deconstructing mark
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Thursday 20.11.03 | GEORGE W. Bush was having afternoon tea with Queen Elizabeth in Buckingham Palace, outlining his plans for the future of the USA. "As I'm the President" said Bush, "I'm thinking of changing how the country is referred to, and I'm thinking that it should be a Kingdom", to which the Queen replies, "I'm sorry Mr Bush, but to be a Kingdom, you have to have a King in charge - and you're not a King." George Bush thought a while and then said: "How about a Principality then?", to which the Queen replied "Again, to be a Principality you have to be a Prince - and you're not a Prince, Mr Bush". Bush thought long and hard and came up with "How about an Empire then?" The Queen, getting a little fecked off by now replied "Sorry again, Mr Bush, but to be an Empire you must have an Emperor in charge - and you are not an Emperor." Before George Bush could utter another word, The Queen said: "I think you're doing quite nicely as a Country". Wonderful. Got dragged to a (wait for this) Gay and Lesbian Salsa class last night. Apart from the fact that I can't dance and ended up waltzing about the place with a camp Frenchman named Christophe, I quite enjoyed it. Bloody never going back though, shat myself throughout... Saturday 22.11.03 WRITING this post from Yorkshire, where I have been since yesterday night, visiting my mum. I hadn't realised until yesterday quite how much I was looking forward to getting out of London and being able to breathe clean air for the first time in about six weeks. Just been for a breathtaking drive across the Moors and about to go for what will no doubt to be a colossal pub-supper, so Mark is happy :-) Tuesday 25.11.03 MICHEL de Montaigne wrote a lot of shit, but one of the truest things he ever noted was that Greatness of soul consists not so much in striving upwards and forwards as in knowing how to find one's place and to draw the line. Defeatist and pessimisstic as this may sound, I think it's both valid and valuable. It's what echoed around my hollow head this morning for two hours, almost incessantly, while I had two lectures on writing a summary of a French text. Quite simply put, I can't do it. This isn't a case of just throwing in the towel, it's a case of having tried for years to write decent French and...just manipulate the damn language like French people do, but it's clear to me now that it's never going to happen; this all hit me this morning as I got back a corrected version of my umptey-third summary of a French text, covered in red and with a big fat 'C' at the bottom. There are worse marks than a 'C' but there are much better ones, which others seem to be able to get. The question that all this poses is what the hell I'm going to do - time is inevitably now ticking down towards my finals, half of which are French, and it's a bit late to realise that, quite simply put, I'm just not intellectually or linguistically capable of doing them well. | |||||||||
