November 30th: Two years later

It's the first of December tomorrow.

Imagine that. One month until the end of 2011 and I'm still here.

Anyway. I'm Molly. I'm eighteen and a half years old and I'm in my first year at York St John University, York, UK, and loving it, where I'm studying English Language and Linguistics. I write, I read, I sing (got grade 6 in the summer), I create spoofs, I'm a complete grammar freak, I love music and musicals--

I'm going to go all Edward Cullen on yo' ass right now (yeah, okay, I can't pull that off) and tell you that I know what you're thinking.

"I know! I already know all this! Why is she telling me again?"

Or maybe,

"Did I go to the wrong page? Is this the first update rather than the latest?"

Well, dear bloglings... yes and no. Two years ago today I started this blog with those exact words (well, with a difference of thirteen, to be precise) and I just thought it would be an interesting experiment to go back and see exactly how much of my life has actually changed.

Oh, my life has changed since then. If you're a regular reader of this blog then you will already know how drastically it's changed - no need to go there again. But how many of the little things are different - the things that actually make me me?

I write. Check.
I read. Check.
I sing. Check.
I create spoofs, I love music, I'm a complete grammar freak... check, check, absolute freaking check.

How do often do we really change? The things that make us fundamentally us? According to Grey's Anatomy, every cell in our bodies regenerates every seven years (quite a cool idea, that; it's very Doctor Who); but we don't notice, which means that everything that is not physical, everything that's in our minds, stays the same. We know the same people, we like the same things, we keep the same personality. So how frequently do we grow in and out of interests?

I think it's different from person to person. Throughout my life I've always had little (or rather large) 'obsessions' - which were basically just exaggerated interests in things like TV shows (Doctor Who), musicals (Wicked) or people (David Tennant) - but they were always one at a time. Becky, on the other hand, tends to go through her 'obsessions' much faster than I do. I discovered Wicked four years ago and I've seen it five times now, but I'm not as obsessed with it as I used to be. Similarly, when I started writing this blog in 2009, I  had literally only just discovered English Language at college - I had no idea that linguistics even existed, let alone what it was, and though I've been a grammar freak all my life, I've only become more pedantic as the years have passed - which I now find is a bad thing for linguists to be! Oh, will my grammar obsessiveness ever be accepted?

Maybe we don't change. I like to think it's possible that we can, but maybe we don't unless we're forced to. Maybe being who you are is a bit like having someone in your life that you really love; just as people come and go, that one person - or people - is always there, and there are personality traits that we possess from the day we're born to the day we die. These traits grow stronger as we grow older, and maybe these are the things that define us; our likes and dislikes, our interests. Maybe these are the things we need to tell people when they ask about us - these can tell people so much more about you than where you're from or what you do for a living.

I firmly believe that the people you meet throughout your life make you into the person you become, and I would be very different if it weren't for the people in mine. We are who we are because of a series of coincidences - I mean, if my parents had never met and had each ended up with someone else, I wouldn't be me. I'd be one half of two other people. Isn't that weird?

We could consider all the things that make us who we are coincidence, but maybe it's not. Maybe it's destiny.

Molly x

P.S. I ended my first post by saying "I find it incredibly annoying that one can't indent these paragraphs whilst writing them."

Some things definitely never change.

November 26th: A post about happiness from the queen of depressing stuff

Deary me, back again! You lot are going to start missing updates if I keep posting this frequently... but of course I won't keep it up, because you know me and my highly unreliable posting 'schedule'. Basically I post when I feel like it and only occasionally when I don't, and it's so obvious which ones are the ones where people have asked me to write when I'm uninspired and I've just dredged any old crap up from the depths of my subconscious.

Just because it will annoy me: despite the fact that it says somewhere up there ^ that this was posted on November 27th, and despite the fact that that is technically true, as I haven't gone to bed yet it's still Saturday as far as I'm concerned. This is update number two of Saturday November 26th 2011. Suck it up.

