Paper Mache Brain

“The trio is down to two!” Or so sung Jenna as she burst forth into a melodious (I’m such a diplomat) rendition from the Lion King. It was part of a last ditch attempt to get me to go out with her and Suzy but I wasn’t really having any of it. I’m trying so save more than I spree because its got to the point where a single zero on the end of my bank statement is something to be proud of. Anyway that didn’t stop them telling me what a first rate bore I am haha. I am a certified bore, yay! That went on for about an hour and there was little variation on the theme!! Why is it that failing legitimate persuasion they always resort to guilt?! Don’t they realise that I suffer from a debilitating disease called stubborness?

They actually just got back and I am suffering the affect effects of my unyielding nature. I kinda wish that I went now, but I was feeling really minging today thanks to a Spot Attack. It would have really taken a proper paint job to make me presentable enough to leave the house minus a paper bag with two slits in it to cover my head. And I look at it this way: I’ve saved myself £20!

In other news, I have been spending stupendous amounts of cash which if not against my better judgdment is quite simply entirely contrary to the frugal (read:miserly) values I uphold. Ahh, with all these end of term parties to attend one cannot be seen wearing the same outfit you know, bit of a social faux pas. So anyway, I was pretty pleased with myself having managed to nab myself a dress for the ball in a buy-one-get-one-free offer. Thats me, cheap all the way. Thing was, it was a bit plain jane-ish so I had to grab me some jewellery to accessorise. Either inflation has gone through the roof or I just don’t own anything that didn’t originate from a 90% off sale (or buy-one-get-one-free offer come to that), I don’t know, but I always find myself comparing the price to what it would cost in indian rupees or to what I would have paid for it in say ’94 or ’95 (The Golden Era!). Ah, those were the days when chocolate bars were a reasonable 27p! When Jen and I go out shopping phrases like “In our day” “Way back when” and “When I was a young’un” become commonplace. Soon we’ll be starting all our sentances with “During the war…”

I’ll get this over with quickly, its probably less painful: I spent 42 quid on about 3 pieces of jewellery and a bag. Incidently that probably would have cost me the equivalent of £2 in rupees. Ugh I could have probably fed a small nation for a year for the same amount! Anyway my purchases were made in the manner of a child on their first day of school- ie. kicking and screaming – which is the only consolation I have – I think there may have been a few rude words under my breath too 🙂

The ball is on wednesday and I shall be able to report on whether the extra expense has provided any additional consolation…

We spent a good part of the weekend searching for santa costumes, well santa costume components, and it was quite a success despite involving even more parting of cash, which as you have seen is my least favourite hobby of all time. The good news is they look very festive and I love them.

Argh. I am such a crap student. My unbelievable capacity for doing no uni work whatsoever is only superceded by my astonishing abilities in finding new ways of wasting time so as to avoid said uni work. So all I have done today is expanded my creative horizons by doing anything possible to keep me from starting the essay.

Hmm on that depressing note, I think I will go and have a shower, and refresh my head. I made chicken madras earlier on and now I smell like an indian takeaway. Probably not a very sexy scent to go for methinks.

Christmas Cheer

Okay, so its not Christmas just yet but I feel its probably now acceptable (I have the final word on these matters!) to find trees, reindeer, snowmen, angels, and all manner of festive themed junk in every shop window down the high street. This was a record year for eager businesses trying to cash in on Christmas – apparently advent starts at sometime around august now, it was all new to me. I’ll stop being Scrooge now, tis the season to be jolly and all!

I prised my eyes open at 9am today, because Tracy came for a pre Christmas inspection. This, is light of my sleeping schedule which has resembled that of a vampire recently was pretty good going. As it was, she only popped her head through the door for a second so I suppose it was to her standards. I dont know what she expected – huge holes in the walls with strategically placed posters, dead bodies in the outhouse… I’m sure in her time she has seen much worse than our house.

I made it to my first lecture of the week, so I was rather proud of myself. All the same I didnt have my paper to hand in. My lecturer is such a cutie. Not in that way. He just is so understanding you feel bad and suddenly long to do the work. So after this, that is the next thing I’ll do, obviously! Priorities etc.

When I got back from lectures we set about finishing our Christmas decorations. We started them yesterday and we’re going for a budget Santas grotto stylee theme. As we are nearing the end of term, we’re all pretty skint so it called for a lot of compromise and imagination. Apart from a £1 tree (bargain!!! Poundland is the God of all shops!), and a few lights it’s all a bit of a handmade effort. We have paper chains, paper snowflakes, paper snowscapes, paper angels, paper Christmas greetings and well anything we can feasibly make from newspaper and old editions of Cosmopolitan. Topped off with some tinsel and sweets/lollypops its all pretty kitsch. A bit excessive but I guess we all came over a bit festive and got ever so slightly carried away.

