We are drifting into the arena of the unwell

In case anyone didn't notice, I was having a snit, yes? I woke up one morning and decided aha, yes, I am depressed, I have been depressed for a long time, clearly the right thing to do is stay in bed all the time, not answer my phone, not answer emails, refuse to talk to people and not post on LJ. This is of course a perfectly logical course of action and exactly what a very intelligent person would choose to do. Indeed, yes. Good plan.

The thing is, though, I'm currently still ill with the sinusitis - coming up on five weeks of it, now - and very overworked and tired, and all the things I believe are wrong with my life are still conducive to my still believing it (syntax brought to you by a year of philosophy tute essays, kthxbai), and externally nothing has changed: but I'm not depressed any more. Of course now I've said that I will wake up tomorrow and contemplate suicide, but in all seriousness, there seems to be a switch in my head that moves to grey, then back again after a while, regardless of circumstances. It's easier to be on an even keel; that is, it's easier to function, than to cope with the ensuing histrionics if I make a deliberate choice not to function. In my heart I'm sensible. Yes. I'm all mature and sensible and soldiering on through. Are you sniggering yet? I am. But I think that I am not, and have never been, clinically depressed; I'm physically and mentally tired and correspondingly unhappy, but my brain chemistry is pretty much just fine. Ah, my lovely brain, what would I do without you. A kilo of squidgy stuff inside my head and it makes or breaks everything. (Yes, yes, too many philosophy essays, I shall stop now.)

This week has, so far, been characterised by not very much happening. Mostly working and sleeping, neither of which are interesting particularly; I sleep most of the day and spend as much of the remaining time as I can in Starbucks, living off coffee. (Actually, now I come to think of it, eating is not very much of the happening, either. Coffee is good.) The weather is getting better, which helps, and the weeks are doing that thing where they're slipping away without my noticing. This is fifth week - imagine, fifth week, and I haven't made an angsty post of fifth-week blues! Although that said, I've been having them since about second week so that probably doesn't count. But yes, this is Friday of fifth and I couldn't hazard a guess where the time between now and noughth week has gone. It's vanished in a whirl of work and vague weirdness.

Um. I went to see Wyrd Sisters (which had sebastienne as Nanny Ogg, and chains_of_irony as various parts) and it was so much fun I can't tell you. They had a rendition of the Hedgehog Can Never Be Buggered At All at the end, and I think I died of squee. And that was that regarding fun stuff on the weekend. When the week got underway and the whole I-am-in-a-snit thing really kicked in, it was all less fun. Round about mid-week,I got up in the morning and this time, decided I was being ridiculous and decided that Thursday, 25th May was going to be the first day of the rest of my life. I told Claire this. It seemed natural, I said. There were several reasons. The first one was obvious - it was the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May (I changed my default icon to lilacs, but no-one noticed because I, um, didn't actually post) and so a day for revolutions, new beginnings and suchlike. More than that, it was the first day with sunshine after what felt like weeks of rain. But the most significant reason - well. The most significant reason requires a backtrack to Wednesday night, when Claire and I engaged in an experiment that had been planned for some time. I have always, always wanted to dye my hair. It's one of those things I've just never dared do. And as with all the things I don't dare to do, I had an exact plan for what I wanted. I wanted to let my hair grow out of the layers and dip it in red so it was the normal colour most of the way down but the last three inches would be pillarbox-red.

I happened to mention this to Claire way back in Michaelmas. She looked thoughtful and said she'd done all-over hair - her own hair is dyed red, and apparently has been purple, black and blonde in recent memory - and she'd done streaks, but never dipped. But she'd like to try. And on Wednesday she tried. It was one of the more entertaining things that has happened to me in recent years, definitely. Pat decided she couldn't miss the fun and sat on the attic floor painting her toenails and making random funny comments that would make me laugh and make Claire swear at me for moving while she was in the middle of a tricky bit. Said tricky bits featured an overabundance of aluminium foil and evil-smelling red dye that we bought from Superdrug in a haze of good organisation. It was rather fun, and ended up with my trying to wash the last of the dye into the bathtub. This was a problem, because as you might expect from a bathroom attached to an attic, it's very small and the bath takes up most of it. In order to get at my hair, Claire was obliged to sit on me whilst Pat (literally) aimed Fairy liquid at the bath enamel. (It didn't work. The formerly white bathtub is now pink.) And then we had to dry it in literally five minutes before running out through the rain to see The Da Vinci Code at George Street Odeon.

