Not a lot

Another blog I’ve decided to write as an alternative to sleeping. Last night I was at my friend Chantele’s 20^th and as is tradition left around the time you hear the morning chorus, a lovely soundtrack to stagger home to. The repercussion of this was me staying in bed pretty much all day. Tomorrow I’m determined to get up and not accidently sleep through a seminar, like I did earlier in the week, missing an awesome powerpoint presentation I was meant to present. I stipulated the inclusion of lot’s of terrible clipart, something that can make or break a presentation and an obvious demonstration of risk. The module I missed, English in Practice apparently gives you extra marks for taking risks, so I’m definitely going to get a 1^st now. Alas I wasn’t there to present it, but as I learnt later neither was the rest of my group so I felt less guilty. Anyway the reason this happened was because my sleeping pattern is not existent and I occasionally end up being nocturnal for a few days. I should get in some kind of routine.
  If I want to get up for uni tomorrow I’m afraid I’m going to have to wrap this up, but if you’re looking for other ways of drawing your attention away from responsibilities, here is a link to my soundcloud.
http://soundcloud.com/matty-scholar/3-chords

Time is of the essence.

Students generally have quite a lot of time on their hands, most of this ‘free time’ could and probably should be spent doing work surrounding there course but even after fulfilling work requirements many of us are left with a large percentage of the week were we can do what we want.
   Though as a young person and a student I have the freedom now to do what I want without having many responsibilities that encroach on my lifestyle. Unable to find a job and unsure on whether or not I actually want one, my only real obligation is attending University, though I usually enjoy that. Occasionally I will wake up (usually hung-over) and decide to miss a seminar or lecture but I always make sure I’ve caught up with whatever it is that I missed. I encountered some students on my course that managed to get through the entire first year without reading a single book and claiming they don’t really like to read. Personally I don’t understand this at all, why would you decide to do an English degree if you hated books? It’s like doing marine biology whilst having utter contempt for whales. Aside from that we are paying thousands of pounds a year to do a degree, you want to get your moneys worth by getting a decent qualification. I don’t really imagine that those students are doing anything worthwhile with all their free time if they aren’t even bothering to do the work. Although, I don’t know them intimately, they could be masked vigilantes for all I know or perhaps even super villains, though they’re probably just general nightclub lurkers who are destined to lead a mundane life.
  Sometimes I have no reservations with sitting in the same place on the couch, baked, playing Xbox and chomping down tasty treats. (I did it often last year). Though recently I’ve been spending a lot more of my time doing productive things, in large playing the guitar. When I wake up and I feel like I can’t be bothered to get dressed let alone do some work the guitar seems to beckon me towards it and I will spend many guilt free hours playing away. Then on the days when I’ve got to do reading or coursework pretty much all day I’ll have little intervals where I play guitar as a kind of cathartic release from everything.
  However I’ve become less satisfied with playing on my own, I really want to form some kind of band, even if it was just a 4 or 5 of us practicing in a garage. If I formed one and we did a few gigs it would be awesome, but it’s partly just because I’ve got the time to do it now and I might not in a couple of years. This year I think I appreciate being a student a whole lot more, partly because it’s the second year and it doesn’t seem like the end is too far away and also because my friends at home with jobs have got hardly any free time in comparison. I don’t see myself ever having a conventional 9 till 5 job I don’t like, I find the idea of that slightly horrific, but eventually I’ll have to get a job if I want to continue to eat. At the moment I plan to do a masters to put off the world of work for as long as possible but when I do get a job I’ll make sure it’s something I enjoy.
    I want to be able to look back on my time as a student and remember all the funny stuff, like getting a tattoo in the bedroom next to mine by my mate Dan at midnight (http://doomandgloomtattoo.tumblr.com) or having a house party where a fat white chap who thought he was black threatened to beat up everyone, there are other things I want to, but shall not disclose for my mother reads this blog. I feel this is starting to get nostalgic and slightly morose even though it’s not meant to be and I’ve got another two years of being a student, possibly more. To conclude I don’t take it for granted and if you are a student you shouldn’t either.

REVOLT!

