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Ye gods, I am spammy these days. (No doubt I then won't post for two months or something, to make up for it.) Anyway! Two public service announcements:

-Firstly, I just got a nice little email from the admin-type people at the central admissions board, and it looks like, if I pass my exams this year, I will have a place at the Oxford Institute of Legal Practice (OXILP, usually; one day I'll get over my allergy to abbreviations) for the LPC, and so will be in Oxford for the academic year 2009-10, as well as this one. So that's nice. We all need a plan.

-Secondly, I am changing meds again - from citalopram to fluoxetine - and as such, in the next few days, if I am teary, flaky and scary, it's probably just a consequence of my winning personality but there is at least a statistical chance that it isn't, and many thanks for patience.

(And, just to make up for continuous spam, the Mousehole is rocking to Amanda Palmer. Have these: Leeds United; Runs in the Family. The second one in particular is fucking awesome.)

I remember, when LJ was still running out of a back room in San Francisco and I had a free account and it would go down for hours just as I'd done my homework for the night and I'd sit and fume that I couldn't pour my fourteen-year-old angst into it.

...I tell this story as evidence of how much things change, really. I have spent the evening not doing my homework; I failed to do contract; then I failed to examine the insanity defence for murder; then my mother phoned and talked at me solidly for an hour; then I failed at offences against the person. I shall shortly give up and go to bed, I think.

Anyway! I am Doing Things for my Mental Health. This gets long, and somewhat self-obsessive, so it shall be duly cut. ( depression! echolocation! menstruation! Gratutious Capitalisation! etc )

And, lastly - pick a topic for my baby-dissertation! (It's not a dissertation, they say; it's just... a long research project. Uh-huh. Yeah. Not at all the same thing.) I was telling my father about it this evening, and he said, thoughtfully, "Well, it was to be expected. Baby's first step, baby's first word, baby's first thesis."

...yeah. And now to bed.

I have discovered why I run out of spoons every day at lunchtime! It's 'cause someone's selling them behind my back!

My mother did, in fact, buy some Iona spoons over the weekend, on the grounds that she'd been wanting to buy spoons for a while (clearly, a long-cherished dream, and who am I to judge) and it seemed a good omen. It's a funny name for product ranges, mine - there used to be an Ikea range of furniture, and also a type of crystal miniature. I don't know what connotations my name is supposed to have - probably, elegant and minimalist, and not, five-foot-three Asian geek-girl, but reality is frequently inaccurate.

Anyway, I am still here. Still quite a lot spoonless, and would really like pills to start working soon, plz. My GP was extraordinarily plummy and somewhat stand-offish, but basically helpful; he said, profoundly, why don't you take two pills every day instead of one. Hurrah for the scientific method. I am duly taking two pills every day instead of one, and so far all that has happened is that I've been very sleepy and headachey, and still feeling grim. Being around other people is draining, but, couner-intuitively, also does me good; they stop me thinking in circles by, I don't know, being themselves and interesting.

One of the things that is quite difficult about all this is that I have to cope with all sorts of stuff just when I'm least able to deal with it. Considering that I am all faily-faily paralysed-with-fear girl, I did think I ought to inform someone of an academic persuasion that, oh hi, there is a distinct chance I may be failing in the general direction of academia fairly soon. I went to see my personal tutor, therefore; he said, that's nice, it's not my bailiwick, go and speak to the department. I emailed the department. They didn't reply for a week, and finally did this afternoon to say, that's nice, it's not our problem, go and see student services. I went to student services. I sat outside for a bit, then went to the door marked "Disability Office" and asked the person inside, "Are you the disability office?"

"No," she said cheerfully, "This is international student services. Disability is in the advisory services."

I went to the advisory services. They were closed. It was 1.26pm. I sat on the floor and read about contract for half an hour. Then I went in and said, somewhat harrassedly, "I would like to talk to someone, please."

The person behind the desk twisted a lock of hair around a very sharp fingernail and looked at me. I looked back. Around us, the clock ticked, the other people in the last stages of bureaucracy-induced breakdown shifted in their chairs. I said, "I'm going away now," and did.

And so, when people ask me where I've been and if I've been ill, I smile and nod. It seems sensible. Today I made it to a nine o'clock lecture, managed to write things down, even, and came home feeling a bit icky and decided I wanted a shower. I got in and found the plumber had turned off the hot water.

Okay, I thought, I'll have lunch, is what I'll do. Not eating makes me feel worse. I went into the kitchen and discovered the plumber had filled the kitchen with a gas hob, a stepladder, two toolboxes, two chairs, two squished-up tarpaulins and several clouds of rising dust and a radio playing angry early nineties pop music.

I'll do some work, then, thinketh I - so I went up to my desk, got out a book on contract, opened it to the chaper on promissory estoppel and reached for a pen. And then next door started playing Bob Dylan at top volume next to the wall, the cat started wailing in concert and from downstairs, I heard the sound of a blowtorch being switched on.

