And another thing...

This is what the world looks like.

Underneath my desk.

(It is not horrendously blurry at the back, there genuinely are two bottles of those three mixers!)

English E-Newsletter

My department informs me (quite ahead of time, which is silly because no one will go anyway) about guest-speaker seminars coming up in the New Year. My birthday is in the middle of term, and I am suggesting we all gatecrash this one in celebration of it:

• 15 February Dr Susan Morrissey (SSEES, University College, London). ‘Suicide and the self in late Imperial Russia’. All welcome.

So my throat is in bits / And my lungs are real sick

I am sick!

I am never sick!

I am not sure what to do about it! At the moment I am pretty much living on sugary lemony paracetamol drinks and am fervently hoping that this will solve all the problems I have been having.

If this is the last update ever, you can take it as read that it turned out to be birdflu or SARS as I first thought, and not 'just a cold' as everyone else seems to think.

What do they know.

Lindemans: good wine, bad muse.

I am not quite sure what that word is for what I am feeling right now. It is like smug, or maybe just content (or maybe half a bottle of shiraz but that is not one word).

I have not seen my dad as pleased with anything as he is with his new car in quite some time. Over the last three days we have talked about cars in general and Saabs in particular; spent hours poring over OS maps of the Derbyshire countryside; talked about Vikings; watched Bleak House, Scrapheap Challenge, some rugby, and Antiques Roadshow; been sensible; been silly; and teased my mother. I let him patiently explain the difference between beer and lager for what must be the third or fourth time even though he knows I am no more likely to remember it this time than any other, and he let me detail the linguistic difference between Old English terms for hill-formations even though I know he is only interested in the historical aspects of my course. I am so like my dad it sometimes scares me.

My mum has changed more in the last two months than I have in the three years since I moved out. She still has little habits which irk me (like the way she will be completely unconciously oblivious to whatever comment I have just made, and then five seconds later repeat it word for word in exactly the same intonation and everything) but she is so relaxed and cool now. My brother and his girlfriend are coming to stay over Christmas and she has bullied my dad into letting them sleep together, which I would never have expected of her. We drank mulled wine, white wine, and Yorkshire Terrier inbetween gleefully traipsing around York in the pouring rain, happily complaining about people who dawdle and get in your way and block entrances and exits. The great thing about my mum is that she will stop at any quaint cafe for a cup of tea, but she will stop twice as fast if that cafe is licensed. The other great thing is that she pays for everything and is so well-practised at this that you do not even notice her doing it.

My parents are the best. There is no competition. They are so sweet now it is just the two of them; they have little in-jokes and they talk about their friends like I have the foggiest idea who that is. They have mock-arguments which usually end up with my mum looking something up, and they go to B&Q together, and my dad always drives and, when the other one is out of the room, they tell me in stage whispers "Your dad works so hard!" and "Sheila's in charge of Christmas," and "Your dad says, don't let the kids spend too much on him for his birthday," and "I like to change the channel when your mother's out of the room!".

Also, they have everything. Need a spare double duvet? No problem. Need the name of a good jewellers? No problem! Need an inch:mile Ordance Survey map of the area between Matlock and Ashbourne, published between 1939 and 1941? No problem.

So. I like weekends with my parents. They is somehow removed from the space-time continuum. It is not possible to worry about things with them.

Now, however, I am back. I am still not worried about anything (well, one thing, maybe) but that is more to do with my refusal to entertain stress this year than that I don't have anything to worry about. There are certain things I am still letting play out before I can really understand, but I have other things mostly under control.

Everything is ok.

Democracy never worked, anyway

Comments are not broken, I have just disabled them (quick knife to the Achilles).

(I know that a public journal presupposes someone else reading it, but I still feel weird about this. Weird in that I am worried that being aware of an audience will affect what I choose to write, rather than weird in that I would rather no one read it (if this was the case I would just not write it!).

If you want, you can email lucy[symbol]mustardsundae[dot]co[dot]uk.)

10am lectures.