Oddly enough I feel now, at half past three in the morning, motivated enough to try and write something that will be hopefully interesting, maybe inspiring and perhaps insightful to anyone reading.
   This motivation comes from watching the latest episode of BBC3’s ‘The Revolution Will Be Televised’ on BBCiplayer.
   I don’t consider myself as someone who is knowledgeable in regards to the news, though nor am I completely ignorant of what is going in the world. I read the news most mornings via the internet but usually only skim through stories, clicking haphazardly about the screen until something pops up that appals or humours me. Though watching ‘The Revolution Will Be Televised’ made me discontented with being a passive spectator, someone who just listens but doesn’t put what they have just learnt to any use.
  For those who haven’t watched this enlightening yet hilarious program, you are genuinely missing out. The format is similar to programs like Dom Joly’s ‘Trigger Happy TV’ or Channel 4’s ‘Balls of Steel’, where the humour comes from real people being victims of absurd comments and characters. Though as you may have gathered from the title’ The Revolution Will Be Televised’ is politically motivated. The two brave individuals behind this program, Heydon Prowse and Jolyon Rubinstein openly insult and humiliate politicians, diplomats and celebrities using a series of satirical characters and comments. The majority of the program relates to injustices committed by countries and institutions, which we are told, ‘are all true at the time of the recording’, as well as some general mocking of stereotypical rightwing opinions.
   Despite it being essentially a comedy program I can’t help but feel riled up by the end of each episode, like I should be an active participant in trying to engage a revolution. One of the reoccurring themes within the program is tax avoidance and abuse. The program highlights malevolent moguls like Phillip Green (owner of TopShop and Aracdia) who avoid paying hundreds of millions of pounds in income tax by having accounts overseas. As well as Chris Grayling, an MP who used taxpayer’s money to payoff mortgages on multiple houses within London. Those are two of the living atrocities I can remember from the program that; have helped to confirm my already strong belief that Capitalism is a greed encouraging system of shite, and makes me want to succeed where Guy Fawkes failed.
  I don’t really have confidence that we will all unite and rise against the powers that be, because too many people are simpletons, content spending there lives aspiring to be like those creatures from ‘The Only Way Is Essex’ who actually detract from what the Human species has achieved. However there are people who try to incite change even if it’s just by boycotting certain shops or only buying fairtrade. With all the corruption you hear about it’s hard to see it ever changing but I’ve decided that it won’t stop me from trying.
  I’m not sure what I hope to achieve but this post shall be the start of it. I shall write again on this topic once I have achieved something.
Viva La Revolución!
   

Student life begins once more...

Today was the first day in a number of weeks where I actually had to get up for something. Admittedly I only had to get up at ‘midday’ but it started to make me wonder how I’ll establish a routine again, or if I will actually bother.
  Today was the induction into my second year of university, which involved sitting in a large but sparsely populated lecture theatre, to listen to various things that we had already been told at some point over the last year. Needless to say my mind began to wander and the notes that I planned on taking soon became a drawing of a wolf in a suit. On completion of the wolf I realised I hadn’t really listened to a word the lecturer had said, though looking up at the PowerPoint briefly, reassured me that it was all stuff I’d seen before. However it made me wonder how difficult people find getting back into the whole university swing of things after being home for months on end.
    I discovered today that I only have lectures and seminars on three days a week. It occurred to me that my routine needn’t change as long as I spend more of my conscious hours doing the work that needs to be done, but importantly I’ll be able to maintain my current precious sleeping habits. Though this isn’t the case for some people who have to get into a strict regime of waking up at 9am to a breakfast of earth and being back in bed before 12pm if they hope to get any work done.
   As well as sleeping patterns the other thing that I contemplated whilst day dreaming in the lecture was my inability to hold concentration whilst sitting in lectures. Hopefully this will change once I actually start my course and people are saying fascinating things but my minds quickly wanders when reality isn’t interesting enough. I’m not sure how to conquer this inability to actually listen to monotone people and boring subjects. Water is meant to be good for brain activity maybe drinking lots will reveal new tones to the drone like voices.
  Moving back into student accommodation is something I’ve had to get used to as well. At home the cupboards were rarely bare and when they were someone was usually out gathering tasty things to fill them with. Though when I stared into a barren cupboard this evening I knew that I’d have to cycle down to the shop if I wanted to eat. Cycling down there isn’t a problem it’s deciding what to purchase that defeats me. Every time I go to Sainsbury’s I find myself wandering back and forth down the same isles staring blankly at a wall of tins and boxes thinking to myself “what the fuck was I here for?”. Despite writing lists occasionally we always seem to run out of sufficient eatables within a couple of days. I’m going to attempt a ‘big shop’ tomorrow and get as much shit as I can crammed into my backpack and more still in carrier bags attached to my handlebars that way it’ll save me returning for a few days.
   Then of course monitoring money. Surviving gets expensive if your not careful with your cash. Living in Manchester where it isn’t unusual to pay over £3 a pint can easily lead to spending too much over a weekend finding yourself having to ration supplies. Though this could be looked at as a valuable life lesson. If you can learn to ration food and make what you have last as long as possible, when the apocalypse eventually arrives with its zombie hordes or nuclear fallout, (those are the best ones) you’ll be able to outlive your greedy equivalents.  

