1 new photos on my Flickr!

Take a look http://ift.tt/1aYSUBR

1 new photos on my Flickr!

Take a look http://ift.tt/1aYSUBR

1 new photos on my Flickr!

Take a look http://www.flickr.com/photos/shootsforthemoon/

In Preparation For Hellfest

I promised myself some time ago - probably around last new year to be honest - that I'd relearn some basic French in order to get by easier when I went to Hellfest.
Well, now Hellfest is almost upon us and until this afternoon, I hadn't even entertained the idea of looking over any french work. A few hours ago, I picked up a couple of good quality (but cheap) books to kickstart my french relearning. After studying the language for five years in school, I'm hoping that it'll trigger my memory and that it'll be easier to learn, within reason, than learning everything from scratch.
In a way, I wish that I'd never stopped learning languages - I feel that if I'd stuck with them all as I picked them up, I could be halfway to fluent in French, German, Spanish, Japanese and Korean as well as moving in the right direction with Greek, Cantonese and Mandarin. When I really think about it, there are so many things that I'm capable of doing and all that's standing in the way is my own mental health issues. It's more disabling than I could ever have imagined.
Like I said though, I'm trying to get back on the horse, and I think that I'm sort of getting there. This interaction overload did set me back but I feel like I can spring forward again, now that I've had a short time to lose myself in the anonymity that the city centre provides.

As for learning French, or relearning or whatever, I'll try to keep this updated and things. Hopefully soon I'll be able to hold actual conversations with people! It's strange, the way they teach foreign languages in British schools - parrot phrases and jigsaw paragraphs. If I went to France, being able to talk at length about my family or what I did during the summer holidays would be so wildly unhelpful that it's almost comedic. And slightly sad too. It's a shame that we aren't taught with immersion although I can see why it'd be impractical. I just feel that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

In regards to Hellfest, I can't tell whether I'm most excited to see the bands, go on holiday to France, or to be reviewing the bands for GetYourRockOut.co.uk. I think it's pretty much an equal measure of all three things along with a whole bunch of other stuff too. Hopefully everything will go better with GYRO this time - it's pretty worrying how my emails keep getting 'lost'. They appear in my sent folder and I'm pretty certain that wouldn't happen if they weren't definitely 'sent'. My email hasn't changed, their email hasn't changed and they're not in their junk folder so lord knows where they're actually going. Of course there's always the possibility that they GYRO people either aren't seeing them because they're getting so many emails from everyone. Or there's the possibility that they're ignoring my emails as a way to subtly remove me from their team. Hopefully that's just me being paranoid though...
With that in mind however, I have wanted to start putting out feelers to find other reviewing sites and other companies that need photographers. I know there's a few local ones but the level of professionalism there is always a bit of a worry. I've seen some companies get really successful very quickly, only to find out they'd been built on a whim and folded within a year. It's scary to put work into something that feels so transient. But then I suppose that's all life is. At the end of the day, nothing is forever.

Downsides of Being an Introvert

Since the last post, given that it was a couple of hours ago, I've sort of done a lot. Mentally, that is. Or at least, I think I have, I guess.

I'm beginning to realise (again) that the more human interaction I have, face-to-face, the more detached from myself I become. It's probably why I coasted through school and college as an emotionally unavailable robot. Seeing people five or six days a week for eight hours really isn't my thing, or so it would seem.

I can handle interaction that isn't in person fairly well most of the time. It's just seeing a lot of people and a lot of disruption to my routine that throws me off. Recently, there has been metric fucktonnes of routine disruption and face-to-face interaction. It hasn't all been a bad thing but it has definitely drained me. Mentally, physically, emotionally: all I want to do is switch off and spend a few hours watching Fringe uninterrupted. That's not to say that if someone came to me with an emergency, I'd ignore them - not at all! But what I do really need is just a few hours to just recharge.

It sounds a lot like I'm just slating social interaction but that couldn't be further from my intentions. I love spending an afternoon catching up with friends or just hanging out. I love meeting up with people and while I might not be so wild about meeting new people most of the time, I can definitely see the merits of it, especially while trying to succeed in a business as network-heavy as photography and photo editing. All that I need, I think, is to manage my time better. I'm trying to heal (as new-age as that sounds) and I simply can't do that if I'm exhausting myself by spending all my time socialising or running around after other people or doing things for other people.
But at the same time, helping others and doing things for others and all that makes me feel better about myself so helps the healing process. What I've got to do is find a balance between the two that allows me to get better by giving myself space and time but that also allows me to feel better about myself by helping others.

Now, after all that renewed self-realisation, I'm going to head home and start working on the poster for Violence Is Violence Festival. After I've made a decent start on that, or done everything I can for now, I'm going to start working on more photo edits. I've got a lot of work to do on my "Uncanny Valley" project so it'll be good to get started on that in earnest after handing in my final piece.

I've been doing that thing again...

So hi there! Again...

Ugh it's been forever! It's been a mixture of being really busy and being really depressed, often at the same time. As many of you probably realise, being both at the same time doesn't really work at all.

