Love of Lights

I think I may have fallen for her. My crush on H has reached critical, slowly but surely. She didn't have to do much at all. She has been herself, unassuming and down to earth, but so clearly Her at the same time. Her personality has fallen into mine like a corresponding piece and her smile and her eyes have won me over with no effort at all. My behaviour towards her is not subtle, but it's not explicit either. I am one short step away from telling her I miss her when I'm  not with her. I've told her I love her in that way one says it in jest; a spark of truth canvassed by layers of 'humour'. I'm not with her enough and my heart contorts when I see her face on my facebook app, in conversation with me. But I know I must stay silent. I think there's someone else in her life, some secret boy she never talks about, unlike most people who can't help but immediately reveal the status of their love life. She may have let it slip once, but either I'm g...

My eyes droop and my temples throb as I write this. I really ought to go to bed, but I've been meaning to write about this for a while and I need to stop putting it off. But how to write about it? Just honestly, I guess. Before returning to Birmingham for the holidays, I lost what I guess one could call my 'virginity'. Virginity is a strange concept because it connotes pureness, having been untouched, but I've had sexual experience before December 2013, just never successful penetrative experience. In any case, I had 'proper' (the scare quotes are shouted , if such a thing is possible) sex in the closing month of 2013. It was with a girl who here I'll call Flowertwig to protect her identity. It's such a curious thing, the fact that I had sex with Flowertwig, because I've seen her in that way for quite a while now and privately decided that I would if I got the chance. Now I'm not entirely sure whether it was by small, quasi-subconscious acts th...

This year, I will try, even when afraid.  I will accept, and thereby improve from, my failures and embarrassments - minor or major. I will work, even when I don't feel like it. Much better: I will see the bigger picture and learn to ignore short-term whimsies; I will learn that just because I don't want to do it now, it doesn't mean doing it now won't be better for me in the long-run. I will remember that the past is gone, the future is a projection, a product of the imagination, and that the present reigns supreme. I will let nothing bring me to breaking point. Every stumble will propel me further. I will experiment with being more truthful about small things, like emotions, without becoming frail. I will find happiness, but not as a heavenly end-goal; I will look at it more like an attribute of things; I will find happiness in the sun, in the moon, in reading, in writing, in girls, in caffeine and alcohol, in having the money to live comfortably and attend a ...

I recently officially became a  British citizen, which is nice. Finally, the papers match up to what I feel inside. It's a strange affair being born in one country and raise in another, feeling a much stronger connection for the latter, but legally being treated as though you are from the  former. But that's not what this post  is about, though perhaps it should have got its own. What this post is about is what on earth I'm going to read in 2014. I've never really made a battle-plan about the books I intend to read, but I've got such an ever-increasing back-catalogue of to-reads that I think it is time.  I've given myself a very modest target of  20 books to read this year, because in the past two years I haven't even broken that and it's quite depressing actually. Now, naturally I'm allowed to deviate from this list, but I'll use it as my main guide. And these are just books read from back to front, not counting the various shorter texts that ...

On this here 4th of January, 2014, it seems to me about time I did my standard Reflexive Post on 2013, with the mandatory attendant forward-looking aspect. So what of 2013? On the dying days of 2012, I wrote that I have almost no idea what 2013 would have in store for me, and I was right. There were two things mainly that came unexpected: firstly, I became president of my university's prestigious philosophy society, an office I still think I don't quite deserve but will persevere with. I guess that taught me that I am fundamentally individual, that I am not a team leader, per se. I wish for responsibility over my own actions only and not to take on the kind of responsibility that necessarily affects a wider group of people. If my actions happen to affect a wider group of people, as in writing a novel and effecting something that way, I wouldn't mind because it's an indirect consequence of an action that is fundamentally individual; but something like being a leader or...