What Makes A Perfect Twenty-One Days?

Is it watching bitchin' 90s movies at Alex's house before drinking wine with Andrea on the way to see The Matches for the first time out of four? Is it a thousand attempts and shouts with everyone to request More Than A Feeling? How about 7 hour bus rides with Colin, Joey, Mal, Tori and Lauren singing swing versions of the Fresh Prince theme? Or maybe it's sitting outside bus stations at 11pm playing cards while a hobo named Nigel (in posession of a recorder) gets down on all fours and shits his pants right next to you? Or staying up til 5am pretending we're in some lame band?

Is it playing the Wii all night? Or Burnout all day with Colin? Is it making cookies and muffins with unhappy faces with Kelly? Is it learning how to drive and Ripstick in an Oklahoma car park? How about wearing gay matching scarves, which were actually far from either? Is it drinking a bottle of red wine by yourself and then being graffitied on and recorded doing so for the whole of YouTube to see?

Is it drinking Jagerbombs and catching lergy at Emery shows with Danielle? Is it screaming "I can't make it on my owwwwwwwwwwwn!" and "Since you been goooooooooooonnnnne!" at the top of your lungs whilst drinking disgusting watered-down whiskey with Michaela, Danielle and Noelle on the way to Tahoe? Is it building snowmen with genitalia and Down's Syndrome and rolling around in the snow with Nina and Eugene? Or maybe sledding into a cabin at 3am after a few bottles of rum like Sam? It's certainly not the Jiffy's grease-ball hangover cure, though.

Is it watching Saved by The Bell with Kim and Jay Jay during the day before watching every Saw film at night with Danielle and Sam? Or maybe just yelling "GARRRYYYY!" at every available opportunity? Is it drinking in a cafe with Jen and Meredith and being taken to strange cars by 60-year old hippies named Steve? Is it walking around Santa Cruz and the taking shots of rum (not water) with Mandie and Andrea, Erika and Sheila, and "the boys from over the road"? Or watching two movies by yourself in an empty cinema?

Perhaps it's eating Mexican food followed by drunken karaoke and sleepovers? Is it building forts with Mary? Or going in disco toilets with Adam and eating bean pizzas?

Whatever it was, it was an incredible three weeks. I can't thank everyone involved enough for making it as good as it was.

Oh, hi Fiji!

A Metaphorical Kick Up The Backside

If this extract doesn't make you get off your ass and do something, then nothing will.
Taken from a letter from Alex McCandless to "Ronald Franz":

"...back to the same situation which you see day after day after day. I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discover all the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover. Don't settle down and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a new horizon. You are still going to live a long time...and it would be a shame if you did not take the time to revolutionize your life and move into an entirely new realm of experience.
You are wrong if you think Joy emenates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against our habitual lifestyle and engage in uncoventional living."

A Moment For Reflection

Normally at the culmination of a year, I look back and think "What a waste." Like the chiming of Big Ben at midnight on the thirty-first of December is just the sound of another year slipping away, another day beginning, waking up in the same familar way. Today however, I metaphorically glance over my shoulder and see a year full of productivity and maturity (not maturity in the dark hours of the weekend, acceptably).

Never before have I been able to think "Wow, I did a lot last year", until now. Trying to list some of the accomplishments of Oh Seven (in a non-arrogant way) would be a difficult task to be honest, as I wouldn't be able to distinguish the not-so-important events from the oh-so-important ones. So, I guess I'll just decide for myself and list the moments that made last year so amazing, relevant or not.
Last year, I...

*Raised close to £600 for Link Community Develeopment by hitch-hiking all the way from Blackpool, down to Portsmouth, through France, through Spain, and to Morocco with Murray; passing through city after city and meeting dozens of amazing new people before finding contentment in the lowly hills of the Cascades D'Ouzoud.

*Travelled to London alone, met up with some people I'd never met, went to the free Mighty Boosh Party on a boat, with a free bar and drank my body's water content in Southern Comfort and lemonade. This resulted in me doing live punk-rock karaoke with Dave Brown (Bollo from the Boosh) in the form of Killing In The Name, then falling off the stage and leading my spinning head into the toilet bowl of the men's room.

*Made two new groups of incredible friends. The California lot and the Liverpool lot, you know who you are.

*Got promoted from lowly dogsbody to lowly Duty Manager. Oh, the joys of attempting to order your friends about.

*Decided in an instant to splash out three hundred units of my hard-earned Great British Pounds on a flight to California to spend my 21st birthday at HelL3. Spontaneity is golden.

*Plucked up the courage and ambition to book a ten month trip around the (mostly) un-Westernised part of the world. No doubt that will be a regular topic in my blogs in the coming months.

*Gone through four different MySpace layouts, three phones, three pairs of shoes, countless gigs, an infinite amount of alcohol and listened to over 20,000 songs according to LastFM.

*Still didn't finish my tattoo...