The Friday 500

The First Sick Day

2012-01-26T20:09:00.002-07:00

I reached another milestone in the land of independent adulthood this week: The First Sick Day. Sure, I’ve been ill since I graduated high school, but I never missed class because of it. I got a couple of sinus infections and one raging bout of bronchitis, but I got the flu while at home over a Christmas break and mono during finals week of my senior year, so I never had a sick day all through college.

But this past Monday, I woke up at 5:30 to get ready for the gym and while I was packing my bag, a dizzying wave of nausea hit me, and I puked. I rarely throw up, so I’m a huge wimp when it happens. I always cry, I always get shaky, I always feel really sorry for myself, and I always tuck myself back into bed after strategically placing a trash can next to it. This time, I also had to text my boss and say, “I puked. I’m going back to bed. I’ll be in later.” Being an hourly employee without health insurance, I cannot afford to miss work.

I woke up again around 9 and dragged myself to work, still feeling very sorry for myself. I don’t remember much of the day, other than wondering why I didn’t stay in bed. I went to bed on a mostly empty stomach, determined to feel better in the morning, even setting my alarm for 5:30 again.

On Tuesday I got up at 5:30, put on my workout clothes, and ate a cereal bar so I wouldn’t be working out on a totally empty stomach. Ten minutes later, as I voided my stomach of said cereal bar, I acknowledged in the self-punishing recesses of my brain that some day in the distant future I’ll be doing this every morning for, like, three months. The joys of womanhood.

Still in my workout clothes, I repeated the (crying, shaking, pitying) routine from Monday morning and went back to bed. At 8am, I learned one of the best lessons thus far since living on my own: if you can’t live with your mom, live with a nurse. When Jessica got home from the night shift, she responded to my SOS text message by coming in to check on me, then going to the store to buy me lots of chicken noodle soup and Sprite. Incidentally, the only comfort Lil Smoky offered was contingent on my possession of said soup. When I ate it she wasn’t interested in me any more.

As far as sick days go, this one was a pretty good one. I was too sick to get out of bed, but not sick enough to be consigned to the bathroom floor. I spent the morning watching episode after episode of Downton Abbey (which is why-didn’t-anyone-make-me-watch-this-sooner good), and then I slept the afternoon away. I completed my self-prescribed regimen of crackers, Sprite, and British accents by watching Pride & Prejudice and then going to sleep again. I was back at work on Wednesday, still a bit foggy but not pukey, and after a restful weekend (in which I may watch every episode of Downton Abbey again) I’m sure I’ll be completely back to normal.

But that’s not to say that I still don’t miss my mommy when my tumbly is rumbly.

Countdowns

2012-01-13T14:22:00.002-07:00

For the past few years, countdowns have freaked me out. During my junior year, I didn’t want to think about my departure from Oxford zooming ever nearer. And during my senior year, I didn’t want to think about getting thrust into the cold, harsh world with merely a liberal arts diploma in hand. I wanted the sad and boring days to end themselves, and the blissful days to stretch on forever.

But since June, my life has been all about countdowns. All during the workday I focus on the dwindling hours until 5:00. On Monday evening, I think, Just do that four more times. Then there were the countdowns to Thanksgiving and Christmas, which brought longer respites from work, dirty laundry, and feeding myself.

This week-- my first full week back since before Christmas-- was chock full of unexpected turns of events. I turned in a fellowship application (you’ll know when I know), landed my first paid writing gig (freelance ad copy for a small company), and finally got a position as a volunteer ESL tutor (after completing the training in October). If those weren’t big enough causes for excitement, I finally acted with some (planned) spontaneity and made some plans.

Last week I was chatting with Abbie, one of my best friends from the Oxford days. We started reminiscing and wishing I could come visit, and I started to casually look into plane tickets. By Monday, I’d secured the funds and my boss’s blessing, and I booked my ticket for the first week of March. I’m going back to Oxford in 48 days.

In the midst of that process, my dad gently told me that my sister was feeling quite neglected. I had made vague promises to visit her at Baylor, but hadn’t done any research into plane tickets. When my dad told me her feelings were hurt, my heart dropped into my stomach. Being the self-centered girl that I am, I hadn’t even considered that my enthusiasm for going to England would communicate to my sister that I didn’t care to come see her. On Monday, before purchasing my ticket to England, I bought a plane ticket to Texas. I’m going to infiltrate my sister’s college life in 42 days.

The day after booking the tickets, I had a sudden, panicky feeling that I’d book my trip to England on the day I was supposed to see The Avett Brothers in Wichita with my right-hand man. I whipped out my planner and rifled through it, tearing a page in the process. The concert is in 58 days.

Have you noticed how close together these countdowns are? All three of those trips are happening inside a 17-day span. Just writing down my itineraries made me almost dizzy with joy.

It’s as the Roman philosopher Seneca said: “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.”

As for me, the anticipation of traveling, of seeing new and familiar things, of reuniting with beloved faces, has already brought renewed vigor to my days.

The Shelf

2012-01-06T07:00:00.001-07:00

I’ve told you this before, but I love books. And I don’t mean “love” in the same way I love burritos or fluffy socks. Books are my lifeblood. One of the few passions in my life that has never grown cold.

I’ve rejected purchasing a shirt because it was twenty dollars, only to turn around, walk into Barnes & Noble, and drop twenty dollars on books. I’ve never regretted buying a book.

The other day I uttered these words: “I’m never going to buy my kids toys. But they can have all the books they want.” I wasn’t completely joking.

Once, I actually got a little weepy in a bookstore as I browsed the shelves, overwhelmed by a desire to read everything at once, and a sorrow that even when I die, I’ll have missed something.

You get the idea.

I’ve been toying with the idea of setting a reading goal for 2012. Initially, I thought I’d set reading a certain number of books as a goal, and then race to it as fast as my Amazon Prime membership could carry me. But then, the other night I walked into my room and was met by the spines of all my books looking up at me. I suddenly noticed all the books that I had purchased and that have been loaned to me that I’ve never read, but prominently display on my shelves. Why don’t you like us? they asked. Please, give us a chance! Guilt-ridden, I counted them and arranged them as best as I could on a singular shelf on one bookcase.

So here it is: The Year of The Shelf. This year, I’m going to make it through as many of these thirty-six titles as I can. Mathematically speaking, I could do it by reading three a month, but as the pictures demonstrate, some are much lengthier than others. My hope is that there are enough shorter ones to even out the tomes.

What do you think of The Shelf? Have you read any of these? Where do you think I should start? I’ll post my progress throughout the year, in addition to the regularly scheduled Friday 500 programming.

