Round round baby, round round

Well, I have fallen back into my familiar slump. Like a new years resolution come early I had decided to change my life, take control and make my own density. Leaving my job, going on the holiday of a life time, starting a new course all the signs were good. The first few weeks involved getting to know everyone, drinking, dancing, flirting and enjoying the challenge of a new career.

Weeks in and the introductory party games have stopped, the work load has kicked in and once again I have spent the past five days in the house pretending to work and watching nearly the entire series of Sex and the City (Series 5 and counting).

Last week I could feel it come on, so I took the bull by the horn, texted some people from my course and generally put the feelers out to make friends. Shockingly, following a pattern of a lifetime, and please forgive the seeming indulgent self pity for I assure you it is all true, no-one got back to me.

I am seriously starting to wonder what the hell it is about me that repels people. Is it just because I am fat? Are people really that shallow? Or am I really a boring, unfriendly bitch that no-one likes? And more scarily, which one would I prefer it to be?

I am so fucking bored, and stressed with the work and my total inability to concentrate and start studying. I have caved in to my old style of making excuses to not go out, to skip the gym and stay at home hugging a pillow.

I’m hoping I can get over the hump before my life fails to change and I wind up a 27 year old, single, friendless, unfit, loser.

New rules:
Gym three times a week
Leave the house everyday for at least an hour
Go to a ‘cultural event’ once a week
Call one none home friend once a week

Theme song for the Just Jasmine show

HELP, you know I need somebody,
HELP, not just anybody,
HELP, you know I need someone,
Please, please, please, help me, help m, HELP MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Existential funk

One of my favorite phrases of the moment is “Existential funk” as in “I’m having a bit of an existential funk”

However, I have realised that I am not exactly sure what existential means and therefore if I was in a ‘funk’ of it, I better find out if is describing what I want it to describe, otherwise things could get messy.

Thanks to Wikipida I can say that an existential crisis can result from:
A sense of being alone and isolated,
The realization of one's own mortality, or the realization that there may be no afterlife or a negative afterlife; or
A realization that one's life may have no destined, supernatural, or in some cases external purpose or meaning.

An existential crisis describes a state of panic or feeling of intense psychological discomfort about questions of existence.

So, all in all, while it may be a little deep for what I am intending, I think its defo along the right lines.

Books within Books

I reading this brilliant book called “The End of Mr Y” by Scarlett Thomas. It’s exactly my kind of thing, jumping about from one idea to the next, delving into spiritually, multi-dimensions, time travel and requiring me to stop every few pages to look something up to make sure I know what they are talking about. It’s an exercise in information and I love the way it is working to link all these things together to create the story. Plus, within the first few chapters it got me thinking about the genius that is Flatland.

Flatland was written by Edwin Abott in 1884. I’d almost forgotten about this book, the idea behind it is so simple, it is used now to explain the idea behind multi-dimensional and this can be extended to the idea of multiverses.

The Plot:
The story is about a two-dimensional world referred to as Flatland. The unnamed narrator, a Square has a dream about a visit to a one-dimensional world (Lineland), and attempts to convince the worlds leader of a second dimension, without success.
Square is then visited by a three-dimensional Sphere, which he cannot comprehend until he sees Spaceland for himself. The Sphere, spends millenniums trying to educate the population of Flatland of the existence of Spaceland. However, the leaders of Flatland decide to hide the truth of the Sphere and Spaceland and ban its mention, leading to the imprisonment and death of anyone found speaking of Spaceland.
Square then tries to talk to Sphere about the theoretical possibility of the existence of a fourth (and fifth, and sixth ...) spatial dimension. Ironically, Spehere finds these ideas preposterous and returns square to Flatland in disgrace.
Square then dreams about visiting Pointland. The point (sole inhabitant, leader, and universe in one) perceives any attempt at communicating with him as simply being a thought originating in his own mind. The Square recognises that all these worlds suffer the same problem of ignorance and denial over the existence of other dimensions.
Once returned to Flatland, Square finds it difficult to convince anyone of Spaceland's existence, and is imprisoned for speaking of it in line with the leader proclamation.


Its just beginnig to talk about quantum theory, and I’ve got two-thirds of the book to go! This is going ot be good.

