philosophy supernatural nude

In another life I would be in Edinburgh tonight, probably weaving gently down the Royal Mile after Lashings of Ginger Beer.

But it's early evening here, still hot, and, well, I'm not. I'm sitting in my apartment at the end of a very busy weekend cleaning, tidying, unpacking, sorting and looking the wrong way when crossing the street, and I have nothing to do until nine o'clock tomorrow morning.

What to even say, then? My apartment is teeny tiny, but lovely. It's a ground floor one-bedroom apartment, and I'm waiting for the catch - it's nice, quiet, and cheaper than the cheapest studio on-campus graduate place - and it has a little bedroom with a little bed and desk and a little kitchen with a teeny stovetop and a teeny living-space with a big ugly sofa. I have my postcards and pictures and calendar up, and it looks homely for all there are only eight books in it.

I'm doing okay, too. On Saturday I went food shopping. It was... a little overhelming. It was very large. It had a LOT of stuff I have never heard of. Oh, it was very large. Can I even encompass how large it was without flapping my hands about and saying "oh, it was large!" I have never thought of Cowley Road Tesco with fondness before. Anyway, so, I went to what I am told is a perfectly ordinary grocery store, and looked for things like cherry tomatoes and bread and cheese and honey and cereal and tins of soup, and it was all going, if not fine, then bearably, until I tried to buy milk. I only put milk in my coffee; otherwise I don't drink it. Even when I was de facto living with Shim, we only got through one pint a week.

...one pint. Given that I didn't want soy milk, rice milk, lactose-free milk or vitamin-D-enriched milk, or organic milk, or milk from local farms, and I wanted it to be full-fat or whole or blue milk, depending on what you call it, I couldn't find a bottle with less than six pints.

I took a very deep breath and got over it and picked up two pints of organic milk instead, and tossed it into the trolley and headed to the checkout. Where a chirpy woman chirpily said, "I think you'll find this is the ten items or less line!"

Because I am well-balanced, and not at all rattled by my new surroundings, I shrieked, "Ten items or FEWER!" and ran metaphorically into the night.

Other than that I'm doing fine. I have a sunflower in a pot on my desk and some idea of what I'm doing tomorrow, and I want to take a quiet moment to tell you all how much I adore you and am grateful for you; I wouldn't have been so sad to leave if I had had nothing to leave behind. Thank you for sending me playlists and stories and good-luck messages, thank you for putting me up on your sofas and taking me around your cities and not minding when I cry all over you; thank you for being you and wanting me to be me. If I return from this year with half the numer of new friends and experiences that I had at Oxford, then it will be more than a success.

Have some music, ( for a thank-you. )

Tomorrow, orientation; now, dinner.

Things that are making me happy today:

1. Sunshine. Oh, sunshine and spring! Is it only me who forgets it comes every year? Over the weekend, jacinthsong wandered through parks and by the river and under lush clouds of cherry-blossom. It was such a long winter; everything is so bright.

2. The Indelicates' new album, "Songs For Swinging Lovers". After a few days of not really listening to it, I gave it the fair shot this afternoon and have spent a little while dancing around my room. I particularly like "Ill" and "Jerusalem", and this is where I would upload them as tasters, but! But, I don't have to! You can download the album legally here! Get thee downloaded and dance.

3. Related to the above - the dancing around the room, that is - I have written 1200 words of my remix, and I know what the rest will be about! Ditto lgbtfest - I'm really looking forward to it, and my wee story is nearly finished, hurrah.

4. shimgray returns tonight, with gin-shaped boozes for me. I missed him but mostly I like boozes.

5. Deep Space Nine! I finished watching it last night, and oh, oh, I have some thinky thoughts and a lot of flail and oh, Odo, and Kira, and Jake, I love them all so much. Why do I lose my heart to Star Trek, why. (There is a long and teeeedious post detailing my love in the works, I am so sorry.) jacinthsong and I spent much of the weekend shouting "Gul Dukat and Kai Winn ewwwww!" at each other. (Ewwww!)

We also spent a lot of time declaring everything in the world to be Nick Clegg's fault - Laura's lack of feather boa, my surfeit of employment law, the failure of my glow-in-the-dark nail varnish to glow in the dark, etc., which brings us to:

6. ...I have been invited, unexpectedly, to a question and answer session with Nick Clegg on Wednesday. I am going to go, but I have no idea what I want to ask him. Hmmm.

