Do you still think that way about me now?

Just witnessed a political struggle between the School of Philosophy and the School of English for the right to claim methodological soundness and the correct form of truth-telling. The philosopher was rather outgunned, seeing as it was a School of English seminar. We could have shot him down by mentioning that philosophical discourse can be proved to be just as "fictive" in its form as any novel; I would also have drawn on Foucault to argue that the status of "methodological soundness" granted to certain forms of discursive practice is dependent on the episteme of their historical context rather than any objective standard - after all, alchemy and the theory of the humours were once deemed methodologically sound. As it was, someone mentioned Plato's Republic. That shut him up.

...You see, this is what I mean by pretension.

( Book meme )

---

Spirited Away. My first anime. I liken.

I have discovered that when my TV/video starts to go wonky with rented tapes, fast-forwarding and then rewinding with the picture up fixes the whole thing. Anyone able to shed some insight on that?

Especially temporary only-going-to-be-here-two-months moving. A lot of stuff is still packed, to be moved to my university accommodation in September. The kitchen needs an extractor fan and more cupboards. We're still puzzling over how the showers work. There's a stale smell in the bathroom, and downstairs shower/toilet. I'm not sure what belongs to whom, because the people who will be living in it have left a lot of their stuff about. We only got oil this afternoon. I need to get a TV licence. We can't receive Channel 5. And it feels odd, living in such a large house with so many stairs and blank cream walls.

But I'm settling in. I'd become used to Ulsterville, which was much more homely than rental properties for students usually are.

My bedroom is absolutely enormous! I keep thinking that there must be a better way to make use of this space, and trying to re-imagine the layout. That's what comes of watching too many property shows.

Between the trauma of differentiation and the furor of moving, my PhD work has been abandoned, and instead I have been devouring novels. One nearly every day, which means I'm reading till 2, 3 o'clock in the morning, because I am stupid and can't make myself stop. Let's see, I've read:

Lost in a Good Book - Jasper Fforde (only kind of half-counts because I'd started it a while ago and was about half-way through)
Bitten; Stolen; Dime Store Magic - Kelley Armstrong
The Street Lawyer - John Grisham (my first Grisham! Probably my only Grisham; I really enjoyed it but it didn't make me interested in the rest of his stuff)

So that's five, four and a half books since *squints* last Sunday. Taking into account that I was moving on Tuesday and Wednesday, went out with Philip on Thursday, and was home from Friday till yesterday afternoon... that leaves me Sunday, Monday and last night. Ok, so I think I also read on Tuesday during the day, and might have finished off Dime Store Magic on Wednesday night, but that's still intensive reading.

Now if only I could read my PhD stuff as easily...

( Meme-age )

And all I got was a T-shirt and a neon yellow coat with a pointless compartment at the ass, which none of us could work out what it was for.

Before you ask if I ran the Marathon: ROFLAMO NO!!!! And if you thought that, clearly you don't know me that well. :)

No, I was a Race Official. And I have the coat and T-shirt to prove it! I handed out cups of water to the runners/relayers/walkers, and I was pretty damn good at it, if I do say so myself. If it wasn't a voluntary position, I might consider making a career out of it. Belfast Council called Joanna in on a favour; they gave her money for her football competition (soccer, that is, to you Americans, who think football is something you play with your hands), and in turn they wanted her to get a team together for a water station. So yesterday I was up at a quarter-to-eight (soooo early! *dies off*) and off to the Winemark on Stockman's Lane (unfortunately shut for most of our stint there), to enjoy the delights of orange buckets, green gloves, and the sight of some 6000 people all running at me at once (ahhhhh!!!).

Och, it was fun, a great laugh. It took me a while to get used to the hand-over technique; I screwed up several times near the beginning (which means I screwed up with the "serious athletes", oh crap O.o) and the cups just spilled all over the ground, but then I started getting really rather good. Several of my hand-offs were so smooth, the water barely juddered in the cups *looks smug*. The weather was good, thankfully. We did have two rain showers, one before the race and one during. The first shower, we sat in the cars and let it blow over, and the second was over pretty quickly, besides which we were all too busy with the mass of runners coming past us to pay much attention. I also roped in two random children to help - well, they volunteered and I told them to go ahead. I was posted at the last table so I had a pretty easy time of it. Poor Joanna and Jennifer get everyone coming at them at once.

The only bad result is that my left shoulder blade doesn't like me now.

*

Buying The Well of Lost Plots has reawakened my book-buying compulsion. I've just been to Waterstones, and purchased:

Sunshine Robin McKinley
Only Forward Michael Marshall Smith
One of Us as above
The War of the Flowers Tad Williams
Perdido Street Station China Mieville (first e has an accent on it)
also The Blue Day Book Bradley Trevor Greive

I have no idea where I'm going to put them. My book drawer is full.

I've been feeling really creative recently, like the storytelling in me is bursting out at the seams. Delaying it and putting it aside only makes it more impatient. The flood gates opened last week when I indulged myself in a little media res writing before going to bed. I didn't get to bed until 5am. And for a piece of writing that wasn't supposed to be anything but a snippet, coming from nothing and leading nowhere, I now have so many ideas for continuing it into almost a proper story, and am constantly revising one scene which I've already written. Gah! I need more hours in the day!

::Edit:: What the heck is going on with LJ's typeface? It keeps changing to Helvetia. O.O

::Edit 2:: WHY WON'T LJ PUT IN MY PARAGRAPH BREAKS ARRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH????????

::Edit 3:: *Discovers that, for some reason, LJ thinks she doesn't want auto-formatting and corrects that mistake*

::Edit 4:: That's better now!

( This involves RL people that nobody here knows )

( Birthdays and other situations of stress )

So that was yesterday, and I got all my TV shows safely taped (thank you Ruth!), and today, I just worked.

Oh yeah, I was trying to get one of those cartoony icon-things that all the world and his wife have, cos I figured, "Hey, it'll be easy!" But no. Not easy. The image loaded as bitmap and I have no idea how to put it into jpeg; I couldn't figure out how to resize the image to the 100x100 frame; hell, it took me about 5 minutes to work out how to get rid of the rest of the images to leave me with just the face >.<

I'm so computer-illiterate.

My cartoon was cute, too :(

Edit: Hi nefermoon! :)

G-Strings and Sympathy: Strip Club Regulars and Male Desire.

Now why can't I think of a title like that? :P

*

On a completely random note, this morning I woke up with Space's "Our Neighbourhood" in my head. This evening, it is "Rest In Peace" from the soundtrack of the Buffy musical episode.