Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in lesslucid's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, October 25th, 2009
2:24 am	edu http://www.smh.com.au/national/good-lord-exams-flummox-students-20091024-hdzz.html "Like a number of other Catholic schools, we are extremely disappointed with the studies of religion papers. The questions were worded in such a way that students were not able to express their full knowledge on topics. If the examiners are going to change their emphasis, teachers should be made aware." Translation: "Rather than trying to educate our students, we just coach them on the exam we think they're going to have to sit. It's a lot easier and it also results in good HSC numbers, which we then use to advertise the school. So it really pisses us off when examiners mess with the formula - how can we tell our students what to memorise if they go around changing it on us? Sure, make token changes if you have to, but let us know in advance, eh?" (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009
4:38 pm	hyp I've just had my first experience of being hypnotised. I feel a little embarrassed about having arranged to do it, but, the hell with my embarrassment because I feel *amazing*. Like I've been carrying a heavy backpack around without realising it and suddenly after years I've taken it off and remembered what's it's like to not have to carry it. Yay! Oh, and current word count: 9223. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 6th, 2009
2:30 am	pointless rants against things that will never change: a continuing series The expression "turning in his grave" is not made more expressive or more evocative by swapping out the sedate verb "turning" for the more violent, dynamic verb "spinning". Metaphorical expressions sometimes follow funny rules, you see. When you say "Boadicea would be turning in her grave", the operative idea is that something that is happening now might in some way intrude on the eternal rest of the dead (metaphorically, "sleeping") Boadicea, who would be so disturbed by these events that even that profound, final slumber would be unsettled to the extent that she would "turn" in her grave, much as a person who is haunted by bad dreams might "turn" in their sleep. But no matter how profoundly upsetting your bad dreams might be, they are highly unlikely to provoke the kind of continuous, accelerating "turning" action that will result in you "spinning" in your bed. When I hear people speak of someone "spinning" in their grave, I get an image of a kind of bizarre necromantic subterranean turbine system. This is not really a very good metaphor for anything, I should say. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, December 25th, 2008
11:22 am	... Hey people. Have a merry Christmas. (Comment on this)
Sunday, May 11th, 2008
3:33 pm	senseless butchery of the English language for fun and profit http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm "Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes: I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. Here it is in modern English: Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account." George, George, it's like you're not even trying! Come now: Inscribed on the interior of a "propietal" apprehension of Hegelian dialectics, we discover the following paradox: for racing (or indeed, to traverse the metaphorical terrain of an undiscovered lexicon of "truth") or its macropolitical antecedents, there is no correct "form" and yet the correction of its formalisms taxes this "larger metonymy" in a Foucauldian sense. We find "swiftness" expressed in a further taxonomy of guilt but it is constantly being both under-written and re-written (in a double sense) through its re-evaluation of its particular epistemological foundations. "Swiftness" hence precedes the discovery of meaning in "race"; to extract from it a "pure" testament to the ahisoricality of our re-envisioning of that selfsame "purity" requires an intervention from the "exterior" of the system which is predicated on the same notion of "purity" being able to transcend the very systematicity on which it depends. The endeavour rejuvenates; by a re-inversion of the paradox of "accidental victory" we discover that there is an insight "maintained" through the expression of "swiftness" as it moulded in the form of the un-won race. And that's just the first clause - I could probably wring a whole thesis from the sentence itself... ...and now, back to marking. :( (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
4:20 pm	long quote, some thoughts. OK, let me see if I can figure out how to put all this stuff under a ( cut. ) (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 8th, 2007
3:12 pm	eed I've done everything. All the bureaucracy, all the... stuff, it's done. Well, a few tiny things left, but nothing I need to stress over. Graduation happening sometime in april next year or something. You know what? Freedom is just bloody awesome. :) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
1:40 pm	pos I'm not supposed to know this, but of my three markers, one apparently has passed me. This greatly reduces my fear that I will get three fails. So... I guess an all-lowercase, un-exclamation-pointed, yay, is in order. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 29th, 2007
4:59 pm	ubm I thought it was probably getting a bit wearing to read updates along the lines of "nearly finished now, just a half-inch left to go", "very nearly finished now, just a quarter-inch left to go", "getting there, unusually rapid progress means a mere ninth of an inch left to the end", &c &c. So I decided to leave off saying anything about it until I submitted it. Which I did, today. I was given a glass paperweight. That seemed like a fair return on my investment. :) Of course, now I move from anxiously wondering if I'll ever submit to anxiously wondering If I'll pass, but right now at least I don't feel at all anxious. The examining and whatnot all seems to be infinitely far away... I feel free. I think I ought to do something extravagant in order to celebrate, but nothing much comes to mind. Maybe the thing is that... with the weight off my shoulders, everything, even sitting here in this silly little computer lab (where so much of the editing and whatnot happened) feels like a celebration, feels like a bit of extravagance in its own way. Perhaps a beer with dinner will round out the day best. :) (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
