the quotidienne and the banal!

i was sitting in wright's bar eating brunch with jolyn on wednesday after economic history class. once againe i was eating brunch (good way to save money), once again i was to be drinking oversweetened tea the way only the people at wright's do (it is closest you can get here to teh with condensed milk), once again i was doing this because i never fail to wake up late on wednesday and have no time to make breakfast. and once again i thought, well isn't this nice. some semblance of a routine. and i like the way you can bring your hot drink into class and sip it. aren't we all adults now.

it's easy to forget that this is only my 7th week here. to be honest it has all gone by really fast. but i think i've settled in enough to start having these routines... like grocery shopping at elephant & castle on wednesdays, etc...

of course i am constantly amazed by what's on offer here. (though definitely not the standard of pedagogy). oh, the peacock theatre, where i have my economics, maths and stats lectures in particular, shows this really dodgy show called "kung-fu masters" at night, and passing by i actually saw the bald headed shaolin wannabes troupe into the theatre. omg. i am enriched by the vast variety of public lectures here, whether it be finance from its practitioners, or someone who came back from north korea. i am starting to like these talks organised by the department of international history because it's really interesting to see copies of the pyongyang times with kim jong il photoshop-ed into random settings and headlines going : "Kim Jong-Il gives on the spot advice to duck farm" and "Kim-Jong-Il gives on the spot advice to industrial plant etc"... as the speaker said, "man of many talents." He was someone who was imprisoned in Burma for over a year, and it always amazes me how any personal statement of religious belief is likely to rankle anyone here, inviting questions like (why do we have to look to a greater power to know what is good etc...) which invited a very good retort, if you're going to suffer or be moved to do something, i hope it's not for some abstract declaration of human rights that the politicians of 160 nations decided to sign after consensus. the most memorable line was "the government would have more money for crime and foreign policy if they wouldn't sponsor half the students in the uk to go to university and take some mickey mouse courses that employers don't respect anyway." he was a tory mp, and he made sense. and here, i think it is anathema to even suggest war is an answer to anything. everyone agress, or takes as given, that iraq was a mistake, and any suggestion which may lead to war is a no-go. given that it was remembrance day, i don't know so much about it. on the one hand we hope that we no longer have to wear all these poppies for dead soldiers in war... but i don't know. i don't want to speculate and comment on these abstract things, but there is a sense i feel that people no longer accept that there is evil in this world and it must be fought. oh no, i'm sounding dodgy again.

was supposed to watch guys and dolls today and catch ewan mcgregor and jane krakowski! but it's friday night, so it's impossible to get tickets, so i settled for next wednesday instead. just had a nice japanese dinner, before the rain got so impossibly strong. the cold's never too bad, it's just so wet! mel and i ended up wasting time in hmv looking at every conceivable dvd from a-z and going through film history (and ending up not buying anything!). so many films they have here. i wanted to grab a copy of "the secretary" cause it was just 3.99 and the trailer said "a perfect way to wind down after a hard day at work (school for me)" "(hyperbolic adjective) erotic." and i wanted to watch maggie gyllenhaal crawling around the floor with a rose in her mouth. alas, i dithered, and i thought i ought to save every last pence. we walked out, until i promptly reminded her of an abba song which would be stuck in her head so we went back to try to find an abba cd so we could get it out. but luckily it closed before we could do real damage to our wallets.

i walked back via lse, for the umpteenth time walked back to bankside. and i got this entire "routine" thing again. lse on friday nights looks more like a club than a proper school with people walking around houghton street with bling and bouncers standing outside the clare market building. and yeah. oh my god. the last time i went to crush was way back in week 1. i was so n00b then. and wow. it's week 7.

and here i am blogging. good, and i have so many replies to emails to catch up on because i tried to convince myself i was in a productive mood and tried to finish all my work. good boy.
now to start on next week's essay.

the fire alarm just went off. fuck.