So, I haven’t posted in here for a while for various reasons. Well… I have posted… but nothing that took longer than copying and pasting a link to something I liked on the internet. Apologies for the neglect (assuming anyone reads this rubbish anyway…. to be honest, it’s more for me, so I don’t really mind).
Anyway, here’s a nice long rambly update on what has been going on in my world.
My course is going pretty well. I’m a little behind at the moment due to a combination of illness (again. Le sigh.) and working at a new job (more on that later). I’m currently in the middle of a nine week “Final Major Project” which will, when marked, determine whether I fail, pass, pass with merit or pass with distinction. Obviously, fail is bad. Fail would mean no Fine Art degree for me (I have been accepted on the condition I pass my Foundation Diploma). Pass means I get in, but neither me or anyone else is overly impressed. I don’t think I’ll quite manage a distinction unfortunately. I haven’t put enough work in for that. I’m just too tired.
Anyway, we were pretty much given free rein for this. At first I chose “Mythology” as a subject. I quickly got bored of this and moved on to the slightly more specific subject of “Fear”. This links with the original mythology idea because fear is often created from stories and imagination. From this I got the idea of death and bodies. I took pictures of myself and my housemates as corpses, created with talcum powder (for pale, blotchy skin), black eye make-up (for sunken eyes and bruising) and dark red lipstick (for blood). These photos can be found here. I will be creating some paintings from these. After that, I’m not really sure where I’ll go with this. I’m sort of making it up as I go along. I prefer it this way =].
This is the one painting I have done from these photos so far (sorry for the bad photo quality):
It’s just a quick painting (about half an hour), but I’m pretty pleased with it. It’s just a study.
My dear Granny finally passed away a few months ago, after a long and horrible battle with Alzheimer’s. She had slowly lost herself, forgetting all that she was and all that she knew. She didn’t recognise us.
Fortunately, she had the best ending we could have asked for after all this. We all got the call early enough to let us know it was time. My parents, my auntie and my granddad all got to her in time. I didn’t go because I though that too many people would make it more stressful for my granddad, especially if he was worrying about how I would react (I’m pretty much still a child in his eyes). She passed away in her sleep, with my granddad and my mum holding one hand, and my auntie and my dad holding the other. She stopped breathing so slowly and peacefully that it took a few minutes for them to work out whether or not she was really gone.
Obviously the whole situation is very sad and upsetting for my family and myself, but I am truly happy that she is at peace. It comforts me to know that she isn’t suffering any more.
She left me, my brother and my cousins £500 each. I bought a locket and put in a picture if my granny and I when I was a baby, and a picture of my grandparents. It’s something I will always keep, and I like having it to remember her by.
As mentioned earlier, I finally found a job. This is damn lucky, considering I need to find £700 for my deposit by June. I work at a hotel on the cliff top in Bournemouth town centre. My job title is “Housekeeping”, which basically means I clean the rooms, make the beds etc. It’s a good job…. I get a decent wage and I have a good time doing it, mostly because the people I work with are fun to be around. I also get a tonne of exercise, walking up and down stairs constantly and doing plenty of physical work. This is great for me, because I really need to build my strength up, and what better way to do it than while earning money?
I have now made peace with all the people I feel out with when I got really ill. It’s a great feeling, not being in any long term arguments or falling outs.
I have my old best friend back in my life, which makes me really happy. I missed him loads and I’m so glad that we’re on track to making things how they were. It’s good to be talking with him again =].
That’ll do for now. There is almost definitely more, but it’s late and I’m tired.
Oh, I made a photo blog. Go check it out: Photoblog
The old one was signed up to an old e-mail address, and it kept crashing when I tried to organise it in any way, so I made a nice shiny new one =].
My new meds are clearing my mind a fair bit. I’ve managed to do a lot of thinking, especially about myself (without meaning to sound narcissistic) and the person I was becoming. Quite honestly, I hated who I was over the past year. I grew steadily worse, became more and more of a bad person, and pushed away the people I cared about. I have made peace with many of these people over the past couple of weeks, but some lost friendships cannot be repaired.
