So I joined Facebook recently. I didn’t really want to –or, to be very honest, I never really thought about whether I wanted to– but Dimitra asked me to, so that she could write that she’s married to me. Which was very sweet, actually. Also, not that I am worried about such things, but one should perhaps make sure that no one would send her messages like: “Hey, I’m a bachelor in my late twenties, have brown curly hair and glasses and look a bit silly, but in a sweet way. Also, I never forget to take the rubbish out, dishes are never greasy after I’ve washed them and I don’t do grumpy moods.”

Of course, I didn’t want to appear like a sad loner whose only friend is his wife. (It’s the internet, after all, so we can pretend as much as we want to.) So I asked a few people to become my friend. And then a few other people asked me to become their friend too and since I know them, kind of, I couldn’t really say no. And then someone complained that I didn’t have my photo on the site and that that looked a bit silly, which, admittedly, it did, so I uploaded a recent one. And then there was a rather empty profile too, which looked like I’m a very secretive person. Which I’m not.

So now I’ve spent at least one hour a week in the past weeks, trying to think of more bands to include in my list of favourite bands, so that it would look interesting and eclectic, but still me, and of books I really liked, without naming just my recently read ones, which I really liked too, but which would appear a bit silly as a list of all-time favourites. An hour a week is not very much, no, but it’s still more than half a percent of my time. So if I ever send you an email, starting with an excuse about being busy: that’s a blatant lie.

In other news, I joined this hangout of people like me the other day, which is nice and all, and takes away another percent of my precious weekly time. And you know, it’s good to make friends and all that, even if they’re just people sitting behind the computer at some other part of the country, or even world. It’s just that sometimes I wonder if all these distractions don’t get in the way of thinking about, well, things. About how to make sense of the things in my head and how to synchronise them with the way the world works, for example. I am afraid they do.

It would have taken one simple email from a source close to my advisor to give up that whole thesis-business. ‘Oh, come on, let’s just forget about the whole’ and I would have done so. Not happily probably, but I would have, that I’m sure about now.

But I never gave up. Because it just would have looked so bad on my CV and wouldn’t be right towards the people that had helped me. And it wouldn’t have felt right either. And there was another reason, but I had forgotten about that.

And then, just when I had slowly started to work on it again –which, to be honest, didn’t mean much more than trying to remember what I had known once– I got this email from my advisor. Who didn’t tell me to give up. And who didn’t tell me off for not contacting him earlier either. Instead, he told me he had been thinking about the stuff some more and whether I would like to have a look too.

Which I did. And I understood it quite well, despite not having seen some of it for over a year. Things fell into their place. I suddenly found myself thinking about it a lot, counting the hours during work until I could work on it again. (This after years of doing the thesis where I was always counting the hours until I could do something else.) I got the feeling I might even solve a long unsolved problem.

Oh, I remember that other reason for not giving up. It was that I can actually enjoy maths sometimes.

An mp3 of Small Factory’s I’m Not Giving Up will follow suit.

Oh, Vienna. Well, since you asked – it has already started to feel like a previous life.

I had a really good time. I also worked really hard, so the fact that I still had a good time, says something about how much I like my job. (A job that, by the way, usually doesn’t involve walking around carrying balloons.) The conference was a lot more professional than the maths conferences I have attended, which probably reflect that there’s quite a bit of money going around in this business, but the people are probably equally geeky. What they were doing is rather tangible though, something that I can tell my mom about, and that makes quite a big difference to me.

But the best thing was to realise, just over a year after moving to the UK, how I had come here not knowing what to do in my life. And how I had had the belief that, if I would just keep applying, the right thing would find me in the end. And how it has all worked out so well, and the right thing did come on my way – even if, for the time being, it involves spending half a week from home. It makes one love life a little bit more.

There’s a new Tullycraft album coming soon. Their sixth. (You can drop your ‘The Singles is a compilation and therefore doesn’t count’-comments below.) You knew that, probably. It’s a bi-annual event that makes us of the international indiepop community have feasts to the honour of Saint Sean and his followers.
Not Quite Rocket Science (the same people who run the WeePOP!-label) join the party through a popcast. It contains eleven songs, all of which have been covered by the band. It’s a pretty brilliant idea, not in the least because it emphasises the greatness and uniqueness of Tullycraft: in the best of cases (Pooh Sticks, Bartlebees, 6ths) Tullycraft’s version is equally good as the original. In most cases, it is a lot better and degrades the original to a song that was only written for Tullycraft to cover in the first place.

(Since you asked, a bunch of Tullycraft-mp3s here.)

The past weekend I’ve learned why in English supermarkets, when someone buys a consumption that contains alcohol, this is sometimes followed by the cashier shouting ‘alcohol!’ clearly audible for the whole store. S., who works at the local Somerfield, something for which I don’t envy him, explained it to me. It is because you are not allowed to buy alcohol if you’re under 18 and, likewise, if you are under 18, which most supermarket employees are (we’re talking about age here, not IQ), you can not sell alcohol either, unless you have explicit permission from a manager. Which is what is searched for by the shout.

I thought this was a rather disappointing explanation. I always assumed that, after trying, and failing, to make people drink less by telling them about the harm it does to your body, to your chances of keeping your IQ higher than your age and to the reputation of the nation on popular holiday destinations, the government had gone for the embarrassment method: a obligatory shout ‘alcohol!’ through the store, which should then be responded by the customer’s blushing and a subsequent request to forget about these five bottles of wine and can I please have some squash instead.

The truth is always too boring.