We will be celebrating our first instalment of Christmas next saturday when we have our house Christmas dinner. Also next week is the CU dinner and dance, which will be cool. *mmm, men in tuxedos…* I can’t believe its been a year since the last one, ahh how time flies! I can’t wait, I’ve tried on my outfit approximately 99 times because I’m ever so slightly overexcited. I just got a disposable camera developed and it has pictures on it from when it snowed last Christmas, thats been sat on my desk for a year too…

We just got back from the pub. Stuart is down so we thought it might be good to make it look like we do more of an evening than just sit in front of the TV. We had the most random and silly conversations. I think I was still high on peroxide from colouring jens hair earlier. We all tried reassuring her her new hair is strawberry blonde, not ginger haha. She is my usual victim just for being such an easy target! We are saving what paltry amounts of money we still have left for the last night out of term next week. Gonna put some christmassy outfits together (Santa (Ben) and his elves (the rest of us) anyone?)

Lately we have been trying to go out to a wider variety of locations. We seem to have Arena Warehouse and the Vic on rotation. In an effort to be cultured we went to see a performance called The Last Supper at the Phoenix Arts Centre last night. It was a contrast of famous last words and the last suppers of inmates on death row. Sounds more morbid than it was. We all sat round a large table depending on a randomised ticket number, and coincidently Jen Katy and Lauren all ended up together. And they call themselves my friends 🙂 It was all rigged. Luckily I was sat between a nice chap and a lady who were much nicer than Jenna Suzannah and Katy put together I might add, just in case any one of them gets to read this!

Anyway they served wine and the prisoners’ dinners. There were much more of the audience than plates of food but ironically Suzy ended up with the first dinner of hot dogs. By the end I was salivating like nobodys business but in the end I got my just desserts – a burger and chocolate cake (see what I did there) so I was all good.

Well, I am being summoned downstairs so until the next time (I know you’re on the edge of your seats right) I’ll be off. We are about to go and take a midnight stroll, which has become something of a tradition/ritual in our house…

Same old same old

Apparently, when woken by Jen this morning I had a “proper” conversation with her only for her to find me sound asleep when she came out of the shower to check on my progress (waking up is a long process for me involving most of the morning and a good part of the afternoon). I was supposed to be helping her rescue the Trolley, because that way we could split the humiliation of wheeling it empty, down the high street and back to the supemarket in broad daylight.

All I know is that when I woke the light was on, and I could remember a vague knocking sound on my door. I had that feeling like I didn’t know if I’d just fallen back asleep for five minutes or come out of a year long coma. As for the proper conversation, I don’t recall much, so in conclusion it was probably a conspiracy! Sometimes I wonder if I don’t spend whole days in a permanent state of somnambulance…

Today was a repeat (or just continuation) of yesterday workwise. I feel I should work on refining my self discipline skills because right now they are sorely lacking I am ashamed to say. My housemates and I as a collective have extreme procrastination down to an art form. So at least I can spread the blame! We designed and made the Springfield Hot Beverages Instruction Manual which provides detailed descriptions of how we each take our tea and coffee. This, in light of my uni work obviously takes priority. We toyed with the idea of creating an advent calendar, but since we are only here another ten days or so, it didn’t materialise. I also spent a lot of today gazing vacantly round my room, wondering how best to rearrange my things for the third time, which is always a great time wasting exercise.

I haven’t always been this way, I’ll have you know I used to have a reputation for being a pretty conscientous student. Oh how times change! I used to work hard under pressure now I barely work at all. Its been a trial trying to kick start my brain after last years study ice age.

This evening I went to student focus at church – it was the last one this term. I should have stayed away, it was 2nd year girls time to wash up the dinner plates. I wanted to claim sick leave like most of the guys do when its their turn, but I’m crap at faking being ill. Hmm, so I just gave in. Every so often one of the boys would come in to crack a sexist joke and/or generally gloat. So I just whip ’em with a teatowel. They can’t retaliate, because boys aren’t allowed to hit girls, haha.

