j'ai un animal

when you're around

Things you can do while listening to IRENE's Baby I Love Your Way:

- combined tooth-brushing and dancing

- making avocado couscous for lunch

- planning a Ph.D thesis

- writing in the blog

I love

It's Sunday afternoon; I'm in the Humanities Centre watching the rain stirring the brown leaves on the grass outside and trying to read 'Defects': Engendering the Modern Body on Google Books. (This is not so much a sign of diligence as of having spent all of yesterday watching How I Met Your Mother and dancing.)

As so often, my desktop picture summarises my mood.

(Original source unknown, but I got it from here.)

collective action

At 4 pm someone's phone goes off on the caterpillar level of the humanities centre; the owner is apparently away from their desk, and it keeps ringing for a minute or so. The ring tone is the Super Mario theme. Everyone starts chair dancing. Then it stops and we return to our work, or, as in my case, the blog.

Further pleasant activity today: morning text from T asking if I want to come to London and go to the Freud Museum on Saturday, admittedly after some expostulating on my part about how boring this weekend is going to be if we don't get to hang out, BUT STILL. Freud Museum!

Tonight will be on the theme of pancakes.

victorians i heart you

From The Young Lady's Friend by Eliza Farrar, 1837. This chapter is called "The Great Mistake".

appreciation

Also, GOD the upcoming conference is well-organised. They have thought about how people are going to get lunch on Thursday. They have thought about how people are going to find the restaurant for the conference dinner, and how they will entertain themselves on Wednesday night and Saturday morning. They have sent several maps. I wish I was staying all week.

i norrtääääälje

I have the unusual quality of quite often being amused by other people's internal jokes. This is a case in point.

omg omg omg

two things

- The guy sitting opposite me has his laptop open, but still inside its orange second-skin casing (unzipped). To keep it warm?

- I got Adam Phillips's Monogamy out of the library this morning and read it very quickly (it's a collection of aphorisms, more or less). Vowed to be less epigrammatic myself in future; it's profoundly annoying. (I like Phillips's writing most of the time, but in direct proportion to how un-epigrammatic and un-quotable it is. Epigrams are disavowals of responsibility, she said epigrammatically.)

i have my webcam to keep me warm

On the list of things I'd thought would be more interesting

Michael Mason's The Making of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (OUP, 1994).

On the list of favourite things

Erlend Loe tweeting the phrase "Jeg må le".