You're Giving Me Capt. Archer? Really?

Sometimes when thinking about certain situations, people envisage a number of different scenarios - generally along the lines of the best, or at least most preferable, one; the good, or at least acceptable, one; and the one which would be bearable if absolutely necessary. In this instance:

• To never have existed;
• To die;
• To have some use in the world and enough health/strength to see it through.

The problem is that one so often falls short of their own imaginings, even those they feel are conservative.

It's like needing someone to command the Enterprise: you're thinking Patrick Stewart, Bill Shatner, or maybe, at a push, Alan Ruck, but then you get stuck with Scott Bakula.

Of course, the first case is clearly impossible, but neither of the others are intractable problems, were I not so weak (even ignoring the physical weaknesses the solutions to which are largely in the hands of others at the moment). How often is it said that getting something done, particularly curing oneself of a mental illness, is simply dependent on really wanting it and deciding to make it happen? Motivation is surely a key, but I don't think it is purely will, I think it is the strength of character driving the will. I don't mean strength in the sense of depth of yearning, but more fundamentally, the ability to put such yearning into action. It is an ability, like painting or composing, which is not always available to whoever wants it. Yes some abilities can be taught, to a point, but can they all, to all people? Can a deaf man hear, just because he really wants to?

I am not just weak, I am weak minded. I mean, both ends of the life spectrum are on my list: oblivion or useful existence, and presumably I could make either happen - I'd love to in fact - but my mental feebleness and pervading cowardice leave me stewing.

I wonder occasionally, if God's idea of 7 days is 14 billion years, then surely the 28 day warranty on this life he gave me must still be intact. D'you think he does refunds?

So, While I've Been Studying...

... my brother and his mates have been doing this:

Crazy Music Happenings Resulting In "Existence Zero: Definitions of a Heresy"

Apparently, it's classed as Cosmic War Metal (generally in all caps, but I'm not really as shout-y as metal-heads), and as much as it's not my brother's usual creative style, it's not my primary go to genre for listening. However, it's the sort of music to play during global war, and when I'm revising that's what my head thinks is happening, so last week was a convenient release date in that I was in the right mindset to receive it and give it a hearing.

Without experience of metal in general, I can't really compare it objectively on the basis on conformity to musical convention, but from an outsider's perspective it seems pretty good. Although there is an overall theme and consistency of style, there is enough of a melodic, rhythmic and temporal range across the record which creates an entry point for a variety of listeners depending on their metal pedigree or tastes. For myself, I have discovered that vocals aren't really my cup of cha in this area, but the examples here seem well produced for those for whom this is not the case, and, since the record is not too vocal-heavy, this did not detract significantly from the listening experience.

I will probably listen again properly when my exams are over, to give a more detailed review, and perhaps to see if the lack of stress alters my perceptions, but for now, I recommend a listen and would have to say it is the best cosmic war metal EP I've heard, although it may help to know that this is the only cosmic war metal EP I've heard...

Life, The Universe and Everything (Well, Google, but that's close, right?)

Life,

Apparently I have been wandering around since New Year with 'flu. It seems to have gone now: exchange program with the common cold. My blood test also showed virtually no vitamin D or folate registering in my system at all. This is considered a bad thing, thus, more pills, and food.

Now, I have been trying for a couple of months to eat everyday, but I'm not a fan. It's like the effort it takes to eat outweighs the energy I receive. This standard of diminishing returns feels pointless, as does the time it all takes. However, it seems imperative to keep up the whole eating lark for the time-being, so I hope I adjust soon.

The Univers(ity)

The end of my time in Bristol is approaching at what feels like an accelerated rate. I have roughly updated my Uni blog with what's happening, but it hard to do since I haven't been with it for a while now. Unfortunately, this not only impedes my ability to discuss work, it also disrupts the work itself. Therefore, I have made the decision (probably a few weeks late) to take a couple of days off in an attempt to let both my body and mind recuperate a little so that I am in a somewhat better state to complete the necessary work in the 5 weeks leading to the Easter break at which point I can refocus on the last stretch to my finals. I hate taking time off, but I am only missing 2 lectures and I think missing 2 and understanding the remaining 18 is preferable to recording 100% attendance and 0% competency.

