7:18 am - Wednesday 28th March 2001

I could be a butterfly dreaming that I'm a Chinese philosopher, or I could be a really sick Ph.D student hallucinating that I'm writing this diary entry…

Orthomyxovrius. Not to be confused with the common cold virus which is a picornovirus. End result is that I'm really sick with the flu. This was a useful excuse to get out of going to dinner with the research group last night, and instead I spent the time in the lab passing in and out of semi-consciousness while I worked up a sample for my supervisor to take to Japan on Friday. I need to boost my paper count, hence I need to make sure that samples are in the thick of any action now and even after I'm gone.
I feel like crap, but in a little while will grab my coat and an enormous bunch of tissues and drag my sorry ass into the laboratory. As I said in an email to a friend "rising above and beyond the call of duty", I should get a medal, though I'd settle for a chest to pin it on. I was talking to a close friend on the phone and I must have sounded high, my brain was/is quite addled and I think I was making no sense whatsoever, thankfully at least I have the spell-checker option on my PC.

This is weird, there's data saying I had a file called Qcacti~1.doc on my desktop and I have no memory of such a file or having it on my machine. More surrealality. I guess this is the point where I find I'm being tracked by the NSA after having my real memory of being a secret agent erased and replaced with false memories of me being a poor, confused Ph.D. dyke.
I guess it couldn't be too hard to access my computer from outside of the college (when it's actually turned on), knowing the computer consultant I expect that the firewall here is a joke, and how would I know if someone was using my machine, I've got thousands of files to trawl through, and half of them I wouldn't know what they are. Hmmm… I think I should update my virus scan…

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