So You Say

Yes, despite the fact that this is a shocking statement it is also true. It all came to me in a startling moment of clarity. The truth is I’m more than ten chapters behind in maths homework, missed something like two chapters in physics and my hatred for German makes it hard to get more than a C in it. Of course every leaving cert student knows  that the points for all the courses are going up next year because of the increase in admissions. My course is high enough as it is, 555 points. Point being, I REALLY need to study.

Suddenly I looked over at my laptop and the light went off in my head. It was all the internet’s fault! Well, not all. But it certainly hasn’t helped. I tend to procrastinate and it’s a lot easier to do that when you have Facebook and FML and icanhazcheezburger.com all at the touch of your fingertips. I considered giving up Facebook but I don’t want to delete my profile altogether and lose all the pictures I put up, the comments and the friends I’ve added and accepted over the years. I’ve managed to stop obsessively checking the Home page on Facebook but really it’s not enough. Even if I gave up Facebook I’d just go on to something else. So I came to a startling conclusion – no more internet.

Now obviously I can’t give up the internet altogether. I might need it to look up DART times or check something for school. I’ll also be checking my e-mail once a week. But I won’t be checking it in the morning instead of having a proper breakfast or writing another blog instead of that essay I’m supposed to be doing for history. However I will be breaking my radio silence if say for instance my novel gets published or something equally insane/awesome happens. So from tomorrow:

- I’ve deleted my bebo and hotmail accounts

- I’m uninstalling Tweetdeck

- My MSN is apparently going to delete itself within thirty days

- Any other ideas you guys suggest

Sure, I’m a little worried about losing contact with friends and completely falling out of the loop but I really need to study. *Sigh* I hope this helps. If not you might be seeing me quite soon. In the meantime if you need to contact me you can text me or e-mail and lizzie.omally@gmail.com.

Signing off til the LC,

Liz

My cousin started a blog recently and I think it’s quite good. The only thing was that she was very, very honest. I was reading things that I never knew about her, very personal things about friendship histories and feelings and things like that. Alarm bells went off in my head. I’m not sure if this was because I felt like I’d stumbled onto something that was intensely personal or because all of a sudden I had an image of some stranger knowing all of this information about my cousin. I have no idea how or why they’d use it but quite frankly there are some nutters out there.

The format of my blog is generally ranting about a topic, not that personal. Even still I wrote an anecdote about my old school (which I have yet to name) in a post about drinking (http://www.liz.viewfromthequad.com/?p=177) and I got a comment sometime later calling me a bitch for posting that story. I didn’t mention any names or specifics and yet I still managed to offend. Most of the spam comments I get are people from my old year which I just delete because they don’t add anything to topic I write about and also they can be quite hurtful. (By the way if you’re reading this, why don’t you say something like that to my face rather than hiding behind an anonymous comment? It’s a lot easier to be mean to someone online). Even a small bit of information can be manipulated.

In thinking about this post I looked at my ‘about’ section. Suddenly I realised what an idiot I had been. A complete stranger would know what I looked like, where I lived, where I go to school and even the name of my dog.  I have changed it to one sentence “18 year old blogger living in Ireland”. Of course it was concrete information I had posted before. What do you give away when talking about your feelings? I’d say a lot. When I sent out a general question asking what people thought of those emotionally out there online many said they thought it might be a cry for attention or perhaps they were looking for someone to relate to them. All it would take is for someone to take advantage of a vulnerable person by leaving a few supportive comments and then they will have developed an online relationship with that person. Who knows what could happen then.

This kind of information isn’t just fodder to the maniacs and psychos out there. According to the survey of 1039 employees and 647 employers, which was undertaken by the employment law consultancy Peninsula Ireland, companies are using social networking sites to check the validity of staff out sick.The survey indicates that 83 per cent of employers have monitored individual’s Facebook statuses to check whether an employee was truly ill. So if you thought you were just taking a relaxing day off and then post pictures of you going out with your friends later that night when you supposedly had the flu, you could be out of a job. In fact in Clacton, England a 16-year-old girl said she was fired from her office job after managers saw that she had branded her position “boring” on Facebook. Someone I know who was holding interviews for her organisation recently said “[it was] amazing how much of their personal info was available online (including comments about how they felt the interviews had gone).” It is very easy for an employer or interviewer to find out about you just by searching you on Facebook or twitter.

When I first started writing my blog I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be a big deal. Who was going to read it apart from a few people I was friends with on Facebook? Yet I still manage to get spam comments from people advertising cheap Viagra and Russian whore services. If people from Russia can find my page you can be pretty sure it’s not as private and cosy as I thought.

Not to mention that many people I knew who had public profiles on Bebo and Facebook had pictures of them drinking or smoking in them (obviously I’m talking about people who were underage). As a general rule, if you’re ever in doubt as to whether you should put up that raunchy picture of yourself or leave a bullying comment, wonder what your mum or boss would have to say about it. And then maybe just think again.

He’s John. He’s Edward. Together they are surprisingly one of the biggest success stories of the year.

I knew I had to write this post as soon as I saw that their debut single ‘Ice Ice Baby’ was No.1 on the Irish iTunes charts. It’s been a whirlwind for the two Dublin lads ever since they auditioned for X-Factor back in August. Even though they were in my school I thought they were gobshites in the beginning. Before you ask, I knew of them. Everyone knew of them. They were hardly inconspicuous with the hair, the suits and the fact that they were twins. I had comparative studies class with them. (Whenever I tell a noob that I let one of them borrow my pen one day they seem to think I had a serious brush with fame). Cheryl asks “Where do you see yourselves in fifteen years?”John replies “Well I see myself being older”. This is the incredible wit we would later come to love. Simon loathed them from the beginning but Louis spotted something, which I guess explains why he is worth millions.

