philosophy supernatural nude

I got up before 10am today, something which I have not done in days and days, and went out to brunch with a friend at a place by the Serpentine. I walked back from Knightsbridge to Covent Garden, through freezing, diamond-brilliant cold, under a cloudless sky.

And you know, it turns out London is a beautiful, ancient city. I went through three of the royal parks - allodial land; held without tenure, without mark, for eight centuries - and along past Hatchards, where a hundred people were queueing up to get their books signed by Tim Peake; and through Piccadilly Circus, which is currently hosting an exhibition in praise of Frank Pick, a shy, unassuming lawyer who lived a shy unassuming life at the start of the last century; who believed that as the London Underground belonged to the city, and all the millions of people who used it, every aspect of it should be a work of public art. I bought a book and a cup of coffee and I did some work in a cafe like the ghastly cliché of a writer I am, and I saw the sun begin to set over Hampstead Heath with the skyline glittering behind.

And though tha sinn anns an dùbhlachd, and it is so very dark - not forever. Nothing lasts forever, except this place that we live in.

I have sleeping pills which say "take twenty minutes before sleeping". I think this is a very presumptuous instruction on the part of the people who make the pills, especially as they do sell them in a box that nowhere says "hey you YES YOU these are ALSO the pills labeled 'anti-hay fever; may cause drowsiness" only we're charging you £1 more. But I've taken them. Here I am.

Here is the bad news. Still going to work every day. Still Not Very Good at my job. (Today I sent a whole stack of papers to entirely the wrong government department. Hellfire, brimstone, etc.) I have my midseat review next week, in which my patient and scrupulous supervisor will no doubt scrupulously and patiently tell me everything that's wrong with me. Urgh.

Here is the good news. I am not going to work tomorrow. I took it off, for no reason at all, and I'm going to read, write the novel and take a French class. (Also, is this weird? My colleagues think this is weird. I am not ill, on holiday, or anything else; I am taking a day off in the middle of the week because I damn well feel like it and also, I hate November with a passion and need something to get me through the murk. My colleagues seem to have decided amongst themselves that I'm going to be the weird one. I am weird, I s'pose. They're not bad people at all, my colleagues; I work for the hardest department for a trainee to work for, so they also call me the clever one. I try to tell them, if I were clever I would be wandering through the crisp fall, now, thinking about my thesis, rather than spending hours of my youth on the phone to the Environment Agency, discussing septic tanks.

What else, what else? I have read Snuff. I am still rewatching M*A*S*H. One of my colleagues, I shall call him the Caped Crusader because that is, in fact, his name, spends plenty of time waiting for his photocopying, standing by my desk, probing the limits of my knowledge. By the time he discovered I can quote from Plan 9 From Outer Space, I know just what it was that John Barrowman said straight-faced in Shark Attack 3 and I like Deep Space Nine best but also "The Best of Both Worlds", I think we were friends. We were talking about The West Wing, and I remember saying that I can't deal with Alan Alda not in M*A*S*H and especially not as a Republican, oh, dear, and he said, yes, I've seen that! I remember one I saw just the other day, when Hawkeye can't stop sneezing....

I carefully didn't jump up and down going, omg, omg, and said, merely, "I said to Shim the other day, only that show can take a classic sitcom plot like 'Hawkeye can't stop sneezing' and turn it into TRAUMA."

Today he wandered across my desk and said, so, you're kinda inspiring, can I borrow the DVDs?

I said yes, if he would take one of my deeds of covenant and aim it at the right people tomorrow while I am lying in bed writing my novel. He agreed this was a fair trade. It's always nice, when you find a similar sort of spirit to yours in unexpected places. The Crusader himself said, no one else understands me when I talk about these things. I strongly suspect we are friends.

It hasn't been twenty minutes yet. Er, a meme. ( meme )

I sleep now! Hopefully.

I keep writing scraps of things to post and then not posting them. Notes and queries:

1. It is now about ten days until I go home. I am still two exams and one 5000-word paper short of actually departing the country. I am also (probably) nursing the beginnings of a bad cold which is all my own fault, but, ouch. ( guess what I can't sleep )

On a slightly lighter note, my psychiatrist's name is Dr. McKenzie. In light of the SG-1 rewatch, I am finding this small fact impossibly entertaining.

