MONDAY #1

(By the time I post this it'll be Tuesday morning, but let's pretend Monday stretches until sunrise, like in Somalia where 0:00 is when the sun rises and not the middle of the night. Cool idea, right? O I could just admit that I only had this idea when Monday was mostly over.)

I've decided to try and do a post here every Monday about good things. Monday can seem like an annoying, shitty day; the weekend's gone, and there's another boring week ahead. So I've decided to take a bit of a cue from Gala Darling, who does a list of lovely things every Thursday (TiLT) and instead do a similar sort of list ever Monday, of awesome things that Monday cannot ruin.

I can't think of a snappy name for it. How about just MONDAY as a title? Right. Anyway, on with the list.


MY IPOD. I know, I know. Everyone else either already has one and has had one for ages, or thinks they're lame and not worth getting excited over. I haven't had an mp3 player since May or so, and let me tell you, I much prefer having one. Sure, I could act cool and 1990s carrying my old rubbish CD player on the bus, but every time it moves it stops for a second and there's only so many times you want to listen to the same couple of CDs that you can carry about with you. I like giving my life a lame soundtrack, you know? I also like listening to music on headphones, and I haven't even had headphones for a while, since I tend to buy books instead of other things that I need when I have money (which is not often). I also like watching television shows on my ipod - I know it's weird, since the screen's so small... but it's just nice.

• THE BELIEVER. I'm not sure if it's cool to like this or not since it probably screams pretentious or lame-hipster, but I love it - it's always so interesting, even when I know nothing about the articles it's got in it, and they're long and detailed and the design of it is so gorgeous. I have four issues, and they're expensive for me to get but I want more. They're my favourite magazines, more like literary journals, and I need more, more more more. I also want to start reading McSweeney's, but jesus is it expensive. If anyone feels like making a stranger a generous gift, I would be yours for a subscription to either of these.
• BLEAK HOUSE. So I had this on my reading list for university and it seemed too long and too dull and so I moaned about it all the time, barely read any of it, and was generally an annoying idiot. Then it got to about a week ago and I realised I should really finish it. I read the last 600+ pages over the last week, like 200 or so yesterday, and it's just my favourite thing now. Clearly the best novel I've read so far from my Victorian Literature reading list, and it's just brilliant. All (or most of) the characters are fully-rounded, distinct, interesting and either funny, sweet, horrible or sad. Often a mix.
  
• PLANNING. I start university in less than a week now, Monday the 6th, and it's all incredibly exciting. I need to tidy my room here and start getting my stuff together. I need to buy things to take with me. My room will be much less cluttered than my room here, it'll be five flights of stairs up and it'll be warm and have a window seat. There are massive pinboards on the walls. I honestly just cannot wait to be in it!

• AUTUMN. It's here now. It's getting colder so I can wear more layers and huddle up in my duvets (yes, I have two - shut up, okay?!) and it gets dark early which I like and it's just generally great. Soon it'll be time to wear my winter coat, and I love my winter coat so I am generally happy about this. Bonfire night is only a month and a few days away.

Other stuff is awesome too, but I think I'll end the post now. If anyone is reading this then... sorry it's not Monday any more, but feel free to reply to this with stuff that helps take away the midweek blues, if you want? Or with whatever!

READING LIST

I'm writing a post now because I said that I would in my previous post and if I left that as the most recent one then I would just confuse everyone since I make a big deal out of how I don't want people to read just that and then hate me for being inane, self-deprecating in a quite annoying way and ultimately pointless. Since you shouldn't really have a blog just so that you can update it with posts about how rubbish you are at blogging.

I AM DOING IT AGAIN. Wow. Okay, moving on swiftly: yesterday I got my third reading list emailed to me. I think this is my final reading list for Michaelmas (for the unindoctrinated, this is the autumn/winter term at my university) since there are three papers so three reading lists, while terrifying, seems to make sense.

I got my first of the three just over a month ago now, on about the 17th or 18th of August (I think). The three papers I'm doing are Victorian Literature, An Introduction To Literary Studies (or something, it's got a name like that and it's about theory and criticism I think) and Medieval Literature, where we get to choose between Middle and Old English. I'm going with Old English, I think, but I don't decide until I've done a couple of classes in each.

There's little point in keeping it massively secret so I might as well say where I'm going, which is Oxford. The reading lists, together and separately, are all rather formidable; if I was going to read all the primary Victorian texts alone, disregarding all the other stuff, then we'd be looking at a book every two days or something from this point on. I have not read as many so far as I would have liked. I am currently working through Bleak House... I kind of like it, actually, but it is not going to be finished in two days.

