feral
Right.
It's coming up for the end of my lease, so I have to move out of my flat. I have to move out of my flat next wednesday, in fact. This is a stressful situation at the best of times, made somewhat more problematic this time by the fact that I cannot move in to my new flat until July. So I'm going home for a bit.
What is causing me to want to cry at the moment is the state my flat is in and the fact that my flatmate fucked off to Berlin yesterday morning. No, he's not coming back. He's moved most of his stuff out, but has left me to clean what has undoubtedly become one of the most filthy places I have ever encountered. He left his notes all over the living room carpet, covered in academic scribblings and red wine. He left cigarette butts in a wine glass. He left rubbish all over his bedroom floor. He used pots and pans that I cleaned on sunday and left them festering in the sink.
I was kind of expecting it. In fact, I saw it happening. And I'm not the tidyiest of people myself, but I am being driven to the bad end of rage.
Ah well. I threw all his notes away yesterday.
It's the little victories that count.
mailathon
Well, the Powers that Beep have fixed the password lock on the postgrad societty's mailing list so people can no longer engage in recursive spamming. This is a shame, in my opinion. The emails "Re: take me off this list" kept on coming well in to last night and for this morning. As far as I can see, a group of asian students thought that the phrasing of the original "take me off this list, I don't want these emails" message was too, too beautiful to be wasted with but one transmission so took to copying and pasting that particular message in to their own. Joy. A few emails had just started to arrive extoling the wonders of receiving so many communications so regularly and how loved it was making some of us feel, my own favourite being the subversive "please keep me on this lovely list" message. Oh, and then there was the message mailed just to me (bless) explaining how the sender was confused and didn't have a list and maybe I should take it up with accomodation services.
Maybe I will, jb, maybe I will.
But now someone has fixed it and we can no longer mail eachother. I'm giving serious thought to grouping everyone together using the emails they sent me and group mailing everyone just to say how much I enjoyed working with them.
Ah well.
Suitmonkeys are here. Not wearing suits. Not technically monkeys either. But you get the idea.
Grist to the list.
So, there's a mailing list that allows all the postgrads here to mail eachother. It's kind of handy if you have something you need to tell everyone about (like a big postgrad event) or if you need something (like a home), but mostly it's fairly silly and is ignored by all.
Until today.
2, maybe 3 people emailed the list looking for somewhere to live for the summer, which is fair enough. Someone took exception to this, decided their inbox was too, too valuable to be frittered on this crap and emailed the whole list asking to be taken off the list, explaining that it was one to her whether her postrgraduate comrades had anywhere to live or not. Her email inspired others, who also emailed the list, asking to be removed. Then someone else got annoyed by ALL the emails she had received today from "students [she] does not even know" and demanded that the nonsense stop. Then someone else (who may or may not have been me) emailed asking to be taken off the list of people wanting to be taken off the list. Then the Director of Housing emailed the list saying that the list wasn't a housing list, and in any case emailing the list asking to be taken off the list was probably a fairly silly idea. Then someone else emailed asking us all to stop, in no uncertain terms. More and more emails keep flooding in. It's like some glorious snowball, running grimly down a hill. I'm hysterically glad to have been a part of it.
Intriguingly, speaking as a psychologist, I have noticed a sex difference in these mails. Those demonstrating a total lack of humour about the whole affair have been from female postgrads. The few from males have had a tone of wry amusment about them.
Ah well. Fucking postgrads, eh?
sit semper cum omnibus nobis
It's all go.
Our corporate sponsors want to see us next week, so the Lab is busy pullling amazing data out of its collective arse. It's worst for LabmateMike who has to submit a report on 4 years of work. All a bit stressful. Miriam's going to present findings which contradict stuff she found beforfe, Ian's got to build a presentation by tomorrow despite the fact that he's only just started gathering data. My presentation is somewhat chaotic at the moment, to put it mildly.
It breaks down like this: the MegaCorp that funds us has 2 wings; one in the UK one 'cross the pond in the US. I, for my own part, am funded by the US lot, as is Ian. Miriam and LbM have UK money. This means that Miriam and LbM have to journey down to Luton on Sunday night, present to UK businesstypes on Monday and come back up on Monday night to meet US suitmonkeys to whom Ian and I will be presenting.
Fascinating, no?
In any event, this whole scenario sees me desperately running regression after regression on skin texture data and correlating hormone levels with goddamn everything I can find. My supervisor has just handed me a different version of my dataset... and now something that used to work doesn't anymore... I might pretend I didn't notice.
Shit.
Tonight I'm off to watch Miriam beat the living shit out of a woman I have never met before. Never been to a boxing match before. I'll let you know how it goes.
Then we have a lab meeting at 9.00 tomorrow morning. Joy. Rapture.
Ah well... these stats aren't going to run themselves.
Laters.
