I hate writing essays. I've spent the whole day staring at my computer screen, my eyes ache and it's a whole load of shite.

Why the hell am I doing post-grad again? I could be curling up on a sofa watching telly having worked a 9-5...

Oh right. That's why.

Do we remember that list I made a month or so ago? This list:

Where I'd Like to Be in Ten Years' Time

I would like to have
~Drunk absinthe in a bar in a crooked backwards alley in Prague; Budapest; Vienna; Tallinn, St. Petersburg
~finished a novel and be proud of it (not necessarily published, though that would be great)
~Lived in Vancouver for a year
~Had a torrid Romantic love affair
~Had a comfortable, secure love affair
~A cat and a 1920s typewriter and a view
~Lived a Bohemian lifestyle, if only for a few months one summertime - I want to plait my hair and wear flowing clothes and live just exactly for each moment as it passes
~Become an aunt and been a bridesmaid
~To be reconciled to my own limitations
~To command people's attention from a distance

Note the stricken entry :)

The last few weeks have been really weird. The last time I posted, I was at my lowest weight in three years, and I wasn't doing too great emotionally either. The strangest part was I wasn't even really really trying to lose weight - I was trying not to gain weight which is a very different idea. I'd just met this guy too, someone I'd known as departmental furniture for the three years of my undergrad but never really spoken to.

We've been together three weeks now, and I've never been so happy in my life.

It's scary really, and makes me feel vulnerable - how can my emotional stability depend so much on one person so quickly? And it's strange, I've known of him for years, but the Alex I knew in undergrad isn't my Alex. It's like I've got two versions of him in my mind, my impressions of him were so wrong and so different before.

This isn't to say that everything's completely hunky-dory just because I'm finally with a guy who isn't chomping at the bit to get away. I've been fairly stressed about the whole thing, mostly because I fell so hard for him so fast. Frankly, I think he's completely amazing and I've had this awful fear that somehow this is all a big practical joke or a hypnosis trick gone wrong, and one morning he's going to wake up, come to his senses, and dump me. And then I'll break into tiny pieces and this is all kinda pathetic considering it's only been three weeks but that's me.

Anyway, we talked about it yesterday and he said I'm being stupid and he isn't going anywhere so now I just have to convince myself to believe that of every girl on campus, he actually wants me. Strange idea.

Even stranger - now I'm 'off the market' it's all coming out. The cute guy at work I had that huge crush on? Has a crush on me too. Scottish guy on my course? Thinks I'm attractive. WTF is up with the universe?

A part of me can't help equating all of this with the weight-loss, which isn't a good thing. But at the same time, for the first time in I don't know how long - probably three years or more - I'm eating meals. Voluntarily. I have gained some weight, which I hate of course, but considering how much I lost in the week or two before Alex and I got together I'm trying to be ok with it.

Mostly I'm trying to be ok with a lot of things. I'm trying to reconcile myself to the fact that Alex thinks I'm beautiful. I'm trying to get it into my skull that when he talks about us three, four, six months down the line as still being an 'us', that he isn't just going for maximum pain impact when he leaves. And I'm really trying to believe that I deserve this.

"... there is a deep psychological identification of Balinese men with their cocks. The double entendre is intentional."

From Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight

I LOL'd. In the library extra-quiet room.

CLIFFORD GEERTZ ILU.

Well, the History department has no problems with the elective I want to take but I'm having a hell of a time getting hold of anyone in the department I want to take those credits in. My paperwork needs to be in Friday, but I'm working a thirteen-plus hour shift on Friday so I need to get it in tomorrow... I've got several hours where I'm going to go stake out campus buildings and make people talk to me.

On top of this, I went to pick up a repeat prescription for my asthma medication today - the stuff I have to take every morning and evening - and not only did the doctors surgery not have the right one; not only is this extremely important medicine not listed on my file as a repeatable prescription - oh no. It isn't listed at all. According to my doctors, they have never given me this drug and they won't give it to me again.

Good job I drill all my housemates on what medications I'm reliant upon, in case of an attack, huh? Nice to know that medical personnel have the right information to hand, right? How can they just lose information like that? They've given it to me twice in the last two months - how can they not know this?

