Turning Eighteen

Yesterday, I went into a pub and ordered a drink. No, it’s not the beginning of a joke. It’s the beginning of this post. And I suck at jokes.

Almost a week has passed since I became eighteen – and finally legal to order my own drinks at the bar. As my birthday fell on a Monday, a dreaded schoolday, apparently, I had a meal but did no more, though a friend had already organised our going out Saturday evening.

So, in effect, it was yesterday that I turned eighteen. I suppose I confused people by wearing a golden sash suggesting that my birthday was actually the Saturday. Not that it actually said so.

But I could argue that the sense of maturity came then, not whilst at school, doing what I have always done for the last billion Mondays.

The first drink I ordered legally was a Sidecar – cognac, liqueur and lemon juice. Yummy! – coincidently, the first thing that caught my eye on the menu. This is also exciting, as the Sidecar is the drink that Donna orders at the beginning of the Unicorn and the Wasp Doctor Who episode (in case you’re wondering: The Doctor orders a lime soda). I am also partial to the gin sour version of the drink, called a Chelsea Sidecar amongst other names. The Paris Ritz claims to have been the first to serve the drink, but there are many variations on the story (this was the 20s, so little evidence has kept). My favourite story is that the Sidecar is named after the sidecar vehicle that the American Army captain who created the drink used to travel about in.

Sidecar!

Anyway, I could say that made a difference to my birthday – well, compared to the other numbers.

People always ask: “has anything changed?” or they go ahead and suppose that it has. In Psychology, we were revising patterns of sleep for a question that might ask use about age-related changes in sleep. Thus, in the midst of many boxes were two: ‘aged 12-16’ (adolescence) and ‘aged 18-30’ (young adult – I realise how ironic this is for the writer in me, who screams “but YA is the previous age group, and 18-30 category is New Adult. NEW!” I just nodded and carried on). My teacher, being the charming woman she is, asked me if my jumping boxes had changed anything. I replied no. Really, nothing has changed, not even in that. I’m just as sleepy as I was the day before.

Of course, as we went on to discuss, how someone sleeps is not defined by their age alone.

Neither is how someone may behave. I think that’s the biggest reason that being eighteen makes very little difference for me. It simply makes it easier to spend time with my friends without being in a place made claustrophobic by its familiarity.

It’s ironic, really; a year ago, I clung to familiarity. I suppose this change comes from the fact that I have stopped relying on my school. The place has changed so much more in the last year than it ever did in six; I face an alien home every weekday. But I am subjective – and the world has changed as I have, too. As I said, age is behaviour, not a number.

Being honest, I don’t expect change, though. The biggest changes come for me in the summer when I move to university. I think it will be then when I realise that I have become an adult. But I don’t mind. For now, I’ll use my age as authority!

 

Revising (and Cognitive Schizophrenia)

I’m well into revising now, and yesterday I was deep in a mix of statistics and Schizophrenia. A weird combination, I know. As demonstrated below, I’m a giant-whiteboard-and-pen girl – and I use colours and arrows and bubbles that don’t connect. Yes, my handwriting really is that bad:

In summary:

Followers of Cognitive model (eg. me) say that the mind is like a machine and explanations come from when the machine is at fault; like a broken processor in a computer, Schizophrenics have faulty processing stopping them from correctly identifying the world around them.

To do a quick overview of the main points, chunks of AO1, I have learnt about the Cognitive explanation (I’ve also added in a few of the scientists I’m meant to know):

Schizophrenics have faulty attention filters, meaning that they are unable to distinguish between what is real and what is not. For instance, Schizophrenics cannot do the Stroop Effect – because they get too distracted by the words to see the colours. This is especially true if the words are associated with emotions or heightened senses, for instance: knife, hate.

McGuigam found that the larynxes of Schizophrenics vibrated when they were hearing voices. As you can see, the Schizophrenics cannot tell that the voices they are hearing are produced by themselves.

Hemslay added that Schizophrenics have a failure to activate their schemas, their models and ‘guidelines’ for living. This can explain the positive symptoms of Schizophrenia – hallucinations, delusions – because it suggests that they don’t separate their extraordinary from the ordinary. It has less ease explaining the negative symptoms of Schizophrenia: emotion blunting and passivity, where the Schizophrenic feels and fears that their thoughts are being ‘inserted’ into their mind. This makes it difficult for them to have relationships.

