Weather

Wow. I swear I didn't realise how long it had been since I'd updated. I'm still here and reading, I'm just... busy. Very, very, busy. As busy as you'd expect for first week of Michaelmas, I guess. Speaking of which, I do love the feel of this place in Michaelmas. Everything, and everyone is new - either actually new or made anew over the long vac - and it feels different and wonderful and worth getting out of bed for. Of course, this is only Thursday of first week and I'm pretty sure I may well have revised my opinion of Michaelmas, Oxford, and life in general by about fifth week, but right now I'm feeling good about life.

Part of this, in fact, may be the simple point that I am not doing economics any more. It is amazing how much effect this has on my mental equilibrium, but there you go; I'm currently of the opinion that this is what I signed up for, this is why I applied for PPE in the first place. I'm doing Ethics and Political Theory as my papers for this term, and I'm enjoying them. I've managed two essays and one tute - the second is at ten thirty tomorrow morning, yay - and that tute was really rather good. My theory tutor, Chris - of the pink tie and shouting at the shipping forecast, that Chris - is the best type of eccentric don, which is to say, he can actually teach. And he's very nice to boot. He has acquired a coffee machine and insists on trying it out on all his undergraduates, so I perched in an armchair sipping very good coffee whilst he peered down his nose at me and asked my opinion on Rawlsian justice. (This, incidentally, is one of the reasons why I love this place so much; nowhere else is anyone actually interested in my opinion on Rawlsian justice.) This innocuous starting-point expanded into a two-hour discussion on the original position and the difference principle, the conflict of values between liberty and justice, the importance of not putting a motorway through St Aldate's, homeless people getting picked up by medical snatch squads so their organs could be "reassigned" and the ethics thereof, and why everyone has value as a person, even members of Christ Church. While I was sitting there listening to him talking about his personal liberty as a human being not to buy Belgian oranges - he does have a tendency to ramble - I noticed that he has a moose's head on the back of his door. It is not a real moose. I know this because it has a red nose and buttons for eyes and large fluffy antlers. Yeah, I like this guy.

Clearly I have not spent my entire week in absentia babbling about Rawlsian justice, but I can't at this moment think of anything else I have done with it. There has been cooking, more of it - the infamous parsley-and-stock-cube chicken recipe has been immortalised on the wall as "Chicken á la Pat and Iona", along with "Claire's heat-resistant pasta" and my chilli chicken (which doesn't need my name on it, because all of my recipes - pasta, rice, chicken, everything - are prefixed by "chilli" whether or not they have chilli in). In the meantime, Maria has started putting avocado into everything, and I've decided that the chilli cinnamon rock cakes would have been better if they hadn't been the diameter of a pancake with approximately the same thickness. They tasted marvellous, I feel compelled to add. Maybe next time I'll actually think to use sodium bicarbonate.

Okay, now I'm making it sound like my life revolves around work and cooking. Which is quite sad and not at all true. Er, on Monday I went to Queerglish! That was exciting, because it was probably the best-attended one ever - the whole gang were there, just about, and there were new people, and I can't actually remember anything that happened - no, wait, yes I can, I think foulds was talking about the trade economy of the Star Wars universe again, and chains_of_irony was drawing comparisons between Theta Sigma, Koschei and the Marauders - and it was all very nice. As was Queer Drinks; I wasn't planning to go, but I sort of went anyway and got very lost on the way to Oriel despite jacinthsong giving me idiot-proof directions, to the point where I was starting to suspect Oriel of some sort of twisted, let's-get-them-all-lost institutionalised homophobia. But once I'd found it, hidden away in a very hot and crowded room, it was a lot of fun.

I mean, first of all, everyone I have ever met ever was there. Lots of ou3fs, including two newbies who have LJs which I can't quite remember at this moment because I am rubbish, and then someone quite new, a girl called Laura from Hong Kong, who was very nice and fun to chat to. Only, after a while, the conversation sort of drifted, and once she'd confessed to being thrown off the university network for downloading Studio 60, I began to realise to where it was drifting. It eventually turned out my new chance fresher acquaintance from, er, the other side of the world, was a big fan of hp_girlslash. And also knew me_ves_y_sufres, bizarrely.

And as if I hadn't had enough coincidences for the night, while I was talking to foreverdirt - who appeared and resolved to stay an hour despite the stifling heat - someone else appeared and informed me that she thought she knew me, was I a Balliol PPEist, and er, was I loneraven?

(Someone, a while back, called me the Kevin Bacon of LJ. I have a feeling this may be true.)

I, as you do, burst into laughter and set to gathering the relevant information. This, it turned out, was chiasmata, a new addition to the fannish cabal in Oxford, and we ended up giggling the entire night about coincidences and fandom and, after a certain point, umbrellas. And it was a whole lot of fun, and even though I wasn't quite feeling up to Po Na Na's gay night - although I might possibly in the future; it seems to be every second Monday, which makes it always fall the same week as Narcissists, and I'd go if I could get anyone to go with me for moral support - I wound up in slasheuse's very pretty room drinking red wine.

You see? More to it than work and cooking, yes!

Wednesday was the day Claire called "the day of the comedy rain." It really was. I was woken by thunder, and opened my eyes to see my room washed through with dull grey light; I assumed it must be four or five in the morning and then discovered it was actually half nine. I rolled over and went back to sleep regardless. When I finally went out later, I stepped straight into four inches of water that soaked through my boots, and then got drenched under literal sheets of rain, that went on and on and on and when I got to the market at Gloucester Green, I had water working its way into my ears. Thing is, I've lived in the tropics. I've seen monsoon rains. They have the advantage that they blow themselves out. This didn't. It kept right on sheeting. Standing with a towel in the kitchen, Claire was moved to observe that this was exactly the sort of rain you would get in bad romantic comedies. It had that kind of sympathetic fallacy about it.

In conclusion, the weather is ridiculous. It refuses to get properly cold, only hints at it, and I'm sick of it. Very ready for it be winter now, please. I was in London tonight, where it was even warmer, and thus even more mystifying. I was down there with Pedar, who has joined the club of his colleagues who sneak out of important college meetings to feed their starving undergraduate children. I'm not starving exactly, but he fed me regardless, and it was very nice, but depressing when I arrived back in Oxford to an empty flat - everyone is either out or asleep.

Actually, I should be asleep, too. I have a tute in eight hours, for which I have written a very, very bad essay about Hume's view of the will. I do apologise for inflicting this post - weather! cooking! comedy mooses! - on you all, you haven't done anything to deserve it. Hope everyone is having a nice Friday the thirteenth.

(Also, one more thing: I'm now sixteen episodes into Supernatural, and it's so good. Why must it be good? Why must I want to write fic for it? This is WRONG, I tell you, I don't have time to be of the fic-writing. I saw the DVDs in a shop on Cormarket today and actually lingered quite a long while before Claire dragged me away to indulge her latest obession (Al Pacino movies). Sigh.)

(edited to add: And, apparently, I have been pronouncing "Winchester" wrong for a while.)