I'm telling you guys, my level of stress at the moment is catastrophic. I swear I am literally twitching. So when that receptionist told me that I wasn't getting the medication that my body is reliant upon to function properly as if I was trying to wheedle meth out of her, I sorta... snapped.

I can be such a bitch when I need to be.

But I managed to get a nurse's appointment out of her for first thing tomorrow morning, and if she won't give me this stuff - if she just sits there with a blank look on her face or worse if she treats me like a moron, like I don't know what drugs I take four times a day, every day - I am not responsible for my actions. I can, and will, plead extenuating circumstances.

..I've also decided not to drive anywhere for the next few days. The way this week is going, who knows what's going to go wrong next?

Wow. I'm furious.

The fucking History department. The fuck crappy shitty bollocksing-

They've changed the course. MY course. All bloody summer they've been listing a set of courses available this year. I even went into the department to check they were the right courses and they told me they were. I chose to do this MA, to pay them to do this MA, because of those courses.

Of course they went and bloody well changed them. Everything I'm interested in, every single thing is missing. Two-thirds of the courses are on late twentieth century. I hate twentieth-century History. What the fuck am I doing here?

So now I get the joy of working my arse off on a course I don't even want to do, with options I don't even want to do.

Oh, and all the staff I wanted to work with, who specialise in the subject areas I wanted to specialise in - ALL OF THEM - are on leave. So there goes my dissertation.

Seriously, can I just go back to bed and start today over again?

....... SHIT.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is actually its end product, myth. ~ E.L. Doctorow.

I dislike the habit of grouping together academics based on their ages. Or, more specifically, I dislike being told I am a post-post-modernist. Maybe I am. But seriously? When a lecturer stands there and tells me that because I graduated in 2007 I must by default be a post-post-modernist I can't help but draw certain damning conclusions about the quality of his professional work.

I tend to write history from a psychological point of view, often focusing on types of sources that have been ejected from the historical archive as 'unworthy'. This doesn't win me many fans in the department but I'm of this strange opinion that anything can be a source, if you approach it the right way.

My housemate, Claire, who took the same course as me and graduated on the same day with the same degree classification, writes political history. She ploughs through big dusty tomes of books that tons of people have read before her, examines rhetoric and assigns motivation.

Our two brands of history could not be more different. Yet we're both supposedly post-post-modernist?

I've been doing some reading for the MA, ahead of meetings and things next week - turning over a new leaf, getting in ahead of the rush, dear god please someone give me a pHD scholarship, etc. The book I'm reading at the moment is actually really interesting, in a post-modern deconstructionalist kind of way. It's called Oedipus and the Devil by Lyndal Roper and it's about the effects of a literal belief in magic on cultural and social perceptions of gender and sexuality.

As a result of which, I think I'm starting to understand Joan Scott.

Scott was the woman, by the way, who I paraphrased as saying that gender was a social construct. Well, I don't have that book with me to double-check but going off Roper's assessment what deconstructionalism is really saying is that sexual difference is created through discourses of social behaviour and interaction - therefore it is founded in the historical and therefore it is something that can be changed. How cool is that idea? It's got its flaws of course, but seriously. How cool? This book is full of them. I read half a page and then sit there for ten minutes mulling it over and going, Wowwwwww.

An equally interesting side-branch of that theory is that, if gender as a recognised difference was created socially/culturally in the past, then theoretically as historians we should be able to find a supposed 'Golden Age' where these categories do not organise people's existence. Which is where the theory falls down, I think, and so where it makes me sad. Golden Ages of history, however they are couched up, always make me sad. It's so unnecessary.

So, since I am now partially understanding and quite interested and excited by some of the key theories based in deconstructionalism - maybe I am post-post-modern. Certainly, I do like to pick away at preconceived facts and, yes, deconstruct them and present a different viewpoint (come on, MA thesis, I'm so excited to write you!). But post-post-modernism as it's been explained to me is viewing every single historical 'fact' as something to be refuted. Taking theories back to their bare bones just wasn't enough because people then tried to rebuild them. This isn't how I remember my undergrad seminars being taught.

