Aaaaah. Tonight was my first yoga session in literally years and I have that slightly disturbing post-yoga feeling of being a bit more flexible than usual (you'd think this would be nice, but when you're used to not being very flexible it just makes you feel like your limbs are coming out of joint). Also that lovely post-yoga feeling of being almost too wobbly and relaxed to type. Will stop typing and lie down and eat a grapefruit or something.

the instigator of underwear / showing up here and there

I don't have such a good track record with Sundays, they're usually days of no new webcomics, running out of nice food and not being able to get any more because the shops are already closed, and not doing much work (and not being distracted from it because there are no new webcomics). But they've been considerably better since getting to York. For instance, good things this Sunday:

- Paying my college bill and discovering afterwards that the exchange rate is currently half-decent, as both our currencies are apparently plummeting apace
- Clean sheets. And floors, because I've actually vacuumed now
- Being jollied out of a petulant "I DON'T WANT TO EAT ANY OF THIS FOOD" strop at lunchtime ("why don't you have this nice scone, you can scrape off the clotted cream and just have it with jam")
- Sitting in the Courtyard bar watching music videos on the big screen and discussing the pros and cons of going out with Justin Timberlake (pros: would want to have casual break-dancing sessions in the evenings, cons: would probably be humourless about having been in *NSYNC, consistently pronounces "me" as "mayyyyy")
- Pink's new album on Spotify, especially "Bad Influence" ("sure, I'll have another one, it's early / three olives, shake it up, I like it dirty") and "Boring" ("insert rap here / onetwothreefourfivesixseveneightGO")
- It might, theoretically, be possible to get some Ph.D funding from Norway, though Forskningsrådet is being confusing even by the highly confusing standards of most scholarship programmes
- Since I started getting my soap from Lush again, the high-tech shower pod (not really high-tech) is flower-scented at all times. I use Figs and Leaves in the shower and Sexy Peel for my hands, and get compliments about smelling nice (on Friday it was prefaced by "I'm not being creepy, but", which just doesn't work as a performative utterance).
- "The Meretriciad", an epic-length 1761 poem dedicated to being a real jerk about actresses
- In fact the entirety of 18th-Century Collections Online

I do miss doing the 1800s a bit, not least because if we were doing a seminar on women in 19th- rather than 18th-century theatre I'd be able to do it off the top of my head. (More or less. I could do some scintillating bluffing, at least.) And I wish I could pay someone to trawl through scholarship websites for me. But apart from that it's all good.

State of the kitchen

I realise I might just have a very low disgust threshold but there are chicken wings thawing in a water bath in the kitchen, right next to the sink. They still have bits of FEATHERS in them. It's so obvious that they're actually dismembered body parts. Wish everyone would just live off lovely inanimate cereal like I do.

(and the freezer is completely filled with yet more chicken parts, leaving no room for my frozen peas and Ben and Jerry's Bohemian Raspberry)

In which new cities are experienced

I got back from Leeds!

I don't know if I genuinely wasn't expecting to, but last night as we were walking back from the train station at about three-thirty in the morning I kept enthusiastically saying "I'm so PROUD of us, we've got back from Leeds." The enthusiasm must have been the remnants of the Red Bull I had around 11 pm, because I was fairly exhausted. We went from John's house (the one whose birthday party it was, though his actual birthday isn't for two more days, so we refused to let him invoke birthday privileges) via Wetherspoons to the train station to the York-Leeds train, where we took up an entire carriage and most of us completed the frankly ridiculous Train-Wine challenge (I had been provided with a low-alcohol-content, extremely disgusting bottle of Liebfraumilch for the occasion, but made little headway before dropping it in a trash can when we got off the train).