However, I believe that the Cognitive model can explain negative symptoms, as Schizophrenics have less schemas to understand how to behave in a relationship, thus they may believe that their thoughts are not their own.

Finally, Frith said that they have faulty cognitive processes, a wide as this title may be. This means that the are less able to will themselves to actively participate - Theory of Mind. Hence comes catatonic stupor. (But if you pay them, there is  greater chance they will comply. A little weird.)

 Parks found that Schizophrenics had mental trouble with their Working Memory – but so did the close relations of Schizophrenics. This muddies the waters a little. Evidently, genetics is involved, but how much so?

The main problem one finds with the Cognitive explanation is that it is reductionist – that is: it fixates on one point, the mind as a machine that falls. On the other hand, Schizophrenia must not be that simple to explain. Even including the genetic component cannot answer the entire bunch of questions on Schizophrenia; one must ask “from where do these faulty processings come?” Is this a set of genes or a negative happening in childhood (for instance, abuse)? The cocktail of explanations must be mixed together before we come up with a complete answer.

Quote: Ecclesiastes

Everything that happens in this world happens at the time God chooses.
He sets the time for birth and the time for death,
the time for planting and the time for pulling up,
the time for killing and the time for healing,
the time for tearing down and the time for building…
(Ecclesiastes v.3)

I decided to weave this Bible quote into my post today because it’s one that I hear every year at our Leavers’ Mass – except this year, it’s my class that are leaving, and, as part of my Chaplaincy Prefect duties, I’m, for want of any other title, the Director of Liturgy.

Too, English weather continues to be a downer, though at least it means I’m missing nothing with my mornings inside revision books and my afternoons buzzing around my computer.

It may not be Spring yet, but it will come.

Editing and Exams

(Both of which are looming for me)

I think ‘word economise’ is the best piece of editing advice I’ve read/been given. It may be more general than some other pieces of advice, such as “remove all ‘could’, ‘just’ and ‘seemed’ phrases”, but editing – and even writing first or subsequent drafts – with the phrase ‘word economise’ in my head is useful. This is because it allows me to think small – and thinking small leads to less elaborate turns of phrase.

It is particularly useful for me as someone who tends to make a phrase-mountain out of a molehill. I readily admit (nowadays) that my writing can be too florid and I should get into the habit of saying a point in three words, not five.

Costa Rican word-mountain…

So, anyway, it turns out that I also do this in my essays. For Philosophy, that’s not so much of a problem; the humanities are creative and allow flexibility. However, for Psychology, structure is needed. Rigid, unflorid, statement-and-evidence type sentences.

Once again, I have great overlap between my writing work and my school work, even when they clash and throw each of my schedules off kilter. (There are never enough hours in a week!)

Here, for Psychology, I’ve been told that not only can I cut away the nice sentence structures, for instance replacing ‘such as’ with its shorthand version ‘eg’, I should make my sentence as concise as possible. Oh joy. Short sentences.

The annoying thing is, I can tell that these good words of editing (despite sometimes being against my natural written flow) are coming into my subconscious and leaving with their mark pressed upon my mind. I may not yet have transferred all the skills to the essays, but they are coming through in my novel. Longer sentences, read aloud, are being chopped, changed and converted into shorter sentences.

I’m working on the second half now, and, though finding this half the more difficult, there is some ease in it being the tenser half where short sentences are coming in very handy.

In this way, editing is coming back and forth, from school to my novel, and from the workings of my novel to the crafting of my school essays.

And then I will be the happy squirrel with the nut… (Yeah, these picture-links are pretty intangible…)

A Week of Time-Management

First, I’d like to clarify one thing: my personalities. I’m a Type A, INFJ on the Meyers-Briggs, neurotic with impulsive and compulsive tendencies. I also might be a mental hypochondriac. I say ‘might’, hence the “semi-hypochondriac” remark on my Twitter bio – but does saying one’s self is a hypochondriac make one’s self a hypochondriac? Or is that too much of a paradox?