Thursday are my worst day, I have three and a half - three! and a half! - hours of seminars. They are always good seminars, that is not the complaint, but they start at 10am and make my day look like this:

- alarm goes off at 7am, turn it off, reset it for 8am
- alarm goes off at 8am, turn it off, reset it for 9am
- alarm goes off at 9am, turn it off, realise it is 9am and I have 15 minutes to get ready
- panic about what to wear for seminar
- change outfit three times
- realise first outfit was best but now my hair is doing something weird
- give it up as a bad job, resolve to get up earlier next week
- leave the house at 9:40
- lamely get the bus three stops to uni, saving myself half an hour's walk
- get to seminar five minutes late anyway
- describe 'emotions' about one thing or another to the rest of the class (this week: rocks)
- realise twenty minutes later that I have no idea where the discussion has gone
- leave the seminar none the wiser
- EITHER: spend four hours in the Hallward, shivering
- OR: walk home, shivering, only to have to walk back again two hours later
- go to English Place Name seminar at 4pm
- watch everyone else through the window, walking home
- hate everyone else
- translate every place-name in sight
- spend twenty minutes rambling about Old Scandinavian for Question 1
- realise that Question 2 is specifically about Old Scandinavian
- crossing-out/re-writing etc
- finish two seconds before he calls time
- walk home in the freezing cold, planning ketchup-based dinner
- arrive home at 6:15
- construct ketchup-based dinner
- CURRENTLY: consume ketchup-based dinner and wallow in after-glow
- make huge enormous G&T as reward for knowing so much, being so fab etc etc
- make second G&T
- make third and possibly fourth G&T
- hazy
- go to bed at 1am
- turn off main light at 1:15am
- turn off fairy lights at 3:45am
- room stops spinning at 5:20 am.

Surrealism

In the stump of the old tree, where the heart has rotted out,
there is a hole the length of a man's arm, and a dank pool at the
bottom of it where the rain gathers, and the old leaves turn into
lacy skeletons. But do not put your hand down to see, because

in the stumps of old trees, where the hearts have rotted out,
there are holes the length of a man's arm, and dank pools at the
bottom where the rain gathers and old leaves turn to lace, and the
beak of a dead bird gapes like a trap. But do not put your
hand down to see, because

in the stumps of old trees with rotten hearts, where the rain
gathers and the laced leaves and the dead bird like a trap, there
are holes the length of a man's arm, and in every crevice of the
rotten wood grow weasel's eyes like molluscs, their lids open
and shut with the tide. But do not put your hand down to see, because

in the stumps of old trees where the rain gathers and the
trapped leaves and the beak, and the laced weasel's eyes, there are
holes the length of a man's arm, and at the bottom a sodden bible
written in the language of rooks. But do not put your hand down
to see, because

in the stumps of old trees where the hearts have rotted out
there are holes the length of a man's arm where the weasels are
trapped and the letters of the rook language are laced on the
sodden leaves, and at the bottom there is a man's arm. But do
not put your hand down to see, because

in the stumps of old trees where the hearts have rotten out
there are deep holes and dank pools where the rain gathers, and
in you ever put your hand down to see, you can wipe it in the
sharp grass till it bleeds, but you'll never want to eat with
it again.

(Hugh Sykes Davies)

Hibernating (like a bear)

I had a dream about this book last night. Well, like a kind of a cross between this book and the Narnia chronicles. It was an amazing dream until my alarm went off right in the middle of it and I never got to see the ending.

Between my being constitutionally lazy, and a desire to go back to sleep and finish the dream, I managed to oversleep again and it is now 11:20 when I had hoped to be in the library by 9am, 10am at the latest. I am still in my bedroom. Whoops.

Christmas. (What do you mean, 'November'?)

Dear Santa.

I have been a good girl this year (well, it's all relative, right?), and these are the things I would like to find in my stocking on Christmas morning:

[ ] One pair huge fluffy, possibly angora (possibly still attached to the rabbit) knee-length toe-socks for cold winter nights

[ ] One kick-ass frying pan

[ ] One pair of the biggest, warmest, most marvellous slippers in the world (for cold winter mornings)

[ ] One new ear-stretchy thing, 3mm (must look exactly like the current one, I am quite attached to it)

[ ] One sensible haircut

[ ] A hug

[ ] Sleater-Kinney

[ ] Hologram boyfriend

... and that's pretty much it. Thanks Santa!

Listening out for those sleigh bells,

Hugs and kisses,

Lucy.

Back to your knitting!

Holy Mary Mother of God.


I laughed.
I cried.
I hid behind my hands.





If I thought I was having nightmares before - pah! I may never sleep again after this (and by 'this' I mostly mean Ron's dress robes).

Insomnia4lyfe

Ok. This nightmare thing? Not cool.

I am not living in some distopian future where people are eating binbags to survive.

There is no barbed wire in my wrists.

There is no bearded man with a truncheon to continuously evade.

