It’s a Saturday night, and I’m in my room at college listening to someone’s shared iTunes music (Queen), guzzling lots of water and watching the end of Groundhog Day for the fiftieth time. Let’s just say that my plans for tonight didn’t turn out quite as expected.
It’s a familiar tale to anyone who lives in college accommodation. Up until the end of the afternoon, you’re blissfully relaxing in the knowledge that you’ll be going out that night. Suddenly, all of your best laid plans are blasted apart in successive volleys as people announce that they don’t want to go out or they’re going on dates or they’re going to films you don’t want to see. At the end of this shock-and-awe conflict, you’re left shellshocked and are reduced to prowling around the corridors, bothering people in their kitchens and repeatedly revising your projections for the night downward and downward. Eventually, you get to the point where you have nothing left to do but post to your weblog and feel pathetically sorry for yourself. It’s a sad, sad state of affairs.
I make it sound worse than it really is, of course. It’s not as if I didn’t have anything to do – more than a couple of people offered decent alternatives – but what with the wind and the rain, my will was sapped away.
None of this is helped by my burning through my entire Lal-Pile of unread books. In the past three days I finished The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe and Time Out Of Joint by Philip K Dick, neither of which can be described as easily read books. Nor is it helped by my irrational insistence on not watching any of my good unwatched DVDs (a Lal-Pile of DVDs, if you will) unless I can do them proper justice, by which I mean watching them with a bunch of friends in a good environment. Anything less would be an insult to the creators of such films as Office Space, Princess Mononoke, Monsoon Wedding and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Let’s just face facts: I’m weird.
mssv 