(no subject)

If you could see my last entry, and now you can't, I'm sorry about that and I am planning to make it public again soon. (Anonymous commenter(s), whoever you are, please comment here if you want to tell me anything further.) I've made the previous entry friends only for a reason that should have occured to me before. vamp_bite, sweetie, thank you so much for what you've been doing.

And, finally;

Last post about this, I promise. I have recieved an email from the plagiarist, who has removed the offending material. She tells me that it's a similar thing to writing fanfiction, but does apologise. I don't think it's like writing fanfiction, and have said so, but barring any action from Lycos, I think the case is closed. Sigh. Anyway, the original entry I made describing this has gone public again, and thank you all for your help and advice. It's much appreciated.

(I guess I can strike "being plagiarised" off the ambitions-in-life list, and believe me it was there.)

Anyway, back to your regularly scheduled journal. This whole thing has had a surprising benefit in that it's given me a project, a problem to solve rather than drifting, which is what I was beginning to do. Last night was not good. I was supposed to be going to see Good Night And Good Luck with the Balliolites, but it fell through due to a lot of reading and suchlike, and I was left at a total loose end and started having a miniature crack-up. I don't know what it was, exactly; lots of bad stuff bringing me down at once, which manifested as the sort of brain-melt I usually only have when I can't sleep at night. After about two hours of not being able to sit down or stop crying, I rang home. Pedar gave me the exact same suggestion as the one I'd already discarded for being far too eccentric, and consequently I did as he said, grabbed my coat and scarf and went for a late-night walk up and down the Broad with my iPod, wailing a little but generally getting rid of the twitchiness a bit. After a while I thought I could function enough to talk, and I went to see Claire and we had some idle chatter, some coffee, one episode of Futurama and lots of giggling about Zoidberg, and I felt much, much better. And the whole copycat thing came up and I started feeling it was time to focus again.

I'm inclined to think - or I'm hoping - that last night was the culmination of my fifth-week blues, because in news of great joy, it is not fifth week any more. This really is joyous. And I've come to a Decision about Forder (yes, with a capital D). It goes like this:

I have two things to do in a week, one Political Theory essay and one Macro assignment.
There are seven days in a week.
One of these days involves my being too tired for anything but tutorials.
That leaves three days for each.
For Macro, that means Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday.
I can work my arse off all these three days.
And if Forder still hates me, it is NOT MY PROBLEM.

Ta-da. That's the plan. Pedar called it "growth". Talking of Pedar, as I haven't for a while, he and my mother are going to India for a fornight at the end of this week. This means they will be incommunicado, and I'm a little blue about it. I miss my parents a lot, and it only seems to come into focus when I actually speak to them, and I can hear the noises of life at home, like a whistling kettle and the voices off the telly and Pedar yelling at his laptop. I like being at home just as much as I like being here, but in different ways, I think. They're both life, they're both good.

Other than this, nothing else of note is happening. Tonight, the gang and me went to a talk being given on eighteenth-centry gay subculture in aid of Balliol's LGBT history month. The academic who gave it was a nutty old enthusiast who was brimful of fabulous trivia about gay men in London in the seventeen-fifties, and although there were some total wankers asking questions in the audience, we all had an entertanining time. This was after an hour's class with Forder, mind you, so perhaps anything would have been entertaining, because oh god the class was hideous. I said later that I felt much closer to twelve than twenty, because something about Forder makes me act just like I did at school, or at least when I was older. Liya wanted to sit at the front. Pat and I looked at each other, and as one, drifted to the back. We sat down hidden by the boys, and proceeded to write each other notes for an hour. (He knew we were doing it, too; he looked very disapproving and made "ahem" noises just as I was scribbling "omgwtf he is SEVERUS SNAPE" on Pat's IS-LM derivation.)

Yes. Will work arse off. Really.

Afterwards, the party retired to have dinner, only for Sky to ostentatiously read Mill over his tray for most of it. I still think Mill is wonderful, and am having far too much trouble attempting to come up with essay criticism of him. I have a weird desire to buy a new copy of On Liberty and send it to the Bush administration. Yes, essay must be written tonight omg. Anyway, moving on. It's been a strange couple of days, all told. By far the high point was the miniature party we ended up having when doing laundry. In between washing, drying and folding, we watched Futurama, ate chocolate cake Pat's mum brought over from Madrid, and giggled incessantly and did no work. I refused to feel guilty about it; before last Saturday, I hadn't had a day off since December.

Eventually, we brought up the clothes to fold and I perched on the head of Pat's bed with mine, methodically folding as you do. Sky was asleep under a tangle of blankets; after a moment he emerged and immediately started looking horrified. "What is that?" he wanted to know.

It was a bra, and I said so. "All of you've got 'em!" he gasped. "Lace, and frilly bits!"

"No frilly bits," I said. "Polka dots."

"In pink and red," Claire agreed, peering at the collective pile of clothes.

"I will never be able to sit through a tutorial with you again," he sighed dramatically, and disappeared below the covers again.

"I lose all credibility as an intellectual opponent because you've seen my underwear?" I demanded.

"Yes! Oh, god, yes!"

There's no reasoning with some people, I swear. But it was a very good night, and surprisingly, there was no wine involved. There was just lots of silliness and sugar. I guess even fifth week has some redeeming features. Sixth week, on the other hand, ought to have more than one; we are going to make it out to Good Night And Good Luck one of these nights, and The Vagina Monologues at Wadham on Thursday, and on Friday, Maria, a lovely medic whom we are going to live with next year, is having a symposium (ancient Greek definition, thankyouverymuch).

Talking of wine, though, we hit twenty-nine empty bottles at the end of Michaelmas. So far for Hilary we have eighteen empty, four full lying about the place, and life is pretty much okay.