Number Twenty Two : Turn your phone into a ticking bomb...

New! Quick and easy way to completely remove any possibility of you completing any work ALL DAY! Follow these three easy steps and YOU TOO can be transformed into a gibbering emotional wreck, incapable of going more than 2 minutes at a time without checking your phone, or jumping every time you hear - or feel - something which you THINK is your phone!

The ingredients are simple:

1) Take one perfectly standard day
2) Add a dose of alcohol/melancholy/bloodymindedness
3) Throw a mobile phone into the mix, preferably one with predictive text which can magically mangle anything you write and add a sporadic dose of ambiguity
4) Choose one contact from your address book to whom you wish to say something you have wanted to for some time (but probably haven't, with very good reason)
5) Offload your heart's troubles via the magic of SMS - NOTE: this may take more than the standard 160 characters (including spaces)
6) Send
7) Wait
8) Wait
9) Wait
10) Wait.....
11) W a i t . . . . .

Notice how sensitive your heart becomes? Don't you feel SO MUCH BETTER that you did got that off your chest?

*NEWER* *IMPROVED-ER* Also available via email! Watch how your brain starts ACTUALLY HALLUCINATING that you've received a message. Isn't the human emotional condition a marvelous thing?

Enjoy.

Number Twenty One : Go a wandrin'

I've been up in London nearly a year now, and despite my feet barely touching the ground, I've hardly had much opportunity to explore the city (besides the Southbank) properly. This is mostly due to the fact that - just as for when I was living in Brighton - the city is the LAST place you want to be at the weekend. A late night foray through the streets of London provides a smorgasbord-esque array of new sights and sounds, but is fairly inadvisable as a lone woman (as I discovered whilst stumbling through Soho not so long ago). Yet any time from Saturday morning onwards, the city becomes the domain of the tourists, "all scented and descending from their satellite towns", as Elbow say. Unless you want to metamorphasise into the stereotypical a-scowlin' and a-shovin' Londoner, it's safer to stay in with a nice cup of tea and watch the Hollyoaks omnibus. But not for me - I was up at 7 this morning, and walking over London Bridge and up through The City an hour later to pay a visit to the much recommended Columbia Road flower market. Now, the market itself is nice enough even though it was much smaller than I'd anticipated and ridiculously overpriced, but the experience of sharing the city with only the market traders, a handful of masochistic joggers and some of the undead returning from a heavy Saturday night is the kind of thing to "put a little birdhouse in your soul" *. This is the fabled un-time, evidently caught between the remnants of frenzied socialising the previous night and the still dream-wrapped beginnings of a lazy Sunday. And of course its attraction is increased furthermore by the fact that I really should have been here working on a PJ** which I've been putting off for about a month too...

*Today's post is brought to you by iTunes/Limewire/YouTube, the letters ESS and ZEE (who've had a bit of a ruccus) and the number 21.

**For those not indoctrinated to archi-speak, a PJ is what we naval gazers like to call a Private Job. If you're looking to waste more time, Norm does a great 1984 DuckSpeak analogy on PartIV: http://www.partiv.com/2006/09/27/doublethink-duckspeak/

Number Twenty: Looking up things that you shouldn't

Oh the joy of the internet; so many opportunities for so much pleasure and yet so much pain*, and all in the privacy of your own home. You can look up anything, be it carrying on from Number Eighteen and photos of your ex-boyfriend's wedding (that apostrophe is soon to take a step to the right, quite scarily**), to THAT Paris Hilton video. These can lead on to repeated versions of Number Nine, or another certain work avoidance tactic that is a favourite of one of my friends that I am as yet undecided whether to publish. Either way, it forms a great link if you're looking to waste - sorry - USE your time in larger segments than is afforded by single tactics alone. Hurrah!

*Which I guess is a win/win situation if you're a masochist
** and add an s in there somewhere too - it hasn't got to the point where two of my exes are marrying eachother, yet...

Number Nineteen: Sleep

This is a subject very close to my heart now that I've finished my thesis - I couldn't get enough when I needed to get up and write at 5 in the morning, and now I'm out avoiding it until 1 or 2, margherita in hand being constantly replenished like the magic porridge pot (whilst my credit card acts in the opposite manner) only to find myself forced out again, blinking in the sunlight of the outside world to which I am still unaccustomed at half 6. You can toss and turn all night, but it always feels just so damn good about 46 seconds before your alarm goes off, just long enough for you to be conscious of what you're missing as you fight to keep your eyelids slamming shut and your head nodding in a way which - however much you may kid yourself - cannot be misinterpreted as "oh, I just really needed to see that detail up close on my screen for half a second". And now that my social life - aside from the margherita quaffing - is confined to weekends I've got that horrible realisation that I should be up to "make the most of the day". God, when I didn't think it could get any worse I find that I'm turning into my mother.


