Still in NH, still very excited about snow, still working for Hillary Clinton's campaign. This is just a quick plug for the brand new lovely anonymous love meme, resurrected after the previous one maxed out at 5000 comments. I'm on it and so should you be.

This week, I have finished applying to law school, put up a fake Christmas tree without lasting damage to either myself or the tree, flown four thousand miles and spent several hours in sub-zero temperatures canvassing for Hillary Clinton. In approximately that order. Oh, and I saw The Golden Compass too. I feel like I have achieved... well, something.I'm in New Hampshire with emily_shore and her lovely family, who remind me in strange incongruous ways of my own family, and to all intents and purposes am in another world. The part of the States I know the best is, to my sorrow, Indiana - land of cornfields and ever-more-frightening relatives - followed by New York, and NH is very unlike both. To start with, I'm in a real small town, of the type beloved of Bill Bryson, with wide streets and family businesses and impressive federal buildings, with a perfect icing-sugar coat of snow all over everything. And it is of course very cold. Funnily enough I'm on about the same latitude of Formby Point, which offers up the frightening prospect of what would happen if the Gulf Stream gave out, because there is a lot of ice here, people use words like "bracing" to describe the air, and somehow everything has a sort of cold, metallic tint to it, something I'm told is the smell of snow. It reminds me in small ways of a thousand other places - notably Himachal, for some reason; it has that same woodsmoke edge to it, and I keep expecting to stumble over someone selling cherries - but is mostly an entirely different kind of place. And that's nice.And I picked Hillary. (It bugs me slightly that the media, and even her own campaign, refer to her as "Hillary" rather than "Senator Clinton", because surely no one really thinks it's Bill running again, but that's how people seem to be doing it, so watch me conform.) I have some reasons, but they aren't very profound; I had to pick someone, and she seems a good bet. I went canvassing today to this effect. It was really cold. I am not profound. I shall say this a lot. It was cold, it was icy, I am a natural-born introvert and I'm British (no, the British reserve is not a myth, and the cultural divide is quite the chasm in terms of politics) and thus wasn't entirely prepared to go up to doors and start talking to people about their views. But I'm glad I did it, regardless. I was doing it with emily_shore (who is great, by the way; without her I would probably be upside down in a snowdrift somewhere) and our favourite registered Democrat was undoubtedly the guy who came running to the door in below-freezing temperatures not wearing a shirt, holding back a dog with one hand, smiling happily and telling us that he'd love to talk, sorry, no time, his daughter was in labour.Well. There's a time and place for politics.My other great achievement for the day was about 600 words of my yuletide story, written longhand on a legal pad but written. I think I'm pleased with it. We'll see. This is an odd sort of working holiday - campaign work, which I'm planning to do a lot more of, and copious geekery - but a good one. Because I'm jet-lagged, I'm even keeping normal-person hours. This can only be a good thing.Oh, yes, The Golden Compass. Well... I liked it well enough. It was a fun two hours, but, well, huh. It lacks the depth of the book by a long way, it's going to suffer from losing the religious angle quite considerably, I think. The Oxford scenes are delightful - there's a bit where Lord Asriel and Lyra are walking through Trinity's gardens, and all I could think about was how the great big orb they show them walking past was stolen last year by someone from Balliol. Cue angry emails from the Chaplain, followed by increasingly desperate ones talking about how they could just leave it anonymously in the lodge, begging the question of how exactly one leaves a two-metre-in-diameter metal globe anonymously anywhere. But I digress. The rest is, yes, fun, and my favourite thing in it Lee Scoresby's hare daemon. But not a classic by any means, and I don't hold high hopes for the remaining two. (Obviously don't get me started on the stupid, stupid name change.) Enough babble for one night. Back to that keeping normal-person hours thing.

Oh, my, you guys talk a lot. Skip?=120 and that was without communities. Er, I appreciate I probably didn't mention this earlier in the week, but, er, I am in New Hampshire. No, really, I am. It's covered in snow and incredibly beautiful, and everyone I've met has a political opinion. Right at this moment I'm pretty sure I'm going to volunteer on the Hillary Clinton campaign, but I'm not sure.Anyway! That's where I am, and where I'll be for the next fortnight or so. I'm spending Christmas in Indiana, which should be nice; my parents are working nights most of that time and I'd be incredibly lonely at home. I made it here despite fallen trees, incredibly high winds, flight delays in and out of Heathrow and snow flurries in Boston. I'm going to take that as a good omen.

Okaaaay. I just clicked the submit button on three law school applications. Maria gave me a bag of Thornton's chocolate-covered caramel for Christmas and I have just munched my way through it all. These two facts are not unrelated. Argh argh argh argh argh I am crazy why am I crazy argh argh argh. We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.There's a thunderstorm going on, but the thunder is so deep you can feel it, in your bones and in the stones of the house, rather than hear it. It's good to be home. I went down from Oxford yesterday afternoon in horrible weather and it didn't really let up all the way here, but it's very cosy, sitting inside with large quantities of chocolate and lots of books - many people gave me books this week - and so tired that I'm viewing everything through a sort of cotton-wool haze. My mum is on nights, and will get back in about half eleven - I just need to stay awake until then and then I am going to bed, in my lovely bed with its overabundance of pillows and pretty Rajasthani covers. I am looking forward to that a lot. A lot. The window is open a crack so I can hear the rain and the wind and the sea all mixed up together and howling through the pines. A whole damn lot.Despite the cotton-wool tiredness, eighth week was actually lovely. It's all in my head now as a succession of sensory impressions, all bright, all vivid (possibly something to do with my having been somewhat tipsy since Tuesday), and all mixed up a bit. It was a good week. I was on a protest, in a pantomime, inebriated and happy and overworked, so it was probably a good term, too. In that spirit, a few brief sensory impressions:Firstly, the protest. I've had enough of the politics of it, and enough of the discussion, but as many wise people seem to have said, decisions are made by those who show up. I showed up. That was it, really. I showed up, and my friends and I ended up on Redwatch.* Nice start to the week. But in all seriousness, what do I ever do but what seems right at the time? I do, and I did, and that's my final word on the subject. Secondly, OULES. The panto - Aladdin - started on Tuesday, and I was a pirate. Well, no, I was Thief #8 and jacinthsong was Thief #7. ("But you're the first one to speak! What happened to Thieves 1 to 6?" / "Oh, they dropped out in third week.") But it's apparently a little-known axiom of formal logic that thieves and pirates are co-referential, so we ended up with bandana and a cutlass (and a Baileys bottle labelled "RUM") and followed Ali Baba about whilst singing the Thieves' Pointless Song ("This song is completely pointless / but it serves to fill a gap / This song is completely pointless / In fact, this song is crap...")It wasn't quite as much fun as last term's, because nothing is as much fun as playing a corpse, but it was delightful fun nevertheless. Full of dreadful puns, a pantomime dame who looks better in a dress than I do, a wonderful wonderful evil sorcerer of evil (complete with song entitled "Squashing Fluffy Kittens On The Road"), bespectacled henchwomen, dancing skeletons and two large buckets of foam, it was fab. I sat backstage on Tuesday night and remarked on a very Oxford scene: the last week of term, backstage, dim light mid-performance, and six or seven people piled up against the wall frantically reading. (Organic chemistry, international law, maths, conflict in Israel.) I love OULES so very much. The cast party was also lovely. I was drunk. I feel the need to point this out before anything else, or indeed before anyone else does, because it is true. It was still the nice sort of drunk, though; the I love everyone and everything sort of drunk. Last term, at the cast party on Port Meadow, I was ritually adopted and cocktailed and wiped the wine out of my eyes to find myself an official Oule. For some reason Maria wasn't cocktailed then, so she decided she needed a set of parents - me and foulds, which is delightfully incestuous, considering he's also my OULES dad - a bottle of vodka and about fifty people yelling "A cocktailing, a cocktailing, there's going to be a cocktailing!" I remember this so vividly - the night sky, the alcohol-made-melodic singing, the smudged eyeliner around the hundreds of eyes, even through the cotton-wool. Later on I was having a conversation with someone about something - the details of who and what have inexplicably slipped out of my memory - when foulds jumped up, also very vivid, grabbed me and somehow or other I was being twirled around the garden yelling "We did it!"We did, though; next term we shall between us be directing the OULES version of the Aeneid, which is yet another reason I'm crazy. (Term before Finals. Directing a show. Yep.) But I actually can't find it within myself to be anything other than very, very excited about it. I'm going to America at the end of this week, and I have a to-do list that once again has "sort out life" on it, but now I'm going to eat more caramel and watch the first season of Buffy.(Law school! The Aeneid! Eeeee.)*Link goes to Wikipedia, not the actual site, because of, er, referral stats.