11:51 am	... ( cut for long, sad ) (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006
2:18 pm	ery Perhaps every shortcut is a bad shortcut. Shortcuts to writing seem to all have certain bad things in common... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 5th, 2006
3:00 pm	train Did any of you read that book when you were little with the train, that goes, "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..." ? Was it called "The Little Train that Could"? Children's books are great. Sometimes, I like people. I wish it were more often. Also... um. Hmm. Hmmm. It's weird remembering pieces of my life. It sometimes seems like... the pieces don't really fit together. How on earth does it all connect up? I keep getting flashes of that last trip overseas I did. I can't believe that was two years ago now. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
12:07 pm	... Saw printed copy of full-length thesis for the first time yesterday. Really seems real now. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 15th, 2006
1:47 am	froge I don't want to forget. Having a record helps me stay motivated. So. Today is the fifth day, technically. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 12th, 2006
2:03 am	night Last night, went to see a friend, someone who's finished her PhD, with the same supervisor as me. I said, he said I could finish in 4-6 months. She said, if he said that, you can actually finish in 2 months. It's just a matter of forgetting the fine-tuning and the perfectionist bullshit, and formatting the thing so you can send it out. Right now, I believe her. I had a great day today. I'm nervous that this heightened sense of possibility will crash down into... something else. But right now, it seems possible. Two months. That, I can really do. In fact, I'm doing it. Put all the chapters together, in one huge document... now just need to sand it down. I think I have the flu, my brain is all crummy and my typing is way worse than usual. Also, I must work tomorrow and I don't want to. :( (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006
6:16 pm	te Tiny spiders everywhere. Wish they'd stay off the keyboard, though. Something might have changed. (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 1st, 2006
12:15 pm	looks There was a song, on the B-side of "Alice's Restaurant", that I really loved when I was... well, from about the age of nine or ten, I guess, called "Chilling of the Evening". The song was never a hit, I've never heard anyone say that they like it particularly or anything, and so I guess... like many of the tens of thousands of songs written every year, and the smaller (but still enormous) number recorded, it just washed up on the shore and then washed away again... ...but I listened to it again the other day and found I still loved it. There's a line in there, one of those lines that sort of... you could find in any love-song, you think, you know, the random mishmash of accumulated love-song cliches that form the lyrics of most love songs. But... to my ear, anyway, or heart, maybe I should say, it says something more than just... um. It goes: "Now to leave before I understand just what it is I know I'm leaving" ...and it seems to be full of that... I don't know. Something. That contradiction between what happens when you love someone and want to give yourself up fully to them, and the... fear of how much you might be giving up, the cowardly non-knowing of your own love so as not to be caught in the full depth of those overwhelming currents. Because of course, he says "before I understand", but this is because he already does understand, or half-knows... hmmm. But unlike most songs about "rats" or whatever, this isn't a condemnation or an attack on the cowardice of this kind of desertion. It's actually a... celebration of that kind of imperfect love for being, in spite of all the heartbreak it causes, love, still. The love that ruins your life is still love, and you wouldn't give it up for the sake of an unruined but loveless life. Well, that's how I take it, anyway. (Comment on this)
Friday, September 29th, 2006
1:32 am	legend Saw supervisor today. Things seem alright. Chapter, miraculously, is nearly there. I should say - in a moment of weakness I begged mrkgnao to help me with it, and she agreed! Well... I shouldn't have asked, you were excessively kind to accept, but... you're off the hook now, so, you know, you can discard that terrifying 20-page monster. ;) But thankyou! (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 27th, 2006
2:07 pm	take Fry: "Wow, way to tell that guy off! Now what's your secret escape plan?" Leela: "Uh...I guess to sit here and wait for death." - At the current rate of progress, I will take as long to finish chapter 11 as I did to finish the previous ten all put together. Or I could sit and wait for death. - I feel like... I don't know. I don't want to start writing anything that's going to take longer than five minutes to write because if I do, I'll get interrupted halfway through, feel frustrated about it, finish off my thoughts with some... hastily thrown-together summary and then stew about it. I hate interruptions. Especially the phone. Some fucker called up today, when I asked if it was a marketing call he told me it was an "information" call. I suppose, technically, lies are a form of information. Living in Katoomba was great. Some day when I'm magnificently wealthy, I'll go live in one of those cliff-edge houses. With no phone line. And a robot butler. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, September 24th, 2006
2:56 am	mass I have a great indigestible mass of words sitting in a .doc file. I want to somehow gently massage them, a little cut here and a little addition there, and have this undignified blob turn into a clear, meaningful, structured chapter. But it's not going to happen. I really want it to, though. Do it for me? Please? :'( (Comment on this)