philosophy supernatural nude

I am chatting idly with the South African Siren; she's telling me about the weather, and how she plans to be in NYC next week, and sends her love to Shim. She is sitting on a deckchair on a patio in Cape Town, in a swimming costume (it's forty degrees, and summer); and I am on the Edinburgh-London train at four in the afternoon, speeding past snow-covered hills lit pink with sunset from below. Remember what the future was going to be like? All shiny and full of promise? I think this is it.

I think you all may have noticed that I have been the world's champion in rubbish at answering emails, texts, phone calls, LJ comments, and have mostly been drifting in and out of radio contact. I do love you all, and am interested in your lives, promise. I think I didn't quite appreciate exactly what I did to my body during my last few weeks in Ithaca, though; at any rate, I am now sleeping till lunchtime, and feeling sleepy again at eight; eating three meals a day like it's going out of fashion; and, as I said, drifting. It's taken me a week to get through half a novel when I wasn't doing much of anything else (Perdido Street Station; I sort of liked it, and sort of didn't), and Shim and I have wandered around Edinburgh enjoying the (relative) warmth and done scarcely much. It's been nice, really nice, and to be honest I am expecting it to continue for a while yet.

Anyway. That is why I am hard to pin down at the moment. I am still here, just... a little translucent, perhaps. I love this journey; I love the beauty of it, and I love how I always take it during times of change. We talked a lot, while I was up here, and there have been good things.

So I had a truly dreadful week, but it ended well and I am happy. I got a solid ten hours' sleep last night, woke up to a beautiful autumn day - oh, beautiful; a solid dome of blue, horizon to horizon, trees blushed and gold, a hectic brilliance to everything - and went to the Tompkins County library booksale and bought seven novels for twenty-one dollars. And was there with friends who love books, moreover; I also got a copy of Good Omens and presented it to a chap I know would love it, and he grinned at me from beneath a mess of curls, the aftermath of a hard-cider lunch and that hectic brilliance of everything, and told me that I am amazing. Which I am, and which everything is.

(I love him, rather. In an entirely platonic way, but it's no less love. He has lived in Ireland, and India, and is full of life and interesting factoids and gives me the comforting sense that here is someone who thinks like I do on most things. He describes himself as "a brown Jewish amicable know-it-all".

"Like Jesus," I said, with far too much glee.)

Other things! Well, tonight I am being a social person and spending an evening with actual people, and yesterday I bought a pair of shoes, and they are entirely impractical leather heels and I love them. And tomorrow I am flying to see my aunt and uncle, and a week out of Ithaca with some of my family will be very nice indeed.

And, and. I don't know if I mentioned it, but on Thursday I had arranged to see one of my tutors about a topic for my research, and when I emailed I thought she would give me the location of her office and that would be that. Instead she suggested having lunch at a Korean place in town. I made slight gulpy noises and agreed. She's not one of the law faculty; most of my courses are cross-listed with the school of government, so she tends to treat me as though I were a grad student rather than a lawyer.

And it was really great! We talked around it all for a while, she turned out to know some of my tutors at Balliol, and then when we talked about what I wanted to write about, I asked her how focused I should make my eventual paper. Should I take a broad overview (which I hate), or should I do a rigorous look at a smaller point.

"You should do whatever you want," she said. "You'll pull it off, you're gifted."

I am happy! I keep wondering, you know, in the dimmer moments, what I'm doing here, if I really should be here, and I had reservations about taking a seminar that is mostly filled with political science PhD candidates, but I'm okay, I'm participating. And now I feel properly enthused about making a proper start on my research during fall break.

Onwards and upwards. Now to clean my apartment, which insists on festering at me, and then to the law school to print some things, and packing. Onwards and upwards.

Well, that was a truly bizarre evening. hathy_col and I left the centre of Preston at 10pm. The idea was for us to take half an hour getting into Ormskirk, where rather than subject Colleen and her car to the rural roads, I'd get on a train home, which would be laborious (it goes round the houses) but warm and safe for all of us.

Cut to the M58, after dark. Picture this like a film, one of those Richard Curtis confections about being home for Christmas - you're driving along in the dim lights, listening to Amanda Palmer, or at least Colleen is driving and I'm making unhelpful cracks about how at least we haven't been hit by an iceberg yet, small blessings, etc, and then the snow comes down and suddenly we're somewhere else entirely. I've never seen snow like this in England, never. It came down in enormous blizzard flakes, driving into the windscreen, layering on the embankment and the verges, encroaching inwards until suddenly you couldn't see the hard shoulder, and then you couldn't see the right-hand lane, and then the traffic was in single file, other than the bastard four by fours who think they're not risking everyone's neck by overtaking, and the snow began to creep.

