Venial Sin

I've been watching Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City series on my breaks from revision, and the whole experience has reminded me exactly why I fell in love with the books back in the day when I found them in used-book stalls at the weekly farmers' market in Karachi.  It probably also explains why I (most of the time) find myself identifying more with the gay generation of the 60s and 70s than I do with my contemporaries, notable exceptions [...]

Be warned right now.  If you haven't seen X-Men 3: The Last Stand, you probably don't want to read any more of this.  I'd do a "/spoiler" tag or something on here, but it's not going to happen, so consider yourself served with sufficient notice.  

I’m sitting in the library, working on Tort law and realising how depressing it is to be even more ignorant of a subject now than I was eight months ago (then again, I suppose one could argue that the increased awareness of my ignorance is actually an increase in my knowledge, but that argument’s even weaker than my grasp of occupier liability), but I simply had to take a break to curse the shrill bitch sitting behind me for having [...]

I’ve spent about nine hours studying Judicial Review, Freedom of the Individual and Freedom of Expression, and still have all of Defamation in Tort to get through, but I thought I’d take a break and fill people in on the story from a few weeks ago, involving Colombians and other exciting rare species. About a month ago, I went to Heaven with the Financier, who I hadn’t seen since before I left for Karachi. I wasn’t really in the mood [...]

I've been having migraines for the last few weeks.  I assumed it was because of the stress from the upcoming exams, but I'm supposed to go in for an MRI/CT scan, and potentially a biopsy tomorrow afternoon, depending on what the oncologist says  So far, I'm expecting needles in my brain. It's 5:30 in the morning.  And the dawn is so beautiful.  The sun is breaking over the horizon, and the sky is glowing, the clouds are incandescent, and the [...]

As the weather gets warmer, my apartment gets stuffier.  Residences in the UK (or at least in London) aren’t exactly designed with climate control in mind; in the winters, you have inefficient radiators spewing excesses of heat in a very limited area, leaving entire chunks of rooms icy, unless one is willing to shut doors and wait until the heat has dispersed.  And in the summers, air-conditioning doesn’t seem to exist in any of the pre-made dwellings that I’ve so [...]

Before going to bed (i.e. in the next three or so minutes), I decided that I’d take a quick look through Craigslist. I have a number of books that I don’t think I necessarily want to keep–or at least that I’m sure I can replace easily–and given that I’ll probably be moving at least once, if not twice in the next six months, I want to worry as little as possible about storing and/or shipping my books all over the [...]

Apparently the people at Gap would like us all to dress like waiters this season. To wit: In other news, a round of advice for the world at large. Dear London Weather, Stop fucking with all us. Especially me. I realise that the entire point of London is to be grey and gloomy with the occasional three-and-a-half seconds of sunshine in order to cause entire generations of Britons to stampede Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens that they may tan themselves [...]

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, because it’s starting to piss me off mightily, but just haven’t had a chance to get around to it for an assortment of reasons. Well, just one major one really, but that particular dead horse has been flogged to pieces, resurrected, flogged to death, then whipped some more, so I’m just going to skip over the exam issues. Kaavya Viswanathan. Christ. Every time I’ve opened Technorati in the last couple [...]

Can someone please just lock me up in a room and take away all forms of entertainment (including cooking utensils) until I finally sit down and start studying? I generally tend to work best under pressure, but I have a nasty feeling that if I don’t start buckling down right now, I’m going to walk out of my Equity & Trusts and Public Law exams feeling as though someone shoved a cactus up my arse. I’m probably demonstrating this paradigm [...]