And Google

Last week I had my final official session with my Google mentor. I had't intended to take part in the mentor programme when first I was offered it for a number of reasons, for example:

• It simply didn't feel very fair - I have not had the best education when it comes to programming: we weren't taught in school, my C lecturer was useless, my Java/Haskell lecturer was out-of-date and clearly apathetic about the whole thing, and I taught myself C++. Clearly, this would make improving my coding skills a mammoth task.
• Inter-personal relations are not my strong suit - I hate being rude, but I have problems understanding generic social boundaries and have to adapt to each individual's as I get to know them (not always a quick process), after which there is always still a chance that I'll say something insulting without even knowing it.
• I was sure I'd be useless - I spend most of my time exhausted, and when I'm not I need to be working on Uni stuff, so finding time to do anything outside the sessions was likely to be impossible.

However, I was told to do it and I think I'm glad I did. I don't know what experience the other students on the programme had, but I would hazard the opinion that I got the best one. I've always had a lot of respect and sympathy for anyone who has had to be my teacher, but for my Google mentor I think it must have been especially hard. How do you work with someone who basically doesn't know anything, who never has any time to reinforce the information you've passed on, and is mentally broken? Well, I still don't know, but he managed it - and stayed cheery throughout as well! Here are just two of the non-programming-specific things that he taught me:

• When faced with a problem, try and break it up into little chunks, or sub-problems: Small problems are generally more easily solved (and/or compared to other problems whose solution you could recycle).
• Never ignore your first idea: Writing it down may help you see where the main issues are, or suggest new ways to break the problem down. It also "gets the ball rolling" which is always a good thing.

Ok, New Plan...

I don't want to go back on anti-depressants again.

The problem is that it's looking increasingly likely that I will soon be in a position where I essentially have no choice. (I know, we always have a choice, but external pressure is a bigger thing than you'd think, as is the shadow of suicide, hence the "essentially" modifier.) I want to stave this off for as long as I can. Luckily, my doctor is almost impossible to get an appointment with, so that helps.

If I want to get anything done I'm going to need to reimpose some semblance of structure into life. I am not functioning at anything even approaching optimal, in fact there seems to be far less than 50% operational efficiency, and I know that lack of structure and routine clouds my mind. Therefore, reinstating this would seem to be a logical thing to prioritise. If my hypothesis is correct, it should at least mitigate, to some extent, the debilitation I currently seem to be experiencing. So, not so much new plan as reinvented old one.

A theoretically public forum may be expected to produce a sense of obligation to maintain standards set, and thus I have chosen this blog as one of the starting points for this regime shift. I will attempt, in particular, to begin using a Word of the Week type premise again, in order to have something in my new routine which is not work related but may be subjected to analysis and is a compatible activity with the need for timetabling.

Any other suggestions, besides "pull yourself together" (or equivalent), would be gratefully received and taken into consideration.

The Voices

My schedule has my final "Work" period of the day down as 1900-2100, but having been a bit under the weather lately (I caught a couple of the "start-of-term" bugs that're always flying around academia at this time of year), I have let myself stop at 2000 instead, with a few more breaks during the day as well. Hopefully as term progresses and my health improves, I will gradually increase the number of working hours again - I see the coursework decreeing a few "all-nighters" in the (not so distant) future too... If you want to know the sort of thing my coursework entails, I have a blog chronicling my final year which, although currently quite sparse, will hopefully, during the year, shed some light on what is apparently quite an obscure discipline to a lot of people.

In the meantime, here is a poem I wrote about 10 minutes ago - it's a bit "meta" since this was written to try and quell some of the noise to which it refers:

It's noisy in my head,
Like a telly on the blink.
But the noise is more than static -
There are madmen in my attic.

