Goddess Of Small Things

The details of my life seem that much more shallow sometimes when I try to write them down here, but for me buying a lot of CDs, endorphin-level-wise, is right up there with beautiful sunsets, belly laughs, MSG, and a warm man. Well, maybe not quite as good as a warm man, but anyway, it feels damn good.

So on Thursday I bought:

  • Since I Left You (Avalanches, £8.99, Virgin)
  • Spoonface (Ben Christophers, £8.99, Virgin)
  • Good Morning Spider (Sparklehorse, £8.99, Reckless)
  • Fog (Fog, £6.99, Reckless)
  • Black Whole Styles (Big Dada compilation, £7.99, Reckless)
  • cLOUDDEAD (cLOUDDEAD, £5.99, Selectadisc)

Yeah.

Dinner with Alec and his dad was inevitably stressful and toothachesome from holding back my usual stream of inappropriate comments and smiling a lot, but it was well worth it for the valuable ammunition of embarrassing Alec stories gained.

Back in my room, I snuggled up in bed with cherry juice and Life Isn’t All Ha Ha Hee Hee (Meera Syal), which I found very much more tragic than ‘omedy, as opposed to the You’ll laugh! You’ll cry! type review excerpts it had on the back cover and elsewhere on the Web. When I closed the book the light outside was long beyond Prussian blue and well on its way to eggshell.

Happy Ending

I’ve only just come to the stage of post-examness where writing for the blog begins to feel like a growing necessity rather than the enforced sidetrack from Getting A Life that it would have been in the past few days.

There is nothing wild or bacchanalian to report. Company Law went much better than I’d expected, and I left quickly after exchanging a few perfunctory words with the few people I actually talk to in the course, nothing of substance; there was no feeling of Here Ends Undergraduateness (assuming I pass), no lump in the throat.

It’s an illustration of my general lack of connection with the social aspects of the law faculty, I guess, even if I will miss the lady in the cafe who worried aloud that the owner of the purply coat left behind (mine) would be cold and since then always reminds me to take it with me when I leave, the lovely Irish security guard who always tried to calm me down every time I was desperately apologizing that my debating tournaments were keeping him there overtime (we always got him some whisky to make up for it), and strangely, the roadworker on a long-term job on the road to the faculty, who chats me up every time I walk past and tells me I’m pretty even when I look bloody awful.

I grabbed a Time Out, a Marks & Spencers lunch, and made a long list of things to do, both practical and frivolous. I went shopping – the makeshift stall on Goodge Street again proved itself an unlikely treasure trove when I found Adventures In Foam (Cujo, 2 CDs, £10), reeled back in disbelief, and snapped it up hungrily. Oxford Street yielded two skirts and a garish top.

Last year the night the exams ended was celebrated in typical style – dinner, pub, club till dawn. This year I had dinner with just Russ (in Carluccio’s, which I loved. Can’t wait to try the one in St Christopher’s Place). It felt right, celebrating the end of my undergraduate life at UCL with a friendship which I count among my most important achievements at university. I didn’t feel the need for anything more glamorous.

Insensitive

The exam venue was a large room which is usually a stomping ground for rampaging medical students (in their UCL Union building on Huntley Street. Thursday nights here are epitomized by mass karaoke and wild table dancing.) I think it was a bit insensitive to leave the Time Crisis machine in there when converting the room to an exam hall.

Hall Chronicles: Theology Students

Being around theology students makes life that little bit more surreal. Two conversational snippets with my hallmate Stefan:

Me: You look troubled.
Stefan: Yes, I am trying to write an essay. The Trinity, it is annoying me.

*

Me: So how’s the studying for ancient Greek going?
Stefan: Oh, I decided to focus on human salvation instead today. I thought it was more important.

Star Wars Cockney Rhyming Slang

On Wednesday morning Xfm was giving out Attack Of The Clones tickets (still can’t say that without making it into ATTACK!!!! of the clones) for the best Star Wars Cockney rhyming-slang listeners could come up with. One guy’s contribution was “Imperial Fleet”, to be used in the context of “let’s go into the bedroom and I’ll show you my Imperial Fleet”. Another guy called up later, suggesting “Trade Federation”, which is “something you can do with your Imperial Fleet”.

New Adventures Of Bobbin #1

I really, really, really should be studying anti-suit injunctions, but I’m too busy embarrassing myself by laughing out loud in the computer cluster room at The New Adventures Of Bobbin (found at Jolene’s), which you will absolutely love if you are a sarky Singaporean ex-convent girl like yours truly (okay, they’re technically not convent girls in the comic, but they’ve got the uniform, the humour and, er, sense of morality), and even if you’re not, go read it anyway for proof that Singaporeans do have a sense of humour.

Oh, and can someone competent in Mandarin please explain this one to me?

Meanwhile, I’m at strip number 74. Only 37 more to go before The New Adventures Of Anti-Suit Injunctions…

They Should Have Achtunged, Baby

Other notable snippets from the weekend include overhearing the Columbian priest staying in my hall discussing terrorism in his country – “Oh, the FARC, it is terrible…” – sorry, childish, I know, and Mark’s (see entry for Monday, 13 May) references to my metaphysical chastity belt when discussing the Channel 4 documentary on Nazi homophobia.

The boy continues to misunderstand. My point, flippantly made, was that surely shagging while you are an NS soldier in Nazi Germany meant to be on duty patrolling the forest, is a dereliction of duty whoever or whatever you’re shagging, especially if you are supposed to be devoting your entire being to serving the Fuhrer rather than servicing Lieutenant Bigschtaff. But enough said on the topic. Mark’s just a slag. :P

Now I Know He Really Loves Me

Alec has earned a significant amount of boyfriend credit (spendable on forgotten anniversaries/birthdays, or uncalled-for “you look fat in that” remarks) by volunteering to buy us Sonic Youth tickets for their gig here in June (can’t wait, can’t wait), and actually following through on that promise the very next day. This from a man who forgot his own 21st birthday and enjoys traditional Irish music rather than my somewhat more abrasive tastes.

[Admittedly this compartmentalizes him too much. He was, after all, walking down the street with me just on Sunday holding a laminated bra in one hand and a lager-soaked jumper in the other. But that’s a long story.]

Halfway Through, Need More Bullshit

It’s half over. There was an annoying little man in my dreams last night; he had black spectacles and a reedy voice and followed me around rasping “interpretation, interpretation” when he wasn’t engaged in unintelligible mumbling. Without needing to don my armchair dream interpreter hat, I think I can safely say that he was very much inspired by this man, whose existence I was hoping to completely ignore in today’s jurisprudence exam due to my hatred of his Law’s Empire. I unfortunately failed in this noble endeavour, but am comforted by the fact that I only invoked his evil name in criticizing Fuller’s The Morality of Law, which richly deserved the criticism anyway.

So much for the fun exams. Today’s went fairly well compared to public international law last Thursday, where I found myself answering an essay entirely from hazy memories of the Human Rights Act, which I studied in 1999. I daresay much more has happened since then than Naomi Campbell’s grudge match with the tabloids, and I’m sure actually studying the topic would have allowed me to write an essay more than one page long, but such is life.

And now to Conflict of Laws next Monday (which I haven’t started studying for) and Company Law the day after. I think the bullshitting possibilities of these exams ran out today. Ulp.