Preheat your ovens to death!

- I'm getting used to being lonely and depressed and spending my time either revising or thinking I should be revising.
- I hate having six subjects to think about. I always manage to get to the end of the day not having done something really important.
- Gaby came round and drank tea with me today. I love her because she came to see me when I was feeling depressed and cheered me up. I hate her because she has a ticket to see the Kooks and a ticket for Reading and I don't.
- I love The Strokes. I've told you before and I will tell you again.
- Went to see American Dreamz. It's a very poor movie. Don't see it. It tried to be satirical and failed. However I love popcorn and I love Berengere. So I win.
- I feel slightly delirious. I have eaten alot of Toblerone and it is 3.34am.
- I'm not really sure what all these bullet points were in aid of.
- I am ashamed of myself for having watched all six episodes of Burnt Face Man this afternoon. It really is dreadful stuff. (With the exception of "calm down baby, have a piece of cheese.")
- 6 days until it all starts, 19 days until it all ends.
- Sorry for Tim-like length. He can pull it off, I can't.
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Here's what's stopping me doing enough revision.

1. Boredom.
2. Youtube/online movies.
3. Laziness/procrastination.
   
4. Marsbars. (And ice-cream Marsbars.)
   
5. Tea.
6. Loneliness.
   
7. IMDB.
8. Wikipedia.
9. Hatred of all/most of my subjects.
   
10. The state of my room.
11. The Guardian.
12. Constant hunger.
    
13. Blogging.
14. Disillusionment/lack of hope.
    
15. Google Images.
16. Impulsiveness.
    
17. False self-reassurance.
18. Salt and shake crisps.
19. A desire for excessive sleep.
20. An inability to plan and prioritise.

I think I'm getting the hang of it all now though. It's a shame I have but twelve days.

This isn't the straight and narrow path!

On Thursday 4th May I get to vote. This is incredibly daunting. I do not feel any of the local mayor candidates are capable of representing me, least of all Robin Wales, a slimy Blairite miscreant who has even been involved in establishing an illegal police force called the 'community constabulary'. Having cost £1.4 million, the constabulary is now facing "allegations of unlawful stop and search, institutional racism and carrying of offensive weapons." Nice. Click here for the gory details (and thanks to Jack for the tip-off.) My alternatives:
Tory - no chance.
Libdem - possible.
Respect - dubious, but the only candidate with a chance of winning (besides Wales).
Christian People's Alliance - HAHAHA no way.

And in other local news, there's been a scandal over illegal ice cream trading on Green Street! Oh no! Ah, the wonders of the Newham Council webpage.

A very uneventful day. Ate too much chocolate and didn't revise enough. Consequently I feel both nervous and decadent.
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It's cold under the blanket.

Today I turned eighteen. It has been possibly the most boring, uneventful birthday ever, but I guess every year more of the novelty of birthdays wears off a bit more. I got up, ate cornflakes and revised proof by induction. Two cards, some chocolates, nothing else. I'm not really bothered any more, to be honest. I feel like I've already celebrated. And two weeks before exams is not a brilliant time to go wild. I feel sleepy and peaceful, anyway. I have wonderful CDs to listen to, and plenty of tea to drink. No one else is home: my parents are on holiday, my brother's gone to the pub. The postman brought a parcel, but I slept through the doorbell and didn't wake up until one. Tony Benn was on Any Questions, which was a neat little birthday surprise. Perhaps I'll have an afternoon nap. I'm still in my pyjamas at half past five.

We Are Scientists was a truly great. Fresh and energetic and funny. Lots of moving and trampling though. Ironically the crowd were at their wildest and most violent when the band played 'Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt'. The last song they played, just before the desperate stampede to get out was 'The Great Escape'.

I was thinking about Paul Wells' arguments about New Labour today. Paul Wells is an incredibly frustrating person to have an argument with: he is not only notoriously right wing, but also completely reactionary and doesn't appear to support taxes, the Welfare State or civil liberties. In fact he behaves like a member of the 19th century aristocracy. He completely disregards Blair's policies on education, privatisation and private financing and dismisses any suggestion of Blair as a neo-conservative or Thatcherite. More controversially he is under the impression that Hitler was left wing, leading me to the conclusion that he is either a far right propagandist or completely ignorant. Hitler attempted, and almost succeeded in murdering the German left and trade union movement. His policies were not grounded in some kind of left wing economic ideology, but rather in racial superiority, capitalism and fascism. How can Paul Wells label Hitler a socialist when socialism involves the people controlling the means of production? In Nazi Germany the means of production was controlled by private capitalists.

I love Paul. I just hate his politics. Sometimes I get the feeling lots of people think that about me.

Show Your Bones is a wonderful wonderful album and I will listen to it until the cows come home.
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Mis-shapes, mistakes, misfits.

