a broken heart leads to a broken mind

Fighting fire with firewood

Thu, 17 Dec 2009 00:45:58 GMT

Must...have...early...night. Been to bed at 3 the past two nights and had to get up this morning for a personal tutor meeting at 10, and I have a tutorial tomorrow at 10 too. Tis not good at all, I will start to die if I'm not careful. I did get to hang out with Steve for a little bit though as we have the same personal tutor, and we saw Jake Holiday which was kind of cool, because he's weird and so on. My computer is being very slow, I'm not quite sure why. Like an odd jerky kind of slow, so I'm typing and then suddenly the letters stop coming up on screen, and then I wait for a bit and they all appear. Gayness. I did loads of packing today, it was awesome =) because it means I'm going home soon, not because packing is particularly fun or anything. I packed almost all of my clothes, apart from the ones I needed for today, tomorrow and Friday, and most of my schoolbooks. Now I just need to find somewhere to shove my other books and the DVDs I'm taking home, and my hair straighteners and various computer cables and chargers. Hopefully I can somehow fit most of the rest of the stuff into just one more bag because it's already looking like it might take up quite a lot of space; I've got a bag of laundry and the bag full of Christmas presents too. And we have to fit in Chris's bike and all of his things. Eep. Been feeling kind of weird and sick all day which is a bit miserable since it made me not want to eat anything, which is gay because I have quite a few perishables to consume before Friday. I still feel it a bit now, it's sad. Table tennis was scary today, because Chris forgot to go so I was there on my own. It was okay, just everyone else there was decidedly better than me. I played some doubles matches with Sarah and we won all three, which was pretty awesome, but mostly it was because she's really good at tt. Still at least I didn't cause us to lose by being shit. And I did stay for two hours without feeling toooo rawr. And George actually had a conversation with me, which was bizarre. In other news my jeans are still partly orange =( maybe I could get a cool patch to put over it or something. Or dye, I don't know. Maybe it won't look so bad when I'm wearing them. In further news, we had a fire bell today, while I was cooking, it was super gay. Time for sleep is soon I daresay. If that damn Westlake boy will shut up. Food: 9.30am: advent calendar chocolate (bells); 1pm: plain begal with Philadelphia and ham; 5.30pm: Go Ahead apple and raisin bars; 7pm: pizza with red and white onions and sweetcorn; 10.30pm: piece of treacle tart Toodle pip xxx

I really don't want to see a cartoon fat chick at the top of the page every time I log on to LJ

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 00:17:05 GMT

Just generally in a kind of bad mood right now. Mostly because I dropped sterilising solution on my favourite jeans, which were black and grey and are now partially brick red. Typically, I also dropped sterilising solution on the carpet of my university room, which has no sentimental value to me (and this whole halls is being demolished at the end of the year anyway), and the carpet is fine. But that's just my life.
Also been feeling a bit ill all day and not really sure why, bad food or something? Bit of a tummy ache anyway. And that always makes you miserable.
However I had a really nice evening with Christopher (my day is not even worth going into, because I did precisely nothing. Well, I showered, I played games on my computer, I created a Facebook Appreciation Society for Longmore, but none of those things are pointful). We went to the Odeon to see New Moon; he observed that it's quite like the Lemmy, because you know it's going to be shit, but you still really want to go. Sehr richtig. Anyway it wasn't too bad actually, there was too much slow mo and removal of shirts for my liking but it was quite eventful and fairly amusing. Afterwards we went to Nando's, and had some yummy chicken (obviously).
Now I'm pretty much just pissing about on the internet because I don't feel like sleeping or doing anything. Well, I'd quite like to punch something (haha, Face Punch), or receive a big hug. But punching is never a good idea, especially since the only thing I have to punch is the wall and that's some pretty hard brick, and I kind of like my knuckles not broken. And no one is here to hug me, apart from Hugsbear of course. But his are only very tiny hugs.
Got a Christmas card from Jeannie. It was sitting outside my door when I got in which was quite exciting. I like Christmas lots, I just wish I had a bit more cheer in me.

Food:
11am: advent calendar chocolate (snowman), bowl of Raisin Wheats; 1pm: Pombears, Vanilla Choco Balls Crunch Corner; 4pm: hot chocolate, 2x scones and strawberry jam (those scones were soooo stale); 6.30pm: Toblerone bar, Lion bar, half bottle of 7up; 9pm: half chicken with chips and garlic bread, glass of Coke.

I'm such a fucking emo. Fuck.
xxx

Oh em gees I am officially home THIS week

Tue, 15 Dec 2009 03:02:03 GMT

So indeed I did actually get up and do Stats notes this morning, albeit at half ten when it really should have been 9 at least. And it wasn't really so much of a good idea because I've only written about half a page and come across a load of things I don't understand. Ooh I wonder if Longmore has emailed me back about them? He has, brill. Maybe now I can understand why some tests are one-tailed and some are two-tailed. For some reason I always think of foxes when we talk about tails. Is there some kind of two-tailed foxlike magical creature in Harry Potter? Because that would almost certainly exaplain why.
So anyway after writing the Stats notes went to shit I thought I should probably do something productive so I did all the annotations for the past four RM lectures which is actually a very useful thing to have done since it was piling up a bit, and I would probably have just ended up not doing it. It took quite a long time, because RM is extraordinarily dull, so I had to keep distracting myself with other things, like general Facebook, reading the second half of My Immortal (epic lulz - Azkaban's name has officially been changed to Azerbaijan), and even filling in the module evaluation questionnaire that we have to do for our course before the end of term. That is literally how bored I was; I did something MORE boring instead of doing the RM notes. Bad times.
Also I forgot that I was supposed to eat my pork tonight so I hadn't got it out of the freezer, so that plan went to poo. It turned out to be not too bad, because I was going to carol singing at 7 anyway so it was too early to eat before I went and too late to cook and eat after I got back. (Well, not too late on a general evening, but I'd arranged to go up to D2 and sample Winter Pimms with James.) Carol singing was fun, it was at the football stadium about 15 minutes' walk away (15 minutes' COLD walk, mind) and it was free with free mince pies (and they were AWESOME mince pies, but I don't know where they came from, so I may never have one again, sob), and I got to wear my Santa hat, so obviously that was really cool. Chris and the others were a bit late so we missed Once in Royal David's City and Oh Come All Ye Faithful but I could hear them from outside so it wasn't too bad. I love singing carols, they're so jolly.
Benn up in D2 pretty much since I got back from carols hanging out with James and Tom and some other random D2ers who I hadn't met before, but none of them are the ones who are going to be living with James and possibly me next year so it was a bit pointless really. I did get to see an episode of James's beloved Merlin, which was not as wonderful as he promised but not as bad as I expected. So it all balances.

Food:
11.30am: advent calendar chocolate (teddy bear, or possibly doll, but dolls freak me out, so I will say bear); 12.30pm: toasted cinnamon and raisin bagel with marmalade, Chocolate Digestive Crunch Corner; 3pm: mug of tea, 4 chocolate digestives (oops, bit similar there); 7pm/8pm: 2x mince pies; 8.30pm: 4 slices of white toast with crunchy peanut butter; 9.30pm-2am: Winter Pimms, port, mince pie

I took about 3 hours to drink one glass of port. There's a reason I never get drunk.
Fare thee well all xxx

Don't stop believing

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 01:55:52 GMT

Samstag: well that was a super fun day, I had a yummy lie-in without feeling guilty about not getting up to do my essay, and then went into town to do some more Christmas shopping. It was a good shop, got all the rest of the Christmas presents for the Wallies and I got Steve's and Immy's presents as well, so the only ones I have left to get are Lorna's ring and something for Chris's mum. Superdrug turned out to be an epic place to go for presents since they were having a 3 for 2 and everything was really cheap anyway. Then I met Christopher and we went to McDonald's for a McFlurry, except they were out of ice cream so we went to BK instead. And that turned out to be much better because they have Rocky Road ice cream, which involves marshmallows.
After I got in I didn't really have much to do before meeting James and going to the Lemmy so I sat in my room and watched Skins. But then it turned out that no one was going to the Lemmy, so Christopher (who was going to come with us) just came over anyway and we watched the X Factor semi-final final (I don't understand how it can be the final when there's three people, and they get rid of one person and then another person - it's still just the semi-final). We ended up staying up quite late because he was initiating me into the evil that is My Immortal (if you don't know what this is, I don't mean the Evanescence song, I mean the Harry Potter fan fiction... just google it), and then Steve was talking to me about how he's all glum, and then Christopher wanted to go and get a kebab. It was crazy times.

Food:
11am: advent calendar chocolate (bauble); 12 noon: bowl of Raisin Wheats; 5.30pm: Rocky Road ice cream; 8pm: pasta bows with chicken, red onion and Philadelphia

After our late night me and Christopher didn't get up until about half one today, which was very silly of us but very nice. He's sad because he has a coldsore coming up, and no Zovirax. But he is still lovely. He left quite soon after we got up because he had things to do, so after he'd gone I did all my washing up from like the past three days (the leftover milk from yesterday's cereal had curdled in the bowl, it was awesome), including the saucepan with all the burnt-on egg which took a long time and a lot of elbow grease to get clean (non-stick my arse). I had quite a productive day considering I got up so late because I wrapped up loads of Christmas presents, but only the ones that are sort of boxy shaped because the others I will probably put in gift bags, but I want to see if I have any at home before I buy some.
Went to Christopher's in the evening so I could watch the X Factor final live. It's amazing how much they draw that show out, the final somehow lasted two hours. They had loads of guests, including Alexandra and JLS, Leona, Paul McCartney and George Michael. It's quite lol how they got George Michael to give a good luck message to Joe even though he doesn't give a shit. Also he was quite creepy because he had these orangey kind of sunglasses on, which just reminded me of this: ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjE2NjAzODIxMl5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNDc0OTM3._V1._SX266_SY400_.jpg
Anyhoo Joe won which was alright by me, although judging by my Facebook feed that was not at all a popular outcome for lots of people. I did think Olly was going to win in the end actually and I was kind of sad he didn't, but Joe was technically a better singer although Olly's a better entertainer. Joe freaks me out a wee bit though because of how much he reminds me of Brendon. Because he's short and skinny, or something? I miss Brendon and Spencer, where did they go?
Also productive was I started writing up my Stats notes this evening after I got in. I've only written the introductory paragraph, but it'll make it a lot more likely that I'll do more tomorrow than if I had to start fresh in the morning. No lectures tomorrow so I'd better get some stuff done.
Looks like no sleep for me for a while since I'm chit-chatting to Mark. Damn my popularity (LOL).

Food:
2pm: advent calendar chocolate (sleigh) 2.30pm: 2x sausages and scrambled egg; 4pm: glass of apple juice; 5.30pm: scone; 7.30pm: 2x beef fajitas

Nighty night xxx

Oh boy...

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:20:01 GMT

Hello, here are some updates:

Pretty much I spent most of my time this week doing work on my essay, since I hadn't actually really started it yet. Monday I spent looking up the remaining journal articles that weren't in the library and making my final notes. It was really annoying though because one article I really wanted I couldn't find the full text for anywhere; it was called "Can cognitive behaviour therapy succeed where other treatments faill?" I mean how useful would that have been? It's pretty much exactly the question that the essay was asking, and probably would have had an answer, but no, nowhere wants to give me a pdf of it, or if they do they want to make me pay thirty dollars for it. No thank you. Also I wrote most of my essay on Monday, apart from some bits for articles I hadn't looked up yet.
Also had the last real Clinical lecture on Monday which was about childhood brain injury, tying in with the last one about neurorehabilitation. I'll miss Clinical, it's so inherently crazy. I really want to do well in the module since that's the area of psychology I want to go into if I do become a psychologist. Which let's face it, I probably will have to, since we all know my writing sucks and I will probably never publish a book =(
In table tennis on Monday I actually won a game against someone other than Chris. It was a really good game as well, very even, and I only won 11-9 so it wasn't like I thrashed her or anything. But still it was an achievement.
Christopher stayed over on Monday after table tennis which was why I didn't post.

Food: breakfast and lunch don't remember =( bad me - my advent calendar chocolate was a present shape though; 4pm: mug of tea, walnut cake; 7pm: pasta bows with sweetcorn, ham and tomato and mascarpone stir-in sauce, 2x scones with cream and strawberry jam. However I also had a really bad upset stomach on Monday night so I don't know how much of that counts.

Had our last real Biology lecture on Tuesday so we were all very excited. Tim said next week we would have a revision session so we should prepare any questions we have, and you could feel everyone thinking "how about just redo everything you've talked about for the past 11 weeks?" He's so incomprehensible, poor Tim. We had a conversation about him in our Clinical tutorial yesterday and how he's so weird, but me and Cat were saying how he was alright in our Brain Challenge tutorial, so we think he might just not like lecturing to large crowds. So bit of a poor career choice for him if that's so.
Tuesday was also Le Formal, the PsySoc and X-Eng one which we got tickets for ages ago. It was pretty cool actually, it was in Reed Hall which is this posh hotel-like buidling on campus used for functions and stuff, and there was a three-course Christmas dinner and jazz band. We sat on a table with Steve and Jake Holiday - it's cute how Chris and Steve get along, I'm so glad. Steve got really drunk of course, and we thought there might be an amusing incident of him getting off with Danni but apparently not. Also it was kind of sad because I really wanted to dance to the jazz band before they left and the DJ started playing pop music, but the band only did a few songs after dinner, so I danced too soon after eating and then felt ill for the rest of the evening. George and Matt were there too since they're engineers, and they were quite drunk too, especially Matt. George and Chris had an imaginary table tennis rally at one point, it was highly irregular.
Didn't get home for ages even though the formal finished at 12 because me and Chris were having one of those deep talks about the future and stuff, and then he didn't want to go home so we were standing around outside for ages. Also when I got home I had to finish off writing my essay so I could type it up on Wednesday, so I didn't get to sleep until about 2.30am. Bad times, as Jake would say.

Food: 11am: advent calendar chocolate (santa); 1.15pm: toasted bagel with Bovril, 2x mince pies with cream; 8pm: three-course Christmas dinner (pomegranate, pecorino and prosciutto salad, turkey with trimmings, christmas pudding with brandy cream), plus random drinks

Wednesday was pretty much type up and cut down essay. I ended up with about 5300 words so that was decidedly not good. I'd cut it down to 2700ish by the time I had to go to table tennis though, so that was pretty good going. Especially considering I'd been into town in the afternoon to get some more Wally Christmas presents (I think we've abandoned the theme Secret Santa now, so I just got random stuff). Also I got yoghurts and bread but forgot to get butter or loo rolls (and at some point in between having enough loo roll that it didn't matter and I could get some on Saturday, and yesterday, the rest of my loo roll mysteriously disappeared. Sod's Law, right?)
Only stayed for an hour at table tennis which meant I got back around half nine, but still I didn't manage to finish cutting down the last few hundred words and doing the reference list until about midnight. And then I had to go to the library to print it since the WSL printers were out of action so I wouldn't be able to do it in the morning. It's amazing how many people are actually working in the library at half twelve.
Still didn't get to sleep until about half two again though because once I got in and stapled my essay together I realised I hadn't yet read the sheets for the tutorial we were meant to have on Thursday. So I had to do that, and then I was a bit hyped up so I majorly tidied up my room. I even tidied the stuff under my bed, which I can't even see. That's how frazzled I was. Good to get to sleep knowing my essay was done though.

