But really, graduation

I did actually get to the ceremony, although it's not the funnest thing in the world to go through an entire afternoon on a couple of new potatoes and half a bread roll.

It was the perfect culmination to the year: a truly Cambridge event. The robes with hoods so heavy they threatened to strangle you whenever your shoulders shifted. The university's old guard stalking through the Senate House in red robes trimmed with white fur, stamping their silver canes and hissing for audience members to stop making noise when they sit (how dare you walk as if you actually weigh anything in this hallowed ground?!). The Latin rolling like an incantation off the tongues of college presenters. The parading through town and the kneeling and the blessing and the shivering under a mottled autumn sky where King's College stands etched against the clouds, immutable and unperturbed, silent witness to 800 years of this same ceremony.


Somehow, it also seemed fitting that our university "degrees" could have been printed out on my spastic Lexmark inkjet. Maybe the university is still miffed that it can't use dried sheepskin and hand-ground ink sticks anymore.

It was a very nice day, finishing with a visit to our favorite pub of all time and a brain cell-killing film (also the funniest, most cringe-worthy film I've seen in awhile). While our families couldn't be there, I was lucky enough to have part of my extended Cambridge clan in attendance. It meant even more knowing this might be one of the last times we see each other regularly (can't think about that yet, though).


So, here officially closes the year. Frustrations and heartache, yes, but also friends and fieldwork and one step further on this journey. Was it worth it, in the end?

I would have to say yes.

So, graduation

Activities I might discourage you from pursuing the night before a graduation ceremony:

Number One: Attending one of your university's notorious formal halls


Number Two: Using the formal hall as a combination "Reunion of Girl Powers" and "Thank God We Aren't the College Officers Anymore" celebration.


Number Three: Well, this one speaks for itself.


Number Four: Reaching that point in the evening where you foolishly think maybe, just maybe, you aren't completely repulsed by the taste/aroma/existence of certain alcohols anymore.


In my defense, I should note that this is the *FIRST* time I've been out partying since the last time I was with this crew in early September. Bad, girls. You are bad.

I don't think there's any need to detail how the following morning progressed, but fortunately I still appear to be clinging to the tail end of those years when you can recover from things before your 2:00 ceremony begins. Recover by the time of rehearsal? Well...not so much. I don't think anyone really bought my impending flu excuse, either.

There's gonna be a party when the wolf comes home

Next weekend, I'm taking the 3.5 hour bus ride back to my graduate institution for my official graduation, as one of the strange rules of my institution is that you aren't officially a graduate until you participate in yet another ritualized ceremony. This morning, I'd actually started looking forward to the spectacle of it all: the stooping and kissing of somebody or other's finger (a great idea, really, at the start of the flu season); the formal lunch; the wearing of strange, furry hoods a la Harry Potter (disclaimer: no rabbits were harmed in the making of my hood. I felt excited for all of ten minutes, and then I noticed who else was graduating with me.

This is a November ceremony, which means the convocation is extremely small. Six people from my college will walk on Saturday. Of those six, two of them despise each other. Actually, "despise" is too kind a word. One wishes the other had never come into existence; the other wishes the first would collapse writhing in a blistering pool of fiery substances. And yes, of course, this all comes down to housemate disputes of yore. It would all be hilarious, if she hadn't accused me of truly heinous things which I think the school might halfway believe.

So, our entime graduate luncheon is going to be a frosty, silent debacle. Ever tried to avoid eye contact or conversation with someone who's sharing your very small table? I may have to accidentally cut off my finger with a butterknife if we're seated across from each other. Maybe I can stave off any simmering tension by blurting out what I could hear through the walls most evenings. That should encourage the others to change the subject before anyone spills blood on the steamed potatoes. Alphabetically speaking, I'm just behind this ex-housemate -- thank god, because otherwise I'd spend the entire ceremony terrified that I would finish with a knife protruding from my back.

See? This is why people should not be allowed to live together unless they know what they're getting into ahead of time.

Maybe I can say I've been deported back to the U.S. and convince them to let me graduate in absentia.

Miss you

It's going to be a bumpy month for posts, as I'm currently hosting family. Yes, they leave in a week, but then I move somewhere which may not have internet service until the end of October, at which point I'll probably have gone mad and rendered myself incapable of writing anything. Hell, I'll barely recognize the keyboard at that point. Six weeks without internet would be...We're not going to think about that.

I was in my garden today, my long, inviting, newly mown garden, home to many a mouse and countless birds, bearer of lavender and sunflowers and holly and roses. That garden and its animal occupants have sustained me for the last year, giving me an outlet for the frustration, the homesickness, the sadness. Every day since the day I moved in, the same robin's cracked the morning open from his perch on the weathered fence beneath the roses, reminding the world that this small refuge is his castle and keep. I've become familiar with two magpies (one mysteriously balding), a family of dunnocks, a blue tit and her boisterous brood, a pair each of collared doves and woodpigeons (also with their babies), and at least three clutches of sparrows. I've had a solitary green tit pop in for a meal now and again, in addition to a dozen blackbirds, an errant sparrowhawk, and the robin, his mate, and their single chick. Where I'm going, I won't really have a garden. No long, crumbling rows of brick for scattering seed; no tumbling clumps of shade-loving ground cover where mice dash between burrows. Nothing to fill the isolation or to quell my inner fears that beat against my chest with the urgency of snared starlings.

