and we dance, dance! and we move a little closer

Turns out I'm not a prodigy of phone fundraising after all! Yesterday I hit answer machines for three straight hours and spoke at length to only one human being (who was a Ph.D student, and lovely, but penniless). Oh well, only two more days and then it's LONDON TIME.

I am super-excited for some reason. May ball gown shopping with Vicky! Dodging Sam's parents! A city that IS NOT CAMBRIDGE! It might be mostly the latter, actually; travel fever, though I'm not particularly unhappy with post-term Cambridge at the moment, as I somewhat was before Christmas. I also look forward to going home; everyone in Norway suddenly bursting onto Facebook has been a bonding experience that I hope will be continued in real life. Also, I've been fruitlessly trying to shop for two and a half months (I've become weirdly fashion-conscious this term, which is either my brain trying to protect itself from thinkier thoughts or just my brain being a bit shallow and reading a lot of Grazia), and I'm hoping to be more successful in Trondheim. And I want to dissertate in cafés while drinking very expensive coffee (my new plan for getting dissertating done).

Of course, before any of this can come to pass, I must:
- Write something exciting for the supervision on Friday (HAH)
- Hand in very overdue books at the UL, get out new, shiny ones
- Open a UK bank account so I can get paid (and you wouldn't believe how tricky that is; you'd think they'd be falling over themselves)
- Break into Sam's room and get the minidisc player and trousers he left behind (or possibly ask porter for key)
- Do one more load of laundry
- Do two more shifts at the campaign
- Pack

Doable!

I've taken to singing softly into my headset microphone after (not before) hanging up a call; generally the Pipettes' "It's Not Love (But It's Still A Feeling)". I also sometimes sing a little self-penned song called "That Guy" when a name pops up that I've tried several times before: "That guy! That guy, that guy, that guuuuuuy!" This is why being employed is not safe for me.

Drama in the last ten minutes of calling as Sam showed up with Mary Ellen, who had broken her arm while they were rollerblading in Asda. (She seemed quite cheerful, though, and Asda seems like a good place to break your arm; they have first aid people and everything.) Calum, who is Mary Ellen's boyfriend, emerged palely from the call room. "If you blame me, it's like you don't consider her a responsible human being," Sam said very quickly. "You use that line a lot," I said.

I finished up my shift (which went well; I exceeded my target for the day and brought in a couple of thousand pounds, though I was also called "uncivilized" by someone with an Order of the British Empire. My call supervisor, who has a sixth sense for bad calls, was at my side with a box of chocolates when I hung up), gradually shook off my reflexive politeness and stopped responding "I perfectly understand" and "That's so kind of you" to everything, and went home. Vicky, Iona, Tom and Zofia were in the kitchen having rumbletinis, and I proceeded into the special squiffiness brought on by many glasses of dark rum and ginger beer on an empty stomach. Strangely enough, I feel fine today; possibly it's the revitalizing properties of the ginger beer.

Next week the Longest Journey begins, as I go to London to get supervised on the doubles dissertation. I am a pretty dedicated supervisee. (I may also be anticipating a day of London Frolics. Out-of-town Frolics are just better.)

These days, I am...

(or, Notes towards a definitive Facebook Status)

- cold. The radiator only heats half the room, and even that's iffy. It was spring! I know it was! I had a spring jacket and everything!
- allowing each snooze cycle to last forty minutes. Fortunately, I set my alarm an hour and a half before I need to get up.
- being informed by people I've campaign-called that I am young, beautiful (conjecture on their part) and have no problems (also conjecture, but I'll take it).
- rereading The Neverending Story, and realizing that I'm missing out on a lot because my reading speed has increased. Perilin the Night Forest is much more awesome when you don't get through it in five minutes.
- listening extensively to P.J. Harvey's "One Line" and The Smiths' "Hand in Glove", and thus being a little more sentimental than necessary.
- still as far as ever from figuring out the bus route to Homerton College.
- getting texts at one in the morning, all "Hey! Hey how are you? How are are you?" It is as though a puppy has learned how to text. I reply semi-coherently and smile and go back to sleep.
- without a May Ball gown. I should've bought one before Christmas, when they had those amazing red-satin fishtail dresses at Karen Millen; now it's all metallic shifts and I'm sorry, but I'm not wearing a smock to my last May Ball. What I'd really like is something in gold, with an actual waist, and kind of drapey and Grecian. Or the same sort of thing in black.
- watching the lichen grow on the roofstones outside my window.
- unable to admit that term is over.
- feeling competent. How about that.

Gainful employment

The payment is coming through for the article I did for Tapestry to illustrate stylistic registers, and it is enough to buy several things at H&M, or innumerable cups of even quite expensive coffee. I'm being Paid for Writing! It's exciting. So exciting in fact that I agreed to write a short story for them, mostly because I'm sure there's at least one short story in the telephone campaign.

Though I'll have to tread quite carefully in order not to make it sound critical of the campaign, because I'm not, really. It genuinely is for a good cause, and people generally seem happy to talk to us, and one guy I spoke to was at Clare when John Northam, the Ibsen critic, was teaching there, and told me about how he used to walk around in sandals. The tiring part is getting your facts straight on whoever you're calling, thinking of things you have in common, events you want to invite them to, etc, and then getting an answerphone and having to start all over again. This happens surprisingly often - it's estimated that we make a hundred calls a night, but only a fraction of those actually end with talking to someone. I was very hyper afterwards, but I expect by the end of the week I'll be drained and will probably get lots of pledges based on sympathy.

