Procrastinatory Nonsense

Well, the new year has come, it's amazing how time keeps going without stopping, I almost thought/hoped it wouldn't happen. (That's not to say 2005 was the best year of my life)
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I came back to Birmingham yesterday and moved into my new room. It's about twice the size of my old room. It has good storage and workspace facilities - I'm even keeping my bike in here.

It's still difficult to actually knuckle down to work, though. I just don't quite know how to go about my current essay. I have a bit of a plan, and a fairly good idea of what I think I might say but haven't managed to put it into words yet. I'm just lazy I guess. Now I have 4000 words to do for Monday. I don't think I've ever left myself so much to do in so short a time. And I'm doubting my abaility to do it at all right now. The fact that it's the first essay of my course doesn't help much. And the fact that they have a different referencing system here to what I'm used to slows me down as well. Having said that, I did write about 1500 words of an essay in one day on my degree, but I'd already got a solid introduction to build on with that one.

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I wish I could just write 4000 words about a penguine called Gary, or a woodlouse called Harry, or a lemur called Malcome, or something stupid like that.
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It was near impossible to get any work done at home. There were distractions such as TV and playing Scrabble with my dad. And then there was other work to be done, such as cleaning sinks and helping my dad gather wood and mend fences. When we finished mending the fence, my dad drove the tractor out of the field and the cattle decided to follow him and made a new hole in the hedge which we had to repair after rounding them up again.

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I wanted to protest about being roped into such activities, citing my essay which required much work, but up to that point I hadn't really done any work on it and I thought my dad would think I was just making excuses. It's difficult to explain that I need to be in the right frame of mind for study. I couldn't do study on a 9-5 basis, or a few hours here and a few hours there. It takes a full emersion experience for me to get into it. I did take one day for study at home, which was spent mainly reading. When my dad came in he asked me if the essay was finished. He doesn't seem to know what it's like to go through the torture of trying to produce an academic essay.

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Spending more than a few days with the parents is difficult at any time. It seems that they're becoming more and more like Frank and Estelle Costanza (from Seinfeld). And no one can speak to you like your parents can. No one else will pay you so little respect as a human being. Usually my mum will say something like 'seeing as you're not doing anything else...' which seems, when she says it, to infer, 'seeing as you have a meaningless existence...' And then they have ideas about what is a 'proper time' at which to get up and a 'proper time' to go to bed. It seems morally irrelevant to me, I work better at antisocial times. But the most distressing thing is that after nearly 40 years of marriage they still don't understand each other. If anything, they just make each other miserable. I guess I wish my mum could be a bit less uptight and my dad could be a bit more sensitive.

Anyway, I don't think there's much I can do about that, so I've left them alone again. Maybe they communicate better when I'm not around. The fly was still there on the wall when I left. I wonder if there's a world record for having a dead fly undisturbed on one's bedroom wall. I reckon I'm up to about two months now.

Speaking of world records, I have a very long hair growing out of my right nipple, I'd say about 10cm. I think it was longer about 18 months ago but I broke it. I guess it would be more impressive if I were female (impressive in terms of breaking records, not in any way that any vaguely normal woman would be proud). I'll leave you with that lovely thought.