The "Freeola Customer Forum" forum, which includes Retro Game Reviews, has been archived and is now read-only. You cannot post here or create a new thread or review on this forum.
I feel vaguely inspired to write a personal topic on here partly I guess for some form of catharsis and partly because I don't want to appear as an aloof film-obsessed obscurantist with a grin...
Have you ever wondered what makes life worthwhile? Is it really earning a vast sum of money for a doing a job that bores you, having gone through the education system doing what is required? I feel that's the way I'm heading and it frightens me... I'm in my final year at school, sitting a-levels in the summer and it's becoming more and more stressful to the point that I can barely keep up with all this work they keep throwing at me. At the moment I'm attempting to juggle French, English, History and Economics and the amount of essays that entails is horrendous and so disillusioning. I barely have time to do the things that interest me.
One thing does make all of this bearable though, and that's my occasional girlfriend Alicia. Occasional because we met on holiday many years ago and she lives in Texas, America meaning that we meet infrequently, to say the least. Long-distance relationships are hell sometimes. E-mail was a godsend because it meant that we could talk everyday instead of relying on infrequent phonecalls and letters. But sometimes finding the right words and meaning is so much harder than if the person's actually with you.
You might ask why such dedication? Well, she's like me in so many ways.. The last time I was in America she couldn't come to see me because she was in a play running for the exact duration of my stay (and I was in Washington making it a bit of a logistical nightmare) so we ended up talking for hours on the phone. One call lasted six hours, and yet it passed in no time at all, and I've never really talked for so long with anyone else so effortlessly. I mean try talking one on one to another person for even an hour and the conversation starts to lull after a while, but for us it was different. And she's beautiful in so many ways I can't count them all. She'll say something without even thinking that is more profoundly beautiful than anything anyone's ever said to you before.
She's coming over here in the Summer and I'm beginning to get very nervous about it because I haven't seen her for what seems like eons. And I know that whatever fleeting moments we have together are going to mean more to me than the sum of my life in the past year. You see, the only times I feel completely secure in myself and oblivious of everything around me is when I'm with her or talking to her. And it sounds so terribly clichéd but love really is one of the only things that can make anything worthwhile. I could justify pretty much any avenue my life takes so long as it meant she would be happy and that is what would make me happy. She also has impeccable taste and likes Kevin Smith films.
She's the reason that I wake up every morning and the last thought of every day and so I can't really begin to describe her within a single post so I'll move on to something else...
My life so far has been pretty uneventful apart from meeting the girl of my dreams on a package holiday. I've spent a lot of it working for school. At 13 I moved to a new school and what with the evanescent minds of 13 year olds I found that after a year some of the people I had thought were my friends weren't really so friendly after all. It started when I was sitting at the front in a Geography lesson and someone behind me shouted to a guy who had just come into the room "Don't sit next to Kieran when he comes" oblivious to the fact that I was in front of him. That wasn't too nice but in the greater scheme of things it was probably beneficial.
For the first time I actually did some work, not because I was particularly conscientious, but because I was getting home from school and really having nothing else to do, particularly at weekends. At times it was heart-breaking when I had to lie to my parents that poeple my age didn't do things on their birthday anymore, when in reality it was because no-one would have come. But this low coincided with meeting Alicia and so things began to look up. And I worked at school and found that I was actually good at some of the subjects I had struggled with, struggled mainly because I was copying the homework out of someone's book in the morning. And in the final GCSE year things really started to buck up. I had been on a history trip to France where my former friends had suddenly decided I wasn't so bad (partly because I was the only one who looked old enough to buy alcohol but there we go). And people also started to accept me for who I was.
GCSE's scared the hell out of me because my mock results had been perfect in grade terms, meaning that the only way was down. I spent a desperately worried summer holiday waiting for those results fearing that I had completely messed up some of the exams. When the results day finally came I was pleasently surprised, and I'll say no more...
Of late school has been a real nightmare. I am trying to do far too much because my delusions of grandeur mean that I have my uppermost targets set on Cambridge. Except UCAS have just informed me of my final offer and it is AAB. Meaning that I now have 5 offers of AAB and so it's Cambridge or bust. This is a stress factor that I do not need at a time when all I really want to be doing is stuff I enjoy.
That's how school should be. Teachers should teach you instead of preaching the syllabus, that cursed thing that says that Dickens must be dissected beyond all recognition for a Grade A and that only those candidates linking factors together can enter the highest mark boundary. My history lessons consist of entirely pointless activities such as going through my coursework and changing every mention of "The American Civil War" into "the War" for the sake of some poxy Edexcel word limit. Wouldn't it be great if you could go to school until you were eighteen and never have to sit a single exam. The teachers could teach you interesting stuff. You could read books for fun instead of marks. At the end of the day is this crazy examination system we have really producing intelligent people? believe me it isn't. I got an A in AS-level History because I compared the rise of Lutherism to "an intricate tapestry". I kid you not, that pushed me into mark band four of the marking scheme, guaranteeing me an A grade mark when backed up with a little evidence. That's just silly.
