philosophy supernatural nude

Small Cat has just arrived on my desk, and is investigating The Perks of Being a Wallflower with hir little nose. She is actually cat-sized now, but continues to lack morals. As evidence: small cat nose in my small-human small-glass of orange juice. The one thing that cat will not touch is whisky. Everything else is fair game, up to and including black coffee and fresh chillies.

I am tired. Deep, in-my-bones, want-to-sleep-for-a-week tired - and a little wary of the thought that the Oxford term is about to end when there is still four weeks of mine to go. I miss being an undergraduate, oh, so much, but that above all: the thought that it was sometimes all over, and you could go home. I am in the not-unenviable position where there are three calendar months until it is all over, but when I consider that those three months have a coursework assignment, five exams and a legal research project in it, as well as being the only time I have to find a job, I kind of quail a bit. The trick, I think, is to not hold it all in my head at once, and apply blissful ignorance to the various bits.

I do still love law, though. In case anyone was in any doubt. My research topic is, briefly, how to reconcile Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights (In the determination of his civil rights and obligations or of any criminal charge against him, everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing...) with the needs of witnesses: disabled witnesses, Deaf witnesses, child witnesses, those who would rather not testify in public, etc., etc. Most likely I will not look at all of these, and narrow it to just one category - I'm tempted to pick child witnesses, right now, but will see - but all of this is contingent on my, er, actually starting the thing. Argh. First comes coursework, which is about the creation of express trusts and the mechanism of proprietary estoppel, and then it will soon be exam-time - criminal and land - and maybe then I might get as far as actually facing the blank page.

Like I said, I am tired. Last night, shimgray and a baby lawyer friend and I went to see the term's OULES shows, which were Robin Hood and Indiana Jones and were delightful, particularly the latter, which was notable for the way the Nazis kept on edging to the side of the stage, picking up saxophone and guitar and becoming an impromptu back-up band. robette_wild was the lead, and was kind of utterly adorable, and the comedy swordfighting cracked me up. It was an utterly joyous production. (Also worth the price of admission: sccye in a succession of beautiful dresses, and darwinian_woman being faaar too scary as Death. She has a certain aptitude for gliding. It's very unnerving.) I decided then and there, actually, that I must, absolutely must, be in the next OULES play. I'll play a tree. Maybe a corpse again. Possibly a comic piece of furniture. But for something that made me so, so happy, to have stopped doing it was stupid and self-destructive, even if it does take up time I don't have. I mean... OULES. I was in four plays, played a corpse, a dork, a pirate, a goddess and Nymphadora Tonks, and I never didn't have a wonderful time, I was dropped on my head, beaten with a baguette, tortured by a cheese and watched the world go past from a college roof. It was kind of magical.

Tonight, I ended up watching Dimensions in Time (oh dear, oh dear), courtesy of DocSoc, and should very definitely be in bed now, I think. Tomorrow I ought to do a lot of work, and there is an All Souls open evening that I thought about going to but, on reflection, shouldn't. The appeal is getting to see inside All Souls, and I've done that - for the beating the bounds ceremonies last May - and seeing it a second time isn't worth the horror of what it would do to my non-existent academic confidence. I hate explaining to people about my not-a-real-degree as it is, because, well, it's just a thing, a kind of anodyne thing that isn't a job or letters after my name. I know, I know, I was not made for academia, and I would hate it, but living in Oxford, it's kind of difficult to remember that doing anything else has value. I'm just... not that bright. Not the way academics are, that way they have of being breathlessly confident about things, because, well, I don't have that wiring in my head. All Souls will just make me sad.

Bedtime.

That Cat, having just run riot around the living room, settled herself down to take a big bite out of my golden-syrupped waffles. I picked her up by the middle - the kitten I could once scoop up in one hand now works quite well as a draught excluder - and put her in the kitchen, and closed the door.

Poor kitty. Cue much wailing. "You don't looooooove me! You hate me! I bet I'm adopted!"

I ate my waffles, put the plate down and let her back in. Cue much purring, finger licking, and finally settling herself down to lick the golden syrup off the plate. Fine, I thought. Okay, she's rotting her little teeth, but she's due to lose them in the few weeks or so.

