Five bad boys with the power to rock you

The girls and I spent Friday night re-living our teenage years, minus the tie-dye t-shirts and the copious amounts of tea tree oil. We had pizza and jelly babies and kicked things off by watching Coyote Ugly, a film that does not hold up so well when you're no longer a teenager thinking a) all your small-town dreams will be realised in New York City and b) Adam Garcia (or similar) will be discovered living just around the corner from you. (And he'll like your songs, even if you did write them on the back of a beer mat.)

We also watched Clueless, which stands up much better (or maybe we'd just drunk more by that point). After R went home, the rest of us migrated to 90s music videos, courtesy of a well-timed programme on Magic (Poster Boys of the 90s) and some delving into the depths of Youtube. B and I are two years older than J, and apparently two years in teen years is more than at any other point, which was why while B and I were remembering the horrors of the Five (5ive?) "raps" in the middle of their songs, J was "fondly" recalling the curtains-and-combats styling of A1.



We didn't even get to 10 Things I Hate About You, or Cruel Intentions, or Bring It On, although we did find this to kind of make up for it.

Sadly, being old I spent most of yesterday napping, reading my book, and not saying no when my housemate C suggested we order takeaway pizza instead of cooking. Seeing as it is threatening to flood outside, I see no harm in doing much the same today...

An update (with llamas)

Last weekend I went home, and my mum and I visited Graves Park in Sheffield, where you can go along and feed various animals (goats, sheep, cows, donkeys). They also have deer, pigs, and a huge amount of chickens, that you aren't allowed to feed. When we went on Sunday, we also saw the llamas:

I am a big fan of llamas.

New additions

The last few weeks have been incredibly busy, mostly due to the continuous battle between me and my PhD. I have eight months left and it's all starting to kick in in a big way. Added to that the new issue of the journal I edit (and my first as joint editor-in-chief), and it's been a pretty hectic month.

Over Easter, I did get a few days off to spend with Jon, who came up for the bank holiday weekend. We went bowling for B's birthday, and out for Mexican food, and then on Saturday night we went out in town: first to a uber-trendy club full of scene teens, where we stayed for 45 minutes before deciding we were older than everyone else in there by about 10 years, and then to Eddie's, where everyone is old and the DJ plays a reliable selection of music I actually recognise.

It seems like there should be more to report after all this silence (although I have been blogging here more frequently), but there really isn't. Study, write, study, write, sleep a bit, eat some pasta, repeat. Take pictures of self feeding goats. You know, that sort of thing.

Return from the Wilderness of Pen and Paper

My computer finally breathed its last a few days ago. It had been coming for a while, mostly because my computer was built out of bits of other computers, and after eighteen months had finally decided that it was time to have a long nap. After a week in the wasteland of no-computer-ville, which was by turns frustrating and wonderfully liberating (screw you, email), I am back online and in action. Currently, my new computer is a novelty simply for being able to play music and open a Word document at the same time.

This weekend just gone I was down in Brighton, which is pretty much the best place to be when March decides to be super sunny. I spent Friday working on the rewrite of one of my thesis chapters on the beach, before sneaking off to the marina to have a look at the boats and eavesdrop on middle-aged men discussing, with much enthusiasm, "that there Westeros" and their enduring love for Sean Bean.

It was also a kind-of birthday celebration for the boyshape, so we had lots of cake. We also played through the entirety of The Next Big Thing (a pretty cool point and click adventure game), ate a lot of Mexican food, and watched an inordinate amount of things starring H. Jon Benjamin. (Plus quite a lot of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which I had never seen before.) On Sunday night, when Jon had band practice, I went to see The Hunger Games, which I wrote a review of here, and which marked the first time I have ever been to the cinema alone. I always thought it would be weird, but it might be my new favourite hobby.

This week, I have mostly been trying not to burn in the sun (and suffering one minor fail there already). Yesterday, I went swimming in the morning and then baked cookies and biscuits in the afternoon, for our vaguely American-themed "dinner party" at Jenny's. The cookies in particular were excellent, and I will definitely be making them again. Sadly, I don't have any pictures of the finished result, but you'll just have to trust me. They were TASTY.

And, in even more exciting news: after getting tickets to see Eddie Vedder in London in July, today we also managed to score tickets for Soundgarden in Hyde Park, also in July. SO AWESOME THERE ARE NO WORDS. Except these ones, obviously...