That's my rant about schooling over. I suppose what I really want to do in life is make films, which sounds like a naive pipe-dream even as I type it. I probably won't at all, after all I'm going to study Law at university if I get my AAB grades. But that's what really gets me going, ever since I had microsoft movie maker I've been obsessed with films, and even my parent's puritanical attitude to films hasn't hindered my obsession. You know that you're obsessed when you start to talk about your DVD "collection" and get all excited about obscure foreign films that no one else has seen or wants to. Films, books and overly long e-mails are what makes me tick. That may fit some people's saddo pigeon-hole but I'm not too bad and if you think I'm sad then I don't really care because I have a beautiful, if not somewhat occasional, girlfriend and I'm happy with who I am.
I do have a desire to actually *do* something though. Something significant. Have you ever had the mad-cap notion that you could change the world? Some of the things that go on in this world of ours make me so incensed. Douglas Hurd came to speak at my school, just after sept. 11 and just before the Americans went into Afghanistan, and said what a good idea it would be to bomb Afghanistan into submission. He then made some joke about how you never want the Chancellor on the war cabinet because he'll just moan about the cost of everything (ha! ha!) and after all who cares about the real men you represent with little plastic figures on your tactical map of the Falklands, who cares if you have to throw one of the unit markers off the map because they've been blown up after walking threw a mine field you pontificating fool. And so I went up to Mr. Hurd after the talk and decided to ask him about the actual benefits of bombing Afghanistan. And let us not forget that Doug is one of the world's most esteemed foreign secretaries (Stuff Henry Kissenger's books on international relations, Doug's contribution to the literary world is "Vote to Kill" - a trashy, sleazy whodunnit set in Westminster) the guy was a piece. An absolute moron. And his answer to my question about his government's own support of the Taliban in the face of the Communist threat and the real merits of replacing the Taliban with a bunch of warring factions masquerading under the misnoma the Northern "Alliance" was to say that you had to be firm.
This is what I want to change and what makes so angry. People don't seem to see that if you keep bombing and warring and fighting and killing you don't solve anything. You only bottle up problems for the next generation. The glorious legacy of George W. Bush will be a new wave of fanatics even more hell bent on inflicting damage on America. Why? Because Bush insists on religious-ising his war against terrorism. He insists on taking out everyone that his father didn't in a sweeping wave of wars that will secure America's oil supply for the next 100 years and the Kyoto treaty can go and get stuffed because America is THE world power and backed up by the moral authority of fighting a war against terrorism.
But who cares? I mean Will won pop idol and GGGGGareth didn't. Geri Halliwell will have a new single out soon and maybe Sven will lead England to a World Cup victory. Evolution. Don't make me laugh. I'm reading, or attempting to read, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs at the moment. It is a series of increasingly more hellish sketches of mad, nightmarish visons (drug-induced because Bill Burroughs tried every drug known to man). But then he reveals at the end that this Dantean vision of hell is in fact our own Earth. The Naked Lunch is when you realise what is on the end of your fork. The naked lunch is something that you consume fully aware of what it *really* is. It's the Westlife single you buy because you genuinely like the song. It's the newspaper you read aware of what has been ommitted because of the owner's TV interests in China. He uses addiciton as a powerful metaphor because people criticise junkies for being wasters after all. People have read that book and dismissed it as drug-induced ramblings. But the junkies are at least eating the naked lunch, fully aware that they have their next hit because it will make them feel better. The people who cannot get through the week without Pop idol, those that phone into TV programs to ask a question to the s-club idols, those that sit in front of the televison just watching, are they eating the naked lunch?
People don't seem to care. After all who cares what's going on in the world if you can just flick on your TV and it'll tell you that everything's all right again. I've got nothing against Pop Idol but when my sister doesn't know who's on trial for war crimes and does know whowon Pop Idol it makes me sad.
So the time is now 1:47am, I should have written an essay on Volpone but you lucky people got to see inside my head for a little while. Well I'll have to leave it there I'm afraid because Alicia has just come on-line (if you thought that was a pun you have an exceptionally dirty mind) and I'm going to talk to her.
goodnight and remeber that some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. (George Bernard Shaw) I'm probably somewhere in between.