(2. Also in light of the SG-1 rewatch, a random thought that occurred to me. You know what the internet needs? The internet needs fic about Claire Ballard. She's the definition of a minor character, yes, but consider the one detail we do know about her: she was a field archaeologist, publishing, working on digs, generally being awesome, with a very young child in tow, in 1965. Why has no one written omg-women-are-awesome fic about her? Why does the whole internet not cater to my whims?)

3. Exams start tomorrow (not for me, thankfully), and the law school is an interestingly fraught place to be at the moment. I thought I was immune thus far, and then I found myself getting obscenly, irrationally furious that one of the precious library carrels was being taken up by someone who wasn't a law student. (The law library is airy and beautiful and technically a public library, so it does get undergrads and people from other schools studying in it. But, you know, law school finals, tomorrow, be fair.)

"How'd you know they weren't a law student taking an outside class?" asked Shim later.

"Because," I said, through gritted teeth, "they were reading an LSAT prep book."

I stomped off downstairs to get some coffee and find somewhere else to study, and when I came out bearing a mug of awful vending machine coffee Tobermory yelled at me, poured it down the sink and got me real coffee from CTB. I think it's people's kindness that keeps me afloat. (Though I'm not doing reverb10, a lot of my friends are and I've been watching the prompts, and today's question asked about what kinds of community you've been part of in 2010. I wouldn't ever have believed it a few months ago, especially given previous experience, but the law school is a community, and one I'm happy to be part of: it's left-leaning, vaguely elitist, far from perfect, but has a quality of shared endeavour.)

4.. That, and birthday cake left over from a party I went to at the weekend (got drunk on pink champagne, I am so cool) and also "Little Wings" by Kris Delmhorst, which I've had on repeat the last couple of days. (artist's free download at link, try it, it's great).

5. It is cold like breaking. Have I mentioned that, recently? It is cold enough that you expect the air to shatter. Over the weekend I piled into a car with thingswithwings, eruthros and livrelibre and we went on a trip around the lake wine-tasting. (Which was fun! There were interesting whites and rieslings, rosés and sparkling wines, but the highlight was definitely a spirit tasting at the north end of the lake, where we were given honey vodka, mead and maple syrup liqueur by a kind chap with a tendency to dreadful puns. Maple syrup liqueur. I didn't buy any because it would be dangerous to have in the house.) My point is by the time we were driving back at the close of the day, I said something about how you could take a picture and caption it "desolation, a study" - the snow flurrying, the frosty intensity in the lake, the landscape just losing all depth, hazing into grey and white and back again. I'd never seen bleakness like it; I'd never seen anywhere with quite so much nowhere to go around. I mean, it has its own beauty, but it's not a simple kind.

In short: it's very cold. Hi.

6. I have vids stuck in my head. The constructed reality vid, but also apparently the internet hasn't any Sam-Carter-is-awesome vid to satisfy me, and now I keep.... pondering. T'wings assures me that vidding is not as scary as I think it is, but nevertheless, nevertheless I am skeered, because it is not like writing. Writing is... okay, for whatever reason, I don't have any issues about writing. It's something that happens. I feel like If I took up vidding, I would have to.... make things happen.

I am aware this makes no sense.

7. And now it's 1.30am, and I can't sleep and my meds aren't working, so I am putting bluebook citations in my attainder paper and moping. One week and four days until I go home.

During the last five days, I have cried through: Swades; Caramel; Mumbai Meri Jaan, and Sleepless in Seattles. Mostly they are meant to be funny. Let us not even talk about Mumbai Meri Jaan. Let us not. Or that bit in Swades where ( really obvious spoiler )

So, I met thingswithwings' puppy, and that was nice (he is teeny but determined; he wants you to Take Him Seriously, dammit, and that objective is usually thwarted by all these pesky humans sitting on the floor and going, "Who's a pretty puppy, you are, you are!" and blowing kisses at his adorable nose) and then as previously related, I went to the law school's annual Fall Ball, and the South African Siren and I have decided to put aside a day in the nearish future to drink pink wine and watch Bridget Jones's Diary.

I think possibly somewhere, a long distance away, I have some sort of opinion about what's going on at home. (On the other hand, I may just get off the plane in December and be surprised that it's not that afternoon moment in August when I left.) But for the most part, despite occasionally getting out of the house and doing fun things, I am sort of doing nothing but dealing with a combination of work that doesn't get any less or any less threatening, and the sort of low mood that Ithaca's awful weather happily provides.

