Monday 30/05/11

I made the most of this long weekend. Busy at work and with OU work to catch up on, I took Friday off as an opportunity to rest and get on with something productive. As good as my intentions were, my body didn’t agree.

I was sick early Friday morning, my guts not knowing which end required evacuation quicker. Following a headache so painful it woke me up combined with nausea, the agony culminated in me projectile vomiting into my sink, a surprisingly recognisable half-digested spaghetti bolognese that stank more than the poo I had just hastily deposited into my toilet. Fortunately, I have a waste disposal function on my kitchen sink (yes, I’m boasting) that can handle even the most bilious of contributions. Anyway, post-sick I felt fine, headache gone, and went back to bed, happy that I had won and not brought up any blood in the process.

It’s a damning impression of my body that since I moved house (haha… house, if only) 9 months ago I’ve been sick about half a dozen times and on most of those occasions I’ve not been drinking. Nobody my age should be being ill, flu excepted, unless they’ve consumed literally pints of vodka. When I later told my parents about this all they had to say was that “it didn’t sound healthy at all” and that I may have a brain tumour. Not to worry, then.

The rest of the weekend ended up being remarkably productive for me. I’ve never had any discipline with education, either at school or with the OU work I’m involved with at the moment. As a kid I would be distracted from homework and revision by computer games, sport or making bastard pop albums using loops of my friends shouting superficially offensive phrases (http://www.last.fm/music/DJ+Joey-C/_/Freeman+Is+A+Problem+%28Fuck+You%29). Ultimately it cost me, and now I’m paying, doing a job that trained chimps would turn down because it would lack any intellectual challenges for them despite the frequent tea breaks.

But this week I completed a hefty piece of coursework with over a week to go before the deadline and all I had to do was block all and any access to the internet. I found a Chrome add-on that I could use to block the Guardian sports site, Facebook and whatever else I could use as an excuse not to get a move on, leaving me zero option but to be single minded and to concentrate on the lava flows of volcanoes in the Galapagos Islands. It’s boring but it seems that complete sensory excision is the best thing for my education.