Omelette

First of all, a sincere thank you to everyone who commented on my last post. I really appreciated your nice thoughts. There's not really much to say in response, except to thank you, so: thank you.

The last couple of days have been without much going on, really, barring the bit where I am amazingly busy, of course. I always feel a little like if I drop the threads in my head, my life will fall apart. Which is true, I guess - at the moment, I have four hours of scheduled time in my week. Two tutorials of an hour each, a Political Theory lecture on Tuesdays and another one I want to try out, Politics of South Asia, tomorrow morning. (I also tried Metaethics - and made it through the first thirty-five minutes before quietly slinking out of the back. Not one I'm going to again.) Anyway, the point is that all the rest of the time I sort of have to keep under control, which is a little tiring but I suppose worth it in that, hey, my entire life is my own.

So, events of note. The newest recipe is an impromptu omelette. Well, there is a story behind the omelette, and there's a story behind the story too. In short, slasheuse is quite right and there is indeed hackery on my horizon. My latest feature for Cherwell is a new thing they're doing, imaginatively titled "Student Profile", in which one Oxonian with an interesting life or interesting contribution to society or whatever is informally interviewed and the result written up for the features page. I (was) volunteered for this duty for next week's, and got sent a list of people with contact details and, er, no reasons given. I went to the Covered Market to buy garlic - I bought it from Sainsbury's the other day and apparently lost it within five minutes of buying it; I have no idea where it is.

(Actually, that was quite an interesting excursion, even if I did lose the garlic: I went up there after Queerglish with sebastienne, lizziwig and absinthe_shadow, and we met two guys holding a placard saying: "ASK US ANYTHING."

There was a bit of conferring, and after a while I went up and asked, "Is knowledge justified true belief?"

Guy #1 looked at me and said, "...yes?"

But, sebastienne wanted to know, if they'd been there all day, surely they must have had people asking help for their essay crises. Apparently they had, but they hadn't had the Gettier problem before. lizziwig asked something historical - I forget what - but they didn't know, and someone was prompted to ask if they'd managed to help anyone with anything.

"Directions."

I suppose it was scrupulously accurate advertising - you could ask them anything, if you didn't actually require an answer. And I liked the experiment. Next time I have three days to spare maybe I'll stand on one corner of Cornmarket holding a similar placard.)

Anyway, the Covered Market with Claire, who helped me practise tactfully ringing someone up and saying, "Hello, I'm from Cherwell, why are you interesting?"

Surprisingly, she managed to come up with a formulation that didn't make me sound like a complete idiot, so somewhat reassured, I dropped into college and checked my pidge. (And found a postcard from insaneizzi! Thank you very much, dear! It's gone up on my noticeboard and looks pleasantly sunny.) On the way back, I was talking about having had something of a dozy day - I kept fading in and out of conversations and missing the point of everything - and then just as I'd got to the dozy part, I nearly got hit by a bike. The elderly man in his woolly hat looked slightly bemused and sailed off.

I got home, tried to ring up one of the people on my list and couldn't get any signal and jumped out of the window, which helped. Claire followed me out of it and laughed at me, but the person whom I'd rung was very nice and agreed to be interviewed, so I was ready to chalk up the afternoon as a success, even if it was a bit dozy, and then I went into the kitchen and Maria wanted to know when I'd taken up vampire slaying. "You have garlic sticking out of your pocket."

"Oh," I said.

So, one essay crisis later, I'd got something done about Cohen and Dworkin's egalitarianism - 2200 words of dullness, and it took me four hours to write, groan - and arranged to meet someone to interview, and was feeling pleased with myself. Unfortunately, a morning of philosophy reading put me to sleep and even Chris, my pol. theory tutor, feeding me more very good coffee didn't wake me up again. Which made me a wonderful tute-partner, of course, but I think Chris knows what he's about; he almost-but-not-quite deliberately shifted the topic of discussion over to feminism and egalitarianism, guaranteed to get me to pay attention. (Feminism for me and Marxism for my partner; they're quite useful triggers.) He asked me what I'd thought of Jerry Cohen's critique of Dworkin, and I perked up a little, because as political philosophers go, Cohen is really rather lucid and easy to understand and he says interesting things that do hold my attention.

At which point my partner mentioned that he had, in fact, seen Cohen yesterday, somewhere round Jowett. "What's he look like?" I asked.

"He's an old guy on a creaky bike in a woolly hat."

"Oh," I said.

After that going back to sleep seemed the best option, at least until he got on to gender issues again. There was an example in this week's reading, which I then brought up: it's to do with how to promote democratic equality within a context of institutionalised homophobia and other such interesting topics. In the end, he got to talking about a "certain restricted liberalism" which is tolerant of homosexuality, as long as it's not affection shown in public.

"Of course, this is rubbish," he went on, "for what do we know about straight people?"

"Er..."

"They show affection in public ALL THE FUCKING TIME!"

I really enjoy these tutorials. I really do. They are much fun. Of course they overrun, so I had to sprint across town to meet my interviewee. She's a Muslim and I'm interviewing her about Ramadan. Of course, me being my thoughtful, intelligent self, I ended up interviewing her in my aromatic, well-stocked kitchen half an hour before sunset. Oh, yeah, I rock. But, actually, she was very nice and very interesting. It's an informal article, with no commentary, so I didn't have to do anything except listen and take notes. And after a while I was asking questions off my own interest rather than for the article, which is probably a good thing; I was asking all sorts of things about "real" Islam - as opposed to what I know from reading - and I hope it comes across.

And the bizzare thing was, after an hour discussing religion with a devoutly religion person, it was six o'clock and she'd gone to break her fast, and I - well, I walked back into town in a thoughtful frame of mind and went to the weekly aarti at the Hindu Institute. I sat quietly through the puja and bhajans and took prasad, and spoke in Hindi and missed home a bit. So much for keeping yourself out of your writing, I guess, but I'm glad I went. And the article, which I wrote up after dinner with Maria, came out quite nicely and a whole day before deadline.

After the aarti, I realised I was helpfully close to Sainsbury's, and popped in to buy tomatoes, onions and eggs. I got home to find Claire frying potatoes, so it all came together and we made an omelette! Told you there was a story behind it.

There are stories after it too, for example Liya wondering aloud as to why the skin wouldn't come off an onion ("Because you haven't chopped the ends off, OMG!", and I actually said "OMG") or why her powdered pasta sauce tasted funny. (Reason: the milk had curdled.) I ended up feeding her some omelette (not without getting slightly pissed off about her insistence on not letting me throw out the pasta; I ended up yelling something about her coming first in the World's First Olympic Self-Righteousness Championships, which may well be a case of pot-kettle-itis) but all in the all, the story had a happy ending.

Yeah. Omelette. Maybe one day I'll get around to posting my recipes.