the love that dares speak its name

[raven]

This is a happy Sunday morning. The light is grey, filtering through the glass and and the rain so it's washed out and translucent, and mixed up with all my low reading-lights. There are flowers at the edges of my room, and shimgray is walking around barefoot singing quietly to Joni Mitchell and I can tell I've had some sleep and a rest, because I'm awake and all these things are lovely.

Further to my feeling quietly happy, I notice my entire flist is not, as is usual, variations on "omg, Doctor Who!" (which I actually don't mind; how nice of the BBC to miss the week in which I have Finals!), but instead, variations on "omg, LATVIA". So far I have deduced that a) Eurovision was good; b) the Latvian entry involved pirates; and c) OMG, EUROVISION LATVIAN PIRATES. I'm sorry for boring you all with the minutiae of my mental state, but I honestly can feel the difference - rather than thinking belligerent thoughts about people having better things to do, I am happy about Latvian Eurovision pirates. I feel like myself for the first time in ages.

(Note for Americans and other aliens: the the Eurovision Song Contest is an annual competitition in which the countries of Europe (and North Africa, and Israel, and whatever else the Eurovision definition of Europe encompasses) each offer up a musical act (with quotation marks inserted there as you see fit) and the other countries vote for them. Politics has nothing to do with this at all. Neither does musical ability. PIRATES. Yeah.)

I am halfway through, as is probably clear by this time, and it has not been, er, easy. . The up from having done one lasted a while, but Ethics being on Thursday afternoon wasn't so good; it gave me time to fret and worry and not be particularly well-prepared in my head, because I panicked a lot during that paper. I wrote my three answers: one on Hume's psychology of action, which was probably the best, although uninspired; one on rights and utilitarianism, which worried me because I felt like I hadn't progressed at all (I wrote the exact same essay for my first-year exams, I am sure); and one on Hume's notion of virtue in which I made a stupid, stupid mistake that I should have caught and didn't. "Virtue" is one thing; "virtues" are another. I should've caught it. Never mind, I guess.

Political Theory, being only sixteen hours after Ethics finished, caused me some considerable pain. I was stressed out and silly because the tension-level never really went down; I went into the theory paper without much in the way of calm. Luckily for me, the paper wasn't too bad. There was a cruel twist in the egalitarianism question - they wanted you to talk about equality of welfare, when the body of the literature generally talks about equality of resources, which was less good; I had to work very hard not to write the exact same rights essay as I'd written the day before, which I hope to god I did succeed at, because writing the same essay twice never goes down well; but there was also a gift of a question in "To what extent (if at all) are cultural differences a problem for feminism?" Possibly - no, in fact, definitely - I did not write anything at all from things I'd read in my academic pursuit of political theory, but more in the way of stuff I've read, er, on the internet. I wrote about the intersection of class, race and gender, and I wrote about whether lesbian feminism is resultant of and constitutive of a specific "culture" and how should we contest and understand culture, I wrote about internal divisions engendered by transphobia, etc., etc. I may not have answered the question. I am fairly certain I didn't. But I got to write for an hour solidly without panicking about my intellectual credentials, so there we go.

(Also, I used the word "cisgender" and its cognates more than once, which it dawns on me now may not be entrenched in academia just yet; at least, I've never read it in something I got off a reading list. There's no chance of my being misunderstood by anyone who knows their Latin prefixes, and undoubtedly most Oxford examiners will, so I'm not concerned. But still, an odd thing that didn't occur to me until just now. In the same way as certain words - notably "gen", "slash" and "fen" - are still vernacular words despite being so very entrenched in my vocabulary.)

History of Philosophy From Descartes to Kant - was awful. I knew it would be awful, I hate the paper (and it is just as vague as the title suggests; twenty-three questions about six different philosophers) and my revision classes last term made me want to die. It was awful. I originally studied eight topics for it, I revised five of them, one of them came up. So, I wrote one coherent answer, deliberately misunderstood another question so I would have things to write, and for the third answer... well. It was a question about whether Berkeley twists the meaning of "to exist" to substantiate his own case in refuting materialism. I at least know what all of that means. So, I did it from first principles - worked it out on my own, probably badly and ineptly, but I have not read any secondary literature, I've never done the topic specifically, I just couldn't do anything else. I am torn between being bitter about it - because I did a term's worth of work and I did weeks of revision on the bloody paper - and being amusedly resigned. I'm still not sure.

Afterwards, I had my first lazy afternoon in, oh, forever, and went up to Summertown in the sunshine to meet the medics. triptogenetica and luminometrice came out looking dazed and washed-out and glitter-bedecked and happy and beautiful. We gave them ice-cream and covered them with silly plastic leis, and they did seem so happy, and ah, the end is in sight.

I have four more exams to go and a lot of work to do today - I don't finish until Wednesday - but things are a lot better now I have got through the first four consecutive days of hell. (There are another four consecutive days to go, but I think I can face it better now.)

All is well in the world, it seems. It's the Glorious Twenty-Fifth of May, too, and I am not wearing the lilac because I was not there, but I wish you all truth and justice and reasonably-priced love. And a hard-boiled egg.

Comments

[chiasmata]

YOU MADE IT TO SUNDAY, HURRAH. I've been thinking of you, ducky, and hoping it hasn't been too horrendous. And telling anyone who will listen that Oxford doesn't respect Saturdays or Bank Holidays, and that this is NOT FAIR.

xxx

[cscottd.livejournal.com]

Pirates! :)

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

I have my pompoms out for you, babe, you're doing SO DAMN WELL. Keep breathing, hang in there, you're almost through.

Possibly - no, in fact, definitely - I did not write anything at all from things I'd read in my academic pursuit of political theory, but more in the way of stuff I've read, er, on the internet.

God, that made me grin. Everything I Know I Learned It From Fandom is a perfectly valid method of passing exams.

History of philsophy sounds awful. But you wrote three essays! That's the important thing.

[thecapitalc.livejournal.com]

Which two medics are those? I saw you there but didn't get a chance to say hi! X