Gay Bear Dating

Wtf????

What is this???

Gay Bear Dating. Hmmm......

I guess I can see the appeal. If I was a gay man, and had a penchant for large, hairy boys.

This would be my outlet!

What's the girl version, I wonder? Lesbian Beaver Dating maybe....

Aww, they look happy! Let's just leave them to it.

Road Trip '12?

Here's what I want to do. After Uni I want to have a massive road trip around America in one of these:

I mean, could you really get any better than that? I love America, just imagine how much better it will be when we can actually get IN to places. Especially Texas! Didn't have that much of a problem in New York, but it was torture walking the streets of Austin at night, all the live music and people spilling out onto the streets. Every place had some sort of bouncer standing at the door, even my mum got carded in a restaurant!

Roll on 21. 

Grab a bunch of friends, jet off to the States, find some sort of VW rental store (currently can't find any of the web, load's in the UK-just shows how much cooler we are then our Yank cousins!--No offence made, I am in fact part Yank :D)

and then just see where the wind blows us.

I was thinking about an interesting route, not the same old Route 66 spiel, maybe start in New Orleans, work our way through Texas, Albuquerque! Phoenix maybe, definitely Las Vegas and then California.

University Courses

At Glasgow they have a special system where you take Three subjects the first year, Two of those you continue on in second year (plus another first year course), and then you decide what to do for Honours. Pretty Ace! Much better than commiting yourself to a single subject from day one, methinks.

Anyway, I have chosen....

Anthropology & Sociology 

Philosophy 

and

French.

The first two should be really interesting, I like that sort of learning- when it's focussed on human behaviour but not SCIENCEY, like psychology always seems to be. 

French, on the other hand....

French was piss easy in school. I'm not saying French itself is easy to learn, but the Scottish system is  so awful, you'd be better off doing interpretive dance to nursery rhymes for the hour. It didn't challenge or force us to really LEARN french at all, for the final higher exam you were allowed a dictionary and supposed to write an essay we had already pre learned. Well, it was a teensy more involved like that, but it wasn't testing french. Just your memory and dictionary skills. That's why, after "learning" french for at least six years I don't really know the language at all. The university calls for a Higher C grade minimum, I got an A but I feel like this is totally irrelevant as an A in higher french is hardly an achievement! I'm far prouder of my B in maths, because it challenged me.

Ah, what life's all about, right? Challenges. 

Anyhow I don't wan't to be a uni-lingual (word? I don't know) idiot for the rest of my life so I am going to take the plunge and LEARN FRENCH. Properly. Fuck Rosetta Stone, I'm going old school.

Post Soundtrack: 

some of the English Patient soundtrack

Single File by Elliot Smith

Cold Wind by Arcade Fire

Truck by The Octopus Project

Edit- Talking about French, I was browsing ratemyteachers and I came across my old French teacher- hilarious man! Not in a I'm-a-funny-teacher-goddammit kind of way, more dry, dry sarcasm and very quick-witted. 

This made me laugh, some guy has written- 

"Is funny, CAN'T TEACH but who cares. Once had a Mickey Mouse tie on from Disneyland and upon being asked where he got it from he said- without missing a beat- "Why, this was my University tie." "

His outbursts were hilarious as well, because of his way of teaching, we found him funny, but didn't really respect him. He just didn't command that type of control, as he had totally sporadic discipline- usually writing some random french phrase on the board then disappearing into his cupboard  (where we pretended he kept the exchange teachers) for the rest of the lesson. Little digression,  back on outbursts, he would just be talking away about grammar, then totally unexpectedly scream as someone having a quiet little conversation with their neighbour. You haven't been scared shitless until you've lived through one of Mr Allan's outbursts!

Elliott

I've got a lump in my throat. And it's over something so trivial and stupid, something no one can do anything about.

It's over the fact that I will never be able to see Elliott Smith live, It's over the fact that no matter how many songs I listen to, I will never be able to see him play them. It's a stupid thing to get upset over, but the feeling just hit me, sitting here, while I was singing along to Between The Bars. I think it's the finiteness (is that a word?) of the situation that really gets me. It's not something I can strive to do, or wrangle, or save up for, because he's gone. And that really sucks.

Elliott took his own life on October 21st, in 2003. He stabbed himself in the heart with a kitchen knife, twice. He must have been in fairly dark place to stab himself, it just seems unreal. There's this whole conspiracy around his death, some claim it was homicide. He left a post it reading "I'm so sorry- Love, Elliot. God forgive me."

The misspelling of his name fuels the homicide theory, I personally don't really buy it. Someone in the throws of suicide isn't really going to take spelling into account, and it wasn't his real name anyway. He chose it after high school, originally Steven. He thought Steve sounded too "Jockish" and Steven too "Bookish".

I love that he chose it. I myself really like the name Elliott, long before I'd heard his music. There's something so special about it now, knowing that someone as interesting and unique as Elliott chose it.

The lump has gone now :). I must learn not to listen to his music when I am tired and fragile! I just love it too much.

RIP Elliott, We Miss You

My Summer 2008

So I've just made a little video about the summer I've had, please watch and tell me what you think :)

For Summery Goodness click here!

We Came, We Saw, We Left.

I need to be consistent with my blogs, otherwise WHAT IS THE POINT?!

I'm becoming lazy.

Anyway, we all journeyed down to good old Reading, minus one ticket but then what's the point of Touts?

Answer: NO POINT. NO POINT WHATSOEVER.

We figured £200-250 was a reasonable amount for them to charge for a ticket, so we weren't worried. Turns out they were asking Five Hundred.

How the fuck do they sleep at night? Talentless assholes leaching off the success of others.

Anyway this "nice" guy told us he would sell for £300, we just needed to wait for his friend to get off a "delayed" train.

Fast forward an hour and we are still there, idly slumped over various bags and making small talk with equally frustrated festival goers.

He then tells us that his friend is AT the festival, in the pub. Also turns out this friend was actually a guy who had been hovering about almost all the time we were waiting. So in a frantic, last minute blur we shoved into a taxi and chased this fragment of hope/truth/whatever. Obviously he wasn't at the god damn pub, so we went back, sold our two tickets and fucked off to London.

There's always a silver lining...

Got put up in the swankiest Hotel in London for a drastically reduced price (Ellie and her connections), our suite had an adjoining Conference Room, which we used to decide where to go out :)

And have our fairly WASP'y breakfast.

Also officially the first people to traipse into the Auldrige in Wellies.

So all in all a fairly bizarre 24 Hours!

Just around the Frigging corner

In: Bel Air in lovely LA, on a massive couch, sending love to my body clock for waking me at half five and not at some obscure time in the afternoon.

Okay, it is now officially ONE MONTH until I move into halls. I am having this deluded flashback of watching this boy freak out last year over the same situation on his "Vlog", this was during my crazed Google addiction where I would trawl the web for anything remotely Glasgow Uni related. Obsessive, much?

But anyway I remember thinking how relieved I was because it was happening to him, and I still had so much time left to prepare, emotionally charge etc etc.

Well now it's happening to me!

On the other hand, I CAN'T WAIT! At the end of the day, even with all these crazy paranoid thoughts running through, I've just got to rationalise them with UNI IS GOING TO BE AWESOME.