The Echo

 Of yesterday. 

I lie in bed and listen to the voices from outside my door. I try to plaster your names, your faces – all that is familiar to me, to the sounds, but it doesn’t work. Try as I might, I can’t make the echo of yesterday overshadow the noise of today. In the safety of my room I might pretend, and for a few days I thought I could, but the weekend brings spare time; time to hear foreign voices, and for foreign voices to remind me. You’re not here; you’re scattered all over. 

So I escape into my head, and for a few minutes I watch a normal Saturday unfold. I would knock on your door and you wouldn’t answer. I would probably knock some more, even though I know you’re in the shower – for that’s how “good” our timing is. In the kitchen everyone would gather, one way or the other, and we would talk of yesterday and today and tomorrow. At some point you would come in with wet hair and ask if it was me who knocked on your door. I would laugh while you’d sigh at how this happens time and time again. We would plan our Lidl-date and ponder upon when to do laundry. I would end up doing mine in the middle of the night, whilst you would postpone till Sunday. Or Monday. Or Tuesday. Or next weekend. 

But that’s how it was, and today I awake in another’s home. Today you have rehearsals all day, so today I go to Lidl on my own. 

Ah… hahaha, now look at that cheesy, melancholic shizzle. Really, I should be writing tragedies. Jupp, that’s it, in a few years you’ll find me writing sappy, bad tragedies made up of far too cliché lines. 

You might say all flats on campus are the same; white corridors ending in a kitchen with several rooms along it. You’d only be half right. It’s surprising how quickly you can make somewhere your haven, and while this new flat has the same layout and the same colours and corners and counters as mine did, it still has the feel of a strangers home and I’m intruding. 

The Day We Pissed Off China

And lost our family.

So basically, we threw the most awesome party in university history and then shit hit the fan. As a result of that, our flat has been split up and we have all been relocated to new and different flats. At least I got relocated together with one of my flat mates, which also happened to two of the others, while the last few are now on their own in their new flats. 

But why did this happen, you might ask? Well, first off, let’s make one thing clear: the university is currently using us as scapegoats and we are innocent. 

Now, for what happened. 

Remember that flat party I told you about? What I haven’t told you is that we have a flat next door to ours. It’s usually empty, apart from the rare temporary lecturer who lives there for a few days and such. Between our flat and that one is a scrawny, little fire exit. This door has opened many a time before, once because someone in my flat simply leaned on it. This we have made the uni aware of, but ah, do you think they did much about it? 

Anyhows, during the party, this door got smashed open. Again. And it was just our luck that the flat at the moment wasn’t empty; there was in fact a small mountain of food in the kitchen. Half of this food was stolen, the rest of it used to vandalize the kitchen without our knowing. We didn’t know until we a quarter past two, Monday 6^th of February, in a meeting with Chris Main (the head of East 15 in Southend) were told. That was also when he told us that we were to be separated and relocated with immediate effect. For you see, it was also just our luck that it wasn’t just a student or a lecturer temporarily moving into the flat – for in that case, we would have gotten a reprimand and that would be it. Oh no, it’s some important university folk from China, who might be interested in striking a deal with Essex Uni which involves huge amounts of money. Ha. Ha. …Oh happy day.

Half past two we were back at campus and were given two hours to get all our stuff out of our rooms. They took our key cards away, and then three security people proceeded to escort us to our flat to unlock our rooms and watch us as we packed and then, half past four sharp, locked it again. 

We used to be the wonderful flat 1 in house 6, proud of it and with a tight knit family. Now I live in house 3, flat 7, room J. Deborah is in my flat, room B, whilst the majority of the rest of my flat is scattered around house 3 on different floors. Toria is in house 4. This is how it’s going to be for as long as the Chinese people are here. Which is an entire month. Meanwhile, the university will try to find the ones responsible, and we will be having individual meetings with them. 

 
Then thing is though, that we have no idea. Through the night, surely more than half of the university came and went through our doors, and I can assure you we are more than a little angry with the fact that we literally have no clue who did it. And if the culprit(s) don’t own up by the 11^th, we have to pay for all the damage.  

