katzenjammer’s blog

Gosh, I sounded defeated last time, didn't I? Well, now I'm not. Now I'm rather happy. Content. I am working again on Saturday night, hopefully in a tip-rich situation, hopefully with alcohol (no! not to drink! to serve! It's amazing the lengths people'll go to to get a drink at a social function.) I've watched plenty of meerkat documentaries on Google video. Including this one called Meerkats Divided, that I haven't seen since I was ten.

Meerkats Divided

Quite frankly, I am ready to shove cacti down the throats of both of my parents because they don't like my temp job as a waitress/bar worker. They can go and stuff it. They want me to work in an office. I don't want to work in an office! Sure I can type, but I've tried office work temp agencies before and they apparently only want people who have lots of experience in an office (if so, why are these experienced people working at a temping agency? Is there some dynamic about temping that I do not understand?). I'm happy doing my catering work. I get to go to interesting places and interact with people and if a tent is perhaps not the nicest place to be during the summer, it beats a depressing office with plastic-smelling carpet and the whirr of PC fans.

I want to get out of this house, but I can't yet. Catch 22. If I moved out of this house, I wouldn't have the parents on my back about sodding office jobs, but if I had a real job (ha! That might take a while) I'd be able to move out and not have to deal with them - but they (probably) wouldn't be pissing me off. Add that to the more well-known Catch-22 situation of the job/experience deal, and yeah, I feel fucked. I wish, sometimes, that my parents would just disappear, or at least be less focused on me. Why can't I buy them a time-consuming pet, or weld a virtual reality console to their heads? Just so that they'll let me do what I want to do, and let me do everything I have to do at a more relaxed pace? My mother wants me to lie to get a job because she's done it and apparently that makes it all right. No. No it doesn't. I haven't had office experience, so I'll have great difficulty getting anyone to take me remotely seriously at a city centre office agency. My mother apparently thinks that jobs are obtained much like in The Sims - if you want a job, you get it instantly, no fuss, no interviews.

All their pressure is ironically making me feel less and less motivated to actually do anything about the current situation. I don't know why. I don't want to piss them off as I know that will lead to more pressure. Maybe I just feel down because there is no way I can do what they want me to.

Sod this, I'm going to sleep.

I don't get things. Yesterday I tore down a BNP poster in the neighbourhood because I'm not having racist shite around where I live. (Also the act of ripping the poster into shreds fulfilled my entirely non-sexual resistance kink, although I doubt it can be called resistance if I've got millions of people on my side. Although I suppose it may not be entirely legal to rip down posters, come to think of it - it might be vandalism - but surely a racist poster is more an act of vandalism than tearing the poster down, right?) I told my mother what I did and she congratulated me.

Also yesterday, I went to a gay club with a couple of gay friends. There, I saw lots of gay kisses. And I'm thinking "Hey! Cool. People in love. Sure, falling in love is not for me, but it's good for them!" (Well, actually I was thinking "VK tastes like crap", as I drank a couple of bottles last night and it was only by the grace of the DOYC that I didn't chuck in a gutter and get filmed as an example of a binge-drinking bird. I wasn't drunk! I was merely disgusted by the taste of cheap booze!) As you may have noticed, there's a big hoo-ha in the UK right now over a Heinz ad that happened to feature two men kissing. The first time I saw that ad, I was all "Cool! Gay kisses in ads!" But now Heinz have pulled the ad because they received complaints about the ad. Not complaints about the fact that a mother was treated as a short-order chef in a New York deli, but complaints that gay kisses are immoral/hard to explain to children/disgusting/unnatural/insert bigoted excuse here. It's on the BBC website. The BBC had allowed the article to have comments. Most of the comments (unusually for the BBC) either spoke of puzzlement about the negative response to the ad, or had a somewhat legitimate complaint about the treatment of the mother etc.

But jesus, the casual homophobia! No, I'm not going to pretend to be reasonable here. If you ever go to spEak You're bRanes (go on, it's funny), yeah... this is what I'm aiming at.

The MPs calling for this ad to be re-instated shows how disgusting our representatives have become.
Brian Keith, Ellesmere, England

Meanwhile, Brian, by posting this comment you've just shown what a pigeon's minge you are. (There's a long-standing - which, in web terms, means about three months - tradition of calling people animal fannies on the blog.)

I also did a double take when I saw this advert. Having grown up in the era where homosexuality is regularly shown on screen even I thought this was a step too far. It is not only unnecessary and confusing for young children, but also serves to emasculate the man even further. He is essentially ordered to kiss the "Deli Chef" which he does full on the lips. This emasculation of the male character within household adverts is insidious with many adverts of today, now showing men being bullied into homosexual acts in their own kitchens is taking it to a new extreme.
Andy, Stourbridge

Ok. "A step too far"? Technically, it wasn't even a gay kiss. The chef was presumably supposed to be the mother. "Unnecessary and confusing for young children"? Er, do you even know how adaptable young children are? If they see two men engaged in a healthy relationship, they're just going to grow up to think it's normal - as they should. Little kids just don't think like that. They see a person in a wheelchair, they don't think "ooh, disabled person, must be patronising". If they grow up and have stuff currently thought of - baselessly - as "freakish" or "unnatural" presented to them neutrally, they're going to be more accepting. In short, they don't give a shit that two men are kissing. "Emasculating the man" - I don't know about you lot, but I'm pretty sure most gay men don't think they're emasculated. Surely emasculation requires unwillingness on the part of the person being emasculated...  and I hardly think the guy on the ad was "bullied into homosexual acts" - meta, he's an actor, he gets paid to do this. And guess what? Some people are, in fact, homosexual, and don't see homosexual acts as something they're bullied into! In short, Andy of Stourbridge is a kittiwake's cootch.

