Day 24, 31 Jan: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Whiteboards

Norfolk Terrace, Day 24. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Whiteboards

By the title of this entry, you may be inclined to think the two things related, namely HP and this whiteboard vault; unfortunately, that is not the case. And to be even more complex, the whiteboards come first, then Harry Potter. This prologue being finished, let me begin.

            The day started off as nothing remarkable. I was quite proud of myself for a consistently faster time for each of my three circuits around the 2-km lake [8:30, 7:05, 6:38—don’t think min/mile time, think min/(mile + .24 mile) time]. Morning runs continue to be successful.

            The 19^th Century Writing lecture blew me away—Robert Clark is an incredible lecturer. Even his white hair has attitude. I sat pretty close to the front, and apparently, as I found out later tonight, I was taken notice of (for laughing at Clark’s jokes and commentary) by this girl—shit, names are not my strongpoint; just know that she was wearing a Fawkes the Phoenix costume at Harry Potter later today and so for the purposes of this entry, she shall hereby be called “Phoenix girl”—and she agreed with me that Clark was quite the guy. She, Phoenix girl that is, is actually an employee for Clark, assisting with his ambitious feat of compiling an electronic resource entitled “The Literary Encyclopedia”.

            Back to Clark’s lecture, he took the basic Austen romance that is Emma and expanded upon it, mentioning the very necessity of free indirect speech to account for the transition of the novel out of its 18^th century epistolary form (oh, to explain: epistolary, or “letter”, form for a story was rather common before the 19^th century: look at Hannah Foster’s The Coquette or even Austen’s first drafts of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice [btw, the words “pride” and “prejudice” were political terms, stemming from the rights of the aristocracy]). So, as the industrialization (Industrial Revolution) had finally become engrained into society to the point that self-control, routine, had essentially contributed to the atomization of society to the individual, not the clan or the parish, there arises this inescapable question of what is the implication of “self-control”? It’s a bit of a misnomer to say “self” when it’s really social control that defines a lot of an individual’s behavior and inclinations.

In Austen’s narration, lines such as “Harriet Smith, one whom she [Emma] could summon at any time”, blur the representation of Emma’s (or the author’s) thought from unquoted speech. The cool bottom line: as modern society is marked by a tension between one’s inherent subjectivity and his/her attempted objectivity (in representing reality), so free indirect speech is the quintessence of the schizophrenic voice(s?) of modernity. Phew, sorry if that was an ill attempt at compressing the lecture—needless to say, I was utterly captivated.

Finally, I come to the Chamber of the Whiteboards! After Clark’s lecture, I rushed over to Creative Writing class and realized we were all packing up to have class in the library. We were ushered to a basement level where there were a series of locked rooms and once the librarian’s key opened our room, I was utterly entranced by what I saw. Hexagonally shaped (6 walls), the room held five of the walls which were literally composed of just whiteboard material. The fifth wall was the doorway. There were four tables with four chairs and each seat held a plugged-in laptop. A projector screen animated the front of the room (opposite the doorway). As for the fun side of the room, there were toy guitars, a big snake doll, and a Lava Lamp that glittered silver. Talk about awesome.

It was poetry day: my three-person group had to describe a famous person (Marilyn Monroe) in terms of being a furniture piece, weather, type of car, etc. We wrote the poem, each of us had a line in each of the three stanzas, on one of the mighty whiteboards. The rest of the class was spent typing up poetry exercises on the laptops—and this was when I realized that UK keyboards are different from their American counterparts by an annoying feature: the shift bar is a lot smaller and a dash ( “/”) key is to the right of it. Every time I wanted to press shift to capitalize a letter, I would // and // all over the place.

Now: Harry Potter…party! After two coin tosses that Steff (Jenny’s boyfriend; side-note: Happy 5-year anniversary, Jen and Steff!) threw in the kitchen (both “tails”, or since it was a 10 pence coin, “lions”—which stood for Gryffindor and for me going), I was as yet still undecided. I took out a bottle of cider, Bulmer’s, and drank it to give me the answer, knowing what would happen completely—at a quarter ‘til midnight, I sauntered over to the LCR and partied it up with Stef and her friends. Harry Potter movies were shown on ginormous flat-screens above the dance floor, oddly showing HP 1 and 3 in one room and 4 in the other. I was unfortunately dressed merely as a triple-layered muggle (yes, a cop-out) while Stef was dressed as Hedwig (white and black make-up, white shawl and all) and James was the Fluffy (tied the laces of his dog-headed slippers together and placed it around his neck, while wearing black make-up—ingenuous!). The hovering sorting hat, deeming my muggle costume unworthy, placed me in Hufflepuff. Ugh. I should’ve dressed as Harry Potter and got into Gryffindor. Oh well. Great night, though.

Day 23, 30 Jan: UEA Choir and Pianos

Norfolk Terrace, Day 23. 23:59. UEA Choir and Pianos

           

Morning running has gotta be more frequent in my life—I get back and I feel refreshed and ready for the day…at 11. I got a bit of reading done today, while having to wear boots and three layers in doors just to keep warm as the Norwich winter steeps into a week of fluctuating 1 to 3 degrees Celsius. There might be snow. Laura, my flatmate (not to be confused with Lithuanian Laura, pronounced LAO-raw), said that if there is even the slightest snow, she’s heading home for the week/weekend. Meanwhile I’m mulling over what it would be like if I will find myself reading Jane Austen and looking out my window thinking, Oh, hey there, there’s snow building outside my window. Better go back under the covers.

            In the evening, Anna and I went to the UEA Choir rehearsal and the director auditioned both of us during the break. The audition was really a simple range test: he asked me to sing basically major scales while he played harmonies on piano. I had said I was a bass and he found that I was a really high bass. Well, it turns out Bill, the director for the UC Men’s Chorale back in UC Berkeley, was right. My voice is maturing into the baritone register, squeezed in between the higher tenors and the lower basses. So basically I’m now in the UEA Choir. It’s free for students too, but not for the overwhelming majority of the choir, the community members. It’s kinda cool having the mix. We’re singing Mozart’s Requiem this semester, so it’ll be fun to have a bit of that famous repertoire under my belt, if I choose to remember it for future auditions back home or just as general knowledge. Then after rehearsal, Michael, another international, typed in the pass code to the practice room area and my happiness increased tenfold; I finally was reunited with a piano! I wish I had brought more scores with me, though. For that matter, instructional books for guitar would’ve been good to bring too. I did not imagine that I’d end up with the fortune of having access to pianos and guitars (through the generosity of Dan) while studying abroad. Oh the wonders of fate.

            All right, I’m going to call it a [really late] night. [Right after I finished, good ole flatmate Stephen bugged me about missing days of blogs. Well, ha! Just finished!]

Day 22, 29 Jan: The Metrics

Norfolk Terrace, Day 22. The Metrics

My apologies for missing today’s entry on the mark. Today was one of those lazy Sundays that, in retrospect, was quite productive. For one, I finally got that bloody gym induction done—now I can pay two quid during specified hours to use the gym. Soooo great. The only perk was a free gym session right after my induction, and my flatmate Dan met me there. After some time on the rowing machines, we headed over to do chest press on a machine and I was doing 50 just to start off really easy and I was surprised at how heavy it was. Then it hit me.

