I find that, more and more, there are things I know I need to do, and even (in some cases) want to do, but I don't do them, and I have no idea why. I write them on my various to-do lists, on the mini-whiteboard in my office, on the back of my hand... and still I put them off. I transfer them from one day's 'to do today' list to the next's, and the ( Read more... )

I'm having more and more trouble finding something I can constrain into just one blog post, something that doesn't just sprout tendrils of arguments all over the place as soon as I get one sentence into it. There's a big long post I've started writing a couple of times now and I've come to the conclusion that it's actually several essays about ( Read more... )

The older I get, the more stupid I feel. At school, I felt as though I knew a lot about my subjects (though not very much about Real Life); at university, I felt as though I knew even more about my subject and quite a lot about Real Life, including some bits of Real Life that I'd've been quite happy not to know about ( Read more... )

It seems like everybody I know has done this heap-of-questions thing, so I'm joining the club (no, not that club).

( Describe yourself in far too many words )

It is useful to be reminded sometimes of the error of my largely unexamined assumption that everybody wishes to contribute something useful to society over and above their presence in it ( Read more... )

Dear j4You may have noticed over the past couple of days that actually doing work -- however pointless and dull the work may be -- is more satisfying and even sometimes more interesting than messing about on the web. You may also have noticed that once you start doing something, it's no longer hanging over you like a bloody great raincloud. This ( Read more... )

Just call me Miss Moodswings. Today I have been mostly excited, but also frustrated. But the frustrated is mostly work, and that's boring. No fewer boring than anything else I write, but differently so. See?

So. Today I managed to win a hotly-contested game of Scrabble (not the one against verlaine, or the one against sion_a, in both of which I was given the ( Read more... )

So tired. I think of so many things I want to do, and I never do any of them. Being surrounded by people who cheerfully teach themselves six ancient languages before breakfast doesn't help, but even the things that might be within my intellectual grasp -- things like doing the laundry, or making myself a sandwich -- just hit a wall of inertia when ( Read more... )

One of my new year's resolutions was to cook proper meals. Wasn't it? I can't remember now. In one ear, out the other. Anyway, this weekend I actually made some progress in that direction: three proper meals, plus one which my parents brought and cooked, and therefore doesn't really count. ( food! )

Remember learning to write? Your parents or teachers make you trace over the printed outlines of perfectly-formed letters time and time again until, after lines and lines of exercise-book pages, your shaky pencil shapes grow so close to the dotted letters that the deviations from the line can barely be seen. Eventually you're ready to write those ( Read more... )