Now we're the other side of midnight, the date is the 27th of March 2009.

My dissertation deadline is 27th April. 11000 words in 31 days, count them (I actually have roughly half the word count but would barely count 10% of it as finished product).

It's actually quite exciting. I basically have 2 months to make it all count, and tomorrow is day 1.

This week I have been realising that death isn't just natural, it's important. We can't function, with our constant need to begin, without also a way for things to end.

I had a dream last night that I think was about cancer. This afternoon I realised the significance (on an airy, melodramatic, pop-literature level) of what lecturers have been telling me for 18 months: cancer is not an invader that comes from the outside, it is as much a part of us as the marrow in our bones and the fear in our hearts. It is the lethal end point of a lifetime of errors. It comes about because we can reset our genome to factory settings no more easily than we could our consciousness.

The other day, when we finished playing football (we rip teams apart; sometimes we're just too good for them to play with us. Nothing makes me happier than playing with the core of the Nazgul when we so thoroughly overwhelm other teams. Not least because it's never what our opponents are expecting when they size us up beforehand. We look like neeks, not athletes.) I realised that there was blood on my arm. I didn't know if it was mine or not. And it made me worry, which was stupid really. I hadn't noticed at all. When we first started playing powerleague, every week I'd trip or slip and tear off the same scab from my right knee, I'd come back with blood all down my right leg. I used to wear it as a badge of pride. I don't feel quite so bold about it now.

I don't know if my course is swallowing my world-view whole. In a lot of ways I never let it dominate enough. But I find myself thinking about different diseases the whole time. I don't want to embrace my end just yet. Not yet.

I'm not dead.

Tired: There aren't enough days in a week, let alone hours in a day. My sleep is messed up, and I can't correct it now; I'm going to have been up for 24 hours and be pretty tired by the time 6pm has come and gone. But that can't be helped. I'm working a pretty hectic amount.

Work: I have a practical module that should occupy 5 hours a week. In actuality it's taking up 10, two afternoons that I need for other modules and things. My partner for the project is not communicative, and appears to work a 60+ hour week. Which I don't, can't, wouldn't want to do, and quite honestly don't think is necessary. Hard work is a virtue, don't get me wrong, but sometimes a bit of dynamism would really help us out in these sessions, and it doesn't benefit me at all to take a two day break to read up on the subject. Fill in the forms. Hand them in. Get the work done and move on.

I've also got to do a presentation on Friday and I'm pretty sure my group for that hate me. They haven't even seen my part of it yet. I hope they're going to be pleasantly surprised.

Housing: Found a house for next year. It is nice, not expensive (cheaper than at present), but for three people so claustrophobia will set in, inevitably. Will I enjoy living on Heron Drive next year? I hope so, but I'm not certain yet.

Writing: I started writing something new, during a seminar in fact. I like the idea at the moment. At present I'm jotting down scenes and passages that seem particularly vivid right now. Bridging them could be a hellish job. But it's fun. It's a simple story and I'm mainly using it to get a feel for writing extended pieces, experiment with style. A good friend has offered to read and critique product. Much appreciated but not certain I'm ready for that!

Reading: Read a wonderful book in The Zero by Jess Walter. This tremendous disjointed work of fiction follows Brian Remy, 9/11 hero cop, as he makes sense of the world in the days and weeks following New York's darkest hours. He can't convince his son to stop mourning him, he's retiring with a fake bad back and damaged eyesight that will soon fail, and he's begun to experience 'gaps' in his consciousness. Walter ponders upon the state of American culture and security while his protagonist attempts to regain control of his existence, and begins to realise there's a sinister side to these dissappearing periods.

More than anything, I was taken aback by the sheer beauty of Walter's prose. Reading this on the back of a fairly low-grade spy thriller, I was nearly crying with joy at the end of the first sentence, and couldn't help but put this book down regularly, close my eyes and meditate, not on the concepts, but the words and their arrangement, like the array of shades on an oil painting. Unlike me, Jess Walter has a fantastic ability with metaphor. A definite recommend for fans of Catch 22, Mailman (Robert J. Lennon), Vonnegut, and maybe also Salman Rushdie.

I'm following up with The Last Testament, by Sam Bourne. Not such a hit, there's one obvious comparison to be made (other than every shoddy paperback spy thriller ever written, I suppose). Moderately better writing style than Dan Brown but a far weaker sense of storytelling, and a nasty habit of hinting at things that haven't been revealed yet at least 5 times a chapter (which are 4 pages long). I'm not disappointed. It's a bit of a waste of paper, but a bit of diversity in one's literary diet can't be a bad thing.

Next up is Crime and Punishment, which I am looking forward to very much (that's not just relative). I haven't read many classics but this is one that has long appealed to me. It'll be the first time in some while I'll have read something written before 1900. And then a little bit of non-fiction; Heat, by Guardian journalist George Monbiot. Recommended to me by a fellow at a house party, purchased cheap online, I'll be interested to see what direction it takes.

I have ambitions, and a short length of time stretching ahead of me. I guess you can tell a lot about someone from what it is they really hope to achieve.

i) Revision - I am ahead of my revision schedule but will feel utterly embarassed if I don't get through it and perform well in my 3 exams in late january. I will keep working. 5 hours a day still leaves me at least 10 hours to improve myself in other ways.

ii) Health - I keep drinking extraordinary amounts of water, and this makes me feel more active. I'd love to go out running, but a) Physical exercise in any form would probably kill me and b) it is friggin' cold. I wish it weren't cold. I will not be joining a gym. So increased fitness is hard to come by. But I will find a way. I rather hope that I'll be able to jog a couple of miles without keeling over and dying by mid-2007.

iii) Reading - I'm way into this "reading for leisure" thing. In the last week I polished off a couple of fairly trashy/slushy books (The Godfather by Mario Puzo and that Tractors in Ukrainian book everyone was on about 6 months ago). I'm embarking on American Gods by Neil Gaiman right now. It's damned good and for the first time in a long while I can say I'm engrossed in reading.

iv) Writing - I know I'll be saying 'learning to tie shoelaces' next, but I really want to start writing stuff again. I guess that's what LJ is, a bit of a practice ground. I have been drafting record reviews for the nottingham student music magazine and they are good but there is a dearth of new albums that I really want to listen to. I have been reading Something Awful (my favourite site - http://www.somethingawful.com) daily and I wish I could write like any of those guys. They're brilliant. Realistically, they are better writers than me (depressed smilie).

v) Juggling - silly, but I've pretty much nailed 3 balls. Now I need a few more tricks and to get 4 balls going well. I can do a few cycles but then everything ends up on the floor and that doesn't look so good.

vi) Guitar - If I have any time, I'd love to pick up a guitar and learn a bit more. It is a perennial disappointment to me that I do not play guitar.


If I have any other time there's always chess, and go, and expanding my array of general knowledge (which is in decline, depressingly). This has been a very sobering post.