you don't know how precious you are / I am the one who lives with the ocean

I have my window open a crack. I can hear the sea.

.....aaaah. Okay. Sane now. Really.

Maybe not quite. But I am back in the frozen north (er - actually, it's a couple of degrees warmer than Oxford), and feeling rather better about life. The Aeneid was wonderful - more thoughts on it when said thoughts are something beyond "omgyay!" - and the week ended very very well indeed. And now, amazingly, I am home. I didn't particularly think about what I was doing this vac, mostly because my life ended with the Aeneid, and now I'm here and really rather quite surprised about it.

But. Pleasantly surprised. At nine o'clock this morning I got a text from my mother, to the effect of, am in Dubai, see you later. I am an awful person and had entirely forgotten she was there, mostly due to the pernicious effect of the Aeneid cast party the night before. It was drunken. That is a big surprise to everyone, I know. But it was also joyous and filled with happy people, and I had not eaten in days, and drinking was clearly the best idea ever. (I tried. I really, really did. I ate a sandwich and everything. In the afternoon, I was packing up my room with the windows open with chiasmata knitting and making soothing noises in the windowseat, and was being gradually consumed by maudlin. Because Balliol are not made of win, they want me to clear out all my crap. I, therefore, was putting away books, thinking, oh, won't have time to read much next term, I may as well take it home for good. Oh, god. Leaving Oxford. Please to not be getting me started on this always-cheerful topic.)

But, yes, yes, cast party. I participated in some glorious cocktailing, and now have adopted two more OULES children as well as Maria. And spent the rest of the evening curled up on the Couch of Lesbian Doom, so called because through a bit of syllogistic trickery, everyone on it was - here's the clever part - by definition a lesbian (osymandias and shimgray objected to this slightly, on grounds of being male, but they were both quite clearly wrong) and I was rather extravagantly rude to a gatecrashing sleazy boy drifting through the party (although not quite as rude as chiasmata, who was heard to wish quite cheerfully that his penis would fall off), and after that, sinking slowly into sleepy contentment. Ahhhh.

Yes, nine o'clock this morning, my mother was in Dubai, and by six, we were both in Manchester Airport, she sleepy and endearingly irrational and me sleepy and wearing the Cat Ears of Troy. (Because, er, everything that was involved in the Aeneid in any capacity has become the "X! Of! Troy!", said just like that, with pauses for dramatic piano music. My life has become constituted and defined by the norms and mores of a student bastardisation of Virgil, why do you ask?) She's been gone a month, and I've been away for three, and it was nice to wander back tonight and dazedly talk about nothing much. She informs me that I've lost weight. To which my answer is, um, I haven't eaten in days, this is hardly surprising. (Is it some sort of grand only-daughter cliche that this should be our very first topic of conversation? Sigh.)

And now I'm home, and feeling sane enough to sit still and write for the first time in a while, and it's funny, but I'd forgotten what absolute silence sounds like. Above the aforementioned sound of the waves - which are particularly clear tonight; it's rough, and the trees are mostly still - there's no sound at all. It's immensely soothing. (I mean, no wonder I get crazy living in central Oxford. I lived here for eight years before that.) And now I can write again, and am eating a little more, and I might even be able to do some work for, er, Finals. These are all good things. (Which is not to say I am not missing Oxford ridiculously. I am, and with almost comical immediacy.) Things I have wanted to post for a while, and not done so through being crazy busy:

-remixredux08! Hurrah, hurrah! I love Remix, and this is, frighteningly enough, my fifth year doing it. (And almost not; I signed up literally minutes before sign-ups closed.) I'm pretty excited about this year's - my author is intimidatingly awesome, in the good way, and writes about places and people and I really want to revisit. One thing I like is that I tend to have more fun with the writing each successive year - last year's effort was "Ways of Not Speaking (the Poetry in Motion Remix)",which I don't think I ever reposted - and that bodes well for this time around. We shall see.

-lgbtfest, run by penknife and my dear mireille719. I love this idea; it addresses something that's always bugged me, namely, the relatively small amount of fic out there that addresses, alongside slash, notions of queerness and gender and sexuality in fandom's fandoms. For once, my timing is fabulous - prompts have just now opened for claiming - and they really are pretty cool. (I came up with exactly one. I fail. Other people emphatically do not, the list makes very intriuging reading.) I'm not sure if I'm going to sign up yet; I really ought not to do more than one ficathon at one time, but I do want to take the opportunity to finish my Teddy-Lupin-is-amazingly-genderqueer story, which is currently festering at 2000 mostly disconnected words.

-(Also, a 9000-word-story, Star Trek, supposed to be for likethesun2's birthday, except not, because see above re: me failing, is festering as well, and that's annoying me because it was going so well. Again, we shall see, now I can sit still and, you know, construct sentences again.)

-My darling wife jacinthsong has divorced me on Facebook. This is a tragedy of epic proportions. It is epic and tragic. (More than the Aeneid. Yes.)

She does, however, have her reasons. Er. Um. In brief: I have a boy; I am as surprised as everyone else, believe me; it's shimgray; I am happy.

Right. To bed, to bed! In the morning I am going to the beach.