- ‘Quirky’ stuff that isn’t funny. 
- Pathetic stuff that fills you with vicarious despair. 
- Revolting pictures that could be presented to some alien jury as evidence that humanity is cancer.

According to me and millions of other university students around the world, a meme is a hilarious time-waster used by students of the same university to moan, berate, mock and commend things about like at our university. If you wanted to be clever, you would call it a social satire.

My university has a meme page at the moment with almost 2,500 likes in under two weeks. They are so popular that one of my ‘rad’ lecturers uses it in her lecture presentations. Surely they can’t be that unfunny if the whole world is currently as crazy for them as a 50s housewife is crazy for vacuum cleaners?

In celebration of memes and the hours of fun I have wasted clicking and giggling, I bring you some of the best of University of Leicester’s memes:

That would make anybody's day.

I can relate to this - and not in a good way.

I don't get a student loan so I never eat meat anyway.

Victoria Park Leicester is well-known for its high case of male rape.

This sums up the whole relationship between University of Leicester (Number 12 university in the UK) and DMU (are they even on the university leaderboard?)

Lecturers are funny.

Another well deserved dig at De Montfort University.

In my post, ‘What Do Exam Results and Homelessness Have in Common‘, I joke about how mediocre my grades are but what happens when this becomes a trend? What happens when everyone around me floats on the 2:1 boat with half the effort that I put in while I sink in 2:2s fearing the worst? I do not understand. I had many friends at school who would take exams five, six times and still fail and I always wondered what was wrong with them. Why couldn’t they just pass, especially since the exam was at a much lower level than they were expected to work at? Now I look back and I wonder what they felt seeing people around them passing with so much ease and rolling proudly off their tongues that they got an ‘A’. It rolled off my tongue too.

I have always been the lion with the shiny coat: the cleverest who put hardly any effort in. Now I am a half-starved panther: mediocre among a group of very very intelligent students with shiny orange manes. The transition process is hard. I am battling with so many feelings every minute of every day that I can no longer take it. I want to tidy them up, write a conclusion and put them away. Perhaps it’s just a transition to the adult world where you have to learn to go from the shallow end to the deep. Learn to juggle feeling angry  and jealous when Stacey goes out with the boy you like to feeling jealous, worthless and ashamed when Stacey goes out with the boy you love.

I thought talking about it would help but all I get is advice I already plan to implement. Learn to write essays and exams and the rest will come to you. I fear taking a 2:2 home to my parents and I am not sure if I can make a 2:1 but I will try my utmost best. My parents expect the best of me and I don’t know how to fail them. I don’t know how to swallow failure among an elite of success. And that is why recluses scream, scream, scream.

Etta James

Studying a course like English and French, you cannot escape what I call ‘culture-snobbery’. This is what happens when you’re constantly studying cultures, art, society and philosophy. Everything starts to have an artistic, cultural and deep meaning – whether real or forced is none of your business.

One of these things for me is music and I still can’t decide whether this snobbery a good thing or not. Growing up, my loyalty lay with none other than R’n'B and hip-hop music. Once in a while I branched to Jazz but that was the extent of my musical tastes. With the introduction of Spotify, my world has been opened to a wider and more cultural form of music. There’s soul, blues, French hip-hop, folk and Indie. I love them all.

Soprano

My hippieness however comes from my ‘groupie’ and slightly Gothic interpretation and reaction to these music. I listen to the lyrics, study the music videos and repeat the song over and over until I develop full blown crushes on the artists and their talents. A good example is French rapper Soprano whose song ‘Ferme Les Yeux Et Imagine Toi’ has been stuck on replay for the past week.  My favourite part is, ‘La liberté d’expression est une conspiration.’  (Freedom of speech is a conspiracy).

Other musical crushes include French rapper Blacko, the legend Etta James, the African-orientated India Arie and so much more. I now enjoy music on a deeper level. It’s a bit like falling in love with your friend with benefits – sex becomes making love. Music is now more than beats and acoustics. It is now culture and an eye-opener to the world I inhabit and further.

I went to New York, got into a relationship with the love of my life and oh yeah! I’m throwing a massive birthday party and look how many people have accepted my invite? So … how ’bout you? What are you doing with your life at the moment?

Facebook is poison for people like me who never had much of a social life – and still don’t. All in all, I have only been to two countries in all 197 countries of the world, I have never been clubbing or been drunk and I don’t really have that much friends. *Awkward silence*.

It's a win-win situation.

I once read a study – which I can’t be bothered to source – that detailed how Facebook actually makes you depressed. I concur. When I told my cousin I had deactivated my Facebook, she asked me why and upon hearing of its depressing effect on me, she scoffed and said I was overreacting. How would someone who just came back from a tour of Asia with friends understand?

So far, I am happier although sometimes suffering from withdrawal symptoms. I don’t know what people are doing with their awesome lives and they don’t know what I’m doing with my not-really-awesome life. It’s a win-win situation.

Lately, I had been feeling very down, very sad and low on self esteem and self confidence. When rejection is semi-prevalent in your life, it tends to get to you. I sought out advice in a cousin three years older than me and therefore, wiser. Among many other things, I was told that the way I carry myself and the image I give out to people is the way they would see me. While it is not healthy to nurse self-hatred from within, it is still advisable in my opinion to create a shell for yourself. People love weakness and would exploit it; you must protect yourself.

