Break: Prison

While it is essential that I note that this is my 300th blog post, I don't feel I have anything particularly more interesting to write about it than that. So I move on...

The days are, mercifully, zooming by at the moment, aided by the discovery of a TV series that I think is one of the best I have seen in a very long time. A friend of mine has gone on about Prison Break so much that he convinced me to lend the DVD of season one he has. So I watched it.

After the first episode, I thought - very good. I really enjoyed it. Very strong acting, great direction, and a pretty decent premise. It's a little hackneyed, but that doesn't matter. In the genre we're in, standard American-style drama, it ticks all the boxes. Stereotypical characters, check. A premise to tug a little on the heart-strings, check. A love interest or nine, check. A deadline, check. A conspiracy, check. Witty dialogue - "Feel free to drop it in my suggestion box" as he taps the toilet with his nightstick, check. And so on.

Sometimes a little escapism is what you need, if you'll excuse the pun. Sometimes you just want to sit back and enjoy, knowing the pace of the show will keep you entertained. This is no thinking man's TV. The only thought you need to do is to keep track of who's friends with who, who betrayed who, and what's in it for them.

So I watched the first episode, was stunned at the quality, and decided to watch the next. At the end of that, I wanted to know more. Going for the hat-trick... a third episode couldn't hurt. At the end of that, I said "Meh, well what else am I going to do today?" - and finished it off in style with a fourth. I don't think I've ever done anything like that. Four episodes of a TV show back to back. Almost as long as Lord of the Rings.

I now have the second disc, and feel it is incumbent on me to watch some more today. The facts are simple. I'm not doing anything else. I have finished my dissertation and got it bound to stop myself thinking about it. I can't make any further changes now. That's good. I was getting fed up of worrying about it. It's gone, and now I just need to hand it in next Monday.

I'm also not in University this week. My lecturers have called this a reading week because they're all away at a conference. Despite the fact that we've just had three weeks off. Everything people say about students is true.

So it leaves me with very little to do. I have one essay left, that is due in five weeks today. So I'm not going to worry about that just yet. Next week I will start some work on it, probably finding the resources I'll need. All I'm doing is trying to pass the time. And when I think about it, once I start working and Real Life begins, I will be desperate to have all this free time back. So I shouldn't feel bad about using it to keep myself entertained with my hobbies. I genuinely can't think what else I could do with it. Not now, anyway. Maybe at the start of the year if I'd realised this was going to be like this I could have found a small job to do.

This Thursday I'm off to London for the day. I have a discussion with a friend which could lead to a solution to the free time crisis. Fingers crossed...