Who's going to take care of the birds? Who'll know that the pigeons need to eat further down the hedgerow, while the blackbirds prefer the paving stones? What if that last sparrow fledgling never learns how to fly and loses the food I leave? How is it possible that we transfer all of our latent hopes and fears to the simplest things, finding it easier to displace our imaginings than to confront them?

It took a year, but I have friends, both female and feathered, as well as favorite paths and well-worn haunts. I finally feel at home here, and I'm leaving. Again. Every time I uproot, another tendril's torn from the vine, another root snags in the churned earth. I'm off again to that Other Place, another city of spires and ancient stories, a place where everyone has a history but me. I know my history, and I know where I'd like my future to lie. I'm just afraid I'll never get there, destined to shred roots and bark and leaves the rest of my life, scattering the pieces among those I leave behind.

But tonight, it's the birds getting to me. I'm going to miss hearing them and seeing them, distracting me from work, flitting between the thick undergrowth and the impenetrable holly. At some point, I'll let my friends and my future get to me, too. For now, the birds are all I can handle.

Mid-week misery

Occasionally, I forget that being vegetarian does not make me immune to food-related catastrophes of the medical sort, even though I feel I am largely protected from things like salmonella.

Alas, what I am not protected from, it seems, are brie-and-tomato sandwiches from a certain sandwich shop with multiple locations in my town.

I had just left the hairdressers, where my request to "clean it up while maintaining the new length" resulted in a cut resembling either a much-abused cotton swab or a furry light bulb. This produced many stares from construction workers perched on scaffolding around the colleges, along with a few comments -- one of which, I'm certain, was "What happened to her head?" Short hair is not terribly common here, and short, wiry, spiky hair attempting to grow out a few inchees is downright exotic. Or frightening, apparently, given the remarks.

I was crankily shoving bits of hair out of my eyes which were the byproduct of her efforts to "style" it in the manner of someone possessing about three times more hair than me, as hairdressers tend to do. Earlier in the day, I'd been to three bookshops which had each greeted my query about selling used books with a raised eyebrow and a, "Phwhat?" They asked me which books I wanted to sell, but I did not have them with me, as I saw no point to carrying 15 books into town (including an 800-page monster about the history of California's water development) if I simply had to turn around and lug them back again. Naturally, when I explained that I could bring them if they thought I'd have a chance at selling them, they shook their heads. I cannot fathom where they procure the used books for their voluminous secondhand collections, unless they are robbing them from Oxfam and reselling to impoverished students like me who do not realize we will have to carry said books with us on every relocation for the rest of our lives.

I'd also stopped at the department to return my keys and give the building a suitable send-off involving furtive gesturing and ancient Italian curses.

At this point, I was hungry. My hair was rapidly approaching the limp tea-towel phase. I still had 15 bloody books gathering dust in my flat. A brie baguette seemed the perfect solution, so I purchased one and sat on the low wall outside the colleges, munching away and watching a group of shirtless young men leaping from the tops of dustbins and pole-valuting over marble pillars until one of them misjudged the distance required to skip over the iron spikes of a church fence and promptly broke a limb or two smacking into one of the pillars.

The sandwich, it was a bit dodgey. Maybe they'd put too much pepper in it. By dinner, I wasn't hungry, but I assumed this had something to do with stress and my utter disinterest in doing anything creative with the lonely eggplant languishing in my veggie drawer.

Then, I woke up at 5am this morning feeling like I'd had my insides scoured with a wire brush. As it only became possible to stand up without becoming ill two hours ago, I've spent the entire day trying to find comfortable positions that would still enable me to crawl to the bathroom if needed. I ended up crouched at the foot of my bed with my arms wrapped around my shoulders while the Roommate from Hell blasted "Going to the Chapel" over and over again above my head for approximately two hours.

Since I haven't eaten in 30-some hours, I am simultaneously ravenous and put off by the mere whiff of food. The packing I was supposed to do remains unaccomplished. My hair is clearly staging a coup along the top of my scalp.

As GIS noted tonight, "You have the luck, don't you? I think Evil Uni Town is trying to spit you out."

Believe me, I'd gladly be gone.

The liver is evil and must be destroyed

I meant to post this weekend, but I instead spent the better part of both days in bed recovering from Friday night.

I assumed that having only three guests at my year-end party would prevent things from getting out-of-hand. Alas, I'd forgotten that my friends were an Irishwoman, a Scotswoman, and a Harpingdon lad with an impressive capacity for beer. In hindsight, I should have considered those factors.

It started out pleasantly enough. We ordered a bottle of Chenin Blanc and chatted over dinner. At that point, it was just the Irish and me. When the Scot and her man showed up, we naturally needed to order them a drink, which I think resulted in a second bottle of wine and two ciders. Halfway through the second bottle, we decided that I had not found a drink worthy of being used for my "end of thesis" toast, and my Scottish friend offered to buy anything I requested.

It was around 10pm. I was feeling brave. I walked up to the bar with her and ordered the one drink guaranteed to make me a very happy girl in a very short amount of time. Its only drawback is the name.

"What can I get ye?" the bartender asked. He was one of the newer employees who had not yet learned to avoid the pack of girls from up the hill who traipsed in every week.

I leaned really close, determined to describe the drink without giving it a name. My friend helped by reiterating everything I said.

"Can I have a pint of Guinness, but can you only fill it about two-thirds of the way?"

My friend -- we'll call her Sheilagh -- chimed in, "Yeah, so not all the way," pantomiming with an imaginary glass.

