#MagicMurray?

I don't think any of us expected to see this:

I mean, fair play to him, he performed well. I didn't see the final because I was watching the bronze medal match, but he was absolutely blinding against Djokovic in the semis. And this is coming from the British girl that is a hardcore supporter of the Serb. Good luck to him in the mixed doubles as well, Heather Watson will be furious.
Grand Slam next?

The name game.

Just a slightly humorous anecdote from earlier:


Me: 'Dad, did you know Brad Pitt was a vegan?'
Dad: 'No. But I don't care, he's one of those Scientology weirdos.'
Me: '? No, he isn't. Tom Cruise is.'
Dad: 'Yeah, I know that, but isn't Brad Pitt.'
Me: 'Nope. Cruise. And John Travolta.'
Dad: 'That's who I meant. Hang on, isn't he dead?'
Me: 'Now you're thinking of Patrick Swayze.'


Bless him.

Teach the children how to swim!

My nan can't swim. One of my best friends can't swim. An improbably high number of people I know can't swim.

I've kept to my February resolutions as best I could and as a result have swam 4 miles this week. Aside for it taking a long time and resulting in me becoming completely exhausted - there isn't much you can do whilst swimming but watch the other people in the pool (and compliment them on their tattoos).

Sometimes this pays off, you get hilarious moments to recall to your friends - such as the ginger in the too small bikini top popping out underwater, or two Chinese guys swimming into each other because neither of them were following the lane rules; but its just as easy to come across something you wish you hadn't - namely one of my cognitive lecturers; and not the fit female one, the middle-aged guy with horrible dress sense. Thank God he wasn't wearing Speedos or I'd have never gone back again. And would have had to drop cognitive psychology.

One of the things I notice most often though, it that on weekends there are children's swimming lessons happening in the inside lane; then I realise just how much of my ability to swim comes from my own teaching - at least if these lessons are anything to go by. I never swim front crawl, my backstroke is not brilliant (I kind of weave, but I have it under control) and my breaststroke technique has been supplemented by watching other swimmers and finding what works best.

My main issue is that most of the children that take swimming lessons (and that's like 99% of all children, ever, if you think about the schools that also go during the week) aren't going to go onto swim competitively. In fact, I know of many people who haven't swam more than a length since they finished with their school swimming lessons at the age of 11. It's good to know how to swim - in case you want to take it up as a non-impact form of exercise - but mostly because there is the possibility that could drown in a lake or something if you didn't know how to. It's also something nice to do on holiday to cool down in a hot country (not that I'd know much about that).

This is where my problem lies with how children are taught to swim. If I'm about to drown in a lake, I'm not going to front crawl with my face in the water. In fact, I'm going to do my bloody best to keep as much of me as possible dry and free from algae and other lake dwelling creatures. Similarly, I'm picking my stroke based on what will get me out with the least effort whilst allowing me to see where I'm going - so backstroke is already out, and possibly breast stroke as well. While I understand the importance of teaching many strokes to children so they can choose which stroke to employ during these situations, teaching them 'proper' technique that involves having their head underwater for 80% of the stroke is not really something that I would consider advisable if you're only preparing them to save themselves from drowning in a lake!

Also, knowing how to turn at the end of the length like Olympic swimmers do (something I was never taught) is not going to help in the slightest - unless you're going to swim competitively - yet I saw the instructors teaching a bunch of 8 year olds how to do it.

Basically, past the basics of being able to get themselves out of a sticky situation, parents should just stop wasting their money on expensive lessons for their kids. And they'd get that basic level in school.

Resolutions Update:

1. Swimming well, even if it does make me exhausted.

2. I knew I had something else to do tonight. The hoovering will have to wait until the morning, but the tidying will commence shortly.

3. Bought a new foundation brush last weekend, so it isn't due for a clean until next weekend.

4. Reading is mostly up to date, just one more journal that will be done on Tuesday.

5. Skipped one lecture on the 8th February. And nothing since.

Resolutions, Resolutions, Resolutions

February, time for resolutions. That's right isn't it?

1. Swim, swim, swim!

I used to swim 3 times a week, but recently I've just been doing no exercise whatsoever. So I've spent £50 on a 12 week membership to the gym/pool, and three times a week is what's required to make it worthwhile.

Such a pain that the new sports centre is at the bottom of a MASSIVE hill, so you have to factor in your ability to walk back up there after your workout. But, it's all exercise.

Aiming for 2 miles a week, split across 2 visits.

2. Tidy, tidy, tidy!

Tidy my room once a week. Recycling and bin out, floor hoovered (as long as my poor hands allow me to do this).

3. Clean, clean, clean!

I don't even remember the last time I washed my foundation brush! I plan to replace it when my bursary comes through, but I will wash it once a fortnight until then, and the new one will get the same treatment. It's soaking in the sink right now.

