flux

[raven]

It's been a hell of a week, all things considered. Let's not even get into the part where I got my passport stolen on a Paris Metro station.

(I should add that after about an hour of that particular flavour of anxiety you only get when you have no passport and are four hours away from an international flight you are already checked in for, I had it returned to me by a mysterious stranger, who handed it over with no explanation and disappeared into a subway tunnel. My life, a Cold War spy novel, apparently. I never stop being surprised by how kind people are.)

Otherwise - things are in flux. I was in Oxford and London over the weekend, missed Pride for the nth time (next year! definitely), but managed a quick lunch with gavagai, at least, and, well. Well, I have a sixteen-year-old cousin from Indiana. She's visiting Europe with her girl scout troop. She has never been anywhere other than the States or India. Her mother is very worried about her getting lost/kidnapped. Accordingly, when I was still in Ithaca I promised to take her and her two friends out for dinner in London, not realising at the time that her well-meaning girl-scout-leader-whatever guardians would be interested in, er, vetting me before I disappeared into one of the world's major metropolises with their little darlings in tow.

So Shim and I dressed as respectably as possible, and made soothing noises about how we are totally grown-up and can totally be trusted with teenagers (and, as gavagai insisted on pointing out, not at all the sort of people who stay up the night before reading fanfic till 3am and posting "DEATH TO THE OPPOSITION" to their friends' Facebook walls). The three middle-aged and very serious ladies asked us what we do. "I am a lawyer, and my partner is a librarian," I said, very seriously, and tried not to look like my grown-up shoes were killing me and that I wasn't holding a carrier bag of Star Trek books.

Anyway, success! I took them out, and fed them a nice dinner, and let them have a glass of wine each which endeared me to them forever, and delivered them back to their youth hostel back to their clueless guardians, having been somewhat enraged by the revelation that their troop leader had calculated their food budget by converting it from dollars. I took them to a Tesco Metro, bought them sweets and fruit and crackers and whaever else they wanted, and ruined their entire learning experience no doubt but I refuse to feel bad about it. Shim and I got home to Oxford at 2am with sort-of feelings of a job well done and sort-of mental whiplash.

Speaking of home, and Oxford. Shim and I move to Cambridge in less than a week. Remember how when I left Ithaca, I was having FEELINGS, only one at a time because I am not an emotionally complex person? That.

Anyway! I digress. glitzfrau asked me some interview questions.

1. How did America surprise you?

This surprised no one except me, but: how much I loved it. I went there expecting to have a good time and be glad when I came home. Well, I did have a good time, and I am glad to be home, but - I miss it. I miss the people most of all. I miss my friends. I miss CLS more than I ever thought was likely, and its complicated internal politics and liberal elitism and its solidity of community, but I miss random things like half and half and Swedish Fish and I miss the predictable weather and I miss the alien landscape, the way the land turns to wilderness two feet from the road. And, you know, I don't say this enough, but I love America and Americans. It's a wonderful country. It has the New York Times and jazz bands and some of the world's best law schools and really good seafood and HBO and I was living somewhere with this on my actual street, for heaven's sake. And it's full of people who couldn't have been kinder to me and couldn't have gone more out of their way to help me and my endless foreigner confusion. I loved it.


2. Lovely Diana Wynne Jones is dead; whom can you recommend to me that might be like her?

Hmm. I think, Diane Duane. Whom you may or may not have heard of; Duane's problem, I think, is that she is most famous for her Star Trek books, and, yes, justifiably, because they are brilliant: they're so rich and warm and full of promise, it's them rather than the actual show that made me fall for McCoy, Kirk, Spock, and Uhura. There's this bit in The Wounded Sky in which McCoy refuses to be complicit in the creation of a universe which contains death, and it makes me weep But they are also stunning science fiction, full of enormous ideas and cheerfully alien aliens: I love Katha'sat, who can play cards if the suits are marked to be visible in the infra-red spectrum; K'tl'k, the fabulous, snarky, blown-glass spider; Naraht, who is an animate rock, who's putting on weight because geology keep asking him to eat things to analyse them.

But the problem is, you write Trek novels and then no one takes you seriously as a writer. And Duane really is good: she's a lot more optimistic about families and home life than DWJ, but has that same breadth of imagination, the same trick of underscoring magical happenings with family and friendship dynamics. Her Young Wizards books start out as fairly conventional magic-is-real stories and turn into complicated epic sci-fi myths. I'd avoid A Wizard Alone - it has what can only be described as "weird shit" - but all the others are great.

And she's less overwhelmingly white than DWJ, thankfully - I adore Kit and Carmela Rodriguez particularly, but they're not the only non-white people she writes about.

3. What would you say to just-enrolled fresher Raven today, if you met her? Or would you just let her make her own path in life?

Join OULES and hang out with ou3fs in your first term, not Michaelmas of second year. (Aha, back when it really was the Oxford University Folklore and Fanfiction Society and before we admitted that it was actually a bunch of friends who got drunk together a lot.) Work less in full term and more in the vacs. Don't be so scared of gavagai. Don't worry about the economics. Or the formal logic. You are a perfectly intelligent, perfectly normal PPEist. Your tutors are, and will be, fond of you. Lovely Nandini thinks you are an "argumentative Indian". Even Bob actually likes you, all extremely fucking contrary appearances to the contrary. Drink more, dance more. Worry less. When your mother calls don't answer. There's going to be a week, sometime in the next year or two, when you eat nothing but melon for three days and fall lovingly into Shim's arms at the end of the first night of the Aeneid because you can't stand up. Don't do that, it's a bad idea.

...on the other hand. On the other hand: be yourself and all of yourself, everything feels full of excitement and promise because it is, and everything is going to be fine. -

4. Where is your dream legal career going to take you?

I don't know, is the honest answer to this. More and more, I am sure that I don't have a dream legal career, or at least, if I do, it's not "make partner before I'm thirty-five and make a tonne of money". It's a step on the way to something I know not what. (It's also not "return to academia and become an acdemic".) But you know, that's okay. I'm happy to not know what I want to do while being trained to do something I like a lot.

5. If you could dress in drag for a day, wearing completely different clothes, who or what would you drag up as?

What a fascinating question! I'd like to dress up. Proper, frilly dress shirt, proper jacket, proper chunky leather boots, hair up, lipstick. Actually dragging up is not an option for me - I'm 5'1", with small-scale curves - but if this is an ideal scenario, I'd like everything tailored to fit.

(I"m actually rather dreading the new job for just this reason: I really, really hate dressing femme when I don't want to. I hate having that decision taken away from me. My life so hard, etc.)

Bedtime.