You are my sweetest downfall...
My mother has brought home the shiny.
Seriously.
My mother is a hospital doctor with a management role, which essentially means that she does three per job's-worth of work instead of the two that most people do. Days on which she is home at any kind of sensible hour are a rarity, and stress is a constant. She loves her job, and wouldn't have it any other way; but it is difficult, sometimes.
But it does have its bonuses. One of them is the fact that I am relatively unsquickable [1] over everyday bodily functions; stuff has been talked-about over the dinner table often enough that it never really bothers me very much. Another is the large slew of anecdotes that are available, especially the One With The Hand.
Another is the shiny.
You see, drug companies aren't allowed to bribe medics to use their drugs. Reps have to be very careful about what they give people; anything over a certain value has to be declared and taxed and all sort of nasty things. This is why the house of any medical practitioner will, more often than not, be overflowing with biros with exotic and unpronounceable words on them. Some people are lucky enough to be given humorous things like Viagra pens; we just get the more boring ones.
Occasionally, though, my mother brings home something more special. The last time this happened, the loot included some really cool mini-staplers and a weird USB light thing that has vanished into the deepest darkest depths of Dad’s desk.
This time it was a lot of cool four-colour pens, some really nifty post-it sets (with big ones and small ones and little strips in five little colour that’ll be ideal for annotating my English texts with to learn where things are) and a really tiny little four-way USB hub which is making me really want a laptop for the first time in my life so that I could claim it.
Like I said; my mother brought home the shiny.
---
[1] Compared to most guys my age, anyway - especially given their performance with the whole Angela Carter thing. I'll have to post Mike's Seven Deadly Sins of Feminist Literature up here some time...
---
I went to Leanne’s birthday party today, which was nice, if a little odd, as was the fact that I behaved as if I were drunk when the last time I consumed any alcohol was exactly a week ago and that only managed to get me mildly tipsy. (
pleezpleezme and
meine_kleine failed.) There was candyfloss and popcorn and balloons and giant Jenga and Snake sand Ladders and Connect Four and much fun was had by all. I got her that Tim Burton book which I also seem to be buying for everybody right now (the great Alexei is getting a copy, too) and a cuddly kitten that will steal her soul.
stripygloveknows the one;
meine_kleine, it’s the grey one with the blue eyes in Little Wonders. Yes. That one.
---
Life-wise, I’ve had a not-so-good week, for various reasons, culminating in (perhaps) my lack of sleep catching up with me and causing me to feel so terrible upon waking up on Tuesday that I phoned school, phoned Dad and went back to bed again and got the equivalent of an extra night’s sleep. (And then I went into town, and bumped into all_my_words and Rachel T, and didn’t actually say much to her, and then was phoned by Lucia, and then was discovered by Tianyan, who walked with me most of the way to Helen’s, where I saw Helen. And things are all all right now, which is very nice.
On Wednesday I won the school squash tournament. It was handicapped, which means that I found it a lot tougher, as I was on -4, but I still beat the people I wanted to and did well enough that I got to play Rory (who took everyone by surprise by excelling on a handicap of +2 and getting the most points) in the final, and I beat him, just. It was such a good game that if he’d won I’d have been almost just as pleased as I was when I did win.
(For the sake of full disclosure and of modesty I will mention the fact that the reason that I won was that James wasn’t there; if he had been, he would have flattened me.) I then walked home with Lucia, which was really very nice.
On Thursday I was so tired that I didn’t get to school until lunchtime. Then I had English and saw the AS plays, which were no way near as good as the A2 plays, even if they did involve Ben G in a miniskirt.
---
Book # 31 will make meine_kleine and crisiks very happy, although my opinion of it may not; it was Pride and Prejudice, and if I need to tell you who the author is then even I despair of you.
It was okay.