Then she shoved her little nose into the mug on the table, pushed it off and bounced down onto the floor. I sat up and found her cheerfully lapping up half a mug of black coffee. This is, I would argue, all the proof one needs that she is not adopted. She would have none of that. I put her back in the kitchen and all was peace.

And then small, stripy, kitty paws appeared under the kitchen door. They flailed. They flailed some more. Then a tiny kitty nose. Then a tiny kitty miaow. "S'okay, if you don't love me. I'll just. I'll just starve. It's okay."

In conclusion: I give up. I have a cat enthusiastically investigating the back of my jeans. With her claws. If anyone asks, I've just got into kink. Is less embarrassing than Defeat By Four-Month-Old Kitten.

In other news, I'm still here. Went to all my classes and lectures this week, save one. I still love the law. As for my brain... well. Still here. Having been offered it, I have so far resisted switching my meds to amitryptyline, because it's a tricyclic and the side-effects will probably be too awful for me to function. I went to my first session of talk-therapy on Wednesday. My counsellor is middle-aged, balding and has ears that stick out to here. I like him a lot. He said, tell me about your family. I told him about my family. I told him my father is a cheerful aging hippie, my mother is both awesome and occasionally crazy. He said, tell me about your friends. I told him about them. He asked, how do you cope with life and depression.

I did not say: I make convoluted puns on the internet. I eat waffles. I pick up my cat and sing, "Kitty in the sky with diamonds!" My dearest friend comes in from Norfolk and sexually propositions me.

I said: humour.

He laughed, and told me that he didn't like to make sweeping predictions so early on in the therapy-process, and he hadn't known me too long, but, well, "I think you'll probably be fine."

In other other news:

Truly idiotic post from Feministing today - apparently we should not be in long-distance relationships because they're not environmentally-friendly. As well as being idiotic in itself, this post exemplifies one of the things that annoy me about the big feminist blogs (Feministing, Feministe, Pandagon): they're so very definite about what a feminist, or in this case, a social progessive, is like. Occasionally that approach backfires spectacularly - see Amanda Marcotte's incredibly racist book covers, for example - but not often enough for my liking. Possibly this is just the week white privilege is pissing me off, but hell, white privilege pisses me off.

(Random bit of rage for the day: people keep talking about Christmas. Christmas is in December, for heaven's sake. I belong to a religious tradition that is also subscribed to by a billion people. The major winter religious festival of this religious tradition is, er, on Monday. Have I heard a single thing from the media, or the world at large, about this? Have I fuck.)

(Note: I am aware that this is not white privilege per se. I have never found a good term to describe it. I once described it as "orthopraxic cultural privilege", but I don't think it'll catch on.)

(Further note: jacinthsong gave me a Diwali card. This is awesome.)

I stop babbling now, yesyes. I am going to re-read Whipping Girl now.

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.

Dear Harriet, kitten, light of my life,

Yes, exactly the most convenient place for you to go peacefully to sleep is with your body on my lap and your head on my Macbook trackpad.

yours in fond exasperation,

Raven

Shush, everyone. We have a tiny wee bitty kitty asleep on our sofa. She came home with us tonight, mewed all the way home, piteously, then had a saucer of milk and consented to being cuddled.

Here she is: ( itty bitty kitty )

Our whiteboard in the kitchen says "The Mousehole welcomes our new feline overlord". She purrs like an outboard motor, and looks adorably out of her box at us all, and we are all utterly, stupidly, irredeemably smitten.

Having lived in the Mousehole for almost a week now, I probably ought to have written down something about the experience before now, but stuff - canoes, mathematics, babies with hats - keeps intervening.

Firstly, the Mousehole is a small, pretty house in East Oxford, inhabited by me, chiasmata, sebastienne, an itinerant and tolerant Frenchman named Pierre, and shimgray has more or less been living here for a week in the capacity of Man With Hammer. (The great problem with living in a queer feminist socialist commune is that you occasionally need someone to pin up your rainbow flags for you. And change your lightbulbs. As women of a certain political persuasion, we could of course have done these things for ourselves. But he seemed to enjoy it, and the flag is very well hammered.) Slowly, slowly, the place is becoming home; we're in the process of getting the contract drawn up, which is complicated, and I probably need bookshelves in my room before I can quite relax. At the moment the books are everywhere unorganised and are making me twitch a bit.

