On the train from Bristol:

Bloke in a nice coat who reminded me of my friend Eivind: Veni vidi vici
Pretty girl: E tu, Brute?
Ugly man: Anno domini
Pretty girl: No, no, that's only two words, too easy.
Me: What's the game, to say things in latin?
Pretty girl: Yes, but it has got to be longer than two words
Me: Quo usque tandem abutere patientia nostra, Catilina?
Pretty girl: That's not fair, you speak latin.
Me: Nope, I only know that sentence. Means "why are you wasting our patience, Catilina?"
Pretty girl: Cool. You win.

I mean, how often do you get to a) show off like that in front of pretty girls and b) actually use knowledge like that when you aren't on QI?

I have too many favourite poems, but there are some that I read more often than others. Some of these are about as exciting as liking Mozart: of course you do. Poems that I have read more than 20 times:


I Know I Am But Summer To Your Heart by Edna St. Vincent Millay
( I know I am but summer to your heart )


Therapy by Walta Borawski

( unravel the obsession )

Sonnet #130 by Shakespeare

( my mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun )


Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

( Whose woods these are I think I know )


The More Loving One by W.H Auden

( Looking up at the stars, I know quite well )


Dulce Et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen

( Bent double, like old beggars under sacks )


Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath

( I have done it again )


Beneath My Hands by Leonard Cohen

( beneath my hands )

Upon a Dying Lady, parts II and III by W.B Yeats

( Curtain Artist bring her Dolls and Drawings )


I could go on.

In order of importance:

1: my feet are cold
2: I owe my bank £400
3: I can't get a UK bank account because Barclays is the worst bank ever
4: I have an essay due in a week and I haven't even read the book
5: Everyone has gone away for reading week and I'm lonely
6: I accomplished nothing today
7: I'm generally dissatisfied

I am so unbelievably dull. How did I not realize?

I suddenly have the time to consider whether or not I'm happy. And I suppose I am! And in November, when I'm usually sobbing into my tea and waiting for March. Truly impressive. I've finished all my essays (though the Shakespeare one was a bit shit), I have next to no work to do over reading week, MY FRIEND EIRA CAME OVER FROM NORWAY, I have only argued with one person this week, I'm catching up on my correspondence... Good times. Though some of my friends and family are less than awesome and there's not that much I can do on this side of the channel. I'm not a good conversationalist any day, but when I'm present I can at least offer hugs and a shoulder to cry on. I can't wait for Christmas, to see snow, see my dad again, find out if he likes all the new music I've discovered/been forced to listen to over here.

Alex just came in and complained about my playlist. I'M ALWAYS PRETTY HAPPY WHEN I'M JUST KICKING BACK WITH YOU.

Eira, Alex and I are going out soon, it will we fun to go to central London with someone who doesn't live here. London used to be a bit magical to me before I moved here. I wished we did more, went to more plays and galleries and walked about more. But mostly we just sack out on someone's bed and watch things on iplayer.

As You Like It, 4.3, line 105 and so on, Norton p. 1670 as it really happened.





Oliver: Oh, hi there, lion.
Lion: Oh, piss off.
Orlando: *kicks lion in the head*
Lion: *dies*
Oliver: Omg, you can kill lions? We should do lunch sometime. Nevermind that thing where I wanted to set fire to you, that's just how big brothers are. My hat is nicer than yours, but that's all right. We'll be friends. Oh, you have hot babes in this forest? I like this forest. It is a good forest. I should sell this forest on ebay.
Celia: Hi, I'm a hot babe.
Oliver: I like hot babes. Let's get married in fifteen minutes.
Celia: Oh, all right, since your hat is so nice. Almost as nice as that Crusoe bloke's hat.

Had a workshop at the Globe. WAS ON STAGE AT THE GLOBE. It was well good.
"Pick whatever Shakespeare line you know and say in the directions I just showed you."
"What if you don't know any lines?"
"Say: O!"
(I ended up with "If music be the food of love", but only because "O!" got a bit old.)

Went to a concert with m'colleague _stormcrow_ . Not a hardcore headbanging rock concert, it was Händel and Mozart. And it was really good! I used to hate Händel a bit, because we were forced to write down facts about his life for music lessons in primary school, but The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba is a kicking tune, man.