Not seen it. Don't want to see it. If equal sexes want to kiss etc then it's up to them. I don't want it pushed in my face as normality nor to see it advertising any type of product. This is just cheap marketing to cause a big stir.
Phil Ashton, Sheffield

My last comments were wordy, so I'll just say that Phil is a turtle's vadge. OK, I can't stop being wordy. Surely "equal sexes" could also refer to a feminist heterosexual couple? And, get this, homosexuality IS normal!

I was appalled at the advert. Having young children calling a man "mum" was sad, confusing, and so very wrong. Seeing same sex kissing is stomach-churning to most people who are not homosexual. Please keep adverts to appeal to the majority. I feel this was possibly deliberate to get discussion going and to brain wash people into eventually seeing these things as normal. What a sad reflection on life today.
Joan Bailie, Grimsby, Lincs, UK

I suppose a male gay couple with children don't exactly want one of them to be referred to as "mum" (but whatever floats their boat floats mine), yeah, but again, let's look at the reality of the advert. The New York deli chef was only figuratively a bloke. So she is "mum". See above for my view on how young children see the world. And same-sex kissing is precisely as stomach-churning as opposite sex kissing. I don't personally relish seeing any saliva-swapping - other people's mouths taste yucky - but IT'S ALL NORMAL. "Keep adverts to appeal to the majority"? Adverts nearly all suck donkey balls. How come this ad gets pulled, but the terribly acted ads featuring insurance claims for falling off a three-step ladder and the sodding Cillit Bang advert stay on the air when they're offences to the ear and so badly acted? Who exactly does the Cillit Bang ad appeal to? Well, I can certainly agree that the ad got discussion going, but "brainwashing" (one word, Joan, please) - surely the true brainwashing is committed on the part of the homophobes, who are hell bound to make sure there's only one normal way to be? "A sad reflection of life today? Get a grip, Joan, you duck's dick.

And back to my mother. She agreed with Duck's dick Joan that homosexual kisses are stomach churning. I just started laughing my head off when she agreed with it and said "I'll assume you're having me on" because I don't want to have a bigoted mother who acts like a turtle's wang.

I think I'll get a T-shirt printed with this ad with a picture of John Barrowman next to a caption saying "Some people are gay. Get over it." I love John Barrowman, and I love that ad. Let's see if I can find it... Here it is.

Some links for your edification:

The BBC article avec comments

The ad in question (I read a comment on youtube saying that the ad should only be given out in adult entertainment shops. Either - I hope - the person is saying it tongue in cheek, or the commenter is really prudish.)

In other news, I saw Prince Caspian last night. Pretty good, quite funny, although the actor playing Peter is some gormless Southern twit. I wish Robert Pattinson - the Cedric guy in Harry Potter - was playing it instead, because he has better hair and doesn't look quite so gormless. The Edmund actor also looks gormless, but he's not shite. Everyone else - good. Though I sincerely wish Trufflehunter hadn't said the like "shut up or I'll have to sit on your head again" to Nikabrik, because in front of an audience of 16-25-year-olds... er... the implied dwarf bestiality can only produce helpless giggles.

Do I prefer adulthood or childhood?

I don't know! I know I like reading about other people's childhoods, which is why I've got a zillion copies of And There Was Light and have a crazy fascination with all the books I read and wanted to read as a child. It's why I buy Chalet School books (but Jesus, I've got to say the religious fervour in those books scares me), and why the first pages of biographies are always much more thumbed through than any pages that cover the subject's life past the age of eighteen.

I can tell you that the four years that I've experienced being older than eighteen were infinitely more interesting than the eighteen years before that, though.

So you've got four years before you go to school where you piss about and watch Thomas the Tank Engine and draw crap, wasting lots and lots of craft paper with little squiggles of nothings.

Then there's primary school, a salutary lesson which teaches you how to eat virulent pus-like custard and curiously gristly meat if you take school dinners (shudder), or how to eat deformed sandwiches and heavily bruised bananas if you're, er, lucky enough to have a parent who will make lunch for you. You might pick up a few bits of education along the way - Nelson joined-up handwriting, exactly where the answers are in all editions of Heinemann maths books - but mostly you learn to eat horrible food and to win games of marbles in the playground. And break stuff trying to do cartwheels while dodging footballs. If you are exceptionally unlucky, you'll be sent to a religious school, which adds half an hour of dreary hymn singing and a lifetime of Catholic guilt to your day.