Food: 11am: advent calendar chocolate (tree); 2pm: toasted bagel with cheese, packet of Pombears, glass of apple juice; 4.45pm: two rows of 125g Galaxy; 12 midnight: four slices of white toast, buttered with strawberry jam.

Thursdayyyyy and the essay was gone. Free from worrying about it ever again, until I have to get it back, and I'm not even too worried about that. I think it was at least as good as the other essay anyway, and hopefully I will also do well in the Clinical exam. But as I say, I do want to do well in Clinical.
Had the PTSD tutorial which was just sooo annoying because it was all about CBT and other therapy techniques in research, and we were all just like "CBT can fuck off" and didn't really talk about it that much. We just had random other conversations which was cool.
Last proper Stats lecture, and we were finally told how we know which statistical test we should use in which situation. We were also told about outliers, which I think was a bit stupid to leave to the last lecture because in the exam we're supposed to identify and remove outliers in every question, so I think it would have been better to do that in the first lecture to get everyone into that habit. But hey, I'm not the course convenor. Also the way he told us to calculate outliers was different from how we did it in S1 so I need to check that with Longmore.
Had the LAST ever Clinical lecture, sad times, just a revision lecture but everyone clapped at the end which was nice. Apparently Huw doesn't teach second or third year so we won't see him again for a while.
Nice to come back last night and have no worrisome immediate work to do - I watched a disc and a half of Friends (finished Series 2) and wrote some Christmas cards. Realised I actually bought way too many cards because I somehow thought I actually know 50 people. Also some of the cute cards which I thought were so awesome, the "have an ice Christmas" type ones, are actually really gay because they say "have a happy New Year" inside them. Who gives people cards for New Year? Especially cards with Santa on them. I don't really understand what went on there.
Also started writing a book last night which I've been meaning to start for ages, so that made me happy. Which was a good thing because I was feeling really miserable and even a shower didn't cheer me up. Meant a late night again though, oops.

Food: 9am: advent calendar chocolate (tiny elf), 2x chocolate Pop Tarts (which kind of takes away the niceness of the advent calendar chocolate tbh); 11am: packet of Go Ahead Apple and Raisin bars; 12.30pm: Vanilla Choco Balls Crunch Corner, half cinnamon and raisin bagel; 4pm: other half of cinnamon and raisin bagel, mug of tea, six pink wafer biscuits; 8pm: sausages with peas and carrotts, 3x scones with jam and cream (sooo sickly but that cream had to be eaten).

Had a Research Methods tutorial this morning - I like RM tutorials because they make it seem so much more fun than the lectures. And I have mine with this cool NZ postgrad student (I think he's NZ, because his accent is more Conchords than Neighbours). Neither Steve nor Jack nor Matt turned up to it though so I was all on my lonesome. We were talking about stereotype threat... the things Kessler is interested in researching are soooo dull it's not even true. Also had an RM lecture in which we talked about survery design. And apparently we're going to be doing that in next week's lecture as well. No revision lecture for RM since we don't have an exam in it in January. It's such a drag of a subject.
Also had the last Biology practical today. It was an awesome one because it was visual illusions so we had it with Longmore. And he stuck a few risque illusions in there and made a lolerific Guitar Hero reference about motion fatigue in vision. Well, I thought it was lolerific, but only because I knew exactly what he was talking about because we always say how weird it is, and because I've had a conversation with Longmore about GH so it was like memorieeees.
Been writing up a few notes since I got in, and watched some Russell Howard. Been talking to James for ages which has made writing out a week's worth of journal updates much more entertaining, but also much slower. Now his space bar isn't working so I imagine he will go soon. I need to go to bed anyway, got to go to town tomorrow to get a few things and hopefully see Christopher, who I miss lots.

Food: 10.15am: advent calendar chocolate (Santa hat), bowl of Coco Pops; 1.15pm: three slices of cheese on toast (cheddar, white bread); 3.45pm: glass of apple juice, Dairy Milk bar; 8.30pm: breaded fish fillet, rice and sweetcorn

Hmm, kind of want appley juice now. May have to pootle off and get some.
Night night for now, in the words of Old Bear, it's good to be back xxx

The wonderful thing about Tigger

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 22:48:36 GMT

Well, a most pleasing X Factor result: Olly, Stacey and Joe!! Like, the best three people ever to be on the show apart from JLS, obviously. So glad. I never thought Olly would beat Danyl because Danyl's the better singer, but I never really got Danyl so I'm glad he's gone. I was really scared for just a moment that it would be Stacey who went - but how could it be? She and Joe have never been in the bottom two, they're clearly the most popular pair. I have no idea which of them I want to win! I can't call it. Either one and I'll be happy.
Had a fairly productive day since I spent about five hours in the library making notes from journals. Also have written nearly a side about depression now. Unfortunately a couple of the journals I wanted weren't in the library so I still need to look them up on the internet. Also I still have no idea which articles I want to look at for PTSD. Humm, I really need to get a move on with that. However, still not panicking, it's totally doable. Probably would have got a slight bit more work done today but Christopher came to join me in the library (I invited him though) and he's all cute and stuff, so he distracted me.
Also I didn't do any more work since getting back from the library since I watched the X Factor from last night and the results. I'd like to thank ITV Player for playing the same six adverts in every single advert break. Unfortunately I still don't want to buy Now 74, it's just that shit.
I have written up the notes from the last Clinical lecture though, well I tried to but the PowerPoint on WebCT was so different from the one we saw in the lecture that it didn't help much, so I sent a further entreaty by email to Huw begging him to update the slides, since they all seem to be very old. Also asked him to put up the slides from the sleep practical since that was very interesting. I know, "sleep practical" sounds like we ought to get to go to sleep while they monitor our brainwaves, but unfortunately it was nothing in that vein. I don't really know what the Exeter definition of "practical" is - it seems to be "lecture in a slightly different and more shit room".
I WILL get up early tomorrow and write more of my essay. I must. Otherwise I will die. Well, not die, but be a very bad person, and that's also fairly glum.

Food:
10.30am; advent calendar chocolate (three wise men), three slices of white toast, buttered with strawberry jam; 1pm: bagel with Philadelphia and ham; 4.30pm: Wispa bar; 9.15pm: rice and sweetcorn with chicken, onion and tomato, slice of treacle tart with toffee ice cream (and I didn't overheat the tart this time so the treacle was all warm and gooey instead of blackened and crispy like last time).

Here's to six months of journal posting! Cheers xxx

Busy busy bee, buzz

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 00:01:14 GMT

If Santa Claus is coming to town, he better be good with his elbows, because Exeter High Street is MENTAL come Christmas. Definitely going to try to avoid it as much as possible next Saturday and just do shopping on Wednesdays or maybe Sunday. I suppose it just doesn't feel like so close to Christmas because it's still a while until the end of term, but it really is not that long, only three weeks. Everyone probably had the same though as me, which was "shiiiit it's not that long until Christmas and I have no presents for anyone, better get a move on". There were some shops where you literally could not move. Anyway I got presents for Lucy O and Ellie today (still don't know what my theme is supposed to be for the Wally Secret Santa or if I'm even going to get one, so not sure whether to buy presents or not yet for the people who are doing it). And I managed to find a purple cardigan for my mummy, finally! So she will be happy because that's what she asked for.
Oh also I got presents for Seline but I won't say what those are =)
Got up very very late today due to desiring to be able to sleep in at the weekend. So I didn't do any work on the essay before I went into town but actually it didn't come off too badly I don't think, since I made loads of notes when I got back and did a more thorough essay plan to try to order all the cases I'm using. And I have about ten more cases I need to look up, but five I'm going to look up in the library tomorrow since I couldn't find anywhere on the internet where I didn't have to pay for them. And a couple more are already on my computer, I just couldn't be bothered to read them once it got to like 8 and I'd been working since 3... and then I just need to find two or three on PTSD and that'll be all the cases. Then I actually have to write the thing though, fuck.
I can do this. I have planned my time well enough to be able to do this. No panic, not just yet.
Haven't yet watched the X Factor because it wasn't up yet when I looked and I couldn't be bothered to wait 15 minutes so I watched Friends and then Russell Howard's Good News. Man that shit is hilarious. And it's a bit late now so I'll have to wait until tomorrow, or whenever, depending on how much work I get done tomorrow. Eep.

Food:
11.30pm: advent calendar chocolate (reindeer); 12 noon: apple, Vanilla Choco Balls Crunch Corner; 4.30pm: 2 scones with clotted cream and strawberry jam, mug of hot chocolate; 9.15pm: 4x fish fingers and beans, 2x mince pies with cream

Oh dear, lots of cream. Purr.
Night night xxx

Got the urge

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 22:56:40 GMT

Ohhh my goddd so bored. Spent several hours making notes for the essay and have made a considerable dent in them: I've got enough articles for social anxiety and panic disorder, read nearly all the ones for OCD, haven't got any for PTSD but can get them from the article we have to read for our Clinical tutorial; got one more I want to look up for depression in the library; haven't read any of the eating disorder ones yet but I've got quite a few. Need to try to find meta-analyses for depression and EDs though since I think those are really the ones they want us to look at (as they summarise results from a lot of studies at once). Also I have a couple for anxiety so it would be incongruous not to have them for the others, as if I'd just searched "cognitive behaviour therapy" in online journal sites and picked the ones with the best-sounding titles. Would I do that?
Not sure how it's going to turn out atm since I haven't started writing anything - I could have way too much or way too little and I have no way to tell right now. Hopefully I'll have enough and not have to look at addiction as well since I couldn't find ANY good articles on that. I plan to include a little blurb in my introduction or conclusion highlighting that CBT has also been shown to be effective for other MHPs such as substance misuse/dependence and whatever else it is we've covered so far in Clinical.
Had my last Stats tutorial of the term, and talked to Cat (who is Emily Girl). She claims to be shocking at Maths but actually is just one of those who can do it but often makes silly mistakes. Not like many of the other people - that girl who I was trying to help in the last tutorial was there again today, and all I could hear every five seconds was her voice saying to her neighbour "sorry, so how did you get this..?" Oy vey. Me and Cat had got the correlation question wrong because we'd done Pearson's indtead of Spearman's but then we did it again and got it right. And I got all the other questions right too, so I'm pretty happy with that.
Trying to reckon on the format of this exam; we have to answer five questions in two hours, but I'm assuming at least one of the questions must be correlation since it's quite hard calculation to follow and the easiest to make a mistake in because there's so many steps. But also I figure there will be an unrelated samples t-test, since that incorporates a variance test (or could end up being a Wilcoxon Rank Sum I suppose). Then which ever we didn't use in that question, there'll be a question on that (so if we used t-test, there'll be either of the Wilcoxons, if we used Wilcoxon, there'll be a related samples t-test). Then there must be a chi-squared test, and that pretty much just leaves z-test for the last question. Of course this is all just speculation, but it's highly logical.
The number of lectures I still need to write up from RM is steadily increasing, there's now three, except this third one is even worse, because I didn't have a working black biro in the lecture so I had to write everything further forwards in the book in pencil and will have to copy it all back when I write it up. Fortunately RM is kind of enjoyable in a really anal way. It's all like, check this, check that, your results aren't valid, your experiment is subject to maturity effects, you can't make that kind of generalisation. Basically it's everyone shouting at each other because none of us can really prove any of the things we're studying anyway.
Finally did my washing today so my room smells of lovely clean laundry smell, yay.

Food:
10.30am: advent calendar chocolate (Santa boots) bowl of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, semi-skimmed milk; 4pm: cheddar cheese sandwich, packet of plain Pombears, 2 glasses of apple juice; 7.45pm: sausages, chips and baked beans, tin of peach slices

Bai bai xxx

The rain it raineth

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 23:00:01 GMT

So, well things are looking much better. Asked James (Westlake, lives upstairs, does Physics) if I might be able to live with him and his flatmates next year and he said that should be cool. And Jack said since there are like 9 of him and his friends who want to live together they will have to split into two houses and so they might be able to have me and Steve. So I should have somewhere to live that isn't with total randomers, hopefully.
Also I got my essay back and I got 73 (%) which is the lower level of "excellent", which is the lowest level of First Class. So it's a very low First, but a First nonetheless, which is much more than I was expecting or even hoping for in my first ever psychology essay. Well, you know, I was obviously hoping for a First, but not really realistically. I would've been good with a 2:1.
However there was an excessive amount of rain today and in fact hail, so much that it got into my shoes and I could feel my toes going numb and preparing to drop off. Me and Steve were all miserable about the housing situation and essays and rain, and my umbrella was broken (but I fixed it in the end) so I was swearing loads, and Steve said "I love it when you get angry, you're so hilarious", which was kind of funny and semi-nice I suppose.
Also aside from nearly getting frostbite it probably didn't help my cold, which I got at the weekend probably from travelling, and which will now probably persist over the whole of Christmas putting a dismal shroud over the jolly proceedings. I hate colds.
Finally have some change so I can do my washing tomorrow.
Forgot to say yesterday because I was so glum, but I got an amazing JLS shirt yesterday. It's white and got silhouettes of the four guys each in "their" colour. It's awesome.
Made a few more notes for my essay. As long as I do quite a bit of work for it over the weekend it should be fine. Really don't want to be up at 4 doing it like last time. Although I probably would have got it done by about 2 if I hadn't lost Hugs and spent so much time hugging Christopher.
Oh btw I didn't get into the University Challenge team, but what ho.
Time for sleep soon I do believe.

Food:
9am: advent calendar chocolate (stocking); 9.30am: bowl of Raisin Wheats, semi-skimmed milk; 12.30pm: Milk Chocolate Digestive Crunch Corner, apple; 4pm: plain Aero; 8pm: ham and cheese (cheddar) omelette, salad (lettuce, tomato, mayo), 2x mince pies with double cream

Adios xxx

Fuck fuckity fuck

Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:28:54 GMT

So well I did no essay today. And I have no one to live with next year. Super dooper.
Was up late last night readin so I didn't get up as early as I wanted and so I didn't get to do my laundry. I will HAVE to do it tomorrow though as it is becoming vital. Also didn't have that much time to do anything else since I was doing an experiment at 11 and had to get ready for that. It was some random experiment to do with stress experienced by witnesses to crimes who have to identify the criminal. They put these little sensors on my fingers to measure my pulse and sweat, and then I looked at some little clips of men's faces and had to say a percentage of how likely I thought it was that they were the prime suspect of a crime. And then I got chocolate at the end.
Hung around in WSL since that experiment finished at 11.30 and I had a talk at 12 so there was no point going home, as by the time I got there I'd have to come back. I think this was my last Careers talk but I'm not sure, I'll have to check. It was about finding internships and work experience. Another daunting prospect. At what point in life did there stop being things to look forward to? Everything in future seems to just be long hard slog, which we're only doing to get one step further ahead, not because it makes us happy. I just want to be happy in my future.
Went to this other talk thing afterwards from the Eco Power Rangers, who were just trying to see what we're doing to be energy efficient and combat climate change and trying to help us think about what we could do to get other people to do the same. So I say unto ye, switch off lights when you leave the room, and only boil the kettle with as much water as you need. It was kind of fun and random and we got free tshirts. And there's a picture of Christopher now in his tshirt switching off a light on Facebook (they have these competitions where you can win Ben & Jerry's vouchers or other cool stuff if you post pictures of yourself being eco-friendly).
Had the afternoon in town with Christopher, we looked round some clothes shops and went into the big New Look which I hadn't been into yet (there's a big New Look and a small New Look you see. The big one is huuuge, a bit like the one in Bluewater). Anyway I got some crazy cool shoe boots, well they are boots, ankle boots, but the side panels are made of like lacy stuff so they're not completely leather (or fake leather). So it seems weird to call them boots.
Got some mince pies in the shopping and a pack on ten scones because they were 35p. And I got milk, to replace my poor stolen milk (I'm not sure if I said about this actually - basically after my weekend at home I noticed on Monday that a near-full two pint carton of milk I'd had in the fridge was gone. And the carton wasn't in the recycling, or near the other empty milk bottles strewn on the side by Jeannie and Charlotte. So either someone drank two pints of my milk, or they threw it away. And either of those is a crap thing to do).
Anyhoo was all set up for a nice relaxing evening watching a bit of Friends, and then Steve tells me that Charly and Charlie have backed out on him for living together next year as they want an all girls house. And since I was going to tag along, neither of us have anywhere to live now. He might be able to live with some other guys but I still wouldn't have anywhere, and he said he wouldn't leave me on my own with nowhere to live, which is really lovely. So now we're both a bit freaked out and we don't really know what we're going to do.
Getting my other essay back tomorrow. Fuck.
Also I have one of those really small stingy spots right under my nose, and it really hurts.