            Kilograms, not pounds (except for currency…the British are odd). That fact saved me from feeing like an utter wimp of being a month or two out of decent lifting shape. There was thankfully a conversion chart on the wall, and the first one was 7 stone 1 pound = 44 kg. Yes, double conversion time—so a stone is 12 pounds, 7 stones add one is 85 pounds, and so in this case 1 kg is roughly 1.9 pounds (Google puts it at 2.2 pounds, more accurately). Let me just say that doing math in-between doing weights is as much fun as flossing while walking on fire. I ended up doing military press with 16 kg free weights. It just felt sad to go to a weight numerically below 30. No wonder Americans have inflated egos: their weight-lifting sounds more impressive when not in the metric system.

            Later on in the day, I joined Dan and we made the 30-minute trek to a nearby international food supermarket Aldi’s. Alvin met us on bike and we each took a corner of the cart (it was a pound to get a shopping cart…but then you get it back once you put it back in the line-up after checking out—good way to get people to put back their carts, or as they call them here, trolleys).

            The topic of nicknames arose in the kitchen this evening, and I found out that I should’ve been calling Vinny “Vinnie”—my bad, man. Gemma, who is involved with the army and gets paid to play netball and bucketball (neither game of which I have ever heard of before coming to UEA but I’m keen to watch  both at some point), has the nicknames of “Gems” and “Jim-Jam”. Jen is Garlic Jen, Dan is Dan the Man, and once I know others, I’ll record them. Those are the ones I remember hearing.

            The New Zealander Joe booked accommodations for 3-4 nights in Dublin on St. Patrick’s Day weekend. Talk about epic. I booked the flight as well.

            I had a skype marathon tonight: 3 hours and 42 minutes. In a row—back-to-back skyping. I’m not kidding. Two and a half hours were spent with that significant other of mine (Katya!), and then the rest was split between my parents and my fellow Berkeley Labyrinthians (or roommates, but since our abode is the “Labyrinth,” “Labyrinthians” fits more), especially Sanjala. Sanjala is basically establishing a coalition for suicide awareness on campus, in addition to her club You Mean More—really inspiring. The subletter, the friendly new face to the place, Eva has taken over being the token runner in the Labyrinth. Man, I miss everybody, but fortunately, I got to participate in an old Labyrinthian tradition of Shirtless Sundays via skype. So there were Memo, Dylan, and I all shirtless and discussing a new tradition for next year, Rock Climbing Fridays. Ah, the good times live on.

Day 21, 28 Jan: A Respite

Norfolk Terrace, Day 21. 22:41. A Respite

            I spent the day indoors, playing two riffs on guitar over and over again, familiarizing myself with chords too, and resting my hands after the pressure on the strings started to sting. Singing also consumed a large part of the day, as I recently discovered the wonders of instrumental tracks to favorite songs of mine on youtube.

            To fend off bouts of sleepiness, I meditated a bit. To fend off hunger, I cooked spaghetti bolognese with mince meat for Vinny and I for “tea” (apparently synonymous for “dinner” in some regional English vocabularies). To fend off laziness, I accompanied Dan to the library to break a few books’ spines and get started on this coming week’s readings (Jane Austen’s Emma, a few short articles on writing poetry, and William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience [his poems came on engraved plates since Blake was an illustrator as well as a poet, so the book contains both images of the original engravings and plain-type versions of the poems]).

            I plan to call it a night early, but before I leave, here’s a philosophical matter: To live for the moment but forget yesterday is almost as bad as planning today as if it were tomorrow. Every day matters to the spectrum of life just as every grain of sand accumulatively makes up a beach. Yet take this with a grain of salt, since too much conscious attention to the breath will disrupt its natural pattern. 

Day 20, 28 Jan: On The Quiet Streets of Norwich

Norfolk Terrace, Day 20. [2:23 in the morning of Day 21.] On The Quiet Streets of Norwich

            “I’m just going to see if this works. Here.” I handed my student ID to the doorman at the club Carnival. I was the last of my friends in the queue. The guy looked it over, checking my face with the picture. Then he scanned the card, backwards and forwards, looking for something.

            “No date of birth on the card. Do you have any other form of ID? Driver’s license, passport—?”

            “No.”

            These next four words determined my next two hours:

            “We cannot accept this.” There. Thinking I could be clever and simply bring my ID and a bit of money, without the burden of my whole wallet, I had grabbed the wrong ID card. I had come in a taxi with everyone else—well, Michael and a girl whose name I am forgetting; there were four taxis that took everyone from Anna’s floor in Suffolk Terrace where we celebrated Briar’s 22^nd birthday—but I would be the only one to attempt what I did next.

            At this point, forgetting to buy/bring alcohol to the birthday bash and resorting to sips of friends’ drinks, I was completely sober. I simply breathed in the night air and before I knew it, I just walked. Getting a taxi home crossed my mind as a waste of money and almost a surrender to my stupid mistake. But then again, I didn’t really mind not getting into the club. Michael and Cameron and I were going to skip out after an hour anyway and hit a nearby bar, but there was no point in me waiting anywhere. My feet wanted to keep moving.

             After walking three blocks, passing the closed shops, clocks with roman numeral-clad faces displaying 12:20, and small clusters of people, I stopped and realized something. There was a square of taxis adjacent to locked-up flee market-style shops all in one concentrated cube. And a little more to the left was the spire of St. Peter Mancroft Church. I knew where I was. That stupid scavenger hunt I had condemned earlier had some use after all.

            For the next fifteen minutes, I traced out the steps my group took on that hunt—just backwards. I found the main shopping mall and, like everything else, it was disguised in the veil of darkness. The letters “House of Fraser” were no longer lit up, but seeing the name “Fraser”, albeit misspelled from the way I know it best, warmed my heart a little on my quiet quest. Next, I found the main road and the roundabout, but I realized that I still had an inkling where I was, this time bringing up the memory of walking from The White Lion to the club Project last Friday. Everything was quiet. I almost appreciated the few fellow pedestrians, giving me the sign that life still existed in Norwich after the street lights go on. I plowed my way onwards and eventually came to another crossroads dilemma. Again this occurred at another roundabout, but I spotted the Norwich Cathedral and knew from my trips on the bus that the Cathedral was always on the right of the bus on the way back to campus. I kept walking.

            I chanced going one way, but eventually I looked back and saw a double-decker bus stopped at the light. I waited and saw the bus turn right. Since all buses at this hour either headed to UEA campus or to the city centre, I deduced the probable direction of the university. I made my way all right for a longer bit of time, helped by bus stop signs and the occasional taxi and bus, and the farther I got, the more explicit the signs to UEA were. Finally, a blue logo with a white backlight shone as the centerpiece on a tall, cubed rock: UEA. Yes! I could not believe that I had trusted to do this at this ungodly hour, but Norwich is considered one of the safest cities in all of the UK, and this thought gave me some confidence too.

            Earlier that night I had talked a bit to Vinny’s and Joe’s friend Ross, finding out that he was probably going to stay in that night while the rest of us went out. But as I entered campus, I saw a familiar figure walking toward me and who was it but Ross, slightly out of it but in good spirits. We both explained how we had come to that spot and the time that had passed since the birthday party. Apparently, there was some psychedelic venue at the LCR tonight and the stage performers were throwing bits of bread into the audience. The reason for it was beyond Ross. We parted ways.

