I managed to bump my head twice today, badly, and now it hurts to raise my eyebrows. Ouch.

However, it is a good day!

It is a good day for the summer holidays are upon us; it is a good day because I went up to Bookmarks after school to combat post-school boredom and got to talk to OtherDominic again; it is a good day because today is the day I finally got to play Portal.

Wow: Valve are impressive. The last time I felt so immersed in a game was the first time I played Psychonauts, and that was, what, two years ago now?

Wednesday through Thursday were spent at work, doing a million and one things. On Friday, I played communal Solitaire; I like working the till a lot. The weekend was spent swapping e-mails with OtherDominic and trying to understand how big clouds are as I watched the sun set sitting in the park. Yesterday, I went back to the place of "education", and the debate club party (including Eliezer lip-syncing to Still Alive from Portal, and cake, which was not a lie).

I watched five movies, listened to about 139 songs , and read three books.

It was a good week.

Saoirse1: Oh, are we blogging, then?
Saoirse2: Yeah, well, it's been a week. I mean we really should have blogged on Thursday-
Saoirse1: Ah, yes, the Birthday. Are you mentioning that?
Saoirse2: Uh-huh. I thought I'd say something like: "I am now half-way to thirty; fuck."
Saoirse1: You like that line.
Saoirse2: I do. I think it's the semi-colon.
Saoirse1: I think it sounds kind of stupid, really. Crude.
Saoirse2: You middle-class snob!
Saoirse1: Do I really need to explain Marxism to you-
Saoirse2: Oh, God, no. I know about the means of production already.
Saoirse1: If you say so. Hey! Maybe we should blog that.
Saoirse2: A political blog?
Saoirse1: Yeah! Why not?
Saoirse2: Because it's boring, that's why. You just miss debate club.
Saoirse1: Yes; I do. But so do you.
Saoirse2: I miss the people. You just miss the arguments.
Saoirse1: And? As great as Bookmarks is, there's not much to argue about.
Saoirse2: God, you're obsessed.
Saoirse1: You like arguing!
Saoirse2: I like shouting. Not the same thing, you know. You're all into the way it has a logic to it. An emotional logic.
Saoirse1: Look, anyway, we're meant to be writing a coherent blog post.
Saoirse2: I hate it when people refer to commenting as "posting"... We should mention lunch with Dominic and Joshua's birthday party.
Saoirse1: Advertise the lasagna of Silva's? Sure. It was a nice meal. So was the dinner party.
Saoirse2: Oh my god, caterpillar cake!
Saoirse1: Yes, and the caterpillar cake. (Smiling)
Saoirse2: Patronising.
Saoirse1: Sorry. What else has happened? Oh! Book club!
Saoirse2: Yes, I can't believe we're in a book club. Sure is you.
Saoirse1: It was great! I mean, you liked seeing Sanna and Dominic, and don't go and tell me you hate reading now!
Saoirse2: Of course I don't. It was fun, yes.
Saoirse1: Anything else? We should probably introduce OtherDominic?
Saoirse2: Why? I've met him twice!
Saoirse1: That's true. And I guess we don't really introduce people on this blog.
Saoirse2: No, we don't.
Saoirse1: That's it, isn't it? Has anything else happened?
Saoirse2: Micheal Rosen came into the shop!!!
Saoirse1: Oh, yes.
Saoirse2: I'm still starstrucked.
Saoirse1: But that's it, right? My Week (edited edition), by Saoirse?
Saoirse2: Mm.
Saoirse3: Oh, God, now I have to make this coherent. Ah, fuck it, I'm too tired. And maybe it'll work to just literally show my thoughts.

NOTES: Not literally how I think, although I do sometimes get the two separate personalities that are me arguing. Obviously, I have not included suppressed thoughts, nor ones that aren't in words.

So! So! So!

Marxism!

Right!

(And here is the fight for coherency.)

The entire event was incredible. The meetings were great, the debate was fascinating, the people were brilliant (and even more talkative than usual, it seems). I had a great time, as I always do.

Perhaps the best thing about Marxism is that suddenly, your views are valid again. I spend the whole year arguing that Communism is possible, that it's not bloody immoral; I spend the year being told that my views are stupid, or at least that they "only work on paper". And there are some very very strong arguments against communism. They make a lot of sense. After a year of that, you begin to believe it. You begin to wonder if things can get better- or maybe you still think they can, but you wonder how. You forget, perhaps. It starts getting lonely. A lonely fight for a better world.

