Today I am going to enjoy life. I love being able to get up in the morning whenever I want. I love writing, reading and drafting a project that is mine. I love being able to learn spanish and meditate. I love the sunshine and the walks I can take nearby. These days are genuinely numbered come graduation. After a couple of neurotic weeks/months/terms, enjoyment is the only option now.

LOL.

Sometimes you read things and it makes you realise many things. Mainly good things. It is better now.

Coffee and cake are my dietary staples.

Finally I am settling down to reading Introducing Derrida (about one a half years after I bought it) and I am getting very frustrated with it. I don't think the people who are writing it give it a particularly convincing account. For instance, the 'supplement' section didn't seem to make sense at all. I understand how supplement means both addition and replacement; however, what I don't understand is why 'addition' can only be applied to something that is incomplete. Where did this sudden 'need' come from? It doesn't follow that just because you add something to something, doesn't mean that the thing you were adding it to a) isn't complete b) works along the complete/incomplete binary in the first place.

Secondly - OK - and this was going to be an obvious cavil: the representation of Merleau-Ponty. I'll give it to the artists of the book that M-P is most handsome of the phenomenologists (and structuralists) in the book, however, that is about as far as my admiration goes. What pisses me off is that his caption reads: 'highly influenced by Husserl' without actually factoring in the key detail, which is that M-P was distinctly removed from his transcendental reduction. Oh, and what do they focus on as characteristic of phenomenology? Yep, you guessed it. Husserl's phenomenological reduction. Only, because the caption for M-P is 'highly influenced by Husserl', people will go away thinking that he pretty much took Husserl's model unquestioningly, when what makes M-P distinct (and more palatable) is his difference from Husserl's method. The writer goes on to say that the aim of phenomenology is to work out the structures of 'interior consciousness' -- umm, vague much? Using such a term immediately conjures up notions of the Cartesian Cogito -- a cordoned off consciousness which is precisely what M-P (and Derrida by virtue of his anti-dualistic attitudes) attempted to break down.

However, I am learning more interesting things about what makes M-P special. I don't think M-P has had half enough attention as he needs. People should stop treating him as a footnote to Husserl of Sartre: it's his differences, not his similarities, with these philosophers that give him his most unique insights.

Ill again. Damn you. When shall I be better? 

I succumbed to buying milk and chocolate-covered hobnobs.

And this is SO cute.

I went to bed at 5.30 AM and awoke before my alarm at ten. I feel much better now after taking a 20 minute nap in the library though. I was awoken by myself "hmming" loudly. Oh dear. I have answered all my philosophy questions, ordered my transcripts (and asked the woman a thousand questions), wrote an essay proposal, began filling in my online form and ate a Langwith Jacket Potato (a panacea for all woes). 

Boo. 3.55 AM. I sent off my essay. I am not feeling very well though. I have a cough and cold. Not very sleepy either. Must. Stop. Updating. Compulsively. 

Instead of going to the pub with friends or going to watch a film avec mes amies, I spending yet another anti-social evening in by watching Woody Allen's Manhattan, drinking a glass of merlot and diminishing a bag of tangerines. Busiest Week Ever is over. So now what? Everything else, of course!

I've got this before, and before that. I was just curious to still see if I was an INTJ. Recommended career paths include Philosophy Professor, English Professor and Dictator. Nice.

I have slit open an artery and out gushes this narcissism: I am obssessed with LJ again, as before. Oh woe. It is 11.45. I haven't done any reading today. I am looking forward to the fiction essays.

Oh geekiness: how I love thee. But I have a careers meeting, one that demands I 'identify my skills'. The woman was not useful and acted as if she were stoned.So whatever generic skills can I include? Well, I don't want to do anything with my hands -- I enjoy analytical thinking, independent thinking, researching, working on my own (although I am capable of working in a team), writing. How many do I need? I want to be an academic so I can lose myself in the textual abyss. I only wish I were male: they get to wear patches under their elbows.Okay: I haven't actually seen a professor wear leather patches under their elbows but the possibility of being a male professor with leather patches under my elbows is too attractive.

Anyway. It's cold again. Boo.

I am in bed anyway. I should probably read or something. Yesterday was hellish sleep-wise. Or, more accurately, un-sleepywise. I'm scared of going to bed and getting up. They are the most strenuous moments of the day. More strenuous than being a cold-stone bitch or reading philosophy.