[left to right and top to bottom]

Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell

The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis

Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh

Same Kind of Different As Me, Ron Hall and Denver Moore

Habits of the Mind, James Sire

Just Courage, Gary Haugen

The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

Giant, Edna Ferber

The Living, Annie Dillard

Diplomacy, Henry Kissinger

Paris 1919, Margaret MacMillan

The World is Flat, Thomas L. Friedman

A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson

The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis

A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving

The Count of Monte Christo, Alexandre Dumas

These is my Words, Nancy E. Turner

Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Native Son, Richard Wright

The Faith, Chuck Colson

Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga

The Jesus I Never Knew, Philip Yancey

Persuasion, Jane Austen

For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

Light in August, William Faulkner

A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

The Inklings, Humphrey Carpenter

Rebel Angels, Libba Bray

“A Problem from Hell”: America and the Age of Genocide, Samantha Power

The River of Doubt, Candice Millard

In the Garden of Beasts, Erik Larson

My Lucky Life in and out of Show Business, Dick Van Dyke

The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis, Alan Jacobs

From Homer to Harry Potter: A Handbook on Myth and Fantasy, Matthew Dickerson & David O’Hara

2011: The Year in Photos

2012-01-01T22:54:00.000-07:00

2011 started with shooting gingerbread
houses with a shotgun.

January: It snowed. A lot.

February: Got the coolest bruise ever when
I fell up (yes, up) the stairs.

March: Choir trip to Nashville
meant awesome photo ops,

See?

April: We got our Oxbridge medals and
pretended to know what freedom would feel like.

April: Started dating this guy.
Accidental matching ensued.

May: WE DID IT.
Also note how swollen my face is.
Mononucleosis.

May: Wittle sister gwaduated.

June: Heather got married!

July: Second best meal of the year
at the infamous Cyclone Corral.

So. Hot. All. Summer.

September: Moved into this cute little Kansas residence.

September: Lil Smoky came to live with us.

October: We ran.

December: Spent hours wrapping presents.

December: My right hand man is now
a 2nd Lieutenant in the United
States Marine Corps.

Closed out 2011 with this view from the back deck.

For the first time, I haven't the slightest clue what the coming year will bring. I do know, though, that the pictures will be way better, because they'll all be taken with this puppy.

Bring it on, 2012.

Dear Friends, Family, and Others...

2011-12-16T23:04:00.000-07:00

Before there was Facebook’s NewsFeed, there were annual Christmas letters.

Once a year, it becomes socially acceptable for families to bombard hundreds of people across America with veritable tomes of their carefully spun triumphs and tragedies, successes and scandals.

I love them.

After years of poring over every one that comes to our mailbox, I’ve become somewhat of a connoisseur. I’m working on the mathematical formula that determines the ratio of number of kids to length of letter. It’s not what you’d think—early studies conclude that the more kids in the family, the more likely the writer-parent gives up on drafting an update and instead sends out photo cards sometime in mid-January.

I love these photos, too. Since I was born, we’ve lived in five different states, and we still keep in touch with people from all of them. For a period of about three years, my sister and I waited impatiently for the photo card to arrive from a certain family of attractive sons. These were pre-Facebook days, so we had to wait a full year before we could see the progression of handsomeness in each of them. We were never disappointed.

Which is a major reason why I feel a certain sense of veto power when it comes time to choose the family picture that will accompany our humble, succinct, and hilarious letter. I don’t want to disappoint a fan with a photo that suggests I’ve developed a double chin or put on eighty pounds, all because of a poorly-chosen angle. It’s vain—I don’t deny it—but that’s one of the main characteristics of a Christmas letter.

One of the most useful functions of a Christmas letter is that it serves as the common folks’ press conference. It’s a chance to set the record straight, to let others know they know that others know their business, to State an Official Account and Proclaim an Official Opinion. Some parents allude to their child’s “rough patch” or “troubled times” without delving into any personal detail. Others take a no-nonsense approach: Johnny got arrested for selling drugs. He’s doing time. We still love him.

One year, though, one family took their paper press conference to new extremes of discomfort. They told of the phone call they received from a crying son and his hysterical girlfriend, who confessed to having succumbed to the temptations of the flesh and engaging in premarital intercourse the night before. And sure enough, a few weeks later the girlfriend discovered she was pregnant. The letter explained that the wedding would be in a few months, and the baby would be arriving a few months after that.

I remember gingerly lifting the letter with the tips of my thumb and forefinger and setting it down as far from myself as I could reach. In the past I’d been delightedly shocked at the length of some families’ letters, or cynically mesmerized by the tedious month-by-month timeline others’ felt sure would enrapture the multitudes. But to this day, that letter stands out as the first and only time I’ve ever felt horror and embarrassment as the predominant emotions after reading a Christmas Card Breaking News Update.

'Tis the Season

2011-12-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

“You always hear that people are nicer at this time of year,” my friend said to me last night. “But I swear, I’ve dealt with more crazies since Thanksgiving than I have since I started in July.” She’s an Executive Team Lead at Target, a store named after what my friend must become when a customer is feeling particularly rageful.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed not only that people in public aren’t nicer now than any other time of year, but also that I’m more annoyed with this behavior than I usually I am. I’m sure this stems from the naughty-or-nice-list paranoia engrained in us at a young age. In July, though, I usually forget that the jerk who cut me off in traffic will inevitably get coal in his stocking.

I’m not exempt from this Scrooge-like behavior, either. On my lunch break earlier this week I went to the Plaza to buy a Christmas present for my sister. My car speakers were pumping Julie Andrews’ Christmas album, but that didn’t counteract the road rage I felt when two cars blocked the entire street while waiting for other shoppers to get in their cars, rid their hands of bags, dig their keys out of their massive purses, start the car, tune the radio, adjust the temperature controls, and slowly creep backwards out of their spaces. While Julie’s dulcet tones proclaimed the birth of the long-awaited Savior, I sighed heavily, threw my hands up in the air, and looked around wildly to see if there was a way around these cars. I’m trying to make Christmas merry, and you. are. ruining. it.

That night, I was at the grocery store. I was tired and frustrated and at the end of my Christmas spirit for the day when a young mom with three boisterous kids cut me off with an overflowing cart in a narrow aisle. She realized it immediately and exclaimed, “Oh, I’m so sorry!” Such self-awareness motivated me to mumble, “It’s okay,” while giving her the pursed-lip-smile reserved for encounters such as this.

Later, I was trying to locate the shortest check-out line I heard someone yelp, “Oh, no! No no no!” It was the same lady, having just rung up all her groceries and realizing she didn’t have her wallet. But she wasn’t saying “no” to the cashier—she was saying it to the older woman behind her. “I just live down the street!” the young mom was exclaiming. “Really, it’s okay!” The older lady shook her head and held her hand out in front of her, stopping the mom’s protestations. “It’s okay,” she said. “Please, let me.” I quickly figured out that this older lady was offering to pay for this family’s full cart of groceries, just so the mom wouldn’t have to go all the way home and all the way back with three little kids in tow.

I was so taken aback just witnessing this stranger’s generosity that tears sprang to my eyes. It takes a great deal of attention and intention to look outside of our own gift lists, party calendars, and baking schedules. This woman’s kindness will remain in my memory for years to come, and maybe because of her I can find some graciousness and generosity to replace the road rage.

Artwork by Colorado artist Dan Fraley

The Thing About Music

2011-11-29T21:35:00.002-07:00

I know. It’s Tuesday. But you know, I was giving thanks with my family, then I was stranded in the Denver airport on Sunday night, and then I was so sleepy last night that I didn’t even eat. Today I wanted to write about the people that annoy me at the gym or the people that annoy me on the phone at work, but I got too annoyed thinking about it and didn’t want to annoy others by writing about it.

