fate is playing silly buggers with me

as Douglas Adams once said. This is the fourth time I've tried to post, let's see if Blogger will stop being a dick for once (it must be hanging out with Ricardo and Trevor or something).

The last five days have been surreal. I'm in London, surviving on what money my parents' have lent me, I haven't heard back from my French bank counselor person (though I've called her twice and emailed her), I've been existing in alternating states of panic and bliss, which will wear you out quicker than sore feet will.
Obviously my number one problem is money. I don't know what I'm gonna do. Being flat broke in London is not quite as fun as being flat broke in Paris, mainly because I don't know the city as well as I do Paris. In Paris I feel comfortable enough to go out on my own at night carrying only metro tickets and some cash. However, all the museums in London are free, thanks to the Queen's Golden Jubilee thingy. As a result I've dropped my flirtation with radical anarcha-feminism in favor of monarchy and divine right. God save the Queen!
I'm in a hostel right across the street from the British museum, where I stumbled on a life sized statue of Anne Damer (the heroine of Emma Donoghue's Life Mask). I'm in freakin' Bloomsbury, which is enough to make me faint from sheer delight. Sitting in Russel Square trying to picture Virginia Woolf there. Also did the British Library, where I promptly passed out from It's All Too Muchness: Persuasion!! Middlemarch! BEOWULF! The last entry in Scott's journal before he freezes to death in Antartica, "For God's sake look after our people." Beatles lyrics!!
Today was book browsing (but not buying, I'm being very good. A heavy suitcase will keep a girl in line more than a bank balance will). The Occult Bookshop, Quintos, Oxfam Books, and Waterstones, the largest bookstore in Europe. This afternoon I did the National Portrait Gallery, where I said hello to Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, etc, and rounded out my Life Mask tour by viewing the busts of Fox and Eliza Farren that Anne Damer sculpted.
I'm pretty exhausted. Trying to work up the energy to check out the girls in The Candy Bar tonight (I can afford a drink). Part of my exhaustion is due to my inexplicably snagging myself a French girlfriend for a 24 hour period my last night in Paris. Friend of a friend of a friend, literally, and my first butch too. Suffice to say I had a little too much fun Saturday night, and we spent most of Sunday inventing new makeout spots and seeing how many old ladies we could shock on the metro. So after 8 months of trying I can finally scratch "French girls" off my To Do list.
In short, when I'm not feeling a constant low-level anxiety or sheer happiness, I'm feeling frazzled. Maybe I should just cool it and come back to London at the end of May.
I better get off the damn internet now; I'm going to attempt to go to Chawton tomorrow to make my Jane Austen pilgrimage.