Trust Tommy

I enjoy almost all aspects of the second-level English course. Media studies, journal entries, fiction, you name it, I’ll enjoy it.

Except poetry.

For the most part, I enjoy reading poetry. I just don’t enjoy studying it. Don’t worry, this isn’t one of these teenage angst posts about how ‘the Irish secondary school system is a farce’ and ‘as if I’ll ever use trigonometry/chemical bonding/ox-bow lakes in later life’, it’s just that poetry isn’t my thing, as it were. I’ll put effort into it and everything, but don’t ask me to like it.

Anyhow, I’m showing you a poem from my English book. Why? Because I like so few of them, finding one I actively enjoy should be noted!

War and The Simpsons – Hilary McKay

The really good thing about war is that they generally put
it on at 6 o’ clock.
Same time as The Simpsons

And nowadays, of course, war is quite safe.
It stays in the TV and makes no mess.
Even if it gets too noisy you can just turn down the sound.

(If you can find the remote.)

Also it is very clean,
No dust, nor smoke, nor blood leaks through the screen.
And when it gets boring you can switch over and watch
The Simpsons

(If you can find the remote.)

The only trouble is, it still goes on.
(The war, not The Simpsons. The Simpsons lasts for
twenty minutes — unless it is a special.)

The war still goes on. The noise and the smoke and
the leaking blood. The dirt and the boredom and the fear.
You cannot switch it off with the remote.

(Even if you can find the remote)

You have to switch it off another way
You have to say, No
No
No war
You have to say No To War.

Then you can watch The Simpsons
In peace.

I think I like it because it’s a poem on an everyday subject, and not something difficult to relate to. I think that’s why I enjoy this poem of Sinéad’s so much. (Check out her other stuff, it’s good too)

Photo owned by Bramus! (cc)

Christmas exams have started in full swing today and I like to think I’ve hit the ground running. Today was Science, CSPE and English, and I was pleased with how they went. I had study periods before each of them and I did my best to revise a little of everything in the time that I had.

Whenever I get exam papers all I do is glance through the questions and see what I can definitely answer and what I don’t know, because I find it really comforting knowing that I have a reasonably good idea of what the answers are as I plough through it. I rarely if ever go along with some teachers’ suggestion of ‘do what you find easy first’ because I can be a bit scatter-brained in that if I pick and choose what I answer as I go through a test, I’ll invariably not see a second part of some question or something. Instead I’ll look over the test and proceed to plough through it, ignoring anything I don’t know until the end.

I’m looking forward to being finished; to Christmas; to New Year’s Eve; to John and Patrick being home; to not having school; to the Young Scientist and to eating chocolate again.

And to be honest, all of that isn’t too far away!

Tomorrow holds Maths and Irish, with people doing Religion in between. I have an exemption from it so I’ll probably head home and study. After that, it’s the weekend, which I’ll split between studying, drumming and finally getting round to buying and wrapping Christmas presents. I always leave stuff like this to the last moment; which is silly. As I always tell myself: I’ll do it in November next year.

Yeah right, T

Then on Monday I have to soldier through History, Geography and Spanish. Once they’re done and dusted, it’s Christmas break and it will be mega.

On the far side of New Year, the Young Scientist beckons! It runs from the 12th to the 16th of January – be there or be an isosceles tetrahedron! :)

So, the school’s closed next Tuesday, because teachers are protesting against pay cuts.

I think it’s a very admirable cause.

So admirable, in fact, that I don’t think you can do it all in just one day. I think you should close all the schools on Monday and Wednesday and Thursday and Friday too :)

One of my teachers, who said he wasn’t going to be actively participating in the marches and such, said he’d protest in his own way: since his pay had been cut by 15%, he would only teach us 85% of what he was going to teach us.

Well played, sir.. well played :)

Woo, Bewleys’ hotels finally have actual working wifi in their hotel rooms. This is a big step forward.

I wrote my emergency, last-minute debate speech during the car journey up. It was rather excellent actually. All my thoughts flowed coherently and I’ve discovered the awesomeness of WriteRoom, after I managed to get a free copy of it from MacHeist.

WriteRoom’s a full screen text editor. It’s great for eliminating distractions and just knuckling down and getting whatever needs doing done. An added plus is that the black background (only optional, but what I use) means I can can turn the brightness of my MacBook’s screen down to 1 and still be able to see anything. Battery conservation for the win!

