I have said before that my life, which people who aren’t me seem to think should be some sort of action-packed romp around the Continent, doesn’t exactly resemble the sort of thing that Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote about. Normally this is a point of some consternation for me. The other day, as I wept into my mid-afternoon martini about the sheer unglamorousness of being me, I recalled this quotation from Hemingway that is just So My Life. (That’s a slight exaggeration. It was a Pims and Lemonade.)

Several days later I have mustered enough get-up-and-go to locate the quotation. Which is written in a notebook. A notebook that is sitting on my desk. The desk where I spend copious amounts of time every day.

Not that I’m doing anything productive during the time I’m sitting at my desk. You see, I am a young procrastinator. I am full of ideas and inspiration and good intentions, I just happen to be terminally lazy. That notebook I mentioned with the quotation written in it? It’s basically full of sketches and outlines of a year’s worth of harebrained schemes. Of all these things I want to write about.

Do you know what I should be writing about right now? I should be writing inquiry letters and cover letters to potential employers about how awesome and motivated I am. I should be writing my dissertation on museum education for students with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. What am I actually writing? This blog. A review of Oreo cookies for no useful reason whatsoever. Instant messages. Because I will leave the things that I should be writing and should be doing until the last possible moment, until right before it’s too late to share them.

Which reminds me…the quotation:

You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafes.

-The Sun Also Rises

I really didn’t intend for this entry to sound so nihilistic and, well, precious. The stuff that needs to get done will get done. Eventually. In the meantime I have some drinking in cafes to attend to.

I tend to have so many browser windows open that I send my computer into fits of hysterics. (And I have a Mac. It is very difficult to send a Mac into hysterics, for they are stoic and unflappable machines.) Then I have to restart, thereby losing all the open windows. Because of this AND because I award myself a self-indulgent point over at Joe’s Goals every time I update a blog I have decided to post about all my open browser windows. In essense I will be Telling You What I Think, cleverly using other peoples’ words to do so. Genius! Of the strictly derivative sort!

First of all, I am clearly elated that it looks like Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States of America. I am terribly excited to be be excited about a politician. Both my Governor and my Congressional representative have had titillating and ruinous sex scandals in the past couple of months, and my Senator is doing the right wing’s job for them, so you can see where I might be wary of indulging in the Politician Love, but there you go. According to the Huffington Post, this election cycle is so exciting that politics sells better than sex at the moment. I posit that no, actually they just go together like llama llama llama, a dippity ding da dong. See: the news. See also: the strange sexual perversions of politics nerds. Ahem.

In addition to the usual suspects (Gmail, Facebook, Livejournal, The Daily Kos, The New York Times and the Huffington Post…sorry I can’t be bothered to make those into links) I also have this news story open: Limbaugh Comes Out for Obama. Everyone’s favorite complete asshole (I have more respect for Bill O’Reilly. Really.) has been running “Operation Chaos”, urging his listeners to cross party lines in open primaries and vote for the Democratic candidate who will have the hardest time beating John McCain in November. Now that we have a presumptive nominee (although I would argue that we don’t–Obama is no more presumptive now than he was before Tuesday’s primaries) and it isn’t Senator Clinton, the candidate Rushy wanted Republicans to vote for, he is claiming that the whole thing? It was an elaborate double cross! He wanted Obama to win because he will have a harder time beating McCain. He just told Republicans to vote Clinton so that people would think he believed her to be the weaker candidate. I guess he thinks that not only Republicans listen to his voting advice, but that Democrats do as well. “Well if he wants people to vote Clinton we had better vote Obama, don’t you think Mildred?”

HA! Joke’s on you, Donkey face! Limbaugh has declared Operation Chaos a rousing success because now it looks like Obama will be the nominee. He fooled you! (To say nothing of the Republican dupes who voted Clinton.) He is the master of the double cross!

But wait! If he was trying to manipulate Democratic voting patterns before, who is he trying to manipulate now? Perhaps he is trying to scare the superdelegates into endorsing Clinton! Perhaps the whole thing is a triple cross! Perhaps, perhaps!

Oh wait, why should Democrats listen to him? (Why anyone should listen to him is beyond my comprehension, but I mean listen to him in the sense of “take his words to heart” and not “tune into his radio program.”)

Whatever happens, know that Rush Limbaugh will declare himself and Operation Chaos a success. That’s all that matters. Eight years of President Obama followed by eight years of President Clinton? Victory for Rushy! Let’s make him that victorious, OK?

It seems that instead of blogging about blogging I ended up blogging about politics. I should go read some gossip blogs or something.

In other news, I have my tickets to the midnight showing of Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull or whatever it’s called! My friends are having a garden party with frilly hats and Pims and croquet! There has been actual sunshine the past few days! I will be living in Camden (London, not New Jersey) this summer! (If you are going to be in London this summer and have any interest in performance art give me a shout. We’re planning something big, where by “we” I mean my friend Kat and I.) I have become an exclamation point abuser!