(If you're lucky enough to be working from home, then mid-afternoon kips are the best - whilst you digest your lunch and nod off in front of Doctors - and have the added bonus of turning your brain to mush for about as long as it takes to get around to watching the repeat of Neighbours. Damn, I miss those days...)

Number Eighteen: Stalking

Where do these thoughts come from? They wander into our heads, usually late at night and often with so little a preamble as to make their apprearance quite rudely imposing. What happened to that guy I used to go out with in school/the girl I used to sit next to in Maths/that actor I really fancied from that TV programme back in the eighties/etc? Friends Reunited only goes so far and, being stingy enough not to fork out the tuppence ha'penny required to contact these people legitimately (and also for the reason that they might imagine that that I take any interest in the site whatsoever, which is completely unfounded of course) It's amazing the number of sites you can use to track people, be it by photo, job, email address, phone number, skype - the possibilities are seemingly endless, although usually finite. It's quite exciting to finally get hold of your quarry, like a fish on a line, to see if you can land a reply.* you might chat for a bit, maybe meet up for drinks and talk about "the good old days"** But frequently there comes the realisation that there is a reason why you didn't keep in touch in the first place - they're dull, they're clingy, you have nothing in common, their temper's a little too prone to combustion at the smallest thing - and so you must now extracate yourself from their company with the greatest degree of politeness but also preferably abruptness as possible.

But what DID happen to that guy I used to go out with at school...?


*I realise that that is an appauling analogy. Or is that a similie. Or something.
** Neil Patrick Harris has - as yet - failed to return my calls

Number Seventeen: For what we are about to Send and Receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful...

Now fully ensconced in the world of work, I've been deprived of many of the former work avoidance tactics (although I've been busted by directors on many occasions looking at ebay - I can't quite figure out if it is a good or bad thing that it's frequently Agent Provocateur that I'm searching for on these occasions...)
However, I've been reintroduced to the addiction of the "send and receive" button on Entourage. This is, however, reserved strictly for those times when zooming in and out from whatever drawing package you are using has become so repetitive that it's beginning to bore you to tears. You know what I'm talking about, we've all been there, it's part of the training.
Despite the fact that our system is set to automatically check for any email updates every nine minutes, my inherent impatience means that I am checking every four minutes, in quiet times, which reduces to every two minutes when bored and every 3 seconds when absolutely desperate to find something else to distract me from what I'm doing. Our strictly "office only" address book has also been expanded as much as one of Douglas Adams' trilogies so as to increase my chances of receiving material to distract me, using a scatter gun technique of contacting people who I haven't even spoken to in ages. This last process however, also necessitates the use of Number Eighteen...:

Number Sixteen: Develop minor - but annoying- ailments

Failing to acheive the drama - and resulting sympathy - created by Number Twelve, I have developed a vast range of minor flaws in my physical make up over the course of the past month. This can be anything from a clicking wrist - which of course would be my right (mouse) hand - incredibly itchy ingrowing hairs on my legs, and a clicking ear which is set off EVERY TIME I BREATHE IN (which, as you can imagine, is rater annoying at 2 in the morning when trying to find yet another word to substitute for "linguistics", "morpheme", "composition" etc...)
I can't work out whether these are brought on by stress, or whether stress merely makes them noticible, but given that they are interrupting my working patterns (!) it seems only right to derive their cause and thus spend time fiddling around with tweezers/cotton buds/piles of books/google etc in an attempt to find their remedy.

**INTERMISSION**

It's in a week today, and quantity-wise I'm pretty much on target. I have no idea about the quality of those 30 000 words though, and I've still got the small matter of sourcing a load of images to place, adapt, reference and caption yet. I've been officially deserted by my housemate who's run off to Newquay with her boyfriend for a long weekend of beer, surfing, pasties, cream teas and general merriment in the three dimensional world (but at least it's raining - ha!) and so am holed up in our tiny house with a weeks worth of ready meals which I'm supplementing with vitamin pills (and feeling more than a little like Major Tom). If I was a guy I'd have grown a beard by now. In fact, I'm taking so little care in my appearance (since I have absolutely no time or reason to venture outside) that I may actaully have grown one and not noticed.

