So, my dissertation gig is closing in. It’s gonna be a really good night! Aiden Randle will start you off with some sweet funk rock, and then Chris Davis will follow with some awesome classic rock and metal tunes. If you happen to be in the Birmingham area, I’d really appreciate it if you’d show up! More information on the page of my Facebook Event.

Driving directions and other travel info can be found at The Roadhouse’s website. If you’re coming by train to King’s Norton, here are walking directions.

In other news, I’ve made a Facebook fan page today. It’s pretentious, I know, but with MySpace refusing to do my bidding it certainly can’t hurt. Go “like” and tell your friends!

So yeah, 11th of May, you know where you’re gonna be, right? That’s right, my gig!

So, I’ve been a bit apathetic lately, haven’t really had the energy to blog… Went home for Easter and it was great, but I caught a rather nasty cold about halfway through, and I’m still not well. This is somewhat worrying, as my gig is in ten days. In addition to that, I still haven’t finished the interviews for my podcast, let alone recorded it. This is because every time I open my mouth to speak more than a yes or a no I start coughing. The nights are the worst. I’ve been having some pretty severe coughing fits, sometimes lasting for minutes. I get a tickle in my throat, try to cough it away, but it doesn’t work. I sent an e-mail to Steve Spencer yesterday to ask if I can do a written assignment instead of the podcast, but he won’t get back to me until Tuesday as he’s out of the office till then.

Thankfully, I can still sing. Not as well as usual, but I can do it, which means that I will manage to do my dissertation. I’ll just sound a little more like Janis Joplin than usual. I have three rehearsals scheduled for this week (though one of them is still just a maybe, as there’s a module scheduled at the same time but I don’t know if it’s running or not). Still, I’m getting along all right for my promo pack at least. I’ve made two flyers for the gig:

Which one do you like best? The photo in the first one looks very inviting, but I like the colours in the second one. The irony of course being that I spent hours on the first one and did the second one in twenty minutes in the middle of the night before I was supposed to go get them printed.

Gonna start putting them up around campus this week, I think. And then I’m putting them in the promo pack, of course. Need to write a press release… Never done that before, but it should be fairly interesting to try. Could just be me, but I have this strange idea that one generally has other people to do that “in real life”… I wonder if I possess the narcissism necessary to make oneself look interesting and, you know, good.

In other news, the new series of Doctor Who has started, and the two opening episodes were absolutely fantastic! I felt like a kid again, the second one was seriously terrifying in several places. I can’t believe they show this stuff to kids!

Anyways, hopefully I’ll be back in blogging mode again soon, and May will be a better blogging month than April was. Oh, and happy May Day to the Brits, and happy Labour Day to all my friends back in Norway! It’s technically over now, as it’s past midnight and already the 2nd of May, but all the same. Hope everyone had a good one! Mine was filled with The Sims 3, The Fifth Element, Bolognese and Cava.

EDIT: I feel that I should mention that, despite my state of rhinoviral infection, I went to the jam night on Wednesday, after I got back here, and managed to belt forth, as I was later told, a stunning rendition of Living on a Prayer. Thinking back at that, at least there’s some comfort in the knowledge that even if I’m still ill next Wednesday, I can always compensate by screaming at the top of my lungs.

I spent the weekend in Cirencester and Cricklade with Chantal. Went down on Thursday and came back on Sunday. It was nice spending some time away from Walsall… Getting to see a bit more of the country and having some company on a weekend for once.

On Friday we went into Cirencester and had dinner at a lovely Italian restaurant called Piazza Fontana. I had linguini with pesto and king prawns for a starter and halibut with lemon sauce for my main course. It was really good! The only thing I can really mark them down on is the creme brulé that they served me for dessert, which seemed like instant microwave-made and was still cold at the centre. Should have had the tiramisú, probably.

On Saturday we went to Fairford to feed the ducks, and then Chantal took me to the Roman Amphietheatre in Cirencester, which was completely overgrown with grass, but really interesting.

Chantal has two cats and a dog. The cats are called Billy and Squeaker, and the dog is called Treacle. It was so nice to have pets around! I love animals, and I miss having something living for company when I’m by myself. Would be so nice to have a cat or something just about now…

One of the nights I slept in Chantal’s brother’s room as he was out of town. That room was like a library! All the shelves were stacked to the limit with fantasy books and sci-fi and videogames and stuff. I took the liberty of ripping his Dune box-set to my computer (the sci-fi channel miniseries from 2000). Haven’t quite finished watching it yet.

