Somebody, Somebody Smell That Air

Well, recess is over; it's the Wednesday of the next week, and that planned timetable? Didn't work out. Would have run if I weren't so tired; would have swam if it hadn't rained and I hadn't been so busy. I don't think I got more than six hours of sleep at any time during the week, and by Saturday I was sporting noticeable bags under the eyes--I'd slept only four hours that day--4am to 8am; though that was entirely my own fault. My procrastination combined with my sense of always being crept-up-on by deadlines meant that I'd frittered the day away on Kongregate and movies (Monty Python, no less!) and so was rushing to look at notes and things in the wee hours.

On the other hand I do have a sense of accomplishment, having managed to get some things going during it--not as much as I'd have liked, of course, but real progress was made; and one of those things was to do with the FYP and the upshot is that I have slightly less than 2ft x 3ft x 1mm of PMMA between my wall and my bed, and a long piece of PMMA grid hanging on a clothes-hook behind my door. It's perfectly transparent and does nothing at all; the larger piece makes a whomp-whomp noise, like rain echoing off a tin roof, if you shake it carefully.

It's about an hour to the next FYP meeting, at which I will be discussing cells and PMMA and how difficult it is to get suppliers and tool bits--this is what happens when you try to do new things, apparently. Everybody else seems to have taken the easy way out and used lasers or chemical modification, both of which are very highly precise and easy to use; my project wants to use fly-cutting, which apparently is a little-known technique and has never been used for anything less than a couple hundred microns. And I'm told that the machine has an error margin of up to 1 millimeter--which is a thousand microns--so we might accidentally carve right through our chip if we're not careful. And of course the tool bits may need customising. Which requires money.

I'm told that I seem oddly relaxed and carefree in comparison to everybody else. I don't know how or why--well, to be honest, I probably do: I'm never seen working, I post very regularly on Facebook (and not so much on Twitter), and I'm very good at lounging around. And of course, I type long rambling blog posts like this. But then so much of what I need to do relies on others for timeliness... at this moment I'm waiting on at least four documents to come into my possession for arranging and editing and compiling, which means sleepless nights and mumbling angrily at the laptop screen. I had one of those a couple days ago, and it was all for naught: I didn't attach the edited document to the email I sent, and by the time I found out it was too late, and so the grammatical version now lives only in my laptop. The ungrammatical version, in which there is an amusingly misspelled "Intellectuallly Disabled", lives in a printed-and-bound copy in the professor's possession.

The odd thing is that my grammar fluctuates depending on what I've been reading or who I've been talking to, too. At the moment I'm reading Bill Bryson, who has a much more colloquial and familiar style; previously it was Terry Pratchett, and Neil Gaiman, and Alan Moore (gads, but that man can proselytise)...

November starts in a bit; I wonder if I want to try NaNoWriMo. I've been wanting to for-- well, for since I found out about it in Year One, I think. I've just never been able to since exams all fall within that time period, generally; but this year the exams don't start 'til the 11th December and so November will be the rush-projects-and-assignments time, which also implies I'll have quite a bit of time. And of course if I adhere strictly to the no-rewriting rule I might actually be able to churn out the requisite 16,666-words-a-day average. Might not have anything resembling a coherent plot, but then if I write it'll likely be a slice-of-life sort of thing. Except with magic and mutants and things, because I'm a reader of fiction and hey, why not? I might actually give it a try. Or I might write a 50,000-word fanfic. Crossover between One Piece and Naruto and Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei, just because it'd be stupidly funny and gamebreaking. Or something like Erfworld--throw people into a game system and watch silliness ensue.

I had a haircut yesterday, my... fifth, I think, in the past four years, in Singapore. The hairstylist took a lot of time pointing out how ridiculous it is for a person to expect one haircut to be enough from August to October, and then shortened and thinned out my fringe considerably, to the point where it no longer covers the left of my face from forehead to upper lip. And then she added that I'd be a ladykiller if I had my teeth bleached and re-straightened (somehow the effect of the 1.5 years of braces has worn off, despite my biological maturity), to which I merely smiled (giving her another opportunity to stare at my teeth) and paid and left. Personally I expect this haircut to last me 'til December, maybe even next January.

It was also yesterday that the roommate found out that I never shave and never have shaved. He thinks it's a blessing and I think it's an aberration; but then my head shape wouldn't go well with stubble anyway. Personally I think it would have been obvious from the fact that I haven't a shaver or shaving cream. (The first time I saw an electric shaver I was quite fascinated and wanted to try it out on its owner, but was deterred.)

This post took me half an hour, less the time it took to have water and pee and alt-tab to Facebook and Twitter and email. I'm definitely getting used to my new keyboard--it definitely saves time not having to hit keys to unstick them or re-hit because they weren't detected the first time.