Unifinished business

(05/05/09) So after watching this 1996 film about 1964, I'm pacing up and down the length of the kitchen wiping up and popping the occasional unwashed grape in to my mouth, desperate to use the only (occupied) bathroom in the house... And I get it. Finally.

What I 'got' that day, is uncertain. But I remember what a nice feeling it was. A slight buzz that would trail me pleasantly, until I wrote it down. But I took so long to get to the point, it had frizzled away. The film in question: That thing you do!
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(18/04/09) Rosemary and Thyme (title only)

I was sick then, and my room-mate improvised with the said herbs instead of eucalyptus or whatever else is usually used, for a steam session at the stove. Which was brilliant. I have no idea what I thought of writing about then though.
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(15/01/09) Having read a lot of diary-ing in the past week I feel like writing myself. I had previously established (probably more than once) that I would avoid diary-like-spewage-sessions here but I haven't quite kept my word on that.. I have also been noticing that when I'm into a book or have just finished it - my language and even the words in my head start to take a slight hint of the style in the book. For that matter I seem to be prone even to the people I spend time with. But wait, are you interested in what my lingual influences are? Does it matter whether you are? Does it matter whether 'ligual influence' coveys correctly, what I'm trying to get at ?And thus we lapse into 'more rhetorical frippery'(1) as one dictionary gives an example usage of the word.

Here I had just finished reading 'Engleby' by Sebastian Faulks. It took some mild rhetorical frippery to find out I didn't have anything to say about it after all.
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(26/11/08)I'm frequently

Well, I don't know. I'm frequently... a lot of things! I'm frequently clumsy, I'm frequently down with a cold, I'm frequently returning to the computer instead of doing work, I'm frequently day-dreaming, I'm frequently awesome :D, I'm frequently.. no I'm not going to make this a painfully long list just to prove my point.
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(13/08/08)"Futility is so attractive to they young, and I had not yet exhausted its possibilities." The story talks about the protagonist's nostalgia for her 'youthful days of unrequited love'.

I forget where I got those lines from. A little bit of googling shows that its from a story called 'Hair Jewellery' in a collection of Margaret Atwood's short stories (Dancing Girls and other Stories). Also found a Scribd i paper version of the book. Which unfortunately was jumbled and I read bits of three stories that started with 'Rape fantasies', on to Hair Jewellery and another unknown one by which time I was very annoyed with Scribd. It was funny how the much the voice of the second story sounded like that of the first one. It was when she told me (the reader) that the only sweater with only one hole she had (she's poor), had that hole because I made it with a cigarette butt, my vague suspicion of two odd paragraphs was confirmed. The earlier one only talked to me as if I were the anonymous reader that I was. Point? There's a reson all these were left unwritten you know!
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(18/03/08)Before all the lovely spring snow interfered, I was working on a post that started off with Amartya Sen's "The Argumentative Indian", intending to talk about what I found mildly disturbing about it and continuing along the same subjects. It unfortunately veered off into murky waters of the shortcomings of our educational system and my reading encounters through school-life (including some silly whining about not being given Baum and Dahl on a silver-platter when I was 11 years old) and ended with excusing my digressions as a means of staying true to the blog's title's claim. And then, I decided it was too much for one post (the joys of complete control) so here I am, trying this time not to stray from the shoddy mental blueprint of this post. I do realize, of course, that with each sentence in this introductory para, I'm championing an increasingly lost cause...

Seriously, whatever.
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(20/06/07)A day in the life of
She had two pillows under her head to facilitate breathing through the night. The symptoms of cold always manifested rather strongly (and frequently) in her and among other irritable things made it a pain to breathe. As it happend on most mornings when she was thus affected, she awoke when, inspite of the elevation, a conscious effort had to be made to breathe. It must have been around 6 or 7 today. She always sensed that there was a gap between waking up and being aware of having woken up. But those few seconds or minutes or sometimes even hours always eluded her and this bothered her in a vague sort of way.

Oh this just sounds like someone else. What was I trying to do?
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(04/12/06) The first one...
...is a major digression, since exams are on in a few days. Nevertheless, as I go off organochemical synthesis of interferon genes, I get to.... shit, I'll leave this 'under construction' right now

:)
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A few excerpts of posts that never got to be a grey-and-purple on my blog. Because I'm desperate to get something on this page but am not able to muster up anything new.

So here's me signing off from a brown velvet armchair in a farm-house in Greater Manchester, that very often reminds me, unbelievably, of home.

