the Daily Grind: October 2003 Archives

Absently digging into one of the sidepockets of my jacket, I cross the street and find, on recovering my senses, an old, balding man waiting for me on the opposite pavement, his face dressed with an affable smile. "Hello," he greets me, "long time no see!" I stop short, lifting my chin and turning my head slightly, to study him from beneath quizzically raised eyebrows. In the same split second, I become aware of the defensiveness of my reaction to him, drop my shoulders and kill any of the imperiousness borne in my initial expression with an utterly nonsense grin.

"Err... yes... yes, long time no see!" I offer. He asks me how I've been - fine, if busy - and carries on briefly, touching on my mother's recent problems with arthritis, before telling me how nice it was to see me. "Cheers, and take care" I return, as he wanders off. I assess his case of mistaken identity momentarily, before I continue walking. Sweet, little old men.

Straight ahead, a middle-aged woman with short hair and boyish features approaches, walking in the street alongside the pavement. She is clad in a pale, turquoise-green fleece, and has her arms wrapped tightly about herself, but as a young girl walks past, "Whee!" she cries, flinging her arms out and making as if to hug her. The girl scurries out of the way and escapes, while the old woman swans over to me, arms still held wide, causing me to step out of the way. "Damn, missed her," she grins, "and I almost had you too!" As she continues past me, she calls back, "Don't mind me, I'm only mad!"

And in a moment, I am left standing alone on the street. As I am prone to doing with or without an audience, I put on the expression of one who has been totally weirded-out by one too many light, if entertaining, encounters with the terminally demented, music from the Twilight Zone playing through my head. Is this the Cambridge that people often talk about?

The majority of my time today was taken up by a single protocol. It began at 0815 this morning, is highly involving, shamefully long, and ongoing as of the moment (2143, rather black outside). I have little against working long hours when necessary, but having to attend at regular intervals all day and evening long is just killing, especially when the restful moments are of a length that is conducive to achieving just about nothing else. A ten minute lunch-break, a brief, rushed dinner and a meeting to follow, topped off by more playing-with-antibodies has made for a tiring day.

[...goes to make an adjustment...]

Thrilling; a realtime moan. What also cheers me up no end is that the college network administrator has managed to keep my computer cut-off from the network since last Thursday night, which means all sorts of inconveniences as virtually everything that goes on at the University is organised via the 'net. The problem? He doesn't really know. Someone must have peed in his mother.

Despite everything, I'm in a really good mood (I am readily categorisable as an optimistic fool), and am also pleased to have finally taken receipt of my Miyazaki DVD (Princess Mononoke), which I ordered last week, only to receive a Pamela Anderson pornographic compendium. I mean for godsakes, if I'm going to be sent the wrong item, could it not have reflected my interests to a greater degree? She doesn't even have any facial hair.

I can't say that there are any cartoons that I've bought recently, but I saw Miyazaki's most recent piece a few weeks back; Spirited Away is one of the best pieces of animation I've seen in a long time, featuring a tremendous richness of both environment and depth of character in what is, outwardly, a relatively simple stylistic approach. If you can't take weird, don't watch it, but few film-buffs, if not any aesthete outright, will find this one disappointing.

Almost time to head home.

Pain.

Last night, my housemates and I sat up playing dominos over coffee, Toblerone and After Eights, discussing all those things that philosophers, scientific historians, mathematicians and molecular biologists tend to discuss - fear not, Proust aside, it was pretty low brow - and in what felt like no time at all, ten o'clock became two in the morning, and I was out for the count. Until two forty-five, when I woke up with the worst stomach pain I've had since my appendix came out; it lasted nearly two hours, leaving me on the verge of vomiting for much of that time, sweating, amd causing me, again and again, to draw my legs towards my body in search of comfort, only to force them back down again in frustration. Cycle after cycle. And then it just stopped, I fell asleep, and that was that.

Today, my forearms drew significant attention at work; I have fantastic, crimson bruises up and down the right arm, and similar, though less obvious, bruising to the left; this is, before anyone gets concerned, unrelated to last night's pain in the... stomach. I teased that I had been attacked by a dude with a bottle last night; this is partly correct, but not quite what it sounds, having been a choreographed component of a Jiu Jitsu demo. Resting my arms on the desk to type isn't all that pleasant, this evening. Everything else hurts too, though it doesn't show quite so alarmingly, leaving me feeling a bit wasted. This has been a painful day.

Seven whole hours without a connection to the outside world; shock horror. You'd think that people would be better able to deal with a University network service suspension by doing something worthwhile outside on a lovely day like today - the reality is twisted bodies writhing in the throes of cold turkey. Well, almost. I sent a couple of emails out this morning, but understand that they'll be stuck in funny places until the backlog clears by the mid-evening. This is where people see the time stamp and wonder why I'm "Good morning" them at five in the afternoon. Admittedly, I've done weirder in my life.