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Written last night while cut-off from the word on a train travelling through the middle of nowhere.

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I spend a lot of my life on trains. Reading, listening, gazing, or trying in vain to sleep. Trains are second nature to me. My home from home on the move. My home on the rails. As seen in my post about safe spaces, I like familiarity. It is comforting. The train I take home has never changed. I have been taking the same route, travelling on the same schedule, in the same carriage for almost a decade. I know most of the staff on sight and, sometimes,  even discuss the conductor’s university-age daughter when he is on shift. My train journeys are long, too long to be considered a commute. So when I travel, I set up shop, dedicating myself to that space for the next few hours. I’ve had adventures on this train. I’ve played poker with Russians, sang Bohemian Rhapsody at the top of my voice, had a deep and intense three-hour conversation with a gentleman whose name I failed to learn, yet whose intelligence and presence has stuck with me always.

I don’t really have a point to this rambling. I think I’m just nostalgic. Is it possible to be nostalgic for the present? I think I miss home. I miss having a home. I always have a home to go to, but it’s not the same as being there. Living in halls is like living in limbo and, I think, retrospectively, it has been feeling like that for a while now. My future didn’t work out like I expected. I didn’t find home where I thought, probably naively, that I would. I still don’t have a home to be in. I have a home to go to, but not be in. I think that’s why I’m restless. Everything just now, and for many months to come yet, is leading to that point. To that person and that home. I have both now, and I cherish that more than I could possibly write, but I’m ready to settle. To stop having everything be up in the air. To plan the future, to plan adventures, together.

I’m ready to be home.

Restless

I’m a little restless this morning. Like I cannot decide where to focus my energies. I have plenty to do (when do I not) but I can’t settle. Can’t focus on one specific thing. I think it’s because I’ve had a rare couple of days of productiveness. I’m finally getting somewhere. So, of course, my brain is going into rebellion mode. It would make for a great anarchist in its spare time. Now I just gotta train it to realise that it has no spare time until August. Though I think that’s also part of the problem. It’s still May and August feels like a far off dream. Months and months of studying and focusing are a rather daunting prospect. But I have nothing but my perseverance. Some days it wins, some days it loses. That’s just par for the course. I’m human and I’m doing the best I can. Who knows, maybe I’m just a touch lost with how much needs done and how little I feel I still know. But for now, I need tea and I need to study!

Adventure

Adventure is good for the soul. I can vouch for this. My soul feels saited, my camera full and my mind finally focused.

In other words, I ran away to London over the weekend. Not for the first time either. Once during my undergraduate degree, I ended up on an overnight bus to London with less that four hours notice and several of my best friends. It was one of the best decisions I have ever made and this was just as fufilling.

I have a habit, neither bad nor good, because it leads to a soild serving of both in the end. I get ideas in my head. Ideas I just can’t shake. These ideas perculate and simmer until I have the entire prospect mentally planned and I just have to know if I can do it. London was one such idea. I can’t really explain it. It started as an opportunity to see one of my favourite poets perform live. It was happening the next day and I was a country over, but I wanted to make it happen.

Oddly enough though, in the space of a few hours the tickets had sold out, and I just didn’t mind. It should have bothered me more than it did, but I just wanted to go on an adventure. I wanted to take my boyfriend and do something carefree and spontaneous, and just deal with the concequences when they came. You have no idea how rare that is for me. Sometimes it’s just impossible to switch my brain off. I’m a realist. Every idea and thought is analysed for practical and likely outcomes, which are nine times out of ten negative. So to just not care, it’s so cathartic. To find that rare get-up-and-go that so often is just absent, it was just luxurious. The excitement. To go. To see. To share it. I needed it, so much.

Now, however, I need to get back to work. But it’s still there, in the background. That get-up-and-go. I’m motivated again, even in the smallest way, but it’s there. I found it again.

I’m reminded of a poem that Tia used to love. (Tia is my grandmother, but she’d whack you upside the head for calling her that and making her young soul feel so old). I just remember the one line, about this old woman reading obituaries just to double check she wasn’t in it.

“My get-up-and-go had got up and went”

Hopefully that’s a while down the line for me yet. Motivation is fleeting for me lately, but I know there are many adventures in my future, whether for a day or a life-time. So for now, I’m biding my time, working away during the lull between adventures. After all, that lull is life, and I want to enjoy every moment.

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P.S. Keep an eye out for updates to my Photography from the Streets of London album. My new photos will be getting added as soon as I get the opportunity to edit them.

Progress

Job applications are done!

Well, they are complete for now. The are an inevitability in life, like death and taxes. Either way, they are off my to-do list for the present, which means back to my Python coding. I’ve been really enjoying learning how to code, but I am still worrying that learning the fundamentals will not be enough to help me understand how to build the kind of code I need for my dissertation. Though there is little I can do about that until I get the learning part over and done with. Then it’s another item off my to-do list. But first, tea!

…okay that was supposed to be the end but OWWWWW!!! I do not recommend chilli seaweed for breakfast or prior to your tea. Tis painful on the taste buds. It’s my own fault though. My roommate is a supreme cook and I love when she leaves us leftovers. Always spicy, but always amazing Chinese cooking. I would love to have the time to learn how to make proper Chinese cuisine, but for now, I’ll just continue enjoying her leftovers.  My dissertation is more important after all.

Comics

I have had the best morning!

I seem to be continuing my trend of ‘out of character early rises’, but today I had a valid excuse. IT’S FREE COMIC BOOK DAY!!!!!!

Ever since I first heard about Free Comic Book Day 6 years ago, I’ve never been able to attend. I’ve always been at work (or last year I was on a long-haul flight to Florida, so I’m hardly going to complain about that), but today is finally my day! Up at 6am, out at 7am, in Starbucks by 7.30am and the onto the queue! I officially have enough graphic reading material to last me about a year. It’s amazing and I cannot wait to dive in head first.