Food:
10.30am: advent calendar chocolate (holly); three slices of white toast, buttered with marmalade; 1pm: funsize Mars bar; 1.15pm: piece of baguette with cheese, tomato and cucumber, some crisp fragments; 5.30pm: glass of apple juice; 7.30pm: cinnamon and raisin bagel; 8pm: vegetable pizza, slice of treacle tart with toffee ice cream, glass of apple juice

I love Christopher, he is the only one who really knows me.
xxx

Heigh-ho, heigh-ho

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 23:25:09 GMT

Well despite getting up a bit later than I intended I've had a very productive day. I started writing my essay this morning, just the introduction about what CBT actually involves. Unfortunately I got a bit carried away and have 713 words on that and the limit is 2000, so I'll have to cut that section down A LOT. Still at least I will have something... not that explaining what CBT is answers any part of the question however.
Other than the essay I've been working for most of the day really and caught up on loads of notes; I'm now fully caught up on Clinical, Statistics, and Biology, including today's lecture. The only notes I have to catch up on now are the past two Research Methods ones. Other than that, it's essay essay essay baby! Good because I can do the RM ones on Thursday night or Friday morning which gives me the whole of Wedensday and Thursday to do essay. Apart from I have loads to do on Wednesday, and have lectures on Thursday. But it'll work out.
Also spent about an hour or two today just trawling the internet for articles on CBT and I think I should now have enough on depression, anxiety and eating disorders (I haven't actually read any of them yet though, so that's only providing that they're useful). I haven't found any articles on CBT for substance misuse yet but I'm sure there are some around. Crossed fingers I can actually do this essay and make it good. We should be getting our Biology essays back this Thursday, so hopefully that will give me some ideas of what I might need to improve (without completely disheartening me of course).
Also did the two Stats problems from last week's lecture and the problems I need to do for the next tutorial (which I thought I'd done about two weeks ago, but then Longmore went and changed which ones he wanted to do. Never say there isn't a downside to doing work well in advance. The new problems included one on correlation which we aren't actually going to learn about until later this week, but we did correlation in S1 and the steps for doing the calculation are all in the handbook anyway, so I just did it to get it out of the way. Was interrupted by a fire alarm but fortunately we didn't have to stand outside for too long. I did get a bit scared because I couldn't find my keys and so left the flat without them, but then I couldn't find any of my flatmates outside so I was scared that I wouldn't be able to get back into my flat. Fortunately Laura was there though, so it was fine.
Only one more Biology lecture!! Then in the last week there is a revision one (ie. doss). It's funny how the end of term is so close now but still seems quite far away. It's all at odds because the essay deadline will come around too quickly but going home will come around too slowly, even though they're only a week apart.
Happy Birthday Hannah, who's so far away in Lesotho and who I miss lots and lots.

Food:
11am: advent calendar chocolate (donkey), apple, two milk chocolate digestives; 1.30pm: cinnamon and raisin bagel, Vanilla Choco Balls Crunch Corner; 4pm: three little slices of walnut cake (made a cup of tea but then forgot to drink it; heated it up and then forgot to drink it again. Fail); 8pm: massive plate of macaroni (thought I'd finish off the packet but it was actually a bit too much, oops) with chicken, ham, peas, sweetcorn and grated cheddar cheese; 9.30pm: slice of treacle tart

Bit worried about this essay now

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:18:08 GMT

Arr I've got so much updating to do from my lovely weekend of homeliness. Posting seemed like it would take up too much of my wonderful free time at home with my family to do it over the weekend, but I guess I should do it now.

Friday was fairly dull from what I remember of it; I'd already mostly packed my rucksack so all I had to do was get up and get ready for my experiment. I was doing the second stage of that EEG thing so another round of icky conducting gel on my scalp and an uber-cool electrode-covered cap on my head. I kind of got really bored of the task that time, mostly because I was trying to win as much money as possible but I did too well on the first few rounds so I wasn't able to improve, which is how you win money. I had super -fast reaction times you see, about half a second. It's because I'm used to all that with Longmore's face and word experiment where you have a time limit to respond. Anyway I won £4 which is pretty okay, and I got four hours' worth of credit which means I'm over the 10-hour minimum so I don't need to do any more if I don't fancy it. But I probably will, it'd be fun just to fill up the last three spaces on my sheet anyway.
Met Christopher briefly in Cornwall House to borrow the cup from his thermos since mine doesn't have one, and to get back my pen and pad of paper that he borrowed. It was sad to know I wasn't going to see him at all over the weekend, even though I haven't usually seen him on a Friday before I've gone home anyway. I suppose it was just knowing I would be so much further away. Then I had to go back to have lunch quickly and get ready for my Research Methods lecture - the trend is still definitely downwards for attendance in that lecture. OMG I TALKED TO STUART, IT WAS TERRIFYING. Stuart is Leather Coat Guy, the guy who always wears black tshirts and trousers and shoes (and probably socks) with a big black leather coat, and he has really long and curly dark hair and is very tall so as you can imagine he's quite frightening. We had to discuss some things with our neighbours in the lecture but I had no neighbours and he and Spaz (or Anthony, as I believe his name is) were in front of me so I had to talk to them. Stuart's much less scary though when you realise his voice sounds kind of like Sid the Sloth from Ice Age.
Came back after the lecture to get my last few bits and pieces ready and to cook my soup for the journey (I nearly set the fire alarm off by using a kitchen paper wick to light the big gas ring from the tiny one since it was playing up again, and in the end panicked and used my hand to snuff out the big flame at the end of the paper, so now I have a burnt hand). I left a bit early to go to WSL to pick up my earnings/winnings from that game experiment on Wednesday (I got £8 - Steve got £11!) but in the end it turned out I left too early because I still got to St David's station at about half four and my train wasn't until 5. I had built in a bit of time in case something went wrong with trying to collect my tickets (which it did) but I didn't need that long.
Train journey was pretty much uneventful - some guy was sitting in my booked seat on the train from Exeter but he was perfectly nice and moved; then when we got to Tiverton Parkway some really big ugly woman sat next to me, took up all my personal space and generally gace out a very unpleasant aura. Also the lights kept going out in the carriage so my work kept getting interrupted. Then had to wait for about 50 minutes at Reading which is sooo long, but at least it's the terminus/start point for the train to Redhill so I was able to get a seat easily. Had a giggle as one of the stops for that train is Dorking Deepdene haha (not Dorking DeepDENE, like one guy said). Also had an interesting time observing a family of four who were sitting across the aisle from me: a very stressed-out uptight dad, a mum and two daughters, the younger one of whom seemed kind of ill and the older one of whom was very annoying (which is entirely likely if her sister was actually really ill). Then had a tiny wait at Reading before getting my train to Tonbridge; it was quite emotional when I got there actually as I haven't caught the train to Tonbridge in so long.
My dad picked me up from the station and took me home; I got in about half nine but didn't get to bed until about half one just because I was up talking to my mummy for ages which was lovely. She's going to get me JLS's album for Christmas!! Soooo excited.

Food:
10am: plum, strawberry Pop Tart (not heated); 1.30pm: three slices of cheese on toast (white bread, cheddar), glass of pineapple juice; 4pm: packet of Hula Hoops, two milk chocolate digestives; 7pm: tin of Heinz Chunky Vegetable Big Soup, triple chocolate muffin

Saturday I had to get up unfairly early as Rhi was picking me up at 8.45 to go to the Wally Christmas Fair. It was brilliant to see her again, we get on so crazily do me and Rhi. We had a little jaunt to the Plaxtol Bakery as we often used to do when we were at school, it felt quite strange to be in a bakery at 9am.
The fair was, as it always is, quite dull, but we did see Mrs Stephens!! And also Mrs Milner, but that's about zero amount of exciting. Mrs Stephens' girls have grown up so much it's unbelieveable; the last time I saw her younger daughter Hattie was shortly after she was born nearly two years ago when she was so tiny and had no hair - and now she can stand! Incredible. Also saw Rachel Jackson who was walking around wearing a billboard for the FLC company she's in. She was trying to get me to buy some of their stuff but I really don't have the money for ridiculously overpriced scarves (£12 for a scarf!). I did feel bad though because I bought a bracelet from the other FLC company. But they MAKE that jewellery, so it's much closer to being worth the money. Also I got a purse like the awesome pencil case that Abi used to have, which has a zip that goes all the way round, so it's like a strip of material but then you zip it up to become a purse. Apparently Abi's become some kind of a whore since we left Wally, going up to London clubbing and sleeping with random different guys each night. She's lost a lot of weight apparently and gained loads of confidence but I can't see how that's a demonstration of confidence in yourself. It's a shame because I always liked Abi even though she was so crazy, and I wish she had someone to help her.
We got back to mine about half twelve but sat in Rhi's car chatting for a bit until she had to go and pick up her brother. I relaxed a bit and talked to my mum until my dad came over to get the shopping list and go to do the shopping; then me and my mum had planned, as we usually do while my dad's doing the shopping, to go out so I could drive my car. However when we got out there and tried to set off the engine just wouldn't start. It wasn't just the battery being flat as it had been fine being left for three weeks the other two times, so we thought it must be because it's got so much colder as well. We rang the AA to send out a Home Start person and he tested my battery and said I should probably replace it, but he was able to do it there and then so at least I have a nice new battery now. After all the waiting and having a new charged-up battery anyway we decided not to go for a drive after all which was a bit sad.
My dad got Chinese food and we watched Mamma Mia! before watching the X Factor; then my dad went but Bruce Almighty was on tv so I stayed up to watch that while making some notes for my essay. I also caught Russell Howard's Good News which is truly brilliant since it can actually make me laugh out loud even when I'm on my own. (Me and Chris were talking about how weird laughing is the other day - because it's really weird to laugh out loud at something when you're alone. Because you sort of only laugh out loud to communicate with other people. But I've noticed that Jamie laughs out loud even when he's watching stuff on his own and I'm upstairs. But he's an odd boy.) It took until after an episode of Family Guy and two episodes of American Dad before I decided to call it quits and go to bed. It's so nice working all spread out in my living room instead of confined to this tiny shitty bedroom.
I got so sad on Saturday night because I knew I had to leave again the next day. It was unspeakably brilliant to go to sleep on Friday night knowing I'd still be there the next night. Roll on Christmas holidays.

Food:
8.45am: packet of Go Ahead Raspberry Yoghurt Breaks; 9.30am: apple and raspberry Danish; 10am: cup of tea and big chocolate chip cookie; 11am: Wally Christmas Fair Waffle (they're shit, but somehoe you can't not have one); 1pm: toasted cheese sandwich, packet of plain Pombears; 4.30pm: mug of tea, apple, Breakaway bar; 6pm: half-portion of special fried rice with sweet and sour sauce; 8pm: bowl of raspberry jelly with vanilla ice cream

Sunday I had a wee lie in but not for too long since I knew I needed to get up to do work. Obviously it took a bit of time to get into doing the work though since I read the You magazine and so on. But then I pretty much just made notes for my essay, from about 11 to about 3, apart from a bit of a break for lunch. It was a very depressing feeling knowing I had to leave that evening and I was just having to sit there doing work. Then I went upstairs to print off my sheets for my next Clinical tutorial, only to find the pdf wouldn't print so I had to copy it all to a word document so now the print on it is abosultely tiny. Also had to help my mum try to figure out how to book her appointment for the boiler to be checked online but the website is shit so we couldn't do it.
I actually left on time with my dad to go to Orpington this time! Unfortunately the gods are still against me because the usual Victoria train wasn't running, and instead it was going as far as Herne Hill and then on to Blackfriars, from where there was a replacement bus service to Victoria. So we got to Blackfriars about quarter past 6, the time I'd hoped to get to Victoria, then had to wait 10 minutes for a bus which took 20 minutes to get to Victoria. So yet again, somehow, I didn't arrive at Victoria until quarter to seven. And the bus dropped us in a really weird place so I had to try to get my bearings really quickly while on the move in what I hoped was the right direction. Fortunately I got to the coach station at about five to, and then saw that the coach hadn't arrived yet anyway. But then I was still panicking because I couldn't see Christopher, and he wasn't answering his phone so I didn't know where he was. It turned out they'd got lost on the way and it was very lucky the bus was late, because he arrived four minutes after it was supposed to leave, in a very frantic mood.
The bus being late stopped being so fun after a while though since it was about as late as the last time, and we didn't leave until shortly before nine. It was nice to make the journey with Christopher though, and have some company. We did have to have a bit of a sleep, and unfortunately due to the odd positions we were in due to sitting rather than lying down I woke up with a terrible crippling stomach ache and felt like I was going to throw up, which was really not something I wanted to do while on a coach. Fortunately I didn't throw up and managed to make it back to Lafrowda, and I had some yummy Bisodol which calmed everything down a lot so I felt much better.
We had a bit of a scary moment at the coach station. There were these two pikeys there (pikey KIDS though, for shame. Like, a boy about ten who was probably half Chris's height and thinner than me, and a girl about twelve who was rather large) and they asked Chris if he had any change to give them for the bus (I wasn't there at this point, since I'd gone away down the steps in case I was going to throw up), and apparently the girl was trying to give him her empty crisp packet for some unknown pikey reason. Then I arrived and they asked me for change too but I said I didn't have any. And they started to walk away but they'd left the crisp packet on the ground and Chris called after them that they'd dropped their rubbish, and then they started coming all up in our faces and then the little boy produced a bottle which he attempted to smash (about four times unsuccessfully; the first time he just like tapped it on the railings, I'm not sure he quite understood the process). But then the girl actually did manage to smash it which was kind of scary, and she was pointing the broken end at us and going "come on!" at the boy, but he was sort of backing away so she threw the rest of the bottle at us and followed hism (fortunately she didn't throw it very hard and it smashed at Chris's feet rather than hitting us).
SO GLAD LLOYD IS GONE FROM THE X FACTOR!!! I can't believe he lasted so long but if it had been any other of the five remaining contestants it would have been really poor show, as much as I dislike old Danyl. We watched the results when we got in and were going to watch Top Gear too but fell asleep; I think I woke up at about five and the lights and my computer were all still on.

