the light in you will guide me home

Sunday: new drug; new drug's interaction with alcohol; new glasses; new orientation of sky in relation to ground; going canoeing on Hinksey Lake. Really, this is the sort of story that ought to end, "And then I woke up in a dumpster in Nantucket".

...I didn't, for the record. It was a lovely, bright, hectic-blue sky sort of a day, one of those days dropped by mistake into September out of June, and while I was helpful and energetic in getting the canoe down into the lake, once I'd got in it without major incident it was a lot easier not to paddle, and be drifted around in large slow circles by the current. Occasionally, the on-the-hour trains to Birmimgham sped by in the background. On the jetty, luminometrice was knitting and shimgray was peering over my shoulder at the trashy magazine du jour. It was a very nice day indeed, given a final burnish by several punnets of raspberries in ice-cream.

Life continues... if not well, at least okay. I've stopped applying for jobs. I keep going to school and doing my homework. I'm not particularly taxed by it at present - so far, the ones that look easiest are those that say "bring a calculator". (Apparently I have to learn accounting. Why, I have no idea, but I used to help run a bookshop that had no money. Some skills do stick with you, even if only the noble and proud tradition of looking down at a column of figures, pulling out the till tray, turning it over, watching lint fall to the ground, picking up your pen and making shit up. I suspect my entirely humourless tutor will not find this amusing.)

In fact, this whole week has been a week of small pleasures - little things against a backdrop of a life that is proving quietly, cosily, reassuringly dull. The big excitement at the moment is waiting for the first day where it's chilly enough for a coat; I thought it might have been today, but still not quite, October notwithstanding. This is a strange year on the whole, a summer that was never very enthusiastic but stretches on into red leaves and equinox. In itself, that's a small beauty; days that still have that hint of balmy air, of promise.

Yesterday, I went over to meet emily_shore's kitten, who is a shy little waif of a cat, with very large eyes and a tail that's far too long for him. In between my attempts to introduce myself - first he scampered, and then he hid behind the refrigerator, and then he deigned to grace me with his presence for whole minutes at a time, and then he decided bubble wrap was more interesting - we were doing the fandom thing, and I enjoyed it; it's not often, actually, that I get the opportunity to discuss these things in a quiet cosy room with no typing required. In particular, we were talking about the various ficathons recently that emphasise queer, female and feminist identity over relationships, and how well this does and doesn't work when you actually try and sit down and write something. (Answer: usually not well. It takes work to hang a plot off an identity, or process, or not hang a plot on it so well it looks like you did.)

As an experiment, I am trying to write a story as a deliberate attempt to do something, where the something is, write a female character's story, and make it about her and not the relationships she's in. The fact I am trying to do something specific, rather than letting the story flow and putting the structure in later, is, I suspect, the reason it is going quite so badly. But I'm trying.

(We also had a brief squee about yuletide, and lo and behold, today the first whisperings from that quarter were heard. I wondered, while we were sitting in Red Star (a gorgeous and gloriously tacky noodle bar on the Cowley Road), how many people in the world were sitting in cafés and restaurants and gloriously tacky noodle bars the world over having the same conversation, because it is a cliché, but I love that about fandom more than anything else, that it's something created by people who include me and are just like me and is bigger than all of us.)

Today, a friend of mine who reads this and is yet to come up with a suitable pseudonym for herself, and me too, yes, went and ate an excessive quantity of sushi at Edamame (an entirely different kind of restaurant; it is a Japanese place being operated out of someone's front room, and they don't take reservations so the queue always stretches halfway down the street), and we squished around a table and ate our way through broiled eel and sashimi and bundles of nori and sesame seeds, and that was quietly nice, too; I said it above, but nothing happens to me any more, I have no adventures, I do nothing new, and I'm surprisingly okay with that. I like this, this doing nothing in particular with nothing in particular on the horizon, this work that I do in bitesize chunks because it's accounts and revision and read-one-chapter-before-bed. Sometimes Shim makes me dinner; sometimes I do my washing; sometimes I open all my windows and breathe in the first of the cold air and think about buying a new lipstick. The amitriptyline experiment has mostly failed - it worked, well, oh, too well, and I slept deeply like the dead for the three days I was on it, and then I had to stop, because I can't make a habit of skipping lunch in favour of napping under a handy table. On Tuesday I couldn't force my eyes open, and then I couldn't get out of bed, and then it was like there was a gloopy murk seeping through the porous parts of my bones, and then I got out of bed, and then I stumbled into a shower, and then I got dressed and went out and went up the hill to school.

My entirely humourless tutor told me, because I was twenty minutes late, that I was unprofessional, unbelievable; that the whole group lacked the enthusiasm and drive to be solicitors, but in particular, in particular, he could not believe anyone could ever be late, he once fired a student on his first day for it, it was the worst thing you could ever do. And at the time I was angry, but lately I've been thinking, I am older now than I've ever been, I have nothing coming, I may have no job but that means I have no firm to chase me to justify myself, my existence, my teamwork and my communication skills, I have nothing to prove to him or anyone. I can't evoke the sense of freedom that brings, that sudden realisation that you don't have to do anything. I feel so much better than I did.

Perhaps when I'm sleeping better, I'll behave myself again.