QUICKIE UNI POST

Just a short post to say that I am here at university and settling in. I have the top bunk, I have Harry Potter slippers on, I’m on a great floor and I like the people in my accommodation a lot. Hurrah university!

Today was a bit of a blur overall, but I hope to document my journey through these first few weeks as much as possible; more than anything, it would just be a nice record for me to have!

Tonight, after wandering around campus a little bit, the group from my accommodation block ended up at a Wetherspoons and it was great fun, especially as we were all pretty knackered. Now I’m about to fall asleep in my top bunk and hope to write more soon. Goodnight!

FOREVER

I will.

I SMILE AS I RESPIRE

I am back.

This blog has been neglected a little – I had intended to write in it regularly while I was in the USA, but that wonderful country has sunshine and some of my best friends, so somehow I never really got around to it.

Home is a bit of a shock. I’ve been trying to distract myself from the reality of it by surrounding myself with friends, Jed Bartlet, loud noises, smells of secondhand books and London buses; I think I am slowly learning to live here again. I love London, truly I do, it’s just difficult when you care about some people so much and have had such a wondrous holiday spending time with them every waking second of the day to go back to the occasional stagnant moment, to juggling money and fitting in shifts at work.

The photo above is from my last few hours in Los Angeles. An impromptu dance party was had on the pavement as we couldn’t come up with any ideas of how else to pass the fleeting moments.

My left arm hurts a lot as I got my last HPV vaccination today, so typing is a little testing. Besides, I have some friends in the West Wing to return to. I leave you with this photograph of Iorek Byrnison enjoying a carrot (a native delicacy, of course) and wish you well until next time.

I CAN LEARN TO FORGET

I posted this on another blog, a long long time ago. Here it is now.

BORGESMANIA

Death (or its allusion) makes men precious and pathetic. They are moving because of their phantom condition; every act they execute may be their last; there is not a face that is not on the verge of dissolving like a face in a dream.

– Jose Luis Borges

CALIFORNIA BABEL

I’m sitting in Rita’s living room, at 1.33am, in the height of Summer, watching The Holiday. I love this film – love it love it love it, and there’s something magical about it being so perfectly warm that you can go out so late to somewhere casual like a shopping plaza and just hang out. Everyone is – in the words of Californians – so chill.

Found a lovely edition of the collected works of Borges. It was $20, and normally I would reason myself out of it, but I couldn’t. It was beautiful and I wanted it and I bought it.

I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man — even a single man, tens of centuries ago — has perused and read this book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.

– Jose Luis Borges “The Library of Babel”

LAZY DAYS AND HOPEFUL HAZE

I’ve been in California since Wednesday and to be honest, I haven’t done masses. I saw Away We Go at the cinema, wandered around the gorgeous Laguna Beach, went for “fries” and went to a very random indian film. Today I think we’re going to see some friends in Hollywood and then maybe go to Beauty and the Beast… on the beach.

Hopefully, this blog will be updated along the way. But for now, I leave you with this wonderful sunset Rita and I saw yesterday.

STOWING AWAY

I keep packing. Then unpacking. Then re-packing. Then folding. Then rolling. Then stuffing heels with bikinis and H&M skirts. I’m excited, very excited.

A FAVOURITE SONG

A hope is that one day I will feel like this.

Whenever I’m alone with you
You make me feel like I am home again
Whenever I’m alone with you
You make me feel like I am whole again
Whenever I’m alone with you
You make me feel like I am young again
Whenever I’m alone with you
You make me feel like I am fun again

However far away I will always love you
However long I stay I will always love you
Whatever words I say I will always love you
I will always love you

Whenever I’m alone with you
You make me feel like I am free again
Whenever I’m alone with you
You make me feel like I am clean again

However far away I will always love you
However long I stay I will always love you
Whatever words I say I will always love you
I will always love you.

EVERYTHING WILL BE ALRIGHT

No words for the way it feels to watch your favourite band perform literally metres away from you. Absolutely no words. I was groped, insulted, elbowed in the neck on purpose, nearly had an asthma attack, but you know what? I don’t even mind, because Brandon Flowers, in all his poetry, was singing and speaking and breathing the same air and god it was amazing.

I remember the night my abuelita died. It was exactly four years and seven months ago today, four thirty in the morning and everyone in my Mexican grandparents’ house was running around, looking for certificates of birth and the horrible technical things that you need to delay reality from striking.

After calming everyone down a bit by making them all tea, I went and sat on the bed in the spare room for a bit. I didn’t have books with me, I didn’t have the will to write things down, so I just sat my eyes, took out my (wait for it) Discman, and listened to Mr. Brightside on repeat. I don’t even know why that song. It just got me, in the same way that many No Doubt (my other equally favourite band) songs have in the past. They just gets you at the core. Mr. Brightside is to this day the song that hits me most profoundly.

In Hyde Park last night, right at the front, right at the centre, jumping up and down, screaming the words, surrounded by thousands and thousands and thousands of people with their own stories to tell… I felt infinite.