Mostly Sleep-Talk

I'm feeling lazy but I didn't write a blog last Wednesday... or pretty much throughout November, but I feel like I owe my neglected blog an update so you get a list. I like lists.

- I am in bed and it is 1am.

- I read a book called Wintergirls, by Laurie Halse Anderson. It's affected me in such a way that I don't know if I want to talk about it at all, but it's the first book that's made me cry. That sounds really dramatic, but the night I finished it I lay in bed and wept, not knowing exactly why.

- I babysat tonight. fun fun fun.

- Exams this week and next. bleh. But I booked concert tickets so things are good.

- Poppy and I are playing a show next weekend. That is exciting.

- Lolita is a weird book but so far good.

- Thank you for all your responses on Twitter and Tumblr and things re the Caggie interview. I still feel really weird about it.

- Coming soon: proper post of relevancy and conclusion.

I like you sufficiently.

Lizzie xxx

"Things That Will Make Me Happier" and Other Bits and Pieces

So I don’t really know what to write today and I feel like I should do something, because I just went back and counted and I think I’ve written for something like the last seven Wednesdays. But it’s not really an achievement anymore if everything I force myself regularly I’m worried it will become completely rid of quality… like pretty much everything I posted in the last half of February.

(Actually, I lied to you… it’s actually Tuesday today. Tomorrow’s the day before we break up for school, for the summer, and I won’t be home from leaving for school until Thursday. I’ll find a time to post this.)

I’m really excited about the summer. Firstly I have to get away from school – I can tell I’m getting tired and lazier than usual, today I got my first considerably awful grade of any of my GCSE courses. Also I’m beginning to hate everyone. But I’m also really about things I’m doing – Isaline’s visiting from France, I’m going to a Greek island called Zante, I’m planning on trying to be quite productive and might also be a part of this madcap internet project which I don’t want to get my hopes up about just yet but I’ll talk about at the time!

I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow Part 2 at the weekend and I’ll talk about that soon, because I think I probably need to see it again before I can make sense of it all enough to write anything comprehensible.

And I found this list today (when I sat down to write this blog, I didn’t want to do anything so I thought of skimming through old writing journals to see if there was any gold in there. There wasn’t) and I remember I wrote it in the bath a few months ago. It partly made me kind of happy, but also embarrassed about my needy pessimistic white girl problems.

*sigh*

THINGS WHICH WOULD MAKE ME HAPPIER

- Flying to somewhere I’ve never been, a few times a year
- Not living with my parents, just visiting every so often
- Being made stressed only by things which I’m passionate about
- Having the strength to run a marathon
- Berlin.
- A radio station existing which I really love and connect with
- Someone I wake up to on sunny mornings who makes me pancakes
- An attic with long windows
- Being able to talk completely honestly, to maybe just one person
- Being closer to the seaside
- The freedom and money to go to concerts more often
- No languages coursework!
- Clearer skies at night time
- A time in the day when I’m alone in a wide space and I could dance without people staring at me
- A pet unicorn
- More friends, less acquaintances
- Being good at painting

This has been a blog made up of bits, I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. I’m going to watch an episode of Charmed now. I’ll see you soon.

Lizzie

2011 Reading Update

Remember a while ago, when I said I was going to read these thirty books in 2011?
Well. I'm sort-of backing out.

I still am going to make myself read at least thirty books by the end of the year, and talk about each of them here, but it's not going to be the thirty on the list (but I will read all of those. One day).
Here's why -

- Books are pretty expensive
- My mum's always saying how you have a right to stop reading something if you aren't enjoying it. And that happened.
- I loved "Unbearable Lightness of Being", was close to the end and lost it. And it's irritating and the library don't have it yet.
- It was stopping me reading other things in the spur of the moment, that I just find in a shop or someone lends to me or something and I love doing that.

I'm sorry this blog was short, but I wanted to write a post because it's Wednesday, and Wednesday is always blog day even though I know this post is sort of a waste of time. A lot of stuff's happened this week (I think that last week and the one before my time for notsome, now it seems to be everyone else that bad things are happening to and I'm having to be around for that) and I've also been super-busy. School is stressful, Poppy and I played a show at the weekend. I have one more big thing at school before we break up for the summer.But after that, I should have way too much time on my hands again.

I may even do BEDA that's a lie, I probably won't do BEDA.

But I'll be back and write something proper, like book reviews or "thank you notes" in a few days. I hope you're having a good week :)

Thanks for stickin' round.

Lizzie xx

"Hair"

“HAIR”

It’s late and I’m lying in bed, trying to imagine a time when I’m in more pain than this.
I imagine you, running me a bath, the perfect temperature. You lower my wasted body carefully into the water, and I feel a slight sting as I make sudden contact with the heat. With one hand you raise the showerhead, whilst you rub shampoo and soap into my scalp, my skin, between my fingers; I’m too tired not to let you. Once it’s dry, curiously, you plait my hair, weaving all of my dead ends in and out of each other, like cloth.