I went back to bed.

Anyway! Things that are cheering, because there still are many:

-sebastienne deciding that the very best thing to cheer me up would be a rousing rendition of Dragostea Din Tei. Moldovan pop music ftw. It was indeed very cheering.

-The Vagina Monologues! It's on next week in Oxford, and it's the first time I've seen a professional production and I am very excited. Also, jacinthsong is coming, yaaaay.

-Last week at the pharmacy, I'd queued up and handed over my £7.10 and was waiting to get my lovely pills, when they called the guy in front of me, a perfectly normal-looking chap in jeans and boots. The man's name was Fertility Crombie. That was his name. I have told this to everyone. It does not stop being amazing.

-A very nice person who elects to remain nameless has translated one of my stories into Russian. I have been able to read Cyrillic since, well, never, but it's nonetheless very pleasing to see it up there. The story in question is "Love in Fire and in Blood", which is one of my favourites of my own stories, being nothing more than an affable comedy about drunken people being drunk. (And is, I think, the last piece of Sirius/Remus I wrote - which is notable, because the only reason I stoppped writing it was that I had, actually, written absolutely everything I had it in me to write about them.) Anyway! Story, in Russian! I should at some point compile a list of which of my stories have been translated - there are a handful in French and in Russian, but perhaps on a day when I have more spoons.

(Actually, I am sitting here being ill, someone rec me Sirius/Remus that I haven't read.)

-I have a cat. She still caterwauls impressively and thinks chewing my ankles is an entirely acceptable way to express love. Have an entirely gratuitious cat picture:

( you're a kitty! )

That's it. Still here, still going to be here.

The LSAT was on Saturday. As I keep saying to everyone, the only thing worse than an exam that is four hours and forty-five minutes long is an exam that is four hours and forty-five minutes long in a room with no clock. I was mostly howling by the time I came out, which was a looooooong time afterwards. I have no idea how I've done, but I don't think I care very much at this stage. ( yet more misbehaving brain babble, srsly, igore me )

This weekend has been mostly marked by a profound sense of unease. I don't like Indian summers; I sort of distrust baking asphalt in late September, and there have been a lot of comings and goings, so the Mousehole hasn't been the usual haven of continuity it usually is (that said, our new housemate is pretty, butch, Swedish, and radiates an aura of absolute calm; I heartily approve); also, on Saturday I did the enormously smart thing of forgetting my pills. By four in the afternoon I was overheated and mad. It wasn't good.

Speaking of pills, ( I pause to boringly discuss myself and my drugs )

(Pause there for shimgray to inform me from the kitchen, wistfully, "Iona, your fridge is on a deep and fundamental level unlike Andrew Jackson's White House."

And a further pause for me to realise a) he is making cheese on toast and b) and cannot find the cheese.)

In other news, I have jacinthsong visiting, which is always a force for good even when I am being flaily flaily useless girl. I went for a long walk, I sat in the garden for a while, I tried cleaning, but in the end I gave up, slept soundly for four hours and she came and petted me occasionally. It was a good cure; I woke up feeling much better, and have since then eaten a large bowl of pasta and cheese, a large bowl of cereal, a slice of bread, a chocolate bar, two sherbet lemons and a sliced apple with lime and am still hungry. Possibly what I have also ails the cat; at any rate, she has spent the last four hours or so fast asleep on the sofa, looking ridiculously cute.

Ah, yes, speaking of the kitty, she is a boooooy. We took her to the vet, walking her down the Iffley Road in a carrier while she wailed piteously, and sat in the waiting room cooing through the bars before we took her in to see the vet. The vet was a very nice woman indeed, not at all fazed by the four women it apparently required to take this one very small animal to the vet's, and lifted up Harriet's tail, and said, yes. She has testicles. Your kitty is a boy. She is, however, still being referred to as "Harriet" and "she", because, well. Because we can, and we're used to it.

(My personal favourite bit of this whole encounter was the part where the kitty sat there like an angel while the vet injected her with a BIG GINORMOUS NEEDLE and we wailed and clutched our breasts and cried, "Baaaaaaby!" She, meanwhile, didn't make a sound and didn't squirm and when it was over she gave the vet a forgiving lick. We've had her a month and I don't know what we did without her, dear little thing.)

There is nothing else of note in my life at present, it must be said. Last night I saw the Jules Verne pass overhead, a brief shining thing glittering through the twilight. Because I am small, and our back garden is full of trees, I had to be lifted up to see it overhead, and it's amazing, how this brief passing star lifts you out of dinner and washing-up and the smell of apples in the garden, up into the sky with it.

What else? Land law is fascinating. I am not being sarcastic. Land law is this delicious tangled mess of common law, Roman law, history, tradition, Latin and lore, and I love it. I hope I still love it after twelve weeks of flailing about in it, but I'm certainly enjoying it at the moment. Tomorrow, the doctor's, then school for just an hour in the afternoon - I'm going to do some pro bono, so help me.

