Ahahah. Matt and I comparing days via Facebook messages:

“Party sounds good, although i’m sure my mega party at the barbecue today was way more fun, except for the incidences where a four year old tried to rugby tackle me on the bouncy castle (three times) which basically involved running at me, hands flailing and headbutting me in the balls.”

I’m going to Oxford tomorrow. Should be good fun, though obviously not as good fun as spending a similar day in CAMBRIDGE. Confirmation of opinion to follow.

fly from the highest wing

I’m home. Hello. I got back on Sunday, after an anxious half hour of packing the car and wondering if we would have to leave behind some possessions/me to take the train home. But everything fit in the end, with some pretty tight squeezing, and after a quick trip to EAT for sandwiches with Matt, we came home. It was sad to leave him, and sadder to know we won’t really get to talk for a month, but it’s alright for the time being. We said all the important things, face to face. And I have company here, and things to occupy myself with, and all in all I’m happy enough to be home.

So I’m back here until 9th July, when I go to Rome with Ev, Emma and Emily – yay! Before then I have vague aspirations to unpack/clean my room, tune my guitar, organise 30 minutes of string trio music and perform it successfully in a concert in Whitwick on the 5th. I’m also looking to clear out a lot of old stuff that as a nineteen-year-old I don’t really need in my room anymore – I think charity shops and ebay will be the places for that. I’m getting my exam results sometime this week too.

The weather’s beautiful at the moment, so I’m trying to get out for a walk every day too. It’s easy to stay indoors all the time if I don’t have specifics to do, but no exercise means insomnia and sleeping in past lunchtime, and that’s not something I want to slip into this holiday.

you can’t always get what you want

Last night was epic. It being epic is the main reason I’m not yet sleeping and not yet even feeling like it: we went to bed at 7:30am. A ceilidh began in the fellows’ garden tent at 3am and when we came out at 4 dawn was coming. And then we danced until 6. I also discovered that a big benefit of wearing a deep red dress is that the plentiful stains (chocolate and various people spilling drinks) aren’t… quite so visible.

My room is an absolute tip today, which I need to do something about. I’m tending towards apathy though, so it’s rather up in the air as to whether I’ll start now or go back to Matt’s where I imagine he and George are still either watching the Matrix or playing Mariokart. I’d guess at the latter. George goes home tomorrow.

I don’t want to go home. I really don’t. Or no – that’s not really it, because I love home. I just don’t want to leave. If only I could have the one without the other. I guess the Rolling Stones are right about that one. Or maybe two.

…but if you try sometimes you just might find
you just might find
you get what you need.

the shot that stops my heart

So exams finished on Thursday. Hooray! Since then I have had a blissful state of affairs where I’ve been occupied with a lot of stuff but none of it relating to Greek, Latin or anything else amounting to hard work. A lot of it has been related to sleep, socialising and champagne. (And pimms.) The weather’s not been bad for that either.

Strangely I’ve been feeling a bit more tired since finishing exams than I did while doing them, but I think when I have something that needs doing, I do it, and it’s afterwards that I start drooping. And I have been quite busy since too, but for significantly different reasons – my days have been filled with loveliness. Drinking pimms and listening to Disney, the final evensong of term, then formalling and traipsing around town until too-early hours (Thursday), shopping for (EPIC) dresses with Ev and Emma, rehearsing and playing (unrehearsed electric violin!) in a concert then rewatching Casino Royale (Friday), shopping, going to a garden party and going to see the Footlights’ Fringe show (today). I like this new schedule a lot better.

But I can see where things like sleep are losing out. Tomorrow I’m up early for the last chapel eucharist, then we’re punting on the Cam with Christopher and chapel regulars, then we have New Hall’s garden party to go to. I might also be sleeping over in a tent in Clare College, but that’s yet to be determined.

This week makes everything worth it. I don’t care if I’m exhausted and sleep deprived, but this time next week is the very last day of my first year here, and it feels like the days are numbered now until yet another goodbye. I need to make this count.

so i carry you

Eee, latin prosecomp is over! (Sensing a theme to my posts of late…)

I think that’s the first time I’ve come out of an exam and not felt bad after checking up on all the bits I didn’t know. I can never resist doing that afterwards (yes, idiot) and it nearly always turns out badly. This was alright though; amazingly I managed to get a lot of subjunctives right (and there were a bloody lot – that many subordinate clauses is just not necessary, thanks), except I used oportat as the subj. of oportet (oporteat) and egisserit as perf subj of ago (egerit). But I don’t mind those, they’re unusual and more excuseable. And I smacked clausuli and chiasmi all over the place as well, so hopefully that’ll do me good.

