Happy days: #2

Sunny days when you've got nothing to do but take advantage of the good weather. Taking too many photos just so you can document your silly nights out (or piece them back together the morning after.) Having someone you genuinely could tell anything and everything to, and not worry. Being so comfortable with where your life is going that you have a chance to breathe, (oh and potentially book a holiday, yay.) Anticipating summer 2014 to be the best yet. Grinning so much your cheeks ache and your jaw begins to seize up. Laughing so much that your stomach muscles feel like you've done three hours at the gym. Counting your blessings every single day that you have the most incredible people in your life, and they're happy to be there. 

Notions.

She knew before she ever even said the words, wrote it down or repeated it to another person. Probably before she even acknowledged it to herself. A look. An exchange of words. She had feelings for him long before he admitted his, or brushed her cheek or held her hand. Before the words fell from her bottom lip and hung in the air, clinging on to some forced, grasped sense of meaning. It felt right, it felt comfortable, it felt like it could potentially be everything she ever wanted. 

Happy days: #1

Okay so I've well and truly jumped on the #hashtagging happy days bandwagon and for that, I'm smiley yet also partly sorry for giving into it. It's kind of just too irresistible. I'm going to write happy posts every so often, in a list-like form, of things that make/ are making me, happy. Plus, as people know, I have a tendency to be cynical, negative and terribly pessimistic. Indeed. So, maybe, I think, this may help lift my mood, and focus on positives rather than negatives. Always a good idea, right? So here goes nothing. 

A kind of given, but Alex Turner's voice is just the soundtrack to my life at the minute. I'm unhealthily obsessed with Arctic Monkeys, and AM is, in my view, the best album yet. My favourite song, well, I have too many. I'm too indecisive for that. 

My "reading week" at uni: yes! It's finally here, shh, we're taking advantage of any time off possie. As of Monday coming, I'm off for the week (according to my own schedule anyway) so that means no uni, no stressy mornings and no boring as hell lectures at 9am. Happy days, I've needed time off for ages. Sleep time yes.

My latest read: as some of you may or may not know, Nathan Filer's debut novel The Shock of the Fall won Costa's book prize this year. Immediately, I almost sprinted to Waterstones to get my hands on a copy. As soon as my eyes feasted on the first few pass of this brand spanking new novel, I just knew I was going to love it. I'm about a third of the way through at the moment, and it's really addictive. The crisp pages are just engorged between my fingertips. It's one of the best pieces of writing I've read in ages. Read it. It's making me happy.

My old new-found obsession with My Family. We bought the boxset around Christmas time. If you haven't seen it already, I urge you to google it, or find one of the many sky channels that count on repeats to fund their viewings, because this programme will be lurking around I promise you. Originally a BBC sitcom, My Family follows the lives of the Harper family, their ups and downs, loves and losses, through chaos and celebration, turmoil and despair. I have seen every single episode multiple times, and now we've invested in the boxset (yes..boxsets are the way forward for a quick fix) I just need to watch them over and over again. Also, Miranda, yes, she's wonderful, and the sitcom is just painfully hilarious. Get watching.

Oh, and I can't forget this one. A spin off from the very well known Grey's Anatomy, Private Practise was discovered by me about a year ago, maybe less. I started watching just one or two episodes a week, and now it's five and a half seasons later and things are unwinding like never before. It's already finished, I might add. This programme doesn't run any more. It ended 13 episodes into six seasons, over nearly as many years. I have around 15 hours of it left to watch, ever, and I'm torn between savouring it and completely devouring it in one intense, bizarre, emotional sitting. The latter will probably occur very shortly. 

So, yes. Happy moments. Also, a tiny little shout out to Lukas. I'm not one for soppy exchanges and waaaaay OTT PDA's, but I don't care, this suffices, because, he makes me happy. So there you go. That's really all there is to it. 

Blah.