OK, time for dinner then drinks. The rest of my day consisted of lunch then drinks. Grad school is very taxing.

I have learned several lessons while looking through photos of myself on Facebook just now. This is an activity I partake in pretty much every time I friend new people, since I know it’s one of the first things they’ll be perusing on my profile. I certainly don’t read their agonizingly long lists of preferred books, movies and ice cream flavors…but 837 tagged photos of them taking body shots, showing off their orange tans, vomiting and/or grabbing their friends’ bosoms? Bring it on! Never mind that the photos tagged of me are mostly of me doing one of the following: a) sitting sedately in a bar with a pint glass in front of me b) smiling with a small gaggle of friends, usually in front of a monument of some sort, and with a minimum of bosom grabbing c) doing something dorky and Harry Potter related or d) humping a wall. I don’t know how that last one sneaks in there, but it always does. There are many photos of me humping walls. And doors. Basically anything flat and vertical.

In addition to this very important lesson (Lesson 1: I am Not Cool. Surprise!) I have learned a few others that, because I am so uncool (see Lesson 1), I feel compelled to share with you

Lesson 2: I look better with long hair. While I desperately want short hair and keep trying to convince myself it will look cute, the evidence is quite to the contrary. The shorter my hair is the more ridiculous it looks. Bobbing it will probably be a poor choice, especially in the summer. Especially in a country that has callously discontinued the one styling product that works for my hair. (I suspect this is because I am the only curly haired consumer in the entire United Kingdom. Damn you, genetics!)

Lesson 3: I have the correct items in my everyday wardrobe (read: items I wear out of the house on a regular basis) to make the following costumes:

• Spy
• Male History Professor
• Female Hippie History Professor
• Hippie
• 1920s Safari Person
• Lady Zookeeper
• Equestrian
• Random 1920s person (male)

The moral of the story is that this is a startling number of costume-y pieces for one, ostensibly normal wardrobe. Also, if I lived in the 1920s I probably would have been considered some sort of sexually deviant drag king. (Especially if I went around humping walls.) If loving tweed is wrong then I don’t want to be right!

Edited for clarity: I realize that there’s the possibility that orange, body-shot taking people from my past may find this blog via my Facebook profile and I want to make sure that, in this eventuality, they understand that I mean no offense. You see, we Uncool folks have our own form of social climbing to do, and the prize basically goes to the person who can be the most facetious and self-deprecating. I am not even in the running for this as I am too mediocre for even the heights of Uncoolness, so rest easy knowing I will never be lambasting your orangeness or my wall-humping in the pages of the New Yorker. Also, I do my fair share of drinking and vomiting, I just don’t capture these activities on film. Instead I say things like “Oh, get one of me in the Eskimo costume running from the taxidermied polar bear!” or “Oh look, people dressed up as Quidditch players! Let’s take a photo with them!” You see fair reader (fair=orange), I have my priorities straight.

I’m going to stop now because I think you get the point. No offense but unto myself, etc etc. I still laugh at your tans though.

Here is a glimpse into my exciting and glamorous life in Europe: I visit cool places, become even more extremely poor than I am now, and then return ‘home’ to my dorm room in Leicester. I never update about my travels because life aside from those travels is so mundanely boring. No one wants to hear about your Continental frolics unless you also have something exciting coming up in your schedule, as in “Last night Zelda and I dined at the Ritz, and tomorrow we will head off for a week in St Kitts.” Notice how my example contained zero references to the Continent, although I guess the Ritz is probably everywhere by now.

Let’s give it a try, shall we?

Last week I went inside a 5,000 year old tomb, and today I am sitting at my desk, listening to the hail outside, and updating my blog. Next I will either go read a book or watch the BBC. Yawn.

So that’s why I haven’t filled anyone in on my travels, which were to Prague and Ireland by the way. I loved Prague but frankly didn’t care for Dublin, though I don’t have anything especially pithy and disparaging to say about it. It was just ugly and expensive.

And the future? Until mid-June I will be completely unscheduled, lazing about and then banging out a dissertation at what is likely to be the 11th hour. I am going to take up Exercise, Drink, and Writing Things That Aren’t Blogs (But Are Unlikely to be My Dissertation Either). I’m mostly kidding about the drink. Then I’m home in NY for a week and a half before moving to London for my summer placement.

Past the end of August my life is basically a Mystery. I will be moving to wherever the jobs are, kind of like those tramps from the Great Depression. Yay recession! Hopefully I will be able to afford to travel on the inside of trains. And hopefully the work that awaits me will not be agricultural.

So, I have been missing. If you are surprised by this you probably don’t know me very well and ergo you are probably not reading this blog right now. So I don’t know why I am addressing you, you non-existent person you, but it might have something to do with the fact that I haven’t had my giant mug of tea yet.

Why have I been missing? Aside from being “around” I have also been in Brussels, Prague and head off to Ireland on Saturday. Mostly this post is just an excuse to brag about that. Also I had several weeks of actual work to complete. This was a real shock to my University of Leicester Department of Museum Studies system, hear you me. Anyway, hi.