4. Read, read, read!

For the love of God, I must keep on top of my university reading. I will make a list of weekly readings and tackle them at the earliest opportunity.

5. Study, study, study!

STOP SKIPPING LECTURES! Unless there's a genuine reason, like that time I couldn't walk, I'll be there!

Mini's Student Survival Guide: GIVE ME DRUUUUGS!

Prescriptions are expensive. £7.40 per item is pretty expensive anyway, but when you're on a student budget it is pretty much breaking the bank.

I needed painkillers for a problem I have with my hands. In fact I'm still taking the very same painkillers right now. £7.40 when I had £5 in my bank account and no milk for breakfast, I thought I would have to struggle through my exam and wait until after my holiday to be able to get them. In the end, I borrowed £5 off a friend to pay for them, and will pay her back out of my next student loan instalment before claiming the money back.

Here's the deal. When you're 18 you can still get them for free as you're in full time education - there's a box on the prescription form to tick; same as the one from when you were in college. Girls, we can get the pill without breaking the bank (condoms as well). If you visit an STI clinic and need antibiotics for that, they're free.

But us students tend to have low income, so from the age of 19 you can apply for a HC2 Certificate. The form is a long as your arm and you'll probably have to send a photocopy of your student loan breakdown and payslips if you have a job - so make sure you know where these things are - but think of how many times you'd rather spend £7.40 on alcohol rather than a prescription. You don't have wait till you are ill, apply at any time.

If you're ill in the meantime, you can also ask for a refund form whenever you pay for a prescription, so if you haven't got the certificate yet, just pay and claim it back when you apply.

So, get ill, get drugs, still be able to eat. Sounds good to me.

Now where did I put my form...

Mini's Student Survival Guide: Don't Waste Food!

Being a student who is seriously strapped for cash, wasting food is something that I try to avoid as best I can. Sometimes you cook more than you can eat. Sometimes you cook and then realise that you're not as hungry as you thought you were. Sometimes you buy things that you cannot possibly use before the use-by date.

With 24 hours before a litre of milk would expire, I couldn't deal with the pound that was about to be wasted when it could be put to good use.

Right now, I present - as a part of what I hope will become a regular feature of 'Mini's Student Survival Guide' - how to use up that milk before it stinks out the kitchen and gets thrown out by a flatmate. Of course, this relies on you having certain other things in to use them with, but it'll be worth it in the long run.

1. Meals to reheat. Some packet mixes require you to use milk to make the sauce, so this is what you need to go with (my personal favourite being chicken supreme, although I use Quorn pieces instead of chicken because I don't eat meat). The packet will probably say three to four servings, but I usually only get two. Either way, you have one for the fridge and one (or more) for the freezer.

Milk used: 425ml

2. Sweet treat. My homesickness food: Angel Delight. I know it isn't everyone's cup of tea, but it comes in a range of flavours so you can find something that tickles your fancy. Whip it up with fresh milk, put it in a bowl and leave to stand for 5 minutes (I prefer to stick it in the fridge, but there is no need to). One packet will do 4 servings, but nobody will judge you if you eat it all in one sitting.

Milk used: 300ml

3. Does cooking make you peckish? Grab yourself a bowl of cereal. Cheerios are my 'breakfast-as-midnight-snack' of choice, but whatever you've got in the cupboard, with a generous splash of milk, will sort out those hunger pangs, at least for the time being.

Milk used: 225ml

4. And wash it all down. Get yourself a hot drink. Tea, coffee, hot chocolate; whatever floats your boat. Of course if you like your coffee black then this won't help you, but a nice milky hot chocolate sorts me right out just before bed.

Milk used: Depends on your preference, but hopefully most of the rest.

5. If there's any left, you may as well just drink it straight from the carton. It's only going to start smelling if you leave it.

So don't waste it, allow yourself a midnight snack, a milky drink, a sweet indulgence and at least two meal portions.

1 litre of milk gone in less than 1 hour.

How would you do it?

Failure

I am afraid of failing. Like, terrified. I always have been and I probably always will be. But it goes deeper than that, I am afraid of getting the tiniest thing wrong. If you ask me a question about something, no matter how insignificant the answer is in the grand scheme of things, I would rather go with you to find someone else who knew for sure than give you a wrong answer. And by going with you I will get to know the answer myself as well.

I guess a fear of failure or of being wrong isn't really an irrational fear; if you are wrong about if the guy at your front door is a murderer or not then it could cost you your life, if you fail to spot the signs of a fire next door you could - at least - end up getting burnt. I can't say either of these things have ever happened to me, but I would like to be correct about my decision if they ever do.