Unfortunately I wasn’t quite so fortunate with the one word I had to make up – tribunitas (fem.) for ‘tribuneship’, where actually it’s tribunus (masc.). That came up a lot. Amusingly (and worryingly) tribunitas is in fact the accusative plural feminine of the adjective ‘made of three turnips’ (tri + bunitus, -a, -um). Hopefully they won’t take too many marks off for moderate surrealism.

Mat and I had our first good fight yesterday. Admittedly it wasn’t a mutual one, he was a dick and I refused to open my door/speak to him for the day, but then in the evening he came round and I let him in and offered him tea and it was fine after that. I think it did us good, the only other people I’ve ever fought with are Sam and Lou (just the once) and I think that’s because I’m closest to them. or maybe they’re just horrible horrible people.

It was the last Sunday evensong of term yesterday. (Strange to think that in two weeks I’ll be home.) We did gorgeous music, Howell’s Mag/Nunc from St. Paul’s Service and an anthem of Parry’s amazing Lord Let Me Known Mine End. There were a few goodbyes said too, and embarrassingly, with the combination of that and the music, quite a few people in choir were crying a little by the end. And some guy was taking photos of us for some publicity thing, so he’ll have got some lovely shots of us all looking absolutely disgusting.

Mmm, just put a lot of big red lines through latin prose comp on my exam sheet. Three to go…

only fly for freedom

Eeeeee, Classical Questions is over! Worst exam down. Four essays in three hours has so much horrible potential to go wrong, especially if the questions aren’t good for you. Fortunately there’s always a big choice, so I was toying with five that I could have had a serious go at. You’re not allowed to answer all four from the same section, so I did one linguistics and three set texts ones, and they seemed to go okay, though I was feeling the litcrit a bit more than the tense and aspect…

Anyway, I now have two whole days before my next one, which is awesome. It also can’t be revised for that well, as it’s a Latin composition one, so the weekend will be spent with Greek translations. Yeah, things are going well, and I’m trying not to second-guess what I’ve done so far. The trick is letting go when it’s done.

I feel so good Classical Questions is over. It’s like being free, except for the four exams next week… but oh, Classical Questions is over and the world is beautiful again.

And Mat’s currently in an exam and I’m not. yessss.

you will not shake us off, above or below

First exam tomorrow, Latin translations. I’m glad. I’m not quite ready everything, but I am for tomorrow – or rather, I’ve prepared all I’m going to. I’m not word-perfect in everything but it’s impossible to be that way with the sheer volume of text we’ve got through this year. But looking back to first term’s work, I’ve seen the progress I hadn’t realised I’d been making, vocab and grammar both, and that makes me feel better. I’m going to do a little more vocab (probably the only benefit of this is reassurance) and then do a little bit of something towards Friday’s exam, and then bed.

Mat, Emma and I sang the compline service by ourselves last night. Normally compline choir has 6+ and a conductor so this was quite different and slightly scary, and initially I refused to do it, which I’m ashamed of now. It went perfectly, but I was quite adamant initially. It would seem that I have a knee-jerk reaction to refuse things I don’t think I can do. Of course eventually Mat bullied me into it, just by not giving me a chance to air my doubts.

This is still all a new experience for me, being with someone that just has things that I don’t. Normally (and I don’t think this is bad at all) I’ve loved those the most similar to me, especially in terms of introversion insecurities, perhaps because I see those as the worst, most significant thing about myself. Being with an extrovert is challenging, and I constantly envy the way that he can talk to people, and jump into some unfamiliar situation without feeling awkward, and sometimes that makes me even more critical of myself in the comparison. But I’m coming to see (sometimes) that it’s not a case of better and worse, that I have some things that he lacks, and that having someone I respect and love love and respect me too must say something about us as equal individuals. I’d like to think I’m growing from this.

Clearly I’ve been translating too much Aeneid, those chiasmatic structures just creeping in again. Time to work, Hetty.

Aaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

Edit: Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh

(Once again, Jazon Mraz live owns anything he puts on his albums.)