...and the dirt still stains me...

It's quite funny, a lot of what I do. I've been talking to someone on MSN for a while, and despite everything I wrote on here between 2 and 3 am this morning, I've already lost sight of so much of it. Evidently I underestimated just quite how much effort I'm going to have to put into sorting my head out.

So, I still haven't been able to accurately recall the quote I was searching for this morning. Whilst I may have found 3 other good ones, none of them seem quite so appropriate as this one particular quote is. I'm so definitely sure that it's an Albert Camus quote, or perhaps someone closely associated with Camus, since when it was originally cited to me the discussion had just mentioned him. It truly was a spectacular quote, an absolutely fantastic statement about self-pity and just how vile an emotion it is. It sums up pretty much everything about my current situation perfectly, far better than I ever could.

I'm also finding more and more often that, despite having a lot of it, I'm not enjoying listening to the music I've grown so fond of any more. Whether that has anything to do with the fact that, at the moment, I'm feeling very apathetic about a lot of things I don't know. A lot of the music I have sat in the library of iTunes doesn't really do much to make me feel any better. The odd track of stuff like MGMT and Keane I have here, though, with the "lighter" music for want of a better description seems to do much more for my mood than such metallic glory as Metallica or Dragonforce.

Which brings me on to the topic that seems to be underpinning pretty much everything I'm thinking about right now, and mostly what is behind a lot of what I write on here. The issue of who, exactly, I am. Who is this person, sat at a computer screen talking about the issues in his life? What do I like, where am I going in life, what do I want from it? Genuinely, I can't answer some of those questions. I came to university with no absolute direction, I still don't really have one. Partially I think this is because of the issues I'm still trying to solve; that I don't think I'm capable of any significant original contribution to the field I'm studying, or that I'm not worth anything as a scientist (or a person for that matter). Yet, at the same time, I don't know entirely what a physics degree - should I get one - would really allow me to go on and do.

So, I got to thinking about why I actually came to university. What helped, was that I found the personal statement I wrote for my application to UCAS. I think I very much lost sight of why I came here, I got too bogged down in everthing that coming to university exposed me to. Before coming here, I was very much a closed off person. I had a small group of friends, and by that I mean I knew a few people well enough to not feel uncomfortable around them and whom I felt I could talk to about things. Then I came to Sheffield. I was no longer surrounded by familiar faces, or by situations I could easily escape from. To be fair, I think I owe quite a debt of gratitude to some of the people I first met at university. Some of the first people I ever spoke to, and some of the first friends I made here, were international students. People who'd not just left their hometown, but had come to an entirely different country to get a degree. And, in all honesty, if I had to make a claim as to who I thought were friendlier - the internationals or the home students - I'd go with the internationals any day. I'm still good friends with a few of them, they're fantastic people. Whereas some of the home students I've met did nothing but remind me of what I thought I'd left behind once I left college. It's remarkable that, no matter what level of education you're in, there's still arseholes. My high school had a lot of them, and college had surprisingly more than I anticipated. I never thought so many people whose life seemed to involve nothing but drink, drugs and sex would've gone to college. Yet, perhaps that just shows how naive I was about the world, 'cause university students seem to predominantly be the people I tried to avoid. Ask anyone what they think students do, and their answer will probably be some combination of drink, drugs and sex.

I've digressed somewhat, and I'm not accurately representing in my statement the people I've made friends with at university. Granted, some of the people I know at university do seem to do very little except go out, get drunk/high/laid or any combination of them at once. But then, I know people who don't. The people who, for all intents and purposes, I suppose I could refer to as an island of morality. And I think I'm lucky, in some respects, that I have friends who fall under both categories. I know people who I can go out with, and have a laugh with - and no, before you go there I don't do drugs. Yet, when I need a quiet cuppa and someone to talk to, I know I've got friends for that too. I don't think I've quite yet shifted my opinion on drugs, to be honest. When I came to uni, I abhorred them - and, to some extent, I abhorred the people who took them. I pitied them, for being so callous as to risk throwing their life away just so they could go get high in a club toilet. Perhaps at some point, I might write another entry so I can try and make sense of my attitude towards drugs. I think if I ever do, it's probably going to have somewhere at the top a warning that it's probably not suitable for most people to read.

