Wasting My Life...

I do not know what I have done tonight.

I walked through the door after school with the best of intentions. Okay, fine, so I walked through the door with some intentions - I was going to do a bit of work, maybe some writing (yeah, about that....you will be getting a very angry post about Writer's Block at some point in the not too distant future), maybe even make a YouTube video and all that other satisfying stuff that leaves you going to bed feeling fulfilled. It's now almost eleven o'clock, and all I recall doing is some minor Hugh Laurie/Tim Minchin cyber-stalking.

Why does this always happen? Will motivation and inspiration ever strike me? Will Writer's Block finally get screwed and leave me alone? Will I ever pass my A-Levels? Find out next time on- okay, I need to go to bed.

January In Films, Books and Music

I was going to write a really long and gushy post about how much I love films, books and music, but then I was struck by a rare attack of guilt at not having done any work this weekend and plans changed. So I'm going to save the gushy post for some other time and instead begin a series of twelve blogs that I will (hopefully) be writing towards the end of each month, to tell you which bands/movies/authors held my attention during the month. My reasons for this being that I always find it interesting to revisit past interests and I am now officially bored of Cromwell's Seventeenth Century Foreign Policy (shocking, I know).

Films
I must have mentioned that I am a complete and utter film-nerd, and this month has been....an interesting one, in movie terms. I go to the cinema a LOT, and am not ashamed of this because it is literally one of my absolute favourite things to do. Seriously, if I wrote a list of 'Favourite Pastimes', going to the cinema would probably be just behind 'Cyber-stalking celebrities who don't know I exist' and 'watching re-runs of BBC dramas'. Anyway, these are the films that have stood out to me in January: -
1. The King's Speech - this was absolutely WONDERFUL. I'll admit to being a bit of a Colin Firth fangirl (not obsessively though...I mean I've only YouTubed the wet shirt scene about six hundred times.....), but in this he demonstrated an absolute masterclass in acting, Geoffrey Rush is always good value and I have a bit of a girl-crush on Helena Bonham-Carter. It was also just a compelling, emotional and poignant story that I simply adored.
2. Season of the Witch - normally when a professional movie critic tells me a film is God-awful I take it with a pinch of salt, and very often enjoy the film they slated. This was an exception. It really was God-awful.
3. Black Swan - I didn't really want to see this, but thought I should because it's tipped for a bunch of Oscars and got amazing reviews and blah de blah de blah....anyway, I spent two hours feeling tense, very impressed with Natalie Portman's performance and flinching. So to repeat what I've said to the many people who've asked me about this film: it was very good, Natalie Portman was amazing, but I did not enjoy and will never watch it again. A bit like The Shining.
4. The Mask of Zorrow - obviously this wasn't at the cinema, and it exploits pretty much every tired movie cliche in the Hollywood book, but I just don't care. Lovage.
5. Tim Minchin's Ready For This? - not technically a film, but it was a DVD, so it sort of counts..... Anyway I used to hate this guy, but recently discovered that this was because I just hadn't heard the right songs. Now I think the man's a lyrical, pianical (so not a word) and comedic genius; this literally blew me away.

Albums
1. Charlie McDonnell - This Is Me. This is reaching the end of it's run with me (by that I don't mean that I'll stop liking it, just that I'll stop listening to it obsessively and take it off my 'current' playlist), but I have thoroughly enjoyed our time together. Quirky, funny, easy to listen to and just very sweet. Favourite Songs: A Song About Monkeys, Melody For Melody, This Is Me.
2. Alex Day - The World Is Mine. Again, I've stopped listening to this as much recently, but still really like it. It was one of those chalk-and-cheese albums; instead of quite liking all of the songs on it, there were some I adored and some I really wasn't keen on, but it was still ultimately a great album. Favourite Songs: Heart On My Sleeve, Time Of Your Life.
3. Kate Rusby - Awkward Annie. A new discovery for me, this angel-voiced, guitar-geniused, folk-singing Yorkshire gal, and oh how I love her. Seriously, I can't describe the beauty that is her voice - I think you'll be hearing me gush about her a lot as the year goes on. Favourite Songs: Village Green Preservation Society, Awkward Annie, The Old Man
4. Take That - Progress. This album surprised me. I was only a kid when Take That had their first go round, and thus don't really know their old songs, but I own all three of their new albums and they all stand out as very individual to me. The first was one I initially thought was rubbish and steadily grew on me, the second maintained but didn't increase my general liking for Take That, but this third one took me by surprise; it's really very different. Much more dance-y, with more backbeats and drums, and less warbling. To begin with I was hesitant, but now I'm really getting into this new sound (though I still don't care whether or not Robbie's in the band...they managed perfectly well without him and will probably manage perfectly well with him). Favourite Songs: What Do You Want From Me?, The Flood.
5. Will Martin - Inspirations. This guy really isn't well-known, but he's a classically-trained Kiwi with an incredibly beautiful voice whom I once accidentally saw live and have been in love with ever since. His first album was full of classical-crossover songs (think Katherine Jenkins, style-wise), but this second one contains covers of his (much more accesible, to me at least) inspirations; people like Elton John, Billy Joel, Simon and Garfunkel, Phil Collins...it's beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. Favourite Songs: The Boxer, In The Air Tonight, Lately, I Just Can't Stop Loving You.

