Terrified

On Monday I'm going to go into a school to do work experience for two weeks and then straight afterwards I have a weekend to move back into Canterbury and start learning my stuff for this year.

I have Linear Algebra followed by Probability and Inference on my first day back, neither of which I'm particularly looking forward to. If I were sensible then I'd be doing some reading up on them before I get back.

Today I'm going to make myself feel prepared by buying a fully stocked pencil case.

What the fuck is a 'PASS'?

So in an idle moment before my head hit the pillow I checked around the Student Data System which is where I get things like timetables and coursework marks.

What I stumble across is

You have been awarded a PASS in Mathematics

Full information will be contained in a detailed transcript which will be forwarded to you as soon as possible.

Which bugs me because I don't know if that means I've actually passed the first year or if that's just their way of putting things. I've been on this earth long enough to release that clarity is not exactly anyone's strong point, at all.

I don't have any more information to go on, I checked my university e-mails and I rifled around in the post to see if anything had been sent to me but got missed. There's nothing. This has set me off panicking like hell and there's no-one on-line let alone IRL that I can moan at about this because well, it's more or less exactly the middle of the night when I'm writing this.

I'd like to explain the implications of a 'pass' in more detail (it doesn't mean anything as damning as what it means in college, for instance) but I really don't know myself.

You might want to tell me that I should be happy about this because a pass probably is a pass but I really don't want to get my hopes up lest it results in me really fucking myself over. Also this has brought my exam results to the front of my mind again.

These are, odly, the first exam results that I've got really emotional about. I wasn't one of those people who said 'oh, I don't care', but I did stand by the 'there's nothing you can do about it now' maxim. The thing is, if I've fucked up this time, then I might loose something that I actually want. That's why, like I perhaps should have been before my GCSEs and ALevels, I'm scared.

In other news, nothing is definite or confirmed or certain or verifiable. I have no idea what next week has in store for me.

I think I need to be more proactive with my life now.

Ce message n'est pas du Spam.

I am waiting to finish my exams. I am waiting for my exams to be finished. It's not like it's me doing them any more, I've got just one left and I feel completely distanced from it, I don't care about doing it or not just so long as the exams period can be over soon.

In a very strange way I miss Essex or at least I really want to be back there now, last time I was there it didn't feel completely like home but right now I don't think Darwin college is my home either. (I'm existentially homeless, how pretentious can you get?) Right now I'm bored, stressed and apathetic towards everything, I'd much rather be feeling all of that in my parent's house.

The title of this blog is taken from some spam that I got today, I found it kind of amusing.

Friends and friends.

Today T-Block had a Christmas roast, which was pretty nice, we all worked together and it didn't turn out to bad, even if the sprouts were completely raw.

Obviously it was as secular as Christmas can get, which I supposed was how I'd like it. There's no reason I see to focus on the mythology side and everyone knows the whole Jesus thing isn't why we have winter celebrations anyway. No moments silence before we tucked in either.

Well in fact, there were quite a few silences, but with a "little s" where the conversation just died down. What I didn't expect was how incredibly awkward it made people, and how they had to say that it was making them feel awkward just to get rid of the silence.

Without really realising it, I've been brought up to tolerate silence, not just tolerate it but to actually enjoy it or at least feel comfortable in it. I doubt somehow that it's a skill unique to Quaker children but somehow my sheltered upbringing or something left me ignorant to how much people suck at just sitting around.

It's around this point that I'm supposed to go into some beautifully versed ministry about what silence means to me, to talk about different types of silence and how the inner light is bound to shine through all them, even the noisiest. But I'm not going to and to be honest anyone that really cares has heard it before by someone smarter than me anyway. Today didn't make me think about silence, no matter how important it is: today made me really think about who I am friends with.

There's quite a few people who I'm fairly fond of with whom I don't share that much in common beyond an ability to sit together in silence for an hour. There's quite a few people without any of the above who I'm fond of anyway, most of my flatmates for a start; it's not like silence is a necessary criterion for friendship. It maybe that what's bugging me is really all me, I can't understand how people can't do silence, I completely fail to empathise.

For the three months since I've been at Uni I haven't really spoken about myself as a Quaker, or myself at all really. The fact is, I'm really bad at it. If someone were to ask me about silence or integrity or pacifism then I would become bumbling and awkward and generally useless. People may suck at silence, but more importantly, I really suck at talking.

The people who I'm really close to, seem quite often to be Quakers, I think part of the reason for that isn't what we have in common, but what we don't have to bother explaining to each other: it makes things easier when you can gloss over the religion bit and get down to the nitty gritty of drinking habits and musical tastes. That sounds awful doesn't it? That it'd be so much easier to be friends with someone of the same religion, I feel a lousy Quaker for just thinking it.

At Quaker youth events there's always some conversation or debate about how friendship works alongside with Friendship. I always ignored those, it sounded to much like hippies moaning that the man was out the get them (armed with peer-pressure and conformity no doubt) which to be fair, it was. There's always a lot of bother about how someone can only find their true family amongst other Quaker children and that their relationships with school friends were shallow and meaningless in comparison. I always though, how fucking ignorant it was to assume that the rest of the world can't do close and meaningful friendship. Of course in retrospect my peers at the time weren't saying that at all, they really did find it easier to make friends with kids who'd been brought up in kind of the same way as them and, as much as it pains me to say so, I do to.

Whiny little teenybopper hippies are a lot more insightful than I ever gave them credit for.

A house

My current flatmates (and one school friend) have decided on a house to live in next year, we have reserved it and will put a deposit down the moment we can.

This is, fantastic.

I'm a grown up now.