Following this is secondary school. The food is, if possible, worse. The pizza looks like someone's vomited on a slice of toast, and those, as well as all the other food (which includes swede, a vegetable used only in school dinners - seriously, I have never seen it before or since), are served by aggressive fifty-year-old dinner ladies with about three teeth and pockmarked faces. The library is staffed not by a human being who resembles a teddy bear but by a martinet with a newspaper face and a desire to travel through time and become a Stalinist lackey. Teachers are divided into three broad groups:

a) young, fresh-faced, deadly serious about their subject, still enthusiastic, set homework because they truly believe it'll help you learn

b) old, prematurely greying, jaded by years of teaching students who don't give a toss, teach with an air of tired detachment, hate mankind, set homework because they've grown to hate anyone under the age of eighteen

c) varying ages, man are slightly bald and women have desperately unflattering hairstyles, still like their subjects but have adapted to teaching it in a way that involves as much acting and blowing stuff up and playing on computers as possible, set homework only because the school says they have to and you do it because you like them, not so much because you have any great interest in what you're meant to be learning.

I only remember a couple of teachers from groups a) and b). They were OK, I suppose. I didn't have any overwhelming urges to set fire to a bag of dog shit and leave it on their doorsteps, except for one A-level physics teacher who constantly bullied and belittled one of my friends. Clever girl, utterly crap teacher. I hope he's lost his job, because he was in group b) - except he hated anyone under the age of forty-eight. What an old fart.

But group c)!

Mr. P was an excitable young bloke who loved his subject (Physics) - at least he liked teaching A-level classes. (Which have a distinct advantage above any other level of education because people want to be in those classes. You have to stay at school until you're 16 and people buy their way into uni "because it's expected", but A-levels are full of people who are neither stupid - well, this holds true for science lessos - nor disinterested in the subject.) So what did I do for him? There was a transit of Venus across the sun in 2004, and I turned up at school at about 5.30 am to set up several observers with him so that year 8s could see a little dot on the sun. It was great. I was a morning person that day. I evern saved a thirteen-year-old boy from blinding himself. Fantastic. This guy was also the teacher I had a discussion about War and Peace with, prompted by seeing a bunch of History students reenacting Austerlitz on the playground with a short-choleric teacher as a French-spouting, victorious Napoleon.

Mr. G was a chemistry teacher, and looked it. He had a teacher jacket - a tweedy affair stained with years upon years of excitingly explosive chemical reactions and burns from the bunsens. He constantly used the word "bleeding". Whenever a lesson was getting slow, he'd shout "Come here!" and drop a little potassium in water to produce pinkish-purple flames, or sublime some iodine (I found out the hard way why halogens were used as tear gas in WW1). And he liked playing the Tom Lehrer Elements song. Hooray!

Mr. and Mrs. L were my biology teachers. Mr. L was a Welsh eccentric. Once, he gave homework that consisted of collecting woodlice, in December. I used a bandanna to cover one eye, to acclimatise the other to the dark. I carried a torch (to avoid stumbling into our bramble bushes), a twig, and a jar half-full of soil and a stone, and, so armed, jumped into the back garden shouting "Right, you bastards - I'm coming to get you!"

Two and a half hours l had caught two woodlice - one was a geriatric and the other  was a baby. I went in, defeated, and ate dinner. Checking the jar afterwards, I found the geriatric one dead. The next day, I took the jar into school and showed my slim pickings to Mr. L.

"Is that all?" he said. "I found over two hundred last night. You're just not applying yourself! Buck up, girl!" and poured ten into my tiny jar. (Why woodlice? We were investigating phototropism.) And all this over some sodding woodlice.  really liked Mr. L, because he and Mrs. L were really nice teachers. They were the ones you went to if you had a problem. They told jokes in class. They rarely got angry. And although they had to mention creationism in their biology classes, they spent about 0.5 seconds on it. Which is about as much consideration as it deserves, going on the proportions of evidence available for each one (we had a month about evolutionary principles beforehand).

So, teachers. But there's also other kids, and secondary school is the worst possible place if you, say, like reading during lunch, or spend time on your homework, or don't make it a death-or-glory mission to have more friends than anyone else. I was in a solid group of six during the latter years there, which suited me down to the ground, and I gained a certain measure of notoriety for being both intelligent and off my nut. Unfortunately, if you're under fifteen-sixteen, the intelligent/off-nut combo doesn't gain you friends unless they're really nice people. I mean, look at Luna Lovegood, from Harry Potter. I survived the other kids, but I still expect people to think I'm boring and not worthy of attention. I just can't quite shake off the feelings of being deemed socially inadequate at eleven. I'm surprised when people want to be friends with me.

Then, assuming you're at a school with a sixth form, you finish school at 18 and go off to uni. This is outside the scope of this entry. Suffice it to say that uni was exciting, but my first extended contact with people from Down South who still thought everyone from Yorkshire kept whippets and racing pigeons and had dads who worked down t'pit was a bit chafing. But I got to live in Germany and I met cool people who weren't obsessively interested in other people's sex lives and I made friends with actual adults. I won't knock uni life - if you want to be there and you're prepared to work, go. It's not for everyone, but it's cool.

I described my Great British childhood in a few paragraphs I typed in about an hour or so. Thing is, it took eighteen years to live. When you're five, December lasts for about six months. A shopping trip with your mother, that according to her lasts a couple of hours, feels like a week (unless you get to go to Waterstone's). And you can't go anywhere on your own. I ran away with the neighbour's dog when I was two, and that was the furthest away I got from my parents with them not knowing exactly where I was until I was sixteen and wandering from Leicester Square halfway to St. Paul's in a vain attempt to get to the National Gallery (get a map of London to see just how stupid I was).