That was an immensely difficult message to write. But it's done: clear enough, so I hope. I thought it would be in sandy-mouthed bad taste to offer to write out a cheque for the expenses he spent, on me. Things went rolling downhill after I was cast into debt, emotionally that is, signified by finances (oh, there are the seeds of a Marxist in me yet!). At any rate, we were incompatible. I did fake an interest in entropy. I couldn't fake an interest in entropy for long. He spoke. I listened. K. was right.He could not even begin to understand Merleau-Ponty. He struck me as almost 'too good'. I like people's faults: the fragile awkwardnesses that reveal how quivering and vulnerable we are beneath (even if that lower level is pure stone). He was careful to show none; the only gods I worship are those that lounge in the staffroom of the academic skies: though even then the crack of a personal fault provides a shower of mental pleasure (rather than pain)!

I won't go to the pub tomorrow even though I was looking forward to it. I know he is most likely to be there: he does not confirm his attendance. Also, I have the workload of Mount Everest shadowing me.I enjoy good conversation, good friends: what need I for pubbery? Mulled wine. Well yes, mulled wine is a good reason. But I cannot afford it. I am better off spending the money on campus meals and coffee as I get more work done that way.

I love LJ. I can be 'my' 'honest' 'self' 'again' - not hoity-toity and literary-flickery at all.

A friend said, "you fear being impolite and so you choose to be cruel instead." This is one of those moments.

*

On the up side, I had a good dinner with a friend, bought cake and went to a reading by an eminent, though elitist, poet.

I had little uninterrupted sleep last night - four hours, perhaps? Six hours of my body refusing to move. I would say 'Coffee = Oxygen' but that's what Starbucks want you to say. My seminar was spent in a daze. I poked my tutor on facebook a couple of weeks ago. He said, to the group, 'feel free to poke me', and everyone laughed -- not knowing how true it was. Oops. Tutors should get facebooks just so you can poke them whenever the whim takes you. I hope someone pokes him after this seminar. He's a postgrad student, can I add: not a graying, patches-at-the-elbow Professor. Anyway, I barely responded to anything. Blank. Lack of eye contact. Hat on. Then coffeed with someone I hadn't coffeed with before, which was nice: art 'n' stuff. Good. I just need a beret and a french accent. Mind you, this guy also had a beret. Hmmm. I'll miss philosophy.

I wonder how long I'll write in this journal before I, with a cavalier flourish, leave it for some younger, prettier blog. Now I'm here because I'm waiting for a tutorial to begin. And, because LJ actually makes me blog obsessively, I'm on here.

I had a strange 'day'-'evening'-'conscious'-dream about Merleau-Ponty yesterday. He was in the kitchen. He looked exactly as he did in photographs and it was with such intensity that he was recreated in my imagination that it was as if I had seen him, in real life, and I would be able to recognise him were I to see him in real life -- and not just from the straight-on or profile perspectives that you see in photographs -- but from all perspectives. This is quite rare for me. Anyway, he was in the kitchen - he had a baby, he picked up the baby, he was happy - he had a brown satchel and a wife. Hmm. I have a very gender-conventional imagination. But I was reading 'Emile' by Rousseau at the time. So there you go. I mention it because it is strange for this happen: I've not dreamed of Plato or Aristotle or even Bertrand Russell with such precision in physical form. Or anyone for that matter from simple photographs. And, of course, I rarely, if ever, dream about philosophers.

Though dreams have been a strange thing lately.

I dreamed someone texted me about not going to the theatre on Friday instead of Tuesday. I did, of course, find a text on my phone the same morning about not going to the theatre on Friday. Reality is all jumbled up. I had de ja vu when filling in a form for an online tasks organiser after having a dream about the same visual sensation of filling in an online organiser. But I also had a dream about someone cancelling on me today because they were working in a shop in Manchester.. This, I believe, is too random to happen!

La la...

Why must people squeal like strangled kittens when they greet others? Especially outside my door.

I'll write another entry as I have forgotten the pleasure of writing in this thing...

After dining, the rain stopped me from leaving campus, and thus stole into a study room and finished answering my AA questions. Then, after having done so, realising that the rain still hadn't stopped, I begun on the Rousseau. Rousseau is also an arse that needs to sit on a very large porcupine. He writes on children and yet abandons his own! Philosophers are monstrous creatures when it comes to practicing what they preach.

I was rather glad I wasn't going to the theatre tonight, although it may be raining on Friday, of course.Oh.After two and a half hours, and twelve pages left to read, I headed home after the rain-noise lulled. The dead hedgehog was gone from the curb of the road and there was no abnormally large cat chasing me.Dead things are shocking. I wouldn't have been frightened by the hedgehog were it not for it being dead.

What I like about the rain is that it intensifies light: white cutting against black. Also, the street lamps taint everything with an orange glow as if the world is filtered through a hyper-sepia lens. The very movement of light becomes violent.