Before you start reading past this point: right click on this link - right click! If you don't, you'll be directed away from the post, and I just want you to listen to the song while you read because I was listening while I was writing. Hopefully it'll set the mood.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HieNpwB3Eac

I was saying earlier today (yeah, that's right, today) about how you can't write some feelings down, but I think I was wrong. You can write feelings down - for me at least - as long as they're negative. I'm the queen of writing depressing stuff. I've got a million sad songs and poems and stories - and, as you know, blog posts (though they're censored a lot) - but only a handful of happy ones. I wonder why that is... my guess is it's because happiness is one of those things you can attempt to describe only if you feel it in every cell of your body, and even then it's difficult. Maybe it's because most of us have been sad more often than we've been truly happy - and that in itself is a sad concept.

I'm not saying everybody in the world is sad - not at all. There are many stages between happy and sad (in linguistics we call this gradable antonymy (or 'Grey's Anatomy' as I read it when I was writing an essay on it at half past two (2:30, to avoid confusion for my European readers) in the morning) and most people sit around the levels of contentment or satisfaction (not that kind of satisfaction. Get your mind out of the gutter). That's why you'd get a bit freaked out if you saw someone grinning inanely at you as they passed you in the street.

However, as creepy as a grin can be, a smile from a stranger can put you in a good mood for the rest of the day. While I was in town today, I literally bumped into a hell of a lot of people (it was very busy; I'm not just spectacularly uncoordinated) and only one of them apologized to me. I don't know, maybe they weren't British or something... some of you will be familiar with the concept of 'British politeness' (one of Britain's defining characteristics) in which we apologize pretty much whenever we can and most of the time when we don't need to. Excessive apologizing is certainly a habit of mine and I've lost count of the times I said sorry today, so it surprised me that only one person said it to me. People are rude, I was beginning to think; how can they think it acceptable to just barge past me and not say a word?

And then someone barged past me, turned round to look at me, said "Sorry!" and smiled at me, and I realised that however many rude people there are in the world, there are also so, so many nice people. For all the times we say "there are only two types of people in the world", we're basically talking rubbish. There must be millions of different types of people in the world.

I've made friends here in York, but I have no doubt that I'd have made friends wherever I'd chosen to attend university. I could go anywhere in the world and make new friends - as can everybody else. That means that wherever you go, there are people you consider 'nice'; people you'd want to spend time with; people like you. And there are also people you wouldn't touch with a bargepole, but they have friends too, right? Most of them, anyway. Consider how many different types of cliques there were in your school and then multiply that by whatever ridiculous amount of people currently live in the world and how many types of people does that mean there are? Way too many to comprehend. But imagine - if we could meet everybody in the world, imagine how many friends we'd have!

Everybody seems to be full of stories about how the world is full of evil - and yes, maybe it is, if you look in the wrong places. I once heard someone say that you find dodgy people in dodgy places and though he was joking, I think there's a certain truth to it. Just as there are people with whom you find yourself congregating, there are places where you and your you-alikes congregate. Similar people seem to like similar places, to a certain extent. So maybe the world has its evils, but it's not full of it. You can find magic too, wherever you look.

I'm lucky, because I have found so much more magic than evil throughout my life to date. Sometimes it doesn't feel that way, but that's only because the evil things have a way of sticking around, of being the most memorable things when really they don't deserve any more of your time or mental capacity than they demanded of you when they were happening. Somehow evil manages to push magic out of your head. But don't let it! Remind yourself of everything wonderful you've ever been lucky enough to experience; remember every person who's ever loved you; reflect on every random smile that's ever brightened up your day. Sometimes magic is huge and it hits you right between the eyes, and sometimes it's small, and you don't even notice it there until you have nothing else to notice. But it's always there. And the people who love you... so are they.

And just in case you were curious to see where my 'on-the-go' post was written this afternoon, I was sitting right there on the bench (the little brown bit near the left hand side of the photo).

I have a thing about ruins of buildings, especially ones like this. It's just the fact that stone is something that seems unbreakable, so solid and strong, and yet the weather, something everyday, something to which nobody really gives any thought most of the time, has done the impossible and broken it. Kind of makes you feel small, doesn't it?

That's why that's one of my favourite places in my beautiful, historical city. You jealous?

