Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Things not generally found in libraries:

- teams of men in Serious Overalls
- crumbled mortar covering the floor enough to cause interesting crunching sounds underfoot
- power-drills
- Lots And Lots Of Noise
- very large ladders. (Which, come to think of it, should be found in libraries a hell of a lot more often, so I won't have to go hunting for the extra-tall kickstools while people look at me and laugh.)

I weave around the strangeness and find Colleague, who explains that one of the large strip-lights in the roof fell down the night before. Wires, plaster dust, loud crash, everything. And this, it turns out, is due to a construction fault which means that every fifth row of lights could suddenly plummet to the floor at any moment.

Well.

Due to imminent threat of squishing, students aren't allowed to get books from the Danger Zone themselves. Which seems like good news, until Colleague repeats himself with the stress on 'themselves.'

"...I'm not going to like this, am I?", I say.

"You can collect your red shirt and tricorder from the office," he says.

Landlords now rearranging furniture. My desk is being moved to somewhere it won't get all that nice natural light, and my bookshelves are being taken down and emptied so they can also be moved elsewhere. I got told about this while on my way out of the door this morning. By tonight, me and my mutilated geranium will be sitting in some dank corner muttering quietly to each other.

At what point can I stop being irrationally annoyed in a funny way, and move on to being genuinely pissed off?

We took the dog for a walk in the freezing fog a couple of hours ago. On the way home, she spotted an Interesting Shape on the road and decided to go over and say hi. So we said "Come on, it's not that interesting," but she insisted.

It was a pair of large, furry gorilla slippers, and a study guide to Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

The dog wins.

We're currently hosting a Great Big Spider conference. Nobody told me about this, but the number of scuttly things with eight legs that are currently in our house is too high for chance. I don't know what they're discussing - "Achieving Optimum Speed Around the Bathtub"? "Introduction To Running Out Of Dark Corners At People Talking Peacefully On The Phone"? "Illegal Glass-And-Bit-Of-Paper Evictions: Your Rights And Responsibilities"? Either way, I wish they'd all get bored and go home.

I'm not scared of spiders, but there's something about a spider the size of a Corgi (this is an approximation only - exact spider-sizes may differ depending on how close the damn thing can get before you notice it) that's just plain unsettling. You know it's not exactly a dangerous creature, but it's far, far bigger than the mental picture you've got filed under 'Spider', and it won't fit in any of the glasses you find to carry it out of the house with, and oh my God, what's it been eating to get to this size anyway? Sheep?

Some Googling has turned up a bunch of interesting stuff about spiders. The word 'spider' apparently comes from the old English 'spithra' meaning 'spinner', which is nice if true ('spithra' sounds too much like the sound you make when you're happily drinking coffee and Spidiana Jones comes sprinting across the table). Also, somebody found it necessary to footnote and reference the idea that spiders are commonly found in the bath. I think these are called house spiders (as in 'if one turns up in yours, you may as well hand over the lease now'). They're still not as big as the biggest spider in Britain, though, which is this baby - a Raft Spider which lives on water. Surrender your bathtubs now.

Campus Wildlife: chirp
Students: Aww.
Wildlife: chirp chirp CHIRP
Students: *close window*
Wildlife: ka-SQUAAAAWK
Students: *sigh*
Wildlife: Quack.
Students: ...
Wildlife: Quack quack quack, quack quack, quack quack QUACK QUACK QUACK!
Student near window: Shut the duck up.

Apart from the fact that this doesn't ever sound like a compliment, it's just annoying. I thought I was organising my time and work quite well. Apparently, I am organising my time and work quite well - but the effect of this is that I'm existing at some low level of tiredness all the time, that other people can see this, and that I don't even notice. Can't I at least fool people? Bah.

In better news, a student who's usually the quietest and shyest person alive, and who's only just recently started speaking at all without looking absolutely terrified of it, turned up to class yesterday all happy and confident and enthusiastic about discussing things. And she brought grapes, too.

Friend Who Lives In The Real World: So, what have you been doing lately?
Me: I just wrote the final draft of an eleven-thousand word chapter, in a week! It's almost done apart from bibliography and footnotes! omgwtfeleventyone!
FWLITRW: Oh, okay. What else have you been up to?

Um, slept?

That's not entirely true. I saw The Incredibles at the weekend, which was fun if a little bit too close to the mess Prince Charles got himself into recently, and I went to hospital with my housemate (who lost a toenail, btw - the only two things in the world I'm squeamish about are toe injuries and seafood). Also, I re-read The Handmaid's Tale, which I hadn't read since I was 17 and frantically memorising every useful-sounding line in time for my A-levels.

It's as scary as I remembered. Not scary in a this-could-happen sense (although places like Afghanistan suggest it could), but in what it says about what people are capable of allowing. My A-level class was all-female, which the teacher said made the discussions less interesting - in previous years, there'd been some good arguments about whether men would really let this sort of society form, even if they weren't directly forming it themselves. To our credit, we did notice that the society wasn't just created by men - it's a difficult point to miss, especially when we all agreed on the ceremony where a mob of Handmaids willingly tear a man to pieces as the most disturbing scene in the book - but I don't think I saw until this time round just how much of it was done by women.

