My day off

I should be asleep. I really should. But I am taking the fact that I am not asleep as something of a good sign. Well, sort of; I'm wondering whether there are any anti-histamines that are not prescription drugs and thusly self-medicating. (If not, I'll get Pedar to dig around in the medicine cabinet and send me some. I sometimes wonder if my parents don't take a very carefree attitude to prescriptions and suchlike; my mother put anti-histamines in my bottles when I was a small insomniac child. Now I am a slightly larger insomniac adult I don't see why there should be a double standard. One day I will learn not to go on big huge long digressions in parenthesis.) In absence of anything stronger, I am swigging cough syrup out of the bottle (ohgod, I am a student; I have no clean cutlery with which to measure out) and waiting for the hit of drowsiness. It has not yet arrived, which makes me think that perhaps I am facing it from the standpoint of person-who-is-almost-healthy rather than person-who-is-clinging-to-life-with-ragged-and-bloody-fingernails.

There is a reason for this, and here it is: I have had a day off. I have had two! And I have one more to come, although tomorrow is less of one seeing as I have to go to a Marxism tute with Adam, who will probably shred my essay into little pieces, but I won't mind, because at least I have written the thice-damned thing and it has corporeal existence. Talking of my Marxism essay, last heard of when I was sitting in Starbucks reading The Communist Manifesto (in a t-shirt with "Well-behaved women seldom make history" on the front and bright red hair!) and wondering why people were looking at me funny, I am actually rather proud of it. It took me four hours - with occasional breaks for LJ, natch - but I wrote it. Take that, Marxist conceptions of liberty! At 2471 words, it's also the longest academic essay I have ever produced (I have this damnable tendency to be concise to the point of minimalism). And - this is the crucial part - it's also the last new-material essay I will ever write as a first-year PPEist. I'll be doing one more essay plan next week, and a whole metric shitload of practice exam essays, but as far as researched tute essays go, this one was the last. I actually enjoyed it more than expected, too; it was about why Marx thought communism all superior 'n' stuff, and I talked a lot about how communism allowed for a different historical conception of freedom and how traditionalist liberal democracy is for losers. Anyway, I felt this fact needed recording, as that represented the last 2471 of approximately seventy thousand words of academic writing for this year. (Why my brain has not fallen out, I don't know.)

And this year isn't over yet. I have another day off tomorrow, as mentioned before, and then from Friday I am revising because I am a Good Person. Friday, 2nd June - exams are on the 19th and 20th - which is a thing of fear, because how can it be June? Last time I checked I'm pretty sure it was October 3rd. It was. And today I was filling in the requisite forms about coming back into residence (or not, in my case) in Michaelmas, on Tuesday, October 3rd. I don't know what happened to the last year of my life. It's faded like ink in water. I don't know what to think about it.

Anyway, moving on. I am having these days off because Adam - who is my personal tutor as well as political theory tutor - did as he said he would and intervened in my workload. Without macro, and with Marxism done, I could stay in and sleep and sleep and sleep. Fourteen hours, to be precise. And I was already teetering a bit having been awake for six hours. But here it is at 2.30 in the morning and I'm feeling, if not bouncy, then not ready for bed. And I guess that means that my days of sleeping most of the day away are coming to a middle.

In short: I'm feeling better. Not perfect still, and probably now I've said that I'm due a horrible relapse, but yes. Better. And it's probably due to the days off, because they've made all the difference. Yesterday's was spent doing all sorts of ridiculous things, beginning when I got out of bed after the hours and hours spent in it and informed Claire about my plans for the day: "I'm gong to Social Sciences to return books, and then I'm going to get a coffee somewhere and re-evaluate my life."

She sounded awkward. "Can you do that before three thirty and come punting?"

I could, and did, and although the weather was not fabulous, she and I and her friend Sonia piled into a boat and made tits of ourselves on the Cherwell. There was something funny about the currents yesterday, which made it very difficult to punt - and Claire and I are very bad at it anyway - and finally, coming round the island having successfully avoided the Isis and going to London by accident, we teetered into a thorn bush, swore a lot, rocked the boat and splash.

"It's only three feet deep," said Sonia after a minute. "My feet have touched the bottom."

I said later that it was blatant schadenfreude, but oh dear, it was very funny. Poor Sonia. She eventually gave up the struggle of actually punting, and decided to swim instead, pulling the punt along on a rope while we made helpful comments and tried not to giggle too much. The people at Magdalen Bridge jetty did their very best to hide their laughter, for which I think we were all grateful. (I'm just glad we didn't take a Balliol boat. There is no record of our utter incompetence. Claire asked, "What is it you always say about girls and punting?"

"We need to leave our feminist values in our other pants," I said.

"Yes! We need a man to go punting!"

"Sky wasn't that great," I reminded her.

She stared at me wildly. "We need a straight man to go punting!")

Today, I have not done anything nearly as exciting. I have been conscious and yet not tired, which is a start, and I have been for long walks up and around St Giles, which were also good, and eventually I drifted to Queerglish at the Union, which was rather amusing. The most amusing part was the impromptu collective effort to drive foulds to tears. This was eventually achieved by such varied devices "the Greeks and the Romans - all the same thing, really!" and "Julius Caesar and Elizabeth I were essentially contemporaneous, weren't they?"

(He didn't actually cry, but I think he might have done had there been much more frantic assertion that the Roman Empire fell because it was defeated by the Aztecs driving dinosaurs over the Alps with the help of the Doctor, the Daleks and a quasi-biblical rain of pleiosaurs.)

Well, it wouldn't be siller than The Da Vinci Code, which I also ( watched tonight )

And that's it for my days off, I guess. Tomorrow there's more Marxism, and a little more wandering, but nothing spectacular. I'm trying to not think about Oxford and my friends and the beauty around me at the moment, because I really, really have to revise. I plan to basically move into the Social Science Library and spend two weeks revising, emerge, blinking, into the sunlight only to plunge back into the dimness of Exam Schools, and then - then there is freedom. I am here a week after exams finish, and there's already a list as long as my arm for Things To Do In Ninth. It helps that my constant pimping has had an effect, and Pat is reading Brideshead Revisited and keeps telling me how wonderful it is. I particularly like the bit where Charles talks about waiting for Sebastian in a "café opposite Balliol."

Well, it's probably not Café Creme, as I doubt that it's been there since the nineteen-thirties, but a girl can dream. Re-reading Brideshead in the midst of a decadent ninth swanning around Oxford - it will yet happen. I'm feeling better. All I have to do is get there.