eclectic

i wish my glasses wouldn't make those red marks on either side of my nose. it makes me feel more geeky. i don't know what's happened, because they never used to. maybe my nose grew?

"wearing barefeet" doesn't make sense. but anyways, i love it. i love to feel the ground that i am walking on. i love to curl my toes around grass or sand. i love the way they slap against warm concrete and gingerly dance over stones. i wish my heels weren't so 'cracked' but at the same time i'm quite proud of my leathery soles. it makes me feel more hardcore.

hooray for good conversations that satisfy. hooray for people who listen and give you time to formulate the mass of thoughts into just about intelligible sentences, and 'get it'.

my friends have moved into a house down the road. i LOVE it that i can see my house from theirs. i wish a whole load of friends lived in my street. i do like my street. there's always kids out playing, people sat out in their front gardens, a daily ice-cream van. we can sit on the pavement in front of our house and eat lasagne and it's OK.

i'm almost enjoying writing one of my dissertations. that might be because it's about breakdancing and 'research' involves watching breaking films on youtube. yesss. in three weeks i will have hopefully handed it, and the other one in. THREE weeks! woohoooo.
better get back to it.

people...

...are amazing. don't you think?
I love it how we are all so different

i love how 2 eyes, a nose and a mouth make a unique combination on every face

i love how none of us are quite the same shade

i love accents and phrases and slang

i love to get a glimpse of how each person views the world
i love it when people get really excited about something
i love it how different things capture our attention and imagination
i love how there's always more to know about someone
i love how just seeing someone or hearing their voice can make you smile
i love how you can recognise a friend from a great distance just by the way they walk

and we're all walking different paths
with different dreams
yet suddenly we find ourselves shoulder to shoulder
sharing the journey
laughing talking and crying together
side by side we can lie there
saying everything in our silence
feeling closer than brothers

breathing the same air
seeing the same stars
warmed by the same sun
why do we build walls around ourselves?
because there's so much more to live and love and learn
if only we let each other in

arty feet

the end is nigh

• half of the people on facebook have statuses that read something along the lines of "1300 down, 6,700 to go" (in my case it's a little more than that to go... :-S)
• I've updated my myspace profile after a year or two of not logging in and deleted other networking accounts
• i'm in touch with people i haven't spoken to in years
• my desk is covered in chocolate wrappers and empty mugs
• i am writing a blog entry even though i have nothing major to say
• everyday i have a new idea of what i want to do next year and subsequently avoid study by researching these ideas
• i check my emails every 3 minutes
• going for runs and baking suddenly are really quite attractive activities

IT MUST BE DISSERTATION TIME

spacious life

"Dear, dear [friends], I can't tell you how much I long for you to enter this wide-open, spacious life. We didn't fence you in. The smallness you feel comes from within you. Your lives aren't small, but you're living them in a small way... Open up your lives. Live openly and expansively!"

2 Cor 6 (message version)

Ezekiel 1:28. WOW.

"Like the appearance of a rainbow in the clouds on a rainy day, so was the radiance around him".

"like a film"

spain pics

music to make you smile!

Last night at a lovely pub called the Fiddler's Elbow in Brighton I thoroughly enjoyed the melodic tones of "The Roots Union", a band hailing from Devon/London and composed of friends-of-friends. Really really worth seeing (hearing) if they are in your area (they are touring lots over next few months). Thoughtul lyrics and the kind of music that makes you grin from ear to ear, stamp your feet, clap your hands and cheer/shout/whistle (we were quite a rowdy little audience :-) !)

positive news

I walked into one of the buildings on campus today and saw on the magazine stand, along side the university newspaper, a publication called "Positive News"... not read it yet as am here to STUDY, but thought it was a really good idea and will look forwards to perusing its positive pages later :-)

from dusk till dawn and more

Well i'm back in room in Brighton, back to not-so-great-english coffee and not-so-warm sunshine. coffee and sunshine nevertheless though! Spain was really great, a lot better than i expected. :-) And while in the end I'm glad for the change in flights by Ryan Air (from Monday morning to Tuesday evening) because it meant i got to hang out with a couple more people that i really wanted to see, it did mean that it took THIRTEEN HOURS door to door. Man i might as well have gone overland! slight exageration but still!!

And no, nothing was delayed, nothing went "wrong" so to speak, so why did it take so long? let me explain...

• 16:45 left Darby's house to catch bus from Bormujos into Sevilla, which got me there sooner than expected, so had a last meander along the River Guadiana, finished my book ("The Hungry Always get Fed" by Heidi Baker, sure I'll be mentioning it soon), and watched groups of Americans sunbathe on the river banks, and Spanish boys in bicycles being stopped by the police. I then went a dropped by Loyda at a coffee shop as she'd told me she had something to give me: a beautiful bag from her beloved Colombia - which turned out to be rather useful on the journey!
• 18:45 bus to the airport, where i worried slightly about the overweightness of my hang-luggage but was relieved to see no sign of weighing scales! Then, last spanish coffee and last consumption of sweetness (pastry) - i've given sweet things up for lent but had 'time off' as it were while in Spain.
• 20:45 boarded the plane as the sun set. another slight panic about slight excess of hand luggage and Ryan Air's "one bag only" thing, but got through fine
• somewhere an hour changed but i get confused which was
• 00:00 after a chilled flight, and feeling grateful that i don't have to get a visa everytime i travel (after seeing the passports of the Russian girl and Pakistani boy sitting next to me!), i rushed through stansted to get the bus to london. thankful i booked online as i don't think everyone got on. randomly bumped into a girl i've met before in Brighton! small world...
• 01:30 arrived at Victoria, only to find the station closed. they only open the gates a few minutes before a train goes. having eaten a cornish pasty to calm me, i decided to catch the only train going anytime soon - to Gatwick Airport - as i didn't fancy hanging outside Victoria for 2.5 hours.
• 02:00 well thank God for Gatwick airport i guess! lots of people were sleeping on floors and chairs. I got a cup of tea and valiently attempted going over notes from the reading i'd done while being away, the fact that i have just over 6 weeks to write my dissertation an ever present fact in my mind! that worked for about an hour then i felt even more like death warmed up so spend the next hour sleeping on a cafe Nero bench.
• 05:00 finally on a train to Brighton, not before being chatted up by 'Don the Dealer', he must have been really bored or desperate because i wasn't exactly in my most attractive state ever!
• 05:30 Brighton station, where i managed to get locked on a train that wasn't going anywhere (skills!). thankfully was rescued ... that would have been a pretty sad end to my story otherwise! thinking... why didn't i just get a taxi?!
• 05:45 the 2 minute trip to London Road, which makes a significant difference to distance i have to walk
• 06:00 at last i arrive home having lugged the amazing case lent to me by a friend up and down one last hill. by now it's getting light and birds are singing.
• BED!!!

so all in all that's two buses, two walks, two trains, one plane, one coach, two pastries, one coffee and one tea. sigh.

now i'm off to the library. joy.