And before I permanently close this exciting chapter of my life, I would just like to add…
[clears throat]
YYYYAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrgg
Thanks.
Moving on.
Do I even need to bore you with detailed recounts of the ongoing motives for this month of particularly slow blogging?
Last week we had deadline frenzy, this week was oral-presentation-and-written-exam semi-frenzy, next week is final apotheosis of exams and masters programs’ applications. By wednesday, I should be all done and back to regular blogging, assuming my computer hasn’t been turned into a smoldering pile of melted plastic by the giant bonfire I am planning to light in my courtyard, using all the paper currently littering my apartment as combustible.
Ever since and until then, I am all work, very little play, and practically no blog to speak of.
However, yesterday night, I exceptionally took a short break to conduct non-studying-related activities, the exact nature of which shall remain prudently nebulous, except perhaps to mention they bore no relations to soccer whatsoever, featured role-playing aerobics, high levels of cross-channel cheekiness and female-on-male wrestling. Also resulted in my voodoo pin doll finally making an appearance in downstairs’ neighbour special 5am collection (see about wrestling, and ensuing loud thumping noises, above) as well as getting up this morning with a worryingly purple-coloured, very broken-looking, middle toe (see about same).
Therefore, in the spirit of keeping things even with my time, I thought I’d take some to post a few scattered notes I just found this morning in a forgotten corner of my apartment, impaled on a dead rat with a sharpened stiletto heel. I reckon they might be my working notes from two weeks ago, during the finishing line of my first deadline grand slam. Do not worry if you don’t understand much, or anything at all: it might just be that you are a) slightly less psychotic than I at the time and b) somewhat below ‘pathetic’ in your general level of geekiness…
[omitting: various doodlings of dubious artistic values and possibly offensive graphic nature, certifiably random combinations of symbols not identified as meaningful in any human languages, text fragments dissolved beyond recognition by stains of what appears to be high-grade alcoholic beverages]
9:14 pm – Hmn. I wonder which month is today.
Oh my.
I think we have just entered official freak-out deadline rush season.
3:24 pm – Interesting fact about computer labs and thermodynamics: a balmy outdoors tropical-jungle temperature seems to turn into slightly uncomfortable bone-melting heat in rooms filled with two dozen cheap PCs running 24/7.
3:46 pm – Attempt to refurbish some of the older computers’ fan into more useful human-cooling activities thwarted by nosy sysadmin. Perhaps it’s time to get ssh going and work from home.
One step up from cheating googling up references for your university assignment:
Posting the entire project requirements to a few newsboards and wait for generous math-loving souls to do it all for you.
An idea that apparently befell a few of my classmates, a cursory Google query tells me. However: none of their gullible benefactors have so far made contributions to their cause of high enough value that they’d help mine (beggars can’t be choosers), so I guess I’ll stick with the initial plan, gear up for a few days without sleep and do it myself.
To the point: Now being the end of May, the end of May being apparently such a nice and round date, than it was deemed the ideal deadline for every single of my university projects, essays, assignments etc., me having as usual spent most of my recent times procrastinating or taking part in entirely unrelated activities…
Anyway, I’ll spare you a few extra steps of sweat and tears in the process, but the conclusion is: blogging will be slow this week… Sorry…
Team, we need differential diagnostic, NOW:
Patients #1, #2, #3 and #4 – a family – let’s call them the Lamiaceaes, were admitted in mid-April: sharing a rather small room, but healthy and showing no sign of infection. They were kept indoors and put on a steady diet of H2O, administered twice daily.
Within days following their admission, they showed signs of discomfort: all limbs progressively went numb, patients could no longer stand upright without assistance. Their health deteriorated exponentially over the course of a week. Finally, patients #1, #2 and #3 all underwent cardiac arrest, followed by acute dehydration, to be declared clinically dead on the seventh day after several failed attempts at resuscitation. Patient #4, youngest member of the family, entered a vegetative state but, in the end, miraculously survived: he emerged from his coma a few weeks later and has been making such an encouraging recovery ever since that doctors have allowed his relocation to the outdoor patio.