The point of the above paragraph is to illustrate that I must fill every second with meaningful activity. Only when I reach a sluggish, depressed trough do I sit and do nothing – simply because there is no point in doing so.

And, in these last two terms of school, as my exams loom and my extra-curricula duties increase, I must manage my time with the utmost care.

So, I decided I’d have a week of pure time-management.

 

Obviously not my time-table, which I shredded at the end of last week…

Did it work? Well, sort of. I started the week off pretty well, though I did underestimate how much time it would take me to complete each task I had allotted in. (This is one of the reasons why I don’t use revision timetables). As the week progressed, I slipped into distraction and stopped following the table, but followed my head instead. That’ the intuitive, feeling part of me breaking free from the chains of the order-obsessed introvert part.

It always comes down to time, doesn’t it? That metaphysical entity that drip, drips away.

Another issue I believe affected my progress through the structured timetable was that of fatigue, something I have been suffering from the last couple of weeks. Frankly, I am exhausted (I bet you can tell just from it seeping out of my blog post/s!). I’m so exhausted that I can’t think of relevant pictures that look nice on this post. Timetables do not win.

At least I can be thankful that the Passiontide service is out of the way, and, at the advent of the Easter holidays, I’ve done most of my extra-curricula items for school. It will take me a full weekend – and maybe more – to get back into routine, but I will be posting in arty voice again soon, I hope.

I’m rambling. Bleh. You know what’s it’s time for? Sims. And editing whilst I play Sims. I have two chapter critiques from my CP to read and one to do for her. Guh. At least I know I can structure my writing time when I’m here at home. School has that obvious problem of not being able to go over time if I miss a self-imposed deadline. At home, I give myself leeway, because I know I can make up for it another time. 

Pieces of the week falling away from the rest of the puzzle. Found this picture by Googling ‘psychology conclusion’ and there were several appropriate pictures I could have used.

In conclusion, however, as much as I think timetables work in moderation, my week of utter structure was my downfall. As I found when it came to the free-lessons reserved for writing and internet-surfing, it’s not possible to order ourselves to structure interest and WIP. 

I can manage time to an extent, but, after that, it ends up managing me. Ah, ideas for the plot of the sequel… If any other good has come out of forcing myself into the cracks of the time-management, it is that I’ve further imbued my mind with possible ideas for what I have lovingly *cough* called The Middle Book. Like a middle child, this is the one getting the least attention currently.

Why do I have the urge to write scenes for the last book?

‘Til tomorrow, readers. Alex

Why Blogging is Awesome (and Useful for School)

There are loads of reasons provided for why writers should have blogs – expanding into the community, meeting new people, really getting a feel for their style, but last week I realised that in the year I have been blogging, something has become better due to my blogging that steps away from writing in the fictional sense.

I’m talking about essays.

For all of my A Level subjects – Latin, Religious Studies and Psychology – I am forced to provide ideas, evidence and conclusions in a time-constraint, for RS in under 45 minutes (but then I have four consecutive essays to write), for the other two, under 30 minutes.

Yes, it’s tight. Yes, it takes a great deal of practise to get those skills honed for

Let’s hope this isn’t me in an exam!

the stress of an exam. Yes, it hurts one’s hand after a while, after all the scribbling.

But it was so much more difficult last year.

I believe that crafting my opinions and ideas on this blogs, especially to the unusual extent that I have in the last few months, has not only widened my mind to think about the topics I’m interested in more regularly and thoroughly, but I believe that blogging is also helping me in my exams. Exam technique is composed of many different ‘legs’ – one of which is the flow of an essay. You know – that little under-remark saying “marks are awarded for the quality of your writing”. When I was younger, it used to be as obvious as “3 marks for spelling, punctuation, grammar”.

Now we simply have to guess what it is that the examiners want. They call it making the exams tougher, but I think it’s just rewording items so that marks are more difficult to award.

Blogging, for me, is basically talking to a computer screen through my fingers. That is, it is helping me expand on my use of the English language to I know that, before I started blogging, my writing was stuck on the sentence structure of finite verb, participle. And it was a bit bland. Through many of the outlets of blogging, my writing has taken on a bit more of a voice…I hope.

