(Elly if you still read this blog (unlikely) this is nothing to worry about x)

Bad news always takes you by surprise.
Like, there are always going to be bad things in life. And even if you've dealt with a very similar situation in the past it doesn't mean your hands are going to shake any less, or the silence is going to become any less oppressive, or you'll stop wanting to literally shrink into a tiny little ball of nothing so that the situation washes right over you.

Bad news traps you. It traps you right where you were when you heard it, and there's no way to escape from it.
It traps you so closely that eating the bowl of noodles on your lap feels like a violation. I can feel them there right now; they've stopped burning through my pyjamas because time has passed and they're cooling down.
Time passes.
You all pretend to be watching Daredevil.
Your hands shake less.

You still don't know what to do.
So you revert to what you used to do when you hated your work experience and you wanted time to pass. You switch off.

I should do something.

I've been here before.
I should do something.
It was different before.
I should still do something.
I shouldn't do something (much like last time it wasn't really my place) but someone should.

I guess we'll just watch Daredevil or something.

The waning of the year.

From here

It's not winter, yet. I know that. We are, however, solidly into the main days of Autumn and I feel kind of glorious. I love the second half of the year more than is normal: I love the smell of bonfires that lingers in the air, wrapping up warm against the absurdly cold northern weather, comfort food, fluffy socks, hot drinks.

I absolutely cannot be dealing with the clocks going back though - has anybody else had serious issues adjusting, or is it just me? I'm like a parrot - if it's dark, it's night-time. If it's light, it's day-time. Clearly my brain can't deal with any concept more complicated than that.

On the plus side, Christmas is coming! I'm already excited thinking about going Christmas shopping and eating Christmas food and listening to Christmas music and enduring awkward Christmas family occasions and yay! Call me premature, but I am SO ready for this time of year!

Winning the family.

You all are familiar with the concept of winning a break-up, right? Doing better out of the end of a relationship than your ex-other-half?
Today I'm going to try and Win the Family.

Whole family get-togethers in my family are relatively rare: usually there's some form of excruciatingly boring Christmas affair once a year and then we can move on. On my mom's side we're a relatively large family - there are four siblings, 3 spouses and 7 grandchildren; but my granddad is also one of 4 who also all have loads of kids and grandkids so it all gets a bit nuts sometimes. In approximately 7 hours time (gah) all of these people will converge on my grandparents' house and whilst on the surface it will be a veritable punchbowl of polite conversation and witty anecdotes, underneath it will be a nail-biting, chaotic whirlpool-esque FAMILY WAR.

CARNAGE.

Because you can't just catch up with the family, oh no.
You have to win the family.

So how's university, cousin A?
Great thanks, I'm averaging a 2:1 and really enjoying my course!
That's great, cousin A! Did I tell you about cousin B? They're averaging a super-first! That's right, they invented an entire new degree classifcation for them. And they have 3 years work experience prepared for the summer! The laws of time decided to make an exception for them. And they love their course so much that Aphrodite herself swooped down from the heavens, saw how much they loved their course and just went damn it, cousin B! I quit! I can never make anyone love like you do! 
Ah. Well. That's good, Auntie B. That's great.
QUIT I TELL YOU.

Tomorrow, though, I'm ready to win the family. I have my two jobs, my supreme levels of organisation, my first in the end of year exam, my killer heels, and my Easter work experience lined up with which to wow the judges. And in the meantime, my cousins and I can sit back on our heels, collectively cringe when asked if we're "courting" at all, and lie through our teeth when quizzed about our alcohol habits.

Winning the family? I think so.

You guys all get this, right? As much as you love your family, there's always a war going on underneath? It cannot just be me...

Hey Friday Friends!

So I appreciate it's not Friday any more (actually I was going into this assuming it was the early hours of Sunday morning and it's actually Saturday morning, whoops!)
Either way, I figure you'd like some blanks! I'm currently pulling an all-nighter because a) I have an essay that I'd like to finish and b) I have to be up at 5 to get my train home to Birmingham for the day! I figure it's probably easier for me to just stay awake at this point...so in the spirit of killing time, here are some blankity-blanks...

