Last year the Psychology department threw a Christmas party for all the third years, staff and postgraduates. Lots of free alcohol, food and some random people walking around singing. Only about 20 people showed up so there was a massive alcohol to people ratio which is usual for a Christmas party right?
This year I got my email invite to the party again..but this time there is a cap on the drink..one drink when you present a voucher.
One?
Uno?
What kind of party gives you one drink? That means everyone stays sober and there are no famous after party stories to cause endless embarrassment. Jeez it is not like us postgraduates are unruly or anything, we are usually too busy keeping the staff in check..
I guess the Psychology department are really feeling the credit crunch* this winter.
(*and can I just say how much I HATE that term. It is as bad as the bloody ‘carbon footprint’. Everyone wonders round peppering their conversations with these buzz words in an effort to make it sound like they know what they are talking about when in actual fact they don’t. Quit it.)
So much has been happening in the last few days/weeks that I don’t really know where to start, so bullets..they will do nicely.
Uni: I got my exam results back. I did well. I am now no longer a student. Instead I have a piece of paper, a fuckton of debt and a liver which is no longer speaking to me. I am therefore no different to any other student that ever did live. So, no longer an undergraduate I find myself with the prospect of like..real life. So I turned right back around and enrolled for another huge amount of debt (AKA an MSc in Forensic Psychology), albeit part-time..since I need to eat and stuff it means I have to dedicate the 2nd part of my time to work. Boo hiss.
Moving: I move in ten days!! Out of student housing..no more mould in the bathroom..no more sex noise..no more snot wiped under the sink..no more house burning down moments..no more psycho housemates..
It also means no more late night McDonald trips, no more jaunts into the country..no more epic guitar hero sessions. The good seems to far outweigh the bad now I am getting all nostalgic.
But you know what? While there are some large black clouds on the horizon there is one shiny moment of squee filled joy awaiting me..
I leave for Vancouver in 68 days, 14 hours, 48 minutes and 21 seconds.
(No I am not kidding..there is an official php time counter-downer which tells me, so there)
So in 68 days, 14 hours, 48 hours and 21 seconds I am going to go play with bears! And pet them! And feed them candy! We will be BFFs.
The weekend just gone was a holiday weekend, but I am in serious need of a holiday from my weekend.
Saturday brought the final exam of my undergraduate career. I think you could hear the joy coming from the 100 finishing Psychology students for about 200 miles. The BBC told us that it would rain but they told horrible lies and instead we had perfect sunshine. This meant that sitting on top of the University hill drinking champagne was made all the more pleasant.
Once the champagne was gone it was decided that a trip to a local castle was in order. There they were holding a medieval fair with lots of swords and people dressed up in crazy outfits. Needless to say I got very excited.
Just when you thought that the day couldn’t get any better..Guitar Hero Legands of Rock was unleashed, which I must say is perhaps the best game in the world. Although I did manage to injure myself in the process of being a superstar. Such a hard life.
Last night I found that all the bandwidth had been leeched from this site and that all my links were re-routing to some medication search site so it meant spending the best half of my night updating my Wordpress. I had been meaning to for ages but I was too scared of making it all go boom! I am quite proud that I didn’t and it now seems to be working. Fucking hacker bastard fucks. They could have at least made it something interesting like..porn. Oh and a quick side note to the MySpace hotlinkers? Nice try you fucking emo retards.
And finally..I just heard there a some big incident going on up at the Uni. The words bomb and scare are being banded about but the email announcement gives nothing away apart from the fact everything is in lockdown so no one can leave or enter.
If anyone touches my Uni I will hunt them down and they will be condemned to death by unicorn hooves while Paris Hilton’s cd is on repeat.
I leave you with a picture of one pimpin’ Henry VIII (click to embiggen)
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Ok lets pretend that weeks run from Tuesday-Tuesday for a moment.
28 – the number of hours worked.
35 – the number of hours studied.
5 – the number of times I have wanted to punch someone in the face.
0 – the number of times I actually did (I win life..I win!).
3 – the number of gorgeously sunny days.
0 – the number of gorgeously sunny days I actually got to go outside in (touché life touché)
4 -the number of BBQs I have smelt but not enjoyed.
34 – the number of A4 pages of notes taken.
64 – the number of pages in my thesis..handed in and all but a distant scary memory.
72 – the number of hours until the beginning of my finals.
1 – the number of bible studies which happened in my living room (nothing to do with me k?)
25 – the number of hours until the Apprentice!
Now my thesis has gone I have a big stats shaped hole in my heart. So I have had to break everything down into numbers.
If you want me I can be found rocking back and forth typing numbers into my calculator and wailing about MANOVAs.
