philosophy supernatural nude

Notes on voting in a referendum, my first:

-The British summer. You could wring out the air like a dishcloth. We were waiting in for the plumber. At the polling station I explained to the tellers that in an outsized efficiency Islington had registered me to vote twice, in two different names. They seemed mildly concerned, thanked me for letting them know, and asked me what my legal name was, and then apologised for asking. I voted, once, with a stub pencil. The lady next to in the queue said to the tellers, “I don’t read well. Can you go through it with me?”

“Of course,” they said. On the way out, someone in a car with all the doors open was playing “Fifty Ways To Leave Your Lover”.

-On Seven Sisters Road, two girls holding REMAIN banners, picket signs and stickers waved cheerfully at passing traffic. A woman with a table further down was explaining very earnestly to an old white man that to remain leaves our options open; if you have the slightest doubt, you know what you need to do, and also, do you trust Boris Johnson? Her companion said to me, have you voted. Yes. Would you like a sticker? I’d love one, I said, but I’m a civil servant. Oh well, she said, best be safe, hope your day is lovely.

-Outside Holloway Road Tube station, the same two campaigners I’ve been seeing most days this week were both standing out in the rain. One was explaining EU parliamentary democracy to a passer-by; the other asked if I’d voted. Inside the ticket hall, in the midmorning lull, a woman had forgotten about the lift she was waiting for and was shouting across the barriers to the station staff. “It’s about our children’s future!” she was saying, as I rummaged for my Oyster card. “Not for us, but for them!”

“Absolutely,” said the ticket barrier guy, sounding fervent. I said earlier this week that of course TFL have no political views, but they’re running an experimental trial at Holborn that’s trying to get people to stand on both sides of the escalators. The signage has started to say things like “UNITED WE STAND”.

I am afraid that in the years to come I may look back upon today as the last breath of the leftist consensus of my childhood; that things were bad and growing worse all the time, but some days mark a steeper descent. But if the terrible thing happens, it isn’t because a lot of people weren’t doing the job that was in front of them.

As predicted, despite the last-minute dashing about, no polling card came for me. I am still kicking myself hard for having been stupid enough to disenfranchise myself; so, you know, could we hold off a little on if-you-didn't-vote-you-should-be-ashamed and you-lost-every-right-to-complain-for-the-next-ever, because it's not that I don't agree with you, but I'm there in that place already, okay? I tried.

In other news, I have one exam down. As usual, I couldn't sleep till four am the night before and went for it with the barrelling force of will that sleeplessness entails, and you know, it wasn't the worst thing. It was a surprisingly humane exam - in form, rather than substance, with a hour's reading time, no writing permitted, to begin with, which is a genius idea because it forces you to think about what you're doing. Eight questions, most of them okayish, I missed the point of one of them entirely and there was another one I think didn't have a point.

(Seriously. It was the first question on the paper and I was finding it baffling, so I left it till the end and came back to it with about eleven minutes to spare. For the first eight of those I wrote a paragraph about nothing in particular, and with three minutes to spare I had a genius idea and wrote "Overbreadth!" Just like that! With the exclamation mark! And didn't deign to explain how or why or in relation to what the statute was overbroad, but you can't have everything in life. Baby E later confessed to having done almost the exact same thing, which was cheering.

Also, the one where I missed the point ( was interesting to none but other people who care about constitutional law and the Establishment Clause, so I'm cutting it )

I could write here about how everything is making me cranky - I didn't get to vote! iTunes is refusing to let me listen to music I paid for, why didn't I just torrent it! USPS want to charge me $175 to ship my books home! migraine migraine MIGRAINE! - but maybe I just won't. The music I am trying and failing to listen to is "Sigh No More", the Mumford & Sons album, and I really, really like it. It's fabulous, affirming stuff - seriously, you can sing along and feel very definitive about everything - that sounds sort of like a cross between Dar Williams and the Gaslight Anthem. Like the Gaslight Anthem got on stage, anyway, with a trumpet and some string instruments, and tried to pretend they were an English folk band.