So childhood was OK to write about. OK to live, unless you're allergic to boredom. I think it's all in the description, really. I can read about eighteen years in an afternoon. I've experienced parts from lots and lots of childhoods. But I'm an adult now, and I can do stuff. I can vote! I can go to Berlin and walk through the Brandenburg gate, something impossible as recently as the day of my birth - you could get shot for it. I can drink as much as I want. I can own a pub and stand for Parliament (well, now I'm over 21). The sky's the limit now. I liked childhood, and OK, now I've got to start paying bills and all that, but you know what? I'm looking forward to it. 18+4 years, and now something new! Well, let's start.

0 to bitch in 10 seconds. Or less.

No, not me. Though I pride myself on being able to achieve an impressive mood whiplash, I refer to my mother, who teases me all the damn time (or at least a good portion thereof) and yet explodes when I reciprocate. And hell, she was teasing me about four years of hard work! (My degree results come out tomorrow. She won't let me forget it, of course, even though I've said I'm apprehensive.) I was teasing her about her favourite music. I wasn't even teasing her about it today, for fucks sake; she was going on about something I said a month ago. Who the fuck, you might ask, holds a grudge about something so minor that long? My mother, that's who.

Jesus Christ, why can the old bag not shut her mouth? Or if she's as brittle as I am, why can't she state so quietly and immediately forget the wrongdoing? (Immediately = anything from a couple of hours to overnight.) And if she is a brittle as I am about teasing, why the hell does she not stop it herself? Because she's being a bitch? What the holy everlasting fuck is wrong with that woman? Is she secretly fourteen or so? What did I do to incur her wrath so quickly? Not much.

I think I need to get out of this house before I get a job. Except that's financially impossible - fuck you very much, renters - so I'm either stuck here with rapidly plummeting self esteem which will prevent me from getting a job, or... well, the other solution doesn't bear thinking about. Well, I suppose I could go and live on someone's sofa while I sort myself out, but I don't really want to impose on anyone like that. Or live in a treehouse, except treehouses don't have electricity and although this is June, this is also England, and you can't live in a treehouse here. They die from rain rot.

She also asked if I'd afford her some respect. Well, here's the rub - I generally do. But I can't respect people when they're constantly ribbing me about something. So I will only respect her if she agrees to stop acting like she's a fourteen-year-old with a really long memory and also stops acting so matey when she's in a good mood. Unfortunately, I don't think this will happen.

I think I will see about getting somewhere to live with friends. They're not related, so they have less of a free rein with me, and given that they're not 56 they do have an excuse for acting childishly sometimes.

I want to be busier! I'm crazy, I know. I've just done two big, nasty exams, and I prepared for weeks for them, and I was exhausted. But now... I bought a book on CV writing and interview techniques. It's what I should be doing anyway, but I'm actually looking forward to writing my CV and touting my Sprachkenntnisse and love of photography. (That reminds me - I really must organise all my photos. And see if I can still ID everything.) Do I have to worry about this blog, though? Will the fact that I have "The God Delusion" in the list of my favourite books (not that it's exactly a desert island book, but it's definitely interesting reading) work against me? If I don't have my name here, how would anyone find me? Do I have to delete this thing? I must have mentioned I like drinking. Have I made a massive cock-up?

I have ordered my graduation gown and hood. It's green - my favourite colour! I will look ever so smart on the day. But I bet I look dorky on the photographs. I'm having professional portraits done. I seriously hope my squint doesn't show - or worse, that I don't have red-eye. I don't know what it is about cameras, but they make me look like the Spawn of Satan. It is, of course, merely an affirmation that my retinas, at least, are in the best of health, but I still don't like looking like I've got "666" tattooed on my backside.

Learned to iron stuff properly. Up until now I have been the past master at putting random and unfixable creases in my favourite T-shirts, but yesterday I successfully ironed 25 T-shirts and a nightie. I even started ironing my socks until my dad pointed out the futility of that exercise. It's an oddly addictive way of passing the time - and you get nice clothes at the end!

Miranda the goldfish is ill, with some bloody streaks in her tail-and-a-half. On the recommendation of the pet shop bloke, I purchased some medication that has turned the water translucent green - and I mean bright green, not swampy green. Miranda seems totally at ease with it. but frankly her tank looks like someone's filming the X-files in it.

Getting my hair highlighted tomorrow! The university have seen fit to give me about £400, so I thought "Why not?"

I was going to post about the Chalet School books - I found a shop in York that sold them, and I found The Chalet School Triplets going for £150! - and how Joey Bettany scares me to death, but it would involve revealing my religious beliefs (and also involve the words "attention whore"). Bad me. Bad Joey. Boo.

I've finished my last exam - the last one I'll ever have to do for this degree. Possibly the last one I'll ever have to do in my life. Unless I'm silly enough to to a driving test - which might be good for increasing the sum total of my knowledge - and learning is never a bad thing - but is not so environmentally sound. Especially not when such items as buses exist. I'll be a BSc soon! That sounds good!