Not wanting to get things wrong is in some parts a good thing, it drove me to make sure that I made as few mistakes as possible throughout my academic life and even in the present moment I am still pushing myself to make sure I understand something - even if it isn't directly relevant to anything I need to know. I have always known things, even back at the ripe old age of 11 when I got incredibly high SAT scores.

I guess the fear of failure has gotten bigger as life has gotten harder. Really I should try and be less scared because the chances of it happening get higher as things get harder, and maybe I should try and learn to accept it; but the whole 'grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change' has never really been my thing. If something cannot be made better I want to know why; and I will scream and kick and drag my heels until someone offers me either a reason or a solution.

In High School I pulled off some of the best results the school has ever seen and then followed it up in College with an A* in what is now my degree subject. Even when it didn't count I got a 1st in my first year of university. The fear of failure seems to have been useful in ensuring that I didn't fail in the past, but now the chances and the stakes are almost as high as they're going to go and I feel like the pressure is mounting ready to pop the cork and drown me in my own misery.

Not that I'm not doing well. I'm working my arse off to keep on top of everything (except writing this instead of doing a lab report) and can generally write essays well. When things go a bit pear shaped I know how to claw them back so things are going my way again. But at the same time there is this part of me, that seems to have gotten bigger in the last 3 years, that is telling me that things keep getting harder and I'm closer and closer to falling off the cliff into my worst nightmare.

For my chosen career, a first is pretty much what I need. I know that and that's why I'm working as hard as I can without spinning into mental illness to get there. It's a tough road but it's the one I need to take. And I tell myself daily that it won't be the end of the road if it isn't a 1st, I'll just have to deviate and take a lesser travelled, less direct road. I've gotten this far and I've not failed yet, as a fan of statistics I cannot fail to see how they are on my side. As long as I ignore the part of me that is saying 'Law of averages, it has to happen sometime!' (or throw it the U I got in a General Studies exam and the D I got in GCSE Music) I can manage to keep myself afloat. And when I can't ignore it, I have a support network of friends and family who will argue with it for me (please ignore how mental this sentence makes my friends, family and myself seem).

So, in a rambly sort of way, I will conclude that failure is scary; and being scared of it is a perfectly normal part of everyday life. But I have managed 19 years without any significant failures, so the statistics seem to be on my side.

So that is going to get written on a post-it-note and stuck to my pinboard, and I'm going to get to work on this lab report.

Mini's Misleading Dream Diary: Recurring Themes and Odd Imagery

From what I remember, this has happened the last few nights.

I'm busy doing stuff in my dream (whatever it may be) and then my old science teacher shows up and wants to play chess. I don't play chess, so I don't understand this. However, any time he gets the board out and sets up the pieces, various other dream stuff happens and we never end up playing chess. Which is good, because I have no idea what the dream me would do if I ended up playing chess.

The night before last I had a dream where there was a girl from university who was a combination of the worst features of all of the girls that I know. She died - I have no idea how or why, or why she even existed - and we all had to go to her funeral (so I couldn't play chess). I think I even cried, which is weird because I knew that I hated this girl, because she had all of the worst qualities of all of my female friends.

Night before that I was packing to go on holiday with Sarah and had a million and one things I had to sort out before I left (which is why I couldn't play chess). I don't remember much about the holiday, but were on a coach on our way back from the airport, and we had a monkey in a bikini. This could be a homage to some of the poetry that I wrote when I was in high school, where one of the guys in my class said 'Like, If monkeys wore bikinis' and that was his first line of his poem, but its more likely to just be a really weird image - which is the kind of thing my brain likes to cling to (and for the record, I think it was one of Sarah's bikinis).

We then got back to campus and slid down the hill to Lake Carter, with Ste Smith and Ellie Sutherland, causing mini landslides as we went because it had been raining much more than we realised. However, our clothes were miraculously clean when we got to the lake.

I usually tell stories in a much more interesting way than this, but how do you make your own weird brain interesting and not completely insane? Answers on a postcard please.

I have ideas for actual proper posts and really want to try and keep to a one a week schedule unless I have a deadline, so let's see if that lasts longer than BEDA, eh?

I'm also thinking of learning how to play chess.

Read into my dreams what you will, but don't judge me on Freudian analysis. I hate to think what the monkey represents.

'Dealing' with bullying

I was bullied. Particularly in high school. As you'll know from my hometown monologue, it was not a good time in my life. But it wasn't even the kind of problems where the same people made your life hell for years until you punched them and then they stopped. It was different people each year and this makes it worse.
You begin to think it is you. If it was just one person over 5 years then it is more likely to be them that is at fault - you are always told that the one person must be jealous of you or they must be having problems at home which is making them hostile. When it is at least 5 different people or groups of people over the 5 different years, you can make as many excuses for all of those people as you like, but you can't help but think that it can't be the case.
It's hard not to think this, but I somehow managed to hold on to it - despite my brain trying to tell me that I was deluded.