It was diagnosed at the time that overcrowding of their room, conjugated with possible lack of fresh air may have caused the sudden and unexpected death of all but one of the Lamiaceaes. Endemic condition or residual infection caught at their previous place of residence was not completely excluded, albeit impossible to prove and somewhat invalidated by the survival of the weakest family member.
Patient #5, whom we shall call Basil, a large-sized fully-grown adult, was admitted two days ago.
It’s noon Saturday. There is absolutely no food in the house, save for a very fat [slow] cat and ten pounds of high-end Parisian chocolate confectioneries…
Compete? Cooperate? Eat the cat?
E. is currently visiting and has retained my services as personal bodyguard and multi-purpose interpret.
Expect lighter-than-usual blogging while I’m busy scaling Parisian monuments and translating food menus into Japanese.
Traveling by train is a nice perk of European trips. Not the trains in themselves, least of all the companies that run them, but being able to hop from from one city’s downtown to the next, read a book, sleep, enjoy the landscape… all that on a budget blissfully unaffected by US imperators’ occasional fantasies of Persian campaigns and ensuing kerosene price variations…
France’s very own TGV, strikes non-withstanding, will take you from the center of Paris, to within sight of the Spanish border, in less than 5 hours.
Following advice from my therapist at the Internet Rehab Center, I opted for the old-school, not-so-high-speed, version of railroad travels, and crawled my way down the bucolic French countryside in about twice that time. Before departure, it took 20 minutes to the announcer, merely to recite the full list of stops along the way: a poem in its own right.
It may be the “most famous avenue in the world” (at least outside of the single-digit-as-name category), but trust me: whether visiting or residing, you have no business venturing anywhere near the Champs Elysées.
Of my previous residing years, I don’t remember ever setting a foot there in broad daylight. Even our recurrent late-night excursions to some of the ridiculously haughty Parisian nightclubs that seemed to flourish in the area were never an excuse to dally around. And neither should they be to you, unless you are a bored teenager making it your ambition to crash through as many bitchy door policies and crappy discopop tunes as humanly bearable in one night.
By day, it is an endless sea of tourists walking the avenue in either direction, past the alignment of prominent international luxury brand boutiques and much-less-prominent but no less expensive greasy food stalls. Shopping-wise, nothing you won’t get in a dozen other neighbourhoods or department stores in the city, and about as typically Parisian a sight as the Ku’damm, Omotesando or a dozen other similarly lined high-end avenues in the world. In fact, I am quite positive you will see less Japanese walking down Tokyo’s version of the Champs Elysées.
But it’s not all tourists and tourist traps.
A new minor Japanese deity is born and she specializes in keitais (Japanese cellphones)…
You may remember Tracey from her previous moblogging contributions to this blog. She is now flying her own colors and has started blogging about her cosmopolitan life in Tokyo and around, at keitaigoddess.com (on a theme beautifully designed by MJ)…
Go check it out now!
What better occasion than a charmingly rainy Spring Sunday afternoon to take care of a long due tidying-up of my blogroll (that list of blogs found under the Links tab above)…
In fact, it was mostly an occasion to crash on the couch, procrastinate all day and do some reading while nibbling on the relics of yesterday’s food orgy, but having accomplished one tangible task, no matter how trivial, gives me a faint sense of accomplishment and somewhat helps relieve the guilt.
First off, I finally ditched the “linkroll”, as you are all probably subscribed to the same dozen blogs I and everybody on the net goes to, to get their fix in “quirky” humorous pieces of web lore. Real links of interest will make it into posts of their own from now on. But anyway, I do suspect your first motive for visiting this blog is not to find the latest in kung-fu-fighting cat movies or dorky teenagers lip-syncing to cheesy eurodance.