Since I got back I’ve done precious little. I’m so bored now, cause I finished the last two leadsheets for my dissertation over the weekend, and I’ve done everything I can at the moment for my E&E case study and my Untold Stories assignment. The next step in both of those are dependent on other people. I have a bit of a cold, so I can’t practice any singing right now… So I’ve been watching anime and playing The Sims Medieval and just generally been bored out of my skull. The most interesting thing that’s happened since I got back is the fire alarm going off at 4 in the morning last night/this morning/whatever you want to call it. Was stood outside for 45 minutes in my dressing gown. It was cold, and I was sleepy, and everyone else was drunk.

Today I just feel lazy and tired. Haven’t done anything at all so far… Feel like I should go for a walk, but the weather’s all grey. To be honest, this would be the perfect time to get some writing done, but I haven’t heard from my beta since before Christmas and that’s kind of stifled my creativity a bit…

I guess we’ll see.

Today was my two year anniversary with Morten. I must admit that we chose this date a bit on purpose. It was the day that we both admitted to each other that we were falling in love, and that we wanted to have a relationship, but we could have waited a little while before doing the whole facebook thing.

But, we did. And the next day was full of amusing comments along the lines of “haha, very funny” (those people felt stupid the next day), texts from people asking “are you for real or is it just an April’s fool??” and a few genuine congratulations.

The two years since have been absolutely wonderful, and although we’ve spent most of the past seven months or so apart, our relationship has survived so far and I’m confident that it will survive the two months I have left in this place as well.

Morten, I love you, and I’m so happy to have you in my life!

Wednesday’s E&E performance went fine. We were a bit late getting started (the school’s fault, not ours), but managed to get through most of the programme anyway. The workshops went fairly well, though Mat needs more credit for the songwriting ones as we ended up leading them together. I hadn’t realised how difficult it would be to teach in a language that isn’t my first. It’s the only time since I’ve been here that I’ve experienced difficulties with English. Still, the kids seemed to enjoy it.

Mat came up with the awesome idea of writing a class song for the kids, by asking them about their school days, getting key words and ideas from them and turning them into lyrics. We put a melody to them and sang them over a simple chord progression together with the children. Most of them were very enthusiastic, and had a blast with us telling them to sing as loud as they could.

That evening I went to a jam night at a pub in Walsall with Robin. It was awesome! We had such a great time. Robin and I played Commercial for Levi which caught on, apparently. Then I came up with the idea of playing Little Wing which Adam happily joined me for. That one was very popular!

I had three new types of ale, and talked to strangers and generally had a great time. At the end of the night they were playing Hey Joe and James, who runs the jam night, did this thing where he started switching out musicians while they were playing. He switched singers twice, changed out the bassist, drummer, guitarist many, many times. Then he had this girl up to sing, but she didn’t know the song and seemed very uncomfortable so he went to fetch me instead. I don’t know the words to Hey Joe, either, but I figure in the end you don’t have to. As long as you get the “Hey, Joe!” part right, the rest can be “herdiberdy herp derp” and no one’s gonna care.

We jammed it out for several minutes, switching styles into reggae and disco before bringing it back to the blues-rock towards the end. Such a great show! I love jamming.

Yesterday I had a rehearsal. I’ve changed guitarists, which at the moment feels like a step back because Luke has to learn everything we’ve already done from scratch, but he did really well on Infra-Red and Supermassive Black Hole, so I’m pretty enthusiastic about that.

Then I was supposed to go to Chantal’s, and that’s where my week stops being cool. Chantal hit me up on Facebook and told me she had too much work this weekend and it wouldn’t really work out so well having me over now. Put a real dampener on everything.

What’s worse, Abi told me yesterday that she’s moving to Gorway Halls, which, while it’s not exactly far away, still means that we’ll see less of each other and given that we hardly see each other as it is… It makes me feel very lonely, to think that I won’t have her around anymore. Annette left last weekend, too, to go back home. We’re only four left now, of the original seven who came here in September. There’s French Girl in Emma’s old room, but she’s leaving soon too, and to be honest, it’s not like we see all that much of her. We see her blonde friend from upstairs more frequently. For the most part, we only notice her presence by way of her taking up so much room in the fridge.

So at the moment I don’t feel like I have so much to be happy about. I woke up at 10 this morning, but decided to go back to sleep. My mind punished me with an awful nightmare where I got stuck in Amsterdam on my way home to Norway because I’d forgotten to check in for my flight and it was too late.

Today I’m doing laundry, and that’s about the only thing I have planned. Well, other than trying to make something for the middle section of heapsong1 whenever Immi sees fit to reveal it. It’s not up yet…

Wednesday is the E&E performance/workshop school thing. We rehearsed today, and I feel reasonably prepared. Just looking forward to getting it all over with. Turns out I have to lead the songwriting workshop by myself as well, because Denise has some health issues and can’t attend.