Have you ever wondered what makes life worthwhile? Is it really earning a vast sum of money for a doing a job that bores you, having gone through the education system doing what is required? I feel that's the way I'm heading and it frightens me... I'm in my final year at school, sitting a-levels in the summer and it's becoming more and more stressful to the point that I can barely keep up with all this work they keep throwing at me. At the moment I'm attempting to juggle French, English, History and Economics and the amount of essays that entails is horrendous and so disillusioning. I barely have time to do the things that interest me.
One thing does make all of this bearable though, and that's my occasional girlfriend Alicia. Occasional because we met on holiday many years ago and she lives in Texas, America meaning that we meet infrequently, to say the least. Long-distance relationships are hell sometimes. E-mail was a godsend because it meant that we could talk everyday instead of relying on infrequent phonecalls and letters. But sometimes finding the right words and meaning is so much harder than if the person's actually with you.
You might ask why such dedication? Well, she's like me in so many ways.. The last time I was in America she couldn't come to see me because she was in a play running for the exact duration of my stay (and I was in Washington making it a bit of a logistical nightmare) so we ended up talking for hours on the phone. One call lasted six hours, and yet it passed in no time at all, and I've never really talked for so long with anyone else so effortlessly. I mean try talking one on one to another person for even an hour and the conversation starts to lull after a while, but for us it was different. And she's beautiful in so many ways I can't count them all. She'll say something without even thinking that is more profoundly beautiful than anything anyone's ever said to you before.
She's coming over here in the Summer and I'm beginning to get very nervous about it because I haven't seen her for what seems like eons. And I know that whatever fleeting moments we have together are going to mean more to me than the sum of my life in the past year. You see, the only times I feel completely secure in myself and oblivious of everything around me is when I'm with her or talking to her. And it sounds so terribly clichéd but love really is one of the only things that can make anything worthwhile. I could justify pretty much any avenue my life takes so long as it meant she would be happy and that is what would make me happy. She also has impeccable taste and likes Kevin Smith films.
She's the reason that I wake up every morning and the last thought of every day and so I can't really begin to describe her within a single post so I'll move on to something else...
My life so far has been pretty uneventful apart from meeting the girl of my dreams on a package holiday. I've spent a lot of it working for school. At 13 I moved to a new school and what with the evanescent minds of 13 year olds I found that after a year some of the people I had thought were my friends weren't really so friendly after all. It started when I was sitting at the front in a Geography lesson and someone behind me shouted to a guy who had just come into the room "Don't sit next to Kieran when he comes" oblivious to the fact that I was in front of him. That wasn't too nice but in the greater scheme of things it was probably beneficial.
For the first time I actually did some work, not because I was particularly conscientious, but because I was getting home from school and really having nothing else to do, particularly at weekends. At times it was heart-breaking when I had to lie to my parents that poeple my age didn't do things on their birthday anymore, when in reality it was because no-one would have come. But this low coincided with meeting Alicia and so things began to look up. And I worked at school and found that I was actually good at some of the subjects I had struggled with, struggled mainly because I was copying the homework out of someone's book in the morning. And in the final GCSE year things really started to buck up. I had been on a history trip to France where my former friends had suddenly decided I wasn't so bad (partly because I was the only one who looked old enough to buy alcohol but there we go). And people also started to accept me for who I was.
GCSE's scared the hell out of me because my mock results had been perfect in grade terms, meaning that the only way was down. I spent a desperately worried summer holiday waiting for those results fearing that I had completely messed up some of the exams. When the results day finally came I was pleasently surprised, and I'll say no more...
Of late school has been a real nightmare. I am trying to do far too much because my delusions of grandeur mean that I have my uppermost targets set on Cambridge. Except UCAS have just informed me of my final offer and it is AAB. Meaning that I now have 5 offers of AAB and so it's Cambridge or bust. This is a stress factor that I do not need at a time when all I really want to be doing is stuff I enjoy.
That's how school should be. Teachers should teach you instead of preaching the syllabus, that cursed thing that says that Dickens must be dissected beyond all recognition for a Grade A and that only those candidates linking factors together can enter the highest mark boundary. My history lessons consist of entirely pointless activities such as going through my coursework and changing every mention of "The American Civil War" into "the War" for the sake of some poxy Edexcel word limit. Wouldn't it be great if you could go to school until you were eighteen and never have to sit a single exam. The teachers could teach you interesting stuff. You could read books for fun instead of marks. At the end of the day is this crazy examination system we have really producing intelligent people? believe me it isn't. I got an A in AS-level History because I compared the rise of Lutherism to "an intricate tapestry". I kid you not, that pushed me into mark band four of the marking scheme, guaranteeing me an A grade mark when backed up with a little evidence. That's just silly.