Molly x

November 26th: A perfect November day

I'm currently sitting in York's museum gardens, directly inside what would once have been a church. On one side of me the walls are mostly intact, crumbling a little, and on the other there's nothing there but the remains of the stone foundations in the ground. It's raining lightly and sporadically and the wind is rustling my hair as I sit here - in other words, it's a perfect November day, and it's exactly the kind of weather that inspires me most.


I've been stuck in my flat for the past couple of days doing work, and despite the fact that none of my friends are free today, I'd have gone insane stuck in there for another day. I'm taking the opportunity to have a wander around York on my own, as I've been intending to ever since I moved in. I can't describe how glad I am that I did it. York is ridiculously busy today; Christmas markets here and there, Christmas shoppers everywhere, but as I walk through its beautiful, historical streets, I can feel myself falling in love with it all over again. York is incredible. It's like being plunged into the past and yet staying right here in the present; it's a city and yet it's nothing like other cities I've been to (in this country at least). It's so easy to imagine the Vikings and the Romans and all the other invaders making their home here the way it's now becoming mine. I truly love it here.


I went to one of the markets I stumbled across and acquired a stack of plastic cups for a pound and three books for 60p... can't beat that! I'm tempted to go back for one of the cakes as well. Nom.


I can't help but think of Zoe as I sit here because this place is swarming with photographers... I even whipped out my camera and I wouldn't call myself a photographer under any circumstances. There are so many things here to take pictures of!


I don't really know why I'm writing this post. I just felt an inexplicable need to express the way I feel right now - it seems York gets under your skin - but I can't. As seems to happen to me a lot, words have given up on me just as I need them most.


Sometimes you can't write your feelings down. Sometimes you just have to feel them instead. I can't think of a more frustrating concept than that, but for me at least, it's often the way. The things that mean the most are the hardest things to describe, and whether you're writing or speaking isn't going to change that. Maybe that's why they're called feelings - because you don't describe them. You feel them, and that's all you can do.


Molly x


(Sorry about the gaps between posts; Blogger's clearly having a bad software day!)

November 25th: Language vandals

I realise it's unusual for me to post twice on the same day, but I have recently been stumbling across quite a few articles on language - which is, admittedly, not a particularly surprising occurrence for me. However, the articles in question have been getting on my nerves somewhat.

Whilst writing an essay for my e-communication class the other week (I know, another post inspired by that blasted class; I swear it's all I ever do) I found an article from the Mail Online, in which John Humphrys describes users of text messaging as "destroying [our language]: pillaging our punctuation; savaging our sentences; raping our vocabulary. And they must be stopped."

And who, I hear you cry, are the users in question? Who are these "vandals" who are doing to our language now "what Genghis Khan did to his neighbours eight hundred years ago"? It's young people, of course - young, impressionable children whose minds aren't developed enough to know the difference between what formality of language is acceptable in which situation. Is that really what you think of us now - that the future of your country lies in the hands of a bunch of imbeciles who can't decide when to add the letters "yo" to "u"?

Well, if that's the case, no wonder you're terrified. No wonder you accuse us of "sloppy habits" and call us "vandals". But to suggest that the responsibility of our language's grammatical collapse falls entirely on the shoulders of the younger generations is completely preposterous. Consider that we do not teach ourselves how to punctuate a sentence or spell a word. Consider that these are your children you're talking about - are you then holding yourself responsible for your child's inability to construct a grammatically correct sentence? Are you accusing your child's teachers of being inadequate? I don't think you are, are you? You think a piece of technology has the power to be completely detrimental to one's language skills. We're not born typing; we learn to speak before we learn to text and according to various surveys, most of us don't even get our first phone until we're ten or older, so do you honestly believe that a mobile can reach into a person's brain and undo all the good work? Can technology really rewire one's language?

To that question I am inclined to respond with a big fat "pfffft". It's bollocks. Abbreviations have been around for hundreds of years - believe it or not, they were around long before fingers could press keys to create them. Admittedly there are ones that are slightly over the top, but most of the abbreviations used in texts are simple and, funnily enough, more widely used by adults than teenagers. This is probably due to the fact that a lot of adults find phone keypads difficult to use - or, in the case of particularly technologically challenged individuals, still think that you're charged by the character rather than the text.

