raven: [hello my name is] and a silhouette image of a raven (misc - mortimer)
[personal profile] raven
(Numbered for ease of perusal, or indeed to spare me from offering any connections between them.)

1. Merton is top of the Norrington. This may account for why I look out across the road at the windows level with mine and see people studious and sitting down hard at work.

"In the meantime, what do we do?" I went on, sitting on the kitchen table fairly early this morning. "We download TV off the internet and throw mouldy bread at the freshers."

Maria was making a paper aeroplane at the time; she got it perfectly balanced between wingspan and general pointiness, I scrawled "HMS Bounty" in blunt pencil beneath one wing, and she launched it gracefully into a clear blue sky. The three of us hung out of our third-floor window and watched it arc beautifully up and out and down, through the sparkling air, down down down...

...straight into a cyclist.

Oops.

(Balliol is, as we speak, fourth in the Norrington Table. I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from this.)

2. Nothing like a clear sparkling day, though. I went up the Cowley Road revelling in the sunshine, and noticed that there is an Indian restaurant about halfway up called "Dil Dhunia". I am unsure whether this means "heart of the world" or "heart of the coriander". Both seem equally likely.

3. Nothing like a long lazy afternoon, either. I was supposed to be working. I managed to read an article by Samuel Scheffler that I've been meaning to read for two years - a critique of the basic-structure objection to Rawlsian egalitarianism; it bothers me slightly because it ought to be manhandled into an unmessy feminist argument, but I can't see how to do it - but other than that, I drank peppermint tea and talked to [livejournal.com profile] chiasmata most of the day. I was hit by a wave of sleepiness around about half seven, just in time to go to OULES.

4. OULES. Yes. We ran the flashback scene today, which I remember writing "unstageable" next to in the margin for the first few drafts, up to the mountain-in-Kashmir draft (so called because I did, indeed, leave the last extant copy up a mountain in Kashmir) and yet, we never did much about that. And it seems to have been a workable approach, because it went far better than expected. Once again, the cast are made of uber-talented love, and one would think I'd be sick of the script by now, but I'm really not. It's wonderful fun.

Afterwards, [livejournal.com profile] foulds and I were walking home and idly dissecting the rehearsal when he noted that we seemed to have stepped into a nineteen-twenties gangster film. The fog is thick tonight, clinging to the gargoyles and the architecture, and the lights were blurring beautifully through it all the way. I love Oxford in that mood - the night-time mood when the familiar looks strange - and it was an interesting backdrop to an interesting day.

5. I got in about half ten, wondered why I felt funny, noted dispassionately that I hadn't eaten in almost fourteen hours, and settled in with a bowl of pasta, with Maria and James, watching The Undiscovered Country.

I think we got about an hour in before I put my head in my hands and said, "It's a fucking Cold War allegory, isn't it?"

Well, it is! And I possibly enjoyed it even more for this fact. I like the notes of whom you can trust and who you can't, why a Neutral Zone is familiar and peace isn't, and how the original crew of the Enterprise really do belong to a different, more paranoid world. I even liked the knock on the head by bloody Francis Fukuyama. It was great fun. And after that we ended up eating peanut butter out of the jar and watching "Trials and Tribble-ations", which is made of love, particularly Dax, whom I have always thought is made of love despite seeing minimal amounts of Deep Space Nine compared to the others.

And now it's four am. I should go to bed, considering I have a lecture to go to in five hours.

on 2008-01-28 08:21 am (UTC)
chiasmata: (Default)
Posted by [personal profile] chiasmata
I should have fed you! Am bad, bad friend. I completely forgot about food until I walked back into the living room and Olly force-fed me pasta. This says something, I think. xxx

on 2008-01-28 01:33 pm (UTC)
chiasmata: (Default)
Posted by [personal profile] chiasmata
And ooh ooh, I've remembered the Annoying Word Mistake. 'Comparation' for 'comparison'. Drives me MAD!

on 2008-01-28 04:31 pm (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] loneraven.livejournal.com
Oh, no, no! I forgot myself to have breakfast, and the insomnia means I have no appetite until I actually keel over. Totally not your fault.

on 2008-01-28 04:33 pm (UTC)

on 2008-01-28 12:16 pm (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] outintherain.livejournal.com
I was supposed to go to Merton! Funny that...

on 2008-01-28 04:34 pm (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] loneraven.livejournal.com
*grins* You iz smrt!

on 2008-01-28 05:35 pm (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] outintherain.livejournal.com
Haha no I ain't! I never got to fully apply to Oxford *is still heartbroken*... did get accepted to Edinburgh though, so I suppose that's something...

on 2008-01-28 01:31 pm (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] footnotetoplato.livejournal.com
The people in windows opposite yours are graduate students, so there shouldn't be any direct correlation with Norrington Table positions. Anyhow, I always thought Balliol did pretty well just by getting lots of smart people to apply.

~ Balliol undergrad turned Merton grad, who sleeps past noon on a regular basis.

on 2008-01-28 04:32 pm (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] loneraven.livejournal.com
*grins* I know, I know, I merely tease. And sleeping past noon is not a character flaw. At least I hope not, because I'd be the most immoral person I knew, if so.

on 2008-01-28 03:22 pm (UTC)
ext_20950: (drinking)
Posted by [identity profile] jacinthsong.livejournal.com
Dil Dunia is lovely! They do amazing aloo bringal/baingan/whatever we decided the word was in the end. Yummy aubergine stuff, anyway.

on 2008-01-29 10:26 pm (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] loneraven.livejournal.com
Ahaha your ICON. I get it now. Dylan Moran is actually oddly pretty. This is strange.

on 2008-01-28 04:03 pm (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] nos4a2no9.livejournal.com
I think we got about an hour in before I put my head in my hands and said, "It's a fucking Cold War allegory, isn't it?"

That made me shoot water out of my nose, and I think I've been giggling about it for the last half-hour. Oh LR. *pets you* Yes, yes it is. *snorts again*

on 2008-01-29 10:32 pm (UTC)
Posted by [identity profile] loneraven.livejournal.com
*giggles* I saw the funny side in the end. Everything in my life is defined by the Cold War! (http://community.livejournal.com/ou3fs/97181.html)

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