Thursday 10th June 2010, roughly quarter to 3 in the afternoon, location my unbearably stifling room @ my cluttered desk

OK so it isn't a great URL; a little cliched especially by student standards where procrastination has become a byword for being a student, but personally I'm rather liking the assonantal rhyme.  If you don't know what that means don't worry, it's just poetry and stuff innit.  Let me see: this morning my GP conclusively told me that I'm not dying of mouth cancer and I need to pull myself together and get on with some work - this being after my cousin (a dentist) had reassured me on exactly the same point.  The bulgy bit on the inside of my lower lip that started off as an ulcer and turned overnight into an uber massive cyst that makes me look as though I've had a lopsided silicon implant is apparently nothing to worry about. To be fair you can't really blame me. In my experience mouths aren't meant to just randomly swell up leaving you to walk around looking like a parrot fish until further notice. Actually a similar thing happened to me a few years ago when I made ginger cake and decided for reasons best known to myself to eat some neat ginger - it was pretty funny but at least it came from a definite cause. I've figured myself to have got to just about that age where you start worrying about your health and can't just get up every morning and go to bed each night assuming everything will carry on running like clockwork. Especially not with my sleeping pattern and more bad habits than I care to name... then there's the fact that I'm the sort of person who knows she has a brain tumour with the very first throb of her head. Not exactly conducive to getting my work done...although it seems a shame now I know I'm no longer dying of one illness that I've got to get on with it!! 

Of course I am doing anything but getting on with it... spotify is my latest and most deadly aid to the avoidance of work. I had a bizarre recollection the other day of a games lesson when I was 10 years old. It was about the only dance lesson I ever enjoyed.  We were supposed to move around in a stiff jerky manner until the end of the song when we had to droop and die, the idea being that we were mannequins from a shop window temporarily brought to life.  I've always remembered what the song was, although until recently I don't think I'd heard it since I was 10: 'The Model' by Kraftwerk.  I had literally taken procrastinaton to a new extreme and was sitting there digging around in my memory for songs I'd heard and listening to them just for the heck of it. 'The Model' is actually an awesome song, even though all the techno stuff would not ordinarily be to my taste; I think because it is a curious tune that creates a very definite image.  With the lifeless parody of beauty in a shop mannequin's imagined movements my year 5 games teacher wasn't far off the mark. 

There's another song I'm completely addicted to: 'Goodnight Moon' by Shivaree of Kill Bill 2 soundtrack fame.  Everything about it, from Ambrosia Parsley's Southern drawl to the lyrics themselves and the slow languid rhythm just screams sex. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHYDFClkqHw

Anyway I really must stop.  For some reason I've recently found that my day just doesn't start unless I go swimming. All very convenient as I live literally opposite the gym (it actually incorporates the Iffley road running track which, in case you didn't know was where Roger Bannister ran the first sub-4-minute mile on May 6th 1954), but when I don't get up until 9am, am immediately forced to try and clear my room sufficiently for the scout to get around it with the vac (have never known why she can't just leave the vacuum cleaner in the cupboard and let us fend for ourselves at a less distressing hour), then troggle off to Tesco in a quest for weetabix, then arrive 20 minutes late for my doctor's appointment and finally come back home to indulge in gratuitous internet procrastination, it becomes a bit of a problem.  I may eventually drag myself, my HIDEOUS swim hat and my still-damp and distinctly greying once white bikini down to the pool for about 5; by the time I've done a decent number of lengths it'll be dinner time, and then hey presto before I know it I'm bang on course for another all-nighter.  No wonder I'm constantly ill. It is also a little-known fact that whilst pro plus might stop you from falling asleep but it does NOT prevent you from feeling physically and mentally exhausted.  So if I've dosed myself up preparatory to burning the midnight oil it is inevitable that at around 3 or 4am if I'm lucky I will find myself just sitting there staring wild-eyed at the computer screen wide awake but quite literally incapable of formulating a sentence. I went through a phase of drinking those energy shots as well; far from leaving me bouncing off the walls and ceiling I've now reached a point where my body has become so conditioned to them I can drink a dozen or more and then happily curl up in a ball and sleep until the cows come home.