Life Before Death

I’m suffering a severe case of chronotype discrimination. I just missed the third lecture in a row on the course I’m currently taking because, for some reason, they’ve seen fit to schedule all the lectures at 9am. Now, I live one hour’s subway ride (plus a ten minute brisk walk) from the university and for me, getting up before 10:30 in the morning is hell. Hell, I tell you. So you can imagine getting to these lectures is … a little bit difficult, to say the least.

Why is it that our whole society is scheduled around morning people? If I get up at seven in the morning to go to a lecture, not only is it impossible to stay fully awake for the three hours they normally take, but the rest of my day has been ruined. There may be about two hours worth of productivity left in me by the time I get home - if I’m lucky. As you no doubt have already surmised, three plus two hours does not equal a full day’s work. If I’m unlucky, I decide to nap, and then the evening is definitely ruined.

What’s worse, I recently discussed this with a fellow evening type, and he seemed to be of the opinion that we should just suck it up and deal with it. Why? I don’t get it. The scientific literature suggests we may be genetically disposed to have our sleep-cycle and productive peak later than other people. Why should we have to suffer? Would morning people suffer the same as we do if we had the lectures start at sometime between 11 and 14? I doubt it. Morning people suffer from evening lectures, evening people suffer from morning lectures, so the obvious solution that would make everyone happy is to have the lectures in the middle of the day.

I don’t want to miss lectures. It makes me upset because I feel like I’m a bad person who can’t keep appointments, it makes me fall behind in the course because I don’t know what information the teachers consider vital and hence have to flounder blindly through the literature, and it makes me lonely because I miss out on a lot of chances to socialise with my classmates. But when the alarm went off at seven this morning, I had had a shitty night’s sleep - yesterday I got up at noon, so how was I supposed to be able to sleep at midnight? - and getting up was simply out of the question.

And not even Sweden has an Ombudsman against discrimination of chronotypes.

chronotypes, evening people, b-types

Scarab is the name I’ve given my very newly acquired laptop. It (I’m still not entirely certain whether it’s a boy or a girl laptop) arrived today in a drab brown box belying the sleek shining treasure hiding inside… Ok so I’m a little bit infatuated with this pretty piece of technology. Who could blame me? Gadgets are a girl’s best friends, don’t you know?

Scarab is a HP Pavilion dv5-1090. If anyone has anything against this particular laptop brand or model, please don’t tell me, because let’s face it - I won’t listen anyway. Scarab will be my constant companion at lectures and seminars and, well, probably pretty much whenever I leave my apartment for an extended period of time. The name was chosen because of the beautiful, shiny black design which immediately reminded me of a beetle.

Now of course this doesn’t mean I’ll abandon Volyova, my trusty gaming rig (named after a character in a scifi trilogy - brownie points to those who can name which one). In fact, it’ll simply mean I can be online and game at the same time without having to alt-tab! *swoon* I’m so happy I could die. This is almost better than Ben & Jerry’s Cheescake Brownie icecream.

No mocking! If you mock me there shall be dire repercussions such as you could never even imagine.

laptops, hp pavilion dv5

My previous blog design was starting to really get on my nerves, for some reason. So until I’ve made a new one, this one will have to do (it’s one of the themes that come with blogsome). Sorry about the lack of greenery and bees; I’m sure they’ll show up in the new design in some form or another.

Go look.

Now!

What are you still doing here? There’s even a kitty! (And a cricket.)

typewriters, art

The other day I got a letter from my summer workplace. The street address was correct, but it was lacking a zip code, and apparently, according to them, I don’t live in Sweden.

Thankfully the good people at the Swedish postal service figured out that a street address containing “-vägen” (-road) probably wasn’t situated in Afghanistan at all.

I’ve had a bit of a weird summer. I could go through all the reasons why I haven’t blogged but seriously, who cares? I still do want to blog though. I have, however, come to realise that if I’m to be able to stay interested in this thing, it’s going to have to become a bit … broader. It must, in fact, be allowed to include ALL of my Life - not just science and secularism.

Well ok, not all of my life. The Doctor wouldn’t appreciate me babbling There are some things the world simply isn’t ready to know. But expect posts on a broader variety of topics in the future. Also expect there to be short posts, and irregular posting. In fact, expect this blog to behave exactly the way it should NOT behave if I were aiming for a lot of readers.

Revamping of the layout will probably happen sometime soon. I can never resist an excuse to redecorate my virtual world.

See you around…

Because I seem to be suffering from an over-all writer’s block, and to make up for the missing Friday Pics, here is a cavalcade of photos that illustrate what sort of things have been taking up my spare time this spring.

Tiny tiny chickens:

Stockholm and beautiful spring weather:

Mountains of beekeeping supplies needing attention:

Planting of interesting varieties of elderberry and discovering beautiful critters:

The first true democratic assembly of the Swedish Humanist Youth Organisation:

Flowers and bees:

Please don’t give up on me. Next week I’m going to the World Humanist Congress in Washington D.C. That should yield some interesting blog topics and release me from my writer’s block!

bees, beekeeping, chickens, humanism, stockholm

Apologies about the unannounced hiatus. Blogging will resume shortly.

Carnival of the Godless will be hosted here in a couple of weeks. Send in your submissions!

I’ve been browsing Mojoey’s Atheist Blogroll lately, looking for new interesting blogs, and found myself tagged by Disgusted Beyond Belief.

The meme goes like this:
1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the 5th Sentence.
4. Post the next 3 sentences.
5. Tag 5 people.

So here we go:

October 3rd and 4th - I was confined for these two days to my bed by a headache. A good-natured old woman, who attended me, wished me to try many odd remedies. A common practice is, to bind an orange-leaf or a bit of black plaster to each temple: and a still more general plan is, to split a bean into halves, moisten them, and place one on each temple, where they will easily adhere.

From my post yesterday you should be able to figure out which book this comes from!

Like DBB, I’m not very good at tagging, so I shall simply repeat what I read there: “Consider yourself tagged if you read this.”