Goldsmiths have failed my degree on a technicality even though I got good marks and a first in my dissertation. People are being helpful and supportive about it on facebook. I am reading the long earth. it's really good. Soon I will get back on the guitar properly. I will I will I will. I have been playing that one beatles tune, that one cat stevens tune, and the opening sequence of knives out for fucking ages. I feel really warm towards people and the world as I write this. It's not the kind of warm that whitewashes problems or failings. I know about those. I just feel warm anyway, I like people.

:)

"Andrej’s mind, like any sane human’s … was a constantly convulsing dialectical unity of consciousness and subconsciousness, the battening down and channelling of dreams and desires, the recurring re-creation of the subliminal by the contradictory, the rational-capricious ego. And vice versa. The interaction of levels of consciousness into an unstable and permanently self-renewing whole."

The last few weekends

Have all been good. :) Lots of drinking and socialising. Happy alex.

Exams done!

Thank fuck for that. Not hugely confident about how successful they will have been, but fuck it - they're done. Uni is done... A dizzying thought, that one. The average wage for a uni graduate is a tenner an hour. That would be sooo good. 400 a week. mmmhmm. :) No idea where I will be able to work, though. None at all. Maybe as an archivist. Jess is in Wales on the beach where they filmed a bit of Harry Potter. She's looking at bugs and shit and analysing... I think species diversity? She has a real degree. After medicine, dentistry and engineering, science degrees are the best for career prospects. She is doing a real degree. But I do really love history. it's difficult to really explain why. I mean you can offer the cliches, like studying the past as a guide to how to proceed in the present, and thats true, but it wouldn't necessarily make it fun. But I still find it fun. I should really try and write something soon. Guitar is coming along quite well, and so is cooking. I am a skill monkey. haha. gonna party my arse off this summer I think. I fancy another round of hedonism.

gonna do a massive workout.

I'm gonna try to do the hardest workout I've ever done to make the day a bit more notable. I'll report back in an hour on how it went, I guess mostly it'll be me trying to come up with creative phrases to express how exhausted I am but being unable by virtue of my exhaustion. here goes!

The first day of work went quite well.

If I don't cock it up I should be able to work until the end of august and have a bit of money.
I really miss jess.

Life at the end of April.

Finished my dissertation and other bits of work, to a dubious standard no doubt on account of my exhaustion and general dementia by the time of the actual deadline. Then I slept 18 hours, came to hastings, went and got smashed with jacob, shannon, olive, codie and katie (everyone else joined in later) and that was awesome. Then got smashed the next day at the webb house with everyone, plus george, codie and two crazy irish dudes who claimed to drink tequila by the gallon, and that neat tequila was 'pisswater'. That was awesome. Then I went to mums and had bare fruit and veg and a big cooking sessions with her which was good + restorative. Now I'm about to go start work at the warehouse, and I'm having a green tea to wake me up 'cause I only got about 6 hours sleep. This is my life at the end of April.

This really is reaching the level of a physical endurance test. I'm splashing my face with water every 10 minutes and snapping my fingers in front of my face to make sure I keep thinking instead of drifting. I'm becoming quite interested in what I'm writing about, (Rousseau, Wollstonecraft, Masculine-Feminine dichotomy) which is jsut one of those bizarre little things that quite often happens when the situation is already absurd.

!!!

Less than 48 hours and all my deadlines will be gone. The next day and a half is going to be insane. Caffeine ahoy. I'm already on a kind of buzz mode so that the ten minutes until my train back to the flat seems a massive waste of time and I'm writing a blog to give my fingers something to do. Maybe I should get some speed.

This rabbit kind of reminds me of the bread-rabbit

Tumblr

I have resorted to actually searching for 'dissertation' as a tag on Tumblr. My procrastination seems to have a mind of its own, and a penchant for ridiculousness. I have learned that you print off the dissertation for 'binding', and it ends up as a little book? wtf? that's weird. I'll have a little book that I've written, sort of.

Weirdly though, looking at the tumblr posts has motivated me. Gonna do 1000 words, right after this blog. yes sireee. mm. yep. Freikorps here I come you fucking scum-fuck-piece of shit-cunts

I can hear a party a couple of streets away

It sounds cool. After this is done I'm gonna rinse so many drugs that I forget everything I know about the German Revolution. And history generally. And about ordinary tasks.

Enchiladas

They looked shit in the photograph so I'm not putting them up, but in reality they were fucking gorgeous. :D

I'm blogging instead of doing my dissertation.

Storm

There was REALLY loud thunder here just now. 0_0

Senate House

Went to Senate House today to get a wider selection of books to read for my dissertation. What a weird place. It was basically shit. The building was massively confusing, the book selection was basically poor, almost what you'd get at any library... I managed to find one book that I quote-mined, and even that I only really did to justify having gone there. The Ge
rman Historical Institute will be better, perhaps. Gotta wait til Monday for that.

I learned the little riff in Hate To Say I Told You So by The Hives. S'just the same power chord in different places, but I feel quite good about it all the same.

Today I'm makin... Enchiladas! Fucking love enchiladas. I'm gonna put so many in my face. Actually, I thought of making a food blog a while back and photographing the stuff I made. Maybe that's a bit narcissistic though. Ah fuck it what's the harm. I'd need to brush up on my presentation skills though, that's probably the least developed part of my cooking.

Really wanna go to a raucous gypsy rock/swing gig and get hammered on s

pirits and dance around - been doing this essay for days and days. I think it would blast the cobwebs away good and proper. Maybe Jess and Molly will be up for going out on the lash when they get here. The best kinds of night are when you head out basically planless, wrecked and hyped up, and end up in a million different places and seeing loads of people you know. It makes the world feel like home. It's funny though, even when there is a plan, the plan really only ever amounts to a combination of people, a variety of intoxicant and a location. These are the only variables. =p I like that though, really. It leaves things open-ended.

