coughcough coughcoughcough cough

I have a tickly cough and it is so much fun! For starters, I have always wanted to know what the hours between 3am – 5am looked while I was sober (dark.) and speaking to people interspersed with coughs (an interesting experience in a call centre situation.) is just a new way of punctuating. Example:

“Hello, is Mr. Customer there… hello, my name is Maura, and I’m calling from coughcoughcough, about recent cover you’ve bought on your coughcough? Well because of that, you now have a cough of coughcoughcough…”

I have already taken too many days off, but I think I’ll have to take tomorrow off, because being red-faced and spluttering in front of a computer screen is not beneficial to either me or my employers. Somehow I’ll have to fit in, “OhbythewaycanIhavewednesdayofftoo?” Maybe in the small print… I am waiting for the time where they get sick of this, but it’s not too bad, because I am so ready to leave that job. I have already started a mental list of things I want to do next Semester with all my free time. University is, after all, about doing completely new things, and I want to take advantage of that in a way I didn’t in first year. It is not dashing to Uni for a seminar, to town for work, back to uni for this/that/the other and maybe going out (because without a social life, I think I would crack under the weight of my routine.) My list so far:

1. Become part of Livewire (University Radio Show) and get a slot for a show.
2. Learn how to play guitar at a basic level.
3. Write more, submit to more competitions and magazines online.

It’s a short list, but I think it’ll be enough. I appeared as a guest co-host on a friend’s radio show the other week, because he was left without a co-host. It was so easygoing and fun, just basically chatting with a friend interspersed with music. Me, him and Kate are planning on getting a slot next year, which I think will be great. It’s something completely different, fun and I think my CV will be friendly to it as well.

As for guitar, well I decided I can always improve on clarinet for life now, I have that skill pretty much embedded and it’ll be an open opportunity whenever. However I think it’d be realllly nice to pick something up from scratch so that improvements are visibly noticeable. Acoustic guitars can be pretty cheap, so it’s no massive deal if it all falls through. I think it’s nice to just have completely new goals and aim for something different.

The writing thing isn’t different but leads back to that CV thing again – I write/think about writing/edit pretty much constantly, but it’s nothing that can quantitively be proven on a CV so submissions will boost that up!

Apart from that, a focus much more on my course will do me an incredible amount of good. I spend too much time at my job sat in front of the computer, speaking to nobody, thinking about all the work that I am not doing because I’m too busy sitting in front of the computer, speaking to nobody. And, currently, coughing.

cough.