We made it into Ormskirk slooooooowly, and then I couldn't persuade my father not to come and rescue me from there. I said I'd get a taxi; he raised the very good point that there isn't a taxi firm in existence that would come out tonight; I said I'd stay the night, and then realised of course that since the bastards stole my handbag last month I don't have keys to my parents' house any more. Lord, is there anything more embarrassing then being rescued by your parents your first night at home for four months? But desperate times, etc., and actually when my father appeared he seemed to be quite enjoying the adventure. And all the way, there was the blessing of the gorgeous Christmas card look to everything. For the benefit of my American and Canadian friends who are going "snow, what of it" round about now, I was born in Liverpool, a place known for salty air and seawater and not, shall we say, rural snowy idyll. In other words, it has never snowed - properly, I mean, not dissolving-on-contact-with-tarmac snow - where I grew up since I was a very tiny person indeed. (The internet suggests that 1990 was a snowy year - I do remember it, vaguely.) And suddenly there's all these familiar places, these places which I know so well, suddenly unfamiliar - suddenly as though we're in another place altogether. Colleen and I wandered down the road and looked at perfect snowy firs and electrical wires marked out with snow against the sky and lovely virgin snow we could crunch over, and the light was reflecting over and over off it unti there was a sort of two am lividity to everything, and I was charmed.

All things considered, it could have been a lot worse; for one thing, Colleen and I got home without incident, and yesterday I made it home from Edinburgh on the main line trains without major incident - I was a little late, but nothing serious at all. I'm impressed with the train companies this week, I must say; first the East Coast line, then the western route, and the local trains are all running.

At this point one might be moved to ask why I was in Preston tonight anyway. ( IANTO PANTO ) On the whole, it was a very strange evening, but I think I liked it.

Tomorrow, it is Christmas Eve and there's four inches of snow in the garden. I think I may make a snowman.

Urgh. I am dreading the 9am start tomorrow more than, well, just about anything. One might say, then, go to bed, but being the sort of person who doesn't sleep at night means, hey, you get wound up about not sleeping at night, and then you don't sleep at night. Sigh.

It does, however, beat swine flu, which is nowhere near as fun as advertised. I am about ten days post-diagnosis now, and feeling every day like some large wheeled vehicle hit me the night before. (It gets smaller. It was a truck. Now it's an articulated pram.) And, really, it was no fun at all. I cannot emphasise this enough, but I am blessed with an immune system that is usually pretty sound, and my notion of "ill" is "a bit off, and you can still watch TV". I started revising this opinion on Friday night, when all I could do was shiver, and then a little further on Saturday when all I could do was shiver and wail about the opening chasms in my head, and then, on Saturday night, round about where the "mild case of symptoms" I was supposed to be having, being an able-bodied adult, was supposed to be kicking in, I woke up in the midst of vague dreams about sushi on picnics with my entire extended family, and thought: aha, I need to go somewhere.

And woke up again, some minutes later, because Shim was picking me up off the floor, and noticed from very far away that his pupils were so dilated that his eyes had turned black as pitch in his face, and then thought: isn't it funny, that's the last thing I'm going to think before I die, and then I probably passed out again. Apparently, This Is Your Brain On Swine 'Flu has a turn towards the melodrama. Shim looked after me beautifully throughout,, but probably never so much as just then, and regardless of anything I never wish to faint on a hard wood floor again. After that things were never so bad, but I think I'd like to register a general complaint: I should have, at that point, started on anti-virals, given that at that point a) they were still effective and b) Shim and I don't live together. Technically, I live alone, and my own bathroom floor is harder than wooden. But as I was slightly conditioned to think, hi, I am an able-bodied adult, I sort of assumed that my case of flu was, indeed, mild.

...okay, now I realise it wasn't. After that I had all the symptoms of the flu, but consecutively, so I had dizzy-and-fainting and then splitting-headaches and then muscle aches and then, bizarrely, a sore throat and blocked nose. (Which were the worst; nothing like being told by all, including the out-of-hours GP, who has been persuaded to call and help only after much shouting down the phone by people who are not you, that you'll "pick up in a day or two, drink fluids" when you can't drink fluids, you can barely get anything past the back of your tongue. Urgh. Urgh, I say.)