Food:
10.30am: four slices of white toast with butter and honey; 1.30pm: Toffee Hoops Crunch Corner, apple, mug of tea (with two spoons of sugar), glass of apple juice; 4.45pm: glass of apple juice; 9pm: a bit of Christopher's pasta, apple, four fingers of shortbread

Sooooo today thanks to our late night Christopher didn't go to his nine o'clock lecture AGAIN and we didn't get up until about half twelve. Also I missed an appointment for some research at 1 which I'd completely forgotten about, but I booked myself in for a new slot on Wednesday so hopefully they won't mind too much and I can go and do it anyway.
Had a fun Clinical lecture in which we talked about autism and Asperger's. Haven't really seen the boys in ages although I glimpsed them in the lecture as they sat a few rows in front of me (!). Steve said sorry he didn't see me after the lecture but he had to rush off for some research participation (that reading/eye movement one which I did ages ago). We've semi-agreed that we will live together next year, with Charly and Charlie since they both want to live with him (who are both girls, I think, but I haven't met Charlie as far as I know).
Been writing up notes for most of the evening as I'm really behind on them. I'm now caught up on Clinical but still need to do the second Hearing lecture for Biological before tomorrow, and the past two Stats and Research Methods lectures too. How did I get so behind on this? Lost a bit of time because Chris rang me and said he couldn't find his power cable for his computer, and I couldn't see it in my room, so I went up to Harrison to look for it but it wasn't there either.
Sad things: Jamie has had his bike stolen; a near-full two-pint carton of milk that I had in the fridge has either been drunk or thrown away by one of my flatmates; I've lost the receipt for my last shopping trip which is annoying because I'm meant to photocopy them and attach them to the questionnaire I'm doing for research. Maybe I will find it somewhere over the next three weeks.
Must be time for sleep now, up early to do the notes for Hearing II and hopefully a bit of essay notes since I have to give back those library books on Thursday. Craaaap where does the time go?

Food:
1pm: plain bagel with Philadelphia cheese; 4pm: mug of hot Ribena, Wispa bar; 8.30pm: glass of Dr Pepper, two milk chocolate digestives; 9pm: breaded fish fillet with potatoes and salad (lettuce leaves, half tomato, mayo)

Night all xxx

Can't find a cardigan for my mummy =(

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 00:59:50 GMT

I definitely should always get up early, it makes me feel so much better. Or maybe it was the getting up early and washing my hair, because washing my hair always makes me feel better too. So I felt supoer-dooper better this morning, I suppose.
Had our second Clinical tutorial, quite interesting actually, about the brain and stress. Had fun times trying to remember what I learnt about the fight or flight system in GCSE Biology, and also actually learnt some stuff too which is of course muchly useful. Don't really understand Clinical tutorials because tutorials are meant to consolidate knowledge from lectures but in Clinical tutorials we just talk about new random stuff.
No time for essay today nor really any time to catch up on the MOUNTAIN of lecture notes I have to catch up on. Had to write up my tutorial before I forgot what we said and then had a Stats lecture, and then Christopher came over in between my Stats lecture and my Clinical lecture, and then I had to go to town, and then once I got back from town I had to go to Christopher's for dinner and table tennis. I really wish I didn't have this stupid experiment tomorrow, it would save me two damn hours.
Stats lecture was sooo dull I almost went to sleep, but for the fact that I was near the front and Longmore would be devastated. I really write nothing down in Stats anymore, there's just no point because it's all on the slides and repeated over and over again anyway. I feel sorry for Longmore who probably knows all this stuff inside-out, upside-down and back-to-front but still has to repeat how to calculate the mean three or four times a lecture.
Clinical was also not particularly top-drawer, it over-ran and I hate it when that happens because then the lecturer rushes and doesn't really get to explain everything. Also I'm getting kind of annoyed with Huw because he doesn't update the lecture slides on WebCT, so the ones on there aren't the same as the ones we see in the lectures. So you think "hey that slide was interesting, loads of writing though so I'll have to write some of it down later" and then boom, you can't.
Had a bit of a spree in town today and bought lots of things in H&M - but I realised when I got in just now and tried on the black cardigan that I didn't try on in the shop that it's actually exactly the same as the purple one I got nearer the beginning of term, just in black. So now I'm not sure whether to keep it or not. I'll ask my mummy and Christopher what they think. Also got a nice light grey jumper and a cool white and purple stripey top. I like the H&M changing rooms because they have angled mirrors so you can see yourself from behind. And my hair looked buff.
Also got loads of shopping but it somehow came to under £20 so that's quite wonderful (and I used the self checkout all by myself!) I fear I may be messing up this dude's shopping study though because I said I was going to buy treats and though I would spend about £25, but even with my treats it only came to £18 something. I do now have a slight problem though because all my treats don't fit in my treat biscuit tin, so my digestives are now out on their lonesome. Oh and apprently Charlotte and Laura did an inventory of all the food in the fridge today so we can know if anything goes missing. We're worried we might have a sleep eater. I do hope it's not me.
Had dinner at Christopher's before we went up for one-on-one table tennis, it's very lovely to go over there for dinner. Matt Bishop be craaazy. We did have to walk up Cardiac Hill though because it's the quickest way to the Sports Centre, ugh. But I WON A GAME!! And it was like 11-5 as well so I won it by lots. It was only the one though, Chris won like 5.
Packed up most of my stuff for tomorrow now, apart from overnight stuff and books I need for tomorrow. Going home for two nights this time! It's gonna be wicked.

Food:
9.30am: bowl of Coco Pops with semi-skimmed milk; 11am: apple; 12.30pm: Milk Chocolate Digestive Crunch Corner, packet of Plain Pombears; 4.30pm: KitKat Chunky, Twix Xtra; 8.30pm: fish and chips with baked beans, yummy, thank you Christopher.

Now it's very late, thanks to the fact that I couldn't get in for about 20 minutes after I got back from TT because the fire bell was going off, and James is trying to persuade me to go upstairs and watch Family Guy with him. But no no, time is now for sleep. Night xxx

PS- just got sooo scared because I felt a really hard lump in my torso. Then found it was my ribcage. Fail.

What a day

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:41:28 GMT

Weeelll the reason for no posting last night was simply that Christopher stayed over, so this was yesterday (tried to do a cut but it's not working, idk why).

Was feeling a bit rough when I woke up so I sort of dozed for a while and was thinking about some things; then I went back to sleep again and I didn't wake up until about 12. I couldn't face working yet even though I'd meant to get up to do some stuff for my essay so I started doing thr hard Su Doku from Exepose, until about 1 when I went for lunch. Lunch was interrupted because Laura burnt the toast AGAIN (you'd think after the dozenth time she'd have learnt how to use the grill) and so the fire bell went off and we had to go outside. And my lunch by then was cold so I had to reheat it. Managed to finish the Su Doku by doing that horrible thing where you write down all the numbers that could go in the box and then do process of elimination (it's not a real Su Doku if you have to guess or write anything else down other than the number that goes in the box).
Had our last Perception lecture with Longmore! Sad times. It was sweet because at the end he said this was the last lecture and everyone went "awwww" and then he said, but he'd be back for the revision session and everyone went "yaaay". And then once he'd finished talking about the exam and so on and dismissed us everyone clapped. And we never clap our lecturers. I think he was a bit chuffed. We'll have him for the practical too, and some lucky devils will get him for a tutorial too. Also, I hope I never go deaf and have to have a cochlea implant because voices with those things sound like an army of Cybermen speaking to you.
After a nice shower I looked up some more articles for my essay when I got back and pissed about on the intertubes until Christopher came over. We were supposed to be going to a PsySoc-XEng social but then we decided we couldn't be bothered so we just stayed in, and Christopher had a sleep while I replied to some emails (I finally got a reply from Mrs Stephens! Yay!) and then we went to the Ram, and got a bit wet because my umbrella's not really big enough for two people and also doesn't really work in the wind.
Apparently the word "broiling" is American for "grilling"?? Sorry but that's ridiculous. Grilling is grilling. Broiling sounds like some ridiculously hard thing that you would do to make suet or something. While we're on this, is grilled cheese American for cheese on toast? Because it sounds more like, y'know, just some cheese that was shoved under the grill. Very odd business.

Food:
1pm: two slices of eggy bread (white bread, using two eggs); 4pm: six-square bar of Dairy Milk; 7.30pm: half a cheese and tomato pizza, glass of pineapple juice, one Go Ahead Apple and Raisin cracker; 11pm: pint of lemonade, 20p of Tooty Frooties.

So Christopher staying over was also the reason for me getting up at 25 to 12 today. He was meant to have a lecture at 10 and then I would have got up, but he didn't go (I think I ought to ban him from staying over on school nights...) Lucky we did wake up then though since I had a talk to go to at 12 and hadn't reset the alarm from half nine. Managed to get there in time though. It was another of these talks that contributes to the Exeter Award so I have to get there for the start so they can scan my UniCard to say I've attended. The talk today was about tips and techniques for interviews, quite helpful again but, again, really scary.
I didn't get time for lunch because I then had to rush off for an experiment. It was a fun EEG thing where I had to be fitted with a special cap with all these electrodes on it and the woman doing it had to put all this conducting gel on my scalp, so my hair is super-dooper icky at the moment since I haven't washed it yet. Then they monitored my brainwaves while I did this task; the task involved me looking at some words in coloured letters on the screen, and depending on the cue that was given just before the word I had to press a key to say whether it was a word or non-word or whether the colouring of the letters of the word was symmetrical or non-symmetrical. And I got 14 bonus points which means I get at least £2.80. So might get £5.60 if I do the same next time. Also I got to see a picture of my brain wave trace which was kind of cool. Like, when I said stuff the line would go wooohoo and go all spiky.
Had to hang around still longer in WSL after that experiment because I was doing another one at 3.30, kind of crazy but I'm up to 9.75 credits now. This one was really weird. We were in a big group divided into two smaller groups, set up in two rows of chairs so we were back to back with each other. Then we were given a sheet of instructions for one of two games - the Equal Game or the Unequal Game. In both games you and your opponent (whose identity you did not know) had to decide for each round how long you wanted that round to be, from 0s to 5s. You won 10p per second the round lasted, but there was a catch. If one of you chose a shorter time than the other, the one who chose the shorter time would win a 60p bonus (if you chose the same time you each got a 30p bonus). So say I chose 3s and my opponent chose 5s, they would get 30p and I would get 90p. In addition to this, you could take money away from your opponent. In the Unequal Game, anyone who was player A could spend 10p to take 100p from player B, and player B could spend 10p to take 10p from player A; in the Equal Game, both players could spend 10p to take 100p from the opponent. But you never got to see what your opponent was going until after you'd done it too - so while we were choosing the duration of the round, they did that at the same time, then they swapped the sheets over so we could all see what our opponent chose and decide whether to take any money away from them, and then they swapped back so we could see whether we'd had any money taken away. And we get to keep any money that we made but they hadn't worked it all out yet so I don't know how much I won yet. I was a player A, so I think it was about £6.80 in the Unequal Game, but nothing in the Equal Game. It was an experiment about co-operation, or coercion or something.
Spent a bit of time in the library making notes from journals for my essay and I've got a good few articles on panic disorder now. Need to read all these other articles I have saved on my computer. I want to try to write quite a lot of essay on the train on the way home on Friday, but I can't do that if I haven't done enough research. Decided to do addiction instead of personality disorders now, mostly because I missed the lecture on personality disorders so don't really understand anything about them.
Was super cold and hungry coming back and didn't feel like carrying on with work when I got in so I watched the first disc of Skins Series 1, woot. Now got to read this stoopid thing on Stress and the Brain which I need to read for my tutorial tomorrow morning. I meant to leave it quite late so I wouldn't forget what it said and have to re-read it, but this is a bit too late, oops.

Food:
3pm: packet of Pombears, apple; 3.30pm-5pm: four biscuits (offered to us by experimenters, how friendly); 8pm: three-egg omelette with cheese filling and side salad (lettuce, tomato, mayo); 9pm: canned Spotted Dick pudding with golden syrup.

A bientot xxx

Sure enough worth fighting for

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 23:29:40 GMT

Yay, I did some maths this morning. Real maths, not Stats. It was for part of an experiment, something about testing gender responses to the questionnaire when we were told our gender was either bad at maths or good at maths. I hate those questionnaires because you always find out that other people didn't all have the same one as you, it feels a bit like cheating. Anyway the maths was fun, 15 minutes to do 15 questions and I think I answered about 12 of them, though I don't know if they were all correct. Also they gave us a different study at the same time about whether we would respect a leader more if they shared the same emotional responses as us. They gave us a newspaper clipping about some controversial issue and the feelings of an Exeter official about the issue (again we weren't all given the same representation of the official). It was difficult for me though because I've got wise to those sorts of studies - any study which presents opinions of a member of the university is going to contain fake information, since they're obviously not going to say the opinions of real people in case they got egged or something - but it's kind of hard to give your views on people when you know they're fictional. And not interestingly fictional, like Harry Potter.
I did actually go to the library as well, and after much searching found the stacks where they keep all the psychology journals. There's a lot. But now I actually know the names of some psychology journals, I can go on their websites and search their archives for relevant article details, then look 'em up in the library. Hopefully, sorted.
We had a really interesting Clinical lecture today, well interesting for me because it was about eating disorders. Huw told us this really sad case study about a 43 year old man who had been bulimic for 17 years and hadn't ever been able to tell anyone. But Huw only ever tells us case studies of people who got better, probably because they're all people he treated himself and he wants us all to think he's super, so fortunately this poor guy did get better.
I did another stir fry this evening but it didn't turn out so well as the other one. Probably mostly due to the fact that my beansprouts were three weeks old, and were pretty much beans by this point. And I made way too much rice, so I had to put some in the fridge, which is annoying, because I had put the leftover rice from Friday in with the new rice, so now I will have leftover rice and leftover leftover rice. Icky. And I have a half-onion that will need eating now too, what to do with rice and a half-onion that isn't curry?
We had some fun table tennis, although I'm still hopeless against anyone else except Christopher (and I still can't beat Christopher yet either). Also we decided we're very weird, because we both think that George is fit and that Kat's boobs are distracting. It's a very open and honest relationship, but it goes in some weird areas now and then. Like that time we had a conversation about which disgusting bodily functions are the most fun, when we'd only been going out for about four months. Odd times.