To alleviate the cranky, I have been reading aaaaaaall the Vorkosigan fic, as you've all probably guessed, so I will leave you with some recs so this isn't just a post about how I have a headache and my life is so unfair.

Aral Vorkosigan's Dog by philomytha
I mentioned this the other day, when I was still reading it, so this is the rec. I really, really enjoyed this. It's novel-length, about Illyan and Aral during the Escobaran war, and like I said the other day, it's sort of like a love story, only with a different kind of love at the centre of it: it's about how Illyan the neutral, human-computer observer finally takes a side, and why. It's about loyalty, and fidelity, and a kind of ownership. There's this scene in it, which I completely adore, where Illyan, exhausted, falls asleep on a chair and during the course of the night slips off it - and on waking, berates himself for literally sleeping on the floor by Aral Vorkosigan's feet. It's both hilarious and very poignant.

A Deeper Season / What Passing Bells by lightgetsin and sahiya.
Is there anyone left who hasn't read these by now? Regardless, they're great: both novel length, with many side-pieces and sequels. Miles/Gregor, going AU from Memory, and while they do wipe Laisa from existence they don't, to my delight, wipe out Ekaterin - she's there and her usual amazing self. My favourite of all the bits and bobs is A Place To Stand, a lovely, fascinating short story. (The funny thing is, these are all so good that I love them to pieces despite the fact I don't buy the major premise: Miles and Gregor are adorable, and no they're not that related, but I have trouble getting behind the pairing when the two of them are foster-brothers; effectively, they have the same parents. I mention this only in case someone else has the same hang-up and isn't reading for that reason.)

Warrant For A Day's Leave by jetta_e_rus.
Aral/Simon set shortly after the latter gets out of prison. Ridiculously sweet and heartwarming and in no way ignores Cordelia. I really liked it.

The Earring by philomytha
I read this and immediately recced it to gavagai, because omgyes. The author's summary is "Aral and Cordelia on a state visit to Beta Colony", which is true as far as it goes, but. Yes. Much love.

Oh, and while I'm here, I got three stories from Remix! Home (the don't look back remix), a remix of my story Pomegranate, which is about Uhura, and Amanda, and tells me things I didn't know about them.It's short and lovely.

And from Remix Madness: The Gardener (the Singing TARDIS Overdub), a remix of Sweetpeas, and I love this SO MUCH, it's about Rory and it's about the TARDIS, oh, so much love; and Be My Love (the first and last time remix), a remix of will you stay with me, will you be my love, and it's Doctor/River and again with the LOVE. I suspect these two are written by the same person. Time will tell.

Right. I need to go back to work sometime ever.

Credit where credit's due - to these people!

Also, come on, don't look at me like that, at least it's not Clegg/Cameron RPF. Although I keep watching this and trying very hard not to chew my fingers.

ficlet:: a historic and seismic shift
by Raven
PG, gen, HP/RPF. David Cameron's first night in office.

( the sun's gone down and not on Portillo )

( locally )

( nationally )

Argh. Why did I even get up.

Hey, you guys, I voted! I love voting: I mean, I love teeny-tiny polling stations staffed by genteel old ladies, I love how you walk in and everyone is so pleased to see you, I love how in every general election in my memory it's a cherry-blossom May, and full of promise. It's an illusion, maybe, but it's one I'm happy to buy into, for one day at least.

Politically speaking, I was doing fine until I read this: Welcome to Cameron Land - Johann Hari visits Hammersmith and Fulham, the council area which Cameron claims is the model in miniature for his potential government. It's depressing. (hat-tip: jacinthsong, foreverdirt.)

Still, we can but wait and see. I plan to stay up as long as I can.

edited to add this article on the BBC about what you can and can't do in a polling station is delightfully cheering. My favourite part:

"We wouldn't want people coming in with overt political clothing," says Mr Tonkin [Westminster's head of admin services]. However it is all about context. "There's a candidate standing in Westminster as a pirate. And if he comes in to vote in a pirate costume as is likely, we won't turn him away. The same goes for any supporters coming to vote as pirates."


