Work on the new site transfer has had to halt briefly to make way for flu, essays and term times. I promise, though, it'll be something that stretches me a little more creatively. I'm also researching a means to backup this whole endeavour in teenage dribbling somewhere, comments et al.

 

Why? Because I'm a narcissist.

 

Meanwhile, my worst essay yet looks the same as all my others so I assume it'll do pretty well and make me feel even more sick than the two litres of mucous I threw up before heading on back to Ebor and the 18th Century. There are two benefits to this viral incursion, though:

 

1) I am hardly ever hungry, I only need to eat to avoid getting light-headed. 

 

2) My cold relief capsules contain as much caffeine as a 500ml bottle of Coke, each.

 

So, aside from a trip to the Hebridean Wastelands (made of guaranteed moon rock, allegedly) and a forthcoming Open Air Art Exhibition in York that I am svengali-ing at (yep, it's THAT time of year again, folks) there isn't too much extraordinary to tell.

 

Or rather, there is, there always is a whole life of extraordinary to tell but I'm in no state to make it interesting to read.

 

 

Progress updates will ensue. 

Cynical family holiday reports incoming. Readers, assume the brace position.

The amount of sleep I garnered last night can be measured in femtoseconds, and not many of them. Later today, I plan to medicate myself into oblivion. Before then, though, there is a seminar to attend. Two hours of violent mental interrogation about texts I finished reading about six hours ago. So I caffeinate and hurl my carcass under alternately lukewarm an scalding water, drowning my locks in eucalyptus shampoo until it smells like a koala shat on my head. Shaving away days of mould, I notice about halfway through my ineffectual scraping that I've put the razor-head on back to front. The scales tell me I weigh a pound or two under nine stone. This could be an utter fabrication, though, since I stood on the scale display a while ago and was a maximum of six stone for a while. I sip the inner organs of beasts and fowl, going straight for as many fish finger sandwiches as I can stomach (six fingers, four sandwiches) before donning my apparel and armour. This (breakfast) is a treat.

 

Having faked my way through 75% of the seminar, gimmick by gimmick; glamour by precious glamour, I notice how green my veins look through my hands. Prominent but not royal. I begin to drift into this writing rather than into my answers to group queries This is a much better strategy than fading out of consciousness so as to only hear the start and end of every vocal response-curbs undesired ticks and ill humours (like crossing myself every time someone mentions Heath Ledger in relation to The Knight's Tale in relation to Chaucer).

 

And then Pearl and the Confessio Amantis are dead to me, ostensibly forever. 

 

Afterwards, blagging discounts in Thresher's and waiting for The Retreat Charity Shop to open so that I can buy a coat, it begins to rain and stain these papers. The irony of waiting in the rain to buy a rain coat is a little too much for the last obligated day of my term so I stumble home, touching the black beads on my wrists and desperately hoping por reposer. Next term will commence with an essay, probably concerning the anchoritic lifestyle or the Katherine Group and then will follow through with an incongruous bombardment of Irish poetry. As if I wasn't done with that twee bugger Yeats already. And I know my tutor, and I know she is not wise, nor terrible in any sense other that concerning that quality of her teaching. And I know it will be a wonderful struggle. And I know I shall outmanoeuvre and outflank and outpace and outer space her fairly easily. And I'm looking forward to it.

 

But until then, there's a holiday and a delicious number of physical chemical modifiers to indulge in, not least to mention the packet of 99.5% powdered caffeine I have in my pocket. I'm going to a volcano isle in the Atlantic and I am going to erect statues in my likeness and become the crazed magma deity of La Palma and subject all to my changeable and twitchy humours.

 

In between writing about medieval virgin martyrs and their masochistic tendencies towards burning, melting, flaying and horribly bleeding before gOD, the dom to their sub. Which, coincidentally, reads a lot like the potential title I will soon have to submit.

 

Life is good. Never let dour, polemic, insomniac miserablists like me come anywhere close to convincing you otherwise. Life is good. 

Two most interesting events of today (not that I'm complaining, since a boring life has made me good at essays and sleeping in):

 

1) Microsoft gets antitrusted by the European Union for 899 million euros, just as the euro attains record strength against the dollar, bringing total fines to €1.68 billion. This update is brought to you by wikipedia, a healthy sense of cynicism, and a hatred of Vista on the few instances I encounter it.

 

2) York has gone to the dogs in my absence.

 

-A car full of teenagers narrowly missed me with a water balloon on a bridge in town, thus increasing the river volume by half a litre and probably triggering another apocalypto-flood.

 

-Two twelve-year-olds were sharing a pack of cigarettes and kicking a bike to death on the pavement of my street as I re-entered the house.

 

-The house is now clean. AND tidy.

 

Frightening times, fellows, frightening times. 

I was discussing computers recently with a CompSci friend and produced the totally pretentious description that they were just complicated regurgitation machines. Instead of tearing my face off and feeding it into the disc drive of one of those obsolete behemoth techno-deities they almost certainly keep in a basement somewhere, he nodded sagely and sipped a glass of cranberry & blavod.

Except, I'm getting certain it isn't just computers. I used to be able to produce at least a modicum of intelligent and original sagacity to integrate or bury a seed of an idea underneath a midden of quotes from external and peer-assessed critical sources. However, since becoming a responsible and frighteningly capable adult-in-waiting, I've found this increasingly difficult: as I aim for higher and higher marks, ingenuity is getting squeezed further and further into the realm of regurgitation. Not that this is too much of a problem with this module, as a sizeable percentage of global critical sources are produced by the High Medieval Literature Department (with our tattooed eyebrow leader in her high troos and countryside-alliance-a-like jackets seemingly leading the field if our library is to be believed...so perhaps not), but I performed a mild experiment this week.

Following a wonderfully busy and frightfully packed week of (much desired, much required) social obligation and (less so desired) intellectual regurgitation, I had a week free to skip lightly through my reading and test a hypothesis.

The net result (as lab results and scientific data are as much an ennui hazard to write as they are to read) was the discovery that I tend to get ideas and function better mentally with reduced sleep and increased mental modifiers. Of course, there's the feeling that my limbs are slowly falling away from my body and the tendency to feel like my eyes are bleeding when I move from one temperature to another but aside from these I think better.

Or at least, I think I think I do. Faster and less lucidly, like an overclocked machine having some form of stack crash (or something equally jargon that I can't comprehend). I only function when I'm running on hot, and the insomnia is beginning to set in by itself without any encouragement. I have a tendency to babble incoherently, though, but I'm not even certain anyone else can discern that.

So, basically, this entire entry has been a means of convincing myself that insomnia is an amazing thing and that I should get back on the complex xanthines pronto.

Consider that a warning that came too late.

Aside from that, after a wobbly start, spring has finally set in for the albion outpost of Ebor. Literally, overday (like overnight but more visible) the lake thawed and the goodly deal of built up water-crystals vanished from every outdoor surface. In the morning, my sopping wet hair was frozen into fractal spirals. By the afternoon, I was itching from all the saline separating from my skin in even more moisture.

I'm beginning to think that dehydration is my natural destiny, especially when tequila makes my face feel filled with formaldehyde until the following Friday.

Thus begins my project of overnight thawing from rigid structures into fluid freedom. Until I figure out steam, I'll just have to submit to heading downhill.