Had cake in a cafe with rude waitresses. Then we took the tube home, and I went to New Globe (the pub) to make my day symmetrical. Had some bad news. A bloke bought me drinks. I bought me drinks. That's pretty much it.

I did wake up in bed, in my pyjamas, with a bottle of water on my windowsill. So that's good?

I HATE MYSELF.

(I know the young master doesn't play the ukulele. But he would if he had one.)

I want to learn to play the ukulele. Why, you ask?

BECAUSE IT IS VERY COOL. All the cool kids do it. Want proof?




Thus.

This post was brought to you by: my essay suddenly makes no sense and is too ranty and is due in three hours.

Men don’t like romance, it’s girly
Being girly is bad. Very bad.
Manly men aren’t gay
Women: also known as “some pussy”
Women: you can’t sleep with them and respect them at the same time, because only dirty women will sleep with you anyway.
“you’re just putting the pussy up on a pedestal,”
Having a good time with other men involve smoking weed and proving that you’re a man by fucking bitches
Men need to masturbate, women shouldn’t
People being made fun of in this film:
People who are in any way shape or form feminine
Actual women
Transvestites
People who are not Seth Rogen
“You punch her in the head emotionally”
HAHAHAH GAY IS FUNNY, MEN CAN’T SHOW EMOTION BECAUSE THAT IS GAY BAHAHAHAHAAH
Women come along. In exchange for the pussy, oh, I mean sex, men need to grow up for some weird reason. Stupid women and their demands!
Why is the woman so cute, why is she in this film? Run away, cute woman! Run away!

THIS FILM IS SO BAD. Now I will analyse its ideologies and beat it with a Marx-shaped cricket bat. Suck it, Apatow.

I think I might be the tiniest bit in love. I usually am, but with a higher intensity level than my crush on the librarian, Callum Keith Rennie or even my friend from back home. He reminds me of Cartwright and Durham, hardly a good sign. I keep doing this. I have a tendency to fall for people with sexualities that don't match mine, people over 40, fictional people, historical people, people in relationships, people who hate me. In this instance, most of these fit. This is a very predictable and boring defense mechanism to keep me from getting hurt again. Since this is all happening inside my own head, it's difficult to hide it from me and I caught on after only three years.

The worst thing is that if it turned out to be mutual, I'd have to breathe into a paper bag and maybe jump off a building because that would be awful. But this unreciprocated whatsit, I'm good at that. It makes me emotional and nervous but also productive and creative and it's all right. Proper love makes me dull and dependent and unable to cope. It doesn't appeal to me.

(No, this is not about my Shakespeare seminar leader, though he is awesome and I dream about bicycling around in France with him.)

I got tagged by thebirdmachine to make a list of sexy people. I didn't obey the rules, though, because they are not in order. THEY ARE ALL SO LOVELY.

Rules:

1. List 10 (or 15!) celebrities you would have sex with without asking questions.
2. Put them IN ORDER of your lust for them (15 to 1; 1 is the hottest).
3. Supply photos for said people.
4. Say which movie/show/thing it was that hooked you.
5. Tag 5 people: _stormcrow_ and... can't be bothered.
( Stephen, Hugh, Maggie, Lisa, Callum, Olivia, Lily, Snape, Steve etc etc etc )

Just came back from seeing As You Like It at The Globe. It was completely amazing. They made a brilliant (if weird) text even better, and made the sounds of helicopters flying above blend in naturally. Jamie Parker was brilliant as Oliver/the evil brother who for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture decided not to be evil anymore. Also, he is handsome. Dominic Rowan made Touchstone a very Blackadder sort of fool, and was rude and funny and had some awesome moves. Jack Laskey as Orlando made me feel embarrassed that the performance was being filmed, in case my staring and sighing was caught on tape. He is intense in a very David Tennant sort of way. I want to have his babies. If the word delish was in the dictionary, his picture would be next to it. And the girls! Even though Celia's part is a bit more in the background, Laura Rogers really made the most of it. I hadn't heard of her before, need to check what else she's been in because she was excellent and very very pretty. And the boygirls! The transformation from Rosalind to Ganymede was perfect. All it takes to be a bloke is a complete shift in attitude and shorter hair. And a leather outfit. That was a GREAT leather outfit, people.

IF YOU ARE IN LONDON, GET TICKETS, I THINK IT CLOSES THIS WEEKEND!