Okay, I have that out my system now. No…wait…EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!!

Okay, I’m good now.

Also, I had a really important interview yesterday. I’ve been bouncing in anticipation ever since. I want this internship so badly. Even though I know it means I’ll be working double time on my dissertation, probably not sleeping (ha! Okay sleeping less at least), and I might even get to spend my partners birthday with him in one of my favourite cities. It’s just so exciting. My life is so oddly exciting right now. I have no idea what’s going to happen, but I’m so happy, I’m grabbing onto every chance that comes my way and working like crazy to get it. It’s exhausting! I think I’m running mostly on tea and adrenaline, among other things.

This is such an amazing chapter in my life. It feels…exciting. I can’t stop using that word. I’m excited. Thrilled. Provoked. Piqued. Stimulated. Take your pick. I think I’m all of them. All at once.

…or maybe i’ve just had too much tea. *shrugs* Who cares!! Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

Mornings

“Why, sometimes I believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

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Few things are likely to get me out of bed before 6am. Very few. However, as of late my track record as a grumpy early morning person is being stolen from me. It didn’t even require a cup of tea, would you believe? I certainly still don’t. But despite such impossibilities, like 2am fire alarms (ooh university halls, we had such a great run) I am once again in my prime position by the window of Starbucks, tea in hand, pen poised over my journal. My master’s research will wait for no man…or woman apparently. Tolkien would be so disappointed.

Yes, today must be a day filled with coding and job applications, because I have not been as productive as I should have been, though I hardly have any regrets. I am not close enough to any sort of deadline to develop worrying guilt over having some sort of life (horrifying, I know, a student trying to have a social life, absurd!) But work prevails and so do I. Onwards Queenie!!! (I don’t have anything resembling a noble steed, just a very loyal laptop I aptly named Queenie and a continual wish for a bottomless travel mug).

Safe

I’ve been thinking a lot about safe spaces. They come in the unlikeliest of places. You have purposefully manufactured safe spaces, like LGBT bars and therapist waiting rooms. But for me, it’s my Starbucks.

I came from a very small town where brand chains were a foreign concept, so when I moved to the Edinburgh to start university, I became a tad hooked. I’d always had this idea in my head. This image of sitting in a Starbucks, sipping my tea, in a big woolly jumper and reading a book. It was such a basic concept, but to me, it signified some sort of arrival. A change in my life that I had strived to achieve throughout all of my childhood.

Over the years, Starbucks was always a backdrop. My one was directly next to campus and I had friends that worked there. We’d all grab one in the morning, study there during long breaks between classes or on the run-up to deadlines and we’d hang there at weekends, sometimes nursing hangovers, sometimes sitting scrolling the internet or reading together in content silence. It wasn’t until I moved that I realised how much I missed it. That one place where everyone knew my name and I never felt out of place. As a person with serious social anxiety at times, I never realised how much I relied on that. On the routine and the comfort.

But I moved and I don’t regret it in the slightest. Other things in my life had fallen out of sync and, simply put, I wasn’t happy anymore. But I didn’t have that space anymore. At least for a while. I live in the city centre, so finding a cafe that didn’t have constant, distracting foot traffic was hard. But one day I stumbled across it, ten minutes from home, perfect distance for studying first thing in the morning (my favourite time to study), my Starbucks.

The fact that it was a Starbucks really is irrelevant. It was the fact that I had my safe space back. I never felt out of place, I always recognised the staff and I have a favourite seat. It’s the small things, but it makes everything a bit easier. It takes away the stress of finding somewhere to study, when the library is too quiet or too loud (yes it really can be both), where it’s always quiet enough for me to find a seat, where I can study for hours without getting uncomfortable. It’s mine.

Or it was.

I recently had a run in with my stalker. Which is honestly a problem I never thought i’d have. I can’t help contemplating the fear women have to deal with in the meer presence of a man, but that is a story for another day. I’m not interested in telling it today.

Today, I would like to stop looking over my shoulder. Looking over and making sure he isn’t sitting there again. I would like to stop blowing it out of proportion in my mind and to stop wondering if I have to worry that he will come back. Come here, to my safe space.

I want my safe space back.

Drag

I’m thinking about drag queens. As you grow to know me and my ponderings, you will likely find that this is far from an uncommon thought. I happen to absolutely adore drag queens. My current thoughts, however, stem from two places (and I haven’t the foggiest which – I can rarely track the pathways of my incohesive thought process). Firstly, a new season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race has started. I can’t get my fill fast enough, so I’m deliberating between my position as a noble information professional and a Drag Race addict and contemplating seeking at ‘alternate’ means of watching All Stars (the only seasons I haven’t yet watched). The info professionals and morally righteous among you will be happy to note that I have risen above illegal online streaming and am instead watching Riverdale on Netflix…again.

Firstly, a new season of Ru Paul’s Drag Race has started. I can’t get my fill fast enough, so I’m deliberating between my position as a noble information professional and a Drag Race addict and contemplating seeking at ‘alternate’ means of watching All Stars (the only seasons I haven’t yet watched). The info professionals and morally righteous among you will be happy to note that I have risen above illegal online streaming and am instead watching Riverdale on Netflix…again.

Secondly, I am thinking about my metadata conference…also again. And likely for weeks to come. But more precisely, I am thinking about the presentation given by Nicola Osborne on Digital Footprints and how a collection of drag queens won the right to not have to list their legal names on Facebook. There are a million and one reasons why this is such a wonderful achievement (which succeeds even my capabilities as a writer and general person with a concentration spectrum).

So this evening, my cup of chamomile and spearmint is in honour of drag queens across the world. Stay Fabulous hun-ty!