"And a shot that's half whisky, half Bailey's?"

"So not all whisky and not all Bailey's, but in the same glass. One shot"

The bartender looked like he wanted to be very helpful. "Well, we don't have shot glasses," he said. He looked downcast. Then, his face brightened. "I could nip across the street to t'other pub and nick one from them?"

We shook our heads gravely.

"I'll just put them in wine glasses then," he said, "but separate."

"Make it two of everything," Sheilagh said unexpectedly. She grinned. "We'll make Allie drink one, too."

"Whatsit called annyway?" the bartender asked.

Great. This called for careful subtlety in a packed pub. "Irisharbom," I mumbled.

"Come again?"

"Irshcarbo."

He shook his head.

"Irish Car Bomb," I snapped, in a pub which naturally went silent the moment before I spoke.

The bartender looked at me in a half-pitying, half-scornful manner and then went off to fix my Terrorist Special.

We left the bar with one almost-full glass of Guinness, a double shot of whisky in a white wine glass, and somewhere between one and two shots of Bailey's in a half-pint glass. With only one Guinness, I was going to have to drink it all.

Normally, with a Car Bomb, you take the combined shot and drop it into the Guinness. The whole thing explodes in a rising tide of froth, which you have to chug like a parched camel because it curdles in about 30 seconds, all the while gingerly maintaining contact with the rim of the glass so you can slurp the last drop and pull away before the shot glass smacks you in the teeth. It's fantastic. Drink one, you earn a little respect. Drink two, you're a bar legend at home. Drink three...well, I just wouldn't drink three unless you want to be remembered as "that girl who drank three Car Bombs and wound up dancing the tango to an Irish jig."

However, now I was faced with the prospect of pouring the drinks in to the Guinness and hoping that it would have the same effect. By this time, everyone at our table was mesmerized, and the bartender was still leaning at the side window.

"Maybe I'll just..." Damn. Thinking became difficult after your third glass of wine.

"Do y'want something to stir it with?" Allie asked. She rummaged in her bag for a pen. "Here," she said.

I dumped the whisky in and splashed the Bailey's after it. We stared in fascination as both liquids swirled ominously at the bottom of the Guinness. No bomb.

"I think it's congealing down there," Allie murmured.

"Right," Sheilagh said. "Drink it. C'mon!"

I grabbed Natalie's pen and hammered it round for a bit until I couldn't quite distinguish just how nasty the bottom bit had become. The table to our right had gone quiet. I should have just given up on the whole idea, but I was officially in Hyper-Competitive Drunk Irish-American Girl Mode. I was drinking that damned thing, and I was going to drink it faster than anyone ever had. I slammed the whole thing back, marvelling at how many textures and solids could be found in a poorly made Car Bomb. Defiantly, I slammed the glass down on the table. Hah! Didn't even feel it.

....Didn't feel a thing, actually. Hand-eye coordination seems to be fucked. Bloody wine. Had to be the wine.

The last thing I remember from the evening was being in Sheilagh's room with a few more friends and yelling, "Marine Corps, bitch! U-rah!" as I challenged one of their fiancees, a military man, to a drinking contest. He had a glass of cider. I had a bottle of Jamison's, and I'm pretty sure I actually pulled the cork out with my teeth. I really must insist that someone render me unconscious with a blunt object before I get to the drinking-from-the-bottle stage.

Saturday morning, I woke up under my covers in a necklace and two black socks. Somehow, I'd managed to hang up my coat, but everything else was on the couch in a mash of shoes, clothes, purses and jewelry. My keys were still in Sheilagh's room. Something had happened to my head, as it suddenly felt it had shrunk around my brain. None of us actually got up until sometime after 11, at which point the rest of the weekend was a wash entailing lots of silence, stumbling through grocery stores cursing the cheery flourescent lights, and refusing to go within ten feet of a pub.

Bloody thesis. I blame it for all of this.

Still standing

I am so sorry for the prolonged silence. I embarrassed to admit that I actually turned the thesis in on Monday -- I just needed a few days to try quashing my rising panic about finding work, so I fled to the partner's abode for the week. The panic is only partially quashed, but at least I'm catching up on sleep.

All in all, thesis completion was fairly uneventful...except for a few tips I'll pass along:

1. Avoid disciplines that are OCD about maps to the point where you are forced to create your own by cutting and pasting tiny bits of MapQuest images into a blank Photoshop document, which you then illustrate in Paint because you do not care about Photoshop's ability to create multiple layers but you do care very much about its ability to make a simple freaking blue line without doing "artistic" things to it, like making it transparent or spontaneously transforming it into something that decidedly does not resemble a line. If your discipline is this anal, I would recommend dropping out, even if it is a week before the thesis deadline.

2. If you foolishly decide to create a map using said process, make sure you zoom in to at least 800% on your hastily assembled Paint map monstrosity.

3. This helps you avoid a Paint creation which resembles something drawn by a catnip-intoxicated cat with a paintbrush tied to its tail, because failing to zoom in means you miss all of those tiny little pixels that the "fill" button did not cover, thanks to cribbing pixels off MapQuest.

4. If you do let your cat Paint, at least print a test page of the damn thing before you walk for 40 minutes to reach your friend's color printer.

5. Definitely print a test page before you print the entire frigging thesis twice at 2am and trimphantly announce you are done. Discovering the Paint problem can be a real letdown at that point.