Part of what got me so confused, though, is that coming to university challenged so much of what I thought - and, as such, challenged how I was as a person. I came to Sheffield with all the opinions, thoughts and views that made me who I was. Perhaps, the fact that they were so wrong shows I was naive and stupid. Perhaps that goes to show they were never my opinions to begin with. As the Albert Camus quote said in my previous entry, we can't be happy with ourselves if all we're concerned about is the happiness of others. When I look back, I find many an occasion where I've not actually gone along with how I felt, but I've instead gone with another opinion. I don't know why. I don't, right now, feel that much compulsion to be another sheep in the herd. And yet I'm not happy with myself. I'm not happy because, ever since high school, I've seen everything go well for people who were nothing like me. The people who, instead of giving a damn about their education and their health went out and purposefully did the opposite. For years, all I saw was a society where individualism was to be discouraged. Where being something other than the type of person peddled by the popular media was a flaw, a mistake on your part.

So now I've been here for three years, and I've managed to wrangle with a few of my flawed opinions. I'm no longer so mindlessly anti-drugs. I don't see the point in criminalising some of them - and when I say this, I predominantly mean cannabis. That's another thing for another time. I won't ever willfully take the majority of illegal stuff - you'll never find me with a needle full of heroin, or snorting coke - but I'm not so blind as to immediately and blindly jump to the defence of the government and start spouting that they're all illegal for a reason any more.

To be fair, I think a lot of what I need to try and do is sort out what it is that I think. I need to spend more time saying damn it all to hell when it comes to other people's opinions and make up my own. I don't think that entirely failing to care for other people's thoughts when it comes to me would ever be productive - if anything I think not caring at all could swing me right to the other end of the spectrum - but perhaps I need to find a middle ground between caring what others think of me and caring what I think about myself.

I've gone all over the place in this entry, partially because I think there's so much floating around in my head that it's hard to think of one thing without invariably wandering into another topic. But, I hope that one day I'll be able to write an entry knowing more about who I am. That the day will eventually come where I can sit here, read back through these and feel content in the knowledge that I'm not this person any more. This sham facade of what I think others wanted me to be. Instead, I hope eventually I'll be what I want to be... and hopefully that person won't be hated by others.

...singing lager, lager, lager...

Well, another year is almost up. The contract for the house is up on the 30th, university's been out for a few weeks now, and I'm still making the same mistakes I always do day in day out.

It's quite sad, and yet slightly amusing, that so many of the people I've gotten to know over the past three years aren't going to be around next year. To be fair, my sticking around next year is heavily contingent on my being able to pass a resit in quantum mechanics and I'm not particularly liking my chances there. A lot of the people I've gotten to know, a handful of them quite well I should say, have all successfully finished their degrees and from what I've seen so far on Facebook a lot of them have done exceedingly well.

Looking back, I find a few things in the past year that I regret. For instance, I do quite regret not making more of an effort with quantum mechanics and classical physics last semester. As much as I find it amusing that we have to take a 10 credit module in obsolete physics, alongside a module on theory that pretty much underpins everything in the modern world, I do wish I hadn't been quite so un-motivated about it. Sure, I didn't particularly like the prospect of quantum since I'm a substandard mathematician but I could've at least tried harder. Same for classical. I regret more than that, for this year at least, but I can't change any of it.

