ritas kleine welt

i have finally started outlining my thesis. most of you are probably now asking, 'what the hell has she been doing the past year?' well, it's easily explained. although i have all these crazy and wild ideas flying through my head, i hate pinning them down. i hate being nailed onto the concrete word. i don't want to be pinned down. of course, resistance is futile. who ever was awarded a title for being silly? (apart from chaplin! but he was a genius in his own field. i'm not even going there.)

so. outline. because, lets face it, if i don't start conquering my demons pretty soon, there's hell to pay. probably even quite literally.

you wanna see how i drive myself mental? it really doesn't take that much. i simply start rambling until my train of thought starts going round and round and round and round...

i just received notice that in june the provider will switch the domain name from "blogkade" to "1on". which means that my two or three trusty readers would have to change their bookmarks. dammit! I DO NOT WANT THIS BLOODY CHANGE!!! I WANT THE BLOGKADE TO CONTINUE AS IS!

thank god, maria (feeling better again!) lured me outside my flat yesterday because since coming back home on monday, i had hardly left it. the only times that i set foot outside was to buy some groceries in the supermarket at the corner (took me a total of perhaps 20 minutes) and a short trip to the english department, the copy-shop and the library (about 3 hours total). in those ventures, i only encountered about 5 people and the library is quite anti-social by definition. suffice to say, by saturday i was pretty much hungering for social contact.

so after a trip to the train station (that's where aldi is) and my being appaled by basic german rudeness (i appologized to an elderly man after i had accidentally bumped into him and he looked daggers at me at me like i had told something really nasty to his face), i was glad to share a pizza with maria and enjoy a few films. god, how i had needed that!

can i please go back to britain?

ps. helge i lying on the bed , snoring away. i guess he's simply worn out after having played with his new toy,which has kindly been provided by maria.

... is a bumpy one and on every street corner you'll find a roadsign on which is written, 'final destination -- 3,500 words away. procrastination -- here.' research is great. writing down all the stuff that's floating round your brain and bringing it into some sort of order is boring. writing stinks!

update: 3,010 words. whoohoo!

update numero dos: 3,734 words. copy-paste rocks! lucky i am stealing from myself. otherwise i'd be in deep trouble!

obama is not even sworn in that bush, #41, puts forth his younger son, jeb, to become #45. as if #43 hadn't done enough damage already, now the family wants to seal the package? first have #44 clean up the mess of the elder bush-son -- and have him followed by another 'dirty, commie liberal friend of terrorists'.

of course at this time it's just a playing with ideas. but this is when you start your presidential race: right before the new one has been sworn in. i really shouldn't have watched that amount of west wing. it makes one rather paranoid when it comes to things like that...

... i had nothing better to do than avoid work. granted, i have been working on my exposé ever since noon, but that does not include the many breaks i have been taking in between paragraphs. it's quite bizarre. i do have so many ideas floating around in my head, but once i get to the moment of writing them down, i draw a blank. i just don't know where to start without making a complete fool out of myself. in order to hide the fact that i have actually feck all to present to the world, i have begun filling in names of authors and their publications. dear, oh, dear. this doesn't go too well.

if this is any indication for the next three years, i am doooooooomed!

once upon a time, a dear friend of mine spoke the wise words, 'rita, bureaucracy is the sign that we have managed to build up a somewhat civilised society! in the olden days, people didn't need paper. instead they just bludgeoned each other to death with their clubs.' she being much wiser because she has seen the passing of many more moons than i have in my short and humble life, she is right of course.

but dammit! i want that club so badly right now!!!

ps. i just wanted to book a single room in one of the cheaper B&Bs in bangor -- but jochen beat me to it. i'm still without shelter at this point.

pps. on that occassion i should mention that i have been able to book a flight with the help of maria and her trusty credit card and i will be staying in bangor for the length of a week at the end of next february. YAY!

worked nine hours staight today without taking even a 5-minute break. everybody (boss and co-worker and some of our customers) was in a bad mood. i felt like i was the ginormous speedbump from outer space or something equally nasty like something that one occassionally finds stuck to one's shoesole.

it all moves rather quick: just yesterday i was on top of the world because the firsties did a really great job in the wales seminar. and todfay it was from hero to zero. i felt like a complete waste of space. actually, i expect to get the boot any day now.

whilst at home visiting my folks last weekend, i was whinging to my mum that i couldn't find a packet of räucherkerzchen here in leipzig that didn't cost me an arm and a leg. it appears like there is some sort of export/import tax placed on the goods as soon as they leave the erzgebirge to be shipped to those other exotic parts of germany, such as the northern part of saxony.

anywho,... mum did not want to have her erzgebirgische daughter suffer a horrendous pre-christmas season and provided her with a generous stack of 3 packets of crottendorfer räucherkerzchen. (KNOX incense sucks!). i was entirely content with the prospect of fumigate myself into oblivion and beyond -- until this morning when i recoiled in horror.

within 90 minutes of today's literature seminar, i failed to impress the first-years with the beauty and ingenuity of "the rhyme of the ancient mariner". i am going to drown my sorrows in red wine now.

it appears that my most creative flashes of genius always come to me in the shower, drying my face, blow-drying my hair, on the loo...

two days ago i received an e-mail from one of my students in the cultural studies seminar that they were completely unable to meet as an expert group (of only two people!) to coordinate their work that goes into the next session tomorrow. and why? because one of the two girls doesn't have internet. naturally, if there's no internet, there's no way in the whole wide universe to pick up a phone, meet in one of the many student cafés, mensa, library or just the uni in general. thus, i rolled my eyes heavily, muttered something not so nice under my breath and sent a reply to the one participynt telling her not to worry too much about monday.

just had a short glance at how the first semester students signed into the modules... turns out, i am the uncool lecturer even before the semester has really started. there are still 34 open seats for the seminar on welsh history and culture and there are 26 seats to fill for the literature seminar. so, if i do the maths on this that means, i have 8 students in my cultural studies group and 14 in literary analysis. i don't so much mind the latter number, because that's an ideal seminar size. but the first... EIGHT?!? are you kidding me?!? wales is not a lepper colony. it's got history, culture, beautiful literature, music, beer, language pressure groups that spray paint the whole town in red, white and green!

ps. steffan cravos is my hero!

instead of being woken by the gentle mating call of the common robin, it was the unmistakable sound of coal tumbling into the cellar cubicles that are lokated right under my bed. needless to say, i was wide awake because i had entirely forgotten that they were supposed to deliver today. lucky our janitor hogged the first delivery of the day for himself again so that i had enough time to have a quick shower and run to the bank to get the money to pay for the delivery -- only to find out that our turn won't come before noon...

why did i get up today?

just now i wanted to pick up the guitar after having filed the nails on my left hand down to a next-to-nothingness -- only to have the e-string explode into my face. one is not amused because now one has to buy a new set of 6 strings to replace just the one lousy faulty one.

have i mentioned yet that my mp3-player died this afternoon?

...

i am going to watch a film now! so, there you have it, cruel world!!!