Cats & cake

On Friday, I submitted the second draft of my introduction to my supervisor. (Cue giddy feeling of FINALLY IT'S GONE HURRAY and sinking feeling of WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST SEND TO MY SUPERVISOR?) To take our mind off such things, B and I went swimming (and for the second time in as many weeks, I broke the 30 lengths barrier), and plotted our respective lazy-ish weekends. On Friday night, we went to see The Artist at The Electric cinema in Birmingham, which I would highly recommend to those three people who haven't already seen it. (It was also my first time at The Electric, which is an old-fashioned style picturehouse, rather than a big fuck-off Odeon.)

Oh hai.

My Saturday was certainly lazy - I read a huge chunk of A Storm of Swords: Blood and Gold, which I finally finished yesterday, and lounged around watching trashy Saturday night TV and even Match of the Day, which I don't usually get to watch, mostly because I live with two girls who are in no way interested in football. On Sunday, a group of us went to see my friend R sing with her choir - a whole repertoire of Queen songs - at a madly inappropriate (for a choir) metal venue outside of town, which J and I were sufficiently enamoured with to plot a return sometime. We all went for dinner afterwards, which led to J (a hardcore vegetarian) being served pork, and us all getting a free meal to compensate.

Pesky kitten

Today, I went to B's house to (finally) see her kitten, who is pesky and super cute and a tiny bit of a menace, like when I am left alone with him for thirty seconds and he takes the opportunity to escape into next door's garden. We baked a crazy chocolate cake, or rather B baked a chocolate cake and I watched and tried to be helpful, culminating in me kind of dropping the cake... But we salvaged it, and I brought it home with me. (Friends who can bake = kind of awesome.)

Cake, before I dropped it.

Demon Kitty Returns

Brighton sea front at night, from the pier

The last couple of weeks have been full to the top with writing. Hard, thankless, progress-so-slow-it-hurts writing. I am in the process of drafting my thesis introduction for the second time (the first attempt being... very obviously a first attempt), and have spent so much time going over and over the same paragraphs for hours on end, before launching into a new section and starting the process all over again, that my brain has been pretty fried. There is nothing exciting about being buried in articles I sourced three years ago, notes I can no longer read, and an increasingly well-thumbed Roget's thesaurus, wondering if "ancillary" and "auxiliary" can be used interchangeably. Amongst other concerns.

There is nothing glamorous about a PhD. Particularly not when my attempts to work on campus have been thwarted by noisy, Facebooking undergraduates and [insert rant about the lack of facilities for arts PhDs]. Twice in the same week I holed up in a library carrel, only for the SAME man with a hacking cough and a propensity for ignoring the "no mobile phones in the library" rule, who from the shuffling noises he was making sounded as if he was wearing a shellsuit, turned up in the adjoining carrel.

As a result, I have been working from home more and more. This has involved working out a complex and satisfying radio schedule (I dislike working in silence). The radio gem of my day is Radcliffe and Maconie on BBC Radio 6, which is where I discovered my new musical obsession, Katzenjammer, a Norwegian folk-pop band who sound like a cross between Wir Sind Helden and Gogol Bordello.

However, moving on from coughing men in shellsuits and combating days alone with Mark Radcliffe's Tortoise News!, this weekend I went to visit Jon and spend some time by the sea. The sun was out, and it was an excellent few days of awesomeness, involving Mexican food and video games and a lot of Arrested Development. On Saturday night, while J was at band practice, I wandered down the pier (doing my best to avoid all the stag nights on parade) and then spent some time holed up in this late night cafe with Star Wars toys hanging from the ceiling. I drank a lot of tea and started reading a book written by a friend of mine (and in which I made it into the acknowledgements!), and afterwards we went and drank beer at this tiny little Scandinavian bar we found a couple of months ago.

Tea at the Marwood

Last night, we went to see The Muppets Movie, which was also excellent. I don't go to the cinema very often, so it's always pretty exciting when I do get to go, but The Muppets was particularly fun, and it made me smile a lot. We need more Muppets in the world. (And less Punch the Teacher.)

I came home today and had lunch with a couple of friends of mine, one of whom got engaged over the weekend. I am, of course, happy for her - but I am still completely baffled by this whole wedding malarkey. As a kid, I didn't want to get married because a) I would have to wear a dress, and b) people would look at me. I stand by these reasons as entirely sound, even as I have fleshed them out with more complex social and political beliefs. I am happy to attend the weddings of my friends, however. So long as there is cake. A LOT OF CAKE.

Some things are just meant to go together

And some things just make you happy.

(thought unknown)

I miss one boyshape or another most of the time.

That's pretty much today.