phlegm

I never know what I'm going to write about in this thing until I start typing. Sometimes I'll even have to go back and rewrite the first few sentences of the post because they'll have so little relevance to the rest of it. Sometimes I truly can't be bothered.

Had an argument with my parents last night, apparently I need to grow up. I've ditched my plans for a gap year, so in 7 months time I'm going to be living away from home. No parents. It seemed so far away when I had eighteen months to go (maybe because I had eighteen months to go), I feel like I've jumped forwards in time, like maybe I fell asleep for two long and all of a sudden I'm supposed to be moving out and I'm so not ready. 7 months. Maybe I should start a count down, T minus 210 days or something.

It's the financial issue that's the real bitch. Wanna hear a secret? I have £4.96 in my bank account, 60p and £15 of book tokens in my wallet and about £3 in coppers and change in the bank in my room. Oh, and an expired £5 skincare voucher from boots. I owe my best friend £13, my mum £30. There's a sociology trip coming up that's gonna cost me £25, then I have to pay for Soul Survivor, the Reading Festival and a trip to Dublin. I'm also supposed to be saving for university, what with tuition fees.

And on tuition fees, apparently the LEA means test from the previous financial year. That would be the year in which my dad was working. Huh.

*puts down the world's smallest violin*

Seriously, I should stop slagging off my job at Tesco (10% discount will be useful when I'm counting coppers for student fabulous beans on toast). I'm gonna take a deep breath, ignore the fact that I could be earning £1.50 an hour more at Marks and Spencers and get me some soul-enriching overtime. Yeah!!!

This is my issue. I can earn the money, but it's gonna take serious willpower not to spend it as I go. I figure I should learn to save now before I get to uni, get my first student loan installment and spend it all in Topshop within the week. It's gonna happen.

*******

Thing is, it's all very well me saying I need to grow up. My English teacher, Paul, spent ten minutes of our lesson today writing the word PHLEGM on the Smartboard. The English department got a telling off from the IT guys for not using the Smartboards to their full potential ("You can convert handwriting into typed text, dammit, the possibilities are endless!").

It's true enough, they're very expensive learning tools and all we ever use them for is downloading Bjork videos and looking up bits of trivia on Google. Gotta mention the fateful day when someone didn't know what a codpiece was, so Paul entered it into Google image search. In his own words, he's expecting to be fired any day now.

Today though, we got hi-tech. We were talking about the four humours (the liquids that Elizabethan doctors thought made up the human body - an imbalance in the humours created personality or health defects), blood, black bile, yellow bile and phlegm.
"Oh I hate the word phlegm." says Helen.
"It's the fact that it's got a 'g' in it, if you say it like it looks, it sounds like you're hacking something up."
Paul drew the word 'PHLEGM' on the Smartboard, coloured it in luminous green and surrounded it by tiny green bogey dots. He then highlighted the word, selected it with his hands (no mice in our college) and sent it flying round the board. Like Minority Report, he said, how cool is that?

Admittedly, I did almost cry with laughter, but I have to ask: with role models like that, how the hell am I supposed to reach adulthood?

I'm listening to: Idlewild, 100brokenwindows.
I'm feeling: Not too bad, a bit cold. Best mood this week.
Quote of the day:
"Pull, and pull strongly, for your able strength
Must pull down heaven upon me -
Yet stay, heaven gates are not so highly arched
As princes' palaces: they that enter there
Must go upon their knees."
The Duchess of Malfi, John Webster.