I was going to babble about how the end of this term cannot come soon enough but, argh, enough.Instead, have Geoffrey and Anna and Bolivian folk singers. I love the Bolivian folk singers, they make my day better.

The debate went ahead. I like the thought of hundreds of protesters sitting in the Union and refusing to move, but the thing went ahead. We tried protesting. No, more than that, we exercised our rights to free speech and went out and protested. I am exhausted, both physically and in my head; I have done no work today, but have worried and fretted and run around and stared at LJ and not said anything. So I will answer all your comments in time, and thank you for making them, but right now I'm just going to post pictures of the protest, and try not to panic about how much work I haven't done. Claire is lovely, and suggested I write to my tutor and say something about how I cannot possibly deal with democracy in the Middle East right now, I am too busy engaging with democracy right here. (Her variant: she can't possibly engage with democracy in Thucydides right now, she's too busy... you get it.) Thank whatever deities are out there for my friends, whose pictures I have happily stolen, with thanks. The banners were worth seeing, it must be said. My favourite was a lovely one of Voltaire's "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" quote, with footnote: Also. Pedar thinks that someone called in to the Radio Five phone-in this morning and was talking about me. Any confirmation on this point would be appreciated.

This is the post I wasn't going to make, at all, being made in the middle of the night, because now it's on the national news and I am enormously, enormously pissed off. As everyone who's talked to me in the last two days knows. In brief: Oxford Union president Luke Tryl has invited Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP (note for non-Brits: the British National Party is a racist, fascist, extremist right-wing political party) and David Irving, convicted Holocaust denier, to speak.(The Oxford Union is a very old, very well-respected debating society in Oxford - it's not officially affiliated with the University, but almost all of its members are students here. It's hosted such people as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, and Bill Clinton. Speaking there confers legitimacy, in other words.)The history is long and convoluted, but as said before, it's on the national news: on the Guardian, on the BBC. The row started at the beginning of term, and has been going on ever since. On Friday, they held a referendum - following much controversy - about whether or not to rescind the invitations. I was fresh from a Cold War tute, wandering through college when a couple of historians whom I know slightly bounced on me with placards and said, "Have you voted?""No," I said, trying to hold off the spiel, and failing; they immediately started on the first line:"You know, it's not a free speech issue...""YES!" I yelled, much to poor Liam's surprise. "Yes, yes, yes, I AGREE WITH YOU."And because it was very cold, and I was very angry, I took a placard and helped them out for twenty minutes or so. It was freezing, but it's amazing how righteous anger can keep you warm.Well, here's the spiel. It's not a free speech issue. I believe in freedom of speech, passionately, fervently, believe in it every day of my life. I believe in free speech in the cold and the wet, I believe it when the sun's going down and you have an essay to do and you're still out there with your placards, I believe in the right to grab people at a doorway and say, "Have you thought about how it's not a free speech issue..."I believe, also, that I am a human being, a free autonomous individual, and that I have the rights conferred on the individual by the liberal democratic state. And Nick Griffin does not believe this. There is no starting point for debate with someone who doesn't believe you have the requisite personhood for debate.So when I believe in Nick Griffin's right to free speech, I believe in his having to stand in the cold and the wet, with passing cars splattering dirty puddle water over him, while he acts on this right. I don't believe in the Oxford Union inviting him in, giving him central heating, wine and an audience, effectively indicating to him that his opinions are worth more than the crap on someone's shoe. That's my money, too, that's paying for it - I am, to my considerable discredit, a member of the Union - and this is just so very wrong. Also, thank you very much, Cherwell, for publishing an opinion on free speech (that I can't find a link for - anyone?) that is so drenched in unanalysed privilege that made me angry all over again. Free speech, it babbles on about. And then it says - paraphrased here; really, I would like the exact words, if anyone has them - that the presence of Griffin and Irving is no physical danger to students in Oxford.Well. Quite apart from anything else, they're wrong on that - thousands of protesters are expected, and Balliol, bless them, have democratically ordained that their usual scheme is to be extended tomorrow (the day of the debate), and anyone feeling unsafe anywhere is to take a taxi home and be reimbursed by the college.But. More than that. Physical safety, yes, okay. All right. But how arrogant do you have to be, to leave the nuances of that unexplored? Maybe I've as little chance of getting attacked on the street tomorrow as I do any day. But here I am, thinking about it. Here I am, going to sleep at night thinking, there are far-right groups in Oxford tomorrow, oh dear. And why should I have to think that? Why? See above where I'm a human being, where I deserve to feel safe every second of the time in my home city, where white people don't have to worry about visual indicators and I do. How dare the Union blithely invite RACISTS into my city, so safe in their straight white male privilege that they don't have to think about the consequences of what they're doing? I am not straight, white or male, and I have no uncomplicated identity, no simplicity or belonging - but I am an Oxford student. No one is allowed to contest the basis upon which I'm here, at this place and at this time. How dare they take the one thing that I have all of my own, my home, and compromise that? (And here's the ironic thing: two years ago, I would have been as angry as this, but a mass of inchoate rage rather than remotely coherent. That's what PPE has done for me.)It has not been a good term for not being white.

