It’s been a pretty good week on the whole. Let’s try and tell a tale with photos.

First thing to arrive through the door. Squee! Indiepop 09 mix from Rough Trade. I don’t have a working CD drive at the moment (silly Macbook) so it’s on rotation in the old boombox. It’s really really good.

There’s the tracklist. The highlight for me was Hopelessly Wasted by Shrag, followed closely by The Punks Are Writing Love Songs by Tullycraft (which has a nearly identical opening riff to Mandy by Jonas Brothers…) and (naturally) You!Me!Dancing! by Los Campesinos!

Then the thing I was most excited about. Cooking Cleaning and Flower Arranging by Manic Street Preachers. Limited to 300 copies. And then….

Garrr, red ink marks. There’s been a lot of problems with them according to the forums - mostly bad packaging and red ink. Have emailed Rough Trade to see if I can get a replacement, although I’m sure they will sell out by the time they get back to me.

After my Decision Maths exam (which was surprisingly…enjoyable?) I went for a drive with my friend from Durham University before he goes back. He taught me life lessons; like the value of university pre-lashes on the wallet, what to drink/what not to drink and most importantly, raiding Sainsbury’s for clearance CDs  = good stuff. [Top one is a David Gray album]. The one of the left is making my ears bleed right now, although getting home and putting on ‘Paris to Berlin’ was pretty priceless. I don’t he’ll ever let me in his car again because he bought me cookies and they were crunchy and I got crumbs everywhere. He also lost a £2 bet because he thought I didn’t know the company of my local petrol station. Dork.

Then…as if life couldn’t get any better…

Yay! Foreign Policy Magazine! I must’ve paid for the subscription months ago (and by I, I mean using my father’s funds) and it’s finally came. Half way through reading it at the moment. Has thrown a spanner in the works in the whole revision weekend shebang. Speaking of which…

My desk has seen better days…

The journal has taken away any need to write personal bullshit. In a nutshell, life events have been good but emotions haven’t. “Lashed” out (in the lightest possible way) at Baldy, luckily he’ll never hold anything against me. Thank the world for great friends. And eating McDonalds and playing music before exams together, and then turning up late. We are silly.

I dug up my old computer the other day, the really shitty PC I built myself aged thirteen. How did I live with 512MB memory for all those years sheesh. Anyway, there were two harddrive in it, one I used when in 2005/2006 and the second one 2007/2008. The former was saved, and I managed to salvage what was left from it, which was some ‘alternative/indie’ music I used to listen to back then (Straylight Run, Pretty Girls Make Graves, Scarling etc.) and the more recent drive is beyond saving as it was the thing that caused the computer to go kaput.

Anyway, there were a lot of things on the salvaged harddrive that I’d rather forget. I was a messed up child to say the least really, and it’s brought out a lot of negative emotions, remembering how little confidence I had then and how much of a horrible person I was. Nice.

I bought a Nikon D50 was a standard lens. I can’t use it yet, it genuinely scares me because I’m so hopeless at it. This photography thing is just silly. It came with an 18-55mm lens, which I had no idea what that meant until I googled for a while, now realising that’s some 3.6x zoom. Seriously, my compact was 7x. I tried using it at the Nick Clegg meeting today, where my friends an I perched on the bar right at the very back (classy). And yes, utter fail (although it did mean little Joanna had a completely unobscured view). So I’m gonna have to spend some £100 to get some 18-200mm lens…fan-fucking-tastic.  It’s a nice little catch-22: I’m not going to want to use the camera without a better lens, but to get a better lens I’m going to have to invest yet more money into it.

Although on The Nick Clegg Meets Bristol at Colston Hall, Clegg proves himself a great speaker: fluent, intelligent, charasmatic…but enjoys dodging questions where he could. A few times he seemed to hit nails on the head, particularly ones about tax loopholes and nuclear fission/fusion or whatever (and did honestly admit that he didn’t know much of the science but tried to answer it politically).

But after so initial apprehensions I decided to ask a really predictable yet sensible question. Didn’t think it through entirely, I wasn’t expecting to get chosen for there were lots of important people with longer arms; but I’m sure it helped that I was young, in a group of pretty females and my position at the centre of the bar made me directly in his eyeline.

