Asparagus

She is in season, Mme Asparagus.

Fresher than new grass, as crunchy as Brazilian sand yet more textured than the finest Camembert. O, she is a goddess and appear to me did she in dream, instructing me to appear at a farmers' market this morning and LO THUS I DID.

I now have asparagus, and the smell of my urine correspondingly smells of Listerine. Anything that goes through one so quickly cannot but be good for one.

Post asparagum, I watched History Boys and bawled my eyes out and read Auden and Hardy. God, am I alive.

Nothing better than a good cry to get things in perspective. Which is why I did this.

Orange

So I found out today (thanks to wikipedia) that oranges have segments. I thought it was just mandarins (or satsumas as the English seem to call them).

My entire worldview has changed to accommodate this fact.

For I thought oranges were impervious walls of thick orange, fleshed out by seeds and pith - I thought them to be Stalinesque, if you will.

Now I think them Stalinesque impervious walls of thick orange but fleshed out with some kind of OCTAGONAL PRISMS! And correspondingly I think that there is nothing in life quite as splendid as a good orange.

From here all I have to do is to work out how ... to ... get ... inside ...

It is at this point when yours truly covers themselves and their keyboard with the pith and seeds of a rather large orange. In short:

In Soviet Russia, orange peels YOU!!

What Lucian did next; or, Greek

περὶ μέντοι τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν, οἵους ἔχουσιν, ὀκνῶ μὲν εἰπεῖν, μή τίς με νομίσῃ ψεύδεσθαι διὰ τὸ ἄπιστον τοῦ λόγου. ὅμως δὲ καὶ τοῦτο ἐρῶ· τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς περιαιρετοὺς ἔχουσι, καὶ ὁ βουλόμενος ἐξελὼν τοὺς αὑτοῦ φυλάττει ἔστ᾿ ἂν δεηθῇ ἰδεῖν· οὕτω δὲ ἐνθέμενος ὁρᾷ· καὶ πολλοὶ τοὺς σφετέρους ἀπολέσαντες παρ᾿ ἄλλων χρησάμενοι ὁρῶσιν. εἰσὶ δ᾿ οἳ καὶ πολλοὺς ἀποθέτους ἔχουσιν, οἱ πλούσιοι.

How very strange, all in all.

So I guess I did do my Greek. Which made me think what Greek is.

linguam Graecam uti est ...

• a way to think in a different way
• a way to see what other people (through the different way) thought
• a way to see how other people (through the different way) thought
• a way to be generally supercilious and tease people for splitting infinitives
• a way to sink farther and farther down into a depressive stupor

Which, I suppose, is why I'm going to study psycholinguistics rather than the language next year. By now, at least, I can read Homer and Plato and Aeschylus on my own.

Which is what I set out to do, not to spend a crazy amount of money learning something I originally taught myself.

And so it is begun.

Well, the blog's started - I guess there's nothing I can do about it now. Besides, I thought I'd bitten my tongue on the side at the back by my right wisdom tooth and I was playing with it to see whether I'd bitten it and then I actually did bite it, really hard, with my monstrous molars.

The weekend seems less of a luxury now that I've had my Monday - given I had some two hours of sleep I did pretty well though. I was in a really good mood all day and handed in my research paper and ate some food at my favourite café and then toddled off to telemarket some suckers.

Quid I did. And then I cooked a curry and watched Planet Terror. So here I am again, ignoring the pages of Lucian's Verae Historiae in front of me that I'm "translating". Hopefully they get read before my exam.

Quae might prove rather inconsequential. I today looked at my uni's timetables for next year and I can't do any of my majors. Greek clashes with Greek, Latin with Linguistics, and all that remains is to do a Gender Studies degree and hope to sort things out after graduation.

Or fall back on a science degree.

Anyway, I hope whoever's read this has ignored the content as it's irrelevant. All I wanted to do was innapropriately use connecting relatives to signal the fact that I've been reading Caesar's De bello Gallico all day.

Quid isn't very interesting anyway.

The first time

So it's 0455 hrs and I've just finished writing up a mammoth linguistics research project.

What then to do but start a blog?

I've never had one before, but I don't expect you want to know much about me.

Too bad, as I'm trying to work out whether I like the taste that I thought was only in the back of my mouth but now I've realised is wobbling through my entire oral cavity. I shaved up the fragments of a block of cheese and put it on some bread and microwaved it and ate it.

You know, the sort of thing you do when you can't quite sleep but can't quite be productive.

Like start a blog.