Mon chat veut devenir avocat (Benjamin)
LIKE HELLO!
How are you all going? Sorry for not writing lately, I’ve been very busy with assessment and the like, and haven’t had time to write. But I can now 🙂
Much like Jess and Adeshola, I have been inundated with lots of assignments, tests and study. It’s crazy to think that we’ve already been at uni for over a month! It’s been stressful, but enjoyable all the same. I still hear people who are saying how easy uni is but this is probably because they are: attending too many barbecues/doing minimal work/sleeping in lectures/impersonating Captain Feathersword (circle one).
In the last week and a half, I have noticed that because of doing the speed greeting with ‘Vladmir’ making a concerted effort to talk to as many people as possible, I am starting to see people all over the place, which is fantastic. What isn’t so fantastic is the fact that my name recalling ability is very poor, but it’s improving. For example, this week at a study group session, I remembered the name of the person I was talking to halfway through the conversation as opposed to not at all. Funnily enough, the trigger word was some random chemistry term like ‘Geometric isomerism’. I have absolutely no idea how that made me remember the name, but there you go. I guess that everyone needs to develop a sort of chemistry in one way or another.
I’ve been having some problems with attempting to talk in different languages at the moment. At work on the weekend, I managed to grievously insult a customer in Chinese. I was trying to say ‘You’re welcome’, but apparently, she thought that I was trying to make advances on her by saying something about her trousers. Not so doubleplusgood.
Here are some things that I have discovered and experienced recently that may be of use(lessness):
Be careful, I’m armed
Managed to sleep on my arm for the entire night a couple of weeks ago. The result of this was that when I woke up at 5am, I could not feel my limb. At all. Not even wriggle my fingers. Slightly concerned and in a sleep induced stupor, I began using my left arm to throw my numb right one about. Still nothing. Half asleep and envisaging the joys of potential amputation, I decided to take things to the next level by standing up and swinging my arm around as hard as I could… into the wall. After befouling the air with a few choice swear words and waking up the entire house and most likely the neighbours, I began to cradle my throbbing arm which had suddenly decided to recover feeling. To give you an idea of the pain, think of the worst accident you’ve ever had in your life. Now multiply that pain by about ten thousand. It hurt about fifteen jillion times more than that.
Picnic for none
Once upon a time in a magical land of fairies and fire breathing dragons there lived a young man named Ben. Like many of the townsfolk, our hero used to brave the crowded trams and trains to uni, avoid the student reps by getting out his phone and having huge d&m seshs with himself and get the Redmond Barry and Richard Berry buildings mixed up.
One fine mid autumn’s day, he chanced upon a French picnic on the South lawn, with food and drink aplenty. Most pleased by the conviviality that he had indeed caught sight of, he and his comrades made their way to a nice patch of grass and began to talk. Now Ben, being the thoroughly kind and good looking lad that he is, had happened to bring along some snacks in order to ameliorate the already perfect picnic. There were crisps, biscuits and other sweets that would make even the most assertive reader begin to drool onto their keyboard and sigh plaintively. Just like the baby sparrow which warbles and stretches its wings as it alights in its hollow, Ben exuberantly withdrew the bag and waved it around with a flourish, lest his companions not see it. Yet ill-starred Ben hadn’t managed to notice that he had opened the bag upside down in mid-air, resulting in nearby uni students being hit (and in some cases, nigh mortally wounded) by teddy bear biscuit shrapnel. After the peals of laughter and hearty guffaws had subsided, Ben took his exit stage left and began to ponder as to whether it would be viable to create his own reality tv show.
Masculine textbooks
When I got all my stationery for uni at the start of the year, I basically just rocked up to Big W and found all the most economically priced things that I could, not really paying attention to much else. One of these books happens to have multi-coloured circles over it, which I thought was very normal. But I was kindly informed by my friend in French this week that it looks a bit girlish, which to be fair, it does, but I’ve just been hoping nobody would notice. Mildly amused by this sentiment, I inquired as to how I can make it more manly, because short of spilling my lunch on it/crumpling it up, I don’t know what I’m meant to do :P. I did try drawing one of those anime characters with massive guns but I’m afraid that looked thoroughly childish. I am awaiting the response mon ami! Unless anyone has any ideas?
The curious case of the shoulder and the student
You know when you’re growing, you constantly bang into things, yeah? Sometimes this can also happen because you just like getting physical with nearby walls and vases or have a shoulder span as large as a Machamp. Being the massive unit that I am…Well, sort of…. Ok, well not really at all….Ahem. Being that I’m just you’re Average Joe with a different name, I have a similar problem (Seriously, who calls their kid ‘Average’?) My shoulder is bony. Therefore, when it comes to giving someone a hug/balancing the cat on my head, a problem arises. That problem is the tendency to shoulder people and the cat in the jaw, which certainly makes those sort of situations pretty high impact. Short of suggesting people to wear mouthguards, the only viable solution appears to be walking with my body slanted laterally at a forty five degree angle which wouldn’t exactly be aesthetically pleasing. If anyone else has any suggestions, I would gladly welcome them.
Umbrella adventures
As I mentioned in an earlier blog, umbrellas are useless contraptions. Mine is made even more useless by the fact that when it decided to rain earlier this week, one of the arms that hold up the fabric broke. Naturally, the wind was blowing so that it turned itself inside out, and I for all intents and purposes, momentarily acquired the semblance of a cartoon character as I desperately attempted to fix it up. Taking heart from what happened to Mary Poppins when it got a bit blustery, I decided to throw caution to the winds by just running quickly and used the umbrella as a walking stick to prevent me from slipping. It didn’t go down well, but I only just got completely saturated. But I tell you what, for once, I actually quite literally had ‘cold feet’ before entering my lecture.
Well that’s about all from me at the moment. Hope everything’s going okay with everybody. Hang in there, be happy and avoid the purple Fanta from Union House. Or just soft drinks in general, really. They do funny things to already over animated people.
Vis tecum sit!
Ben