If you don’t write a blog, I’ll kill your kittens

James is holding me hostage and forcing me to blog, which isn’t very nice. I value the life of my cats though!

I do in fact have quite a lot of things I’ve been meaning to blog about, but to be honest that’s fallen way down the priority list below staring blankly, in a close tie with sleeping (which I try to avoid as much as possible). It’s not that I don’t want to blog though, but I get tired of repeating myself, which I tend to do  lot on here; my 1000 word posts leave a lot of room for it too.
So, a brief summary of my past few weeks, which I may or may not expand upon later -

I’m now staying back in Southampton for the summer. I have a room in the student accommodation of one of the Universities there. James just interrupted to say that he’d like to say poop to that. In fact, so would I. The room is not the nicest room ever, that’s for sure. I guess you get what you pay for, and I’m only paying £50/week – a little over half of what I was paying for my nice en-suite room in Exeter University accommodation for the past year. The room’s pretty small with little storage space, and a fairly uncomfortable bed. There is a sink in the room, but I’m not sure that I trust it for drinking water. The water’s too warm anyway. Well, so is the rest of the room. It was uncomfortably warm last week when I moved in there, and we were having some moderately warm weather at the time.

Now that the August summer is into full, painfully hot swing (at least for my weak british skin), the room has turned into some sort of sauna or oven, take your pick. Well, saunas are supposed to be good for you aren’t they? Frankly, I don’t care, since it has me sweating more than a… sausage, for lack of better metaphor, 24/7. I invested in a fan last week, but as the temperature’s increased outside, it’s become close to impossible to breath in the room, thanks to the window barely opening at all, without the fan blowing right in my face all day and night.

So I’ve been taking mostly every opportunity to get out of said room, which unfortunately means spending money. Money, one of my least favorite things; or at least my lack of it anyway. I’ve done pretty well to keep my bank balance in the green, or white, or black, or whatever color it is you say you’re in when you’re not overdrawn. People say University is expensive, but my spending’s gone up a lot more since coming back to Southampton. I guess that’s partially thanks to having a social life here, and the fact that said social life relies on me spending £5 to even see friends on any one day. Then add in food, drinks at the pub, and other things, and I’ve been spending close to £20/day since I came back here. It doesn’t take a genious to work out that this will not go well with my £150/month bank balance, even with the bit extra my mum gave me for the summer.

So to cut a long story short (because I just realised I have a train to catch in 20 minutes) I’m stuck with the choice between staying in the room from hell, doing the same thing I do every day, or going to see friends and doing more fun things, but spending money I don’t have.

One thing that WAS worth spending money though – Seeing The Dark Knight 2 days before release, even if it was twice the price. I may or may not go into a more detailed review later on, but for now all I can say is 10/10, and I’m still somewhat stuck for words with anything further to say.

A ticket to the semi-finals of university

I’m not really doing so well with this whole blog affair am I? I started off well, thinking I’d never run out of things to write about. But at the end of the day, I have.

It’s not so much that I’ve run out of things to write about, just that I’ve run out of INTERESTING things to write about. Still, in a blog about myself, there’s a fairly limited number of things I am going to think are interesting, so I guess I’ll just get on with it and ramble about myself a bit more, eh?

So, my first year of university has come to pass, in a relatively dull fashion. I was going to say “uneventful” and “predictable” in that sentence, though I suppose that would be a lie. It would also be a lie to say that this was the easy first year I was expecting, or that I put in anywhere near enough effort.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever learn from my mistakes, or if I’ll always keep scraping through on the last minutes of deadlines, the minimum of passes at the early stages, and the least effort required. I can say now that my intention is to put in 100% effort, do all my work on time, and start revising sooner than a week before my exams next year… but I say that every year. Each year I seem to get closer and closer to just getting what I need, and one of these days it’s going to go too far.

Still, the results were decent. I got 70% or so in  my programming class, which is pretty good by university standards.  My other classes averaged out at around 60%, which isn’t bad, but considering what I had to do at the last minute to scrape that, and the level of some of the stuff, I should be getting higher than that. I guess some would say “what are you complaining about”, and less successful people would hate me for being able to do that well with so little effort, but the truth is, I know I can do better than that. I’m -capable- of getting a top level degree, I’m capable of being the best in my class (from what I’ve heard I actually got similar/a bit lower) to most other people in the class this year), and I was capable of getting MUCH higher grades than I did this year.

From being a top-of-the-class quiet kid who had nothing more to his life than school, I’ve coasted through the latter half of secondary school and college with the attitude that it doesn’t really matter. And it really didn’t. I suddenly realised around year 9, that it doesn’t MATTER if I get straight As. I knew I had the potential to get them at the time, but I was content to give in passable work because at the end of the day, that was all that mattered. Every exam was just a ticket to get you through to the NEXT exam, and the requirements were low. As long as you showed more potential than a comatosed gnat, they’d quite gladly let you go on another year for some more exams. It wasn’t until college that I had a bit of a wake up call when I realised that my grades were starting to matter. Of course, it was still just another entry requirement for some more exams at university, but this was something I actually wanted. After seeing some of the better and worse universitys, I realised that I really would like to go to a good one, and not a bad one.

But still, I achieved the bare minimum requirements after recovering from an extreme slump at the start of college. I always thought though, that at the end of the day, when it came down to it at university, there was no reason why I couldn’t do everything, get top results, and come out with a 1st degree.

I’m still waiting for that day to come, the day where I suddenly realise that I need to put in some hard work, to prioritise doing coursework in good time, to study as I’m going along and not at the last minute. I can say that I’ve realise that now, but I’ve said it before. I hope that next year I can kick myself into gear, but I’ll just have to wait and see.

The exams were.. not fun. It didn’t help that I’d missed a bunch of the classes, and couldn’t begin to understand half of the maths stuff. As I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of the teaching methods in university, especially for maths, but that’s no excuse. Half of it was stuff I’d done before, so I could have learned it if I put in the effort. At the end of the day, I was glad to actually pass the exams (which I honestly didn’t think I’d do) given the amount I’d studied for them.

Still, at the end of the day, the exam results weren’t all that important in comparison to what I’d done already for coursework. I passed well enough overall, and I go back to learn another year next year. Thing is, next year actually matters. This year doesn’t count towards my overall grade, it’s another of those tickets to the next round. But now it’s really time for me to unlock the supposedly hidden talent that I keep thinking I have, and hope it hasn’t shrivelled up and died by now.

For now though, I’m going to enjoy the summer. Right now I’m relaxing with my parents in cornwall, but next week I’ll be back to good old Southampton to see my friends. Can’t wait.