In Which what Always Happens happens. You know, like, again.

I have an essay due on Monday. If we are Facebook friends, this can hardly have escaped your notice. And it should be really easy. I mean, it's a measly 1000 words, about a reasonably abstract concept for which we have enough evidence to sustain debate but not enough to make Obviously Right Decisions. They actually gave us the references. Also, inasmuch as it's competitive (and it isn’t, thankfully), I'm competing against a bunch of Science students who are used to having length requirements in pages. Or, millimetres. Not essay writers by preference, in fact.

What's stupid about this is that I still haven't done it. I haven’t even started writing it as such. The problem is the readings. I used to be pretty ok with these (warning: this may be lies caused by the golden haze of intervening years which overlies my recollection of Essays Past) but these days trying to read these papers is not so much boring as overwhelmingly soporific. It's bizarre. I can write (I would go so far as to say that I am, in fact, writing even as we... uh... write) but I'm moving, then. I can watch videos, TV, youtube, because then other things are moving. I can read books and suchlike because the characters are moving (maybe this point is a stretch?). But in the research, nothing moves. People either get vaccinated or don't, and then get sick/die or don't. All while remaining, narratively speaking, perfectly still.

What this means is that I keep having to pause in order to regroup and wake up. It's pretty irksome, dudes and dudettes.

So anyway, what's happening here is that, in an attempt to keep awake and focused, I've opened (that word always looks like it has the wrong number of Ns in it to me; no matter how I spell it, it looks awry)this blog in another window, so that I can flick between essaying and blogging. The only potential problem (apart from the "that's not your essay, you idiot, why are you online at all" issue, which naturally strikes one most forcibly) is that you might all get told things you couldn't possibly be interested in with regard to flu vaccination. Also that if I put bits of essay on the internet I could conceivably be hauled up for plagiarising myself or something. But what are the odds, really, eh?

Aaargh. It's so boring. I'm struggling not to sit, lurking, on Facebook, spamming everyone I know by updating every second second (have a self-imposed limit of 3 status updates per day, tops, in case I just drive away everyone I know) (unless, y'know, I really want to update more). The problem is that these days everything you do is published. Whenever someone thanks all their friends individually for the birthday wishes, it floods the feed. And that's a pity, because you essentially use up the patience your slight acquaintances have whenever you address a mutual friend. This interplay tends to keep my friend numbers static. I get added occassionally, but the number never changes much because the people I know less well defriend me in a trickle. Which is fair. People I met once, years ago, don't necessarily need to be kept informed about my kitchen or whatever.

Twitter has a similar problem, but only about 15 people are following me there, so it's less of an issue. And some of those are probably bots, really. But I still feel like the Courtney Love of my circle of Online acquaintance. (Not in a drug-addled late nineties sort of way, in a man-she-sure-uses-twitter-a-lot sort of way. I would've nominated Stephen Fry as the other example of that, but I really feel that to be a trifle above my touch).

Technically, I haven't updated my facebook status at all yet today. I say "technically" because (a) in my mind, I've written maybe 80 (this counts in the this-is-a-disease-you-know-that-don't-you? stakes) and (b) I keep having to do other things, like write on people's walls (I do have to, I was asked for that link, for instance), which still interrupts everyone. This is a pity. I saw 2 movies today, for one thing, and I could happily have been pithy (or at least "said something") about either, although less readily about both, since they're not all that easily integrated.
My goodness, do you realise that this post is already almost as long as my essay needs to be? It could totally be done by now! It's about 10 times as longs as what I've actually written.

I wonder how long an essay would have to be before it got really annoying that my Backspace key seems to be squeaky? Also, whoever heard of such a ridiculous thing? A squeaky delete? But my computer is still so new and shiny!

It's almost on a par with the fact that my DVD player still only plays voices on about 20% of DVDs. Not all DVDs, I have learned, will allow you to view them in "Bypass" or "2 channel". This seems confusing, but soon I shall get organised to get it fixed and afix to it a note of such searing passive-aggressiveness that no-one will ever again cause it to stop working while trying to be helpful, because no-one will dare to touch it at all.

Back to the essay, though. I keep having a fairly stupid problem. Since I have spent those parts of the evening when I wasn't actively writing my essay (so, most of it) writing this, lurking on the internet and watching stand-up comedy, I keep going off on these interesting-but-not-strictly-relevant tangents in my essay. This is because in viewing or reading anything, one temporarily absorbs its lexicon. Thus, for instance, in my mind at the moment, all of this is in this slightly chav english accent, on account of how I've been watching a Russell Brand show. Also, because like attracts like and all that, I tend to like comedians who spend a lot of time off on tangents and lost among subclauses. (Ross Noble, Russell Brand and Eddie Izzard spring to mind, so I guess "unusual looking" is also a thing?) The difficulty with which is that that really only exacerbates the tangential distractableness in my writing. In a blog, this is mildly exasperating at worst, in an essay it's rather more unfortunate.

So I shall probably have to delete that whole well-reasoned but not strictly relevant paragraph about whether or not it is ethical to consider health care workers primarily as vectors for disease as opposed to considering them in their capacity as individuals who have to actually undergo the mildly aversive intervention (getting a flu vaccination). (It's indicative of the interestingness of this essay in general that this seemed like a really interesting point before. Now I return to this window and reread it after half an hour, I feel that my view of its interestingness is perhaps better-balanced).

Aaargh...