Personal Blogs

I nearly set my dancing penguin on fire with an incense stick.  I'm glad I didn't.  He serves to remind me of a romantic time when Al would go off to the supermarket for bread, and return with an all-singing all-dancing cuddly penguin.  Long has it just been boring old bread, with not a penguin in sight.  Still, the penguin sits infront of the fireplace, or where ever the cats have most recently flung him to, and every few months, I flick the 'on' switch, and we have a little waddle.  Not today though.  I will however try to avoid leaving burning sticks under his belly.

I spent the day in Bristol yesterday, child minding.  Well, adult minding, but still.  It was good.  Hot.  Too hot.  We tried to feed the swans but were attacked by a gang of seagulls, acting together to strip the enemy of bread, and myself of my dignity.  We fled the scene, with me holding my hat to my head with one hand, and my other flailing out behind me gripping a half full bag of bread, whilst attempting to maintain the essential bond between wrist and hand.  I think it gave me a minor sprain.  The man I was caring for thought it to be the best thing since, well, sliced bread.  Pun not intended, but acknowledged.  As we made our way up towards a favoured market, I spotted an old man crumpled up in a doorway in a pile of empties.  A really strange feeling.  He used to sit in this town, always just on the edge of losing himself to drink, but never actually slipping off the edge.  He was interesting and friendly, and beardy.  I used to give him smokes most days on my way to work.  When I gave up smoking for a few months, as I was always prone to doing, I used to buy cigarettes just to give to him, as I somehow felt he would think I was lying if I said I had given up, after so many years.  Inevitably I would then smoke the rest of the pack at work, and so the cycle would be broken anyway.  About two years ago, he just wasn't there anymore.  Not there to smile to on the early mornings; not there to discuss, and usually share, in my latest foodstuff obsession, and not there to jokingly pretend to trip me over, when he had disappeared so far into a bush that I hadn't noticed him.  I sadly had to assume that he had passed away.  But without question that was him, passed out in an empty shop doorway in Bristol.  I walked past him three, four, five times and he didn't move.  Finally, after many hours, he woke, caught my eye, and I smiled at him.  Not a glimmer of recognition.  Not a glimmer of friendliness.  He turned away, swigged from a bottle and went back to sleep.  Left me with a funny hollow feeling.

Today I made minor scratches into the surface of my soon-to-be assignment inroads.  I will be launching a full attack in the very near future.  There is a minor difficulty in attaining full momentum in that I am awaiting a tutor response as to where to send it, and have been for ages.  The difficulty is, Friday is not a real deadline.  It is a self imposed one due to the fact that from Friday onwards I am back into birthday celebrations all the way through to the deadline, and will not have a moment to study.  I'm told due to the nature of the assignment - diagram utopia - it is better to post than to use the eTMA system.  I am loathe to put in the effort to finish by Friday, and then have nowhere to post it to.  The fact that I won't have any time to complete it if I don't is not featuring in my irritating anti-study head.  I need an address.

I told my mother the other day that part of the reason that I felt I had lost my study motivation was because all my friends are graduating.  And even they are graduating between five and ten years post typical age.  Yesterday a friend had her graduation, a few days previous another friend did, and a few weeks previous, another friend. The final study buddy has graduated technically but the ceremony is not until September.  My mother is now trying to be my study buddy and it's not really working out.  Because she isn't studying.  I don't know how to get this across to her, that the reason my friends are no longer my study buddies, is that they are no longer studying.  It seems fairly obvious to me, but I know when I try to explain obvious things to people, they often take offence.  So I'm just sort of going along with it for now.  Incidentally, study buddy does not mean studying together, for me anyway.  It means someone to phone for a drink when it all gets too much.  It means someone to text random obscenities to when calculations repetitively don't work.  It means someone to send sweets to in the post.  And most importantly, it means someone to celebrate with each and every time any one of us achieves anything; from a single assignment, to an exam, to a full blown graduation.  It does not mean phoning me up during the day to discuss the ins and outs of what I'm doing.  Actually I might just have to phone her back and explain.  Maybe she'll bring me some wine.  That's what I'll do.