There's a book on my shelf that I put there at the start of this thesis that was intended to be used as a key text for the evolution of the argument. I bought it in Barcelona shortly after the end of my Diploma, when Mum and I went for breakfast at the Miro museum up one of the city's ridiculously steep hills, and lugged it's excessive weight around the city for the rest of the day in the sweltering heat. Suffice to say that it's never been read and probably never will now. It's quite sad really. Actually, maybe I should just have a quick flick through...

Number Fifteen: Use Microsoft Word to type your thesis

The computer age seemed like such a wonderful leap in evolution - we were promised time saving devices that would cut down on the amount of work we were faced with, to make our lives easier and less stressful. I'm old enough to remember typing up my homework on a typewriter, and even at A-level I literally cut and pasted drafts of essays together (yes, with scissors and a photocopier - I'm not really a luddite, I promise) before writing them out by hand on reams of ridiculously expensive display paper. So with the advent of new technology I stood marvelling at my friends' parents' electric typewriters, despite the constant need for Tipp-Ex if you'd made a mistake beyond the printed five line error margin. I took great pride in navigating an angular plastic "turtle" around a classroom to spell out my name, enjoying the sense of control that the computer gave me - you told the robot to do something, and it did it (albeit about 6 minutes later). But the glory days of black screen and green text, and programmes on tape that you had to play for half an hour to load the game (weeeeeeee ERRRRRRRR kerchun kerchun kerchun, dit dit dit EEEEEEEEEEEEEE) were numbered. And along came Windows (in my world at least, although I acknowledge that the Mac concept existed first elsewhere) with its colourful icons, folders that actually looked like folders and generally all-round friendly user interface.

Or should that be interfarce?

I cannot begin to imagine how many hours I have spent reformatting text that Microsoft Word has "helpfully" altered for me. Did I tell you to make that red? Why is it now a different font and size? And why - given that I just deleted this bit - did you just change something three paragraphs up?!

This is beginning to relate to Number Fourteen again. Pass me the typewriter and Tipp-Ex. Or maybe writing it out via the turtle would be quicker?!

I'm off to throw sticks at an automated loom....

Number Fourteen: Get Angry!

It's not very often that something rattles my cage so much that I can barely concentrate on what I'm writing (besides, I'm usually too busy on ebay...) but there's something about schools' league tables that really chaffs my ass. And when you get that wound up, you just have to release the torrent of venom at someone. In my case that was Amanda Baillieu, editor of BD. It took me an hour of getting cross, another of writing and rewriting, and then a good half hour (and sseveral chocolate biscuits) to calm down again. Nice.

"Like many members of staff and graduates of the architectural schools around the country, I read the article informing us of Cambridge Architecture School's prowess ("Cambridge ranks top for architect students" 5th May 2006) with a cynical slant. However, it was refreshing to hear the system denounced by those it congratulates, and that the staff at LMU were steadfast enough to refuse to participate.

Whilst I accept that Cambridge may well have an outstanding course to offer students, the scoring system applied to all university courses is not appropriate when assessing architectural education. For instance, many schools with a high ranking research score are unable to offer the time and design expertise in studio - where architectural education is put into practice - due to the staff's workload. Other criteria used by both the Times and The Guardian includes the A-level scores of entrants, which bears little or no relation to their architectural capability once in the school, and actively discriminates against those chosen by their ability to design rather than perform well in exams aged 18.

It is a shame that the Guardian's article may form a negative influence in the choice of schools made by those soon to complete their A-levels, and I would certainly encourage them to take the time to visit the different institutions and gauge whether their means of working are appropriate to the way in which they would want to be taught.

Whilst Portsmouth school didn't feature in the top 20 (which given its relation to other league tables would certainly prove Disraeli's theory regarding statistics) we aim to turn out students with a broad spectrum of abilities and who are capable of applying themselves in the workplace. Surely the truest test of a school's educational capabilities would be to question the employers. Afterall, these are the people better placed to assess the quality of students that an institution is capable of producing."

The next time wastage was incurred the next friday when I suddenly got scared about maybe seing it published, and then the disappointment that they'd managed to edit out all the salient points. Humph. I feel another letter coming on...