Stationary

"Now, I don't know if this is just a female thing..." Uh oh...

 Seriously though, I'd like to take a moment to rant about how much I love folders. And stuff. Mostly just folders. They just get me so excited. More so than sex! Almost as much as chocolate... So, next year I'm going to college. Not your American colleges, you understand. It's a sixth form college, so it only has 16-18 year olds. Just a little explanation for you there.

But you're probably wondering what that has to do with anything! Well lets see... Individual learning, leaving old friends behind, stepping out into the real world, meeting new people, studying new subjects, buses, exams, notes, folders... Wait! Folder! From that entire like, I can honestly say, that's the thing that excited me the most. Isn't it great? A few weeks ago I bought (Well, my mum paid. I chose) my folders. There's one for each subject and a big hard one for transport. Subject/folder colours are as follows:

Philosophy

Politics

English language

Sociology

I repeat. Isn't it great? I love it. For about 3 days after we bought them, I just spent hours staring at them... To me, they're like an abstract art form.

Now you might think this is a new thing. It's not. As a child, I loved boxes. LOVED them. And, well, I've always had a soft spot for notebooks. They're a staple birthday present that can't go wrong. But here's the thing. You might think I'm amazingly organised, but I'm not. I mean, my room is a mess but I know where everything is. I usually have everything with me, but not always. I'm never more than two or three minutes late. So I'm not really sure about this. Are naturally organised people unimpressed by folders? Do they stun and amaze disorganised people because it's such a strange concept? Or do all girls just have this weak spot? It's something I find it very hard to talk about, so opinions people, please!

Now I'm off to stare at my folders some more.

Cats

Evil, cute for the purposes of evil, or just cute?

I have a cat. He's called Marmalade and he's ginger and gorgeous. But he's knocking on a bit and he's starting to remind me of an old person. Sometimes a little grumpy, sometimes nice and affectionate, but it's mostly the fact that he's losing the ability to jump well.

Here he is, prowling along in the snow. He probably thinks there's some cat treats hidden in it. You might think that he looks fat because of his fur, but he is just fat. Honestly.

This is him trying to get us to feed him. When this doesn't work, he'll wrap himself around your legs. Then he'll glare at you lift one paw up (for some reason). And then he starts biting your ankles.

And sometimes, he's just in a bad mood. Of course, the camera making his eyes glow green does make him look more evil than he really is. But sometimes, you'll just be casually lying on the floor watching the telly and he'll come up to you and chew your shoulder.

Sure, he has his flaws. But really, this was just an excuse for me to post some pictures of my cat.

The Day It Happened...

This is something I wrote a year and a bit ago for English coursework, but it is based on a true story :) Enjoy!

I was only about five and a half years old at the time, honest. Anyway, when you’re that young anything and everything can be fun, including cutting whatever comes across your path up with a pair of blunt scissors.  With my thumb and forefinger squeezed through the miniscule holes in the handles, I chopped a piece of eye-burningly fluorescent pink paper into about fifteen messy pieces, a wide, slightly crazed grin plastered across my pale and still babyish face. I was loving this. This was easily the most fun I’d ever had, at that age at least.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a fat elastic band, and a small roll of Sellotape.  I had no idea where it had come from; I was certainly not trusted with things like those at that age, and for good reason too. Aha! I thought. I’ll cut the elastic band up, and then stick it back together! Oh yeah, that would be awesome…

Clumsily, my chubby little fingers worked to get the elastic band into the open scissors. When it was finally in place, I forced my thumb and forefinger back into and the handles and closed my eyes tightly, thinking that it would add to the excitement that was already fizzing and bubbling violently deep inside of me. I squeezed the handles together. Nothing happened. The elastic band had evaded the blades. Darn! I repeated the action, over and over, and still nothing happened. Furiously, I opened my eyes, and saw that a small cut, a fracture, if you will, had been made. Not wanting my experiment to fail, I kept going with the scissors for at least another minute, until finally the band was broken. I was left with a strip of elastic.

Grabbing the Sellotape, I ripped a bit piece off, removing it from the rest of the roll with one of my incisors (I had recently lost my two front teeth). I lay it down on the matted blue carpet of my bedroom floor, my gravestone-grey eyes twinkling faintly. After carefully arranging the ends of the elastic band onto the Sellotape, I wrapped the tape around the band and picked it up. With the repaired band held in both of my hands, I gave it an experimental stretch. The ends of the elastic band merely slipped out from the tape. I repeated the process with a heavy sigh, as if I spent my entire life doing the same tedious task, except this time I wrapped the tape around much, much tighter. And yet the second stretch yielded nothing but the same results as the first one.