How can I make them see,
That these half-formed words and sounds
Just flood my brain and knock me down -
It only takes an inch to drown?

I hope they mean no harm,
But their presence all the same
Really does me no good at all -
True thoughts displaced by inane drawl.

Here We Go Again Then

Who would have thought it - I made it to the start of my Master's year? When I was growing up, particularly in my teenage years, one of the things that I considered to be an inevitability in my future would be the acquisition of a degree. The astonishing effort to get this far was not something that I remember featuring in this prophecy, and the exhaustion which it has generated was more than a little surprising and deflating. I am thus looking forward to my final year with mixed feelings. In principle, University has been fantastic, the majority of my units over the last few years have been things that, had I been in better health, would have been of great interest to me, and so I should be tremendously excited... There is, however, also the increased sense of trepidation which has been steadily growing since I was told that I had passed last year's exams, and is in fact only the latest, almost seamlessly transferred, incarnation of fear which has engulfed me for a number of years. Basically, my anxiety seems to have more lives than the Master - every time I think it's dead, it glows a little and returns in a newly regenerated form of madness.

This time next week I will have had my first day at Uni. I say day, but I think that it will be one lecture only on Monday. In fact, before Christmas I believe I have an average of 8.6 contact hours a week. Don't be fooled into thinking that this is one of those degrees where you have a couple of lectures a week and then spend the rest of the time drinking and sleeping - I will study 8 units and write a thesis (with accompanying website and poster design) in the course of this academic year, and I can quite easily envisage putting in a lot of 60 hour weeks before I am through. If anybody is reading this and happens to be interested in the work I do, I plan to maintain an online chronicle of what a final year in Engineering Mathematics entails, hopefully at a level accessible even to the sciencephobic.

The hope is that this year will progress in a smoother fashion than those preceding it, but as I am not renowned for my optimism, I am not going to lay odds on it. As usual - and based on everyone insisting that it's the healthy thing to do - I will attempt, during term-time, to assign more recreational activities to my schedule, which probably means I will try and reinstate my Word of the Week hobby, and perhaps begin writing and taking photos again. The likelihood of renewed panic seems to be quite high, and as this site has been designed as a venting place, I imagine numerous dark and/or inane ramblings will appear here in the near future.

Revision 2011

It’s that time of year again – May/June is the bane of most students’ lives.

I have 7 exams this year, 2 of which I sat last week: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, and Continuum Mathematics. The first exam was bearable, the second much less so. Luckily, I had some friends from church who live round the corner from the venue and very kindly invited me for dinner. This gave me a chance to calm down and have a bit of time completely away from work, refreshing me for the revision to begin again on Saturday.

This Tuesday will see me sit exam number 3 – Optimisation Theory and Applications. Really, I should be revising for that now, but the progress seems to be going well enough that I have decided to call today my ‘day of rest’ to attempt to shake this headache in time for a blitz day tomorrow. To be honest, the likelihood is that I will actually return to work later this evening, but for now I’m just focusing on feeling better and not feeling guilty.

If anybody reading this is also going through exams at the minute or in the near future, I wish you all the best.

Quick Competition:
You may just be able to see in the photo that my pen is very kindly being held by a little man. This is my mascot, Dave the Spaceman, and his name has been carefully chosen for two specific reasons – if you can tell me what they both are, there may be a prize. It may possibly something as amazing as the smug feeling that comes from being right – like when you shout at the telly! Or perhaps something more tangible, like chocolate or something…

(More pictures of Dave ‘helping’ with my revision may well follow on Picasa, but for now, if you’re itching for more, you can check out my Facebook album ‘Revision 2011’)

Trawling through old material...

... because work and life were getting too much.

I write a lot of random (and quite weird) stuff. Currently I'm writing an exposition about why you shouldn't pretend to be an expert on things which you really don't understand, but that will probably be a bit heavy-going, so before that I thought I'd give you something a little less moody.