Just a Little Update

Amazingly it is already the beginning of September. Summer is probably over, though it’s hard to tell since the climate is on par with Michael Phelps for records broken these past two years.  This time last year we were making the most of the final days of warmth, preparing for the icy weather that was surely soon to follow, then a month later a week in October was warmer than any week we had in ‘Summer’.  So I shall keep my hopes up that winter will give us a miss this year and be replaced by vibrant rays of sunshine and some kind of hot snow which doesn’t go all slushy and brown making everything look bleak and polluted a few days after its fallen.
   Anyway my summer holidays have pretty much drawn to a close as I have now returned to Manchester to try and conquer my reading list before the start of term. It hasn’t gone entirely to plan since I returned as I’ve been… Sidetracked. When I moved into the house everything about it seemed void of vibes. The off white walls were blank and bare, mould hung above the sinks and the whole of the downstairs smelt of stale cigarettes and forgotten milk.
  The first thing we did was explore what we could do with what was already in the property. The key to interior design, I found, was the creation of spaces and focal points. In the living room we achieved this by trying to keep an open space within the centre of the room placing all the furniture bar one coffee table against the walls. In the downstairs bedroom we achieved this by placing a cat’s tail we found under the bed into a jar and putting it on a shelf.
   We soon ran out of interesting stuff already there so I bought some gnarly Indian bed sheets to hang about the place to hide the state of the walls. My nan provided us with a Sony stereo, that’s as old as I am, complete with vinyl player. She said it was broken but I don’t know what she thought was wrong with it because it all works fine. This prompted me to buy some vinyl which is how I discovered the magical and vibe producing band that is ‘Goat’ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swOjaFXnDeA. I spotted the vinyl in the ‘psychedelic rock’ section because it had a trippy case, which was enough for me to buy it. Turned out it was a good move because there the most original band I’ve listened to in ages (LISTEN TO THEM DAMN IT!). So now with ‘Goat’ playing, and things hanging from the walls and ceiling the living room at least, seems more homely.
   Even though I might only live here for a year I can’t help but try to make it feel like a home opposed to the staffroom feel of the student halls last year. As I’m living with two of the people I did last year, one of them being my cousin, there’s no issue with people leaving their possessions lying about indiscriminately or with the consumption of whatever’s in the fridge by whoever feels hungry for it.
    All in all it’s starting to feel like a home and perhaps I’ll feel comfortable enough to finish my reading list within the next couple of weeks.
  

It's been a while...

It’s regretful that I have to start another blog by acknowledging the fact that I haven’t written one in months but, yet again, it must be done. The reasons for this stretch far and wide, some may say, too far and too wide! So I won’t attempt to bore you with these reasons, which stretch, to the very horizons of each and every one of your sensory perceptions.
  Yes it has been quite a while since I have written a single word. I feel that now, enough time has passed for me to be able to string out five hundered or so words informing my avid readers of what exactly I have been up to for the past 4-5 months and it will be sufficient and perhaps entertaining enough.
  Well my last blog was posted at the end of March, slightly before or perhaps slightly after my last exam, I don’t really remember. What I do remember is that I passed all my exams and am able to cling to the label of ‘student’ and to all the luxuries that go hand in hand with that label, such as getting marginal percentage discounts from selected retail outlets and a special railcard that says student on it, which gets you a third of any journey just like all the other types of railcard you can purchase.
 Since then I have been comfortably busying myself by doing nothing. Every now and then I’ll try desperately to find a job but it seems that every CV I have handed out is another wasted piece of paper playing its part in destroying the rainforests, something I abhor. So I have decided to stop printing off CVs that don’t even get looked at, another step towards saving the planet.
  Another studenty thing that I have experienced is the feverish excitement I’m sure all students endure when they have to move all there shit from one place to another. I’m not sure how it happened but over the course of the year I managed to accumulate quite a lot of random stuff I barely used such as an accordion, a violin and a nerf gun to name a few. Perhaps the greatest acquirement was obtained on the day we moved out of the flat.
    As our sneaky Korean housemates emigrated before the end of the tenancy, myself and two other English tenants I live with, had to clean the entire flat. Not only did they leave the tidying to us but also they pretty much left all the things they kept in the communal area of the flat. Fearing we would lose our deposit if the flat was full of stuff we decided to claim it all. The most precious treasure we acquired was there fancy Korean rice cooker. Unfortunately all the buttons are in Korean so unable to use it, it serves only as a cultural ornament and talking point, perched proudly on a table in the centre of the living room in the new house.
  At the moment our abode for the following year of university is bare and unappealing, (apart from the living room of course!) The alarms go off every time someone moves and I am scared of the responsibility of having to arrange bills and their payments. So currently the house functions only as a sort of squat, a cold building in which you can shelter from the elements and sleep, providing you are very very still.
  I am planning on furnishing it with bohemian wall hangings and various other gnarly stuff to make it more homely; perhaps I’ll upload a picture or two when it is complete.
  That about wraps it up, a few other occurrences have occupied my time but I’ll save them to give me something to write about another day.

