![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ego, opinion, art and commerce
Nov. 16th, 2006 02:54 amWhy have I never noticed before what a beautiful intro this song has? It's lovely, and the instrumental throughout is delightfully counter-intuitive.
Sadly, I may not get to listen to it very much from now on because oh god, my iPod is BUGGERED. It is displaying a sad-face icon and telling me to look up Apple support, so I did, which helpfully told me that my beloved favourite toy is a year out of warranty and will cost £161 to fix. Argh. I hate everything. I cannot afford this, and I cannot afford a new iPod - I'd never have afforded it in the first place, it was a birthday present from my parents. More than that, it was an extra-special eighteenth birthday present to make up for their having forgotten and been away for so many of my previous birthdays. So I have no music and this makes me blue. It's my birthday again fairly soon, but, argh, I don't know. My parents didn't spoil me when I was small, but now I'm adult enough to feel crushingly guilty about it, they pay my tuition fees and feed me nice dinners. They were in London over the weekend, as said before, and I went down to visit them on Saturday morning at the crack of dawn.
No, wait, I didn't write about Carousel, did I? It was a lot of fun. As musicals go, it really was. After a bit we gave up on the plot - "This is really daft!" Claire whispered in my ear after a while - and sat back and enjoyed the singing and dancing and real-life costumed versions of all the songs Pat and Ben have been belting out in the kitchen for weeks. Due to a peculiar twist in the plot, Ben ended up in a sailor suit. This sailor suit.... jesusgod. A great deal of people have offered sexual favours if he'd wear it again. We did bake him a cake for possibly the same reason. And when the cast stood up and got everyone to sing "You'll Never Walk Alone" I got chills. The jury is still out as to why Liverpool FC took their motto and song from a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about angels and clambakes, but they did, and I can't hear that song without some very vivid associations. I was born on Hope Street; I was gonna get chills regardless. Claire shared the feeling.
Yes, because of the musical I couldn't go down to London until very early on Saturday morning, but I'm so glad I did go even it was only for a day and night. It was good to be out of Oxford - I was getting under the weather here a bit - and it was very, very good to see my parents. They both apologised they hadn't brought any food, or been able to find all the books I'd asked them to bring me up, but like I said, they didn't have to bring anything at all, it was just so good to see them. My mum has been on call and working horrendously hard for weeks, and I had a dose of fifth-week blues, and Pedar weighed down with paperwork - so we decided to have a Day of Fun, and walk around looking at the Christmas decorations (yes, already!) and eat ice-cream and giggle and take a lot of pleasure in each other's company. I found a lovely pair of boots to replace the ones of mine that were broken, and Pedar wouldn't let me buy them for myself. (See above re: crushing guilt. I always feel so very bad about this sort of thing.) They are lovely boots, and my mum wants to steal them - they're tall black leather with higher heels than the others, and slightly pointed, and feel like they were made for me. The last pair of boots were bought the week of the American presidential election, and gave up the ghost the week of the midterms. Hopefully these ones will last a full term.
By the evening, we were sat eating pizza and had drifted naturally into the easy, comfortably ungrammatical Hindi that I tend to speak at home nowadays, and I was thinking about how I never miss my family when safely in the swing of Oxford life - it's seeing them that makes me miss them. The day after we went in three separate directions - my mum back up north, me back up to Oxford, Pedar just to Regent's Park to administer college exams - and it was really terribly depressing. I got back up here on a grey day and I haven't really shifted the grey since.
Oh, but I'm forgetting something. On Sunday morning, we were drifting down the street looking for somewhere to have breakfast when we saw an elderly lady being helped up a set of steps to church. She looked a bit familiar, and then she turned around and Pedar and I both stared. It was Margaret Thatcher. Seriously. I saw Margaret Thatcher. She looked so fragile, it was shocking, and then it dawned on me that of course she'd be old by now, she was Prime Minister when I was born. But still. Definite cause for omg!