(I malign it a little, today. It was beautiful, today. But for the most part I've never lived anywhere where the sky is quite so constrained and grey.)

But, yes. Living off cereal, pushing through the mood, writing awful papers and, because I am sleeping worse than ever, shutting my brain off by watching films on Netflix in the small hours. It's not the best of lives, but there are only five and a half more weeks of it. Still here, just... off the radar a bit.

It's 3.09am. I cannot sleep. Naturally, tomorrow is a day upon which I have something scheduled to do every minute from 7.55am to 11pm. I remember being told once that people who can't sleep at night aren't really insomniacs; they just say they are because it sounds glamorous.

As it's 3.09am and I am awake for no reason at all, I think I shall discuss exactly how glamorous chronic sleep disorder really is. For one thing, it never goes away. Some people have it come on later in life, but in my case, I was a newborn who didn't sleep through the night and then a baby who didn't, a child who couldn't quite manage it, and now I am twenty-two years and ten months old and I cannot sleep at night. It ruins everything. It makes you paranoid about hours, about times, it makes you fail any class before eleven in the morning (and don't you dare laugh at that and say something faux-amusant about students), it makes you constantly think about something that everyone else takes for granted.

I'm trying to stop calling it insomnia, though, because it really isn't. Sometimes, I can't get to sleep until it's light; sometimes, I fall asleep like a light going out and jerk bolt awake again at two in the morning; sometimes I fall asleep at ten and wake up fourteen hours later; sometimes I don't see daylight for a week at a time; sometimes I see sunrise every day. A rampant smorgasbord of disorder, but the one thing I cannot do is fall asleep at midnight, stay asleep for eight hours and wake up refreshed. This is it, this is the holy grail I've been aiming at all these years.

Things that don't help:

-Warm milk. (I have given up trying to be polite to people who suggest this.)

-Hot baths. (They do, a little, but you can't do this every day and besides right now I don't have a bathtub.)

-Breathing exercises, meditation and whatnot. These don't lack value; they stop me lying in bed and having anxious three-am thoughts. But they don't get me to sleep. Cognitive behaviourial stuff in general is not bad - but it hasn't fixed this problem.

-"Getting up early so you'll be tired". Once again, spoken by people who don't have disordered sleep. Do you know what happens when I try and do this? I force my unwilling, exhausted body out of bed, I get through my nine-to-five day, I desperately stay awake until some reasonable hour for bed, at which point I don't sleep. And the next day I usually wish I were dead. So. No.

(Actually, the best advice I have ever had is from my father who has the same issues with slightly less severity. It goes like this. Are you sleepy? Are you actually going to lose your job/fail your degree if you go to bed now? Then go, and at least you'll have slept.)

-Diazepam and its relations. Well, of course they do work - I can take pills and be out like, again, the proverbial light. The thing is, the pills wear off, I wake up twelve hours later, then the next night, if I don't take them, it's the same old story.

-10mg amitriptyline. This puts me to sleep nicely, but then I wake up at lunchtime with a splitting-skull hangover. The one time I tried to get up at eight and go to school the night after I'd taken it, I nearly fell into traffic. I had to go home after my first class and spend the rest of the day sleeping it off. Sub-optimal.

-5mg amitripyline. Less experience of this, but what it seems to be so far is I take it, I fall asleep when it's getting light and then wake up at lunchtime with the splitting-skull hangover.

Things that do work:

-Sleeping at other times. I sleep nicely in the early light, in the mid-afternoon - any time when it doesn't matter if I sleep or don't sleep, where either is acceptable. In fact, the most comfortable time of day is six in the morning - still cool and quiet, but somehow my brain lets me out without the need to force the door.

-Sleeping in other places. I have slept comfortably on trains, aeroplanes, bare floors, beaches. As an undergraduate I had a room with a windowseat and that was such a blessing - I occasionally used to sleep in it instead of my bed, and it was very useful.

-Sleeping with another person. This isn't infallible by any means, but as an average taken over months and years, I sleep better if there's someone there. Shim usually sleeps through my night-time wanderings, which is a blessing.

-Citalopram. When I was taking it for depression, it worked quite well at making me sleep regularly and deeply, but the reason I came off it in the end was because it was tending to extremes - thirteen or fourteen hours' sleep every day. Plus the side-effects it was having, which weren't nice.

