Thursday, June 01, 2006

My latest distractions

My username on MSN informs the world that I am officially 'busy until June 16th'; I have stayed in recently on many evenings I could have gone out; I've missed out on rowing in order to hurry back to my computer. In theory, I'm eagerly working away on my dissertation - in fact, by now I am supposed to have a complete rough draft ready to email to tutor. Half of it still remains to be written, however, and this is entirely due to the latest distractions I have discovered.
First of all, I stumbled across a website called YouTube - never mind the home videos people have uploaded, I'm more interested in searching for episodes of Seinfeld and Scrubs to get me through the day. When I feel that I should at least pretend to use my brain at some point, I switch across to online Sudoku (dammit, I'm determined to complete one of the 'evil' level ones). After frustrating myself completely with this, I move over to the latest rapidly developing addiction, and probably the most 'dangerous' of them all.
Online poker.
My heartfelt curses go out to a certain Swede for introducing me to this concept, and for telling me about the site which gives you - no questions asked - $10 to start you off. As someone who just about understands the rudiments of poker, I make a few completely stupid moves on occasion and then follow them up with the perfect hand and up goes my overall balance once more. The problem is that I can feel myself learning the rules as I go along and 'getting the idea', and indeed improving my playing. Which, if I'm not careful, is going to lead to me just adding A Few Pounds to my poker account from what is a very real bank balance and becoming firmly lost in that world.
Having a seriously addictive personality does have its advantages. It means that once I get started on this damn essay, I'll sit there until it is done, and done properly. Which means it'll just take me a good chunk of a day to finish - BUT, I know perfectly well that once I start I really will get firmly stuck into it. And I can't face the idea of staring at an MS Word document, checking that word count every two minutes.
Right, I'm going to read through my notes one more time, try and gather some focus - and it if hasn't happened after ten minutes then I'll give in and watch a few more Seinfeld episodes. Curses to this technological age and the uber-fast internet provided by the university. One feels obliged to make use of the awesome 100Mbps speed.

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