Sand Ceremonies and Sex Pistols T-shirts

Today (30.9.12) I witnessed something unusual.
Greg married Jan in September 2011, Jan giving birth to a son in December 2011. I wasn't present at the church ceremony but I did witness something far more interesting that day. At the reception, they had a second ceremony, that seemed very traditional, perhaps Celtic.
 Basically, we all scribbled a well-wishing note on a piece of ribbon, and wrapped it around a broom. The broom was placed on the floor, before a woman said a few words about the symbolism of the broom, which I'm afraid escaped me. The happy couple then hopped over the broom and everyone was really happy.

 

Today, we welcomed Angus Robert Danger Gregory Joyce into the world. Angus is of Scottish origin, Robert is Jan's dad's name - or Grandpa, I'm not sure - Danger relates to his extreme earliness of birth and Gregory is well, Greg's name.

 His closest relatives each had one colour of sand in a pot (not actually the one from the picture but my Ipod was out of memory and it's very close apart from the height of the pots). Each colour represented something different e.g. yellow is the colour of the sun and symbolizes joy. When all colours are in the jar, it is a symbol for all of these qualities coming together and supporting Angus throughout his life.

 We were all asked to give a memorable item to Angus. I drew him a dragon, a traced outline of an original I'd done in art class. I coloured his underbelly red and turned his flesh yellow as it neared his spine, so that the dragon resembled fire. My dad wrote a four verse poem on the back, so that he knows what the dragon's about, and remembers us, since we don't see the family very often.

 I'll tell you how to remember me Angus. I was the girl in the Sex Pistols shirt.

Fashion - My Greatest Inconvenience

There are some things I can't quite grasp the reasons for : the current stage of Public Image Limited, why gravity came into existence, why high school students care whether or not other people conform to their arrogant ways. But above all, I just can't grasp fashion. They say you're not meant to wear blue with green? That's my freaking school uniform!

My School Blazer

My School Tie

 What escapes me about fashion is who decides what's hot and what's not?

Take these three garments :



They're all pink so that eliminates colour preference.
If you ask anyone who knows anything about fashion, they'll choose the first (though don't take my word for that).
If you ask a Whovian, they'll choose the second.
If you ask someone who's broke, they'll choose the third.
Who determines which one the fashion expert chooses? And I know Whovians, we're a fairly intelligent bunch. Who's to say the Whovians haven't chosen the best one.

I simply don't understand the rules around clothing choices. Right now I'm wearing a t-shirt design of a shark that appears to move its jaws when I bend forward. I mean what kind of designer clothes sport sharks?

 Fair enough but that cannot be comfortable.

In conclusion, my faith in my ability to choose 'in' clothes may suck but I think buying these pyjamas ...


Can earn me the right to say I can choose awesome clothes. I just hope I never end up working here :

If You Had a Time Machine, Where Would You Go?

I have heard this question often, but never properly answered it. I guess, I would be too scared to go to the past, you know, in case I alter some sort of history. That would send me forward, which to be honest, I wouldn't hate, but without money to buy any new-fangled gadgets, I would be tortured whenever I saw a holo-book, or a uni-moped.

Imagine then, a doctor who concept of time travel, where you only change things by specific actions rather than simply by your presence. If this were the case, then I guess I'd go to 1977. I've seen countless documentaries about the rise of punk and I've always wanted to witness the explosion of when the Sex Pistols played 'God Save the Queen' on the jubilee. Since my craft is fiction writing, here's how I hope it would go:

"No future! No future for you!" Johnny Rotten cries out as the gig explodes into a frenzy of chaos. He whips his head back and forth to rid himself of the saliva pasted into his skin and clinging to his spikes. I don't understand how these people can cope with the constant gobbing.
 I have landed my TARDIS on the boat party the Sex Pistols hosted the night of the silver jubilee. I feel awkward, knowing that this particular show ends with the police. Suddenly I can see blue uniforms swarming in on the band. The drummer is hefted off of his stool and the rest of their band are robbed of their instruments.
 I clear out hastily before the violence starts but check the newspapers in the morning. Sure enough, there's the scandal, occupying the front page. I grab a sharpie from my pocket and scroll DFTBA, just to leave a small stamp on the seventies, before sauntering into the TARDIS and returning to 2012.

If any details are incorrect, I apologize since this took place twenty-one years before I was born.