-Exhaustion. I'm not one of those people who will never sleep - after four or five days, it'll happen.

Caffiene:

-gets its own category because it fits into neither of the above categories. I have lost count of people telling me to cut down on caffiene, or asking me in incredulous tones, "But if you're an insomniac, why do you drink so much coffee?"

Because I'm an insomniac, you fucking idiot. How the hell would I get anything done? Filtered coffee is what keeps me approaching humanity when the problem is very bad - it's the reason I can be up and about nearly every day, even at a nadir point.

(And yes, I have tried the giving-it-up experiment. I'm not physically addicted, but I missed it. A lot. And slept no better, though I gave it the fair three weeks. So.)

Right now, I'm kind of at the end of my options. Amitriptyline was my GP's Great White Hope - now it hasn't worked, I'm not sure what he'll be able to suggest, if anything. He seems to think that any kind of referral would be futile. I don't know if I agree, but I don't want to push it. So, in conclusion. Pretty glamorous, huh? Bet you all wish you were me.

It is now 3.40am. I have a few more hours' lying awake to do.

I just had a long and decadent bath, but now I can't stand up. Life, she is hard.

Some notes and queries, before I drag myself to bed:

1. Life lesson for the day. When you decide to use up about-to-go-off milk by making it into custard, using a measuring jug for the purpose, you know what you should do? You should wash out the measuring jug very thoroughly first. You should especially do this when the last thing the jug was used for was making vegetable stock. Mmm, delicately spiced custard.

2. Also, when you have less-than-stellar mental health, you should fill up every weekend so you're busy every calendar day for two months. Actually, yes, you should do this. I am currently too busy to draw breath, but, well, that's not so bad, I think. I need to get more sleep, though, or at least ride out the current bout of insomnia. One of these days I really must make a proper post about Life As An Insomniac, It Sucks, because, well, it does, and it continues to irritate me how people who do not have chronic sleep disorders seem to often think that Glasses of Warm Milk and A Regular Routine and, most nauseating, Maintaining Good Sleep Hygiene is all us deviants need before we're snoring in the rank and file.

(I mean, seriously. I've been sleeping badly for in excess of two decades now. If one of those things was going to work, it would've have worked by now. But I digress.)

3. lgbtfest is asking for prompts again! This time, I plan to participate. You guys should too, it's kind of awesome.

4. Regina Spektor - Braille. I can't stop listening to this right now.

5. And finally, and the real point of this post: tomorrow, shimgray and I skip off to London and trespass on apotropaios' hospitality, and on Saturday morning, bright and early, we're going to Paris! For adventure and excitement and really wild things! Or maybe sitting in cafés drinking good coffee and watching the world drift by. It is cool. To all a good weekend, shall be around on the flipside.

My insomnia is, er, bad. Am thoroughly and comprehensively sleep-deprived - am having trouble making my verbs agree, which is always a bad first sign - and I have an exam tomorrow and another the next day. I have just today to learn something, anything, about free movement of goods and people, and while I have all my notes right there in front of me, they're not doing that thing where they go into my head. Cue quiet orgies of self-loathing, which have been something of a feature over the last week or so, but my god I am so tired of failing. \

(Or, at least, having the sort of brain that tells me I've failed so often that I don't know when it's telling me the truth. Although in this instance it probably is. Why I am such a failure as a lawyer, I ask you? It's NOT THAT HARD. You can look it up ON THE INTERNET. In CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER. LOOK. That is the Statute of Marlborough, 1267. That is the extant law that means I cannot drill for oil in my back garden if my landlord doesn't want me to. SEE.) And, also, how? I mean, how can I be taking an exam on contract law when I didn't know what it was twelve weeks ago? How does that work?


...ye gods, I am tired. And I think I've got beyond my caffiene quota for the day and it's only 3.45.

Okay, I'm shutting up, I'm going back to work, let's just call that an interlude.

It was an unsettled night. At seven am I woke up after a violent nightmare involving someone moving into the Mousehole with a snake. (I am, as previously noted, severely ophidiophobic.) I remember quite clearly telling chiasmata that it wasn't poisonous, it was a kingsnake, and its coloration pattern is in a different order from venomous coral snakes. (Wikipedia, with images turned off, tells me that this is absolutely true [note for other phobics: there is probably a picture of a kingsnake on that page]. Once again I am amazed by my dream-self's capacity for perfect trivia recall. So I wandered around the house, read some of dreadful Germaine Greer and her dreadful book, and went back to sleep.