Getting back to the debate, we’re proposing the motion that rising unemployment at home is too high a price for overseas aid. It’s a grand old motion that provides plenty of arguments and chances for rebuttal. It’s on tomorrow evening in school, but I’ve plenty of time to get home.

The reason I’m up in Dublin is I’ve got a meeting with a surgeon tomorrow who’ll be giving me Botox…

* pauses to allow the jokes about Simon Cowell and face lifts to abate *

…into my left hand, because Botox functions as a muscle relaxant, and my left hand’s been tight all my life, because of the Cerebral Palsy. Increased hand movement can only be a plus on the drumming front though!

I’ll be conscious for it, of course. I’m debating asking whether I can film it or not.. something you as a reader would be interested in seeing? Lemme know in the comments!

I’ve decided to stop using my MacBook Air at home. I’m not totally sure why, but it’s being a pile of ass recently. I think the old Airs were for people like Dad who use Safari and Mail, and almost nothing else. Not even iTunes. Now, it’s perfect for him because it weighs nothing, and he travels. A lot.

For me though, who enjoys being able to listen to music AND browse Safari, which, not long ago wasn’t a tall order, it seems incapable to manage it. Everything gets intolerably laggy and when I type, the screen doesn’t keep up, which makes it look like I’m typing nothing, then typing 200 words a minute as it plays catch-up.

Now, I’m not against MacBook Airs – in fact I think they’re rather fantastic. I think it’s just the fact that I’ve got Patrick’s old one. It’s 2 years (ish) old and probably has a bunch of old programming stuff slowly killing it slowly. If that’s the case, that he forgot to remove his stuff off the Hard Drive before giving it to me.. I’m in a rather fantastic position.

I’m not going to blackmail him.. nah, us Collisons stick together.. but if I could learn off him..!

Well that’s that plan down the drain.

Either that, or he’s more cunning then I give him credit for.

Could be either.

So, the MacBook Air isn’t able to support my gluttonous lifestyle – every time I boot up I hear a little wail from the bowels of the machine: ‘Ohhhh, he’s gonna want to use iTunes and Safari and maybe some iPhone’. And then a little mechanical arm comes out and prods the hamster that lives in the cage situated in the empty space the disk drive should be. It begrudgingly awakens and begins running on his wheel, a little pop tart hanging on a string attached to another mechanical arm, by way as intensive.

I decided to move back operations to my old Macbook, which I used before getting the Air. However, I’ll still use the Air in school. The lightness coupled with the fact that Hammy the hamster seems okay with using TextEdit, along with the occasional usage of Numbers and Mail.

The rather unique problem I refer to is the fact that since I was using old Macbook last night, I forgot to charge the Air overnight, as I’ve done every night for months. I was putting the Air in my bag this morning when I realized it wasn’t turning on.

So I went into Maths this morning -my first class- and charged it there. I go into Irish, class #2 and discover that the damn thing hadn’t been charging. it was plugged in, the socket was on and even the light in the charger was orange. I think I needed to wake it up first but boy was it annoying.

Silly laptop!

But yes, I do think that I’m unique.. any other secondary school bloggers ever have the problem of an uncharged laptop? :)

I originally wrote this post, but it sounded awfully press release-y so I went back and altered it :)

_____

After I set up the directory two other secondary school students (Ben Chapman and Enda Crowley) took it upon themselves to bring my vague pipe-dream of someday making it into its own website and took it so much further.

With their tech expertise and my idea, a website was put together that did all and more of what I had in mind for it.

Welcome to IrishStudentBlogs.com

It now could (and should, and can, and will) be classed as an aggregator; people can now subscribe to IrishStudentBlogs’ RSS feed and get everyone’s posts in one go. With featured articles bringing the best of everyone’s posts together at the forefront of the site, I think we should start to see some really good blogs begin to emerge :)

If you want to get listed, head on over to our Get Listed page, and fill in the simple (oh, I hate those rock-solid Capchas as much as the next guy!) form. We’ll whiz through a quick submission process to verify you’re in secondary school, and not doing/posting anything undesirable, like advocating viagra or practicing the occult.. :)

We even have a kickass mobile site:

Like pretty much all fledgling sites, we’re looking for linkage and other such attention, so if you would tweet about us or blog about us we’d love you forever. :)

I was talking to someone doing about blogging this afternoon and as we talked it hit me that there are very few secondary school students blogging. Well, I know a good few college students doing it, Aoife and Alan to name a couple.