But yes, I came back, I am grey, and, in fact, the whole week is making me grey. I am ill, to start with. Not fall-into-bed-forever woe, but the sort of ill I always seem to get mid-term-time, the world-shifting, lurching, frantic restlessness type of ill. Claire asked me if it was all in my head, in the sort of tone that indicated she wouldn't think it any less valid or debilitating if it were, and I honestly don't know the answer. It makes me incapable of concentrating, which is just great when you have two essays to get through, and in the end I went to Political Theory pleading cotton wool inna head. Chris wanted to know if I meant this literally, and I assured him no, so he gave me coffee as usual.
(Speaking of Chris, I'm beginning to suspect him of peripheral fannish connections. Last week he described something as "completely batshit", and this week I'm almost sure he said - he talks very fast - something about "wacky wanky one-nation Conservatives."![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
pinkdormouse is considering pretending he's fictional and putting him in her novel. I would be all for this. In fact, I think that after four terms, I may have finally stumbled into the great Oxonian tradition of fangirling my tutor a little bit.)
Four terms, because Michaelmas is nearly over and suddenly people are talking about Christmas, Nepotists, and admissions (tutors seem to be reading sixth-form essays rather than tute essays). My tute-partner apparently submitted, as one of his admissions essays, a Marxist critique of King Lear. My mind is well and truly boggled. I merely babbled about the American electoral college in mine. Anyway, next week we are finally doing feminism and I'm geekily excited about it.
I'm losing sight of what I was talking about. Er, nothing in particular, I guess. Michaelmas is nearly over! How this is possible, I have no idea. Tomorrow I've got to be up early and essay-writing, so I probably should go to bed, but I don't want to, I feel rubbish. I actually wanted to talk about, of all things, books in this post - I just seem to have wandered off topic madly and now I really should go to bed.
What was I talking about? Er. I was trying to re-do my userinfo yesterday after leaving it blank for weeks, so I thought I'd just scribble a placeholder paragraph about what the unsuspecting reader finds in my LJ, and I read back through twenty posts to see what, exactly, I do write about. Um... I have a piece of gen fic, something about politics, some pictures of magnetic poetry, a bit of meta, only all grounded in trivalities and my endless babble about my pathetically boring life.
Argh. Sleeeeep. I am miserable and grey and I feel boring and thus, am boring, in some sort of vicious accidental mind-over-matter thing, and I have spent the whole night trying to work and achieved precious little of note.
Sadly, I may not get to listen to it very much from now on because oh god, my iPod is BUGGERED. It is displaying a sad-face icon and telling me to look up Apple support, so I did, which helpfully told me that my beloved favourite toy is a year out of warranty and will cost £161 to fix. Argh. I hate everything. I cannot afford this, and I cannot afford a new iPod - I'd never have afforded it in the first place, it was a birthday present from my parents. More than that, it was an extra-special eighteenth birthday present to make up for their having forgotten and been away for so many of my previous birthdays. So I have no music and this makes me blue. It's my birthday again fairly soon, but, argh, I don't know. My parents didn't spoil me when I was small, but now I'm adult enough to feel crushingly guilty about it, they pay my tuition fees and feed me nice dinners. They were in London over the weekend, as said before, and I went down to visit them on Saturday morning at the crack of dawn.
No, wait, I didn't write about Carousel, did I? It was a lot of fun. As musicals go, it really was. After a bit we gave up on the plot - "This is really daft!" Claire whispered in my ear after a while - and sat back and enjoyed the singing and dancing and real-life costumed versions of all the songs Pat and Ben have been belting out in the kitchen for weeks. Due to a peculiar twist in the plot, Ben ended up in a sailor suit. This sailor suit.... jesusgod. A great deal of people have offered sexual favours if he'd wear it again. We did bake him a cake for possibly the same reason. And when the cast stood up and got everyone to sing "You'll Never Walk Alone" I got chills. The jury is still out as to why Liverpool FC took their motto and song from a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about angels and clambakes, but they did, and I can't hear that song without some very vivid associations. I was born on Hope Street; I was gonna get chills regardless. Claire shared the feeling.
