Turn my back for five seconds - five - and somehow my computer knows that I've saved everything and have stopped working and thus will not kill it when it dies. I look back, and the monitor's going ape-shit, like I've told it to load satanic hamster pornography in the wrong resolution or something. Either that, or an alien life-form is trying to send me meaningful messages of cosmic goodwill, although I doubt that. Never know, of course. I turned the entire thing off and left it to sit for twenty minutes while I went to give an entirely spurious pol sci tute.

My playlist segues from Garbage into Megaherz (can't beat that Shirley-purr into German-growl smirk) and I try to beat myself back into reading for my essay. Which is due on Friday. No more time for good behaviour (even if I was, contrary to all available data, behaving well). I can't handle reading and living in a music-free vacuum, though, so I have to have the music going, and now (because I paused to dispatch a shopping trip in there) it's moving from that Grrr-Rawr Rock Me Amadeus into Def FX's "Majick"; psychedelically 80s-reminiscent in the American-Psycho "Some of us are trying to do drugs in here" sort of way.

So much essay to do and I can see how to write a brilliant work that will win me Aat's approval, which I crave, but I can't see how to do it in two days with the material I have. I have to try, though, because I should, and thinking up a new concept will take too much time and effort anyway. But with so much essay, so many other things are falling over. Like my email communication, lapsed now shamefully. I haven't emailled an old friend to arrange coffee, and she's probably justified in the voodoo dolls she's making of me. I haven't emailled old school friends about returning home in a week. I haven't emailled Drioux in forever, and I miss communicating with him. And I haven't emailled Hamilton, and every time I visit his site, there's something more to talk to him about. A marvellous young man, that one, saved only from complete fixation by his unfortunate animal preferences. The search for the perfect male continueth.

The music moves forward, never looking back, into Orgy's wall-of-sound take on "Blue Monday", and I bow to the inevitable and return to the machinations of the women of Han China. Hey nonny nonny and blood all over the place. (2 points)