Recently, someone asked me, “Do you like music?” I replied, “Doesn’t everyone?” I was sure music held universal appeal, that only specific preferences varied. Then I heard of someone’s uncle, who doesn’t “get” music. Doesn’t care about it. Doesn’t choose to play it for personal enjoyment. This baffled me, and I wanted to write this long-winded opus on the importance music has in my life, on how even in my darkest days Concert Choir was always a sunny ray of hope, on the reasons why I was named after a hymnal and my dog was named after a country music star. But I knew that I’d get carried away and start bragging on the number of songs in my iTunes, but forgetting to mention the percentage of them that I’ve never listened to. Somehow I’d find myself arguing on the side of Pitchfork for Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’s perfect score, but disagreeing with just about every other rating they’ve given and berating them for being such a pretentious gang of garrulous band geeks. Before I knew it, I’d find myself making claims that I can in no way substantiate about the most underrated bands or the best lyricist of our generation.

And so, as I type this, I’m pulling up iTunes. In this Friday 500 exclusive, I shall bare my ears’ and my soul’s true preferences.

The first glance at the list of my Top 25 Most Played songs reveals to me that almost all of these songs wouldn’t be on the list in the first place if it weren’t for my weird penchant for putting songs on repeat. Sometimes, no other song will fit my groove (see #19, “O Children” by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds). Sometimes, I’m trying to up my street cred by learning all the words (see #10, “All of the Lights” by Kanye West). Sometimes it’s because I was studying for hours and didn’t realize the repeat button was on (see #21, “Dawn”—the first track on the Pride & Prejudice soundtrack). Or sometimes it’s because I was studying and was very aware that the repeat button was on because I need to drown out the music in the Union and receive an uplifting message at the same time (see #2, “Don't Let Me Fall” by B.o.B.). And sometimes it’s because I made a playlist of only four songs and played it every time I showered for six months (see #3-6).

But as far as I can remember, I’ve never put #1 (“I Feel It All” by Feist) on repeat. It’s my happy song. The one I play when I’ve had a victorious day, or when I want to pretend my life has a soundtrack. I must say—I’m pleased, and somewhat relieved, to discover that my happy song’s playcounts far surpass those of my weird-repeat-phase songs.

The complete list, per request.

Half a Year as an Adult

2011-11-18T21:41:00.000-07:00

As of this past Monday, I’ve been a college graduate for six months. I’ve learned some surprising things since then. Here’s a sampling.

1. Everything in my life is now my fault. If I don’t have clean pants to wear to work, it’s because I didn’t do laundry. If I have eaten nothing but beans and rice for three days, it’s because I didn’t go to the grocery store. If I can barely see my face in the mirror, it’s because I haven’t replaced burnt-out light bulbs in my bathroom. There are no work orders, no cafeterias, and no offices that will allow dirty and/or wrinkly pants.

2. I should never live alone. I have come to embrace my introverted self in the past couple of years, and I’m finding that it’s easy to disappear into my own world in the evenings, even when I live with three other girls and two dogs. If I didn’t have them to interact with, there would be a strong chance of my semi-misanthropic behavior completely consuming my days.

3. This is the first time in my life my friends aren’t readily available. While it may sound contradictory to #2, I hate not being around them on a daily basis. Seeing each other takes intention and planning—no more spontaneous dropping in or trips to Wal-Mart. What’s hard, though, is realizing that this is the norm for adult life. I haven’t made the adjustment well.

4. Words are still the love of my life. I haven’t been without a book since I graduated, although I haven’t had as much time to read as I used to fantasize about (see #1). Last night I met with a friend who’s working on writing a book, and just going over her work with her left me giddy. Times like that, coupled with the mind-numbing job I have now, strengthen my confidence in the fact that some day I will make money by writing.

5. The new love of my life may very well be cooking, especially for other people. When my right-hand man and I get a weekend together, we try to have at least one cooking adventure. We’ve made some delicious things together, which motivates me to keep trying new things when we’re apart. Some of our proudest achievements include a whole roast chicken, a hummus pizza, and chicken tikka masala.

6. I’ve gotten to the point in life where I have to do math to remember my age. And that number still confuses me some days.

7. I will never ever ever ever ever ever ever be a morning person. Ever. I have tried for months to make this happen, but all it’s doing is turning me into a no-time-of-day person. Early to bed and early to rise may be making me healthy, but it sure isn’t making me wealthy or wise. Just cranky.

8. Discipline is good for me, and I’m not as bad at it as I previously thought. I’ve been to the gym nearly every weekday morning for over three months. I went to a volunteer training session at the local community college. I went to an eight-week class at my church. I’ve written this blog every single week. I’ve cleaned my room and bathroom, washed my sheets and towels, vacuumed my carpet and car more than once since moving in.

9. I’m certainly not where I thought I’d be, and I still have no idea where I’m going. Here’s to hoping the next six months bring more surprises and greater adventures.

Posole

2011-11-14T17:57:00.000-07:00

For the first time ever, I'm responsible for feeding myself on a daily basis. I find therapy in preparing a meal, and victory when the first bite reveals itself to be exactly what I wanted it to be. It's like in Julie & Julia, when Julie is making a chocolate pie and says, "I love that after a day when nothing is sure-- and when I say 'nothing' I mean nothing-- you can come home and absolutely know that if you add egg yolks to chocolate, and sugar to milk, it will get thick. It's such a comfort."

And in the fall, few things are more comforting than soup. One of our family's signature dishes is a Mexican stew called posole. After I left for college, cold weather always brought a hankering for Dad's posole, and I always requested it on visits home. I always assumed it was a complicated recipe, because we're the only family I've ever met who a) knows what it is b) eats it.

But this last weekend my right-hand man was coming to visit, and I wanted to cook to impress, so I asked my dad for his recipe. He said he'd never used a recipe, so he made a batch and wrote everything down for me. Turns out, it's pretty much a foolproof meal. And now, I'm going to share it with you. Make this the next time you feel like you'll never be warm again. It'll warm you up, fill you up, and clear your sinuses out. All measurements are estimates, so tailor them to your needs and wants.

The Cast of Characters

-Boneless pork chops (I bought 1.3 pounds)

-2-3 cups of vegetable stock or chicken broth

-2 16 oz. cans of red chili or enchilada sauce

-1 big can of white hominy (mine was some weird size like 29 oz)

-One large onion

-Spices: cumin, oregano, salt

-Minced garlic (not pictured)

Step one: chop the onion.

Fun fact: I only cry while chopping onions when I'm not wearing contacts. I like to think they act as little plastic shields.

Step two: cut pork into bite-sized pieces.

Raw meat always makes me feel weird. I could never be a cannibal.

Step three: drizzle some oil into a large soup pot. Cook onions with a heaping tablespoon of minced garlic. Giggle with satisfaction when your creation starts smelling magical.

Step four: add pork chop chunks (say that five times) and cook thoroughly.

Step five: pour in can of hominy, with juices.

If I had a British twin sister, her name would be Hominy.

Step six: pour in enough broth to cover the contents of the pot by about half an inch.

It should be this color.

Step seven: add spices to taste. I used a full teaspoon of cumin and about a teaspoon

and a half of oregano.

Look closely and you can see my awesome apron.