- During a seminar today I was discussing something I had read on the BBC website about how Obama is distantly related to G.W. Bush and someone piped up in the background ‘who is Barack Obama?’. I am pretty sure she also still thinks that Tony Blair is our Prime Minister and that the world is flat.
- During research for the same seminar I found out that one of the most feared US prison gangs; Nuestra Familia were, in the 1960s, known as the ‘Blooming Flowers’. I presume they changed their name shortly after because they kept being mistaken for horticulturists. Or laughed at by little old ladies.
-I only have one lecture and one seminar left in my undergraduate study. While everyone else is practically bouncing about this fact it makes me a little sad. I think this means that I clearly need psychological help.
-I seem to have the urge to write on this here blog a lot, you’ll have to forgive the boring and pointless updates but it’s procrastination season so I am representing yo.
Since I will be all lost for what to do with my life come graduation I decided that I should start applying for jobs so I can earn money to come back in to education (can anyone say career student?). Yesterday I had an interview with a software company which meant that I have spent the last few days rehearsing my answers to such tedious questions as “so tell me about a time when you were awesome in the face of adversity”. Ok so I may have paraphrased a little there but that is totally what they want to know.
I hate all those kinds of questions because instead of being able to answer truthfully about why I want to work for their company (your salary is pretty, the perks you offer are pretty..and this means I can indulge my habit of hookers and blow without annoying my bank manager) I have to say things like “your graduate schemes and career progression are one of the best”. I have said these things so often now that I am actually starting to believe myself. I guess the adage of saying it so often that it becomes true is accurate. My new mantra for this week: I will win the lottery I will win the lottery..
There were a lot of positives that I took from the day along with one negative. I realised when I walked in to meet the other interviewees for the day that this was going to be an all boys club. I further realised this when I took a seat and watched as another interviewee came, greeted all the other boys with a cheery hello and a handshake and then turned to me with a look which said “this chick is here to fetch my tea and answer the phones right?!” before turning back to the others. I laughed on the inside because this guy just single handedly gave me the motivation to get this job. So I could beat him. The cocaine and hookers are now taking a back-seat.
When we did the obligatory tour of the facilities I realised all the women in the offices were confined to HR, Sales or admin, I think maybe they have government targets to meet about the quota of women in certain departments and that was why I was given the interview. Now they need the obligatory ethnic minority and disabled person and they will totally get the all clear!
I kid..I got there with my magic CV writing powers of course.
The interview went well. We spent a large amount of time talking about photography and caving. Two things I had listed under interests, they love to pair you up with someone who knows about what you put down just to make sure you aren’t a cheeky untruth telling sprite. We also talked, rather randomly, about the cultural differences between Finnish and English people. No idea where that came from but hey..I can roll with it home skillet.
I now have to wait impatiently to hear whether I am through to the next (and final) audition interview stage. If I don’t then I guess I should have learnt my lesson and reapply for tea-girl.
On the way back home last night I met up with some friends in Windsor. Better known as the home of the Queen. We did stop by her castle for tea and crumpets but the big men with even bigger guns weren’t about to let us say hello so instead of heading round the back and pelting the windows with gravel to see if she wanted to come hang out we ended up sight seeing. In the dark.
It was very pretty there so it’s now added to the list of places I would quite like to sight see around during daylight hours. Plus the Queen still owes me a cup of tea.
Today I have to:
-Cook two different types of Christmas meal for the house Christmas
-Pack to go home and try not to forget all the important uni work
-Renew Insurance
-Play Badminton
-Transfer over a bunch of stuff to my laptop
-Buy some final Christmas presents (then it will be over! Done!)
-Get out of my PJs
Today I will do:
-Sit here with my head on my desk trying not to think about food for fear of being very very ill. Stupid free wine at the Psychology Christmas party.
I think I might order in pizza, stick some festive decorations around the box and serve it up for the meal instead.
On this, the eve of Halloween, it is time to consider what you are going to dress up as if you haven’t already. Obviously you are going to want something that is going to terrify small children into nightmares for weeks and these days the average ghost, witch or zombie is just not going to cut it so let.
Today I saw Frank (Donnie Darko’s rabbit manifestation thing), a Hello Kitty (yep that would actually scare me stupid..) and a couple of other outfits but one thing which stood out above all others were a group of girls who had perhaps the three most terrifying outfits in the entire. universe; Amy Winehouse, Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
I only wish I had a camera to document the perfect costumes they had crafted, I mean granted it doesn’t take a whole lot of crafting to wear next to nothing, but to pull of that level of skank takes a bit of dedication.
The thing which killed me the most was the extra detail all three of them carried around, a soft plush Giant Microbe venereal disease.
