I am not a huge fan of electronic gadgets, but this is just brilliant:

It’s remote-controlled, rechargeable, and is totally cheap and nasty. Fifteen bucks from The Reject Shop. Mind you, it’s virtually impossible to fly. I just crash it into the curtains for five minutes until the battery is flat. Ah, but still… who wants an iPhone when you can have a frickin helicopter?

Tonight I got home at 12, after going out to a comedy night with Ross, and there were two emails. One confirming that my Low Paying But Stylish Job is going to pay almost nothing over summer, and the other confirming that I am now the author of a PEER-REVIEWED PHILOSOPHY PAPER! So, a big, fat raspberry for the first email, but a big cheer for the second.

Of course, this leaves me in a dilemma. I had made up my mind this afternoon to quit the Low Paying But Stylish Job in favour of a real job - a Real Job With Shirts and Ties, to be specific. I had dreams of sports cars, flash suits and unlimited juicy steaks. But now I realise that it was the spare time and stolen printing afforded by my current job that got me the publication in the first place, and I stand a better chance of getting a couple more if I stay there. Plus I can apply for the fellowship in London if I stay.

I have to think it over. I’m leaning on the ’stay’ side of things, but I don’t know.

Perfect for wearing my new Scary Go Round t-shirts. Perfect for going all out and ordering extra cheese (!) with my meatball sub. Perfect for having impure thoughts about just about every girl I see. (Even students - I’m so going to hell, but who fucking cares y’know?)

Things to look forward to:

dive trip in summer
my birthday (on the 23rd - send me luv or I h8 youse 4 eva)
week off next week
oh, and The Hollowmen - it’s on right now so bye.

After all the crap this week (mine and other peoples’) I want to say something. I’m note sure what though.

Last night I was at a dodgy bar in Northbridge listening to a dodgy band, around midnight. Tomas was there MCing and keeping me well lit with his bottomless bar tab. So I was leaning against the sound desk and watching the band when this chick comes up and leans next to me. Body contact. The utter hotness of her. I want to say hi but it’s too loud. Then after a while she goes away. Then she comes back. In the break between songs I ask her what the name of the band is (not that I really care) and she says she doesn’t know. I say they’re pretty cool anyway (which they obviously aren’t) and she nods. Then more epic noise from the crap band so I can’t really say anything. She really is hot though. We lean for another song, with more body contact, then she goes off again. I leave to get some air and don’t see her again.

Now the point here is that, I assume, I was supposed to do something. And the problem is that I have no idea what. It has been brought to my attention, by Tom, that I should have offered to buy her a drink - but even then I can’t see how it could have ended, except for me accidentally spittling in her ear as I tried to make conversation by shouting. Fuck, how can something as simple as meeting someone be so awkward and difficult?

I don’t know. I don’t even want advice about it, really. What I want is to say something about the bad fit between me and what’s happening around me. There are so many situations like that, that don’t suit me. Where I don’t fit in properly. It seems as though others adapt naturally, but I have to try so hard. And this isn’t just about me - it’s about you as well, because maybe you feel the same way. And here’s what I think it comes down to: you can keep it together, and become the great person that you want to be, but you can never change how you feel inside. The spaz will always be part of you.

The downside: it goes deeper than picking up girls in crappy bars. You feel lost, awkward and anxious as a matter of course. You have to pull yourself together to appear normal and you might disintegrate again from time to time.

The upside: you are so adept at self-criticism that you can’t help but develop self-awareness. You love making out, punk rock and Mark Rothko paintings more than other people because they make you still inside. You understand that the world is a strange place.

Or maybe this is just me and it doesn’t apply to anyone else. Hell, maybe it’s even a bad self-portrait. I don’t know. The one thing I’m sure about is that, from time to time, I meet someone who is like me, and I somehow feel a bit better.

This week I am wavering wildly between suave and spaz. I can get the suave up and running ok, but the moment something unexpected happens I turn all twitchy and weird. It’s nothing too overt - I haven’t puked on anyone or started stammering - but there are definitely holes in the mojo. Mind you, this isn’t a completely bad situation: I’m usually spaz 100% of the time so anything’s an improvement. Still though, I need to get a handle on things and I’m not quite sure how. :(

(Does any have any anti-spaz tips? I know a lot of people who read this site are, or were, spazzes themselves, so I’m hoping for some advice.)

l wonder if Edith Cowan will accept torrid descriptions of illicit boy-love as your assignments?

