My Life - Flu and Me (Week of 7/10/13)

Greeting and salutations good people.

So, straight off the bat I have to apologise, more to myself than anyone, for neglecting this blog over the past week. There's a reason for it - namely a horrid flu that plagued me midweek - but I still should have posted once or twice. I need to get on top of my schedule, as I can feel myself slipping behind both on this and on uni. I'm not happy with my work ethic right now, and I need to change it.

Anyway, moving on to my past week. I spent the weekend over in Glasgow reuniting with a childhood friend. I'm always amazed by how easy I find it slip back into an old friendship. With no effort whatsoever, my friend and I were speaking like we'd seen each other yesterday, and that same comfortable rapport we've always had came back into play. True friendship doesn't just fade away like that. It was a reminder I needed to have, as a worry I've been having recently is one that when all the people I know who went away abroad to have a brilliant time on their years abroad come back to sunny Scotland, our friendships will have faded. Last weekend helped settle that fear. I'm rambling.

So, after an amiable reunion with my longtime pal, a night of drinking and meeting mad but brilliant people ensued. At one point in his party, after somebody turned off a Rush song, I yelled "DON'T HUSH THE RUSH". I hope they had as good an impression of me as I had of them. Waking up in the morning worse for wear, both in health and in wallet size, I returned to the merry city of Edinburgh. Pro-tip, if ever in Glasgow City Centre, there's a milkshake place there (I can't recall the name) that do a Parma Violet milkshake. It's as divine as it sounds.

After a brilliant weekend in Glasgow, I paid the price during the week. My mate and his flatmate were suffering from a brutal sounding cough and a fever/flu respectively, and as my dumb luck would have, both of those symptoms were mixed up into a disgusting cocktail of illness for me to experience. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and some of Thursday was dedicated to illness. I even had to miss class on Wednesday, which really sucked. Now I'm in the unfortunate position of playing catch-up, which is only building to my stress. Luckily, I'm getting to play catch-up from the comfort of my Mum's and my Dad's over this weekend, so I can take some solace in that.

I'm hoping next week will be better, I'm at a pretty low ebb right now.

Updates next week...I PROMISE! 

-James

My Life - Blogging Anew (Week of 30/9/13)

So this is the first of what is hopefully going to be a long stream of "personal" blog posts. A diary of sorts, I suppose. I really don't expect anyone to read these, beyond close friends and family and even then I would be surprised. I'm ultimately writing these for myself.

This week has mostly been about this blog. I'd let it lie dormant for far far too long and it was beginning to get me down. I felt I was disappointing myself by not writing here regularly. Hence, I came up with a weekly schedule and I fully intend to keep to 5 posts a week. I tried to set myself a day-by-day schedule but that fell through 3 days in - however, when this goes up on the blog, I'll have fulfilled my goal! I'm excited to build up a portfolio of work, regardless if people read it. The goal here is to develop my writing style, and people are already complimenting it. It's an honour that people read this, and even more so that they enjoy it.

I started back at university a few weeks back and the schedule has been difficult, but manageable. I'm only in 3 days a week at uni, but the majority of my time is spent reading or writing. English Literature might seem like an easy degree to some, but there is a hell of a lot of work that needs put into it. Last week I had to read a 500 page tome in a week, which I had to do on top of other assignments. It's pushing me though, and it's getting me motivated.

I went through somewhat of a tough time towards the beginning of the month, as a lot of my friends went meandering over to Europe for their years abroad. Part of the curse of doing French in first year but dropping out and switching to single honours English Literature is that most of my friends came from languages, and were ultimately going to leave my life for a year. I won't mix my words - I was pretty lonely. I used to see them several times a week and not having that has sucked. I'm not worried about losing touch with them, Skype and Facebook has seen to that. But I'm worried about not meeting new people. Luckily, that seems to be changing somewhat. I've been meeting new people on my course, and some people from my previous summer job have kept in touch. Things are on the up.

This is just a short one this week - I think what I'm going to do is change this to a Sunday blog post. It makes more sense to chronicle a full week rather than doing Friday to Friday. The weekend will be fresh in my mind that way, and everyone knows the weekend is when interesting stuff happens. Nobody wants to hear about my degree anyway, probably my future self reading this back included! So, till next Sunday.

-James