I think I'd rather agree with what my mentor, Simon, once told me. Like him, I write primarily social history. He called us 'the pariahs' of the department.

If I ever get anything academic published, I'm going to make them byline me as 'a pariah historian.' It's a pity when being Out Of Your Time means being twenty years too late.

and I had the amazing good luck to lose the right inhibitions instead of all the wrong ones.

( Outcome~ )

I've been trying to investigate whether weight loss could be having an impact on my asthma mostly because I'm just trying to find an explanation for why it should suddenly get so much worse but annoyingly, Google "asthma" and any variation on the idea of "weight-loss" and you just get a kajillion articles on how being obese makes asthma worse, and losing weight is always a good thing. Which is great but it doesn't really help me.

...I worry sometimes that because I tend to blog when I'm down and out about something, that people get the impression that I live this dark, depressed life in a vale of shadow and you know, it's really not true. I spend most of my time laughing, and yeah the eating stuff and the loneliness is always there but it isn't the most important bit. There are lots of great things in my life that don't have anything to do with my weight or my relationship ups-and-downs and I'm eternally grateful for them. I doubt myself a lot, but I think that's healthy. I've also always been super-ambitious and I'm determined that I won't look back in thirty years' time and regret as much as I do now looking back on the last ten years. My mother says she worries I'm going to live my life like It's a Wonderful Life, the film. I'm not. I'm going to live it like the phrase. I'm going to travel and write and meet people and fall in love and it's going to hurt and be terrifying and fabulous and envied.

In the spirit of which: Where I'd Like to Be in Ten Years' Time

I would like to have
~Drunk absinthe in a bar in a crooked backwards alley in Prague; Budapest; Vienna; Tallinn, St. Petersburg
~Have finished a novel and be proud of it (not necessarily published, though that would be great)
~Lived in Vancouver for a year
~Had a torrid Romantic love affair
~Had a comfortable, secure love affair
~Have a cat and a 1920s typewriter and a view
~Have lived a Bohemian lifestyle, if only for a few months one summertime - I want to plait my hair and wear flowing clothes and live just exactly for each moment as it passes
~Have become an aunt and been a bridesmaid
~To be reconciled to my own limitations
~To command people's attention from a distance

Where I Do Not Want to Be in Ten Years' Time can conveniently be summed up in one word...

~Suburbia.

What about you guys?

It's the darnedest thing. For weeks I've been watching new Smallville for the general hilarity. Bad writing, bad acting, and what is everyone's deal with Tom Welling anyway? He looks like a quarterback and that has never been my style. Call me the stereotypical indie chick. I like my boys tall, dark and skinny.

However, it's like... a contagion. Extended exposure and I've caught the bug. Last Sunday, I watched the new episode, laughing along except - I wasn't laughing any more. And forty-five minutes weren't enough. I went Youtubing, and then fic searching, and then I bought Season 1 of Ebay.

Today's my first day off work since I came down with this sickness and I've spent all day watching it. All. Day. And I already bid on season 2.

New fandom, guys. New fandom.

So. Any Smallvillers hereabouts? Any fic recs/author recs whatever? Smooshy Chloe/Clark for preference though I refuse to type the ship name.

Yes, I am aware that this fandom is full of incredible batshit insanity. Yes, I know I am about five years too late.

Oh. And Tom Welling is SO HOT

Today my housemate and I hypothesise that I am disappearing.

This is not a random idea - well, it is really rather random - but I mean, it isn't that we were sitting around watching Diagnosis Murder and thought, Hey, wouldn't it be cool if you were disappearing? Let's pretend! There is a reason. I promise.

Some point last week - days are hazy - I was intensely freaked out by my feet. This is nothing unusual; I am habitually freaked out by my feet, any feet in my eye-line, feet just outside my eyeline, feet which may one day rear up, scream, "Revolution!" and touch me. I just plain do not like feet. However, on this particular day I noticed that I could see every vein in my foot. Not just a couple of big ones on the top near my ankle - ALL OF THEM. Criss-crossing over and around the arch, tendrilling up into spikes at my toes, creeping around and across the soles. Like encroaching but necessary foot-ivy! I do have fairly bony feet and ankles, but this is a whole new level.