            I walked the last stretch to Norfolk Terrace and glanced at my watch: 2:40. I had literally walked for an hour and a half. First thing I did, after a much needed bathroom trip, was sit in the kitchen. The radio had been left on, so I turned the knob to off. The blue sports-direct.com playing cards were scattered all over the table and onto the floor, as if it was a spilled liquid. Empty bottles, wine glasses, and cider cans lay clumped together in an odd way that resembled a 3-D model of a metropolitan area’s skyscrapers and other buildings. I sat down with a banana and candy, looking out the opened window to the pitch black fields.

            In the next moment, wrapped in a ream of smoke, the face of Stephen appeared just outside the window. He looked in, eyes dilated, and after flicking the remnants of his cigarette into the blackness, he hopped through the window and into the kitchen. We talked a bit and eventually said good night. He was higher than I had ever seen him. One of the things he asked me, though, as he does on most nights, was “Have you written in your blog today?” I told him I would soon. “Good,” he replied. “I want to read it.” Backing up a bit, the night that he tried to kiss me was merely an attempt to be on the blog for that night, fifteen minutes (or in this case, words) of fame, as the saying goes.  Well, you made it on here yet again, Stephen. Cheers.

            Now backing up to the day overall, I found my morning Romanticism seminar a little stifling. The discussion glossed over intensive close readings, incorporating broader themes and historical context that, although fascinating, was brought up in the seminar in a way that silences were awkward after questions were asked that did not correspond to my thought process in the discussion. Anyway, I was tired from less hours of sleep than desired.

            Vinny and I, after a failed attempt at eating at Zest (there was a 30-minute wait for it to open for lunch), headed to Steff’s room in Norfolk Terrace block B, a neighboring block. In the room were Steff, Dan, and Jenny’s friend who is visiting this week, all around Steff’s laptop screen watching the semi-finals of the Australian Open: Murray v. Djokovic. I had never before been into watching tennis as I was this afternoon, literally watching from the third set until the final minutes literally two hours later. One of the scores toward the end was utterly incredible: 2 sets Murray - 2 sets Djokovic, 5 games M - 5 Games D, and 40 – 40 within the current game. Dead even. In the next five minutes, Djokovic snatched two more victories and so with 7 games to Murray’s 5, he won the final set and the match. He literally sat prone on the floor of the court and made victory gestures. That has gotta be one of the most endurance-required sports I have ever watched. Yes, there are Iron Mans, but this constant psychological struggle to stay in the game, to not give up, to pull out of defeatist notions and make good serves and hits all made for an understanding that a victory is made up of a margin more success than all the failure that goes along with it too. And that victory is also in playing the game ‘til the end. Even Murray was not a loser in the sense that this match highlighted some of his best playing that fans had ever seen him do. He certainly gained my respect, as I rooted for him the whole time after realizing that whenever he was winning, there were wicked rallies (and whenever Djokovic was winning, there were excessive power serves and disjointed playing). Pizza came in at some point; Stephen and I split the ground beef pizza.

            I next dropped down for a nap in my room for 90 minutes, went for a muddy run that helped clear my mind a little, and got ready for tonight. I shaved, showered, cooked tortellini in a nice tomato sauce, and sang and played guitar a little. In the kitchen, Alvin impressed everyone with his new time on completing the Rubik's Twist from a line to a ball: 33.34 seconds. As for the birthday party at Anna's flat, it wasn’t bad—I got a little bored but still had fun seeing a large amount of my international friendship group (from the Cambridge tour and before).

            You know the rest. The night ends in the glory of warm and weary calves, strengthened by a walk that I knew would be more of an adventure than simply taking a taxi back. Plus, the walk was free.

Day 19, 26 Jan: Dan the Man

Norfolk Terrace, Day 19. 23:59. Dan the Man

My first seminar for my Nineteenth Century Writing class went well, but at points I was frustrated that I wasn’t picking up the tutor’s underlying destination from her prodding questions. It all came down to Sir Walter Scott’s language claiming to be plain and that the journey will become more romantic (and entertaining; oh, romantic as in akin to a medieval romance which was basically a tale of a quest—not really related to love) BUT of course the language itself was poetic, metaphorical and already embedded in the romantic component of the novel. And when Scott explicitly mentioned a dull bit, he did so in order to NOT make it dull. Literature is the art of linguistic subversion (more nicely called “ambiguity”), I tell you.

            First Romanticism lecture (that I didn’t miss) was fabulous: the lecturer was passionate almost too loudly but hey, his points were good and actually followed very well from a handout he gave out at the beginning. In contrast to a Berkeley professor’s lecture, I’d say it was slightly less profound/abstract but more visibly demonstrative of his organization and textual citations. Subject matter was definitely favorable (much more so than Scott’s Waverley): Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads and what it means to be a ballad and why have metre in these revolutionary unconventional poems. Good stuff.

            Based off one interesting hand posture I saw a guy do with his cigarette (not even unique), I wrote a single page of a short, but got too deep too fast. Character was fun to write, though.

            I spent the night indoors, much to my gratitude because Dan, the ever generous and good-hearted flatmate, actually took forty minutes out of his day to teach me a few things on guitar, i.e. pentatonic scale, “Otherside” intro, Linkin Park’s “Bleed It Out” intro, etc. He even let me borrow his acoustic for a bit. He reminds me of Will Houston, good friend from back home, when he used to teach me a few chords here and there. I have a guitar friend here now too. Dan’s the man.

             Again it’s almost 1 o’clock by the time I sit down and write things, even these twenty minutes it took me to write all this (oh yeah, I put 23:59 now if it’s past midnight when I begin the post).

            I should join a society (well, a “club” as it would be called back home, but “club” here is exclusively a drinking club—the place, not a group) on campus soon. Gym membership will be available after my Sunday induction, so maybe the yoga society might be fun. I could do it with Steff. Swimming? Athleticism is running but if it’s on a track, forget it. I’ll look into it, though. Singing’s always an option too. I’ll just have to see. Good night.

Day 18, 25 Jan: A Boring Day In Verse

Norfolk Terrace, Day 18. 23:59. A Boring Day In Verse

Besides the noontime waking,

This day did cause me aching:

Reading on and on that book

That seriously is not ending.

Mid-afternoon I ventured to,

To run a trail I knew not where

But only through a runner in view

Did I discern my way back fair.

To the gym I booked this Sun.,

An induction to use the gym soon

and after carrot-meatball-pasta fun,

I returned now to the book of doom.

Slow to read: some dialect, some dull,

I urged onwards through Sir Scott’s bull

(and bull it is, as fiction’s hook and pull)

‘Til last I came to the final page so gleeful.

Midnight struck so closely then,

So off to the kitchen I salvaged the den,

To find some chocolate solely to mend

The day sucked dry of playful friends.

               ~ The End ~ 

Day 17, 24 Jan: Laundry Day, Creative Walk, and LCR

Norfolk Terrace, Day 17. 19:00. Laundry Day, Creative Walk, and LCR

Whoa. If you ever check the time I write these entries, it generally comes down to midnight (or later, but I just put it at 11 something usually, so it’s still the same day) but today I plan to party at the campus club LCR, so this is rather early.

            Reading Waverley is a challenge. The narrative runs episodically so the plot is looser than a standard plot (yeah, I know, a “standard” is a bit BS, but there is a general form of plot) and the hero Edward Waverley is no hero and just like his name, he wavers on everything. Do you ever notice how often you actually want to be a character in a story? For me, it’s so rare that it’s not funny. All these literary novels have gorgeous settings I want to be in, but never main characters that I particularly wish to be with or think I embody. My current leisure novel, part II of Lord of the Rings, is easy enough to enjoy and I admire Gandalf for wisdom, Sam for loyalty, Frodo for guts, Legolas for basically 5/20 (no, even better) eyesight, Gemli for bad-axness (oh! See what I did there?), and so on.