Books
Rather embarrassingly, this is probably going to be a shorter list because I haven't been reading much lately. I have no justifiable excuse for this, I've just reached that point of work-related exhaustion where I can't seem to go home and read a book. I have to collapse onto a sofa and stare blankly at a screen for four hours, soaking in nothing and gently drooling. Thankfully though, my mum won't let me install a TV in the bathroom, so bathtime reading is still keeping me vaguely literate.
1. The Fry Chronicles - Stephen Fry. I love Stephen Fry, I love interesting people's autobiographies (comedians tend to write the best ones, in my, admittedly limited, experience) and I love books that reaffirm my belief that it's cool to be a nerd. Though this is a bit too intellectual at times and has whole sections that the editor should have given a brutal chop, it's still fascinating and witty and just generally wonderful.
2. Journey To The Centre Of The Earth - Jules Verne. I started this on holiday because I literally had nothing else. And I mean nothing. Desperation is the only circumstance in which I would have turned to Jules Verne, but it turns out that this discrimination was a mistake. Far from being stuffy, boring and unnecessarily wordy, it's witty, compelling and surprisingly easy to read.
3. The Ring Of Solomon - Jonathan Stroud. This was an unexpected prequel to my absolute favourite YA trilogy of all time - The Bartimaeus Trilogy. Fast-paced, hysterically funny, gripping and moving with superb characters, I was expecting this to disappoint and it so did not.

So, there we are January 2011 in books, films and albums.
It would have been quicker and easier to write the gushy post, wouldn't it?

The Digital (R)Age

So I'm waiting on quite a few interesting emails. Well, quite a few by my standards anyway: more than one. One is exactly the same as almost every other A-Level student at this time of year: "something on your UCAS application has changed!" Now is that, or is that not, the cruellest, nastiest, most teasing cliffhanger in the History of Everything? Because the email you receive doesn't actually TELL you which whether you've been accepted or rejected, what your conditional grades are, or even which Uni has replied -- just that "something has changed." This was particularly soul-destroying on my first day on holiday, when I saw that teasing email, immediately opened a new tab to log on to the UCAS website (forgetting that our laptop is allergic to multiple tabs) and the whole machine promptly crashed. When I eventually DID get onto the UCAS site (some twenty minutes and several screaming fits later), it turned out to be good news, but I still heartily disapprove of this method.

The other email I am waiting for is (most likely) a rejection. This is because I have been sending my 'new book' off for about five months now, and having amassed a substantial pile of about fourteen rejections, I'm reaching the critical decision period. This decision basically boils down to this: should I continue to pay for my own misery, or stick two fingers up at the professionals and chuck my new manuscript on a shelf, where it will gather dust until the day when I WILL BE a published author. In any case, at the minute I'm simply delaying the decision whilst waiting for the last few agents on my 'First Choices' list to email back.

This basically means that everytime I log on to my email account (I'm not gonna lie, this is at least six times a day, some of them barely minutes apart) and see that little yellow envelope, and the words '1 Unread Message', I pretty much hit the roof. Which makes it particularly heartbreaking when you glance at the 'Sender' column to see that one, mocking little word. Facebook. *sigh*

Goodbye New Zealand, Hello 2011

So I'm writing this on the flight between Auckland and Los Angeles, meaning I am currently knackered, grumpy, bored out of my skull and homesick - the recipe for a good blog post, I'm sure you'll agree. But having just watched four films on the trot, my mind needed some sort of re-awakening and I'm hoping that trying to remember/write down the events of the last few days in a witty and interesting way should do it. So after much recollection, blank staring at paper and reanimation of brain cells, here goes.

We spent a record three nights in Te Anau, the highlights of which were the glowworm caves and Milford Sound. The former is something I'd seen on David Attenborough programmes and expected to be a disappointment - maggots with bright arses stuck to a cave ceiling. Beautiful. But d'you know, it really was! The only thing I can compare it to are those pictures you see in museums of what a starry night would look like if humans hadn't polluted the ozone layer beyond all repair etc. etc. (like how I slipped that guilt trip in?). In other words, vastly more impressive than I was expecting and really very beautiful.

Milford Sound likewise. I was predisposed to enjoy this day because a) it was a boat trip b) our tourguide had a rather beautiful Irish accent and c) my mum had been going on about it ALL holiday. A Sound, in this sense, I now know is a massive expanse of water leading to/from the sea that was created by a river - they're often confused with fjords, which are the same thing creates by glaciers. New Zealand, however, had to be different, and thus it's coast has fourteen fjords, all of which are called sounds. In their defence, they tried to make up for this by naming the whole area Fiordland, but managed to bugger that up as well - fjord is a Norwegian word and should be spelt with a 'j', not an 'i'. But geographical and grammatical errors aside, it was (in my Mum's words) "truly spectacular", and well worth the day trip.

The next couple of days, however, were defined by rather less 'beautiful' and rather more exciting activities. We moved on to Queenstown, our last stop and kind of the New Zealand equivalent of Blackpool (with more class). Here we had another couple of goes on a luge (we could actually see the track ahead of us this time, which was comforting) and also a go on the Shotover Jet. This is essentially a very fast, quite scary and somewhat wet speedboat ride, wherein the driver does 360 spins on the water, pumps 800 litres of water a second out of the engine and goes disturbingly close to the canyon walls. Despite screaming like a girl throughout, I absolutely loved it and felt the winery we toured that afternoon kind of paled by comparison...

However, my littler brother completely out adrenalined-junkied me that afternoon by throwing himself off a bridge. Bungy jumping is something I have always had every intention of doing, but I wanted to save it as something special for my gap year, which I have every intention of returning to New Zealand for. My brother had no such qualms. The AJ Hackett bungy was actually the first in the world, and they have the measurements down to such finesse that they ask you how much of your body you want dunking in the river below. My brother came back drenched from head to waist, and I - being the kind, supportive sister I am -videod the lot for YouTube. :)

But unfortunately that put an end to our New Zealand adventures, and now remains only two days in LA before the holiday of a lifetime is over. Sorry as I was to leave NZ, I am glad to be on my way home, and have absolutely no doubt that I will one day return to this incredible country.