different names for the same thing

I was up marking coursework till nearly 3am last night and now my head is full of wool and my neck feels simultaneously stiff and too wobbly. Today was running up and down stairs chasing more coursework, sending the students out to buy plastic folders and find me the hole punch because surely you're not submitting THAT? It's all in but one now, finally, and for the rest of the evening I am off duty. I am eating bucket pasta and thinking about watching 24 Hour Party People, which always inspires me because it's about a shambolic disorganised mess of a person who through sheer enthusiasm manages to make great stuff happen, almost by accident.

But even despite my adrenalin-filled get-things-done state, I still found myself perched on the edge of the bed half-dressed for half an hour this morning, breathlessly devouring the end of Geoff Ryman's Air. Oh my. I'd only picked it up while packing my bag to see how far I was from the end. I went out to catch the bus still staggered by the brilliance.

More people ought to know about Geoff Ryman. Okay, lots of people seem to have read 253, his book of thumbnail portraits of people on a tube train, but who knows about The Child Garden, the love story of a girl and a polar bear opera-singer in a near-future sub-tropical London? It's full of amazing language and big ideas and is one of the best books I've ever read. Was, his remix of The Wizard of Oz, is also great and very, very dark. Lust is an awkward one, about a scientist who develops the power to manifest anyone he fancies, alive, dead or fictional, but it's still got more crunchy concepts and moments of insight and beauty than any three more processed and pasteurised books you care to mention, and towards the end goes careering off into a gorgeous crazed mystic tangent about what really happens when you die. He writes about time and memories and the random connections between people, the texture of cities and making art and throwing impromptu street parties in the face of death. With balloons.

Excuse my fangirling. I just think he's criminally ignored, though he did win a bunch of awards for Air, which is set in the last village in the world to get online. When I was in Trinity Netsoc we invited him over to give a talk about 253 and online fiction (yes, it was the late nineties, how can you tell?) and a bunch of us committee people got outrageously drunk with him in his B&B while he told the guy who was Secretary to stop wasting his life and go have babies. It sounded as if he felt he'd failed at his life. I think he ought to have people peeling grapes for him, if there was any justice.

Off to the Bristol Comic Expo tomorrow with a bundle of Wasted Epiphanies to thrust upon people. With polar bears in it, yes. I rip off Mr Ryman all the time without meaning to.

"All right. This is a picture of an atom. Can you show me which part is the - "
"Miss, what's an atom?"
(blink) "You haven't done atoms? No? Okay... atoms are what all matter is made of. They're like the building blocks that everything is made from. You're made of atoms. I'm made of atoms. The air is made of atoms. There are lots of different kinds of atoms, have a look at this periodic table - "
(peering at his hand) "I can't see any."
"They're very, very tiny. Microscopic. Things don't get much smaller."
"But what if you cut one in half?"
(rashly) "There'd be a huge explosion."
"What?!"
"Um... atoms are held together by powerful forces. If you split one it releases lots of energy. That's where nuclear power comes from. But it's very hard to split them in the first place."
(he turns pale, eyes darting around) "So there might be some atoms in this room?"
"Yes, there's lots - everything is made of atoms."
"Do I have atoms in my eyes?"
"Yeah. Your eyes are made of atoms. Everything is made of atoms."
"So I might have atoms on me right now?" (He's rubbing his arms, to wipe the pesky things off)
"Well, because everything is made of atoms, yes, you do."
"Isn't that dangerous?"
(struggling to keep straight face) "No, it isn't. Don't worry."
"But what if I just did this - " (he pinches his fingers together) " - and split one by accident?"
"Really. Don't worry. It takes huge amounts of energy to split the atom. It's never going to happen."
"But if it did, miss, I'd be in the newspaper, yeah?"

Last night I went to kesstrel's for Heathers and enthusiasm soup, and when I left to walk up the hill everything was silent and frozen, with an almost-full moon shining, and some weird compulsion made me draw stars and faces and things with my finger on car windscreens, the tops of wheely bins, and any other flat surface I could see that had snow on it.

That morning on my way to the bus I'd passed another windscreen with "ZAPPA!" written across it in the snow.

*

I'd been worrying that he'd been locked up in a detention centre for illegal aliens and not made it to America at all, but verlaine just phoned from Miami. Apparently triple-breasted women swim around town totally naked, but he can't get on LJ because his local library has declared it to be "tasteless".

*

It was a day of small embarrassments.

I teach this boy GCSE English. This is the demanding one I've ranted to some of you about, who rings me up at all hours of the night to ask me to set him essays. Last week he asked if I'd give him an extra half-hour each week. Fine, I said. That would be an extra x quid. "No, free," he said, "as a favour. All my other tutors agreed happily to do it." Hmm, said I, I dunno. This week he asked again. I said I was quite skint and couldn't just go around handing out free half-hours that I could be spending earning money. Or going home for a rest. (I might have done it if I liked the kid, but something about him always puts me on edge.)

He got his dad in to back him up. Dad makes me even edgier than Kid. "All the others are very pleased to do it," he said, "and they live further away than you." I still said no. "Well, then," said Dad sulkily, sounding younger than his son, "one hour, not a single minute more, if you want to be like that." He flounced out. I was expecting him to kick something on his way.

I went to the tube, alternately feeling triumphant and brooding that maybe I was a horrible person (am I? Answers on a postcard, please), and in mid-brood completely failed to recognise eviltwinemma. Her hair is short and red and I've hardly seen her since 2001 when my hair was blue, but still. Duh.

Then I timed my return home perfectly so I could run into Mad Claire Downstairs in the hall as she was going out. She smiled a stretched smile that clearly pained her. "I haven't seen you in a while," she tinkled laboriously. "No indeed," said I, and went on up the stairs.

*

Can I have a new womb, please? Do they sell them on eBay?

*

Oh, the fun of dropping letters for postwodehouse.com. The thrill of standing behind things and watching people examining them, or ignoring them. Today I dropped three in the Science Museum and two in the Natural History Museum. Last I saw them, one was being treated as suspicious by a security guard, who seemed to be scanning it with some sort of raygun thing. Another was snatched up almost as soon as I dropped it, which was cool, because I'd put it in front of an ecology display which announced that we were connected to all other living things. Another, sadly, was being repeatedly trodden on.

I think I'm going to update the site every week from now on. I'll try to incorporate some sort of experiment blog. A lot of you seemed quite interested to see how it progressed, so I was thinking of setting up a mailing list to notify people when an update's been done. If you'd like to be on it, put your email in the box. I won't spam your inbox; in fact I won't mail you more than once a week, promise.

[Poll #443184]

And miss_newham, of course you can have another go.