I am slightly concerned that all my social networking is currently being carried out in the guise of a penguin.

Misha the Penguin now has a Twitter account: http://twitter.com/Mishaisapenguin

He says it will help him keep in touch with Rami while he is away.

Essay is done with. I hated writing it, hated the final product, hated everything.

But it's done.

Now, what to do with sweet sweet liberty?

I’m trying to write an essay for school (my last essay before I have to throw all in and hurl myself at the damn dissertation) and in my current wordless state it’s like pulling teeth.

It’s taken me two days to write three paragraphs.

Not that I’ve been trying as hard as I could. Gah!

I met up with my Dad on Sunday, since he nagged and nagged and nagged and wouldn’t leave me alone until I consented.

It was … okay.

Dreamwidth? Y/N?

Never mind the fact I hardly write here at the moment.

I really need to either get back into the LJ habit or give up altogether. This shilly-shallying in the middle is no good for anyone. I am reading, just not commenting very much, which is silly again, because commenting is part of the fun.

I had some more excellent spam (although probably not as good as ‘better wang parameters’). It says: Shower Sex – A Hedonistic Solution to Your Insomnia.

Why, yes, I suppose it might be.

Although I have the opposite problem to insomnia at the moment – extreme indolence. It’s not that I’m sleeping a lot but time is trickling away and I’m not doing anything. I was completely exhausted over Easter and mainly played Mass Effect but I’m less exhausted now but I’m still sort of rolling along.

I’m not worrying about it, though, not yet. I think I am content, actually, although is mildly distressing to be a creative and social void. Hopefully I will be more interesting in a bit.

On the other hand: sunny weather and April thunder storms.

I am I missing something but why the fuck would you want scented tampons?

I saw some in Boots today.

Like ... why?

Also, it's distasteful right? Playing into female paranoia? Are you afraid your body is disgusting? Try a scented tampon!

I haven’t written anything here for ages but I haven’t really felt like I’ve had anything to say. And LJ is a habit. Like crack.

The other day I walked past a parked van with a sticker on the side that read “God is my co-pilot.” This is, in itself, creepy but when I crossed to the front of the van I saw that it had been in an absolutely enormous smash.

I wish I’d been able to take a picture.

Life has been busy – I am trying to read John Henry Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua and it is the most boring book in the world. Otherwise I scoured the Internet for Earl of Rochester slash, couldn’t find any (on the internet?! You can get everything on the internet) and was therefore obliged to write some. I have also written a brief text adventure about our bathroom of fail which I shall post shortly.

My rage has made me unduly attached to the 'strong' tag.

As some of you may or may not recall, over Xmas the landlord decided he was going to re-do our first floor bathroom. He went about this in much his usual manner: blithely and idiotically. Despite his assurances that we would not be without a toilet at any time during this process and would only be without a bathroom for a week, we were in fact without a functioning toilet for three days (Dan and I fled to Dan’s parents, and thankfully Shani wasn’t in the house at the time) and have been living with a bathroom in various states of disarray ever since.

The bathroom is now as close to being complete as it has been since the landlord tore it all out in the first place.

I’d just like to emphasise that the previous bathroom, although not the most beautiful bathroom you’ve ever seen in your life, was marked by its comprehensive functionality.

The new bathroom is, well, quite nice to behold (being a bathroom it is never going to steal your breath with its scintillating gorgeosity) but fails in every other conceivable way.

The bathroom is quite a small space anyway but because the landlord was determined to fit in as much as possible into it, the overall impression is that everything in there is clustered around the toilet. Like it’s some weird scatological centre piece. Or a white porcelain shrine. If this were merely a issue of aesthetics I’d be fine, but there are practical implications as well?

For example, the heated towel rack has been stuck on the wall right next to the toilet which means that any reckless motion during the process of evacuation is likely to result in a burn or two. And, actually, just the other day I climbed out the shower and foolishly bent over to retrieve my towel from the floor … resulting in a toast-rack patterned injury to my arse. It was not a happy day.

Additionally, the mirror-fronted bathroom cabinet that previously resided above the sink so that one could, y’know, use the fucking mirror is now above the toilet. Why, God, why?! A more useless position I cannot not imagine, unless we were to bury the cabinet in the back garden in multiple pieces. In order to use the mirror at all affectively it now necessary to straddle the toilet backwards, like you’re a cowboy in a saloon.

