Another post

So I'm still here. Yup. Still alive and kicking. Just living life in Leeds. Going out. Doing some reading. Getting distracted by girls. Standard affairs, you know. Last Saturday we went to Manchester. We were told beforehand that "Manchester is a shit hole". We were a little dismayed by this, but as we had already paid the £15, we were determined to go. When we got there, we found that Manchester was actually very nice. We determined that this was because the guy who told us it was going to be lame was from London. Those southerners are always so posh and "holier-than-though". They can suck it. Why not enjoy everything?

 This is a pagoda archway at the China town square

 There's an actual pagoda. Notice the moss on the top of it. It's pretty cool.

 This is just an alley way. It looked cool.

 A building in downtown. It was really early when we got there, as you can tell by the fact that the sun is so low on the horizon.

 More streets in Manchester.

 Mimi and Olenka

 This is the square of Manchester. This is a statue of a very fat queen, who I can only assume is an English queen.

 They had a bunch of wooden ducks,

 They had feet! Cute.

 More pictures of the square

 More!

 Primark is like is the quality of Target met the price of Walmart. And the store in Manchester was enormous.

 They still have Burger King!

 They also have trees.

 I think I always take pictures of my feet. Make sure I was there.

 They had police on horses!

 They had a huge ferris wheel.

 And we went on it. Here's a view from the cabin.

 Another view from the wheel.

 More

 More.

 Here's a picture of Mimi on the ferris wheel. She's the girl I'm dating. I think she's very cute. (She says I only like this picture because it's the face I always make)

 More views from the cabin.

 This is the Manchester Cathedral. It was really cool.

 More Cathedral.

 Inside the cathedral. You can't see it from here, but they had a lot of tables set up inside that people were having tea at (it would be out of view to the left of this picture above). What I really liked about that was that they actually use this piece of history. It's a very old building, and they integrate it into their daily lives heavily. I really liked that. They probably have to do this in England because EVERYTHING is that old. They can't just use the new things, because nothing is new.

 Picture of the stained glass. The windows weren't really that impressive, but the building itself was really cool.

 View of the alter.

 The alter was ready for its closeup.

 This painting if suppose to be a non-traditional representation of God in our lives. The center piece is the bringing together of God (father, son and holy spirit(the holy spirit is traditionally a feminine quality. I liked that they chose for her to be non-white)). The ketchup is the blood of christ that is spilled for us, but most importantly that God gives us substance, and that the sacrifice, while important, is not everything. We're meant to enjoy the life that God gives us. You can't see it, but up on the train tracks there's a man and an angel on either side of the bridge. It's meant to symbolize the divine presence is in our daily lives, whether or not we recognize it. We are the real and the divine. The part to the left is the unchaining of creativity. The part to the right is a headless man who is devoted to God. The people around him can't see the divine because they're too distracted with life, while the blind are attuned to it. It was a good painting.

 Cool building.

Museum of Art

 Cool glass

 A desk

 A very small set of furniture.

An ancient Egyptian Idol. Made between 1200-400 BC. That's so old!

Um, for the record, I know that most people know already, but I've started dating this girl named Mimi.

She's really cool. She's from Bakersfield and she goes UCSC. The irony of going to England to date someone from CA is not lost on us. But I really like her. And I don't like it when there's a set end date on anything. It makes it seem real pointless.

So yea. There's a post of sorts.

Macbook Air!

Finally got my Macbook Air. so excited. It's like Christmas as a little kid.

I Sorta Wish I Was Back In The States

But only because of the "Occupy Wall Street" thing that is happening. I want to be there. I want to stand up for my country. It's our way of life that the people in Wall Street (and Washington) have endangered, and I'm angry about it. It's time that we stop listening to what they tell us. We need to be courageous. We need to have guts. We need to rip ourselves from our comfortable lives and do something worth while. I've said for a long time that people should be pissed at America. When they had the riots in the Middle East, I said people should be as mad here as they were there. And now we're getting there.

I'm proud of all those people who are standing up to the Police, taking time from their jobs, their classes, their comfortable lives that the rich have successfully pushed onto us that has numbed our brains and made us complacent with everything going on. We need to stand up and fight. The boondocks called for this revolution long ago. In "Return of the King", a Boondocks episode, aired January 15, 2006, Martin Luther King Jr gives a speech. Here it is.

What happens at the end of this clip, is that the black community rises up, and starts standing up for themselves. They gain respect for their community and then America becomes a better place. This is what should be happening now. They should be angry now too. It's mostly white people from I can tell. What should happen is that minorities should be up in arms as well. What they don't realize is that these banks and the rich have been keeping them down for 200 years. They should be angry about that. Aaron McGruber (the creator of the Boondocks) is truly a head of his time. He saw the corruption and the flaws of this system 5 years ago. and the rest of the country is just now realizing it. C'mon America. Make this count. Here's more I have to say on the subject.

I wonder if there was an actual revolution, if I could even get home. What if I'm stranded in the UK for a while? lol.

Week 2 of classes! I got through the first 6 chapter of Ulysses. and man was it hard going. And I haven't even gotten to the hard parts yet. Sheesh. Some book told me that reading a book that helps explain Ulysses on your first time is cheating you out of figuring it out for yourself. Basically, "You're doing it wrong". I don't think so. I can't get through it otherwise. I'm not smart enough. Sorry.

Finished up the trilogy of plays called the "Oresteia". Now I'm on the Oedipus the King for my Tragedy class. I check out a book from the library about the last play "Eumenides". I brought a lot of the ideas from that book to my seminar and I think I sounded really smart. Little did they know....Anyway, one of the tools thats helping stay really organized is Microsoft Word. I've been putting everything about the books I'm reading and the lectures into it and its serving as a really good central resource for everything. It sounds really lame, but I think I'm more excited to study here than to see the country. There's different things to be gleamed from traveling abroad. One thing I KNOW I'll never get another chance to do is study at their institutions. Anyone can sight see. Anyone can drink a lot all day. But how many people get to go to school here? Not many. I'm going to be taking advantage of that opportunity so much.

Started this book called "Waiting for the Barbarians" for my Postcolonial Literature class. I got about 5 pages into it before getting distracted. I'll finish it soon though.

These are the books I have so far. Still waiting on most of the ones for my Tragedy class. Yes, on the left, that is a casebook for Ulysses (collected essays about the book), Ulysses (the version for my class. has interesting notes at the end), another copy of Ulysses (from my Irish Lit class. Has lots of notes and annotations in it. Very useful) and "The New Bloomsday Book: a Guide through Ulysses" (a chapter by chapter summary of what happens in the novel). When I read the book, I have that and I go through the book at the same time I'm reading the summary, just to make sure I know what's going on.

I've been skating a lot and I actually got the ollie down. Don't care if 10 year olds can do it. I never could. It took me a while. But like my father taught me: "Practice, practice, practice". That's the only way you can actually get good at anything. Now I've got to just keep practicing and I'll get even better. Too bad the weather is about to go south.

I'm going to Manchester on Saturday the 15th. Should be fun!

I'm seeing A Day To Remember on the 14th of November. Should also be fun. 3rd time seeing them, but they put on a great show. August Burns Red is going to be supporting them, so maybe I should listen to them. And Living With Lions. And A Ghost Inside.