twothousandandnine/one - hold both your eyelids tight

Since I had about two hours to kill, travelling back to Teesside for Christmas, I decided a good way to fill this time was to consider where 2009 has taken me. It’s fair to say 2009 has brought me a hell of a lot. As I glance back at two festivals, leaving college & successfully passing A-levels, leaving home, passing my driving test, I realise it’s been a year for me, I feel like I have become somebody. Significantly for me, is the amount of music I have been exposed to and got into – I’d consider me appreciative of most genres, less ignorant than I was a year ago. Hardcore, in the correct sense, the roots of indie – The Beatles, The Doors, Joy Division and The Smiths – the alternative and progressive expansion of genre’s and the battle bands see against the nature of their genre and the mainstream. Bands like Have Heart, who are were liked in the past, due to their solid hardcore sound, but not acknowledged for the newer, more progressive work they have done, due to hardcore’s punk based, prescriptivism-based roots – displayed perfectly by a Fast Point gig in some hotel basement in a fucking ghetto of Leeds. On the other hand, we have bands like Yeasayer and Wild Beasts who are pushing the genre’s they exist within so far it’s almost like they exist in their own genre, because of their sole regard for a unique sound. The Strange thing about such bands is how they are so popular, but within hardcore bands that hint at experimenting aren’t accepted within their genre, see More Than Life.
I am being watched by the man who was sat in my seat, as I felt his eyes upon me, I made eye contact, which he severely broke, beginning to scribble onto the page below. I wonder what is going through his head, there are a lot of things we never see and we will never know. Where does an inquisitive nature end and paranoia begin? The times of love and loss, lust and despair have been aplenty, merely in the past month and a half alone – I suppose its part of the university experience, I’ve learnt far more about myself than journalism.
The year began at Empire in Middlesbrough town centre, where it will end; a kind of accidental metaphor that has made me realise what has occurred over the past 353 days. My ipod just broke into MGMT’s Time to Pretend, which, when looking back stands as a sole reminder of 2008 and the days of being underage, doing anything to get into Sumo on a Friday night, hyped off four cans and eager for the night ahead. The sun is low and bright today, a real cold, winters day that seems apt for such reflection, almost like the end of a film, where the morals are conveyed to the audience before the credits roll.
It’s nice to have time to head home for a month of good meals and to catch up on sleep, which university seems to have denied me of, no matter how hard I have tried. The best advice I would give to anybody considering university would be to take out a fucking big 5 year overdraft, and just go into it, because if you manage to keep out of it, you’ve either got very, very rich parents, or are not having enough fun. I'm going to add to this, for my own sake – it’s really nice to realise how good of a year '09 has been for me.