review

I did okay with the Lent writing, I guess. Better with the chocolate (er, barring Paris).

I started two short stories in the last week, though neither are more than a hundred words yet.

Back at college today. Seven weeks of teaching left, three exams and its all over. We went to Bristol on Friday to separate parties and I drank too much (and so did he) and as we drove up to the University I said it breaks my heart, being back here.

I am still tired from that night out because I am old and, as we agreed on waking from a long afternoon nap, very much not undergraduates any more.

That's alright.

under the

I've bought the new Basement Jaxx album. It's on, now. I can't think of another band whose new releases I've always rushed to buy.

Miss McG influenced my musical expansion, third year university finally tumbling into albums I must have loved subconsciously before. I saw her on Sunday, hesistant and pretty (vintage says MM) in the Cambridge sunshine.

Today I sat in a conveyancing seminar and put together fragments of what she'd said, stitching her words with thoughts of my own and missing that year with an empty stomach ache.

Remembering PC saying you just don't care what people think. Until he said it I had no idea it was true. Now, it doesn't seem so accurate. I'm not sure what changed.

I miss parts of myself.

homecoming

Tuesday is the new Sunday. Oh yes.

I spent the weekend in Bristol. Meeting AM in a bar after far too long an absence, we gossip and exclaim disbelief at how strange it is, how alien to be drinking in our university city. The attack of his warm, delighted hug is just as I remember.

As I stumbled from the train earlier in the afternoon, bleary from afternoon drinks in London, I text a friend; Just arrived. Feels like coming home.

Beautiful moments; emo kids perched like crows against the rounded wall of the building by the river; carrot cake and a stolen crossword; that extra hour on Sunday, and shy amazement at quite how wonderful some people can be.

d day

Results today. Planning to sleep until I need to collect them.

Will get back on with all this writing stuff soon, kids. Promise.

back in the game

I take all that shit back about not being stressed. I am definitely stressed. I know this because this morning I ran an eight minute mile. I have been hovering at nine (ish) for ages. I took my frustration out on the treadmill. It helped. I might pay for it later, but my knee seems to have improved a lot recently.

Unfortunately, I ended up going later than usual, and the Stupid Bitches were out in force. Ladies, if you can hold a full-on conversation while you're exercising, you're not working hard enough. Plus, if you're walking on that massive incline but holding the bar, you're not burning shit. Shut the fuck up and do it properly. And take your fucking make-up off. You look ridiculous.

Very, very tense. Be nice.

tired

Slept badly. Lay in bed fretting about work, friends, the summer. Looked at the orange sky.

My friend E loves the light polluted night sky, and in my few years in the city I've grown attached to it in an odd sort of way. I leave my curtain slightly open.

Sluggish and hoping that translates into easily, silently, swiftly plodding through the last thousand words or so that I need to write before I can begin to edit my dissertation.

nostalgic distractions

Dissertation is due three weeks from yesterday. It will be Done. On earth, as it is in heaven. Yeah, whatever. It's in my blood now.

I haven't worked this continuously since my A Levels. They were four years - FOUR YEARS - ago. I heard that Lost Prophets song 'Last Summer' on the radio this morning and was sad, for a moment, quiet and sad. So much loss.

I am nostalgic before the fact, often. Cold snap April air as I walk to the gym brings regret that these weeks will be the last time I make the early morning journey. Funny, to miss the little things, the nuts and bolts of life. Missing people is a given, but they are always there, somewhere. I can call those friends, they move on with you, but I will never recapture exactly how this city, this life makes me feel.

To work.

addict

I think I am addicted to cornflakes.

I think this is because I do not do enough with my time, and so end up in the kitchen, idly eating breakfast cereal out of the packet. At least it is low fat.

Also, when the alternative is translating a site report, cornflakes are your friends.
(Average translation time: two pages of French an hour.)

Most people do drugs. Me? Cornflakes.

I think I need a drink.

do not read this box

"Gosh," says Wonderful Tutor, as I walk in. "You look... tired."
She is being polite. I look like death. I have just had a coughing fit and my make-up, applied in the hope that eyeliner would counteract the sickness, is smeared down my face in emo-wannabe stripes.