Food:
9am: 2x chocolate Pop Tarts (not heated); 1.15pm: Vanilla Choco Balls Crunch Corner, big mug of hot Ribena; 4.15pm: small mug of tea, four Milk Chocolate Digestives (which tasted like cinnamon, shrug); 7pm: icky stir fry (carrots, onions, tomato, and the very excellent addition of plum, plus gross beansprouts) and rice, glass of Dr Pepper; 9pm: Lion Bar

Goodnight all xxx

While I've been stuck here

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:44:27 GMT

Sooo yes, haven't posted in a few days due to reasonable business/tiredness in the evenings, but here are my updates:

Quite stupidly I forgot to set the alarm on my tiny clock, so without a phone I in fact had no alarm to wake me up. Fortunately I was woken up reasonably early by someone slamming the front door; I woke up and looked at my watch thinking "please let it be about 5 so I can go back to sleep" but no, it was half nine so I thought I'd better get up and go to Northcote House to get my phone. It's quite nice walking around campus early in the morning during lecture time because there aren't really any people about, and students as a general rule are very loud and annoying and get in the way a lot. Got my phone with no trouble except the battery had died during the night so I had no way of checking that it was actually mine before I walked off with it (fortunately it was).
Started trying to do some research for my Clinical essay using the ISI Web of Knowledge thing, but it's all a bit tricky and I'm not really sure what I'm doing to be honest; this essay topic seems quite broad, like there's such a lot you can write about it, and it's hard to know which bits are good and which aren't. I've got a few article references written down now to have a look at but haven't read any of them yet. I need to go to the library to have a look at the hard copies of journals they have there. Also I still haven't looked at any of the other books I took out of the library, must look at them too.
Had a Research Methods lecture and I swear there were fewer people than ever, soon it'll be down to just me, Matt Bishop, Jake Holiday, Stuart and the mature students, which is about a dozen people. That's because we're about the only people who are actually diligent enough to turn up to such a boring lecture every week.
Went to town after the lecture to try to get some Christmassy things for my mum and so on, I can't remember the name of that book she wanted me to get for her so I'll have to ask her again. Also they've either moved or got rid of the cardigans like the purple one I bought in H&M so I'll have to look around elsewhere because she said she wanted one too. But I did get a couple of presents, although they didn't have the Top Gear cars that Christopher wanted, which was extra specially glum since I had to walk past one of those disgusting huge mechanical toy spiders to get to where they would have been.
Went to Picturehouse to activate my free membership so now I have a real membership card instead of a fake cardboard one. It's quite far away though, much further away than I thought, way past the far end of town. Also it's in a kind of narrow side street and when I was walking towards it I definitely passed a house which had a red light in one of the windows. That was scary. I saw An Education there, it's got Carey Mulligan (Sally Sparrow from the Blink episode of Doctor Who) in it, and some other quite famous people such as Dominic Cooper and Alfred Molina. It's a really good film so see it. But it kind of put me into a really bad mood, not that I really want to go into it now since I got really depressed. I needed to go back to my flat to drop off my shopping bags but then I really wanted to be out of the campus, out of Exeter in fact, so I went for a bit of a walk down to St David's Station, to see how long it would take me to get there, and to imagine that I could be on my way home. I saw Anna there though since she was waiting for Karen who was visiting her for the weekend, so I walked with them back in the direction of Birks (where Anna lives) and then dropped in on Christopher for a bit. He and Dom and Dommer (as are their names, apparently) were planning to watch a film but sadly I couldn't stay as I had chicken defrosting back at my flat. So off I had to go.
Food:
10am: three slices of white toast, buttered with marmalade; 1.15pm: two hot white rolls with Philadelphia and lettuce; 6.15pm-8.15pm: tube of Galaxy Minstrels; 11.30pm: chicken tikka masala with egg rice.

Had to get up reasonably early because me and Chris were going to Bristol to pick up the bike he bought from eBay, leaving about 12.15 - got there in good time thanks to my walk the day before. Christopher was very glum when he arrived because when you book train tickets online they ask you to have the card you used to buy them when you collect them, but he'd bought them with his NatWest card which is at his house in Beckenham. And he'd tried to ring someone up to say could he still get the tickets anyway if someone was told he didn't have his card, but they said no, they'd only do that if your card was stolen not if you'd just left it at home. And then he tried to get a refund but they charge a £10 fee for refunds, and then he ran out of credit and had to leave so it didn't get sorted out. So you can imagine he was very glum. But the tickets didn't cost any more to buy on the day and he eventually did manage to get the refund, so it's okay. And we got the train all in good time and managed to get seats, which isn't always likely on these Western trains since sometimes all the seats are reserved. Not how we do it in the South East matey.
Bristol seemed very depressing, maybe because it was very windy and rainy and we walked past two identical-looking Big Issue tramps, but also possibly because it might just be a depressing place. Exeter is a very pretty location, when you're not being attacked by wind and rain, but Bristol was just like yerr, here's some city, it's all grey and polluted and we don't have any fields here. We walked around nearby the station for a bit and couldn't find anything much worth doing, although we did see a bar-restaurant called the Reckless Engineer. And Christopher got his bike, and the guy who sold it to him seemed very pleasant so hopefully all will be well. Chris says it's a very nice bike, but I have no way of telling. Since I hadn't really managed to get any work done on the train with Christopher I did some when I got in, I read the whole of the chapter of the Haslam and McGarty book (but I didn't answer the questions yet) and answered all the Stats problems I need to have done for my next tutorial, even though one of them I think was to do with a test that we haven't actually learnt yet. I may be wrong, but if I'm not then that's very cool.
Jammed it over to Birks at about half seven, and somehow got there at quarter to eight which is crazy times. After arriving at Steve's room I discovered I knew precisely zero of the people there, but most of them talked to me and were very nice. I met a couple of people who live down in Birks and Moberly (the catered version of Lafrowda, ie. shit) and also Steve's Kent homies, one of whom lives in Sevenoaks and actually knows of the existence of Wally, which is pretty awesome. They are all complete drunkards though, I don't know how I fit in with these people. To give you an idea, we had planned to go to the Lemon Grove, but also to the Impy for pre-Lemmy drinks, to the Boot (the Birks' student bar) for pre-Impy drinks, and to Steve's room for pre-Boot drinks. That is how much these people drink. We had a good laugh though, although me and Chris may be the only ones who will remember. Steve was superbly drunk, in the kind of way where you do/say complete shit which you would never even consciously think of when sober. He was dressed as a banana for the entire night, he hugged a lamppost, and he came out with the eternal line "we're already in the Lemmy. The Lemmy is in my penis." Jokes.
I did get hit on in the Lemmy by this really creepy guy though. I was dancing on my own to Mr Brightside since Christopher was in the loo, and he came up to me and said "have you got a boyfriend?" and I said "yeah I do actually" and then he said - which I think is incredibly rude - he said "is he here?"
!!!!!!!
Like, as if I said no, does he think that would mean "no, so come and get some"??? I thought in the general rules of society you ask "do you have a boyfriend?" hoping the answer will be no, and if it's not you back off respectfully. Not think, hmm, but if he's not here, there's still a chance this chick might be a proper slag and I can get with her anyway. Anyhoo I obviously said yes, but maybe he though I said no, or maybe he was just a douchefag, because he still took my hand and proceeded to try to dance with me, with some line like I had to teach him to dance or something. He did look properly scared though when Chris came out of the loo and was like ehh mate, wtf? It was quite the scary experience indeed.

Food:
10.30am: three slices of white toast, buttered with Bovril; 1pm: white roll with Philadelphia and lettuce, packet of plain Hula Hoops, apple; 3pm: half tube of Milky Bar Buttons; 4.30pm: mug of tea (no milk or sugar); 8pm-2am (Sunday): few swigs of vodka and Fanta, WKD Blue, VK Apple; 3am (Sunday): one and a half slices of buttered white toast

Well Christopher and I slept in obviously, until about midday in fact, it was quite super, but then we decided we ought to get up since he had shopping to do and wanted to go on a bike ride with his new bike, and I had work that needed doing. So we went to town and got some things, they still had no Top Gear amphibious cars in Marks though. And I can't find a good advent calendar! Where the hell is Woolworths when you need it? My dad is going to see if he can get me one at home since he can normally find a nice plain Christmassy one, not an HSM one. Fail. And it was decidedly cold, rainy and windy yet again, so my feet got very wet as did my combats, since I kept stepping on the end of them. But me and Christopher paid a visit to Shaul's bakery again which was super. They have curry pasties in there. That's right, curry, in a pasty. What more could there be in heaven?
Mostly just been dicking around in my room since I got back from town, well after I had a nicewarm shower obviously - just watching the X Factor on itvplayer and trying to look for articles for this essay. Library is definitely the way to go methinks. Fortunately I have some research participation at 10 tomorrow, so I won't be able to sleep for too long and not do any work, and after that I can go to the library before my lecture at 2. Hmm. That means I must've wasted about six hours of my life this evening. Not good, not good at all.
I hope Christopher is back safe from his bike ride, I haven't heard from him.
Time for loggy-offsies methinks.

Food:
1pm: apple; 3pm: toffee flapjack; 9pm: cold hard boiled egg, bowl of macaroni with Dolmio Stir-In Sauce (sun-dried tomato and onion) and grated cheddar; 9.45pm: plum, swig of Dr Pepper

Back to the good old routines tomorrow hopefully. Pip pip xxx

Lost

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:15:51 GMT

Hrrrumph, sleepy. Thirteen hours with the contact lenses in is not good for my eyes. Also I dropped both of them as I was taking them out so now I have no idea which is which. Will find out next time I put them in I suppose!
Had a - dare I say - fun Biology tutorial today, even though it was with Tim Hodgson (to be honest, he comes across like an absolute nimrod, but he's not a bad bloke at all I don't think. He just has very very dry humour. And also very weird humour. So you have to have a very special kind of brain to get him. I don't really get him, but I think he's kind of funny, with his Nobel Prize noises and his brain gummies). We were having a "Brain Challenge" quiz in which we were split up into the Braniacs or the Neuronuts (I was a Braniac, because I was late and they were nearer the door) and he asked us random questions relating to what we've learnt so far in Biology (minus the bits we've done on perception). I surprised myself with what I could remember actually, I earned us a fair few points. Also the fact that Latin is epic is in no doubt, because otherwise I wouldn't have been able to confidently answer the question "what are sulci and gyri and which is which?" (they're the grooves and ridges on the surface of the brain, or cerebral cortex, and I knew that sulcus is Latin for ditch and gyrus is Latin for circle. So yeah, Latin rules all.
Started reading my Biopsychology textbook this morning, and in fact I was nearly late for my next lecture because it was astoundingly interesting. So yeah I think it will prove to be a good buy, worth the money probably. It explains classification of animals, you know like you have kingdom and then phylum and family and some others all the way down to species. And I've always wanted to know how that goes.
We did a very strange and wacky test called the t-test today in Stats. Longmore said to me yesterday that everyone's going to hate him next term because the week after our exam, in which we have to do all these tests with pen and paper and a crappy calculator whose only interesting function is a square root button, we'll all be shown how to do those same tests quickly and simply using a computer. But I do understand why they think it's important for us to do it this way first. This t-test apparently does the same thing as a Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs but involves variance and the z-test. So it's some sort of random hybrid test.
Went to the Ram after so the boys could get lunch, I've never been in there in the day but it's still all dark and pubby, it's fun. Also they have curly fries, the kind which are spicey, so I'll have to get some at some point. Those were one of the only pros of old school lunch in the old lunch v new lunch debate. Not that we ever even had one of those, particularly. We mostly just commented on missing the old stodgy puddings, which were abandoned in favour of tiny pretentious pots of jelly and yoghurt, and weird strawberry goo which looked like it was in a brown cake case but was actually sitting in a pot made out of chocolate. Man I miss school lunches.
Stoopid sitting at the back in Clinical, I need to stop trying to be friends with these people if I want to actually learn anything. Especially in Streatham Court, because there are big noisy fans at the back. And Huw was speaking very quietly today for some reason so I didn't catch much of what he said. I did get to see Tulip Crazy Hair rolling a cigarette in the middle of the lecture though, which was kind of odd. I mean, it's not like she could smoke it there, or anything. Couldn't really hear too well in the Research Methods practical either, because everyone kept talking around us and in the practical rooms there aren't any microphones so you have to rely on the lecturer speaking loud enough. It was one of the weirdest surveys I've ever answered, and I'm including ones from Facebook in that - essentially we just had to tick one of the five boxes ranging from very negative to very positive regarding how we feel about certain groups of people. And some of them were like child molesters and wife beaters and men who leave their families and feminists and such, but others were just very random, like Cornish people, people who smell bad, stuff like that. Also a few of them were like mentally retarded people or blind people - you can't say you hate them, that's just cruel!
I'm really shocked by some people's work ethic here. I know the rules for attendance are much less strict at university than at school, but it's still a place of learning and the learning process should be respected. After all, if you could learn it all without turning up to the lectures then they wouldn't have lectures, they'd just say "here's the website where you can read everything you need to know, go do it". And even then some people either wouldn't be bothered or wouldn't have been listening enough to know to do that anyway. The number of times I've told one of the boys or that Sian (I can't even think of an adjective for her, she is just dim and annoying and makes me mad, and unfortunately and unfathomably Steve is friends with her) something that we've been told, often more than once, in a lecture... They just don't listen. When they look at my notebooks from lectures their eyes go really wide, because they can't understand how I can have written so much down. But all I've done is write what I hear the lecturer say, then go through and annotate that with anything from the lecture slides that I missed. So I don't do anything beyond the resources that are handed to us, or at least I haven't yet. I don't know how they expect to learn anything by writing nothing down in the lectures. They think they're just going to remember it all, or what? And the fact that they keep missing tutorials because they "didn't get up early enough". Um, hello, you don't just hope you'll get up in time for your tutorial, you know you have a tutorial so you plan to be up in time for it (likewise with them and breakfast, don't get me started on catered people and their breakfasts). Tutorials are even more important to attend than lectures in some ways because a) they're not on WebCT and b) they help to consolidate what you've learnt in lectures. Although I suppose if you haven't been to the lectures there won't be any learning to consolidate. There's a lecture we have on a Friday afternoon which is Research Methods, and only about 50 people ever turn up to it. It honestly shocks me how people can think it's okay to not turn up to a lecture/tutorial/practical, much less to talk all the way through it and then leave before the end because you're bored. It's not like I want to sit in a room for two hours from 4 till 6 listening to some guy talk, but we all came here to study Psychology because we're interested in Psychology, and if you're finding all your lectures boring, or you can't be bothered to go to them or write anything down or try to learn what you've been told, then why the hell are you there? At the very least you could just fuck off so the rest of us who actually came to university to learn something by doing honest hard work can do so in peace.
//rant
Oh, well, not quite, mainly I just wanted to note here that I've decided not to let Steve, Jack, Matt or anyone else on my course for that matter copy/photocopy my notes, because I figure none of the people I've met can be that stupid or they wouldn't be at Exeter, because it's not like one of the worst universities in the country, and if I can put in the hard work then so can they. I'm not going to be friends with Nat Lane three times over again. So there, I have decreed that in the publicity of my journal, and so it shall be.
In other news I'm a sodding idiot because I lost my phone, either it was in Newman A during Stats or in the Ram afterwards. But fortunately it was found and handed to Lost Property, and they rang my mum and she texted Chris and he walked all over the place looking for me and then waited outside my flat for half an hour so he could tell me. So I'll have to go and get it tomorrow, it's in Northcote House which is soooo far away but it's my own damn fault. Exeter seems to want me to lose all the possessions I hold most dear to me. This is definitely one of those times when I really wish I weren't here.
We played table tennis again today, since Christopher didn't have frisbee, and I didn't win any games still. I did win twice at chess though. And I emailed the Guild President to ask how I can set up a chess club here, yippee.