This is an introduction to a piece of fiction which I have planned and may or may not write (I have numerous plans for different stories in various stages of development)... It's not very good, but it's certainly not as unpleasant as the essay that's on the go at the minute.

I'd value people's opinions on this as I don't normally share prose (in fact, it's fairly rare for it not to be burned upon completion).

Story Beginnings...

(This links to a Google Docs page, please follow it and take a look)

The last few weeks have not been great...

... and hence the lack of posting - I haven't even had a Word of the Week, let alone a chance to blog about it. Today has also been a bad day, I did almost no work, and the stuff I tried I got wrong.

The worst thing is that yesterday was great, and the weekend coming should be too. I spent the afternoon with friends from church yesterday - lovelier people you couldn't hope to meet - and on Friday one of my all time truest friends is (hopefully) coming to stay for a few days. So, all told, I should be in a good cycle, not a bad one. Unfortunately, if my mental state were that rational then I guess I wouldn't have all the issues that I seem to.

Just in case you were wondering, dear reader (although I doubt you were), here is a rough draft of what it's like to be me today. Caveat - This is only reflective of now, and is not a comprehensive, or even proof-read exposition of myself.

Life is that thing which you and I

Experience before we die.

A cacophony of feeling and thought,

The noise of any place you sit and wait.

To some of us,

THE single thought is thus:

When everything is said and done,

Death comes far too late.

Losing the game:

Sometimes I think I'm just a pawn,

In that game you play with other people's lives.

You set up challenges throughout the day -

Knowing full well they can't be done.

Do you laugh, I wonder, as you watch us flounder?

Is it some sadistic pleasure you draw from our efforts,

Or is it just cold academia that drives your study?

Even as the night draws in and the game is at a lull,

Some other force, (or is it you?)

Denies me the rest I’m sure I'm due

And so, exhausted, it all begins again.

This viscous cycle spiralling down.

Until,

I fear,

The darkness will out.

I’m having a bad few weeks. My grades are getting worse instead of better; I feel less and less inclined to participate in daily domestic duties – from getting out of bed onwards (inclusive of all those little things which most people do instinctively everyday and which I used to be quite particular about); my laptop is increasing the speed of its descent into electronic senility and the result of my psychiatric evaluation is that in view of the severity, range and longevity of my many issues, the best course of action seems to be longer-term, more intensive therapy rather than guided self-help. There is, of course a waiting list for this type of therapy (aimed in part at helping those sorts of people who have self-harmed or felt suicidal tendencies…), so I have no idea when that will start, but I hope that it starts soon and is effective, because to be honest I’m starting to get a wee bit desperate.

Apart from anything else, I’m dying for one good night’s sleep, although if I woke up in the morning to find I wasn’t still utterly exhausted, I’d probably have a heart attack.

It’s had a big effect on my work: A lot of the time I’m like some sort of confused, sleep-deprived, geriatric zombie suffering from senile decay and when I’m not, I’m being overly hyper to try and compensate – both scenarios leading to general bad health and I’m left wondering how the group I’m working with can possibly make sense of anything I’m saying. On the subject of which – apologies if this is in appalling English, I will probably retract this post at some point in the future.

(Sorry for the shitty quality of the poem – it’s a first draft which I dashed off about 6 minutes ago purely to head this post… may or may not polish it off at a later date)

New Year Blues

I don't really have the time to write this - to much Uni work still to do. However, I've just had a panic attack and am trying to stave off the next one.

I'm aware that people in the past have permanently stopped reading my blog because of posts like this, and I'm quite happy for you to stop doing so too, although my only query would be 'why are you here in the first place?' This site was originally set up, as a part of my therapy, as a place where I could let rip in a way that I never could in person or in a diary. So, posts like this basically fulfil that remit, and if you don't like it, you are quite welcome to leave or silently curse me, but please don't post comments about how I should pull myself together/stop whining/get on with it etc. because doing this in this limited arena is aimed at helping me do just that in the real world.