"Yes. I'm ill." I hand her some paper. "You just have to tick boxes. Please. Tick boxes."
Wonderful Tutor looks at me strangely. This is the woman who described me as "optimistic" on my mid-year progress report. I have wobbled over to see her in order to get these Boxes Ticked. Otherwise I don't get to go to Law School. Whatever.

She studies the Stupid Form. "Which box should I tick? You're between a 2.1 and a 1."
I know this. I feel so worn out that I don't give a shit. "I have written 2.1 on every bit of paper that asks for my degree class. Just in case."

"Should I write something in this Pointless Box?" she looks up at me. I can hear the fluid in my chest when I breathe. It's distracting. "Or are you going to go and get your transcript?"
I haven't realised either of these tasks is necessary.

Subsequently I find out that I have to pay for my transcripts. I have to give the University money to write my results on a piece of paper. So I don't do that.
Irritatingly, and prior to this discovery, I have also dissuaded Wonderful Tutor from writing Nice Things in the Pointless Box, and am now worrying vaguely about not getting a place at all.

Bureaucracy sucks ass. So does being ill.

two favourite chat up lines

Both rather politically incorrect.

#1: "Nice shoes. Wanna fuck?"

#2: "Wanna play the Rape Game?"
"No!"
"That's the spirit!"

I am a sucker for bad taste. Also, I am sick of Feminism. Dissertation-itis has set in.

head shot

I spent much of today avoiding eye contact with acquaintances in the sad dusty corners of the library, struggling, resolute, back into the New Year's academic commitments.

And then from my seat I look up and he is there, at the issues desk, smooth accent liquid among the pages words punctuation. He sees me and smiles, briefly, tiredly; I raise a hand and my mouth curves in reply. My pulse quickens, adrenaline. Fight or flight. That last row, that final awful night ending in bitch and irreconcilable accusations, it flashes in my blood.

But that is it. He leaves.

I cannot concentrate, and I leave, too.

getting fresh

I spent the weekend in Southampton visiting my younger sister. She is in her first year at university and still in the Hardcore Fresher phase where every night is full of drinks with questionable names (Jesticle, anyone?) and chicken burgers from a van owned by a man named Ali. I drank one of those innuendo laden cocktails last night and regretted it when I woke up with a head full of gnomes with gongs at 7am. Clearly my body clock does not allow for Jesticle abuse and still believes I should get out of bed (or, you know, off the floor) at Bright and Early AM.

Southampton is fun. Getting home was not. Stuck at a sorry excuse for a train station because the delay to the first part of my journey meant I missed my collection I texted nearly everyone I knew with much RAGE about the fucking trains. My experiences in relatively economically weak Eastern Europe this summer with trains that Run! And! Are On Time! make me particularly bitter about the stupid fucking government and their stupid fucking trains.

But! I had an awesome time. Like, totally groovy, which is my sister's new phrase du jour. I didn't embarrass myself particularly. I didn't throw myself at men who are too young for me, and I only had to use the toilet in that awful, awful bar once.

I am exhausted now because I am a sad old fart and so, to bed.

wherein I am frustrated

I have a presentation due on Thursday, about a Roman villa no one cares about unless you are daft enough to read Archaeology at university. I am tired and fed up of writing notes on the excavation reports, scanning 20 colour plates and trying to collate it all into a coherent 10 minute piece that not even my supposedly academically inclined classmates will care about. It isn't even assessed, doesn't count for a point of credit, and yet it has enveloped my life these past few weeks.

University work at the moment, it makes me want to cry, like I used to over my Maths homework, balled into frustrated sobs. I am tired. I hardly see my friends. My best girlfriend lives two minutes from my door, and yet I have not seen her in a week. I wasted two hours today in a talk that was meant to give me some direction in my future career; all it did was convince me that most journalists only like to talk about themselves and that the inflated sense of ego they bear is totally undeserved given their presentation skills. If I wanted to listen to the supposed achievements of an overbearing overweight twit I could watch our illustrious PM splutter his socialism on the 10 o'clock news.

Undergrads are notorious for thinking they Know It All and of course I am right there, cooing away in my neat little pigeonhole, but I truly find it depressing that four successful professionals can damn their life's work by all coming across as rambling and incoherent, having previously stressed that the entire point of journalism is to produce news that is relevant and succinct.

Just, frustrated.