Bacon

It’s been a number of weeks since I last updated this blog, the reasons for this vary between laziness, lack of inspiration and excessive amounts of coursework. Over the course of the last week I spent many hours frantically trying to finish ten worksheets that we were meant to be completing throughout the academic year. As I never seem to panic or get worried about deadlines I always end up leaving the majority of them to the last minute, so far this doesn’t seem to have compromised my grades but I don’t think I’ll be taking any chances next year, mainly because University is expensive. It would be a waste of money if I graduated with anything less than a 2:1. 
  Anyway, what inspired me to write today is a very real hazard to everyone whom I consider real people. This hazard being the ‘bacon police’, which is a phrase coined by myself in accordance to anyone who has anything negative to say about bacon… Shame on them!
  According to ‘Science’, which I have ridiculously over generalised for the sake of my argument, eating bacon or any red meat for that matter everyday is bad for you. The result of bacon badness, being bowel cancer. When I first heard this I expected it was the kind of scaremongering you would find in the daily mail, according to that particular institution being a black person gives you cancer amongst many other things, so I assumed it was just invented to instigate needless paranoia and I shouldn’t let it coerce me into eating less bacon.
  However after reading a story about it on the BBC website backed up with statistics I decided that there might actually be some risk in eating bacon everyday.
  This prompted me to cut down on my bacon consumption slightly but I still expected that at some point in the near future ‘science’ would find some new research telling us that actually bacon isn’t bad, its magical and it fights cancer and terrorism at the same time with one hand tied behind its back…bacon.
  Sadly this news never arrived, but I did stumble across some other news which should bring the joy back into your life, unless of course your fictional man in the sky says pigs are dirty and you can’t eat bacon anyway, which also places you into the fictional category when I afore mentioned ‘real people’.
 Anywho before this blog digresses into a rant about organised religion I’ll get back to the point. I was on the BBC website yesterday when I read a startling piece of news. According to new research if you eat an Aspirin a day it dramatically reduces the risk of developing cancer, particularly Bowel cancer.  I’m not entirely sure why, but the article failed to explain what I deduced straight away. Aspirin cancels out Bacon cancer!

  So my top tip of the day is if you’re worried your eating too much bacon or the ‘bacon police’ are oppressing you, just have an aspirin after your bacon sandwich. 