Robinson Crusoe is the worst piece of literature I have ever read, and I have read Bridget Jones' Diary.

Robinson Crusoe in five minutes:

I am from York. I want to go to sea. My mummy says no. The middle classes are cool. They are not too rich, nor too poor. I go to sea anyway. It goes horribly wrong. I keep doing it. I become a slave. Then I sell my friend as a slave, because I am a bastard. Then God punishes me for being a bit of a twat by letting me get shipwrecked. I take a toothpick, and tobacco, and my cutlery, and a bible, and everything else that I might need from the ship. I describe these things in detail, twice. I write in my diary like a fourteen year old girl. I get sick. I get religious. I get better. I stop being religious. I make the island into my own little plantation. I start being religious. I kill animals. I make bread and think that I invented it. I make a hat. I tell you about my hat for 60 pages. The hat, oddly enough, has all the functions of a hat. I see a footprint. I think about the footprint for a very long time. I assume it's the devil. I discover that there are cannibals on the island. I describe their customs with very, very many adjectives. I consider whether or not to kill them. I save a man from the cannibals and kill some of them, because that is how I roll. I decide to name the ex-prisoner instead of just asking him what his name is. I decide to own him, because he is black, though with no afro, and that is how I roll. I make him a hat. I describe his hat in great detail. I make my slave convert to a religion I don't really believe in myself. I kill some more savages and meet some marooned blokes. Then, in an unlikely chain of events, I am saved and return to England. I then get filthy rich, fight some wolves and a bear, and send some ladyfolk to my colony for wifemaking purposes.

There.

Bought a lamp
Made soup
Read Romeo and Juliet
Generally basked in domestic bliss
Helped two wasted people get in bed
Chilled out on an adult-sized shrimp costume (it was nice and squashy)
Shared a bed with another Irish person (She was fab, we talked about tits and I fell asleep giggling.)
Lost my keys
Found my keys
Offended all my neighbours
Pissed off the cleaning lady
Failed to purchase a bike in Brick Lane
Purchased a cup with TWO HANDLES instead (cool.)
Watched five dvds and a bit of Xena the Warrior Princess
Spent too much money
Made an arse of myself
Met the most clichéd posh bloke ever
Wished I still had my headkicking boots (the two were related)

I will not make a list of the things I didn't do that I was supposed to, because that will just depress me. Best British bank, anyone?

I tried to post a bunch of links, but livejournal won't let me. Everything turns blue and bold and looks like crap, even though there are no open B's in the html. What am I doing wrong? Livejournal won't let me ctrl+z it either, twat. I will go smash something now.

Second day of lectures today. Lived in London for a week now, starting to settle in. It's starting to feel like home. Helps that I have _stormcrow_ withing ceiling-knocking distance. The crowd in Maurice Court where I live are all very nice people, though none of them seem to find me very fascinating. My neighbours are lovely, Emily who lives in the room next to mine is one of those sparkly people with cooking skills and bright smiles, and Callum who lives upstairs has great taste in music and thinks pasta with ketchup is dinner. Poor lad. After just a few days an Irish pub was established in the courtyard, meaning that we hang out outside Irish-Johnnie's kitchen window (in which there is a huge Irish flag) and drink. A lot. There are a lot of Irish people here, like Terri from Derry, who is awesome and with whom I went to a fancy dress party. As Bosie to her Oscar Wilde. It was deadly.

Reading, theory and interpretation scares the crap out of me, the essay assignments look incomprehensible and difficult and long. But we're doing Marx! And Freud! And Robinson Crusoe. Damn it five times around the car park and back again for another damnit. I hope Man Friday kills Crusoe. Does he? Please tell me that he does. (I know he doesn't. BUT IT IS SUCH A NICE THOUGHT.)

Making Theatre Work is led by a slightly crazy American and is based on the work of an insane group called Goat's Island. Very experimental, a bit too experimental for our first performance here, perhaps. Weird stuff. Could be cool. Could be just weird.

London, culture, performance is also led by an American, this time a woman who shares my name. I have no idea what this course is actually about even though I sat through a two hour seminar this morning.

On Wednesdays and Thursdays I have NOTHING (except writing essay, reading FUCKING ROMEO AND JULIET, etc) which is nice. And then Shakespeare every Friday. For a year. Please let us do Hamlet?


