Boring (and I like it!)

(Warning: don't take stuff too seriously. Also don't confuse liking boring things with being a boring person)

So much for the melodrama - I feel much better now, thanks.

My congestion cleared up pretty much in sync with my cough, so I'm happily spared the dry cough. Nevertheless, I still asked my dad to bring over noscapine. Just in case.

I seem to have most of my hearing back, too, which is good.

Finally, I stopped feeling hopeless about my future. I'd hit a bit of a low point with my last post, I presume, but now I remember that there's always, somehow, a way. I probably just get a bit melodramatic over set-backs because I'm not actually used to them. In fact, the biggest set-backs I've experienced so far include a uni rejection, a job rejection ('a', as in a grand total of one), a funding rejection, and not always getting what I wanted when I wanted it - but, with regards to the last thing, I often did end up with a version of what I wanted later on, so those aren't truly set-backs. If that's the sum of all my set-backs, I should count myself lucky and I usually do, but it's so easy to forget sometimes.

That's also why I'm terrible at telling anecdotes - I don't really have any good stories in which everything goes wrong. I didn't even get seasick during the Cruise of Horror last year and "so yeah, I ended up fetching water for everyone and pouring it over their faces" doesn't do much in terms of heroism either. I'm really much better at telling fairy tales, which my dad will surely attest to.

I attended one of the lectures in the Scarman Lecture Series here in Leicester today, and it was on being a police researcher and, more importantly, about the ethics and authenticity of that type of ethnographic research. I love ethnographic research, it's got such a feeling of adventure to it, but that's not the point - during the Q&A at the end, it was mentioned that in lots of ethnographic research things, the more salient bits are pointed out while the boring bits are... 'left on the cutting room floor' (my interpretation plus editing reference). It got me thinking - what bits of my life should be left on the cutting room floor? As said, I don't have any good anecdotes, no grand extraordinary tales, no 'remember that time when's.

Oh, I have that one time that I thought I was locked in an alley in Oxford for about three minutes once.

And that's wildly comforting. I'm jumping the right hoops, I'm not deviating too much either way, and so while I may not have anything super-exciting to say, at least I won't also have to be scared of everything going wrong.

I like boring. I like the minutiae of corporate crime and tax evasion and all that. Boring is just really my thing.

Gee, I must've been such an easy child...