Always worth the wait though (I guess)

Today, I am wearing flipflops.

I can see sunshine and cherry blossom from my bedroom window.

I am having my lunch bought for me, and later on I might be having a replacement camera bought for me.

Today, I am the scientific opposite of grumpy!

THE HOTTEST ROCK

1) Anyone want to come to Birmingham (April 10th) to see these boys play some music? They are scientists!

I will probably drive there, if I can work out where on earth Birmingham is. I have heard talk about 'motorways', I might have a go at one!


2) Slightly more expensive (£11) but also slightly classier are those Decemberist types, who are going to be in Camden on May 19th!

Everyone likes songs about Victorian street urchins, captured spies or Spanish princesses and I encourage such people to think about this gig with serious faces.

3) AND THEN Sleater-Kinney(!) will be doing their sexy trans-Atlantic thing in Leeds on May 28th (edit: apparently I can't read the internet, and it is actually May 30th). For £10 you can go and listen the pleasing sounds of three girls singing about light-rail coyotes and diamond thefts and revolutions.

(<3)

I still haven't found my shoes

Last night, we had a houseparty.

I'd really like to write about it but this 'being awake' thing is doing absolutely nothing for my hangover.

HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY DAWNY!

Pretentious + grumpy

I don't like to harp on about it too much, but some perceptive people might have noticed that I'm sometimes a bit picky about coffee!

I know what it is all about and so sometimes, what I want to drink doesn't have a name. So today I took care to explain to the barista that what I wanted was bizarre and sorry to be That Customer but I was really having a bad day and I wouldn't normally do this but could he humour me this once and make me a double espresso topped up with just a couple of inches of hot water please thankyou? Like a midpoint between an espresso and a black coffee. No problem, he said. My pleasure, he said.

By the time I'd left the shop and realised that he'd given me a double latte I didn't have the energy to go back and point out where he had started to go wrong. Milk makes me sick, so I threw most of it away.

This was the best thing to happen to me today :(

ERIC

Thank you.

You unwashed, bearded, alcoholic, illiterate Northern wuss.

It is the best thing ever.

<3

DRAMA!

I was nearly killed on the way home! As in, emergency-stopping, screechy-tyres, smell-of-burning rubber killed! Excitement! I want to say that I am scared and shakey and that I am never driving again but to be honest it was pretty exciting and I was able to do some justified shouting which I always enjoy.

(I might have been more shaken if that Stranglers song, 'Peaches', hadn't come on the radio almost immediately afterwards.)

I'd forgotten how much I like that song.

No they'll never catch me now

A T SHIRT! In the post!

To celebrate, I might have a conversation about a band so underground they haven't been invented yet.

Maybe I will break up with my girlfriend at lunchtime and write a song about it on the bus. The song will be an allegorical sea-shanty, and when I get home I will tie a parrot to my shoulder and hang out of the window shouting "ARRRRR!" at people in the street.

Today is working out pretty well.

EDIT: This pirate thing is not going over at all :(

Where the hell has Spring got to.

I am so grumpy today.

Last night I dreamt I was offered an American-style 'Extra Credit' assignment involving making a picture of a lecturer into an animation in Photoshop. It was going to add 15% to my final grade.

I woke up and was really excited for the five seconds it took me to realise that, actually, rather than improve my grade, such a project would probably lead to being banned from graduating at all.

So totally done.

IT'S MY PARTY PRESENTATION AND I'LL CRY SCREEN PORN FILMS IF I WANT TO

Time change (you lose, you gain)

I have an almost pathological adoration for suitcases. For train stations, bus stops. Airports most of all. Coloured-in passports. I don't care about destinations. I can't read maps, I don't speak the language. I need to take photos. I need to document the places I'm leaving.

(Dawny has gone on holiday, I am jealous and I miss her!)

Hey presto (?)

I would like it noted that I did not delete that post.

I would like it noted that Blogger is rubbish.

I am looking into things.

Editorial.

Nottingham Trent Uni gets a lot of flak from my uni. Admit it. At some point you have made fun of people who attend Trent. 'Polytechnic'. 'Mickey Mouse'.

Well, you can all fuck off.

The moment the Hallward is a beautiful, graceful, glassed building with a dazzling open-plan system of balconies (accessed by one central staircase) with shelves whose classmarks are in a logical numerical sequence and upon which books are replaced by attractive, friendly and helpful staff - then and only then will the University of Nottingham be able to throw stones at Trent. Because that is exactly the library available to Trent students.

Notts Uni is old. The Hallward is old and it is ugly. On the outside: 1970s spaceship. On the inside: wood-fabulous belly of a narwhale. When it tries to implement technology (SmartCard access to the library, SmartCard photocopying, self-service in the Short Loan Collection) in the desperate attempt to move into the 20th century, it doesn't really work. It feels half-hearted, forced. Gadgets rattle about in the Hallward, looking self-conscious, awkward, like your nan at a rave. You get the impression that the librarians are still pining for their card catalogues. The books in the stacks are all catalogued according to an arcane, indecipherable system. What are 'stacks', anyway? No one one really knows, but everyone talks about them. Anyone can wander into the library; the electronic barriers have never been turned on. There is reputedly an audio-visual room, but no one knows where it is. But rolls and rolls of microfilm are kept in the Short Loan Collection. Maybe someday, someone will want them.

Things break. The photocopiers time out while you're using them. The book you need is archived in a basement five miles away. There are no windows, anywhere, and it is always freezing.