I was alarmed.

Luckily, my housemate understands me. She mocked me mercilessly and then threw chocolate at me and told me to eat more to hide them again.

However, today. Drying off after my late-morning shower, because today was my day off and I like to laze around and - ARM IVY! Seriously, guys, I have never been one for extremely visible veins. I used to have one that showed up darkish blue in the crease of my elbow and at my wrist. Just the one - Twinny has a tonne but not me! I am a normal person who keeps her blood safe and secure and under wraps. But not any more! Deep-scored blue lines down the middle and hatchings all down the sides, and up my hands (both sides!) and after twenty minutes throwing myself into artistically consumptive positions and calling for sal volatile the Disappearing Act occurred to us and it no longer seemed so very funny.

I have googled it, of course, as all good nervy hypochondriacs do and it appears I have several options, the most popular of which are:
(1)Pulmonary embolism
(2)Circulation problems
(3)Varicose veins.

Thing is, if I'd had a pulmonary embolism, wouldn't I be dead? And although I always have a LOT of trouble finding my own pulse, I'm fairly sure I'm still upright and sentient (mostly). I already know I have circulation problems so that's not exciting, but varicose veins is a horrid idea! They pull them out, like.... string from jelly (though why you would put string in jelly, I have no idea).

All in all, I think I'd rather disappear. Sure, I'd turn up to work and they wouldn't realise I was there but I could perve on the cute guy and no-one would know.

We consumptive invalids have to take our jollies where we can find 'em.

and to quote istele It still makes very little sense to me that the welfare of fake teenagers is so much more important than that of real ones.

Just when I thought the LJ team could not beat burr86's stupidity.

Also, FUCK YOU LJ.

Last day temping at the Jaguar Dealership Near Me. Someone had removed the enormous flower penises I had been so very distracted by yesterday, which I think means that someone in that office knows I was considering floral liberalism and flower porn and how different our world would be if we shared it with a race of flower-people (imagine the scandal!) rather than doing the photocopying. Dirty mindreaders. No-one was obviously avoiding me today, but several members of staff were inexplicably absent so the jury is still out on who is to blame.

New job tomorrow as a part-time manager of a shop in town. Please God don't let me burn it down, or get there, feel really awkward, and regale them with the flower penis story to 'break the ice'.

In other news, the N on my keyboard is totally crapped up. I've got to hit it 3 times to get it to work. Sounds trivial but it is actually the most annoying thing my computer has ever done to me, including the fact that it now routinely freezes and then won't let me back on the net.

...One of you guys once listed me somewhere as the most-BNF person you knew (I know, right?), do you remember? Whoever you were, silly you, because I'm now going to use my God-given right to demand that my flist (hereafter referred to as 'minions') buy me a new Mac. Oooh, actually, a ibook - TWO ibooks. Just, you know, in case...

ETA: To quote a good friend of mine JKR got pwnd

New InsaneJournal: Legseleven

Anyone with an IJ, please let me know so I can friend you over there, or go right ahead and friend me.

ETA Also GJ = legseleven cos I really like the name

So. I'm guessing we've all heard about Ponderosa and Elaboration?

Have we also all heard about the proposed fan-run alternatives to LJ (and commercial archives)? I know about fandom_flies, two_corpses and about Ponderosa's suggestions over on GJ. I know that astolat and chums is working on the archive side of things.

Personally I like Ponderosa's ideas best, but integrated journalling and archive, with RP facilities and all the rest has got to be years off. two_corpses is much closer - they're already beta-testing a site which at the moment looks verrrrrry much like Journalfen (www.scribblit.org)

But the reallllllly important question before I decide what I'm going to do is to ask you lot what you're thinking of doing?

Poll #1032973
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Will you stay or will you go?

If go, where will you go?

Because at the end of the day, that's the bugger about a community isn't it? I'm going to do what you all do. End of.

Harry Potter isn't the first literary obsession of my life. I'm very much a serial monogamist when it comes to authors, and when I was a child I attached myself to some very odd books.