People try to teach you how to deal with bullying. There are courses for teachers. There are books on dealing with bullies. Parents are always trying to tell you ways to sort it out. People tried and tried, I tried and tried to use the techniques people tell you are completely fail safe to keep your spirits up in the moment and allow me deal with what was happening. It didn't work. It never works.

Realisation of this fact didn't really hit me until someone else said it. As with a lot of things in life, the truths that you will deny to the end of time become the biggest realisations of your life when you hear it stated by someone you look up to.

Hank Green hit the nail on the head for me and my experiences with bullying. 'Your job is not to deal with it, your job is to survive it, which you can do; because it will end!' (If you've ever heard Hank Green speak, you'll know how difficult it was to punctuate this).

A nerdfighter friend thought this was pessimistic and doesn't offer a lot of hope, and it's probably as useless as all of the other advice you could be given and I didn't want to agree with that, but I guess he is kind of right. But the truth isn't always optimistic and the truth isn't always helpful; but a lie is never helpful either!

I guess as advice, telling you to just survive isn't really enough. It needs more to actually be any use to someone who is in desperate need of something to help them lift their spirits. So, I tell you this: You get out of bed tomorrow morning, and you carry on with your life. Unless there is something you can do to actively stop this; such as some action that can be used to remove you or the bully from the situation most of the time (which did happen to me, I was put in a room during breaks to keep me out of harms way) this should be done where possible but it isn't always possible. When you're being bullied it is easy to think that every day will be a bad day and this prevents you from doing what you want to do with your life - whether its going to school and getting your qualifications, working hard to get up the career ladder or just a hobby that you enjoy. But if you don't get up and get on with it, you're not doing any of this and it is instantly a bad day. If you get up you could still have a bad day or you could have a good day, the point is that you don't know until you try.

If your day is bad then you can feel bad; you can cry, you can go to the gym and punch a punchbag for an hour, you can treat yourself to a piece of chocolate if that's your thing (though I don't recommend this as a long term solution). You should do whatever it is that makes you feel better (providing it doesn't hurt yourself or anyone/thing else), because when you're in that position, if you can find something that makes you feel better, then you should do that thing.

But even the cliché advice that I said isn't helpful still has some place. It isn't you, and it will end and it will get better (another thing that Hank Green said). My former best friend started working with someone who used to bully me at the start of high school and she told her that she was so jealous of me because I was very smart and people would ask me for help and things like that and I honest burst into tears upon hearing this. Looking back at it all I know that it wasn't me, and eventually you'll be able to get to a place where you can look back and know that it was all unfortunate and you handled it badly, but you did your best and it's made you who you are right now.

And I'm proud of who I am. I wouldn't change me for the world. And if I could go back in time and change something I wouldn't. And if I could go back and tell my younger self something it would be:

'You can do this, as long as you keep getting out of bed in the morning. You can't see it now; but in the end, you're going to be great!'

365 days in 30 ways - REVIEW

It's over, how did I do?

1. Bake cakes for my new flatmates.

Okay, so most of them had left before I actually made them, but Sunny, John and Adelina liked them...

2. Get a poem published.

3. Meet up with someone I met online.

Marinassia, Megan, Dan and Ros.

4. Raise £100 for charity.

5. See a famous comedian live.

6. Pass the first year of my degree.

With a first as well.

7. Keep my cacti alive.

Technically I killed one of them, but the other two are alive and well.

8. Meet someone famous.

9. Go to the Torchwood paving slab in Wales.

10. Learn to play poker.

11. Go to Pride.

Liverpool with my Mummy :)

12. Go on the London Eye.

13. Pass the 21 Day Challenge.

14. Stop being superstitious.

I didn't put my new shoes on the table, but that was for my mum's benefit.

15. Fit back into my size 10 clothes.

16. Learn sign language.

17. Swim in a river/lake.

18. Join a writers society.

I paid the joining fee even if I didn't go, so it counts.

19. Have a snowball fight with strangers.

Technically my flatmates and some people they knew, but they were strangers to me.

20. Be part of a flash mob.

21. Take a first aid course.

22. Get a Henna tattoo.

23. Get a job.

24. Get a book signed.

Sent a signed copy of Like Bees to Honey by the wonderful Caroline Smailes.

25. Take up yoga.

Wii Fit yoga, but it still counts.

26. Have a nerdfighter t-shirt custom made.

27. Sell something on eBay.

28. Cook a meal for my best friend.

I made Sarah some pizza, so I'm counting it.

29. Blog about all of the things that are on my 'wall of stuff'.

Can't actually happen now as it's been taken down :(

30. Have regular blog readers who aren't my mother.

Welcome, reader!

I did pretty badly really, didn't I?

Expect the coming years list in a few days