DON'T DO THIS. Leaving the lid on prevents extra water from evaporating. You want it not-too-runny and not-too-thick. If the latter happens, add boiling water a cup at a time.

Do this.

Step eight: bring to a boil and then immediately turn it down to a simmer. It can simmer while you finish make guac or shredding cheese or pulling some rolls out of the oven, but don't let it go much longer than 45 minutes, or the hominy will fall apart. I can't imagine hominy crumbles to be that appetizing.

Serve it up. I'd guess my pot could have served 4-6 people. That hunk in my bowl is part of a roll. I like sopping my soup. Sue me.

Typically, I also like grated cheese in mine. It gets all melty and stringy and happy.

I also made these Buttery Cloverleaf Rolls from How Sweet Eats, my favorite food blog. Mine weren't as pretty, but they were just as delicious.

Leftovers keep really well. I know because I just had some for dinner, and tomorrow I'll have some for lunch. And my heart and my lips will tingle with joy once more.

Fright Night.

2011-11-04T13:48:00.003-06:00

Short of sitting upright, I awoke in the middle of the night in the same fashion as every movie character victimized by a nightmare has woken up. I gasped for breath, eyes wide, trying to find comfort in the reality of my room. My ears strained to confirm the silence around me. But wait—there was a sound. It sounded like slow, sneaking footsteps on gravel—the gravel that surrounded our window wells out back. While we had neighbors, our house was remote compared to the tight security of a suburb. We were about to brutally robbed, tortured, and murdered, and no one would know for days. Then I remembered that Mom and Meagan were out of town, and tears sprang to my eyes as I imagined them coming home from their trip and being welcomed by the grisly scene. I had no choice but to wake up Dad. I knew he had a gun—I just prayed he could get to it and load it in time.

I counted to three and leapt from my bed, tiptoeing as quickly as I could without making a lot of noise. My parents’ bedroom was on the other side of the house, meaning I’d have to cross in front of the windows where the thieves were operating. I braced myself, waiting for a gunshot or the sound of broken glass, but I still only heard the crunch crunch crrrruuuuuncccchhhhh of the gravel under their feet. I made it into the bedroom and loudly whispered Dad! while shaking his shoulders. When disturbed, my dad always wakes with a start. “What? What?! What is it?” he said.

I burst into tears. “I think there’s someone outside and I heard people walking on gravel and I’m so scared and what are we going to do and will you go check and can you take your gun?”

“What?” he said, cocking his head in confusion. In this interest of full disclosure, this was not the first time my middle-of-the-night frights had interrupted my parents’ slumber. I took a deep breath and described the noise I had heard outside of the window. He got out of bed and followed me to the back doors. Sure enough, crunch crunch crrrruuuuuuuncccccchhhhh. But after a minute, the sound seemed to move, and we followed it to our left, pausing every two feet or so to reevaluate. After a few steps, the crunching was louder than ever. Surely only the wall was separating us from our inevitable attackers.

After one more step, Dad bumped into Shania's crate. She looked up at us with those sweet brown eyes, and we realized that the crunching sound seemed to be coming from a spot much lower than we had originally thought. I squatted in front of Shania, and I heard it again. Crunch crunch crrrrrruuuuuunnnnnnchhhhh. It wasn’t coming from outside. It wasn’t coming from the soles of serial killers’ combat boots. It was coming from inside my dog.

“Is that her stomach growling?” Dad asked.

I continued to stare at my dog and tried to make sense of these new clues.

Crunch crrrrruuuuunnnnnchhhh.

“Um, yeah,” I said. “I guess so.”

Dad sighed. “Did you remember to feed her today?”

My face flushed as the final pieces of the puzzle snapped into place. “No,” I said, shaking my head. “I forgot.”

“Well, give her some food and go back to bed,” he said as he walked back to his room.

I was fourteen years old.

[As a way to thank my indefatigable readers, I'm going to start doing giveaways every now and then.]

YOU COULD WIN a $10 Amazon gift card! Just post a comment that answers this question:

What are you afraid of?

One (1) winner will be chosen at random on Tuesday at 8pm. One entry per person. Make sure your comment identifies you in some way-- email address, website, name, SSN... I'll contact you and we'll figure out the best way to get you your prize! --M
edit: Caitlin W. is the lucky winner! Not so lucky for the whole kidney stone thing, but lucky nonetheless.

On Courage.

2011-10-28T21:58:00.001-06:00

I sat on the wrought iron bench at the corner of Westport Road and Broadway, and I opened my book to read. I hadn’t made it through the first paragraph of the new chapter before I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a man approaching me. I glanced up and gave him the closed-mouthed smile reserved only for strangers whose eye contact you can’t avoid.

He was of Middle Eastern descent, I would guess, and squat, with his black hair combed straight back. He was dressed all in black, not in the goth way, but in the trying-and-failing-to-be-mysterious kind of way. He sported transition lenses, but the cloudy sky couldn’t convince them to transition one way or the other. And it’s worth mentioning that he was at least 30 years old.

He stopped in front of me. “Do you like poetry?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, hoping the open book on my lap communicated that he was currently interrupting my literary pursuit.

“Would you like to hear a poem?”

“Okay.”

He began reciting in the style of slam poetry; it ended with “Touch. This. Word. [pause] Freedom.” He was now sitting on the bench next to mine, and he reclined, taking a sip from his coffee and looking pleased with himself.

“Did you write that?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “What’d you think? Am I right to be cocky about that one?”

It wasn’t a good poem, and I don’t particularly care for slam poetry, but I didn’t say so.

“I’m Josh,” he said, proffering his hand.

I shook it. “Melody.”

“Melody,” he repeated. “That’s a pretty name.”

“I didn’t pick it out,” I told him.

He asked what I did, and I told him and returned the question. “I’m a web developer,” he told me. “I’m also a DJ. But I haven’t DJ’d in, like, two months, so I think I’m really trying to fill that creative void.” I nodded sympathetically and he began rooting around in the inside pocket of his coat. “Here,” he said, handing me a CD labeled AMAZE in Sharpie. “This is my demo. You can have it.” I thanked him, slipped it in my bag, and started to wonder where the cameras were hidden.

“So do you have big Halloween plans?” he asked.

“No. It’s been a long couple of weeks,” I said. “I’m looking forward to a quiet weekend.”

There was a pause, and I could see the wheels behind his indecisive transition lenses start turning.

“I’m going to a poetry reading on Sunday,” he said.

“Oh.”

“Do you like poetry readings?”

“I’ve never been to one,” I replied. Where was all this inconvenient honesty coming from?

Another contemplative pause. Then he gestured with his coffee cup and asked, “Would you be willing to take a chance on a random stranger?”

“I have a boyfriend,” I said, in a tone I hoped was confident and unapologetic. I mentally noted that this was the first time in my life I could use that sentence to say “no” and I wouldn’t be lying.

“You have a boyfriend?” he said, and I nodded. “Of course you do,” he said, sighing dejectedly. “That’s probably why I sat down to talk to you in the first place.”

“Thanks for the poem, though,” I said. He smiled sadly and bid me good day.

Oh, no, I haven’t listened to the CD yet.

[edit: I've listened to all of 1:12 of the 59:23 of the CD. Even that was a stretch.]