            Before going into a brief retrospection on classes today, I want to take a moment and mention that I got up at 9:30 to do laundry today. I proceeded to go the Laundrette on campus (there are only two), met Joe there, managed to do a bit of shopping and withdraw money in the meantime, and the highlight of all this came soon after my laundry was done with the wash. Joe was sitting, watching me as I opened up the door to the dryer directly opposite my washer. Without warning, I forcefully threw my clothes from one to the other. Each clump mostly made it, but stray socks and pants (that is, British for “underwear”) flew to the floor. He definitely busted up laughing a bit as I did this, much to my delight. Then back in my room, I realized that it was “laundry day”, and so as I put my clothes away, I listened to the soundtrack of Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, especially “My Freeze Ray” which starts with “Laundry day…”

            The lecture on Waverley hit a few insightful points and had a good consistent rhetoric, especially when the speaker explained why reading this novel is crucial to the module since Sir Walter Scott influenced or was the object of opinion by every single person on the reading list, from Jane Austen to Charles Dickens. Fine, fine, I’ll finish the novel soon.

            Creative writing class, day 2: After discussing an assigned reading, we were instructed to write observations around us in a notebook—the best part was that the tutor allowed us thirty-five minutes to go anywhere on campus to write. We just had to be back by 6:05. I walked through the emptying drizzle, past the glittering willow tree, into The Hive where students were dancing, downstairs into the Union Pub where students were seated in clumps talking, sipping ciders, or playing billiards (the balls are smaller in the UK than in America, no innuendo there…). We came back, shared a section of our works, and at mine, I discovered mine to be described as internal monologue, a focus on the time of the piece, and related to a bit of an opinion/allegory for society.

            Okay, I gotta stop here. A flatmate literally called and apparently my flatmates want to know where I am. I think that’s my cue to go. Off to the Kitchen!!!

Eight hours later…

            Steff is the greatest. Gave me loads of advice and mentioned his experience in keeping up his long-term relationship with Jenny while he was abroad for 5 months in India. I was inspired by his account. Then he bought me a drink, generously enough. Between Steff and Dan, I don’t know if I’ve ever met more generous people.

            And then there’s the live-in-the-moment Stephen who definitely tried to kiss me tonight but I pulled away once I realized what was happening. Sorry, Stevie, but these lips are for Katya’s only.

            Meanwhile there was that party tonight, right. Again I managed to get on people’s shoulders and swing my arms up. Somehow that’s always exhilarating. There was also a stay-on-the-surfboard platform (think riding-a-mechanical-bull type of activity and then replace the bull with a surfboard) which I decided to try my feet at, but I definitely lasted merely the average eight seconds on the board. Dancing with my flatmates is always fun and the LCR is a good venue. The night ended well.

            Oh yeah, I remember now that funny word that the British use when they mean a “vest”: waistcoat. And what they call a “tank top”: a vest. So when Marie and Dan wanted me to wear a vest to the LCR tonight, I was utterly confused. The theme was Australia, and the general attire was beach clothing. Yep, in this second week, I brought out my swim trunks and wore them amidst the freezing cold. And I sported a “vest” too.

Day 16, 23 Jan: Two Lists

Norfolk Terrace, Day 16. 23:49. Two Lists

           

Shopping list: clothes hangers, cold medicine, top up on my pay-as-you-go Lebara phone credit (felt so clever to get £20 worth, which automatically makes me eligible for £10 free of more credit), bottled water (yeah, the tap is not enjoyable here), shampoo, conditioner, frozen pizza, etc. All check.

           

Reading list: Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley. Unchecked.

This is one of those days when you realize the burden of studying is greater than you anticipated.

Side-note: Met up with my UEA Buddy today, Alex. Kinda reminds me of my high school friend Tavi. Animated when he talks. Oh, saw an English version of Sanjala walking toward the bus stop. The bizarre reincarnations of friends from home continue.

Day 15, 22 Jan: The Kitchen

Norfolk Terrace, Day 15. 23:47. The Kitchen

            Good ole Stephen put it to me earlier tonight: “So what are you going to write in your blog today?” I had to admit that today was nothing special, yet right after his question was asked I felt I had a good enough highlight to go on.

            Let me briefly sketch the rest first: comfortably overslept til 11:20, ate breakfast and counted it as lunch too, put up an album of my London adventures on fb, saw daylight dim and ran til darkness (44 minutes), and showered. Done, now back to the highlight: the evening.

            I skyped with Katya for two hours and some, and her insistence that I practice singing finally resonated with me. I found youtube instrumental tracks to favorite songs of mine and started singing and counting measures. Just a bit each day, that’s crucial.

            Before this, I made my dinner in under an hour. I’m going to guess that I picked this up watching my mum, but as I boiled the water for the pasta, I multi-tasked by sautéing the chopped onions and sliced mushrooms for the sauce. I put on a tomato sauce, mixed in the onions and mushrooms, got the pasta in, microwaved the beans (the Achilles’ heel of my meal, I’m afraid—I made do with what I had, despite the somewhat decline of appeal that canned beans provide to a homemade meal), and in good time, spaghetti with a vegetarian sauce and canned beans heated, done. Then I went off to skype Katya.

            Once I returned to the kitchen after skype, the place was full and things were normal once more. As in, during the making of my meal, I endured in an uncanny silence in the kitchen. I almost felt out of place in the kitchen when it was empty. The room is rarely ever empty entirely. There’s always someone there—kinda the magic of our flat, in a way.

            I sat down and saw (well, they came in after me but by the time I sat down, they were there) Steff, Jenny, Vinny, Dan, James (a neighbor of our flat), and Matt all with pizza boxes in front of each of them. These weren’t American larges now—they made a good one- to two-person meal (not much more than that), as I’ll come to show. Laura (Lithuania Laura, so Marie’s roommate) was cooking, I think, and the aforementioned were mentioning [As I write this, Vinny just came to tell me that Matt’s room is flooding. I miss out apparently when I start writing. Boo.]  the football (soccer) games that were on today. Steff offered me not one but two of his pizzas, more than generously but he insisted that he was full and it had been a full two hours since I had eaten dinner/late late lunch (call it what you may). So I accepted. J Dan offered me some of his too, again good man. On my part, I provided a garlic and mayonnaise dipping sauce for their pizzas, but yes, I still lucked out that everyone was beginning to get full by two-thirds into eating their pizzas. Steff takes to cycling as I do running, but he also swims so I’m going to try to do it with him sometime. Joe facebooked me later and asked where I usually run—told him around the lake and despite the darkness, he actually went out and did it not two hours ago. I’m impressed and apparently he’s a boxer.

But back to Steff, he’s probably reading the boring forty pages on the nitrogen cycle right now—he told me it was boring, compared to a novel. Yet, as for my current novel, somehow I’m finding the hardest time breaking the spine of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley. I have a free day tomorrow to do it but ahh! Procrastination nation here—but I can explain. After stopping and starting the second episode of Sherlock the new series on BBC iPlayer, it literally would not allow me to finish. It is no longer available for free viewing. So pissed and afraid that the third episode would turn off on me too, I watched the last one. I don’t regret it. Now I don’t have anything I generally watch available to me and I can focus. Yes, that is twisted logic and I admit it. But it makes sense to me. No distractions…

I want to go check out Matt’s room now. I might write later.

