the pseudo-novel now boasts close to 30K words of drivel about a dead priest in Hell. some are pressing me to get it published, although i doubt its calibre is high enough not to be used as kitty litter by any respectable publishing house; in any case, i will let you junkheads decide by posting bits of it once the first draft is completed.
in other news, yes, 240mg of codeine will fuck you up, Google-searching drug-quester, unless you're like me and you're already fucked up. the codeine by itself wouldn't be so bad, but it's probably cocodamol, and you're talking 16g of paracetamol there, which your liver DOES NOT WANT.
interestingly, paracetamol is one of the most hepatotoxic compounds we prescribe to patients nowadays, as i learned from my biomedical buddy. i bleev it's one of those drugs that wouldn't pass modern safety guidelines, although that might be an urban myth. i have a lot of those stuck in the lobes.
end drivel. expect Mask excerpts sooner or later.
L
unconditional acceptance to the University's Honours programme. score three for Blofeld.
that's right, it's time for more information than you wanted about Lepht's fucked-up relationship with its ex. i write it down because it makes me feel better, so go 'head and ignore it.
i've been informed - and looking at his LiveJournal (yes), my source was entirely correct - that w3dyt has become rather obsessed with this 'beating me at grades' idea. i'm told he no longer even tells people who he means to 'win' against, or how - it's ingrown into his head that i, Lepht Anonym, am the academic equivalent of Blofeld, stroking my pet gimp as i hog all the best jobs and grades, laughing at him, surrounded by a cadre of cronies i've hypnotised into following me. in this scenario, w3dyt is of course James Bond, who is going to beat Blofeld because he is the hero and that is what always happens with heroes. it would seem that success on my part has been needling him ever since he decided that the break-up - which was a joint effort in failure - was to be my dain-bramaged doing.
this frightens me, and makes me sad. frightens me because there's more opportunities for him to be angry when i do well coming - the CSD welcome address, for instance, where i'll be up on stage in front of him recieving prizes i won and he didn't - or class, where i'm fairly sure he is going to find out about the forementioned pet gimp and try to do something about it. as we've seen, if he decided to, the question of who'd be crying in the back of the ambulance isn't a hard one.
it makes me so sad because this is so far from what academia should be about. i hear ya - how can someone who writes in all smalls possibly tell us what academia is about? - but i didn't get the idea on my own; it came from the open-source scene here, and from the University itself, and from the guys with doctorates i hang around with these days, of whom i ain't one yet. w3dyt says he's going to 'win' because he thinks of what we do as a contest, where if you didn't get the highest marks, you lost. but it's not like that - we're not here to fight. we're here to collaborate. we're here to help each other learn, get degrees, go out into the world and use that knowledge to help other people who have different knowledge, because in turn, they help us.
it makes me sad that a guy with so much potential - not to be top of the class, but to act as any smart human being can, as a collaborator to help other human beings - is wasting his energy on this futile, puerile inferiority complex. he's not going to 'beat me'. if he did, i wouldn't care - if he got a research job that i didn't, it would mean that he was the one who could contribute more to computing science in that particular post. if he got a first and i got a second-class degree, it would mean that he worked harder than i did, and in contrast to a year or two years ago, that would impact my self-esteem not in the slightest. i am less fragile, now, than he thinks.
i hope this obsession fades from his mind once term starts. i hope his friend on LiveJournal stops placating him by telling him it's OK to have a bitter commitment to tearing a person down, even one that will never work. and i hope he gets a boyfriend or girlfriend who really does love him, who'll distract him from thinking about me, because if it doesn't, the friend doesn't and he doesn't, i can't see that this is going to end healthily.
L
PS. i retract what i said about the novel. it occurs to me that having a literary penchant makes me a verbose, pompous motherfucker, and possibly isn't therefore all that 'sweet'.
i've written 24,250 words of a mutated story, and i have no idea when i'ma be done with the fucker. sweet.
i still can't believe they sent my streetscum butt here. i'm at the visiting scientists' residences of the Mario Negri Pharmaceutical Research Institute, in Milan, which turns out to be not a pompous and preening fashion capital but an industrial wonderland full of huge open factory spaces, lamps hanging from wires bundled down the middle of the streets, tram lines crossing every space of the sky. the Institute's HQ is new, and where i'm staying is essentially a fancy city apartment, or the best goddamn student dorm i've ever seen. there's air conditioning in here, and a power shower, and lights around the bathroom mirror, and ice water in the fridge, and a double bed, and goddamn i still can't believe they sent me, Lepht "Charity Shop" Anonym, here.
i'm writing from right in front of the open windows, looking across the Institute car park where you can see white pools of light on soft grey stone and the words "Istituto Ricerche Farmacologiche Mario Negri" in huge neon letters, and the scientists' office balconies all lit up, and at first i thought you couldn't see any stars - this is Italy's most industrialised city, and the light pollution is pretty bad. i was wrong - you can see them if you're not looking directly at them, faintly, like the Pleiades in Scotland. they're still there; you just have to look for them in a different way.
uplifting, when you think about it.
poppy tea is a strange, pseudo-legal substance, made from Papaverum somniferum, the opium poppy. you cook it up from either the straw, or the seeds; the straw is gotten by putting poppy pods into a coffee grinder, and you can get the pods from any craft shop, cause they're pretty, natch. or you can grow your own and dry it yourself, which is also legal. cooking this dusty stuff properly results in a small amount of Pepsi-coloured, stunningly disgusting liquid, which needs to be done as a shot, since you'll likely vomit trying to drink it normally.
that is, you get low-grade opium, what they call the peat angel. it's an effective painkiller and sleep inducer. in daily life, it's pretty invaluable: takes away your pain at night, cures your insomnia, lets you sit on the floor or at the table and study without having to stop every five minutes and go lie down.
or it would be, if it didn't carry a huge burden of guilt. not because of the questionable legality - you can ask Uncle Wiki about that - but because of where it comes from. see, the opium poppy is one of Afghanistan's largest crops, and the Taliban control its production. i can't help feeling like every time one of us pays for a sack of somniferum heads, that money is going to someone who thinks his wife is his property, who murders unmarried lovers, who wants us all to be slaves of his god. i'm paying that guy money.
but i still accept cups of peat when someone brews some. i feel like a total douche for doing it, but it's hard to decline when someone is offering you free painkillers. i honestly don't know if it's ethically acceptable to drink the imported shit. then again, i'd have a hard time growing my own, not having any garden and being the Death of Houseplants.
i'm in a bind here. thoughts?
L
turns out i won two prizes in CS this year, one for first-year AI (which i don't think i shoulda got since i'm in second year, but they really liked my article on using AI techniques in security, and i got the best grades in the exam, natch) and the other the O'Reilly Prize in Computing Science. they're giving me a mystery parcel that i gotta go pick up, and apparently at the welcome session this year the prizes are good for £150 worth of books. (the mystery parcel is taunting my curiosity by waiting in a Department office until Thursday.)
i'm gonna be able to afford textbooks!
L
PS. who knows, maybe i will make top of the class in something next year.