The Frosty 500

2011-10-21T08:51:00.003-06:00

In high school, my friends and I coined the term panicky-hot, which can most accurately be defined by the sensation one feels in those moments between entering a car that has been baking in the summer sun and rolling down the windows. A secondary definition is the sensation one feels when one is wearing a hoodie that’s a little too snug, and one realizes one’s body temperature is rising rapidly, and one frantically tries to remove the garment causing the aforementioned temperature rise, and one gets an elbow stuck in the armpit and one’s head in the neck of the hood, thereby delaying the removal of the garment and relief from the uncomfortable rise in bodily temperature.

You may notice that a salient feature of both definitions is the anticipation of imminent relief from the uncomfortable temperature. The panic arises from not being able to attain that relief fast enough.

I’ve never used the term panicky-cold because for me, there is no anticipation of relief. When I get cold, I experience a long-term form of panic, more commonly known as despair, and it lasts from about this time of year until, oh, the middle of March. This week was mostly cloudy, with temperatures in the 50s, and until Thursday afternoon, our office didn’t have heat. The thermostat read 57 degrees. On Wednesday I layered a tank top, a t-shirt, a wool sweater, and a hoodie, but I was still huddled into a ball in the chair at my desk, trying to keep my body heat centralized. What if the heat never gets fixed? I found myself thinking. It’s only going to get worse from here and I can’t work under these conditions and I’ll have to quit but what if I can’t find another job and then I won’t be able to pay my rent and Jessica will evict me and I’ll have to spend the whole winter under a bridge or move back to Colorado and either way I’ll never ever ever be warm ever again.

To cope, I started thinking about other times in my life that I’ve been so desperately cold, like every lacrosse game I ever played, the time in Oxford in January when our flat’s heat was out for two days, and every minute I spent touring Edinburgh.

And then there was the time over Christmas break in middle school that my mom asked me to check the mail after a significant ice storm. Our yard in Tennessee had a drainage ditch along the street, and the mailbox was on the other side of it. Happy to serve my mother in this small way, I immediately went outside wearing only pajama pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and tennis shoes without socks. I walked down into the ditch… and I couldn’t walk out the other side. The ice and snow allowed me no traction, and my hands went completely numb after the first twenty seconds of trying to climb out on all fours. I was stuck. And no one in my family noticed for twenty minutes. Entering the throes of hypothermia, I tried every way I could think of to get out of the icy valley, but to no avail. Tears froze on my cheeks as I awaited my end. Snippets of To Build a Fire and stanzas of The Cremation of Sam McGee bounced around in my head. Just as I was preparing to succumb to the Grim Reaper’s frigid grip, my father appeared and pulled me out of the abyss.

Back in the house, I received warm blankets, hot chocolate, and tepid apologies. No one got the mail.

I was running.

2011-10-16T20:46:00.000-06:00

There are a lot of things I don’t like about running. But the thing I do like about running is that it’s a Choose Your Own Adventure story. You can run around the block, jog a few miles, sprint a hundred yards. You can train for a race or log miles in the name of maintaining fitness.

My adventure with running started about a year and a half ago, and I wrote briefly about it here. I started training for a 5K while also rowing 3-4 times a week, and I got into shape fast. In the summer of 2010 I ran a four-mile race and two 5Ks was content with my times.

Then school started, and I was faced with the choice of running or sleeping. The latter won out. The spring of my senior year was tough, and I was relying on calories for both comfort and energy. Coming down with mono in the last weeks of school meant that my first month after graduation was spent sleeping, eating, watching Say Yes to the Dress marathons, and crying when these three things exhausted me. Starting an office job zapped any tenacious remnants of fitness that had been doggedly clinging to my body.

One night I poured out my frustration to Clark, saying I wanted to be at a fitness level that would allow us to be active and adventurous together. At his suggestion, we signed up for events at the Kansas City marathon—the half for him and the 5K for me. Knowing I had the potential of disappointing someone else by not following through with training got my butt out of bed and my feet on the pavement nine times out of ten. Around the same time, my coworker got me a deal on a membership at the gym around the corner from our office. Since the beginning of August, I’ve been at the gym almost every single weekday before 7am. I’m seeing results with my appearance, but the real test came yesterday.

Race Day.

Even though I’d been running three miles for a couple weeks and even though I’d participated in races before, I was a bundle of nerves. “I just don’t want to disappoint myself,” I texted my mom. Because unless you’re a professional or intentionally competitive runner, once you cross the starting line it’s just you and your timing chip.

Once I started the race, my head cleared.With my special playlist blasting, I tried to focus on the run itself—not the thousands of people around me or the clock ticking at the finish line. I tried to push the pace, because I didn’t want to cross the line and feel like I’d held back. Earlier in the week I’d run three miles in thirty minutes, and I was convinced that the adrenaline, massive downhill, and flat finish would culminate in a time of thirty minutes or less.

But then the official results came in, clocking me at five minutes slower than I was hoping. Maybe I should have warmed up more. Maybe I shouldn’t have eaten pizza for lunch on Friday. Maybe I should have gone for a run on Thursday rather than treat it as a rest day. Or maybe I should have gone to the gym less and hit the road more.

The best and worst part of being mad at myself is that I’m the only one who can fix it. I can quit trying and void the possibility of disappointment altogether, or I use my current disappointment to fuel the next challenge. And that’s what I like about running.

Stay tuned...

2011-10-14T16:29:00.000-06:00

This week's post will be up tomorrow, because things are happening tomorrow that I'm going to write about.

And that's all you get to know for now.

To tide yourself over, why don't you click on the dates over there on the right and read some oldies but goodies?

Awkward is as awkward does.

2011-10-07T13:04:00.001-06:00

Some people are born awkward, some become awkward, and others have awkwardness thrust upon them.

I like to think that I fall in that third category. There are few things in my life that I relish more than the elaborate re-telling of an awkward situation in which I was involved. But since the number of people with whom I interact on a daily basis has decreased dramatically since May, I've been rifling through the Awkward Files in my memory, trying to pinpoint the moment in time that I was the most uncomfortable.
This week, it’s a long one, but well worth it, so be sure to click on the “Read More” link to continue on this awkward journey with me.

We're jumping in the Time Machine and racing back to the year 2008.

It's July in Kauai, Hawaii. When my dad hit the five-year mark at church, the elders and congregation were loving enough to not only grant him a lengthy sabbatical, but also to raise money to fund it. Through their efforts and some others' connections, we found ourselves on the beautiful island for a full month. You would think such a lush set-up would be immune to the vexations brought on by other people's social ineptitude. Wrong.

We had attended the same church for the Sundays we'd been in Kauai, and toward the end of the trip I noticed a blurb in the bulletin that the college group would be having a movie night the next Tuesday. A night off from playing card games with the fam sounded nice, so I decided to go. It wasn't until I walked in the doors to the church that night that I realized I wouldn't know anyone there. I froze, frantically scanning the room, silently pleading someone would make eye contact with me and be nice to me. That person was a boy named Colin. He invited me to sit next to him and his friends.

Now, most conversations are like a game of catch. One person throws a ball (asks a question), and the other person catches (answers) it, and throws it back (asks another question). Not so with Colin and his cronies. I spent the fifteen minutes before the movie started trying to come up with every small-talk question ever uttered in an elevator, public restroom, or Starbucks.

