You don't need philosophy when you can make do with binoculars

I haven't updated this in ages. Mainly 'cos nobody reads it, hehe. But also as I have been ridiculously busy with life and, well, University, mainly.

I had my last ever class yesterday!! Feels a bit weird, but don't think it'll really sink in 'til I hand all my work in next week. Also got my dissertation mark back...got a first, whoo! Really chuffed with that, but again, it hasn't really hit me yet.

I still have two essays to write...in four days. That's going to be fun. Should really get some sleep in preparation...

stress stress stress

i wish they'd take all the medical information off the internet so i could stop freaking myself out :S

So, I finished my dissertation, handed it in, managed to convince myself I wasn't going to die of liver failure (as I had thought last week...), met a nice boy, had some great sex, and now am paranoid that I am pregnant, or have caught some kind of horrible disease. Obviously, this is my own fault for being an idiot who's incapable of taking her pill regularly, and who trusts boys who say they've been tested and don't 'have' anything, but still, ARGH!!! Everybody I know is as stupid as I am when it comes to this stuff, why am I the only one who ends up stressing about it?! Well, I'm not, but still. It would be lovely to have a nice straight-forward week with nothing at all to stress about.

That is all.

i've finished my dissertation!!!! whooo!!

i'm really quite excited, i've been doing the bloody thing since july! and i had a total panic on sunday when i realised that it's due in a week earlier than i had thought, oops. but i think i've done a decent job! it's all in sentences anyway, which is always a start.

hooray!!!

don't know what to do with myself now...

Is it:

a) because it is approx. -50 degrees C in my room?

b) because the crap weather seems to have given me the flu?

c) because I keep having minor panic attacks about the dissertation situation?

d) because I have spent the last two hours looking at pictures of Keira Knightley, and deciding that I must go on a strict diet IMMEDIATELY, and spend my entire student loan on a new wardrobe?

or

e) because I'm just a bit of an idiot?







Dear me.

Well, it's a whiley since I wrote anything on here! But, as it is approaching dissertation submission day, I suddenly find myself with an awful lot of procrastinating time on my hands, as I try to put off 'til the very last minute writing the last 500 words of the sodding thing.




And I have now spent so long dithering over what to rename my journal that I don't actually have time to write anything. D'oh!!

Although I did discover a new favourite quote, courtesy of Spike Milligan:

'A sure remedy for seasickness is to sit under a tree'.

Teehee.

i'm going to fuck up my dissertation

 

:(

Scotland won!!! Just. But just is still winning, so huzzah. 

And, to celebrate, here is an not-entirely-gratuitous picture of my future husband, Mr Chris Paterson



Hooray. And now I'm going to go and attempt to become less of a shallow, sham of a person. (I saw a very impressive student play last night, and am berating myself for not having really done anything for the last 3 years, other than watch rugby and drink and faff about, so from now on I am going to try to develop some interests and hobbies and such.)

Gah. It must be so nice to be from Australia or Brazil or somewhere equally successful and never have to experience the dread and nerves that come with watching your national team attempt to struggle throught to what is only the quarter finals of a major competition. Scotland are currently playing Italy in their final group game of the Rugby World Cup, and all is not going terribly well, just for a change, and so I am spending my Saturday night watching what is probably going to turn out to be yet another 'glorious' defeat through my fingers, and getting angry with the Italians, who are playing dirty and getting away with it. Grrr. 

In fact I am feeling particularly Scottish today. Passionate but pessimistic attitude towards relatively minor sporting event? Check. Hangover? Check. Heart-disease inducing diet? Check (double battered sausage supper for tea, mmmmm). Random abuse from passing Rangers-strip-clad tennagers? Check (there's an Orange Lodge round the back of my flat, and when there's a march on, as there was today, it all gets a bit manic, especially if there is also a match). Really really really cold?? Absobloodylutely. 

Yeah, my flatmates still won't let me turn the heating on, and I can't find my winter duvet (how one loses a king-size duvet in a flat as small as mine, I do not know), so I am spending a lot of time shivering and glaring at people. And not in my flat. 

In other news, I have had a supremely unproductive week! Which, given that I was supposed to have written my introduction for my dissertation by Monday, is not so good. At some point, hopefully VERY soon, I am going to have to realise that my degree needs to take precedence over my social life, but it is proving very difficult at the moment! Especially considering my social life is probably more fun than it has ever been, and my dissertation remains as dull as the proverbial. Possibly even duller. But I really must not screw this up, as I will beat myself up for EVER if I do.

Anyway, the match is getting interesting, in a horrifying, going-to-go-horribly-wrong-any-minute kinda way, so I'm going to go  pay it my full attention. I will write something interesting in this thing one of these days, and maybe even find someone to read it.

It is SO COLD in my flat!!! And my flatmates won't let me turn the heating on 'cos our gas bills are costing us too much :o( Honestly, it gets more and more like Withnail and I every day.