5.08 am. Why... in fact, I'm not even going to go into the rant right now. Suffice it to say there are reasons for my being awake at this time, most of them involving Balliol/Tiptop/law school/life in general being really, really crappy, and my flamethrower is in the post.ANYWAY. The ds_match results are in, and Team Angst won! Marginally. By less than 0.25 points. (We got 15.33 points to Team Romance's 15.19.) But still. And also who cares, because the whole thing was so, so unutterably awesome. I had a lovely time, and I never have this good a time when I'm new in a new fandom, it just doesn't happen. So. Yes. That is made of joy.Also, now would be the time to confess. I began as a ds_team_angst back-up writer, and was, after a fortnight, promoted to actual challenge writer, which was a little brain-breaking but very very much fun. And as for the real confession, here's what she wrote:Fic:: At The Time of Writingby RavenPG-13, Due South, slash. Fraser/Kowalski. Written for Team Angst, but mostly oblique in its woe.( twenty-five pieces of documentary evidence, and something else that happened )Yep, I committed epistolary fic. Well, it's not so much strictly epistolary as a mixture of letters, journal entries, answering-machine messages, fridge notes (none about communists, alas), database entries, lists, you get it. No continuous prose at all, which means it's only about 3200 words, but comes to eleven pages in a Word doc, and as I said more than once, it took the amount of work that eleven pages of continuous prose would have taken. Every word having to be exactly right was a bit of a problem. So was not being able to bounce it off the people I generally bounce my fic off, because of the whole anonymity problem, but actually, see above where this whole experience was great, because it was. nos4a2no9 and spuffyduds did the actual beta-work, and jamethiel_bane and isiscolo held my hand throughout, and they are all awesome people. Thank you, guys; I never did thank you before, and you were so great.The anonymity thing made it all interesting, it must be said. absinthe_shadow guessed without even a pause for doubt who'd written it, and we resolved to only discuss it in coffee shops and not on the internet at all, which is the sort of resolution which makes me laugh and talk about fandom happily in public places. It makes me wonder, though, if knowing me in real life means you've a better shot at knowing what my writing voice is like. I'm not really sure about that - I mean, it would imply that I write how I talk, or at least my writing in everyday situations, such as notes and emails, is a clue to my narrative writing. Which is probably not the case. And I'm not sure I do have a consistent narrative voice - especially in a story like this, which has no prose to bear my fingerprints - but people have guessed stories of mine before now, so I'm really not sure. (Also! Two people guessed that it might be isiscolo who wrote it! I found this very, very flattering away in my new-to-fandom corner.)Of course, there were a number of clues in this story that indicated it was by me. Independent bookshop database entry, for example. (Guess where I've worked since I was seventeen?) And, well, there is the Case of the Unnamed Psychiatrist. Originally he was going to stay that way - unnamed - until I realised I couldn't cite him unless I did, indeed, give him a name. So I looked wildly about and eventually christened him J. Gaddis.John Lewis Gaddis is, of course, a fairly eminent Cold War historian. Speaking of whom, I have read pretty much all of We Now Know over the last six weeks or so, and it may just be me doing my reading at 5.29am, but I think he, too, is getting bored and somewhat flippant. My favourite section so far:"Certainly it was the most memorable General Assembly session ever... The Soviet leader himself enlivened the proceedings by trying to shout down Macmillan; when this did not succeed he took off his shoe and banged it at the unflappable Prime Minister. 'A pity,' Gromyko later sighed, 'but it does happen.' Castro made his own unforgettable impression when he took the podium: 'We will do our best to be brief,' he assured the delegates, and proceeded to harangue them on the evils of American imperialism for four and a half hours... The assembled representatives of the first, second and third worlds reacted, for once, in harmony: they listened attentively for a while, but then began to fidget, and then, to slumber, and then, as discreetly as possible, to steal away."Yes, I did just type all that out, I must be going mad, oh look it is 5.34am.Back to work.