It is this same girl who ignored texts and other things who now tried having a conversation with me last week – incidentally, my first day trying out my new shell. Perhaps I got it all wrong: I will never hear her side of the story. But I want to focus on me. Four months as an undergraduate and I’m finally travelling that journey to healing. God loves me and that is enough. The rest of you can go trip on a plug! It might not ‘do it’ for others, but it works wonders for me.

In real life, the guy will not leave the football game (and a possible contract with the big names of football) just to kiss the girl in the rain, thereby choosing 'her'.

Three years ago, aged 16, at the advice of a deluded friend, I bought a card for my crush. This card detailed beautifully how I felt about him. I was finally going to confess this true and real love I had for him. Fantasy was going to become reality on this grey, wintry day. The card burned a hole in my school bag all day as I waited for the last lesson of the day – Maths – to give it to him. This was the moment when sparklers would burst from the ceiling and coat our love in an unbinding bond. I wish I weren’t that stupid.

Long story short, upon making fun of me before I could declare my love, I tore it to pieces in passionless anger and threw it in the bin in his presence. I wonder if he knew the card was for him – most likely not. Three years on and I still fantasise about anything and everything. I realise it is not healthy because it leaves you vulnerable to the disappointments of the real world, but once in a while, I indulge. A bit like eating deep fried Mars bars once a month, hot dogs once a week or chocolate muffins everyday.

It’s Valentine’s Day and I have a fantasy. In this fantasy, he (not just any boy, but he) finally professes his love for me and we can begin to get to know each other and go shopping whilst holding hands. I guess deep down, I’m still that 12 year old girl who really really wanted a boyfriend like Chad Michael Murray. The boy I bought the card for, his name was Musse. Musse taught me a lot of things about boys: number one was that these fantasies do not come true. So it’s back to the daily grind and hussle of life and a promise to myself to stop getting high on these stupid fantasies! I am not Cinderella.

Mona the Vampire

When you have to take a 1 hour 15 minutes bus ride to university everyday (to and fro), really pointless lectures start to p*ss you the jam off! It doesn’t help when you also haven’t slept in more than 24 hours only to come in for the torture of trying not to fall asleep in the middle of an incredibly worthless seminar. For the duration of this post, I will become a Moany Mona (that actually doesn’t exist. I just made it up).

On the question and answer site, Yahoo Answers, someone once asked why universities are so incredibly over-priced. Of course they were only spouting their opinions but this question stuck with me and soon, I was exploring possible answers. For the elite, university was just a way of gaining unecessary knowledge as a character in George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede once said. [It's a bit like the bladder. It's only there to hold in what you pour in.] Classy, yet true.

Study pharmacy, mathematics or law and I applaud you for this ‘investment’ in your future career. Study languages like I do and I nod my head approvingly on the philosophical nature of your course. You learn the world through books you would never have had a chance to peruse except through university (or an extremely large bank account). Study History of Art and I refuse to comment.

Excellent!

Is this an elitist viewpoint? Frankly, yes it is. But when you’re paying that amount of money (to be trebled to £9,000 next year),   you don’t have room for socialism. £3,250 each year means I expect to get the full monty, hence my anger at pointless lectures, seminars and workshops.

Perhaps it would be better if tuition fees were calculated based on the course itself. That way, lecturers (and students) would give each course the estimated amount of seriousness.

So the lecturer sends you a post on Google Plus (another story) about your exam results. They are online, ready to be checked. So my heart beat skips and does not calm down until I find my student number and (to the right of the screen), my marks for both modules. I will tell you that I did not get a First and that with each assessment I get back, my chance of getting a First overall slips even further. In fact, if I manage a 2:1 at the end of this year, I will be happy.

I may not have a psychologist but I am learning to control my mediocrephobia. When thoughts of completely failing in life and becoming homeless invade my head, I simply push it all down to my ‘safe’ place and work even harder to move closer to the top of the class. Perhaps it is not healthy to have thoughts of being ‘worthless’ whenever my marks do not meet my standard, but hey! we all have our unhealthy quirks.

This was 10 years ago when rejection from the outside world did not phase me. I was comfortable in my skin in that inexplicable, confident unawareness that I call childhood. So I was mocked, ridiculed and cast off like a middle-class student at Eton College – I couldn’t care less.

I aged and self-awareness kicked in. I aged and I began to question these rejections, practising the art of self-comparison. Was it my background, my accent, something I did – or said – or was it just me? I never got my answers although most of the time, I could guess why. Rest assured that the chain never ends: from toddlers claiming, “you are not my friend anymore!” to those sophisticated adults ignoring emails, messages and calls.

I will be rejected as a friend, as an equal and even romantically. It’s high time I got used to it!

There is nothing more empowering and fulfilling than learning, learning, learning.

Luckily, my course (English and French) delves me into the history of man from a cultural, political and critical perspective. It is literally fun! As a sexy nerd, believe me when I say that you will miss education during the holidays and will literally plead with it to take you back as you wait for the next term to begin.

Unfortunately, soaking in all that knowledge comes with a price: examinations. I am not a tad bit excited.