We had to drop Waterloo Sunset, but I feel pretty good about the arrangement we’ve made for Everybody Wants to Be a Cat. There’s some talking and distractions in the recording from today, and I think I’m gonna ask Eliza not to ad-lib at all on the slow part as it throws me off my game, but you can get the general idea from this:

Everybody Wants to Be a Cat

Also on Wednesday is a jam night at a local pub, and I’ll be playing Commercial for Levi by Placebo with Robin.

I also feel like I need to really get working on building my set for my dissertation. I’ve only got about half of it decided, and I feel like we need to be reasonably done by the time the Easter Holidays begin, because then we’ll probably all be going home, and when they’re over we’ll only have a couple of weeks left until the gig.

In addition to that, this week Imogen Heap is starting work on her experiment, heapsong1, for which she’s asking fans to contribute. Today, people sent in samples, and I just finished watching a live vlog of Immi picking through some of the samples and trying to decide on which ones to use. She got over eight hundred samples in today, so this will be no easy task.

I would really like to contribute a bit to all this, but with so much else going on it’s hard to find the time. In addition, I’m going to Chantal’s on Thursday and staying until Sunday. Maybe she’s got a quiet room so I can try and record something for the middle section on Friday. I can probably drop some words into the cloud tomorrow, at any rate. I want to contribute teapot and aardvark. They’re good words. Possibly do some images on Wednesday, too, if I can fit it in around everything else.

So much creativity going round! I wish I could use it to my advantage more… I want to write a new song, but nothing’s coming to me. I guess I’ll just have to see if inspiration strikes. I don’t think I could make a living as a songwriter, really…

Interim task yesterday went better than expected. I felt completely spent when it was over… We had a couple of problems, but most of it went quite smoothly, and the tutors seemed to think I did well, in any case, cause they gave me a B13. I feel very relieved… If I make a high enough mark for the promo-pack and the actual performance in May I’ll be able to get a good over-all mark despite Steve Spencer’s poor opinion of me before Christmas.

So now I need to focus all my energy on the school performance we’re doing next week for Employability & Enterprise. We rehearsed today. Everybody Wants to be a Cat went well, and we got through Waterloo Sunset okay. Eliza’s singing Forget You and You’ve Got a Friend in Me. She had some trouble with the latter. We sat down after the rehearsal and I helped her figure it out. We also worked on harmonies for Everybody Wants to be a Cat. I think it’s gonna be okay. Still, we started rehearsing less than a week before the performance… Definitely too short a deadline. I just need to nail the lyrics for Waterloo Sunset, though, and I’ll be ready.

Woke up with the worst headache today… Not even my caffeinated paracetamols did any good. I’ve taken some ibuprofen and am feeling a bit better now, though. I’m getting hungry again now, but I don’t know what to eat… Don’t really have anything that doesn’t take too much effort to prepare.

Also, figured out today that the song Infra-Red by Placebo is recorded in a key that doesn’t exist. Literally, it’s recorded in a key just below D#-minor. At live-shows they play it in D-minor. I couldn’t understand why my playing along sounded so off-key at first, while I was trying to suss out the chords… I’ll be playing it in G-minor, so it doesn’t really matter, but my God, was it frustrating to try and figure out those chords! I can’t imagine what it must be like for someone with perfect pitch to listen to that thing… I’ll bet they did it just to annoy people!

I think I’ve decided to cover Charlie Big Potato by Skunk Anansie for my dissertation as well. I wanna try, anyways. We’ll see how it goes. If it turns out it’s too epic for us, I’ll give Brazen (Weep) a go instead. It might actually suit the set better… But Charlie Big Potato is just such an awesome track! So I’m gonna try, and if I’m lucky, it’ll work out.

Am I an idiot or what? I went to bed last night with the intention of getting up at 9 so I could rehearse with (the rest of) my band at 10. But my alarm wasn’t set to 9. It was set to 11. I feel so stupid! I’m still rehearsing with Robin at 1, so that’s something, but I wish we could have had time to rehearse all together… I guess we’ll just roll with it.

I have a vocal lesson at 2 as well, and then the interim task is at 6:30. I’m kind of shitting myself now… I have to do well, or I’ll never get a high mark for this module! *dies*

EDIT, 4:20 pm: So now I’m just sitting around waiting for stuff to start… 40 minutes until they begin with today’s interim tasks, assuming it’s all on time. I’m on at 6:30, if there are no huge delays. I’m nervous, but I guess it’ll be okay… Nothing left to do but hope everything will be fine, that no one will screw up or anything… Think I’ll make myself another cup of lemsip.

