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Never Mind The Backlogs

Cryptonomicon is still good going whenever I have time to pick it up, but that doesn't mean I don't feel an ongoing and recently gnawing need to feed greed. Which is rather absurd, given that American Gods has languished, unopened, for far too long on my bedside table and needs a lot of TLC, The Prince really should get reread soon so I can return it to the guy I borrowed it from six months ago, and I really want to finish Love In The Time Of Cholera some day instead of reading it halfway three times and inexplicably abandoning it each time despite liking it very much.

So I suppose that means I shouldn't go out and buy Atonement today then.

Of course there is also the small matter of all the other books that remain unread and completely unfamiliar, such as Cases And Materials In Company Law, Cheshire And North's Private International Law, Dworkin's Law's Empire, Shaw's International Law...

I think this all boils down to an acute case of eyes bigger than brain.

Assinine

In my hall's somewhat lacklustre attempt to celebrate St George's Day, there was bickering over finding someone to play God Save The Queen on the piano.

Me: Tay, God made you more musically talented than me. You should play it.
Tay: God also gave me a fiiiiine ass to sit on, and that's what I'm doing right now. (plonks himself down in my seat)
Me: Fine. So what if I say God also gave me a fiiiiine ass to sit on, and I'm also gonna sit on it right now? (I plonk myself down)
Tay: Well your ass ain't finer than mine.
Me: Oh yes it is.
Tay: Oh no it's not.
Me: Well my ass can kick your ass's ass!

So much for my brilliant legal mind and rapier wit.

Fumbling With Múm

I already have problems writing anything remotely original, profound or unpretentious about a lot of the conventional instrument-based music I listen to, despite the fact that I like to believe I appreciate it on more than a superficial level, so I'm not even going to try to say anything more about Múm's Yesterday Was Dramatic - Today Is OK other than that it is one of the most exquisite little collections of bleeps, fuzz, static, dinky music-boxes and glockenspiel chimes that I've heard in a long time.

The Gayometer Has Spoken

So if Alec is 43% gay and Mark is only 40%, this makes my boyfriend even more of a raging queen than Her Majesty during the annus horribilis. Oh well. At least he cooks and cleans.

Hating Losing Doesn't Necessarily Make You A Sore Loser

There are so many things I've got in life which I've done nothing to deserve (good grades, tolerant friends, to name a few), but when you thoroughly deserve something (like winning the quarter-finals of a mooting competition where you clearly outclass the opposition and have worked damn hard for it too), to be denied it for no logical reason at all still hurts. A lot. I know I should shrug this off, focus on studying and not let this become even more of an exercise in futility than it already has been, rationalize that in the larger scheme of things this is hardly something to go into melodramatic raging-against-the-injustice-of-it-all about.

I know all this.

Right. Back to your normally scheduled flippancy. Let's just pretend none of this ever happened.

In Which Zen Calm Eludes Me

Fucking dissertation due today. Fucking moot tomorrow in fucking Lincoln about the fucking law of fucking finding i.e. if Lord Fucker leases his land to Fucker 1 who employs Fucker 2 as a gamekeeper, and Fucker 2 finds an antique brooch one day while walking through the forest, who gets to keep it? DUDE, DO I LOOK LIKE I FUCKING CARE????????

[Hmmmm. An addendum, now that Microsoft Word has finally kindly consented to stop conducting chaos theory experiments with my footnotes. The dissertation is printed. Love dissertation. Love computer. Love printer. I am calm and full of love. Except for the fact that I now need to prepare the moot. Which I still FUCKING HATE.]

Dissertation Description Shorthand

After a while, saying "I spent the day writing my dissertation, on Bentham" in conversation became too tiresome, so I shortened it to "I spent the day disserting: Bentham," and then that got to be a bit of a pain as well so I abbreviated it further to "I spent the day dissing Bentham," which is probably a more accurate description anyway.

When To Start Worrying

You know you should begin to worry a bit when you wake up to turn off the alarm clock and there's a Post-It stuck to it saying "ignore this and LOSE ALL SELF RESPECT!!!"

