This evening, my school has organised a “formal” for the year 10s and 11s. I foolishly agreed to attend this “formal” when the organisers were desperately trying to get the numbers. I promised umpteen times that I would go, I paid the deposit, I even collected the ticket (yes, without paying for it in full. I wasn’t going to complain about saving $20 now, was I?). Unfortunately, I neglected to do one thing. I neglected to buy a dress.
I have mentioned before the extent to which I really hate clothes shopping. That’s because I do. I loathe it. It’s horrible. It’s almost as bad as shoe shopping. For that reason, I procrastinated on buying a dress. It was in the back of my mind — “Hey, I really should get one of those dress things soon…” — but I couldn’t bring myself to actually go and get one.
It was yesterday I realised that the situation had turned into an emergency. Read More »
I have to admit that I find it mildly disconcerting when my laptop starts acting of its own accord.
See, I am a bad person and I usually leave my laptop on overnight, despite all the carbon emissions I’m sure this creates. I do put it to sleep before going to bed, but still. It’s on. Perhaps this disruption to my sleep is karma’s way of saying, “Fight global warming, dammit!” Read More »
A good citizen writer will put down her pen for a noodle pudding.
— A NaNoWriMo “pep talk”. With that said: You know what, NaNoWriMo? Keep sending me stupid “pep talks” like that and I am not participating in your event again. I mean, what does that even MEAN? Good citizens eat noodle pudding? Don’t they get a choice of what to eat? What’s so great about noodle puddings?!
Early in October, I mentioned in an entry here that I was participating in NaNoWriMo again this year. For those who missed that entry, NaNoWriMo is an annual event in which thousands of people, all over the world, buckle down and write a 50,000 word novel over the course of November. I’ve participated every year since 2005, and today I notched up my third victory.
It’s been more difficult than the past three years1, because I’ve had a lot of other things to do. Preparation for my International Studies exam was always going to take precedence, for example. I barely wrote at all during the school week — only a couple of hundred words here and there — because school took up a lot of my time. The only reason I’ve been able to win this year at all is because I wrote 20,000 words in the first four days of the event2. I did so deliberately, to ensure that I could neglect writing for a couple of weeks without losing. And hey, it paid off, didn’t it?
So today I crossed the 50,000 word mark, and it seems as good a place as any to stop and explain what I’m writing. Read More »
Apparently, in some provinces of South Africa, people who suffer tuberculosis can be legally detained to prevent them posing a threat to public health.
Not all tuberculosis sufferers, of course: only those with the “extensively drug resistant” strain, or XDR-TB. This strain of tuberculosis is resistant to almost every drug available to treat it. Like every other strain of tuberculosis, it also spreads through the air, when people cough and sneeze. It’s highly contagious. It would be difficult to say you wanted sufferers loose in the community. Read More »