Today I saw two massive murals by Southbank. One said "Life is to blame for everything" and the other was a big clenched fist with "fight the nothingness" written underneath it. I thought they were pretty cool.

2012

Saturday at Linton was such fun. :) Drinking in the sun there is always good. We played umbrella stretch, and then Merlin long-boarded from one end of linton to the other, plucked the stuck umbrella out of the ground, hurled it and stuck it back in again, and seamlessly long-boarded to the station. What a legend! It was nice seeing him even though h
e crush hugged me and threw me around like a toy. He's such an irrepressible maniac. =p The moon was also really good that night.

I've played guitar every day of 2012 so far, which is good. I think it might be the first new years resolution I've really stuck to, except when I was a kid and decid

ed not to drink coke for a year for no particular reason. I was a weird kid. Do people normally stick to their new years resolutions? I get the impression most of them are to do with losing weight and going to the gym... pretty dull really but I suppose if you were fat then it would be a big deal. hehe. BIG deal. God that was really atrocious even by my standards wasn't it? For some reason I take real pleasure in things that are just stupid/lame, hence my habit of deliberately cannibalising all the most ridiculous slang. The guitar is going well, I think, although it's definitely become apparent that you never reach any kind of escape velocity where it gets easier - basically every bit of progress has to be slogged away at. But that's okay, so far I've mostly had the self-discipline to just keep at it without being int

imidated by the difficulty. Hopefully I'll be able to play along with people and be competent enough to do some songs with kie and jess within the year. This is the plan. If I practice hard I can do it I think. Jacob said the other day that my projects and attempts at skill-acquisition are getting more likely to be stuck to on a long term basis, like with cooking. I hope that's true.

I'm half-way through The Scar by China Mieville, which is proving to be his usual gourmet level. It's like the pudding of literature. It's almost sickly, in that the sophistication of the prose just doesn't relent, you can't breathe for the poetry of it... like drowning in custard. He is bloody awesome though, the sheer talent of the man... *fanboy*

At the moment I'm in London on my own, writing up my dissertation. It's a massive mission, but I am quite enjoying it in a strange way. It's pleasant to be able to just about handle myself and know what I'm talking about at this level of complexity.

I've got a penpal now, although I keep forgetting to reply to her letter.

I hope I get a job this summer. I wanna get some new clothes and go out nice places. Money and being busy definitely beat boredom and poverty, although it is great to be able to get ruined for days on end. :D Jess is way better at this than I am, she applies everywhere and works efficiently and stuff. She's gonna be more successful than me, blates.

Well looking forward to Boomtown and bangface! I love raves and partie

s. I would never have predicted it for myself when I was young, but my whole life from 16 onwards attests to this fact. haha. Seriously, getting ruined with a good mixture of strangers and friends is where all the magic happens.

As soon as this dissertation is done, I get another summer with my completely insane friends! Their love buoys me up until my head knocks against the sky. I love that bit of Keats even though mostly he is a sappy shit. And it's true.

OH MY GOD THIS IS SO BLEAK. GOD DAMN YOU FRENCH AUTONOMISM WITH YOUR ALMOST CONVINCING NIHILISM.

God damn it French autonomism. Why'd ya have to be so utterly despondent? If I didn't have the friends that I do I might even take some of this on board.

I think life at it's worst fits the description here. This is how I picture the existential despair of the middle class. The life of the working class and poor is of necessity more social and therefore less alienated than this, although the effects of capitalist individualism do bleed in everywhere to some extent. The revolution will blast away these spiritual cobwebs forever and ever and ever. Anyway, enjoy, if that's the right word:

“I AM WHAT I AM.” This is marketing’s latest offering to the world, the final stage in the development of advertising, far beyond all the exhortations to be different, to be oneself and drink Pepsi. Decades of concepts in order to get where we are, to arrive at pure tautology. I = I. He’s running on a treadmill in front of the mirror in his gym. She’s coming back from work, behind the wheel of her Smart car. Will they meet?

“I AM WHAT I AM.” My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you, and something’s wrong. Mass personalization. Individualization of all conditions – life, work and misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampant depression. Atomization into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of contact. The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tired I get. We cling to our self like a coveted job title. We’ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like an amputation. We insure our selves to the point of bankruptcy, with a more or less disguised clumsiness.

Meanwhile, I manage. The quest for a self, my blog, my apartment, the latest fashionable crap, relationship dramas, who’s fucking who… whatever prosthesis it takes to hold onto an “I”! If “society” hadn’t become such a definitive abstraction, then it would denote all the existential crutches that allow me to keep dragging on, the ensemble of dependencies I’ve contracted as the price of my identity. The handicapped person is the model citizen of tomorrow. It’s not without foresight that the associations exploiting them today demand that they be granted a “subsistence income.”

The injunction, everywhere, to “be someone” maintains the pathological state that makes this society necessary. The injunction to be strong produces the very weakness by which it maintains itself, so that everything seems to take on a therapeutic character, even working, even love. All those “how’s it goings?” that we exchange give the impression of a society composed of patients taking each other’s temperatures. Sociability is now made up of a thousand little niches, a thousand little refuges where you can take shelter. Where it’s always better than the bitter cold outside. Where everything’s false, since it’s all just a pretext for getting warmed up. Where nothing can happen since we’re all too busy shivering silently together. Soon this society will only be held together by the mere tension of all the social atoms straining towards an illusory cure. It’s a power plant that runs its turbines on a gigantic reservoir of unwept tears, always on the verge of spilling over.