You know you should begin to worry a bit more when you don't even remember writing it.

Force Of Habit (20 Minute Loop)

Sometimes I probably take music deconstruction too far (although I hardly ever write about it here for fear of (a) sounding pretentious and (b) being wrong) but it was quite an epiphany when I was blissing out to Force Of Habit (20 Minute Loop) yesterday and trying to figure out what made a reasonably ordinary sounding song feel so tragically beautiful, and realized it was the augmented fifths in the chorus. (There you go, guilty of (a) already. Proceed with caution.)

Kelly Atkins' and Greg Giles' voices don't convey anything particularly special when singing on their own but the minute their harmonies begin you're drawn into their misery; they're staying up all night "finessing a way of keeping each other down", they're locked into a relationship destroying itself by "force of habit", and those augmented fifths strain at the seams with hurt and helplessness and regret.

I hasten to add that the song doesn't reflect my current mental state at all, and I hope it never does. For now the lump in my throat is pure sympathy, no empathy.

It's Reassuring When

It's reassuring when your pretty unfly white guy tells you he's just gone out and bought a hookah. You know he means a water pipe, not a ho'.

When Family Car Games Attack

dooce.com is funny today, especially if you used to play that game.

Games in our family car included As The Car Rounded The Bend The Baby Sister Hurtled Through The Window! Oh Wait, No She Didn't, Her Heroic Big Brother Saved Her. The two main players of this game were, unsurprisingly, my brother and myself, although given our considerably different sizes at the time (he's 11 years older than me) he pretty much wrote the rules.

East, West, Buying CDs Is Best

I'm sure foot reflexology is an enjoyable and beneficial form of alternative therapy when actually done by a foot reflexologist, but right now the most visible effects of the foot reflexology slippers my mother sent from home via my brother (here for a chess problem conference. He wasn't the most popular kid in the playground) are that I jump a mile every time I put them on and shriek "Fuck me, that hurts."

"Retail therapy", on the other hand, is a phrase too Generation X'y and Douglas Coupland stylie even for this Coupland fan ("parental units" is another), but it undeniably works wonders once embarked on. Sunday saw the acquisition of:

• Closer (Joy Division)
• Music Has The Right To Children (Boards of Canada, finally)
• Sound01: A Big Dada Sampler (excellent)
• Hip-Hop 24/7 (3 CDs featuring a surprisingly good range of styles: Roots Manuva, Aim, Jeru The Damaja, Public Enemy, Sugarhill Gang, and, er, Snoop)
• Urban Funk Breaks III (also much better than your usual bog standard Ultimate! Party! Breakbeats! compilation)
  (all of the above for a total of £28.85 at HMV)
• three pink items of clothing (one little top and two unmentionables)

Rocket (Smashing Pumpkins)

Ever since Yoichi nearly banged my door down in glee on Tuesday brandishing the Smashing Pumpkins DVD he'd just bought, and we rushed downstairs and monopolized the TV room by sheer noise and enthusiasm and nostalgia, thumping out drumming climaxes on the tables, belting out choruses and air-guitaring ourselves into a frenzy, everything has been building up to this morning.

Sun. Breeze. Saturday. All you need is Rocket.

Around 1.00 the riffs start sliding into that wonderful progression and I realize the rules I learnt in Grade 5 music theory about how some progressions just work and always will were actually spot on.

Around 1.20 what I've always somehow thought of as the "Indian motif" comes in. It's too insistent and compelling to feel sensuous, but it's damn sexy in its own way all the same.

They haven't hit us with the big chorus yet. It's coming. At 2.00 the guitar wails steadily and inexorably upwards, Billy sings "the moon is out, the stars invite. Think I'll leave toniiiiiiiiight..." and we're off, up, away, employ all the rocket metaphors you want, baby, because they're all good.