Frankly, I don't care if no one reads my blog, for me it's all about the potential for anonymity, and although I am quite often really personal, this feels somewhat more detached. On here I can focus on my grammar and spelling, and the blog layout. It is precisely that focus - which I cannot achieve in conversation, that helps me to lessen the effects of a panic attack.

Of course, if you are reading this, then welcome and thank you very much. I am not completely anti-readers - on the internet that would be pretty stupid - it's only ignorant people that I don't like, but then I'm sure you're not. I'm also not anti-comments, and if you have some advice, some (constructive) criticism of myself or my blog, or just generally want to say hi, then I'd love to hear from you.

I had meant to do a bumper edition of ... of the Week this week, to make up for the silence over Christmas, but this will have to wait, as I really should be getting on with my coursework. I am very stressed, and this has probably contributed to the panic attack, not helped at all by finding out that I failed the last piece of (easier) coursework for this unit. I'm in a bit of a low state in general right now, and next week I think I might talk to my tutor about leaving/taking some time off, but I have two deadlines before that and so I'd better get on.

If you've made it this far, thank you and congratulations. Your prize is the answers to my Christmas Tree quiz, and my Word of the Week: Trepidation.

... of the Week (#12):

This week - Word of the Week (#11):

boffin

n. Possibly an acronym taken from the Armed Forces, meaning 'Back Office Intelligence'.

The etymology of this word is actually uncertain, but I have presented my personal favourite theory. Having had this word levied at me as an insult for the majority of my school career, this post is aimed at reclaiming it as a positive word. I was always proud to be called a boffin, and I would like to think that this definition may help others too.
If you are unsure of how to use it, think of it as the original English version of the now commonly used Americanism - geek.

This post is a couple of days late due to a horrific coursework load, sorry about that. Apologies also for the somewhat lacklustre words lately, I will soon be returning to London and the majority of my books, so hopefully I'll be able to share some more unusual/fun words over the Christmas period.

New Term, New Me?

Bristol University starts teaching again on Monday. It was touch and go, but I made it back - and am still on track for a Masters too. Although my overall year average wasn't amazing, I am taking comfort in the fact that I managed a 2:1 or greater in nearly half of the modules. I really hope to build on that this year, and to prove, to myself and some other people, that I can do this.

There are a bunch of you out there who really helped last year, supporting me both morally and, in some cases, practically (Thank you especially to JB and Harry on the ComSci front). I know that a few of the people that helped probably wish that they hadn't as I wasn't exactly a picture of confidence, and I am aware that this annoyed some folk. However, I am extremely grateful to all of you, and I really hope that, having got this far, I can push through to the end and earn the good will that you've been kind enough to send my way.

I hope that you like the word of the week slot, and I aim to share some more of the quirkier, more positive aspects of me in the future.

Panic

I'm having a panic attack, and the only way to try and keep it vaguely under control is to be writing something like this.

I would be doing coursework, but just looking at that seems to make it worse: I can feel my head burning as though someone had just poured a mixture of boiling oil and burning tar into every crevice in my brain and watched as it seeped it's way through all my synapses and seared away any pretence I had to intelligence.

So instead I'm doing what I started this blog for - using it to stave off the wave of hysteria by writing a post and letting my obsession for decent grammar and content flow and take over my head. Unfortunately, when I'm in a state like this, what my mind thinks is good content and grammar is different to what I would normally consider checks those boxes. So apologies to anyone reading this who is wondering why it doesn't seem to make much sense.

This is one of the worst panic attacks I've had in ages, and it is making me feel very ill indeed. I went to bed ridiculously early last night because I thought that if I could get to sleep it might not come. I didn't get to sleep. It did come, and it has lingered on into this morning. You don't want to know how long this post is taking to write, it's quite hard to type when you're shaking harder than the last Pope.