And woke up again at one in the afternoon, when shimgray decided I would probably sleep until Doomsday unless he intervened. In my defence, I was awake at 3.42am - because that's when I finished my yuletide. It has been sent off for beta, and I'm pleased. Not just with it, but in general, because here is December, and I was all ready to just opt out of the fannish round-up memes this year, because I have been so staggeringly unprolific. But! What I wrote this year:

Changes in Sea Level, TOS, 1000 words;
Autochthony, TOS, 10,000 words;
interlude, Slings & Arrows ficlet, 400 words;
things fall apart, Doctor Who, 500 words;
Dirty Witch Doctors, HP, 645 words, co-written.

And also, thirteen photographs (the via crucis remix), 4500 words for Remix, and my 6000 words of Yuletide.

So, a total of about 22,500, which is about two thirds of what I usually do, and, well, for a year which had both my Finals and six months of clinical depression in it, I figure that's not so bad. And, well, I'm not much with the writing-when-I-don't-want-to, but it is pretty much the only hobby I've consistently stuck to for a decade, so I ought to keep track. (Ye gods, 2009 - it really is ten years of writing fiction, isn't it? I seem to remember trying to write a novel when I was twelve, which was 1999. Oh dear.)

I also have two half-finished stories on my hard drive - well, at any given moment I have hundreds of half-finished stories on my hard drive, but these two are of note because I fully intend to finish them. One is Merlin/Arthur, a short and not very happy love story, and the other is a gen HP story about Hermione keeping Remus's books in trust for Teddy. I like both of them, and they might see the light of day, er, sometime.

And, one other thing. Whilst writing 6000 words in two days is a bad thing - seriously, children, do not do as I have done, especially when you have exams in January - it is fun. Yeah, writing is fun. Sitting up to all hours of the night crafting something is one of my favourite things to do. This was a plot-driven story, rather than character, which made me worry about it: I'm worried it has no heart to it, it's just, stuff happened. But the process is the fun part, and I guess, well, I'm not an artist, I don't do crafts or hobbies, I don't do very much other than law, except this. I fangirl! I write! I am entirely socially unacceptable! It's awesome!

My father was in London a few days ago, doing exciting things for his college, and came up to Oxford on his way home to visit me. He said he wouldn't come if it would distract me. I said I wanted distracting, by this stage. So he came, and wandered into the city with me, and he came up to my room briefly, noted that if this was what it looked like when I tidied up then he didn't want to know what it looked like before, and then fed me a very nice lunch, and we walked down along the Isis for a bit. I told him the various things I have been reading about/doing to stay sane, and pointed out the prettier bits of the Parks, he told me about the stuff he's doing for the college in India, we paused to take in a few civilised overs as various of the University's cricket teams were playing under the trees. It was very calm, and pleasant, and sane-making.

Before he disappeared, he left me with a bag of stuff: my mum's iPod, which she said she was lending me if I was nice to it; an enormous bag of very very nice jellybeans; the wedge of forms required to reapply for a photocard driving licence; the red Pucca wallet I used when I was fourteen, as I am currently without one. Giving me that last thing, he said, "Don't just put that in a drawer, there's some money in it. Your mum insisted."

I thanked him, and he went off to get his train. Putting the things away, I noted that there was indeed some money in it: £33.50, to be exact.

Which was, I thought, a strangely specific figure, and strangely familiar. It has just now dawned on me - now, at 2.14am when I am awake for no reason and unconsciously grinding my teeth - that it's the exact amount required for a single ticket from Oxford to Liverpool Lime Street.

In other words, my parents would still love me if I packed it in right now and went home without taking my Finals.

I have no intention of doing this, and it's not as if I actually doubted it, but. It is a very nice realisation to have had at 2.14am when I can't sleep and the awful things are five days away and I'm beginning to panic and... yeah.

Over the weeked, glitzfrau asked me how long I've had insomnia. Twenty-one years, I said. (This is, indeed, broadly true. My poor mother.) At least, she said, it's vaguely glamourous as life-long afflictions go. It's not, for example, constipation.

