Just life, really.

Well, I actually managed to get up in the morning today, and then wasted all the time online. Honestly, I feel as if I am addicted to the internet. The first thing I do when I get up is go on the computer and see who’s online. It’s sad, actually. A lot of time should actually be spent writing. However, I have just finished a story, and I expect to feel melancholic for a while yet. It just feels like that another stage of my life is over, and I’ll never experience the joy of writing that particular story again.

I did read a book, and it was a really funny one too; a chick-lit novel. I’ve become quite fond of those at the moment. Maybe it’s the need to read something silly and lighthearted after reading all those serious history books. My friend’s got his forum up and running, and people are posting things there. It’s quite exciting, and I’ve stolen some ideas from the other forum .

Anyway, I did a paper dump again (to those of you who don’t know, a paper dump is when I dump all my drafts because I’ve finished typing them up. It amounts to quite a lot of paper per week). My desk now looks slightly tidier, but I’ve yet to prepare for the return to my studies. Exam grades come out on Tuesday, and I hate waiting for results. It’s almost worse than doing the exam itself.

This week, I should actually be working on the beginning of the next instalment of my fanfiction series. I’ve got the minor details sorted out, finally. What amazed me was how long it took to find a proper name for a very minor character, and the right Roman emperor. Since it’s only the first week of semester, I don’t expect too much work, so it’ll be quite good for launching the sequel (and even if it was a busy week, I would launch the sequel anyway. I made a promise).

Nothing exciting has happened in my life lately. I’ve even neglected journal writing *gasp*. Once the semester starts, there will be more things to talk about.

 

The Power of Passion

It’s the end of the semester. I never realized how much I enjoyed studying history until I started revising today. Most of that stuff was still in my head, just buried under a bunch of other stuff. It was so easy to bring up with a few keywords, unlike my science subjects. Revising for those is like learning it from scratch. Mainly I put it down to the enthusiasm of lecturers, or lack thereof. For history, you could feel how much the lecturers loved what they were talking about. They might be old-fashioned, but fashion cannot change the fact that they genuinely liked what they did. For me, that was the most important thing. I’m a creature of emotion and I associate memories with emotions. Simply the word Crusade or Islam or something like that makes me excited and interested, because I’ve had good experiences while learning about those things, and I remember them. On the other hand, I’ve fallen asleep in my communication disorders class despite the large cup of coffee I’d consumed just before to prevent that very thing from happening. If one can be pumped full of caffeine and still fall asleep, then there must be something seriously wrong with that class.

 

Of Ditzy Days and Student Life

I can’t say today was my best day. It started out pretty well, with handing in my second-to-last essay, a history lecture, and then shopping. I bought myself a proper Moleskine notebook, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl DVD.

And then I got lost on the bus route, waited at some strange bus-stop for half an hour, and then caught the same bus back. This time I kept my eyes open. I totally missed my destination (the university) the first time, because it was the other side of campus, and me, being half-blind, with no orientation skills, couldn’t recognize it. So that was about an hour and a bit. I came back to campus, and tried to study, but even with the caffeine pumping through my system from the coffee I had just before, I still managed to fall into a stupor while studying speech anatomy. I have to say flicking through notes is extremely annoying, especially since I have to keep referring back to diagrams which are somehow separate from all the written stuff. Definitely prefer history. The only way to study speech anatomy without falling asleep is to have loud music and a hot drink, preferably caffeinated. Too bad my mp3 player is broken.

I have an interesting new fanfiction idea. This morning, the history lecturer showed us a video about the story behind the cathedral of Chartres. It was during and around the Kingdom of Heaven period, and the architect is unknown, so there is great mystery surrounding him. Since in the movie, Balian returned to France, I was thinking of having him be the mysterious architect, since he’s an engineer, he’s smart and he’s quite innovative. I would think he was a pretty good mathematician for his day as well. It would be an effective disguise for the defender of Jerusalem. No one would be expecting him to build cathedrals, I don’t think. I’m adding it to my growing list of fanfiction story ideas. And at the same time, the Albigensian Crusade is taking place. I could have him take part, and try and save some of the Cathars. Don’t even know if I’ll get around to writing it, but putting Balian in all of these fascinating situations in history certainly does help me to learn it.

 

Of boring lecturers and Islamic kings of England

Once again, I have to go to class in forty minutes, but I really have no desire to do that. I spent the hour of linguistics lecture taking notes for my other history essay. History lectures are still my favourite. I think the enthusiasm of the lecturer about the subject really does do something for the listeners. Out of all my subjects, only the History teachers seem to love what they teach, and even the dullest of them can keep me interested, and I don’t go to sleep during their lectures.

I don’t think the lecturer for Communications Disorders – the anatomy and physiology of speech really cares much about the subject. If she did, her lectures wouldn’t sound like a speech sample which a speech and language pathologist needs to analyze. When she lectures, it sounds something like ‘And these are the…errr…erm…uh…hell [hair] cells…and they have…erm…cilia coming out-coming out of them which…err…pu-ushes the…erm…erm…mu-mucus up.’

She sounds like she has a communication disorder, and her pronunciation of words really annoys me. There is no way in the world I can link the word ‘hair’ to ‘hell’ and yet, she can make that mistake. Her grammatical mistakes are also constant. I wouldn’t notice it much if she spoke slightly more fluently, but I think she needs to get treatment for her speech disfluencies, or else she just needs to prepare her lectures a bit more. I’m not going to bother going today. I need to do my research for my essay, and am too busy to sleep in class. Not that I need treatment for insomnia.

The Medieval History lecture was interesting today. I learnt that King John of England (Lionheart’s brother) once threatened to become Muslim, which was pretty funny, considering his older brother was a Crusader. He didn’t mean it, of course (he would make a horrid Muslim) but the Pope didn’t really appreciate his sense of humour.

It’s now almost the end of lunchtime. I’m debating whether I should get a large or small coffee. Caffeine tends to help me to concentrate on my work (as opposed to falling asleep on top of it). Ah, stuff it, I’ll go into caffeine withdrawal in the weekend. It doesn’t really matter since I don’t have lessons. I just want to be able to finish researching the Revolutions of 1848 so I can start drafting the essay.