Had dinner tonight with a couple of very old friends indeed. It was sort of supposed to be an evening of new things - they're brothers, whom I'll call V and P (which aren't actually their initials, because I'm crafty like that), and their mum has just moved to a pretty new apartment by the water. So off we went this evening, with a box of chocolates and a poinsettia, and oohed and aahed at the new place, which has, among other things, a coffee grinder, a kitchen floor with actual, honest-to-god sparkles (it made me want to dance; my kitchen floor doesn't make me want to dance!), a large tank of tropical fish and a wee tortoiseshell kitty, who is very shy and lives in a cupboard.

But my point was, we got to reminiscing about long ago and far away, which reminded me of all sorts of things I'd forgotten about living in hospitals. I mostly did until I was twelve-going-on-thirteen, and V and P and I used to spent quite a bit of our time - basically, all of our time - running around getting in trouble. See, this was the late nineties when most of the small infirmaries became big district generals, and ours was no exception - it moved out of town to an enormous greenfield site complete with duckpond, and left behind eyes, gynae and geriatric psychiatry, to the amusement of all. And in the mess of the move no one really paid attention to the kids running around the place, and no one was exactly supervising - the logic was, doctors' children in hospitals are sort of supervised by osmosis, and besides if they break a leg, accident and emergency is right there - but even so, until V reminded me tonight, I'd forgotten we built a go-kart out of scrap wood and raced it around the hospital car park.

Seriously. Out of a three-legged table, some wheels taken off a trolley the porters had thrown out, some string and some enthusiastic pushers, including my dog, a fairly excitable Alsatian. Funny how you can forget brushes with certain death. We also built a treehouse at one point, and tried to spend the night in it; I think we lit a fire in a dustbin before giving up because it was cold. And went trick-or-treating through the hospital wards at Hallowe'en, and got songs played on the radio station, and walked out to the beach and tried to push toboggans down the dunes. It was all a bit Swallows and Amazons, only with less water and more sharps bins.

It makes me a little sad that now the infirmary really is closed, the buildings are going to be turned into flats, and the whole place is going to be different. The funny thing was, there were a lot of kids running around at the time, and I've forgotten most of them - but many years later I was at a party in Oxford when a girl came up to me and said, "The old infirmary...?" - and it sort of came flooding back.

Anyway, a lovely evening, surprisingly. In other news entirely, the week's lunatunes theme is "top five at the moment":

1. Florence and the Machine - Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up) (with thanks to musesfool; she said she'd had it on repeat for a few days, and I nabbed it off her and now I've had it on repeat for days, too - it's so great, so full of energy);

2. Sarah Brightman - Nessun Dorma (so lovely, this, and usually thematically appropriate);

3. Amy Ray - Laramie (for Matthew Shephard, and I like it a lot, especially the first couple of lines: we hit snow on the road to Laramie / we all heard about that mess)

4. Regina Spektor - Eet (jacinthsong pointed me at this, and I don't understand it at all but it's really gorgeous)

5. Melissa Etheridge - Bring Me Some Water (I am not at all a fan of hers, but I really do like this song).


...tell me if you like 'em. Alas and alack, I return to writing my statement of purpose for Cornell.

Basically: yuletide fail (4500 words! none of them ANY GOOD); Christmas shopping fail (four presents! Have I got them? Guess); birthday present fail (shimgray's birthday is November 17th); work fail (mock civil advocacy assessment tomorrow - need to read case, write submissions, IRON MY SHIRT, which of these have I done, hmmm); cool temperate maritime fail (cold, wet, cold, wet, no heating, cold, wet); daylight savings fail (sunset in Oxford, December 15th, 2009 - 3.52pm); and getting-out-of-bed fail (er - I didn't).

Also I am nearly out of filter coffee. But I am going to survive to the end of this week, I am going to go home for Christmas, all will be fine, in the words of gamesiplay's soothing and affirmative mantra for the time of year, ALL IS CALM AND ALL IS FUCKING BRIGHT, GODDAMMIT.

Have some Christmas carols and winter-themed whatnots:

-Sixpence None The Richer - Carol of the Bells;
-Stars - Fairytale of New York;
-Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson - Winter Song (m4a);
-Sarah McLachlan - The First Noel (m4a);
-Vienna Teng - The Atheist Christmas Carol.


The holiday love meme - I'm here. I have dropped across and posted love on the people I know (and love, obv). The world needs love today.

And now, back to sorting my life out.

Exeunt, reciting "all is calm all is bright all is calm all is FUCKING BRIGHT GODDAMMIT..."