I've been trying to think of a way to describe the way that I'm feeling at the minute, but I can't get the words out. They've been taken in the flood which washed away my coherent thoughts of work and calm and forced itself out of my system in tears and sweat and phlegm and mucus.

This has not been a good first week of my countdown, and I am feeling more and more disillusioned with everything. I still wake up every morning and am still around to pray it might be otherwise every evening. I had hoped that this might not be the case and the the decision would have been taken out of my hands, but it was quite a vain hope I suppose.

It's nearly over

Warning; this post is mostly (entirely) a rant; rhetoric spiralling into near-despair. I will try to make the next post better-possibly with another poem.

Right, tomorrow is the start of week 8 in the University calender. There are 10 weeks in the term leading up to Christmas, which means I've only got 3 weeks to go.

I'm having mixed feelings about this and many things at present. I'm getting used to Uni, the panic attacks are less frequent, but at the same time, I still have no energy/inclination to do work outside of lectures, and this is getting frustrating, because I want to do this properly, but there's another part of me that just switches off when I start work, and it's hard to do what I have to do when half your thoughts are somewhere else.

Also not helping is the fact that the only coursework I have to do this year is Electronics which involves 3 hours of lab time every Tuesday afternoon for 4 weeks, starting last Tuesday. This would not be so bad apart from the fact that I have a few problems with electronics:

1. The lecturers are boring;
2. The lecture contents are confusing;
3. The confusing contents are complemented by badly written lecture handouts and poorly presented lectures;
4. There is no incentive to try and get over such obstacles to find the heart of the subject as this too is incredibly boring and comes across as not worth the effort.

I went to the first lab, and found that as I had suspected might happen, I had no idea what I was doing. Looking for something positive I noticed that apparently almost no one else had any idea either, so at least we were all in the same, somewhat waterlogged, boat. The lecturer of course was no help; any question that was asked would be answered in the patronising and slightly annoyed tone that implies the answerer is convinced of it's obviousness and the fact that everyone who isn't a congenital idiot has done it before and should therefore be fully conversant in the details.

Needless to say, it was one of the worst 3 hours of my life, I left with no more idea than I had gone in with and feeling rather worse than a bug which has been squashed under a boot which had not long previously stepped in some fresh fox excrement. And, joy of joys, I have 3 more weeks of this to come.

This and other events this week which I cannot so specifically lay my finger on, have left me swinging wildly between feeling okay and so black that pitch shines as a beakon of lightness before being totally swallowed in the depth of my unhappiness.

Although so far I have been able to act/react pretty normally when in conversation, particularly with my parents, my sleep which has never been good is now at a stage where I can either get absolutely no sleep or my body relents and I sleep very deeply at all the wrong times and for too long. I'm also starting to feel, as I mentioned, mixed feelings with regards to the end of term: I'm happy because of the holidays and the end of the labs, and I'm looking forward to Christmas; but at the same time, I'm worried, among other things, about how my change of schedule will affect my already pretty rubbish health/sleep patterns, and how I will be able to make use of the holiday which will be my best chance to consolidate what I've done this term and actually make sure that I know all I need to know about this term's stuff before we start learning more new things next term and I have to start again. Those and other worries which I can't quite work out how to articulate are all pretty banal and irrational, but they are what they are, and I can't shake them.

Right now, I really wish I was in bed, or working, but while being to tired to concentrate on work, I'm not tired enough to sleep. So I'm doing this: hardly productive and sounding pretty pathetic, leading me to decide that I'm going to stop, give up, and go to bed anyway. At least it'll be warm in there.