6. Load up your jump drive with Every Single File you used to create the thesis, even the image files you swear you'll never use again. This prevents you from walking back to your friend's house a second time at 9am the following morning to print the Paint image you stupidly created when you could have just drawn the thing on an Etch-a-Sketc and stapled the thesis to it.

7. Beware of the office supply store which charges reasonable rates for thesis binding.

8. Do not leave the office supply store alone with your thesis.

9. I would also recommend against standing more than five feet away from the binding machine, as that's where I was stationed.

10. Even when you are five feet away, do not doubt the possibility that they can bind one half of your thesis upside-down and tear parts of the other copy out of the binding.

11. Do not go home without discovering this.

12. Do apologize to your friend for the 800th time as you trek back again to print the color pages which they bound upside down, since the holes are now on the wrong side of the document.

13. Do call the office store and speak to them in an alarmingly cheerful manner, lacing the end of each sentence with a knife-edge laugh that conveys the impression you are still deciding whether to forgive them or to test the binding machine on their appendages.

It's done, it's in, and if they call me for a viva, I will show up in my best punk paraphenelia and instantly convince them that it would be best just to leave me out on the department steps, laughing/sobbing and throwing bits of my thesis into the wind.

In which I unwisely blog about academia

I know the rules, I do. Never blog about work, particularly if your work happens to fall into the category of "incestuous academic travails," and if you share the category with cranky supervisors who would enjoy grinding your soul between their fingers if they discover how you really feel about their program.

Oh well. Considering that my last bit of living dangerously involved confronting a massive hairy spider under the gym scale, I think I can risk it. (Why is it that just writing "massive hairy spider" makes my skin crawl?)

I am now approximately three weeks away from thesis submission date, and the replacement advisor has actually taken an interest in my work, meaning it reads my paper when I email a copy. By "reads," of course, I mean skims frantically while multitasking and occasionally writing nonsensical remarks in the margins like "qawlkdso." While I'm sure that failure to qawlkdso is grounds for immediate dismissal from my program, I still have no idea what language it is or how on earth anyone is allowed to advance beyond grammar school with penmanship rivalling a drunken person riding in the back of a truck on a washed-out mountain road.

Regardless, it manages to randomly scatter important thoughts between those impenetrable phrases, which means I have to painstakingly go through the entire document to see which ones make sense. I particularly enjoy comments in which it becomes apparent that the advisor must have skipped the page above its remarks, as the question scrawled in the margin was answered two sentences ago. Also, the comments which clearly come from the point of view of someone who writes about issues from a completely different perspective than my own. While this would be helpful if we were from the same theoretical backgrounds, we are not. I really just want to say something along the lines of, "Yes but I don't care," in response to the next comment about how this really indicates problems with transnational power redistribution, but somehow I think that would not be received well.

And no. Baja California is not part of California, nor is it part of the U.S. Please stop circling it and adding alarmed punctuation nearby.

Next, I'll move on to the new, and possibly most loathed, part of my thesis: maps.

Descending into the bowels of nerdiness

After spending the last six or seven weeks in my room (sad but true), my descent into geekdom was inevitable. Today's highlight? Figuring out how to convert my spiffy demographics table from a Word table into a PDF so I could shrink it down in Photoshop.

Hey, I have barely been out of the house this summer. Don't judge me!

Time grows short

I can't believe I'm less than a month away from finishing my thesis. Let me tell you: writing a massive paper when you live somewhere that can't get your thyroid meds straight? I wouldn't recommend it.

Not much to report, as I have been holed up in my cave for the last week working. At some point, I went to a pub. Yesterday, a sparrowhawk (first one I've seen, ever) tried to snag one of my garden's resident blackbirds -- he flew about a foot past my open door, which was quite cool. That's really the extent of my incredibly interesting life.

So yeah. First draft of thesis, almost complete. Thyroid issues, legion. Environmentally-related employment outlook, well, I'd rather not discuss that right now because I've only just managed to stop fretting about it. Ooh, but we are going on our honeymoon, finally (!), and I've even decided not to job-hunt intensively until after we return, just in case I land that ideal job and then have to take two weeks off the day after I start. I was really hoping we'd go to Albania, but the country doesn't quite have its international travel together, and so we couldn't quite make it work in a two-week window when we were also going to Croatia. (Buses in Albania run when they feel like it or when they aren't broken, and we aren't willing to drive in a country where drunk driving's relatively acceptable and most car owners have only had licenses for the last decade).

So, it will be off to Albania in the spring, either as the next "big" trip or as my last hurrah before admitting defeat and going home to find work. Here's hoping for the former, particularly since the Other Half would stay here to finish his PhD (I still have no suitable online moniker for him, sorry...). The honeymoon, then, will consist of two weeks in Croatia and Bosnia, ideally with stopoffs at Plitvice Lakes (awesome hiking, potential wolves), Mostar (charismatic Bosnian city still recovering from war), and Lopud (tranquil tiny island within hopping distance of Dubrovnik). The rest of the agenda is pretty open -- maybe a day on the Montenegran coast, since we'll be in Dubrovnik for a bit anyway, maybe a visit to Risjnak or one of Croatia's other parks, definitely a day trip from Mostar to one of Bosnia's villages.

But before then, there's a thesis to write, and a move that requires packing, and a potentially terrifying job hunt. Oh wait, I'm not supposed to think about that last one yet. Augh. Regular posting will resume at the end of the summer, but I promise to maintain at least the once-per-week thing until we depart for the Balkans.