“MUMMY!” My screeching voice echoed through my door, down the stairs and right into the ears of my unsuspecting mother. She ran up the stairs and into my room with a speed similar to that of a certain insane ginger cat who has just heard the cat food cupboard opening. She shot me an expectant look.

“I cut my favourite elastic band in half…”

Both of my parents and my elder brother were now stood inside my room. I looked up at them sadly, holding the remains of the elastic band in my sweaty hands. In perfect unison, as my remorse filled words forced their way out of my mouth, their worried, anxious expressions broke into wicked grins, their eyes flashed, and a chorus of loud, carefree laughter erupted from them, and began bouncing around the room joyfully.

Never, even to this very day, have I felt so angry. Bitter tears fell from my eyes, like dead leaves from a tree; they were shallow and filled with nothing but hatred and fury. My feet grew warm. I don’t know why, but they always do when I get angry. Such inexplicable feelings I felt at that moment, that even what I remember is only a ghost, a shade of what it was really like. I was angry. No, more than that. I felt betrayed.

“I HATE YOU! YOU’RE RUINING MY LIFE! YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ME!” I screamed, the emotion in my voice sending fresh floes of strength around my body. My loud stamp echoed around the entire house. Everything stopped, suspended in that awful moment… And then I flung myself between my mother and my brother, and through the door, slamming it shut with them inside my room on the way out. The door came off its hinges, leaving everyone behind me amazed.

The hole was still shallow, but I gently placed the elastic band inside it anyway. As I scraped the earth back on top of the makeshift grave, I said a few words, my voice wavering.

“Mr. Elastic Band… I know we weren’t always the best of friends, and there were SOME PEOPLE who you just didn’t get on with…” I glared over my shoulder at my parents, ”You’ll be in a better place now, but we’ll all still really miss you.”

R.I.P

Mr Elastic Band

Diaries - Isn't it easier to just remember things?

FRIDAY 1ST JANUARY... TODAY I SAW A RAINBOW, IT WAS GLORIOUS!

I LOVE keeping diaries. Every year since 2006 I've started at least 3 new diaries. I get a new one approximately every 4 months, and on average they last about a week and half before I forget about them and give up. It's a great idea, and I love looking back through them but it's just SO MUCH WORK! You see, the problem lies within the idea of the diary itself, and I'm going to explain it to you now.

There are several forms of diary, I think:

1. The boring, appointment type thing. Y'know, "5th May - Dentist 11:25 am"
2. The write it all down at the end of the day. "I saw Ellie today, we had such a laugh and ate an entire tub of chocolate ice cream!"
3. The journal. "13th September - 3:10 pm LOL a bird just flew into the window! Now there's a massive like, splat mark on it!     - 6:30 pm Dinner was really nice, we had chicken and bacon pasta bake :D     20th September - School is soooo dull..." Etc etc. Just write in it whenever you want. No rules.
4. The one with pictures. Some people try to do a picture a day, or whatever. Some people just stick them in randomly. This can be integrated with either [2] or [3]. Obviously not [1], don't be stupid.

So here, are the problems.

1. Do you really want to look back through your diary just to remember when you went into hospital to have that X-ray of your knee taken? Or when Uncle Martin visited before Christmas? It's just rubbish. There's no point! There's just no point. Write it on the calendar, or remember it, or keep your appointment letters handy. There's no two ways about it! JUST REMEMBER IT!
2. This can be a bit difficult. At the end of the day, most people go to sleep. You don't think 'Oh! Before I go to sleep I must write about that beautiful tree I saw!', you think 'Teeth, check, hair, check..." etc etc. So, more often than not you just completely forget to write about stuff that happened. And then you wake up in the morning and it's all like 'Oooh, breakfast' and stuff, so you don't actually get a chance to write it until later and by then you've already forgotten what you had for dinner last night! (It was chicken pie and it was very nice) So really, unless you're very strict on yourself, you're not actually going to have anything to look back on. And if you do write every day, half of it will be 'Did nothing. Went to bed.'
3. Okay fine, so this is mostly what I do. But really, when do you actually write about something while doing it? Really? Honestly? Quite. And you have to carry it around with you, and then it ends up looking really mank. Besides which, do you really need to know the exact minute that you decided to paint your nails lime green? I mean, okay, "3:44 am Oh my god, a plane just landed in the pond!! Calling emergency services now." is going to trigger some memories. But what about "7:29 pm Nearly the end of Have I Got News For You repeat on Dave. I'm going to brush my teeth now."? I rest my case.
4. Pictures?! PICTURES?! I laugh in the face of your pictures. Pictures are better than 1000 words, but all of those words are synonyms for tedious. Do you really want to carry a camera around with you every day? What if more than one thing happens in a day? Words totally take up less space. Hah.