I woke up this morning with a feeling of impending doom. I find it very hard to articulate my feelings of impending doom; they tend to correlate with grey, thick, raw weather, the freezing-cold equivalent of humidity, the ones that hurt your head. And I was pretty sure that, as they say in the glorious suburbs of Liverpool, that something was about to kick off. The funny thing was, I had the kind of night last night that involved my going to bed at five in the morning, and it was truly delightful. I got through everything on the dreadful to-do list save going to the lecure on the Cold War - I laugh at the Cold War! - and Maria's birthday dinner was just utterly lovely. Two weeks ago jacinthsong was cooking dinner whilst I read my email (yes, yes, we are co-dependent) and she happened to mention giantmicrobes.com, a company devoted to the production of fluffy plush micro-organisms ("1,000,000 times actual size!"). Best thing ever, I swear. I spent a very happy afternoon looking through the various scourges looking for something Maria would like, and eventually settled on Helicobacter pylori (which is incredibly fun to say), E. coli, and HIV. They arrived two days ago, and they are quite possibly the best things in the universe. E. coli has cute little flagellae, H. pylori is yellow and mutely appealing and people seem divided about whether HIV is cute or demonic. I personally plump for the former. But, yes, we went for Thai food and gave them to her afterwards, and Maria was very, very happy. I have never seen anyone so happy to be faced with giant prokaryotes. I love Maria a lot. We also got her a book about knitting, a book about philosophy and a book about murder, and a lot of wool. (I currently live in fear of waking up in the morning to find civilisation as we know it has ended, because Maria has knitted it into a nice scarf.)And after that we went to Moya, which, as I have said before, is possibly the only Slovakian cocktail bar in the world outside of Slovakia (my personal favourite aspect of the place is the corridor that leads up to the loos is lined with posters encouraging you to visit Bratislava) where I drank a strawberry daquiri the size of my head and proceeded to consciously not fall off my chair and to talk about aesthetics and films and the forty-something base sounds of the Devanagari script and melon liqueur and pie. And sebastienne is made of greatness. I have a blurry memory of maybe possibly perhaps teaching her to say "hippopotamus fucker" in Hindi and still not falling off my chair. Following which, there was cake, and Angels In America, and because it was Maria's twenty-first birthday and we are all grown-ups, we filled condoms with water and threw them out the window. It seemed like a good idea at the time.(Yes, I am quite drunk right now, why do you ask?)So as for why I woke up this morning afternoon with a feeling of impending doom, I'm not exactly sure. Maybe it was the weather. Maybe it was the atmosphere in and around the flat, and indicators I could feel of one or another of my flatmates hauling off and killing another one. And walking around the city today did not help; this morning I realised I was out of toothpaste, shower gel, shampoo and indeed clean clothes, and whilst I could quite happily go to Boots and buy more of three of those things, it seemed a little unwise, because I'm pretty sure I was giving off the impression that I'd just today discovered the institution of cleanliness. Which is really, really not true. Really. But oddly enough, my day improved greatly. I didn't want to have a party tonight, I really didn't. I didn't realise that my flatmates and I are amazing people who had cleaned the place and got in sweets and crisps and alcohol and done new playlists and basically done everything you need to do for a party except, y'know, inviting people. So, well, not a lot of people came. (I think a lot of people we might have invited were at Queer Bop, anyway.) And those who did come got drunk and ate lots and foulds and chiasmata and I sat in a corner and talked about knitting and giant microbes and various other things all night. Eventually jacinthsong appeared, post-Queer-Bop, wearing a rainbow flag and not a lot else, and I had ended up on Maria's bed sleepily drinking elderflower-flavoured-vodka, and there was knitting going on, so we sort of reached that sort of three-in-the-morning mellow place of joy and love.Sigh. Yes, I am still filled with love. After I'd finished complaining about it always being three in the morning - it is always the small hours of the morning, nowadays - chiasmata jumped up and decided home was in order, so I went downstairs with her and nearly froze to death - it's below zero, and I was barefoot - but it was absolutely worth it, because somehow or other we got to have a discussion I wanted to have with someone, about why I am still racked with guilt about the way I am now, about being "other" (more about which in the morning, when I am not drunk and thus have a greater chance of being coherent) and it was fruitful and sensible and worth my feet freezing off. I got back to my room to find lovely people to warm my feet up and make me watch Doctor Who. (Time Crash is made of love. So much love. Ten secretly loves Five! They both secretly love the Master! It is all made of cracky, beautiful joy!)Oh, will you look at that, it's five in the morning. Huh. Maybe, possibly, it is time to go to bed. I do babble. Er. One thing my flatmates are perhaps not great at is doing washing-up. Neither am I, really. Cue lots of notes left to each other, stuck above the sink, saying things like "Do the washing-up! Like, now! Love, the Washing-Up Nazi", with swastikas. It is crude but effective.Yesterday we cleared the back-log. The sink was empty, so was the draining-board. The cupboards were full of fresh, clean kitchenware. Cue this appearing, like magic, above the sink:It made me very happy.And now the wind is howling, it took me five tries to get my password right, time for bed.

Okay! This began as a to-do list for my reference, has somewhat transcended that now. Tomorrow, I have to:-Return books to Social Science Library, pay off spectacularly awful fines, why have they not stopped me borrowing yet, I do not know;-Return books to Philosophy Library, ditto;-Read, re-read, edit, and reference awful awful essay on China, reiterate to self its awfulness, double-space the horrible thing, and add in something called "Paper Cover Sheet", also double-spaced, because tutor is American and insists on paperwork, ohgod;-Go in to college, stand there with hands on hips in college office and SCREAM. Because they said, they SAID they were sending off transcripts to Law School Admissions Council, or at least not transcripts, but piece of paper saying "the University of Oxford does not issue transcripts", they said so, and I went back and checked twice and they kept on saying it, only for me to discover today that they did not in fact do this. The docments and addresses I gave them have been sitting in an office for six weeks and have got lost. Because of the six weeks' processing time, this means I may well miss deadline. Horrible woman from office said they would FedEx it, I do not believe them, am considering just sitting on the floor and crying until they send it in front of me. -Go to a lecture! On International Relations in the Era of the Cold War! I hate the fucking Cold War!-Go to a tutorial! Also on the Cold War! A double tute! One hour of which is in on of the grotty ghetto rooms in Balliol, and other god knows where because we're being chucked out at two. I voted for Starbucks, tutor has no objection, this may be the sole high point of day.-Send off Cerberus emails, as usual, Anthony Kenny coming to speak on Monday, sure this will be terribly nice but I have no time. I was supposed to be doing Tiptop's art design for next term this afternoon, I had exactly two hours to do it in, neatly allocated, Sky was supposed to be either a) at home or b) leaving his door open for me to get in, did he do either of these things, did he fuck. Bastard wanker bastard is not remotely apologetic about it either, suggesting instead that maybe he should do the design instead of me. Bastard. Tiptop, or at least Pat, said they only trust me with it, which is flattering but ARGH NO TIME maybe on Sunday, if I get up early, maybe, oh god, why don't I just keel over and die of exhaustion, it would save on both stress and paperwork.-Go to the computing services armed with external hard drive, great deal of patience and goats for ritual sacrifice. My computer is dead. Dead, deader than any number of potential dead things, really, really dead. I need to hold my breath and hope to retrieve 59GB of data. Am trying, also, very, very hard, not to cry over this.-Somehow spend few hours reading about Kant, art and morality, I HATE MORALITY, it is a boring topic, it comes into everything and it has its own papers (see PPE Philosophy paper 101 (no, it actually is paper 101), Ethics) so why, why, I am just in the mood to be irrationally angry about it. Went to Aesthetics tute today, discovered the opinion I espoused in my last essay is not shared by any writer in the literature, tutor understandably upset about this. After hour of me trying helplessly to say no, no, I don't believe originality is an aesthetically relevant property, I really don't, I didn't write 1300 words on the subject just to be difficult, we reached the point where he was saying, "Have you even considered the epistemic ramifications of what you're saying oh God I sound like such a dick."Yes he did and it wasn't my fault. Still not aesthetically relevant, so there.-Wrap Maria's birthday presents. Which are great and awesome and not being discussed here just in case she's reading. But I feel like my brain may fall out if I sit still long enough to do something as nice and normal as wrap someone's birthday presents.Obviously, must do all of above on no sleep, because is now four in the morning, I went to bed at eleven, actually, and have tossed and turned ever since on account of enormous splitting tension headache of doom. (I feel like my jaws are wired together. It is decidedly unpleasant.)Also. I need to write another draft of my personal statement, because when don't I, and another essay on the Cold War before next Wednesday, and OULES performances begin at the end of next week, and really, I hate everything. Paracetamol really doesn't work, does it? Beginning to feel as though my head will split into two neat halves, to reveal a label "if found, please return to Balliol College, Oxford" inside alongside some instant coffee powder and a large quantity of fluff.