This is neither helpful nor dignified.

Would that were the end of my litany of bathroom-focused woe.

The bath itself, although pleasantly capacious, is ludicrously high, requiring undue acrobatic proficiency when performing ingress and egress. This is particularly challenging when one is wet and slippery, as one often is when engaged upon one’s ablutions.

The exquisitely tiled floor, by the way, has taken its inspiration from ice rinks. So, not only does the bath require a balletic leap to leave it, but the chances are that your inevitably damp feet will find no purchase on the faraway floor.

And because the bathroom is so small, if you should happen to fall over, as, quite frankly, seems most likely it is also most likely that you will fucking die.

Am I done yet?

Oh no.

The shower is fitted over the bath. In order the protect the aforementioned exquisitely tiled floor from water damage, there is an immovable plastic screen extending half the length of the bath. This means that in order to turn on the fucking shower you have to be standing in the fucking bath. Directly under the water, in fact. Which, of course, is really rather cold when you first turn in on it.

To clarify, to turn on the shower in our bathroom the following ritual must be performed:

1) Lean crazily into the bathroom like you’re trying to flag down a passing jumbo jet
2) Streeeeeeeeetch
3) Streeeeeeeeetch
4) Fail
5) Remove clothing
6) Climb gingerly into ludicrously high bath, trying not to die
7) Edge towards the shower switch
8) Streeeeeeeetch
9) Streeeeeeeetch
10) Douse yourself in freezing water
11) Try not to jump back, squealing, lest you die (see above)
12) Edge gingerly away from the water while waiting for it to heat up
13) Be disappointed because on top of everything else the shower doesn’t get much hotter than room temperature.

Can there be yet more fail than this?

Well, yes, actually there can, both minor and major.

Minor: The edges of the pleasantly capacious but ludicrously high bath, for example, are so narrow that they cannot hold ordinary bathroom items, like shampoo and shower gel bottles, requiring yet further taking-your-life-in-your-soapy-hands manoeuvring around the bathroom of doom

Major: The toilet struggles continually with its raison d’etre of containing and removing human bodily waste. It has two settings, an environmentally-friendly flush which merely swirls the contents of the toilet around prettily and another flush which … doesn’t work either. I spent Sunday morning up to my elbows in poo and toilet paper. What, one wonders, is the point of having a toilet if it obliges you to remove poo yourself.

Life pootles on – all is well, I think. I am a bit tired and I have a bit of a cold but, yes, all is well.

Helen has got me obsessed with a German musical.

I have always had a bit of a kink (probably not the right word) for personifications of Death, especially if he/she/is is beautiful and angsty and inclined to fall in love with mortals. CAPITALS ENTIRELY OPTIONAL.

But these days it’s a tendre I feel uncomfortable indulging. It’s not a macabre glamorisation to play with in the wake of a friend’s suicide.

Although from an aesthetic perspective alone, if Death was going to fall in love with anyone I have known, it would be Celine.

But not matter how desperate they become, mortals do not fall in love with Death and he does not kill with a kiss.

On a happier note, we actually had pancakes on Pancake Day. This was very satisfying as usually I forget.

Harlequin has an adorably silly generate-a-romance thingy as part of their anniversary celebrations.

Here is mine. It is made of awesome.

Adventurous Kyra never realized that her fiancé, wickedly handsome male model Dan, saw her as just another item on his agenda. How could she share her life with a man who'd negotiated the terms of their marriage on paper instead of between the sheets? Years later, Dan needs Kyra — and is determined to claim an award-winning writer as his bride.

Kyra will return to Paris, the City of Lights with him — and if he has to seduce the brainy beauty into agreeing, then that will make it all the more pleasurable for him....

I particularly love "brainy beauty".

Although the idea of Dan being any kind of romantic hero type is, in itself, hilarious.

"But sweetie," he ground out, pacing like a tiger across her boudoir, "I love your nose."

Erk.

Oh God heavens … this is kind of …

Words fail me.

This is an hardly intelligible recording of Browning reading one of his own poems. I had no idea such things even existed. It’s such bizarrely fascinating, moving and incredible to actually hear the voice of someone so … remote, otherwise conserved only by their written words.

It’s hard to hear but I believe he’s trying to recite ‘How They Brought The Good News From Ghent To Aix’, which is a typically wrestlesome bit of Browning poetry.