Here concludes a chapter of my life. A time of Natalie Portman, avoiding things and being friends with Michael Jones. I have decided none of these pursuits are remotely fulfilling, satisfying or rewarding. Harsh but true. Natalie Portman is a distant, glamourised Hollywood star. Michael Jones frustrates and depresses me. As for avoiding things, it limits progress, induces unecessary anxiety and depression and ruins your life.

My brother just forced me to do two hours of revision. I'm not sure if I'm annoyed or vaguely grateful, but it almost certainly needed to be done.

And that was my 150th post.
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Coffee black and egg white.

Even though I spent hours cleaning, filled the dishwasher four times, hoovered everything, went to the bottle bank, removed anything suspicious and put everything back in the right place, she knew the minute she got in, and gave me the most evil, depraved look and fired a series of pointless questions at me: why were there less things on the mantelpiece, why hadn't the cat been fed, why was there lemonade in the fridge; then pointed out some imaginary stains on the carpet, which I'm pretty sure were genuinely nothing to do with the party, then threatened to penalise me, and stormed off to her room.

It was worth every minute though. Every fucking minute. Completely the best party ever, and the best birthday I could hope for. For so many reasons. People who I was sure wouldn't come turning up, bringing presents and being wild, about 40 people all singing happy birthday, Chris making my rickety old piano sound beautiful somehow, Berengere actually making me a beautiful cake, Phil telling me I looked like 'Karen O in tin foil', Becky making me a sparkly mirrorwith a cello on it, Alvin of all people turning up (!), Tim and Jackson dancing wildly to Franz and falling around for hours, Paul Wells asleep on a chair, Ben telling me his life story, Beth and her brother, and countless others, Sarah grinning crazily while drinking ginger beer and talking to Helen Mackenzie, Liam giving me hysterics at 4am.

And lots of other things too. Thanks.

On Friday I suffered from severe withdrawal symptons and lack of sleep, and waves of anguish about my lack of revision, and lack of food, and loneliness and depression, but today I feel fine. Almost optimistic, actually. Had a very charming meal at Berengere's, she really is a wonderful cook. The chocolate-raspberry thing was divine, and it made a change from tea, breakfast cereal, and fairy cakes (though the fairy cakes were fucking amazing fairy cakes), which is basically what I've been living off for the past week.

I'm going to miss human company for the next few weeks.
It's lucky that it's nearly Easter and I can drown my sorrows in chocolate, hot cross buns and boiled eggs.
The house was so much more fucking peaceful without my parents.
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PS Meant to post this link a while ago, thanks to Jack for sending it to me: "Some people claimed the IB was an international conspiracy"(!)

It starts so fast and it ends so slow.

Pete and Carl busking. Theo showed me this video centuries ago. Look out for Pete shouting 'cagoules!' at some random tourists.
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Living in the ruins of a castle built on sand...

Seem to have lost my touch with this blogging thing. Over the past few days, although I've thought of things to say I haven't found a way to say them without sounding horribly offensive or annoyingly happy. Not that there's been a lot of happiness to think of. Actually that's a lie, Tim's party was strangely wonderful, although I seem to have upset both Paul Wells (by drinking his Martini) and Joao (by saying something regrettably stupid). I really do suck. Sorry, not that either of them read this.

Anyway. It's all study leave now, but there hasn't been a huge amount of studying to speak of. Have watched four movies: three at Tim's, two featuring Jake Gyllehaal. The Good Girl was thoroughly depressing from start to finish. I can't think of a single happy moment. Jennifer Aniston plays this depressed, unfulfilled, unattractive woman who hates her husband, her job and her life. She meets a young, beautiful, college dropout (JG of course) and gets pregnant, but rather than running away with him once he's stolen $15,000 she chooses instead to return to her boring, dreary life with her dimwitted, unattractive husband and be boring and dreary and fucking despondent for the rest of her life. Disappointing. I'm not saying I crave happy endings (although I was expecting a "feel good movie"), but the whole film left loose ends and didn't really seem to have a plot. It was very beautiful though. Jake Gyllenhaal, the very reason I bothered to watch it, was brilliant. Zooey Deschanel (what's with her name?) totally made the whole film: 'Ghouls and goblins, witches and warlocks, wandering these aisles day after day, I put a Halloween curse on your hellish heads'. She's hot too. Also, unsurprisingly, the middle aged, irritating, gabbly woman who worked on the make up counter turned out to be called Gwen. Flattering.

I'm not going to bore you any more with movie reviews because I've done enough of that lately. (Although Charlie & The Chocolate Factory seems to have been turned into some kind of psycho thriller.)

So here's what I did today: tidied up, failed a physics paper, ate lasagne, copied my Franz albums onto my computer, phoned people, worried.

The parents have left. All is peaceful. Yeah.
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P.S. 'Holden was a thief and a disturbed young man and what happened was a sad thing. Perhaps we can learn a lesson from this tragedy like don't steal and don't be disturbed.'