I am back to posting to this lj account directly as confession-box.org is down. Sadly I don’t know when – and if – this will be fixed. I took a chance by using a new webhost and one of these promotional offers. Now my webpage has been deactivated, I don’t know why, and none of the e-mails I sent them resulted in any response. Also – their webpage hasn’t been updated in a while, the forum is broken and the company generally doesn’t look to healthy. There’s been a post in the support system last Friday though – so maybe there’s some hope. If not … I will have to switch webhosts which is always annoying and loads of work
I do need to take up blogging again though – or just keeping a journal in general. As all the time before journaling helps with keeping track of what I do, reminding myself that I am actually moving forward and helps sorting my thoughts. Sadly … that’s quite important just for my day to day functioning, once more. (And for what it’s worth this made me give a trial run to Windows Live Writer which seems to be a quite nice tool so far.)
That is – while I am doing better than a year ago things are still sluggish, I struggle to keep up my motivation and (seasonal related?) I am certainly less able to do some of the things I have to or should do. For example, I tried joining Batala, a local drumming band (see photo / video). Panic attack during the first band practice killed that off – I haven’t been back since. Which is of course the worst way to deal with this, but is mostly due to having a lot of other things going on in my life at the time. Now that those are out of the way I probably should be looking at trying again. Or, well, focus on making it to one of the meetings of the local Mountaineering club (that I joined last June, but never participated in). Or just working on that slightly underlying panic that is just there in the background most of the days, hiding in my room at times, despite living with much more likeable people then last year. I can’t place this anxiety. It’s just there at times and usually in the mornings. I guess this might be a backlash from last years shared housing or similar.
Here’s a quick rundown of this years crew (as names will likely appear in posts later on):
Anne, German, just moved to Liverpool. One of those that fell through the German education system and has been "selected out". She doesn’t have the qualifications to go to uni in Germany. Will study Environmental Sciences. Lived in Mozambique and Portugal (and speaks some Portuguese). Connor – Irish … seems to be a typical student, really – studies economy & politics, but hardly ever seems to be around, or just in background if he is. Well except when you can hear him sing Irish folk songs. Karina – Russian born doctorate (medicine) student, whose family moved to Israel when quite young and eventually to England. She talks loads. And I mean loads loads. Alex (more later) happens to be her friend as well and – despite being good friends with her – "can’t deal with more than half an hour Karina". Finally there’s Gopi from India who only moved in a couple weeks ago.
Despite all this … . Headspace is continuing to move forward, I’ve done a number presentations to a variety of people about it, been on the radio, whatever. Chances are that some members of the National Institute for Adult Continuing Learning (NIACE) will knock on the NUS door and suggest groups like Headspace to be established at student unions nation wide. I am trying to link Headspace in with other university services like the Graduate Development Programme. There’s also a chance that a research sub-group will form, looking at student mental health, with the aim to film a documentary, eventually. I just finished working on an Audio Installation with some of the FACT artists in residence that will get an exhibition sometime in December (and will likely work on a video installation next) so I am using connections I’ve built on that end.
Here are two recordings that did not make it into my soundpiece, but that I was quite happy with:
#1 – Walking past a Dylan cover singer in the city centre and keeping recording while passing an African musician … it’s the transition effect I aimed for. *Click*
#2 – One of these odd things just happening. Guitar player in city centre standing next to a small drum kit, his colleague somewhere else. A man (white hair/semi-bald, a cigar in his mouth) walks up, talks to the one on guitar for a while, sits down and starts playing, eventually says thank you and walks off again. It takes a while to get going. *Click*
