Day 18 – Your favorite birthday, in great detail

Spectacular views.

Ice palaces.

Mine shafts.

Birds wearing top hats on turrets.

The fiery depths of hell.

Naked ladies.

Bears playing cards.

A 20th birthday with amazing things and amazing people!

All pictures except the last one taken at The Forbidden Corner. The last one taken at my house. I hope my 21st birthday will be just as fun, although I may have to drink less as I'm hoping to fly to Italy the next day!

x

Day 17 – Your favorite memory, in great detail

My favourite memory is, perhaps quite tragically, not real.

My family and I are having a picnic in a big green field on a sunny day and I’m playing on a space hopper.

My mum tells me that I never once played on a space hopper in her presence, meaning I probably made this memory up. 

Another nice memory is my dad reading The Tyger by William Blake to me as a child.

Day 16 – Your first kiss, in great detail

As with my first love story, this is completely unspectacular. I was at a local live music festival, boogying away, and a boy came and danced near me. I was 15, which is my excuse for being this immature: I told him my friend fancied him and then boogied away. Yep. Real smooth. He told my friend that he in fact fancied me, and this news got back to me, and hell, I don’t know, he bought me a pint of cider and we ended up kissing outside Lloyds TSB. He then snuck me into a pub that was IDing, by putting his arm round me and simply saying, ‘she’s with me.’ Ah, I had a momentary taste of the high life that night, apparently. He then bought me a pint of Diesel and continued to kiss me. He was shorter than me. I kept opening my eyes while he was kissing me, and seeing that all my friends were laughing hysterically at the awkward height difference. I remember feeling smothered by him kissing me, as though I was going to suffocate even though I was breathing through my nose.  We swapped numbers. He rang me the next morning and I ignored his call. I then ignored all his texts.

It could have been something beautiful… but it really was not. With the height difference it was likely doomed from the start.

*

I wrote this a week ago and have just read it over and realised one important thing – ‘he […] continued to kiss me’, ‘while he was kissing me’, ‘smothered by him kissing me.’ I’d like to point out that I was a willing participant in said kissing, even if I clearly didn’t enjoy it all that much. I was young(er) and stupid(er).

Day 15 – Your dreams, in great detail

I don’t know if this means my life dreams, or my sleeping dreams. I’ll go with sleeping dreams.

My dreams used to be incredibly weird. Here are excerpts from my old livejournal, which were filed under the tag ‘i have weird dreams.’

“I had a weird dream this morning in which I kept waking up from a dream, telling somebody about the dream, then waking up again and telling somebody, and basically this just kept repeating itself until I actually woke up. Like, I was waking up from dreams within dreams. It was so strange. Also, I did that thing again where I make myself wake up in real life by falling asleep in the dream. In the final one I was running along the road and I saw my friends in the distance, but for some reason I was worried about what would happen when I caught up with them, so I raced in front of them, laid on the floor and closed my eyes... and then woke up in real life. It was kind of amazing! But I really don't know how normal it is to be able to do that. I told my friend and she was like 'woah, that is fucking weird dude.' Is it?”

This is one of the most peculiar things about my sleeping brain… I quite often have semi-lucid dreams. I can’t control them, as such, but I’m aware sometimes that I am dreaming, and have on a few occasions managed to wake myself up from a dream by falling asleep in the dream.

“Oh I think this is hilarious so I'm going to tell you all - last night I had a dream that the degree I'm doing wasn't English with Creative Writing, but instead it was... wait for it... English with Creative Sandwich Making! No, seriously. So instead of fretting about having to write three poems, I was fretting about having to make three creative sandwiches! My brain is so, so odd.”

That’s just kind of funny, really.

“In Year 11, I had a recurring dream about missing the bus home at the end of school. In the dream I would be panicking, crying, running for the bus, and would feel completely empty and helpless when it drove away without me. The reason I missed the bus would usually be because I was trying to get to the bus lane on time, but people were walking really slow, getting in my way, not letting me past. I hated it, the feeling of struggle, and it always seemed so unfair that it was happening in my dreams. I would go to sleep to relax and the exact opposite would happen and I would wake up exhausted.

In Year 12, I had a recurring dream that I would get to college and then realise that I wasn't wearing any shoes. I've thought about this one and I think it could be something to do with the fact that while I went to school 5 minutes away from home, I then went to a college that was 40 minutes away, and maybe subconciously I was anxious about leaving something at home and not being able to get it. In these dreams, I would just be walking around and realise my bare feet. This would send me into a complete panic and I would usually either hide in an empty room or have some sort of emotional breakdown on the spot.

One of the strange things about these two dreams is that neither of these things, in real life, would have bothered me much. They certainly weren't things that I ever worried about, and as far as I can think, not things that have ever even happened. If I had missed the bus, I really don't think I would have cared. If I had forgotten my shoes, then oh well. Tesco sells shoes for like £4. I would have been alright. Still, I had these dreams often, and would wake up in the same state of panic and anxiety as in the dream.”