Can old friends become new friends?

I’ve been feeling a bit blue since the weekend, and haven’t been able to motivate myself to get back online.

Meet up with S. and R. at the weekend, it was so amazing to see them again and I had a fabulous time but once again it was a bit of a struggle to move on, conversation wise, from “great times that were” to trying to talk about our lives now. I mean don’t get me wrong, reminiscing is all well and good but I want to try and build and strengthen these friendships and you can’t do that if all you have to talk about with each other is a shared past, otherwise you have one of those friendships that only meet up every couple of years to have the same conversation over and over again about ‘remember when…’ I think we started to make headway in the end and by the end of the weekend definitely felt that we were beginning to lay down the foundation for building a friendship that was based in the present as opposed to the past.

So I’ve been feeling a little blue, which is strange as things are looking up, only 8 days left at work, 15 days till my holiday of a lifetime to China, one month until I start uni and get to feed my intellectual and hopefully meet some new and interesting people and start engaging again. I’ve had a few men hit on me, a few who were reasonably cute too! But I think I’ve got a bit of the blues, to make it worse, I haven’t been the gym so far this week as I keep making excuses and that is making me feel bad.

Ho Hum, guess I’m just having in a bit of a soul funk, hopefully it will work itself out soon.

Shooting Stars

I am so excited, my two old flatmates are coming to stay for the weekend – it will be the first time the three of us have been together in three years! I can barely think straight, I can’t be bothered to focus on work (shockingly) and I keep planning on where I can take them to best show off my wonderful home town. I’ve seen them individually over the past few years but we have never managed to all meet up, due them being at either end of the county and me stuck in the middle.

We make quite a fun group, S. is the posh one, talks like out of Mallory towers and goes sailing and skiing in her holidays but is the sweetest lovely person you can ever meet, a total grafter, dedicated to training as a doctor. I fist met R. during fresher week and she was a totally skater boi, baggy jeans, no make up and an angry wee soul to boot but again so funny and sweet she just liked to wrap it up in a shell of barbed wire. And then there was me, emotionally unable, hard nut northern lass (well not really but compared to the rest of them..) However, I like to think we made a good team, all of us bonded over our love of and ability to drink, or in S. case her belief in her ability to drink. There was a big group of us at uni, about 10-15 and we had so much fun in the beginning, oh happy happy days. There are so many things I would do different but those stories are for another time, in the meantime I’ll focus on trying to regress back to fresherdom student days – yee ha!

I’m very distressed that I missed the partial eclipse today – I remember travelling down to Cornwall for the total eclipse of the sun (break in to song here) and was so excited and of course it was cloudy but you still got to feel the effects of the darkness and all the birds settling down to roost and the flowers closing. It got me think about the comet Hale-Bopp, I loved that thing, it was so totally amazing to see this clear bright object in the sky at night, spotting its three tails spouting behind it and watching it make its way steadily across the summer sky. During this progression I went skiing to a remote little town in Italy and I remember looking up one night and it seemed to fill the whole sky and be resting just above the mountains. It was one of those moments that inspired you to write poetry, sing, dance, love and generally want to hug everyone everywhere.

I’m a sucker for all this astronomy stuff. Here are my facts for the day:

Meteoroid: Pieces of interplanetary matter orbiting the sun, traditionally smaller than a kilometre and frequently only millimetres in size.

Meteors: Are meteorids that have entered the Earths atmosphere, thus turning them into meteors. They burn up completely when they enter the earth's atmosphere. Meteors are commonly known as shooting stars.

Meteorites: If any part of a meteoroid survives the fall through the atmosphere and lands on Earth, it is called a meteorite. The biggest meteorite that we have recovered is the Hoba, Namibia meteorite that weights around 60 tons and the Meteor Crater in Arizona was thought to have been created by a meteorite 25 meters in size.

Spell it how it sounds

....is one of the WORST pieces of advice I have ever heard. As a border line dyslexic, but with a bizarrely high reading ability I can categorically confirm that this does not help, in the slightest.

Words I can not spell, a sample of:

Maintenance
Available
Convenient
Permanent
Numeracy
Colleagues