Secondly, thank you all for your many kitten-naming responses. We shall have our kitten in three weeks once it's weaned, and it shall be named Harriet. (My original suggestion, I would like to point out, was in fact Harriet Taylor Mill - because I had said, look at me, be proud I didn't demand we name the cat Socrates, or Mill, or Plato, and.... yes.)

Thirdly. People have been visiting us all week, and it's been very nice indeed. jacinthsong came to stay, and that was lovely; she was here for three days and we drank wine and ate lots of delicious vegetarian food and watched a programme on Channel 4 entitled "The Perfect Vagina". It was... hideous. There was surgery. At one point Laura and Katie and I were all sitting with our legs crossed whilst Shim whimpered in my lap. Yeah. After that we mostly drank, and recounted the story the following day in the manner of Vietnam veterans, to foreverdirt and footnoteplato, who had come with cake. We made them more risotto - with a brief interlude for playing with our food - and ate a lot of cake and drank yet more wine. Wine has been a theme, this week.

Actually, the theme this week has been a mixture of things that seem terribly grown-up and mature, like the contract, and a job interview on Thursday morning up at the business park, and the letting agency demanding a witness for the signing of forms (shimgray stepped up to the plate, signed his name as a respectable member of society and thoroughly perturbed the agency, who wanted to know why he was listed as "tenant's partner" but not the partner of any of the actual relevant tenants, it all got very complicated very fast) and things that are not at all grown-up and feel strangely transient, like wine and the coming and going of people, and Thursday evening, idyllic and sunny by Hinskey Lake, with a box of home-made tiffin and everyone taking it in turns to jump barefoot into the canoe. It felt like an Arthur Ransome novel, and doubly strange that it was the same day as that job interview, and again, the admixture of perpetual summer holidays and future-ghasts.

In brief, I guess, everything is quietly good, but I can't relax very easily. I am more and more frightened that I won't get a training contract, and more and more convinced that I am an intellectual fraud; I can't tell all these people that yes, employ me, I am the best person for the job, because I don't believe that myself. (It doesn't help that my parents are still of the opinion that I'm a confirmed failure. I keep having stiff and stilted conversations with them in which we avoid the white elephant in the room. It's very depressing.) A return of the unspecified neuralgia is possibly related; I am back on the codeine after a brief holiday. Opiates, lest we forget, are really great.

Tomorrow, we're going to the zoo. I am looking forward to this with childish intensity. There will be elephants. Also, I am looking forward to August being over. It's humid and unexciting and the worst month of the year.

Quoth jacinthsong: "You're eating mango while you're talking to me, aren't you? You CUNT."

Some time later: "We've spent the last hour talking about kittens, mangoes, and our boyfriends. You know what? I think we might be girls."

In other words, o hai, I miss Oxford like burning, but mostly I miss the people. It is as if this is a surprise or something. Before I go on, some thanks are in order. First of all, I'm a little late in saying this, but whoever referred my post on white privilege to Blogbharti, I'm honoured. Thank you.

Second of all, to all those people who appeared on slasheuse's love meme and left me furtive love: thank you, thank you, and thank you particularly to the person who made me cry, thank you. And, actually, speaking of my missing Oxford, it seemed somehow natural that so many people on the meme should be Oxonians what I have known and loved, and I had ridiculous fun leaving anonymous and not-so-anonymous love for all of them. It seems quite appropriate, here and now, for it to be recorded that slasheuse herself is made of greatness; that everyone secretly wants to marry apotropaios and eat foreverdirt's brains; that I am not the only person who lusts over absinthe_shadow's shoes; that shimgray's most notable feature is that he is "endearingly meerkat-like" and that magic_doors is destined for greatness, possibly in the manner of CJ Cregg. It would be ridiculous to tell you all again how much I love you, but. I do. I do, I do.

(And, also. The meme is currently at 315 comments. These things max out at, I believe, 5000. There is world enough and time for all of you. Go and demand love. It is, by my time, very early on Monday morning, an excellent time to demand love. Go forth.)

In other news, I went into work today, and, well, the local populace had certainly been eating their crazycakes. I refer you to the woman who came in, looked confused, then said, "I'm looking for a book. It has something to do with the Fonz."