1. Something I swore I'd never do, but have ended up doing anyway: I'm not sure there's anything! I'm very much a never-say-never type person...
2. Something I've always wanted to do is: go on holiday on my own. I love holidaying with friends or family but the idea of going somewhere completely brand new, completely alone and having time to explore and think and relax...gah it would just be a really lovely time :)
3. Something I have absolutely no desire to ever do is space tourism. The idea of going out into space where there's no way out if things go drastically wrong is absolutely terrifying to me...and the idea of paying for it makes it even worse! Hopefully there'll be no apocalypse any time soon, so I won't have to evacuate the planet in a gigantic life-sustaining space shuttle. I would not be cool with that.
 4. The best thing I ever did was: mess up my Cambridge interview. I can't imagine ever having not come to York. Time of my life.
5. When it comes to trying new things: I'm a total wreck. If I'm going to do something new I need lots of time to mentally prepare, and I'll still be super twitchy when the day actually comes. Getting better at coping with change is definitely one of my life targets! I do think I'm improving though. Like, I came to uni (big big change!) and managed to not have an emotional breakdown, shut myself away and never speak to anyone ever. Which I think is a fair shout.
6. One thing I've never done: just one thing? There are so many things! Been in a committed relationship, had a full-time job, had children, owned a house, bought a sofa...all these juicy juicy things to look forward to...
7. My favorite thing to do: I like getting impromptu takeaways and watching a film with my buddies, spontaneous pub trips ("Pint?" "Pint."), getting paid, snuggling up under a duvet with a warm ribena and some toast, long train journeys, having long conversations...so many things. Loving life 2k12 and all that...

:)

Workaholic!

What's up, bloggers? I hope everything's going well for you all at the moment. As usual, I still have no internet (and won't have for another three weeks or so, CRY) but I'm in the library between lectures at the moment, procrastinating doing my reading as usual, so I thought a quick update might be in order.

As longtime readers of my blog might know, I used to work here:

Then, after I moved to uni, I started stressing out about how little money I had, and eventually (after a lot of searching,) I got a job here:

Being on a university campus, YourShop is mostly restricted to term time, so naturally I filed in a few hours over the summer here, just to keep me busy:

So far, so logical...I figured I'd do YourShop in term time, then the races over the summer, and everything would be dandy.

And then I went a little bit nuts this term and decided I wanted a bar job, just so I could get some experience with different types of work for when I'm an unemployed graduate living in a cardboard box. So I got a job here:

Disclaimer: there are usually no flags. I do not work in an EDL bar, if such a thing even exists. That will be all.

Except then I discovered that my "summer" job at the racecourse in fact extends over term time too, albeit on a much less regular basis, and that I can get semi-regular 4 hour silver-service waitressing shifts there (if I want) as well as working at Society as WELL as working at YourShop.

Also I'm working something absurd like 29 hours this week. Ladies and gentlemen, my new, work-filled life has begun. I'm pretty sure it'll still fit in around my studies (hopefully) but holy god, who knows. My course has a relatively low commitment of hours, though, and the Society job isn't in hours where I'd normally be reading, it's in hours I'd normally be wasting watching TV or on the internet, so hopefully it'll be okay. I may be making a big, big mistake. But to quote How I Met Your Mother, "sometimes you know it's a mistake, but there are certain things in life where you know it's a mistake, but you don't really know it's a mistake because the only way to really know it's a mistake is to make the mistake and look back and say 'yep, that was a mistake.' So really, the bigger mistake would be to not make the mistake, because then you'd go your whole life not knowing if something is a mistake or not."*

In conclusion, even if this is a bad, bad idea, I'm still gonna do it. And actually I don't think it's going to be a mistake at all. Fingers crossed!!

*and if you made it through all that without getting confused at least once, I applaud you, good sir. 

Hey there beautiful *waves*

Having just deleted acres of spam posts from both my twitter and tumblr accounts, I have to say it's refreshing to log in to Blogger and find it pristine and untouched from the last time I checked in.

THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LEAVE THE INTERNET TO IT'S OWN DEVICES.

Well I've deleted all the posts and changed all my passwords...looks like we're back to normal.

As I type this, I'm sat in the cafe of my University library, eating a panini and swigging down a limited edition Mango and Passionfruit flavour fanta (Delicious, by the way. Like fizzy J20. Officially recommended.)

All is very calm on the York front. There's just me and one of my flatmates in our house - everyone arrives staggered from Thursday to Friday this week. There are a few people scattered around York, but not many. It's peaceful as hell and I really, really like it. I do love living at home but it was starting to get a bit constricting! I was itching to get back in the kitchen and cook for myself, to not have to walk the dog every day, to do my own grocery shopping...ah, it's delicious.

Moving in had a few hiccups: everything broke, the TV wouldn't work, blah blah blah...but it all got worked out in the end. And now I'm luxuriating in having next to nothing to do and living in my own exciting house.

Next stop: working out how the terrifying gas oven works so I can bake some cakes in preparation for my house's arrival later this week. The one flatmate I'm living with at the moment DOESN'T LIKE CAKE. Can you believe that? Who doesn't like cake?!

Wow, I've lost my thread completely. Coolio. See you later branflakes.

Things

I'm having one of those "the TV is too loud and there are too many people in the house and everyone keeps talking" days...which is never a good thing! On the plus side, it's 20 past midnight and the house is good and silent now. Which is handy.

