creeeeeeeepy

So while doing dissertation research, I came across this: the animated Sleeping Beauty in Madame Tussaud's. It's the oldest figure still on display in the museum; it's been there since the mid-nineteenth century. In 1851, one visitor said that "you instinctively move softly, lest she should be disturbed in her slumber".

after we'd handed in our essays, we went to the pub.

"...I was convinced that if I'd been allowed to go to that concert, Taylor Hanson would have seen me from across the room and fallen in love with me."

"Well, that is what happened. Seeing as how I am Taylor Hanson."

"Shut up."

"I saw you from across the room -"

"Shut UP."

Highlights of my first conference

- One of only about three critics I cite in my paper shows up outside the lecture room door like a revenant just as I'm quoting him (thank God it wasn't Harold Bloom, but rather someone I was agreeing with)

- My paper turns out to match up unusually well with the other one in my panel, and we have an excellent cross-paper discussion

- One of my fellow speakers and I invent beer-wine, which is flat lager with white wine in it, and he starts to find it curiously addictive

- We discuss whether you need to read more than three pages of Powers of Horror to be able to fake in-depth Kristeva knowledge, and then describe everything as "abject" for the rest of the night

- A script treatment for a film about Shakespeare's Catholic espionage activities, co-starring Zac Efron as the teenage vampire addressee of the sonnets, is prepared ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more undead")

- One of the professors tells me it's lovely to meet such young and unjaded people, and wishes me the best of luck

- Another of my fellow speakers fails in his attempt to open an unlocked pub door. "WE'RE LOCKED IN." "I thought you guys were intellectuals."

- Everyone starts to talk in American accents as if they were on The O.C.

- I successfully find my youth hostel and fall asleep on a top bunk

- When I wake up the next day, my hair looks amazing

I don't think I really did any networking, though.

you think I wanna get involved / you're not wrong

In my room in York. Have discovered that my conference presentation does not sound any more convincing when delivered over the sound of this.

Paradigm shift

My parents, Axel and I are having dinner.

"We didn't know how lucky we were in the nineties," I say. "Boybands. 'Not' used as a modifier...jean jackets with jeans."

"Jean jackets?" says Axel. "What?"

"You know. Denim jackets in a different shade from the denim trousers. It was amazing."

"Jackets made out of denim?" He is baffled and not a little suspicious. Axel is thirteen and has never seen a jean jacket in his life. He's nice about it, but it's obvious he doesn't actually believe me until I go and put on one I used to wear when I was about his age. To be fair, it looks about as unfashionable as is physically possible, right at the nadir before the trendiness cycle starts to repeat itself.

"Oh! It looks like you've...made a jacket out of trousers. Huh."

He's so cute that I have to give him a hug. "It even feels like trousers," he says. He seems quietly convinced that I have, for reasons of my own, created this prototype of a ridiculous imaginary trouser-jacket in order to mess with his mind.

Easter Sunday, in fragments

- We wandered into the cathedral to do some touristy looking around just as the Easter service was finishing. People had already started to rise from their seats and head out, slowly and casually, while still singing the last psalm, "Deg være ære, herre over dødens makt". We are not as a people enthusiastic and skilful psalm-singers, but everyone was pretty much on board with this one.

- I drained my hot chocolate, then scooped up the remnants of melted chocolate curls with a spoon.

- On the way back from Korsvika, I insisted on stopping every few minutes to photograph interesting graffiti, cats, and heaps of scrap metal floating in the harbour. The urban-exploration aesthetic is so completely ingrained in me by now that I no longer think of it as controversial; I'm surprised when other people don't immediately share it.

- Maren said, "Some places, they have variable prices for outdoor beer according to how cold it is out. You can drink incredibly cheaply if you're willing to do it outside in early March."

- I shook myself awake from a brief nap and headed back to the café to get some work done on the essay. Nothing is open during the Easter days but cafés, so that's where everyone who's still in town is, even in the twilight time between five and seven. Cheerful-looking emo kids with coffee cups, two people having what appeared to be a serious discussion while sharing a bottle of wine, people playing chess, babies with accompanying families. I wrote six hundred words and called it a night.

- Diana's and my combined efforts were insufficient to get the DVD player to work. We watched "Atonement" on my laptop while eating blackberries.

- As I type, the first mosquito I've seen this year has just settled on the duvet in front of me. It looks dopey and slow, but I don't feel I can kill it. I do fully anticipate waking up with the first mosquito bites of the year.