There is a world map in my kitchen. It's any old projection, any number of crumpled edges, and it's battered and well-used, well-loved. Every night, every day, there will be some conversation in that kitchen about places we've been, places we're going to go, and then someone, sometimes me, lots of times not, jumps up and traces an index finger along a journey, carries us with it forwards into time and space. Today: me, Chinese foreign policy which I am still not finished with at 2.38am and subsequent inability to get out of bed; Claire hasn't done her exam questions; Maria is reduced to making wee models of cholera bacteria out of jellybeans, the others are worring about economics and iridium, there is woe.And? The map has fallen down. How's that for a metaphor? It is very, very cold outside, and absolutely still. I hadn't realised, but it's three degrees below, and rather lovely and I wish I were not filled with woe. As Claire says, it is beyond fail: everything is made of toilets. Anyway, whilst I sit here and woefully fail at Chinese foreign policy, this is something I meant to post before and forgot: Pretty Bird Woman House, a women's shelter in South Dakota which I've written about before in here, has been torched. They're soliciting donations and it's a particularly noble and relevant cause. A meme very much worth propagating.Back to work.

I should be reading for, and also actually writing, an essay on Chinese foreign policy right now, but I don't want to, I want to a) watch Angels in America or b) go shoe-shopping or c) sleep all day or d) some combination of the above. I was supposed to go to a lecture today, but I couldn't get out of bed. It is so awful to say you physically couldn't get out of bed until twenty-five minutes past twelve, but I couldn't. It wasn't just vague laziness, as it usually is, but more along the lines of being glued flat. I couldn't do it. I was therefore only awake for twenty minutes before leaving the house, during which Claire popped in to tell me she'd found Jesus. I found this a tiny bit surprising. Just a bit. It eventually became clear that she has practice exam questions coming out of her ears, and one of them is actually, possibly, perhaps, a picture of Jesus Christ. It seemed an auspicious beginning for the day. I went outside, nearly walked straight into robette_wild, wailed a little bit about how much I was already failing at the day (yes, Im incapable of doing anything else; can it be just said for the record right now that Michaelmas 07 was the term Iona Failed) because I didnt get up before twelve twenty-five and it all seemed slightly hopeless. I was going to yuletide lunch with ou3fs, which was a resounding success as long as we do not define success by talking about yuletide. Instead, more or less everyone turned up and talked about New Years, and shoes, and I think Blakes 7 at some point..Speaking of which, I actually found this quite interesting. The other night I had a bunch of people in my room, mostly female, who got to talking about clothes. And shoes. And ball dresses. And I said, well, I always feel guilty about how much I love clothes, and even more guilty about talking about it, and there was a general consensus on both points: liking clothes, and feeling guilty about that. Why is this, I wonder? I mean, I do like clothes. I like outfits that match, I like my very favouritest skirt its short, heavy denim with large ruffly bits, from River Island so much that Im trying to find it in other colours, I love slogan t-shirts and strappy tops and when Maria buys Cosmo I pick it up whilst the kettle boils and read the fashion pages. (And thats another thing: I always feel guilty about reading it, and I notice all my female flatmates picking it up and reading it with just that same shifty-eyed look of guilt.) I dont like shoes as much, as I am five foot three and a half and have size seven feet, but I got some boots the other week that I am terribly fond of. And, well, I know my friends are the same, or at least a lot of them are they all have amazing clothes, anyway, and today lizziwig was telling me in loving detail about a lovely pair of shoes she wanted to get and yet we all have guilt. Why? Does it make you a bad feminist, to love clothes? I dont think so. Does it make you a bad person? I dont think thats so either. Is it just the fear that if you profess said love, it leaves you open to accusations of being shallow and frivolous and not caring about more important things, such as, I dont know, the patriarchal oppression inherent in many parts of the fashion industry? I dont know. But still. I hereby resolve to feel less guilty, if thats possible. After all, Im a woman with choices. I can choose to be happy about a pair of boots. And I am, so there.Despite Chinese foreign policy, the last couple of days have been very nice indeed. I have been co-dependent with jacinthsong - in the last ten days or so, we have communicated via LJ comments, LJ messages, Facebook wall posts, Facebook messaging, ordinary email, Herald webmail, Google Talk, phone, text, and pidge, and failing that, realised we live a quarter of a mile apart and have gone round to see each other and eaten faaaaar too much chocolate and done no exercise, and on Monday night lots of people I love came around to watch Angels In America, and it was great.(Seriously, how much do I love Prior? I still havent seen all of it am about half an hour into Perestroika now but I thought I loved him as a character before he turned up looking like Morticia Adams, and now, well. Heeee. Love.)Also, there was microwaveable sponge pudding, which we didnt eat that night in the end, and not pie. But there was lots of sugar, and I keep finding mugs and glasses and cutlery in improbable places, like under the bed, and it was only about the second time this term that Ive filled my room with people and it was lovely.I am suffering lately, though, from an odd convergence, which is manifesting as my putting my head in my hands and yelling, Secret double life! I always used to have, you see, a secret double life par excellence. When I was thirteen, fandom was my little secret. And it didnt stay that way - hathy_col arrived in a burst of, well, enthusiasm and squee and potatoes, and changed my life but it was still somewhat distinct. I talked about it at school to people who knew about it already, which helps enforce the separation, I think. But since Ive been here in Oxford, and particularly since Maria joined OULES, its all coming together in a big blur and is upsetting my notions of how life should be a little bit. Its a good thing, its a great thing that my friends are now one glorious mess of out-there fannish beautiful people who talk in cat macros, but it still worries me a tiny bit. I love it here, I do. Maria and I were chatting online at three am about how people should write fic about Plato and Socrates where theyre in a band with toga-clad groupies, and at length I said we should maybe make some peppermint tea and I went into the kitchen to find her teary-eyed with laughter, and yes, thats it, thats what I want, I have always wanted not to be an outsider in my real life, and now Im not and it is so great Im actually becoming incoherent. That is a very long paragraph.Er. Dear self,Write about Chinese foreign policy. Remember that? See the books all over your room? Recall the deadline today at five? YES. THAT. Sincerely,you.

