I'm in my office with my feet on the desk, again, laboriously filing the contents my Readin' Folder while listening to Toto's 'Africa' because it has been in my head for days and days and must be liberated. The Readin' Folder is the lynchpin in my unnecessarily complex reading management system. The Readin' Folder contains current articles and chapters I must read and understand and comment on. They are catalogued in the world's worst Excel spreadsheet and EndNote, possibly a bad idea as I use EndNote the way your quietly senile 80 year old aunt would, entering everything in by hand. After the readings are read they are transferred into a filing cabinet and more details are inexpertly plugged in to EndNote and Excel. It is unwieldy and cumbersome, and I need to do something about my haphazard keywords, but it has come in handy in the past. I submitted an article earlier today and hope to have a draft of something done tonight.

So far, 2008 and I are getting along just fine.

2007 was a hot mess of the year, hard, crazy, but necessary. Highlights include one panic attack so intense it saw me sheepish and covered in ECG leads in the emergency room, a necessary but demoralising break up, multiple crises about whether it was the right thing to jump straight in to a PhD, three trips to Ikea, many life-sustaining dinners at the houses of my dearest friends, and a puppy.

I feel better about 2008. In the last week of December I packed up my things from my grimy sharehouse and, with a foreign man, moved them to a poky, endearing house not too far away. We are well suited. He likes to shout obvious things at people from a moving car, such as 'you're running!' or 'you're wearing a hat!' He once answered the door with a cotton bud dangling from his ear. He gives me an achey feeling beneath the eyes, like a love-induced sinus infection. And now we have a house, and white goods, and 2008, and I'm very happy. Oh, and a fuck-off huge plasma screen TV. That also makes me very happy.