Thesis progress

To-date:

1. I'm now done with the massive revisions of 2 major sections. Yes, yes, I do despise the very sight of them.

2. The third major section, the research methods chapter, is but an outline on the Fujitsu. Work on it commences tomorrow from the corner window stool of a certain local coffee house. ("Work", as in, rereading all the articles I don't remember and consulting an old paper to see what I said I'd do on this part.)

3. Most of my tables, maps and figures are finally done, although I still have one substantial conceptual map to build, and I need to track down current and historical numbers on pollutants so I can visually depict the river's condition via a jaw-dropping chart.

4. I have to go back to my introduction to see if what I said I'd write about bears any resemblance to what I've done.

5. I need to create a timeline for the PhD work I don't intend to do, becuase under the guidelines here I'm still expected to fake it.

6. I need to write a conclusion. As it always has been, this small, relatively insubstantial portion of the paper is the part I most dread.

7. I need to maintain a steady tempo for the next five weeks, regardless of how tired I'm feeling or how annoyed I am with the work.

8. I still need to find time to go to the gym, continue rowing, and occasionally read something that doesn't involve environmental governance or riparian conflicts.

9. Oh hell, I need to add one extra bit into the section I just finished, the one that's already about 700 words too long.

10. First, since it's about 90 degrees out, I think I should probably go sit in the shade and...um..."brainstorm" a few ideas for the new section. Yeah, napp -- I mean, brainstorming, sounds really good.

No, really, give me my damn meds

So, I suppose I can't attribute my current stress levels solely to my thesis. My phantom thyroid also appears to be going out of whack, as evidenced tellingly by my dry skin, thinnish hair, general inability to focus and raging mood swings (I'm fairly certain that my GIS now lives in terror of doing anything that might turn me into the alternately raging-or-sobbing psychopartner he never knew existed...unfortunately for him, I never know what's going to set me off, but everyone within a mile radius becomes aware as soon as it happens.)

Thyroid-related depression is always exacerbated by another cruel symptom, the "WTF happened to my thighs?!?" syndrome.

Some people enjoy clothes shopping. I used to be one of those feckless individuals until I suddenly found myself clothes shopping every season this year because my lower half no longer fit last season's wardrobe. Shopping's become a guessing game: gee, which size will I take this time? It never helps that current fashions appear to be designed for an alien race of stick insects with large waists and microscopic butts.

Me? I have a butt. I find it quite handy for sitting, but it's a little annoying when the only trousers I find that will make it past the thigh-butt meridian wind up being about two inches too big for my waist. Hello world! Yes, these are my Ex Officio briefs, thanks for asking.

Since it is somewhat alarming for an otherwise healthy individual with carefully cultivated diet and exercise behaviors to find herself going up two or three sizes in about six months, I visited my GP. Yes, this is the same GP whose full prescription for my motion-inhibiting back pain was to keep moving. I stupidly assumed that thyroid problems would raise more alarm, so after emailing my awe-inspiring endocrinologist back home, I went in to ask for a different medication that's commonly prescribed at home for people who just don't cut it with normal thyroxine. T3 has been prescribed in the US for years.

Note to self: in hindsight, it would have been helpful to know that GPs are very suspicious of anything that the US prescribes regularly, as they think we are a country of overmedicated hypochondriacs popping pills in lieu of afternoon snacks.

My conversation went something like this:

"I think that my thyroid levels have dropped a bit."

Annoying GP: "Oh?"

"You see, I seem to have developed a bunch of secondary symptoms --" At this point, she is already checking her watch. Appointments last 10 minutes here, unless you are extra-special ill, in which case you can book for 20 minutes if there's space. Generally, I think this means that they have to chuck a sickly child back onto the street to make room, judging from the number of people who appear to be living in the waiting area every time I visit. Hence, you just don't take up 20 minutes unless you are a sociopath because what kind of person would put their piddling autoimmune problems ahead of a snuffly child?

I start listing my symptoms. When I get to weight gain, her eyebrow arches.

"It's just that I've gone up two sizes since Christmas," I said. "For me, that's not normal."

The eyebrow climbed higher. She asks me to step on the scale. I do, and she informs me that I've actually lost weight. This is not possible. I ask her to check again.

"Look. Your BMI is still normal, so until you're fatter..."

Row, row, row your boat

Straight into a barge...

See, the Rowing People (for rowing is a way of life over here, complete with its own language and clothing), they tempt you into this by telling you that rowing is fun, that summer rowing is particularly fun because you really just use the rowing as a pretense to reach nicer pubs on the outskirts of town, where you then spend most of your practice time posing by the boat and telling cute passersby that yes, yes you do row.

The Rowing People are fucking liars.

Contrary to all assumptions, rowing is insanely complicated. You have to lean back from the hips with your arms out in front of you, then move your arms forward and down, roll forward (back straight!) from the hips, slide slowly forward until your knees are fully bent, then shoot backwards while you keep your arms and your back straight until you finally have to bend the elbows and pull the blade to chest height.

