Political theory. And cakes with nipples on.

[raven]

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.

Comments

Er...

[thucyken.livejournal.com]

This may be extremely forward of me, but I stumbled across your lj by a circuitous friend-of-friend-of-friend-of route. Since I've actually just submitted an application for postgrad at Oxford, with Balliol as my first college choice, it seemed a bit fated. Not in the 'we should get married!' sense, but rather 'would you have any advice about Oxford/Balliol?' type of thing. I've never been to Britain so I really can't begin to predict what life might be like, and I'd appreciate any tips you might have.

Re: Er...

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Hey, that's fine! What in particular would you like to know? (And what's your postgrad in? I don't know how much you've managed to garner, but I'm a second year undergraduate PPEist.)

Re: Er...

[thucyken.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm going for the MSt in Japanese Studies (mainly Japanese-centered comp. lit.), but what I'd really like to know about is the atmosphere. What's the weather like- is Balliol a supportive college- what's the one item no student there should be without- any tips that, in hindsight, you wish you'd gotten.
Thank you very much!

Re: Er...

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Hello there - I am going to answer this comment in proper detail, but unfortunately this is the last week of term and I don't have time to sit down!

(Actually, there's a first tip about Balliol - eighth week is very hectic!)

Anyway, this is just a placeholder comment - I will come back and answer your questions fully, I promise. :)

[amchau.livejournal.com]

I am tempted to offer to talk about The West Wing with your father. :)

Are you still on for a telephone call tonight? Do you want to give me a guideline on when?

[birdsflying]

It was lovely to meet you! And don't worry - somehow - and I try not to think about it too hard in case it stops working when I return to student-hood - you will manage to survive the adrenaline/seventh week of term/etc. in one piece!

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

Thanks! It was lovely to meet you too!

[hathy-col.livejournal.com]

Could be worse; you could be in ninth week with another four weeks to go and the only communication from home is to check Simon isn't dead and to tell you that your aging mid-life crisis mother is entering Miss Slinky UK!

*twitch*

Although to be fair, my general workload is much easier. It balances out in the end.

Over Christmas, I say that if you are about at any point we have commiseration meet-up of "Why Our Respective Universities Are Driving Us Mad In Cruel And Unusual Ways." And possibly I can inflict Torchwood on you. Ahem. I NEED TO BE SQUEEING WITH YOU.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

ARGH this actually is cruel and unusual. If I ever emerge from the library this week I think I'm going to ring you and try and commiserate. My general workload is beginning to grind me into the ground. Having just done two eight-hour days, I'm about ready to die. ARGH.

I hope Simon is lots better, and omg, I HAVE NOT SEEN TORCHWOOD. As in, at all. This needs to be remedied!

[tmpe5t.livejournal.com]

ooh, don;t get me started on gender politics... :_D Although (here we go) people always forget to combine it with class politics (as in, it's as beneficial to the 'ruling classes*' to keep the 'lower orders' males stupid and thuggish as it is to keep middle and upper class women anorexic and pregnant...) traditonal class/gender politics turn women into objects and men into machines. Even now, the 'working class' is still the one that gets sent to the frontline to die in any wars that the oxbridge (sorry :-p) educated elite decide are in their interests...

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

I think that by existing, I rather scupper your theory. I'm a non-white, queer, northern, Oxford-educated woman. :)

[tmpe5t.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but you're not in the career ladder yet- the changes made by generational behaviour don't tend to kick in until that generation meets middle age... For instance, Dave 'Look at my bicycle ignore the car' Cameron is only 3 years older than me and is now trying to sell the electorate the ideas that i was getting excited about at 17 (recycling, green energy etc) - The Boomers (Tony et al) think they changed the world with their Sgt Pepper albums, but the real 60's visionaries were the government of the time who did things like legalise homosexuality and all sorts of other fun things, after having a good think about what they'd actually fought the war for, whereas the massive changes wrought (sp) by Tony & Gordon in the 90s got, for instance, people who's been thoroughly scrap-heaped due to the chaos that the education system was in the 80's back into education to allow them to then goof off on LJ.. :L_D

Anyway, being at Oxford overrides all your other stuff... You get default access to the establishment; probably the occupants of your kitchen will be running the country in 20 years time... :_D

[biascut.livejournal.com]

What do you think of Judith Butler? I finally read Gender Trouble earlier in the year, and spend a lot of time going, "Yes! YES! And also, yes! And - ok, I didn't understand any of that chapter, but ... yes! That bit's good!" I think there's a lot of stuff that I've either absorbed through the drip-drip-drip of academic queer studies into the mainstream, but there was an awful lot that I know, but I'd never seen formulated so neatly before.

[loneraven.livejournal.com]

What I've understood, I've mostly agreed with, but I'm too overworked and ill to be really taking it in. I bought the book, though; I'm planning a proper read of it over Christmas. The essay is done now, so I can get some sleep!