I tried wording it in a way that, if he was to deliberately avoid my question it would’ve been pretty obvious. “If the next election resulted in a hung parliament, under what conditions would you form a coalition with either of the two major parties.” The man wouldn’t even let me keep a straight face, as soon as I mentioned ‘hung parliament’ he said something which I forget, and I just started laughing. Hooray. Anyway, basically he rambled on like “I can’t predict the outcome of the next election…I get flattered when people think I can predict the future” when I just wanted to shout…HYPOTHETICALLY. He probably didn’t know this, but I knew exactly why he refused to answer it.  He hinted at a possible coalition with the Tories a few months back, and Vince Cable said the Lib Dems would never back the Tories and would only consider Labour. Since then, he’s kept tight lipped about “The C-Word” no doubt to avoid ‘internal divisions’ which have damaged both major parties in the past.

Anyway, it was totally worth it to have Nick Clegg talk directly act me for five or so minutes. I struggled to keep a straight face, like I had kind of a power-crush. Oh, and it helps that he’s attractive.

As Jenny said: “You got face time with Nick Clegg, I got Douglas Alexander. I think we know who wins.”

I unfortunately did not get to complete my lifegoal of getting photograph with two Lib Dem leaders (had to shout at a security guard to get a photo with Charles Kennedy, whilst hungover, great fun). It was a good evening and I feel like a little school girl: “OMG he talked to me!”

This is why I could never do political journalism. I get power-crushes and act like a tween.

Ahoy. A bit later than anticipated but…“Now guess who’s back with a brand new track they got everybody in the club goin’ madddd….”

Life’s been up and down lately, I’m slowly learning than I’m a lot of things that I thought I wasn’t, some good and some bad. In the past fortnight I’ve had one of the worst weeks ever, and it all got let out in the tears… I had about eight different negative events hits me within the space of five days and it was one of those “I feel so low, what’s it gonna take to bring me back up?” Well the answer is always me, and a group of friends who I wouldn’t give up for the world. Oh and I also had a few moments of “WHAT THE FUDGE!?” but I just sit back and laugh at everything now… I’m still not one-hundred percent there but I’m getting better every day. And the amount of “EXPLAIN YOUR TWEETS” texts/IMs I’ve been getting…I really need to stop being so honest, haha.

Recent events have been scarce, two weeks ago it was Georgie’s seventeenth where we went out to a lovely Italian restaurant and I bought her metallic green Skullcandy Lowriders. I remembered she liked my lime green ones, but when hers came they were ONE MILLION TIMES NICER THAN MINE and I was nearly crying with envy. I visited Cambridge University a few days after for the Politics, Psychology and Sociology talks, which blew my mind…I don’t think I could ever set the bar that high for getting in but WOW. And I saw two of my college friends who were there on a summer school, I literally RAN down the street and began dancing like an utter idiot. They screamed in shock.

Oh and the picture above is keeping to my old tradition of alcohol-related posted, whereby I was slightly too intoxicated at my friend’s eighteenth birthday shenanigans. I ended up with so many bruises. And I think the drink count was…two glasses of wine, a double Red Bull and vodka and a pint of pear cider. I really need to man up my liver.

Oh, and college ends at 2.30pm TOMORROW. I’m so excited! I start working full-time on Thursday though, I’m so broke! And I’m due to leave for college in…twenty minutes. But I found my Urban Decay black eyeliner after six months so I’m going to spend far too long in the mirror…adios!

Hangovers. The better the night the worse they get. Listen up kids, the only way to prevent a hangover is to drink a lot of juice/water before you collapse. Caffeine and painkillers in the morning will help that “revenge of the vodka” feeling, but you’ll still feel irritable, achy and regretting text messages you made the night before. On the plus side, that mix of Mountain Dew, Coconut Rum and Apple Vodka tasted lovely. Or maybe that was because you managed to paralyse your taste buds with a concoction so vile. And in that dazed phase, you remember recieving a phone call from a past hook-up* with a bottle of vodka in hand, hoping you hadn’t said something dangerously innappropriate. Oh wait, you did. Well, that’s his fault for calling you just when you had forgotten about him, like he had some sort of “Everything’s okay in ____’s life, better call her!” radar…

Anyway, party’s over. First exam is in, three weeks? Oh my shit. The only one I’m confident in getting a much-needed A grade in is Economics. Everything else, Ds across the board! (Probably). So naturally, I’m taking a break from blogging. Twitter’s kinda taken over. It’s disappointing, I like to blog but it’s hard to really take time out when I have deadlines whooshing by. I’ll be back in mid-June when my exams are over. I’ll come back with a bang, I promise