Food:
9.30am: strawberry Pop Tart (not heated) mug of hot Ribena; 12.30pm: two slices of cheese on toast (white bread); 6.15pm: apple; 7.30pm: fishfingers and baked beans with a little lettuce and tomato (lettuce goes with beans super well)

I'm annoyed because I feel like cereal for breakfast but have no milk, poo.
I've got myself into a right annoyed mood now. I'm gonna go to bed.
Night xxx

Universally challenged

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 23:18:31 GMT

Had a bit of a glum feeling this morning so I didn't get up early AGAIN. It's okay, I have a tutorial tomorrow at 10 so I will have to get up reasonably early for that. And I bought the Biopsychology textbook today so I can start to write up my Biology notes while actually being able to understand them, and that gives me something to do so I can have a reason to get up now. Need to find out if there's a Clinical textbook I might need to help with writing up notes. Actually that Treating Complex Cases book is quite helpful since it explains a lot about the symptoms of the conditions it's discussing. Textbooks cost so much money... the one I got today was £45, but I supplemented it with some of my book tokens collected from past birthdays, Christmases and Prize Givings. Should be able to budget it fairly well if I only buy one book every now and then and go about half and half money and tokens.
Had THE MOST confusing and overwhelming talk on choosing postgraduate study today. Apparently if I wanted to become a clinical psychologist I would have to do my three-year BSc as I'm doing now, then a year to get a Master's, and then to stand any chance of doing a clinical doctorate I'd probably have to do a research PhD beforehand. So basically I would be at uni for about ten years. Which would suck. I imagine Ill do the four years inclusing the Master's and then do some minor work (and hopefully be writing books anyway, so won't be totally poor) and then if I want I can go back to uni and study for my PhD when my children are younger, since I don't want to be working too much when I have young children as I'd like to be around for them. Life is so haaaard.
The University Challenge trials were crazy! We all sat in a lecture theatre and the Student Guild President read out the questions and we had to write down the answers. There was a General Knowledge round and a Science round, the GK round being like stuff about literature and history and stuff like that - I know I definitely did better in the Science round! And I think Christopher did too... It'd be cool to get through but I doubt I will. Also it would be really scary.
Had my repeat of the Remembering Words and Faces research today; I was sooo late because I went into town with Christopher and it took me much longer to get back from town to Washington Singer than I thought. But Chris Longmore didn't mind, in fact he was just relieved that I had actually turned up and not dropped out. Weirdly the test seemed actually a lot easier than before, and I did a bit better in it because this time I got £4.50 and last time I got £3.75. They used the same faces as before, I think they're trying to test how it affects your response when you get more familiar with the faces or something. It was weird because we were talking about the study and stuff about face perception and recognition and so on, and he said how they try to pick unattractive or relatively plain female faces, because they know most of the people doing the study will be girls (since most psychology students are girls) and they don't want any guys who do it (or lesbians) to be distracted by attractive faces. And then we started talking about attractiveness and how it all works, and why people seem to have the same general standards for attractiveness and so on, and then we kind of ended up just talking about random stuff like Guitar Hero and Star Wars. In the end we chatted for like two hours until he said we had to leave because they would be locking the building soon. So yeah, that was an uber-cool thing I did today.
As a result of that not only did I have a late dinner but also I think it's about two hours earlier than it is, since I expected to be back at 5 and actually got back about half seven. So I must to bed very soon.

Food:
10am: three slices of white toast with butter and marmalade; 1pm: small buttered white roll; 2.30pm: packet of Pombears, apple; 7.30pm: Yorkie bar; 9.30pm: sausages, buttered potatoes and cauliflower with ketchup, half a mug of tea. Just gonna go warm up the other half now since I forgot about it, oops.

I know I should do P&Ms every day, but tbh sometimes my days just aren't terribly interesting enough to do them. I'm sure that's not a surprise to you.
Toodle-oo xxx

Little pains

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 23:26:16 GMT

Hello hello.
I want to make this quick since I've got a busy busy day tomorrow: careers workshop at 12, the leg it to Queens for 1 for the University Challenge tryouts, and back to WSL later for research participation at 4. (I've found a kindred spirit; some guy called Jake Holiday will have done 12 hours of research participation by the end of next week - I'll have done 13.25 ha!)
Late night last night so didn't really get up that early today, and then had a fairly dull morning doing the rest of the notes from the video on Colour Perception and last Research Methods lecture (you forget, when Kessler's talking, that actually what you're learning is super dull). Also I managed this time to book my train ticket for the 27th so that's a-go-go.
We had another perception lecture today but this one was the first of two on sound - I'm kind of sad that they got rid of this old Perception module as it seems like it would've been fun to learn about taste/smell and touch as well as vision and hearing. But those are the most important two I suppose. And probably the most interesting. Also I learnt that the reason why you fall over a lot when you're drunk is because when alcohol goes into your bloodstream it can also get into your inner ear, and it's much less dense than the normal inner ear fluid so it throws your balance systems out of whack. Cool, huh? I didn't write anything down in that lecture though because it was all a bit rawr, so I have to watch the video over and over, poo.
Also, the answer to "if a tree falls in the forest and no one's around to hear it, does it make a sound?" is definitely "it depends what subject you do". In physics, it's yes, because of subjective sound and objective sound. In psychology, it's no, because sound is a perceptual quality with no physical existence. But the luckiest ones are the philosophers, because they don't have to find an answer.
Did the rest of Research Methods notes and all the ones from that super-boring Clinical Lecture yesterday, so I'm all caught up apart from today's lecture. And I did this weird quiz which I think might go towards my grade for the year? I'm not sure - it was on WebCT, and it said "Plagiarism and Cheating module" and then there was a whole list of pages you had to read through with a little quiz at the end, and then it said my quiz had been sent for assessment. So I guess I'll hear about that in a few days? Or maybe not until I get results for my January exams next year? I dunno, but they haven't told us anything about it so I hope it's not vital since most people won't know to do it.
Also I've done a wee bit of work on my essay, but only insofar as deciding what serious mental health problems I want to talk about in my essay and looking on WebCT to see what references Huw used in the lectures regarding each MHP (so I can steal them). I've decided to do depression, anxiety (including OCD, phobias and PTSD), personality disorders and eating disorders. They kind of seem like four fairly major MHPs right? Obviously I can't talk about all the ones that exist but I need to focus on the main ones I think (the title is "Is there strong evidence that cognitive behaviour therapy works for serious mental health problems?")
I AM ANNOYED. Because my mum got a letter from the Driving Standards Agency today saying that my driving test has been changed from January 8th to January 11th. Which is fine, except that's the day my Easter term starts, so I kind of will be in Exeter on that day. And no one even asked me! It's a shit system they've got going on over there. So I sent them an email saying if possible I'd like to have one before the 8th rather than after if the 8th is no good, so hopefully they will say okay, here is one for the 7th, sorry.
Quite a lot of people still up for Secret Theme Santa =) but some people are worried because of money so I'm not sure how many people will actually do it... I've thought of a good few themes anyway so that's lucky, and we think we know how we're going to sort out who gets which theme without having to meet up and pick them out of a hat.

P&Ms:
James talking to me on the way out of Lafrowda: p=8, m=8 (James lives in the flat above me; he was leaving for a lecture at the same time as me and said hello and asked how things were going, so we chatted until we got to the Business School where my lecture was. He does Physics, and he's really sweet and kind of crazy, and as I found out today like Doctor Who, win. But would he have spoken to me if I'd been wearing trousers and flats as opposed to a short skirt and heels? Well, I wonder indeed).

Food:
10.30am: 2x strawberry Pop Tarts (not heated); 1.30pm: plum, packet of Hula Hoops, Vanilla Choco Balls Crunch Corner; 4.30pm: big mug of hot chocolate, four pink wafer biscuits; 8pm: bowl of Heinz Chicken and Vegetable Big Soup, small white roll

Want to eat something now but won't.
Night all xxx

I've seen a Coke advert - Christmas is coming

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:58:34 GMT

Tum ti tum, and I got back so early from table tennis too. Damn thetrainline for being so slow. I was trying to buy my train ticket home for a couple of weeks away (I'm getting the train so I can get back on a Friday, since I want to go to the Wally Christmas Fair) but in between pages it was really slow and whenever I got to the payment page it kept crashing. So I tried going back to "start again" but then when I got to the payment page my old order was still saved so I would've ended up with two tickets. So I spent ages trying to remove one (there was a button saying "Remove", so it wasn't because I'm retarded, I just have slow internet/computer) and then the payment page crashed again so I just quit it and I'll try again tomorrow.
Also I spent quite a long time sorting out my spreadsheet for my NatWest account, because I first wanted to work out my current weekly budget based on how many weeks of term there are left (since in the holidays I'll use my Abbey), and then I thought it would be fun to work out how much I could save if I only spent as much each remaining week as I have in each week so far. So then I had to work out my average weekly expenditure, and take that away from my current budget, and multiply it by the number of weeks left. And then I thought it would be fun to do that every week from now on, so I had to make loads of new columns and go through working out each column for all the weeks that have gone (because obviously there has to be continuity). And y'know, it didn't take THAT long, because I could just fill down the formulae, but it was definitely a diversion. I love spreadsheets. And yippee because currently my projected savings are about £340. Which is much better than Charlotte, who has £50 left for the two weeks until she gets some money given to her by her parents. Fail.
Stayed at Christopher's last night and thus managed to make him not go to a lecture... Although he maybe wouldn't have gone anyway, usually I make him go to lectures when he doesn't want to. So probably he wouldn't have gone anyway, the only difference being this time I didn't complain. I had meant to go to the library for the morning to look up journal articles for my Clinical essay, but I'll do that on Wednesday. Had to leave Chris's at 11 anyway because I wanted to get back and change and then get up to Devonshire House for 12 because they were meant to be selling tickets for the PsySoc and X-Eng Christmas Formal from 12-2. Funny how there's a Psychologists' and Engineers' Formal, huh? (Christopher's doing Engineering, in case it's not clear why that's funny). Anyway I waited until half twelve and no one showed up, so I left and then checked my email for the first time in a couple of days and found one saying they'd sold out so the sale was off. Glummm. Should still be able to go though as the Engineers still have tickets.
WE HAD THE MOST BORING LECTURE IN THE WORLD TODAY. It was something about... giving us awareness of what goes on in the world of therapy, or something? Some new scheme they're developing to try to help more people with therapy? I really don't know. It was one of those lectures where they turn all the lights really low and the lecturer has this really droney voice and the topic isn't very interesting so everyone's just like ...zzzz.... I can barely bring myself to look up the slides on WebCT. It'll bring back memories.
Didn't get much work done after the lecture due to trying to find an appropriate train journey for me to take and being very bad at internet. I won't go into it much; suffice to say that I got myself very confused, and was also trying to find a return journey via Redhill and Reading for Sunday night when I don't think there are any. Well, only if I wanted to go via Redhill to Victoria, then from Paddington via Reading to Exeter, but that would be ridiculous.
Christopher came over after his late lecture and ran a virus scan on my computer which was very lovely, and I have lots of cookies. We had some tasty pasta and then went off to table tennis, but we didn't run this time because he's messed up his arms from playing frisbee and they hurt a lot. He also made me try to catch a potato with my eyes closed (he found a potato on the pavement on the way back from the Impy on Friday, and it was still in his coat pocket; when I said that was gross because he found it on the ground he said "well potatoes grow in the ground" and I couldn't really argue with that). TT was good and we had another teeny training sesh, serves this time. It was cute because Heather joined in too even though she's on the committee so supposedly "good".

P&Ms:
TT: p=7, m=8 (Sarah said my serves were really good, and that I should do more backhand ones not just forehand ones, because they are equally good. But it's very hard when there's lots of people around, especially if they are behind me); Wally Christmas Presents p=8, m=9 (WOOHOO because people are saying we should do a Secret Santa, but the special kind of Secret Santa we invented where instead of having a secret person you buy a present for, everyone has a secret theme and they buy presents for everyone else based on that theme. And that's woohoo because it means I get to buy presents for everyone I emailed which is obviously what I wanted in the first place, rather than like in a conventional Secret Santa, and because I will get presents guaranteed from the others, and because I started this whole ball rolling and people are actually interested and getting involved in it. Kind of makes up for when Rosi and the others would do the theme Santa in fifth form and I wasn't a part of it).

Food:
10:45am: two pieces of white buttered toast; 1pm: Ginster's all-day breakfast sandwich (icky); 4:30pm: small mug of tea (no milk or sugar), 6-square bar of plain Dairy Milk; 7:15pm: bowl of macaroni with onion, bacon and tomato sauce (tell me a better word and I'll stop calling it a sauce Christopher) and grated cheddar cheese, glass of apple juice; 8:30pm: Kit Kat Chunky (not my choice; Christopher wanted Fruit Pastilles but accidentally pressed D6 instead of D8).

Y'day: got up earlyish and spent the morning doing work; I actually finally started the essay/discussion questions from the Haslam and McGarty book. Haha, I can't not hear that in my head in a German accent. I did three and wrote quite a big paragraph for each, so I felt kind of okay about stopping when I got to the question: "what is there to be learned from studying Psychology?" =/
Also wrote up the notes from Thursday's Clinical and Stats lectures. I love Stats, it's so simple. Partly that's why I love Thursdays, but also because they're the days when I often have tutorials and practicals so they are busy busy. Also I think yesterday was when I finished the massive five-way intersecting Su Doku that I got in the paper I found on the train from Victoria last weekend.
Kind of got distracted while doing the notes as well because I tried to do them while watching Saturday's X Factor, but that doesn't really work when both things you want to look at are on the computer so I gave up trying to multi-task in the end. And then I remembered that John Barrowman had been on Family Fortunes last weekend so I watched that too, oops. Which is why it took me basically half a day to annotate notes from two lectures, lol.
Told Christopher I would be over about 6 which meant leaving about 5.30, but then just as I was about to leave I realised if he was staying over my room would get really messy, because that's what always happens, and it was quite messy anyway, so I had a massive tidying frenzy and cleared up mostly my whole floor, apart from the stuff that stays by my bed and the bit next to the desk where bags sit. I kind of had the urge to sort out all my recycling too but I knew I didn't have time, kind of gay though since I probably won't feel like doing it again for a while. Oddly enough I still got to Christopher's at 6 even though I only left at about twenty to.
Anyway the reason I went over there was because we had planned to watch Doctor Who together, and OH MY GOD IT WAS SO GOOD!!! Like, almost good enough that you could pretend Russell hadn't been involved in it. The moments when the nuke exploded, and when the Doctor was going all evil, and then the Ood appeared, and then the trailer for the Christmas show!! Not to mention the fair scariness of the water monsters. Ruby if you're reading this you're hopefully agreeing. Then we watched the X Factor result show =( another insane result. That's the second time in a row when it's gone to Deadlock and the act which was definitely better and deserved to be there more was the one which went out. I miss Lucie. And then there was the first episode of the new series of Top Gear, which although I am a girl and not really very interested in cars (beyond my own car, because it's cute and enables me to get places, and fancy cars, because they are shiny), is a very amusing and entertaining programme.
We had planned to go to Timepiece and then stay at mine after since it's closer, but then we decided we couldn't be bothered to go to Timepiece, so we just stayed at his and had one of those amazing evenings where we laid in bed and talked about silly rubbish until we felt sleepy. We have lots of love.