It feels later than Wednesday.

Our projects are coming to fruition: Muse, the Poetry Magazine, was launched on Monday with a very nice launch party at which no one threatened any Directors of Studies with a wine bottle (which is what usually happens at engling-heavy parties), and the Miscellaneous Theatre Festival began tonight, and will continue for another two days. Quitter is on tomorrow, and I've been told to be very good because Vicky and Alex's chances of getting to direct the May Week show hang on this. By Friday I plan to be very tired of short plays and will put on fairy wings and go to the bop. The theme is Musicals, to Vicky's horror; for circularity purposes we're going as the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz, which is what we went as for our very first Freshers' Bop. We're hoping to look far more impressive this time.

Then I have to get up at ten on Saturday to get trained for the calling-up-alumni job. And then there's the end-of-festival party, and then I have to get up at ten again to get trained some more. At the moment my head is all fuzzy and the very idea of this seems extremely complicated and strenuous, and so I think it may actually be time for bed.

Spring

A ladybird on my computer keyboard!

It's bright red and black against the white, and big - three spots on either wing. It's doing that hapless thing of flaring its thin grey under-wings, then being unable to quite fold them in again neatly. Of course we're quite randomly societally conditioned to be delighted by some insects and repulsed by others, but it's delightful all the same.

It's now moved on to my books, and seems to have a particular interest in "Forbidden Journeys", a collection of Victorian fairy tales.

Last night, after a discussion of whether Oxford would be a better place to do a graduate degree than Cambridge, because you could go "MA Cantab, MA Oxon!" like a great twerp, or whether it would be worse because it's not as pretty a town, Sam and I both voted to go on a day-trip to determine whether it really was less pretty. This turned out to be economically unfeasible - why isn't there a direct Cambridge-Oxford train link? it would foster cooperation - but now I do quite want to go day-tripping. Tom is getting his car after term ends, so if we can fit it in with my call-centre work we might all drive to Norfolk for a day or two. In the meantime I'll have to content myself with ladybirds, and lunch from the cheese shop.

hon vet hur man ater / en kronartskocka / hon har inga finnar

The Lunar Eclipse Party (which we didn't actually realize was going to be a Lunar Eclipse Party until we emerged from the short film screening and saw the earth's shadow slowly obscuring the moon over the Downing spires) was excellent, and today has been a reasonably good post-party day. Even if it did start with remembering I had a rehearsal for Quitter, and having to throw myself into and out of the shower at great speed. That particular role, though, is only improved by having just woken up; it lends credibility to the "do you have to SHOUT ALL THE TIME" wincing.

The short films were surprisingly fun; Reece's was beautifully shot on grainy Super 8 and even featured me briefly, which was nice. My favourite, though, was one of the professional ones they showed towards the end, "The Delicious" (http://astateof.com/films/delicious/). Needless to say, much of the party was spent doing The Delicious, excitedly referring to red objects in the room as The Delicious, etc. Also playing with balloons (our every hope and dream was fulfilled as regarded the presence of balloons) and shouting at the moon to just eclipse already. Photo-odyssey here: http://cambridge.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2091010&l=16a40&id=36904377

At the moment I'm just kind of tired, and would like to be less busy. A few days at home would set me up nicely; sometimes I wish I lived in London and could dash home whenever I wanted. That's what you get for going to Fancy Universities Abroad, I suppose.

Off to continue writing my prac crit essay on a page of Peter Manson's Adjunct: An Undigest. Prac-critting a text that may well have been written using a random number generator feels like trying to catch fish with rubber gloves: weird.

Slow motion.

Supervision today in which it became increasingly likely that "threesomes" will be a theme of my dissertation. Apparently semi-involuntary menages à trois were something of a thing in Victorian England - you couldn't just get a divorce, so men would occasionally just move their mistresses into their homes. Or have parallell families, like Wilkie Collins. I don't know why I ever thought new historicism was boring. Also I get to write about His Dark Materials! I said something incoherent about daimons, and my supervisor was all "YES! Pullman in relation to Paradise Lost!"

So I'll have to reread that, as well as a ton of fairy tales. I have no idea why I'm reading Northanger Abbey instead of anything useful, but it's the most soothing book ever. More so at least than Forster's "The Longest Journey", which Sam got me to read and which is basically about how your life will never again be as good as it was at Cambridge, especially if you go to work at a public school.

Things are at least good at the moment; I'm spending a lot of time in the faculty library and in rehearsals, and being very tired in the evenings. Yesterday we became exasperated with our sedentary lives and went to Samba at the Kambar, where Becky and Ollie went into whirling-dervish mode and the rest of us wished we had such a dance-tastic relationship with our college spouses. The live music was so loud that everyone wore earplugs, and drifted about in speechless cocoons. I danced until the early hours, actually got to sleep at the slightly later hours, and am now tired as a sock. Tomorrow is a glamorous day: the premiere of Reece's film at the short film festival, and then an Old Court attic party, for which we are all elevating our expectations unreasonably. Vicky, Reece and Alex have promised roomfuls of balloons that we will dance among in slow motion.