on the tables. All good clean fun.

Saturday, I went to gym. Turned out that Gemma (one of the coaches) had seen me at La Tasca. Small world, eh? I did some more flicks. I did them the week before with only Jodie helping, but I’ve gone back to two coaches because I find it easier to have support on each side. Still, I’m getting there!

Sunday, we had my grandma over to celebrate her birthday. It isn’t her birthday ’till Saturday, but she’s going to France tomorrow to visit my uncle so we celebrated early.

Yesterday I did sod all.

Now it’s SATs week. We had all the maths papers today, which were all ridiculously easy, though I did find one mistake just as they told us to close our papers, which annoyed me. Ah well. It’s only one mark, and I’m certain I got most of the others.

Aaah, nine days and no updates. Really must get round to this more.

Okay, time to tie up loose ends. My list of things to do over the holidays:

• Read ‘On the Road’ by Jack Kerouac: completed! Hooray! And it was a really good book. Hopefully I’ll find some similar things to read.
• Actually revise for SATs =O: Yup, did that! If you count about half an hour, anyway…
• Get all my homework done before the last day: well, I did all my homework, I just happened to have a whole bunch of extracurricular stuff left…
• Go to see The Woman in Black! Hooray! (okay, that’s definitely going to happen, but hey, it’s a task): yup, did that. It wasn’t as good as I thought it would be, actually, though it was still definitely worth going to see. It chucked it down with rain that day.
  
• Sort my room: some progress.
• Learn my piano pieces and the Mexican Hat Dance I’ve got for recorder: yeah, I guess so. I learned the Mexican Hat Dance, though I still feel like there’s something to it I’m just not getting. I made a determined effort with the piano pieces, though I’ve been truly defeated by one of them.
• Watch at least one Michael Palin out of the pile I have waiting for me: I watched 20 minutes of one and then trashed the lot. Can’t be arsed.
• Do some laps on the treadmill at least every other day: pfft.
  
• Keep on top of my correspondence: oh yeah? Forget about it.
• Find a new hairstyle that I can wear  on the first day back to school: kinda. Relented to my old ways on the first day back, but I’ve certainly learned a few new styles.
• Hopefully go out with my friends a few times and have some fun!: success! Hoorah.

We’re back at school now, which is boring as fuck, but that’s just life. SATs next week and everyone is making a fuss about them. I can’t say I’ve particularly bothered to do any of the work, but hey, since when do I?

Can’t be bothered to do anything more right now. Hopefully this blog will see the light of day again soon, mmkay?