I'm hopeless beyond doubt, stroppy beyond reason and lost without hope. It's Saturday, closing in to 6pm and I'm in bed, hanging, and totally exhausted. The very famous "few drinks" last night went out of control, and my ill advised, and yet, note: ignored, taking of antibiotics with copious amounts of alcohol turned out as well as it possible could have. Messy nights are my life lately, oops. I'm lost behind my uni work and I'm just so uninterested in what I should be inspired by. I feel a bit out of touch, with eveything. I've recently just had a catch up with some good friends and discussed booking a holiday, and yet, I don't know why, but my heart isn't in it. Don't get me wrong, I love them, and holidays are one of my favourite things ever, but at the minute, excitement about sunny times seems so far over the horizon. Winter is thoroughly depressing me. I want to hide under my winter-weight quilt and wait for it all to blow over. Uninspired, uncoordinated, unorganised, unhealthy, under-the-influence. Blah. I don't care. It's Saturday night and I'd rather spend it in bed gorging on greasy food than leave the warm and drown myself in more alcohol, but who are we kidding, we all know I will. Exhaustion has set in and it's not great, admittedly. I'm unhappily yet happily mulling everything over. I want to change but I'm not sure what it is that I want to change, if that's even English speaking. As you can tell, I'm still on a drug-and-alcohol-and-caffeine comedown and it's horrific. I can hear Patricia Hodge's voice echoing "SUCH FUN!" repeatedly as I clumsily get ready and get paraded off to the pub rather than turn boring at a mere twenty and stay in on a Saturday night. Now that, my friends, would be sacrilege. 

Bear with me.

I'm exhausted, stressed and close to tears. It's finally happened, my belated January blues, the winter depression everyone talks about. That's what I feel like now. The bags under my eyes get darker every day, I'm irritable and getting lazier as the mornings get darker and colder. Uni is just causing me a lot of unnecessary stress, and I hate that. Assignments are flooding in, deadlines are looming and decisions have to be made, fast. I feel like I'm losing my friends, to uni, to other people, to everything. I can count on one hand how many times anyone has attempted to contact me in the last couple of weeks, and it scares me. It seems like everyone knows what they want, what their end goal is, what they're aiming for. While I sit, twirling a pen between my thumb and forefinger, absent-mindedly daydreaming about one day writing some fabulous bestselling novel or something. I want to scream (into a void, perhaps) or just disappear for a few days, hibernate and pull myself together. Sort out my work, and my immune system, and boost my mood. I'm a nightmare lately, I'm moody and stressy and I'm intolerable when it comes to anyone else. I feel like I might just eat everyone alive that comes into close proximity with me. I'm constantly checking my watch, counting down the days, until my week off. I need some down-time. Some rest. Some peace. It's hard, I feel like I push people away sometimes, I know I do, but that's only because it's for their own good. I'm just saying, if I want to be on my own, it's because I need to be. I really need to stop stressing and start smiling again.

Unauthorised absence.

Well, I've been AWOL for eleven whole days, so I think I've got some explaining, or at least writing, to do. So, where have I been? What have I achieved in that week and a bit I haven't been blogging for? 

Sorry to disappoint, but not a lot. It's like the last eleven days are one surreal blur just leaving me with fragmented memories of smiles, laughter and laziness. So, it's February now, and it's threatening to snow up north, yes we do exist, even though we may not be under water like our capital. I've spent my weekends, as usual, out drinking, making new friends and reigniting others. In absolute honesty, nothing life-changing has happened in my absence. I'm increasingly burried in a stack of uni work that keeps mounting, and I keep actively ignoring in a desperate bid for it to disappear. Unlucky for me, I'm falling behind. I've felt rubbish for a few days, totally run down, and yet again, my immune system refused to pick up the slack once more after another weekend of bingeing, eating and staying up too late, hence why I spent the remainder of the weekend tucked up in bed, doped up, feeling utterly sorry for my miserable self. 

Recovering now, I'm greeted unwelcomingly with looming uni deadlines. Anyone who underestimates second year's difficulties, like me, will be sadly mistaken when it rears it's ugly head. Part of me feels like I'm stifled, it's like I can't breathe. I have too much reading to do, too much writing to delay, and too much sleep to catch up on. So, as well as this, I have something else that conjures up a feeling of dread deep inside my chest. I have six days left to settle on my module options for third year. I'm very indecisive anyway, but this is like torture. I kind of feel like I'm writing my own death warrant, carving out my own failure or something. It's important, and yet, there's no telling what will happen. Maybe I can hide from reality for one more day at least? Yes, that sounds very tempting.