Life, v. exciting. Goodnight, all.

I am brain-fogged and chilly. This is probably a combination of September squalls and the fact I forgot my pills, leaving me with a cumulative effect of feeling a little translucent and washed-out, as though the light is passing through me. I'm being held to earth by the expedients of sharp claws and the newly-discovered art of caterwauling. I took a bath, leaned back into the water, and listened to an ice-cream van go past playing "Greensleeves", the rain hitting the wrought iron in the garden in manner of arthritic gamelan, and the racket outside the bathroom door. "Betraaaaaaayal!" wailed kitty. "You're in that roooooooooom! You don't loooooooove me!"

It's not what I expected, I must say. I expected a more, shall we say, businesslike and companionable relationship with this cat. I am a dog person. I like dogs, I'm used to dogs, for preference enormous solemn-eyed dogs who, if I am crass enough to take a bath in the middle of the afternoon, do nothing so ostentatious as howl or scratch on the door but rather arrange themselves in attitudes of mute, hopeless devotion, occasionally shifting their paws into better silhouette for the sculptor who is no doubt on his way. Kitty, on the other hand, demands food and shoelaces and love, vociferously. They tell me she will grow up to be a dignified and serene tabby-cat. I will believe this when I see it. In the meantime she gets stuck in the bookcase and goes to sleep between my crossed legs and attempts to steal the bootlaces out of one's boots. The jury is out as to whose boots she prefers, or indeed if she has any concept of us as individuals, even the-tall-one-who-smells-of-dust and the-smaller-ones-who-smell-of-gin.

(Apparently the way my hands move over the keyboard is very threatening. My forearms are getting ripped to shreds.)

In other news, being an unemployed layabout continues. I had a job interview yesterday - well, I say interview; it was more in the way of an assessment day, consisting of five hours of fairly horrifying set tasks. I was, shall we say, terrified; Shim spent much of his morning talking me down from the tree I got myself into beforehand, and then I rang for a taxi and it didn't come for ages and blah, blah, glaaargh, it was at nine and I got there at 8.59 and honestly, I could have started better. As well as an interview, I had a written test, a group exercise, a quite awful exercise in verbal reasoning, and I had to give a fifteen-minute presentation on "challenges facing the legal profession", which I had practiced on many inanimate objects, as well as chiasmata and sebastienne, who, to my surprise and joy, found it interesting. So that went all right, actually. The rest of it, I have no idea; I just did it, so we shall see. I would like this job very much; I was the youngest person interviewed by a long chalk, so I don't know. Again, we shall see. (As an aside, I really do like living in this house. It's comfortable, well-lit, warm and cosy. I get home exhausted and all interviewed-out and am made tea and told that watching Doctor Who is the best possible thing to do with my afternoon, and we all watch "Utopia" and it's marvellous. It feels like home to me.)

I'm in two minds about whether or not I want term to start. Because on the one hand, back-to-school terror, and while I can afford to jettison an afternoon on acount of brain fog now, I won't be able to do that in a couple of weeks, but on the other hand, not-doing-much is not a look that works well on me. It's ludicrous, really, but there's nothing for thinking you're wasting your life when your housemates and your boy are off at work all day while you're vaguely bored, doing the washing-up while you don't have to and Pierre, your resident itinerant Frenchman, asks you, in tones of mild disbelief, "You don't work?"

"No," I said, "I am the stay-at-home-mum-of-cat in this household."

He looked confused. I added, "I'm a baby lawyer."

"A lawyer?" There was a long pause. "But you're nice!"

Oh, I don't know. The cat is eating the ficus. I should not forget my pills.

I am being useless. This is clear. It is a result of unspecified neuralgia and resulting brain fog, and while I'm not in continuous pain any more I do seem to spend an awful lot of time wandering into rooms and forgetting what I went in there for and forgetting that to send cheques you need to sign them and forgetting that plugs need pins otherwise they do not fit and forgetting how to spell "appropriate" and "profession" and "commune" and other multisyllabic words I have been reliably able to spell since small-childhood.

This is... not good. Especially as I am still an unsponsored, umemployed layabout, and the odds of my getting a training contract whilst having difficulty with shoelaces seem slim to minimal. Life is certainly not all bad - last weekend, for example, Katie and Shim and I went to the zoo! And saw elephants! and it was actually the best thing ever! - but could be, you know, better.

Anyway. I mention this only because I have finally got myself registered with a GP, and had my head examined (no, really), and amoxycillin, prescription analgesia and good old-fashioned opiates having succeeded in shifting the pain but not the lack of cognitive function, they have suggested citalopram. I am not sure what I think about this. That said, this is just a placeholder - I may well be even more crap than usual when it comes to, you know, replying to email and doing what I'm supposed to and suchlike, and so I ask for patience. I now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.