That's my rant about schooling over. I suppose what I really want to do in life is make films, which sounds like a naive pipe-dream even as I type it. I probably won't at all, after all I'm going to study Law at university if I get my AAB grades. But that's what really gets me going, ever since I had microsoft movie maker I've been obsessed with films, and even my parent's puritanical attitude to films hasn't hindered my obsession. You know that you're obsessed when you start to talk about your DVD "collection" and get all excited about obscure foreign films that no one else has seen or wants to. Films, books and overly long e-mails are what makes me tick. That may fit some people's saddo pigeon-hole but I'm not too bad and if you think I'm sad then I don't really care because I have a beautiful, if not somewhat occasional, girlfriend and I'm happy with who I am.
I do have a desire to actually *do* something though. Something significant. Have you ever had the mad-cap notion that you could change the world? Some of the things that go on in this world of ours make me so incensed. Douglas Hurd came to speak at my school, just after sept. 11 and just before the Americans went into Afghanistan, and said what a good idea it would be to bomb Afghanistan into submission. He then made some joke about how you never want the Chancellor on the war cabinet because he'll just moan about the cost of everything (ha! ha!) and after all who cares about the real men you represent with little plastic figures on your tactical map of the Falklands, who cares if you have to throw one of the unit markers off the map because they've been blown up after walking threw a mine field you pontificating fool. And so I went up to Mr. Hurd after the talk and decided to ask him about the actual benefits of bombing Afghanistan. And let us not forget that Doug is one of the world's most esteemed foreign secretaries (Stuff Henry Kissenger's books on international relations, Doug's contribution to the literary world is "Vote to Kill" - a trashy, sleazy whodunnit set in Westminster) the guy was a piece. An absolute moron. And his answer to my question about his government's own support of the Taliban in the face of the Communist threat and the real merits of replacing the Taliban with a bunch of warring factions masquerading under the misnoma the Northern "Alliance" was to say that you had to be firm.
This is what I want to change and what makes so angry. People don't seem to see that if you keep bombing and warring and fighting and killing you don't solve anything. You only bottle up problems for the next generation. The glorious legacy of George W. Bush will be a new wave of fanatics even more hell bent on inflicting damage on America. Why? Because Bush insists on religious-ising his war against terrorism. He insists on taking out everyone that his father didn't in a sweeping wave of wars that will secure America's oil supply for the next 100 years and the Kyoto treaty can go and get stuffed because America is THE world power and backed up by the moral authority of fighting a war against terrorism.
But who cares? I mean Will won pop idol and GGGGGareth didn't. Geri Halliwell will have a new single out soon and maybe Sven will lead England to a World Cup victory. Evolution. Don't make me laugh. I'm reading, or attempting to read, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs at the moment. It is a series of increasingly more hellish sketches of mad, nightmarish visons (drug-induced because Bill Burroughs tried every drug known to man). But then he reveals at the end that this Dantean vision of hell is in fact our own Earth. The Naked Lunch is when you realise what is on the end of your fork. The naked lunch is something that you consume fully aware of what it *really* is. It's the Westlife single you buy because you genuinely like the song. It's the newspaper you read aware of what has been ommitted because of the owner's TV interests in China. He uses addiciton as a powerful metaphor because people criticise junkies for being wasters after all. People have read that book and dismissed it as drug-induced ramblings. But the junkies are at least eating the naked lunch, fully aware that they have their next hit because it will make them feel better. The people who cannot get through the week without Pop idol, those that phone into TV programs to ask a question to the s-club idols, those that sit in front of the televison just watching, are they eating the naked lunch?
People don't seem to care. After all who cares what's going on in the world if you can just flick on your TV and it'll tell you that everything's all right again. I've got nothing against Pop Idol but when my sister doesn't know who's on trial for war crimes and does know whowon Pop Idol it makes me sad.
So the time is now 1:47am, I should have written an essay on Volpone but you lucky people got to see inside my head for a little while. Well I'll have to leave it there I'm afraid because Alicia has just come on-line (if you thought that was a pun you have an exceptionally dirty mind) and I'm going to talk to her.
goodnight and remeber that some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. (George Bernard Shaw) I'm probably somewhere in between.
Page:
Its Half 3 in the morning, normally I would never read anything that long around here, but your a good writer so I thought I might as well...
I'm glad to say it was a good read. I havnt really got much to say, sorry. Only really that I'm suffering from a bit of stress at the moment. Final year of A-levels and all. Hopefully I'll study Business Economics at Uni but I need some good grades. CCC is what I need. At the moment CEU is my prediction, and it really aint doing much for my morale...I've just lost the motivation really, not trying hard enough. Surely the thought of working in a supermarket for the rest of my life is motivation enough to not fail?! I dunno, maybe I aint being realistic enough.
