Political theory. And cakes with nipples on.

At two am on a dark, horrendously windy night that has been variously described, by those who've gone out in it, as "icky", "vile" and "blustery-apocalyptic", and I've been sitting in my kitchen for hours with Claire, Ben and Pat, working through the huge metric tonne of reading I haven't done, and thinking a little bit. It never ceases to amaze me how four people who all get on so well, and are all about the same age, and spend so much time together, can be so, well, different. This isn't a profound observation, but it felt like it sitting in our circle of light in front of the glass in front of the dark; Pat was tapping away at an essay about the economic modelling of performance-related pay, and Ben was working out the efficiency of a motorbike with the help of a lot of partial differential equations, and Claire was reading Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, and I had my feet on the back of Ben's chair and I was reading about Judith Butler's notions of sex and gender and we had French toast, half an apple pie and some chocolate mini rolls, and it was all perfectly content. That table, when we haven't covered it with crap, piled up the chairs or held a party, is made for four people. I think there's a certain irony in the fact that I was never, for all my years at school and probably before, very good with people, or fitting in to the swing of things, at being normal, and it's here, in this flat where no one is like anyone else, comes from the same country or speaks the same set of languages, that I finally, suddenly, fit.

Told you it wasn't profound. Quite the anodyne epiphany, in fact. But it was still a contented evening, and I got some work done after a weekend alternately unconscious, cranky and drunk. Maybe not that drunk, actually. We had a flat party last night - to celebrate Maria's birthday (Thursday), Pat's birthday (September 25th - seriously), the end of Carousel (last week) and our, er, house-warming (we moved in seven weeks ago) - and in a (worse) spirit of bad timing, we put it the same night as Queer Bop, so half our invited guest-list couldn't come. But, surprisingly enough, it went off beautifully. Maria and I spent most of the day making nipple cakes-

Er, a brief digression about the nipple cakes. Last week I made a cake and put stupid amounts of baking soda in it, so it rose in very, er, anatomically suggestive places (I got it out of the oven and wailed, "I made an Amazon cake!") and this gave Maria ideas about fairy cakes and nipples and the icing thereof. So we made fairy cakes, and icing, and Maria sculpted it into the appropriate shape. With the help of pink food colouring and instant coffee, we made them sufficiently ethnically diverse and put them out on plates, and people seemed to like them. There are pictures, but they haven't been uploaded yet.

-and in the morning chiasmata had been round for a dish in which to make her Chocolate Thing of Joy and Wonder, and she arrived in the evening with it and people dived in fingers-first. There were lots of people, actually - I got introduced to meglolas, and quite a few medic-type people, and also, also, Pat and Ben's director in Carousel, whose name is Helen and is a MILL FANGIRL. OMG. After a bit she and I and foreverdirt - whom I haven't seen in aaaaages, and it was great to see again - stood in the doorway and earnestly discussed the order of the songs in Helen's proposed "Mill: The Musical!", whilst chiasmata leaned against the doorway and laughed herself silly.

At length, as is usually the case with these things, I ended up very mellow on the floor of the kitchen, with James giving me Bailey's - unfortunately, we had at this point completely run out of glasses, so he was giving it to me in a 50ml beaker - and Maria was telling me, in equally mellow fashion, about she'd like to wear coat-tails when she gets married. I somewhat tipsily confided that I was pretty sure that she and James would be the first people I knew to get married, and she looked very embarrassed and sort of drunk and then started talking about rice and confetti and suchlike. We got distracted at this point by a very drunk Liya doing an ungraceful swan-dive off a chair.

Oh, it was a good party. It finally broke up around two-ish, and I went to bed and slept peacefully through until a quarter to eleven, when a very-hungover Liya proceeded to overreact out of all proportion to being hungover. The kitchen required about half an hour to tidy up, which was much better than I thought, and everything seems to have been good.

I spent today in the library, reading about gender politics, all except a brief hour in the pub with chiasmata, foreverdirt, megolas, and, er, a very nice person whose LJ I have forgotten - and I need to spend much of the week doing the same thing. Grooooan. At least it's seventh week now. It's that part of the term where I begin to feel I can't survive much longer. Why is Oxford life like this, I wonder? There's always that point where weeks of no sleep, too much work and too much [insert coping vice here] are finally hitting you like a tonne of bricks, and you're just coasting through tutes on a surge of headachey adrenaline, and waiting for the end.

Less than two weeks, which is good, but that said, this has been the happiest term I've had here, and I've loved it. Still, it will be nice to get away for a while; Pedar rang me tonight because, of all things, he wanted someone to talk to about The West Wing. I miss him a lot.

Er, yes, bedtime, and tomorrow I'm spending in the Bodleian reading about gender and sexuality and political theory, and, um, stuff.