Once the movie was over, I attempted to slip out, but Colin stopped me. He asked for my phone number, saying the college group was always getting together to do fun activities, and he could let me know the next time they had something planned. Smooth, right?

Two days later, he texted me. "Going to the beach. Want to come?"
Cool! I thought. College outing to the beach! I texted back and said that I'd love to, but that I'd need a ride, since my dad had taken our rental car to go exploring that morning.
"We'll be there in 20," he replied.
Over an hour later, he knocked on our door. Another guy was with him, who Colin introduced as Jeff. As I walked out of the house, I expected to see a large church van, packed to the gills with people my age. Instead, I saw a small car plastered with the Progressive Auto Insurance logo. "I brought the chick magnet," Colin chuckled.

Once in the car, I realized that we were the group going to the beach. Me, Colin, and Jeff. Colin asked what year I was in at school, and I told him I was going to be a sophomore. "So, you're, like, twenty?" he asked.
"I just turned nineteen," I said. "Last month."
"Oh."
I paused, not sure I wanted to know the answer to the question that was about to tumble out of my mouth. "How, um, how old are you guys?"
"I'm twenty-four," Jeff muttered.
"I'm twenty-six," Colin added.
Then we were turning into a parking lot, and Jeff got out of the car without saying anything. I got in the front seat and asked where he was going. Colin said, "He wants to get his boogie board. He'll meet us there. Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if he didn't show up after all."

Yes. Colin, the twenty-six-year-old college group leader was taking me to the beach by myself.

On the beach, I once again was scrambling for topics of conversation. Colin settled comfortably on discussing the finer points of Rastafarianism, a belief system to which he sometimes subscribed to-- mostly while high.
While bobbing in the ocean, we somehow started talking about children in Africa, and I mentioned that a friend of my mom's was currently investigating an orphanage in a west African country. "The director of the orphanage disappears with some of the kids for days at a time, and no one knows where he's taking them."
"Ha," he snorted. "That's awesome."
"No," I said, amazed that he could misinterpret such a horrendous story. "They think he's, you know, selling the children to powerful men."
"Oh," he said, not laughing any more.
Once again on the beach, I subtly checked my cell phone, hoping my mom had called or texted, needing me home immediately. She hadn't, and I noticed my agony had been going on for about two hours.
"Do you want to swim to that island?" Colin said, pointing to a little clump of sand about fifty yards off the beach.
"I'm not a very strong swimmer," I said, but he was already up and walking toward the water. Reluctantly, I followed.

The little sand clump had been formed by two separate tides that met at that point. Getting there meant swimming in about two feet of water while being sloshed by waves on both sides. I thought I'd just wade there, but the opposing waves tackled me in about ten seconds. So I doggy-paddled to the little sand clump, lamenting the fact that I was going to die such a stupid death at such a young age. When, at last, I reached the sand and stood, my legs were stinging. I looked down and felt a bit light-headed at the sight of bright red rivulets of blood streaming down both my legs. In my spastic swimming attempt, I'd slashed my knees and shins on the coral on the ocean floor.

Colin didn't notice, though, and asked me if I liked seafood. I replied in the affirmative, and he said, "There's this great sushi place I want to take you to."There was only one place I wanted to be taken to, and that was to my home, where a big box of bandaids awaited me.
"Whoa," he said, suddenly pointing at my legs. "You're bleeding."
I pretended I hadn't noticed. "What? Oh, yeah. Look at that."
"Don't get eaten by a shark!" he yelled as he raced back into the water and started swimming back to shore. I sighed, this time lamenting the fact that my stupid death was now probably going to get national attention.

Back on shore, Colin asked if I was ready to go. I said yes, and that my mom had texted me, needing me home. (She hadn't.) He patted the pockets of his swim trunks, and then looked befuddled. "What did I do with my keys?" he asked.
I shrugged. We walked to his car, thinking maybe he'd left them in there. He hadn't. And the car was locked.
We retraced our steps back to the beach, and he burst into laughter. "They were in my waistband! They totally fell out in the ocean!"
I failed to see the humor of the situation. "Does anyone have a spare?"
"My parents might," he said. "But my cell phone is locked in the car, and I don't know their numbers."
And then he was off, speed-walking through the parking lot toward a family of tourists getting into a mini-van. "Hey!" he said, getting their attention. "I lost my keys in the ocean. Can you give us a ride home?"

Completely taken aback, and probably just as creeped out by the situation as I was, they agreed, and the next thing I knew, I was standing in Colin's garage. "Do you like my motorcycle?" he said, pointing to a Harley.
"A motorcycle hit my dog when I was in fifth grade. Now she only had three legs," I said by way of an answer.
He frowned, and then opened the passenger door of the Mustang that was sitting next to the Harley. "Here, I'll take you home," he said.
I can do this, I thought. If I can force three hours of awkward conversation, I can last another fifteen minutes.
But as he drove, Colin took it to a new level and started telling me about the problems he had with his ex-girlfriend. After a few minutes of venting, he sighed and said, "I don't know. Have you ever been in a relationship?"
"No," I said. "I've never had a boyfriend."
"Yeah," he replied, nodding enthusiastically. "I could kind of tell."
"Excuse me?" I said, with what I hoped was a steely look.
"Look at you!" he said, laughed. "You're a frickin' Amazon! What are you, five-nine?"
"Five-ten," I muttered, turning my glare out the side window.
He continued his monologue on failed relationships for a few more minutes. Finally, we were pulling into my cluster of condos, and he said contemplatively, "Why do you think it is that you have this special kind of social awkwardness? I mean, you look like you'd be a popular girl."
Through gritted teeth I replied, "I don't know," and then we were in the parking lot.
"Thanks," I said as I got out of the car. He said he'd be sure to text me later to let me know what the gang would be up to that weekend.Great.

In the house, the rest of my family was in the midst of uproarious laughter.
"I saw you!" my dad exclaimed.
"What?" I said, the blood draining out of my face (and out of the wounds on my legs).
"I saw you on the beach! You didn't see me, but you and that guy walked right past me! I felt like I was dead and I was watching your life from beyond the grave.”
“Dad!” I shrieked. “What didn’t you say anything?”

Throwing his hands up, he replied, "I didn't want it to be awkward!"

So far.

2011-09-30T23:43:00.002-06:00

It wasn’t your standard boy-meets-girl rom-com. It was more like this:

Girl decides to attend small liberal arts college in the Midwest. Boy decides to attend the same small liberal arts college. Said small liberal arts college randomly places Girl and Boy in the same orientation group for the first weekend. The first evening, Girl writes in her journal, “Boy is pretty cute, but probably thinks I’m weird.” Boy and Girl develop a friendly acquaintanceship based on their classmates’ absurdities. Girl thinks Boy is a run-of-the-mill frat boy. Boy thinks Girl is nice, but otherwise has no opinion.

