bright lights

The lights on Sloane Square were beautiful today. I thought I’d become jaded towards London after nearly two months, but as I turned a corner on King’s Road this evening, Christmas shopping bags in hand and feeling completely exhausted from what has been a very, very tiring week at work (plus an all-nighter looming tomorrow - don’t think I’ll leave before 11pm), this ethereal, otherworldly blue mist of lights suddenly unfolded before me. I felt the old enchantment rushing back, I found myself putting everything down and whipping out my camera like a tourist all over again.

London still has its magical pockets, after all.

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trypophobia

Trypophobia. An intense, irrational fear of holes.

- Article

Oh, my goodness. I totally have this phobia. I never realised there was a name for it, it never even dawned on me that all the skin-crawling, stomach-churning feelings I get when I look at things like a lotus seed pod or animals with lots of holey bumps on their skin (see Surinam Toad) were related to each other and part of the same ridiculous fear… until I was freaked out of my mind by a truly terrifying postcard on this week’s Postsecret, and realised from the massive reaction to it on the Postsecret forums that I wasn’t alone.

I know it sounds completely daft but just the thought of a cluster of little holes is making me twitch very uncomfortably as I type this. Clusters of little holes in fleshy, organic material ESPECIALLY. I haven’t much of a problem with honeycomb, sponges, or anthills, because they’re not fleshy (I guess sponges are debatable but I am okay with the vast majority of sponges – some sponges I have to admit are scary to me), but things like lotus seed pods are unbearable. I don’t even want to link an image of one because then I would have to Google it and add to the trauma that still lingers from the Postsecret postcard, which as you can see is distracting me so much that I am making this post from work just to get it off my mind and get on with my phone calls.

I can’t explain it. Singular big holes are okay. Lots of big holes are okay. Sparse, widely spaced out little holes are okay. It’s when they’re bunched together that I get all tingly and itchy and my insides turn and I really feel sick. ARGH! Am I completely nuts or what?

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strangely reconnected

I finally have internet at home again, after not having it for… well, I suppose it’s been nearly two months in total, since I only had it for one solid week while in York since coming back to this country in mid-September. It’s a really weird feeling. I’ve grown so adept at entertaining myself without internet, and have come so much to treasure this post-work evening period of me-time where I’m gloriously solitary and unaccountable to anyone, that being online again is just… really weird. I can’t say I’m not thrilled (I was counting down, even), but it is a strangely unexpected and sudden lifestyle shift. There’s something to be said for spending my evenings curled up in bed with library books and tea, after all.

I have so much to say about life in London so far that I wouldn’t be surprised if I had to break it into two posts - but work always leaves me exhausted and it will have to come this weekend instead. ♥

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thorns

Life in point form:

• Still internetless at home (nearly 3 weeks and counting)

• Still jobless
• Still missing my family incredibly
• Exhausted from job applications and interviews
• Know I owe emails but am too tired/internetless to send them sorry to Wanyun and Wey Ren specifically, I love you both!
• Still visa-less
• Still, foolishly, stupidly, optimistic
• despite erratically flagging spirits

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end of the road

19,791 words, 61 pages and about 5 months after all this started… I dropped two copies of my dissertation off at my department yesterday. And I’m done. Done and dusted. Done. Done. This is beyond surreal. Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who supported me along the way - i am right out of words at the moment, and my brain and energies are spent, but - thank you! ♥

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disoriented

I am back in York with a week to go to my dissertation deadline (technically less - horrors - since I should really make sure I have it ready by Friday so that it can be bound in time for a Monday submission), a list of jobs to apply for, a messy collection of documents I need to apply for a post-study work visa, a huge flock of unpacked boxes, and absolutely no idea at all where I’m going to stay over the coming year.

Oh, sheer terrifying uncertainty… it’s been a long time since our last dalliance.

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stuck in a trough

It just dawned on me that I have precisely two weeks left to my dissertation deadline and I am still writing at a crawl instead of revising this patchworked monster - and writing badly, too! I have slightly over 16K and much of it repeats itself, and I still have a point and the conclusion to go, and I cringe at the thought of having to cull, rearrange, and rewrite large chunks of it.

Qué horror! Where did August go?

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sweet child o’ mine

For a long, long time (since Christie implemented it at Avendesora way back when) I’ve been wanting an easy, idiot-proof way of including an avatar in my posts. Having searched high and low for a Wordpress solution a few years back and failed to find anything (other than tedious workarounds that would require me to memorise the filename of each image and type it into the custom field of every post), I kind of gave it up, but it occurred to me today that perhaps advances have been made since 2.2 and I really ought to see what 2.6.1 plugins have to offer. And I wasn’t disappointed! I found a fantastically straightforward plugin that works via dropdown menu - as all such plugins should work - and is so dead simple to configure that I didn’t even have to tweak my layout code beyond sticking a few lines of CSS into the stylesheet. And now I have an avatar on all my posts. I was so unnecessarily excited by this that I wasted a good hour or so uploading a tonne of icons, then going back and selecting one for each of my previous posts. Ah I’m easily pleased.

Here is a song to detract from the eyecandy-geekness of this entry:

It’s “God Knows…” by Hirano Aya, and it’s that song from Suzumiya Haruhi that my sister and I were supposed to sing at Animania last week. Neither of us had heard it before and the chorus gave us a helluva hard time (try it, it’s FAST!), but the song itself is really catchy! If you’re inclined to snag it, right-click on the player and you should see a “Download this song” option.

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ikenai taiyou

New layout!

Every now and then, I go through a phase where I just want something dead simple. It usually comes after a layout which was very graphic-heavy and complicated, and goodness knows the previous one was. I was hoping not to use a single graphic in this layout actually but eventually succumbed to placing a teeny pattern background in the header to save the whole thing from becoming overly dull.

But the big thing about this layout, really, is that it is fully liquid (i.e. columns dynamically resize with your browser size and it should be cross-broswer compatible, give it a go); which is not such a great deal if you are a better coder than I am with CSS, but is a great deal to me because the 3-column liquid layout has been an elusive goal that I have aspired to for a long time now, and I never had the patience (till now, while dissertation-procrastinating) to carefully, slowly pick apart some sample CSS and try to figure out how it’s done.

I also have catchy new music to go with the new layout, available for download on the etc. page and for live preview here!

This is “Ikenai Taiyou” by ORANGE RANGE (theme song from the jdrama Hana Kimi), my song of the moment and one of the most incredibly catchy things I have ever heard. It is also my current jogging song. I have it pretty much on perpetual loop on my iPod when I run.

And this is “Exodus” by Maksim Mrvica (probably better known as just Maksim, of The Piano Player album fame). If you’ve been obsessively watching the women’s gymnastics Olympic events, as I have, you might recognise this as Anna Pavlova’s floor music. It’s by far the most amazing of all the floor routine background music and sent me on a mad hunt for the track when I first heard it. (Anna’s floor routine is also amazing, by the way.)

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sleepless beauty

So I don’t normally embed media in my posts… but this, this piano remix of a song from Gravitation, is amazing. Perhaps my reaction to it was so much greater because I’ve just wasted a good 6.5 hours of dissertating time over the past two days marathoning the entire Gravitation series (♥) - maybe because I really like piano - maybe because I love the original song, and the contrast between the two is awesome. Have a listen and then have a listen to the piano version again:

Just… so much love.

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