Got all that? Good. Now do it about three times faster on a narrow channel that masquerades as a fully navigable "river," complete with psycho boat people from Serious Boat Clubs and full to the brim with barges, sculls, the occasional river kayak and the rare inebriated cyclist who tumbled off the bank into the water. Although you may be tempted to brain all drunken obstacles with the flat of your blade, do not do this, as it may wreck the blade. Did I mention you also have to keep precisely to the rhythm of the person in front of you? Well, you do. This is always fun when the person in front of you has been rowing for years and decides to set a just-shy-of-Olympic-record pace that leaves you flailing hopelessly, snagging duckweed and half-swamping the boat as your blade gets caught beneath the surface. Then, she has the audacity to glare at you when your handle smacks her squarely below the shoulder blade because you're out of synche...At this point, I'm thinking the only way to slow her down is to break a rib or two, so obviously I'm just not smacking hard enough.

Serious Boat Clubs are by far the worst. City bumps are this weekend, we think, as there were many Serious Boat Crews out on the river this evening. Some of them are polite enough to slow down until we novices can steer for the nearest bank to let them pass. Others roar right up behind you, apparently intent on honing their bumping skills by crushing our fiberglass boat. They then become highly annoyed when you yell at them...but you can't really do anything, as the boats are apparently so fragile that sneezing on them will cause permanent damage. Seriously, after we heft this 8-man boat out of the water (and it is surprisingly heavy for frigging fiberglass), we have to stand there grunting with the boat numbing our palms as the cox wipes it down because IT CAN'T STAY WET.

It is a BOAT. It is supposed to go in WATER. Yet, water hurts the boat.

You will also enjoy the Weekend Boaters. You know, those fine, perpetually sloshed lads and potbellied middle-aged men who loll on seats at the riverside pubs and make snide comments about your rowing abilities. "Oh, bad form," they'll tut before returning to their pint glass. You can almost hear them: "When I rowed back in university..." You want bad form? Yourself in a speedo, darling.

So, at the end of the day, you finish with numb forearms, screaming glutes, seeping blisters below your fingers, and a growing distaste for the Rowing People...and yet...and yet...you sign up for the next outing and promise you'll learn how to hold the blade square by next time.

But you're definitely clotheslining the next Serious Boat Crew.

Seriously, this sucks

The aforementioned meeting resulted in 10,000 words or so of my thesis draft due to the advisor by Wednesday...and I'm suffering from the worst case of "can't untangle my fieldwork to write about it"-itis I've ever had. I'm 4000 words or so away from done and I've spent most of the day staring at my computer in absolute frustration and agony.

And to help that writer's block, my examiner's comments for my other program papers came in today. Not bad, but not what I wanted, so that sort of threw any remaining will to succeed out the window.

Back after Wednesday.

Today, my head feels like:

No, really. This whole "write your Master's thesis in a year" thing? It's great. Just great. So fantastic, in fact, that I can't imagine why US universities don't adopt a similar policy. Just think of all the graduates you could churn out -- and advisors would have a lot less stress, since half of their charges would self-combust before they ever made it to a second meeting!

But I'm not bitter.

I have a meeting with my advisor tomorrow, and I thought it might help me if I reviewed what I'd written to see how it fit together thus far:


It seems I am have been operating under the delusion that what I write actually makes sense. I had to stop editing partway through because my pen ran out of ink. Okay, okay, I really had to stop editing because I started getting into Stressed Overachieving Student Mode, in which I convince myself that I am going to produce the worst thesis in the 800-year history of this university, then promptly spend a lifetime consigned to admin assistant drudgery because I'll never escape my English major past.

So instead of coming up with brilliant questions to ask my advisor, I decided to shave my legs.

Look, they really needed it.

I'm serious. Personal hygiene sort of takes a backseat to EndNote these days.

Tomorrow is another day, and the day after that may be the day I finally manage to type without wincing because the stupid blisters on my palms from my first rowing effort will disappear. (By "rowing," I mean flailing around and almost sinking the boat as the cox looks on in disbelief. Oh, and smacking my potential teammate with the paddle. I mean, oar. I mean, blade. See, it's the terminology that screws me. Well, that and my inability to remember the order in which one physically executes a stroke, thereby providing much entertainment to the semi-professional rowers and fully-intoxicated pub crawlers observing from the riverbanks. At least I can put "incompetent rower" on my CV next to "bewildered graduate student" so people can appreciate the full fruits of my labors.)

Augh! Auuuugh!

I'm at that point in the thesis where I'm working on a very tricky part of the literature review -- tricky because I've realized that most scholars are smart enough to spend a very long time reading up on this particular topic before attempting to summarize it themselves...and here I am, having read about 30 papers on it, suddenly trying to come up with 2500 words or so that *don't* sound like academic nonsense. For an example of how poorly I'm doing, here's my latest sentence: "Broadly, “governance” involves a transition away from traditional, state-centered forms of agenda-setting and policy implementation, to more diverse processes where a range of non-state actors also participate in an intentional effort to influence human activity around a given issue."

Yes, that's as terrible as it looks. I hate the whole thing, but it's better than the three other versions I wrote previously. Oh, how I despise this stuff. I have 14 pages of outlines from the papers I've read that I need to skim through so I can draw out the key themes and turn this into a real discussion. Then, somehow, I have to bring in a bunch of papers on water management along the border to explain why the hell I'm talking about governance instead of wastewater management or something that might actually be relevant to my research.

I have a meeting with my new advisor on Friday, and I think it's going to go something like this:

Advisor: So, what progress have you made?
Me: *blink.*
Advisor: Okay, let's take a step back. How did analyzing your fieldwork go? Have you pulled out a few themes?
Me: *blink. blink.*
Advisor: Do you have any questions?
Me: (hoarsely) When...will this...be over?