With that in mind, I keep thinking I'm together enough to write this blog entry but in actual fact, I opened this dialogue box yesterday evening and I've stared at it, I've ignored it, I've talked about it and I've even showed the terrapin (he didn't seem too fussed). I think it's probably taken around 23 hours for me to even get this far...

And low and behold, it's taken a further 20 hours for me to start up again after that last paragraph. Everything is too difficult to deal with right now. I hate to say it but yesterday night I was too mentally exhausted to even change my fucking webpage - how pathetic is that? It's like the epitome of #FirstWorldProblems and it might actually be killing me.

I'm gonna leave this here for now. Hopefully I'll get to post again in a little while but in the meantime, I need a break and possibly another coffee.

Benefits of a THIGH GAP

No, Actually, I'm Not Dead Yet.

Getting back into the blog writing thing is tricky. I set up a little scheduling reminder thing on my phone a little while back to remind me to blog on certain days and stuff and I've steadfastly ignored each and every one up until today. To be honest, I even ignored today's until I got bored and restless enough.
I've been in a pretty dark place over the last few months and I know that I find blogging cathartic, it's just getting the willpower to actually do it that's the hard part.

A lot of the time, I just can't be bothered to blog; I'm so consumed will loathing for pretty much everything that the idea of doing something constructive disgusts and repels me. Although, occasionally, I can use this as fuel for creativity - photo-editing and things like it have been done very successfully in these darker days. NaNoWriMo in particular pulled me through a pretty rough time last year - it was just about a month after my Gran passed away and having Wrimo related obligations pulled me through it and forced me out of the house on a bi-weekly basis. It gave me a good, solid, creative outlet something to do other than just the monotony of work and college and crying. It helped. Sure, my grades for that period still suffered, my manner with the customers took a beating, but I didn't do too many self-destructive things. As pointless and futile as living seemed, I stuck with it, I got my 50k words in the 30 days, against all odds and successfully 'won' NaNoWriMo.

Anyway, I'm going to stop rambling on about that now, this post was just to get me back into the swing of writing (again) and I think it has. I'll do another post tonight, probably a medication based one. Maybe a music based one. It doesn't really matter to be honest, I'm just trying to theme my posts or at least my days a little bit more than having my brain vomit guff all over the internet. Maybe I'll do a weekly round-up of 'Shit That I Find Interesting' rather than spamming my Facebook feed with links from anywhere and everywhere... ANYWAY! I'm just trying to get my head in a little bit of order or something so that I don't feel like I'm going around the bend all the time.

Peace, people, TTYL!

Out the Other Side Again.

The second week of this year was rocky. So rocky, in fact, that I became more paranoid than I have been in a long time. I was despondent, and, when I wasn't paranoid, I was so emotionally blank that I shut myself off from everyone and everything. Unfortunately, what I needed the most was some love and affection but due to things beyond my control, that was pretty unattainable.
Things came to a head the other day, Monday, in fact, but I didn't want to write about it then. It felt like it was too soon, I think. I don't really know. I just wasn't ready. I'm not entirely convinced that I'm ready even now, to be totally honest.
I'm going to say I don't know what brought it on. I sort of do but the reason isn't for the internet. I'm open on this blog but there are things even I want to keep to myself. And realistically, a lot of these paranoid episodes I have are sudden and out of nowhere and I think this time, it was just too many things that came together and came out of nowhere all at the same time. Yeah. I spent the entirety of Tuesday wanting to either throw myself in front of a bus or from a high area.
In the end, it was nothing that a good long talk couldn't pull round and, even though I'm feeling a little worse for wear, I'm pretty much out the other side again now.

A Year of Loss

In the last 12 months, a startling number of people I was close to have died. Last January, my Great Grandma Vi, who'd lived to the grand old age of 101, died just short of her 102nd birthday. It both was and wasn't a surprise at the same time. She was very old (obviously) and very frail but she kept her wits until the moment of her death which was wonderful. I regret not spending more time listening to her stories. After a century on this earth, she must have had some amazing ones.

Then in the summer, my step-dad's mam, Jean, died. She took ill fairly suddenly and we were told as soon as she went into hospital that she was unlikely to make it more than six more weeks. She made less than three. She passed relatively peacefully, all things considered, although the manner of her sickness was, and still is, a point of embarrassment for my step-family. Simply, she was an alcoholic. The human body just isn't equipped to deal with the volume of alcohol she took in.

In September, as I've already written, my Gran, Dorothy, died. We were incredibly close. She pretty much raised me - even though I lived with my mum and step-dad, they both worked full-time so I spent a lot of time at my Gran's house until I was in college. Her death was sudden and heart-breaking. I think what made it even worse was that she recovered from her heart operation faster than we expected - doctors and nurses on the cardiac ward included. The speed of the turnaround from fine-but-tired-after-undergoing-heart-surgery to, well, dying was enough to give even the most seasoned head-banger whiplash.

