On Being An Unemployed Bum...

This morning I had my last exam, which I think went well, although I was finding that I was pretty tired. (I didn't sleep well last night, for no particularly good reason.) On the other hand, I'm now free, free as a bird (or will be until I find my next job) and it's quite disorientating. I'm thoroughly used to the idea of holidays having set time limits and for there to always be somewhere something that I need to be doing, and someplace that I need to be. Right now, I don't. I haven't been in this position since the first half of the 90s, when I had long hot summer holidays and afternoons of hanging out after school. I'll let you all know how it turns out.

In other news, I hate the Student Health Service with a white hot passion, and will henceforth attempt to fill out the numerous forms that go into applying for aegrotat only if I think I'm dying. It involves lots of fluffing around talking to people who tell you different information and make you hang around their office for ages and come in for multiple appointments in which you say pretty much the same thing all over again, but you have to turn up for the sake of their precious damn forms. Bah! (I had a cold last week for my last exam and applied for an Impaired Performance Certificate. I suspect now that my exam would have gone better if I hadn't been stressed out by all the fluffing around.)

Dear Diary...

On the weekend I went to NAAMA, one of the biggest re-enactment camps in the country.

There was hanging about:





There was fighting:



There was a fort:


Which was fun to play in:


But then we burned it down:


Also, I visited my sister Catherine and met Spider the Zombie Cat, who is missing much fur on his rear half, but is slowly growing it back under Cat's care:


(He's on stress leave from his previous home which had two noisy children and a dog. I suspect sometimes that he's pulling a Blighty to avoid having to go back.)

(I have more photos on Facebook for those who can see them.)

Last Essay.

All done and handed in.

I somehow managed to pick the three hour period of today in which the weather was soaking wet to swim into town to hand it in. I feel that the Gods of Academia are punishing me for my lateness or something. :-(

I Love The Smell Of Clean Washing In The Evening...

Particularly when it's been line dried on a nice sunny day like today.

As a study break, this evening I watched a movie called Music & Lyrics, which is light and silly and fun. It has a spoof 80s pop music video in it, but I feel they let the side down on that one. They just didn't get the hair big enough.

The Last Class

Today I had my last class as a BA undergraduate. It was oddly anti-climactic, actually, probably because I have some exams to get through before I cease to be a student altogether. Also, I have to work on my Last Essay, which is going to be about Janus, God of the Gates, which epithet I find aesthetically appealing given the timing.

Also today, I finally finished the dreadful Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence. It's very highly thought of, and I hate it bitterly. I only kept reading out of bloody-mindedness, and I feel that any book which requires you to read the first three chapters twice, the Introduction and look it up on Wikipedia before you have an idea of what's going on has some essential problems. That, and every now and then I felt like I was reading what the Eye of Argon could have been if Jim Theis had been able to spell. F'r'instance:

Gudrun was as if numbed in her mind by the sense of indomitable soft weight of the man, bearing down into the living body of the horse: the strong, indomitable thighs of the blond man clenching the palpitating body of the mare into pure control; a sort of soft white magnetic domination from the loins and thighs and calves, enclosing and encompassing the mare heavily into unutterable subordination, soft blood-subordination, terrible.
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love, (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2000), p113.

Note the use of the word 'loins.' It's Lawrence's favourite word, and I mean favourite, and I'll grant that many men have nice bottoms to look at, but if it's eye candy he's interested in, he could stand to give us a slightly broader view of men's other nice features also. Bah humbug.