No-one in the world ever gets what they want...

...and that is beautiful.

How do you believe that? Sure, it sounds good and philosophical, but in practice it sucks great big cock.

There is a hierarchy of what we want, I think. I could not for a second claim that I have nothing that I want. I have great friends and colleagues. I live in a great city that gives me plenty to do. I have my computers and my iPod and my books.

But I would give all of that up to have what I really want. Someone to come home to. Fucking pathetic, isn't it? I have a great talent for becoming far too emotionally engaged with people who, while they like me well enough, just don't feel the same way. Why-oh-why is this the case? Why-oh-why can I never settle for the people who do occasionally seem to be interested? Why can't I just lower my bloody ridiculous standards?

Right now, I could simply curl up and die and not feel that was a bad thing.

How long before you just stop bothering to get back up again?

The Joy of Tech

Everything is logged. I was going to go to sleep a few hours ago. Then I realised that Skype probably still has logs of all the chats I had with my ex. So I just searched them out and re-read them all. Now I'm feeling really happy and ready for a peaceful night's sleep. Except it's half past four in the a.m., so a night's sleep is out of the question anyway.

Today I was accused of evangelising. I wasn't, and no-one in their right mind would think that telling a story about an idiotic thing someone said in Church equals an attempt at forcible conversion. But it bothers me how upset I am at the accusation. I feel dirty, as though I've been accused of sexual molestation or something. I don't want to evangelise people. I don't want to spread the good news. I think Christianity has become an intellectual exercise for me. Knotty theological questions are just ways of keeping my brain active - what ingenious bullshit answer can I come up with this time? Plus I'm a junkie for love and attention, and God is the ultimate indulgent parent. Never mind plausibility, tell me that someone loves me and I'm theirs for life. Which is a problem when they change their mind, but God never changes his mind.

Though, as Shania Twain once said, "that won't keep me warm in the middle of the night".

Complaints

So. Technically, I earn £20 per hour for teaching. But that's per teaching hour. So, say I do an hour or two of preparation for a class of seven students. I then spend three hours marking their work. I've worked six hours for that £20, thus making my wage less than £3.50 an hour. So, I teach 5 hours a week (which is all I can manage while I try to finish my PhD - a full-time job in itself). This works out to more like 20 hours a week on average. After tax, that's about £75 a week. My rent is £115 a week. In the meantime, college authorities are threatening some kind of disciplinary measures for a £200 bill I can't pay for student services I didn't use. My mother's been ripped off by crappy builders and is having to repay for bad work. My Dad's quit his job. Perhaps only rich kids with family money are allowed to take the time to be academics these days.

My PhD. Well, what can I say? Except that it's a disaster area. I'm getting nothing done. I have to see a neurologist soon, as it appears I may have inherited my Dad's narcolepsy. If this hadn't been misdiagnosed for the past ten years or so, I might have finished my thesis before my funding ran out. But god forbid the NHS should be competent. The neurology appointment will have to be private, as NHS waiting times are silly and I need to get back to work very soon if I'm going to have any chance of having a job next academic year. In the meantime, on a bad day (often at the moment) I sleep maybe 14-18 hours a day. It's so fun.

On the bright side, my personal life is looking up.

Oh no, wait, I forgot... it isn't.

Sorry. Things are getting to me. And better I should complain to a blog no-one reads than a friend who'll be annoyed/depressed/wearied by my bad mood.

I emphasise that no-one reads this, so that when chance people stumble across it they don't think I'm writing all this stuff in the mistaken belief that it will entertain anyone :) It's just catharsis. With an emphasis on "arse".

Woo-hoo for Ubuntu!

May I encourage all you Windows users out there to switch to Linux? It's unbelievably cool. OK, so admittedly it's not as easy to set it up and get it working. But when you do... ah! The power and the glory shall all be yours. [Note to self: check whether that's blasphemous; rewrite if so.]

The prompt for my change (well, not so much a change, since my laptop will still also boot Windows) was the acquisition of a new ASUS Eee PC - a posthumous gift from my wonderful grandma. I must also recommend these very highly - they weigh less than a kilo, cost less than 200 pounds, and just work, straight out of the box. You need to play around with them if you want the standard desktop configuration, but that's easily done. And they ship with Linux (Xandros) installed.

So, after a taster of Linux via the Eee, I decided to take the plunge. All in all, it's probably taken me about ten hours' work to get everything up and running (including partitioning the hard drive, which involves a long time spent defragmenting). Most of that has been dedicated to the wireless card, something which Linux doesn't support hugely well. Still, now it's up and running and I'm quite delighted.

Now, all I have to do is learn regular expressions and the world is mine...

Revolutions

I just realised that I didn't post my New Year's resolutions.

1. Finish my doctorate. No, really. It's getting beyond a joke.
2. Publish something. Something academic, that is, not a poem in the school magazine.
3. Get a job. Preferably in America.
4. Find true love. This will probably have to be accomplished by getting a cat.
5. Make more monsters. It's been too long.

Do I need more than 5? I suppose the more there are, the better the chance that I will actually stick to one of them. Okay, let's add another:

6. Be obsessive about something, someone, or somewhere.

Which means that I'm already a whole sixth of the way towards keeping all of my New Year's resolutions for 2008. Hooray!

Palpitations

It's odd when the thing you were dreaming about but never thought would happen happens. And it's an anticlimax. At least it is when all it does is provide evidence of something you realise you didn't want to know about anyway.

OK, I had vodka and cocktails and I'm not too coherent.

But what I do want to tell you about is the book I'm reading. It's called A Game of Thrones and is utterly wonderful. I don't usually read fantasy fiction any more (apart from my annual rereading of LotR, of course) but my friend JZ recommended this one and I can never refuse him anything. And I'm so glad that I can't, because I'm completely hooked. The Americanisms grate just a little for me, but that's like complaining that Dickens is Victorian or that Shakespeare can't spell. Really, I would urge anyone who has even the remotest liking for dragons, wolves, swords and really brilliant plots to buy this right now. Here's an Amazon link to make it even easier. And here's one in case you're American. The rest of you benighted heathen can fend for yourselves.

How I am...

http://www.lefthandedtoons.com/139/ just about sums it up.

Or, did you ever look at a picture of a hibernating bear and think "yeah, I could do that"?

What is the sound of one person?

Why am I writing this when there's no one left to read it?

Who can pull me together if I can't do it myself?

Did I just revert to teenage angst AGAIN? Did I ever even abandon it?

Cartoons...

...are now at http://batsflewin.blogspot.com. Bow down in awe.

That is all.