That's what I would do with a time machine, as long as it was a TARDIS because it's a little conspicuous - a fourteen-year-old driving a DeLorean from central Scotland to London.

What would you do?

Teenagers ... or Atleast the Decepticon Ones

For those of you who don't know - a decepticon is the complete opposite of a nerdfighter. A nerdfighter is someone who is made of awesome.

I was in RMPS (Religious Moral and Philosophical Education) today and felt like I was ... in a zoo. Or maybe a space explorer discovering and observing some Martians. I'm not calling my classmates aliens. I just can't understand the things they do sometimes.

For example : One girl debated the cause for her suspension from school with our teacher. He had allegedly claimed she had sworn at him. She was adamant however that she hadn't sworn at him, just around him.

Okay, so it may sound like I'm just venting here, but I swear there's a more meaningful point coming up.

When we're little, we get in trouble A LOT. We run in corridors where we shouldn't, we wrestle slightly too violently with our siblings and cousins and the classic taking a hissy fit when you don't get your own way. As we grow up, we get into trouble for slightly more serious reasons : staying up after you should have put the light out, forgetting to do homework etc. Course, as we become a teenagers, we have worse problems. We skip school, start smoking, drinking, even taking drugs. I know a girl who started using drugs in first year.

I always thought that by the time I reached fourth year we would have matured but this conversation made me doubt my theory. My friends all stayed awesome when they reached high school, but others have just degenerated and degenerated into a state of decepticonness. I keep believing that the attitudes of my classmates will become more civilised as they grow older but the ages of the London rioters being somewhat into the twenties worries me.

What if the anger of these teenagers only increases with age? Will we end up with seventy-year-old arsonists?

I'm really excited to have any readers at all and since I want to be a writer when I grow up, readers are sort of essential. Thankyou for reading and I promise that the rest of my posts will be longer than 3 lines.

Why I Love Back To The Future

 

 Back to the Future is constantly dogging my thoughts, nearly a year since I first saw it. When I heard that it had been a household movie in the houses of my friends, I felt robbed of a classic family movie. Yes, I had Finding Nemo and Monsters Inc and Shrek and Ice Age and Harry Potter but none of them have Doc Brown, or Marty McFly. I plan on a 'marathon' this weekend with my friends, though it's slightly more like a five thousand metres, since there are only three movies. My obsession could be based on many things : Michael J. Fox playing guitar, quotes like "Great Scott", or maybe even the surreal plot of a boy's mother falling in love with him. No, my reasons are far more meaningful than that. What did you expect from a nerdfighter?

You may have noticed the onslaught of sexual exploits in entertainment today. Seriously, you don't want to get me started on 'Fifty Shades of Grey'. I shudder at the name. I read a line of it in a shop once and nearly threw up. But I digress. BTTF was originally turned down by many studios for being too clean, with next to no direct references to sex. Ironically, Disney turned them down for their salaciousness in the idea of a mother coming onto her son. However it is the lack of pandering intent that makes it so appealing to me. The plot is highly entertaining in itself. I mean, a boy stuck in his home town, thirty years before he is born? That's pretty damn funny. It is stuffed with vibrant characters and situations so ridiculous that you wouldn't accept them did you not know the plot-line.

For those of you who don't, though I can't imagine why not, here's the plot. A seventeen-year-old Californian boy is friends with a stereotypical mad scientist - though frankly he couldn't be more unique - who unveils to him his latest invention. A time machine. It turns out that he bargained with Libyans to get his hands on some Plutonium to fuel the time circuitry in exchange for building them a bomb. He, of course, fools them and when the Libyans find out they hunt him down, killing him on the same night that he unveils his invention to Marty. To escape the Libyans, Marty jumps into the car and accidentally travels in time.
 He is transported to 1955 where he diverts the course of time and causes his parents not to meet. He also somehow attracts romantic intention from his mother, as they are roughly the same age at the time. He tracks down Doc - or the 1955 version of Doc - to help him get home, Doc is skeptical of what Marty tells him. Marty eventually convinces him and with Doc's help, he helps his parents fall in love as well as concocting a way to get back to the future.

My point is that although the film incorporates elements of action, comedy, adventure and romance, it leaves out the sleezy innuendo that has become so common in modern film-making. I think a film this devoid of popular techniques but still this exciting and loved is one mighty fine piece of cinema and that is the real reason for my obsession.