So now I can return to the land of the living - or rather, the land of the blogging, because I'm too damn tired to do any of that "living" stuff right now. I can summon up the energy to breathe, keep my eyes open, and type. Just. I feel like the relaxing yoga stretches I tried to relieve exam stress have pulled not only a muscle, but my entire body. On the plus side, I can put both hands flat on the floor in front of me with my legs straight, and touching my toes is chicken feed. On the minus side... it hurts to walk. I am beginning to sympathise with old people. Speaking of old people, I hope I'll be one of those 60-year-old yoga practicioners who thinks nothing of putting one foot behind her head first thing in the morning. Right now I'm 22 and therefore don't experience first things on the mornings; I have first things in the afternoon instead.

Land of the living... I've cleaned Miranda's tank for the first time in weeks and regretted I didn't do it earlier, as there's nothing I enjoy more than seeing a young, healthy, stupid oranda try and swim into the filtration output. (Maybe I'm underestimating her and it's actually the fishy equivalent of a treadmill.) I'm going to polish the glass table in the conservatory; I managed to get vinegar all over it yesterday and it's dried into a smear. I'm going to tidy my room and arrange my books more like in the order I have to read them in. I'm going work out why iTunes has stopped talking to my iPod - I suspect a lover's tiff is what's stopping me from being able to listen to the Sweet Charity soundtrack on the bus.

And I can get back to talking about books!

Sophie's World: A Novel About the History of Philosophy

Jostein Gaarder

So... back in 1998 or so, I bought Sophie's World. (Ten years ago! Time flies...) I loved it; the didacticism didn't weigh too heavily on the text, and I rather enjoyed the twist when Sophie finds out exactly who she and Alberto are (I didn't see it coming - but give an innocent 12-year-old a break). And it genuinely did make me a deeper thinker, I think - at least I hope. Because when it comes down to it all, "Why are we here?" is a damn good question. Even apparently silly questions, like "So why do all horses look the same?" still have interesting implications. So there is no such thing as a stupid question.

And I liked the characters. Sophie the everygirl - I think her age was captured perfectly, as she seemed awfully grown up and confident to the 12-year-old me, but ever so fifteen to the twenty-odd-year-old me (though I admit it did strike me as odd that she still had one best friend at 15). She grew up with the reader as the book went on. I kind of envied her all her pets, but even more I envied the teacher-student relationship with Alberto. I've always liked having older, wiser friends. I wanted a mentor. But I was quite content to have a proxy, fictional mentor in Alberto.

The story? Well, it's explicitly stated in the book that it's not so much a novel as a philosophy textbook - a statement I originally read with a hint of disappointment. I thought I'd been reading a novel, albeit one with a heavy emphasis on philosophy discussions. But now I realise I can't be wrong with my assessment - I think it's a novel. So it is. The setting is quite ordinary, just like Sophie, and barring the later portion of the book, nothing extraordinary happens apart from the friendship between a 38-year-old man and a 15-year-old girl. And that was fine by me too, because I could almost imagine the novel happening to someone just like me. Sophie was me - a Norwegian me with a mentor and a cat and a tortoise - and I identified with her, grew and learned with her.

So when I finished the book after a couple of days of dedicated reading (it's not small!), I was desperate for something else to read. Something in the same vein. I ploughed through the rest of Jostein Gaarder's books (and I can particularly recommend The Solitaire Mystery and The Ringmaster's Daughter). Still not enough. So was there another novel with a similar theme? Perhaps by a different author, treating a different subject...?

Theo's Odyssey

Catherine Clement

It seemed there was. Turn your eyes to the, um, volume to the right (I assure you that the back copy advertises the book as the superior cousin of Sophie's World. Ha!). My first rule for a book is that you shouldn't have to look at the cover 36497 times to check the spelling. OK, this isn't the writer's fault, but the fault of some cloth-eared translators who wouldn't know fluent prose if it bit them in the arse, but let's be fair. If Catherine Clement hadn't written this book, they'd have been out of a job, and although with their ear that would have been no bad thing, they've got to eat.

So this kid Theo gets a deadly disease - according to a google search it's some deadly aggressive leukaemia. I wouldn't know; I wasn't able to penetrate past the first couple of chapters. I was under the impression it was glandular fever, which, while debilitating, is hardly worthwhile of the fuss over it in the book. He's a geek with a particular interest in mythology and an inexplicably attractive appearance, which probably remains unsullied by the strangest form of leukaemia the world has ever known. He has a best friend, which occurrence I would also deem impossible given that he's a 14-year-old nerd. OK, a pretty nerd. We get it. Did I mention he's a sickly, attractive, delicate genius geek? I don't know, so I'll state it again! Just so you know you're meant to like this character! Instead of getting pissed off at his overprotective parents, or just a teensy bit jealous that his crazy harridan of an aunt is taking him on a round-the-world trip, damn the consequences, you're meant to like and sympathise with the nerdy sickly pretty boy... argh.

In an effort to stop getting pissed off by the ineptness of the writing and the fact that my mid-teenage years didn't involve a trip around the world (even if it did have the purpose of teaching me about world religions), I  flipped through the book. Now Theo doesn't have a character so much as a set of characteristics which have hopefully been hammered into your head, so it's not surprising he flips between childhood and almost-adulthood, and the fact that the host characters who tell him about the religions are cardboard cutouts - but it's a religion textbook, right? All this characterisation rubbish can go out of the window, and the plot, well, it can hang like a bedsheet held by two pegs on a washing line. I could almost accept this if reports (OK, Amazon reviews) had not indicated that the information presented was very often inaccurate. So the book fails at characterisation and at information. Let us hope that the denoument....