Seriously, the barbed wire thing was probably the worst yet. I had escaped from the bin-bag future to my parents' old house, where my mum forced me to have a bath to get lines of embedded razorwire out of my wrists. While this was going on I was having flashbacks (which were actually experiences) of watching myself lying in a bed with a carefully-constructed steel wire mesh suspended above the duvet. I had created this mesh with the intention of not being dragged to the bin-bag place but while I was dreaming it I had already been through the bin-bag place and so knew that something awful was going to happen, but I didn't know what and I couldn't say anything.

ARGH

Cold-blooded (like a reptile!)

I cannot wait for this boy's book to be done! If he hurries up and sends it to me before the end of November I am totally writing my Cognitive Poetics essay on him.

Today has mostly been: walking around in the cold. Some sitting in seminars, some sitting in the theatre (again). But all I really remember is the cold.

I really hate the cold. I genuinely despise it. I do not find it refreshing, or bracing, or invigorating. I do not like 'wrapping up warm'. I hate the restriction of gloves. I hate being choked by scarves. I refuse to wear silly hats. I hate it when my skin goes see-through and the ends of my fingers go numb and my feet don't work and the small of my back aches with it all. I depise everyone who is sporting a grin and rosy cheeks and I swear to god if you toss that snowball at me you will not live to regret it.

So I got it wrong about my EPNS test! It is actually next week. This is good, I get a whole week to brush up on (i.e. learn about) Old English inflections and how they act around other languages (staring at the ground, scuffing their toes in the dirt, blushing). Also, I am now befriended in Cognitive Poetics, EPNS and Detective Fiction! This is all the modules I take!

The only thing I do not like about uni at the moment, actually, is the fact that it is not entirely contained within an impenetrable plastic bubble.

Will someone please sort that out? Ta.

Shivering on the shore in skins

+ =

That thing in black is actually me on Halloween. You cannot tell what I am because it is the worst picture/outfit ever and my hair is across my forehead (because Harry is pretty much the archetypal emo teenager!) but I am meant to be Harriet Potter (Harry's long-lost, better-looking, twin). I had a painted-on scar and a glowstick wand and a hollowed-out owl and everything! But this cloak is basically what I wanted to make so everyone would know what I was, except I couldn't be bothered to make it. Figures. Anyway, seeing as only three of us had dressed up, it really wasn't too much of an issue.

I have done no actual work today. Even that elementary faux-Photoshop took longer than it really should have.

There is a standing invite to the Cookie Club tonight which I desperately want to be a part of, but work is stacking up. Scruffys on Monday night and the Playhouse last night, combined with the theatre (again!) tomorrow at 1.30pm and a test on English place-name elements (which counts for 20% of the overall module mark) tomorrow at 4pm, which I have to revise for, I am a bit stretched for time. I could do going-out tonight if I had all day tomorrow to learn this EPNS stuff, or I can do theatre tomorrow if I learn this stuff tonight. I can't really do both. Since I have booked tickets for the theatre, it looks like it is going to be the latter!

Ross and Lee turned out to be all kinds of nice and not murderous weirdos at all! Lee was a lot quieter than I thought he would be (I was expecting a gregarious loud indie boy) and Ross was a lot more friendly than I thought he would be (I was expecting morose and argumentative). At no point did they try and kill me which I always find is a bonus on any night out! Also, Lee has quite good taste in cocktails (Ross not so much).

We met for drinks in the Ropewalk at 7ish and spent so long chatting that we missed the start of the play! The usher [bouncer] wouldn't let us into our seats but we ended up doing pretty well up in the dress circle. The play was very short, just over an hour and there was no interval, so no cheeky drinks! But afterwards, we went for cocktails in Cucamara's and got on like the proverbial house on fire. Sometimes it is just really easy to fall into people, which is especially nice (gratifying) if you have been worried that they will be wittier and better read than you, or terrified that they will be hateful arch indie hipsters in girl-jeans and Oxfam sweaters. I admit, I was a bit panicked after the recent Dawn-led revelation that I hate fun! Thankfully, one large glass of wine and half a dozen cocktails can generally be relied on to supply the fun. We did 'stories' (the trading of humourous anecdotes to amuse and entertain, which took longer on their parts because they had to keep stopping and explaining all their in-jokes) and 'acting like hipster snobs about music' (nothing is any good if other people like it) and 'make-and-do' (job-creation schemes for unused straws). They even offered to walk me home. See? Nice boys! No mention of cults all evening.