It struck me later as a very good plan - hair dye and then cinema and then night in with friends and lots of cheap wine - although somewhat lacking in logic, because we forgot to book tickets. The Da Vinci Code was sold out. I was slightly disappointed, but not so much that I slipped off the omg-I-have-red-hair! high, and tramping back to college through the rain, I was probably more cheerful than I have been in ages. This is the only decent picture I have, so far:

( omg I have red hair! )

I think you can recognise that bizarre expression everyone always has when they attempt to take pictures of themselves with a digital camera. The background is the attic porthole, which is nicer every day because of the days getting longer. I digress.

Amyway, no Da Vinci Code. And I really want to see it, because by all accounts it will be AWFUL and thus, so good. But we went back via Sainsbury's to buy wine, and then I suggested watching Withnail & I. I saw it on telly once years ago, and Claire has recently acquired it, so I accepted a glass of wine (it was a very big glass) and curled up in the dark to watch it. And it was lovely. Okay, "lovely" is not the word. But I can't understand why I didn't fall in love with it when I saw it the first time; it's so funny and quotable and gratuitiously silly and ultimately tragic. Also, Paul McGann is quite pretty as Eight, but ten years earlier, he was prettiness incarnate. So pretty. So, so pretty. And so gay. Oh, so gay. The other thing I don't understand is why the internet is not teeming with Withnail/Marwood slash (Claire spent a long time trying to find out "I"'s real name), because omg so gay. The only good fic I found was written for yuletide, and it turned out to be by calapine because the internet is just that incestuous. I want to write fic for it myself, I really do, because yes, it was lovely. And the ending was far, far too tragic for words. I sat there and made "eeee" noises, whilst Claire didn't look, because she's seen the film a dozen times but the ending only once, it's that sad.

So until the world is put to rights and there is lots of slash produced for my benefit, Marwood is going to peer bemusedly down at you all from the top of my journal, just as he is at the moment, looking pretty and witty, and gay.

Where was I? Yes, getting up on Thursday with red hair, a new attitude, ready to face a day of revolution and life-not-happening-to-me-but-me-happening-to-it. Of course, the first thing that happened was me sleeping four hours later than intended and the second thing that happened was my peeling a banana and throwing away the banana, so maybe it wasn't that much of a success. Actually, I know it wasn't, because the new-and-exciting thing for the day was supposed to be me going down to a Cherwell arts meeting, but I couldn't stay because I was too scared. All of Cherwell's contributors seem to be very, very scary, but the arts people most of all, because they're all serious and bespectacled and posh and literary, and I don't usually get quite so intimidated by people but these are the sort of people whom I'm sure would find out I'm from Liverpool and then hang on very tightly to their wallets. I ran for it.

So it was not really a very glorious twenty-fifth of May. I noticed a big, stupid flamewar going on on discworld - apparently some total arse decided that people wearing lilac were being "mawkish", and then decided that slash was to blame for everything (of course) and then later somebody got upset, weirdly, that people pay attention to a fictional event but not to Memorial Day, having seemily forgotten that, uh, not everyone in the world is American, some of us come from other places omg - so I guess it wasn't just me for whom it was not glorious. (Actually, I want to know why so many American visiting students are horrendous. For every nice visitor, like annikah who was visiting during Hilary, there seem to be half a dozen very very rude visiting students or Rhodes scholars or whatever. Perhaps I just keep having bad experiences.) [Edited to add: No offence meant to Americans in general. This is, in fact, the mystery; why the Americans I happen to know personally are generally wonderful, but the ones I meet randomly around college are not.]

But still, it was more glorious than it might have been. The weather was beautiful, and in the afternoon, after running away from Cherwell, I went to a political theory tute. That was quite good, but afterwards my tutor stopped me from going and told me that I look very ill, and why do I keep coming to tutorials? I told him about the whole long-term aspect about the viral thing, and he looked thoughtful and said I should have some time off. And before I'd really realised what was happening, he'd arranged for my workload to be halved during sixth week so I get three days off just to catch up on sleep and not stress out and just rest. I plan to spend the weekend reading The Communist Manifesto and doing my Marx essay, and then spending the week just doing nothing, for a little while. I can't wait.

And now I must go and drink coffee and read about democracy. It's a hard life I lead.

Edited again to add: I was just complaining to Pat that people looked at me funny when I was sitting in Starbucks just now. She said, with as little acerbity as possible, "You were reading The Communist Manifesto. You are wearing a t-shirt with "Well-behaved women seldom make history" across the front. You have bright red hair!"

After recovering from mild hysterics, I conceded the point.