Except what he says is something like this:

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;
I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three;
…
…
I’m terribly sorry but I can’t remember my own verses.

This charms me greatly.

Edit: I'm kind of obssessed with this now - I also recommend Yeats who sounds exactly like you would expect him to sound.

Please indulge me a moment as I burble about my not-so-secret fondness for romance for a bit.

There’s a new(ish) romance writer I feel particularly ambivalent about. Her name is Anna Campbell and she’s written three books to date, the first of which, Claiming the Courtesan, I remember spluttering about here a year or so ago. It was one of those “rape the heroine until she gets to like it” scenarios that personally do nothing for me. Basically I like my dominance games in the other direction.

On the other hand, I kind of came round to it (the book, I mean, not rape) retrospectively. I mean, it’s not my fantasy but there is something weirdly, compellingly readable about her. She has a rather nice, if perhaps over-ornate, prose style that kind does it for me. Perhaps I’m the romance reading equivalent of one of those guys who say computer games have been going downhill since the glory days of Pong but most of the romance books I treasure are actually quite old and, occasionally, even out of print. It’s just nice to find something a bit different, or daring you know – even if it’s not to your own taste.

Anyway, her second book I liked very much indeed. There was less raping of the heroine, the power dynamic was less fucked up, the hero was less blatantly psychotic…it had some flaws (really annoying over the top villain) but although it would be the book I’d take to a desert island with me, it’s not a book I’m actually ashamed to possess.

Anyway, as one of the few modern writers of historical romance that still interest me, I picked up her third book pretty speedishly. Tempt the Devil, it’s called. Well. Um. Again, it’s not quite to my taste. There are a lot of power games in it but not quite of the sort I like. Somehow. Also it’s completely exhausting. The hero and the heroine are up and down, up and down, so much emotion, so much angst. And I generally like my romances dark, intense and full of woe. I’m only up to page 200 and I had to stop to catch my breath. In a bad way.

But the really terrible terrible thing about it is the cover. Now, I know awful covers are par for the course if you’re a romance reader. But the thing is, I’m used to the guy with the mantitty and the mullet. He’s kind of harmless. I’d rather have the discreet feather and fan combination, which is the up market alternative but, y’know, sometimes it just doesn’t feel like a proper romance unless you’ve got a picture of a woman falling out of a historically inaccurate diaphanous dress and a dude with no shirt and a profoundly stupid expression.

Unfortunately, this being the 21st century and perhaps we’re too sophisticated nowadays for mantitty man … there seems to have been a move towards absolutely terrifying photographs. And I think Tempt the Devil might be the epitome, or rather nadir, of it.

Seriously. Check this shit out. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.

( cut for sanity )

Isn’t it just awful? I hate it so much I actually want to rip the cover off the book, except he’s also leering at me from the spine so I'd have to pretty much destroy the whole binding and then it would no longer function as a binding.

And, maybe it’s just me, but .. seriously … there's something unbelievably creepy about him. You look at him and you think "that man wants to rape me."

Why on earth is he on the cover of a romance book instead of in prison where he belongs?

Y’know, I think it’s been a good week.

I had two nights of school, one of which (religion in Victorian England) was awesome, and one of which (pointless dissertation hoop jumping of doom) was awful, but then I got to go to Intrusion afterwards which made it all better again. I think it was a good Intrusion, too, but I’m not entirely certain on account of getting inadvertently massively smashed. Normally we go to cocktails first but due to PDHJ of Doom I didn’t have time, so Shani and I split a bottle of fizz while we were gothing it up. And then I rolled around to Intrusion and had one shot of apple sours followed by one shot of tequila in good company (when, normally, Julian drink about three each) … and … then … ??? It was only when I left, sensibly at midnight, recalling that I need to get up for work the next day, and staggered out in the chill night air that I discovered I couldn’t walk so well. Thankfully nothing terrible happened, well no more terrible than the inadvertent consumption of vast quantities of kebab van chips and cheese.

And I caught up with various folks … and … triumphantly I completed all the irritating paperwork required before I’m allowed to actually embark upon writing a dissertation. Definitely the most stressful part of the exercise.

Also I have manoeuvred my 15k wordsers into bed. Finally.

So, yes, I am accomplished and, for someone who keeps having massive attacks of moop, contented.

I'm slightly embarrassed to like this song as much as I do ... I remember reading some blogs raving about at the end of last year and I was a bit "you saps" about it - although not outloud obviously. Actually it is heart-stoppingly romantic. I think it's must be the dancing...

