Blogaroo

There is still some editing to be done, but I think I have the essay that is due in tomorrow under control. It isn’t exactly what I’d want it to be - which is a publishable quality masterpiece, of course - but it shouldn’t fail. Or at least it had better not fail, because if it does I will cry because it has been a complete pain to write. I have two more essays due in next week, one of which is mostly written and one of which hasn’t even been started yet (but should be relatively simple to do given that I’ve already done a presentation based on the paper it’s about). Then I am giving myself a few days break (and a great big nap) before starting on a corpus project.

Once that’s handed in I have almost a month to revise for my two exams in May. And then, assuming eveything goes okay, third year is over! Phew! I’m tired just writing that!

I’m finding university quite hard going at the moment, mostly because nothing has really grabbed me this semester. I don’t care about anything I’m learning - or attempting to learn, anyway! And before you ask - everyone always asks! - I don’t know what I’m doing once I finish. At long last I have a couple of ideas about directions I want to go in, but none of them really focus on my degree subject. Which is a good thing, because the only real jobs available for that are in academia, and I am SO not destined for that!

The first plan is to try to get some sort of summer job in a vaguely-related field (or just anywhere, really), just to have something to put on my CV to show “commitment”. And then I need to try to get through fourth year alive (dissertation, aargh!) before convincing someone to employ me. And if I were you I’d get to a betting shop and put a wager on, because the odds of that are low!

One of the things that drives me most crazy about my life is that my desk always looks like a hurricane hit it and then, just as it was starting to recover, a herd of elephants walked across it, throwing paper into the air as they passed. The idea of tidy, ordered, perfect rooms fills me with happiness, but in reality I can’t be trusted not to make a mess of anything. I get into clean elevators and by the time we get to the third floor the place is full of junk, with small children drowning in oceans of dust and paper.

It’s not that I don’t try to be tidy – I do, I really do – it’s just that I seem to have a biological need to make things messy. And it’s not that mess doesn’t bother me, because, if I’m honest, it stresses me out more than you I thought possible. It’s just that part of my brain doesn’t think about the things I could do right then and now to improve things.

Part of it, I am sure, is that I don’t live in the perfect clean palace that my head lives in. You know when they go back to the Grand Designs house just after they’re finished, and everything clean and white and stainless steel and slate and there’s no clutter and, despite the fact that there’s no evidence of it really living in the place, there’s a cat – a magic, moult-free cat – slinking around the place like it’s in a sofa advert? That’s the house my head lives in. And because I live in a cluttery flat, my head says what’s the point of trying? Who are you trying to impress? It’ll still look bad anyway.

But my desk is a constant problem. I’m a web designing student, I live at my desk. But between notes and bills and textbooks and to-do lists scribbled on everything I feel lost. I’m sure it affects the quality of what I do. But no matter how much I try to keep things under control, it controls me again within two days.

So here is my pledge of the week: tonight I am going to tidy my desk. And then I am going to tidy it up again every day. File things away every day. I want to be in control for once, and my desk seems like a good place to start. Well, until I’m showing Kevin McCloud round my brand new house, anyway.

Note: prepare for a backlog of “written offline” blog posts. I’ll backdate them to the correct day, don’t worry, they won’t attack you all at once. The internet has been flaky: Word, and free wireless for the price of a bottle of juice, are my friends!

Last night, following our mealtime Scrubs, we flicked through the channels. We always do this, and it’s almost always Top Gear on (Dave, do you want to consider showing something - anything - else?), but last night we ended up on Channel Five - who knew it was still alive, albeit in a rebranded Five style - and It Pays To Watch. Basic premise: change your bank, insurer and lunch and save some money. It’s a bit of a “no shit, Sherlock” situation, but one fact jumped out at me:

Times the price of one bottle of Coke by 250 - that’s how much your daily coke at work is really costing you. Admittedly, being a full-time student means I do way less days in uni than 250, but even a liberal estimate of 100 days (2 ten-week semesters, not including days spent slogging in the lab or library) means a quick, “oh, I’ll get a Coke Zero, that’ll wake me up” is costing me £85 a year.

Scary.

Working on the premise that you need to spend money to panic solve problems, I haded over ten of my finest British pounds to various chemists yesterday in a bid to solve two niggling - and not so niggling - problems.

The first problem is Migraine. These are new for me, and while I have a prescription medication for these, it doesn’t appear to be helping. Seduced by the advertising, I went looking for 4head Quickstrips (£4.99 for 8, so 1p cheaper for the same quantity of the Boots own brand alternative). If these help, I will let you know - and attempt to have them nominated for a Knighthood. These headaches need all the help they can get.

The other problem, the nigglier one of the two, is a generally feeling of irritation in my ears. After my sister kindly gave me an ear infection almost 10 years ago, I’ve had constant ear problems, infections and itchiness/irritation. After seeing Audiclean, an ear cleansing wash, on the shelves in Superdrug, I bought it in the hope it will help. It is essentially just purified seawater (so I could just take a few dips in the North Sea and save myself a fiver), but if it helps things feel better, I will sing the praises of it high and low!

It’s hard for me to spend out on unproven items, but I figure that if they even start to help, they’re worth it.

Call me deluded, but I always considered opticians to be well trained individuals. After all, my eyes are quite precious to me, and I trust them to the optician. So finding out, through an eye problem that is not healing (if you’re there, Karma Gods, I give money to charity and everything) that they don’t really seem to know what they’re talking about and that two different opticians in the same place are giving me strangely conflicting advice is unnerving.

The next step, if things don’t improve (and I don’t see how Optician2’s advie can help when it directly contradicts both Optician1’s advice and my own instinct) is to see my doctor, and then possibly change opticians. The worry is that different companies charge a lot more for my contact lenses, but if this problem doesn’t clear up I won’t be wearing contact lenses again anyway!

And in the meantime: ow, my eyes!