To this day I still have anxiety dreams which are set in my school dining hall. Issues? Probably. Lately I’ve been very subconsciously stressed. By this I mean that I’m not actively tearing my hair out, but I am in a constant state of stress about one thing or another, I’m not sleeping well, and I have bitten the skin off my fingers to a disturbing degree. So all my dreams are a manifestation of my stress, and they all consist of me struggling to get somewhere or do something, and I wake up in the morning feeling utterly exhausted.

Cheery, eh?

Day 14 – What you wore today, in great detail

Black vest from H&M. Wardrobe staple.
Black and white stripy skirt from H&M. The sun was shining but it wasn't exactly beating down on me so I thought I'd wear this in order to feel summery but not freeze.
Scarf, Sheffield market.
I added a long yellow charity shop cardigan, not pictured, and cream ballet pumps. 


Later on in the day I changed into gym clothes, which consist of a long vest, three quarter leggings and trainers. I then changed into blue pyjamas, a white vest, and a white cardigan for bed.

Day 13 – This week, in great detail

I’ve been an all round bad human this week, and I’d like to think this week does not serve as a representative cross section of my life, so I refuse to go into great detail.

Monday. Assignment. Egg explosion. Grapefruit is not good. Wine. Macarena. Takeout delivery driver called me a bitch.

Tuesday. Hangover. Skive. Free box of food from Graze.com. Bloody awful. No hot water. Shower at a friend’s house. Food shop. Pomegranate and cantaloupe melon. Chat on the phone to my mum. Happy.

Wednesday. Assignment. Spend 40 minutes washing up. Hot water comes back on. Very little else.

Thursday. Collect an essay. 63! Happy, but I could have done better. Try to collect another essay. It’s not there. Get annoyed with the peculiar man in the English office, as usual. Work on assignment. Lecture on 1930s literature. Work on assignment. Seminar on 1930s literature. Walk home in the freezing cold. Talk to my father on the phone and all he has to talk to me about is Peter Kay. Split pea and bacon soup made by my own fair hand. Finally finish assignment. Almost weep with sheer relief.

Friday. Woken up at 5 in the morning by drunken friend on the phone. Panic because I think it is morning already. Wake up again feeling very grumpy around 10. Shower. Eat sardines on toast. Resolve to eat sardines more often. Hand in assignment. Feel the usual strange sense of shame and helplessness as I watch it fall into the drop box, where I cannot rectify any mistakes. Resist the usual urge to go over the Word documents with a fine toothcomb to find a mistake and worry over it. Get books out from the library. Go to the gym. 30 minutes on the exercise bike, 20 minutes on the treadmill and some weights exercises. Go home. Eat Covent Garden cauliflower spinach and coconut soup. Delicious. Eat a wide variety of other somewhat strange things over the course of the evening – a banana with peanut butter, a kiwi, half a cantaloupe melon, a handful of cherry tomatoes, cream crackers with butter and Wensleydale cheese, and Twiglets.

Saturday: Going to get caught up on work. Eat some more delicious soup. Go out to Spiders on the night.

Sunday: Boyfriend is visiting. We’re going to eat burgers and Easter eggs and have an early night watching The Big Bang Theory. We know how to live.

I have so much more planned for next week! Bad week for this question to crop up.

Day 12 – What’s in your bag, in great detail

While I was at college I got into that usual girl's habit of carrying around everything but the kitchen sink in my handbag. I never cleared it out, and felt the need to carry almost everything with me, in case of emergencies. I also always had at least one book, and occasionally two or three, because I got the bus to and from college so I would read while on the bus. I also used to have a pencil case sized canvas bag in which I kept first aid type things such as plasters, Bonjela and Olbas Oil. As I was carrying half my life around with me, I started using oversized handbags. Now, I don't tend to carry much with me in my actual handbag on an off day, and on a day when I have lectures I carry my notes and books in a canvas bag separate to my handbag. Still, though, all my handbags are huge, and now seem quite pathetic for housing just a few lonely things.

Handbag from Next. 
Samsung phone.
Felt elephant purse bought from a gift shop in Whitby.
Sony mp3 player.
Card wallet, which a wide variety of cards, ranging from the obvious and necessary such as my debit card and student card, to the unusual like a Subway loyalty card, and an Oyster card even though I don't live in London.
Vaseline, and Vanilla Coke flavoured lipbalm.
Two library receipts.
Not pictured are my keys, a bottle of water, and a carton of apple juice.

It just seems easier to carry my lecture stuff in a canvas bag. Also it fits better.
Bag, free from Topshop.
Moleskine diary, bargain courtesy of Amazon! Kind of wish it looked less like a Bible though.
Pukka Pad.
Smaller stripy notebook - my creative writing notebook. In there is a veritable treasure trove of glimpses into my peculiar imagination.
Memory stick.
Free pen from the University of Perugia! Oh yeah.
The two books on the left are It's My Party: Reading Twentieth Century Women's Writing edited by Gina Wisker, and Women's Writing: A Challenge to Theory edited by Moira Monteith.
The rest is just assorted pieces of the work I have been doing today.


And that is the contents of my bags!