Another Pair Of Eyes

Coincidence

Recently, one of my flatmates moved out. I say recently because that is when she made it official, but in truth she’s been moved out for quite some time. In fact, if I’m 100% honest, she started moving out about a week after she moved in. It’s a pity really – I think she found it difficult to integrate and seemed to be doing a lot more work than was necessary, never came out of her room when she was in and then spent half (progressing to all) of her time at home.

Another reason not to live too near to home. Anyway, another story.

Today our new flatmate moved in, having changed rooms due to all kinds of unpleasantness in her old flat. Late, but not too late to recover a bit prior to exams. The reason that this is eminently bloggable is as follows: out of the 5000 first years at this university, the one who needs to move and moves into this flat is someone I went to college with for two years.

I am mindblown by the size of this coincidence. I don’t think I’ve been this surprised for years. Inexplicably pleased though.

Quality

You regularly hear people complaining that things just “aren’t what they used to be.” In some cases this is true, in some not, but it is definitely the case with a broad swathe of consumer goods. Especially, it seems, mobile phones.

I am one of those who was blessed with one of the Nokias which was the first really popular phone about. Can’t remember what particular 4-digit number the model was named with (I’m VERY glad they’re beginning to stop that with the N-series. It just made every Nokia sound the indistinguishable from every other one ever created), but it was the one with the aerial and was fairly…solid. It would withstand anything – I heard from people who’d dropped, flooded, immersed, thrown, flushed, sparked, run over and even boiled (albeit for a short time) their handsets and they were still functioning. One of those phones would last you years, and indeed I believe that my old handset still worked fine in the hands of my grandmother until her death a couple of years back. I don’t know where it is now, or whether it still works, but I’m confident that if it were accessible by me it would still function.

New phones do not have this ability. I’ve not had a phone last more than a year since that one, and to be perfectly honest the vast majority don’t last 8 months before faults start developing. My current phone, a Samsung U600, has a huge variety of malaises, from sticky buttons to a screen that mostly doesn’t work, or appears in any combination of negative colours, upside down/back to front and split in half. Sure, it’s got a camera and an mp3 player, but I own a camera and an mp3 player for those purposes and the battery life on this phone is so poor anyway that attempting to use these functions would reduce my battery life to minutes. My phone is 7 months old. Asking the guy in the shop, he said that he’d only expect a phone to last about a year. Not impressive.

I’m going to have to get another one, an expense I can really do without, however good the deal is. Unfortunately, my phone is the only method of contact I have at university outside of my room and I can’t really get by without one – it’s my link to home and friends outside of uni which would be gone in the near future when the screen finally packs up 100% of the time.

Downtime

In the last 24 hours I have:

• Played 94 minutes of badminton
• Written notes on 32 lecture slides
• Consumed 8 units of alcohol
• Slept for 7.5 hours
• Watched 6 episodes of Eureka
• Played 4 games of pool
• Walked 3.8km
• Eaten 3 double chocolate doughnuts
• Written 3 blog entries
• Received 2 text messages
• Cooked 1 meal
• Stared into space for 1 hour

And despite all that, I achieved nothing.

Nothing at all.

Spelling

I was having a chat with a certain blogger earlier, and she said how she kept mixing letters up in words and misspelling things. Putting letters in the wrong order, or putting the first letter of the next word on the end of the word before, or similar textual misdemeanours.

Question is, how many of you have found that this seems to be happening a lot more then, say, it did when you were sixteen? I certainly note that I regularly make errors mixing up letters or, most often in my case, throwing in apostrophes and the wrong type of your/you’re or there/their/they’re into sentences. Is this laziness, or an increased recognition of when mistakes are made, or just some kind of age-related writing issue (I hope not – I think the huge majority of readers of this blog are a far cry from their 30s even, let alone anywhere near the sorts of age you’d expect loss of skills).

Or maybe it’s just myself and an anonymous girl who never has to write again =P. Who knows?

Awkward

Awkwardness is an odd phenomonon, if you think about it. Nobody likes things to be awkward, but the main reason that anyone is ever awkward is because they feel that a given situation ought to be. It’s self-created mess and it also becomes self-propagating: once you start being awkward it tends to continue as both sides perceive that distinct feeling of being forced and ill-at-ease to grow. And so on, and so forth.

I just told someone that something wasn’t going to be awkward, and if I’m honest I don’t believe it will be. However, the thing with awkwardness is that it doesn’t take two to tango, so hopefully that’ll be a bilateral awk-free zone (anyone know the stem of awkward off-hand? Is ‘awk’ a valid guess?). Although uncomfortable silences are dead handy to get a patient to tell you more (stay quiet long enough and they will tell you further information – it’s actually quite difficult to learn to let the silence stretch because politeness says you should bail them out), I’d rather these patches of unhappy stillness didn’t exist amongst my friends.

Reporting

This is reporting.

I know people will argue that tracking him detracted from the aid effort. The aid effort provided by the junta is massively insufficient, however, and without knowledge of this brought to the outside world the chance of change occurring becomes ever more slim. Unless the relent, more people will die and this is one of the chances at changing the junta’s stance. Which is preferable to the other possibility, invoked by news that another cyclone may be forming off the coast.

The man deserves a medal, as do his producer and cameraman. I’ve never seen the BBC in a more positive light than today.

Summer!

The last weekend has been brilliant. Long, sunny days, BBQs on the grass by halls, frisbee, fancy dress mixed netball tournaments, even the mini-music festival (which was pretty mundane really even after the departure of the Christian ‘rock’ band, but got people out of their flats to lie about outside).

All in all, I had a great few days. The only shadow on the sunshine was the looming essay, and I sat down on a number of occasions with the full intent of completing it. I tried:

• On friday, but got invited out to Jesters with some friends and having not been out for a couple of weeks, went for it and had a great time.
• On saturday afternoon, but ended up at badminton instead, saying I’d not go to badminton the day after and do it.
• On saturday evening, but there were a whole bunch of friends outside my window with a frisbee.
• Over sunday, with the time I gained from not going to badminton. Jo needed another team-mate for her fancy-dress mixed netball tournament*, and I spent the day dressed as a dwarf playing netball.
• Finally, on sunday night, when I got invited to a BBQ (there was a very good reason for me to be there) and then ended up on a picnic bench until midnight talking about the balance between academic success and social skills, religion, and some lightweight ‘social news’ (because gossip is for girls =P)

So, I’m, going to do my essay tonight. No buts. I’ll relay the failures and the numerous, doubtless extremely good, reasons why I failed tomorrow…

*Netball. I never appreciated just how much work this game is, especially on a sports ground at midday wearing a dwarf outfit. It’s actually a very fast game and I have a newfound respect for netball players! We came last of the last as half our team had never played before, but we did win the fancy dress prize jointly with Team Pacman, whose captain is shown below =)