One hour later…

Yep, definitely flooded. Didn’t see the mess but Matt came into the kitchen raising up a clear plastic bag filled with yellow liquid. From the leaky radiator, apparently. In the meantime, Alvin, Stephen, Jenny, Vinny, and I played two rounds of Yaniv with those familiar blue Sportsdirect.com cards. The kitchen is more my home than my room is, in a way. Stephen, Jenny, and I later were left in the dark (Alvin and Vinny playing pranks with the light switch) and we just sat in the stillness talking about how we’ve dealt with losing or keeping friends from our youth. Later Matt turned the lights back on and got to talking about the medical education experience at Cambridge (he has a friend who is in it, Jenny has one too in fact) and the bizarre traditions of needing a degree from a different science faculty within Cambridge in order to get into the medical program—I’m not explaining this quite right, but overall it involves inter-university degrees. Apparently, all graduates from there go onto Ph.D’s, all into clinical routes of medicine. Matt has another friend who got into the medical program at Harvard (from Canada) by spending every single day between ninth to twelfth grade studying and working with four different academic tutors. He had set out for that goal and actually achieved it. That’s amazing, but again, to each his own—I wouldn’t change my life for anyone’s. I have a good group of high school friends still and for me, that’s what I cherish from high school, along with the bits retained from English classes, the memories of having certain teachers (ahem, Mr. Meegan, but others too), and the choirs of Mr. and Mrs. Slabbinck and cross country coached by Mr. Delgado. I still get a bit of nostalgia going back there, but each time I do, I’m more aware of how far along I’ve come since then. I mean, hey, I’m 8470 miles away from my hometown—halfway around the world and studying in the birthplace of the English language.

There is a wall near the edge of Norwich that was built in the mid-1200s; the Norwich Cathedral was completed in 1145. The land itself has been occupied longer than anything I’ve ever known in America. Even my flatmate Jenny’s house (not in Norwich) is older than America (as a nation)—it’s 400 years old.

With great history comes great responsibility—there are preservation laws for buildings just about everywhere in the UK. Even the ziggurat housing structure I’m in falls under these laws and it was built in the 70s (no, not 70 A.D.—the 1970s). My flatmates were surprised that I had never heard of any. But this whole topic leads to why there are leaky radiators on my floor and not all of them are being replaced at once. Repair squads have to be extremely delicate with even broken pipes, it seems—much less pipes susceptible to breaking but still cannot be touched until leaking, due to the fear of ruining part of the building.

So the night ended in stories, in bonding with the flatmates, and in realizing that it is unbelieveable that I’m here. The odds are unmeasurable. And even this very semester was crucial—last semester, as Jenny and Stephen told me, contained some of the worst weeks in their lives in living in this very flat. They knew no one, hung out in their rooms mostly, and didn’t really bond with people until halfway to three quarters into that semester. Vinny and I have come as their flat has solidified into cohesive friendships, with everyone. And they bond in the kitchen. There’s something about it in which people make the room complete, where conversations run like sink water, and where awkwardness is a foreign language that no one speaks.

The hour is late as I drop my pen (er, cursor), but the extra hour in the Kitchen meant another hour of games for the sake of games, stories for the sake of stories, fun for the sake of fun. Good night.

Day 14, 21 Jan: Cambridge

Norfolk Terrace, Day 14. 22:35. Cambridge

Yes, I suffered getting up at 8, crafting my breakfast of two pieces of toast spread with peanut butter and topped with banana slices, and treading to the main campus bus stop, but it was all worth it. Cambridge Tour for £15 is hard to pass up.

            I sat in the back of the bus with Anna, Michael, Briar (yes, that is her name, spelled correctly; this is the Univ. of Oregon student I mentioned back in Day 7 and I attended an art history lecture on the Canterbury Cathedral stained glass with her and Anna on Tuesday, so Day 10), and two other girls who will go unnamed due to lack of information. I was never introduced to them really. Anyway, at a quarter past 9, we were all asleep as the bus drove us onto Cambridge.

            “It’s like Inception. We wake up and we’re there,” said Anna as we awoke upon reaching Cambridge and realizing that the trip had felt like a twenty-minute bus ride, not a 100-minute one. After a long queue at the loo (ha, see what I did there), we all were split into two 20-person groups and began the tour! I won’t cover the walking history lecture too much, just highlights:

            Cambridge University is, in a sense, a city centre that holds 31 colleges (the tour guide said 32, but then again, she also said that the central offices for Microsoft were nearby the city…and I just researched another thing she said wrongly: the half-eaten apple that was found near the body of the famous cryptanalyst (and persecuted homosexual) Alan Turing was not the reason why the Macintosh computer logo is the rainbow half-eaten apple. That was merely a poetic myth.). So let me stop and explain “college”: know that this university first began when the Bishop of Ely, Hugh Balsham, founded the first of Cambridge’s colleges, Peterhouse, in 1284. Now, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, more colleges were built and students came to the university and were put into a college (yes, Harry Potter fans, this is like Hogwarts and its four houses), which was essentially their home while studying there. Each college had a prayer area, dining commons, library, and bedrooms. Even alum from Cambridge in those earlier centuries would say they graduated from such-and-such College, rarely including Cambridge since it was the college that made their experience there.

            So basically the entire “campus” is the city centre, filled with streets and pubs and stores and dozens upon dozens of tourist spots and gated entrances for just Cambridge students to pass. One of the best moments was entering King’s College Cathedral and literally losing my breath as I stared up at the highest vaulted arches I had ever seen and then at the sparkling blues and reds and whites, etc., of the fifty-metre tall stained glass windows. You read in novels the moment when a place entraps the character so powerfully that it takes a few seconds to merely take in what he is seeing. That happened now, as my eyes kept moving around and seeing what it meant to be in a place of utter power and glory. There atop a middle wall (dividing the cathedral’s length in two) was the grandest of grand organs I had ever seen, and through the arched pathway, I walked to the second half of the cathedral to see a sight that thrilled me instantly. There were medieval wooden seats upon seats once used for clerical assemblies and all I could think of was the scene in the movie The Da Vinci Code when the Council of Nicaea is assembled in a place exactly like this!

            I visited the cathedral with Anna, Michael, Briar, Ella, Cat, and Haley, and also walked around with them to the fudge shop (oh my God, I can’t even describe the bliss that occurred in my mouth at the moment I had the free sample and later some of Briar’s and Michael’s fudge purchases) and before that to this vegan and vegetarian Rainbow Café. The pasta marinara was incredible. Worth the price definitely.

            The tour guide, as I hinted earlier, was not the most credible and somehow she kept believing that we couldn’t speak English, so she would taallkkk realllyyy slowwwwlllyyyy. Yeah, it got a bit annoying, but it was still cool to learn about Queens’ College, King’s College, Trinity College, and a local pub The Eagle. Did you know that all examination scores were (still are?) posted in a public hall in May (they took their exams in April) so EVERYONE knew if someone passed or failed and by how much. Talk about intimidating. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that the Cambridge University Press was a fantastic bookstore, located in the same spot for oh-so-many-centuries. At this point in the tour, I remember our tour guide saying that a certain businessman Ronald McDonald had tried to put in his business at that spot and had failed, but um, I can’t seem to find anything online about this. That seems a too bizarre of tourist-shocker to be true.