In the winter of their sophomore year, they go on Outward Bound. Boy is in the same group as Girl’s mentor, and afterwards, Girl’s mentor mentions to Girl that Boy is really cool. Girl is surprised to hear such an evaluation and starts to wonder if she’s misjudged Boy. That spring semester, they have almost every class together. They sit next to each other, passing hilarious notes at inappropriate moments. They talk about deeper issues. They discover an uncanny amount in common. Sometime around Spring Break, Girl realizes that not only has Boy unexpectedly become one of her best friends, but she really likes him. The mental checklist of standards she’s always held is slowly being met, box by picky box. He reads books-- big ones, and fast. He makes her laugh, catching her off-guard with his wit. He’s undeniably good-looking. They have the same faith and the same taste in music. He is indefatigably kind. He’s taller than her. He likes manly things-- knives and fishing and dressing well.

Then Girl goes overseas for junior year, and Boy goes to Officer Candidate School the following summer. They don’t see each other for eleven months. They talk frequently, and so their reunion the next fall is surreal-- they’ve both had some of the most significant experiences of their young lives, but it feels as though no time has passed. A few days later, they finally discuss the possibility of an Us. Boy says maybe. Girl assures him of her friendship, regardless. A couple months later, Boy says no. That he doesn’t think they’ll ever be more than they are now. Out of his sight, Girl cries. But she reminds him of her promised friendship, and they continue on. During the next semester, Girl’s head moves on, but her heart still regrets a lost chance. She has trouble believing that she’ll meet anyone like him ever again-- someone who also checks all the boxes-- but she tries to trust that God has it under control.

Toward the end of March, Boy and Girl are studying late. Boy gives Girl a ride back to the dorm, parks, and asks if he can talk to her about something. Girl freezes, convinced she’s about to be friend-dumped. Instead, Boy starts telling her about his trouble sleeping, that he can’t stop thinking about their relationship, that something has changed, that they’ll always kick themselves if they don’t give it a chance. Stunned, Girl asks, “So, what do you want to do?” Boy replies matter-of-factly, “Well, I think we need to go on a date.” And as a slushy, late spring snow falls from the sky and piles up on Boy’s windshield, Boy slowly leans over the center console and gently kisses Girl. All she can think is HE’Skissingmehe’sKISSINGmehe’skissingME.

Their first date feels the same as every other time they’ve hung out, except completely different because he kisses her again and she gets to intertwine her fingers with his.

A week later, they realize that the terms “Boyfriend” and “Girlfriend” now apply. They change their statuses on Facebook, and fifty people click the “like” button. After graduation and a long month apart, Girl moves back to her college city, three hours from Boy. They see each other as often as they can, and never seem to get bored of each other. They realize This Is A Big Deal.

Sunday will mark six months together. Girl knows it’s love because she finds herself wanting to employ all the cliches normally applied to these situations. Boy makes her want to be a better woman. She believes in his dreams, and she feels safe in his arms. Together is default; the rest of the time is spent in countdown. Girl still has moments of shock, of astonishment that this boy loves her back. And for that, she loves him all the more.

The Scoop

2011-09-23T09:10:00.001-06:00

I deal with a lot of crap in my job.

And I mean that literally.

There are three different dogs that hang out in our office on any given day. They have drastically different personalities, but they share one thing in common: All three of them have had accidents of the second variety.

The first time it happened was about a month after I started. Bella the bulldog was wandering around, and as I sat at my desk I thought I caught a whiff of something earthy. No, not earthy. Stinky. I dismissed it, chalking it up to a stuffy nose and the smell of the dog herself. A few minutes later I walked into the conference room to make a cup of coffee and missed a scattering of fresh turds by mere millimeters. I muttered a description of the scene before me under my breath, and then turned to go tattle on the crapping canine.

As I began my report to my boss, I realized halfway through that this could backfire. I could very well be on the verge of a Devil-Wears-Prada type scenario. Would my degree from the Harvard of the Midwest now qualify me to clean up bowel movements? I breathed a sigh of relief when my boss gasped and hurried to the conference room to survey and rectify the situation herself.

On Wednesday, Frodo was at the office. He’s a sweet little ball of yellow fur, but he doesn’t have a whole lot going for him between his fuzzy ears. While I worked at my desk he stood behind me and stared at me for a bit. He eventually trotted off, but a few minutes later another attorney jumped when he attempted to cross in front of my desk. He also muttered a description of the scene before him under his breath, and then notified Frodo’s owner of said scene. She shrieked in horror and began berating Frodo, who only looked at her and wagged his tail. “Bad boy!” she cried. “You know better than that! We do NOT poop inside!”

On Thursday, Neko visited. He’s my favorite—a sleek, docile Weimaraner with doe-eyes the color of celery. When his owner left for court, I put his bed and water bowl by my desk, but he refused to lay still. I could hear him pacing the hallway, and I kept calling his name and squeaking his toy goose to entice him back to me. Finally, I stood up to see where he was hiding. And that’s when I saw it.

Them, actually. Three glistening, cylindrical, olive-colored turds. Had they been attached, they would have measured roughly eight inches long. They formed a loose triangle on the carpet, mocking me, daring me to leave them for the next unsuspecting visitor to trod upon.

The sound of nails clicking against hardwood brought me back to reality, and I realized Neko was downstairs by the entryway. Never having had a public accident, he was recognizably ashamed of his delinquent defecation. I made my way down the stairs and stopped short. Sure enough, another gleaming pile was on the doormat. Neko walked toward me with his head bowed. Clearly, he hadn’t been able to hold it or to communicate nature’s call, so he got as close as he could to the great outdoors. Of the three dogs, he’s the only one to show remorse.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, I stuck my hand in a plastic garbage bag, gently clasped my hand around each still-steaming unit of chartreuse excrement, and disposed of the mess in an outside garbage can.

Concerts.

2011-09-17T13:47:00.007-06:00

I’ve known this week’s topic since last Friday, when I was being jostled by drunks at the Bon Iver concert. Even though I got in a bit of a tiff with said drunks, and even though I stood for six hours straight, and even though all I’d had to eat since lunch was a palmful of almonds, I walked out of the Uptown thinking, That was a good concert.

What makes a good concert? Surely, if you like the artist, you’ll like the concert. In the past twelve months, I’ve gone to ten shows, and I can assure you that my level of enjoyment was pretty varied.
For example:

Sufjan Stevens: October 17, 2010 at the Uptown Theater in Kansas City, Missouri.

The concert was comprised of mostly Sufjan’s new, experimental album—complete with backup dancers wearing tinsel on their heads. I spent most of the show with my head cocked to one side, baffled by what was occurring on the stage before me. One song was twenty-five minutes long. I was being played at, not to. And it was evident that Sufjan was miserable. “Music left me,” he told us.

Josh Ritter: February 18, 2011 at Liberty Hall in Lawrence, Kansas.

Josh is one of the greatest story-telling musicians currently recording. His show still is the best I’ve ever been to. He played the full range of his discography, as well as some as-yet-unrecorded tunes, like the side-splitting “Sir Galahad”. He also sang “Thin Blue Flame” unplugged to a dark and silent room, soliloquized on winter ending and skirt season approaching, and led the crowd in a slow dance to “Kathleen”. His ever-present grin made it clear that he was having just as much fun as we were—if not more. “I’m singing for the love of it,” he sings. “Have mercy on the man who sings to be adored.”