I'm liking the look of the lit theory, although I haven't really done much reading for that yet (since the Victorian list goes on about everything being vital and the theory list being recommended for dipping into I think I've decided to prioritise) and I'm also really, sadly excited about the medieval stuff, possibly largely because the other day I remembered studying Chaucer's The Miller's Tale and decided to send friends who aren't Middle English-nerds some funny bits of the tale, such as when Absolon works out that he didn't kiss Alison's face because women don't have beards and when he keeps bringing her all the food and money in a really hilarious, yet stupid, way. My friends were bemused, I was laughing. I want to do Old English because I hear all the cool kids know dead languages, and also it may be my only chance to lean about the hronrad or the other cultural references that other friends of mine sometimes make to anglo-saxon while I desperately try to look like I'm totally up on my medieval knowledge. Anon, anon, anon. See what I did there? I'll be writing blog posts in runes in no time, just you wait.

Know what else I've discovered? I do not get on with most of the Victorians. My Mum (who I promised I'd be in bed hours ago - sorry, Mum! I just wasn't tired!) lovea the Victorians for some weird reasons of her own and I know a lot of people actually like the Bronte sisters three (top points if you can spot the cultural reference there, I'm on fire tonight with my indie cred) and all the other people who wrote about governesses trapped in their own biblical, fiery nightmare but I don't want to sleep with Heathcliff or Mr Rochester (which a disturbing amount of people do, if the number of facebook groups devoted to them is any indication) and would rather not read anything where every page has to contain at least three references to hell or fire (or preferably both, which a healthy amount of good piety thrown in) for the author to be able to move on. OKAY, YOU GOT ME. Jane Eyre isn't quite that bad. I was exaggerating for comic effect. I don't think it worked though, sorry.

I do like what I've read of Hopkins, largely because he was really weird and doesn't read like yr typical Victorian - there's all that sprung rhythm (which I still don't really understand, although I also don't really get how people spot whether something's iambic or trochaic etc., so really, I'm a bit fucked when it comes to analysing the metrical aspect of poetry) and wanting to have sex with Jesus and all that other stuff. I prefer him to the other Victoriana that I have read, although, as I said, I am enjoying Bleak House. I'm not sure if I'd be able to analyse Dickens though, there's too much there! In this way maybe i'll be better at the Brontes. I guess I will find out with time.

My problem is that I finish a book by one of the Victorians and then want to read something different - I generally have quite a short attention span and so I don't want to just read the same sort of stuff over and over. I got a Glyn Maxwell book that I ordered second-hand in the post today, his debut collection, Tales of the Mayor's Son. It's incredible, he's got to be one of my favourite poets ever.

I start university in 16 days, or something. It now seems quite close, although loads of my friends go tomorrow (/today, since it's half two in the morning now) and so by comparison it is an age. I am going to bed now. Whine at me in the comments about how pointless I am, you kno you want to.

BACK BACK BACK

I just looked at my little list of blogs that I have on blogger. This one has not been updated since March. That's so stupid and pathetic and I'm a bit sad about it. Sorry if my sentences are basic, it is almost 2am and I am typing in the semi-dark.

I don't know why I stopped updating this. Actually, that's a lie; I do know why I stopped - I never really thought I had enough to say about books or education and thought that if I did write anything then it'd just be stupid and no one would want to read it anyway. Which is a STUPID reason for not updating a blog - I'm not writing this for money, am I? I'm hardly writing it to try and reach loads of people at once or anything. I mean, let's face it, how many people want to read what I write? I'm 18, socially awkward, am listening to REM on my macbook at almost 2am on a Friday night and idly wondering about starting a poem. I mean, I don't think I'm a terrible person or anything, I just don't think I'm going to be massively interesting.

WHAT A WAY TO START MY FIRST POST IN ABOUT 6 MONTHS. I THINK I JUST ANNOUNCED THAT I BORE MYSELF. WELL.

RIGHT. Anyway I'm going to finish this post here because I do actually have something to write about and if I do it in the same post as all my "lol i'm just boring aren't i" whining then people are probably already annoyed at me or whatever and if I update immediately after this post with a nice post that has some actual content then by the time they get to this they might not care so much. WOW MY LOGIC IS EXCELLENT TONIGHT. WELL DONE CHARLOTTE.