Overall verdict: A++, would meet for drinks and culture again!

Thursday night = night in (please, God)
Friday night = HARRY POTTER OH MY GOD I DON'T BELIEVE IT IT HAS GOT RALPH FIENNES IN IT AND EVERYTHING
Saturday night = maybe Harry Potter again, minus the squealing, plus Ross.

The move is time's, the loss is ours.

I was going to do this last night, but I wasted too long trying to work out what to put in a letter. And then we went to do 'dates'.

So I was coming off campus yesterday, just minding my own business, (a bit smug after handing in my essay, maybe) and who did I see walking towards me but Mr. Adrian, from college. It was genuinely one of those "Buh? What?" moments when you are increasingly unsure with every second that passes that the person you are looking at is actually the person you think it is, but then we were like "HI!" and it turned out that it was Ady after all. I haven't seen him since I ran into him in town in the first year, when he was working at the Law Courts behind the Broadmarsh, and before that I had not seen him since A Level results day. Last year he was doing a law degree in Sheffield; this year he is doing a maths degree at Nottingham. Random!

It was really weird to see him again, what with all the events at college. He seems exactly the same as ever, which is kind of reassuring in a way. We did swapping of numbers and provisionally arranged to go for coffee and catch up and what have you, which would be all kinds of lovely.

Speaking of lovely, Dawn took pity on me after I complained that maybe I was not a fun date and took me to Scruffys for a romantic meal and then to the Ropewalk, where she bought me wine and tried to take advantage of me. It was great! It was made more great by the fact that Rachel was able to come to dinner and I felt like we were The Three Musketeers (with the exception of lovely Emma, who would have made an excellent fourth musketeer), all planning the future and eating fancy-like. Rach was later replaced by a boy called Rob from Rock Sock, who was wearing a mohawk and a Questionable Content t-shirt (a poor replacement). I kept meaning to do testing in-jokes to see if he actually knew what his shirt was but I forgot. Nevermind.

Today I am going to buy tickets for Thebes! Dawn and Rach spent about twenty minutes last night scaring the life out of me by trying to convince me that Lee and/or Ross will turn out to be 60 yr old cult-members who are primarily interested in raping and killing me and not, as I had previously thought, friendly but harmless indie boys who like the theatre. I am slightly worried, although not so worried that I have agreed to Dawn's suggestion of a curfew. I am a big girl now! I am more worried about spending all evening surrounded by poncy English students. If there is talking during the performance, I will not be responsible for my actions!

Campus of Flying Leaves

Quarter past ten in the morning.

Sunday.

Me: in the library.

Impressive.

Franz Ferdinand possibilities?

This is totally me last night.

I am totally not useless at skating.

(Seriously, how is that girl staying upright without holding onto the side of the rink for dear life? How is she not wobbling along, looking like a retarded baby deer?)

I fell over three times and now have the most fantastic bruise down my right thigh. I was OK as long as I was just doing 'skating' but as soon as I starting thinking about what I was doing, or looked at my skates, or some scallywag went whizzing past me, backwards, I lost it and started wobbling/clutching at Rach/falling over.

It was lots of fun though! I have not laughed so much in quite some time. Thanks Rach!














I am currently halfway through my essay regarding these two characters. They are Baroness Emmuska Orczy, a Hungarian noble who invented The Scarlet Pimpernel and (more importantly) Lady Molly of Scotland Yard; and Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, necrophiliac Francophile American who has a Nottingham theme pub named after one of his most famous works (and who, more importantly, invented 'detective fiction'). It is quite the good essay so far, I am most pleased with it. 1,200 words of a possible 2,200 and I suspect I will be cutting things back rather than panicking because I have not got enough to say, which is usually the case at this stage in the compositional stage. I would have written more if it weren't for the infernal lure of Spider Solitaire, the English student's equivalent of the opium den.

Still, I am confident that I will have completed the thing by tonight, which leaves me nicely set up for a cosy Saturday night of fun. Hurrah!

Ode to my shower

O! Shower.
You are better than the next bestest thing in my house
You never refuse me hot water when I demand it;
I love to stand, scalding, scorching, under your firey glare.
You are the reason for mornings
(And evenings, and those times when I am awake in the night).
In the summer, you keep me calm when it is too warm to breathe
In the winter, you make me warm enough to breathe
And fill the bathroom with steam so thick it might be smoke.
And I do not even mind when, half-conscious, I get in
Having forgotten to take my makeup off the night before, and get out
Looking like a boiled panda.
In my next life, I would like to be a lobster in a fancy restaurant,
Because sometimes, in this life, I cannot get your dial quite high enough
To broil me for quite long enough.

