Exams and Hyde Park Corner

It’s slap-bang in the middle of the first Physics exam season, and it’s going… well, it could be worse. Tomorrow is problem solving, so I’m pretty much stumped for what to revise, although numbers like 7000 kg/m^3 density of metal are floating round my cranium. We shall see.

The last couple of days I’ve been coming back to halls on the Piccadilly Line and been evacuated at Hyde Park corner. On Wednesday there was a fire on the line, and I ended up catching the bus back. Friday it was just a false alarm, but it was awful strange. Strange and annoying.

Anyhoo, I’m hoping normal service will resume next week on all fronts. It’s felt like this week has taken forever.

THE ALGORITHM CONSTANTLY FINDS JESUS

Rank stupidity

I just checked my college email, and it turns out that you’re supposed to deduct £200 from the third term’s accommodation invoice to essentially recover the £200 deposit put down to secure the room.

However, in the College’s infinite wisdom, they send the email telling you you’re supposed to do this after they sent out the invoices. The email was sent at about 11:30 on Monday, which is frankly just not good enough. Heck, it’s not good enough that they just couldn’t deduct the £200 from the invoice themselves.

So, me prudently visiting the bank early to get the hassle of paying my accommodation fees over and done with nice and early has backfired upon me and I now have to figure out how I’m going to recover £200 from the accommodation office. Fantastic.

Right, I need to go have a shower, ready to spend a day doing tons o’ revision. Oh, the joy.

So it’s quarter past 5

And I’m kinda bored, waiting for Lost to finish downloading, and listening to Kerang on my awesome new MP3 player.

It’s an iriver clix2 4GB, and it’s pretty great. It’s got a 2.2″ screen, plays MP3, WMA and Ogg Vorbis, as well as video, JPEG pictures and Flash games. Oh, and it has an FM tuner. And a microphone for voice recording. And you can record from the radio.

I’m really happy with it, not only because it just looks amazing, but because I can put episodes of Scrubs on it, which is always good.

You wait ages, then…

The last few days I’ve just accidentally met up with people that, for one reason or another, I hadn’t talked to in an incredibly long time. It’s not that I didn’t like them, and I’d hope that they didn’t not like me (ugh, that’s an ugly double negative, but it somehow sounds better than saying “I’d hope they like me”); but for one reason or another, we haven’t talked.

Then meeting them again, it feels entirely natural, like there was never this crazy six-month (or longer) interval: I guess this is what having old friends feels like, but in a way it makes me feel regret for the people that I could have known better, the people I wish I could meet up with again but don’t really know how to ask, and I wouldn’t really know how to start talking to if I did meet up with them. I’d imagine there’d be reminicenses, and a bizarre realisation of just how long it’d been since we first met.

Like the other night I ran into a certain person (I was going to mention by name, but tough) who I realised I met something like three years ago. It’s just… kinda crazy. I feel like I don’t know half the people I’ve met half as well as they deserve, to crib a line. But I’m glad I met them.

Life’s… it’s never ever what you expect, I guess. Being back in Birmingham, it’s been reminding me a lot about the past. A lot of things have gone right, and a some other things, well, not so much. The last three or four years, they’ve been at times some of the best and the worst of my life. I’ve grown. I’ve changed. Some things I’m glad of, and others I’m not, and sometimes confusingly they’re the same things. I sometimes miss the shy, akward little boy I was, sometimes I wish I’d become the person I am today faster; experienced more things, known more people.

I’ve made mistakes. I’ve made more mistakes than I’d care to admit, and… some of them were far worse than I’d care to admit. Some mistakes I didn’t even learn from, and for that… for a lot of things, I’m so very sorry. I wish I had the nerve to apologise to those I wronged. I hope that some day I’ll have the courage to give you the apology you deserve. I hope, at least, that you’re happy.

I have this idea which borrows a bunch of really Christian terminology but uses it in a subjective sense rather than objective. We judge our souls by our own measure of sin, and condemn ourselves to heaven or hell; sometimes I wonder if people – people I care about – are living in their own personal hell, one they’ve lived in so long that it’s started to feel comfortable, closed in by the weight of their own sense of sin.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s where I am. Either that, or the night is making me melancholy. I will adjourn, and climb the wooden hill.

And y’know, comment or something. You don’t have to, but it’d be nice, y’know?

Forgetting to post kinda sucks.

Mostly ’cause then to cover everything you wanted to say, you have to write an uber-long post and most annoyingly of all, you forget all the really cool things you wanted to say. Bugger.

Anyways, here’s how it is. This is the end of my second week of freedom, which puts me slap bang in the middle of my holidays. I spent the first week bumming around halls, and the second here at home. Both went pretty quick, really.

I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.

Pretend I said something clever.

Oh yeh, miss all the uni people, so can’t wait to be back in London. But not looking forward to my exams quite so much… :(