Tell me I’m not a horrible human being, that I’m not going to fail med schoolat the first hurdle because I get too fucking distracted by everything to actually get any good revision done. I need to start making myself a better timetable each day, actually plan what the hell it is I’m going to do.

Like today. Today is a Wednesday which means it’s a day to be learning about tissues. And there is a hell of a lot I can stand to learn about tissues even though apparently it comess up the least of all of them. It ties in a lot with metabolism, though, like we did the adrenal gland in tissues long before we did it in metabolism even if it was in somewhat less detail.

Ooh, Mum just pulled up. Yay, human contact!

8.30am: Get Up
8.35am: Get breakfast/read paper
9.00am: Watch mindless TV
9.35am: Realise Jeremy Kyle is about to come on and turn off TV
9.36am: Realise am cold, turn on fire
9.37am: Read in front of fire for very long time
10.00am: Have bath and finish book
10.45am: Get out of bath and dress
11.00am: Go get dark load of of washing maching and put it into tumble dryer
11.05am: Put white load into washing maching
11.06am: Realise do not know how to work new washing maching
11.07am: Push buttons randomly
11.10am: Compose text message to Mum
11.12am: Have another go at washing maching, push buttons at random
11.13am: Washing maching starts working
11.14am: Delete half finished text
11.15am: Upstairs, brush teeth
11.16am: Procrastinate
11.52am: Am still procrastinating

I am going to quickly check facebook, then do 40 minutes revision then wander into Town to meet darling sis for some Christmas shopping. I still need to get hers, Mum’s, Dad’s, and Zoe’s (secret santa). Then several birthday presents for all the people who’s birthdays I missed while I was at Uni.

Oh, politics.

I’m not a quitter. Generally. This year I did NaNoWriMo for the third year in a row now. I quite like it, actually, though I’m probably not really allowed to say that about my own (uncomplete) novel. It’s about a girl who has to go on the run because when he was eighteen he murdered his girlfriend and ran off. Her father, who happens to be a drugs warlord with a hell of a lot of influence is tracking him down. It’s taken him twenty odd years because he was in prison for a while, but once he gets out he starts to chase Robert and his family and bad things ensue. Random things ensue, as is the way with NaNoWriMo. On about day three I gave Nadine (my main character) a twin brother, then killed him off on about, er, day seven.

On about day nine I found a book in Asda that looked interesting and upon reading the back cover realised that it had a plot line depressingly similar to mine. It had something to do with what the parents doing affecting the next generation. I felt like crying, I think this is when the novel was going through the “bad patch” stage. I was way behind, but somehow managed to pull it back and actually finish a day early. As a result it was my most successful NaNo ever, as in year one I submitted it at about eleven o clock on the 30th November, while last year I flopped about halfway through. The ironic thing is that I actually liked that one the best, it just wasn’t a sustainable enough story for 30 days. I also think I needed more life experience.

Then I have this other idea that floats around in my head. It’s a six novel series, about a nuclear war (well, technically they were declared as two separate nuclear wars but we shan’t worry about that, they were pretty close together) and the repercussions over the six following generations, each book focussing on one generation, so there’s a fair bit of overlap, but not to an annoying extent, it’s just there for continuity, and for the different points of view. For example when the main political party that dominates the later books rises towards the end of book two, this is covered by Elora, who is at that time a mother and wife, but a former adventurer who helped rebuild the world to it’s current state.

The same events are covered at the beginning of book three, but by the eleven year old Janice, Elora’s daughter, who naturally has a very different take on it. And such the interest is kept. Icidentally, Janice’s son goes to stay with Elora, now a widow, in his early childhood. This bit isn’t covered in Elora’s book.

It’s my epic. Everybody has an epic in their heads, the story they were born to write. The entire story is mapped out in my head, the wars, the rebuilding, the rise and fall of the Government, another rebuilding. One of the key moments of the final book is when milk gets delivered to the main character’s house. Milk, in bottles, delivered by a milkman. That is the sign of normalcy, the message that is passed down throughout the books. Milk bottles.

Now you’ve hear this, I shall have to kill you.

Jokes. x

Whatever, the fact is that you must be just about as bored as I am.

Okay, todays nugget of detail. Have you been watching flashforward? I’m up to episode 6 or something, then Demand Five kept cutting out on me so I had to stop, which was irritating in itself but anyway that’s not why I’m here. There was that one episode, where they diagnosed Addisons disease basied on the fact that in his flashforward the white man had somehow become black. Why does Addisons cause someone to become black?

Basically, Addisons is a disease caused by having too little cortisol. The secretion of cortisol is regulated by two things. When cortisol levels rise this is first detected in the hypothalamus in the brain, which releases CRH (corticotrophin releasing hormone). CRH goes on to stimulate the pituitary gland (which is also in the brain), causing it to secrete a substance called ACTH. The ACTH goes on to stimulate the secretion of cortisol from the adrenal cortex.

Anyway, in Addisons disease the adrenal cortex basically gets annhihalated by the body, i.e. in technical terms it is an autoimmune destruction of the body’s own cortex cells. As a result, the amount of cortisol it secretes decreases, which feeds back to the hypothalamus which releases more CRH, so the pituitary releases more ACTH. But due to the damaged adrenal gland, the amount of cortisol doesn’t rise up again, which means that moreand more ACTH is produced.

That’s all well and good, I can hear you crying, but how does it turn a white man black?

Well, when the ACTH is synthesised, it actually has within it a sequence of amino acids that is very similar to another protein called Melanocyte Stimulating Hormone (MSH). As a result, ACTH can, when it is in excess, bind to MSH receptors on melanocytes. And what melanocytes do is increase skin pigment, such that to wild excess, it could turn a white man black.

I’m one of those annoying people about religion. I would identify myself as Christian, and yet I only ever go to Church at Christmas and for weddings and shizz, and while I kind of believe in God it’s not necessarily that God, if you get what I mean. I feel that there is something, I feel we are not alone in this world, that there is something guiding us. But I don’t know what it is. It’s just the little things that make me believe in this stuff. Crazy little things, little miracles that have happened to me that I don’t know how to explain.

Like, in year 8. We were on a school trip, me and my friend forgot to put our suitcases in the door like we were told to so when we looked out the window and saw everyone getting on the buses we left in kind of a rush. A generally unsupervised rush as well. We charged into the lobby, annoyed that we had nearly been left behind, and were told to put the key cards to our room in this little glass globe thing with a hole in it. So we throw in the cards. Then later we’re on the bus and I look in my purse and lo behold I still have one there.

Naturally, panic ensued. I imagined all kinds of ridiculous things, I imagined that the police would come after me for stealing a key card to the shitty hotel that we had been occupying, that they might think that I might one day go back and try to rob room 635 (or whatever the hell it was, were you impressed for a moment then that I had actually remembered our room number?). So I closed my purse and I wished, it wasn’t even praying really, though some of it might have been directed to God for all I can remember, I wished the card away. I prayed that it would disappear, that it didn’t exist, that by some fluke of time I actually HAD put it into the glass globe with a hole in it thing.

There’s no reason for you to believe this, perhaps this is a stupid thing to say in my first blog post, you’ll have me down as a liar before we’ve even begun, but I swear the key card disappeared. It just wasn’t there at the next stop. Perhaps in my unconscious mind I threw it away, perhaps someone else did it for me though I don’t remember mentioning it to any of my friends (I was nervous they might later give me away, see, I was always rather untrusting of my friends). Whatever, I don’t know.

All I know is that I believe in miracles, and that’s why I believe in a God.