In other news, Friday was pretty disastrous, but not as bad as it could have been. It did, however, land me with a date on Sunday, which I hadn't really been expecting, and which was pretty disastrous. Hohum, can't win them all, etc etc. Had a pretty good weekend though - recovered from my hangover enough for a shopping trip on Saturday (I bough Eeyore pyjamas and an eyeshadow...rock n roll) and a curry-and-X-Factor binge in the evening. Then on Sunday I met up with a mate of mine who I haven't seen in ages, then had my disastrous date. The less said about that bit the better. AND today, Monday morning, I managed to get myself to the gym for 9!! Which I am very proud of. It was a pretty successful trip too, unlike on Friday when, for some reason, I just could not run for more than 6 or 7 minutes without getting really out of breath. I hate it when that happens, especially when the previous training session has gone really well, makes me wonder if I'm ever actually going to be able to run this 10K next Spring, which is my big, and possibly slightly unrealistic, goal. I'm not doing too badly though, I can (usually, Friday excepted) manage half an hour at a reasonable pace on the treadmill, without any great difficulty. So I am getting somewhere...

Oh and the meeting with my tutor went really really well! Finally feel that I know where I'm going with this dissertation, which is such a great feeling after all the months of panicking! Still got heaps of work to do, and, basically, I'm not going to have any free time 'til Christmas, but I don't really mind 'cos now that I know what I'm doing I'm actually looking forward to getting it finished and having something to show for my efforts. And yes, I do realise how nerdy that sounds, but hey. Trying to get some bits and pieces of work done at the moment actually, as a friend of mine from 'home' is coming up my way for a couple of days, and we're off to Murrayfield to see Scotland lose in humiliating fashion to play Romania in the World Cup tomorrow, so I plan to be drunk until Wednesday. Which should be good fun...!

Title says it all really...is it entirely normal to be posting in one's journal three times a day? When one has nothing particularly interesting to say? And when one has precisely zero 'friends' on LJ to read said journal!?

Ah well, keeps me off the streets I guess. 

Feeling soo positive about my dissertation though! I'll probably get shot down in horrific fashion tomorrow when I go see my tutor and attempt to answer the question 'So what progress have you made over the last month?' without lying myself into a dead-end, as I usually do, but still. For the moment I am feeling positive, and all is well with the world. I'm in my nice warm bed in my nice warm flat watching Bruce Parry herd reindeer and freeze his nuts off in Siberia.

Quite looking forward to tomorrow. If all goes well with the tutor, I'm planning to head to the gym, figure out the questionnaire thing I need for my 'research', maybe do some shopping (seeing as I have £25 that I didn't spend on my lovely car burning a hole in my pocket) then head out for a binge drinking session few glasses of fine wine with my pals. (If it doesn't go well with the tutor, I'll be interning myself in the library until further notice) Although, truth be told, I'm not looking forward to my Friday night as much as I should be. My uni course is a pretty small, and male dominated one, so there's only about eight of us girls, and hence a LOT of rivalry/bitchiness etc etc. I have two really good friends among them, but I just cannot be doing with all the girly sniping and back stabbing that inevitably goes on. I've always been a tomboy and hung about mainly with boys, partly as I just get on better with them as I'm not into stereotypical girly stuff, but mainly because  boys just DON'T DO all that nasty bitchy stuff! And it makes life soooooooooo much simpler! You always know where you stand with a guy. Well, unless you sleep with him, of course. Then, fuck knows. But at a friendship level, I definitely prefer to hang about with the boys, and talk about rugby and music and politics and so on. Of course, this means that  the girls think I am a terrible stuck-up bitch just trying to get one-up on them, so I am trying to be girlier and talk girl stuff with them, but I'm just not very good at it. I don't know what to say and go all weird, and as a result I think a fair few of them now think I am a lesbian. Hohum. 

Anyway I've gone off on a bit of a tangent here...yes I was tlaking about going out tomorrow! Well, all this bitching and awkwardness that's been going seems to be coming to a bit of a head, and there's a fair few cracks beginning to show in our little group, and the one girl who acts as the glue and gets on with us all, is the one person who can't come out tomorrow. So it could be interesting...This is the kind of night that always ends in disaster, 'cos I'll be nervous and end up drinking way too much and doing something horrendous. Oh well. That's being a student I guess!

I am learning some pretty interesting stuff from Mr Bruce Parry. The Innet (I think that's what he's calling them) kids have to go to boarding school in the town 'til they're 16, which is pretty impressive stuff, but they go home at the holidays. But....and I hate to be facetious, but I have to ask...how do they know where 'home' is, if their parents are packing up camp and moving on every two days?! Or do they usually stay in one place for a while, and Bruce has just joined them at a particularly televisual time of the year, when they just happen to be packing up camp and moving on every other day?? Who knows... I like Bruce though. He's got frost-bite on his cheek, poor chap.