Ostensibly Holy Week

A week without Internet access leaves lots of blanks to be filled. More for my sake than yours, I propose to fill them. Here goes last week:

Ken has already given his/our impressions of Vertigo on Monday, except more coherently than we managed to express at the time through manic chortling on what I think was Waterloo Bridge.

Tuesday was a pleasant reminder of the fact that I'm still a moderately good debater despite a year of rustiness, and winning the friendly at QMW with Mark as partner was a fitting way to end our debating year. Dinner was my first ever carbonara, and then mixed-bag hip-hop and cringeworthy stand-up comedy at 93 Feet East. A sign attached to one of the bar tills said FUCK OFF in big red letters. It was a flyer for an upcoming Sonic Mook Experiment night. I brought it home.

Wednesday was the first day of the beginning of hell. Preparing music for Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday masses took the entire afternoon and most of the night. Choosing psalms. Compiling hymn packs for the choir. Practising everything on the organ. Photocopying, hole-punching, stressing, praying, cursing.

I realize it is probably inappropriate to describe making a joyful noise unto the Lord as hell, but even though the music all went splendidly well in the end and I'm actually really happy about that, I never, never want to go through that ever again. That is all I will say about the liturgical music aspects of last week, and, I suspect, more than anyone else would be interested in reading about.

At some point on Good Friday, at the same time as I was ploughing through Bentham as Proto-Feminist? in my room, Alec and Mark were apparently cosied up in Mark's room having some lesbian tea. (On inquiry I was told lesbian=herbal in this context. Perhaps this is reassuring. Perhaps not.)

At some point on Holy Saturday, when asking choir members to get themselves hymn packs, which I had by now started referring to as fun packs, I nearly called them fanny packs. (Note: if you are American, your understanding of the term "fanny" is quite different from ours. Over here the fanny is the bit even bikini bottoms cover.)

Later that night my hallmate was using a window-divider as an improvised pole against which to pole dance. It was a ground floor window opening out onto Gower Street. Gower Street's a busy street.

Alec describes the content of this site as "pointless meandering". I'm beginning to see what he means, but don't care. That was the week. Some called it Holy.

When Harry Met Sally Can Kiss My Ass

[Posterity Note: Written last night while merry. Somewhat embarrassing in the cold sobriety of morning. I admit I still stand by the sentiments, though perhaps not by the sentimentality.]

It's been far too long, I know. Even as I write this I am painfully aware of the 5980 or so words of my dissertation I have yet to write, and the vast unexplored realm of legal knowledge that was meant to have been this year stretching out before me, but right now I'm probably too drunk to be able to do real work and therefore resort to writing this.

Why this drunkenness, you wonder, and what is she drunk on? I'm not particularly drunk on alcohol, I must clarify. Half a bottle of wine and two Smirnoff Ices do not a drunk Michelle make. I am drunk on the sheer bliss of the click, the connection, the comfortable conversation, the warmth of a glance, the joy of remembered and continuing fondness. I am drunk on laughter and the honeyed sound of a trumpet in a smoky pub. I am drunk on love, platonic but long-standing and equally intense as all the other kinds, just in all sorts of different ways.

There is no cure for the blues quite like a night out with people you love. Tonight was dinner with Nick, ostensibly to celebrate our recent birthdays, but really just the impetus we'd been needing for the longest time just to get together and revel in the glory that is us. The Social in Angel yielded some good wine, an extremely good steak for Nick, an interesting rabbit risotto dish for me, and talk, and talk, and talk, as good as it had ever been, as if a gap of months had never happened. Russ joined us later in The King's Head, where the two boys enjoyed themselves shouting rather embarrassing and intrusive questions at me over rather good renditions of jazz standards.

To describe it more would make more, or less of it than it was. It was a night out with two of my best friends. It was a night that answered creeping and somewhat irrational fears of "Have we grown apart?" with a resounding NO. It was a night that reminded me, although I hadn't forgotten, that you can love and be loved in all sorts of ways. I was blue earlier this week. I'm not any more. Other things contributed to this, but tonight was the turning point.