Last night I was happily toddling along to the geek quiz, with Maria, talking about my round of questions, and suddenly I was being handed a bag of treasure - candles, and chocolate, and an actual real-life Diwali card signed by lots of people, all from ou3fs. It was dark, so I was able to sniffle undisturbed all the way up Broad Street. Like I said last night, only much more incoherently, no one's ever done anything like this for me before. I find Diwali more upsetting than fun, usually, because it's a reminder that I am a) hundreds of miles from my family and b) thousands of miles from my origins. And that people could do this for me just makes me incoherent and gooey with love. Tonight, jacinthsong came over and helped me light my candles. This is what it looked like:College can complain all they like, I really don't care. It was beautiful. I got Liya and Ben and Pat and Pat's mum, who is visiting from Spain, in to look at how pretty it was, and they wished me a happy Diwali and I tried to tell them the Diwali story form the Ramayana, with some little success, and then the stories my mum told me when I was very young. (Speaking of my mum, she rang to tell me specifically that she'd made most of my favourite things for Diwali, and why wasn't I there to eat it. I love my mum a lot.) The idea, I guess, briefly explained, is that the lights are for Lakshmi, Hindu goddess of prosperity and love. She comes down to earth for one night, and the lights are to welcome her in. That's why they are left in windows, mostly, and on either side of the front door. And they are also left in each room of a house that should be blessed, so I went around last night as it was getting dark and left one with each of my flatmates, to burn for a blessing.I've never felt like this before - like it was my festival, and that it was celebrated by the people I love, in the context and grounding of my life, like it's my life here, too, that's blessed. So much love, today. Someone gave me an anonymous LJ gift, which I see is marked by LJ as a Diwali lantern - thank you, anonymous giver, it's very sweet, and happy Diwali to you too.And in addition to this, I went to pick up my post today and found two bags of Thornton's chocolate-covered toffee in my pidge. So did Maria. So did jacinthsong and absinthe_shadow and me_ves_y_sufres. I have my suspicious as to whom it may be. But that's not the point. Thank you, too, whoever you are.So much love. So, so much love. I blew out my candles eventually, and went into the kitchen to sit with my flatmates, mellowed with wine and pancakes, and eventually the conversation turned to the things it generally does at three in the morning, which Pat's mum is very interested in, and she asked me, "What is philosophy?""Who we are and where we come from," I said, promptly; it's my rote answer. But no, she said, what about philosophy in everyday life, what about the flash of doubt when you wake up in the morning - who am I, and how did I get here? And is there a God who arranged it?I don't know, I said, but I know what you mean; I think that flash is a human thing, that means we are human, that asking these questions is always important. That's what I think when I stop, mid-sentence, and realise all at once that I exist. She said: I was brought here at this time to this place to learn this from you.And in the dim light, and the afterimages of the flames, it seemed a strange thing to say; strange and strangely appropriate. This is not a religion, I say over and over; I don't believe in what I believe as an article of faith. But this is important. Lights in my window are important. And people are, too.

Diwali! It's Diwali! I forgot until last night until my mum reminded me in her Disapproving Voice. Eee, yay! I think I'm going to put diyas (see icon) round the kitchen and I can't get proper mithai and such like, but I can get sweets and fruit and flowers. It's not until tomorrow, properly, but I've got to do Cerberus, so I can get things and force tradition on everyone I meet today.Also. I know I cannot put naked flames in the North Lecture Room, but people should come to the geek quiz anyway so I can make everyone conform to my religious tradition* as well as answering geeky questions. This is a good plan, y/y?* i.e., be fed sweets.

Fruit 'n' nut muesli is actually rather good. Admittedly I'm eating it with Greek yoghurt and squeezy honey, but huh, the point stands. I'm ridiculously hungry because I had breakfast at lunchtime, lunch at teatime and I suppose now is the time to have breakfast again. Watch me amaze you with my profundity, oh my yes.Thank you all for your comments yesterday, I really did appreciate them; I wasn't so much reading them as having them read out to me from the other side of the room, which was in itself a rather charming experience. And after that I calmed right down and read a little about Eastern Europe before bed. Today I went to a tutorial, and then I went back to bed, and then I went to a lecture, and then I went for a long coffee-and-squee with absinthe_shadow, in which I managed to talk about ds_match for almost forty-five minutes without letting anything slip. (Well, almost.) We also talked about other things, and because I am mostly failing at it, I think there should maybe be an ou3fs yuletide lunch soon. I think that makes today a success. Well, it was a success. I am a lot cheerier now, mostly because I have accepted that I will never write an essay on eastern Europe, I didn't write about what art is, and tonight I found out something that it would really be breaking a confidence to tell, but safe to say, it put my mind at rest about something I was very worried about, and after a relaxed and cheerful dinner with Claire and Liya, I went out to the OULES rehearsal feeling in the mood to sing and dance.Maybe "dance" is not the term. I can't dance. I tried. I waved my arms around and did jazz hands a lot. (My OULES mum is darwinian_woman, so I hid behind a table with her for a while too.) I tried hard not to kick people in the arse by mistake. I laughed a lot, because I am rubbish but no one seems to mind. And after a bit we all retreated to the pub, where I ended up on a table in a squishy pile of sleepy jacinthsong and foulds, which is a lovely place to be in. I feel better, I do. Long may it last. I can at last stop doing totally ridiculous things, like, er, eating my weight in chocolate mousse and vandalising Wikipedia articles for no particular reason.(Case in point: we were sat in Claire's room the other night, she and Ben and me, all working away at our various things, and Claire looked up and asked, "Could someone just wiki the Emperor Trajan for me? How did he die?""That's very interesting," Ben said after a minute. "Says here he was mauled to death by an avocado.")Other things I have done this week have included watching Rent again, eating my whole weight in muesli too, and doing a round of questions for the geek quiz, for once. (I am ridiculously proud of this. I am a geek, I should do geek rounds for other geeks. It is only natural.) And now I'm home, having been treated to a variety of horrifying tales regarding other people's sexual practices all the way home, and still very sleepy, and it's time for bed. Three days left of fifth week, and I refuse to believe that next week won't be better. (For one thing, it is going to feature, probably at some length, the HBO miniseries of Angels in America.)I am not mad. I am proud of this, too. Now sleep.

Oh, so much woe. I hate fifth week. I hate it, I really do. I hate sleeping for fourteen hours and still feeling tired, I hate seeing the world through a haze of grey. It's funny, how you can write two essays a week for four weeks consecutively, no trouble, and it's essay no. 9 that's the killer. It's safe to say, I think, that I will never write this essay about Soviet relations with Eastern Europe. I have been trying all day to read, and failing. And I guess I should be grateful I live here now, where there is maybe twenty minutes more light than there is in the north, but it's still so dark. (I had an odd moment this afternoon, thinking: this has been, and will be, my life, this swing from manic, crazy term-time to long holidays of recovery, back to can't-breathe crazy and ruthless optimism, then back to my family by the sea, but it won't last forever. An Oxford degree is three years. It won't always be like this. As always, I'm not sure how I feel about that.)I think I may be nurturing some sort of viral population, which I do NOT NEED right now, I have too much to do as it is. I can't write this essay, or even read for it; I can't be bothered writing this personal statement, I am British, I self-deprecate, fitting yourself into the norms of another culture is too tiring so the papers just stay on my desk and get more and more covered in dust and coffee rings, and I'm supposed to be doing some artwork for Tiptop, and I'm sort of angry about it - I do their design for nothing, save comps; I do it because I can help them out, and now they're pissed off because I won't do this design before next week when I DON'T HAVE PHOTOSHOP and am nurturing viral life forms, oh, everything is rubbish and awful - but mostly just filled with woe. It's going around. My flatmates are eating cupcakes and watching Al Pacino movies, Maria and I spent an hour dismembering a crab. Piece by piece, with chopsticks and a nutcracker, and I probably shredded my hands with it, but I hate fifth week and it was fun. Urgh. This sort of woe is so dull. Even for me, I assure you.

