revelation
I've been thinking about it and I've come to a conclusion.
Gayest. University. Ever.
Seriously. This town is insane. Being a straight girl round these parts must be a nightmare. Maybe it's something about being by the sea... all that fresh air. I dunno.
I mean, EVERYONE is gay. There are about 10 straight lads in the entire place. One of my close female friends has often commented how she didn't know ANY gay guys until she came to uni and now
all her male friends do blokes. From innocent to faghag in 3 easy years.
My flatmate's in a theatre thing. I was trying to remember the name of one of the other lads in it the other day and found the easiest way to do refer to him was "you know, the other straight guy apart from you"... fair enough I guess. Except that 2 nights ago the only other straight guy in the troup came out / on to my flatmate in a flurry of homosexual enthusiasm.
Not that I'm going to complain, obviously.
But still.
Gayest town ever. I'm telling you.
Distract the Gloom.
My supervisor has vanished off to edinburgh today. Not one of us is doing any work, with the possible exception of Andre the Intern who is using photoshop to manipulate people's gaze direction. LabmateMike is wandering aimlessly around the lab, trying desperately to avoid writing the report he has a week and a half to write, I think he's just finished reading someone else's thesis. I'm looking for things to buy on ebay (feeling spendy). I can't see what Ian's doing on his computer, but Miriam isn't even here.
In just under half an hour I have an appointment with the postgraduate tutor here to have a general chat about how mindcrashingly stressful my supervisor can be. I'm trying to get my thoughts together on that one... ah well.
Last night, I watched
Nightwatch. Yes I did. What EXCELLENT fun it is. Well done, crazy Russian peoples. Thoroughly enjoyed it, even if I lost track of exactly what was happening every now and then. Can't wait for the next chapter.
Of course, having watched the film, I now want to be an Other. I think I'd probably join Nightwatch if I had the chance... but then, I guess you never know.
It is, after all, easier for a man to destroy the light inside him than to defeat the darkness all around.
And vampires are awfully sexy.
See you in the Gloom...
je n'ai pas du pantalons
My life has begun to calm down again.
Actually, that's not entirely true. My life HAD begun to calm down until last Friday when I got a big list of ARSE from my supervisor. Actually 2 lists of arse. Given that my musical finished on Thursday night (and went very well, by the way) and that I had just started to relax on Friday morning (day off work with massive hangover, hoorah), my life was calm for about... 4 hours.
Yes well. In a week or so, we have to journey to sunny Luton (woo) to meet our corporate sponsors and WOW them with our science. Cue my supervisor descending once more in to bintness and mild panic. I've been running multiple regressions all morning. I now pronounce myself bored.
I've clippered my head again. I melted the grade 2 guard in the washing machine so had to use the grade 1. Shorter than it's ever been before. Weirdly, cutting off your hair seems to compel people to point out to you that "you have no hair". It's hard to know what to say to that. I've been oscillating between looking surprised and feeling my head in shock
and insisting that they are wrong, and look, look at my flowing locks!
I want a new watch.
Also I am thirsty and the water fountain still tastes of disinfectant.
Ah well.
I got a nice letter from the nice people at Maverick TV yesterday, thanking me for my input in to their tellyprogram. Bless them. Maybe they'll want more from me for the ALREADY COMISSIONED (woo) 4th series of 10 Years Younger. We can but hope.
How very random all this has been.
Ah well, as you were...
The inevitability of plaid
Hello.
My supervisor sent me a very rude email last week about my lack of productivity. I replied listing all the work I'd done getting experiments together and making sure the panicking undergraduates were ok with their projects, and then I submitted a piece of work to him, so he apologised yesterday. This does not alter the fact that I am more than somewhat concerned about my doctorate and all. The endless fun of my first year has paled somewhat with the realisation that I have no direction to my thesis. This problem was not helped by my supervisor pointing out to me that I have no direction to my thesis and saying that this was cause for concern. Well no, that's because I spent my first year letting theory wait on empirical data
like you told me to . You fuckstick.
Anyway, it's not all bad news. Little Shop of Horrors opens a week today. Have I mentioned that I'm in it? Heh. So I'll be singing my lungs out next tuesday-thursday. Laaaa.
Andandand I signed on the dotted for my flat next year! Wooo. Basement flat in a very nice part of town. Just me in it. Oh yes yes I think so. Of course I will have no money ever again, particularly this month because the deposit on the new flat plus rent on my exisiting place means I will have output 3 times the normal amount of rent. Hoorah.
My talk and poster have been accepted by HBES, so I'm off to Philadelphia in June for a conference. The rest of the lab is going too. Should be a giggle.
Anything else? Well, I'm hungover and very very thirsty.
Plus ca change.
memetic drift
So. Grabbed a meme from
Jess because I am trying to avoid work in all its forms despite the fact that my supervisor hates me and I have some writing to be done, thank you. Anyway, it looked like a laugh. So I did it.
List of books.
bold the ones you've read,
italicise the ones you might read at some point and
strikethrough ones you defintely won't. Mark any on your shelves with an *.
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown*
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger*
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams*
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald*
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger*
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman*
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller*
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell*
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
The Secret History - Donna Tartt*
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis
(Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides)
(Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell)
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Atonement - Ian McEwan
(The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Dune - Frank HerbertSense & Sensibility - Jane Austen
(Mrs. Mike - Benedict & Nancy Freedman)
(My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Piccoult)
The Illiad - Homer
(The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien)
(The Girls Guide to Hunting & Fishing - Melissa Banks)
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
Age of Iron - JM Coetzee
Existentialism and Human Emotions - Jean-Paul Sartre
In general keeping, here are a few books I think should be on the list, all of which I've read (obv):
The Diceman - Luke Reinhardt
Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
Pale FIre - Vladimir Nabokov
Rules of Attraction - Brett Easton Ellis
Vurt - Jeff Noon
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
The Talented Mr Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
I have to stop now because I want chocolate.
**EDIT: Ah, yes. Forgot to mention: brackets mean you've never heard of it. Ta
Andy.**
