"There is a darkness deep in you. A frightening magic I cling to."

I am now writing to you as an adult. You have no idea how weird it feels to say that

What is even weirder and undoubtedly scarier is that I am leaving Belfast High School in a month. I was looking at the "Former Pupils" section on the school website today and could not believe how many comments there were saying " the best years of my life were at Belfast High". Reading them almost had me in tears, which, I know, may sound a bit ridiculous to anyone who's like "why would you ever get emotional about leaving school?", but I am honestly majorly nostalgic about it.

I just keep thinking about the inevitable moment where I'm going to be seeing some people quite possibly for the very last time ever. What will I say? " Hope you have a nice life"? " " Maybe I'll see you at the reunion in 20 years time?" I mean I know that I can't say that I like every single person in my year, but there are some people, for whatever reason, that I'd miss seeing all the time. It'll take a lot of getting used to. I just can't imagine wakening up and not having to get ready for school, walk down the road to get the bus or listen to cheesy songs with Caters every morning. When it's winter, I think I'll maybe appreciate the fact that I don't have to walk down prince andrew way in my school uniform, getting tossed about in the wind and rained upon until my shirt turns transparent. Those days were crap and even when I'm older and looking back, I'm pretty sure that I'll still think of them as crap. For one, school uniforms are never sexy, no matter how hard you try to make them be. And the girls who pull their skirts up round their asses, because they think it makes them look hot, are even less sexy, especially when their knickers are on full display. Yum.

Ooops- I only intended on briefly mentioning school, but that nonsense up there could be called 'Ode to BHS' so I'm going to move on before you start thinking 'she has no life'.

I celebrated my 18th last week in a pink karaoke limo. I now affectionately refer to it as the 'chavmobile' because it was the kind of limo that, 5 months ago, I would have seen and thought: I bet people called 'Jamie-lee' and 'wee Steeky' hire that for a night out. The good thing about limos, of course, is that the windows are blacked out, so we were able to look out at the world and laugh but the world was not able to look back, meaning that we were able to maintain some dignity. The 'karaoke' turned out to be a really good laugh. I say karaoke with a hint of sarcasm, because the limo's actual machine seemed to have been created so that you can't actually use it. Everytime we attempted to get the words of a song up on the screen, the language flicked to chinese and, being not-so-fluent in chinese, we had to think of a plan B.
Our plan B was to put in our own Now cds and sing along to them. It's worrying that most of us knew all the lyrics to the Vengaboys' classic, "we're going to Ibiza". Cultured.

After about an hour of limo fun, we were dropped off at Bourbon, where we spent a good few hours eating and, oddly, admiring the prettiness of the toilets. I also can now officially say, thanks to Sarah's generous nature, that I've tried a 'red aftershock' shot, slang for: this-will-make-your-stomach-want-to-explode-and-your-nose-feel-like-combusting-for-about-a week -shot. After Bourbon, the plan was to go to Irene and Nan's, which is literally just round the corner from Bourbon. That was the plan, not the reality unfortunately. We went to the door, feeling brave and like we could conquer the world only to be told: " we need to see ID from everyone." Hmm, slightly problematic when two of us aren't 18. So what to we do? We go to the Grand Opera House and sit at the bar there for most of the night. We didn't think there was anything abnormal about that unil a lady asked us: "so are you not going to see the show?" to which we replied, "no, we're just relaxing. Do people not normally come here unless they're going to see the show? Is it weird?" After a considerable period of hesitation, she told us: " No, not weird, just eh...noone does it. Cool." Though she said 'cool', you could tell she really meant to say " these people are the biggest weirdos i have ever come across." When we looked round and saw that we were the only people on two floors of the bar,we realised she was probably right.

Given that the night of my birthday ended with a woman implying we were losers, I felt like I needed cheering up. Saz and I, therefore, decided to go out clubbing for the first time in an attempt to de-geekify ourselves. We got to the Odyssey at about 8.30pm and realised that that time is probably hours too early. We headed immediately to the Streat café to pass some time.
As we were sitting, contemplating when we should head over to Box, Sarah shouted: " Oh, there's Amy outside. Hold on..." and ran off to find Amy. Through the huge glass window of the streat, I watched Sarah run out, shouting "Amy" at the top of her lungs and wave her arms about frantically. And then the girl turned round, looked at Sarah liked she'd just seen an alien and walked off. It wasn't Amy. *Scunderment*.
After facing the embarrassment of having a stranger think she was an obsessive stalker, Sarah ran back in to the Streat and told me ( and the rest of Northern Ireland for that matter) that " IT WASN'T AMY." Hmm, I noticed that.

That was embarrassing incident number one of the night. The second was trying to leave the café through the wrong door and the third was trying to get into the bottom floor part of Box before it had even opened and the bouncer coldly telling us " closed."
Despite the fact that we clearly screamed " this is our first time", we managed to have a really really good night- partly due to there being so many hotties there and also because chav dancing under strobe lights never gets old.

On Friday night and last night, I went to the 'Celebration of Hope' in the Odyssey where the speaker, Franklin Graham was speaking. I have to admit, I was feeling majorly sceptical about going, given that a) he is an american and b) it is in the Odyssey and so it's like 'let's convert thousands of people in a big building' evangelism. To my surprise, it wasn't that cheesy, apart from Franklin's desire to say something and then say, in a cheesy voice, "yes, really" afterwards.
On the Friday night, his sermon didn't convince me. Well, I mean, it wouldn't have convinced me if I was going as a non-christian. I kind of thought that it lacked content, though apparently hundreds of other people didn't, so I guess that is more important.
The Saturday night was marginally better, probably because it was completely overflowing with people and because the bands and the sermon were all better.

I'd really like to go tonight again, except I have to annotate all of Oedipus, which, by the way, is not happening since it took me 2.5 hours to do 5 pages. There are 42 in total.
Besides that, I have to do all the rest of my homeworks and still make room for YF tonight somehow.

Yuss.