The only thing I do not like is when, unthinkingly,
My housemates flush the loo, or fill the kettle,
And I am plunged into a sudden, breathtaking world of ice and needles
And I have to leap backwards, cursing, laughing, twisting out of the way,
Halfway through washing my hair. (Forgetting to finish washing it, and wondering
For the rest of the day why my hair feels so sleek, is always
My own fault.)

Burial at Thebes

Multi-tasking is evidently not my thing. Whilst trying to combine reading literary criticism essays with moisturising my winter-ravaged skin in my poorly-lit bedroom last night, I somehow managed to confuse this: with this: .


I think that showers might be my favourite thing in the entire world (next to pesto, and swing). Stepping into a scaldingly hot shower at some godforsaken hour in the morning is like being hugged by your best friend after a particularly bad day. Better, maybe. It is basically my only reason for getting out of bed at the moment (Detective Fiction essay is not doing it for me anymore, imagine that).

Anyway, the point of this was: dreams. I have been dreaming an excessive amound recently, to say that usually I don't dream at all. Last night was particularly weird; first, I was having a Carluccio's food-fight with Mr & Mrs Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances ("CHILLI SAUCE!"). Then, I had created a new world and only my brother and I lived in it. There was nothing but grass and sunshine and huge gnarled trees which were equal parts branch and water-jet. You could turn these huge, multiple-fountain trees on and off as you wished and I was so delighted! After that, I think I was investigating a murder a la Miss Marple. The night before, I dreamt I was involved in a class project with Graham Cox and Liam Mitchell, which is strange because I have not seen or thought about them since Mill Hill.

The night before that, I had a nightmare! It was awful. I was a sort of CSI-investigative type and it was my job to fill in this shallow pit that had a woman's mutilated body in it. She had been killed by this weird giant burning circular-saw thing that had come over the wall behind her. After I filled the hole in, these two kids appeared and I was holding them/hugging them, and the little boy was telling me (about his sister), "She's my Pig!". Then, I put them down and went to do something else and when I turned around the giant circular buzz-saw had come back and not only burned open the body-pit, but the two kids were completely blackened and horrendously dead. I woke up crying, it was so graphic!

Tonight, I am not sleeping. I am going to write my Detective Fiction essay instead so I can actually do some reading over Reading Week Weekend.

Also, I am going to the theatre with Lee and Ross on Tuesday. I am a bit scared! It is a bit of a grown-up thing for me. Also, it is the Eng Soc trip night, which I had really wanted to avoid. Still, maybe everyone will be envious of my non-wanky, non-English-student friends. Maybe I am not scared, maybe I am just excited!

Voldemort + Tory vacancy = SUCCESS

I am so ridiculously excited about the new Harry Potter movie, I did a little squeal when the advert came on telly yesterday evening. I am going to see it with Donna and Zoe on the first night (which is good!) but I have so far not managed to persuade them to dress up to stand in line (which is bad!). There is still time!

On a related note, I went to my department's Postgraduate Open Day today. I felt like a bit of a hypocrite (as I spent the majority of last year bitching about the department) but I thought I should consider all options.

The MAs sound interesting (the phDs sound insane); there are two options in Linguistics, my preferred field. Applied Linguistics and Literary Linguistics are both kind of appealing, or there is a joint Modern English Language option (but I suspect you end up specialising in Applied or Literary at the end of this anyway). It is definately something I could do; it sounds harder than the BA (obviously), but I am getting a lot better at the course since I gave up Stones. However, it is not something I have a mad passionate burning desire to do, and I cannot justify spending £howevermuch on something which I will not really enjoy and which will leave me in exactly the same position that I am in now, only two years older and considerably poorer. Plus, there is a reason I was so unhappy at the end of last year and I would be a fool to willingly put myself in that position again. I came to uni because that was really the only viable option for me at that time, but continued academia is no longer my only choice and I would be silly to do it because it is safe, or because I would quite like the prestige of being a Dr., or because I am too scared to go out into the world and make my own living.