I am in such a great mood!! I've got over the *huge* disappointment (ahem) of losing my Austin Allegro, and, despite still spending most of my day on the net/watching daytime TV, I have somehow managed to get quite a lot of work done (well, relatively) and have had a breakthrough with my dissertation! I think I finally know where I'm going with it, so I'm going to stop panicking, get on with it, and, in the mean time, just lie through my teeth to my tutor about how much of my reading I've got done already. So all is well.

And now I can get back to watching Mitchell & Webb.

 'My' car has gone up to £150 over night, definitely out of my price range now. Unless I don't mind starving in a freezing cold flat for a month, which I do. Ah well, guess I'm a pedestrian for a while longer :o(

So, first ever blog. And do I have anything interesting to say?!

Probably not, especially, as my life at the moment seems to consist almost entirely of sitting at my desk, surrounded by books, paper, pens etc, gazing out of my window and generally doing anything but actually study. So, a whole lot of faffing about on Facebook (hope it's OK to mention that here...), the Guardian website, various Harry Potter sites etc, none of which is doing much to further my dissertation, the subject of which is far too dull to go into here. Well, I find it relatively interesting, but I imagine I would probably be in the minority, so let's leave it at that. And if anybody's actually reading this and at all interested, there will probably be enough clues in whatever I write for you to figure it out :) Anyway, I have had months to work on this thing, but decided to spend my time traveling about Europe and generally having a fantastic summer instead, and so I now find myself trying to get all the research done in a couple of weeks before term starts. I'm counting on The Fear kicking in at some point and spurring me into action...

On to more interesting things, and the fantastic car I found on eBay today!! I've always been a bit of a tomboy, and I do love cars and driving, but, despite having had my license for five years now, I am yet to own my first set of wheels :( However, while killing time earlier, I found a 1980 Austin Allegro on sale for £25, with which I am now totally in love and slightly obsessed! OK, so the Allegro is probably one of the ugliest cars ever made, and, (clue #1 coming up here!) at least a tiny part responsible for the downfall of the British motor industry, but this one is bright green, and has leather seats, and little foldy-down trays in the back! I've let my imagination run slightly riot with this one and now have all kinds of fantasies involving me doing it up (hah with all that technical expertise I have acquired over the years...ahem) and making it a perfect, gleaming example of its kind, with an admirably low ratio of gaffa tape to steel, and taking it all over the country to rallies with the Allegro Owners Club (there has to be such a thing, right?) where it will be admired by big men with beards who will kindly agree to tow me home when I break down in a ditch. And all that from £25, it's got to be a bargain!!! However, being the starving student that I am, I don't think I can even afford £25. Hmm, think I'll keep an eye on it anyway though, it's still got 5 days to go...

Anyway, in the big wide world...Scotland beat France 1-0!! Which is quite impressive, although I have to admit I do find it pretty hard to get excited about Scottish football. In the words of some Brazilian guy I met on my travels 'You're from Scotland?? Wow they play some ugly football there...pretty violent!'. It also means I will be kept up all night by the noise of drunken celebrations at the pub across the road, which makes me sad. At least it's a bright spot in what has otherwise been a pretty depressing news day. I hate all this foot and mouth stuff. I know the culling is necessary, but I'm not sure the 'before and after' aerial shots the BBC keep showing are. Y'know the ones, the 'before' is a bunch of nice healthy-looking cows being herded through a lovely sunny field, all nice and pastoral and like something from Countryfile, into a big pen, then the 'after' is a JCB trundling along, a poor dead cow lolling from its digger-bit (you got me, my dissertation is not on farm equipment) and dumping it in a big trough full of similarly dead cows. Obviously I know all this stuff goes on, and that the 'waste' of all these animals is the great tragedy of the whole thing (and it is a tragedy, don't get me wrong, it really is about time our farmers got a break), I just don't think we need to see it all in quite such graphic detail. Apart from anything else, I find this attitude that's about at the moment, that we are all obese and doomed to die of heart disease all becuase we don't understand where our food comes from, and so we need to see Gordon Ramsay or whoever slaughter a lamb on television, terribly condescending and pretty distasteful. I get the point that it's supposed to teach us to respect our food, but is it really doing that?? It's obvious from Ramsay's programme that it's teaching him that, but I can't help but think that many of the millions of people watching what is essentially a light entertainment programme are doing so more out of grisly curiosity than anything else, and are not taking the same lessons from it as Ramsay himself. I don't know, I'm just rambling really.

Maybe I'm just a bit squeamish ;)

Well, my 'first blog' seems to have become rather longer than I meant it to, so I'll leave it there and try and get some sleep, so I can get myself up early, head to the gym, then nerd it up in the library all day....at least, that's the plan :S

Oh, and if anyone could tell me how to make proper smilies, that would be much appreciated! Thanks