Hello, internets. Have two songs that are making me cry:

Dar Williams & Joan Baez - You're Aging Well
I'm so glad that you finally made it here / you thought nobody cared, but I did

Dar Williams - After All (live)
I am the daughter of a great romance / and they are the children of the war

tau_sigma asked for ( five times Martha Jones was awesome )

deathbyshinies wanted ( the top five things that made you want to go to Hogwarts (or not) )

petronelle wanted ( top five Darren Nichols productions )

fahye wanted my ( top five Geoffrey moments in Slings & Arrows )

gamesiplay wanted my ( top five fannish characters )

brewsternorth wanted my ( top five fictional lawyers )

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.

For everything: Vienna Teng - Hope on Fire.

For Proposition 8: Vienna Teng - City Hall.

This is the part in democracy where we fall over in exhaustion with textbooks open on our heads. I am so tired I am almost horizontal and blurring through contract law, but I don't want to set it aside just yet, because, well, because of a silly, similarly blurry reason. This is what lawyers grow up to be, says my brain, this is what you can do, sit down and use your brain and your hands and your books and you will always be a part of your world. Well done, Senator Obama of Illinois: I have been looking behind sofa cushions and in cupboards and down the back of the fridge, to no avail, but last night, at 5.30am, you found my work ethic. Thank you.

What can I really say about last night? The Mousehole election party was subdued to begin with, then started to fill up with gin. We flicked on the BBC coverage the moment it started, left it on all night, eight of us piled around the living-room drinking gin and pink wine (before we even began drinking, we had established who in the room wouldn't throw Obama out of bed) and magic_doors, who has exactly the same sort of political sense of humour that I do, decided that, ideally, McCain would lose a lot of states, then lose Arizona, and then have to go out drinking, and fall over in an alley somewhere and be kidnapped by organ snatchers and wake up without his kidneys. We both, for some reason, thought this mini snuff-fantasy was hilarious and embroidered it throughout.

It wasn't a costume party, but there were thematic elements. I had a wee Obama pin, sent to me by heidi8, that I wore to school all day and felt oddly smug about (when I was actually at school, the wearing of political accoutrements was Strictly Frowned Upon), and we got the kitten a luxury kitty dinner so she'd remember the night fondly. And in the evening, subservient_son appeared and asked me to guess what his costume was. It consisted of paper flames attached to his jeans at waist height. "Fire," I said.

"What is the fire on?"

"Er..."

"No, not that!"

"Your trousers."

"And what do Americans call trousers?"

"Pants. Oh, liar."

The next intuitive leap was too hard for me, unfortunately. Nevertheless, he gets about million geek points for coming to my election night party dressed as the Bradley effect. jacinthsong came with a sink plunger. I did slightly better at identifying this costume. I had meant to get a blue ribbon for the cat, but I failed at indoctrination. After going for a long walk down the Cowley Road to get Chinese food with me_ves_y_sufres, I poured myself a large gin and settled down for the night.

So, we drank. We ate. We made (mild) merry. We made fun of the plummy BBC voices talking to American voters. We complained about general statements made about people with vaginas. "Women are voting for Obama," said the television. Well, yes, I observed. I imagine, right now, there are women who are voting for Obama. Personally, said someone else, I always vote with my vagina. (Some of those women don't have vaginas, to be fair to the BBC, but, really.) All the vaginas in the room quivered with anticipation of the next states to be called.

By four thirty in the morning, I was almost asleep on the sofa. And then, within two minutes, they called California and Washington, and the little counter on the screen ticked over, unobstrusively, up to 270, and then more, and then all of a sudden we were screaming and hugging each other and dancing and scaring the cat and waking up sebastienne, who wandered blearily in to be met with cheers and screeches and finally, quiet, happy clinging to each other while we listened to the speeches. I was impressed with John McCain. I really, really was. His speech was calm and gracious and classy - classier by far than his audience, who booed mentions of Obama and Palin and were generally embarrassing.

But... then, Obama's speech. It was five thirty in the morning. I had been awake for twenty-two hours, had been drinking for the last six of them, I was high and fragile as a kite, and he came on stage, with his family, and stood there with them in front of millions of people, and then he started to speak. When he spoke about all people, white and black and Asian and disabled and gay and straight, I could feel the people in the room around me starting to cry. He got up, the president-elect of the United States, and he spoke about people as if they were people, as though to be liberal was how to be, as though, for the first time in years, we should be proud to be liberal. He talked about his international spectators, and there was cheering from us, he talked about the new puppy his kids are getting, and there was more cheering. He spoke for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, and there was such quiet in the room. I don't know what happened last night, I don't know. But I went to sleep in the morning and the house had quietened down, and it was good.

