Do you still think that way about me now?

...I've had a reminder tonight of exactly why I left academia. Writers' group was supposed to be holding a poetry writing workshop. It turned into part-lecture, part-tutorial about poetic theory, the nature of meaning and the audience-as-author, with a little bit of biographical/historicist material for good measure. Roland Barthes got mentioned >.< I was so angry; we did only two practical writing exercises, neither of which were particularly inspiring or interesting (one was that old "write one line and pass it on" chestnut) and ugh the woman just talked and talked and talked *rolls eyes*

At least it made me appreciate what my writers' group is usually like. Everybody is down-to-earth, talks like regular human beings, and is focused on the practicality of actually writing rather than this airy-fairy literary theory guff. So glad that I'm part of the Tuesday night group; the guy who brought up Barthes goes to the Monday night group and the others who go on Mondays also strike me as being prone to "academic" pretensions.

I hate organising travel. I hate trying to work out cheapest flights/most direct routes/availability of public transport/closest bus stops/coordinating timetables aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahh.

I also hate de-stoning. (For non-farming types, Dad's resowing some of our fields, but they're full of brick-size stones which have to be removed before the grass will grow. Guess who's been roped into the job all week. Oh the joy.)

I also hate spending all day on the internet without getting a chance to read my friends page, but after the day I've had, I can't be bothered tonight. Sorry.

I swear, feet, if you blister today again, I'll cut you off and trade you in for a new pair. I'm fast running out of plasters. Also, brain, how can I go to bed with Adam and the Ants' "Prince Charming" in my head and wake up with Green Day's "Holiday"?

And Penny, stop moving my food in the fridge. ( Rant ahead )

Thank goodness I'm moving out in September.

I hate getting up. Waking up's not great either, but the getting up is worse because you have to move. Life would be easier if I could go from awake to washed-dressed-and-breakfasted without having to do anything.

My clock's alarm has been strange since I came back. It doesn't sound the full alarm, just fractured bits of it. It sounds like the batteries are dying but it's still keeping perfect time. Yesterday morning it was back to normal and I thought the problem had fixed itself, but this morning, it does the fractured thing again. Mind you, it's not half as annoying now as it is when it's working. I have possibly the most irritating alarm in the world - fake, mechanical bird-twittering, followed by a plinky-plonky tune, and when I turn it off, it says, "Good morning!" in a ridiculously cheerful tone.

Swimming was fun yesterday. I got goggles ok, then discovered at pool-side that you had to wear a swimcap too. Luckily the nice lifeguard lent me one. I only did half-lengths; I'm not strong or fit enough to try full lengths, and since I'm not a good swimmer, I prefer to stay where my feet can touch the bottom. I didn't count how many I did - I can't be bothered with that - but I stayed about an hour and I spent most of that swimming up and down. I'm getting the whole exhale-underwater thing too, which was good because there was one guy near me who was splashing all over the place and would have given me a mouthful of water if I'd been keeping my head above water. I was thinking about going again today, but I got all my blister plasters washed off and had to replace them when I got home, so I decided against that.

I wonder if they make goggles with corrective lenses in them. One bad thing about going to the pool is I have to walk around not being able to see anything. Now if I could get goggles with the same lenses as my glasses in them, it'd be great.

And now, an apology. These last few entries have been pretty inane, I know. Not much happens in my life that's ripe for LiveJournal exploitation, but every time I come here, I feel like I ought to make a post, so for lack of anything better, you get a list of the banalities in my life.

Y'know, you would think, since the Wheel of Fortune was a popular image in the medieval world - painted in church murals, included in marginal illustrations in manuscripts, and generally used a good deal - that it would be a simple matter to find at least one of those images. You would think that you would even have few problems finding your preferred choice, which would include the labels of regnabo, regno, regnavi and sum sine regno at the appropriate points. You would think that when you have a whole library at your command, full of books, some of which are bound to have illustrations and plates included, you ought to have no trouble at all.

You would be wrong.

*

Looking at the responses generated by my desk grafitti, I feel disappointed. Rather than joining in the fun of (a) quoting song lyrics back at me or (b) guessing the songs and artists, they tell me that I'm "sad". *Sigh* I had hoped to bring something different to desk grafitti other than "Tick here if you're bored", "Fuck *insert object/person here*", "I wuz ere" and the sectarian bullshit that passes in this country for politics/culture. I had hoped that people in Queen's were not so scornful of someone having a bit of fun, that they might actually get the joke, or at least be interested. Meh. That'll teach me to have faith in humanity :P