Anyway, cheers for the post. Good luck to ya. We all need it.
I'm glad to say it was a good read. I havnt really got much to say, sorry. Only really that I'm suffering from a bit of stress at the moment. Final year of A-levels and all. Hopefully I'll study Business Economics at Uni but I need some good grades. CCC is what I need. At the moment CEU is my prediction, and it really aint doing much for my morale...I've just lost the motivation really, not trying hard enough. Surely the thought of working in a supermarket for the rest of my life is motivation enough to not fail?! I dunno, maybe I aint being realistic enough.
Anyway, cheers for the post. Good luck to ya. We all need it.
I feel vaguely inspired to write a personal topic on here partly I guess for some form of catharsis and partly because I don't want to appear as an aloof film-obsessed obscurantist with a grin...
Have you ever wondered what makes life worthwhile? Is it really earning a vast sum of money for a doing a job that bores you, having gone through the education system doing what is required? I feel that's the way I'm heading and it frightens me... I'm in my final year at school, sitting a-levels in the summer and it's becoming more and more stressful to the point that I can barely keep up with all this work they keep throwing at me. At the moment I'm attempting to juggle French, English, History and Economics and the amount of essays that entails is horrendous and so disillusioning. I barely have time to do the things that interest me.
One thing does make all of this bearable though, and that's my occasional girlfriend Alicia. Occasional because we met on holiday many years ago and she lives in Texas, America meaning that we meet infrequently, to say the least. Long-distance relationships are hell sometimes. E-mail was a godsend because it meant that we could talk everyday instead of relying on infrequent phonecalls and letters. But sometimes finding the right words and meaning is so much harder than if the person's actually with you.
You might ask why such dedication? Well, she's like me in so many ways.. The last time I was in America she couldn't come to see me because she was in a play running for the exact duration of my stay (and I was in Washington making it a bit of a logistical nightmare) so we ended up talking for hours on the phone. One call lasted six hours, and yet it passed in no time at all, and I've never really talked for so long with anyone else so effortlessly. I mean try talking one on one to another person for even an hour and the conversation starts to lull after a while, but for us it was different. And she's beautiful in so many ways I can't count them all. She'll say something without even thinking that is more profoundly beautiful than anything anyone's ever said to you before.
She's coming over here in the Summer and I'm beginning to get very nervous about it because I haven't seen her for what seems like eons. And I know that whatever fleeting moments we have together are going to mean more to me than the sum of my life in the past year. You see, the only times I feel completely secure in myself and oblivious of everything around me is when I'm with her or talking to her. And it sounds so terribly clichéd but love really is one of the only things that can make anything worthwhile. I could justify pretty much any avenue my life takes so long as it meant she would be happy and that is what would make me happy. She also has impeccable taste and likes Kevin Smith films.
She's the reason that I wake up every morning and the last thought of every day and so I can't really begin to describe her within a single post so I'll move on to something else...
My life so far has been pretty uneventful apart from meeting the girl of my dreams on a package holiday. I've spent a lot of it working for school. At 13 I moved to a new school and what with the evanescent minds of 13 year olds I found that after a year some of the people I had thought were my friends weren't really so friendly after all. It started when I was sitting at the front in a Geography lesson and someone behind me shouted to a guy who had just come into the room "Don't sit next to Kieran when he comes" oblivious to the fact that I was in front of him. That wasn't too nice but in the greater scheme of things it was probably beneficial.
For the first time I actually did some work, not because I was particularly conscientious, but because I was getting home from school and really having nothing else to do, particularly at weekends. At times it was heart-breaking when I had to lie to my parents that poeple my age didn't do things on their birthday anymore, when in reality it was because no-one would have come. But this low coincided with meeting Alicia and so things began to look up. And I worked at school and found that I was actually good at some of the subjects I had struggled with, struggled mainly because I was copying the homework out of someone's book in the morning. And in the final GCSE year things really started to buck up. I had been on a history trip to France where my former friends had suddenly decided I wasn't so bad (partly because I was the only one who looked old enough to buy alcohol but there we go). And people also started to accept me for who I was.
GCSE's scared the hell out of me because my mock results had been perfect in grade terms, meaning that the only way was down. I spent a desperately worried summer holiday waiting for those results fearing that I had completely messed up some of the exams. When the results day finally came I was pleasently surprised, and I'll say no more...
Of late school has been a real nightmare. I am trying to do far too much because my delusions of grandeur mean that I have my uppermost targets set on Cambridge. Except UCAS have just informed me of my final offer and it is AAB. Meaning that I now have 5 offers of AAB and so it's Cambridge or bust. This is a stress factor that I do not need at a time when all I really want to be doing is stuff I enjoy.