There was the time when I was nine, and The Scarlet Pimpernel had to pried from my tear-dewed hands because we were going home and the book belonged to the holiday cottage. There was the book I found in Harwood Library (that font of literary prowess) about a girl who had her brain transplanted into a chimp. There was I Am David, a holocaust survivor book which so traumatized me that I barely stopped crying for two days, and afterwards my parents kept a much closer watch on what I checked out of the library.

You know that bit in You've Got Mail when Meg Ryan is talking about reading books as a child, and how they become part of your identity in a way that no other reading does? That line has always rung clear to me, in the same way that "So much of what I see reminds me of what I read in a book, when shouldn't it be the other way around?" is the mantra of my life, but a couple of days ago, it's profound truth became apparent to me.

See, one of the long-lost and very weird literary obsessions of my childhood was my love, adoration, worship of 84, Charing Cross Road. Allow me to set the scene....

I am about seven and on my summer holidays with my family. I don't know which holiday this was - I summise maybe Somerset. While I don't know where we were, though, the church is a crystal-clear image in my head. It was a sunny day, not boiling hot but bright white, and the trees around the graveyard were that spectacularly improbable shade of green you only get in high summer. There was a wooden gate with a little slate roof to it, and climbing flowers up one side. We hadn't meant to go there, we'd stopped off because my mum had seen a Summer Fete sign, and joy of joys, we got inside and there was a tombola! We all bought tickets, us kids, and I don't remember what the others won but I imagine it was the usual - bath oils, knitted toys, etc. But when my turn came, I can remember the book with its vivid yellow cover right at the top of the pile on the table being handed down to me, and I remember my mother saying she was sorry I hadn't got something better. And I remember reading the book cover-to-cover on the journey to our real destination. And then again the next day. And the next. And crying my heart out fit to burst each time I finished. And loving loving loving every single syllable.

The point to this post is this: 84 Charing Cross Road is the long-lost obsession of my childhood. For the longest time I forgot that book even existed (and I forced my parents to take us traipsing down Charing Cross Road when we went to London when I was 7 or 8, just so I could see the spot where the shop had once stood). I remembered quotes from it vaguely, but didn't know where I'd got them from.

Then the other day, the film made of the book, with Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins was on the telly. Mads yelled upstairs that it was on, and I should come and watch it and as soon as she said the name it all came flooding back and I screamed blue murder I was so excited. I told her everything I've just told you about my history with the book and then we sat down to watch it and at the end, she turned to look at me and said, "Dude, that book warped you. You are Helene."

It's true and kinda freaky. She lived the life I want for myself, loud-spoken and forceful, with a clackity-clack typewriter and walls covered in books. And the things that she writes about - my adoration of old books, the smell and the texture and my love of old fly-leafs and margin notes - my catch-phrases are all paraphrases of hers!

After I'd got over this shock of being quite a bi less original than I had thought, I got to wondering. I was a very prolific reader as a child but now I'm stuck wondering how much of what I am is me as I was born, and how much of me is ideas and images and phrases I've absorbed from all the thousands of books I've read in my life.

Nature versus nurture on a whole different level.

So, the moral of the story is burn the books
don't read to children
You've Got Mail is great cinema.


....ha, even I can't say that without laughing.

So, I've been officially asthmatic since I was about 15 or 16. It took me a couple of years of wheezing back and forth to the doctors for them to take me seriously though, so let's say I've been oxygenatedly-challenged since my early teens.

To my mind though, I've never been properly asthmatic. I mean, I've got friends who've got the whole blue-flashing-lights-to-casualty, oh-my-god-this-condition-can-actually-kill-you-instead-of-just-getting-you-out-of-P.E. thing going on. Me, I just take my inhalers every day, and get short of breath in smokey places or if I drink a lot of vodka.

In fact I always found being asthmatic kind of fun. Not in a Michael Hutchence sort of way, but because I figured that, what with the obligatory TB jabs and all, this was the closest thing I had to emulating Emily Bronte's consumptive downward spiral.

Let me tell you - consumptive pining is over-rated.

When I was in Prague, I caught a cold. Most of us did, there was one doing the student rounds just before we left. I thought I'd shaken it off, then I got another cold. And another. Eventually, I thought, Alex, it's summer. Possibly, this is the same cold. I was wrong. It was a chest infection.