The week before last, I heard that a close childhood friend, Hal, took his own life. We'd been in the county swimming club and competed together. He was in the year above me at the same school and even though we didn't hang out often through school, we always got on well and always promised to get together more often. It never materialised, unfortunately. Through college, I'd bump into him every other week or so and we always talked as if no time had passed. I regret not talking to him more. His life was a one so full of promise. He was a musician and a writer. He'd played at festivals with his band and was looking to get books published. He would have been so great. In one way, I wonder how it went so wrong for him but then again, at the same time, I totally understand how it could have happened, even if I don't know exactly what he went through. I can wish all I want that I was there for him when, realistically, it's pointless. He had better, closer friends than me who were or should have been there for him. At the end of the day, it doesn't really matter how many people are there for you, if you feel as though you have no self-worth then nothing can make it better but you. It's a catch 22 situation and it's horrible.

This year has very limited ways that it can be worse than last year. I've said that before and I was told that I was jinxing it. Fuck jinxing it. There'll be hell to pay if this year falls to shit as well as last year. Frankly, after my sorry mental state in the last few weeks, I'm not sure I'd make it if this year was worse.

Coming Up Blank

Writing this shit is hard. Like the title says, I'm coming up blank on pretty much everything these days. I'm on holiday from work which is kinda nice but at the same time, I feel sort of purposeless. This is why I tend not to take holiday. I've only been off for seven days and it feels like a fucking eternity. I'm not even due back until Sunday either...

Time is taking like six times as long as it should. It's only January 13th but it feels like it should be like March or something. November feels like a year away when in actual fact, NaNoWriMo ended barely six weeks ago. I can't handle all this too well. 

I'm getting paranoid, dejected, lonely even though my boyfriend's right there with me. It's sort of ridiculous but at the same time, I haven't even got the energy to feel that bad about myself. I mean, obviously I do, that's most of what's getting me down after all, but at the same time I'm just so apathetic towards it. I feel dead inside. Like a zombie or something.

I know it can be the meds. Mirtazapine can do that to you. One of the people I know had this reaction and switched to Fluoxetine. Obviously I can't do that - having tried them and it going badly, I don't exactly want to do it again. I don't know what I need, really, I guess, or what I want. Apart from a hug and some attention. Unfortunately, everyone's out at the moment so that's going to have to wait until later.

As for progress, I've started doing the washing. I've got maybe three loads left to do. And all the kitchen's nearly clean and the dishes are all done apart from a bunch of glasses and the plate and mug I used this morning. I changed the bedding yesterday. Or maybe the day before. Either way, it's changed. It doesn't match this time like it did but I guess that doesn't really matter. My eating's not going so well and with all the festive disruption my gym going's kind of gone all to pot but I'll be going later today, and then before college tomorrow, with a rest day on Wednesday. I don't want to plan too far ahead, because I can find it too restricting and overwhelming, but at the same time I need some structure to actually make me get out of bed in the morning. I'm actually managing to do my currents project at college now too. There's the PPD 2 and the portfolio that we're doing at the moment. PPD is personal and professional development or something like that, and weirdly for once, it is actually exactly what you'd think. It's a portfolio of work that details my progression into photography and the world of photographers. Everything that I've learned about shoots and target setting and visiting class speakers and jobs in the industry that I've looked at. It all goes into the documents and then it counts for a decent portion of my grade at the end. The other project is the portfolio which is huge and important and it's to be used in our professional lives to get clients and frankly, that fucking terrifies me. What scares me more - I guess that should be 'scared' now - is the fact that it is supposed to be a professional grade portfolio which costs approximately £150 - £200.

I worried and worried about this, and the money that I had to pull out my arse for the London trip, until last Thursday. I turned up to college fairly convinced that I was supposed to have a lesson but apparently not. But I bumped into my lecturer, who I'll not be getting on there but more on that later, and sorted of freaked out all my stresses about there was no fucking way I can afford any of any of the things I 'need' this year. 

We agreed that I can submit my portfolio on my iPad - it's only going to have to be with my lecturer for one day in the summer. Hopefully it's not going to be when I'm at a festival! (More on that later too.)

As for the trip to London, I've got to talk to one of the girls on the full-time who's organising it all with the gallery. I still need to do that. I've been meaning to do it since November but I dunno. The thought of talking to a stranger about it, about the fact that I need yet more time to get £40 together, fucking terrifies me. I nearly lost my shit when I had to talk to my lecturer about it back in November! I feel like it'd be a wasted opportunity but then again, any sort of opportunity like that is never going to be a waste unless I really just submitted crappy work and frankly, I don't do crappy work. Especially not where music photography is concerned. 

I think I should just stop worrying about it or something. It's all going to turn out fine in the end. I just wish I didn't feel so shitty in the interim.

I Just Hit 1300 Views!

Needless to say, I'm pretty darn happy about that reaching 1300 views! I never imagined that anyone would read this blog really. I figured it'd maybe get a few views a week or something. I know that 1300 hits isn't really a lot in a year but it does feel like it when I see it there in the counter!
I guess I just wanted to thank you for reading, if you're actually reading, that is, rather than just being dragged here by vampirestat.com or other sites that don't really exist to do anything...

Anyway! Thank you! Thankyouthankyouthankyou!