Daylight savings time

I woke up this morning to find Claire sitting on the end of my bed. At which point I looked at my watch and said: "Shit, it's twenty to one."

"No!" she said delightedly. "It's half past eleven!"

And so it was. The missing ten minutes remain unexplained. I went into the kitchen to find Pat making the world's biggest veggie stew. I had run out of coffee, so it took me a while to ask: "Are you cooking all your food a year in advance?"

"More or less," she said cheerfully, and made me help spice it. Apparently some people, who are very organised, cook enough food for a week's worth of lunches in one go. I am not one of these people. I drank the last of the coffee over a very boring book about liberalism, but trying to read in a kitchen that has two doors and the Stew That Ate Mesopotamia is sort of like being the unwitting star of a French farce. It was very distracting.

After a while I gave up, took a shower and went to meet chiasmata for coffee. And that cheered me up no end. Actually, we got thrown out of the Queen's Lane café for, among other things, ordering a cream tea without the cream and sitting and chatting endlessly while the proverbial five thousand waited for tables. And despite the huge amount of reading builing up at home, I went to see where chiasmata lives, in a very pretty house with terrifying phallic wallpaper, and would have stayed much longer if it hadn't been for the liberalism.

Argh, liberalism. I like liberalism. I do. I believe in it. But this essay is horrific, and there is too much reading, and it isn't even relevant to the essay, and besides, I can't work lately because I can't be bothered to do anything. I have unspecified gloom that makes me run out of things to say mid-conversation and spend all my time staring at the wall. Thankfully Claire is also suffering through an essay, only hers is on ancient Greek architectural geometry, and we shared woe until we both got quite hysterical and tried to eat through everything left in the kitchen. This involved cooking something with red peppers and rice noodles, and whilst nothing we cook is actually bad, Pat was at rehearsal and we left her with a plateful and the following note in the pan:

Paaaaat!

Salt liberally, it's unbelievably* bland. Enjoy!

love,
Claire and Iona

*Like, really, really bland. Think the International Olympic Tastes-Of-Nothing Championships.

(Er, yes, I do add footnotes to everything. Pat cleaned her plate and said she enjoyed it, so I can only assume it marinated or something. It was distinctly average. Pat had been at the press preview for Carousel, so we were operating of the theory that either it had been good so they'd gone to the pub, or it had been bad so they'd gone to the pub, and it turned out it had been mediocre so they'd gone to the pub. Pat said she'd have felt better if I had been the Cherwell reviewer. I didn't get the chance to volunteer, I don't know why. I am pissed off with Cherwell in general right now; my centrespread for fifth week has been axed for being "too niche". Which is a polite way of saying you are a geek. Why am I always such a bespectacled, ungainly, five-foot-three bastion of uncoolness? Why couldn't I have had smart and edgy interests, like, say, theatre, or indie music, or Sanskrit shlokas, or anything other than being a BIG GEEK?)

Later on, when it was midnight and no one had done any work and Pat was picking noodles out of the pan and I was in deep depths of grey, Claire told me sternly that no, I can't eat sugar straight out of the packet, that is a whole new low. But I do feel low, I argued. It still doesn't merit sugar straight out of the packet, she said. I only believe in two things, I said. Liberalism and sugar. She gave me a looooong look. No.

I did it when she wasn't looking.

So we all sat there, eating cold noodles and talking about rubbish. Claire bitched about the man who wrote her very boring book about the exact measurements of the Acropolis, and I bitched abut the boring secondary source author who manages to make John Stuart Mill boring (er, I fangirl Mill quite disturbingly, so I find this wrong) and we all made lists of academic authors in order of boringness. And ate Jaffa cakes, and pepperoni pizza with ketchup and mayo (Pat mixes them up into orange gloop) and powdered parsley. (And sugar straight out of the packet.)

Ohgod I am grey and tragically unhip. Today is apparently Quote Your Own Fic day, so I shall do that:

From "Love Story" (SG-1/SGA, Daniel/Rodney for pegasus_b, because I was thinking about it today. It's old, but I still like it, and it features a lot of insulting remarks about PPEists I made before I was one.

( love story )

And so to bed. Liberalism and grey, waaah.