Yeah, it's going to be a painful couple of months. Oh wait, even less than a couple of months!

I have to go be ill now.

Regular posting will resume

Sunday or Monday. Too much debauchary this week to even think about posting. Since Saturday, number of events/parties: 4 (soon to be 5). Number of visitors to entertain here or Oxford: 3. Number of alcohol units: enough to say I've done my Irish heritage proud (20+). Number of calories consumed: enough to fatten a beluga whale. Number of hours sleep missed: at least a full night (thanks, May Ball).



Number of times I've glanced at that mess and thought, damn, I really should do something about this before returning to wine and beer? Enough to make me regret this all next week.

I'll be back by the start of the week, promise. Thanks for putting up with my bad posting this month.

Why I will NEVER make it into the world's elite circles

Yesterday at an end-of-the-year scholarship function, one of the trustees introduced himself to me. I quickly realized that his family is one of my undergraduate school's biggest benefactors, made all the stranger because he was standing about 10 yards away from the university's Greatest Benefactor of All. This slightly smaller benefactor (only a couple buildings with his name on them -- clearly, he's just not up to snuff) was a wonderfully nice person, but I was still a bit awed by the fact that he was That Rich Guy.

Unfortunately, as a result, when he said something about going to the UW himself and then mentioned his name as if I hadn't seen it on his nametag, I blanched. What could I say? He waited expectantly for some sort of great remark about me, or world politics, or my plans to revitalize the entire downtown core...

"Wow," I said, listening to the words coming out of my mouth and unable to stop them. "I had a class in your building! I mean, not just a class but a couple...I mean, not your building, but you know, the one with your name..."

And as he looked slightly bemused, I saw my chance at piercing through the city's upper echelon evaporate before my eyes. Valiantly, I tried to recover, but the combination of complete humiliation and too much champagne had taken its toll. (Who the hell provides copious amounts of champagne but only a single tray of ice-cube sized hors d'oeuvres for vegetarians??) Behind me, two of my good friends here -- not the typical scholarship kids themselves -- tried to give me sympathetic smiles. Unfortunately, they were snickering too hard to do anything besides turn away slightly so That Rich Guy wouldn't hear them.

"I just hadn't realized--" I stopped, realizing I had almost made the fatal error of saying something along the lines of I thought everyone our buildings are named after was dead. Instead, I managed a partial save by saying that I hadn't realized how great my old school was until I left; consequently, I planned to return to the school to finish my graduate work someday. Alas, I was talking too fast and my face had turned strawberry red, so I'm sure I came off sounding like a slightly intoxicated, starstruck schoolgirl. There's a career move for you.

Naturally, just as I might have redeemed myself by actually talking about something remotely intelligent, the photographer insistently herded us away for our group photo. I withdrew politely and immediately downed my giant goblet o'champagne in one gulp.

Rich Guy probably flew home thinking it was nice of my graduate school to admit such a tongue-tied, inarticulate weirdo.

The heat is on

Whew! In a single week, England morphed from frozen, windswept tundra into humid, muggy oven. I actually have tan lines now -- real tan lines! -- and we've finally remembered what it's like to walk without carrying an umbrella or wearing a raincoat. My poorly insulated flat has adapted to the trend: I can't see my breath in the evenings anymore, but now I can lie on top of my sheets at night, sweating and wondering why no one in Cambridge considered proper ventilation when constructing student homes.

Unfortunately, England is scheduled to revert back into land of tepid downpours this week, and I've been warned by several Cambridge residents that this may be the only time I see the sun this summer.

Excuse me while I crawl back into my room and die now.

At least the presence of World Cup fanatics will keep the area warmer for awhile, surrounded as we are by hordes of shirtless, sweaty, ale-guzzling fans who invade the pubs with their faces painted and their England flags hoisted high.

On Saturday, we visited Stratford-upon-Avon, home to the one dead white male worth worshipping.


Yes, that is the Bard's Officially Rumored Birthplace, and that's me touching the railing in the desperate hope that talent radiates from the building and will transfer to passersby.

Naturally, the afternoon matinee of Romeo and Juliet didn't finish until
Shakespeare's Birthplace closed for the night, so we had to stand outside and oogle the dust-filled windows. It may not have mattered anyway. Since the entrance to the birthplace was three buildings down in a shiny new edifice blaring "Enter Shakespeare's Birthplace HERE!", I'm thinking perhaps the Bard's abode still has a lingering touch of the plague.

Alas, I'm afraid I've married someone who does not appreciate the Bard's wit, so it's probably just as well that I'm not an English PhD because I'd have to disown him. Over our pints after the show, he looked at me nervously and stutteringly said, "So, so you like this stuff. Can I ask: why?" Math people. Dropped at birth, I tell you. I suppose I can still find some redeeming qualities.


Granted, this performance didn't rank among Stratford's finest. A modernized rendition, it featured ambiguous period costumes that could have been 1920s Verona, although Juliet spent most of her time running around in a slip for no apparent reason. The low point had to be the avant-garde decision of the director to feature...Dance Fighting. That's right, Mercutio and Thibault perform some sort of Flamenco-Tap-Capoeira choreography and melodramatically swing giant bamboo poles at each other, occasionally pausing to hammer them on the ground, ape-like, and then are impaled/bludgeoned/embarrassed to death.

It was pretty awful. Ruined some otherwise fine acting, too. Alas, thanks to the dancing fools, the only way I'll ever get the husband back to Shakespeare involves a lot of lies and drugs.