Bits of it were very good; I liked early!Mr Bennet, and everyone likesLizzy, and Mr Darcy turned out to be quite cool; but the book, in my eyes, didn’t quite have enough substance to warrant its status as top of the pantheon. There wasn’t much wrong with it, except perhaps the amount of it that felt like filler, and the people-watching was wonderful and acute and occasionally funny, but the book either needed to deliver more or be a third of its current length. Northanger Abbey, in my opinion, is a far better novel - it has the same style of characterisation only drawn even more finely, and it’s far funnier and cleverer to boot, in my opinion. I suspect that I shall come back to Pride and Predjudice at some point to see if my opinions have changed; but it will not be until I have cleared everything else on my to-read shelf, which will be a long time coming.
Book #32 was Iain M Banks’ Consider Pheblas. It’s the first Culture novel, and it shows in a lot of ways, but it’s also a very different perspective on the Culture to the other two that I’ve read, because it’s outside of it. It’s fascinating, if not quite as sweeping and ideas-based as I usually expect from Banks. But a good read nonetheless, even if the whole snarky-drone-personality thing is getting a little overused now.
Book #33 was 36 Children, by Herbert Kohl. It’s one of those books that you find on your parents shelves upstairs in the attic and always wonder about why it’s there at all. In some ways it’s a fascinating book, and in some ways it is dull; in some ways it is uplifting and in some ways it breaks your heart. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it, really.
Here is another book to talk about, but that I shall save for tomorrow. The only other thing that I shall say on the subject is this:
meine_kleine, I am catching up.
---
Today I saw a Nac Mac Feegle, Peter Pan, Aragorn, a Gandalf, a Gorrilla, a Mock-Turtle, a score of Alex Riders, a Sherlock Holmes, Will Parry, a very strange creature with a grey face and something orange coming out of its mouth, a godfather, some form of oriental warrior with a bamboo-pole, a kid with an afro that could possibly have passed muster from a distance as a car tyre and three poets. I love my school.
---
The layout change was precipitated by the fact that I had wanted a change for ages, and that I have realised for a while that as much as I loved my title Speaking Jabberwocky gibberish, I really should have changed it a long while ago; the phrase ‘Francis Bacon’s Mechanical Head’ has been bouncing around in my head ever since Hob Galding dreamed it in a dream, somewhere. I need to fiddle with it a little, but I do really like the new layout, and I love my tag-cloud. Even if it is very, very messy.
Seriously.
My mother is a hospital doctor with a management role, which essentially means that she does three per job's-worth of work instead of the two that most people do. Days on which she is home at any kind of sensible hour are a rarity, and stress is a constant. She loves her job, and wouldn't have it any other way; but it is difficult, sometimes.
But it does have its bonuses. One of them is the fact that I am relatively unsquickable [1] over everyday bodily functions; stuff has been talked-about over the dinner table often enough that it never really bothers me very much. Another is the large slew of anecdotes that are available, especially the One With The Hand.
Another is the shiny.
You see, drug companies aren't allowed to bribe medics to use their drugs. Reps have to be very careful about what they give people; anything over a certain value has to be declared and taxed and all sort of nasty things. This is why the house of any medical practitioner will, more often than not, be overflowing with biros with exotic and unpronounceable words on them. Some people are lucky enough to be given humorous things like Viagra pens; we just get the more boring ones.
Occasionally, though, my mother brings home something more special. The last time this happened, the loot included some really cool mini-staplers and a weird USB light thing that has vanished into the deepest darkest depths of Dad’s desk.
This time it was a lot of cool four-colour pens, some really nifty post-it sets (with big ones and small ones and little strips in five little colour that’ll be ideal for annotating my English texts with to learn where things are) and a really tiny little four-way USB hub which is making me really want a laptop for the first time in my life so that I could claim it.
Like I said; my mother brought home the shiny.
---
[1] Compared to most guys my age, anyway - especially given their performance with the whole Angela Carter thing. I'll have to post Mike's Seven Deadly Sins of Feminist Literature up here some time...
---
I went to Leanne’s birthday party today, which was nice, if a little odd, as was the fact that I behaved as if I were drunk when the last time I consumed any alcohol was exactly a week ago and that only managed to get me mildly tipsy. (
pleezpleezme and
meine_kleine failed.) There was candyfloss and popcorn and balloons and giant Jenga and Snake sand Ladders and Connect Four and much fun was had by all. I got her that Tim Burton book which I also seem to be buying for everybody right now (the great Alexei is getting a copy, too) and a cuddly kitten that will steal her soul.
stripygloveknows the one;
meine_kleine, it’s the grey one with the blue eyes in Little Wonders. Yes. That one.