Food:
10.30am: big bowl of Raisin Wheats with semi-skimmed milk; 1.30pm: TOASTED BACON SANDWICH OHH YERRR and an apple; 4.30pm: big mug of tea (no milk or sugar), four Milk Chocolate Digestives; 7pm: Sharwood's Jalfrezi chicken curry with chicken flavour packet rice; 9pm: four squares of Sainsbury's Basics Dark Chocolate

Toodlepip xxx

Sleepy beep

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 01:31:18 GMT

Graarghgbleeargh. That is how I feel.
Had a very odd sort of day in that I got up at about 1, not good, so my day's timings were all mixed up. Forgot to fill in my shopping questionnaire before I went out as I was in a hurry so I did it when I got back, which isn't really what you're supposed to do but I tried to remember as well as possible how I was feeling just before I went out, and I think I did quite well.
Got me a new umbrella so that's yay, it's black with a starry pattern. And I got some Christmas cards and a present for Verity (crazy colourful fruity bath salts) because it was Mix and Match 3 for 2 in Marks and Spencer. The Christmas cards are amazing and cute, one of them has a cartoon penguin on it and it says "have an ice Christmas"!!! LOL. Me and Christopher got distracted looking at baby clothes because we are very odd and want a tiny cute baby.
My back and shoulders are sore because I got quite a lot of shopping and had to carry it all back, and it was a bit scary because the bag handle scraped my tin cut and it bled quite a lot for quite a long time, that scary kind of blood where it comes out in big dark beads. But also I got some new Smith's narrow-ruled paper and a fabby sewing kit for 75p which had 30 assorted needles and 12 different (and, more to the point, useful) colours of thread, as well as some other random crap.
We had planned to go to the Impy so Christopher could get some more ales, so after my lovely long hot shower I waited for ages for Christopher to tell me when to arrive but he didn't, so then I tried to ring him and his phone was off. So since I was bored I decided to just go and ring his buzzer and hope that he was there and there hadn't been some kind of miscommunication. But when I got there I found out that they were going into town to where Dom was working before going back to the Impy. So my cunning plan of wearing nice heels fell down because now from walking to Chris's, then into town, then back to the Impy, then back home, my feet rather feel like they want to fall off.
Also saw G in the Impy because she was there visiting Anna and Viki. Kind of awkward since I don't really talk to any of them. And also because before they called out to me I had just been kissing Christopher quite ferociously. And they were probably there. But oh well.
Bad food day today:

Food:
2pm: two sausages, two rashers of bacon (all grilled), two eggs (scrambled); 6pm: bottle of lemon Lipton ice tea, cherry scone; 8pm: three rice crispie squares; 9pm: a chocolate and hazelnut cookie (made by Christopher and his flatmates); 11pm: packet of salt and vinegar crisps; 11.30pm: blackcurrant Sourz spritzer, several Ready Salted crisps.

You see what I mean.
Got to do lots of work tomorrow, whoop de whoop de whoop. Also must remember to watch X Factor before the results show in the evening. DOCTOR WHO IS ON TOMORROW.
Whatever was under my T key is now under my backspace key. Why can't it be under something like hash which I virtually never use?
Also when did the LJ time thing change? It used to post whatever time you started writing, but now the time changes as you write so it posts whatever time you finish. Clever.
Night night, oooh, fuzzy vision, that's fun. xxx

You broke the code

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 01:34:28 GMT

Hmm, well I'm pissed off because I've just had an email from a girl who said she would sell me a textbook saying that the book is no longer available. And, y'know, it's her book and everything, but she said "yes the book is still available, when and where would be good for you to meet me to buy the book?" and I emailed her back with a suggested time and place, waited there at the suggested place for ten minutes since I hadn't had a response from her to say whether she was coming or not, and she didn't show up. So I'm assuming she hasn't actually been as shit as to sell it to someone else; I mean it's not like we had a conract or anything but still, if you say you can give someone something you shouldn't just give it to someone else unless you can give the first person a very good reason, eg. they will kill me otherwise. So anyway I emailed her back just sort of saying, um, okay, sorry why is that exactly? So hopefully she does have a good reason. Or she might just not reply. Some people really suck.
Other reasons for being pissed off: 1) it rained in the extreme today. Like, the kind of rain where there are miniature rivers being formed along pathways and where you have to take some fairly major detours to avoid walking in puddles. And it was also windy, not quite enough for me to lean into it but enough that I felt physically propelled by it walking back from WSL. I kind of felt like I was going to die. Also I felt a bit dim because I had my umbrella with me but I couldn't use it, because if I held it at any angle other than against the wind it turned inside out, and if I held it against the wind I was in danger of being trapped inside it (since the little catch is broken so the only thing holding it open was my own strength, which isn't very super) So people probably thought I was kind of odd. 2) My T key is stuck, so I have to hit it quite hard in order to type the letter T. Which makes for some pretty odd-looking writing if I don't since T is like the second most common letter. 3) I cut both of my index fingers today. Not on purpose, mainly because I'm an idiot and a spastic. The left one was first while I was trying to separate some frozen sausages by levering them apart with a knife, and that one was sort of stabby and bled a lot and really throbs now when I move that finger. I blame the fact that Charlotte was in the room, and I hate people being in the kitchen when I'm trying to cook/prepare food. It throws me right off. Also I couldn't separate the frozen bacon slices so I will have to eat six slices of bacon in about three days max, how gay. The right index finger was more dim tbh, I was opening up one of those tinned puddings where you have to take off the top and the bottom of the tin and then push the pudding out, but I couldn't get the top part to come all the way off because my tin opener is a bit rubbish, and then when I was trying to take off the other side I sliced my finger on the edge of the lid. That one was a bit more worrying actually even though I don't think it bled as much, because when I looked at it I could see silver bits in the cut which I assume was metal. But I washed it out and put TCP on it so hopefully I won't get some kind of puddingy infection.
Reasons for being cheerful... hmm I can't think of any of those right now. Well maybe a few for the day. 1) Someone left 10p in the vending machine in WSL so I saved 10p. 2) It's the end of week 15 which means it's only five weeks until the Christmas holidays. 3) I think Jack and Matt maybe do actually sort of like me a bit. So that's nice.
Reasons for being glum: 1) I was reading my S1 notes from A level this morning and definitely found some errors in them. Also I'm not sure if the perms and coms formulae I have in there are correct. And I can't figure out how the easier formula for variance comes from the harder one; if it still applies here (and I don't see why it wouldn't) then I'll use the easier one, because it's easier. 2) One side of a disc of Friends wouldn't work in my computer so I had to skip it. 3) I would very much like a baby. And also a cat. But I can afford neither of these things. Also I'm still not ready for the whole idea of labour (labour scares me more than the idea of being a parent). But I think you kind of get mentally prepared for that only when you actually find out you're going to have a baby. 4) I miss Christopher and I wish he was here wih me. 5) I also miss my mummy, because she is crazy and my mummy.
Thought I was going to have a nice leisurely morning until my Research Methods lecture at 2 when I woke up this morning. Then at half ten when I was not yet dressed nor breakfasted I remembered that I had a tutorial at 11. But I managed to get there on time, and dudes were all in the same group as me. We were discussing key methodological concepts using various different theories in groups, and we had to consider how you would test the determinants of attractiveness in guppies. Yes that's right, those tiny little fish. Interesting? Not especially. Depression would have been a lot easier, especially the definition.
From this day forward whenever one of us does a study that has really good results it will be known as "sexy data". That's Kessler's description of data that's really cool. He is a very odd man.
Had another Biology practical today, much like the other one in that we did virtually no work and just messed about on the computer. We were doing this Iowa Gambling Task where you had to pick one out of a set of four cards and you would either win some money, or you'd win some and lose some too. It's a test they do with patients with frontal lobe damage to check their cognitive functioning, because the theory is that people with frontal lobe damage have pretty much no concept of risk or learning from mistakes. See in the task cards A and B gave high wins and C and D gave low wins, but also A and B were much more likely to give high losses and C and D not. Well, that was the aim, but sometimes D did give high losses too, and A seemed to give higher losses than B. And it depended how often you picked the card because if you picked it lots of times in a row you were more likely to get a loss than if you varied your choices. And I actually figured all this out in the task and tried to win as much as possible by not picking A at all and trying to pick C often towards the end which seemed to work very well(we were in pairs, one of us doing the task and the other scoring; Steve borrowed £4000 and won £2100. But he just picked random cards) and on my second-to-last card I had £2350 which would have pu me in profit, since I'd only borrwed £2000 which was what we started with. But then on the last card I lost £2000! So I didn't win a gummy brain sweet =(
Got quite a lot of work to do I think. But I also must do shopping so I can fill in my shopping survey and get lots of juicy credit. Mus remember to do my Post-It with my appointment listings on for next week.

P&Ms:
My mood is pretty well deconstructed above. It hasn't been a terribly pleasureable day.
Dicking around with dudes in WSL computer lab playing stupid computer games after getting soaked in the rain: p=9, m=7 (didn't fail too badly at the crazy football game, only lost like 9-6 or something so I didn't embarrass myself); Facebook message from Rhi: p=9, m=7 (but I know Rhi loves me).

Food:
10.30am: apple; 1.15pm: tuna sandwich on white bread (unbuttered), packet of plain Pombears; 3.30pm: cup of tea, white chocolate Crunch bar, two Milky Bar somethings (I don't know what they're called, but they're like white chocolate Galaxy Minstrels); 8.15pm: fish in breadcrumbs, chips (which I MADE), cauliflower, Sainsbury's Basics syrup sponge pudding.

My tummy is very uncomfortable. I want to go to sleep now, and since I have to wake up I'd like this to be one of those things where my mood changes for no reason overnight and I go to bed feeling sad and wake up feeling great.
Goodnight, peace on earth xxx

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:57:11 GMT

The getting up early went really quite well. Up at 7.30 and then tidied up some clothes just to make sure I would wake up enough not to crawl back into bed and go to sleep. Then down to business, took notes out of that book for several hourrrs. It is a very interesting book though. But it would have been much easier to photocopy it. I don't know how much photocopying costs though. And I wanted infro from like half the book so it would probably take just as long to photocopy as to just copy. I now have information on CBT in social phobia, panic disorder and agoraphobia, depressive disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder. I wanted obsessive-compulsive disorder too but that chaper was soooo long I didn't fancy trying to do that. I'll do it if I can get the book out again before I have to hand the essay in. Also the personality disorders. And the eating disorders, and the abuse, and the aggression, and the psychosis... Yes, I like fucked up people, they are interesting and easy for me to understand.
I returned the book and it was weird because you put it on this little conveyer belt thing and it gets taken off back into a little room to be sorted, very weird. Whatever happened to just going into the library and saying "hello, I borrowed this book, here you can have it back now"? Just put a reserve on it so I should get it back again in a couple of weeks and then I can look at some more stuff.
We learnt about normal distributions today (bell curve and that) and a very rough way of finding out if something has a normal distribution. Also we did standard deviation and a stupid easy test called a z-test which you use when you only have one participant with one data point. But I'm not sure about that test because we used it to decide that a man with an IQ of 85 after a stroke had not necessarily been significantly brain damaged. But what if he was like a super genius before? Then it would be extremely significant brain damage. And he'd be really sad to think that his IQ was now ridiculously low but nobody minded. Also I haaaate my rubbish non-scientific calculator with its lack of fractions and brackets.
Also some crazy crap about PTSD. But it was a very odd lecture, Huw wasn't very on form. I don't really remember that I learnt very much.
Wow, I was just replying to loads of emails in my Exeter inbox, and I typed my name so many times it started to look odd. I'm used to that happening with words, but not my name. I now have another hour experiment lined up plus the Words and Faces one I did before is being repeated so I'll get another 1.5 for that, and I have the 1.5 lined up for the shopping study which is another 4 hours' credit which brings my definite total for this term to at least 9.75!! Out of 10. And it's still a little over a month until we break up so I still have plenty of time to find myself another 0.25 credits! Haha I'm so full of win right now.
It was very rainy today which is sad as I made a poor choice of trousers and of shoes (trousers too long and big so they dragged on the ground and got VERY wet, shoes made of kind of suedey material) and I had no umbrella because the one I brought is broken and I keep forgetting to bring my other one from home. And I'm too cheap to buy a new one.
Also I found some of my plates in the sink today which is very odd since I never put them in the sink. So either someone used them, or moved them. Both are very not acceptable.
Been at a pub quiz this evening, it was a PsySoc social (I reeeally want some PsySocks now...) and I took Christopher along so he met Steve et al. (look at me goooo Psychology peeps). It was a vair good quiz actually, we came joint second and missed first by like four points or something which is RIDICULOUS because we were amazing. And there was no second or third prize so we got nada. Very glum.
Time for sleeps now, up early because apparently there's some crazy penny sale at M&S. And then I have a Research Methods tutorial at 11, snore. Wtf happens in a Research Methods tutorial? I'm suspicious of them, because we only have two whereas in all the other modules we have three. And I have a practical tomorrow, very dull dishwater.

P&Ms:
None that I can think of particularly... I feel agreeable currently. Not super happy, but not despairing. Just pretty okay =)

Food:
8am: rather large bowl of Raisin Wheats with semi-skimmed milk; 12.15pm: small amount of reheated rice and peas, apple; 2.15pm: Yorkie bar; 5.30pm: fish finger sandwich, cherry scone, glass of Dr Pepper; 8pm-10pm (ish): 2x vodka and Coke.

Baaaa-ye (that's what sheep say) xxx

Wherefore art thou Nerdosaurus?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 00:19:12 GMT

Hmm, something is wrong with me because I'm waking up sooo super tired. So something bad is happening to me as I dream.
Had another doze/nap this morning after I woke up so got up at 10 instead of 8.30 but I felt much better after it. I'd planned to do some laundry but then had no change so couldn't do that. But I sorted all my washing and left it out to remind me to do it. Then started making some notes out of this book I have to return tomorrow (I got out four books last Thursday, three long loan which I have until December 3rd and one short loan which I had for a week. And which one did I decide to take home with me to read at the weekend? Not the short loan one, no way, that would have been too smart) and found it's actually really interesting so I'll have to check it out again sometime for a gander at the bits I won't get to read. Probably a useful book if I decide to go into therapy too so might buy it if I can get it quite cheap from Amazon.
Had a wee talk to go to at 12 and I got some research participation signed off beforehand so now I have 5.75 hours signed off. And I got the questionnaires for a shopping study where I have to fill in a mood questionnaire before each of my next ten food shopping trips and they're gonna see how my mood affects my shopping, or I guess that's what they're doing anyway. And I get 1.5 credits for that so that's 7.25 credits. And if I can get three more experiments in within the next six weeks of term then that'll be about another three hours and then I'll have my whole required ten hours done within the first term (we have to hand in the sheet by April). So then I can do more studies next term but get paid for them, win. Or I can do studies which only offer course credit just for fun and because apparently it improves your chances of doing well in the module if you do more than 10 hours.
Anyway the talk I went to was kind of interesting but also very disheartening as it was an "effective application form" talk and I realised I have done precisely nothing worth note outside of my studies in my life. Or not that I can think of anyway, but then I have problems with self-belief. So I decided I'm definitely going to try to start a chess club. But I'm not sure how you go about starting a club so I need to find out. I believe it involves some kind of market research to find out how many people would be interested in the club, before they actually let you start one. En masse email here I come...
So then I went to the Keystore for some food and dutifully completed the first mood questionnaire for the shopping survery. And I got a £2 as part of my change which was also super since the washing machine costs £2. Sadly I could get no chicken in the Keystore but I got pretty much everything else, including a big bottle of Dr Pepper and some Oxo cubes so now I can have onion gravy with my leftover onions, woot. However all my food officially does not fit in my cupboard. It's decidedly insane to have cereal/canned foods/spreads/pasta/rice/drinks and cling film/tinfoil/freezer bags/kitchen towels/oven gloves all in the same cupboard. I NEED MY OWN FUCKING KITCHEN. Why do I always want to grow up more than I can?
Anyhoo then got all the laundry done, weirdly I hadn't checked the time I started it but I guessed when it would finish and I arrived back at the laundry room like ten seconds before it finished. Got lots of trousers hanging up in my room now. I wonder how much it costs for alterations? Hopefully not too much since at least three pairs need altering, probably more since I think all my seven pairs of trousers are too long. Damn my short legs.
Pootled over to Christopher's in the afternoon and we both did work - we could have worked better separately I suppose (well not suppose, there was definite occurrence of distraction) but I missed him, and thought if we both needed to work we could do it in the same room, why not? *Dr Zoidberg voice* Ended up staying there for ages, well into the evening, but got quite a few notes done. I swear if somone had explained to me about this whole referencing malarkey before I applied for Psychology I would've done Latin instead. Much easier. All your references come out of the dictionary. I've done two chapters of the book and there's about eight more I'd like to look at, but could cut it down to three or so maybe. It's all so interesting though!
I realised I have soooo much to do. It's quite scary. So I wrote it down in a list and now I'm trying not to think about it all at once, just take it a bit at a time. Otherwise I will panic. And we don't want that.