That's how school should be. Teachers should teach you instead of preaching the syllabus, that cursed thing that says that Dickens must be dissected beyond all recognition for a Grade A and that only those candidates linking factors together can enter the highest mark boundary. My history lessons consist of entirely pointless activities such as going through my coursework and changing every mention of "The American Civil War" into "the War" for the sake of some poxy Edexcel word limit. Wouldn't it be great if you could go to school until you were eighteen and never have to sit a single exam. The teachers could teach you interesting stuff. You could read books for fun instead of marks. At the end of the day is this crazy examination system we have really producing intelligent people? believe me it isn't. I got an A in AS-level History because I compared the rise of Lutherism to "an intricate tapestry". I kid you not, that pushed me into mark band four of the marking scheme, guaranteeing me an A grade mark when backed up with a little evidence. That's just silly.
That's my rant about schooling over. I suppose what I really want to do in life is make films, which sounds like a naive pipe-dream even as I type it. I probably won't at all, after all I'm going to study Law at university if I get my AAB grades. But that's what really gets me going, ever since I had microsoft movie maker I've been obsessed with films, and even my parent's puritanical attitude to films hasn't hindered my obsession. You know that you're obsessed when you start to talk about your DVD "collection" and get all excited about obscure foreign films that no one else has seen or wants to. Films, books and overly long e-mails are what makes me tick. That may fit some people's saddo pigeon-hole but I'm not too bad and if you think I'm sad then I don't really care because I have a beautiful, if not somewhat occasional, girlfriend and I'm happy with who I am.
I do have a desire to actually *do* something though. Something significant. Have you ever had the mad-cap notion that you could change the world? Some of the things that go on in this world of ours make me so incensed. Douglas Hurd came to speak at my school, just after sept. 11 and just before the Americans went into Afghanistan, and said what a good idea it would be to bomb Afghanistan into submission. He then made some joke about how you never want the Chancellor on the war cabinet because he'll just moan about the cost of everything (ha! ha!) and after all who cares about the real men you represent with little plastic figures on your tactical map of the Falklands, who cares if you have to throw one of the unit markers off the map because they've been blown up after walking threw a mine field you pontificating fool. And so I went up to Mr. Hurd after the talk and decided to ask him about the actual benefits of bombing Afghanistan. And let us not forget that Doug is one of the world's most esteemed foreign secretaries (Stuff Henry Kissenger's books on international relations, Doug's contribution to the literary world is "Vote to Kill" - a trashy, sleazy whodunnit set in Westminster) the guy was a piece. An absolute moron. And his answer to my question about his government's own support of the Taliban in the face of the Communist threat and the real merits of replacing the Taliban with a bunch of warring factions masquerading under the misnoma the Northern "Alliance" was to say that you had to be firm.
This is what I want to change and what makes so angry. People don't seem to see that if you keep bombing and warring and fighting and killing you don't solve anything. You only bottle up problems for the next generation. The glorious legacy of George W. Bush will be a new wave of fanatics even more hell bent on inflicting damage on America. Why? Because Bush insists on religious-ising his war against terrorism. He insists on taking out everyone that his father didn't in a sweeping wave of wars that will secure America's oil supply for the next 100 years and the Kyoto treaty can go and get stuffed because America is THE world power and backed up by the moral authority of fighting a war against terrorism.
But who cares? I mean Will won pop idol and GGGGGareth didn't. Geri Halliwell will have a new single out soon and maybe Sven will lead England to a World Cup victory. Evolution. Don't make me laugh. I'm reading, or attempting to read, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs at the moment. It is a series of increasingly more hellish sketches of mad, nightmarish visons (drug-induced because Bill Burroughs tried every drug known to man). But then he reveals at the end that this Dantean vision of hell is in fact our own Earth. The Naked Lunch is when you realise what is on the end of your fork. The naked lunch is something that you consume fully aware of what it *really* is. It's the Westlife single you buy because you genuinely like the song. It's the newspaper you read aware of what has been ommitted because of the owner's TV interests in China. He uses addiciton as a powerful metaphor because people criticise junkies for being wasters after all. People have read that book and dismissed it as drug-induced ramblings. But the junkies are at least eating the naked lunch, fully aware that they have their next hit because it will make them feel better. The people who cannot get through the week without Pop idol, those that phone into TV programs to ask a question to the s-club idols, those that sit in front of the televison just watching, are they eating the naked lunch?
People don't seem to care. After all who cares what's going on in the world if you can just flick on your TV and it'll tell you that everything's all right again. I've got nothing against Pop Idol but when my sister doesn't know who's on trial for war crimes and does know whowon Pop Idol it makes me sad.
