The Adventures of Matt (in Leeds!)

Not tons to say, nothing major going on, except that, er, I cut all my hair off. Any of you who know me in real life or have seen photos know I have pretty long (approaching shoulder-length) hair, so it was something of a spontaneous decision to just cut it all off for the summer (as any guy with long hair will attest, it’s not fun in hot and humid conditions). Also, washing and drying it every day took far too long for how it ended up looking.

The cut itself was an adventure, I’d never been to a real salon, let alone a trendy looking city one. It was kinda sad to see strands of hair I’d come to regard as brothers, maybe even PART of me, being cruelly razored off and swept away. I almost asked to keep a lock, for old time’s sake, but it was the kinda place where such thing would be regarded as akin to voodoo magic.

Anyway, since the only reason you’re still reading is to see the before-and-after pics, enjoy:

BEFORE

AFTER

(yes, the photos are ridiculous, but it’s so hard to take a photo of yourself and somehow pose at the same time).

It’s so odd looking in the mirror and being all “..WHO THE HELL IS THAT?!”. Also, getting a shower and not having my hair touch my shoulders/neck is scary and strangely exciting.

This week has been a blur but I’ve had fun. After my bike/river mishap, I went out again a few days later only to a) pass my Computer Programming lecturer out with what I presume were his wife and kids in the forest, and b) realise my handlebars were coming loose from the frame and had to go home early, which annoyed me. What annoyed me further was trying to fix this with my poor toolkit and realising I don’t have the right stuff to tighten it, so I can’t go out on it again till the DIY shop down the road opens again on Wednesday.

Every night this week, me and my future housemates Lee and Hayley have been watching a variety of TV shows or movies in my room, since I have the superior speaker set hooked up to my PC. We watched Napoleon Dynamite, which I’m still not sure about.. overrated but awesome, or just uninteresting and boring?

Today, Lee and I went on an epic quest for easter eggs. Since we’re spending the weekend here away from family, we figured we were due a treat and walked into town to get them. Unfortunately, nowhere we tried (of about 6 places) had any, so I had to settle for a mini Creme Egg and, unrelatedly, brioche. Mmmm, brioche.

I fashioned a plastic jug-like drink dispenser from an empty juice bottle yesterday in a bid to make cool liquids more rapidly available. I just cut off the top of a big bottle and it now resides in our fridge, making it look like it belongs to some homeless, juice-loving delinquent. But hey.. ice-cold juice at all hours.

I have two essays to write by this time next week and I haven’t started either, although I did do several hours of research for one today, which kinda counts. I also have an exciting new program 80% written for my Programming class, which I might be able to post up here to dazzle you all with my skills.

Oh, and in relatively minor news, my IAN MACKAYE interview is now online! ..if that name means nothing to you, I’m pretty disappointed, but you can repent of your sins here.

Finally, I have to make my module choices for next year pretty soon. All the ones that look appealing (”3321: Angry Young Men and Women: Literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century”) are reserved for 3rd year students only, bah. This means I have to take courses with words in the title that set off what I can only refer to as my “bullshit detector”, with names such as “cognitive”, “postcolonial”, “sceneography”, “modernity”, “deconstruction”, and unbelievably, “metatheatricalities”. I can hardly wait. One of the medieval modules includes reading Harry Potter (#1), though..

So yeah, I’m back in Leeds and it’s awesome. Everyone in my flat is still home for Easter, so I’m enjoying the peace and quiet, which is only broken by me playing guitar ridiculously loud, or just blasting out music, the stuff I’ve missed while in Nottingham. The train journey back here was epic. These stereotypical chavs got on, a family of them, and the boys seemed to be trying to skip payment. They asked me if it was a “fast train”, to which I replied “No idea, all I know is that it gets to Leeds in an hour” and returned to Paradise Lost. When the ticket collector showed up, they fed him some story about losing tickets, but he didn’t buy it and threatened them with police action at the station. Eventually they coughed up their fare, but while they were doing so, the 3 or 4 year old kid they were with started putting his hand in the ticket guy’s pocket, to which he reacted angrily. Luckily they got off soon and I was able to relax again.