Now, seven weeks, a course of antibiotics and hideously huge amounts of steroids later and guess what? I'm still down a quarter of my lung capacity. And asthma really isn't fun anymore.

Somehow it's only just sinking in to my brain now, as I sit on the couch and gasp for breath every couple of minutes, that asthma means my body is failing in one of its most fundamental functions. My lungs aren't working properly, I am not breathing properly. And it isn't because there's something invading me and disrupting stuff - my own body is trying to stop itself from working.

It's scary. I'm only 21 and I have a similar lung capacity to my fifty-odd-year-old parents. Only mine's worse. I can't climb the stairs without being horrifyingly out of breath. It takes me three times as long to walk anywhere. And once again in an unwanted deja vu, the doctors are not taking me seriously. I'm supposed to be going to Leeds Festival in a month. I've got a new job as part of the management team of a shop. I've got trips planned, and one of my oldest school friends is getting married and eclipsing all of this is the fact that I can't breathe. One second does not go by when I am not horribly aware that I can't breathe. I went to a gig the other week and nearly fainted in the crowd. I had a mini-asthma attack driving down the M62 (want to put more a thrill into driving at 70 miles an hour?). I cannot live like this.

I went to the doctor the other day. She told me to monitor my peak flow and go back in two weeks. Does she honestly think that, when I'm gasping from breath, I'm not monitoring my peak flow? It's down almost 100 since April.

I came out of the surgery and cried.

Very quick update to give news, and offer advice.

1. Holy crap I passed my degree! I GOT A 2.1, which, for all the people who don't understand the English degree classification system is good. It's what I needed to do the History M.A., and for my Barbados "Island Mentality" essay I got 77%, and I was only 2% off a First and when I saw the results I've never switched from vomiticious whiteness to teary happiness so fast!

2. Gradball was AWESOME. I was there for 11 hours, didn't get home till 5am and have a total blast. Really fabulous. I have pictures, but I can't be bothered transferring them from Facebook to Photobucket to here so - I was wearing the black Kate Moss dress, from Topshop. And I had purple knees because...

2a. Dodgems are not made for people with three feet of leg. In fact, dodgems are incredibly damaging to people with three feet of leg. Bruises are still a strange, speckly purpley-blue and I looked like I'd fallen down all three flights of stairs at the Racecourse. Kind of spoiled the glamourous image I was going for but hey, this is me we're talking about. When am I ever anything other than slapdash, last minute and hopelessly unsophisticated?

2b. Anyone who gets the chance to see Ash live, go for it. They played the Gradball and yes, I am biased because I love them but they were really pretty good. Better than pretty good. On the sliding scale of gig awesomeness I'd put them between Exceptional and Amazing. I wasn't amazed, but I jumped up and down, in heels (!!) for 45 minutes.

Yes, I wore heels.

3. New house. Pretty house. Feels like a holiday cottage house. I don't think it will quite sink in that we've left the Grove and the other girls aren't coming back again in October. Maybe in October it will be more clear to me that most people aren't coming back, and most people, I will never see again in my life.

Weird thought.

[Unassociated Aside]
The Waterstones in York is having a Potter Party, and all the tickets have sold out. Also I'm bleeding money and terminally unemployed, so no London trip. To console ourselves, me and Moopy are going to throw our own Potter Party.... and it's going to be the best of them all.

THE BEST.

Done now. ♥

Prague. Wow. WOW. To paraphrase Bill Bryson, if you haven't been, go now! Take my car! It's wonderful.

I love it. I don't think I've ever loved a city I haven't actually lived in as much as I love Prague. And that's even with the general rudeness of the waiting staff and the most overt sleaze we have ever encountered (including Italy and Greece). I want to learn Czech and buy an apartment and move there and drink lots of Czech absinthe in pokey wood-filled Czech bars and read Kafka on the green of Petrin Hill, and buy my clothes from the rabbit-warren shops down Michalska, and go clubbing next to the river and leave to watch the sun rise over the Charles bridge.

