Witches and unicorns

Oh, fuuuuuck it. I am quite ridiculously drunk right now. But as I have said many a time, my linguistic skills are always the last to go, after my motor skills and whatever the skill is that stops you a) walking into lampposts (owww) and b) craving honey on toast. Half a bottle of wine, lots of peach schnapps, most of Claire's vodka and three slices of toast with honey later, I'm an inch closer to sober but I'm going to have such a headache tomorrow. Which will be great, at eleven am in a lecture on Hindu nationalism from 1970. Oh, yeah. Gonna be great. I had a crap day. Really, really crap. I didn't get out of bed, not because I was tired - although I was - but because I was just not in the mood to do anything, including get out of bed. When I finally did, it was to crash into the kitchen to find Pat and Liya having already been to a lecture making chilli cheese sandwiches, and I ate one, and then took a shower and found I couldn't be bothered to dry my hair. So I sort of traipsed around the flat half-shampoo-aromatic and half-dripping-everywhere and bitching to myself because no one was home, and then went to a tutorial.

Where I did not make an idiot of myself, and was very proud of that fact, but we didn't exactly talk about the topic in hand (rights) but instead babbles about the Tories and rampant xenophobia. Also, Chris said, waving my essay about, "And Iona wrote about witches and unicorns! And a little bit about rights, too!"

Which is all true, I suppose. I ended up staring at Chris's moose's head a lot. Last night, when I essay crisised and actually wrote the essay, I also baked cookies. Well, I accidentally baked a cake. I did it by following a chocolate-chip cookie recipe, having borrowed a whisk from the mathmos, and I whisked batter whilst listening to Claire telling me her essay plan about Thucydides which, er, expanded across two baking trays and started to rise. In the end I gave up, cut it into slices and served it out to my flatmates. They liked it, as cake. Chocolate chip cake. It might yet catch on. I got it out of the oven at two am and we draped ourselves over the table and ignored work and essay crises.

(I said at the time that the stereotype has domesticated women barefoot in the kitchen baking cookies, but very rarely are these stereotypical women whisking batter and trying to make analytic points about Thucydides, so maybe there's hope for me yet.)

After today being crap, I couldn't sit down to work. I paced fretfully about the kitchen trying not to talk about non-cognitivism - even though I have an actual class (I haven't had a class in about six months) on Friday and have done no reading at all - while Claire made stir-fry. She was very calming, it must be said, sternly telling me to chop potatoes mushrooms when I got silly. After a while I went to aarti at the Hindu centre, and on the way my parents phoned. I asked my mum if she'd got leave for a holiday in March, something I have asked her to do at least ten times in the last two weeks, and she broke off to talk to my dad, and then they started bickering and ignoring me entirely, and I hung up on them in a huff. (Seriously: they shouldn't have to communicate through me, omg. I live two hundred and twenty-five miles away from them both. They live in the same house. They should talk.) And then I went to aarti, which was spoiled by some guy who sleazed all over me with his horrible eyes and smug, slappable face. I didn't slap him, and I was very proud that I didn't, and I was so pissed off and unhappy and can't-be-bothered that I bought a mini cheesecake and lots of white zinfandel before sloping off home.

Claire's stir-fry was wonderful. We had asked Sam to dinner, because he spent seven hours today in the OxStu offices doing the front page and forgetting to eat, and he cleaned his plate in less than five minutes and looked much better for it. I, in the meantime, ate it slowly with chopsticks and drank the wine feeling a bit better. At which point Claire and Sam went off to a party, and asked me if I wanted to come, and I thought what the hell, it's not like I can be bothered to work. And I never drink like this, like I want to destroy my head and everything in it, but it felt like that tonight. We took alcohol and there was alcohol there, and it seemed natural to just shut up my internal monologue. And it's silly that one bad day can do that to you, but it wasn't a bad day in itself - I made it bad, I smeared my fucked-up mental state all over it and made it shit. But after that I made it better. I think. I'm quite drunk still.

I met a girl there. Actually, I met two. The first girl was very nice and chatted to me lots, and I was lying back on someone's bed and we were talking about Swiss cheese plants. "Why are they called Swiss cheese plants?" she asked. "Lots of things have holes in. Graters have holes in."

"Maybe," I said, "it's to do with, you know" - she was another philosopher - "that they've got similar. Things. Platonic forms. Outside the cave they're the same."

"All sort of mixed up," she said thoughtfully. "Yeah."

"Iona," said Claire at that point, "are you babbling about Platonic forms? You're drunk, aren't you?"

"Little bit," I said.

"I love you," she told me. "Also, I love Oxford."

I do, too; where else do drunken people talk about the Platonic forms of Swiss cheese plants? (And Latin conjugation in the accusative case, and the Nicomachean Ethics, and the metabolism of the eukaryotic cell, and All Tomorrow's Parties, and hackery at Cherwell, and the importance of cherry brandy, and all the other things I heard people talk about.) And after that - after that, after that - we ended up wandering around the High Street and to Narcissists at Baby Love (where, sadly, the toilets are no longer labelled "Dicks" and "Pussies"), and dancing a lot. Which is where the second girl comes in; she was the younger sister of Vikram, the guy whose party it was (and whom I had never met until tonight). He was worried that as she was underage, she would never get in to Baby Love. After a while he looked at me and said, "Show me your Bod card."

I showed it to him. And, well, she was also short and Indian with long dark hair, and Bod cards have famously distorted pictures on them. So we worked it out - she was going to take my Bod card and pretend to be me, and I'd use my driving license as ID if asked. And it all worked perfectly. They didn't look too closely, and she got in.

Of course, all this time I was assuming she must be seventeen or so. I found her again by the bar, took back my Bod card and asked, and she said: "Nearly fourteen."

...jesus. Apparently she can pass for twenty. Fuck. After that I felt the need to drink some more, and here I am home again safe, really quite drunk because the day was quite bad, but it's better now than it was. Pat's pulling an all-nighter because of too much economics work, so we sat on her floor and shared the cheesecake and she ran equations by me which I managed to make substantive comment on despite being quite pissed, and I might just make that ten o'clock lecture.

Bad day. But I do love Oxford. I really do.

Edited to add: And in the news of the very good indeed, all that self-righteous indignation actually worked. There is to be no more content filtering on computers connected to the Balliol network! Teaspoon! YouTube! Photobucket! OMG!