... no. Theo gets better, sorry to spoil it for you. There might have been a poignancy and poetry to the book if he had died, having come to a spiritual peace through his exploring of world religions, but he's now, apparently, no longer a sickly pretty nerdy boy. He's a healthy pretty nerdy boy. And he gets the girl - the best friend I mentioned before. The girl has been patiently waiting and worrying at home while Theo apparently has the time of his life. Blah. Maybe it's just my wanderlust mixed with jealousy speaking, but I'd want to be out there.

So who would like this book? It has three and a half stars on Amazon. So someone - many someones - likes it. But I'm hard-pressed to think: indiscriminate religious people who prefer anything to secular atheism? Umm... 14-year-olds who haven't read Sophie's World, and think this is as good as didactic lit. gets? Any other suggestions?

I was only reminded of this book because Amazon.de assumes that buying anything from them is license to sending the purchaser endless e-mails containing books that may prove interesting based on previous purchases. From Amazon.de, I have bought one book - Das wiedergefundene Licht (yup... And There Was Light, but in German this time). So apparently I will quite happily read German translations of spiritually-themed books by French authors - WRONG! I want books about resistance. Or the Second World War. Amazon - please use a different algorithm. Anyway, the latest offering included a book called Theos Zweite Reise - Theo's second journey, by Catherine Clement. Another world trip? Think of your carbon footprint, Theo! Apparently he is - this new one's about saving the planet. Now I'm all for some environmental awareness, but Christ Almighty - not through the medium of a Catherine Clement book! Please, Mme Clement. Write a pamphlet. Do not subject the world to Theo.

Holy mother of God. I had my viva today. Conclusion: academics are arses. Because they read my whole OK-ish project about two proteins interacting and then ask me about a different interaction which I didn't study, seeing as it wasn't exactly the subject of my project, and then ask me about what a specific detergent does. Ask me about disease states! Ask me about the specifics of the interaction I tried to study! Don't try and make me feel like an idiot! At least one guy was nice, but the other guy can, in the words of Goethe... I digress.

At least it's over and I will never have to talk about this transcriptional repressor again, and at least I practised my bullshitting/schmooze skills. I am better at sounding confident. As with exams, vivas don't seem to be the best way of examining something, although they are significantly better than a bald little essay prompt about viral gene delivery vectors. If I don't know a peripheral detail about a detergent, I'll look it up. Nnnhhhh!

Watched a documentary about child geniuses. The quality has significantly gone down since, say, the 1760s, when Baby Mozart was touring Europe and writing music that actually sounded like music, not like someone wanking on a keyboard and calling it "modern". Sure, Mozart did a lot of wanking - it was probably just as easy for him to compose as it was for him to introduce Frau Hand to the Schwanz - but he knew when to separate the masturbation from the composing, and that's what made him great. Totally offputting personality, if his letters are any indication, but marvellous composer. Only Constanze wouldn't agree he was much improved for being dead. Someone's bound to argue that I don't understand music, but as far as I'm concerned the arts are for the people. Hoi Polloi. Not people who have spent years studying music or literature.

Similarly, there was a seven-year-old writing a novel. Co-incidentally, I was once a seven-year-old who liked writing stories; my major influence was Paddington Bear, whose complete failure to understand simple earth concepts was a constant joy to my mind. I still have a fanfiction on my first computer's hard drive. I opened it recently. Apart from a mangled sentence, the result of an ancient version of Word deciding that "fluoride" is an acceptable replacement for "floor.The" (who writes for spellcheckers? Do they assume that people expect to be able to type by bashing their fists against the keyboard?), it was correctly spelled and punctuated according to the convention. The TV seven-year-old didn't start sentences with capital letters, didn't start a new paragraph when opening speech marks, had run-on-sentences... all the things that even in 1993 I knew were major no-nos. OK, I had the advantage of a patient, English-language-obsessed mother, but she wasn't proofreading this story. Yes, the quality's dropped in the past fifteen years.

I'm just glad I was never classed as a child genius. I wasn't, for a start. Just obviously clever. Even then, the criterion for being placed in the clever group at school was bizarre: spell "accommodation" correctly and you were there. The clever group consisted of me and six boys. Doesn't say much for equality, does it?

In other news:
- There's a molecule called "Catherine" out there. I feel chemically validated. See Molecules with silly or unusual names for proof. Also delight in "Moronic Acid", "Arsole" and a zillion names. Chemistry is such fun. Although chemists do seem to be nerds.

- My iPod, which "died" on Monday, has been resurrected! It needed a new battery. I've never seen a man struggle so much with a small appliance as my father did with a small green tool and my dear old iPod. He won, of course. (Why didn't I mend it myself? Would you, if you had a handy electronics engineer for a father?)

- I finished the NaNoWriMo book. Then I realised there's about six months to go until November, yet I've already come up with a concept for the novel - something open-ended enough to let me go crazy, but something that might actually have a plot. And I've got to hold on to the idea for six months without writing about it or even thinking about it. I'll have to write it down and shove it in a box. But then I'll have to label the box "NaNoWriMo Concept" or else I'll have forgotten about the very existence of NaNoWriMo by then. Never mind, I'd just lose the sodding box anyway. Epilepsy left me with a mangled memory. Alas!

