What? A... new... entry?

Whenever I find myself losing my way in life and then resort inevitably and invariably to writing this blog, I look back and review my previous forays into self-publishing on the internet asking the question:

Where did it all go wrong?

Why is it that my attempts at regular posts always fizzle away into nothingness leaving behind only an orange residual liquid, like a berocca in water?

Terrible comparisons and a worryingly bad sense of humour are just a couple of items on a very long list of flaws. However, many though the problems with the blog may be, my limited study of psychology (which I started in college this year with 'mixed results') has taught me that outliers like the occasional god-awful simile are insignificant, and what I really should be looking for are the salient problematic themes. No, I didn't understand any of those terms either, but the basic jist is that I have to identify the shit aspects of the blog that are prevalent throughout, and then tell them to feck off.

And so, as I glanced over the past year of blog entries, what salient problematic themes did I find? Well I'll TELL you what salient problematic themes I found. Negativity. Negativity, negativity, NEGATIVITY. Negativity. It's everywhere I look. Apparently, in the world of me, everything is crap. I would wager that the award for most commonly used words in the blog would be closely fought for between 'Shit' and 'Fuck off'. Negativity is embedded in the walls of the blog, no - built into its very foundations.

Quite the pickle indeed is this negativity. What am I to do, just become a more positive person, just like that? This is of course impossible. Comfortingly enough people cannot change overnight. Change takes time. So instead of promising a more positive blog, I will promise to strive for a more positive blog (yes I just discovered the italics button - be afraid). I will try not to use and abuse the blog to vent negatively. I will do my best not to inject every sentence with spite and cynicism. Like a good Catholic, I will promise to try, but I'm not promising anything will come of it.

It is good to be back dear readership. POSITIVELY wonderful. Keep reading to find out what shenanigans I have been up to in my absence... it's 'juicy stuff'!

French Oral Angst

I have to stop worrying about how my French oral went... it's driving me insane. What's horribly ironic is that before the oral I was Monsieur Cool, unphased by all manner of complicated questions on social problems and economic crises, and now that's it's over and I can't do anything about it or even find out how I did I'm a nervous, eyebrow-twitching wreck, forever starting at the thought of imagined grammatical blunders and staring regretfully into the distance thinking about all the sexpot phrases I could've thrown in as filler but didn't.

And it's a pretty inconvenient time for all this worrying, as my music practical, which is significantly more important than the oral (50 fucking percent of Leaving to be exact), is tomorrow morning. So I need to relax, and I need to relax NOW. I'm considering having a drink or two before bed, that's how twisted my logic is while I'm in this fretful state.

Que Sera Sera......... Fuck you Leaving Cert, fuck you in your fuck ugly face.

everybody hates me

I've noticed something about these blogs: I only ever write them when I have nothing to do, and I spend most of the blog whining in a pathetic way about how crap stuff is or how good stuff is going to be or what I do when I'm at a loose end. I've realised this is because when I'm actually out there ENJOYING life I couldn't care less about blogging. So with that introduction I'm sure you know what's coming...

Noone wants to do anything ever! They're all big losers and I'm not a big loser because I want to do stuff but nobody wants to do stuff but I want to do stuff and when I ask them to do stuff they say no and then I get angry and then theyre losers! I know what you're thinking, gentle reader: 'what a sad-sap... clearly you just have no friends. People are out doing stuff, I can assure you... just not with you'. And to some degree that's probably true. But unfortunately that's no consolation when you're sitting at the computer on a Friday night just having finished your mocks flicking between the 'Balla' and 'Próifíl' pages on your Facebook as Gaeilge and listening to Lady Gaga.

I must have some kind of inability to shake the feeling that I could always be doing something more fun than I'm doing right now. Some day I'll just join some sort of cringy group therapy session and meet other people with the same paranoia and restlessness, and they can be my friends... But you what sitting at home on a Friday night REALLY makes you think about: that the Leaving Cert. sucks, because you never get to see people or go out anywhere (even though you do, loads, but it's never as much of a bender as it might ideally be). It just does you know? I just wish I could skip the next few months and glide into a summer of blissful drunkenness and that be the end of it.