Yes, because of the musical I couldn't go down to London until very early on Saturday morning, but I'm so glad I did go even it was only for a day and night. It was good to be out of Oxford - I was getting under the weather here a bit - and it was very, very good to see my parents. They both apologised they hadn't brought any food, or been able to find all the books I'd asked them to bring me up, but like I said, they didn't have to bring anything at all, it was just so good to see them. My mum has been on call and working horrendously hard for weeks, and I had a dose of fifth-week blues, and Pedar weighed down with paperwork - so we decided to have a Day of Fun, and walk around looking at the Christmas decorations (yes, already!) and eat ice-cream and giggle and take a lot of pleasure in each other's company. I found a lovely pair of boots to replace the ones of mine that were broken, and Pedar wouldn't let me buy them for myself. (See above re: crushing guilt. I always feel so very bad about this sort of thing.) They are lovely boots, and my mum wants to steal them - they're tall black leather with higher heels than the others, and slightly pointed, and feel like they were made for me. The last pair of boots were bought the week of the American presidential election, and gave up the ghost the week of the midterms. Hopefully these ones will last a full term.
By the evening, we were sat eating pizza and had drifted naturally into the easy, comfortably ungrammatical Hindi that I tend to speak at home nowadays, and I was thinking about how I never miss my family when safely in the swing of Oxford life - it's seeing them that makes me miss them. The day after we went in three separate directions - my mum back up north, me back up to Oxford, Pedar just to Regent's Park to administer college exams - and it was really terribly depressing. I got back up here on a grey day and I haven't really shifted the grey since.
Oh, but I'm forgetting something. On Sunday morning, we were drifting down the street looking for somewhere to have breakfast when we saw an elderly lady being helped up a set of steps to church. She looked a bit familiar, and then she turned around and Pedar and I both stared. It was Margaret Thatcher. Seriously. I saw Margaret Thatcher. She looked so fragile, it was shocking, and then it dawned on me that of course she'd be old by now, she was Prime Minister when I was born. But still. Definite cause for omg!
But yes, I came back, I am grey, and, in fact, the whole week is making me grey. I am ill, to start with. Not fall-into-bed-forever woe, but the sort of ill I always seem to get mid-term-time, the world-shifting, lurching, frantic restlessness type of ill. Claire asked me if it was all in my head, in the sort of tone that indicated she wouldn't think it any less valid or debilitating if it were, and I honestly don't know the answer. It makes me incapable of concentrating, which is just great when you have two essays to get through, and in the end I went to Political Theory pleading cotton wool inna head. Chris wanted to know if I meant this literally, and I assured him no, so he gave me coffee as usual.
(Speaking of Chris, I'm beginning to suspect him of peripheral fannish connections. Last week he described something as "completely batshit", and this week I'm almost sure he said - he talks very fast - something about "wacky wanky one-nation Conservatives."
pinkdormouse is considering pretending he's fictional and putting him in her novel. I would be all for this. In fact, I think that after four terms, I may have finally stumbled into the great Oxonian tradition of fangirling my tutor a little bit.)Four terms, because Michaelmas is nearly over and suddenly people are talking about Christmas, Nepotists, and admissions (tutors seem to be reading sixth-form essays rather than tute essays). My tute-partner apparently submitted, as one of his admissions essays, a Marxist critique of King Lear. My mind is well and truly boggled. I merely babbled about the American electoral college in mine. Anyway, next week we are finally doing feminism and I'm geekily excited about it.
I'm losing sight of what I was talking about. Er, nothing in particular, I guess. Michaelmas is nearly over! How this is possible, I have no idea. Tomorrow I've got to be up early and essay-writing, so I probably should go to bed, but I don't want to, I feel rubbish. I actually wanted to talk about, of all things, books in this post - I just seem to have wandered off topic madly and now I really should go to bed.
What was I talking about? Er. I was trying to re-do my userinfo yesterday after leaving it blank for weeks, so I thought I'd just scribble a placeholder paragraph about what the unsuspecting reader finds in my LJ, and I read back through twenty posts to see what, exactly, I do write about. Um... I have a piece of gen fic, something about politics, some pictures of magnetic poetry, a bit of meta, only all grounded in trivalities and my endless babble about my pathetically boring life.
Argh. Sleeeeep. I am miserable and grey and I feel boring and thus, am boring, in some sort of vicious accidental mind-over-matter thing, and I have spent the whole night trying to work and achieved precious little of note.