For a start, my hair hasn't been as short as in my photo ID for at least a year and a half. It's past my shoulders by now. I've remarked on this before, but it's weird how fast time goes past, sometimes. I haven't been an active contributor here for over two years already - indeed, I was only really active for a couple of months. Many of the same old themes still run through my life: the conflicts between head and heart, theoretical and practical, idealism and irrationality, about which I used to write so copiously (if not always lucidly). Always, there is a sense of nostalgia; to what degree it is justified, I can not gauge. The past always feels better than it actually was, after all. Do I wish I could return to regularly creating content? Yes, but not at the expense of the repetitiousness that was, I imagine, already clearly apparent by the time my rate of contribution here started to decrease. Part of the curse of my condition is that I first spark people's interest as an unusual person, but it is gradually revealed as one gets to know me that the ways in which I am unusual are not, for the most part, all that interesting. A case in point is my obsessive fascination with a given subject, be it for a period of hours or months, which "inspired" such efforts as the five-and-a-half hours of copying in pencil a photo of a model of Herod's temple, which never reached fruition.

As always, with these meandering monologues, I have no particular direction in mind when I set out and remain unsure of my path as I progress along it. I suppose a big part of the purpose of this entry was just to reassure anyone who might go to the bother of reading it that I am, indeed, still alive, whilst doing my best to put an original twist on it by turning that which should take no more than a sentence into a prolonged essay. At least if you've read this far, you presumably have at least some interest in whatever it is that I'm writing about at the moment - I'm not entirely sure myself - that, or you've just got nothing better to do for now.

I am, as might be surmised by anyone who either has been keeping track of my progress along the academic ladder or knows me personally, currently in my second year of an undergraduate degree at Imperial College, having failed spectacularly to summon, somewhat over a year ago, the presence of mind to make a decent job of preparing for those exams which might otherwise have sent me in the direction of Cambridge. Not that it's all a bad thing: the same difficulties I had then with getting my act together continue to imply that the pressure of being at the top institution for my subject in the country is perhaps something I would not be best suited to. Even here, I often find myself getting by largely thanks to the significant amounts of (arguably unnecessary, though in my case that may not be true) extra reading that I do, and have done, about those subjects which particularly interest me. Which isn't bad, I suppose, for somewhere like Imperial, but I'm getting sidetracked from an entry which didn't even have a main point to begin with. An impressive feat. The message, I suppose, of the whole "Imperial / Cambridge" mention was that, sooner or later, like most people, I do eventually seem to get over things. Failed aspirations, or ex-girlfriends or what have you, while they may remain anathemas for far longer than they would for the average person, do in the limit tend towards being just part of the baggage of life, in all its glory and mundanity.

And so, it's about time I drew this entry to a close, what with it being 2:30 in the morning and all (even if tomorrow is both Graduation Day for, well, graduating students and the weekly afternoon off for sports - as if I would voluntarily participate in an activity which required the use and co-ordination of more than one limb at a time...). For any of my imagined readers who might actually want to hear more about my life now and then, I have from time to time considered keeping a blog (tried once; failed miserably) or taking the lazy route and just publishing old diary entries on the Internet; the latter has the advantage that I've already written it, and the disadvantage that I did so several years ago so that it's seriously out of date. I'm also neatly sidestepping all the associated emotional issues, such as all the people I've written about over the years, many of whom I am no longer in contact with, who might not all be very happy with my suddenly telling everyone what I thought about them back when I was 16. So yes, in practice, it's never going to happen, but it's a fantasy I like to entertain now and again.

Anyway, I was supposedly bidding you goodbye. This always happens - unless I make a conscious effort to avoid it, in which case I inevitably come across as abrupt instead.

Night night!