Somebody up there likes me

I actually found the ocarina. I had almost given up hope, when suddenly there it was at the bottom of a wicker basket full of childhood drawings and wasted crayola markers, dusty and battered but earthier than ever. It has a small crack near the bit you blow into which I don't remember it ever having before. But it looks as though it must've got broken somehow, and that then someone took the time to glue it back together; I like to think this gives a satisfyingly used, 'there's a story behind this old thing you know' air to the thing. Even if I don't know what that story is exactly... but that only adds to its mystery.

Damn its piercing though... it was awful, because I found it at ten last night and was yelled at from the playing of very first note. Hasn't stopped me practicing every chance I get though. If I get good enough before my interest wanes I may even upload a video of myself giving it my all on the ocarina (I do love to spoil (both of) my readers from time to time). Any requests will be taken into account...

A Link to the Past

What should I be doing?

Studying for my Mocks which begin next week.

What am I doing?

Trawling the internet for a cheap ocarina.

I don't know: I just came home from school on Friday utterly shattered and thought, you know, I deserve some relaxation here people. So I figured what better way to unwind than with some soothing music, and who better than myself to play it? I honestly couldn't tell you where I pulled the idea from, but it struck me to look for our old ocarina, the one my parents bought me at some market stall on an family holiday to Menorca. As I recall this was an excrutiatingly dull holiday on an island which I'm pretty sure couldn't have existed before tourism, and as far as I recall I ended up spending most of my time out on the balcony of our apartment complex accommodation learning to play the ocarina. Handily enough it came with a pamphlet explaining how to play the ocarina for beginners, and by the end of the 2 weeks I could play such popular hits as Happy Birthday and The Sound Of Silence with its help.

I found the leaflet of course... but the ocarina itself seems to have been thrown away or lost in time (and I can say that definitively enough because I spent a worrying amount of time looking for it). My new tack is, being from the generation I am, to look for one online. But it hasn't proven to be a very fruitful search... See all the ones online are really artificial looking, nothing like the earthy, authentic clay one I had when I was ten. The whole thing's a bit stupid really, because all I want is my old one and nothing else and I'm hardly going to come across that, even on e-bay... and the sound of the ocarina, to be honest, is not a soothing one at all. It's piercing. Still, I don't seem to be able to rest until I've found one... so if anyone can point me in the direction of one, or you know if anyone has an unwanted ocarina lying around the house, you know what to give me for my next birthday.

A Dastardly Plan

So I've decided I'm going to solve all my problems by teaching English as a foreign language. I'm just going to do an online TEFL course, which the TEFL website tells me is so easy I can 'even do at home in my pyjamas', and then I'll take down our ancient old globe that still has Yugoslavia marked on the map, spin it around, close my eyes, and go wherever my finger falls (and as it happens I don't want to go to any of the places formerly known as Yugoslavia, so that dodges that particular landmine). I'll teach in an off-handed yet zestful manner for a couple of hours a day, then perhaps wander the cobbled streets of the town I'm in (in my head the town has cobbled streets), chancing upon curious little shops, having encounters with the locals when I go to buy fish at the market (there will also be a market, naturally), communicating through broken tongues and a mutual understanding of good-naturedness in eachother. At home in my quaint, slightly tumbledown accomodation, maybe a bungalow, I'll write stories and blogs and letters home, and sketch little cartoons which will cover the walls. I'll eat well on the local cuisine. I'll cycle to the beach at the weekend and go swimming, or take photos of the coastline which I will later paint at home. I'll strike up unlikely friendships with my garrulous foreign neighbours, who will have me over for dinner regularly, and they will always spill wine on the floor because they're so animated and foreign. I'll fix up the little patch of garden I have, and repaint the cracked outside wall of the house, and I'll get a good tan from working outdoors. My whole life will be a combination of sun and sea, ancient local history, lesiurely unfinished works of art, and simple pleasures of food and drink.

