I love daylogs. I don't generally daylog, (but I'm daylogging) but I nearly always read them. One of the very very many things I have learnt from the site is the relativity of human emotions. In a typical daylog you might find one noder complaining about hir boss, another about hir partner who's left em, and perhaps yet another noder who's house has been repossessed. They are each as unhappy as the others, but the plight of the least fortunate throws the others into perspective. Camus says that Sisyphus must have been happy, and perhaps he's right. I suppose that I like daylogs for their very ordinariness. They're so human. In a shrine to intellectualism such as this, the presence of real, mediocre humanity is reassuring and ... (shudder) ... life-affirming. This is a community packed with monoliths of intelligence, knowledge and understanding. It's easy to forget beneath all this that there are real, bleeding hearts. Call me morbid or voyeuristic or just plain odd, but after a hard session trying to get my head round people people people like like like people or ariels' latest piece of math theory I find it refreshing to read these enchantingly simple and even banal contributions. It's easy to forget sometimes that E2 is people, and daylogs remind me of this. So, thank you, dayloggers.
You want this daylog to have content about my life? What kind of unreasonable request is that? Well, since
my last daylog, I've had my results changed to straight As and a Distinction, been to a
memorial service, had a job at a publishers, had my first medium-term
girlfriend,
read a lot of books, eaten a lot of
pasta, recieved unconditional offers from two universities, and become a lot more wilfuly
rarified. Was that so interesting? It's the
minutiae that count, let's not dwell on such important things.
Anyway, today is my little
sister's birthday: she's a charming five. She's desperately cute, and she knows it. She's prone to making knowingly sweet declarations on mankind, as kids can be. Obviously, I had to buy her presents, but being 200 miles away I had to send them to her. So, not being overly
pecuniate I bought her some
Lemony Snickett - at that age it's also important that the parent enjoys the gift too. Straight books in a package, I thought? How excited could any kid be about that? Part of the whole experience of getting presents is the opening of them, the excitment and
anticipation. Right? So. I bought little edible gold sugar stars and wrapped them up with the books. Then I put
that on a sheet of wrapping paper and
scattered it with gold and silver glitter and little gold stars and ballons saying 'I am five today!' on them and wrapped it up again. Then I found a card with a badge on it - badges are important - and wrote in it and filled it with
glitter and stars as well, and put it in its envelope. Then I put all that in a big
Jiffy bag, poured all the rest of the glitter and stars in - that's about 4 (little) tubs of glitter alone now - and sealed it. All I can say is, I hope they open it outside. Opening the damn thing'll be like being a giant caught in a
blizzard of light. A
technicolour snowstorm, speeded up. Must be one hundred grams of glitter in there: it's going to be messy. But that's the point, isn't it? This is why
siblings are fun.