Yes, I can be pedantic about grammar. I do accept that language must change - of course it must, or it could never progress - but I will never approve of misplaced apostrophes or unnecessary capitalisation (Never Do This Or I Shall Kill You. Also, ORDINARY NOUNS DO NOT NEED CAPITALISING. ONLY PROPER NOUNS SHOULD BE CAPITALISED. REMEMBER THIS). Some errors are just so simple I wonder how much of an idiot you'd have to be to get it wrong. And yes, people frequently make grammar errors - but 'text speak' finding its way into real life situations is the least of our worries. Most people know which formality of language is appropriate for which situation and can adapt accordingly. How do you think we're achieving higher exam results than ever? Oh, excuse me, I'd forgotten - exams are getting easier, aren't they?

If you want some really horrifying examples of grammar, try these:

Funny - I don't know any teenagers who know how to "loose" a car. Do you? 

I also don't know anybody my age who would insinuate that J.K. Rowling's storylines are less than satisfactory.

It would seem that even the church isn't exempt from their share of (rather alarming, in this case) phrasing mishaps. Don't let worries kill you - let the church help? I may not be religious, but even I know that killing off your congregation isn't likely to get you to heaven. Typical; must be all those teenage vicars. Sort it out!

I am a teenager. I have always had an instinct for grammar. When I was younger I went through a stage of using 'text speak' but grew out of it (as so many do) and now I - and a great deal of my peers - ALWAYS, without fail, punctuate everything I write fully, no matter whether I'm writing an email or an essay, a text or a tweet, or, perhaps most surprisingly, a Facebook update. I have never used even the smallest example of 'text speak' in an essay. 

(Well actually, that's a lie, but I had to; I was writing about text messages! And examples were all they were. Blame e-communication.)

I suppose I'm lucky, because I am good at grammar; I don't ever really remember being taught it, so perhaps people whose talents lie in other areas find it more difficult. All I'm really trying to say here is that yes, we have a problem with grammar, but it is not purely down to the 'youth of today'. I am not particularly prescriptivist in my outlook, but if in the future I have to enter a shop to buy "cake's" and then follow it up with a trip next door to acquire "CD's, DVD's" and - worse still - "BOOK's", then you might as well make like that infamous panda who walks into a cafe, eats a sandwich, then whips out his gun and shoot me now.

You can read the offending article here. Notice how comments are no longer accepted on this article; clearly I was not the only one who was inspired to defend the "vandalism" of my peers.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-483511/I-h8-txt-msgs-How-texting-wrecking-language.html

Molly, who is deliberately including an imitation of prosodic features in the form of "x" to show that even fully literate university students are at liberty to use whichever bloody form of language we please. Suck on that, Mr Humphrys. X

P.S. Found this when I searched Google for some of the horrifying errors above and thought it was worth sharing with you. Guess those poor seals aren't the only ones with issues.

November 25th: Free lemons

Well, this is probably going to be a very disjointed and not particularly interesting post because I don't really have much to say today, but Charlotte requested a blog post a few days ago and as I love it when people show an interest in my blog, I'm going to do my best to oblige.

First of all (since this blog was set up to record my "school" years... technically college and university but let's not get fussy) I should mention that I got the results back from that test I wrote about a couple of posts ago and totally got a first! This makes up for never getting an A in English at A Level because it totally shows that I'm kicking some arse. Long may it continue!

Last week was reading week and I went back to the... er, glorious area from which I... am. Does that make sense? Probably not... anyway, I went home. It was really nice to see my family again (and really nice to eat something other than pasta; I mean, much as I love it, I'm getting to the stage where I never want to see another piece again as long as I live). I also saw my friends for the first time since we all started uni; Becky, Zoe and I went to see Breaking Dawn Part 1... and before I get a deluge of abuse for being a Twilight fan I must point out that we only watch them because they're so bad that they're amusing. Also, having read all the books and seen all the films to date, it's just sort of a given that we'd see it.

Charlotte and Lauren, not being Twilight fans, joined us for a sleepover at my house, which was great. I was worried that being at university would have a negative affect on my old friendships, but I think I was wrong. We're doing a pretty good job of staying in touch so far, and when I saw them on Saturday it was like we'd never been apart, though I could see the difference in them already. It was like we've all grown up, even though we've literally only been at uni for two months... but it was the first time that we've been apart, living our separate lives, and then come back together. We had our own separate stories to tell, rather than knowing all the day-to-day details of each other's lives, and to me we seemed older.