And before you ask, we are marking an assignment on the ethics of paedophilic literature at work. I swear!

Please note that tomorrow is the day that CERN’s Large Hadron Collider comes online. Scientists say it probably won’t create a black hole that will destroy the Earth, but in case it does I’m taking the rest of the day off. Although, to be serious and scientific about it, the first zap will only be half a tera-electron-volt, and I assume that the universe will only be torn asunder when they ramp it up to the full five TeV over the coming months. And I think my sister has worked on some of the software that runs the thing, so at least I’ll have someone to yell at on the phone while the world is being squashed into a 9-millimeter-wide ball of condensed matter.

(Note how the woman on the right does NOT look tight. She thinks the thing is about to destroy the entire Earth, including her prized collection of ceramic cat figurines.)

Now, if you’re scratching your head about what this whole LHC deal is all about, I’ve read the website and I can tell you exactly how it works. You see, scientists have realised that the universe as we know it does not make sense. For the longest time they thought it did, but the overwhelming weight of evidence finally convinced them and now they are just as confused as everybody else. Except the scientists have a tentative hypothesis. If there is virtually no sense in the universe we know, it must have leaked away into other dimensions. Therefore we must locate these other dimensions in order to find the missing sense, and then use that sense to explain away all the nonsense in the dimensions we inhabit. Of particular interest is gravity. Gravity makes no frickin’ sense, and that’s according to people who would totally understand it if it were possible to understand in the first place. In all likelihood, they say, most of what makes gravity work has leaked into another dimension and the interesting stuff is all happening over there.

So, we have to find out more about these other dimensions. In order to do this, we must take some atoms (which don’t make sense) and smash them to bits to find out more about the stuff that makes them up (which might make sense if we let Steven Hawking have a go at explaining it). Steven Hawking will then publish a series of papers outlining what’s going on in the other dimensions and his house will be filled so full of Nobel Prizes that he won’t be able to get in the front door. After that the universe will make complete sense, and we will all sleep a bit easier.

That’s assuming, of course, that the LHC doesn’t destroy the Earth in the process. Hell, maybe tomorrow all that’s left of humankind will be Voyagers 1 and 2 and the decaying signal of tv’s Make Me a Supermodel. Probably not though. PROBABLY NOT.

A friend came back from a trip to Europe this week. He peed in outdoor urinals, ran away from bulls and had wine poured on him by frenzied Spaniards. And I’ve been sitting here with a blocked nose and a pile of marking. So jealous.

There’s a one-year job in London for a philosopher slash web designer and I’m thinking of applying for it, but I’m probably not a chance so maybe I won’t bother. Eh. I have given myself a break from thinking about things for at least another week due to the complete bollocks of everything. Did I mention my rent is going up thirty bucks? Right. So given that I’m not supposed to be thinking about things, I’m just going to go and do marking now. Mark, sleep, repeat. Sometimes it’s just the Goldfrapp that keeps me going ;)

So I sent of my thesis the other day. That was cool. Not lugging the big box to the post office, mind you. That wasn’t cool. Nor the fact that my work has still got heaps of mistakes in it. Nor the fact that it will just come back again with all the mistakes pointed out by people who shouldn’t have to spend their time pointing out mistakes. But the process overall was cool. Mostly because I was soooooooooooooooo bored with uni work and now I don’t have to do any.

But anyway that was one thing that happened. Another was today that I got an email saying I have to go and have a meeting with my bosses about the anonymous feedback the uni collects from students. It’s a standard meeting so I don’t think the feeback was all “Mark is crap and looked down my top too much” but I’m still not looking forward to it. I have the double burden of being far too lazy and arrogant to act on advice yet so insecure that I get really worked up about anything negative that anyone says about me. I’m a complex man, you know? And very hard to work with.

So the place where this is going is completely different. So I was thinking about university and I decided that the only people who can really appreciate university are the people who have already graduated. I mean, most of the students are in their late teens or early twenties and their skills are really limited, especially in terms of writing ability. I wonder, then, whether they get the most out of the courses. Perhaps I’m projecting my own difficulties onto others? That could be the case. And this certainly only applies to courses that give one an Education in the old-skool sense, like humanities and sciences. Job-oriented courses like accounting, commerce, nursing, physio, etc. might be different. But when I think of how illiterate and hopeless I was when I graduated I just cringe. I can’t be the only one.