The "What I Learned These 3 Years" Blog.

Yep, It's my turn, it's been done a few times now so I feel like I'm joining the party late, like I did with the whole wearing a fedora thing:

Hello? 1950s America? No you can't have your fashion back

Anyway, I finished my last essay yesterday morning (a whole day before it was due to be submitted!) and the odd feeling of having no more essays to write makes me feel like I've lost an arm. I just don't know what to do with myself anymore, so I'm doing my version of the summing up post that's been doing the rounds lately.

I'm going to split it up into a couple of sections, so without further ado, I present the "can't think of a name for the blog" what's-changed-in-the-last-three-years round-up.

Well, I'm not someone who gets hung up on appearences or anything but I have noticed that where three years ago the standard outfit would be footy shirt, jeans and trainers, I've moved slightly up the style ladder to casual shirts, jeans and trainers, with a fedora for the winter months. The beard spends a lot less time roving wild around my face and the ponytail has become much more prevalent.

Away from the physical, I now actually know what postmodernism is, and have much love for it, I've gained a useless passion for ethics and I now have a blog. I've also made some very slight progress on learning the guitar, bought two new guitars, a bass and a drumkit and I twice tried to get back into songwriting, each time remembering somewhere around the second verse exactly why I gave it up in the first place. I've joined facebook in the last three years and thankfully stopped using txt spk lol in my statuses (Thanks, timeline, for reminding me that I used to do that, now I feel like my first forays into the world wide web were even more senseless than than my songwriting, which is saying something).

I've been on my first ever night out, managing a grand total of one pub before getting ID'd and having to go home and I've become more knowlegable about the British railway network than I'm comfortable with. Seriously, three years of making an average of five rail journeys a week and you turn into a little bit of a trainspotter, no matter how hard you try to resist.

And now, the "things I would tell my younger self" section.

1. DUDE! Move into Halls in first year, I know commuting is marginally cheaper and you feel capable of maintaining a good social network without being on site but when third year comes around and folks are reminiscing about good times in Shrewsbury, you will regret not being there.
2. DO NOT move into Halls in third year, I know by then you'll have realised you missed out and its much easier being on campus but trust me, commuting is marginally cheaper and I'm confident you can maintain a good social network without being on site. ALSO, commuting will have the added benefit of avoiding being woken up at 4am by someone singing the only four lines they can remember from Joesph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat. I know not who these people are but trust me they are neither handsome, smart nor walking works of art.
3. Accept Luke's housesharing offer first time round, push everyone to get the originally planned ten-bed house, stage a coup and become king of this small tribe, rather than waiting 'tl the last moment only to end up taking the place of the person you were actually hoping to live with.
4. Don't worry if you mess that one up, 330 Burley Road will become one of your favourite places on earth.
5. Footy shirts are not a good look in Higher Education establishments. Get a better wardrobe.
6. Learn to take a compliment. Your better wardrobe will surely bring many - well, some - well, one or two - well, one - compliments flooding in and I still don't know how to deal with them.
7. You will get more appreciation for well-chosen band T-shirts than any faux designer shirt you can imagine.
8. Listen to Fleetwood Mac. NOW! Every second you are not hearing Lynsey Buckingham's insane guitar tekkers is a second wasted.
9. Buy a fedora, they are cool.
10. Your fedora will look better on everyone else.
11. Everyone will steal your fedora at least once.
12. Don't buy a laptop just because it is white. It may look sleek but it will be shit.
13. Always check the quality of goods you are going to buy from ebay. Bass guitars without strings, machine-heads, a bridge or working electrics are not smart purchases.
14. Go to pubology in first year, before the lecturers stop going and it gets lame.
15. That's right my friend, at uni, everything is backwards: when teachers do something, it's cool.
16. Do not judge a book by its cover, literally. Books are the one thing you actually do judge on outward appearances, despite this being the example that's been hallowed by time as the cliché to end all clichés. You will carry far too many useless books home for essays and have to carry them all the way back without quoting them once.
17. Do not judge an album by its single. You will mourn the downfall of a musical legend when you hear "Los Angeloser" on the radio as you get the train every morning, but when you eventually buy Hang Cool Teddy Bear, "If I Can't Have You" and "Did You Ever Love Somebody" will make the whole thing totally worth it.
18. Learn more about Sikhism, it is awesome.
19. Avoid Buddhism at all costs, it is not your friend.
20. Buy a camera, the amount of times you will wish you had pictures of people and places that you've encountered will be ridiculous.
21. Join the university gym, you will have days off and they will need filling. Playing FIFA will eventually get boring.
22. Start a blog, you don't write too good but it's actually kind of fun, in an "I hope nobody reads this, oh my God it's so stupid" kind of way.
23. Compulsory modules are always the worst. Fact.
24. On a Wednesday morning some time in early October 2009, you will be on a train to Horsforth, something will catch your eye, some ethereal voice will tell you to look up and see what it was, what you see will be a defining vision for your next three years and beyond. The reason why you want to live in Halls or at least in the general Leeds area will be contained in what you see, as will the reason you wish you'd got in on the housesharing earlier, and the reason you'll realise what a scruff you look in a footy shirt and that you need some better threads and the reason why love songs start to have deeper meanings and the reason why Sikhism's concept of love will draw you in and the reason why you wish you'd captured every moment of the last three years on film. It'll be the reason you've got angst that needs the catharsis of a blog, it's the reason you got out of bed for Vision at Work and New Testament even though they were the worst classes you've ever taken.
25. Enjoy yourself, man. You only get this time once.

Bon voyage, mon amis