( in other, better news )

The Chancellor announced the Budget, yesterday; coincidentally, hathy_col and I found ourselves in a pub in the early evening and reached the not-unreasonable conclusion that really, we ought to take the opportunity to drink cider at the day's prices.

Which wouldn't have been so bad, had we not also got through most of two bottles of wine. Today mostly I have been having, inexplicably, the worst hangover of my life - I don't mean that it's inexplicable that I drank a lot of wine and cider and now I have a hangover, I mean I have behaved much worse in the past and not suffered with quite such inside-of-head toxicity - and am emerging into the cold blue daylight feeling rather delicate. It was worth it, though. We meant to watch Deep Space Nine and instead just sat up talking about life and work and dating Scottish boys and how much we love Kate Mulgrew. And watched this, courtesy of tau_sigma and giggled a lot.

Amidst my delicacy, I am trying to sign up for Remix. ( and it's very difficult! Why do I write so much rubbish? )

Today has also been notable for a lot of interesting articles drifting by on the flist.

-Republican senators refuse to work late, citing obscure Senate procedural rule. I kind of love this. It's so transparently throwing their toys out of the pram (via speccygeekgrrl and gwynnega).

-A lack of class in the GOP. This is a really good article.

-The Tory party have done something that would be hilarious if it weren't so unhilarious.

-In better news, Constance McMillen has had the last laugh even if she doesn't get a prom.

And a quick handful of recs:

Thursday's Child by thistlerose
Star Trek, gen. Spock, McCoy and a baaaaaaaby. So adorable.

Force of Habit by taraljc.
Star Trek, gen. McCoy and his ex-wife, Jocelyn, and Joanna. Really nice, this, with good voices.

Relatives and Relativity, by yahtzee63.
Doctor Who/Sense and Sensibility. Such fun. I haven't got anywhere near to finishing it yet, but such a great idea for a crossover, and so far really wonderfully executed.

That's it. Bedtime, then tomorrow the Grand Adventure Up North begins.

So, I am posting after quite a lot of a bottle of wine, and a pitcher labelled "pink spritzer" which I am told had both pinot grigio and blackberry liqueur making up most of its volume. But. Some things you post about when you're drunk, too, and sometimes drunkenness is what lends you the eloquence.

The BBC reports: Anger at US mixed marriage "ban"; ThinkProgress had more. Basically, some justice of the peace in Louisiana is getting his place in the sun by talking publically about how he doesn't issue marriage licences to interracial couples, though he does like black people, and even lets them use his bathroom. I mean, he's not a racist, like. He does it for the sake of the children.

The funny thing is, it isn't actually a picnic growing up as a child of two cultures. If you're really unlucky, your mother will be Lowri Turner and she'll write in a national newspaper about how much of a racist she is and how sensitive, thoughtful and attentive she isn't going to be to your journey being a child of more than one world. White people are funny like that; they think they are the normal, and everyone else is "multicultural" and "ethnic" and strange; they think they are the only way to be. But we outnumber you, you know. Right now, we outnumber you in volume of numbers - I'm an Indian woman, one in twelve of living humans is Indian and female, and one in six is brown (and stands up straight, and is strong, intelligent and beautiful, despite not being pale like you). Right now, we outnumber you; mathematically, we are the normal, and it's only accidents of history that make you so proud of being white. (Even if we weren't, we sing, dance and tan better than you. Deal.)

And then, interracial relationships are quite close to my heart, as a topic, as a way of losing all sorts of privilege, but also as a truth it's very difficult to deny. I grew up as a brown person in a white culture; I'm whiter than lots of people who are white, establishment baby lawyer with PPE degree from Oxford, but I can look in the mirror and never be white, when the summmer comes I wear strappy tops and feel the sun beneath my skin, I'm brown, brown, brown again. (And I am strong, intelligent and beautiful too. Deal with that as well.) Right now that's strange, and odd; exploring being the child of two cultures is something we don't talk about - in America they have hyphenated identity, they don't have this odd British thing of being British but having come from somewhere else within the last generation, of having a place I came from and a place I'm going but not a place I am. And right now that is strange - but we outnumber you. I say it over and over again, but the nation-state is dying, slowly, slowly; a nation is a group of people who identify together, who are one culture, one people; and a state is a political entity of people who are governed together, and it has been another accident of history that the two have so often coincided, but it's just that, a coincidence. Why should people who are one people all live in the same place? Every people has people who wake up one morning and take long journeys in search of better things.

