This one's for the girls.

The girls of the Chaplaincy, minus two

Living with a ton of great girls was one of the best parts of my undergrad experience, and I'm realizing more all the time that I've been incredibly lucky in the same respect this year. There were six of us up to a week ago, but now we have a seventh, an Italian girl who lived here last year and is back indefinitely while she looks for work. Getting to know these girls, hanging out with them, and simply knowing they're around all the time has been one of the best parts of my year here.

A group of girls living together, I think, is always like a little family, even when there are guys in the house, too. There will always be at least one "mom" -- for you Sellardites reading, the Maria of the group who will iron your skirt, give you hugs and backrubs, and most importantly, has an extraordinarily high tolerance for whining. There will be the party girl(s), the quiet one(s), the chatty one(s), the high maintenance one(s), the no-nonsense one(s) and the slacker(s). There will be pairs and little groups that have especially strong connections, often among personality types you would never put together. Despite these differences and various relationships, if you're lucky, there is a larger, inseparable Girl Unit. You may only really notice it every now and then, maybe when the going gets tough for a couple of its members or when the weekend rolls around, but you always have the comfort of knowing it's there.

I asked a male friend one time whether he was glad he was a guy or would rather be a girl. He shocked me by answering he'd never thought about it. Maybe it's something girls are especially given to pondering. Some days it would be a lot easier to be a guy, for all kinds of reasons that don't need enumerating. But I also think it would be lonelier, and for myself, I wouldn't trade. I've never seen a guy bring another guy a cup of tea and a plate of biscuits because he's had a bad day, and I've never seen a group of guys out having cocktails on Valentine's day to celebrate their singleness. I'm sure there's a certain satisfaction in being macho, but I think real guys' guys miss out on a lot.

So, here's to my girls, near and far. I don't know what I'd do without you.

Providence, indeed.

There have been some big updates on my calendar this week. First, I have a date in Rhode Island in mid-March, and more importantly, I'll be back in Kansas for Holy Week and Easter! How lucky can I get?

It's also been one of those weeks where a few great people have appeared to provide inspiration, encouragement, and just plain happiness exactly when I needed it. Like Monday night: I was hosting my pro-life meeting in the chaplaincy, as usual, and none of my few regulars showed up, for various reasons. I was feeling pretty down until a new friend came along, a guy who isn't quite ready to take a firm anti-abortion stance but cared enough about life to come along and talk about the issues. He turned out to be just the right person to help me set aside a lot of frustration and get re-focused, and he completely turned my day around, right out of the blue.

Yesterday, I walked down to the city centre for my appointment to apply for a National Insurance Number, which I'll need in order to get a job. It turned out to be the highlight of my day. Two people interviewed me, one woman and one older man in his first week on the job who was sitting in as part of his training. They had to take information from a whole pile of documents I'd brought in, and the process should have been dry and bureaucratic, but it turned out to be relaxing and fun. The man told me stories about his other jobs as a part-time engineering lecturer and his travels in the U.S., and when another woman came in to look over my paperwork we all got to talking about how lovely Edinburgh is and how she and I have the same name (which should always be spelled with an "e" at the end). I felt like I'd made three new friends when I left.

Tonight I cooked dinner for the house plus the younger sister of my housemate Laura, an adorable red-haired second-year named Emily who has become my adopted little sister for the year. I very courageously made beef stroganoff (a new and fairly complicated recipe for me -- I actually marinaded steak strips in white wine), which was a big hit, although I practically destroyed the kitchen. It was a fun, sociable dinner, and I got to have a nice chat with Emily as she helped me do all the masses of washing up.

So, those have been the high points of the week, and I'm happy to have a couple more to look forward to in the weeks to come. Back to the books, now, to see what further inspiration I can dig up.

Shakin' it.

