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1. •  
     CommentAuthortexture
   • CommentTimeSep 16th 2011

    (10205.41)
   Wow, reading through this month's thread has really put my shit in perspective.
   
   Inspired by oddbill, oldhat and allana, I've also decided to start working on my weight / fitness, and to stop telling myself I'm a fat cunt every time I look in the mirror, and actually DO something. I went for a brisk walk yesterday (I'm asthmatic, and exercise is my trigger - I'm hoping to build up to a proper run in a week or two) and it felt good. Energy levels higher than they've been in a while. I can do this!
   
   Started my Masters in Creative Writing this week and have had a boost of self esteem from that which is great... then today I found out the bank have not approved my funding for the course. Can't pay rent next week, and I'm jobless (quit to come here). Cue massive panic attack which I'm currently medicating with Dr Whisky.
   
   There are other options, some of which involve tapping my parents for money in the short term, something I'd hoped to avoid. Guess I'm lucky that is even an option.... my folks are incredible and very supportive, for which I've always been grateful.
   
   I'm determined to finish this course and get at least the first draft of a novel under my belt before April next year. Hopefully that first draft will be accompanied by an 'after' shot as HAWT as oddbill's (ROWR), or at the very least a more healthy lifestyle and better self esteem! I've been off the sugar and beer for 2 days (no congrats yet please too soon), and havent smoked any weed (my snack-enabler) since then either. I think what I lack is discipline... but sheer bloodymindedness can and will overcome my failings... I hope.
   
   Plus, fuck it, I get to be a student again for a year... even if I'm paying that shit off til I'm 40, it's gonna be worth it, and moving away from the ghosts of Edinburgh has been invigorating. Finally laid to rest a failed eight year relationship and moved on from the suicide of a close friend. That took work, and a change of scenery... so fuck the bank eh, today is a good day regardless.
   
   Whitechapel - You Are Beautiful At All Times. Big electrohugs to everyone.
2. •  
     CommentAuthorallana
   • CommentTimeSep 16th 2011

    (10205.42)
   The real reason I haven't gone to Newsgirls yet? I haven't fixed my hand piercing to make it safe under a hand wrap. SUPER lame excuse.
   
   I, too, started classed this week. Just some undergrad night courses as a psych-up for my masters apps, but I'm really excited. It's already the exact situation of every classroom I've been in since grade school: I'm the only one who gets the teacher's jokes (or bothers to smile at them, at any rate), I talk too much, try to answer every question, and get really bored when things aren't moving snappily enough. I know, I'm that student, but it's just how it is. It's nice that some things never change.
   
   Also this week: did three TIFF films, all Midnight Madness (that's the awesome-gory-horror-suspense-sci-fi-thriller programme at the Film Fest). The two I knew nothing about (Livid and The Incident) ended up being fantastic, and the one I was really stoked about (The Day, a post-apocalyptic fight-fest) ended up being awwwwwful. It was basically The Road with twenty-somethings and weak dialogue and shitty plot twists. Bummer.
   
   Currently I am waiting for my creepy sociopath of a landlord to come by and look at the fridge that's been spoiling my milk for the last month. He's two weeks late in turning the heat on, so it's chilly in here -- but that rising smell from the summer is gone, so I guess it evens out. Did I mention I filed papers with the Landlord Tenant Board? The hearing isn't until November. I occasionally dream of bailing on my lease, dropping my classes, and hopping a plane to England. Occasionally.
3. •  
     CommentAuthortedcroland
   • CommentTimeSep 16th 2011

    (10205.43)
   This thread is centering. Empathy is your link to self-examination, and knowing someone else's plight and empathizing with that is important to putting your problems in perspective. It's refreshing.
   
   Also it's nice to have a place to spill your brains out. Super cathartic.
   
   So for the first time in more than a year I am taking classes outside of my department, and it's driving me fucking crazy. Especially since I feel like I'm making real headway in getting to actually do philosophy for real, not just read and read and read and read and react and read and read. I have ideas!
   
   But these classes are absurdly bad. Sociology of Religion! Sounds interesting! Nope we're going to give credence to intellectually inert ideas and challenge any atheistic thought that might be brought up. Because atheism is the real enemy. Because we make the world, right?? We don't interact with an objective external reality, we control how our mind percieves it by ordering information! Fucking stupid. Just because we interface with an ordered chaos doesn't make the external world inert. Stupid British Empiricist Berekely douchey nonsense. Anthropocentrism at its purist. I hate it.
   
   He also told the whole class that Marx didn't HATE religion, that he just hated how it was used. Bullshit! From the same essay he was discussing:
   
   

   Criticism has torn up the imaginary flowers from the chain not so that man shall wear the unadorned, bleak chain but so that he will shake off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man to make him think and act and shape his reality like a man who has been disillusioned and has come to reason, so that he will revolve round himself and therefore round his true sun. Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves round man as long as he does not revolve round himself.

   
   
   Right. Marx loved religion.
   
   And my Native American Literature class is going to drive me insane. The instructor stumbles over everything, including lists of nouns she reads off her purposeless powerpoints, she's rarely if ever fully prepared for class, hasn't had a cohesive thesis for any lecture so far, and she's forcing us to use the large-form 200 question mini-blue-book scantron for 10 question quizzes. WUT.
   
   I start to hate this school more and more as I continue to attend. It's a State school, and not a particularly good one. Most of the student body are girls, and I use that word because most of them are drunk SoCal girls that couldn't get into a UC. The boys that follow them are even worse. Ugh. How did I have a better time at the Junior College than real school? How did that happen??
   
   Just gotta make it to grad school.
   
   Just have to get through this and I can set up an awesome spring semester with classes that I want. If the school doesn't collapse under economic weight.