So Mr. Bardwell and his interracial marriages are all very nice, and think of the children: the children who will be all there is, who will all that is left after a world has understood that race is a thing and ethnicity is a thing and people and community are other things, and the world is marching on, on, towards better things. He can live in Louisiana and not issue marriage licences to interracial couples but he's an old man and he'll be dead soon, and I woke up this morning and I am still myself, still brown and strong, and my partner is white, and we are human beings, and tomorrow is the festival of light, and we celebrate it as part of a billion people, and no one can take it away from us, that endless beauty in the world.

Firstly: I am taking medical leave for the rest of the academic year. This is less extravagantly melodramatic than it sounds - the rest of the academic year is, after all, about a month, followed by exams and research-project submission. I could try and stick it out, I suppose, but, in the end it comes to the question of whether I should use my limited energy to be a functional depressed person who, you know, eats, and washes her clothes, and whatnot, or use it for... um... law school. Given that I still have about 5000 words to research and write on special measures directions, plus the end of the equity and public law syllabuses, and revision for the last three exams, Not Dealing is my preferred strategy right now.

(edited to add: okaaaay, there is a case at the Old Bailey today that is going to necessitate re-writes of my baby-dissertation. Why do I insist on being interested in current affairs?

Note: it is a very horrible case, about abuse of a child. Don't click, if you'd rather not.)

So through some bureaucratic jiggery-pokery, I am going to be a sort-of law student at Liverpool for a bit, and I was very impressed by the efficiency and kindness with which Brookes have achieved this. forthwritten has already promised me company and good things, and my parents were remarkably unfazed by this whole revelation. (My father noted that when he was my age, he had a similar revelation whilst reading for his MD exams. "Of course, in my case I was only six miles from home and I came on the Vespa. But it's the same principle without the Vespa.")

I'm pleased, or at least, as pleased as you can be about these things. I'll miss shimgray, but other than that, I think, this is a good plan for the time being.

In other news. Justice Souter is stepping down from the Supreme Court... two days after the Democrats have a filibuster-proof majority. Souter has generally tended to baffle me, but he seems to be a liberal now, sort of. The make-up of the court may not change all that much, but I'm actually hopeful about the potential nominees for once. One hundred days, and the novelty hasn't worn off. I hope it doesn't.

Amd so this post is not all a) law and b) my broken brain, I say my obligatory Dreamwidth bit. foreverdirt bought me paid time over there! I am still not sure what I am going to do with the account, but we shall see. My username, by the way, has changed (due to aforementioned crazy, please don't ask) - I'm now raven, and if you should wish to give me a poke over there, please please do.

It's really nice to be home. I didn't have the quietest of weekends, really; I was at Amicus training again on Saturday, and that was kind of sort of exhausting. Practical, not theory, so lots of running around with my hands in my pockets trying to make myself as good an investigator as possible, i.e., not very good. The funny thing is, I find, is that the other side of the law - the private sector side, the type of law done by the large impressive firms with the large impressive training contracts - is so... sleek, so glossy, so very talkative. You have to get in the habit of talking and dressing sharply. It's wearing. Whereas, for this sort of thing, you dress, talk and think forgettable. Clean jeans and brushed hair, a notepad any colour but yellow, and you sit and you listen. Your client is on trial for his life, but... well, right now he's not going anywhere. I really enjoyed the change. That said, I don't know if I could really do this work: do it for real with real people and be all things to them, a good lawyer, but a good listener and someone who can get people to tell me, not the right things, but the real things.