I’ve entered one of those really insecure phases now, where I don’t feel like I can do anything right… I’m listening to my own voice and it sounds awful, and I’m listening to my songs and they’re just terrible and boring. I feel like I’m no good. Have no self-esteem. Slightly neurotic. Just wanna go hide.

Help!

Tonight is Aiden’s interim task. I’m a bit sad that I won’t be singing with him and his band anymore after this, even if it does add to my workload… It’s fun being asked to help someone else for a change.

Do you know, this is actually the first time ever that anyone has asked me to sing with them in a band? And even this time I offered first… In the past, I’ve offered and they’ve always picked someone else. The idea that anyone would ever approach me and ask if I wanted to sing with them seems simply ludicrous…

I try not to let it get to me. Does stuff to the self-esteem, you know? Never being asked. Am I just not good enough? But that’s stupid, I know I do well. I’ve received high marks for my singing in the past, and people always tell me I did well after a gig and they sound like they mean it. But they never think to ask me. Then, to cheer myself up, I think maybe it’s that they think I’m too good. I hardly ever ask the best because I just assume they’ll be really busy already… Except I do, when I pluck up the courage, I do ask even though I know they’ll say no, so that one doesn’t work either. And besides, I’m really not that good.

I would love to be in someone else’s dissertation band. It would give me something to do, things to learn, stuff to think about. It would take my mind off the loneliness and uncertainty. Keep me occupied.

Not that I need more to do right now. Aiden’s interim task tonight, mine tomorrow. And my bassist texted me this morning and told me he couldn’t make it to rehearsal tomorrow morning. Which really, really sucks. It’s not that we haven’t gone through the songs and all quite well already, it’s just that it’ll make me feel insecure and uncertain and I just won’t do that well. I can’t afford another low mark in this module, not after the D7 Steve Spencer gave me for my milestone presentation before Christmas.

Now, whiny emo stuff over with, Happy International Women’s Day! Ladies, it’s a day for kickin’ arse and takin’ names! So get to it! Be awesome! And don’t let men talk down at you today!

My last couple of days at home were lovely. Going out drinking on Friday was great! Not everyone who said they’d turn up did, but the ones who did made it awesome! Even my wee sis KayKay/Edd/Ednie  (it changes with the mood) came and drank with us.

It was great seeing her again. We went out for sushi on Wednesday, too (I asked if she wasn’t bored with Japanese food, but she was all for it) and we had so much to talk about! Also made me realise how unbelievably much I have actually missed her… You push that stuff to the back of your mind when you’re far away from people, but it catches up eventually.

My old friend Aurora also turned up, whether randomly or by design I’m not sure, but boy has it ever been ages since I last saw her! Must be at least a year and a half. I think she attended my 21st birthday party, at least… Not sure whether that was the last time I saw her. Fun, anyway. And yes, believe it or not, that’s probably the most flattering picture I got of her…

Saturday we did the whole family lunch t my mum’s. My godmother and her husband and eldest son attended (her son’s wife was ill and couldn’t come) and my goddaughter and her parents were there, too.

My goddaughter is the cutest thing! She’s getting to be quite big now, too. Absolutely adorable! And chatty as hell, though her language skills are still quite limited and I must admit I don’t always understand what she’s getting at… Still, cute! And she seems to like me, which is lucky if I’m gonna be babysitting her and stuff when she gets a bit older.

So, yesterday I went back here. Traveled all day. Spent two hours at Schiphol again. I had salmon miso ramen there. Yum! Then, when I landed, I headed straight back to Walsall to drop off all my stuff, fixed myself up as best I could and went off to Wolverhampton for dinner with Emma and people. It was so great to see her again! Wish I had had the sense to take some pictures… We ate at Dilshad. Awesome Indian food!

Today I had Employability & Enterprise again. My group is coming together okay, but there’s still a lot to do. We tried to rehearse this afternoon. Didn’t go too well. We found a room to practice in, but then it turned out someone else had “booked” it. I think priority should be given to those of us who have less time left, but whatever… We’ve booked a rehearsal for Thursday, at least.

Right now I’m stressing out about my interim task for Wednesday because there might not be time to run through the songs with my band beforehand… We were planning on just doing it on Wednesday morning, but now that slot is booked by the university for all rooms, apparently.

As for E&E, I guess as long as I know all my stuff and we manage to get something done on Thursday we’ll be okay. I think we’ve given ourselves too short a deadline for this… But at least Denise and I have a good idea of what we’re gonna do for the Songwriting Workshop.

Afterwards, I went to Wetherspoon with Chantal and Lucy. It was great! We’re thinking of making a weekly thing out of it, which I would just love. It’s so nice getting to hang out with people just for a quiet drink and some food. Makes me happy!