Yet, I don't think I should entirely just turn around and concentrate on everything that went wrong this year. Granted, stuff did go wrong, but thinking about it a lot of stuff also went right. For instance, I passed the majority of the first semester. If I get my sorry arse in gear, and get a pass for the two modules I failed, I can pull my grade up some. The modules I passed were predominantly good grades, and I'm fairly confident that most of the second semester exams went fairly well too, despite the fact that I complained a lot about having to revise - much to a certain someone's annoyance. I made some new friends this year, and to an extent I do owe that to one particular friend of mine pretty much forcing me to talk to people. It's a bit sad that, despite having been going to lectures with them for two years now, I only know 6 or 7 people from the year. I guess that's something I need to work on: confidence. Not just in terms of having the balls to go up to someone and say hi, or having the strength of mind to change the way I think (that's a whole other blog entry right there, trust me) but to improve my confidence with maths and physics as well.

I guess it's funny that, for everything I look back on and see as a negative, the same occurance has usually spawned with it at least one positive thing. Even the fact that I'm behind a year, something I regret every morning when I wake up, isn't that bad. I've met some awesome people in this year, some more so than others, and I've learnt a few things about myself. Acting on this new knowledge, however, is going to prove the tricky part. There's still a lot that I need to even figure out, a lot of stuff that I still don't fully understand, and I think that until I'm sure I know how I feel and what's going through my head I'm not going to be able to completely fix things - or to improve myself as a person. Thankfully I've got a few months in which to do this, without a lot of the hassle of constant work and stress. I can take my stress out on zombies, though, since I still haven't completed RE4...

One thing I do know, though, is that I'm a considerably lucky man. Not only to be at the university here in Sheffield, to be given the opportunity to study here - as bad as I may be at it - but lucky that I've met the people that I have. Lucky that, despite the fact that I've been an immensely terrible person to them at times, they've still got the patience to put up with me. They're still my friends, and they're still willing to help me should I ever overcome one of my greatest flaws and ask for it.

I spent some time looking for a particular quote that, on occasion when I sit and think about what I think about my life, reminds me that I should never be quite so negative. But, unfortunately, I can't remember who the quote is attributed to and thus it lives solely in a file I don't have with me. So, I went and found another quote or two which I think should be inspiring enough for now.

"Self-respect is to the soul as oxygen is to the body. Deprive a person of oxygen, and you kill his body; deprive him of self-respect and you kill his spirit." - Thomas S Szasz.

"To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others." - Albert Camus

"Laugh at yourself and at life. Not in the spirit of derision or whining self-pity, but as a remedy, a miracle drug, that will ease your pain, cure your depression, and help you to put in perspective that seemingly terrible defeat and worry with laughter at your predicaments, thus freeing your mind to think clearly towards the solution that is certain to come. Never take yourself too seriously." - Og Mandino

I think the third one is the most appropriate. I also wonder exactly what would happen if any of my friends ever followed the link from Facebook to this blog...

And so concludes another year...

Well, the institution at U. Sheffield that is the end of year Carnival was on Friday. It's a 12 hour long partay for students to enjoy as one last big blow out after working for a year. Unless, of course, you're part of the crew - in which case it's an 18 hour work-a-thon. Still, despite it being a lot of work and some stuff going wrong, it's actually quite good fun.

Have to say that the Pendulum DJ set was awesome. Would've been better had there been a laser (!!) but everything looked good and sounded good, and they were really happy with how it went and thus so was I. We had Edith Bowman as well as the Cut Up Boys playing on stage too, who both did fantastic sets as well. All in all, I think Foundry would've been an alright night out for those who went in there.

That said, my end of year experience this year has been pretty bad. It's gone from bad, in the sense of on Wednesday I royally pissed off a lot of people including one very important to me, to worse in that I'm now sat at home, alone and not entirely sure how I feel. I suppose I could try and find someone I trust to talk to about it, but sadly the few people that are on my list for that aren't around any more. I guess it kinda shows that, by now, I'm kinda expected to be able to sort my own problems out...

Now, if you'll excuse me, I should really be doing something useful so I guess I shall leave this entry at that. Sayonara, from a very dejected "man".