Of course, as the girls pointed out, I also want to re-enact Bohemia in Barcelona, Strasburg, York and Somewhere, Canada. Maybe I can be a nomadic Bohemian revolutionary, with a collapsible typewriter in my knapsack.

A girl can dream.

I'm not going to do a travel entry of the whys and wherefores with times and dates and descriptions but just give a general impression of the trip. And seen as a picture speaks a thousand words (and I'm lazy) here is

( Prague in Three Days in 11 Pictures )

So, my life as we all know it is over. Sounds so emo but seriously, it's true - my primary label is nomore. Studentship is ended, or at least, undergraduate studentship. I spent the tail-end of last week at my parents' and seen as they keep nursery hours, a couple of hours a nightI succumbed to the nausea of OH GOD WHAT IF I'VE FAILED. Generally, I'm quite good at not thinking about things like that because there's nothing I can do one way or the other now, but now that I can't do anything about the outcome I find myself wishing more and more that I'd done more when it would have made a difference.

Such is life.

In celebration of the end of my degree, I've spent several days apparently attempting to expel my liver through my mouth. One last fling before I grow up (though I'm seriously doubting that will ever happen - my mother says that she still thinks she's 23 and looking in the mirror is a great shock...my nan agrees. There is no hope for me).

After my liver gallantly defended its thoraxical position against all entreaties to the contrary I decided that some bodypart at least should go. So I behove myself to the hairdressers and lopped off my hair. Shortest I've ever had it, and quite a shock but great for the hot weather, piss-easy to style and people seem to like it. So far so good.

Spent a couple of days at the parentals cos I had to go see my doctor. Joy of joys, blood tests and ultrasound tests abound. If they find a heartbeat, it'd better be mine. My mum took a day of work to spend it with me which was nice, and made me feel guilty because she feels like she needs to do that in order to see me, and was ... uncomfortable, in places. For a family that talks so much, we don't tend to talk about very much - Thursday was the first time my mum referred to my weight problems in first year. Apparently she's fearing a relapse. So am I, but the very fact that I'm fearing it means it won't happen. I think.

To reassure herself she took me to Slatterys in the Whitefield area of Manchester, which is an enormous treat. I had sascha torte and hot chocolate and a mini-orgasm, and expounded on the internet socialisation. They like to take an interest, my parents.

Now I'm back in York and suddenly it feels as though everything is slipping away. June is our last month in this house and it's already the 10th, and even though I'm staying and I know loads of people are staying and so on still, this house is like a security blanket and I'm not relishing having it pulled out of my grasp. It makes me wonder, will I ever face up to real life voluntarily, do we think?

Off to Prague on Monday for a few days' jaunt, and then hopefully I'll be settling into my new house and new jobs and earning some money for next year. Hopefully this summer will be lots of fun (I'm still unsure about London, but the finances are making it doubtful). But I'm definitely going to be at Leeds, and then in September one of my best friends is getting married (HOLY SHIT!) so that'll be great fun.

I have no idea why I've written this enormous entry. Seemed like a good idea at the start. Of course, at the start it was going to be a five-point list.

Not that I don't think all the GnHers on my flist have already got bookshop friended or whatever, but that is the middle of my week of freedom between the end of finals and going to Prague and fic would be fun!

Also, have not forgotten about that fic questionnaire I stuck up a while ago, and fic will be forthcoming, post-examinations and post-post-examination piss-ups.

Wish me luck for tomorrow, you guys and keep your fingers crossed - I suspect I may need it.

It's just occurred to me that if I fail my degree, it isn't just going to bugger up next year. So I won't get to do an MA I'm not amazingly hot on anyway, big deal. And council tax is a third of the tuition fees. And it isn't just going to mean I've wasted a load of my parents' money, and disappointed them, and disappointed my family and my friends.

If I fail my degree, I will never escape it. This is the rest of my life we're talking about here. This is every application form I ever fill out, every job I lust after.

Crapsticks.

Of course the real problem here is that, having thought this, the little Fee Verte in my head is whispering that it doesn't matter, because if I fail I can simply concentrate on being a true Bohemian revolutionary, live in a garret, rattle away at a rusting typewriter and then die a Romantic death from consumption at the age of 32.

A century late.

Double crapsticks.