On the time I won the lottery, put iron maidens on my feet, and took a trip to the moon.

You know you're tired and have to stop writing essays when you write down the lottery results on a post-it to check against the screenshot of your mother's work-pool lottery ticket, realise she matched 3 numbers, and then when she asks you to show her, you see that the winning numbers and the ones you've written down on the post-it are the same and for about ten minutes you are a) convinced you have just won the £110,000,000 jackpot and the millionaire raffle, b) that the British Intelligence have infiltrated the lottery website and somehow know the numbers on that lottery ticket screenshot because now they are everywhere, and c) that you might be at that moment surrounded by silent helicopters and guys with guns and camouflage about to pound on your front door, haul you away and interrogate you about ESP.

And that totally, totally did not happen to me.

So, moving swiftly on -- to apologies for continually committing the blogging equivalent of a hit and run. It's not that I didn't want to comment, I reeeeeeeeally did. It's more like, I commented in my head, and then vowed to come back later and actually post the comment, but invariably secondary reading about the Gothic novel/voice in post-45 literature (WTF?) consumed my manners, and my brain, and turned me into a zombie. My coping mechanisms included watching two episodes of Daria per day, dancing to the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack when creatively frustrated, and drinking way too much Coke.

I know, I make it sound like a John Carpenter movie, but really I enjoyed this semester a lot. Third year was the first year that I felt actually really settled and established in uni, and like I wanted to integrate myself more, because by this time next year I'll be done, and I won't see any of the amazing people (most of the Yahs seem to have died out, thank God), or be able to use the amazing library, or walk around the quad in the snow, and I'll have to actually get a real job and pay bills, and stuff. One of the highlights of the semester was Glasgow author Louise Welsh coming to talk to us about crime fiction and where she gets her ideas and stuff. She was awesome, and by the end of the hour I kind of wanted to run away and marry her, but sadly Zoe Strachan's already beaten me to that.

I do have upcoming exams, but the nice thing about my uni is they time everything perfectly with people's birthdays, so that the end of the semester/start of study period starts with a birthday, and ends with a birthday. Or two. Or three. Thing is, most of them are going to be twenty-firsts because my lot are getting old now. They realised they were no longer little girls, but little women etc. Which is quite apt because none of us are any taller than five foot four. Which is why we wear heels. I say 'we' because last night I became part of that group of masochists, and I can say with almost absolute certainty, that I am getting the damn hell out and that anyone who voluntarily subjects themselves to binding death-spikes to their feet on a regular basis needs their head examined. I admit that part of my dislike of high heels has always had a kind of quasi-feminist element to it, and I stand by that because NOTHING IS WORTH THAT PAIN, and I could go on, but I won't. But I also have to admit that the dress I was wearing did look better with the added four inches of height, and the shoes are gorgeous and kind of steampunk, if I can apply that to shoes. However, the night that ends up with me walking around the West End at half one in the morning in naught but my invisible tights on the frozen frozen frozen ass ground, dangling the foot version of Iron Maidens from my fingers, and looking quite destitute, is not a night I want to repeat. I was promised, over and over, not only by my 'friends' but by Lorelai Gilmore, that the pain would eventually turn to numbness. But that was a dirty rotten lie. Every step I took produced vivid images in my mind of the balls of my feet exploding in tidal waves of blood. And before you ask, no, the vanilla coke float, although the most amazing drink I've ever had in my puff, did not make up for it.

Maybe you (yeah, YOU, reading this), were expecting some kind of fantastic conclusion, some pearl of wisdom, some light at the end of the proverbial tunnel, but honestly, the traumatised state of my brain and the amount of spelling mistakes flagged up in this post are telling me to go do something brainless, until I like, regrow my brain. I said brain a lot there. Braiiiiiiiiin.


And goodbye.


OH NO WAIT. I did have this super-awesome dream last night that me and my parents went on one of the first chartered flights to the moon, and we stayed there in an old white-washed ramshackle cowboy type house, with a young cowboy, in the middle of a kind of moon-desert, and everything was dusty with moon-dust, and there was no daylight but there was oxygen and I saw Jupiter, like spinning around with its eye and its many little moons and I woke up thinking I HAVE BEEN TO THE MOON. It was pretty great.