M.I.B it's a big horse...
It occurs to me, as it often does, that some time has passed since last I put virtual ink to cyber blah and put something up here. Oddly, there's been a strange hiatus in bloggage among all those scribblers that I read (list to the right), as if we've all been far, far to busy, darling, to sling anything into the ether. Hmm. The others seem to be coming out of hibernation at the moment, so I suppose I should join in... seems somehow impolite not to.
So, I went home to London last weekend. For Chris and Rachel's engagement HOOO-hah! (that's like a party, but more so). Took me most of saturday to get back home, met my dad at the station, checked that my mum's car was still parked in the random house in St John's Wood and back to me dad's for martini (woo) and lasagne. Then off to party.
Spent most of the first half of the party moaning to friends various about how I wasn't getting drunk no matter how much I drank. So I drank more until very suddenly I couldn't feel my face and was having difficulty speaking. Yey. Amusing moments: me agreeing with Danny that what this party needed was goddamn limbo, me feeling up the German girl because I thought it was a mate of mine (what do you say? "sorry, I thought that was George, who I was feeling up ... for a... um...joke..."), the massive Old Wet pile-up, and me trying to kiss absolutely everyone. Then I passed out on the floor. Woo.
Nice lunch with some people on Sunday, and the purchase of what are undoubtedly the gayest cowboy boots in all the world. I'll supply a picture at some point, but me camera's up the creek. I wore them out on Sunday night (think shiny patent leather, think bright red stiching, think slightly S&M spur-strap thing... and you're not yet close) but, being new cowboy boots, they ATE my feet. Post pub, I had to hail a cab.
Now, if you've never been to London and ridden in a taxi, stop reading NOW, go there and do just that. There is nothing better than London black cabs and no better species of human than the London cabbies. Except the racist ones. They're cunts.
Conversation with cabbie ran as follows (cabbie has outrageous East End accent, I have mellow RP tones), we begin a minute after we are underway:
Cabbie: Mate, the weirdest thing just happened to me.
Me: Really?
Cabbie: Yeah. The fare just before you was this woman. She was totally pissed, right?
Me: gotcha.
Cabbie: so, I takes her where she wants to go, and she's paying me through this slot here [indicates a new feature of the black cabs, which is a slot in the perspex behind the driver for money posting]
Me: right
Cabbie: and she's down right on her knees, pushing money through. And she sneezes, right?
Me: ...right
Cabbie: and she fires her front tooth through this gap, and it hits here somewhere [indicates the dashboard].
Me: you're kidding
Cabbie: no, mate. It's in here somewhere... I don't know where. I think it's in me bag. She had all the doors open, we was looking everywhere. God knows where it went, but I know it's in here coz I heard it, you know?
Me: [unable to speak through laughter]
He went on to tell me that it is a well known con to take a cab and drop a ring in the front of the car when paying so that the cabbie bends down to pick it up and you can cosh him over the back of the head and take his money. I didn't know that, but apparently it's very common. He said he wasn't all that worried this time because it was, you know, a tooth and seemed somehow a bit extreme.
So that was great.
God I miss London.
Anyway, pleasant day with mum on Monday ("are you *sure* you're gay?"/ "yes, mum, reasonably") with roast beef and things. Yum. Then back up here on Tuesday and back to work on Wed. Fun fun.
My supervisor's decided he hates all of us today. No one knows why. I suspect the menopause. Or something.
I'm drunk. Ignore me.
After I've finished writing, I'm going to open the Kinder Surpise Egg that's sitting, humpty-like, by my hip.
There's a bunch of stuff that deserves recording. I watched Sin City last night and wished I'd seen it on the big screen. A mate of mine came to see me, and he's unconscious just over there. I made a decision not to type an arrow. Just then. My supervisor is pleased with me again and I was so pleased about it I let my enthusiasm outweigh my tongue and heard my own report mutate by interpretation. I fixed it. But it was hard.
One friendship I cannot afford to loose.
So.
Pete's been talking about tumblelogs . It's bothered me a bit, because I don't really see the difference between the definition he offers and the stuff I write.
I mean.
I don't redraft. Not really. I post and that's that. I fling bits of my life into the ether. And what I choose to fling, I do not edit. I return, I correct spelling. I punctuate.
I do not think, for example "this is worth a post". I just... you know, post.
So. My blog, I guess, IS a tumblelog. I think about posting, so I post. I tend not to worry about formatting. I tend not to draft before posting. What you read is what I wrote. That sort of jazz.
Which is fine. I understand that blogs are meant to contain more links. That what you have here should probably be hosted by Livejournal. Blahdeblah.
"it just gets things out there"
Said the
man who got me in to all this in the first place.
Hmm. It's a very scary snail thing. Who'd put this inside a chocolate? People are weird.
Deviations will not be tolerated.
Right. So. Thursday night.
The plan was simple:
1. Leave work and go home.
2. Get ready.
3. Get train to Edinburgh to arrive around 8 ish.
4. Sink pints.
5. Go to gig.
6.Dance like a fuckwiit.
7. Overnight in a hostel.
It was a good plan and as we all know, or should by now, one has to stick to plans. That is what they are for. Modifying plans an hour before their implementation is never a good idea.
