I printed my thesis yesterday. Here it is:

It’s not as boring and grey as it looks. Here’s a close-up view of the cover:

OK. So tomorrow, I will find a big box and send the thing off.

I thought of having a party to celebrate, maybe with Hawaiian pizza, but actually I’m not sure if I want to. The thing is, I’m glad that I sent off my thesis on time, but the whole ‘having a PhD’ thing just doesn’t seem like something that needs to me celebrated. It won’t get me a decent job. It won’t get me respect from the people at work. All it will get me is a stupid hat, and even that will be a one-night rental. I’m so over it.

Maybe I will order pizza and spend the evening working on potential publications. That sounds…. fun.

This one is dedicated to Julia, because she sent me a fake FB mixtape. Everyone can listen to it though, that’s the benefit of making it virtual.

Mind you, this is my first dance-related mix tape, so it’s a bit crap. Fujiya/Miyagi and Franz Ferdinand are just in there because I couldn’t think of anything else. I stand by AIH, Sneaker Pimps and the Roots tho. Add suggestions in the comments.

1. Architecture In Helsinki - Do The Whirlwind (Saftey Scissors Hot Chip Mix)
2. Sneaker Pimps - 6 Underground (Perfecto Mix)
3. The Roots (feat. Cody Chestnutt) - Seed 2.0
4. Fujiya and Miyagi - Collarbone
5. Rancid - Time Bomb
6. Scissor Sisters - Laura
7. The Bloc Party - Flux
8. The Killers - Mr Brightside
9. Franz Ferdinand - Michael
10. You Say Party! We Say Die! - Five Year Plan
11. The Black Kids - I’m Not Gonna Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance With You
12. The Knife - Heartbeats

I have long suspected that the world is mostly full of people who are mean, stupid or simply crazy. What is perhaps surprising, however, is that this suspicion has stayed with me well past my teenage years. Granted, I no longer dislike people in the same way - I now think that the most common character flaws are mundane ones like laziness and arrogance, whereas I once believed people to be outrageously wicked and self-serving. Nonetheless, the human race still strikes me as a bit of a disappointment. You, dear reader, will certainly feel the same way. Let’s try an exercise together!

Think of all the people you know, and then subtract:

1. everyone who thinks they’re right all the time
2. everyone who won’t stop talking
3. everyone who lies to you
3. everyone who wants to palm their problems off onto you
4. everyone who can’t do their job properly
5. everyone who wants to make themselves feel better by putting you down
6. everyone who wants you to behave
7. everyone who doesn’t like Joy Division
8. everyone who thinks that women don’t have a right to choose
9. everyone who thinks that Guernica is just a bunch of squiggles
10. everyone who never asks questions when they ought to

How many people do you have left? I’m guessing not many. Of course, the people we cut from our lists aren’t obnoxious, depraved teabags. Not all of them. Most are average people, distinct only from you and I only in so far as we could never actually be friends with them. That’s the great disappointment, really. That so many people are normal and yet strangely unlikeable all the same. I submit that this is the reason it’s so hard to make friends, so hard to fall in love, and so enjoyable to spend a good deal of one’s time alone.

This all may seem quite obvious. However, what I wish to draw to your attention, dear reader, is not the inescapable nature of alienation but the fact that alienation changes over time. When I was younger I found it hard to understand why people did what they did, and almost impossible to participate in a convincing manner. Nowadays, having attained a reasonable range of social skills, I am more or less equipped to participate but I have difficulty seeing the point. It seems to me as though normal social intercourse wavers between the superficial and the barbaric, and I am frustrated because I would rather exercise my hard-won ability to carry on a decent conversation with someone who can actually do the same. Simply put, I believe I have graduated from socially retarded teenager to civilised man without becoming any less an outsider in most aspects of life. I honestly do hope you feel the same way, dear reader.

Guess who’s submitting their thesis in a few weeks? That would be me!

You can also have a guess at:
who can barely type?
who has a range of interesting new nervous tics?
who desperately needs to get out of the house?
who would rather stab his tender parts with a spork than read another book of philosophy?
who will stab your tender parts with a spork if you look at him the wrong way?

Right now I am editing two documents simultaneously. It’s doing my head in, because there are many tiny differences that must be preserved, even though some sentences are being moved around and rewritten three or four times.

It makes me wonder how we can manage to remember all the people and places and things we have to deal with in life. I’m surprised we don’t all walk around like the guy in Memento, with hundreds of to-do lists telling us what to do next. Lists of things we have to do each day, lists of people we know and what they can do for us, lists of things we own and where they are, lists listing the lists we have made, lists telling us what we need to know in order to write the next list, and so on. How can our memories be adequate? And how can we sustain this increasing desire for rules, procedure and accountability if our mental faculties are as limited as they appear to be? At some point there will be a meeting and somebody will point out that the note they wrote at the bottom of the spreadsheet only applies from the beginning of the week after next and even then you still need to get another copy of the spreadsheet at the beginning of next week but only if there have been changes to the list which you can contact admin to find out about on the Friday of the week before but make sure you submit hardcopies of your records for the next four weeks and not the next three weeks like it says on the sheet because central admin have been given new orders from the DET AND THEN EVERYBODY’S BRAINS WILL EXPLODE. There will just be a room full of headless bodies and bits of paper covered in brain goo.

Or is it just me who has trouble with remembering everything?

So there are two entirely inexplicable things that are going wrong with my body. The first has been going on for a while actually: at random moments something will happen to my hearing and it will feel as though one of my ears has been stuffed with cotton wool. There is also a tone - descending in pitch and decreasing in volume - that I hear in the affected ear at the same time. (Please imagine what this feels like. It’s very disconcerting. Like you’re just sitting there and then “peeeeeeeyowwwww!!” right out of the blue.) Note also that when this happens I’m not temporarily deaf in the effected ear, but it’s like the volume on that ear has been turned down somehow. Weird huh? I’m pretty sure this problem is due to long-term exposure to blaring, hedonistic rock and roll, but I asked the doctor to take a look in my ear and he said it all looked OK. Honestly, I think something is wrong with my brain rather than the ear itself.

The other thing is, well, I’m pretty sure that MY EYELASHES HAVE GOTTEN SHORTER. Yeah, WTF?! I liked my big lashes! Now they are gone. It sucks. As for causes, I’m putting this one down to old age. Perhaps my eyelashes have been recycled as back hair. Or maybe I just rub my eyes to much, who the fuck knows?