370... of DOOM!

Well, not really, but it's fun to be melodramatic.

It began on an ordinary winter's day... today, that is, which wasn't that ordinary given the temperature and wind, but anyway. I had a meeting with Bernadette which went well, she is seeming increasingly pleased with my thesis (I can't see it yet, though I'm sure I will later), followed by meeting up with Warren, Alice, Jimmy et al at Manning, extended (and fruitless) ramblings around Broadway. I decided to check out the opshops along Glebe Point Road, which I haven't done in a while, and completely by chance found a beautiful top which is really hard to describe. So I won't.

Since I was on the right road anyway I decided to catch a 370 the rest of the way home... all was going well (as well as a bus full of schoolboys and sundry disgruntled passengers CAN go), until we turned left near Harold Park. At the following right turn, we met a 370 going the other way.

Now, kids, this is a very squeezy intersection at the best of times, and two buses makes you want to hold your breath. Both drivers got pretty impatient, and went to turn at the same time... and, well, this resulted in the driver's side corner of the Other Bus taking out two windows and bending the metal frame of Our Bus, while we merely broke his wing mirror. And Yours Truly was sitting right next to one of the windows, consequently getting knocked about and covered in safety glass.

And THEN having to walk the rest of the way home! So, headache, blisters (not the best shoes to have worn) & glass later, I am fine having had a snooze and cup of tea, but still. My favourite part was when Our Bus Driver insisted it would be fine and kept driving till the next stop. "The 370 Bus Route - now with EXTRA free air!"

=P

bwahahaha

YAYAY!!!

The muppet, John "I'm a Muppet" Brogden, has RESIGNED!! You're outta here!

Pathetically hanging on to his MP-ship, but hey... he is no longer the leader for the opposition, and rightly so, the fool.

Grumbling Tonsils

So very annoying. I spend one day working my ARSE off on my thesis, then take the evening off, feeling that I have done enough work, and what happens? That's right, illness descends, and not just any illness, but the wonderful and joyous fun of haemorrhagic tonsilitis. If that's even how you spell it.

On the other hand things do seem to be going fairly well. Thesisaurus appears to be under control, and has stopped munching quite so much of my sleep (though this is of course not helped by the Garbage Trucks of Doom, which collect Gioia's bins at anything from 12 till 3 in the morning, sigh), classes are good, and I have been awarded the "How the Fuck do you Manage to Read All These Books" award by my fellow honours students. Which is gratifying. Which makes me, of course, a nerd.

May well be getting a job at Berkelouw's for Christmas, which would be awesome, as Centrelink are cutting me off at the end of the year... no longer term plans for career-type decisions as yet, but hey.

And, Lutfi and Anna are both back for a short while, before they fly off back to London and Californ-eye-ay respectively... two of my favourite people, moving so far away! Though Lutters will be back this time next year, and will hopefully stick around for a while before buggering off again.

I want my Black Books dvds back! Funniest show IN the world, and kidnapped away from me so cruelly... would be just the thing at the moment. That and a huge cup of Lemon and Ginger Tea.

mandellebrotte had her first lecture today, which no doubt went off as any good studies in religion course will... practically a rock concert in there, I'll bet. That's my Thursday.

rising stress - like rising damp, but for people

I should by rights be feeling dreadful today, what with all the cocktail drinking and the wa-hey last night, but for some reason I have been spared a hangover that I richly deserved. Let's not speculate - go with it! Don't question it!

This promises to be a busy month... rest of year really now I think about it. Lutfi and Anna are both back from their respective overseas jaunts, L for 2 weeks and A for 3, possibly more depending on how long it takes her to get her US visa. So I will be trying to cram in as much seeing them as I can, but also, in 3 weeks (ack ack) our drafts are due. And then 2 weeks after that the thesis itself. So I really have to get my ass into gear and stop editing my first chapter, and get the other two written!

I hope it's a good thing, but I was thinking the other day how widespread my research is... like I am looking at Deleuze and Guattari, and Wittgenstein, and maybe a little Judith Butler... but then people like Rose Lucas and Lyn McCredden, and David Brooks... and Livio Dobrez... It's a weird mix of local specific theory and history stuff and much more general or at least better known theorists.

So that's my task for today, kiddies.

Ginseng baths on Tuesday with the ladies, Anna, Nessa, Kristen and Corinne, which will be good, and this time I will not forget my voucher (big dork that I am) and I should ring and book the treatments today too...

This is just me musing online, which seems silly.

Apparently blue eyes are more sensitive to light than brown eyes. It's weird that no matter what colour your iris is, for the purposes of genetics, they're all either blue or brown. Which puts Adam in an interesting position because he has heterochromatic eyes. And whaddaya know, according to wikipedia David Bowie doesn't have different coloured eyes, like I always thought, he has one pupil permanently dilated due to childhood injury. This requires more investigation...

amazing

I just can't get over this, it's truly amazing. He has done a lot of street art, his name is Julian Beever (apparently spelt like that), I'm sure you could look it up on google!

weird chair

The chair in question being Warren's... I am sitting with my feet on the seat of the chair and my knees up, and the chair keeps rolling back every time I pull myself close to the desk, very slowly, and only about 4 inches.... it's really quite weird.

I am taking a break. Yes, yes I know that ' break' has this amazing ability to morph itself into 'taking the rest of the night unofficially off', but I swear I will do more work later on.

Funny how people do that, anyway, like when we were all doing the HSC, and you would call your friends and say (when you realised Seinfeld was about to start, or whatever other lame-ass programmes we used to watch when we were all 16) "Hey, I really have to go now, I have heaps of work to do"... So you'd go, and watch telly, and be convinced that everyone else was doing more work than you, and they would likewise be convinced that YOU were doing far more work than you ever did, simply because of the numerous phone conversations like that!

Ack. And you would think that we all would have learned to be a bit more honest with each other. Although there is always that competitive person, not mentioning any namescaroline, who wanders around with an expression of gleeful anticipation and self-assurance asking everyone what their wordcount currently is, and following this with "Oh, that's really good, don't worry, I'm sure you'll catch up!" And you just want to stab them in the eye with a bulldog clip and set fire to their computer for making you feel worse than you already did.

Maybe that's why we all still do it, to try to protect our fragile honours-year egos.

Those moments of true exhiliration are really something to hold onto, when someone you admire comes up and tell you they think you're great. David Rylance did that to me the other day, this being I think the top contender for a University Medal this year - this fabulously intelligent and lovely person told me that they thought I had raised a really interesting point.

Nothing on telly tonight, Nessa's cooking stirfry, and my hands STILL smell like bleach from cleaning the shower this morning! Another day gone...

phoenix and griffin

I thought I had made a brilliant revelation about the book I just finished reading, Dark Mirror, because the last name of the main character was Griffin and the woman she thought was her grandmother's mother has perished in flames and the whole family was a misconglomerate of people and intertwined and cut off genealogies... but no.

That would be a phoenix, not a griffin.

Sigh.

Anyway, today is a Friday, and I have work to do. I want the first chapter done by tonight, at least in draft form, and then there is dinner of yum-ness and tomorrow alone doing work. And then Jade and then work again.

So much work! And it's hard to tell if I am enjoying it or not, at times, weirdly.

Black swans and dark mirrors and the easy corruptibility of the flesh... and the wankery of art critics *chuckle*

se fin (-say- fin)