We stayed up pretty much all night talking (except Zoe, who got back from Prague that morning and fell asleep on my bed about ten o'clock... adorable), and though we've been friends for years, it's really the first time we have ever talked like that, together, about those things. I don't know what made us feel like we could; maybe it's the fact that we're around different people everyday, around people we maybe couldn't tell those things to... that can really make you miss the people you can talk to. But we all have 'deep' stuff, and they say that you don't really know someone until you can see their depth, and if that's true then the bond between my friends and I just got a whole lot deeper. It's very easy to drift apart when you're not together everyday, but I think that as long as we keep making the effort, uni will be the making, not the death, of our friendships.

And Becky (and hopefully Charlotte too) is coming to visit me in two weeks... yay! And then the week after is the start of the Christmas holidays, so I'll be home again in three weeks' time and that's the end of the first semester. Blimey. That was quick. It's scary how fast it's going... it feels like I've been here practically all my life and yet no time at all. I only moved in nine weeks ago on Sunday! Ridiculous!

In other news, we started our grammar class (yay!) on Monday and I've already marked myself out as the nerd... what can I say? I just love grammar. Strangely there aren't too many other grammar geeks in my classes - I would have thought there'd be more, considering we're all language nerds - but then again, there's a lot more to linguistics than grammar. Besides, I kind of like my obsessive-grammar-Nazi status. My ability to spot a misplaced apostrophe from a mile off is pretty much my unique... was going to say 'appeal' then, but I doubt many people find it particularly appealing. It's my incredibly annoying but extremely satisfying talent.

Hmm. A tip for grammar geeks everywhere who are just itching to correct someone who won't mind: find some foreign friends. I've found that some of them actually appreciate it. Imagine that!

I found out this morning that Old Orleans, the restaurant in Reading that my friends and I frequently attend, is closing in early December. I'm going to miss it greatly... it was the place we went for Becky's seventeenth birthday and our end of exams celebration - twice; where I went when I passed my theory test; where we had our fancy dress meal the last time we all saw each other before we all left for uni! It's been quite a big part of our time at college and it feels to me like the end of yet another era. Eras are ending all around us these days! I guess that's the thing about growing up... when I look back on my life when I was little, it was nothing like the way it is today. The clothes I wore, the places I went, the people I knew, the programmes I watched on TV... everything was different then, and now everything is changing again, and I can barely remember the specifics of my day-to-day life nine or ten years ago. I don't mind that, because that's normal, but I don't want to forget about my life before I came here. It was pretty good, as life goes.

Change is normal. Change is good. Change happens so frequently that sometimes we don't even notice it, and I guess it's only when we do that it becomes the scary thing that people try so hard to avoid. Good things bring new experiences, and new experiences are things you've never done before, and things you've never done before are scary... but you only have to do it once, and then it's not so scary anymore - and you get some pretty kickass moments out of it too.

In the wise words of a Facebook group: when life gives you lemons, keep them, because hey - free lemons.

Molly x

November 10th: A portal from your world to mine

Right now I'm researching a project I'm doing for my e-communication class on interactive advertising, and I stumbled across a video on YouTube which started me thinking. The video starts with these words:

"Once there was a time when we knew where people would be and how to reach them - with messages that would be heard and signals that would be seen.

We'd broadcast what we had to say, secure in the knowledge that somebody, somewhere, was listening."

Well, isn't that exactly what I'm doing here with my blog? Putting my message out there so that people can read it?

I didn't start this blog so people could get inside my head. I started it so I could get out of it. I needed somewhere to express myself and I can't do that here anymore - isn't observer's paradox a bitch?

But in some way, am I not glad that I'm not making all this effort for nobody to bother reading it? Am I secretly looking for an attentive audience?

The video then continues, "We took what we had to say and we said it in the most public way. We took our messages into people's homes at a time that we knew they'd be most receptive."

