101 Stropping Things to do Wickedly in Prison Naked

Short hand and Stropping

Last night I had a massive strop about short hand. I was doing the home work last minute, and I could just not do it. Nothing was going through my head.

I had also been doing my presentation all day, so my head was screwed. Sometimes things just get on top of you, and all you want to do is stomp your feet.

Funny how this isn’t allowed.

Why aren’t I allowed to scream at the top of my voice and lose all composure if I am not happy? It’s not the done thing I suppose.

It wouldn’t be ‘grown up’ now would it? So I did it anyway, and it made me feel much better.

This morning, I came back to doing it and it was all fine, I just needed 8 hours sleep. Ho hum.

I also find the last half hour of that class the worst half hour of maybe the week. My head is fuzzy, the letters all join together and become one huge blend.

Wicked
I have wanted to see the musical Wicked since approximately forever (timing might not be an accurate assessment of the wanting).

And when I entered the Junction on Tuesday night to start the nights drunken procedures I heard ‘SAAAAAAARAAAAH’.

I did not turn around. There are normally far too many Sarah’s for it to me that’s being called.

Anyway, it happened again, so I turned around and a huge afro full of Nicola (my arts editor) ran towards me.

She told me that I was going to see Wicked for FREE next Wednesday. It has made my life.

Prison
I am finding my room in halls, to be a prison when it comes to working. I need to find other places to work. I think I may go and work underneath the trees in Northwick Park today.

Perhaps being one with nature might help me to become Einstein! I could even become a nudist. If you happen to see a nekkid person stomping on their short hand book, well I’ll say no more.

101 things
I have been reading The Dice man by Luke Rhinehart and decided that my life is not nearly random enough. I have a book called 101 things to do before you die. I am going to pick a number at random from it and then do it.

Of course if this involves anything illegal, then all the better. One of the options is travelling around the world, I might avoid this for now. I will keep you posted.

Birds, smoke and sponges.

I moved to the big smoke about 6 weeks ago.

Life has been much the same and very different since.

The journalism course that I am doing is the thing that is most different. When I did English Literature in York, there was very little contact time with the lecturers and class time was even less.

It is a weird and gratifying experience to have so much contact with the people teaching you, who also have a lot of time for their students.

I realise the hours of the classroom are needed because we are on an intensive one year course to teach something completely different (in some cases) to what we have done before. We are being taught a profession.

I sometimes feel very dazed by all of it; it is easy to become overwhelmed with the information being given to us. All of it is essential, and more importantly it is actually worth knowing. I couldn’t always say the same for Eng Lit.

It’s slowly beginning to seep in though. Learning short hand is becoming easier. At first all I saw were random symbols.

Then I saw images like birds and trees (if you’re pushing the imagination) in those symbols. But now I am beginning to see the formation of words with the birds and the trees.

I am not entirely sure about the writing side of journalism yet. I realise that I must have a niche for writing to some degree or I would not be here. Ho hum.

Sometimes though, I do feel a little out of my depth. Especially when our lecturer Chris Horrie is teaching us, there is a lot of information to absorb. I must become sponge like.

I feel like there is a lot of history and general culture that I have to study as well to maintain a realistic grasp of today’s news. You can’t really have one without the other.

Back to the books then.

Review

For my 'News Agenda' class, we have to review a book, so I decided to do one I had recently read:

Review of the book We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

Kevin Khatchadourian killed seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker and a teacher, shortly before his sixteenth birthday.

It is the mother of Kevin, who narrates the story, through a series of letters to her separated husband.

Eva informs the reader of the life of Kevin, through these letters and wonders how much she is to blame for her son’s ‘flawed’ character.

Shriver explores the theme of Nature versus Nurture and it’s relation to the human psyche. This makes the reader question the motives of the youths who commit high school murders.

It is a frank account of a family’s life through the years, and how we don’t always like the people we love.

It is a great risk to write about something so prominent in the media, especially in America. Yet Shriver pulls it off with her own satirical view of American culture.

The characters are all complicated, layered and trapped within their own personalities.

Shriver investigates her characters limitations and their relation to one another in the confined space of the family home.

Who actually needs to talk about Kevin? Maybe we all do.

Little Blue Men

I saw these little guys last night:

At the New London Theatre in Convent Garden. They're called 'The Blue Man Group'. I think the best way to describe it is performance art. This is how they started off, as street performers.

The show mainly consists of percussion, drama and comedy. There's a huge audience participation happening in the show. At one point, we were all passing masses of toilet roll from the back of the audience to the stage. A stream of the stuff everywhere!

When I looked around everyone's grinning like a loon at the blue dudes, and at everyone else. Pretty much how I must have looked.

At another point, the three of them leave stage, and a TV screen just floats down onto the stage! (perhaps suspended on strings, but hey let’s pretend.) Then a blue face appears on it. Watch for yourself!:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MsdTeCnnRO4


It’s this and much more that makes the whole show bloody brilliant! It’s about the basics of human communication, bringing in modern and ancient forms of it, using paints, drums, lots and lots of music.

On the way home from this show, I was left with a stupid grin on my face. They make you feel like children because this is exactly how they act! It's brilliant.

You have to see this show!

I am interviewing them this Thursday for the student magazine. Wheeee.