We skipped and pranced into Leeds, which does look very nice and should be revisited at a later date, and immediately headed into another Wetherspoons, where tears and recriminations erupted between two of the party attendees and everyone else did their level best to ignore them. (I was helped by the Wetherspoons toilets, which in my experience are always huge, clean, full of mirrors and dramatically lit, making them the ideal place for brief caffeine-fuelled dance parties if you've brought an iPod.) Having realized that we'd essentially sat on a train for half an hour in order to get from one 'spoons to another, we went to the Cockpit, where the air was thick with fog-machine smoke and everyone was dressed like members of My Chemical Romance. We danced until about two - the most unsettling part was when, towards the end when the music was getting cheesier, "What's My Age Again" came on and I realised that I am now the very age mentioned in that song (twenty-three) - at which point John started telling me that I had to be in charge and lead the troops, and I decided we should probably get to the train. (By that time one of us had been chucked out for fighting (it was more like "confrontational dancing", but the distinction was lost on the security guard), so it was about time.)

Outside the club I changed from my high-heeled boots to a pair of flats I'd brought with me, to many impressed comments about my foresight. I regretted it when we got to the station and, with a while to wait for the train, John and Gary snagged the boots and refused to give them back until I pried their fingers off. Long story short, we all piled onto the very last train of the night and were very pleased to see York again.

Now I'm going to go for a run and then, sadly, to a graduate seminar on Theory and/as Methodology.

boudling away

Key phrases from Ph.D proposal notes, currently at an early stage:

"Possibly pushing it."
"jokily cross-gendered"
"tearing you apart, or filling you with self-realisation, or making you go mildly insane"
"THING THEORY"
"I really think this is where I got confused last time around"
"You can't just marry one of them."
"the full-on paranoid gothic"
"completely obsessed with written records, drugs, and people who look like other people"
"might make my supervisor die of boredom"
"just enough to fill a bathtub"
"boudling" [a misspelling of "doubling", apparently]
"IT ALL COMES TOGETHER."

You can't tell from this, apart from possibly the last excerpt, but I feel like it's going pretty well.

Saturday

The boy behind the counter put my mini-brownie on a fairly big plate. He disappeared behind the espresso machine for a bit, and when he returned the little brownie was festooned with whipped cream, chocolate sauce and cocoa sprinkles. "That is ridiculous," I said. "It looked lonely," he said.

Then Sarah and Emma and Jane and I settled down in the leather armchairs, and I swung my legs over the armrest of my chair and addressed myself seriously to the brownie. The others talked and I drank coffee and read Between Women by Sharon Marcus (I'd promised myself to do some reading while we were waiting to head to the cinema, so was forced to be antisocial). It was a sunny day, nearly springlike - considerably aided by me wearing the Liberty rose-print dress my mother made me - and we were in a medieval-looking little stone room in the city walls, overlooking Walmgate. From time to time I popped my head out of the book to see what the others were talking about, or to say "OHHH this is so GOOD", in reference to the Marcus. It made me begin to feel qualifiedly excited rather than terrified about the Ph.D proposal, even though I still feel as if the plan should strike me like a thunderbolt, not be worked out laboriously. (And not just because it would be a lot easier.)

Afterwards we went to see "The Reader". Wept madly into tissues, and got on the bus feeling wistful.

Tonight is a toss-up between books and beer pong, and I really think it'll have to be the former. Serious committed student etc.

always, always / goodnight and go

Contractually binding (according to the one trainee lawyer among us) agreements entered into last night:

- Jimmy pledges to allow John to sell his (Jimmy's) future children for profit.

- Rifa pledges not to ruin John's birthday on Tuesday (this contract later shredded, but it was signed and witnessed so might still count).

- Gary pledges to go swimming in the river Ouse or its tributaries if I do (verbal agreement).

I'm just glad I got through the evening without getting married.

Tonight for once I'm staying in, with historiography articles on JSTOR (I am a history student manqué this term), Amanda Foreman's biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Sarah got me a copy with the Gainsborough portrait on the cover rather than Keira Knightley, and much as I like Keira Knightley I think it's preferable), and "Goodnight and Go" by Imogen Heap, which is very sweet considering it's literally about stalking. If I could just pry myself out of bed I could even add peppermint tea to the equation. whee.

uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, oh my

How annoyed must Keats, in his alternate dimension, be that the part of his work people quote most often is from some random letter he wrote to his brother? Or do I just think it is because I'm not a Romanticist, and in fact lots of people go around quoting long reams of "Hyperion" at each other?

(The part of which I speak is this: "...several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason." It's going in my essay, but I feel bad about it.)