Remember Me?

I'm going to dredge this Blog up again, as though it was some kind of literate zombie, and I was an idiot with a book of incantations and a very poor knowledge of Horror Movies. There are an awful lot of reasons why I haven't blogged in the last six months- some of them horribly angsty, so it's a good thing I can't remember what they were- but largely because nothing very interesting happened. It was half a year in the prime of my life, which is a bit unsettling. I don't want to reach fifty and end up looking back wistfully at "the times where I used to sit around", or, worse, "the time where I had legs". That wouldn't be good at all.

Still, when I wasn't frittering away precious weeks of my life staring at walls, one or two things did manage to happen to me. I won a short story contest (you can read it here, although I'd advise against it if you're religious, French, or have political opinions that are relatively advanced, as opposed to stupid), saw several movies I didn't understand, and summarised medical files.

Summarising medical files I did a lot, because it was my job, but didn't do as much as I could have, because it was sheer agonising torture after a while. When it's still new, it's fantastic. You get to read pretty much every meeting between a patient and their doctors that they had in their lives, and pick out the parts that matter while ignoring the bits where the doctor envisioned numerous warts slowly erupting over their charge's face while explaining for the fourteenth time that day that no, antibiotics do not, in fact, work on colds. It's strange, and kind of cool, to see someone slowly growing older as you flick through the letters, as concerns about the size of a nose give way to hideous sexual diseases give way to abortions. There are a great many stories I can't tell from the files, some of them facinating, some of them heart-rendingly tragic. After a while, you begin to feel the pain of everyone whose file you see (except the people who never have to go to the doctor, the lucky bastards), and begin to realise that pretty much everybody has horrible secret problems, problems which they can't talk about because they're terrifying, and so don't realise that everybody else has them, too. There were a lot of people who were depressed in there. I wonder if doing my job for a day could have helped, or made things worse. But then all you can really do in the end is forget, except for the things that you never can, and never should.

After a longer while, though, the job really sucked. Eventually doing the same thing over and over again can become unbearable, and when the thing in question is leaning over a desk three sizes too small for you in a seat that won't adjust that's slowly crushing all your interior organs, while reading the words "He was in hideous, hideous pain" repeat themselves over and over again, that point arrives depressingly quickly. Now I have nothing interesting to say about my work at all except that the Scottish NHS readcode systems, that put all the significant information from medical files into a computer database in an encrypted form, have codes for "Injury caused by tropical venemous millipede on farm", "Injury due to scalding chocolate" and "War injury: Crushed by falling plane", but no code for "Hepatitis A". Our tax pounds at work, there.

That's all, really, barring brief interludes where I tried to conduct an experiment on horse grazing which backfired when a horse ate all my data, went to London on a protest and protested in the wrong place by mistake, and passed part of a University course by drawing cartoons of rabbits. Not the most interesting of half years, I'll grant. But then the slim medical files are the dull ones, and the ones you become most jealous of, so, at least in a way, "not interesting" is perhaps a very positive thing indeed.

Even my mid-life crisis is an early developer

There are, as far as I can see, three types of students: the ones who know exactly what they're going to do in life, and so are able to spend their time as a student drinking constantly, the ones who have no idea what on Earth's going on with them, and so drink constantly to forget, and those who lurch wildly between the two, and have to drink for other people's safety.

I fall somewhere between those last two camps, like a non-accurate parachutist in a terrible analogy. Every so often, I'll sit bolt upright, say something like: "Yes! Starting up a company which creates abstract art out of sheep is exactly what I want to do!", before sinking into a blind panic that lasts about seven hours. After which I'm pretty much where I started, but with about 7000 GigaJordans of added humiliation.

This comes from doing the least vocational degree ever. Actually, prospective employers could read this. From doing a spectacularly vocational degree. But to what end exactly I'm still not quite sure: Biology has a nasty habit of seeming too sciency for creative-type jobs, and too soft for analysis-type jobs. So spreadsheets, basically. Woo. There is always the "Medical Researcher" pathway left open, but frankly I'd rather go down a pathway to a big scary house, which, knowing my luck, is exactly the sort of thing I'll end up doing in my future career.

So I'm a bit terrified, really, especially considering my concern about my employability, twinned with my concern for the rights of all people, led to me agreeing to be locked in a cage. God knows how that's going to look on a CV. Still, whether I'm locked up, mildly dazed, or lost in the middle of a suburb, one thing's certain: Pan Bloglodytes is most assuredly running again. Yay!

