I'm going to a wedding at the start of september. Pleased to say it's not mine. It will however be interesting for a couple of reasons.

1. It's the first time I've been to a wedding where I was also at the previous wedding of one of the couple. Husband number 2 is much better, so I'm not bothered about that, it will just be necessary to not make ANY reference at all to wedding number 1 even late at night after a few drinks.

2. There will be someone at the wedding who I really don't want to see. 5 years ago I had to change my phone number, email, identity (ok, not identity) to get rid of them. This meeting therefore requires the kind of outfit that instils confidence and self-esteem, and preferably makes me look 6 inches taller and 3 stone lighter. Went to the shops yesterday and discovered that all the clothes are either magenta, lime green, or black... which means I'll probably put it to the back of my mind for a couple of weeks and then have to make emergency lunch time, after work, Saturday and sunday afternoon shopping trips in the final week.

The news today informed me that scientists have located the first gene that influences handedness. Good, I thought, a genetic basis for being left handed is much better than the other theories, which as far as I understand it, are basically different types of brain damage. Then I looked at the smaller print... This candidate gene only makes someone slightly more likely than average to be left handed (i.e. it's likely to be working in conjunction with other genes or in fact brain damage), AND the same gene is also associated with a higher risk of psychotic illness. Ditch the brain damage and gain psychosis - not a particularly attractive swap.

I'm quite a fan of Facebook. Ok, make that quite an addict of Facebook. But this evening hit a new low as I spent 45 minutes sending messages back and forwards to a friend who was upset... because she thinks she's been removed/blocked from someone's friend list. Oh dear.

First a confession. My name is Defying Gravity, and I watch Big Brother. Yes, it's shameful but true... 

Anyway, tonight I was watching and admiring the BB apology technique. I personally am not very good at appropriate apology giving. I tend to either apologise profusely when there's actually nothing to apologise for - this reaches its pinnacle when I automatically apologise to inanimate objects for bumping into them - or find myself tied up by a British emotional reticence and have to make a huge effort to actually apologise rather than burying my head in the sand/running away/emigrating to avoid the issue. Ostriches and Jonah are nothing compared to me. However I was amused by an apology on BB tonight. It was a development on the 'I'm sorry for upsetting you' (but I'm not sorry for what I did because I still think I'm right and I'm only apologising so that you'll talk to me again and stop throwing things at my head) technique, and went something like 'I'm sorry, you still shouldn't have said what you did and you were well out of order, but I'm sorry anyway'. Well at least it's honest... although can't help wondering exactly what the person thought they were saying sorry for, or whether they genuinely thought that 'I'm sorry for my behaviour but it wasn't my fault, actually it was your fault' counts as an apology.

Ways in which I've been told I'm quite male:

1. When I get home from work I can't cope with having a conversation straight away. I have to process the day first. If I was married it would be my partner going 'have you had a nice day at the office dear?' and I'd be the one grunting and pouring myself a drink. Actually, I've often thought it would be handy to have an old fashioned wife - someone who would know how to do things like make a cake or hem some trousers without having to look up instructions on the internet.

2. I really dislike it when people give non-specific warnings about an 'important conversation that's coming up', e.g. sending me an email saying 'there's an issue you need to know about, please phone me tomorrow night.' That's just wrong. Either tell me what the problem is so that I actually have time to prepare myself, or just phone me and talk about it. I quite like having the prep time, but I really don't like spending a day or 2 wondering what the 'serious issue' is going to be. Actually, I don't really know if this is a male trait, but someone once told me it was, and who am I to argue?

3. Although I have - I think - reasonably good interpersonal skills, in meetings I like to stick to the point. If we have a decision to make, I like to go straight to that decision without faffing around. Feel free to state your opinion, but please do it without unnecessary details or diversions. Tell me about your personal life/ existential philosophy/ detailed procedures for paying the cleaner AFTER the meeting, not during it. Meetings are for problem solving, not for sharing.

Since I'm definitely female, and am not feeling very sleepy tonight, I thought I'd see if I could find some kind of 'what gender is your brain' test. And indeed there is one on the BBC website. I'm pleased to report that my brain is on average female, but somewhat more masculine than the average woman's brain, if that makes sense. It seems to be masculine in very specific ways - I was better at a couple of tasks than the 'average' woman, but on one of the tests of maleness I scored an impressive 0 out of 20 - it appears I don't have any drive at all to systemise things. This is a bit of a relief I suppose, since one of the theories about autism is that it's an extreme version of the male tendency to systemise.

I live in a block of flats, and I've blogged before about the fact that our downstairs neighbours like to smoke out of the staircase window and then go back into their nice smoke free flat leaving ash all over the window-sill and the hail/rain/snow blowing into the hallway while the open window bangs against the wall. The other problem we have, which will be familiar to all flat-dwellers, is the bins. Our rubbish bags used to be left in a big pile by the back door, which was nice for the foxes and less nice for everyone else. We now have big wheelie bins in special enclosures, and recently we also got a recycling service that has a brown bin, green bags, and orange sacks to be left by our front doors.