Needless to say, I am finding this an oddly comforting thought at 1.27am. I am overtired in that very special way that involves pacing up and down your room being wide-eyed and loopy and hyper-aware of the quality of the light. Bizarrely, I seem to be sleeping better in places that aren't my bed. I woke up a lot but did actually sleep when I was in Leeds, chiasmata put me up on Thursday and I slept, and tonight I dropped in on jacinthsong after OULES and dozed off whilst sprawled full-length on her floor. I think I might seriously try sleeping in the window seat again, but perhaps not on a night when it is six degrees below zero.

(A brief digression on that point: holy cow, it is cold. It was a couple of degrees chillier in the north, but it's still very cold here. Worth it, for the three or four days of perfectly cloudless, clear winter days, which are my favourite type of weather and I should stop moaning.)

Anyway, yes. It remains true that lack of sleep is making a wee bit of a nutcase of me. I was on jacinthsong's floor, as previously mentioned, staring at my bare wrists and noting that I never know what time it is any more, like so: "My watch has stopped. Also I'm not wearing it."

Yep. I'm very bright, me.

Cue laughter, because, oh, dear, I am not made of win at the moment. I have spent the last few days fighting off an utterly black mood - why should I get out of bed? why? no, really, why? - mostly successfully, by being very busy. Friday night was Queer Cabaret, and it was marvellous. The bar was filled with beautiful people of every gender, and there were pink wigs and glitter and luridly-coloured cocktails.

(Also, it was four degrees below zero and this is what I had chosen the coldest night of the winter so far to go out in:

( huh )

Yes. But freezing to death aside, it was a wonderful evening. There were two "professional" queer acts, neither of which I liked particularly, but I actually went for Girlesque, and they were worth every penny. They sang and danced and were gloriously louche and genderqueer and talented and beautiful. sebastienne's beyond-lovely version of Cole Porter's "You're The Top", redone with a distinctly sadomasochistic flavour, was probably my favourite part. And this is entirely apart from the fact that I was immortalised in the line: "... you're the harsh slave-owner / you're Laura to my Iona..."

Every new person I met for the rest of the evening said, "Oh, you're the girl in the song!" I love it really.

On Saturday morning, at eight in the morning, chiasmata appeared with a lot of coffee and informed me we were going to Leeds. And we did, indeed, go all the way up the M1 to Leeds and visit biascut and glitzfrau, who are delightful and were very good to us. We didn't do very much beyond eat, giggle, read the Saturday Guardian and watch Mean Girls, and it was a lovely relaxing couple of days. It was nice to be back in the north, however briefly. I might've been tempted to actually go home as well - Leeds is, I believe, east of Formby Point and not too far a drive - but my parents are away. They're in Bangalore doing interesting and exciting things and undoubtedly getting into trouble of some description. They're with my favourite uncle, all three of them are skiving off any lectures they ought to be giving in Delhi, and last time this was the case, I was flying home out of Delhi. I'd said my goodbyes outside, got through security control and just settled in to wait for my flight when my mum and uncle appeared looking very cheerful. You're not allowed to be in here, I complained.

Sure we are, they said. We're government officials of India.

"Since when?" I yelled.

"Since," my mum said, holding up some expertly forged dated paperwork, "er, since this morning?"

...I digress. But they're having fun without me and have probably got into lots of trouble by now.

We came back to Oxford late this afternoon and made it home without any hassle, despite traffic accidents on the motorway and a general aura of sleepiness. The weather was almost ludicrously beautiful all the way down, with a glorious, sticky-Neapolitan confection of a sunset - pink and yellow stripes! - and I was thinking, in that half-witted very sleepy sort of way, that a lot of my thought processes lately have been framed in metaphors of travel and movement and distance. I noticed the landscape changing from rolling Oxfordshire fields to the more industrial north; I noticed the curving lines of streetlights looking strange and starry against the sky; I noticed changing signposts and people's accents and all the things that are different when you go anywhere. Which is all not very profound, but it makes me think that the next six months of my life, after June and Finals, will not be spent here. Not here, not in one place. I want to travel - I want to keep on moving and keep noticing and keep writing - and this will be the first time I've ever been free to just start moving and not stop. And part of it is undoubtedly a straightforward response to urgh, Finals, but it's true: it's time for something different.

OULES is going well. At some point this week, we are going to acquire the Sack of Troy from eBay. I meant to come home, but stayed and drank peppermint tea and did nothing but stare at the ceiling and love my friends and now I'm going to try and sleep.