( cut for embedded sappy video )

I had fun in the Bod last night. I was sitting in a corner with Wilmot the eeeeeee-pc when somebody sat down next to me with an identical eeeeeee-pc, although in white not black. For a while we just worked on our respective texts, but these two eeeeeee-pc rubbing shoulders with each other was cute not to remark upon, so I pulled up notepad and type “My eee is called Wilmot.”

Him: “Oh? Well mine is called Elizabeth.”

Me: “Really?!!?!!!!”

Him: “No, not really but wouldn’t it be wonderful if it was true?”

Me: “Mallet or Barry?”

Him: “Either?”

Me: “Well, you’ll have to be careful because the moment your back is turned, my eee is abducting your eee.”

And then he laughed out loud and everyone glared at us.

But yay.

Bodleian flirtation.

Yay!

There are few pleasures greater.

Also I feel like a complete ... I’m not sure what the word would be … fraud, possibly considering I was sitting there in reading room, surrounded by serious texts and dead great minds and fierce librarians and perspiring scholars … aaaaand I was reading Sweet Savage Love. When I went to collect it, the librarian kind of inched it across the desk towards me with the tip of his little finger as if I’d requested a turd from the stacks.

And one more thing: what the hell is up with the Bod these days? Talk about the most uncomfortable chairs in the fucking world. Also the individual lights are positioned at the back of the desk so you have to sit hunched over like Quasimodo in order to be able to read properly. What’s with that?! And why have I never noticed it before?

Y’know, I actually don’t mind Valentine’s Day. Like, it’s pointless and we celebrate it with pizza and Buffy (best way, darlings) … I imagine I’d be bitter-er if I was alone-er if that makes sense. Anyway, in anticipation I have waxed poetic. It has a fucking awkward rhythm but it’s meant to (although that still means it’s stuck with a fucking awkward rhythm) – it’s a kind of mock-heroic / adapt-an-alexandrine-today thing …

My dearest dearest darling, just a card to say
How very much I truly love you, but only
On this official and correctly sanctioned day.
I shall send you roses, messages impassioned
And all the proper tokens you could wish to see.
But don’t forget my sweet that my love is rationed.

(Adopt An Alexandrine would be awesome...)

I keep having moodswings, or rather downers – I hope this is PMS.

But I am resolved to write only frivolous / positive things in my LJ for a week, instead of angsting with ceaseless tedium.

Positive thing for today: I have written 3k of my dissertation, and intend to plough on this morning assuming I can keep actual work at bay.

Also: I think it is Intrusion tomorrow and I intend to go.

Also: I really want to see Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist (which was realised in the UK on the 30th Jan 2009) because the book was adorable … but it seems to have bypassed Oxford completely.

This is not woe, it is rage. Whyyyy? Well, fuck it, I shall go to London if I have to.

Dan’s fencing lesson was cancelled so the vaguely impending angst I felt for the evening to come was thus banished. I don’t know why I’m so moopy at the moment.

But it’s dreary. A moopy person is not a fun person. But I suppose now I am a recluse I don’t have to worry about whether or not I’m fun any more.

Also I just ploughed into my dissertation – I’ve written 1.3k words. They are probably not good words but I can worry about the later. The most important thing is that they’re there. I’m slightly embarrassed to note that I have approached my dissertation rather in the spirit of Nanowrimo. Oh well. No abstract, no problem!

Writing semi-seriously about romantic fiction is also hilarious. It feels like you’re cheating. I have several lines that I put in to make myself need to be taken out: “It is testament to the glamour of the Duke of Andover that he suffers no diminishment from this revelation of his unfortunate Christian name” (he’s called Tracy – oh Georgette, what were you thinking) and “Because the Duke keeps expressing himself by abduction…” I suppose this the pleasure for first drafts. You can be as silly as you please because nobody will ever know.

The fact I have put something down on paper (well, virtual paper) makes me feel much more in control of the whole situation.

I can do this.

Also there is yet more sno today. There is something peculiar about snow in Oxford. It is like you exist in two planes simultaneously. In the distance, is a picture-book city, adorned with a perfect icing sugar glitter. In the foreground it looks as though a gigantic demon slug has crawled on its belly down every fucking street. This is some sort of allegory for life, I’m sure.

But I want to know: how do you get to the beautiful bit?