It is very cold outside, and I am feeling strange and restless. I am out and about at midnight, walking, because I'm not sure what else to do, and because I love that, walking in and between the sounds and lights of a city. Where I live up north, the presence that presses through the night is the sea: the sound of it, and the way the wind in the pines sounds like it, so they're one thing, deep, and not at all human. It isn't safe to go walking in the middle of the night. I get woken up, sometimes, by helicopters - someone is out there, lost. Here, it's different, and sometimes I come out here just because I need a book or to print something or I need chocolate and Sainsbury's are still open at 10.55. But there are other times, when I'm tired and I can't sleep and I'm tired of myself and of other things, and it's hard, here, to be in a place where no one knows your name. You can't get from one place to another without meeting someone you know; Claire caught me on the way here and didn't ask where I was going but gave me her gloves. I always find Michaelmas like this; everything closes in, first the nights and then the world, because you see everything shaped by time - essays, deadlines, weeks until Christmas - and space: the pools marked out by streetlights, every destination marked out by the distance that you can walk, into the cold and the twilight, from home. But, well, this is my home. I'm happy here, now, in this place. It has been fifth week for half an hour, so this is subject to change. I have read five articles on What is Art?, and today was a good day. Last night I ended up drinking far more than is good for me and at some ungodly hour James and Maria and chiasmata and I were draped about the kitchen eating purple pancakes and singing along, with some gusto, to the national anthem of the Soviet Union. ("It's very inspiring," I said. It was - lots of bass-voiced Russians singing to the glory of the mother country, but leaving out the verse about Stalin, or so Maria told me. "It makes me really want to do something, I don't know what. How long does it take to drive from Moscow to Vladivostok?""Years," Maria said.) Gin. Yeah. Lots of that. With sloes in, and wonderfully purple in the jar. The pancakes were purple because we were out of sugar, so we used blackcurrant jam instead. They tasted just fine, although that may have been the gin. And vodka, too. I was punch-drunk anyway, for some reason; not much sleep, and being around people after three days closeted with the Cold War, and I was stupidly giggly and weirdly insistent about being made of fail. (Which, in itself, is made of fail, watch me be recursive.) And I got over that after a bit, but I was behaving quite oddly, which prompted someone to ask me if I were feeling Dionysian (I wasn't happy about that - "I'm down, and you hit me with Nietzsche? Is that what you do to people?") but that was actually it: I was feeling stupidly, studently at one with everything, and happy with it. I still have bits of that feeling, mostly because I didn't get much sleep last night either. Er, yes. The reason I was doing this, and the reason I am so tired and stupid now, is that last night I went to the Union production of Angels In America, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since. I'm not sure about the actual production - it was good in parts and not in others, as student things tend to be: the lighting was weird, the girl playing Harper was depressingly one-note, no-one's accent slipped into British at any point, which was good, they all had marvellous chemistry, the guy playing Prior was both a very good actor and ridiculously, ridiculously attractive, etc. - but the material is what I was thinking about. Somehow or other it's passed me by until now - I picked up a copy of someone's bookshelf a couple of weeks ago and read a fair chunk of it, and oddly enough, my hawkfromhandsaw story took a quote from it as a prompt: "Respect the delicate ecology of your delusions." But I'd never properly seen or read it until last night, and, well, yes. I've always thought, more since I started doing this aesthetics paper (what is art? shockingly, I still don't know!), that I am a literary Philistine. I'm not an artist or a critic; I've never read a book published before 1900, I've never said a single intelligent thing about literature. So, I don't know, things that appeal to me on a deep visceral level are rare, and this was one of them: something about the frenetic pace of it, the self-conscious stumbling for profundity, the way the word Zeitgeist is used exactly once, but it's appropriate when it is. I loved it and I'm not exactly sure why.I woke up this morning still thinking about it vaguely, and read about art as function, as form, as expression, as truth, as beauty divorced from function, as a cluster of word usages, as the kitchen sink, and went with Claire to see Stardust. It was lovely. Lovely, lovely, lovely. The deft touches - the sarcastic star, the wonderful epic landscapes, the peanut gallery of dead numbered princes! - and oh, oh, the QUEER SKY PIRATES, and oh, such a lovely fairy tale. So predictable, ish, so perfectly executed, and the bits of the macabre. It's very slow to start and get going, but once it does, it's a delight.And now I'm hopefully so sleepy I will go home and fall straight asleep and stop boring you all with my head's oddnesses. Tomorrow, sunshine and coffee and 1500 words on one of the greatest philosophical problems of all time. And much less gin.

My reasons for EPIC FAIL, let me show you them:1. I'm having fifth-week blues early, god knows why. (Speaking of which, there are always people, freshers usually, who mock this concept. "Fifth-week blues?" they say. "How amusing, how ironic." How much they have to learn!) In other words, it's only Thursday of fourth and I spent all of yesterday weeping and woeful and finally I went back to bed and refused to go anywhere or do anything. Maria and Claire, because they are win, got me to revise never-going-out-of-my-room-again to at least never-going-out-out-of-the-flat-again, which at least got me into the kitchen and functional enough to ring the other Triarchs and say I wasn't making it to Cerberus. I feel terrible for flaking out, but I couldn't face anything. Judging from the flist, it's going around. I just hope that this doesn't mean I will spend all of fifth week in a quivering wreck on the floor, because, huh, that would be suck. This time I shall not, however a) burst into tears on tutor or indeed b) throw International Economics down four flights of stairs. That would be bad.2. In the morning, though, I felt much better, realised I had written 1000 words on the Cold War that were truly terrible and had a tendency to use the same noun twice in a sentence, and I would have made a success of things had I not realised, three hours too late, that I arranged to meet someone today to talk about, of all things, my experience of multiculturalism, and I forgot and stood her up because I am made of LOSE. Oh, so much lose. And I totally failed to go to my International Relations lecture for the third week running, made of fail, oh yes.3. Ben is in labs all week, so he's working on setting up a new physics experiment....I ate it.Oh god. Maria said, "Aren't those the radioactive brazil nuts-""WHAT RADIOACTIVE BRAZIL NUTS?"Turns out they aren't radioactive yet. And he shouldn't leave food items out on the kitchen table if he doesn't want people to eat them. But still. It's the principle of the thing. Oh god, I fail. But. There are things of win, too.1. Four weeks, forty-one years, far too many books and articles, and 10,000 words, but I have finished with the history of the Cold War! The truly pathetic part was me this week, getting to the plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, held by Gorbachev on January 28th, 1987, and getting very excited about it. The reason I was so pleased? I was alive. Yes, I was one week old, but the point stands.Okay, my essays are kind of crappy, and my tutor's American and insists on actually marking them - and he calls them "papers"! - but they're DONE. I now have four more essays on things like decolonisation and suchlike, but no more actual history. I am not a historian. I have said this far too many times, but it never stops being true. I also did essays on Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Hume, so I'm feeling somewhat pleased with self. It will pass. Tomorrow I have to start my first non-thinker aesthetics, and, well. The essay title is "What is art?" Not at all vague, then? I plan to sit in Starbucks all day and read about art as expression and truth and beauty, and emerge uplifted. That's the plan. (Also, jacinthsong and I are going to start a hippie commune for failed PPEists. All failed PPEists are welcome.)2. shimgray is a sterling example of a good human being and turned up this morning wth a laptop for me to borrow. The university won't let you connect more than one machine to the network, so no internet, but it means I can convert my thoughts into digital data without actually leaving the flat, so that's very much fine by me. And I can actually write for yuletide, too.)3. I just finished one of the ds_match stories. Yeah, I've read one of them, because, see above, I have no laptop, I have the Cold War, I have what is art? and I am MADE OF FAIL. But. Find Me A Find, is lovely, lovely, made-of-win lovely. It's long, and meandering, and fluffy, and Ray and Frannie Vecchio run a matchmaking service, and it's lovely. Go, read, be made of less fail than me. Okaaaaay. Bedtime, before I quite keel over. Angels in America tomorrow night! This pleases me.