Long, long pause, while I stared, and she pointedly did not tell me the author or title of the book. Finally, I said, faintly, "As in Arthur Fonzarelli?"

Blank stare. I tried again. "The Happy Days character?"

She looked slightly happier. I sat down at the desk computer and wondered vaguely what would happen if I typed "something to do with the Fonz" into TBP. Eventually I did discover that Henry Winkler has written a series of children's books with titles like "The Curtain Went Up, My Pants Came Down: The Mostly True Confessions of the World's Greatest Underachiever". I ordered this book and felt pretty good about life.

Possibly a gesture from the universe to make up for this bout of weirdness, we got a late-afternoon visit from one of my favourite customers, a retired doctor who is endless in his affability and his total failure of recall when it comes to ordering books he wants. (Long-term readers of this journal may remember him as the man who came in and demanded a book called "The Assassin's Boyfriend" - and was delighted when I successfully got him The Time-Traveler's Wife.) Anyway! He bounced in, caught sight of me, drew to a comical halt and demanded, hands on hips, "Well?"

I thought about it for five seconds and said, "I don't know, they haven't come out yet."

"Well, many good wishes for a first - even though you went to the wrong-coloured university, you reprobate."

I thought about it some more. "Dark blue instead of light?"

"Precisely!" he boomed, gave beaming smiles all round and bounced out again.

He's a lovely man, just rather odd. Work this week has been mostly uneventful, as most of the regular staff are on holiday and, er, we don't have any customers. I met the latest of my replacements, a solemn, fluffy-haired boy called Matt, who is plagued by all the other male staff continually referring to "Matt's harem". I found this odd, because a boy less likely to have a harem I never did see. He did the morning shift and I did the afternoon one, so off he went at one o'clock. Watching him pass the window, I saw a girl come out to meet him from next door with an umbrella, and they went off together into the rain. "Oh, you're all being mean," I said, into the relative silence of the shop. "I think he's rather sweet."

Cue rustling and the sound of someone dropping a mug. "How the hell does he do it?" yelled Assistant Book Monkey, storming in and trailing coffee and ash everywhere. "You said, you said you thought he was sweet! He's half your age!"

"He's SIXTEEN!" I yelled back.

"They all said that! All you women! Crazy Al and Deb and Bernie! Even Her Upstairs, and she's a LESBIAN!"

(At which point, the only customer in the shop, a little old lady with shopper, picked up her cane and went out.)

"What..." I started to say, and then saw Matt cross the glass in the other direction, with a different umbrella - and a different girl. "Right," I said.

"If we could only bottle Matt," said Assistant Book Monkey sadly, "that'd solve all our problems."

The shop's problems are pretty considerable at the moment, it must be said. I see it more than the others, because I come back every three months and see the changes, but this time it's really palpable. Every day, the takings are less, every day, the shop gets slightly shabbier because there's no money to pay people to tidy it up, every day, something else breaks and can't be replaced, every day I angst about taking money for a job that I do well. I think this is the last time I'll ever work here. When I come back next summer, it'll be gone. And that breaks my heart, because the cult of the independent bookshop is one of the few things I subscribe to without reservation. I love independent bookshops. I know most of the customers, I know the books, I know the people who come in to deliver, I know the place like the back of my hand. And, well, I've been working there for four years and coming in for ten. It's a long time for something to be a part of your life.

Blah. It's all fundamentally depressing. Once the shop is gone, I have nothing left holding me here at all; all my friends from up here are now in other places doing exciting things, and so it should be, but it makes me feel very remote from everything, a mere transient. I am getting twelve-fourteen-am maudlin. Moving on.

Further things of note. chiasmata and I are trying to get a cat. We're trying, because we don't know yet how the landlord feels about it, but, eeee, cat. I have never had a cat. I am, in fact, very much a dog person - the only pet I have had worthy of note was a long-haired German Shepherd - but I am open to persuasion on the matter. I shall probably be a lot of a geek-dyke-girl cliché, but. Cats are nice. So are geek girls. jacinthsong and I engaged in something of the Lament of the Monogamous Bisexual earlier. Etc.

Ye gods, I am dull. I leave you to go proof-read an eighteen-page guide to transvaginal ultrasound. (No, really.)