Our fate will be sealed depending on how this all ends. At the moment we don’t even know if we’ll be allowed to live back together when this is all over. The worst part is that it is not our fault. Yes we held a party, yes we had extremely many people crammed into our flat, but what do you expect? It was Friday night in University, and you can be as dry and old a grown-up as you want, but can you honestly tell me you’ve never been to even one big party through your whole life? I didn’t think so. Yet the security people who were watching us had the gall to nearly enjoy our misery. One of my flat mates burst out crying, and the lady (the security were two men and one woman) just snorted a laugh and said “you should have thought of that, shouldn’t you?”. 

The only slight comfort at the moment is that according to Chris Main, all the teachers were on our side when they talked about this. We’re far from the worst students in school – quite the opposite in fact, with clean slates and everything. So they didn’t think it was us who had done it, even Chris himself admitted to being livid on our behalf when what was to happen to us was decided. They had tried speaking our case, but they (whether it was the actual campus people or the Chinese people I’m not entirely sure) would have nothing of it and were not satisfied until we were banned from our home and torn from each other. 

By the time we reached our flat, word had already spread, and a small group of people who didn’t have classes met us by the door, which was a great help. They helped us pack and carry our things, which only proves how quickly rumour truly spreads in the hour of need and how us students over here stand up for one another. 

The thing is though, that this has happened before. Students keep breaking in to each other’s flats and messing things up when drunk. Half the campus smells heavily of weed, and to all of this the campus just turns a blind eye. But because we were so unlucky to have it happen to some people with power over a lot of money, the campus now suddenly has to step into action and “prove” themselves. In this place, there is no such thing as "innocent until proven guilty", and at the moment all the grown-ups down at the reception are treating us as criminals - all disaproving glares and arrogant faces. 

At least many of our friends have said that they feel for us and that we are welcome to their flat anytime. It makes it all a tad better, but it doesn’t change the fact I at the moment feel homeless, miss my family and can’t sleep.

ABC

Easy as 123.

Friday night, half the university were half naked in our flat. Needless to say, it was a very fun night with a mountain of empty bottles left in the kitchen to be cleaned up the next day. 

ABC. Anything But Clothes.

Is It A Ghost?

Is it a geisha? 

No! It’s Commedia Dell’arte! The first and second lovers to be precise. 

I realise I hardly ever get around to writing about what I actually do in school, but oh well. Today I am, for today I had the opportunity to take a few pictures of what we’re doing, and that makes posting just so much more interesting.  

A new subject of this term is Commedia Dell’arte, and we have it for four hours every Thursday.  Today we were using makeup, and while we waited for the last few people to finish their makeup, I quickly got my iPad mini out and snapped some pictures. 

Now, what is Commedia Dell’arte you might ask? I’m sure Wikipedia can help you with that. But since I’m so nice, I’ll give you a short briefing: 

Basically, it’s “comedy by the craft of improvisation”. If you go to watch a Commedia Dell’arte play, you’re going to watch a comedy improvisation. The theatre company will have already planned the plot, or the scenario, but they will not have rehearsed it and so they don’t necessarily know how to “get from” one part of the scenario to another. That is improvised then and there.

In Commedia, there’s a basic stock of characters, and mostly one actor will play the same character for the entirety of their career – the one that fits them best. The characters themselves are “types”, almost like caricatures of different society types I suppose, such as the proud master, the innocent young lovers, etc. The characters are more or less two-dimensional, predictable, and very “exaggerated”. 

 

All the characters have masks, except for the lovers, of which there are two pairs. There’re the young lovers – the 2^nd lovers, which are the innocent ones. Then there’re the 1^st lovers, who are anything and everything but innocent. These two pairs use the makeup shown in the pictures, and these two pairs were the characters we were working on for the day. We’re slowly going through all the characters, and by the end of term we’ll make a small performance. 

Art

Nail art, to be precice.

Guess what? I found a new "canvas" I enjoy drawing on. And in correspondence with that, I just bought a small nail art kit consisting of eight colours, some glitter and diamonds. 

Each colour is equipped with a thin brush and a precision tool. 

It’s a newly acquired hobby, and the nails in the picture are just my fourth time of drawing on my nails (done with the very kit mentioned above), so I'm just a real beginner, but practice makes perfect. 

A sensible, good investment of money? Maybe not. When I ripped open the packaging I could clearly picture my mum rolling her eyes and groaning at my useless purchase. But I find my new little hobby to be quite a lot of fun and know I will use my little kit a lot, sooooo oh well. You only live once, as they say.