So the time is now 1:47am, I should have written an essay on Volpone but you lucky people got to see inside my head for a little while. Well I'll have to leave it there I'm afraid because Alicia has just come on-line (if you thought that was a pun you have an exceptionally dirty mind) and I'm going to talk to her.
goodnight and remeber that some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. (George Bernard Shaw) I'm probably somewhere in between.
Have you ever wondered what makes life worthwhile? Is it really earning a vast sum of money for a doing a job that bores you, having gone through the education system doing what is required? I feel that's the way I'm heading and it frightens me... I'm in my final year at school, sitting a-levels in the summer and it's becoming more and more stressful to the point that I can barely keep up with all this work they keep throwing at me. At the moment I'm attempting to juggle French, English, History and Economics and the amount of essays that entails is horrendous and so disillusioning. I barely have time to do the things that interest me.
One thing does make all of this bearable though, and that's my occasional girlfriend Alicia. Occasional because we met on holiday many years ago and she lives in Texas, America meaning that we meet infrequently, to say the least. Long-distance relationships are hell sometimes. E-mail was a godsend because it meant that we could talk everyday instead of relying on infrequent phonecalls and letters. But sometimes finding the right words and meaning is so much harder than if the person's actually with you.
You might ask why such dedication? Well, she's like me in so many ways.. The last time I was in America she couldn't come to see me because she was in a play running for the exact duration of my stay (and I was in Washington making it a bit of a logistical nightmare) so we ended up talking for hours on the phone. One call lasted six hours, and yet it passed in no time at all, and I've never really talked for so long with anyone else so effortlessly. I mean try talking one on one to another person for even an hour and the conversation starts to lull after a while, but for us it was different. And she's beautiful in so many ways I can't count them all. She'll say something without even thinking that is more profoundly beautiful than anything anyone's ever said to you before.
She's coming over here in the Summer and I'm beginning to get very nervous about it because I haven't seen her for what seems like eons. And I know that whatever fleeting moments we have together are going to mean more to me than the sum of my life in the past year. You see, the only times I feel completely secure in myself and oblivious of everything around me is when I'm with her or talking to her. And it sounds so terribly clichéd but love really is one of the only things that can make anything worthwhile. I could justify pretty much any avenue my life takes so long as it meant she would be happy and that is what would make me happy. She also has impeccable taste and likes Kevin Smith films.
She's the reason that I wake up every morning and the last thought of every day and so I can't really begin to describe her within a single post so I'll move on to something else...
My life so far has been pretty uneventful apart from meeting the girl of my dreams on a package holiday. I've spent a lot of it working for school. At 13 I moved to a new school and what with the evanescent minds of 13 year olds I found that after a year some of the people I had thought were my friends weren't really so friendly after all. It started when I was sitting at the front in a Geography lesson and someone behind me shouted to a guy who had just come into the room "Don't sit next to Kieran when he comes" oblivious to the fact that I was in front of him. That wasn't too nice but in the greater scheme of things it was probably beneficial.
For the first time I actually did some work, not because I was particularly conscientious, but because I was getting home from school and really having nothing else to do, particularly at weekends. At times it was heart-breaking when I had to lie to my parents that poeple my age didn't do things on their birthday anymore, when in reality it was because no-one would have come. But this low coincided with meeting Alicia and so things began to look up. And I worked at school and found that I was actually good at some of the subjects I had struggled with, struggled mainly because I was copying the homework out of someone's book in the morning. And in the final GCSE year things really started to buck up. I had been on a history trip to France where my former friends had suddenly decided I wasn't so bad (partly because I was the only one who looked old enough to buy alcohol but there we go). And people also started to accept me for who I was.
GCSE's scared the hell out of me because my mock results had been perfect in grade terms, meaning that the only way was down. I spent a desperately worried summer holiday waiting for those results fearing that I had completely messed up some of the exams. When the results day finally came I was pleasently surprised, and I'll say no more...
Of late school has been a real nightmare. I am trying to do far too much because my delusions of grandeur mean that I have my uppermost targets set on Cambridge. Except UCAS have just informed me of my final offer and it is AAB. Meaning that I now have 5 offers of AAB and so it's Cambridge or bust. This is a stress factor that I do not need at a time when all I really want to be doing is stuff I enjoy.