I am not happy about Proposition 8. It breaks my heart that civil rights can be taken away, for bigots. I am happy that Al Franken may be a senator for Minnesota. I am happy that Indiana went Democratic for the first time since 1964, and that my young cousin, voting and campaigning and rallying for the first time, was a part of a 0.9% margin.

And I'm tiiiiiired. But something was done.

Oh hi, I'm still crazy. (Actually, no; much wailing and much being fed junk food by lovely boy has helped, and now I'm depressed and knackered but no longer actively considering throwing self in front of bus.)

Anyway, that's not the point. Via thistlerose, Sarah Palin apparently can't name any Supreme Court decision other than Roe v Wade. The meme: post any Supreme Court decision, modern or historic, to your LJ. After six straight hours of baby law school today, I feel honour-bound to respond to this.

So, I give you a classic: Brown v Topeka State Board of Education, which established that seperate does not mean equal and ended racial segregation in schools. I can't name many others - Loving v Virginia comes to mind - but I have to say, English law is much better for this sort of thing, in that the cases that are used every day to set binding precedents are astonishingly, delightfully old. Yesterday I looked up Payne v Cave (1789), which establishes that you may withdraw your bid in an auction at any time before the hammer falls; Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball (1893), wich establishes that you may, if you are sufficiently stupid, accidentally make a unilateral contract with the entire world; Donaghue v Stevenson (1929), of which the substance is immaterial: all you need to know is it involved decomposing slugs in beer.

Have I mentioned I really like the law? I really like the law. Other strange thing I have learned today: consent is not a defence to actual bodily harm. Also, a sin of ommission is not a crime. Which means I could have consensual kinky sex with someone, and be prosecuted, and watch a child drown, and not. Huh.

In other news, Dar Williams' new album is made of perfect. (Have two songs: Buzzer; Midnight Radio.)

Anyway. I return to land law and crazy. Hope you're all having a nice Thursday.

Yesterday, mid-afternoon:

( the world outside in focus, it is SYMBOLIC )

Thursday afternoon: Final Honours School of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, paper 0103, Ethics, question 18: "Would your death be good for you?"

Thursday evening, 10.13pm:

( I fall over a lot )

Over the course of the last few days:

Tori Amos - Taxi Ride (x51)
Indigo Girls - Let Me Go Easy (x36)
Vienna Teng - Recessional (x179, ohGOD)
The Indelicates - ...If Jeff Buckley Had Lived (x68)

Tomorrow: Theory of Politics, Saturday, History of Philosophy From Descartes to Kant, (Bank Holiday) Monday, Politics of South Asia. Tuesday, Wednesday, also.

Finally, finally, after days and weeks and respectability and life out of a suitcase, I am on my way home. It's such a lovely feeling that I even managed to get out of bed this morning at nine - and, wow, nine was a lie-in, I really have been being respectable - and venture out into the grey warmth with scarcely a backwards look. There's a softness in the air again, a faint hint of springlike things to come. Of course, it felt like this last week, and well. It snowed. I love England, sometimes.

Last night, I finished work at half five, ran through the city, took the world's quickest shower, was just about to run out again when I had one of those moments, where you're standing holding an eyeliner pencil thinking subtle, subtle, and then, clearly: actually, I don't fucking want to, and what the hell did I do with the glitter? Some rummaging revealed said glitter (Urban Decay heavy metal in Baked - it's sunshine and joy in a tube) and my own very favourite eyeliner, which is actually kajal, and the effect was not subtle at all. I was pleased. And I ran out to Hammersmith in a very cheery mood indeed.

None of this is to say that I haven't enjoyed this vacation scheme or that I'm not glad I did it. If I do go down this route, actually do become a lawyer, then I will have to deal with normality and respectability as part of the job. Respectable is a mantle you can put on and take off. I'm just not very good at it at the moment. As I was bemoaning to several people earlier in the week, I made it to Thursday lunchtime still passing as normal, and then came out accidentally. It was faintly ludicrous, at that; one of the other students started an anecdote with, "My ex once had a mishap with a breadmaker."

"Oh," sayeth I, "I had an ex who once had a mishap with a breadmaker. She put icing-sugar in it instead of flour."