( SOME PICS FOR YOU )


Tally ho, pip pip!

My morning:

*BANG BANG BANG*
"Hello, maintenance!"
"Uhh. Hi."
"I'm here to fix your toilet seat."
"Sorry about the mess."
"No problem, miss, you live here, not me! Sorry to wake you up."
"'s all right."
"Were you out last night? Seems like everybody and their brother went. There you go miss, all fixed."
"Thanks. Bye!"
"Bye! Lalalalalalala..."

He was very nice! Except I hate being called miss. "Hello, unmarried little girl with no authority!" Mrs is worse, to me it's just "Hello, you are a woman of marriageable age, thus you are married". It's just a system of ownership, isn't it? Miss = your dad owns you. Mrs = your husband owns you. I know you native Englishers use it so much you probably don't think about it, but isn't it awful that every single letter I get from UCAS and my uni is marked with my marital status? I am getting a PhD just so my letters will be addressed to doctor Johanne.

I'm settling in all right, except getting a bank account here is SUCH A HASSLE. I can't go to the local branch, because it's not big enough. How much space do you need to open a bank account? You need ten pieces of paper signed and a calculator and a credit card. And it takes three weeks. What on earth do they do in those three weeks, count my money by hand, thrice? And I need a letter from QM, which I can't get until I enroll on Thursday.

I feel very grown up, buying my own bowls and a garlic press and things. Except I still don't have plates. Or a pizza cutter. But I do have some of the books I need to read. I have to read Frankenstein, which is annoying, since I did that six months ago and it was only interesting because it was TEH FRANKENSTEIN and not because it was actually any good.

I've given everyone here nicknames in my head so I'll remember their names, like handsome John, pyjama Johnnie, Starkey and Hutch Alice, not-Keith Callum and brown jacket Piers (someone told me it was with an S, you have to spell it like that, surely? Piers or Pierce.)


This post was brought to you by Too Much Time Spent With Irish People™.

Guess who I met in Shanghai? A German girl called Stephanie Kowalski. "Do you have a cousin or something called Stanley Kowalski?" I asked her. She had to think about it, but no, no Stanleys. "So I guess there are no Stellas, either." "No, my sister is called Stella!" Hahaha. So, I asked if she had read Streetcar, or seen the film. She hadn't. But now she's going to. STELLAAAAAAA!

Went to the hairdresser to get extensions at nine in the evening. I left at two in the morning, looking like this:



It was so funny. The guy told me it would cost 2-300, so I thought, what the hell, it’s cheap, it doesn’t matter if they don’t have the right colour or if it ends up looking like crap. Even so, when they started braiding my hair I nearly cried. It looks like I’ve tried and failed to get rasta braids. They really had no idea how to do it, they kept asking other people and getting advice from the old woman who was getting her hair dyed. They just made tiny rasta braids near my scalp. But it’s “no problem, it makes me look like an Indian”. Don’t you love it when people decide on your behalf what is and what isn’t a problem? “These shoes are not size 38. They’re 36.” “Ah, no problem, no problem!” “Sorry, yes, problem.”

Anyway, I decided to just let them do their thing and then shave my head in the morning. But when they’d done everything except the very top of my head (at around one thirty) they decided to tell me that it was actually 1500. So we argued with him, told him a hundred times that we agreed on something completely different. I said that either, I leave with my hair half done and all his precious hair still in and he gets nothing, or he finishes it for 500. He refused. I threatened to shave my hair off. It was good that I had Alex there, who was calm and reasonable and speaks Chinese properly. We good customer/ bad customer-ed him until he agreed to do it for 700. One-two punch.

Now I'm trying to get them out, and it hurts and it's very difficult and I curse that hairdresser with all the old Norse curses I know. (Two.)

I love:

Shanghai and the people I met there
Regina Spektor
My friends
Re-reading Harry Potter
Leonard Cohen
My spiffy blue suit (following in father's footsteps...)
The progress I made in Shanghai, anxiety-wise
The Norwegian commies
Election night
Naked Lunch by Burroughs
Norwegian bread
Drinking water from the sink
Mattresses
Twitter
Due South fanfiction
That I have gotten over my irrational fear of taking the underground
Autumn
Playing around with my new Norwegian wordpress blog
The word "petticoats"
Squashing all my belongings into three suitcases
Sneezing
London