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narcasseAt this juncture I can probably admit with impunity that I work best under pressure. I may rant and pull at my hair and chain-smoke my way through the stress of one thing after another but I do seem to be at my most productive when I’m in that sort of ongoing situation. I’m also oddly sociable when put on the spot while going at things full tilt or perhaps I just get so tired that I just go with the flow of social interaction so that I smile or laugh or make the expected comments in the expected places. Regardless of the what and wherefore I’ve had a busy week and that’s paid off rather well in the end in a variety of ways.
While I’ve been rushing about to the point where I’ve had to set Outlook reminders to do my laundry otherwise I’ll forget, it seems that everything has presented a possible inspiration to write something. At the moment it’s all fanfiction but I’ve written things featuring the croissants I had for breakfast one day, having a soak in the bath, having a blood test and of course the obligatory smoking that I do fairly frequently. I have newly unfinished pieces in my WIP folder that were prompted by being on the train at Farringdon, riding the Waterloo & City line one day in jeans and another in a suit, the obligatory piece that takes place in that London where all the major players are only a step away from being Patrick Bateman and the obligatory half-written behavioural analysis couched as a story. I have a post to make about classism and regionalism triggered entirely by the fact that while I was moving things about I discovered my riding crop covered in dust which leads into the fact that it’s the real thing, meant for horses, and purchased from the local supermarket at the height of riding season one year because that’s just the sort of area I live in. I have a distinct feeling that any post I’d like to make about Orientalism in The Blind Banker will start with my yelling ‘Norbury’, because I’m just that kind of a Sherlockian, and then degenerate into expletives beginning with blasphemy and ending in insulting someone’s mother. I’m also fairly sure that there’s some kind of civil service fetish playing into the fact that I fancy Mark Gatiss’ Mycroft.
I’ve quoted “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains [...well, you know the rest]” entirely without irony because it was supremely applicable, and it raised a chuckle. I’ve sat on a train examining my own changed body language due to being unable to use the hand that I normally use to check my phone with quite as well as usual and realised that for anybody to notice that they’d have to already be aware of that pattern of behaviours specific to me. I have also had two conversations this weekend alone about body language, one involving demonstrating three ways to perform the same gesture that still are distinctly different, the other in an entirely business context. I’ve talked about game theory and used clips from The Great Game and The Blind Banker to demonstrate conversational power dynamics, explained the limitations of discourse theory using electoral results, used clips from House of Cards and BBC audio books to demonstrate British regional dialect variations and compared and contrasted Filmer, Hobbes & Rousseau in conversation. I’ve also discovered that my father wants me to study with the monks so that I can engage in actual Buddhist teaching because he honestly thinks I’d be good at it.
Cerebrally it’s been a great week. Practically, early Monday morning I was rooting through the dryer trying to find clean underwear for work and muttering that I only go commando when it’s just a quick trip to go put out the bins. I’ve got a pile of filing to do, laundry to put away, I still have a faint bruise from Thursday’s blood test, I’ve managed to trap nerves in both my feet on different occasions and I’m currently in the middle of correcting an ESL essay. Still, in the midst of all that frenetic doing I now have an even better phone contract than before which gives me a ludicrous amount of texts, extra minutes and the usual data capacity and Blackberry services at a much lower cost. I also have enough flashdrives to make an external HD but none of them support Ready Boost, even the free one from The Economist so that might need looking into. My hayfever seems to be getting worse quite possibly because I’m becoming more susceptible to it when I stop smoking and run myself ragged, though thankfully cigarettes do still clear my airways remarkably efficiently and hopefully next weekend I won’t end up doing one simple thing on a Friday that runs into several other things right after each other so that I’m sitting at my desk on a Sunday afternoon trying to round it all off still. I’ve yet to discover why the Logitech drivers consistently turn off my function keys but since it’s only really a minor issue when I boot from hibernate I’m not going to let it bother me, and I’m just going to get use to the fractional, split-second lag when I use the media keys as pre-programmed hotkeys for WinAmp. My handwriting with my left hand turns out to be legible but childlike so that’s something to work on which also makes me consider the implications because despite being right handed there are certain things I default to with my left hand instead. And I think, at last, that I can safely say that my previous crisis is over.