So, I left work. I came home. Flatmate is ill and thinks he should abandon gig. This is sad. Lynn comes over to check the plan and goes to get ready. 5 minutes later she calls from the flat downstairs (the girl there is coming too) and says that she has met a guy who wants to come as well who has a car. A seven seater. Given that there are 4 of us going (since Flatmate has pulled out) that sounds good. We go to chat to him. Flatmate decides he will come after all, we all agree the car is a great plan ESPECIALLY since we can then drive back AFTER the gig. They guy with the car says his friend is coming too and he won't be drinking and he'll be driving.
Job's a goodun.
We get ready.
And we wait.
And we wait.
Until 9.00, when our wheels turn up. No one is hugely bothered, but we're feeling the change of plan rather keenly. The car appears (a massice renault) and we pile in.
We meet the driver.
He is fucked. On nothing more serious than dope, I think, but still. He takes off like a rocket in to the night, hitting 80 mph as soon as he's vaguely outside town (on country roads, mind). ALL of us tell him to slow down, which he does. For a bit. When we hit the motorway, the speedometer (a softly glowing pair of numbers in the centre of the dashboard) climbs to 90 mph. We shout. He slows.
We arrrive in Edinburgh almost before we set off, all glad to be alive.
A small tangle with directions, with everyone shouting to the driver to "go just down there" even though he can't see where anyone is pointing which is fine because everyone's pointing in different directions anyway.
We leave the car. The 5 of us have a group hug to celebrate our not being dead and decide, on balance, not to get back in the vehicle.
Then
MandalinRose looses her ticket, probably at the garage we stopped at to, you know, breathe a bit. We decide to go to the club anyway and see what we can do.
We get there. A man sells Mandalin a ticket for the bargain price of £16 (face value, bless him) and we are about to go in... when we realise we haven't checked in to the hostel and, consequently, will not have keys for it when we roll back at 5 in the morning.
It is now 11.00 and the gig is starting.
Mandalin and I leap in to a taxi and tear across town to Cowgate where she runs to the hostel while I bitch to the taxi driver about how contrary to plan the evening was going. Mandalin returns, and we race back to the club and go in. After queuing for half my life to put my coat somewhere, we hit the bar / start to dance.
And have, I must say, a FANTASTIC time. Dancy dancy. Couldn't get near the dance floor (heaving) but found ourself a place up on a sort of mezzanine. 2manydj's themselves were cool, as were the other dj's on the decks before and after.
A question: why did anyone bother making any more dance tracks after Josh Wink released Higher State of Consciousness? Where else is there to go?
Anyway, there were some small dramas after the gig ended, but let us not worry about those. Needless to say we did NOT drive back that night, but staggered home the following morning. Quick shower, straight in to work to be shouted at by my supervisor.
A whole other story that one.
Anyway. Barring the adventures en route, or even including them, I had an absolutely FANTASTIC evening. Oh yes.
Today I have an eye infection, which is very poorly timed indeed. Not to worry, I have eyedrops that'll clear it up by tonight. I insist.
Endorphins.
This week is going very, very well so far and I am very pleased. GRIN.
Ok, so this morning my supervisor went through the draft paper I gave him yesterday and took it apart a bit, but in a very nice constructive way. The one cloud on the horizon there is that I have to return to the data and grab more info from it. This is a problem because I cannot FOR THE LIFE OF ME remember where the rubbery fuck it is. All a bit embarrassing. As a bonus, however, my super thinks it's his fault because the computers all crashed a while back.
Disasters with data notwithstanding, I AM ON A ROLL. Much like ham and cheese. Only larger. And less edible. Sort of.
Have gone ALL domestic. Tidied the kitchen last night, the living room the night before that. That leaves my bedroom and it'll all be great.
I wrote a paper yesterday.
I'm sleeping well again.
And TONIGHT (oh tonight) I'm off to see
2manyDJs in Edinburgh tonight. Oh yes. Oh yes in-DEED. I shall be dancing myself into a state of mild euphoria, transcending both space AND time in a glorious sacrifice of my identity into the collective.
What fun it shall be.
Then I have to stagger back here tomorrow (after an overnight in a hostel) and meet with a new PhD student and try SOMEHOW to make sense. Oh god.
Anyway, I shall let you know how it goes.
BIG.
GRIN.
ON.
MY.
FACE.
yadda yadda
My supervisor is doing the rounds of the lab today. What with there being only 3 of us here, it's been quite intense. He has melted my head and forced my progress with the paper I'm writing at the moment into sudden retreat. Begin again, I think may have been the message. He was asking LabmateMike about spherical wavelet analysis or something. It's all go.
Not much else happening. Getting kind of excited about a few things, but I'll let you know about them as and when. Don't want to jinx anything.
There's the gig I'm going to on Thursday... but I think I'll save that for later.
No, that's it. How tedious. Think I'll go buy a book.
I think I need a holiday.
All I want to do is curl up somewhere and read
The Golden Gate . Sadly I cannot.
People do tend to complicate their lives, don't they?
Putting a shout out.
By the way. Anyone seen
this lady recently? She has vanished from cyberspace. Hello? HELLO?
Like shouting in to a hole.
Wading through treacle.
It's really perfectly simple, all I have to do is write a paper. I mean, I've done the research, I have results. People are excited by them...
Why, then, am I finding it so hard to knuckle down and WRITE up my results. One might have thought I'd be keen to see my work published. I mean, I am, obviously. It's just sitting down and GETTING the THING written. Sigh.
Anyway, I've told me superv that it'll be with him this week. At least a draft. And so it shall be done. It must be done. IT WILL BE DONE.
sigh.
Tidied my desk today. I can see formica and everything. Tis a miracle.
