this time last week, i sat down with my notebook and made a list of things that i was going to do over half term. at the time, these things were essential, and i had every intention of doing them , and during the week i actually managed to do them. my room was cleaned, and re-arranged, i started making revision notes and i sat for hours writing essays on middle aged political commentators whose names were difficult to spell. it feels weird to have done all these things because usually i make elaborate plans which never get followed through, and live forever in my head, along with my good intentions. but this time i've actually done stuff, and i feel quite strange. i've become so used to having something impending looming over me that i've forgotten what it feels like to be on top of things. it sort of struck me this afternoon after i finished my last essay. for the first time in a while, it wasn't windy and there wasn't any rain...and for a change the sun was out which changed the greyness of the sky to orange and if the calendar on my wall didn't tell me that it was february i would've easily of thought that it was the middle of summer. everyone knows that summer is just the best time of the year. i never appreciate it at the time, it's only in the midst of winter when i've got no time and the weather's shite do i really appreciate it. i think the one thing i always miss about summer is the time. there's always so much of it. there's no sense of being rushed and you can stay in bed until lunchtime everyday without feeling the slightest bit guilty. that all seems so far away at the moment, there's still months to go, which include exams and more coursework deadlines. but thinking about it, once it comes, those things will make it ten times better. so i i've come up with some strange logic for myself, which means if i work harder i'll appreciate stuff more and i'll be the happiest boy alive by august. i told this to my friend, and she smiled and told me that things don't actually work out like that. i sort of know this, but still. dreaming's not that bad is it?, and it'll pass the time. tonight, i went to a slipknot concert with my friend. not that either of us are fans of the 'knot, but had to chaperone my friend's little brother. he's only eleven or something, and was pretty adamant on going. so, me and my friend were given the task. i didn't know what to expect, because i remember seeing them from a distance at leeds festival two years ago and all these crazy people going mad because the performers were inflicting pain on themselves. but when we got there, it was nothing like that. the crazy people, had been replaced by a swarm of people all dressed in black and bearing the most excited grins on their faces. i couldn't help but feel out of placed whilst queuing to get in, mainly because i wasn't wearing a costume and my t-shirt didn't have any slogans on it. me and my friend made a plan, we'd take it in turns to look after his brother. one of us would stay with him near the front and one would stand at the back, and every twenty minutes we'd swap. we even bought a newspaper to read and everything. this plan quickly disintegrated once the first band got on stage. everyone went crazy, even my friend's brother who looked as if he'd been possessed. he was jumping and kicking and punching as if he was going to die. it was quite funny to see a little kid behave like this, but once loads start doing it at the same time it gets sort of annoying. so for about four hours i was kicked and punched, people jumped over my head whilst various bands "sang" songs about being outcasts and generally unappreciated. this was then concluded the a lavish firework display which blinded most of the audience, which temporarily caused a halt in said moshing so i was thankful for it. by the end i was exhausted, incredibly sweaty (luckily my odors were made insignificant by a big looking biker man) and slightly bruised. the weird thing was, my friend's brother loved it. he was smiling as if someone had just told him he's going to live forever and kept telling us how it was the best experience of his short life. for a moment i feared for the future of the planet, but then i remembered how i felt when my brother took me to see radiohead when i was about his age. there was no possible way to understand what the songs were about at that age, but still i had something to be involved with and something to belong to. so i suppose that's what my friend's brother was feeling. his little group or whatever may be more brutal than mine but it's his. this sort of relates to something that my dad used to tell me and my brother about people having individual pockets of happiness that you'll keep as your own, things that give you some sort of identity and in a way shape who you are. umm. --- everyone's talking about storytelling, i would too but i haven't seen it. instead i'll talk about 'monster's inc.' which i thought was great. although, when going to see it, i forgot my glasses and after the first ten minutes the characters lost any identity and became just coloured blobs on the screen. i sort of felt bad, i mean, all those animators spending all that time trying to make stuff real and i was laughing at something that can be achieved by putting M&Ms in a washing machine. Stuart Gardiner wrote: I notice that my concert tickets haven't turned up yet. Which is interesting when I've paid £4.50 for them to be delivered. For that price, I want them hand-delivered by the band. heh me too! i ordered my ticket for brixton ages ago and they still haven't come yet. looking forward to the gig though. somebody whose name eludes me (sorry) wrote about making cereal and getting stuff mixed up. i do that all the time. my mother's getting annoyed at finding crunchy nut cornflakes in the fridge, and the milk in the breakfast cupboard. i haven't posted for a while, so this has been suitably rubbish. apologies. take care, nafees. +-------------------------------------------------------------------------+ +---+ Brought to you by the Sinister mailing list +---+ To send to the list mail sinister@missprint.org. To unsubscribe send "unsubscribe sinister" or "unsubscribe sinister-digest" to majordomo@missprint.org. 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