coming home

On the 26th. Should arrive in the evening. Flight booked.

The meaning of 'revision'

We've got this week off, ostensibly for studying, which most of the university seem to be procrastinating from with great vigor. My exams are both at the end of next week, so I've been finishing up course reading I haven't done and looked over previous exam questions for the first time today, but all-in-all haven't been panicked. Instead, I've been reading a book of World War I poetry, working on a comic (around a speaker-silent listener motif) and being ill, as my body went "Wait, are we all done here? Right, I'll just die for a bit then."

Excited for this summer, both coming home and going to China. Not too worried about exams, all things considered, I feel very up-to-date on the concepts of the courses.

Here's a poem I wrote just now. I've been reading this poetry, as I said, and opposite our flat there is a park with a football (soccer) pitch.

Outside boy-men with sunken chests

Play football in a muddy field,

Inside I sit and read on death

In wartime, of men broke and healed.

Reading trench-poems to springtime days

As they turn evening, shadows long,

Outside my window, the football players

Are the same age, about as strong

As men who died in foreign lands.

Tired boys, with footballs in their hands.

free associating--sort of (maybe I'm just bored of punctuation?)

done i'm almost done this piece of crap is in tomorrow and its okay not great but i think i'm fine with that, then a couple more things but first of all i'm going to see people and eat and drink and have fun cause i've spent all day today in bed in my boxers wedded to my laptop and our marriage isn't healthy and HAS TO END, oh laptop, you dispatcher of the infinite internet that tells me everything i need to know (how did you people write essays with books and pens and typewriters? it boggles the mind)

and my play ended oh my play ended yeah it was a success, got some great audience interaction (did this one as un-theatrically as possible, opened with a paper-crane-making/drumming/storytelling workshop, proceeded to the performance [in a classroom in a museum, no lights, no set, no real costumes, just the actors and some instruments], ended with an hour of audience discussion) and it was about GENOCIDE and REFUGEES and stuff and that's very real etc but we raised over £100 to go toward warning people of attacks and getting them firewood so there's some real world good and i don't think i was able to fully appreciate the play because of this essay and life going on and generally having too long a rehearsal time, i think short-and-intense always beats long-and-exhaustive, though the script is possibly the best thing i've (collaboratively) written, ever, its quite good

and this gives me hope for my dissertation next year, a play as research, the audience as ethnography, really such a bullshit thing but it's what i want to do and so i'll do it and i'll justify it and it will come off with a solid academic backing and maybe i'll delude myself into believing that that legitimizes it as a project

and in terms of relationships i have had some great meals and chill-time with people, friends really coming through (and others not) and life goes on--i think maybe i have too many friends here, there is a critical mass you reach in any given place and you CANNOT physically see all of them, even if you want to, and the ones you do see are not necessarily the ones you would like to most, though i see more people i want to see than last year. the ones you like the most are not even necessarily the ones you want to like, and it gets very first order/second order philosophical but I think that in the end all friendship is may be reducible to time and proximity, and that's scary but there are scarier things in heaven and earth

have started talking, half-joking, about what i'm doing after uni, that's scary. a friend at directing school asked, when he was up, if i wanted to start a theatre company with him. yesterday a friend and i decided it could be fun, in a i-am-the-devil kinda way, and possibly incredibly lucrative to do fairtrade organic tobacco and market it to environmentally conscious people who are going to smoke anyways...this summer in china i think will see major developments in my thinking. i really should have worked, properly worked, before now--all i know is school and school is a tiny microcosm of life--or maybe it isn't, i wouldn't know. i'm kinda scared of this summer, the idea of 'the last freedom' is terrifying, though less so with a british and not american mindset--british people are fine working at a menial job for a year to go traveling for a year, that's considered valid, whereas in america that would be career suicide (maybe?)

there is a lot i don't know. i have been thinking a bit lately about "life as a game"--I have a friend who owns a shop. What does that mean? She isn't any different, and it's just a room. But she rents it out and puts stuff in there and puts a sign on the door that says 'shop' and people come in and give her money. The 'shop' game. Likewise, the 'academic' game--the essays we write, the stuff professors talk about as 'knowledge' is another kind of game, a true-make-believe. You speak with authority, you take on a role like a kid in the sandbox, and then that is you. But it is just as mutable, just as fictitious as the child's role, just as easy to shed and shape, if only you see that it is.