I guess that the point I'm trying to make is that if something is worth remembering, you'll probably either remember it, or put it on the calendar. Why bother remembering old stuff when new stuff is always happening? Honestly, you can live in a cave with your many diaries, or you can get out and do stuff.

I mean, I choose the cave, but still!

Oh, is that the TIME?

"Every second is of infinite value" - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe...

Well, that's great, except you can't actually sell time.

Quit yer whingin'! I mean, honestly. It's not a case of you not having enough time, it's a case of you having too much work to do. I really don't care for people who whinge about having 'so much to do and so little time'. You know why? It's because it's ALWAYS the people who push their workload to the extreme. It's never a case of "Oh, well she said to do an essay about something we're interested in, so I'll do one about puffins.", it's "Oh, well she said to do an essay about something we're interested in, so I'll write mine about THE ENTIRE SODDING WORLD! What a great idea, I'm sure I can handle it!". And you always end up getting a D grade. Idiots, honestly. No one ever gained anything from doing extra unnecessary work. Sure, go ahead and put loads of effort into what you ARE going to do, but don't do extra because THERE'S NO POINT!

I have a friend who does nothing but whinge about work. I don't think I've ever had a conversation with her that wasn't either about dwarfs or English coursework. That's not fun! Seriously, you're doing yourself no favours with that attitude. Care less, it's more entertaining. At least don't moan to me about not having any time. I have too much time, if anything. That's even more annoying, I feel awful for not filling it up with useful and insightful blogging work. You have no idea! I'm always sure that I have too much time because I haven't been doing any useful work, or I've forgotten to write my 500 words for the day. A novel is like a child, it needs care and attention. But I still have enough time to devour 1.5 books every day. Yep, I can spend entire hours just sat in the warm and dry in front of the telly with a book, listening to music and texting people on my phone, while cramming cold pizza into my cakehole. Am I making you jealous yet? WORK LESS.

According to lead scientists (Note: The Intelligent Blonde ® is not responsible for lies and made up 'facts'), YOUR life should be split up into 3 parts. Note the lack of the word equal between '3' and 'parts'. These three parts are as follows:

• Socialising. Important, obviously. If you neglect your friends, they will ignore you. Trust me, I've ignored many a friend who's been too busy working. But then, workaholics just aren't my type. Anyway, if you have no friends, who will be there to scream 'DON'T JUMP!!!' or make you fat at Christmas? No one. Besides, it's fun. If you have any friends to start with, obviously. Friends are a laugh. Fact. Friends kill 99% of all bacteria. Fact. But seriously, approximately 35% of your time should be spent socialising, be it through the phone or actually face to face.
• Not working. The human body can only take so much pressure you know. You have to unwind. If you happen to have a handy back condition such a spine that is too straight, or you are prone to high blood pressure, then it is VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU DON'T DO TOO MUCH WORK. This is a serious, truthful health warning. (Note: The Intelligent Blonde ® 's definition of truth may or may not differ from the dictionary definition of truth) Some people may find it very difficult to unwind and may need to spend more time than usual not working. These people make up 999,999 people out of every 1,000,000. It is estimated that 60% of your time should be spent not working.
• Working. Well, if you don't have any money, you can't afford pizza and books. Hey! Don't complain to me that that's unfair. Life isn't fair, young ones. If it was I would be able to magic my book into existence instead of having to actually write it! Only 5% of your time should be devoted to this, because wages are so crap, and the law of diminishing returns means that you get less and less money the more you work! Well, money, or grades, or whatever. Potatoes, if you live in Ireland. Potato cakes if you live in Oirland.

So, young ones, make sure that you spend your time well, or you may end up being a boring old fart with no friends and not enough time. Work less. Enjoy your TIME while you don't have too much of it. Quit your complaining.