We pulled into Leeds and the sky instantly grew dark and it began raining… welcome home, hah. I got back, unpacked, and just chilled, then went shopping and cooked dinner for Lee and Annabel while we caught up and watched the Mighty Boosh.
Monday was good. I went to the student medical practice and got a checkup on my blood pressure. They took it in September and it was too high, so they told me to come back in 2 weeks to get it re-checked. Did I go? Hell no. But then they sent me a letter, so I decided I’d probably need to at some stage. Luckily it was back to normal, so I’m not about to explode. The real best part of today though, was going out on my bike with the intention of just exploring the area a little and getting some exercise done. Going along the roadside, I stumbled upon the entrance to a forest.. as you do. I went in and checked it out, and found to my delight a river running throughout the woods, dotted with little waterfalls and old stone bridges. It was beautiful. I biked around it, trial style, going down steep embankment and steps.

The best part was deciding to cross a shallow part of the river, which in fact turned out to be several feet deep. Alas, I only realised this once I got past halfway and it was too late to turn back, and obviously I couldn’t stop, so I had to keep going and got knee-deep in water. I just laughed till I reached the bank at my own misjudgement, and luckily nobody saw me, although some dude walked past as I was pouring the water out of my shoes. Converse shoes are not good at repelling water. In more crazy adventures, the front wheel of the bike got lodged in some really thick, squelchy mud and I was forced to leap sideways off the bike with a great cry of- well, what I shouted wasn’t important, but it was that or risk falling sideways into the quagmire. I got back covered in mud, soaking wet to the thighs, my shoes squelching with cold river water and my hair sticking to my face and splattered with mud, and I bloody loved it. It reminded me of being a kid again. I’ll definitely be going back.

Anyway, it’s time to start cooking my lasagna. Enjoy!

Soooooo, the major thing since my last ‘real’ update was interviewing a band called Against Me!. I bought my ticket for the show way back in January, and only later found out I could interview them (thanks to a vague email to the email address listed on their site, which was replied to by their merch guy who in turn forwarded me to Nanette, Fat Wreck Chords’ European tour manager or something). Outside the venue was a guy offering to buy spare tickets (which was odd, since a sign at the front of the queue said they still had tickets available). I thought about selling mine, since the cash would have been useful (or I could have bought a shirt, something I try to always do at shows) but I remembered last time I was on a gueslist for my Tiger Army interview, the zine I was doing it for messed up and I wasn’t on the list. I made it inside anyway using my own ingenuity, but I wasn’t so sure in Leeds so I took my ticket along.

In typical Matt Luck©, I was on the guestlist and could have sold my ticket. Once inside I asked at the bar if there was some way I could get a refund, and there actually was; apparently the people on the door would buy back tickets. I asked them, but they said they had enough. D’oh.

Anyway, I was due to interview at 8, and when I asked the merch guy, Jordan, he told me that Warren (drummer, who I was down to interview) wasn’t around and nobody knew where he was. I waited and he still didn’t show, so we agreed I’d do it after the show.

I was at the show on my own, as with the last few I’ve been to, and this was the first time it’s really sucked in that respect. I’d borrowed my friend Lee’s camera to get some shots for the interview, so I couldn’t get involved with the crowd like I would normally. Also, the people surrounding me just seemed a bit weird. There was a very … “fashionable” … looking girl and guy who were kissing throughout most of the set. Why pay the ticket price when you could just stay home, guys? Also, a really really short girl next to me, who gave me a completely dirty look and no response when I said “If this bothers you, just lemme know”, pointing to the camera. I was really only saying it to be polite, or maybe even in desperation for conversation, since I wasn’t obstructing her view in any way, and I was by no means the only person there with a camera on.

Anyway, the interview itself went really well. Warren was a really awesome guy, and we chatted for over half an hour, which surprised me. It felt far more natural than my interview with Nick 13 of Tiger Army. Anyway, to cut a long story short, the interview is online on my music webzine Scene Point Blank, and you can read it here.

