Hundredth post

When I got back to halls this evening I found a notice saying that I couldn't use the water in my room (that is, shower, toilet and sink) until further notice. Which was pretty annoying, especially as I couldn't really do without washing my hair. Apparently there's a blockage in pipes on the lower ground floor.

I'd been back home to see Birmingham Royal Ballet in Cyrano with my mum. It was really good, though there was perhaps a bit too much acting and not enough dancing. The acting was good too though. Before seeing it I couldn't quite imagine how they could possibly make a ballet from the story of Cyrano de Bergerac, which seemed to rely too much on words, but they used a lot of British Sign Language, which made Mum happy as she's been studying it up to Level 2 for her job. I thought Kosuke Yamamoto, playing Le Bret, was very good- he's currently a First Soloist but I thought he could have been a Principal- but then I'm not that good at judging quality: to me the Artists and the Principals look equally good. But he did have stage presence- even when he was standing at the back with other people dancing in front you found yourself wanting to look at him.
I got up quite early on Friday- early for a Friday, that is. I didn't do anything during the day other than sign up to Facebook- I'd been planning to go along to the Government Common Room as invited but Facebook turned out to be pretty addictive (as I had imagined- one reason why I held out so long), and I spent so long uploading photos and inviting people to be friends that I had to give up the idea of going in to LSE.

In the evening I went to a Chinese Dinner organised by a Chinese student on my course (X) to celebrate Chinese New Year. I wasn't actually looking forward to it that much to tell the truth- the whole area of food was quite shaky ground with the potential for awkwardness, since we'd been asked to order several days in advance. For one thing, I hadn't been sure if we were supposed to order rice too- it wasn't mentioned and I didn't know if X was going to order some for all of us. I was also not quite sure whether she really meant us to choose two drinks. And then when she emailed to confirm our choices, she added that she'd ordered six starter plates between us, the only item of which that I could eat being seaweed. I didn't mind not being able to eat the rest, but I worried that if she realised when she saw me only eating that then she would feel bad for not having ordered vegetarian stuff and I didn't want that. Finally, in the same email she said that we would all have to introduce our 'favourite dish', and I had no idea what to say about what I'd ordered, which in any case wasn't my favourite dish; I'd picked it because I fancied trying something new. Then I was also a bit worried about the conversation- it seemed like there was great potential for it to be quite awkward, since there were quite a lot of people going that I didn't know, and others whose names I still hadn't quite got sorted, and it could be difficult talking to the lecturers (a few of whom were also going).

It was actually quite good in the end. The food was excellent, and although indeed those who hadn't ordered rice didn't get any, and I no longer wanted the white wine I'd ordered a few days earlier (I didn't really feel like it after the night before, and anyway I just felt thirsty), it all worked out ok: I felt perfectly full without rice or large amounts of starters, and I managed to avoid the wine- they didn't come to pour it out, and when they were asking if anyone else was missing a drink, my neighbour to the right looked at me as if to say 'Go on, aren't you going to ask for your wine?' so I explained that I didn't actually fancy it any more, and I'd only have it if they actually gave it to me, and he insisted on giving me his orange juice since, he explained, he'd only wanted one (that two drinks thing again)- something he'd mentioned when they first arrived. And there was even another main course that was vegetarian, besides mine.

The conversation was still a bit problematic: I got on fine with my neighbour to the left after a little initial awkwardness but he spent quite a while talking to the people to his left in Mandarin or Cantonese, and my neighbour to the right was the teaching assistant for ST418. I couldn't think of much to say to him at all, and at one point he asked 'Are you catching up with the course work?' which I thought might be a reference to my having skipped the computer class (which he takes) last Monday- I wasn't sure but I thought it was best to own up in case that was what he meant. So I explained that I'd tried the exercises by myself, and the computer stuff was fine but I was unsure about the interpretation. But it turned out that that wasn't what he'd meant and he had indeed been unaware that I wasn't there: he must have meant 'Are you keeping up with the course work?'- whether he said that and I didn't hear properly or whether it was just his English, I don't know. And then he fell asleep during most of the latter half of the dinner. Which I didn't think was rude or anything, but it did leave me a bit short of people to talk to- though I talked to the lecturer for the course, sitting a couple of places further round, for a bit, and he was encouraging me not to get put off by pound signs (I'd told him I wasn't interested in finance).

After the dinner some of us went to a pub. It was quite a nice pub, but annoyingly some men asked me how I was when I was getting a drink at the bar and said I was looking sparkly that evening (I was wearing a skirt covered in sequins), and didn't seem to understand that an utter failure to respond on my part was a subtle hint that I wasn't interested. Still, I was talking to some of X's friends from elsewhere and had a pretty interesting conversation.

I did poke AH in the end. And every time over the weekend that I imagined him receiving it in a state of purely platonic friendship towards me and thinking it was a wierd thing for me to have done I wondered what I'd done, but told myself that it was probably a perfectly normal thing that happens all the time, that that was probably part of how most relationships got started, and that it was about time I took some risks- living in safety wasn't going to get me anywhere. He poked back on Sunday evening, which left me as I had anticipated not all that clear as to his position: it's quite possible that the accepted thing with poking is to poke back out of politeness even if you wouldn't have poked yourself in the first place, and even if that's not the case and you only poke back if you mean it, it's quite possible that he thought I was doing it as a joke, like he told me he and D did. At least it wasn't an absence of poking though- that would almost certainly have meant he definitely wasn't interested.

I was left with another problem: the poke came with an option to poke back, even though it was itself a poke back. My original plan had been to leave it if he poked back and give him the chance to poke again later if he really meant it, but now I thought that if I didn't poke back it might look like the first time had been a mistake or that I wasn't that interested, and that if I didn't poke back he'd think that to poke twice himself seemed a bit importunate when I was probably not poking because I didn't want to poke. So I poked, but I probably should have left a bit more of a decent interval- now I probably look too keen. I suppose I'll just have to wait and see how things go. I might see him tomorrow- I'm planning on dropping in to the Government Common Room. Actually, that was a bit interesting- I got a message from D on Facebook asking me to come tomorrow, and something about the phrasing- and the way she was talking about it in the pub- almost seemed as if he might have asked her to try and make sure I came because it would look strange doing it himself. That's probably reading far far too much into it though- I expect she just wants to be friends and it has nothing to do with him.

I've just successfully attempted my solution to the interesting problem of how to wash my hair without access to my shower or basin. I got my washing up bowl, filled it with warm water in the kitchen (it's only my room and the one opposite that are affected), filled my kettle too, warmed up the water in the kettle, put both on the floor of my bathroom, dunked my head in the bowl, applied shampoo, dunked again and then rinsed the rest off with water from the kettle, holding my head over the bowl. It worked surprisingly well. It does you good to have a challenge.