wee bit mad

ahahahaha. Am going a wee bit mad. Have slept fifteen hours in last seventy-two. Have walked around London all day and almost falling asleep on public transport. (Although - I did go to Mornington Crescent, which made my day. It is a REAL PLACE, not just made up for the radio.) Have just realised that cannot sleep tonight, as have approximately four books to read before ten, and have to go to tute, write essay from scratch, and stage-manage Cerberus tomorrow, thus will have to stay up finishing said essay, and get up v. early on Friday to get back to London, retrieve cousin (again!) and go up north on late night train.

DO NOT NEED SLEEP. SLEEP IS FOR TORTOISES.

Am at stage, now, where everything is terribly funny for no reason. Not sure why. The word "phlegm" is inherently funny. So is the word "scrotum" and also "veridical". Am not sure what "nomological" means, but will probably find out.

Dear me. Three more large-chunks-of-books to read, and so much coffee required if I am even to stand up out of this chair and go back to work.

Mmm... tutorial in eight-and-a-half hours. I can do this. I think.

ooh, look, zombies.

braaaaaaains.

Edited to add: Cannot do essay tonight. Will do it tomorrow.

Have just realised that tute rearrangement is TUTOR'S FAULT ANYWAY.

No essay from meeeeeeeeee.

BED OMG.

Blair resigns; toothbrushes are important.

Eeee, sleep! Went to bed at three, got up at nine, feel marginally better although not by much. I went to the tutorial in question, which was bad for my head; my tute partner had written a six-page essay, 12-point single-spaced, and it took forty minutes to read. Groooan.

Right now, I'm watching Tony Blair's resignation speech in Sedgefield. He's stepping down on June 27th, as we all know - I liked Gordon Brown, talking about unemployment: "There are of course 600,000 vacancies in the economy as a result of- actually, there's one more today..." - and at the moment he's saying "Britain is not a follower today; Britain is a leader" and other such examples of syntactic parallelism. I have a problem with rhetoric, I think - I like the effective use of language so much that I end up being susceptible to it. So I'm not going to venture an opinion just yet on Tony Blair's departure. It's good for him to go. But more than that I will not say.

(Oh, no, wait: good rhetoric, again! He just used the phrase "messianic zeal", which I rather like.)

I now need to go and hide in the Social Science Library and read ridiculus amounts and do an essay and then go to Cerberus and then stage-manage and sneak out early and finish the essay before three am. I also-

(Shit, he just said, "The world knows it: this is the greatest nation on earth."

I am fresh from a theoretical analysis of the legacy of South Asian colonialism. URGH.)

I also need to get some sleep! In the meantime, though, also because of this tutorial, I am moved to examine some terribly important political issues. The thing is, I am Indian, my tute-partner is Indian, my tutor is Indian. Hence a mini culutural bubble (although we have so far avoided that horrific practice, evident among some people in tutes on British politics last year, of talking about "our government" and "our history") and I've been messing about on Facebook since I got back and found some group entitled "You know you're Indian when..."

A lot of these things ring true. One that stands out is, "You wonder why your English friends brush their teeth after breakfast when you do yours first thing in the morning..."

Yes! I have always wondered about this! Is it an English and/or British thing, to brush your teeth last thing in the morning? I never chalked this up to culture before. In fact, I never even thought about the social context of toothbrushes before. Quite possibly this is a lacuna in my education.

Actually, similarly - I wonder if it is a British cultural thing to fill the sink with water when you want to do the washing-up. I actually used to get in trouble at school for this - I was once accused of not knowing how to wash up, merely because I thought that filling the sink with bubbles was messy and unhygienic. Which it is. But again, maybe it's culture?

(Ahahahaha. Blair's just finished this speech, and the correspondent has just commented, blithely, "If you're worrying about the noise, that's just the anti-war protestors...")

Anyway! I need to do some work! I need to not babble about trivialities!