I walked back with Ruk and Paul. Paul tried carrying me for all of 20 seconds. Its worth noting here he’s at least half my size, approximately. I’m no big girl myself but I feel like a whale next to him. He told me I have put on weight since the last time (when he picked me up to throw me into the snow last Christmas), and I told him he should work out more. They both have got to the point where they feel they have known me sufficiently long enough to hurl abuse at me when the whim takes them. What lovely friends I have. I take it like a man and give as good as I get! (translation: I hit them)

Here’s one I made earlier

I cant decide whether or not an online blog is a good thing for me just yet. Statistically most ideas that pop into my head at 3am in the morning are a result of the sporadic chemical impulses that occur in my head when most of my body has all but shut down, so they don’t tend to have the greatest success rate.

Also, my memory is pretty bad already, there is the risk I’ll come to totally rely on it as my source of past events.Then I think, maybe the world doesnt want to know all about my little life but then I suppose if you’re reading this, you must want to… which is cool.

Well its a nice way to let off steam!

So this week was the same as most weeks. Thats another way of saying I can’t remember how this week was different from any other weeks. Funny I can remember whole days in my life as a 5 year old but struggle to recall anything prior to thursday. Hmm, my life isn’t that monotonous, really! Well starting thursday, I was invited to a thanksgiving dinner. I wouldn’t have minded being an honorary american for the night much if it were hosted by a true yank.

But it’s my friends friends flatmates parents who are american, and so their daughter’s flatmate’s friend who was hosting it which i thought was a little bit of a tenuous link.

We went out to a club instead. Its reminiscent of what I think used to be called a discotheque. That or it simply hasn’t been renovated since the jurassic era. They can afford to do that though because with the serious club drought Exeter suffers from you just grin and bear it, and get out before they turn the music off/put the lights on (which is when you get to see it in all its glory). Well, the music was as cheesy as is usual, and the prices confirm that extortion still abounds but we all had a good time anyway. By morning we had also acquired one supermarket trolley, not I might add the result of some drunken fit. This called for Operation Trolley Removal because in daylight you realise how conspicuous these things look outside the front door. At the time it was something of an oasis in the desert, because my poor soles hurt so much I didnt know how I was gonna hobble home without sustaining lasting damage. I think I should devote my

life to making One Pair Of Shoes that won’t make womens feet blister and swell to double their natural size if you wear them for more than say, 15 minutes.

Anyway, we finally put the trolley in an alleyway under cover of darkness, which although probably not the best solution is pretty much the state we found it in. Rhea had a good idea: wrap it up in Christmas paper, decorate it in ribbon and attach a tag saying “To Tescos Merry Christmas love Sainsbury’s” though I don’t think they’d see the funny side.

Well Friday was spent mostly asleep, or in bed at least. It gets to winter and suddenly its too cold to leave the warm cocoon that is your bed, let alone get dressed, leave the house and generally do stuff. If I could, I’d just hibernate December til February and my life would start again on my birthday (march 6th coming I’ll hit 21!! yay! hinthint). That said, we had tickets to see The Incredibles friday evening, so I got changed in the end. I thought the film was pretty good. At the risk of sounding like a grandma, I think that its amazing how much they can do with computer graphics now! “Things have come a long way since my day”!

Today the plan was to research for my essay on theological responses to neo darwinism (or something along those lines anyway), or failing that at least glance at the actual essay title. I use the word plan in its loosest sense because most of my planning is confined to the indefinite future, much in the same way i use the future tense eg. I will pay you back your £400. I’m all about good intentions me. So most of today was spent half heartedly entering Darwin related search terms into Google. At the rate I’m going my essay might be done before I graduate. Google is a curse because you get bored with research after a while and some random thought process enters your head and you just get carried away with that, and see what Google throws up in your quest for knowledge. So for example I decided I wanted to find out where my surname comes from, and which famous people have the same birthday as mine. Well I didn’t get any very conclusive answers apart from the fact that all the so-called celebrities who I share my birthday with are people I’ve never heard of in my life. Now if I were studying surname etymology you can be sure that I would have been researching Darwin for kicks! Always the way…

Saturday wouldn’t have been the same without some mind numbing TV to kill off a few more (much needed) brain cells. So another year, another talent contest style singing programme. I have to admit its enjoyable just watching the humiliation people voluntarily put themselves through! Then Jen Suz and I got onto a topic of conversation we always get onto which is our Inferiority Complex Concerning Our Regional Accents. Its close to all of our hearts because its what we have in common, and we can cry to each other about it in the knowledge that we feel each others pain. I capitalised it because then it sounds like less of a general hangup, and more like an actual condition.

They went off to bed hours ago and I think it’s my turn to get my beauty sleep. The bags under my eyes are reaching unacceptable proportions and I have a Darwin essay to get excited about. Woo, yeah!! A demain as the french say.