            After a day of photographing and walking around Cambridge, our group retired to the meeting place and the coach took all the groups back to UEA. On the bus, I had a really good talk with Briar about our universities back home, Greek life (more of its cons than pros), Shakespeare, Tin Tin, and the ridiculous cost of living in college towns. Sleep occupied the rest of the ride.

            First thing I did back at UEA was walk into my flat’s kitchen, not my room. Apparently Dan and Steff had been at it for hours playing monopoly and as I made myself dinner, I witnessed Steff win as had been foreseen by the third cycle around the board. Still, they were both beat after the game.

            I watched a bit of Sherlock and started Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley but almost fell asleep. Then I remembered I’m behind in this blog so might as well get up to date. So this was the day at Cambridge, the university of posh British kids (who Marie referred to as “twats” at some point), but hey, there is no denying that the place is incredible. The history is embedded in the buildings—I saw the bed chambers of Sir Isaac Newton. And the King’s College Cathedral is utterly breath-taking.

Day 13, 20 Jan: Convenient Coincidences and The White Lion

Norfolk Terrace, Day 13. Convenient Coincidences and The White Lion

Party nights always cause delays in these blogs, my apologies.

The day started at 8:50, silently cursing my strangely passive £2.95 phone. I had expressly set the alarm for 8:30 so that I could have breakfast before my 9 a.m. seminar! Bugger. Oh well, hopped into some clothes, and more clothes, and then walked briskly for 400 meters until I came to the ARTS building. I spotted my peers first, seeing that the classroom was still empty. Ha! I beat the tutor (seminar teacher) and woke up less than ten minutes ago! But the victory was small, as my empty stomach made clear to me.

            The Romanticism seminar was fantastic: I love when teachers know the philosophy of why they’re teaching and so plan to educate the students in an insightful way. In this case, the tutor emphasized the arbitrariness and misleading-ness attached to time periods. “Romanticism” can be defined between 1789 and 1832, surely, but there are books written after that could be Romantic and there are plenty of characteristics of Romanticism (the emphasis on feeling, as a part of its character in literary history) even back into the Enlightenment. Plus, the canon of English literature depends upon an authoritative community, namely anyone but not everyone, that changes with the times.

            Afterwards, I switched my American Gothic to Nineteenth Century [British] Writing. I finally met Kate, just outside the ARTS a few minutes later, who is Dodo’s friend (Dodo is currently a UEA student studying abroad at UC Berkeley, and I met him last semester; we share the same scholarship but in different directions). And Kate brought me into Blend, the café with packaged sandwiches and apparently good coffee (didn’t have any—just bottled water, thanks), and I finally met Stef (Kate’s best—and also Dodo’s—friend; also facebook friends before arrival at UEA) and her friend James. Now here comes a convenient coincidence: both Stef and James had both been in my Romanticism seminar AND were also both in my Nineteenth Century Writing module! Needless to say, I swapped notes from missed lecture in each. Cheers.

            I knew that today was my only day of the week that I could go to the 7-piano practice rooms of the music hall at UEA (every day but Friday is closed off to non-majors), but I learned of Dan’s successful purchase of an acoustic guitar and quickly realized that maybe I’ll practice that while here in Norwich. I may still pay the ridiculous fee of £3 for one hour of practicing on a campus piano, but only when I get more desperate and crave it. I do wish I was better at consistent practice in music, mostly singing and piano, but I do what I can. Thinking of next year back at my home uni, I still don’t know what I shall do activity-wise, besides Running Club. I need some artistic flavoring in my schedule, but writing groups get too invested and I can only take so much reading a semester…beatboxing and/or introductory guitar decal? That might work. Sorry, random tangent. Moving on…

The rest of the day is unimportant so…skipping to the night, it was my flatmate Matt’s birthday and our flat celebrated at The White Lion, a traditional pub in the city with an odd game called Billiards Bar (analogy: the mini-golf of billiards) along with dozens of board games and even darts (btw, John, you can stand closer to the dart board by a foot. At least, that’s how this one was set up). Matt definitely yet gradually lost disorientation, along with a few glass pints, in the night, but he had fun and so did we. Vinny’s game of chess with Laura’s boyfriend Chris was intense—just when Vinny’s king was cornered, he made a move that neither I (as an observer) nor Chris foresaw: he simply took the pawn next to him and got in the clear. Brilliant. Later there were a few games of mini-Jenga and a good dinner—but as for the ciders and beers, there was a perpetual flatness to the drinks that turned me off to them.

            A lot of us (a few taxi-ed home) managed to walk all the way to Project, a modern club with a £5 entry fee and lines at every bar in the place that made drinks impossible to get. Dancing was fun but more fun was the endless migrations our group went into: somehow a small group of us would get lost, then find the others, then move everyone to dance floor 2, then to the platform. Steff (not to be confused by “Stef” Kate’s friend; this is Steff, the honorary flatmate and Jenny’s bf) put on some moves and at some point I climbed on top of Vinny and Charlie’s shoulders for a moment of amusement.

            The taste of a meaty burger, twenty-five minutes later; the eight-person taxi, forty-five minutes later; home and asleep, an hour and a half later.

Day 12, 19 Jan: The Pink-Spotted Buddha

Norfolk Terrace, Day 12. 23:21. The Pink-Spotted Buddha

           The day is best defined as more of a mental process than a physical account. I do this every semester: overthink my classes ‘til I am content enough with my decision. Most of my brain power of the day went towards choosing between 19^th Century American Writing, American Gothic, and 19^th Century Writing (British). I took off the 19^th Century American once the claims “the reading list is really boring” and “why study some of the American time period you studied last semester” felt sufficient to drop it from the triad of what-should-my-third-module-be. Currently, I am enrolled in American Gothic, but after finding out that it’s only opened to international students, I finally set my sights on the third, 19^th Century Writing in the country that is the birthplace of it all. I probably won’t get another chance to study Dickens in a British class with British students.

            I decided to save you the long and painful process, the pro’s and con’s, the list of advisors, from official to familial to friendial to girlfriendial. All arrows point to British 19^th Century.

            Now here comes the story of the pink-spotted Buddha: In the midst of this agonizing juxtaposition of the modules’ syllabi to determine which to choose and which to drop, I checked my timetable of current classes (oh wait, class. Singular, yeah that’s right.) for today. Apparently I had misread my Thursday class from the first time I had set eyes on it. Fuck. Not 15:00-16:00—14:00-15:00!!! Stupid 24-hour time setting. I didn’t intuitively think “2 o’clock” but more like “oh there’s a 15:00 and I know that as ‘3pm’ and so that’s all I need to know. It probably starts then.” or some other rubbish idea like that.

            Ah—no. So I ran to Congregation Hall, just like in the old times of last semester (and every semester of uni basically) when I lollygag until the last second and then rely on my legs to get me to class like Hermes’ winged sandals. The students were just filing out of the small classroom (I’m still so used to a lecture being in a big hall) and I got to the front of the room, got a copy of the syllabus, apologized to both tutors and walked back out.

            I hadn’t really thought about how one of the tutors had kinda given me an odd look until I was walking on the pavement (yeah, apparently they don’t call it a sidewalk like in America). Even this guy I saw walking out of lecture looked at me funny. Then I felt my forehead. Damn it, my flatmate Stephen had been right. I would make a fool of myself with it on. Quickly I stripped off the bright pink sticky dot that I had attached to my forehead earlier that afternoon. I had simply tried on a new white T-shirt I bought yesterday, found a pink dot on it, attached it to my forehead to amuse my flatmates (which worked like a charm), and had lunch…and forgot about it ‘til now. Oh boy, not only did I apologize to my tutors for missing the first lecture but I did it looking a little ridiculous. Glasses on and a hot pink dot smack dab in the middle of my forehead to feel Buddha-ish or as I told Stephen, “Hinduish” (similar to Buddha-ish only because of the marked forehead). Great.