But it is Tuesday, or 18 minutes past Wednesday, and I have finished my reading for the week -- it took me less time than expected, even though I still wouldn't have been able to go out, due to the unexpected buttery fluttery heart moment that punctured the afternoon. What will I do tomorrow? The possibility of possibilities is more exciting than any determinate idea.I know the responsibilities are stacked up -- societal duties (I must get the website up and running: I must organise the collection of prizes!), MA researching, reading my philosophy texts, writing my philosophy essay, reading the novel for next week, which is 544 pages, alongside the essay that goes with it, that I haven't even started - in total, it possibly comes to 600 pages reading - and then there is planning 1,000 words for my English essay, the tutorials of which begin week 8. Then I have society meetings and events and my careers meeting. And I have barely any spare time for chats, which often end up lasting hours.

I work best, of course, outside of the house.

I hate this space between going to bed and sleeping. I hate the waking up even more. I don't feel sleepy in the least. And the struggle to sleep is offset by the anxiety of thought. Writing is not getting me nearer to sleeping.

Perhaps I should turn this thing off and return to dear Proust.

Roger Scruton is an arse that needs to sit on a very large porcupine.

My attention is a fluttering butterfly. So I resorted to stalking myself online. This is more fun than stalking other people, who are clearly less interesting than yourself, because they don't agree with you, tend not to be interested in the same things and write words that don't follow the natural patterns of your own thoughts. You, you, you. I mean, of course, I, I, I. But 'I' is less interesting.

Anyway, I found myself re-reading these entries with the same fixation as I would do a character. So this is me, no? This 'was' me? There is no 'me', period? Let us toast such intense pleasurable narcissism! The last entry I wrote on LJ belonged to an alter-ego. Oh yes, I have many of those. But, I suddenly thought, where is THIS person now? Seriously. She was batshit crazy without the slightest knowledge of it whatsoever. What happens to people 'like' that? There was the entry where 'she', I, was having a conversation with her personified leather journal. She also had hints of non-dualism! Roxxors!

But now: yes, here I am. Here she is. Is this a little duck-rabbity?

Today: well, I started stalking myself again because I was unable to concentrate. My little buttery, fluttery heart slips and flips about. It could not focus on Roger Scruton and his views on photography and representation (photography is inferior to painting, so he says, utterly incapable of representation or expression!). I understand, on the whole, what he is going on about. But he is a tosser. His paper is dense. Boring. I get what he's saying but cannot read him. I should read something else, then, no? A bit of Rousseau to tickle the cerebral cortex? But I am impatient: fluttering. I cannot read: how do I calm myself down?

Silly silly silly.

I had lunch with a friend. It began with a sullen sort of quietness. We talked about generic things: meaningless events, social events, workloads and going-outs, yadda yadda. This is a comforting level of conversation - a warm mist. Neither heart-piercing nor spine-tingling. Then it turned into cup-ripping, dead-authoring, psychoanalysing, philosophising goodness. Oh yes, for some reason we ended up on consciousness, the body, the status of science. The pleasure of it all! Then so-and-so walked in. And my little buttery heart did a few a flips. Which was very silly of it. Very silly of it. Very silly. And this shot shiny, electrical impulses through my nervous system so that my feelings were excited and stirred that when I went to the library, I couldn't go straight to a seat, though there were ones; I did a circuit of the library's second floor, I went down the stairs, I went out, I went back in again, I went up the stairs, then settled, for a while, in a Quiet Room, and read the newspaper. I enjoy the student media here immensely. I read a review of my friend's play and was struck through with sadness at its panning by some overstrung bitch who expected the first draft of an original student written play to be on par with Tom Stoppard: the ass. The frontpage article was an ambiguous non-article about how it wasn't an article on what it would have been: this gnawed me with curiosity. OH.

Then I thought I'd go on LJ. And, after a very long while, visit my old blogs. I read she_opened and found it generally to be more engaging than my alter-ego's, although my alter-ego's is pretty amusing as well (ha ha, yes, how vain I am to actually take pleasure in my own mad ramblings!).

So I'll continue this mad girl's ramblings as I am curious to know what's happened to her.

But I should possibly dine. And then go to the library. And then finally finish the questions I am supposed to have answered. And then perhaps tickle my cerebral cortex with Rousseau.

I hate the cold. I hate my over-sleepiness. I hate my lack of a bank account. I hate my inability to feel proper emotions like-everybody-else-should. I am less in the mood for going-outness and too behind on my work and social and societal commitments for buttery, fluttery heart moments.

But anyway.

Hello.