h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

... is not a very cheery song. but it does have assonance.

Dear Typolifi
I guess your doing that evasion or avoidance thing then. the difference, as im sure you know, in terms of tax returns is that tax avoidance is almost expected whereas actual evasion of payment is a crimnal offence. im sure there is a moral in there somewhere.

Last week i found a frog in my garden. not a metaphorical frog, a real honest to goodness flesh-and-blood slow moving, unblinking, hardly ribbeting frog. it sat there giving not a damn for the wet grass or the cold day or that blinking ant that kept strutting about. it sat there, ugly and malancholically defiant and i felt a great deal of empathy towards it then. then i noticed its little heart was racing. id been scaring it by just looking at it. i moved away and felt indescribably sad, like id been rejected by my own kind. it was the kind of frog one would write an ode to.

a propos of which, i happened to see a little whatsit on your page of poetry. it was very interesting, very jabberwocky. this is the type of poet who might perhaps see why you feel like writing about the woman who mans (or rather womans) the flora helpline (the number on the side of the tub) or who approaches life death and everything in between from a frogs eye view.

i also saw a message called "back to poland" and would like to ask you three silly, truistic and trite questions.
1)are you going back to poland?
2)hence, have you come from poland?
3)and three, are you, at all, polish?

im done now

in the touching hope of peace on earth

mary t g f uncle

Oh girl!
Avoiding is a void thing, and I'd never do it. Even before you admitted me in Something Very Original I only spoke of it as a joke, and now it became unpossible. I was delighted to see that a group of friends existed elsewhere too. And who am I to keep silent when an ode is needed. But I simply got busy preparing my trip, to see my mother. For I am half Polish, half French. I live in Paris now, with my dad, but I don't see my mum very often.
I was out with friends tonight, and the air was so chilly when I came back (I live in the suburbs and have to walk quite a bit) that I now sit in duffelcoat and doublesocks.
I have many many things I'd like to talk about with you. I'll come back from Poland in three weeks. Read you then!

Oh boy!
(sorry, its this phrasal balance thingy I've got going.)
Thanks for the reassurance, I hope you enjoy your trip to Poland - by the time you return to Paris I'll have been in Oxford for a whole week, pretending I've read law books whose prefaces left me entirely devoid of the will to live. Apparently email is the default method of communication between students and tutors, so I'll be actually obliged to waste time online! In anticipation of talking to you then, Mary

Hello Mary!
I'm back and I did all I had to do in both Warsaw and Paris. Sorry I didn't write earlier, hope you didn't go paranoid about that
How were your first weeks?
Mine were a bit boring. By the way, I'm a student in linguistics. 4th year.

Still willing to discuss some deep matters with me?

dear typolifi
moi, paranoid? I don't think so. or do i. i dont know. what does that mean? argh!!!
my first few weeks have been... a relevation. literally. every day a new damascus. i'm in the middle of much much work and events and things but stepping back to answer your question from the distance of the average pedestrian, i love oxford, the city, the university and the people. Almost all of them.

sorry to hear your first weeks have been excitement free, did anything interesting transpire in the major cities of europe? what deep things are you delving into deeply these days? i hadnt bought a newspaper in a month so i bought one at the weekend and really wish i hadnt. one good thing about here is the fact that you cna have deep and meaningfuls everyday out of the blue with anyone, though philosophy students generally the best bet.

hope to receive a cheery and/or profound missive from you tres soon,

yours v truly, Mary

Hullo Mary!

How nice that your year started well, these Oxbridge places really must be swell, though I don't remember right now where you actually are. The Sorbonne, on the opposite, is a very common university and I would even say it is below international standards. Let's you do your own little work yourself, though, and I think I like it. I say, it's very pleasant to find the books that interest you in the Library and read them and write about them, no matter if they really are planned to be read by your curriculum. And the teachers accept the papers you write about them afterwards!

But when I'm free like that, everything becomes difficult. I'm a bit of a perfectionnist you see, so I always want to read everything on a subject and come up with my own revolutionary theory about everything. Silly isn't it? It must have psychanalitic grounds, I'm trying to work this out at the moment.

Anyway, I'm very much into semiology (semiotics) now, the study of signs. After a few years of linguistics, I begin to have my own idea on what could be done beyond its field, concerning other systems of signs than language. Trying to find out which linguistic tools apply generally for all sign systems. Semiology's a complete mess actually, with little relation between the various essays and monographies on the subject. Maybe it's even beyond my synthetic skills to unify it
Or maybe I'm just growing up and I don't believe any more I'll be the one who brings the last piece of the puzzle...

Typolifi

dear typolifi
last time i researched the subject (thursday) the sorbonne was not called, thought of or even dreamt of as "a common little university"! im in keble college in oxford, which is very gothic and atmospheric, although i was expecting warmer weather coming from glasgow! where are the palm trees?

working on your own completely unaided is a bit of a culture shock isnt it? your course sounds highly interesting, whereas mine just sort of is... i still have vague fears i should be studying english en lieu of law but there you go, you cant have everything i suppose i dont dislike what im doing, i even enjoy criminal law! but constitutional law is very political and rather arid. i have my last tutorial of the term in one hour's time so i'd better go and look over my notes, im going home on saturday for five weeks of winter wonderland (four essays exams on january and lots of catch up work)
hope all is going well for you and promise to write something useful or interesting very soon!

mary

KEPZ!

Here I was talking to you 8 years ago and maybe even flirting a little and now I see I never answered your post here above.

And suddenly I also see it was your last post on this website!

Please come back someday and tell me I didn't stop your h2g2 researcher's destiny by not answering your post.

I do have an excuse though, you *were* talking about law

(But if anything, I guess I might have been intimidated by your Oxford location...)