tell me that you'll open your eyes

I'm feeling just a bit hopeless about the exam situation. I think I am, anyway; I'm finding it very hard to think today. Everything is mixed up and messy and it's getting hot again. Ideally I'd like to sit in the sunshine and rest and process Susan's passing away, because that's the one thing always in my thoughts at the moment, but sadly, as I was saying earlier today, my brain is not allowed to switch off yet. Prelims are so soon it's painful - they start on Monday morning - and I know nothing.

Regardless, my brain really isn't working all that well. I woke up in a dream this morning, an hour later than intended, got dressed in a dream, walked out across college in a dream. I was thinking - trying to think, anyway - about Susan, and days gone by, and about some of the issues the last couple of days have highlighted. I met Susan four years ago, as said last night, on a yahoo group called mash-slash, which does exactly what it says on the tin. It still exists, although it's pretty quiet, but I started posting on it about this time in 2002 and was lucky enough to be around for a significant event in its history - an explosion of stories and conversation and people that manifested as over eight hundred messages posted per month. Given that at the time, there was barely a hundred people on the list, I think it really was remarkable. And now it sounds so, so ridiculous that one of the significant things to have happened to me is my choosing to post on a small, obscure mailing list devoted to people writing slash about an ancient television show, and yes, it is ridiculous. But the people I met there were funny and clever, wonderful writers, and even when we moved away from the list, onto LJ, into other fandoms, into other lives, they were, and still are, my friends. I find it remarkable and inevitable at the same time that we all stayed in touch.

It's been such a long time now. But I was thinking about that, and remembering, and when I got outside college someone stopped me and asked, "Are you loneraven? I'm Meredith."

Inside my head I had a mini freakout, which soon resolved into a more sensible line of thinking - it wasn't garnettrees or the_acrobat, of course; there's still an ocean separating me from them - but rather deepbluemermaid, whom I greeted with some large degree of gormlessness for which I do apologise. It was very nice to finally meet you, Meredith. I wish I'd had time to talk.

And it reminded me that, through fandom I'm meeting wonderful people everywhere I go - and Susan was a part of that, almost the beginning of that. I'd like to join my voice to the chorus of people who were very young when they were first posting on the yahoo group, or on LJ, and whom Susan helped and guided and made so welcome. I think it's amazing, how you can be friends with someone you've never met, and such good friends at that; but I wish so much that we could all meet. I've wished it for years, but never so much as now.

So the day today has been marked by my thinking a lot, and not a lot about the things I ought to be thinking about, I suppose. I think I must be very upset over my Prelims - I probably am, because I've worked hard, really properly hard, and I still don't know anything - but it's not really manifesting because other things are more important. My checklist of things to revise has been replaced by a checklist of purely practical matters, like my candidate number, my alarm clock for Monday morning, my sub fusc, etc. My sub fusc is a total state - my shirt looks like it's been bunched up in a pile and stuffed under the bed, which is really not true - and I have to ask people who've done Mods or Prelims or Finals or whatever already - are the tights really necessary in twenty-seven degree heat? I don't think I even have any; the gown and long skirt will be hot enough without them.

Claire ventured out to the Covered Market today for exam carnations, but they had sold out. As I sort of thought they would have done, given most arts students' exams are this week and they all want carnations. Because I only have three exams, mine will be a little silly - white for Monday morning, pink for Monday afternoon, red for Tuesday - but Ben is buying them for me regardless, at seven am to be sure to get them in time. I'll get Pat's, she'll get Claire's - it's all very incestuous, to reflect the co-dependency that has characterised all the time I've been revising. I honestly think I wouldn't be still functioning if it weren't for Pat. Tonight, we wound up having coffee in Starbucks, with her patiently drilling me on the rules of differentiation scribbled all over napkins - product and quotient and chain and implicit and partial, all the elementary methods I still haven't mastered, and withholding mocha until I managed to successfully differentiate a natural log.

(Yes, I cannot differentiate a natural log at this stage in my education. You can point and laugh as much as you like.)

After that, economics in the quad, under a cloudless sky that faded imperceptibly into twilight dark, and me despairing at how much I don't know, will never know, and then giving up and just lying on the grass. It's so beautiful here today. It almost escaped me that it's Saturday of eighth, and people are going home - I went home on Saturday of eighth in Michaelmas and Hilary - but I'll be here another week yet. On Tuesday at lunchtime, I'll be free, as will Pat, and if anyone wants to come to Exam Schools and throw things at us, please do, I'd love to see you. My own plan is to come back to college, get Pimms from the buttery, and start drinking gently until half five, at which point we will go back to throw things at Claire emerging from Exam Schools.

That's still a long way in the future.

Right now, I'm watching Sometimes You Hear The Bullet on YouTube, and it's wonderful, still. It's warm in here, full of street noises, and I'm going to bed while it's still dark, which is new, and it is still so, so beautiful. I'm glad I'm here, even though I'm unhappy tonight, and I wish you were all here to share this week with me.