Now, I am lots better, but am told by said GP that the general feeling of ennui will not pass very easily; that I should expect to feel tired and ill, especially in the evenings, for weeks yet. Which is not a thought that fills me with hope and good qualities, but it can't be helped. And much as I do complain about the NHS in my particular case, I would like to point out, for the record, in reference to some recent debates about US healthcare in particular: I was ill. I was too ill to function. The NHS helpline told me to stay in bed, drink fluids, and rest, and send someone out for antivirals. They told me not to panic, and that there would be plenty for everyone. (In their FAQs, they did not include "will I have to pay for them?", this presumably not having been asked frequently enough.) When I went to see my GP, he asked if I had an employer whom he could write to to explain why I would be off my work for a while. When I said no, he said not to be tempted to jump straight back into studying; rest, rest, and rest some more.

In short: I caught the flu. My government told me to rest, drink fluids, and take the drugs they gave me, and feel better before I went back to work. Why, those evil pinko commie bastards.

I have very little else to report. I read Unseen Academicals while I was ill, and while I liked it, I didn't like it quite as much as I wanted to. ( spoilers )

The grand Deep Space Nine watch continues; I just finished "Doctor Bashir, I Presume", and as well as getting episode-title-win points, it also ( spoilers ) Also, Alexander Siddig has lovely eyelashes.

Maybe I ought to go to bed. I know I ought to. Sigh.

edited to add: just as I clicked post - yuletide nominations are OPEN.

son of eta: Okay, guys, I want to nominate Connie Willis' novels for Yuletide again. Thing is, though, To Say Nothing of the Dog and Doomsday Book have been nommed as separate fandoms in the past, and that makes no sense to me. If you were nominating the two of them together, plus the novella, Firewatch (and, presumably, the 2010 novels will be included for the Yuletide after this one), what would you call the universe as a whole? I cannot think what the fandom is actually called.

As a number of people have asked: I'm all right, really. The night before last it wasn't so much that I couldn't sleep as I couldn't sit still; I wandered around the house feeling really rather insane, and then, at five o'clock in the morning, thought clearly, hell with this, and when it got light, started making arrangements to make the journey north.

As dramatic gestures go, it wasn't bad - I got out of Oxford all right, and somewhere near Leamington Spa, rang my father to tell him that, er, possibly, maybe, I might have adjusted my tickets and might, possibly, be home in a few hours. He was concerned. And then because he is secretly five, carefully didn't tell anyone about it. So at half past four, when I stepped softly through the front door, my mother shrieked, "My baby!" and jumped on me. Which was worth it, really. Within about five minutes she'd made me some coffee whilst simultaneously telling me I drink too much of it, and when did I last eat, do I ever, why didn't I tell anyone I was coming, etc. It was good to be back.

I am actually not entirely sure this was the best idea in the world - there are so many relatives visiting that I'm having to really fight for peace and quiet, and of all the assembled masses, only my father knows why I'm really here, in the sense that he knows I'm quite depressed, not that I've been diagnosed as such. My mother merely thinks that I meant to do this all along as a surprise, and I think telling anyone the truth would lead to a major family meltdown, so. So this isn't actually relaxing as such; I'm having to hide my pills and such. I tell everyone I have a lot of work to do, which is certainly no lie, so can hide behind textbooks when needed.

But there are compensations. The weather in this part of the world is doing something it often does at this time of year, and getting hectically, fiercely beautiful. I went out briefly earlier - before remembering that in small country villages, post offices close on Wednesday lunchtimes - and watched the seagulls wheeling up against powder blue. It's lovely. The family situation is one thing, but what isn't claustrophobic is of course the landscape, which never changes. It's worth this, at least, being here.

Also, it is worth being here for some of my relatives. My cousin Sunny, who is an easy-going Australian medic, is here for four weeks to do his elective and is making my life calmer by his mere presence. He is cool, calm, collected, and predictable in what makes him happy. "Today," he announced this morning, "I am going on pilgrimage."

"Anfield?" I asked, ever-so-slightly amused.

"Yes," he said dreamily, and I wrote down the bus routes for him, because, seriously, who am I to stand in the way of other people's religious experiences. Off he went, happily, at about lunchtime, leaving me to the soft afternoon and the study of the criminal law.

So, yeah. I'm... not okay, but I'm still here. Some things - the small, everyday happy things, like my mother buying me a cupcake, or jacinthsong ringing me up to be appalling, or being in the vicinity when a life-long Liverpool FC supporter is asked by a well-meaning relative if it's Goodison Park he's going to today, and has to be led to a chair and given a glass of water - are making me smile, and feel good, or at least okay, and then it reverts, and I'd rather go and hide and shiver in a bath. But, well. There is a bath, at least, to hide in.

Tomorrow, if I feel up to it, I am going in to Liverpool to find the post office, get my Macbook fixed and possibly have lunch with forthwritten; at the weekend, shimgray is coming up, which will be very good for my mental health and catastrophically bad for his. And on Sunday, I return. I will go and get my head looked at by the medical profession on Monday.

So... yes. Still here.