Beautiful Proof

Okay guys, if you're not a mathematician, bear with me. It's sad I know, but to try and convince myself that I was working earlier, I produced a lovely typed copy of the proof that the square root of two is irrational (cannot be written as a fraction). This is something that I know off by heart and really had no need to type up, but I really think it's rather elegant.If you have any interest in logical thinking/reasoning etc. (even without knowing/caring about maths itself), you will find that this does flow very logically, and is about as beautiful as this area of maths can get, I reckon. Anyway, I hope this will if nothing else give people who know my character an understanding of why I love maths so much, and even possibly get a few people a little bit excited by, or at least less hateful of, mathematics.

Assume: √2 = a/b such that a,b are two integers (whole numbers) which share no common factors.

Therefore: a = √2.b (multiplication by b)

Squaring: a² = 2b²

Because a² is a multiple of 2; a² is an even number.

[Note at this point if x is an odd integer; x² is also an odd integer:

If x is an odd integer, there exists some integer, n, such that x = 2n+1.

Therefore: x² = (2n+1)²

= (2n+1)(2n+1)

= 4n²+4n+1

Taking a factor of 2 from the n components: x² = 2(2n²+2n)+1.

If n is an integer, n² is an integer. Likewise 2n is an integer.

Therefore: 2n² is also an integer.

Therefore: 2n²+2n as a sum of integers is also an integer.

Thus: x² = 2(some integer)+1

which is equivalent to 2n+1, as n is also 'some integer'.

Thus, x² conforms with the initial condition defining odd numbers;

x² is shown also to be an odd number.]

As: a² is even, a must also be even (as an odd number squared is odd; see above).

Therefore: a = 2c (where c is some integer)

Squaring: a² = 4c²

Using (a² = 2b²):

4c² = 2b²

Therefore: 2c² = b² (dividing by 2)

Because b² is a multiple of 2; b² is an even number.

As: b² is even, b must also be even (as odd squares are odd; see above).

Therefore: a and b share at least one common factor, 2, thus contradicting the initial assumption such that a,b share no common factors.

Therefore: √2 cannot be expressed as a ratio of two factors a,b and is irrational.

QED

Exams

Okay, so this is a venting post.

Not five minutes into my first (and theoretically easiest) exam, I started a panic attack. In order to stem the oncoming flow of hysteria, I had to initiate a complete mental shut-down, meaning that although I had the pen in my hand and am pretty sure I made marks on the paper; I have no idea what I wrote or whether any of it was relevant to the exam in question.

So I failed my easy unit. This obviously does not bode well for my other exams which are all going to be harder and which I know very little about. Leading me to spend the afternoon in a very black mood hiding under the duvet.

And it's all my own fault: I've been too unmotivated to do the work and even when I have been doing it, it exhausts me in no time at all (This post has taken me goodness knows how long) and I can't take it in. I hate it.

I know it's my fault, but knowing that isn't changing anything, the part of me that wants to change is just too damn small, and I'm too tired.

I feel so ill. I have to admit that I have spent most of this afternoon desperately planning suicide, but to be honest I feel too ill even for that. I can't say that I have decided not to do it, just that I have decided to put it on the back-burner for now, but it is looking more and more likely to happen as I feel less and less able to cope with this whole life thing (yes I know I'm a coward running away from the consequences of my actions etc. but I never claimed to be anything other than a wimp of the first degree).

So I'm still here, for now, but don't worry, I'm fairly sure I won't be a bother for too much longer.

Failure

Why, oh why did I choose Engineering Mathematics?

I don't think that I have ever been so convinced of failing in my life. And to top it all, today I have already had three severe panic attacks; of the gut-wrenching head-exploding uncontrollable-twitching variety, and I failed three past papers in my easiest unit.

I have now come to the conclusion that failure is inevitable, and so a part of me has completely given up on the basis that 'I'm going to fail, why bother?'

If anybody has any miracle solutions or ideas on how to give myself a kick up the backside before Wednesday, please let me know, because otherwise I am completely bu****ed.

I should've done leisure and tourism or 'golf-course studies' or just slit my throat...

Shhh...

I'm sleeping, er, no, revising. Yeah, that's it, revising (I think I got away with that one).