When I was seventeen, we didn't like Offred much. We would have preferred it if the book had been about the first Ofglen instead, who could've talked just as much about that society from a Handmaid's perspective, and who seemed far more interesting because she was part of Mayday. And who wants to read about a man character angstily going along with the system when you could be reading about one who's trying to bring that system down from within? (I still wish we'd heard more about Mayday - the people at the end call it a 'quasi-military organisation' that's separate from the underground railroad, and then go back to being haughty and superior academics, which I can do all by myself thankyouverymuch.) But with Offred as the narrator, it's a much more interesting book. Dystopian futures as external forces of oppression aren't difficult to write, and they're easy to feel smug about - we all want to think we'd have been like Ofglen in that situation, sacrificing our lives to fight against it. Except probably we wouldn't. Offred's self-conscious enough to realise she's buying into the mindset, but that doesn't stop her buying into it, and 'Serena Joy' is no more of a real name than 'Offred' is. She doesn't fall for it completely; she just falls for it enough.

I remember the film being pretty terrible, though. Still, there aren't many film adaptations that work as well as the books do.

I went out to buy goldfish food last night, and on the walk home I was in a really jumpy mood - the kind where you glance three times at everyone you pass, just to make sure they're not looking at you. It was pretty dark by this time (although walking in the dark, by itself, doesn't usually bother me), and I wanted to get home as quickly as possible. So. As I was walking down a main road towards a short-cut sidestreet, there was a man walking down the pavement towards me, and I hurried up my pace a bit so I'd get into the (well-lit) sidestreet before having to pass him. I turn off and start walking up the flight of steps, and hear his footsteps behind me, walking up the same steps. This didn't surprise me, since it's a well-travelled short cut, but I felt a bit safer seeing that there was an old couple walking the other way when I got to the top of the steps. I passed them, turned round to see how close behind me the guy was so I could let him pass - and he'd gone. Not there. Nowhere he could have turned off without doubling back on himself, either.

I suppose it's possible he just forgot something and turned round to go back for it, but that must have been about the time he saw that there were other people in the sidestreet, and that bothered me. I hurried up and got home as quickly as possible. Mentioned this to my housemate today, and she said that exact same thing had happened to her on a street nearby.

I got a lift home today from Friend With Car. I do not fancy the walk from the bus stop in the dark. In fact, right now, I don't fancy walking anywhere on my own in the dark for quite a while.

Unless you're a character in the Iliad, of course.

I saw Troy tonight (I'm guessing I don't need spoiler warnings for one of the oldest epics still in circulation). My housemate had seen it already, and recommended it "if you ignore some of the dialogue", so we went to see it together; secretly-deep-down, we're still Classicists. (Our undergraduate Classics professor liked it, too.) It's worth seeing, especially on a big screen, and it was better than I'd expected. But some things...

They took the gods out. They took the gods out. I already knew about this, and I don't really blame them; I'd love to have seen Greek gods done well in a serious modern film, but part of the reason I'd love to see that is because I can't imagine how they'd do it, so quite possibly they couldn't either. (Plus, it would have been terribly confusing and six hours long if they'd tried to fit the gods in.)

But I wasn't expecting them to take the gods out quite so much. They went for a very human-centred Iliad, where people believe in the gods but the gods aren't there. Which, well, okay, Historical Epic. They worked around the plot points that require divine cheating involvement in the story quite well. Except... it made it sort of flat, I think. And it definitely lessened the idea of having characters who think quite differently to us. (Except that one of my favourite parts was the negotiation of burial rituals for Hector, when the script went all subtle and didn't hammer us over the head with Burial Rituals Are Important, just had the characters take this for granted so well that we got the message anyway.) (My other favourite bit was the duel between Menelaus (pronounced 'Men-e-louse', apparently) and Paris, with Paris crawling away and clinging to Hector's ankles.)

They also went for a very hero-centred Iliad, in the sense that they were trying (part of the way, at least) to make it a film about how heroes and myths are created. And this is the sort of thing I like, although here I think there's so much more they could have done with it. When Achilles dies, it's not the arrow in his ankle which kills him, but the four or five in his chest - but he pulls them out, and when his body is found, there's only an arrow in his ankle. I think we were supposed to get the implied "...and when this story is retold, they'll all say that it was just an arrow to the ankle that killed the mighty Achilles!". Hmm. Clever, but...

Oh, and Briseis was about the wimpiest Mary Sue I have ever seen. Helen was at least supposed to not do a great deal, and start a war about as passively as it's possible to do so. Briseis was just a terrible, terrible character all round. I wish she'd stayed as a bit-part, and I hope to hell they didn't give her such an extended role because they needed a good female character, because she's really not it.

I hereby renounce anything I might ever have said about Angel not being as good as it used to be. I don't know what season we're on, and I don't know what the episode was called, but they were trying to bring back Angelus so they could defeat that magma-demon thing and then they didn't and then everything all worked out happy and "Isn't it great to be a team, everyone!" - and then, the ending. Um. Wow.

Anyway. A 2am conversation about Spike, Angel, Hannibal Lecter and Heathcliff, and why the obsession with making the bad guys not-so-bad these days (which is a post for another day, but an interesting one) turned into a grumble about Wuthering Heights being seen as 'just a love story'. (As in - if you cut out half the book in your film adaptation so that Heathcliff is Not So Bad After All, Really, then it's boring.) And then sitting around all day waiting for some furniture to arrive, and couldn't get any work done, and was Thinking. (Plus, it's occured to me that the two other Delenn/Lennier shippers in the fandom (numbers are growing! yay!) have interesting Lennier posts, and I don't. Can't promise this one will be as interesting or anything, and it turned out to be more about Delenn than Lennier, but here it is anyway.)

So:

( Delenn, Lennier, Sheridan, and what I think that whole thing was about. )