Day 34, 11 Feb: "AD-i-das, not a-DI-dus" (and Haircut too)

Norfolk Terrace, Day 34. “AD-i-das, not a-DI-dus” (and Haircut too)

Friday. The day of my earliest class: at 9. I woke up with only six and a half hours of sleep--a record low for this week/month so far. (But in the spectrum of my life, I’ve had only two all-nighters: one was for a junior-year English project on Tim O’Brien’s The Things We Carried [at three A.M., I distinctly remember pouring Nesquik chocolate milk into a cookie sheet, placing printer paper in to soak, and laying the “authentic”, “dirt-stained” paper out to dry in the pavement outside under the moon and dry evening] and the other was…for school again, but I forget. Only the first one sticks out since I got a B+ on that project and realized that the lack of sleep did not earn me a good grade. Lesson in procrastination: never start a project the night before. Note: Leaving most of the work for an essay/project for the night before is not included in this lesson.)

            As I sped through a quick milk-and-cereal breakfast, Stef texted for the room number for the Romanticism seminar. I realized it was later than I had anticipated, but I was able to finish the cereal and run to class five minutes before 9. I made it again before the teacher! Freshman year back in Priestly Hall of Unit 3 at Berkeley, I ran to class and it took at least 5 minutes. Thanks to the on-campus location of Norfolk Terrace, the ARTS building is an under-5 minute run: fastest late-to-class commute ever!

            This seminar on the essays of Hazlitt was much better than last week’s: the subject matter inevitably dived into a bit of the philosophy of perception (subject-object representation in art, derived from these lines: “Nature is also a language. Objects, like words, have a meaning; and the true artist is the interpreter of this language” (“Indian Jugglers” essay of collection, pg. 133)). I even enjoyed reading the last essay (last night) on poetry, and the “natural impression of any object or event” which defines poetry. The rationale for a metaphor’s purpose was explained suitably:

“We compare a man of gigantic stature to a tower: not that he is any thing like so large, but because the excess of his size beyond what we are accustomed to expect…produces by contrast a greater feeling of magnitude…than another object of ten times the same dimensions. The intensity of the feeling makes up for the disproportion of the objects. Things are equal in the imagination” (“On Poetry In General”, pg. 312).

All right, pardon the English-major tangent. One reason for a better discussion was the opportunity to talk in small groups and let more people talk at once (finally!). Analyzing the first page of his political essay “What is the People?” was refreshing: anaphora, long sentence structure, repetition, jolting beginning, antithesis, Biblical allusion, King Lear reference, intimate second-person tense, body metaphor for the nation (punning on “body politic”). [There was another on including differing categorical objects in a list to connect them rhetorically…I failed to find the term for it.]

            Seminar thus ended well. I got tea with Stef at Blend and we sat in the library (where you can eat on the first floor) and talked for an hour about movies and whatever interesting popped up in the “Cement” student newspaper in front of us. Here’s another British terminological quirk: “Spring break” is “Easter holiday”. A “break” from school is always “Holiday”. When I tried to argue for a “holiday” just being a day long, the look on Stef’s face made it appear as if I had told her someone she knew had died. Apparently, “Holiday” from school—separate from a public holiday—is the term for a “break”. At least for Stef. Flatmates, let me know if “break” is ever used.

             I then mailed out the love letter I wrote yesterday as a Valentine’s Day package—excuse me, “parcel”—and a postcard of Norwich. The post office employee took one look at my return address on the left-hand side of the front of the parcel and literally crossed it out. “We put return addresses on the back in this country,” he said sternly. Whoa, dude, I didn’t know that was a big deal. He put it in the Out box all the same, though.

            Ah, next was my trip to the city centre with Dan (also known by his title “Dan the Man”). We walked around the mall for a bit, I bought a £7 blue-checker collared shirt with a stylish zipper that only goes down to the solar plexus, and he teased the hell out of me for calling some shoes “Adidas” (a-DEE-dus) and not “ADD-did-dus” (apparently the British pronunciation; I soon learned that “Nike” (NIKE-y) is also said weirdly: Nike (Nye-k)). Finally, we got haircuts! (When the guy asked me how much I wanted cut off, I quickly ran the conversion from inches to centimentres in my head: 4 centimeters.)

            On our way back to the bus, we stopped in a movie store and I thought to look for Dr Who (oh, British grammar for “Dr” and “Mr”,etc.: no period) and did not find it at all. I asked Dan, and so he brought me to the other side of the store. Dumbfounded, I beheld a shrine of ten rows of all Dr Who episodes, a Dr Who poster rack, and Dr Who merchandise. I was simply curious. I have yet to really watch the show, but I want to.

            After the bus trip back, we prepared for the night in our own ways. I skyped Katya for two hours, in which we bought train tickets from London to Paris for her Spring bre—Easter holiday week in the UK. Halfway through the skype, Charlie, Marie, Dan, and Jen all entered to ask if I would like pizza (that was a yes) and said hello to Katya.

            The night at Carnival (that place I never got into and had to walk home that night; Day 20) was fun; the place is smaller than I expected. Joseph (New Zealand) was his giddy self that night and lifted me up in the crowd once or twice. Always great to find him at a club. There was an odd side-showing of Dragonball Z on a projector-type screen on the side of the main dance floor. It just was out of place. But dancing in a big circle with Gemma, Dan, Jenny, Charlie, Alvin, Marie, Lithuanian Laura, Malindi, and Joe was ridiculously fun all the same.

            The night ended at 2:50am (can’t say 3—2:50 sounds a lot more earlier than it really is, just like 2.99 psychologically is a lot less than 3).

           

P.S. I stumbled upon a video where a guy mentions that the Adidas brand is from Germany, so it’s really pronounced “uddy-duss”. …Ha.