These days, time both is and isn't an issue. People are always talking about the increased pace of modern life being confusing and frustrating and the way that being constantly reachable feels like you're trapped - but is it? Let's envisage a scenario. You own a smartphone. You are used to having everything you could possibly want at your fingertips all the time - all your emails, all your work, your friends, your family - and you go out for the day, and you forget your phone. You could think of this as an opportunity to relax, create a bit of space between you and the rest of the world... but do you?

Maybe you do. If that's how you choose to see a day without your superior communications device, congratulations. You're a stronger person than I am. Because, despite once being one of those people who thought being glued to your phone was pathetic, that version of me disappeared almost the minute I got a BlackBerry. I feel naked without my phone, unable to stand the frustration of not being able to know everything now. I might be missing something really important!

I realize now that I'm in this culture that people aren't addicted to their phones; they're addicted to the ease with which they can access their entire lives from wherever they happen to be; they're addicted to the freedom - not captivity - that their phone brings; they're addicted to the people they're talking to. We can know whatever we want whenever we want - anything, anywhere, anytime. With the fast-paced nature of modern life, mobile everything-devices are timesavers, not timewasters. What's wrong with that?

And to say that using a mobile phone is anti-social is ridiculous - mobile phones are the very antithesis of anti-social behaviour. Isn't that why they call them social networks?

I received my first anonymous comment here on the blog last week and though I eventually found out who it was, for a while my brain went into overdrive. An anonymous comment? Who is this person? Why do they like my blog? What are they doing poking their nose into my life?

You see, I hardly ever give any thought to the fact that everything I write to this blank, white screen is out there for everyone to read - and who owns it then? When you upload a photo to Facebook, Facebook owns it; same with YouTube and video ownership. But surely writing is different? Writing is individual. Writing - and speech; the way we play with words - is the way we as people construct our identities. Nobody can place words or construct sentences in exactly the same way I can, and nobody will derive exactly the same meaning from these words as you will, so how can Blogger possibly own something as personal as my - MY - writing? Wait, so the internet owns my identity now?

The YouTube video "An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube" describes vlogging as "somebody watching where nobody is". Same with blogging. I've got people from all over the world reading everything I'm thinking and I don't have a clue who any of you are, and that is the most brilliant yet terrifying thing I've ever really thought about.

People are also saying that the skill of multitasking is a huge benefit of all the modern technology we have access to these days, but - again - is it? Can we really complete more than one task at once or are we just spreading our minds too thin, resulting in an inability to really get into detail in any one topic? From experience I can say that I almost never sit down to write a blog post and finish it however much time later having done nothing else. My brain is all over the place, flitting from one topic to the next, starting new paragraphs in the middle of old sentences, especially when I'm inspired-- and coincidentally, as this was exactly the point I was about to make, my phone has just started flashing and my brain is screaming, "No! Not now! You're on a roll, don't answer it! Don't answer it!"

But of course I will, because who can resist the pull of modern technology these days? Who can ignore the red flash of a BlackBerry, the call of the social group - the disappointment when it's only a spam email or a text from your service provider. And, of course, if I'm checking my phone, I might as well have a peek at Facebook as well. And I can't ignore Twitter, can I? And ooh - what if I'm missing a really important email?

I'm not a sociologist, but this is an area of sociology that I do find interesting (which is lucky, because this particular topic is almost exactly the same as most of the second year of my media studies A Level). The internet seems to be one big circle which we can never truly find our way out of - because (like sex, or so I've heard) even the lack of it complicates things. We are travelling through a million different portals every day, in and out of the lives of strangers without them even knowing you were there. The internet is a scary place, but god, it's so brilliant too. 

You may find it interesting to know that I was in the middle of the aforementioned project when I became inspired to start this blog post. What project's that then? You can't remember, can you? And is that because you stopped reading this post to do something else and then came back, or are you just thinking about too many things to remember what you read five minutes ago?

Molly x

(Now I'm going to go and see to my Facebook notifications and my ever-vibrating phone. Because yes, I ignored them. Your applause is appreciated.)

Videos referenced in this post:

"Nokia Interactive Advertising"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zkmi_AXACw

"An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TPAO-lZ4_hU

And, because my e-communication lecturer referenced this as 'essential reading' for our 'create your own LOLcat' assignment:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi8VTeDHjcM