bar the door, please don’t let them in.

well hello there blog, long time no speak.

these past few weeks i’ve had a lot of headaches. i get headaches way more often than anyone should, but recently i’ve woken up with excruciating headaches for no reason at all. a week ago i woke up on wednesday and my headache was so bad i was sick, and on friday it was so bad my vision was all blurred and i couldn’t see. obviously this wasn’t ok, but what made it worse was that i had my final spanish exam that day so there was no way i could do it! i had to go to the doctor and get a letter excusing me from my exam and they are sending away my practice exam instead for my final mark.

as well as the headaches i get nosebleeds all the time for no reason too. despite the doctor saying it is only because i have low blood pressure i am seriously starting to think i have a brain tumour, and it’s freaking me out .. now i have to take pills all the time to stop the headaches. i don’t think anyone should have to pop a pill each morning just to make their head feel normal but there you go.

in everything i do i find traces of my grandad bob, like little waves from the afterlife or something. today i was clearing out my room [me and my sister are swapping rooms, so that she will have a bigger room while i'm in glasgow] and i found a little note in a box in my cupboard. it was obviously my grandad bob’s work: it was on a piece of paper that had had a border which had been clumsily cut off, and the words were written in a pen which had never quite started working but that he’d had high hopes of. it said: “dear gemma, thank you very much for my birthday present and card. i hope you had a nice holiday and i’ll see you soon”, then there was a muddy paw-print at the bottom of the page and an X. this just sums up my grandad bob, he’d put so much effort into writing this note and then driving all the way across town to deliver it when i wasn’t even home, just so that rocky the dog could thank me for a birthday present he probably didn’t even know he’d received!

i was cycling to the supermarket today to buy some reduced pineapple and was trying to remember the combination for my bike-lock when i suddenly remembered my grandad bob taking it off his bike and putting it on mine, helping me remember the numbers. “34-36, 34-36. don’t forget it now.” and i didn’t forget it. i never will.

the hardest thing is when i am on check-outs at the supermarket where i work and old couples come in together with the same dynamic my gran and grandad bob had; that constant loving bickering. the old men give me their money and i place the change back into their hands, and i see my grandad bob’s hands in their hands: big and freckled with sunspots and the nails dark with earth and work; the hands i held the second last time i saw him, when in the aftermath of a fit he wasn’t responsive so i held his hand in mine and he still didn’t say anything but squeezed them; the hands i held in his coffin, now waxy and heartbreakingly cold.  

i get frustrated sometimes because i want more than anything to believe that he is floating around somewhere out there, watching over us and looking after us as he did in life. i pray every night for this and that we are making him proud, and i would love for him to suddenly appear in some ghostly form beside my bed for a wee chat. i am simultaneously hopeful and scared to see his ghost, if there is such a thing as ghosts, because i am scared of what he would be like, if he would be in pain or if he would be back to robust health and look like he’d just tucked into a good sunday dinner. on the one hand i think it gets harder every day, because every day i come a bit closer to accepting that he is gone. on the other hand if i believe in the afterlife it should get easier every day because each day is bit closer to seeing him again.

my current hobby is watching the whole series of glee whilst eating large quantities of reduced fruit and three cups of tea. i work every single day at the supermarket, apart from thursdays which i savour .. today i celebrated my day off by doing my laundry in scent co-ordinating washing powder, fabric conditioner, and ironing water. if i tell you this was the high point of my day you can probably gain some insight into how eventful things are around here now i have no school .. i also like trying out new recipes, which so far have come off surprisingly well, especially chicken parmigiana from kevinandamanda.com [i now have my whole family addicted to kevinandamanda.com, and when my dad, my gran and i watched amanda's video about scarves we practically self-combusted from joy at her accent!] add this laundry and cooking to the fact that i like furnishing my imaginary house on ikea.com and searching rental properties in seattle and edinburgh and i sound practically middle-aged. is it bad that i sometimes wish i was middle-aged already? ..

and if you were wondering what colour i ended up dying my hair? i dyed it a deep red, but because my hair was so dark it came out as a kind of brown dark red mixture. here’s a picture for photographic evidence: [actually this picture is so small you can barely see but ho hum.]

 

reinvent the good times.

last friday i obviously had too much of a life to write a life update friday .. but this friday i don’t!

in english class this week we’ve been studying a portrait of the artist as a young man by james joyce, which has to be one of the most complicated books i’ve ever read. i just can’t understand why someone would want to write pages and pages of self-indulgent, introspective drivel and then try and fob it off on other people to actually read. [although i suppose that to everyone else i'm being extremely blasphemous to one of the classics! pssh.] but, i realised that not only do i really hate the main character, stephen, i also see a lot of him in myself! then i realised that his self-indulgent introspective drivel has a lot in common with my blog posts .. so, internet, let’s try for something different next week [our last week of school ever!]

last week i was finishing off my hideous advanced higher french folio essays, where we were reading l’étranger by albert camus. whenever i got horrendously bored i kept re-reading my favourite part. i think i might adopt it as a sort of over-long motto. it goes like this:

i often thought in those days that even if i’d been made to live in a hollow tree trunk, with nothing to do but look up at the bit of sky overhead, i’d gradually have got used to it. i’d have looked forward to seeing birds fly past or clouds run together .. and come to think of it, i wasn’t in a hollow tree. there were others unhappier than i was. anyway .. you end up getting used to everything.

i’ll just read a book instead.

so, here’s for the second installment of life update friday ..

i ended last week dreading the week ahead, but i’d set my alarm tone to funkytown, so when i woke up on monday i did a little dance and i think this set me up for the rest of the day! i was in a good mood: it was sunny and my hair was behaving. i was absolutely dreading going to get the dissertation of doom back because i thought it would ruin my great mood, but when i went my teacher told me it was “excellent” and i only have to make some minor changes. well, gosh, i wasn’t expecting that at all and it made the day even better.