This is evidently all a bit complicated for our neighbours. Several months after the bin enclosures were built people are still leaving their rubbish at the back door, where it won't be collected. They're also fond of leaving furniture, fridges, cardboard boxes etc, which don't get taken away. So now we have bin bags and random items by the back door, and recycling bags plus random items in the bin enclosure, and a great stack of letters from the managing agents instructing and threatening everyone. I'm deeply embarrassed to admit that I even went as far as phoning the agent (outside office hours so I didn't actually have to speak to anyone) and left an authoritative and articulate voicemail that went something like:

"um, I'm, um, from flat 23, er, we just rent but, er, well, there are bin bags being left by the doors and, er, I don't think people know where the, um, the , er, bin enclosures are because there aren't any signs and, um, well, lots of the people here aren't, um, well,, they're not that fluent in english, and your letters are, um, well, erm, not that easy to read or, erm, understand, and well I don't think they're reading them, maybe they don't get them or, er, understand them and, erm, well, ok, that's just it really..."

Small rant coming on.... One of my friends brought her 2 children to church with her this morning. It was a family service, which is supposed to be ok for all ages. Unfortunately she didn't get to take part in much of the service because some welcoming and friendly member of the congregation sitting behind her early on in the service said SHHHHUSH to her children. Honestly.... what kind of person thinks it's polite and ok to shush someone else's children (who weren't making that much noise) in the middle of a service that's supposed to include children? It doesn't make the children quiet, all it does is embarrass and/or upset the parents, make the kids think they're not welcome, and most probably scare people away from church. But that's ok apparently, because we only want people into church if they'll follow our (usually totally arbitrary) rules. Sometimes you'd think this whole church thing's got nothing to do with god and everything to do with maintaining some kind of 1930s social norm that most people didn't manage even in the 1930s....

Sometimes I wish my mother had never learnt to text. Since she's been moving house they've increased in frequency, so that I decided I'd have to train her not to expect an immediate reply from me. This decision was reached at Easter when I was on retreat in a convent. Retreat, convent, you think that might give some clues as whether I'd have my phone turned on and how often I'd check it, but apparently not, since I came back to my room one evening to discover a series of texts sent at hour intervals, which culminated in one saying 'why aren't you answering, I'm very worried, has something happened?' Yes, the unthinkable has happened and I've turned my phone OFF for 4 hours....

So over the last few weeks I've been gradually increasing the time in between getting a text from her and answering, to try and get her out of this idea that I reply immediately and if I don't there must have been some disaster. This has been ok until Weds this week when I left it a bit too long. The first text at 9am I forgot to answer, and then I got another one as I was getting on the tube, so didn't answer that either. I then went in to a  meeting for an hour, and when I took my phone off silent I had 3 texts. One from a friend, one from my mother saying did you get my texts, and one from my flatmate warning me that she'd had my mother on the phone worrying that something had happened because 'she's usually so good at replying'. Groan...

What I learnt at the weekend was.... don't agree to do something before working out how you're going to do it. This less than profound thought came to me at 4.45am on Sunday morning, as my alarm went off and I got up contemplating the prospect of spending 8 hours on a coach travelling to and from Northampton. A few weeks ago I agreed to go to a friend's confirmation on Sunday morning. I've visited there before so I knew the train was fairly quick from London, and that you couldn't book tickets in advance. I therefore didn't check train times until Saturday, at which point I discovered that there were no trains between London and Northants on this particular Sunday. There was a replacement bus service but it didn't get in til 10.10 and the service was at 10.15. No problem, I thought, it's not that far away, I'll get a coach... and then found that coaches from Victoria don't start until 9am on Sundays, and it's a 2 hour journey. They'll let you travel from Northants to London early on the weekend, but not the other direction. Hmm... Next tactic was to see if I could travel from Oxford. Yes I could, but not before 9am... Finally I had the inspired thought that coaches run all night to airports, and checked Heathrow. A 7.10 bus would get me there on time, there was just the small matter of actually getting to Heathrow, which is 2 bus rides away from where I live... hence the getting up at 4.45am. Moral of the story... don't have friends who live in Northampton.

Just came across the following statement in a well respected journal (The Lancet):

"The Asian category has a wide geographical variability in its interpretation. Even within the same population, different constructions of the term might exist.7 In the UK, Asian usually refers to "brown" Asians. In the USA, Asian is typically used to describe, "yellow" Asians."

Is it just me, or is that the worse possible way they could have described the difference between use of the term Asian in the UK and USA? Well, perhaps not the worst possible way, but probably the worst way that would still be printed. It sounds like something from the eugenics movement.

I needed to work today, because I've got a day off this week to have a wisdom tooth removed. However my computer equipment had different ideas. My laptop and desktop decided to stop working on the same day, meaning that I spent approximately: 

7 hours trying to fix it including uninstalling and reinstalling the same programme 3 times
1.5 hours swearing and throwing things around the flat 
1 hour doing a piece of work the first time
45 minutes re-doing the same piece of work because it didn't save even though it said it had 
A further 45 minutes faffing around designing a poster without getting round to putting in any content.

I'll have to hide from my supervisor tomorrow while I do what I was supposed to do today. Could be a small problem during our meeting at 2.30pm, but I plan to take precautions - a fake moustache and glasses should do it.