P&Ms:
Remembering the way to David Crelley's office: p=7, m=8 (WSL be CRAZY - I swear it's like The Burrow or Hogwarts or somewhere, in that parts of it exist which don't seem to be achitecturally possible); application form talk: p=4, m=2 (you get that); actually starting notes for my essay and writing down references as I go: p=5, m=7 (kind of fun, but not the MOST fun thing ever); Facebook comment from Gem ("hellooooo i missed you at the weekend! when are you next back? xxx") p=9, m=8 (I was missed? By someone I actually like? I feel validated by that); talking to Bender on chat: p=7, m=7 ('cause I like Bender and it's cool when people actually talk to you on Facebook chat).

Food:
10.15am: 2 chocolate Pop Tarts (cold); 2pm: toasted cheese sandwich (white bread), glass of Dr Pepper; 8.30pm: 7 Maryland chocolate chip cookies; 9pm: cottage pie (from the Esso garage, microwaved), small chunk of hot dog pizza (as opposed to pizza hot dog - ahh, memories of Amsterdam); 9.30pm: Big Green Triangle

All of that stuff in the evening was eaten with the knowledge and acceptance of Christopher. He also ate seven cookies (in fact, he had 7.5 and I had 6.5) and a big green triangle and the rest of that pizza. I resist any criticism of our actions.
I need to eat the end of my first pack of Raisin Wheats tomorrow morning so I can put this other box in my cupboard. It's been sitting around for days.
Alarm at 7 tomorrow I think. Got to get up a bit earlier now if I want to get all this shit done. All work and no play makes Ashley very dull, therefore time management is essential.
Ta-ra-ra-boom-di-ay xxx

Ride the wave

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 23:38:26 GMT

Soooo here's the weekend:

Saturday Got up at 7.30 to get ready so I could go and get the bus back to London. I'm not sure what happened because I'm sure last time I got up at 7.30 and I had plenty of time, too much time in fact, but this time I was really rushed, so I only got to the coach station at about 5 past 9. Most of the seats were full up so I was in a really bad spot, on the right hand side and right at the back. Sat near a guy who's an Exeter student though - I could tell from the EURTC trousers he was wearing.
I finished Sophie's World during the journey (finally, after having started it about six times). Got a bit philosophical myself thinking about the meaning of life and so on. Then I read the Appendix B that we had to read as follow-up to the past two Research Methods lectures. I don't know if it was due to tiredness from late nights on Wednesday and Friday and getting up early or what, but I had to struggle to keep myself awake. The Appendix was about writing reports and essays in psychology so it wasn't the most scintillating thing in the world, especially since we'd already been told how to do that in the lectures. So I had a bit of a doze after that and then ate some lunch since we were getting into London. Found my roll was a bit mouldy though... Also for the first time in absolutely ages I listened to Avril Lavigne's first album, which I got for my twelfth birthday! Unbelieveable. I'd forgotten how brilliant it is.
Got to Victoria in plenty of time for my train and even with time to spare to go to Smith's to get a card for my mum to give to my dad this Friday, but then spent about 15 minutes in the queue for the ticket machine because some stupid dude couldn't understand how to use it, or something. Eventually a train man came and told him that the machines don't take fifties, and he said "but that's all I have". Jammy bastard.
Found a big puzzle section from a paper on the train so I stole that and did it on the journey. I'm not sure but I think there was some kind of creepy paedophile man behind me because he started talking to this little boy about whether he liked racing cars and showed him a picture of Lewis Hamilton, and then the boy's mum said "thank you very much" and like dragged her son off. It was all very odd. My dad met me on the platform since the barriers were open and held out his arms like he expected me to go running into them - like I would do that at my age! He was just joking though. He gave me the tag he got engraved for Hugs so now at least if he gets lost again someone will be able to ring us if they find him.
Didn't meet Rhi in the end which was really sad as her car died and she couldn't get to Tonbridge. But I did get a chance to go driving with my mum so that was good. We went up to Sevenoaks again and I did a reverse park which was okay, although it needed a bit of correcting. I did stall twice this time though which was kind of sad. We got really confused as well because I hadn't turned back the clock in my car so we thought we'd been out for ages and I'd have to rush to get ready to leave for fireworks at 7, but actually when we got back it was 20 to 6 not 20 to 7 lol.
It was sooooo nice to see some Wallies again! I met Stacey and Ellie in Bligh's carpark and we went to watch the Sevenoaks School fireworks (but we didn't go in - they cost £8!) We saw so many people from Wally, especially year below people, and they all sort of looked at us funny like they thought they knew who we were but couldn't quite figure out why we were there. Then we met up with Nat and the four of us went to Spoons; Kaz, Anna, Viki, G and Harriet were in Spoons too but they were with some random guys and we didn't sit with them so it was a bit awkard. It was interesting to hear Ellie and Nat's different perspectives on uni (Stacey's having a gap year). Ellie seems to be really loving it and having an absolute blast, but Nat seemed more like me and was a bit more meh about it all. I think it does make a lot of difference if you really like the people you live with as Ellie does. It's quite depressing knowing that you have to come home each night to a place and people you don't really care either way about.
We went to Spoons in Tunbridge Wells for a bit after that since Kaz invited everyone to go clubbing but I was getting pretty tired so I only stayed in TWells for a bit and my dad picked me up at 12. But then I chatted to my mum for a while when I got in, which was nice, and also gave my room a chance to heat up since I'd switched my radiator off when I was away and it was freeeezing.

P&Ms:
Seeing Wallies: p=7, m=4 (it was nice to see them but it seemed like we were all aware of how separate we are now, we've moved on from each other and are leading separate lives. Also it reminded me how I really don't fit with them).

Food:
8.30am: cheese, onion and potato pasty (not really breakfast food I know but it would've gone off over the weekend otherwise); 10.30am: apple; 12.30pm: ham roll, packet of plain Hula Hoops, a few strawberries, piece of strawberry bubble gum; 3.30pm: cherry scone, rice crispie square; 6.45pm: veggie burger, cauliflower cheese burger; 8pm-11pm: four glasses of cocktails

Sunday Had a lie in and then washed my hair, in my own shower! Actually I prefer our shower at uni because our one at home can't make up its mind what temperature the water should be, but it was good to have all the other bathroom stuff around and not have to bring my towel and shampoo out of the room with me afterwards (I did leave my shower gel though, gayyy). It was funny because after using my deodorant I put it back where it normally goes when I'm at home, even though I knew I had to take it and put it in my bag again. I should get my dad to get me deodorant for home so I don't have to bring it; anything I can leave here will save space at the end of term when he comes to pick me and Chris up for Christmas. I asked him if he wanted to come on Saturday or Friday (we break up on Friday) and he was like ooooh I'll come on Friday! Bless.
Kicked back with the X Factor my mum taped on Saturday night (CUMMONNNNN STACEY SOLOMON) and then was flicking through the channels afterwards and Back to the Future 2 had just started so that was awesome. My dad arrived for his birthday tea and opened his cards and present - he made me write in his book like he always does for me lol. We had some yummy tiny sandwiches composited of cheese, ham, tomato and pickle and he bought 3 different kinds of cake =O is it any wonder I have such troubles?
Had a bit of a mad rush to leave because I hadn't packed up my rucksack and I hadn't printed off the sheets I needed for my Clinical Tutorial and they took ages to load, and then after I'd closed it down I realised the first page hadn't printed so I had to start it all up again, so after planning to leave at 5 we didn't leave until quarter past which didn't leave us much time for me to get to Orpington to get the 38 train. We would have made it with the speeds my dad was driving at, except we lost five minutes because I thought I'd forgotten my uni keys so we went back for them, and then I found I'd just put them in the wrong place in my bag. FAIL.
So I missed the train I wanted to get and sat at Orpington with my dad for half an hour (which was nice as at least I got to say goodbye to him properly, unlike with my mummy) and then had exactly the same panic as last time that I might miss my bus. So when I got off the train at Victoria I sped off towards the coach station, and when I got there it was still only 10 to 7 so I went over to where the coach had left from last time and couldn't see it, so I asked a man and he said he didn't know where it was if it wasn't there. So I asked a woman at the Megabus desk which gate it was to leave from and she said Gate 19, which was where I'd looked, only it wasn't there. So then I was a bit panicky that it had somehow already left, but then I went into the waiting area and it said on a big screen that the Exeter bus was delayed. So after all my rush the bus was delayed anyhow! And lucky I hadn't got the earlier train or I'd have been sitting waiting for even longer. They said there had been a burst water pipe when the bus was leaving Exeter which had delayed its departure, and the new departure time was 8.30 =( which meant it wouldn't get to Exeter until about half past midnight, instead of eleven. So I rang my mummy since I hadn't been able to say goodbye properly and to apologise since she knelt on the needle I used to sew the collar for Hugsbear's tag earlier =(. Also met another first year Exeter student who's on St Luke's Campus but doing Biology. Didn't find out his name though, we only chatted briefly and I don't know that he'd remember me if I saw him around, unless like me he's freakishly good with faces.
Read the start of the Introduction to CBT book on the coach, and entertained a baby who wanted to grab at my book (babies are actually quite strong when they grab hold of your finger), and listened to the Sweeney Todd soundtrack. I need to watch that film again soon. We actually got to Exeter at 12 but I'd told Chris to meet me at half twelve and my phone had died. There was a payphone but he lives about half an hour away so he would've been leaving as I called him anyway. So I sat in the waiting room looking at the pattern on my rucksack and really needing the loo, until lovely Christopher arrived and we went back to mine. And he had bought my a MO toy XD (MO is the little OCD cleaning robot from WALL-E who goes "foreign contaminant!" and frantically scrubs stuff).

P&Ms:
being late leaving: p=0, m=0 (I hate leaving in a panic and a rush and as always happens when you leave in a panic and a rush I forgot things); playing with baby: p=8, m=5 (haha I want a baby - but not really right now so please don't give me one yet!) phone dying: p=2, m=2 (because I knew I should have turned it off to save battery, but for some reason I give myself very good advice but I very seldom follow it).

Food:
12 noon: 2 bowls of Crunchy Nut Cornflakes; 3pm: packet of plain Pombears, two pieces of strawberry bubblegum; 4pm: assorted mini sandwiches (about 2 whole sandwiches' worth), three slices of cake (Battenburg, Manor House, Victoria Sponge); 8.30pm: row of Divine Milk Chocolate. As you can see, being home does nothing for my eating regulation.
Today I woke up feeling oddly shit and tired and so I reset my alarm for ten, and then following that for eleven. I probably would have carried on sleeping but I had a research participation session at 12 so I had to get up. I have no idea what happened to make me so depressed. I can only surmise it might be leftover sleep deprivation from the weekend, possibly too much salt and not enough water from Domino's Pizza last night, or maybe I just had a really rubbish dream that I don't remember.
Anyway it kind of helped with the study anyway because they were trying to find out how your mood affected your performance on a meory task. Basically there were two groups of depressed people, and one group was asked to focus on themselves and their feelings and then perform the task while thinking about that, and the other group did the same but focusing on thought about the outside world and surrounding environment. The memory task was to look at two groups of words each containing three words, one group in red and one in blue, and then a coloured box with a word in would come up and you had to say whether the word in the box was a word you'd just seen in the colour that matched the colour of the box (so, if a red box came up and the word in it was one that was just in the red group, you say yes, and if it was in the blue group or was just a random word you say no). The theory is that if you're feeling depressed you're more likely to answer yes to negative words even if you haven't just seen them. So me feeling shit was quite useful since I didn't have to take much effort in maintaining the negative mood they tried to induce in me by having me focus on myself. However it still didn't really work since I'm very good at remembering words and when I'm doing something like that I don't tend to think about how I feel, I just think about the task.
Finally finished the Biology notes, well I have to write a tiny definition for the horopter but I have my epic dictionary for that. Just in time for the final visual perception lecture which was on colour. And of course for those who did Physics and Chemistry A Levels colour is old school. Went back to Birks for a bit afterwards and watched some Family Guy with the dudes, but then they all had to go for dinner (losers who don't cook) so I came back to campus. Washed my hair and tidied up all the clothes that were dumped in front of my wardrobe. I really need to remove all the recycling from my room, it's beginning to pile up quite considerably. Made some sweet and sour pork (with the scary raw pork) with rice and peas, except I did too much rice and peas so I will have to eat that tomorrow. Reminds me, I still need to put that in the fridge. Chatted for a bit to Ellena and Matt Polydor on the Facebooks, me and Matt are semi-driving test buddies since his is in December. Nice to have a driving test buddy since Hannah went and passed her test the second time. Fuck Debbie. Yes I'm still annoyed about that.

P&Ms:
sleeping too much: p=6, m=3 (lovely sleep, but I really shouldn't need it and should be able to make myself get up even when I don't want to); sitting with the dudes in the lecture: p=8, m=6 (no no get this, they called out to me to get my attention when we were waiting to get into the lecture room. Therefore, they actually want to hang out with me XD however I felt kind of gay that I went to sit with them at the back even though I prefer to sit at the front. But making friends is hard. Once the friendship is solidified then I can be a nerdy loner); cooking sweet and sour: p=7, m=7 (first time I've ever cooked raw meat! I know I know, that's insane. There was a bit too much meat though, I don't like a lot of meat. And too much rice, obviously. But everything ended up cooked at the same time so yay).

Food:
8.45am: toasted stale roll with butter and peanut butter; 11am: glass of apple juice; 1.30pm: two slices of reheated Domino's veggie pizza; 4.30-5.30pm: assorted biscuits (in total I believe 7 - snacking, v. bad.); 8pm: sweet and sour pork with rice and peas, rest of bar of Divine Milk Chocolate.

And so to bed. Fare thee well xxx