I lost my best friend, and it’s my fault. My illness made me into a horrible person and I ended up making him hate me. I know that nothing I do or say will fix it, he doesn’t want to know me and I don’t blame him, given the way I’ve been. I can’t think of any way to show him that I’m getting better now without him thinking I’m just trying to trick him into speaking to me again. I miss him every day.
What I am grateful for is the people that stuck by me through all this. Particularly Johnny. He’s been amazing, and he helped me more than he will ever know.
To all those who stuck by me while I was a dick, thank you, I will forever be grateful.
To all those I hurt and pushed away, I’m sorry. I will never forgive myself for the way I became. I should have gotten help sooner, I just didn’t realise until I got really bad.
My new meds started out a bit weird, as highlighted in previous posts (e.g. sleep laughing), but today I really feel a change coming. I feel positive for the first time in ages.
Maybe things are finally starting to turn around.
Fingers crossed this isn’t just a short phase.
Okay, so I mentioned new meds a few posts back. So far they are having little or no positive effect.
They have worsened almost all my symptoms, changing “ohmygosh i’m so tired” to “holycrap I literally can’t get out of bed”, creating seriously weird mood swings and making me constantly feel like i’m going to pass out or throw up. Fun times.
One pretty weird side effect is sleep laughing. I have done this twice so far, and however much I manage to freak John out with it, I just can’t help finding it funny.
The first time I did this, about a week ago, John woke up to find me asleep, facing away from him shaking with what he thought was some sort of fit. What actually happened was I was dreaming that I was in Hook showing Darren how to get birds to come to your hand, and there was a really funny looking bright orange bird with a long neck that went “HONK!” when I poked it, which I found pretty damn funny, funny enough to be silently shaking with laughter in my sleep.
Then, last night, John woke up to me gradually pushing him off the bed by roughly rubbing his arse cheek/leg and going “hahahahaha…..what?…..hahahahaha”. I’m still not sure what I was dreaming about. Literally all I remember from that dream is someone saying “Duracel batteries”.
Yeah…
I’m still on a bit of a buzz from yesterday. A good friend of mine is finally free after months of unnecessary and completely unfair torment. I literally couldn’t be happier for him. John and I have a pretty cool innocence present lined up =].
I started on some new meds today. Whether I am happy about this is debatable. If they work, great. If they don’t, then maybe that will be the kick up the arse the doctors need to try something different. This is something I have fought against doing for well over a year now, and I sort of feel like i’m giving in a bit.
I finally started the Fine Art pathway in my Foundation Diploma this week. No more being forced to do Textiles or any of that shit they have been forcing on me. Now it’s what I want it to be.
The Fine Art tutors are great. They are both laid back and helpful. They talk *to* us rather than *at* us. They treat us as equals.
I went to Christian yesterday because I was a bit stuck on research. I was expecting a 30 second response, something along the lines of “Well, you can check the library. Spend more time looking and you’ll find something”. Instead, he sat me down at a table, got out his laptop, and spent over half an hour going through various artists he thought were relevant to my work. If i mentioned an idea, he would fire off several artists relevant to that idea. He talked for so long i ended up being late for the doctor.
I think this guy could give my college art teacher a few valuable lessons.
I have spent the majority of this week drawing endless pictures of a pink rubber duck. Sounds boring, right? Well, it has gotten tedious at times. This was only until I found out that paintings, models, photos, videos etc all count as drawings too. I have used endless media, had a lot of fun with inks and even recorded the sound the duck makes when you squeak it and put it on a loop. The point of this is to learn about drawing and recording. I also learned how to stretch watercolour paper, simply because I mentioned to Christian that I wanted to try out inks on watercolour paper. He’s so enthusiastic about every idea we come up with. It’s really encouraging.
Okay, so in my dream I was going to a gig with some random girl, but we had to cross the swamp by Mordor to reach my Grandad who was waiting to pick us up to take us to the gig.
On our was across a Modern Warfare type thing showed up and I was told to throw grenades at a bunker, and I blew up some guy that was covered in grenades. Then I went in the bunker and found John and Edward from X-Factor and the guy from the All-American Rejects.