Firstly, re: Angels in America, comment now or forever hold your peace.Second of all, my laptop is hooked up to an IV bag feeling sorry for itself. I hope to have it back in two weeks. I am truly bereft, it is awful. It is astonishing, how attached you get to inanimate objects. And also, I don't know about real people and their living arrangements, but I never noticed before that a laptop is the focal point of a student room - or maybe it's the sort of people I hang out with, but still, laptops are important. Poor old Loki. And quite apart from anything, I will now need to be awake during daylight hours so I can use library computers for, y'know, the internet, and fanfiction, and ESSAYS. (On which note, this week's features the end of the Cold War. It ended! I was beginning to think it didn't! Thank god for Gorbachev.)And speaking of endings, today I handed in my examination entry form, having been somewhat emo about it last week. It's odd, seeing my degree down in black and white. Three years, eight papers, five philosophy, three politics, and that's it. The end. I'm still not sure how I feel about leaving this place. Anyway. It's a beautiful day outside, and I should probably go to political theory lecture with ridiculously attractive lecturer, but, you know, I am still here, just sort of quiet. Not having my own laptop around means I have to actually get my coat and scarf and go out when I want to go online, so, you know, if you really need me to know something in the next couple of weeks, probably best to actually ring me. And, also, I have started writing my yuletide story. No, writing it. With paper and pen. Oh, look, it's 1998. Sigh.

Reasons why I, and other people, but mostly me, are made of epic fail:1. My laptop is suffering from, and I quote the computing services here, "spontaneous hardware failure". ("That sounds like spontaneous human combustion," Maria said, and I am forced to agree.) What does that mean, I wailed. "Sometimes," the man said, "sometimes, chips just die."Great. "We'll take it apart for you no problem!" he said. I find the thought of someone taking Loki apart very violating, for some reason. But at least they aren't saying it's irredemable, which is something.Er, yes, this is me typing on Loki. It's best not to look to closely at this phenomenon in case it disappears. Like quantum.2. I came back from the computing services and went back to bed. Slept fitfully for an hour or so, woke up feeling hungry, went into kitchen for late breakfast with assorted flatmates. When I went back to my room, my scout had locked it. With the key inside. I should point out that my attire was, well, not something I mind my flatmates seeing me in - my flatmates have seen me in worse states, it must be said - but, yeah. I went to Claire and demanded clothes, and went determinedly down to the lodge wearing one boot, one sandal, half-pyjamas and half-jeans. Fail. Oh, so much fail. They did get me in again, and I thought the day had to start getting better, which brings us to point number three.3. So, there's me having a shower and getting ready to face the hopefully now-improving day. I drop the soap. I reach down and pick it up, and note in bemusement that the whole floor is awash with red. It looked like some sort of cheesy B-movie, honestly. Blood everywhere. I eventually discovered, and dressed, a cut on my foot - no doubt acquired by the walk down to the lodge - but in the meantime, it looked like I was disposing of evidence, seriously. I'm just glad it happened before my scout came in, as she already thinks I am some sort of moral degenerate because I always go back to bed mid-morning. Sigh.4. Some time actually passed. I ran around everywhere, I got out many, many books on Nietzsche, I handed in a dreadful essay on Cold War dtente, I got stuff in order, and then I went to London in the afternoon to have dinner with Shubhra, American cousin what has abandoned the mother country, and my dad. We were all settled in a cheery restaurant somewhere off New Bond Street when Shubhra said, "I can smell something funny." And then, "Iona... you hair's on fire."Yeah, I set my hair on fire. I win at life, I really do. I sat back down and tried not to notice the people moving to sit downwind of me. I can still smell it, sort of. Sigh. I managed to get home without further incident, but still.Reasons why I, and other people, but mostly not me, are made of win:1. chiasmata telling the nice people at the Queen's Lane coffee house that she'd like a cream tea, please, with no cream. This might go under the fail list, were it not for the fact that she is made of win anyway and cheered me right up after my morning of failure and Nietzsche and the bloody birth of tragedy. (Speaking of which, I really want to write fic where Darren and Geoffrey are Apollonian and Dionysiac and there are wacky pseudo-philosophical hijinks. There is something wrong with my brain other than the mantle of burning hair.)2. Being in London with my dad and Shubhra. My mum sent me down some things - cake, and coffee, and proper spices: dhuniya and haldi and other things I cannot be bothered looking up the English for. And I have new boots. Boots are good. 3. ds_match is up and running! The first pair of stories went up yesterday, and there are more today. They are all made of win. 4. tau_sigma is also very much of great. I spent much of the journey back tipsily babbling to her about intelligent design and Egyptian food and natural sciences and indeed, burning hair. 5. Another thing that should probably go under the fail list, but. Shubhra today confessed a misconception that I thought was the best thing ever. The signs on the Underground, that say "Keep left" to stop people walking into other people going the other way? Yeah. She thought, she said, that they were political. That Transport for London were, in their small way, making the world a better place. Carry on, never surrender, bring on the revolution of the proletariat!I feel bad for laughing as much as I did, but, you know. I still have a postcard on my door that says "You are now leaving the American sector." I couldn't help but laugh.Right. Time for bed.