            Well to make up for it, I plowed through reading the Preface and the 1798 version of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, finished the last thirty pages right now but definitely covered seventy pages in the library after that unfortunate affair of the pink dot. Made chicken wings and baked beans with Vinny; sharing food is awesome. My tube of mayonnaise dropped for the second time out of the fridge and splattered the floor. I put the half still in the tube into a bowl, and then Garlic Jen (yes, she’s known this name) got all excited and wanted to put garlic in it. I let her, quite amused that at least someone was making light of it—but oh! Dan! And he stepped into the mayonnaise still on the floor. I wasn’t quick enough to clean it. Oh well, white shoes are better than brown, anyway—and put the bowl in the fridge and cleaned up. There. Hmmph. Pink Buddha signing off. 

Day 11, 18 Jan: Run Til You're Done + How the Blowfish Got Its Name

Norfolk Terrace, UEA. Day 11. 22:04. Run Til You’re Done + How the Blowfish Got Its Name

          My heart pounded. I warmed up my legs, did strides, but all in a focused fury. Meditated for a minute, let the timer count the minute so I could forget. I tapped the outside window and clicked my watch and took off, starting in an elevated sprint ‘til I reached the trees. I followed the path all the way round the lake, halfway feeling too out of breath. The pace too fast, but I had to press on. I wanted to prove myself, even in this silly contest. Yes, I felt able to stretch out my stride, did that, also calmed down my breathing and assumed a more focused run movement. All right, by three-quarters around I wasn’t feeling as bad as I started. Definitely out of recovery mode from the beginning sprint, almost at last-minute sprint mode. Wow, it feels weird to be racing less than twenty minutes. There’s a bench…is that the one Dan told me to go past and then head toward the flat’s corner window (just touching the grass)? Maybe. I see the hedge, I’ll take it. Mud, mud, ugh, yes! tougher ground and now grass, and the last stretch on tough grass. I got this. Here comes that unstoppable pain jamming at me but my mind knows it’s only momentary. Here it comes, the window, touch. Done.

            6:56.3. Fastest time for the flat. I heard cheering from my flatmates and then an unexpected chorus of girl voices yelling “That was amazing!” from an adjacent flat’s kitchen window, looking out to the grass like all of the Norfolk Terrace kitchens do. I panted and got my breath. I checked my degree of recovery. Good, a little out of breath but seven minutes should bring me back to a resting heart rate. Sweet, that was better than I thought it had been while running. Always one to compete, Vinny told me I had missed the right bench, about ten-fifteen meters added to the trail in that case, but I figured it only ten-fifteen seconds at the most so adding that to my time, Vinny and I tied. We were both content. The girls from the adjacent flat were asking questions as I hopped into the window and onto the kitchen seat. Stephen and Vinny explained that we were racing for time, as a flat activity.

            After that unexpected run, I quickly showered and made the most out of shopping in the city centre. I got a lot of what I needed, from white T-shirts to silverware, all at DQ (NOT Dairy Queen, remember they don’t have that here. It was a we-have-everything Target-kind-of store). Headed back, cooked raw ground meat for the first time on the stove (usually did pasta and BBQ’ed burgers/salmon on the grill back home) and the ever-generous Laura let me have a bit of her garlic. Then the ever-nice Jen explained how I cut the garlic and put it in with the meat. Charlie later asked Jen for help and Jen put in a bay leaf on top of his meat. He cried out, “You just put a leaf in my meat. So do I just put it in there and pound it around?” Yes, there was acknowledgement of the innuendo thereafter.

            After Vinny and I worked like bosses on a good meat sauce (wow, I just remembered back on a choir Christmas carolling bus ride when Stephen was Spaghetti and Ryan was something else. And I was “meat sauce”. Brothers-by-inside-joke who were to start a spaghetti factory. Good times.) and pasta and carrots, we ate and then joined  a clean-the-kitchen marathon started by us and Dan (always keen to clean too). Dan and I started off to watch Black Swan at Lecture Theatre 1 and found it empty. Apparently the ad on the wall promoting the movie “This Wednesday!” had been there for a while. Boo. Still watching it tonight, but by other means.  And wow, speaking hour and some later, that movie has a painful aftertaste but an actually better after-aftertaste upon reflecting on the movie’s interesting message of how obsessed perfection is a death wish. As Katya told me, that movie is definitely a sex thriller…and would be awkward to see in a movie theatre with the whole family. Really bizarre. Ended the night talking to Katya on skype and then unexpectedly finding a lot of my flatmates (and Steff, but he’s an honorary flatmate) at the kitchen table playing yaniv. Man, I think I’ll try to make this card game atmosphere happen more often in the Labyrinth (oh, that’s the name of my Berkeley flat, shared with 2 girls, 2 guys. But I’ve been temporarily replaced by a very friendly subletter Evie until I get back).

            Random query (btw, they say “query” here, instead of “question”; So, in lecture, it’s “anyone have any queries?”): As my dad asked me, I wonder why I keep looking up in pictures as my general pose in photos of me in the UK. Huh.

Oh one last thing. Earlier, after dinner and before midnight, I fabricated a wonderful story to Marie about how the puff-fish got its name. But hey, it was Marie who started it by saying, “You just have an answer to everything, don’t you?” And I couldn’t resist when she asked me, “Well then say something about the blowfish” and I came up with this: The blowfish was cornered at a wall [Marie: Wall? Me: Sorry, coral reef] by baby sharks and then PUFF! It’s big and the sharks run away scared [Marie: But that’s not the puff-fish] and then the blowfish met the puff-fish who was smoking a joint and offered the blowfish some. And that is how the blowfish became the puff-fish [British term for it?]. The End. 

Day 10, 17 Jan: The Creative Introduction (like in Men in Black)

Norfolk Terrace, UEA. Day 10. 23:28. The Creative Introduction (like in Men in Black)

You know, the second day of school is what it is. I switched my Nineteenth Century American lit class for American Gothic. The ladies in charge of changing modules were really nice, and even asked about Berkeley’s protest. One of the ladies’ friends lives in Berkeley, so the protest might not have actually made big news over here after all. But back to class changes, you know what sucks? All the modernism modules were offered last semester! UGH! And if a class is full, it’s full. No waitlist here. 40 is 40, even apparently if the professor says you can be in the class. Anna tried to tell the ladies that earlier yesterday and they refused to add her. Professors have less power here and that’s a little upsetting, ironically enough. Anyway I hope the Gothic class is good.

            I went running with British Sean today, 3 circuits around the lake. He has an incredible running story. After a week of running for the first time in an Australian university on study abroad (after years of soccer, though), he was able to race in a 10K, didn’t do so hot, but he raced. In a couple of weeks, he actually made a team of some sort and they paid for his travel and hotel. Damn. As we were running, I was bothered by the fact that his running pace was annoyingly close but a little faster than mine. I kept up just fine, and by the second circuit, I was warmed up enough that the pace felt good and not contrived/competitive. I did this run and then changed my module, btw.