That bothers me about law as I see it, here - it's all telling you what you want to hear. I tell interviewers what they want to hear, they tell me what they think I should hear, and none of it bears any resemblance to reality. That might be a problem endemic in the law itself - it's interesting, of course, that the Law, this great amorphous thing I spend every waking hour on these days, isn't a thing about how things are, but it's something that people do. We've written about it so much that we've made it exist. And there's no doubt that electric chairs do exist. That's a real sense you get, actually: that the judicial system induces this twilight state, so people taken away to spend forty years in prison are still thinking, where am I, what's going on, there's been some mistake, this isn't real.

The saddest part was the bit on Atkins v Virginia, a 2002 case where the Supreme Court established that it is unconstitutional to execute someone with "mental retardation", undefined. I find it horrifying that this is actually a point at issue, but there you are. Lots of people have been executed who have had the mental age of nine-year-olds. And it's still perfectly possible to execute someone with the mental age of an eleven-year-old, or a nine-year-old on a good day. It puts investigators in the awful position of going to see the person's community, their their teachers and their elderly mother, and ask things like, was he a bit slow? Was he incapable of washing himself, and will you talk about it on a stand in front of hundreds of strangers?

Yeah. It's not good for your view on humanity, this sort of thing. On Saturday night I went out gloomily and was cheered by a nice dinner in Soho with sebastienne and jacinthsong and deathbyshinies and liminreid, which was cheering but, as I said, I couldn't go dancing afterwards because the Sunday the clocks go forward was the one Sunday in the year I had to be up at seven am. And go to another day of lectures and workshops and try interviewing people myself, which I have to say I did spectacularly not well at all, and then run across the city to get a train up north, which was eerily quiet, and lacking in announcements and indeed people, and didn't stop, and gave me this muted feeling that I might be on the Caldonian Sleeper or the first train into the Twilight Zone.

That said, I did wake up at seven this morning, have a momentary panic as to where I was, realise that a) it was my own bed and b) the alarm clock belonged to someone else, and roll over and go back to sleep. I shall have to be careful. I am NOT ON HOLIDAY. This cannot be emphasised enough. Not on holiday. Yes.

...and here I am, feeling a little like an unspoken sentence. Notes and queries:

-deathbyshinies has started a Secret Histories Project. As she puts it, it is a blog devoted to "little random tidbits of historical fact that make you sit up and go 'BLOODY HELL, WHY DID NOBODY EVER TELL ME ABOUT THAT!'" (Examples already mentioned: Alan Turing's homosexuality; the fact there were South Asian people living in Britain before 1700 (I was never told this at school); Helen Keller's socialist and feminist activism.) Definitely worth looking at.

-A brief unrelated rant, also. Why is there a sudden resurgence, recently, of the "it's only natural" argument? I keep seeing this: polamory is natural, wanting to have children is natural. I really thought that the blogosphere had finally got over this one, but apparently not. Okay, internets. Saying something is "natural" is an argumentative faux-pas of the worst order. Because, to begin with, you're implying that polyamory or childbearing or whatever are worthy of respect only because they are some inalienable feature about how people are. You're devaluaing people's choices pertaining to either of those things. Sure, childbearing is natural. So is living in trees, so is killing people who don't agree with you. Natural does not equate to good, and for good reason. People choose to have kids - it's the choice that's worthy of preservation and respect, not the entirely fallacious biological imperative behind the choice.

And as for polyamory being "natural" - maybe it is natural for people to want multiple relationships, I don't know, and maybe monogamy is a stifling yoke upon the natural impetus of society blah blah whatever (I remain to be convinced of that last one, I must say). But it's worthy of respect, surely, whatever its provenance? It's worthy of respect if it's the way people have always lived or if it was invented out of whole cloth by L. Ron Hubbard in 1971. I'm just boggled that people still think this is a smart tack to take. I suppose it's the gay-gene for the twenty-first century. My god it's hard to be a liberal.

Okay, I'm going to stop yelling now. To finish: the clocks went forward and I was very upset. There is now more light in the evenings, and I am less upset. Thus, I leave you with the Spring Arrangements Bill. shimgray can recite it on command. This fills me with joy.