University Stuff

I got two essays back for my Reading Poetry and Exploring Medieval Literature modules respectively. I got 65 and 68 respectively, both 2.1s (the 68 was a mark shy of a borderline First, doh). The Poetry one was annoying. My course tutor is a postgraduate who is really only a few years ahead of me, and on top of that, she’s Indian. Not that I have any issue with non-white teachers or something stupid, but it can be annoying to be marked down for stuff when the tutor herself makes errors in English when commenting. She also didn’t seem to stick to what we’ve been told. As far as I can tell (and for every essay I’ve submitted to date), we’re supposed to reference stuff in this format:

1. Matt Andrews, A Book About How To Reference, pp23-45.

According to her marking, however, we’re meant to add the Publisher’s information into that footnote as well (information that I’d provided in my bibliography). I’ve done it in this format for every other essay and nobody complained, as with all my friends too. I also heard some girl complaining that she’d been asked to provide a source for the phrase carpe diem - how do you reference something like that?

Also annoying was that she wrote next to my quotes from the poem “please include line numbers”. I wouldn’t have minded this, BUT I DID INCLUDE THEM! And spent extra time in making them look nice! Look:

Life is unfair. Bitching aside, a 65 is good and I’m not complaining.

The Part Where Matt Complains About Random Individuals For No Real Justified Reason

Yeah. In my Medieval Literature seminar, there’s this one guy who makes these ‘hilarious’ comments all the time. He’s a real “Jack the lad” and loves to get his jokes in. One time, the tutor was talking about old Irish road builders stopping their work when they came across a fairy ring in the middle of their planned building area, and he interrupted her to make some awful Irish impression, like “Oh, Paddy, we’ll have to stop building!” or something. The worst part was, he said it not once, not twice, BUT THRICE! He interrupted her AGAIN to say it, and then AGAIN!! No, the reason nobody laughed the first two times is because IT WASN’T FUNNY.

Worse still, was the following week, when the tutor didn’t actually show up because she was on a lecturer’s strike. Annoyingly, we’d been told we’d get 3 days notice of strike action, but she didn’t tell us anything, so we all showed up at 10am (meaning an 8am wakeup time for sleep-loving Matt) for no reason, with our next lecture at 3pm. While we were sitting waiting in vain, this guy, who had sat opposite me, started telling a ‘hilarious’ story about smoking weed with his teacher. I made the fatal mistake of doing that fake polite laugh, and he somehow interpreted it as some kind of friendship gesture. When we eventually realised the tutor wasn’t coming, he walked with me and started chatting, starting off with a great opener about how he used to have long hair like mine until he cut it short and it looked much better. Luckily, I had the old “I’m meeting a friend” up my sleeve and made my way due east away from him.

Back in Nottingham

Yeah, the last two weeks, I’ve been back in Notts. It’s been nice to be back, not having to cook meals, being bought new clothes, and books (a huge collection of John Milton stuff, including the full Paradise Lost) and just being spoiled a little. Also, it’s been cool seeing people, although my two objectives for coming back, 1) to film Joesus III (my film project with friends) and 2) to have a band practice or two, were both cruelly dashed. Joesus isn’t happening this Easter because Joe gets back from uni basically right when I leave. As for band practice, I guess we were too slow in getting organised and our practice space was fully booked when we called. There’s talk of the guys coming up to Leeds now since Stephen (drummer) passed his driving test, and we’ll do something up there. There’s even tentative plans for a week-long “mini-tour” this summer during Stephen’s time off from work, where we’d just play a show each night in various locations around the country. It’d be awesome to do and we’re really excited just by the idea, although whether it actually happens is another matter. Also, we should get the recording for the new EP (which has been sitting three quarters done now since last summer) finished pretty soon so I can show off our newer material.

I think being at uni has caused me to grow up and get a more mature outlook on things like cleaning up after myself, so it annoys me to come home and argue over trivial crap like cleaning up a few dishes, where the argument takes longer than the task itself would take.