            I went to the library for 90 minutes instead of walking back to Norfolk Terrace, found this really interesting book on old Cambridge lecture summaries on the nature of literature and the difference between poetry and prose and the four elements of good writing (perspicuity/clarity, accuracy, persuasiveness/charm, and appropriateness). Here is a quote that I just had to write down:

“Thought and speech are inseparable from each other. Matter and expression are parts of one; style is a thinking out into language. …This is literature; not things, but the verbal symbols of things; not…mere words, but thoughts expressed in language.” (Cardinal Newman qtd. in On The Art of Writing by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, pg. 28).

[HIGHLIGHT:]    Right after this I had a really good 2-hour seminar of my Introduction to Creative Writing module. The tutor did a really weird way of having us introduce each other. We talked for 10 minutes to a peer next to us and for the first five minutes I talked about myself, and then the next he talked about himself (James and I used up a lot of his time to write stuff down so I didn’t get that much info about him). So the assignment was to use our notes and write about our partner as if we were writing the background information of an author at the back of his book. Well, while everyone else wrote about the author as he/she is now, I somehow took the instructions a little differently and given the little information I had about James, I actually wrote his author bio as he might be ten years from now. I even included how he used his degree (Environmental Geography and International Development) to go to third-world countries with his girlfriend and then used his experiences and the people he met in his first novel, Tales of A Striving Land. Somehow, I really felt like Jay in Men in Black when he takes the intelligence test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w67dhHLUK3M&feature=related

Except I didn’t thereafter join a secret agency to defeat evil aliens and save the world. But you know, close enough.

Day 9, 16 Jan: Lost In Translation

Norfolk Terrace, UEA. Day 9. 23:59. Lost in Translation

First day of class today meant two hours in the middle of the day (and I got to get up at 11, ate breakfast at 12). This is like college-light, a vacation even. I had Nineteenth Century American Writing and it was actually interesting a bit. I talked a few times but then the tutor [name for a professor in a seminar/discussion] hoped that most of the 13 of us had read Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Sorry, didn’t know where to find the online module bulletin board of announcements and messages (I am apologizing subconsciously, in reality he didn’t really press anyone and he was super friendly). After class, I ate dinner alone at Zest after Mo didn’t respond; he had lost his phone for most of the day and texted me about it later. It’s cool. Anyway, after a long but really good skype session with Katya and then a shorter one with my parents, I played yaniv with a few of my flatmates, Dan, Alvin, Charlie, and Stephen.

            The most hilarious part of the day came next. Amidst watching the first episode of series 2 of Sherlock free on bbc.co.uk (yeah, in America, it’s not accessible to watch—one perk after losing Netflix and Hulu when crossing the Atlantic, I guess), in came Marie to visit and ask me something I think. The more important fact is that we found each other lost in a sea of odd translations. I am the left-facing arrow ("<"), Marie’s the right-facing arrow (">"). So Marie starts:

>What do you call chips in America?

< Um, [google-picturing a bag of Lays potato chips] these.

> No, those are crisps.

< For us they’re chips. Like potato chips.

> No, chips are these [UK-google-picturing chips].

< No, those are French fries!

> No, they are chips. Don’t they look like chips?

< No!

< Ah, but they’re Lays.

> Well, here they’re Walkers.

< So odd. But they have the same logo. I bet they came from America.

[We stumble upon a picture of a global survey of different labels for Frito-Lays products. Both of us:] Whoa.

< How many hours a week do you have class?

> Oh, 3 and then 9 hours of placement.

< What’s placement?

> For this year, I basically shadow and stalk a social worker on different days. Next year more hours and doing more of the social worker’s job. The year after I get the degree.

< So after getting your degree, you just become a social worker?

> Well, there’s a shortage of them in the UK. So I apply and I’ll become one then.

< Oh, cool. Well, in America I’m studying English for a degree but then I can apply to law school. It’s not as specialized as it is here. Oh but here’s my schedule from last semester. I did swimming Monday and Wednesdays, English literature on these days, and rhetoric and Gospel chorus and music history. The music for most likely a minor. Oh, yeah you don’t have minors. Um, think of it as a mini-course and then you have your main one.

> That’s so weird. Why do study so many different things?

< Uh, well uni is more of a broader education in America than here. We have breadth courses in America too, where you take courses in like science even if you are an English major, er, course.

> So do you have to take breadths when you get back?

< No, I’m done with them.

> Oh, really? I don’t think I can stop taking breaths.

< Oh you mean breaths as in breathing?

> Yes.

< [still showing her my schedule from last semester] I had swimming these days and English on these.

> So do all English students have to do swimming?

< Oh no, it was for fun. You get to choose your classes.

> Ah, well here they choose your year for you.

< So it’s only three years and then a degree? It’s so specialized.

< I took a British Literature: 1900-1945 course, er, module last semester.

> That’s silly. Why British and not American?

< Because British literature is sometimes more interesting.

> What did you study?

< Oh like a bunch of authors, like T.S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad…

> Oh T.S. Eliot, I know him.

< Yeah, he wrote the Wasteland.

> I just know his name.

< Oh, well, the poem’s not as bad as Ulysses. By James Joyce. That kinda takes chapter headings from The Odyssey. You know The Odyssey?

> No.

< Do you know Homer?

> No.

< Trojan War?

> I know the Trojan horse.

< Yes, same area.

< YOU DON’T KNOW DR. SUESS?

> YOU DON’T KNOW JACQUELINE WILSON? She does the child books, The Story of Tracy Beaker.

< Nope. Never heard of her.

> [looking at my opened Microsoft Word document] What is that?

< Oh I was seeing how many pages would make 1500 words. It’s an essay I wrote from last semester. Oh, since you’re here, I was wondering, how do you format a paper here?

> [still looking at the essay] You have so much space between the lines.

< Oh we have to double-space. For the grader to comment.

> Why not just have them comment in the margins?

< There’s more room to revise whole phrases.

> So you get a lot of wrong markings?

< Well, no, not that many.

> [sarcastically] Oh so you’re clever, are you?

< Oh yeah, that’s the word for “smart” here, isn’t it? Like, you say it more often than “smart”?

> I guess. If someone’s kinda posh [stuck-up] and goes to Oxford or Cambridge, they might call themselves “intelligent”. But kids there all have parents who own something big, have a lot of property. I knew one kid from college [high school] who went there and he was all posh.

< [Back to Microsoft Word] But back to this, how would you do the heading? Where would your name and everything go?

> [looks closely] Why do you put the date? Our papers are scheduled like a month in advance.

< In America we have to put the due date. Kinda in replace of “Paper 1” or “Paper 2”.

> Oh, well we just put our student ID number and a title in the center.

< That’s all?

> Well you put the paper in your pigeon hole in your school’s hub.

< Um, what?

> You know your school?

< School of American Studies.

> Okay, well every school has a hub on campus. Do you know where yours is?

< [looks it up online] In the Arts building. [a pause] Wait, is a hub like a department office?

> Yeah!

< So I put the paper in the pigeon hole and they know what to do with it?

> Well yeah.

< So all papers are single-spaced and have just a student ID and a title?

> Yeah. You have a paper due next week or something?

< No, about six weeks.

> [laughs] Then why do you need to know?

< I was curious!

> Oh, one thing. Put spaces between the paragraphs.

< Why?

> So there’s more of a divide.

< Why not just double-space? In America, that’s what we do.

> So in America you double-space the shit out of it and organize it into a big bulk?