The other reason for this post is to share with you one of those internet sites you just can’t make up. Maybe it will be a regular feature! Probably I will forget about it. But this? Hopefully this will be emblazoned into your mind for all time.

The Apple Store Dating Blog!

Apparently this is the dating hot-spot for technophiles everywhere! In my experience they are usually staffed by 12 year old boys, but apparently I am just not going to the right stores. (I also seem to frequent the pubs filled with 12 year old boys. My life is very hard.)

Anyway, travel, actual work and sharing a martini over by the iPod Nanos. Life, eh?

Oh, look what I found on DailyKos while I was procrastinating writing my paper about the challenges to the authenticity and authority of museums posed by the Internet! (That’s not really the thesis or anything, just a Big Simplification. I am all “up with the Internet!” so such a paper would hardly be my style.)

Incidentally, I am currently writing the section about blogs.

Are Blogs Becoming Respectable and Legitimate?  I’m going to go ahead and be contrarian and posit no. Rest assured, Internet, there will always be at least one completely disrespectable and illegitimate blog out there. That is my pledge to you.

He may have crushed my computer in a freak body-slam accident, but there’s no way that Nichol deserved this.

Freaking Lucius Malfoy and the school governors, pushing out the beloved Albus Dumbledore… (Isn’t it a shame that this is where my mind goes? Like, directly?)

Go Gene, Hark upon the Gale. 

I’m posting this here because, let’s face it, it’s pretty nerdy.

It’s a pain in the ass trying to follow US politics from a different time zone. Yesterday’s Super Tuesday polls didn’t even start closing until 7pm EST. That’s 1am GMT! And of course they’re nothing appreciable by that time. I had to force myself to go to bed around 3am. I dreamt about 7 different outcomes to the primaries, and then was wide awake at 6:30 am. I really wanted to check the results, but I knew once I did that I wouldn’t be able to get back to sleep. I had to force myself to stay in bed until 9am, and then I made tea before looking at my computer.

I almost fell asleep in class today, but oh man I had forgotten what a thrill it is to be so excited about something that you lose sleep over it. In the good (not the anxious) way.

For the 2008 election I have (another) new blog. I’ve finally kind of got the feel for the content of each of my blogs, so hopefully that will lead to me posting more in all of them.

Absentee Ballot: 2008 From the Expat Perspective is pretty much exactly as it sounds. Following the 2008 election is something of a challenge when you are relying entirely on the internet to keep you informed, and it comes with its own set of pitfalls such as an over-reliance on alternative media that could leave you completely out of touch with the opinion of average Americans. Or so thinks this DailyKos reader… It’s a group blog that is ideally supposed to cover a variety of locations, situations, ages and political perspectives, but so far it is just my friend Jenna and I. We’re studying the same thing at the same university and we both like (to different degrees) the same 2 candidates. Hopefully we’ll expand our writers over time.

Flying (By the Seat of My Pants) is the study abroad, pretty pictures and travel and non-political musings on being away from the homeland blog. Clearly it is not what I originally intended in terms of recounting my every breath, but sheesh people, I can’t handle that!

Nerdgasms is the general interest blog; it’s much like my LJ except it’s for public consumption. It’s definitely my fave.

I’m not really here, it’s an illusion (Michael!). I just want to ask you all a favor.

But first a quick update! I had a rather nightmarish return from the US, where I waited for over 6 hours at Heathrow for a National Express coach back to Leicester. I hate National Express, their approximately 6x a day route to Leicester (and 3 or 4 other places, so the bus is mobbed), the unreliability of an open return ticket, and the unreliability of air travel that necessitates an open return ticket. Thank God my friends Jenna and Kat were at the airport too or I probably would have lost my mind. I went for almost 30 hours without sleep on that particular travel…. no fun!

When back in Leicester I got to speed-write the WORST paper ever. It involved filling out the documentation paperwork that would be required if you were accessioning an object into your museum collections and then–get this–writing a 4,000 word essay explaining how you filled in the 3 forms. There is just no way to make that sound smart. It reads like it was written for small children. If you know anyone with an IQ of 70 who wants to learn how to document museum accessions, I’m your girl.

Then I’ve had some class and stuff. Currently I’m doing laundry. I don’t know how I can stand this whirlwind life of mine; I clearly have exemplary stamina.

And now for my request: If you know anyone (American citizen) currently living outside of the country with an interest in politics who might want to contribute to a group blog about Election 2008, could you please point them in my direction? I’m trying to set one up, and am particularly looking for conservatives if you know any. They’re a bit harder to find outside the US. I’m also NOT looking for anyone who fits the profiles of Jenna and myself, since we’ve probably got the ‘over-privileged white kid with her head up her ass while temporarily living in England’ demographic pretty well covered. Please send people my way if you (and they) feel so inclined. It’s a WordPress blog so anyone who is going to be added to it would need a WordPress account. With a non-pornographic name. But it can be anything else!

Cross-posted approximately everywhere.