&so this is christmas

I have a new blog.

I Am The Blob.

There won't be anymore posting here.

That is all.

Wow, this article is so completely convincing:

BBC NEWS | Health | Humour 'comes from testosterone'

And when I say 'convincing', I should clarify and say that I mean 'entirely, desperately UNconvincing'.

Really. How many articles can possibly be published about gender-related trends that are then linked back to hormones-slash-genes-slash-hard-wiring, all without the slightest shred of evidence as to why 'hormones' are necessarily the culprit for trends in behaviour? Evidently the imperative at work in this article and the research it reports is: "link back to hormones".

And thus we see silly, wannabe-Darwinian claims like this:

He suggested men might respond aggressively because they see the other unicycling man as a threat, attracting female attention away from themselves.

Mmmmm. Of course.

Have these people never heard of 'culture'? 'Enculturation'? Socialisation, etc?

In lieu of having any better ideas post-thesis, I am applying for jobs. This saddens me somewhat, as I feel that I possibly should have come up with something better to do with my time by now. Perhaps I will benefit from the increased value that time will seem to have once I have less of it for myself? Ah, but then there's the other possibility that worries me - perhaps, instead, all that will happen is that I will be too tired to do anything altogether?

In other news, I am not really tempted by the idea of posting psuedo blog posts on my Facebook page. I am comfortable with the blog format - which seems somehow of 'higher quality' than the Facebook page. Even though this is plainly a nonsensical statement, a piece of elitist rubbish.

I am also toying with the idea of starting a new blog. Now that I am no longer an undergraduate I can shed this childish history etc etc.

I am writing the last smelly essay of the year. It’s more than the last ‘smelly’ essay – all essays being smelly – it’s the last essay altogether. Of my undergraduate career! Of course, when I say ‘I am writing’ this essay, I am lying. I’m not writing it right now at all. No, I’m writing this silly blog post in the hope that the essay will somehow be written by itself.

The thesis was handed in on time, miraculously.

What else – I just made a whopping $1.80 on the Melbourne Cup. Two years ago, I made 20c on the cup. Last year, 80c. This shows consistent progress, does it not? Forecasts for 2008 suggest that earnings for the Cup should top $2.20.

Other smelly things: the Federal Election; Deleuze; a tremendously awful season in Australian Idol; the leaked Madonna single (‘The Beat Goes On’ – have you heard it? It includes the lyric, ‘Here comes the rain / To wash away the pain’. Seriously! I don’t think there is a single instance of new lyric material in the whole song. She seems to have written it by putting chopped up portions of every other one of her songs in a big hat and then pulling them out at random to form the new work).

Things that are not smelly: the Justin Timberlake concert tonight; warmer weather; wilful overuse of semi-colons; the prospects of a Tatu film; the prospect of soon being able to read things that were not written by a certain M. Deleuze.

Where am I at the moment? At a kitchen table. With empty plates and things all around me. With chapter one of the thesis open in another window. Looking rather pale. Not quite sure if I'm hungry or not. Not quite sure what to write next about Deleuze. Feeling some strange existential angst that is, I know - disappointingly - only related to the thesis' not being finished. So yes. This is the last post until that fateful day.

Here is a link to the recently-published report into child abuse in the Northern Territory, Little Children Are Sacred. I've been wanting to read it for some weeks now. I think it will cast an interesting light on the Federal Government's recent intervention / takeover, which has been roundly criticised.

A few unsystematic declarations.

1. I am beginning to think that The Age stinks. Yes, complaining about the declining tone of a newspaper is an old pastime. Complaining about a nominally left-leaning newspaper even more so (those on the left being ungrateful buggers, forever griping about the unwillingness of the existent, actual world to conform to its not-at-all-defined notion of How Things Should Be). All the same, it goddamn stinks. Queue gripes about sensationalist clap-trap, uninteresting lifestyle blogs, &c.

2. No, that's it, actually. I thought I had a list of insights. But it was just a vehicle for me to put forward my venom about The Age. Carry on.

Once again, I don't really know what to do with this blog. I think it might only be read by friends who check by out of curiosity once in a while. But now that Facebook has soaked up that function (answering the question, 'what's Catherine up to these days') - what is to be done with this thing here? I'm sure someone must still read it.

I'd comment about politics or music or other topical goings-on. But the thing is, I'm very, very unengaged with the world at the moment. That is, all parts of the world that aren't Deleuze or Hegel scholarship. Which, when you think of it, is probably most of it. The world, I mean.

Secretly, however, I like my blog more than I like Facebook. Oh yes, Facebook is fun. It is nice to get a little bulletin everytime someone scratches their arse, or to know that if I was a man named Harry who only watched Lateline to relish the unresolved narcissistic sexual tension between Tony Jones and Kevin Rudd, that I could join a group called "People named Harry who only watch Lateline to relish the unresolved narcissistic sexual tension between Tony Jones and Kevin Rudd". All the same, I think Facebook indulges proclivities of mine that really should be left to wither in the dark somewhere. These include: the temptation to live in the past; and spending too much time staring at my own goddamn face.

And worst of all - after a hard evening of reading Deleuze talk about differential calculus and the wonderful violence of Ideas, is it really refreshing to go to the internet and look at 20 pictures of my friends living it up in Berlin, or cruising around somewhere exotic in the sunshine? Surprisingly, it is not.

I'll have to leave it there, as I'm about to run out of batteries on my laptop. But if I come up with anything to post, you'll be the first to know.

At the beginning of "Get Me Bodied", Beyonce announces a cryptic set of numbers amid some seriously spacey-sounding reverb: "9... 4... 8... 1." Ominous pause. "... B Day." Now, as it turns out, this set of numbers refers to the day of Beyonce's birth: the 4th of September, 1981. This, it would seem, is her birthday - literally, birth-day, the day of her birth, her B Day. So perhaps what the phrase 'get me bodied' refers to is the incarnation of the godly power of Beyonce in the form of flesh. Previously she'd been just an immanent force in the universe, but what the B Day marks is the becoming-flesh of Beyonce, her getting a body.

So plainly, Beyonce is working with some sort of dualist mind-body distinction. I just don't know if I can find that plausible! Where are her references? Where does she define her terms?

Good song though.

Ok, I think I've got the Deleuze reading in hand - 164 pages down, 140 pages to go. If I do 15 pages a day, I should at least finish Difference and Repetition before second semester goes back.

The Hegel, however... I wonder. Do you think it's quite common with these things that you can read words, and yet not really have any idea about what's going on? At all?

Oh well. Downloads of recent days include Justice's † plus assorted others - the Freemasons mix of "Ring the Alarm", The Human League's "The Things That Dreams Are Made Of", some others that I can't think of now. Tatu, Kate Bush, various things from Tim's mix CDs and Destiny's Child's #1s have been in high rotation. Oh and weirdly, I found listening to System of a Down invigorating while going for a run. How perverse!