Neuron: Your Own

I went to Edinburgh's AGM today, the democratic system in the Uni that, depresssingly, 99% of students excercise their democratic right not to go to. Blogging, voting, giving your opinion in a World this full of people can be like being a red blood cell telling the circulation system how to work: things tend to ignore you, and flow on by at dizzying speeds. I think this might be too cynical though, or hope, anyway. I still believe, perhaps because I'm still eighteen years old and there's only so much cynicism my glands can produce, that a more appropriate analogy from Biology for any of our positions would be that of a neuron, a little interconnected cell that lives in the Brain. One neuron telling a person to scream won't succeed, but if it nudges those beside it with chemicals in a way science still doesn't quite understand, and everything else understands even less, slowly they'll start signalling to other neurons, the whole process building and building and multiplying, until suddenly the woman they all inhabit screams for her life in the middle of a conference about scissors, and has to retire in a fit of shame, you stupid neuron, you. If you're in the right place, at the right time. And aren't a hopeless wuss like me. I still believe that, because I still need to hope.

I worry I'm not outspoken enough, and then speak up and accidently offend everyone, and worry about being outspoken. When you have views that aren't offensive if expressed right that have the small snag of being impossible to express, and passionately believe in things people don't understand very well, or believe it's impossible to be passionate about. I'm worried that, over halfway through First Year (that's an eighth of my time as a student!!! Not counting Masters and possibly pHDing!!!) all I seem to have achieved is annoying a corridorsworth of innocent people, mistaking a blazer for passable ball dress, and designing a poster which attracted precicely one person to the advertised event, the fact that it was the most attractive person on my course and indeed Planet notwithstanding. Meanwhile there are all these people debating concepts I can't pronounce, editing newspapers, being mindlessly attractive. I'm worried I'm going to look back on my Student years and remember them. I'm worried I'm going to have about as much impact on anything as One True Voice. You don't even remember who they are.

But the motions I wanted to passed, and the one I really didn't want to pass folded despite overwhelming support from people who weren't me. Yaying and booing on the sidelines isn't much, but perhaps it's enough, for now, before I have the energy to do things and the schedule to fit them into around the endless work. Things change, and change in ways I certainly don't understand, and sometimes you hope you were a part of them, and sometimes you know you were, and have to hide the poison darts. I hope you reading this change the World. Trapping Boris Johnston in a cage, naked, over a field of angry Liverpudlians armed with feathers would be a start. But more on him later.

Urrk II: Curse of the Speaking Blob

As you'll know by now, this blog is like a field of brambles: every once in a while it produces something sweet and purplish, but you have to wait a lot to get it. If you're me, you tend to slip and fall into acre upon acre of agonising thorns, which, if you've ever kept a blog, you'll know isn't stretching the analogy very far.

Life at the moment isn't great: someone seems to have installed a Doom-o-matic over my left shoulder, and it's been on full pelt these last few weeks, dumping steaming piles of awfulness as it goes. Much of the stuff I can't talk about, because to do so would cause any hope I have left of PB remaining angst free shattering, and because I don't want to right now. Suffice to say that there are still lots of good things happening to me, although I often don't notice them until five hours later, like that joke someone told me I took six years to get.

Soon, every post won't be a "here come some posts!" post, I promise. Not now, though. I'm tired now. If I've got more traffic now I'm on ScottishBlogs, hey! Nice to see you. It's exciting here when there's less February around.

Emergency Edit: I just looked at ScottishBlogs, and it appears I've spelt the word "basically" wrong on my blogvertisment. 'S the Doom-o-matic. Nightmares in its path.

Urk: The Blob speaks

Several people become different things depending on the time of day, as anyone in the market for a huge, monsterous half human who accidently turned up during Jekyll's practicing hours will testify. I myself undergo a transition to a huge squeaking blob in the afternoon, which given I'm an Evolutionary Biology student means I could probably launch a research investigation into myself. It sucks- for at least two hours every day I lose all functions, and any speech I'm capable of usualy involves grunts, waving arms, and nodding. Given that it's ten past one right now I shouldn't technically be capable of writing this, so yay, go me.

Which is a slightly more interesting way of saying nothing very exciting is happening and it won't for at least two hours. And that I need to get the hang of only updating when there are things to say, a skill several posts here suggests isn't the most finely honed of things.

Monky Buisiness

Much as I don't want this Blog to become an Evolutionary Biologist's cliche, and be about my encounters with Religion all the time, it looks like I might have a fairly hard time of it (as you might have surmised from the no posts for ages), as every single one of my encounters is, in fact, Religious. I don't mean this in the sense that I frequently have majesticly righteous visions of things catching fire in increasingly incomprehensible ways, but rather in the sense that everything that's happened to me while being back in Edinburgh that wasn't me sitting on my bed imagining what it would be like if Arthur's Seat had eyes, and was staring at everybody, involved the old A-Atheism in some way. I've played pool with Creationists (who cheated several times more than I did, to both my and Jesus' disapproval), thrown out some old hot chocolate in a Church, and run away from a man with a look in his eye only marginaly less disturbing than the covers of his books, which were along the lines of "Jesus'll love you while you burn forever in sulphurous Hell". More interesting than those, however, is the relationship I've accidently struck up with a Monk on the Royal Mile. Now, I'm quite scared of Monks, as a rule, never quite knowing if they're donating the butter you're buying them to a small, independant commune or a company that makes nuclear bombs out of endangered animals, and this one was, at first, no exception. He ran up to me as I was walking from one improbably religion-based episode to another, telling me that I should give him money for reasons I don't remember. I'm hideously miserish when it comes to even real, established Charities, to be embarassingly honest- I haven't even joined Amnesty International, despite being in the Society and giving a five minute talk about it in three weeks time- and while he was talking about freezing Monks unable to raise enough money for even one forty volume Sanskrit tome, I was thinking about how I could probably get to the Hot Chocolate shop without him noticing were I to run under his legs. Still, something gave in me, and in desperation I realised a pact I'd made with myself after not giving money to thirty-three charities in a row.

