The last few days have been heavy with work and headaches. I was in bed all day Saturday with one of those migraines that shatters your head in two and reaches right down into your stomach. Lying in a dark room, willing the pain to subside but ever-conscious of its all-consuming hold on you, there is an intermittent fight to overwhelm body with mind. It always fails, and all I can do is wait hopelessly for the sleep that refuses to come to my rescue. When you watch paint dry, nothing happens. You have to leave the room for the wet patches to fade. Waiting for sleep when I have a migraine is like staring at that wall of moisture, studying each bubble, waiting for colour to matt into opaqueness.

Today was better. I had a poster presentation to give in Postgraduate Research II on my dissertation, which I had initially thought would be a terrible waste of time but discovered to be a wonderful way to visually define ideas. Stepping back and looking at the finished product, I was quite surprised at how organised my thoughts had become as opposed to the jumbled mess they had seemed in my head and my notebooks. Perhaps I oversimplified a little; I suppose you have to pare things down a bit to make them visual to an audience that hasn’t had grandstand seating inside your head. But Ashley seemed to understand what I was trying to get at and gave me some really positive feedback. I read some of her articles on Ebsco tonight, just to get a feel for her research area, and have found some great correlations between my ideas and her research. I found myself reading with a dictionary, which could be a bad thing, pointing to my lexigraphic naiveté, or a good thing, since I was interested enough to look up the handful of words I wasn’t completely clear about. (Incidentally, lexigraphic gets a squiggly red line of confusion from Word). I got really excited about her thesis on Wollstonecraft and Austen, especially where her comments on Austen’s marriages linked so succinctly with my brother-sister paradigm. Anyway, I got up the courage this evening to e-mail her and ask (beg??) whether it is possible to request someone (her) to be your (my) adviser… I don’t know whether it is or not, but I thought it couldn’t hurt to try. There’s an advert playing on TV at the moment: a guy doing silly things like riding in an ice-cream truck and getting a piggy back from a rather startled heavy-set man. The slogan is something like ‘If you don’t ask, you don’t get’. I decided to work on that theory.

I’m really exited to get stuck into dissertation research. I like the idea of focusing on a personal project rather than having to juggle three things at once (along with life). The pressure of essays is mounting up, so I suppose the freedom of setting my own deadlines for a while is looking more and more appealing. I will miss the creative writing side, though. It has given me a side-focus and taken the intense edge of the academic side of things.

Louise called the police the other night because she heard someone walking up and down outside and thought it was a bit suspicious. Apparently it wasn’t the first time she had heard someone walking on the stones, and she was alone this time, so scared. I wonder whether it was some guy from the next apartment block out having a cigarette at 2 a.m.

The most alarming thing that happens to us at night seems to be the sudden collapse of the blinds in the study. Why do they wait until 3 a.m.? We weren’t able to fix them back up this time, so I called the landlord and he brought around his friend to fix the fittings. I’m not really acting like much of a feminist, am I, calling the men in to do my DIY jobs? Or I could suggest that I’m getting the men in to do the jobs I just don’t have time for, since my days are spent on a higher intellectual plain. But that just sounds snobbish, and it's not at all true.

The other day, walking to meet Mum in Café Nero, I saw a pudgy, blond-haired boy with a Burger King drink stoop down to the speckled pavement to pick up a dusty red rubber band dropped by the postman earlier that morning. As he straightened back up, rubber band wrapped around three fingers, he took a satisfied slurp of sugary drink through his straw and stared intently at the red band.

I remembered seeing a snippet of Newsround, the news programme for children that comes on before Neighbours (oh, there’s an admission), about children who collect the Royal Mail’s red bands to make huge red balls of woven elastic.

The red was striking against the grey pavement. It lay there amongst splatters of pasty bird droppings. The boy and I spotted it at the same time, and he reached out purposefully and paused as I hurried on. The wind was blowing ferociously and I was late.

My parents think I’m uneducated because I can’t spell chiropodist. I told Mum I could spell hermeneutical phenomenology (look, no squiggly red line), but I don’t think that made much difference. I was looking up podiatrist. Is that American?

That reminds me of the West Wing episode where Bartlett is trying to make his scientist daughter laugh by confusing all the names of medical specialities. Podiatry? Pediatrics? Oncology?

We started to watch Something’s Gotta Give tonight, wanting something to take our minds off work while eating dinner (which was chicken breasts cooked on a medley of red onions, red pepper, mushrooms, baby plum tomatoes and bay leaves with sweet soy sauce and olive oil). I love that movie. It’s silly to start with, but I could watch the whole thing just for those scenes of Erica sitting in her room writing: the big bay window opening out onto the beach, the French music in the background, the muted eggshell greens and whites of the room, the bookshelves surrounding the house. So that’s where my Hamptons craze kicks off. And then there’s the crying scene, which is so painfully ridiculous in its mixture of sad and funny that it is almost beautiful. That house is the epitome of the idealised lifestyle: so ordered and white and clean and open. Lori suggested we’d have to get a whole library of French books to match the white décor or go to the extreme and organise our books in colour-order, which made me readjust my image of the perfect house just a tad.

Having said all that, if it came all with Jack Nicholson as the lover, I think I might have to give up even the Hamptons… Could I swap him for Johnny Depp?

Our Billy Collins book hasn’t arrived yet and I’m toying with the idea of buying The Portable Kristeva. Speaking of books, I have to go read Camera Lucida, which Margaretta described as a book we would hate her for assigning. I’m curious.