This ‘talking through my fingers’ has been helping me with the way I structure my exams. Whilst there could be the problem of being too colloquial, I think I’m okay on that account. Instead, I’m now taking the idea of talking in structure and applying it to strands of other people’s works.

Take, for example, my Latin Prose mock exam this afternoon: one question, to be answered essay style in half an hour, was along the lines of ‘How does Tacitus make the reactions to Nero’s daughter’s birth and death vivid?’*

I had been talking about Nero’s excess in celebrating his daughter so much that he treated her as a goddess after her birth. Now, the question – albeit implicitly – says that I must talk about both little Augusta’s life and death. Suddenly, I knew how to administer the switch using the theme of goddess that I had detailed upon in the previous two paragraphs. Without putting much effort into it, I switched to talking about Nero’s opinion after her death. Sorted.

How do I know that I have blogging to thank for this? Simply because I have been honing the skill of flowing from topic to sporadic topic here – one might even say in this very post! Because my life revolves around so many different things, my mind jumps to another even when I am in the middle of one (this has resulted in many abandoned blog-posts, sorry); in this way, it is necessary for there to be some way of collecting up the pieces.

Blogging has just helped me tighten up the links between all of my favourite topics and theories!

 

*For more information on the text I am studying, see this external link.

I’m Back!

Hi, I’m back from my trip to New York. I’ll try and see what I can do for getting the blog schedule back and running, but mock exams are invading my creativity this week. For the moment, I’ve got a couple of Psychology and Philosophy posts planned - and I’m attempting to shift some of stubs in my ‘to be written up’ folder.

On the other hand, I’m writing for three personal assignments at the moment, which are taking priority away from the blog. I know: it’s a disaster!

For the time-being, here’s an awesome photo of the Statue of Liberty!

Alexandrina

Agnetha King: Behind the Character

I thought I’d do something fun, since I’m not really in the mood for a great written post today, and as I’ve been (on-off) rewriting Of Jackets and Phones, I thought I’d blather on about my precious MC.

 

For instance, to expand:

Golden Hair. If I could, I’d lighten the hair altogether (note to self, get Photoshop Pro). Described by Agnetha in OJAP as “honey-golden hair”, Agnetha’s hair is simply wavy. I couldn’t find a picture that really represented that. In the final book, she gets into the habit of straightening it like this, though.

Weapon Fixation. Whilst this does exist in real life, it is as more of a victim’s focus on the weapon of attack. In Agnetha’s context, I have used it to express her interest in weaponry and its application, something which is definitely more prominent in the first book.

Sharp Tongue. Agnetha is probably the ‘snarkiest’ of all my characters, perhaps because she is the narrator and started life as a thirteen-year-old with no manners. Agnetha’s temper certainly gets the better of her, but, by the end of the trilogy, I hope she will have learnt to curb her tongue at times.

There’s quite a few running jokes with Agnetha, such as the ‘likes puzzles, hates cheese’, and her dangerous skill of hitting people over the head with an odd collection of objects. Too, I make sure that each of these traits, physical and meta-physical, change as Agnetha does through the trilogy. Because she has a dear place in my heart, she needs to learn from her mistakes.

In this way, I am hoping that my character will be as realistic in her quirks as any other detective.

 

Announcement:

As I’m going to New York for the next week, and then shall have my mock exams the week after, the blog is going to be quietly off the radar for some time. I apologise, but there’s not much I can do without access to a computer! Just enjoy some of my other posts whilst I’m gone.

Photo of the Week: Costume

Obviously not my own photo, but it would be my idea were I the photographer this time. I’ve been incredibly busy. Beauty and the Beast dress rehearsal today, and I’m utterly swamped. To add to that, I’ve been a little under the weather, too, very likely due to stress. Ack, everything is suffering! Anyway…

Whilst I could go into depths about how costumes are essential for Drama, I’ll leave that for another post. The first performance is on Wednesday and it’s very exciting! And, oh yeah, I also have a gold dress with tinsel!

Photo of the Week: Castle

New segment and the quality’s not great, but I’ve been busy.

With rehearsals for Beauty and the Beast fully underway, I haven’t had much else to think about, let alone take pictures of.

I took this on Sunday, of a part of our set.