Then I realised I didn’t know what gig I was going to. Until this point I thought it was Green Day but then I remembered i’d already been. I also realised I had left my gig tickets at home, so I had a road trip to Odiham with John and Edward and AAR guy.
We got to Odiham and met Sauron there and he said the only way to get past him was to sing well. This was bad because John and Edward are bad at singing (AAR guy had disappeared by now for some reason). Then my Mum showed up and laughed at Sauron and this turned out to be his weakness so he fell and we got past, but then Mum grounded me for not turning up at my Grandad’s.
Weird, right?
And I remember it really well too. Maybe it really did happen…
OOOOOOH….
So, I’m supposed to be working my arse off today getting work done. It’s not going so well really. I think I need to resign myself to the fact that I will not pass this assesment first time round. It’s not such a big deal, i’ll get referred and my tutor will tell me exactly what I need to do in order to pass and will help me. He’s a really nice guy actually, determined to help me. He understands that I struggle. He’s pretty much the polar opposite of my college art teacher. She was always saying things like “You come here in MY lunch break expecting me to help you when you can’t even do the work i set you??”. My current tutor is more like “Yeah okay, sit down and we’ll work out what we can do to help. Don’t worry, we’re here to make things easier for you.”
Slight difference, huh?
Recently I seem to be spending at least a few hours every day thinking about past friendships. I miss the simplicity of them. I miss having a best friend with whom I could simply exist. When we didn’t have to actually *do* anything together, we could just be.
I miss lying on our backs in the fields making shapes in the clouds. I miss sitting cross legged on a fallen tree speculating about the future and vowing never to lose touch. I miss staying up all night playing games and sleeping all day. I miss dancing to songs on the tv. I miss walking through the woods to the fields at 4am just so we could watch the sun go up.I miss discussing the way we will be trouble makers when we’re old and sitting in rocking chairs together. I miss the times when we would laugh so hard it hurt even when nothing *that* funny had happened, then laughing even harder at the fact we were laughing. I miss entertaining ourselves for hours by playing hide and seek in particularly tall crops and getting freaked out when it got a bit dark, I miss doing spontanious yet stupid things like remaking the Blair Witch Project in a dark forest or trying to make the biggest human pyramid in history. I miss being able to have the best fun in the world without having to spend a penny.
Nobody I know now seems to be like that. Perhaps it’s too soon to tell.
Today I was made to do an ICT class, which we apparently need in order to pass our course.
I was handed the assessment brief. Today’s work was to research 5 universities we plan to apply to through UCAS in order to attend after completing our Foundation year here at Bournemouth.
Sounds fair enough, except I already have a place on the Fine Art degree right here, in this university. I told the tutor this, to which she replied “Oh, well I guess you’ll just have to pick 5 at random to use for this then”.
o_0
Fine. I did the work and printed it out. We were asked to make a table on excel listing the five weekly prices of accommodation, then work out an average. We were also asked to do five print screens to prove that we did research said universities. I didn’t want to waste paper/ink/my printing credit, so I put the print screens in the excel document and printed it all out on one page. The following conversation went along the lines of:
Her: “Why do you only have one page of evidence?”
Me: “To save on paper and money. It’s all there.”
Her: “But you only have one page of evidence…”
Me: “Yes, but all the evidence I have been asked for is on that one page”
Her: “Well, yes, it is. But you will have to explain during assessment why you only have one page of evidence”
Me: “Right. Cool then.”
Jeeeeesus.
I have now read through the rest of the brief. Turns out that to pass this “unit of work” I will need:
- The work I did today
- Lecture notes from talks on applying to universities through UCAS
- Notes from UCAS tutorials
- Evidence of visits to other universities
- A draft UCAS application form
- A draft personal statement
- A copy of a completed UCAS form
- A portfolio of work for university interviews
All of this is entirely pointless to me, given that, as previously mentioned, I already have a place on the Fine Art degree RIGHT HERE. I therefore need none of this stuff, I simply need to pass my Foundation Year. All the above listed things are useless to me, but I still have to do them to “fulfil course requirements”.
I am not happy.