As promised, I've been making the most of my cushy new schedule this teaching block and having some fun this weekend. I reached a milestone this week by doing what I always made fun of the business school kids and Greeks for doing at KU: I began the weekend on a Thursday. Shock horror. We went to a very cool indie-electro night at this club called Thekla, which is actually a ship in the floating harbour. On Friday we switched it up and went to Brazilian Beatz, a monthly event featuring a capoeira troupe, carnaval dancers, and reggae music upstairs.


Brazilian Beatz night


Girlies at Thekla

Just to keep up appearances, I guess I should write a little about non-bar-related activities which, believe it or not, are still occupying most of my time. I started the unit I've really been looking forward to, "Classics, Myth and Modernism," this week. The professor is one of the most genuinely intimidating people I've run into in a while, but she's not actually hostile (although not one of those just-a-teddy-bear-underneath types, either). That's OK -- it's always a good thing to be kept on your toes. I've been revisiting lots of the modernists, with a heavier dose of theory this time, and reading lots about myth and psychoanalysis. I'm currently failing to be convinced by Joseph Campbell's argument that all religions and mythologies are oh, all just the same thing, really, but at the same time enjoying reading lots of good stories about gods eating people, etc., in The Hero with a Thousand Faces. And, in a burst of naive optimism, I've re-begun Ulysses, which (let's be honest) will probably be flung at the wall sometime in the next 12 to 24 hours and set aside for another 2-year cooling-off period.

I don't have too much else to report on at the moment, but here are a few pics of some recent fun times. Happy weekend to all!

I've got nothing but time.

This week was the first of the new teaching block and of my unbelievably wide open new schedule. I have no class between 11 a.m. Wednesday and 4 p.m. Monday. How is that possible? Of course, that doesn't mean tons of free time as much as it means tons of time that I'm going to have to be really disciplined about using well. Still -- if anybody wants to go dancing, say, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and/or Saturday, I may very well be game.

It's both exciting and uncomfortable having so much unstructured time to deal with -- both during my weeks this term and in and the gigantic, gaping T.B.A. hole of life beyond Sept. 15. But I think it's a good exercise in figuring out how, exactly, I plan to justify my existence from here on out. Being busy can serve as a cop-out from dealing with big, scary existential questions sometimes -- if you can't afford to slow down and think about anything but work and the basics of life, you can ignore the big picture and its scary and unattractive features. Stop to catch your breath, though, and it hits you full in the face. It's all very well to fantasize during stressful times about what you would do with a big chunk of free time, but once it's handed to you, I don't think it's an unnatural impulse to want to hand it right back because it can be so intimidating. Time is a frighteningly valuable commodity, and as with all valuable commodities, it's easier to squander in little bits than in large quantities. Sitting on a larger-than-usual portion, the big question arises: what am I supposed to accomplish with my collected amount of time on earth -- the sum total of all the minutes, hours and days? And with the question comes the warning: if I haven't started yet -- if I don't start now -- I probably never will.

This is the heavy stuff that's been occupying my brain for the past week, and I've made some good resolutions as a result. I think I've been given these few months as a challenge, and I'm excited to see the outcome.

I'm getting a little queasy.

I handed in my Late Antiquity essay yesterday morning, and after a beer and a burger with some girls on my course, a long nap, and a couple hours' blissfully undisturbed reading of Middlemarch (I'm halfway through after four months -- maybe I'll finish it at about the same time as my dissertation?) I'm feeling utterly mentally stable.

I survived this week unscathed (well -- I should wait to see my essay mark before going that far), but some others I've been surrounded with haven't been so lucky. In fact, I've had more direct and indirect contact with blood and guts this month than I ever have.

First, Prudentius' martyrs. I've read some gory Latin in my day, but nothing to compare to this. It's conventional Christian wisdom that the glory of a martyr increases in direct proportion to his suffering, and in the Peristephanon, Prudentius does his best to prove the point.