And then, in July, you are suddenly being reminded that capitalism is not a good system to live in. You hear people who know why, who have seen why, talk. You are told again and again that communism will work. That it has to work. And maybe it's propaganda. And maybe it doesn't really make much sense. And maybe I'm just dazzled by the singing and the conversation and the people and the life.

But it feels wonderful to be part of a movement again.

The workers, united, will never be defeated. Maybe we need Marxism to keep us united.

Seen the Discovery Channel's latest advert? Well, you should.

Other than that:

It's the last week before work experience, so everything's been crazy-busy coursework-wise while remaining pretty quiet otherwise.

So that is my blog for this week.

By the way, I think Debate Club saved my life today.

Second place is far from bad when the winning team was a grammar school. Eliezer, Miles and Pritesh were amazing. Go QPCS! Go Brent!

Damn Grammar School Zombies.

It's amazing how often I find myself defending the earthly. I'm always arguing that we need to disregard religion or ceremony or tradition in the name of saving lives, of ending war and poverty and much preventable death.

It's part of Marxism: nothing comes from dreams. We're materialists, the lot of us.

I was saying this to John today: we don't understand the universe, and we don't understand the constructs we make to deal with it. There is no definition of art, for example, that satisfies us all. And we still don't really know how anything works, not really.

I was also saying this: I am a sceptic when it comes to reality. And a lot of other things, but reality is what I've been thinking about. I don't think it is possible to prove, at all, that the world- in the sense of the physical world, not the planet- is actually real. And that it may just be possible to prove that it isn't. Of course, you can't prove anything- but it's that feeling that you can never know. It's the sense that I can never, ever know the most basic thing about these things I interact with that has begun to drive me mad.

I keep feeling trapped by gravity. Like I can't move in enough dimensions.

Maybe I'm just tired. I don't really have reason to be.

Since I wish to lose no geek points, here is the follow-up post for yesterday.

We- Amber and I- went to the place in-between platforms thirteen and fourteen of Waterloo station, where we found a whole bunch of geeks immersed in playing Ticket to Ride, which seems to be the fourth most (as opposed to forth most, which is reserved for War on Terror) complicated board game on Earth. Since the two of us were rather late, we instead played Whot, although not without adding the Prime Number rule, the Multiplication, Addition and Division rules, the Wind rule, and, eventually, the Justifiable rule, which made it actually entertaining.

I love Geohashing, in all its geekiness. Maybe the true joy of it is that it is amazing, poignant, even: an utterly random location is picked, and, without two words being said to one another, people assemble there. It's a sense of community, really. (Pictures are here, BTW.)

I feel like there is community everywhere now. Marxism has always been like this. You feel safe for once, at home. Strangers, who all share at least one aspect of your ideology. Geek culture is like that. But it's quieter, more subtle. That feeling, though, of finding out that someone you know is a geek too, is incomparable.

Geek points for saying that? Loads, right?

I thought I had something vitally important to blog, but on inspection, it turns out it's just that I dreamed I promised Alice I'd blog about my week.

Which would have been a brilliant post. I'd start it: "I killed a man on Monday."

Even in my dreams, I always say the things that make me sound mentally unstable in front to Alice.

Anyway, I should probably go and get ready so Amber and I can hang out in-between platforms thirteen and fourteen of Waterloo Station because a webcomic told us to.

Geek points for today? If I add that I went to a debate club thing already today? Pretty high, I'm guessing. Maybe thirty-one?

Ha, yes. We- QPCS's debate club- won the Brent Heats. We are, sometime this month, going through to the London ones.

Oh, dear Lord! This is... this is good. This is very good. This is brilliant, this is fabulous, this is wonderful, this is fantastic. I really care too much about Debate Club, but, Christ, we all work rather hard for it. And it's fun, obviously.

The only real competition was JFS: St. Gregory's were mostly reading from sheets of paper, and we didn't end up arguing against Preston Manor and the other school who turned up. (Two schools dropped out at the last minute). We had beaten JFS before, of course, in two debates, but this time it was purely the years nine and ten team and they have gotten a lot less formal and a lot more confident. Somehow, and I think it was mostly Mile's speech (the team for this debate was him, me and Pritesh), we beat them again.

Seriously, w00t, minus sarcasm.