While I’ve been rushing about to the point where I’ve had to set Outlook reminders to do my laundry otherwise I’ll forget, it seems that everything has presented a possible inspiration to write something. At the moment it’s all fanfiction but I’ve written things featuring the croissants I had for breakfast one day, having a soak in the bath, having a blood test and of course the obligatory smoking that I do fairly frequently. I have newly unfinished pieces in my WIP folder that were prompted by being on the train at Farringdon, riding the Waterloo & City line one day in jeans and another in a suit, the obligatory piece that takes place in that London where all the major players are only a step away from being Patrick Bateman and the obligatory half-written behavioural analysis couched as a story. I have a post to make about classism and regionalism triggered entirely by the fact that while I was moving things about I discovered my riding crop covered in dust which leads into the fact that it’s the real thing, meant for horses, and purchased from the local supermarket at the height of riding season one year because that’s just the sort of area I live in. I have a distinct feeling that any post I’d like to make about Orientalism in The Blind Banker will start with my yelling ‘Norbury’, because I’m just that kind of a Sherlockian, and then degenerate into expletives beginning with blasphemy and ending in insulting someone’s mother. I’m also fairly sure that there’s some kind of civil service fetish playing into the fact that I fancy Mark Gatiss’ Mycroft.
I’ve quoted “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains [...well, you know the rest]” entirely without irony because it was supremely applicable, and it raised a chuckle. I’ve sat on a train examining my own changed body language due to being unable to use the hand that I normally use to check my phone with quite as well as usual and realised that for anybody to notice that they’d have to already be aware of that pattern of behaviours specific to me. I have also had two conversations this weekend alone about body language, one involving demonstrating three ways to perform the same gesture that still are distinctly different, the other in an entirely business context. I’ve talked about game theory and used clips from The Great Game and The Blind Banker to demonstrate conversational power dynamics, explained the limitations of discourse theory using electoral results, used clips from House of Cards and BBC audio books to demonstrate British regional dialect variations and compared and contrasted Filmer, Hobbes & Rousseau in conversation. I’ve also discovered that my father wants me to study with the monks so that I can engage in actual Buddhist teaching because he honestly thinks I’d be good at it.
Cerebrally it’s been a great week. Practically, early Monday morning I was rooting through the dryer trying to find clean underwear for work and muttering that I only go commando when it’s just a quick trip to go put out the bins. I’ve got a pile of filing to do, laundry to put away, I still have a faint bruise from Thursday’s blood test, I’ve managed to trap nerves in both my feet on different occasions and I’m currently in the middle of correcting an ESL essay. Still, in the midst of all that frenetic doing I now have an even better phone contract than before which gives me a ludicrous amount of texts, extra minutes and the usual data capacity and Blackberry services at a much lower cost. I also have enough flashdrives to make an external HD but none of them support Ready Boost, even the free one from The Economist so that might need looking into. My hayfever seems to be getting worse quite possibly because I’m becoming more susceptible to it when I stop smoking and run myself ragged, though thankfully cigarettes do still clear my airways remarkably efficiently and hopefully next weekend I won’t end up doing one simple thing on a Friday that runs into several other things right after each other so that I’m sitting at my desk on a Sunday afternoon trying to round it all off still. I’ve yet to discover why the Logitech drivers consistently turn off my function keys but since it’s only really a minor issue when I boot from hibernate I’m not going to let it bother me, and I’m just going to get use to the fractional, split-second lag when I use the media keys as pre-programmed hotkeys for WinAmp. My handwriting with my left hand turns out to be legible but childlike so that’s something to work on which also makes me consider the implications because despite being right handed there are certain things I default to with my left hand instead. And I think, at last, that I can safely say that my previous crisis is over.