I think that, like all respects, people in secondary school can bring a lot of fresh ideas to the table. They’re (what am I saying? we’re!) growing up in a vastly different world than most, facing different challenges and new influences like the internet, which wouldn’t have been around 5-8 years ago.

So, I’m hoping to build a directory to highlight some wicked secondary school-going bloggers: I’ll add this as a page up top and edit it as new blogs come in. I’ll take a looksie around Boards.ie too and see if I can add ones from there too.

But not just yet… gotta get my homework done! :)

Check the directory out here

At the moment, it looks neither pretty nor populated (alliteration, where the poet uses the same consonant sound to- sorry, some English learning getting in the way there….) but I’m working on fixing both problems. If this takes off, I would consider buying a domain for it and getting something by way of a list orientated theme. We’ll see if it flies.

In Music, we’re currently making notes on the set songs for our Junior Cert. So far, we’ve done Preab san Ól, an Irish Drinking Song preaching to us to spend all our money now on drink, cos we can’t take any of it to the grave. Marks for being technically true..

The second one that we’ve done is Muss i Denn, a German folk song made famous by none other than Elvis Presley, in the form of Wooden Heart. Funnily enough, the original song is a lament about a man leaving his lover. There’s not a mention of this in Elvis’ one. Just a bit of whining about not being Pinocchio.

Why is that funnily enough? I don’t know.

Our third one (and my current favourite) is Streets of London by Ralph McTell. It was also the first one I’d heard of before. Just as well.

The teacher played it for us on piano too. “Anyone wanna try singing it?” she asks. A girl volunteers. She performs it admirably. “Any guys?” One from the back does so, again quite good. “Any other boys?”

“Tommy!” pipes up my friend beside me. Thank you, Théo… “Errrrr, ok” I mumble. Yes, I’m outgoing, yes, I’ve no problem talking in front of large groups of people. Singing in front of 30 people is a first though. Yes, I used to perform Norwegian Wood with Dad whenever my folks had friends over, but who honestly is self-conscious when they’re 6?

But I got through it. The first verse flew by, and just as I was looking forward to everybody joining in for the chorus (as had happened with previous performers) when the teacher goes “stay going for the chorus!”. Eeeep.

Ah well. I got through it and nobody hated it. An interesting experience nonetheless.

Before anyone asks (looking at you, Patrick), no, there will be no repeat performances. Not without copious amounts of alcohol on one or both of our parts

what the post title’s alluding to

My first full week back at school has been rather good. Like I’ve said, I miss waking up at 12:30 (got up at 08:30, shock horror) but perhaps that’s for the best. I’m back at school, where our work is being geared toward the Big Scary Thing In June 2011.

Colloquially, it’s known as the Junior Cert. My name is better.

I won’t do the usual angst-y teen thing of going on about how it’s an incredibly flawed system and so on and so on because I’m not a very good angst-y teen.

That, and I don’t really have much experience with it, or the Leaving Cert. Patrick never did the latter and I was away in Tipperary intern-ing for most of John’s.

The Leaving Cert was that thing you did in between coffee in La Cucina. For this reason, state examinations and fruit tarts are forever intertwined, in my mind at least. I rather like this fact.

In other news, I’m in the process of jailbreaking my mom’s iPhone. It’s going swimmingly. By swimmingly, I mean.. OK. There are two main steps to what I’m doing:

Upgrading her to 3.0 and then re-jailbreaking her from there. I’ve done the first, leaving me with a rather expensive paperweight, which I’m trying to convert into something that can call, text and tweet.

Update ~ 17:51 Managed to fix her iPhone. Not before wiping her personal contacts/text messages though. I fail sometimes

One thing that never fails to amaze me about summer is how the days become names. Friday now means the same thing as Tuesday, which means nothing different to Saturday, which is identical to Thursday, and so on.

Now that I’m back at school, I’m happy it’s a Friday because it’s the weekend. The weekend, which of late has just been 2 days like any other, is now Saturday and Sunday, it’s rather shocking. Saturday and Sunday have an immediate smile to them because now they mean something.

School’s going well, by the way. Double Business Studies is no longer the last thing on a Friday, it’s now the first two periods. That doesn’t sound like a big difference but Business is by far the hardest class, so it really did murder the cute little rabbit thing that is the Friday Feeling.

In other news, my laptop’s speakers, which have been fritzing for a while now, have annoyed me so much I’ve decided to nick a pair of speakers from Patrick’s room.

I’ve had worse set ups, I’ve had better, but it beats using headphones all the time..