That's how school should be. Teachers should teach you instead of preaching the syllabus, that cursed thing that says that Dickens must be dissected beyond all recognition for a Grade A and that only those candidates linking factors together can enter the highest mark boundary. My history lessons consist of entirely pointless activities such as going through my coursework and changing every mention of "The American Civil War" into "the War" for the sake of some poxy Edexcel word limit. Wouldn't it be great if you could go to school until you were eighteen and never have to sit a single exam. The teachers could teach you interesting stuff. You could read books for fun instead of marks. At the end of the day is this crazy examination system we have really producing intelligent people? believe me it isn't. I got an A in AS-level History because I compared the rise of Lutherism to "an intricate tapestry". I kid you not, that pushed me into mark band four of the marking scheme, guaranteeing me an A grade mark when backed up with a little evidence. That's just silly.
That's my rant about schooling over. I suppose what I really want to do in life is make films, which sounds like a naive pipe-dream even as I type it. I probably won't at all, after all I'm going to study Law at university if I get my AAB grades. But that's what really gets me going, ever since I had microsoft movie maker I've been obsessed with films, and even my parent's puritanical attitude to films hasn't hindered my obsession. You know that you're obsessed when you start to talk about your DVD "collection" and get all excited about obscure foreign films that no one else has seen or wants to. Films, books and overly long e-mails are what makes me tick. That may fit some people's saddo pigeon-hole but I'm not too bad and if you think I'm sad then I don't really care because I have a beautiful, if not somewhat occasional, girlfriend and I'm happy with who I am.
I do have a desire to actually *do* something though. Something significant. Have you ever had the mad-cap notion that you could change the world? Some of the things that go on in this world of ours make me so incensed. Douglas Hurd came to speak at my school, just after sept. 11 and just before the Americans went into Afghanistan, and said what a good idea it would be to bomb Afghanistan into submission. He then made some joke about how you never want the Chancellor on the war cabinet because he'll just moan about the cost of everything (ha! ha!) and after all who cares about the real men you represent with little plastic figures on your tactical map of the Falklands, who cares if you have to throw one of the unit markers off the map because they've been blown up after walking threw a mine field you pontificating fool. And so I went up to Mr. Hurd after the talk and decided to ask him about the actual benefits of bombing Afghanistan. And let us not forget that Doug is one of the world's most esteemed foreign secretaries (Stuff Henry Kissenger's books on international relations, Doug's contribution to the literary world is "Vote to Kill" - a trashy, sleazy whodunnit set in Westminster) the guy was a piece. An absolute moron. And his answer to my question about his government's own support of the Taliban in the face of the Communist threat and the real merits of replacing the Taliban with a bunch of warring factions masquerading under the misnoma the Northern "Alliance" was to say that you had to be firm.
This is what I want to change and what makes so angry. People don't seem to see that if you keep bombing and warring and fighting and killing you don't solve anything. You only bottle up problems for the next generation. The glorious legacy of George W. Bush will be a new wave of fanatics even more hell bent on inflicting damage on America. Why? Because Bush insists on religious-ising his war against terrorism. He insists on taking out everyone that his father didn't in a sweeping wave of wars that will secure America's oil supply for the next 100 years and the Kyoto treaty can go and get stuffed because America is THE world power and backed up by the moral authority of fighting a war against terrorism.
But who cares? I mean Will won pop idol and GGGGGareth didn't. Geri Halliwell will have a new single out soon and maybe Sven will lead England to a World Cup victory. Evolution. Don't make me laugh. I'm reading, or attempting to read, Naked Lunch by William Burroughs at the moment. It is a series of increasingly more hellish sketches of mad, nightmarish visons (drug-induced because Bill Burroughs tried every drug known to man). But then he reveals at the end that this Dantean vision of hell is in fact our own Earth. The Naked Lunch is when you realise what is on the end of your fork. The naked lunch is something that you consume fully aware of what it *really* is. It's the Westlife single you buy because you genuinely like the song. It's the newspaper you read aware of what has been ommitted because of the owner's TV interests in China. He uses addiciton as a powerful metaphor because people criticise junkies for being wasters after all. People have read that book and dismissed it as drug-induced ramblings. But the junkies are at least eating the naked lunch, fully aware that they have their next hit because it will make them feel better. The people who cannot get through the week without Pop idol, those that phone into TV programs to ask a question to the s-club idols, those that sit in front of the televison just watching, are they eating the naked lunch?
People don't seem to care. After all who cares what's going on in the world if you can just flick on your TV and it'll tell you that everything's all right again. I've got nothing against Pop Idol but when my sister doesn't know who's on trial for war crimes and does know whowon Pop Idol it makes me sad.
So the time is now 1:47am, I should have written an essay on Volpone but you lucky people got to see inside my head for a little while. Well I'll have to leave it there I'm afraid because Alicia has just come on-line (if you thought that was a pun you have an exceptionally dirty mind) and I'm going to talk to her.
goodnight and remeber that some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not. (George Bernard Shaw) I'm probably somewhere in between.
Page: