Oh dear. My college is having a traffic lights toga party on Valentine's day, the idea being that if you wear a red toga, you're unavailable (i.e. part of couple and darned smug), if you wear an orange toga you're thinking about it (i.e. partner back home, but they'll never be any the wiser!) and if you wear a green toga, you're up for it (i.e. desperate).

The whole idea of "pulling" in its purest form (i.e. as a social convention rather than a sexual urge, when you needn't even exchange any words with person in question) scares me witless, so events designed for solely for that purpose are even more terrifying. And naturally, it especially saddens me that such things take place at universities, supposedly places for intelligent people and certainly places that provide plentiful means of meeting new people with common interests.

But, after four years of university, I have had to come to terms with their existence. Fresher culture is a potent force, but most people grow out of it.

Or do they? For this party is in my college. A graduates-only college. A college for people who have been at university for at least three years and have 2:1s. People who surely realise that meaningless sex is very much overrated?

I'm just about part of Generation X and I often feel deeply grateful for my narrow escape from the horrors of Generation Y. But they're snapping at my heels and taking over the world. How scared I am that I'll still be a student in 2007, surrounded both in university and industry by people who were born in 1988!

To add insult to injury, the e-mail I got about it reads, "In the tradition of ancient Rome, the GSA brings you Caligula's favourite type of party; the traffic light toga party!" Quite apart from the dubious usage of a semi-colon, as one of my classmates pointed out, did they have traffic lights in ancient Rome?

Then again, the advertisement in my stairwell is a slight improvement on the Christian Union one that's been there for the last few weeks. Now I've nothing against "Are you Christian? Do you want to meet others? Then come to our meetings!" adverts, but this one's message was "Don't you want to be a Christian?" which is incredibly stupid, since spirituality can only come from within. But it was the phrasing which was unbelievable. It listed all these famous people, like Charlotte Brontė and Alexander Graham Bell, who were presumably Christians, and asked, "Do you want to be like them?" My first thought was: "What, dead?" And then it said, "Do you want to have what they had?" Ok, let's see, Charlotte Brontė had an early death, an alcoholic brother, a lot of angst . . .

How To Totally Mess Up Your Amazon Recommendations In One Easy Step

Just ordered:
* "Elements Of Mathematical Ecology" (self-explanatory)
* "The Rough Guide To Melbourne" and "Melbourne City Map" (self-explanatory, and I got money off if I bought them together)
* "Margaret Thatcher: The Grocer's Daughter" and "Margaret Thatcher: Iron Lady" (on special offer) (1. Margaret Thatcher interests me greatly. 2. I need to learn more about 80s politics in order to write Great Novel #1. 3. I need to learn more about stuff in general: I've been feeling v. thick lately. 4. I need some really heavy-going stuff to read while in Australia, so I don't buy a zillion books and have to pay for extra shipping when I come home. I have a 900+ page book about the Russian revolution, a 700+ page book about Rasputin, a 600+ page book about David Bowie and a 500+ page book about Britpop and Blairism which looked really boring but was on sale, but my outward plane journey alone takes 18 hours and there's a 4 hour stopover in Singapore (huzzah! Another continent conquered!) and I can never sleep on planes.)

So now it's going to keep telling me about Maths text books, tourist guides and politician biographies, none of which I usually have any interest in. Not that it's much good anyway, since I buy nearly everyone's Christmas and birthday presents there, so it keeps suggesting agreeable woman's fiction and obscure "post-rock" CDs.

This morning's lecture was cut short when the lecturer realised that were she attending this lecture and someone else giving it, she wouldn't have a clue what they were on about. Still, me and my group project partner then wrote our two-page report, thanks to bullet points, one-and-a-half-line spacing and regular use of the word "investigate".

In my five consecutive hours of lectures, one of my lecturers spent an hour talking about baby fish dying, another of my lecturers spent two hours talking about species extinction, and my Dutch teacher kept talking about dead Dutch people. ARGH! I know I'm a (partial) Biology student and Biology is The Study Of Life and death is an unavoidable part of Life's Rich Tapestry, but the amount it features in my lectures, I feel it should be renamed Necrology. There's four forms of two-species interaction: competition (where two species fight over the same resource), predation (where one species eats the other), parasitism, and mutualism (where the species' flourish in each other's company). Guess which one we're NOT studying?