I am probably going to apply for a PGCE, once I work out a) what this involves and b) how to do it. I want to go and teach in some backwater village in the wilds of Yorkshire, living in a stone cottage with honeysuckle and lavender in the garden. I will grow my hair down to my waist and own a treadle sewing machine to run up last-minute costumes for the Christmas pageant. I will always be 'Miss' to the small adoring children I teach, but there might be a heartwarming romance with a local farmer or lord to make me happy. There will be a knitting circle and a book club and all the locals will love me despite my funny 'foreign' accent and I will organise May Day fairs and bonfire night and solve the occasional village murder as and when it happens.

Registering my hatred of the word 'uber'

- I think I am in love with Franz Ferdinand.

- My wireless gimmick is still not working. I did "chat" with a man from Belkin who told me to try installing it on a different computer. Plan of action: 1) Uninstall from current laptop. 2) Buy new laptop. 3) Install on new laptop. 4) Realise it was an adapter problem all along. 5) Buy two new adapters, one for each laptop. 6) Drop 'English Studies', begin life of cyber-piracy, only speaking in C++.

- I have wasted Day One of Reading Week! (I will add it to the running total of 14 wasted Reading Week days that I have accumulated in the last two years)

- Emma has been conducting terrifyingly inept scientific experiments in our back garden all day. I have been supervising (hiding).

- I walked all the way to Sainsburys with a spring in my step, and all the way back in a similar fashion. I bought flowers (partially for beautiful housemates, mostly for myself) and chocolate and lots of fruit juice. I put the fruit juice in the freezer, because apparently you can do that! The shopping was so heavy I put it in one of those orange over-shoulder bags and now I have a shoulder-hickey. Sexy!

- I am only dating boys in suits from now on. Preferably, boys in suits wearing those little ankle-boot things (see above).

- What is a good excuse for visiting my brother? Christmas (too far away), birthday (too intent on having fun here), Valentine's Day (too Freudian)?

- [requisite emo comment, question and/or query about boys]

- Quo and queef are not real words. And as if folds is a sex word. Honestly.

+5 points for sex words.

Mulled wine!
Scrabble!
Housemates!

Tragic Endings

Does anyone want to come and see Burial at Thebes with me? It is required for next semester and I do not want to go on the organised Eng Soc trip (usual reasons). It should still be interesting though! It is a reworking of Sophocles's 'Antigone', but this is literally all I know about it.

I was lucky I did not burst into tears halfway through my seminar today. Asking a roomful of emotionally fragile English lit students to bring in their favourite love poem was probably not the brightest idea ever. For the record, this was mine:

Talking in bed ought to be easiest,
Lying together there goes back so far,
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest
Builds and disperses clouds about the sky,

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Philip Larkin, Talking in Bed


I think I did it wrong, everyone else had got things like Keats and Byron and Shakespeare. Some Carol Ann Duffy. It was surprising how many people had brought things they did not really care about; one girl brought that Shakespearean sonnet, the 'My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun' one (I am sorry, I do not know the number) for the sole reason that it was a Shakespearean sonnet and therefore was about love. It is, but not in the traditional sense and she must have known that because she was in the first year with the rest of us when we spent two weeks looking at how Shakespeare's sonnets are actually about death and time and decay and very rarely about any positive form of love. Honestly.

On a related note, I was in Blackwell's yesterday and had to restrain myself from injuring the pair of overbred lit students in front of me. They were sniggering about some sort of 'inappropriate' novel they had found (and by 'inappropriate' I mean 'teenage fiction', not 'pornographic') and generally acting pretty pleased with themselves that they were above all that sort of thing. I hate how studying 'Literature' makes people into giant obnoxious monsters, but I hate even more how 90% of the people who choose to study literature are already giant obnoxious monsters. This is why I love Cognitive Poetics, I think, because it is closer to what I want to do with texts (treat them like cute fluffy bunnies and watch them frolic around) rather than what I have been forced to do with texts every day since Fresher's Week (circle them, cawing, until someone else has staked them down and then tear them apart systematically and with something approaching hatred).

On an unrelated note, last night was quite a lot of fun! Rachel's little brother stayed the night, and we went to the Grove as a form of entertainment. Four glasses of wine later I was passionately arguing with a tramp who had attached himself to the group and trying to find one good song on the jukebox. We stole a trolley on the way home (found it in someone else's garden!) and had trolley races up the street, and then I was a bit ill and passed out on my bed. This morning, it turns out that I had pinched the Grove's Sunday lunch menu and stuck it to our living room wall, which I do not remember doing AT ALL. Worrying.

Sorry I am such a lush, guys.