University started back up 3 weeks ago and since then it’s been a lot of meetings, coffee and some more meetings interspersed with falling asleep in lectures (and being final year the lectures are much smaller..so the person giving the lecture knows *exactly* who is sleeping and exactly how to make them jump 6ft in the air in order to wake them up..)
Anyway part of my year this year is designing, carrying out and writing up a psychological study with the aims of getting it published in one of the 403842082720170 psychological journals out there and a big part of this is being able to cite references correctly. Our University issued us all, right at the beginning of our course, with an acre of Amazonian rainforest a guide to helping us with that but I bet if you asked any Psychology student in the history of the world they will tell you that citing to APA standard is not a whole load of fun. In-fact some say that colonic irrigation is more pleasurable but having not partaken of that little bit of joy I wouldn’t know and I certainly won’t be feeling the need to test it out any time this side of 80.
In steps Microsoft* (yeah you wouldn’t think I would be saying that huh) and Office 2007’s neat little trick of having it’s own little tab for citations, in a whole variety of formats and then when you are done citing it pops up with this little cute Bibliography. This little addition to their software (I hope it’s new..and that I haven’t spent the past 4 years slaving over citations when really it was secretly there in Office 2003 because what I do next wouldn’t be very pretty) will probably be one of the main reasons I will be submitting my work for peer review rather than sitting alone in a very soft room mumbling about the misplacement of commas and full stops.
This blog post will be interesting to exactly none of you who may read but it’s purely placed here so when I get bored with clapping my hands with joy over this feature I can come back and see exactly how happy I felt and then clap some more.
*Why do I get the feeling the Apple loving people out there will tell me that Macs came with this many aeons ago?
It used to be that when I would sit in a lecture all the people around me would be quietly taking notes from the slides while their desks were littered with coke bottles, crisp packets and baked chocolaty goodness. The only sound being from those cold ridden individuals who so kindly decided to share their sickness with the rest of us and were hacking up a lung or trying hard to contain the Niagara falls within their nose.
Now however those sounds are almost non-existant having been replaced by a new and altogether more troublesome noise. Stomach growling.
Not just the growling that you get just before a meal but that of people who hadn’t eaten in quite some time and their body had given up with the polite ‘feed me’ signals and had opted instead for the ‘if I am loud perhaps she will notice meeee’ route.
The majority of people on my course are of the female variety and take their fashion, fake tan and acrylic nails very seriously, so of course the size O (which is what? A UK size 4?) fad sweeping through such literary gems as ‘Heat’ and ‘Now’ magazines have begun to be adopted by these girls because to them your weight is everything.
The desks formally littered with coke are, and I kid you not, now home to ‘metabolism increasing water’ and..well, that is it.
A new hobby of mine is, on the route to lectures in the morning, to pack a muffin (blueberry bitches, no one can say I don’t get my five-a-day) or something of a similar food group for that 5 minute break we get in the middle. I carefully take it out of my bag when I arrive and place it lovingly on my desk where it will sit for an hour until I get the chance to tenderly unwrap it and break it slowly into little bite size pieces for eating. It is during this hour and the 5 minutes of actual eating that this humble blueberry muffin becomes the most watched thing since Britney’s mental state. People will turn round to lovingly gaze upon the muffin and fantasize about how many gym hours they would have to put themselves through to earn just one bite, the girl who sits on the row with me will spend more time shifting her gaze to the food than she spends on the actual course content being presented and you know what..the sick part of me delights in this new hobby.
I have never, and will never, understand some of these fad diets. I can understand the need not to eat 7 big mac meals a week because it will kill you, but surely, starving your body of food until it makes you dizzy just so you can show off the genetic superiority of your rib-cage on the beach this summer is going to kill you too? These girls are not stupid, they can’t be to get onto the course and they certainly don’t have a disorder like anorexia, no these girls choose to pursue this route and sometimes I just think they are life stupid.
I am a firm believer in eating fresh, good things wherever possible and I do so regularly, and I also allow myself some not so good food because everyone needs those things but you know what? They key words there are eating and regularly . One of the characters on Devil Wears Prada joked ‘I’m on this new diet..I eat nothing all day and then when I feel faint I eat a cube of cheese!’ and yet why do I get the feeling this is a reality lol. It won’t be long before the Red Cross start deploying their advertising on TV featuring the gaunt faces of Lindsey Lohan and Victoria Beckham and slogans such as ‘Please..just one packet of mini eggs could provide enough calories to feed these girls for a week…’
Slowly though, the muffin torture is working. Today for the first time the girl next to me left the lecture in the break and returned..with a chocolate chip muffin and I silently rejoiced along with her stomach.
Links: A BBC reporter tested out this crash course in starvation which you can read here