- C is quite nice when sequestered! Still, I miss arguing with him, which is what we do in a group.

- Had a disturbing dream today. I got stuck to a turnstile in a suburban Morrisons with a basket of shopping and Bart Simpson had to save me. WTF? Why are there media characters in my dreams?

- I'm just tired and pissy today. Viva, tiredness, early start, dead iPod. Tommorrow will be better, because I can have a lie-in. :)

- Oh. Saw a report from a comic convention with Avatar clips. Can't wait until our anonymous friends in the other land give us a nudge, because I want to see Suki and Man-Toph in action. Suki is the best girl for Sokka. Yue was a Mary Sue (unusual hair, check; boringly nice personality, check; ascension to a higher plane of existence, check), Toph is all of twelve and doesn't blip Sokka's radar, and Ty Lee is still a bad girl, although admirably bendy. Bet she doesn't have any trouble grabbing her ankles and touching her forehead to her straightened knees, a yoga position which is as yet unattainable for me and my ligaments. Also want to see the Zuko-Aang friendship, because they're bonding very well and Zuko seems to have forgone upper body garments, which is good as he is rather aesthetically pleasing for an animated character.

I am shit at computer games. I bought Avatar: The Burning Earth today. I saved my Pokemon game, took out the cartridge for the first time in weeks, and put in the Avatar game. And promptly proceeded to have the shit kicked out of me by two grown men with spears who were "just trying to make me go into the Avatar state". I tried to resist them, but ended up sending spinning balls of air in the opposite direction while they stabbed me in the back. Let me remind you I'm playing as a happy-go-lucky twelve-year-old who has funky tattoos and has a ten-ton flying bison with two extra legs. And some bastards are trying to kill me. Yeah, I got Aang killed. Now if I'd only been playing as Sokka, I could have thrown my specially sharpened boomerang and exacted revenge some turns later - now if only I had Sokka's aim. Or if I'd been Katara, I could have... well... given my poor aiming skills, I'd have ended up randomly icing walls and having the shit kicked out of me. Alas. I had to restart the game after about three minutes of lowering my HP into the red. Poor Aang. I'll never forget this cartoon saved to my computer, where a badly injured Pikachu is begging for mercy while a frankly psychotic-looking young boy is grinning and fiddling with his Pokedex and getting out a bunch of Pokeballs. I've gone scratched Aang up all badly. In my hands, he is bleeding heavily and begging for mercy. He's only twelve! And he's so cute and big-eyed! Maybe Sokka would look cool with a big manly facial scar on his right cheek - he'd certainly look less of a boob in his wolf-warrior getup - and Zuko, well, he's already been banged up a bit. I am dreading being able to play as Toph. Possibly because I have even worse aim than she does (at least, when it comes to the wholly airborne). And I don't want to get a tiny twelve-year-old, even one who can demonstrably kick large abouts of arse, all HPed out again.

Well, anyway. I've been carrying on with the Yoga exercises. I have made it a point to touch the floor with my toes every day. Not a big achievement, you might think. Well, I mean touch the floor while balancing on my head and arms. It's meant to be relaxing. It's terrifying. Today I ended up wedged between two walls - my bum was pressed up against one and my head against the other. My legs were sticking straight up into the air. I was stuck for five terrifying minutes, but managed to wriggle out of the position. I decided to try the child pose, which is basically a return-to-the-womb type posture. I have little or no desire to return to the womb; my legs fell asleep.

I come bearing a book! On Saturday I purchased No Plot? No Problem! - by the guy who set up NaNoWriMo. I'd love to sign up some day, if only because I've got A Novel in me somewhere - probably in my spleen or my fallopian tubes, not my heart - and it wants to come out. And it needs a deadline.

No Plot? No Problem!: A Low-Stress, High-Velocity Guide to Writing a Novel in 30 Days

Chris Baty

I've not yet finished the book, but I like it already. There's a portion that asks why we give up things that we're not immediately good at, and I thought "Good point!" I've already admitted I am shit at computer games (apart from Pokemon). But I'm not going to give up on the Avatar game. I will learn to aim. By the same token, I'm also not good at yoga. But I'm not going to give up (though I will wisely moderate my attempts after twisting my wrist trying to do the arch posture); I'll take lessons. So next time I start a novel (and it will be from scratch, as long as I can come up with a decent setting and a vague idea of the plot), I'll stick with it. Even if I think it's shit after two weeks. I really want to read the rest of this book now (OK, and do revision), so I'll sign off. Also, I have to wash my hair because I'm going out for an epic bender tonight! I am so not in tune with a yoga philosophy. But one day!

(Actually, that's something else the book advises against: saying "One day I'll do XYZ". Arse. OK, I'll make a resolution. Get better at everything. Good!)