Old libraries are beautiful, intoxicating, mystical places full of arcane knowledge in which you could spend your whole life and still want to read more. New libraries are smooth, simple places which contain all the knowledge you actually want and which use their integrated technology to let you find this. Both types of libraries have their place.

Clearly, the Hallward used to be the former, but for some reason feels it ought to be making a move towards the latter, and in doing so has become a hybrid, strung between existences, making noises about moving on while it still has its arms wrapped firmly around tradition. No one wins.

Mood: whiny. Music: inaudible.

My gross ear infection is back and it is worse and so painful and I am going to go deaf and I want a hug.

:(

I don't think I'll make it through the night.

You can sell my textbooks to pay for my funeral.

Spring Break

I am locking myself into the Hallward library over Easter.

Before I do, I am going to go to the Natural History Museum, to look at dinosaurs, and to the British Museum, to look at Vikings. No other viewing options will be provided as I am not interested in the rest of the exhibitions.

If anyone wants to come on Saturday March 25th, or maybe Saturday April 1st (not an April Fool's joke!), you are very welcome.

Un Chant d'Amour

Hasty preliminary viewing suggests; there is basically no way I can show even part of this movie to my seminar.

DOUBLEPLUS UNGOOD

Dear Lucy,

We write concerning the repair of your Sony DSC P150.

Unfortunately we must advise you that our appointed repair agents have found addtional repair work that was not apparent upon initial examination of the equipment. Accordingly it has become necessary for the repair estimate to be revised as follows:
Parts: £215.99
Labour: £46.67
VAT: £45.97
Total: £308.63

Should you wish to proceed with the repair of your equipment, this estimate is valid for thirty days from the date of this letter.

Yours sincerly,

Jessops.

Uh. What.

I have already paid you guys £175 to fix my camera. I paid this money to you to fix my camera. I did not pay it to you to send my camera away for some grubby-fingered technician to take it apart, scratch his head, and invent a new quote out of thin air. And yet this is, apparently, exactly what you have done.

I am not paying you nearly five hundred pounds to fix a three hundred pound camera. It is just not good economic practice and also I HATE YOU.

Fuck you, Jessops. Screw you.

Gggggrrrrrrrrraaa

aaaarrrrgggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

7:30 my hair is still wet I did not want to get out of bed I hate 9 o'clock seminars someone please please please turn off the lights and delay today.

9:00 my hair is still wet I drank half a litre of water before my seminar and I don't understand my lecturer's leading questions about Dickens what's going on out of the window.

11:00 FIRE ALARM Indiana Jones-style descending shutters standing in the rain outside the Portland building trying to sneak off for a drink in the Ark.

1:00 I am wet and tired and ok the library is full of books about dramaturgy why can't I find anything useful for my presentation this is going to be a disaster.

3:00 learn a new word.

5:00 road-tripping ex-husbands are welcomed with open arms new anecdotes and travel dates.

This is thirty minutes I want back.

I once read a psychological study in which people had to identify their own body image using an adjustable, pictoral scale. It turned out that women generally think they are fatter and uglier than they actually are, whereas men think they are slimmer and more muscular.

That doesn't really bear any relation to this example of how I spend my time when my uni is on strike and I am supposed to be reading Charlie Dickens.

Picture One (left) is, monkey not withstanding, how classy I imagine I am. Picture Two (right) is, I think, a more accurate portrayal of the usual level of scruffiness. For the record, Picture Two is me dressed as a boy.

(I don't know how the monkey got in there.)

Journal entry #101!

To continue the 'unintelligible film' theme started in the last post, I would like to inform the members of my drama seminar that it is quite likely that they will be seeing this silent, black-and-white 1950s film by absurdist playwright Jean Genet in the next few weeks, when my turn to present comes around. It is "a poetic and intensely physical vision of homosexual desire set in a French prison".

Amazon thinks it is an 18, Play.com thinks it is a PG.

Regardless, anyone who refuses to watch it on grounds of 'offence to sensibilities' will be excused only if they can prove they have not seen Brokeback Mountain.

(Pre-presentation previews will be screened sometime around the weekend!)

Syriana

Last night I went to see this movie.

I would like to post some sort of terse, witty review of it but unfortunately I have no idea what was going on at any point.

April 2nd

'SOLD OUT' MEANS NOTHING TO ME

I am going to be rocking out to this band and their sexy new album.

Rocking out so hard.

Ces choses nous faisons

Dear Diary

Last night I had a dream that I was a rebel MI5 agent who got transferred into the CIA because I was too unruly for the British. MI5 transferred me even though they knew I hated those damn American slackers. The CIA had nicer offices but I spent a lot of time complaining. While I was there I fell in love with an American agent because he took me to an indoor carnival. What does this mean?

When I woke up, I made a Johari and also a Nohari window. I posted them in my LJ because I feel awkward posting something so 'bloggy' in my journal but no one except Dawn can read my LJ so I am reposting it here. What does this mean?

Later I checked my email but my brother still hasn't sent me the pictures he promised me. I don't know what to do, I think I am going to have to beat him up. What does this mean?

Finally, Diary, I wussed out on going swimming at lunchtime because I realised I would rather sit and learn about Strategies for Teaching English as a Foreign Language (Vocabulary). I really love my course at the moment. What does this mean?

Hugs and kisses, Erica.

TODAY IS NOT PANCAKE DAY

. . . or is it?