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.