It's been so long since I last updated that the system logged me out. I'd feel lazy, but I've spent the last few weeks revising and doing a piece of coursework about bioinformatics. I do wish they'd set us more coursework at uni. I'm not a masochist; I mean, I'd prefer coursework to a heavily-weighted final exam. It's more realistic, isn't it? I mean, I've worked in a research lab. If you want to know a vital piece of information - the exact structure of 5-methylcytosine, or where the gene for lactate dehydrogenase is coded for in a mouse genome - and you're actually working in a lab, you look it up, or ask someone. You don't memorise a whole load of crap that might not even be pertinent to the situation, do you? (Mind you, being given a set of clearly defined, guided questions isn't all that realistic either. But it's easier.)

Anyway. Media. Finished watching Avatar: The Last Airbender. Thank God for video uploaders on the web! Otherwise I'd have been deprived of an intelligent animated series. I've decided I love it; it's a Ten out of Ten. I like the lemur best, given that I like small fluffy creatures at the best of times. But small fluffy creatures with big green eyes and wings - hell yeah! I think I'd have an easier time concentrating on the current plotline, though, if Prince Zuko wasn't voiced by Dante Basco. Nothing wrong with that guy per se; it's that long before I'd ever heard of Avatar, I watched "But I'm A Cheerleader", and when Zuko tried to introduce himself to the Gaang (as I believe they're called) I was expecting him to say "Dolph. Homosexual varsity wrestler. How you doing?" and not "Hello. Zuko here!" Personally, I think Zuko would make a pretty good homosexual varsity wrestler, if it weren't for the fact that Toph could kick his ass. And when you don't stand a chance against a tiny blind 12-year-old, maybe it's time to reconsider. Anyway, I'm rather liking the burgeoning Zuko/Aang dynamic. The funny is only funny when the sap's got dignity, and Zuko's got plenty of that to lose when he gets covered in goo or distracted by a lively 112-year-old boy with no hair. Who can also fly. Or when he tells Aang to step back for his own safety at the beginning of the firebending lessons, which Aang dutifully does - only for Zuko to find out that he's all but lost his powers. That must be terrible. The Fire nation version of impotence. But they're so funny together!

I can now touch my toes! I know this has nothing to do with any form of media, but I can do it. Not bad, considering the tendons in the backs of my knees are wound up so tightly I couldn't actually do it for years. But I can do it now! Goodness knows why now, and not three years earlier, when I should have finished my growth spurt and my bones should have ossified for the last time. Life, I suppose. It likes playing tricks on you.

Hmm... what else? Can't write about my revision - it's hopelessly uninteresting unless you're into Drosophila development or bioinformatics, endless bioinformatics. I've almost completely withdrawn from internet life, because there's an incredible selection of idiots there if you only care to look. I'm in some sort of geek limbo. Geekier (in the good, sciency-smart way) than the average girl, but nowhere near geeky enough to own a copy of Lord of the Rings, let alone read the damn thing. I don't play role-playing games (well, apart from  Pokemon, but any game with animals that cute - and where the player character is a  cute ten-year-old - doesn't count).  I  don't do any useless geeky crap, really. I speak another language - a real language - and I can play chess. OK, I've also revealed I watch a kids' TV programme. But really, am I a geek?

Hmm... Pokemon. I've defeated the Sinnoh Elite Four and the Champion, using cunning typematching and brute force. I adore my Dialga. I've also captured the Sinnoh Legendary Psychic trio - I like Uxie the best! - and I've caught a Ditto, Mitosis (so I can have another Piplup - so cute) and Bebe gave me an Eevee, which I've named Mutable. So what should I evolve him into? I'm tending towards Vaporeon, or Umbreon.

Found a page full of yoga exercises for students. I can do... most of them. Although anything involving grabbing my feet will have to wait until my knee ligaments stretch a bit more. And although I can do the shoulder balance and the plough position while lying on my bed (well, not really lying, more posing), it's murder on my elbows if I try to do it on the floor. I need an exercise mat. The boat pose is achievable for about 0.3 seconds before my legs (which are rather muscley, from walking halfway across Germany, and are therefore heavy) come crashing to the ground, which is murder on my heels. For the same reason, you can forget the locust pose. My legs weigh a ton. Forget the arch and bow poses. My spine doesn't like bending backwards - yet. I hope to achieve them one day. Give me a million years of trying some of the less stressful poses. A lot of the poses claim to increase height. I'm almost 5'10"! I'm already tall by every country's average! The Dutch are apparently the tallest average people in the world, but even their average woman is 5'7" or so. One thing I can do is the corpse pose, which involves... well, lying flat on your back and occasionally turning this way and that. I could do it in my sleep. Given my acrobatic sleeping skills, I probably do do it in my sleep. My problem is I'm not a natural gymnast - not of the body. My mind is like quicksilver. My body will quite happily do the normal demands of life - walking, running (unless I walk round Berlin with a suitcase, which hurt my legs so much I literally couldn't move faster than a gentle amble), lifting fishtanks, putting my big toe on my forehead scar - but it will not, at this juncture, allow itself to be twisted backwards. And I can't walk on my hands. It would be a useful novelty skill, though. One day...!

Currently feeling a bit achey from working my way through the yoga positions. I've had a go at every one apart from the ones that involve putting your head between your knees, which seems to be a rather ridiculous level of suppleness. I think I'll go and exercise the mind now; Latin. Latin, with its zillion cases (German's enough trouble with four, and even then the genitive is obsolescent) and fifty ways of declining nouns. German looks positively simple now.

Zzzz...