mexico can fucking wait

I need to stop guessing what reactions I am ‘meant’ to have. That is all. I can’t be a critic or a commentator without being a reader and an audience first.

Also, I miss my laptop. But then I’m torn, because I can see how much more productive I am without it. And it means I’m looking to other entertainments too, like sitting playing computer games with Sam and baking and inviting Susannah over to watch films. I really like home and the change of pace it brings. I really like having my family around me.

After term finished last week, I went on a minitour to Cornwall with the choir. It was surprisingly fun for the company, and surprisingly beautiful (though I should have guessed this) with amazing, clear weather and epic hills and fields. And blue, endless sky. I miss these things in Cambridge. On Monday, some of us took a roadtrip to Land’s End. It makes me want to explore more of England. I really don’t know my home country at all, and there is so much of it to admire. Even the train journey back to Cambridge was incredible; breathtaking coastals through Teignmouth and Dawlish and massive, silted-up rivers in faded misty watercolour further on. I am a big sucker for pretty.

Anyway. I’ve no plans for the foreseeable future, which is something that I think I like. Just a relaxed schedule of translation and taking things easy for a while. <3

hit the floor with you

Best xkcd in a while?

Tonight Lou and I are going to astronomy dinner, lols. I think it’ll be fun though, good food, good wine, good friend, potential worldview expansion…

I’ve an hour or so before that, though, so I’m going to listen to Cobra Starship (probably the best catchyfun music I’ve ever heard) and do a Greek prose comp. Watch me go.

alright to the core

The view from my desk window is beautiful. I’ve got a rooftop, a church spire and endless sky. Today it’s blue and sunshine and huge clouds of white and blue shadow.

Today there’s nothing and everything. Today there’s the memory of your warmth, your solidness, there’s a clean page in front of me waiting for Greek to be untangled and arranged on it, there’s a free afternoon of Greek vocab and scudding clouds and as much tea as I want. Today there’s days slipping away but the hope of all this, forever, and the belief that that’s something I could handle.

I am constantly pulling and pushing myself into different shapes, only to be recognised and refound by you and by him. My God is an awesome god, and you are the best person in my whole world, and today I am the happiest I have ever been, again.

treading on the ground.

Today I’m being a loser. I rearranged a history supervision two days ago and worked my ass off to finish this essay on time and hand it in at 5pm yesterday… only to find out today that it’s actually 5pm next Tuesday that it’s in for. So yeah, the supervision I thought was today is this time next week, in the exact timeslot I rearranged history for. \o/ I confessed this to Farzin via text and he replied with “lol”.

But being a loser’s pretty fun sometimes. I got up late (and it would have been later if it had been up to me), I had lunch with Matt and Em, then I sat in a coffee shop for an hour or so translating Virgil and trying to get Em to put the phrase ‘carousel of girls’ in her Apuleus pract crit. Now I’m home to write up notes from the lecture I missed this morning. Emily told me, “I would have got you a handout… but I didn’t.”

Speaking of perfect imperfections: this is the best love poem I’ve ever read.

portraits of the self in the attempts to absorb classical scholarship and respond with a modicum of intellectual worth

When I read Plutarch’s Conjugalia Praecepta (‘Advice to the Bride and Groom’) I was first enraged by how sexist it was. Yes, unsurprising. When I began reading Pomeroy’s commentary, I was struck by how actually, Plutarch’s pretty foreward-thinking: the woman might actually enjoy sex, she should enjoy men’s company, she has the capacity to be taught… that’s getting towards a pretty good construal/construction of a balanced relationship. Then I continued reading the commentary, noted how much advice is aimed at the bride (over half) and its nature (she needs lots more improvement) and realised there is a reason he is writing all this stuff down. Then I recognised him as the moralising, misogynistic traditionalist he really is and got enraged again.

lols, tldr. But I need to write some of this stuff down somewhere, and I need to pull an essay out of somewhere before 5pm tomorrow and it needs to be fit my beardy intellectual giant of a supervisor. right now I have so many thoughts and nothing to hang them off. and I’m still reading.

but just like the rain

I like my life. I like it a lot.

I woke up this morning thinking I take some people for granted too much. And by some people, I mean him. I’m surrounded by people I think are awesome, and sometimes I forget that the world isn’t really like that.

and those that matter…