don't walk away and say you love me anyway

I woke up far too late this morning. Still, I have my remix assignment, which is good, because I seem to have been assigned an author whom I've heard of only peripherally, but who writes excellent fic, and also, in more startling news, I won this week's dw_caption simply for being smutty-minded. (Actually, I think jeanne_dark, whose mind went the same place, should have won it rather than me.)

In about half an hour I have to go and have lunch with American Girl (who's shadowing me round Balliol in order to decide between here and Yale) and she makes me feel very provincial and working-class, so I'm not looking forward to that. One side-effect of mentally calling her "American Girl" is that I get the Counting Crows' American Girls in my head whenever I talk to her, and besides it's not as if it's even really accurate. She lives in London, but has a distinct American twang. She's at St Paul's, too. I read about such people when I was younger, but never actually thought they existed before I came up to Oxford. People really do have such terribly posh upbringings and education. It's quite terrifying. I don't care that Claire says I talk like a southerner. Maybe I do a bit (and inexplicably so - when have I ever lived in the south?) but I'm not from down here, and I didn't have a former life anything like the ones people here have had. My quite prosaic existence at an ordinary public secondary school is, oddly enough, unusual, because everyone else went to such wonderful places and did such wonderful things.

Talking of me sounding like a southerner, one or two of Pat's friends came down to visit last week and thought I was the funniest thing ever. So British, they said. To which my quite sensible answer was, well, I am British. But the moment I describe anything as "terribly tedious" or "a tad peculiar" (and believe me, I do this a lot), I am forever doomed to hilarious Britishness. I blame Monty Python.

Anyway, none of this was in fact the reason I wanted to post this entry. Is anyone else suffering from a problem where their entries aren't appearing on other's people's friends pages? I read my friends' friends pages when bored, which is what I was doing blearily last night, only to start worrying that all my friends had taken me off their default view. Which in the light of day seems a little paranoid, so I suspect a bug somewhere.

Edited to add: Talking of bugs, Herald seems to be back up, but it's painfully, painfully slow. Is that just for me, or is everyone watching it creak along at a snail's pace?

Going to lectures

I may, possibly, have misjudged American Girl. When you get her talking, she's actually quite nice. And I wanted to know if she had any more questions, or if I could help her with anything else, and she said yes, she had a question. Go ahead, I said.

"Tell me," she said, "do you people ever go to lectures?"

"Um," I said. "That depends."

The thing is, I know what it depends on for me - I would go to my compulsory ones if I had any, I go to the good ones (c.f. Morison and Pooley), and the later the lecture is in the day, generally the more likely I am to go to it. But I am curious, and procrastinating, and therefore spamming.

( in the interests of gathering opinion )