Oh but it's all just a dream really.... For now I'll just go to school in the rain, and learn everything ever, and order dominos, and hang out with the same friends, and be tired all the time, and sit inside watching Friends and Scrubs every single day at the same time.

But I'll be dreaming all the while.

Updates

Sorry for the lack of blogs lately. I'm not best pleased with my blog at the moment... Reading over some of my more recent ones (I always seem to be doing that... how desperate am I) I've noticed there to be a distinct lack of continuity to them. I know there's nothing exactly wrong with a lack of continuity; as with everyone, the only constant factor in the events of my life is me being in them. But what bothers me is that I seem to construct settings in my blog whereby follow-ups are promised or would be necessary to complete the 'story' of a particular blog and I never deliver. I suppose its not a big deal because a) nobody reads this and b) if I meticulously followed up every subplot of my life alluded to here for the sake of it, I'd probably be writing because I felt some obligation to do so and not because I had anything interesting to say, and I'd probably lose interest in writing them altogether if I did that. But I still think I should answer a few things, just to finish the stories.

Remember Cian McLoughlin the artist guy? He eventually did turn up at school. He gave a very interesting talk about his work and what gives him inspiration. His commitment to his work astounded me, he said he usually paints 8 hours a day. If anything it put me off a career in art because I don't think I have rigour and the passion necessary to do it well. And the choir thing? I got my CD! I am very pleased with it, the sound is good, but most of all I love just having it, being able to put it in a CD player and think 'I wrote that'. It's pretty cool, but I can't play it too often because it's not good enough to warrant playing over and over without it getting a tad annoying.

Did I even mention Midterm was coming up? That's another thing I seem to leave out of my blog a lot, the lead up to things that seem like they deserve a lead up. Well at this stage it's almost come and gone: we're back to the grind on Monday (mock French oral on Wednesday, fuck ye...). I'll fill you in on what I've been up to. Though that's not very much, as you'll see.

I jetted off to the beautiful city of Rome for five days with my Latin class, a group of people none of whom I have any problem with, which considering how judgmental I am is quite something. That's not 'not very much', I hear you pout, quite jealous that I was in Rome and you were at home wasting your life away in the grey landfill site that is this city. Be patient... the story's not finished yet.

So we arrived in Rome on Monday at about 9am, having got up at a disgusting hour of the morning to catch our typically school tour 'first plane out of the airport' flight. Before our flight had landed I knew I wasn't feeling too hot. Get some panadol, I thought. So I looked for shops in the airport at Rome, asked around everyone. I only got any after we had reached our hotel (3 hours after landing). So I had that. Nothing. Had some more later. Seemed to be getting worse.

By the time we were halfway through our tour of the colosseum I was shivering, feverous, barely able to stand up because my headache was so bad, all my energy was sapped. I was so bad I had to retire to the hotel, curl up in the dark and drink water all day while the others continued with the tour. At night I didn't sleep at all, and I must not have drank enough water through the day because I was having delusions about some sort of cloning factory in the room, the blue light by the door was part of some machine and the pictures on the walls were kind of boxes stationary on a conveyer belt. Sounds lovely and trippy, but really it was horrible, the night seemed endless. By morning I was even worse, and I ended up dragging my sorry ass down to reception after the guys were gone off for the day to ask them to summon a doctor. He came; it turned out I had really bad strepthroat, whatever that is. All I know is it's hell.

I won't bore you with more details. Spent the next 2 days imprisoned in the hotel room, the only notable points of that time being when I kept vommiting up the contents of my stomach - water, and antibiotics - in reaction to my drugs, the battle with the doctor to convince him to prescribe me something else, his extortionate fees, and the hotel maid coming into my room and not realising I was there for a full minute or two, then running off when she realised.

There was a slight consolation on the final day as I was well enough to go outside again, though my symptoms were all still threatening me. Despite them I had a reasonably pleasant day seeing Pompeii (actually very, very impressive). But of course, now that I was starting to get better it was time to go back home, though not before a 12 hour wait in the airport on account of delays. You go Ryanair.

So now I'm back. Upcoming news will include mocks, orals, music practicals, and possibly the end of the world.