I am a published poet :D

Haha, not quite in the way one usually imagines. There is no little slip of a book filled with verses that only the local bookstore has a modest 25 copies of. That's too much to expect. There is but one poem (and probably will remain the only one for a long time now from the looks of it). And it's gotten into the Winter issue of an online publication called The Smoking Poet. I might be able to identify with only half their tag-line (of sorts) "A fine cigar and good literature - two of life's most enduring pleasures", never having had a cigar. But that is immaterial. I take heart from the fact that lots of others whose work is featured seem to be full-time writers who have actual books (of poems or not) to their credit and are generally in print. That gives me some sort of validation I think, cosmetic as it might be. Whatever, yay me! :)  

Click on the title to go to the poem. 

PS happy new year and all that

Where do You stand?

Here's what Political Compass thinks:

So from the looks of it I'm clearly on the left, though not too far . Good to know -I was vaguely concerned about straying from the fence while not being sure I wanted to be sitting on it either. Had always refused to properly make up my mind about that somehow.
Have a go at http://www.politicalcompass.org/

Everyday Distractions

Words are clearly not my thing right now. So here's some bits and odds snapped up (mostly) from my phone camera:

Feet first

My shiny Blackwell bag catches light

I turn shades of grey

The Duvet twists

Train mirrors

Even teeth frame the bruise

Window looks at Times Square

Gold

the Headboard looms over filmsy blue pillows

Feet lie together

Henna colours

Music travels along with me

the Pinkness comes Next

Light shines through

Cutting right through the Heart

Since I do not have anything to say, I'm putting up something I do. So here is the heart, complete with the blood it was in the process of pumping when 4% PFA* (I assume? Correct me if wrong) put an end to it.

*Para-formaldehyde

What happens in Vegas?

"Bland enough to make millions as culture edges closer to oblivion" says Ian Nathan of the Empire Magazine.

What is it that makes us flock to pay 6.80 quid (or even free on megavideo) to go see two 'beautiful' people kiss in the end?

Is it better/worse if it's free?

I apologize, I need to go. Oblivion awaits :D


PS Oh but don't take me seriously. I'm drunk anyway - not too much, just a little bit. Vegas did it say in the beginning?

So, what's next?

Alright, that's done. Thesis completed, reviewed, examined; I passed. It's over! MRes in Medical and Molecular Biosciences - Applied Immunobiology, attained. So for a bit now (2 years, more?), I'm done being a student. Having rushed into this Master's program last year, I've decided to give it a break before starting on the seemingly inevitable PhD. Therefore, have obtained myself a change in occupation from student to Research Assistant. So much for the bum-life hmpf! :/

This means I don't get student discounts anymore: concert tickets cost twice as much, and shoes and groceries some 5% more; but I can live with that, no problem. I can also live with giving away a quarter of my income to the tax man. It would after all, allow me to get my finances together, take a vacation or two, go binge-shopping, get more research experience: all while working on someone else's pet idea before thinking of diving into my own 3-odd years' project - to give me time to decide if I actually want to do that and bail out without too much damage (and with some spare cash) if I don't. Of course, it seems impossible now, to be doing anything but this sort of thing for a living -but it's just beginning: I don't even work full-time yet, I've only seen so much and there's so much I'm shit scared of failing miserably at. Hopefully, I won't have to run away from it all.

No Sanskrit this time, no immediate insurmountable problems no terrible maladies... hell, I even like my boss! The only sad bit is that I'm not doing Immunology anymore - not for at least two more years. I had visions of working on TB or other random infectious disease at LSHTM but it was probably not meant to be. Instead, I have been saved the trouble of moving to a new city and life's so much easier for that (not that I'd pick easy in this context) - and have also a relatively unconventional start as the sole member of a brand new research 'group'. One could argue for a start as an anonymous member of a big-ass lab group in Oxford someplace as better for experience at this stage. Whatever man, this is more special, no? I am more important here :P

The only other thing that bothers me about not being a student anymore is that it means that I have effectively lost my divine right to be careless/stupid at lab-work. On the other hand, this IS it - these experiments matter, the project matters. It's not some side/fanciful hypothesis that the PI (Principal Investigator - heads an academic research group) hastily drew up, or some stale left-overs of a project that the last PhD student didn't bother with, dug up - so that the poor sod master's student or undergrad can be given something to do in the lab.

It's the real deal.*

Which is both scary and exciting :)

*At least as far as a career in medical research is concerned.