Fortunately for us, we were able to experience more dancing fools at the Dirty Duck, a famous literary and theatric hangout. I'd hoped to see a famous Shakespearean actor or two while we nursed our pints, but this was the afternoon of England's first World Cup match, so instead we were treated to the sights and sounds of approximately 15 pale, shirtless men howling children's songs from picnic tabletops in the beer garden. England, it seemed, had won.


Clearly, the appearance of mandatory plastic cups was not a coincidence.

After being treated to about 11 cycles of "Sunshine Mountain," we were severely disappointed when a barkeep came out and asked them to leave. Frankly, I couldn't imagine a more interesting evening than one that involved trying to discuss postmodern literary theory to a chorus of "Going up Sunshine Mountain...Meee and youuuuuu!"

Naturally, I had to have a photo with one of the quotes on the bar walls. It had to be either Hamlet or King Lear, but the Lear quote wasn't spectacular and this somehow seemed appropriate for a grad student:


Note: I am neither bright red nor that sweaty in real life. I blame the questionable camera quality.


Stratford itself is charming: lots of shaded paths along the riverside, quiet side streets, quaint shops bearing every name ever found in a Shakespeare play...but alas, the trip ended too soon and today I am feeling completely overwhelmed by the ever-growing workload.


The thing in the middle is the conceptual map I'm trying to make for the "discussion" part of my thesis. My new problem is that my literature review and my fieldwork discussion aren't exactly matching up. I think I would like to quit now.

Two more months. I should be elated, but the very thought of time slipping away has me panicked...and next week is May Week, or the most Drunken of Debauched Summer Days, and there's no way I'm getting anything done then because I am either attending some sort of snooty soiree or recovering from the soiree. Oh yeah, and did I mention I had a lovely ant infestation this morning to top everything else off? Gotta love living with slobs for flatmates...I think I'm going to go drown my sorrows in a bowl of ice cream. Might as well get fat if I have to spend all summer inside...heh heh. Sigh.

Head...spinning...

I've decided to document the thesis writing process with occasional pictures, all of which promise to be low quality and gratuitously melodramatic. Here is Image One, in which she realizes she will in fact be living at her desk the whole summer. Note how England has suddenly decided to be sunny. Sometimes I hate this country.



That cereal bowl there is not posed. I actually did eat two of three meals in front of the computer today, transcribing my bloody interviews until I wished I'd just flipped the recorder off halfway through them and made up the rest. Unethical? You try listening to nine or ten hours worth of recordings over and over and over again and then tell me if you still think interviewees should be able to speak for themselves. They don't have a Human Subjects Review or a research ethics protocol here, remember? Or was that one of those things I was supposed to refrain from talking about until after I graduated?...

So I'm going to spend my summer writing until my keyboard falls apart. Now, of course, the undergraduates are also finishing their exams, so a week of sheer drunken rioting is about to begin. It has begun, actually: the undergrads across the street (the only people I've ever actually filed noise complaints about) are apparently done, as they seem to have all gotten smashed and then passed out with the same bad, Nintendo-sounding techno song blaring over and over and over again until I feel like I'm trapped on a video game level I can't escape.

I don't really blame them: for the first time since September, the weather is beautiful, and people here react much like they do in Seattle (strip, burn off a layer of skin, repeat). The punting guides are out in force, hurtling in front of bikes and buses if they see potential prey across the street. If anyone asks you whether you fancy a punt, just scream at them and run. Punters, by the way, are the people who navigate you up and down the river in punts, sort of like gondolas but bigger and flatter and lacking the pointy bits on the ends. It's a fun thing to do, but I suspect the guides are paid on commission, as they will ask anyone within a 10-foot radius if they'd fancy a punt down the river today. This includes those of us who are lugging vast armfuls of groceries. I've always wanted to say, "Aw yeah, let me just throw the fruit and veg in the back and make a wee snack while we're at it." If you talk to them, though, it's over, so running is generally a better idea. Besides, it's much more fun to try steering the punt yourself. Based on my casual observations, about a quarter of the people who do fall in, but the water's deep and not that brackish. Mmmmmm.

It's finally warm enough to shed the raincoats and sweaters (okay, at least the sweaters). Alas, if midriff shirts are supposed to be out of fashion now, someone forgot to tell the lasses here, many of whom are flouncing around in floofy pirate-type skirts and tops fit for someone about half their age (and half their weight). It's always amusing. You can sort of tell who the foreigners are. The European students tend to be dressier; the Americans and Canadians look like most of us rolled out of an REI catalog (oh wait...); the British students either run around in baby pink shirts (boys) or half an outfit (girls).

To clarify, there are some nicely dressed people here, and I'm sure not every half-outfit belongs to a British student, but this uni's sense fashion is unique. No one I know from another country wants to buy clothes here. We all go home with half-empty suitcases and then lug them back filled with the next season's wardrobe. I have a friend here who wants to publish a true-to-student-life fashion book that will feature only short denium miniskirts paired with black tights and muffin-top shirts. In the dead of winter. When it's below freezing.

Now that I've offended most of the student population, I'm going to go print out my transcribed interviews so I can start analyzing them for the paper! Then, I'm going to curl up with a cup of tea and obsess about ever finding (let alone qualifying) for a job here. I haven't been diagnosed as obsessive-compulsive yet, but that isn't because I'm not trying.