Even though I didn’t think they were great I still wanted them to go through. They were quite amusing and although I knew they were going to get through to the live show I still cheered when Louis picked them to be one of his groups. Really started to like them after their performance of ‘Hit Me Baby’ at the live show. It was the combination of the red leather suits, the crazy dance moves and the absolute hilarity when they did the dialogue out in front of the stage. As my friend put it “They passed annoying, stopped off at bearable and ended up at amusing.” Every week people who weren’t even X Factor fans would tune in to see what kind of spectacle they would be putting on that show. They ranged from dancing in between girls legs, coming down from the ceiling and having giant John and Edwards dancing on the stage that week. And of course who can forget the Ghostbusters routine? Pure genius.

Even if Jedward didn’t win the show they were still the hottest thing to come off it in years. With brilliant quotes such as ‘We met Queen. As in the band, not the actual one”, they quickly garnered a lot of media attention. I can’t remember which company it was that ran a huge poster campaign with the slogan ‘In Jed We Trust’ after Simon Cowell pledged he’d leave the country if Jedward won the X-Factor. But even Simon himself even fell for the ‘gruesome twosome’ and saved them when they were voted into the bottom two with Lucie Jones. Of course the shock elimination ensured even more hate and abuse for the twins who were the only act ever to be booed upon gracing the stage. Ironically if Danni had chosen to save the twins in the deadlock with Olly Murs, it would have been Olly to go out as he had received less votes that week.

However even after their elimination John and Edward still popped up in the papers and have thousands of fans at this stage. Like them or hate them, they are an unstoppable force. In the first day of it’s release, ‘Ice Ice Baby’ shot to number one and there is more to come for the starstruck pair in the form of their own clothing ranges and hair products. As for me? I’ll be looking out to see what they do next.

You can view the song here - Ice Ice Baby – Jedward

After telling a few people that I hadn’t had a drunken experience until I was eighteen many laughed. In Ireland nowadays you’re expected to have KO-ed, been ditch drinking, have had a ‘what the hell was I up to last night?’ experience and a hangover by the time you’re fifteen. Quite a few people I know started drinking when they were twelve. I immediately start thinking about all the things I did when I was twelve. I was completely addicted to Pokemon, I wanted to go to secondary school to get away from stinky boys and have a locker for the first time, I didn’t get half the jokes on ‘Friends’ and drinking had never even crossed my mind. The most risque thing I knew people were doing was playing spin the bottle.

I should probably clarify that not having a drunken experience does not mean I had never drank. My parents were all for the allowing small doses of alcohol as long as the family were around so there was champagne at New Years, a glass of wine at family dinners and maybe one beer at a friends party (it takes me hours to drink one so I was safe from a drunken experience). I never got what drinking was all about though. I was quite self-righteous about it. “I think drinking should be banned”, I told my parents one time. “I don’t like the way people feel that they can’t have a good time sober and all it does is develop a dependency where having a good time means getting wasted and not even remembering what you were doing the night beforehand”. My mum and dad looked at each other and Dad said “Wait until you’re older. Then you’ll understand.”

I do understand now. There’s that warm sensation and a lightness and not caring so much what people think about you. It is good fun drinking. Once you get past a certain point though you get into ‘making a fool of yourself’ territory and fuzzy edged memories aren’t as good as the clear ones I think. I realize that the younger me was a little prudish when it came to drinking but I’m glad I was. When it did come to my 18th birthday I had something to look forward to and I’m glad I had an innocent childhood where the cool thing was getting sugar highs instead of drunken ones. I never had to steal my parents drink or go up to random older guys to get them to buy me alcohol. Even if seasoned 15 year olds laugh at me, I’m still very satisfied.

I’m represent an unpopular view but I really don’t think that teenagers should be drinking or if they do they should at least wait until they’re sixteen. For starters, a 14 year old who drinks thinks they are cool and mature. A cool and mature 18 year old thinks that the 14 year old is an annoying wannabe. Mostly teenagers drink because they want to be grown up but I’m not sure how mature getting so drunk that you need to have your stomach pumped is or wrecking your still growing kidneys is. I heard quite a number of stories in school about girls getting incredibly aggressive and beating up friends and then not remembering the next morning and they were only in second year. You just wanted to shake some of them and say “you’re only young un’s! There’s plenty of time for this later!”

I no longer believe that drinking should be banned, but I do wish that drinking culture wasn’t so prevalent in Irish society. It’s not so fun the next morning when you’re avoiding puddles of vomit on the pavement and tweens are complaining of hangovers (or are still drunk from the night before). So hears to drinking, but to drinking responsibly. Cheers!

You know the horror stories you hear about sixth year? The pressure, the endless amount of homework and tests and no social life? It’s not a myth. I’m struggling just to keep up with homework let alone putting in studying time. I finally fell into stride onto the whole studying thing just before the midterm and while on midterm I didn’t get half the things I had planned done. It takes hours to properly plan a 1,500 word history essay. Writing out physics definitions on cue cards is not done as quickly as you think. It all takes time which seems to be slipping out of my grasp.

Last week was the month’s mind for my cousin and I was honestly shocked. I couldn’t believe it had been a month. It’s like being in sixth year has put me in a different time frame to everybody else.  I’m literally buckling under the weight of my work. I’m developing a hunchback from my schoolbag (and I wasn’t that tall to begin with) and I’m feeling guilty for even going out with my boyfriend for a few hours at the weekend.

I’m going to keep this post short… I’ve got studying to do :S