________________________________________________________________

I found The Drabble Challenge today - to write something about a given theme, within a five word range of 100 words. But despite how much the idea of it inspired me, this is the best I could squeeze out, it's also vaguely based on a scene in Skins. I was sort of hesitant to put it here, of all places. But I never post writing here and I probably should, and I won't want to do this in the morning.
K... enjoy, I think.

when lizzie doesn't know what to write, she googles "thought provoking questions" and things like this occur...

Do you remember that time five years ago you were really upset? Does it matter now?

At my primary school, we had this very, very open and politically correct headmistress and this was probably a good thing most of the time. We celebrated Diwali and had to fill out sheets with an anonymous compliment for each of our classmates each year. Anti-bullying policies were jammed at us constantly, and there were motivational, positive posters everywhere with things on them like pictures of a black child and a white, hand in hand, and I'm not sure if it was lovely or maybe just a little too enforced.
There was this one poster, in the girls bathroom - and when I say poster, I mean a laminated piece of A4 - and on it it said "If it won't matter in five years, it doesn't matter now". It was a quote from Cher.

I honestly think being in Year Five (that's aged nine and ten here) was one of the toughest years of my life, because in the earlier September of that year, my best friend left the school. It's really hard to explain why this upset me much more than it should have, but you could say that I was always one of those children who liked to have one, single best friend, maybe within a few others. She and I were inseparable. We'd have these slumber parties and the whole week before those Saturdays, at school we'd write out these plans of what we were going to do every half hour. At break time we strolled around the edges of the playing field and did impressions of all of the other girls in our class, who talked about their "boyfriends" and made up sexy dances and lay on the disused football pitch with their polo shirts rolled up and tied in a knot.

But because of how close we were, there was never really room for anyone else and so when she left I was at a complete loss of what to do, who to talk to, because for two years I hadn't needed to make more friends than the one I had already.
The class I was in was an absolute wreck - there were three or four misbehavioural boys who I think probably all had ADHD or something, (one of who I think moved to Australia after he was expelled) and girls who wanted to grow up much too fast. Everyone was loud and obnoxious, and by now I had pretty much no self confidence at all. Our teacher was new, and he was male, which was a first for our school, only two years old. But he was very, very nervous, and left a while after a boy shouted at him. We went through three teachers that year, and the third left at the end of it.

I was permanently upset. One time about a year ago I realised how bad it must have been when my mother told me the things they'd said to her that parents evening. I can't imagine how big an impact something that simple could have on me. Apparently I stopped raising my hand in class, nearly became mute and lost a lot of weight. At breaktimes I would sit on my own and read, or write stories in a leather-bound notebook I still have in my drawer and smile at sometimes. I was picked on and laughed at, and for why I understand completley, but the lower my self-confidence got the worst it became. The boy I had to sit next to in lessons was the worst of all - the other boys idolised him because he was cocky and wore hair gel and swore that, in the bathroom of the public swimming pool, his fourteen year old girlfriend had given him a blowjob. (I'm fairly sure I didn't believe it at the time, and I know I don't now). We'd done a spelling test (remember spelling tests?) and everyone who got ten out of ten was told to stand up, to be given a sticker or something. It was his job to write down all of the names of those of us who got that score. I think there were probably about eight. And he moved slowly around the class, calling out the name of each child, one at a time, and writing them down. He was smirking and doing it very, very slowly and I realised early on what he was doing. As it became that there were less and less of us stood up, I started to feel a lump in my chest rise (you also need to know that back then I cried ALL of the time). And then in a moment tears started trickling down my face and I could hear myself from inside my head making tiny noises. And it went quite quickly from some people in the class asking if I was okay to everyone of them laughing and taunting me, the teacher ignorant and embarassed and awkward, staring down at his desk.
They thought it was for no reason, but the boy next to me didn't. He knew exactly what he'd done and he seemed to feel nothing. He carried on the torture, leaving me until the very end.
The teacher never knew what to do about things like this so he took me to the headmistress' office, where she offered me water and gave me a big box of Kleenex and played Zen music. I was a regular visitor there, now I think back it was probably a sort of therapy they arranged for me. She asked me what was wrong but I couldn't explain what he'd done in the right way - it was a link in a chain of mini incidents like that, and they seem silly now and I can't remember what it was like but I know he was doing it on purpose.

I know how ridiculous it sounds. I feel guilty that it's easy for me to laugh at now, because of what it did to me then but that always seems like a different version of myself.
And the point is that of course it still matters now, the in five years.... Because in some ways I think maybe all of that changed me as a person for the better, because if that situation happened in school now I'd probably either not notice or just have a bit of a bitch and a moan about it in my head. But a lot of it's to do with the people I'm surrounded by - although people this age are still immature, I think ten year old boys are much more powerful than we think.
I don't know if it changed me as a person. More stuff did, more recently, but in the years after that it forced me to develop social skills and I became much less co-dependant. It was even the time I started to turn to the internet. And there's things which happen to me nowadays - even things which have happened in the last month which I know I'll remember when I'm twenty. (woah, I'm halfway to twenty from all of that. I'm getting old :/ )

I don't really know why I wrote that. It got me away from French revision. Beth asked for a post. Myeh.

Lizzie xx