Take, for example, the scalping of a little boy who precociously professes his faith in Per. 10:

comam cutemque verticis revulserat
a fronte tortor, nuda testa ut tegmine
cervicem adusque dehonestaret caput

The torturer pulled back the hair and skin from his brow,
so that the skull, laid bare without its covering
down to the neck, would dishonor the head. (Per. 10.761-3)

And then, later, his mother's reaction at his decapitation:

manusque tendebat sub ictu et sanguine,
venarum ut undam profluam manantium
et palpitantis oris exciperet globum:
excepit, et caro adplicavit pectori.

And she held out her hands under the blow and the blood,
so that she might catch the stream flowing from his dripping veins
and his head, with lips still breathing:
she caught, it, and pressed it dearly to her breast. (Per. 10.841-4)

Makes it a little hard to focus on the glory of God, doesn't it?

The gore has also been brought a little closer to home recently due to a freak accident here in Clifton. When Dee was here, he and I were walking down Park St. on the way to the train station one morning, not paying much attention to what was happening on the street, when suddenly, right in front of the post office, I stepped in a huge pool of human blood. Like, a good gallon or so of really thick, fresh stuff, of about ketchup thickness. I looked up in horror to find that we'd walked right through an accident scene, so new it hadn't been properly cordoned off, and there was a guy with his head cracked open being loaded into an ambulance right next to me.

Well, we didn't stop to rubberneck, and went on to the station. When we came back at the end of the day, you couldn't tell anything had happened. I didn't think much about the incident again until yesterday, when I picked up a copy of the student paper and found the headline Triangle Brain Damage Tragedy and a picture of a police officer standing outside the post office. The article made it clear that the accident was the one I'd walked through. Turns out stonework was being done on top of the building, and a brick fell 50 ft. and hit a chemistry Ph.D. student from Syria on the head. Someone noticed him lying there bloodied and called an ambulance, and he's been in the hospital unconscious ever since -- over two weeks now. If he ever wakes up he'll have severe brain damage, and he doesn't even have any family in the country.

Pretty intense stuff. Sorry to gross you all out. Future reports should be less gruesome. I've had enough blood and guts for a while.

Who would've thought?

I really should be studying for tomorrow's Greek exam right now, but I'm feeling the need for quick blog break. It's the little breaks that are keeping me going through Friday -- the impromptu let-off-some-steam run, the trip downstairs every few hours to refresh the caffeine supply and maybe chat with a housemate, a few snatched pages from The Best American Essays of the Century while I'm waiting for my food to cook. I've got to get some more exciting vices.

The pressure is on with my Friday Late Antiquity essay deadline looming, but the research has been great fun. And I've reached a milestone in my academic career: the point where reading Latin has actually made my life easier. I wasn't sure I'd ever see the day. It happened this weekend when I dug up some of Augustine's sermons delivered on the feast days of various martyrs, English translations of which are hard to find and aren't available in the Arts and Social Sciences (ASS) Library (shocker). I was expecting to have to fight through the Latin, but it turned out to be easy (he's trying to reach the average Roman North African Joe, after all), and more to the point, beautiful -- I felt like I was in Augustine's congregation, laughing at his jokes and getting all fired up with the Holy Spirit along with everyone. I think this Latin stuff is starting to pay off.

Even though there's not much time to socialize at the moment, it's great to have almost everyone back in the house. We got some of the last few back yesterday, and you can really feel the difference in the house. We had our first dinner together tonight (Michelle was kind enough to trade cooking shifts with me so I could spend the whole afternoon studying), and we had a good laugh as we tried to decide who would be the tastiest human, if what you eat determines your flavor. Mark Mangino came up as a possible strong contender, and then we got to thinking about how big an oven you would need to --

But it's time to get back to work. I'll leave you to work out the rest of that problem yourselves.

Makin' the rounds.

After a long holiday spent traveling here, there, and everywhere, I'm back in Bristol and back down to business. Firstly: the break has been fantastic, and there's nothing better than spending time at home with family and friends and traveling to fun and exciting places. Secondly: coming back to Bristol after a couple weeks away has really shown me how much I love love love it here. I just feel all tingly sometimes walking around the city or coming through the door at home because I'm so lucky to be here. Two big thumbs up for Bristol and its lovely inhabitants.