Wrath in response to the apparatus

Since I started University, Tuesdays have become my least favourite day of the week. On Tuesdays I am a victim of the heinous crime of having to waking up at 9 o’clock. I then have to make the arduous journey from my flat, up some of oxford road, negotiating a busy road, avoiding collisions with busses and people who can’t walk at speeds exceeding two miles per hour. Then when I eventually arrive at Uni I have to scour my mind in order to remember which lecture theatre or seminar room I need to be in. After this I endure two hours of brain exhausting ‘learning’. I must then tackle the return journey with all the perils that plagued me on my outwards venture.
  When I think about it, the three other days I am in University are pretty much exactly the same as Tuesdays, though the 9am wake up is replaced by a 1pm wake up.  And if I compare my average week this year with my average week at college where I had to get up at 7am and usually got in 5.30pm I feel like I shouldn’t have any reason to complain.  However I complain anyway.
  Though this particular Tuesday has been slightly more irritating that my average Tuesday, which is the reason for me writing about it.
  Today I decided to start an essay that’s deadline is 9 days away from now. I was going to leave it a little longer because I didn’t think it would take too long to write 2000 words on Christina Rossetti.  Not unless the university introduced some ridiculous rule regarding this essay, which they did. We are forbidden from using any Internet sources to research said poet!
  I don’t understand the reasoning for this decision; the Internet was created for sharing information. All Universities should actively rejoice everyday and thank Tim Berners Lee for creating the World Wide Web, (see I just learnt who invented the Word Wide Web thanks to the World Wide Web, BE IN AWE AND FEAR THE POWER OF TIM) by sacrificing a nerd.  The Internet is an omnipotent omniscient overlord that actually exists, unlike all those gods that people go on about.
 Denying the use of the Internet in a modern assignment is like forcing the emergency services to use horses.
  This means that the time I could have spent writing the essay will be spent exploring the library for relevant books which are readily available from the relative comfort of the staffroom furniture provided by my halls of residence. On realisation that my time was under assault by an oppressive rule I decided that I must do what others have done in similar situations and revolt against the domineering apparatus. This involved me sticking my fingers up at the computer screen and to any prospects of getting any work done tonight, and then drinking Guinness and Irish Coffee. Now it is no longer Tuesday and I don’t have to get up at all as I don’t have university on Wednesdays, I do however need to go to a library and study multiple books that might not even have any significant information in.
 However, I recently had a kind of alcohol induced epiphany, I needn’t bother waste time looking at books in the library when the internet has sites and tools for looking inside actual books and finding all the details I need to reference them. The University will be none the wiser and their rule is pointless, gratuitous and unenforceable. I also demonstrated revolutions are successful when fuelled by Guinness.

House Hunting

In late November I was surprised by one of my high school chums informing me that he had already put a deposit down on a house for his second year at university. This immediately put me into a state of panic, as I assumed that everyone else had started to secure accommodation whilst I had barely thought about it.

  Driven by fear of being a homeless student I wandered into the closest estate agent and pleaded for assistance with finding a suitable abode for myself, and two of my current flatmates. I was told by an agent to peruse the properties on the companies website and email him when we had found some houses we would like to look at. This seemingly easy task was made infuriating as, for reasons still unknown, the estate agent wouldn’t respond to an email unless I sent it to him multiple times. I decided that the reason for this derives from the stereotypical estate agent being a wanker. It wasn’t his fault it was merely part of the job description. After numerous emails sent, in return for little advice or insight, we eventually secured a viewing of three houses in early January.

  We met a representative, near the first house on our list, then ventured to it. After knocking on the door with no answer she assured us that the current tenants were aware of the situation then promptly let herself in. I personally felt like we were breaking some kind of law entering someone’s house without knowing whether they really gave their consent. However we wondered in anyway and found one of the tenants still asleep unaware of what was going on. At this point I started to doubt that he had given his consent. After looking around briefly and quietly we decided to move onto the next house.

  Like the first house the agent knocked, then let herself in. Although this time the two people who were in knew that we were coming and provided us with more information about renting houses than our estate agent did.

 At the third house the sales rep didn’t get a chance to use her set of keys as a chap with a broad grin opened the door slightly and told us to give him five minutes. After waiting five minutes we entered the house to be greeted by a strong herbal aroma and another guy who was also clearly in high spirits. We explored the house a bit and in one of the bedrooms found two plant pots with a light above them, which were obviously for growing bedroom tomatoes. After looking around for a short while we decided that we liked this house the best as it was the cheapest, at the best location and smelt nicest.

 The next day I emailed the estate agents three times, as I was now accustomed to him being awful, telling him we would like to put a deposit down on the third house. A couple of days later I received an email from him telling me to ring him.

I attempted to ring him several times but he was equally difficult to communicate with over the phone. Eventually he picked up the phone and apologised as the estate agents had advertised the house we wanted incorrectly.

Apparently the price and number of bedrooms were incorrect. I understood how the price could be incorrect but the number of bedrooms we saw was three and number advertised on the website was also three. How they managed to hide a bedroom is a mystery that made the house even more desirable to me. After finding out that all the houses we viewed that day were now unavailable to us we found ourselves back at square one.

  After this ordeal we have decided to cut out the middleman and not bother with estate agents. Instead were looking exclusively at properties where we can speak directly with the landlord. This way you get a good idea of whether or not you’re going to get on with the landlord, you save paying all the ridiculous agency fees and you don’t have to deal with the bastards that are estate agents. Hopefully we shall find a house soon.