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The South African Siren came round last night and shouted through the door, "I am wearing a DUVET!"
I opened the door in the middle of a lipstick crisis ("I didn't think," I said to the mirror a bit later, "that I was the sort of person who has lipstick crises", but apparently this is possible) and admired her new winter coat, which is less coat and more protective shell. She came in to my pleasantly warm, room-temperature apartment and started to turn a delicate shade of lobster pink.
Taruithorn held their annual Gandalf's fireworks and bonfire last night. For the first time in several years, I didn't attend. Instead the Siren and I got dressed up in thin layers of chiffon and sparkles, headed out into the sub-zero night and went to the law school's annual Fall Ball. This involved teetering around surrounded by some of the drunkest undergraduates I've yet met - this was eight in the evening, and there were some of them smelling of gin and wearing shorts - and going to pre-ball drinks another friend was having, in a very small, very nice apartment that filled up with graduate law students and their plus-ones and acquired a warm-lit, tipsy quality very quickly.
My friend E., who needs a pseud, I suspect, is the only underage person in the law school, which makes her life very difficult. She's also a very serious, studious person, whose sense of humour needs coaxing out bit by bit. Application of cheap Riesling seems to do the trick. Application of such to everyone is probably what got us through the even-more-sub-zero night to the engineering department. I explained to Baby E, with the help of the golden quality to everything, that as I am all of three years older than her, I have taken it as a personal charge to get her to have more fun. She smiled at me fondly and tolerated me. The entire cohort thrives on an atmosphere of patient, kind toleration. This is, I suspect, a natural consequence of taking seventy people from nearly as many different countries and expecting them to cope with the various caprices of an Ithaca winter and a determinedly idiosyncratic department. It leads to bonding through bemusement.
Where were we? Getting up the hill, through the sub-zero cold, and finding the place.
Which was weird, actually; the ball was held in the atrium of the building. It was full of passing engineering students, who had clearly decided they were going to stay late in the library and get some work done, and now their way out was blocked by five hundred law students in formal dress dancing to "Thriller". I waved at one of my upstairs neighbours. He waved back at me with an expression of confusion, which might have been the dancing, and might have been the sight of me in a red and black sparkly chiffon dress when he's never seen me not in pyjamas yelling at him to shut the hell up, it's two am. He doesn't seem to hold a grudge. He disappeared into the night with a face like the world tilting below him.
One of the real law students, another nice chap who definitely needs a pseud, danced with me most of the evening, and as he was retiring, said, wonderingly, "You... people" - motioning to most of my cohort waving their hands around and kicking up their heels - "really know how to relax, don't you?"
I told him it's because we have one chance at everything. For me, and for most of the rest, this is the last holiday from real life. Where other people might choose to exist, we live - much too loudly, much too excitably, with far too much nineties pop - but we do. I don't know how much of it he understood, but he kept on dancing with me until the cooling down of the night.
By the small hours, the Siren, Baby E and I teetered back down the hill, called a cab and drifted home in a collective mood of mellow, and talking happy nonsense about the people we'd met and danced with and the gossip we'd collected, and at the close of it all I sank into my pillows, watched the last bit of Caramel, and fell asleep feeling good about the world. Less than six weeks, now. We're still here.
I opened the door in the middle of a lipstick crisis ("I didn't think," I said to the mirror a bit later, "that I was the sort of person who has lipstick crises", but apparently this is possible) and admired her new winter coat, which is less coat and more protective shell. She came in to my pleasantly warm, room-temperature apartment and started to turn a delicate shade of lobster pink.
Taruithorn held their annual Gandalf's fireworks and bonfire last night. For the first time in several years, I didn't attend. Instead the Siren and I got dressed up in thin layers of chiffon and sparkles, headed out into the sub-zero night and went to the law school's annual Fall Ball. This involved teetering around surrounded by some of the drunkest undergraduates I've yet met - this was eight in the evening, and there were some of them smelling of gin and wearing shorts - and going to pre-ball drinks another friend was having, in a very small, very nice apartment that filled up with graduate law students and their plus-ones and acquired a warm-lit, tipsy quality very quickly.
My friend E., who needs a pseud, I suspect, is the only underage person in the law school, which makes her life very difficult. She's also a very serious, studious person, whose sense of humour needs coaxing out bit by bit. Application of cheap Riesling seems to do the trick. Application of such to everyone is probably what got us through the even-more-sub-zero night to the engineering department. I explained to Baby E, with the help of the golden quality to everything, that as I am all of three years older than her, I have taken it as a personal charge to get her to have more fun. She smiled at me fondly and tolerated me. The entire cohort thrives on an atmosphere of patient, kind toleration. This is, I suspect, a natural consequence of taking seventy people from nearly as many different countries and expecting them to cope with the various caprices of an Ithaca winter and a determinedly idiosyncratic department. It leads to bonding through bemusement.
Where were we? Getting up the hill, through the sub-zero cold, and finding the place.
Which was weird, actually; the ball was held in the atrium of the building. It was full of passing engineering students, who had clearly decided they were going to stay late in the library and get some work done, and now their way out was blocked by five hundred law students in formal dress dancing to "Thriller". I waved at one of my upstairs neighbours. He waved back at me with an expression of confusion, which might have been the dancing, and might have been the sight of me in a red and black sparkly chiffon dress when he's never seen me not in pyjamas yelling at him to shut the hell up, it's two am. He doesn't seem to hold a grudge. He disappeared into the night with a face like the world tilting below him.
One of the real law students, another nice chap who definitely needs a pseud, danced with me most of the evening, and as he was retiring, said, wonderingly, "You... people" - motioning to most of my cohort waving their hands around and kicking up their heels - "really know how to relax, don't you?"
I told him it's because we have one chance at everything. For me, and for most of the rest, this is the last holiday from real life. Where other people might choose to exist, we live - much too loudly, much too excitably, with far too much nineties pop - but we do. I don't know how much of it he understood, but he kept on dancing with me until the cooling down of the night.
By the small hours, the Siren, Baby E and I teetered back down the hill, called a cab and drifted home in a collective mood of mellow, and talking happy nonsense about the people we'd met and danced with and the gossip we'd collected, and at the close of it all I sank into my pillows, watched the last bit of Caramel, and fell asleep feeling good about the world. Less than six weeks, now. We're still here.