the age of enlightment

My exams are over. Which is a good thing on many levels, because I was going insane. Truly, howlingly insane. And oh, not sleeping isn't good at all. I'd reached the point where I was sitting up at three in the morning belligerently mentally drafting a letter to all the people in the world who don't have chronic sleep disorders, which is never a good sign.

(That said, the best advice re: terrible sleeping I have ever got from anyone was from my father, who suffers the same thing with the same severity, and it was this. Are you sleepy? Right now? And are you actually going to fail your degree/lose your job? Then go to bed, now, and sleep. People whom I do not like very much as a consequence tell me that I should push through, "so you'll sleep at night". Er... no. What happens, in the life of the chronic insomniac, is you go to bed, having pushed your exhausted body and brain through the whole of the working day, and then you don't sleep. You lie awake for eight hours, and then as you're dropping blissfully off, your alarm goes again. This way, at least you get some sleep sometimes.)

Anyway! So I had slept maybe three or four hours the night before my EU exam, and maybe another two hours the night before my contract one. And the first one went, well, not that brilliantly - I had things to say, but not particularly specific things, and in no sensible order - but the second one went slightly better. I much prefer problem questions to essays, I think; you can at least work through the thing in order and feel some muted satisfaction when finished. And I have, thank god, finished. And that, bizarrely, is a quarter of the course done, dealt with and examined. I'm pleased, I think; regardless of how well I've done, that was me getting to grips with new university, new course, new skill set, new knowledge and new material, up to exam standard in twelve weeks. Hurrah.

And new friends, also! Afterwards, we went for pizza. It seemed sensible - the initial plan had been to go drinking, until someone pointed out that this would involve drinking at half-past eleven in the morning - to decamp to the city, order lots of food and enough wine for tipsiness, which is not very much when everyone is grossly sleep-deprived and thus the cheapest of cheap dates, and it was good. And we ended up scrutinishing the two-for-one vouchers the internet had provided for exclusion clauses, and writing our order down and putting it on a napkin to give to the waitress, which is what happens when six baby lawyers go to lunch. And I meant to read all afternoon, but instead got home and fell soundly asleep. It was good.

shimgray took me for dinner, and, note for Oxford-types, Shangai 30s, on St. Aldate's? Really, really good. The food is wonderful, and the dingy aesthetic is pretty cool, although, as Shim noted, the large painting of a naked woman on the back wall does lend the place a certain raffish air. (That said, he was wearing a tie and I was wearing a dress. It was all eminently respectable, even though we were the youngest people in the place by several decades.) And, brownies and cream, and an evening lying around doing nothing but talk and read.

(Speaking of, I am reading Mason & Dixon, an epic Thomas Pynchon novel that I really would recommend, even though I'm only about a hundred and fifty pages in (of seven hundred!); it's on the surface, a historical pastiche about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon (yes, them) scurrying around the globe drinking and having sex with everything in sight. It's full of jokes and allusions, and at the heart of, the friendship between the two, which is strained and silly and full of endless sniping, and gloriously well-drawn. And if that were not enough, it can rollick along for twenty pages of bodice-ripping and then take an abrupt left turn into more sheer prose, a kind of sparse lambency in the way it builds time and place with so few strokes, and gosh, it's beautifully written. A brief aside, there.)

Tomorrow, I return to school, hurrah. Today, I had a day off, what fresh wonder is this, and meant to run errands, but somehow ended up spending nearly four hours in a café with magic_doors, talking about politics and Kosovo and academia and disestablishmentarianism and the Age! of! Enlightenment! pronounced just like that, and I remembered the enormous plethora of things and issues we seem to agree absolutely on. It was nice, and so was walking home in the cold, which still has the snap and freshness but doesn't actually make icicles of your extremities, which I entirely approve.

Onwards and upwards. Equity and trusts, criminal law, land law, and public law still to go. Tonight I might sleep!

[One further note. People talking to me on Google Talk, I entirely appreciate it, but please tell me who you are: for some unknown reason it's stripping the names off of people, and so it's kind of like talking to God.]