And you could see it - you could see the clicking gears in all their brains, as they processed, first icing-sugar, and laghed, and then the pronoun clicked, and then there was a sort of quiet oh. I was a little vexed at the time, but ah, what the hell. What can you do? You can't watch your mouth all the time, you'd lose your mind. What the hell. And there are compensations to being me. I met anotherusedpage for coffee that night and we put fandom to rights, as usual - several hours of gesticulating wildly at each other and talking about fannish paradigms and OTW and atypicality and what it means to be a new type of person are very good for the soul.

So, on Friday night, I got on a Tube train to Hammersmith which was clearly being driven by one of the world's nicest humans - "And look at that!" she said, as the train emerged from below ground, "It's sunny! Watch you don't get dazzled and fall on the track! And by the way, Hammsrsmith station is closed!" - and I didn't actually mind. They re-opened the station just before I arrived at it, and some confusion later, I met chiasmata and there was much glee. We were going to the Apollo to see KT Tunstall and it was marvellous. We timed it well, missed the support entirely deliberately in favour of getting a very nice dinner at a small restaurant run by a pair of exuberantly delightful Italians, who fed us a ridiculous amount of baked pasta and we kept laughing and scaring the other patrons and it was joyous.

(On the way into the gig, we met one of the other people I'd been at the Vaguely Notable Law Firm with - she had warned me that she'd be there, taking her middle-aged mother to her first Rock Concert (awww) - and there was a moment or two of small talk and awkward introductions, and it didn't dawn on me until a few minutes later that she clearly thought that chiasmata and I were together. I'm surprised that this happened this time around, and no one assumed we were together when we went to see the Indigo Girls last year!)

Speaking of which, the gig itself was ahhh, lovely. KT Tunstall would be very entertaining even if she didn't sing. But she did, and most of her songs are cheering, wonderful things that made the venue bounce, and yes. It was just the right thing to have done, last night. Musically speaking, I think the high point was about halfway through; I'd been reading that very morning in one of the Tube newspaper review sections that she'd been trying out a different cover at every gig on the tour, and this one, she did a haunting, soft acoustic version of "Every Day Is Like Sunday", and I just... yes. I love that song with an unholy passion, and she did it so well, with such clean, sparse layering of instrumentals and voice, and it was... um. Yes. Wonderful.

Afterwards we hung around for coffee and made happy noises at each other before running down to catch the last trains. The journey back was a little surrealist, a little hallucinogenic in quality; I'd been up for eighteen hours and the tunnels and stations were a bit of a clean-lit contrast to the Apollo and the night outside. I saw a man carryig a surfboard onto the last Tube train of the day. It was a little bizarre. Opposite me there was an odd couple, a very pale man and his very drunk girlfriend, whose voice was clear as a bell; she kept saying, "Are you sure? Are you sure? I don't want to be an evil temptress. I'm not an evil temptress. Are you really sure?"

I guess he was; at any rate, they stumbled off into the night at Knightsbridge and I wended my way back. And now, I have had some sleep, I have had some breakfast, and this morning, I was back on a Tube platform looking at the curving adverts on the opposite wall, and I was reading something for Orange pay-as-you-go, with the small print at the bottom, and it talked about limited liability and terms and conditions apply, and, without a break, Thank you for reading this far, it makes our legal people feel valued.

Well, it made me laugh. In about forty-five minutes, I will be back in Oxford, and tonight there is new Doctor Who. I also have about 1200 words of remix to write in the next twenty-four hours, alas. Ah, well. Very nearly home, and the sun's at my back.

(Of course, I wrote all of the above, and it wouldn't post. Fail, internets, fail. So, what else can I regale you with?)

Oxford! Oxford is beautiful. I came back and it was all awash with sunlight and Morris dancers, and I came home and filled my room with my stuff - oh god, I hate unpacking, I still haven't done any - and I let the afternoon drift by in a shamelessly slow sprawl of sunlight and wandering. shimgray and I were supposed to be making pancakes and hosting the assembled masses watching Doctor Who. (Domestic? Very.) And it was lovely, lovely. Everyone turned up and was sweet and chiasmata provided a TARDIS cake that dyed my tongue blue and after some technical difficulties - including the procuring of a teatowel to gag apotropaios with, should he decide to be a classicist about proceedings or indeed harbour a secret desire to resemble Yasser Arafat - there was watching of Who.

( Fires of Pompeii )

And then, pancakes - mostly shaped like the Flying Spaghetti Monster - and sugar, and joy, and tea, and sleep. I walked home this morning through showers and intermittent sunshine, and now I must unpack my room, take a shower and get to work. My life, she is hard.