But, back to my whirlwind past couple of weeks. Dee has been over here with me since the 30th, and we've had an awesome time touring the UK and hanging out here at home. We have definitely made the most of every day he's been here -- I can't remember two weeks when I've walked more! We started off spending about 24 hours in London after flying to Heathrow, and jet lag didn't even cross our minds -- we were out and about as soon as we'd ditched our stuff at the hotel in Bloomsbury. We both get a big kick out of all the dandy stuff in Piccadilly, so we headed there first, then headed to Mass at Brompton Oratory and had dinner in Chinatown. The next day we walked more around the center and saw the greatest hits of the Portrait Gallery, National Gallery, and the British Museum before getting the train back to Bristol on New Years Eve. New Years was pretty chill -- we had great pizza at Pizza Express and then came back and had mulled wine and watched about numbers 40-15 of the "Top 100 Most Annoying People of 2007" on the telly. I must be getting old.

It was a good thing we got to bed not long after midnight, because we were off to Cheltenham for the New Years Day races after a run the next morning. Neither of us knew quite what we were getting into at Cheltenham, but it really blew us away. We were probably some of the only foreigners there: it's definitely an old establishment thing, with most of the men in long tweed jackets and hats with binoculars around their necks and the women all poshed up in ladies' tweed, big Russian-style full hats, and (inexplicably, considering the cold and the mud) high heels. The place was packed full of thousands of people, and we saw seven steeplechase races on a gorgeous green course under the hills of Gloucestershire. We didn't put any money on our favorites, but we cheered hard for a horse called Wichita Lineman.



The next day we went to Bath, where we of course toured the Baths, walked up to the Royal Crescent and (major highlight) popped into the gift shop of the Jane Austen Centre to check out the Mr. Darcy range. I bought a greeting card featuring a portrait of Colin Firth as Mr. Darcy that is awaiting installment in a gilt frame to be featured prominently on my wall!

Dee headed off to Cardiff on Thursday while I stayed home to atone for my pretty much complete neglect of my studies over the previous week. I'm in the middle of a lot of good reading right now for an essay on Prudentius' Peristephanon, a collection of poems on the martyr cult of the late 4th century, and loads of revision for my Greek test next week. When Dee came back we had a really nice dinner, provided by one of my housemates, of food she'd smuggled back from Romania -- it is absolutely amazing what she managed to get through customs!

And then, we were off to Paris the next morning! Hooray for EasyJet -- they make it simple to leave Bristol early in the morning and be strolling down the Champs by early afternoon. Wow. It was pedal-to-the-metal sightseeing from there, for four very full days. On Saturday, we checked an item off the top of my to-see list by taking the commuter train to Versailles. We had a sort of odd snafu getting onto a guided tour of some of the various Louis' private apartments, which at one point had us chasing through the palace complex after an extremely passive-aggressive desk worker who insisted a) that we were late for our tour (we weren't), and b) that there was a tour that we could catch up with if we ran like mad people through the palace and round Louis XIV's chapel (there plainly wasn't). Anyway: the apartments were quite impressive when we got to them two hours later! Other highlights of Paris included some very nice dinners in the Latin Quarter and a visit to the Museum of the Middle Ages, part of which is housed in an old Roman bath complex -- very neat.



The past couple of days has been more or less a marathon tete-a-tete with Plato (see, I learned some French while I was away) while Dee has seen more of the southwest, including Oxford. Sadly, he's off tomorrow morning, and even more sadly, I've just realized that the essay I thought was due Friday is due in tomorrow by noon, so our time together has been even further shortened (so why am I writing this blog entry right now? That is a very good question indeed!). Anyway, I'll get back to it. Sorry for the ridiculous length of this entry! To compensate for my wordiness, here are some pictures to go along with it. Happy New Year to all!