"April!", I said loudly.

The Monk stopped in mid-explination of the Holiest Fountain in the World, and looked bewildered.

"I'll give you the money in April! When I'm finished here! And not just you! All of them! No matter if you're connected to Arms Dealers or Terrorists or that bloke next door who plays the same bloody song over and over every night! April! I'll take all the small books about Karmic Spooning you have then!"

I think I may have got a little flustered. Passers by might have thought the Monk was holding me up, thereby lowering my reputation in Edinburgh to ever-new depths. Still, the Monk himself, once realising I was serious, and, more importantly, not actualy going to kill him, split into one of the biggest smiles I've ever seen on a creature with lips, and assured me that yes, indeed, April will be fine. And now every time I walk past the Royal Mile, which is lots because it's Edinburgh and that's what you're supposed to do, he smiles at me, waving books and CDs of insperational wailing, saying "April!" "April!", in a manner suggesting he's enjoying himself very, very much. It seems they aren't all bad, those scary Monks.

...I realised yesterday I'm actualy leaving in May. I don't quite know what I'm going to do.

DC Confidential

Have you ever had an exam where all the way through, you have a nagging feeling that something isn't right, that despite knowing all the facts, they all seem to be telling you quite clearly impossible things, such as the fact that the combustion of water couldn't happen, and that the three things you know about chiral molecules all contradict each other? And then, afterwards, hearing other people talk, you slowly realise that all the facts you thought you knew were completely wrong, and the World actualy works in a totally different way, and gruff, eighty year old men are even now clustering around your paper, slowly guffawing as they read your pathetic attempt at a sensical answer? Have you ever had an exam like that?

No? Good, because I'm not going to talk about that today, but rather (Ooh!) Current Affairs, specificaly those of David Cameron, a man who utterly facinates me. I remember when I saw him for the first time I almost fell out of my chair in astonishment (I only didn't because it was a really big chair), due to just how ridiculously British he looked. He didn't just look like a Prime Minister, he looked like the sort of person people would hire to play the Prime Minister in an idealistic Rom-Com involving Richard Curtis and a rampaging mob of Disgruntled Cynics. It's astonishing-He's like Colin Firth crossed with a big jolly cushion, the sort of man Old Ladies would cross the street to hug. He looks, and acts, like the Platonic Ideal of a PM. It was kind of terrifying. As soon as I saw him, I knew he would win the contest he was in, even though at that point he was a laughable outsider. He couldn't not, looking like he did.

I'm rubbish with political predictions, mind, so I'm not using that as a basis for my employment as a Political pundit (although, by managing to get the result in every single swing state in the last US Election wrong, I've about the same success rate as the best of 'em). Rather I'm saying that what's interesting, and kind of terrifying, about Cameron is that he could very well win the next election just based on the myth he spins around himself. Furthermore, looking and listening to him, it's obvious he understands this in a way David Davis didn't to an almost heroic extent: he knows he doesn't have to cast around spin very much if he just lets his body do the spinning for him. All he really has to do is sit and watch the Labour government implode, and then wag a knowing finger as it does.

Why is this terrifying? Two levels. First, Cameron's rise to power, like Blair's, shows that detailed policy doesn't really matter: As long as there's this nice seeming bloke who says nice seeming things, nobody really cares what his plans for Train Station Renewal are. Secondly, though, and more importantly, I don't care. I've tried very hard to dislike Cameron on principle until I've found out about his policies, as is a good idea, and I just can't do it. He's too loveable, and while the tiny rational voice in my head is bitterly screaming into my frontal lobes that I don't know this man, the larger, emotional part of me is thinking about his funny pudgy cheeks. You can hardly not win an election with that on your side, especialy not when up against Gordon Brown, a man who caused a two minute silence by telling a joke. Dark times.

Still, I might be wrong. Ol' DC seems to place Climate Change high on his agenda as a really bloody important thing, a fact which alone puts him into the "worth listening to" section of Politicians, even though the mere thought of voting Conservative literaly makes my hackles raise, which is actualy a surprisingly relaxing feeling. But in all his other policies, and in some of his dealings, he seems to be somewhat more complex than he appears to pudgy lovely cheeks embarassed wee smile. Look at his sweet little eyes!

...It's one thing being brainwashed. It's quite another to do it to yourself.