The Purpose Of The Bathrobe

I’ve just come up from mooching about downstairs in my hall’s common area, having taken something like 3 hours over dinner because of various distractions. The more I realize the strangeness of the people I live with, the more I like this place. :)

Conversation snippet from downstairs: (Necessary information: Joseph has a knack of saying ridiculous things in a completely deadpan manner, and was walking around in a bathrobe.)

Me: Joseph, why are you walking around in a bathrobe?
Joseph: Well, I enjoy walking around the hall before I go to sleep, in order to get myself relaxed, and I feel relaxed in my bathrobe.
Me: Just promise me you’re not going to try getting any more relaxed.
Joseph: Well, if I were walking around exposing myself, then other people wouldn’t be relaxed. And then there wouldn’t be a relaxing atmosphere, which would defeat the purpose of the bathrobe.
Samer: I’m beginning to feel just a bit tense…
Joseph: Time for me to move on, good night.

Small Successes

Some level of self-respect has been salvaged. I can report relative success of yesterday’s list. I’m particularly proud of managing breakfast, although in my morose, half-pajamaed state I doubt anyone would have voted me Miss Congeniality.

In the library, I managed to limit my meandering in the English section to half an hour (borrowed The Ground Beneath Her Feet, which I’ve been meaning to read for ages, and On The Road, which is one of the books on my “Books To Read For The Sake Of Having Read Them” list). Then I started researching my essays, and spent the rest of the afternoon staggering in dismay from shelf to shelf as I realized the extent of the chaos that is English contract law’s doctrine of privity. Or rather, the chaos that judges induce when they try to think up cunning little ways around it.

Blindness, and death by sizzle have been staved off by the new multiplug and desklight. I’ve found two floormates with VCRs. Nick and I made a mutual decision that we wouldn’t bother with Oxford. This clearly bodes well for our debating career this year, not.

But anyway, reasonable success on yesterday’s list. Tonight I’ll reward myself. I’ll put the Magnetic Fields on the stereo, sit at my well-lighted desk with some good coffee, and……read law articles. Sob.

Starting Small

All right. I’ve had it with indiscipline! I’m laying it all out here.

Short term objectives:
1. Get my Reading Week essays done
2. Find out how to program the hall VCR so that I can record the X-Files
3. Make it down once, just once, in time for breakfast (it’s from 8 to 9. Oh, the cruelty…)
4. Try to wriggle out of having to go debate at Oxford, due to the need to accomplish 1.
5. Buy a desklight and multiplug with switches, to prevent gradual blindness or sudden electrocution in my cave of a room

These are reasonably immediate. Another list for the long haul will follow as soon as I get round to writing it!

Inaugural Gooseflesh

I feel as if some meaningful commentary must be made on this first entry; this big toe gingerly dipped into the bloggy waters of Web “independent content”, or whatever damn buzzword they’ve dreamt up for it now.

Perhaps I should describe some sudden epiphany that prompts this decision to clamber onto an already teetering bandwagon. But nothing comes to mind. Nothing profound, anyway.

Right now I’m distracted by the mundane. I need to buy groceries, have dinner and get to my debating committee meeting by 6 pm. I need to wrestle with my conscience about whether to stay for the debate, which should be fun (This House Would Invade France) or go get some work done, which I should have done today but didn’t. And on a more fundamental and long term level, I need to think of some way to channel my disgust at my own laziness into something productive, instead of letting it melt away as it usually tends to do.

I think the message of the day, and of this first entry, is that the last thing I need is yet another inspired way of wasting time. But am I going to keep on doing this blogging thang? Hell yeah!