---
Life-wise, I’ve had a not-so-good week, for various reasons, culminating in (perhaps) my lack of sleep catching up with me and causing me to feel so terrible upon waking up on Tuesday that I phoned school, phoned Dad and went back to bed again and got the equivalent of an extra night’s sleep. (And then I went into town, and bumped into all_my_words and Rachel T, and didn’t actually say much to her, and then was phoned by Lucia, and then was discovered by Tianyan, who walked with me most of the way to Helen’s, where I saw Helen. And things are all all right now, which is very nice.
On Wednesday I won the school squash tournament. It was handicapped, which means that I found it a lot tougher, as I was on -4, but I still beat the people I wanted to and did well enough that I got to play Rory (who took everyone by surprise by excelling on a handicap of +2 and getting the most points) in the final, and I beat him, just. It was such a good game that if he’d won I’d have been almost just as pleased as I was when I did win.
(For the sake of full disclosure and of modesty I will mention the fact that the reason that I won was that James wasn’t there; if he had been, he would have flattened me.) I then walked home with Lucia, which was really very nice.
On Thursday I was so tired that I didn’t get to school until lunchtime. Then I had English and saw the AS plays, which were no way near as good as the A2 plays, even if they did involve Ben G in a miniskirt.
---
Book # 31 will make meine_kleine and crisiks very happy, although my opinion of it may not; it was Pride and Prejudice, and if I need to tell you who the author is then even I despair of you.
It was okay.
Bits of it were very good; I liked early!Mr Bennet, and everyone likesLizzy, and Mr Darcy turned out to be quite cool; but the book, in my eyes, didn’t quite have enough substance to warrant its status as top of the pantheon. There wasn’t much wrong with it, except perhaps the amount of it that felt like filler, and the people-watching was wonderful and acute and occasionally funny, but the book either needed to deliver more or be a third of its current length. Northanger Abbey, in my opinion, is a far better novel - it has the same style of characterisation only drawn even more finely, and it’s far funnier and cleverer to boot, in my opinion. I suspect that I shall come back to Pride and Predjudice at some point to see if my opinions have changed; but it will not be until I have cleared everything else on my to-read shelf, which will be a long time coming.
Book #32 was Iain M Banks’ Consider Pheblas. It’s the first Culture novel, and it shows in a lot of ways, but it’s also a very different perspective on the Culture to the other two that I’ve read, because it’s outside of it. It’s fascinating, if not quite as sweeping and ideas-based as I usually expect from Banks. But a good read nonetheless, even if the whole snarky-drone-personality thing is getting a little overused now.
Book #33 was 36 Children, by Herbert Kohl. It’s one of those books that you find on your parents shelves upstairs in the attic and always wonder about why it’s there at all. In some ways it’s a fascinating book, and in some ways it is dull; in some ways it is uplifting and in some ways it breaks your heart. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it, really.
Here is another book to talk about, but that I shall save for tomorrow. The only other thing that I shall say on the subject is this:
meine_kleine, I am catching up.
---
Today I saw a Nac Mac Feegle, Peter Pan, Aragorn, a Gandalf, a Gorrilla, a Mock-Turtle, a score of Alex Riders, a Sherlock Holmes, Will Parry, a very strange creature with a grey face and something orange coming out of its mouth, a godfather, some form of oriental warrior with a bamboo-pole, a kid with an afro that could possibly have passed muster from a distance as a car tyre and three poets. I love my school.
---
The layout change was precipitated by the fact that I had wanted a change for ages, and that I have realised for a while that as much as I loved my title Speaking Jabberwocky gibberish, I really should have changed it a long while ago; the phrase ‘Francis Bacon’s Mechanical Head’ has been bouncing around in my head ever since Hob Galding dreamed it in a dream, somewhere. I need to fiddle with it a little, but I do really like the new layout, and I love my tag-cloud. Even if it is very, very messy.