from monday through wednesday i worked at the supermarket stacking shelves and doing reductions, and during the day i worked manically on all these essays that have suddenly sprung up out of nowhere. i also worked on my goal to get as many freckles as possible, because the weather was quite sunny for once.

yesterday afternoon i was ironing my things to pack for tomorrow when the phone rang. it was my great uncle, who lives in dundee with his side of the family and my great granny [who's ninety six], phoning to speak to my mum. she wasn’t in, but later on she came to tell me that my great granny has had a massive stroke and is still unconscious, they’re not sure if she’s going to make it through. my mum is going to visit her today. the worst thing is i can’t even remember the last time i saw her.

yesterday evening i was at p7 youth club, where we had a party for one of the other youth worker’s birthday. it was awesome to be back with the kids, they were so happy to see us and said  they had missed us. but i don’t know, i still felt out of place. i’m scared i’ve been away too long to fit right back in again. there were all these kids that i didn’t know, who didn’t know me because they’d joined in the weeks i wasn’t there; and it was strange.

today i’m catching the bus to glasgow with six other friends to celebrate one of my friends eighteenth birthday. we’ve got a big dorm in the youth hostel and are going to the imax cinema and having a picnic in the park if the weather’s nice. [ .. it's not going to be, i just looked up the forecast. but we'll just hope for no rain instead!] i’m really looking forward to it; this is the first time that i’ll be going to glasgow knowing that it’s where i’m going to spend the next four years of my life .. and i’ll worry about all the yearbook articles, spanish volver essay, and two french essays when i get back sunday night.

wear these lucky socks until they fade.

i’m always rambling on here about random stuff but i never write about what i’m actually doing right now in my life, which is a bit stupid seeing as i gave up writing in my diary on february fourth so now i have no idea about what i did even last week. so, to make me write more regularly and to keep a record of what i’m actually doing i’m starting life update friday, where i’m going to talk about the little things that have happened to me in the week, as opposed to writing some epic post with a moral message at the end like i  normally do! let’s see how long i can keep this up for anyways ..

at the start of the easter holidays [when i was, of course, supposed to be writing my dissertation instead] i began looking at domain names, and wondering if i should buy my own. i was listening to a podcast where the host described us all as ‘citizens of the internet‘, which i thought was really cool. i wanted to be a permanent citizen of the internet. i didn’t feel like, like my diary, i’m going to give blogging up as a lost cause, that if i bought a domain name in a few months i’d get fed up and not blog anymore; i’ve been blogging since 2006, it’s part of my every-day life now. the saddest thing of all is when you’ve read someone’s blog for years and you feel like you know them, and then one day they decide to stop blogging, and now you’ll never know what happens to them in life and it’s kind of like losing a friend. i’m scared that one day everyone will shut down their blogs and i’ll never know what happens to them! so anyways i’d been thinking about it for weeks and doing research, and then today i decided to just bite the bullet and buy one .. and now longlostpenpal.com is officially mine!

now, let’s jump back to when i said that i’d researched it all. i’d done a google search and made sure that there was no other long lost penpals. long lost penpal is actually a song by this random swedish band, hello saferide, so it’s definitely not a popular name, like if i wanted to be called iloverpatz or something .. so, i’d done a google search for long lost penpal and hadn’t found anyone, and as most of my usernames for websites like twitter, 43things, vimeo, formspring, my email etc are longlostpenpal i figured there was noone else out there. so i promptly bought the domain name, did a google search for longlostpenpal to try find myself and then immediately found another longlostpenpal on blogger. great. why am i so stupid? why on earth did i search long lost penpal and not longlostpenpal? so now i’m scared to incur the wrath of this other longlostpenpal and i’m just hoping it’s ok. i’m not wanting to take over the world .. i just wanted to be an internet citizen and have a corner of the internet for my blog! :O

i went to glasgow and edinburgh last week and finally bought my dress for senior ball. we went to two of the biggest department stores in edinburgh and ransacked them, picking up any dress that i could conceivably wear. i’m the worst person to buy dresses for [not that i buy dresses often, or ever ..] because i’m really fussy, couldn’t wear a strapless dress if i tried, and am small with a long body and short legs. so eventually as a last-ditch attempt we went into john lewis, which is a department store where old ladies usually shop, and found this one. and i was so glad to find something that actually fitted and that my sister said was ok we bought it. i was all set to go all hippy and wear my hair up like this and wear flat shoes and lots of bangles, but my sister said not to be ridiculous, so now i have to wear these shoes instead [i'm still wearing my hair like that though.] and oh my gosh, this is absolutely not what i would have wanted to wear or look like and i’m going to look like a fussy middle-aged woman at a debutante ball but i suppose it will have to do. i’m still not too sure about those shoes though. [and my sister says these ones won't go either .. internet, i would die for those shoes. they are so so awesome.]

as for my grandad bob, him living at home finally got too much. the last time i saw him at home i waved to him and he waved back, and i told him that i would see him soon. now i have to look back and think that was the last time i’ll ever see him at home. now we visit him in his care home which is barely five minutes down the road from his house, and he’s become a shrunken old man sitting in a chair, his hands now too big for his body and his face swollen from the drugs. every single night since october i’ve prayed that he would live to see me get into university, and now i realise that i prayed for the wrong thing. i should’ve prayed that he lived to understand me getting into university; now he’s still here and i’m here and into university and he doesn’t understand, and it’s worse because if he wasn’t ill i would’ve made him so so proud and now i can’t. it cuts me up to see my gran by his side in that home all day every day, their devotion to each other, in sickness and in health.