Starting Third Year
I’ve finally managed to find more than ten minutes to spend in the computer room – it’s been frustrating these past few days, with so many things I feel like writing about, and so little time to put stylus to screen/fingers to keyboard to record it all. If anyone (anyone?) has been checking in here every now and then to find very little has changed, I apologize and plead Real Life Syndrome. But don’t give up on me yet – I’ll probably be cured of that particular malady soon enough, if 3rd year law and my intellectual pride have anything to do with it. Sigh.
Sunday was surreal. I spent most of the day in a narcoleptic daze due to having had no sleep for the previous 24 hours after spending the night alone in the Athens airport. I’m not really at my socializing best when acutely sleep deprived. I tend to vocalize my inner monologue a lot more. My usually intricate self-censorship system breaks down. I get goofy, almost child-like. I make even filthier comments than usual, or comments that only mean anything in my inner world and are exceedingly strange in the one everyone else inhabits. I don’t think of any of this as necessarily bad – it is, after all, a glimpse of me that’s perhaps more genuine than what’s normally available, but I don’t think it’s my preferred introductory impression either. One thing I didn’t exhibit was grouchiness, partly due to Russ delivering CDs, speakers and box-hefting assistance in the afternoon, John calling at night and just being John, and the general joy I always feel on coming back to London and the lovely hall I live in.
Oh yes, the hall. It’s lovely. It’s the same place I lived in last year, except this year I actually have to take on some responsibility. I’m the choirmistress (stop laughing, everyone who knows me), and have to choose hymns for our weekly masses, coordinate musical accompaniment for mass and do whatever the hell (oops) I can with throwing together a choir. At this point I should probably say I don’t sing very well. I sing in tune, but my tone is far from dulcet, and the last time I was in a choir I was a very ill little Christmas caroller who lasted a few houses before getting sick on the floor of some unfortunate person’s condo. But back to the hall being lovely. My two nearest neighbours are rather nice chaps who also happen to be exceptionally easy on the eye. My room is massive, which is a pleasant change from last year. So far the people who have moved in are promising to be excellent company – Mark, previously introduced here as My Bitch, is a source of eternal amusement, and other people with unconventional senses of humour are already becoming apparent. I thought I’d be going to gigs alone this year, since Marten’s graduated, but there’s a guy in the hall studying composition who likes Pixies and Pavement and Beck, so perhaps I’ll have some company after all. Our housekeeper nun still goes through occasional bouts of Nazi-ness, but you can’t have everything.
Speaking of gigs, I want to go to these, or whichever of these I can manage:
- Mark B & Blade, 11 Oct
- Sparklehorse, 11-12 Oct
- Roots Manuva, 12 Oct
- Rollins Band, 16 Oct
- eels, 25 Oct
- Mercury Rev, 2 Nov
At university, the first week of term’s been reasonably typical, or rather, reasonably typical for me and my particular social patterns. Feelings of extreme blahness at seeing most of my coursemates in the law faculty, although of course there were some exceptions. Walking around Freshers’ Fayre and getting accosted by various friends at various society stalls (Lib Dems, LGB, Film, Thai etc.) reminded me that I’ve always found the societies environment at UCL far more socially appealing than that in the faculty. My own quick trawl of what was available got me a place on the drum’n’bass society mailing list and a couple of jazz society leaflets which I’ll get round to reading at some point, and hopefully get round to attending at some point after that. I spent most of the time standing at the debating stall promoting our first debate of the year (This House Believes That Penetration Is Not Enough). I admit it wasn’t particularly hard work persuading people to come to a debate about hardcore pornography with free wine available, but for some reason I was exhausted by the end of it all.
Late nights this week have been spent snuggled in bed with a book (a trip to the library yielded the new Seamus Heaney collection, Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance, and W.S. Graham’s Collected Poems), listening to all the music I missed terribly over the summer while my CDs were in Russ’s attic and I was in Singapore, and generally feeling, just for a few precious (delusional) minutes, that all’s right with the world.