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October 17th, 2002
12:27 am - That was quick
I just came back from London, where I met with friends. Arriving at Reading I found my bicycle had been stolen. I stood at the car park for a few seconds, letting this in, looking at other bicycles that were there and different places where I might have parked my bike, but of course I
knew I was not forgetful, it really was stolen.
Briefly I felt angry for the theft, and for not having noted the frame number, and for not having insured the bike. But though I bought it knowing it's quite likely that it will be stolen, I judged it's not worth insuring something so cheap. Of course I wasn't planning on this happening so soon. Well, tomorrow I won't have time, but on Friday I'm likely to go to town to buy another bike. Since a hundred pounds for two weeks of bikehoodness is a bit expensive, I'll either buy a real cheapo second-hand pair, or something actually more expensive, but that (a) has shock absorbers and (b) I won't feel silly insuring.
This is annoying, I suppose, but I'm strangely not aggravated. If it had to happen sometime this week, it happened at the best possible time. I don't have bags full of groceries to carry home, I'm not late for a lecture, and it isn't raining. In fact, before I left for London it looked like it'll be very cold tonight so I wore warm clothes, and now the walk home was no suffering.
Tomorrow I'm giving a talk for our MA seminar, on ethics and literature. I don't quite know how I volunteered to be first, but I'm not too worried about how it turns out. I've no idea what kind of talks are normal for this forum, so I'm pretty much giving my common sense free reign. It's a nice chance to present to a sympathetic audience of peers a topic, problem, issue that's been on my mind, and that does require some setup.
Still no Internet in my room. That makes for lousy LJ updates, and I'm sorry for that, but I know enough of myself to tell I just can't do more than X "administrative" things such as compare and pick an ISP in a given period of time. I also want to get a mobile, so that I can play around with SMS. Also also, to everybody misses me on IM--I miss you too! I was able to go online once or twice here, but it appears the services are blocked again, so we should just fall back to email.
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09:16 pm - Things
The talk went well. I was sorta worried it might not do because they might expect a clearly stated thesis, or it to be given from a written script, neither of which I had. But I presented my stuff with a whiteboard, two slides, and a bullet-list for myself, and despite one hiccup in the middle where I did something out of order and afterwards had to do a weird jump back that I could see people had a difficulty following, the discussion afterwards was very good and people asked me some questions that made me clarify things that I hadn't really been rigorous about before. I also came out a bit feisty, 'specially on the subject of politicians, politics and ethics. But I was so invigorated by the talk that I came home in a very good mood, and then wrote everybody ( a follow-up email ).
It's not often that I have this positive energy and that I can maintain it for long. Then I learned that the brother of a friend of mine, whom I never knew very well, had killed himself a few days ago. That slowed me down a bit.
Current Mood: swinging
Current Music: David Bowie - Diamond Dogs
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