SO I'M GOING TO DO A SERIES. It will probably take a while to complete - I'm internet-less between September 13th-26th due to a mix-up at Sky and moving into my new house - but I thought I'd start it off now because why the blazes not. 

And the title of this exciting new series?

POP CULTURE CHARACTERS WHO ARE FLAWLESS*
*IN A PARTICULAR WAY WHICH I WILL SHORTLY OUTLINE

*tada*

Essentially, I'm a pop culture whore. I watch, read and listen to it. And then I dissect it to death. I read other peoples' dissections. I'm fascinated by meta discussions based on GIFs of one tiny blink of an eye which apparently reveal the innermost thoughts and feelings of a fictional character. I ship obscure ships just because I think they might work together. And occasionally, in the middle of an otherwise mundane task, I will remember just how fuming I am that the main character of an otherwise excellent Nickelodeon cartoon somehow is allowed to steal someone else's boyfriend, and it's morally totally okay. 

But more about that later, I promise.

When I say flawless, I don't just mean attractive, or funny, or successful, or badass. It's kind of hard to pinpoint, actually...maybe it'll flesh itself out as we go along. But mostly, I'm just saying I love this character for a variety of reasons. They make me want to simultaneously hug, high-five and bake a cake for them. I want to live with them. They are good people.

Hopefully that's enough to be going on with!

Anyway, our first entrance to the Flawless Pop Culture Characters comes (naturally) from the Whedonverse - Kaylee Frye of Firefly fame.

For the uninitiated, Firefly is a space-western mostly set aboard Serenity, a firefly-class spaceship. Kaylee is one of the team of smugglers/all round good guys that live on Serenity. If you're weirded out by the concept, good. Watch it anyway. It's a stunning show.

But Kaylee Frye? She is perfection. As you can see from the picture, she's feminine - she likes frilly dresses and parasols and speaks in a kind of girly voice. She's also a mechanic. This kind of masculine/feminine juxtaposition isn't really uncommon in television, particularly with Joss Whedon - think Buffy, who's also pretty, feminine and kills demons on a regular basis. Don't get me wrong, it's a good thing - upsetting the norms, challenging gender dynamics, blah blah blah. I always felt that Buffy ran the risk of feeling just a tiny bit tokenistic - look at me, I'm a strong independent woman, how new and important to make a big deal out of! Whedon himself makes no secret of the fact that that's exactly what Buffy is - a reversal of the "blonde girl in a dark alleyway trope." I feel that less with Kaylee - her masculine/feminine dichotomy is very subtly introduced and not really commented on, which is a good thing. I always felt like Buffy was slightly punished for her 'masculine' side - the fighting and the sex, particularly with Spike - but with Kaylee, it's a whole new world of totally fine, as if it ever wouldn't be. 

Which sort of brings me on to Part 2 of Kaylee is The Best - the sex. Again, to bring it back to Buffy, sex was almost always coded as a bad thing - particularly with Spike ("Last night was the most perverse, degrading experience of my life.") but also with Faith, bad girl extraordinaire and big fan of casual sex; Angel, the good vampire who turns bad when the sex thing happens; even good-guy Riley - remember the crazy haunted-house-fuelled-by-sex episode? And don't get me started on the whole penetration/blood drinking/sex parallels* Meanwhile, Kaylee enjoys sex. It's as simple as that, and there are no repercussions. And again you have that unexpected dichotomy, the pretty princess who's open and upfront about just how much she likes sex. Unexpected. And fabulous. Two of my favourite Kaylee lines: 

"Kaylee Frye: Goin' on a year now I ain't had nothin' twixt my nethers weren't run on batteries! 

Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: Oh, God! I can't *know* that! 

Jayne Cobb: I could stand to hear a little more."

Girl has needs and she's not ashamed of it. Kaylee has none of the (traditionally female) pretensions about talking about sex and I love her for that. 

Dr. Simon Tam: In all that time on the ship... I've always regretted... not being with you. 

Kaylee Frye: With me? You mean to say... as in sex? 

Dr. Simon Tam: I mean to say. 

Kaylee Frye: To Hell with this. I'm gonna live! 

This whole exchange is hilarious, mostly because Simon is being so ridiculous about it all. And instead of going for the heartfelt declarations of love as Simon does, Kaylee's like...damn, I'm going to shoot some reevers now. 

All of the women in Firefly are excellent...just excellent. To the extent that I feel bad splitting the cast down the middle, into women and men, because they all embody different aspects of humanity rather than gender, which is a beautiful thing to see. But Kaylee is by far and away my favourite. Not just because of her gender and its representation, but also her relationship with River, with Wash, with Mal...she's just a fabulous person. Which is why she's included on the list. So there.

*I think it's fairly obvious, but I could actually write a dissertation on sex and sexuality in Buffy. In fact, I really, really want to do it at some point. Watch this space.