The Best Cure is More of What Made You Sick

The shadows have grown long and the sunlight now streaming through the leaves and into the bedroom window has softened with the waning day. Bags and boxes and clothes are strewn across the floor with a sense of neglect and abandon. The bed is unmade; covered in papers and assorted odds and ends of clothing that managed to migrate from the floor or on top of the suitcases. I am sitting on a cheap IKEA stool cushioned by a cheap IKEA pillow, with another - even cheaper - IKEA stool holding my papers and box full of pens, hi-lighters, and Post-Its. Such is my life.

I can now say that I actually feel as if I'm back in school. The past 5 hours have actually been spent attempting, and sometimes even completing research. I've read articles on JSTOR, Project MUSE, the websites for the Tate Britain, V&A, and NPG, and even - true to my undergraduate form - Wikipedia. There's something satisfying in realising after 2 highly intimidating seminar sessions that perhaps I'm not as hopeless as I thought.

After hours of reading on everything from Godfrey Kneller to mezzotints to Banyans and writing copious notes on such, you'd think I'd unwind by watching mindless TV, right? Not so. Only I could somehow find solace from hours of reading and writing by doing even more reading and writing! What sort of reading and writing? Oh, of course only the mindless sort.

Reading: the latest Dan Brown novel which is making the rounds through all of my flatmates like a communicable disease during fraternity pledging.

Writing: my blog. A beautiful exercise in being simultaneously informative and self-centred.

Perhaps, though, as a special treat I'll browbeat teh interwebs into cooperating long enough to let me enjoy the latest episode of Private Practise before my back permanently sinks into a hunched-over position signalling my regression from life as a fresh-air-breathing, Regent's-Park-running Human Being to life as a bleary-eyed, indoor-dwelling, internet-database-researching hermit, otherwise known as a Graduate Student. Or perhaps, after months of prolonged exposure and close contact, I'll become fused to my laptop in a creepy sort of symbiosis only previously seen in Disney's latest epic fail, Pirates of the Caribbean III: At World's End. Or maybe it's more like the Borg in Star Trek...I'm not sure.

yeargh...no onomotopoeia is sufficient to convey

such thorough disgust.

At least I have 2 pages of nicely colour-coded notes to show for my efforts. And no carbuncles yet...