What made these two concerts—both put on by men I really like, and at similar venues—so vastly different? I had this discussion with my right-hand man Clark, who’s been to six of the aforementioned ten shows with me, and my friend Beej who writes music reviews for The Modern Culture Blog. Beej said, “If a concert sounds too much like the album, it’s nothing special seeing them live—but if the experience is enhanced via seeing them perform the music, then the concert is successful.” This was my problem with Sufjan. The only difference was watching him lose his mind, rather than just listening to the aftermath. Compare this to Bon Iver: while they played both old and new music, Vernon changed the way he performed some of the songs. He was able to showcase their musicianship and creativity while still preserving the integrity of the melodies and the familiarity of their distinct sound.

But even more important than the set list is the musician’s attitude. “You can tell when a band or a musician thinks they're doing you a favor by performing,” Clark told me during our conversation. Bon Iver was a confident but unpretentious performance, and this was Josh Ritter’s strongest quality. He was earnestly grateful—sincerely thanking us for coming, rather than using “thank you” as a cue for us to clap. As the review in the Kansas City star said, Josh “arouses a tide of energy and exuberance that sweeps the room. Resistance is difficult, if not futile. It’s like trying not to get wet while white-water rafting.”
To be carried away by the current and completely drenched, rather than standing ankle-deep in the kiddie pool—that’s how you know it was a good show.

Ten Years Later

2011-09-09T08:18:00.003-06:00

I was in seventh grade, and it was a pretty Tuesday morning at Freedom Middle School in Franklin, Tennessee. During second period choir, we sang a sweet little song with the words dona nobis pacem. When we finished, our teacher asked, “Does anyone know what this song is about?” Someone ventured, “Peace?”
“That’s right,” Ms. Fuller said. “It’s an important song to sing, especially today.” She looked at us meaningfully and was met with blank stares.
“Why today?” I asked, voicing the class’s confusion.
Ms. Fuller looked briefly surprised, realizing she was the one who would have to break the news to us. “Oh, well, a plane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York this morning.” More blank stares. Not many of us knew what that was.
“Was it an accident?” I asked.
She paused for a second and then replied, “They don’t know.”

Then class was over, and I went to the library for my next class. The TV was on. I saw footage of firefighters walking around in smoke and rubble, but the magnitude of thing was still lost on me.

By lunch word was out that it was probably terrorism, and, still not grasping the severity of the situation, I made the joke, “Yeah, I heard that the terrorists hate country music and are going to bomb Nashville next.” A girl further down the table heard the joke repeated and dissolved into tears, thinking it was the truth.

When Mom picked me up from school, I could tell she had been crying. She had that same strained look as all the teachers at school, the manifestation of trying to process her own emotions while combating the desire to protect her children from such horrific evil.

That night, we attended a prayer service at church. Thousands of people were there, and it was standing room only. We watched the newscast of President Bush giving his speech, and I remember thinking, “This is my Pearl Harbor. This is my JFK. My kids will ask me where I was today.”

After the speech there was a long silence, and then an old man in the back of the sanctuary began singing in a booming baritone, “God bless America, land that I love!” People hesitated, unsure if this was going to take off, but slowly the voices began multiplying and rolling towards the front of the room in a powerful wave of patriotism. For the first time, I felt a surge of American pride in my own heart, but I don’t remember feeling the weight of the injustice, or any initiative to take ownership in my American-ness.

If we’re callously honest, most of us were not affected by the events of September 11th, 2001. Geoff Nunberg notes that, ten years later, even our language harbors almost no vestiges of the day. As a nation, we quickly got over our fervor and resumed apathy, rendering it just another Tuesday. Initially I thought I’d write about 9/11 out of a sense of sentimental obligation, but the more I read and remembered, the sadder I got. I asked my family to e-mail me their personal accounts of that day, and reading them made a hot lump rise in my throat. For most of us, nothing has changed, but for thousands upon thousands of our people, life as they knew it was obliterated.

And so, because of them, and because of the thousands of servicemen and women who have willingly sacrificed their lives in two wars on our behalf, it is vital that we, at the very least, remember. This week, post your account in the comments. After the jump I’ve included the reports from my mom, dad, sister, and grandparents.

Finally, I encourage you to check out the National Day of Service and Remembrance to see how you can get involved.

_________________

Susan Rowell: I got up early that morning. Your dad was out of town speaking at the Week of Spiritual Formation at Taylor University so I decided to get busy on painting the dining room. After you and Meagan left for school, I needed to get in a work-out, but checked my email first. The Yahoo headline said something about a plane that crashed into the World Trade Center. I turned on the TV - which I NEVER did in the morning - to get more info. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The station was replaying the first and then the second plane crashing into the buildings. I felt panicky. Do I go get you and Meagan from school so that somehow I could insure your safety? I tried to call Ed to see if he was watching, but he was not in his hotel room. Then I called my mom and asked if she was watching the TV and she was. Her voice was strained. I continued to watch and hated being home alone.

The news then switched to something going on in DC, but no one was commenting because no one knew what had happened. It was a picture of smoke billowing from some building and it took several minutes before someone reported that the Pentagon had been hit. Later, the news came about the plane in Pennsylvania. A nightmare was unfolding in front of me.

While the cameras filmed the twin towers burning, one newsman mentioned debris falling from the buildings. However, it looked like bodies falling. I found out later I was right. I remember watching the first tower collapsing and I started screaming and crying. Peter Jennings (ABC news anchor) couldn't figure out what he was seeing and said something like maybe a bomb went off. I was yelling at the TV telling him he was an idiot because it was obvious that the building was collapsing! When the second building collapsed, I continued to cry because I knew there were people still in those buildings and I was in a way, watching them all die.

Needless to say, I didn't work out that day and I don't think I showered. I couldn't get away from the TV. I worried about you and Meagan and Ed. I worried about the future of our country. I had difficulty praying; I didn't know what to say.

Your dad finally called later that day. Someone from Taylor called him and woke him up to let him know what was going on. Taylor students gathered in the Chapel - standing room only - and your dad changed his talk for that day and spoke to them about what happened. I think they had an all day prayer session. Since all planes were grounded, your dad wanted to find a way to get home quickly. He found one rental car available in a town about an hour away. The next day, someone took him to the rental agency and he drove all the way home, straight through.

You and Meagan came home and had heard what happened. I was afraid to keep the TV on because I didn't want you guys to be scared. At the same time, I was afraid to turn it off. I kept waiting for I'm not sure what.

The Peoples Church had a service that night. It was standing room only with Michael W. Smith leading worship. I found great comfort in the service and came away remembering that when all hell breaks loose, God is still in control. We watched the telecast of Bush speaking to the nation - one of his finest moments. When he quoted part of Psalm 23 (yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death...) people cheered. After the telecast, someone started singing "God Bless America."

I substituted at Moore the next day for Mrs. Brown and she left me a note that said not to mention what happened the previous day. Umm, not sure how you do that when the kids wanted to talk about it. So we did talk about it and when I told her we did, she was mad. Oh well.

Sunday after Sunday, church was packed out. People were looking for answers. People were scared. It felt like the U.S. was on the brink of a revival. I kept thinking there's no way we can return to our previous lives, things had to be different. But one day, church attendance went back to what it was, TV returned to it's regular crapola stuff, and life resumed.

_________________

Ed Rowell: On Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001, I was in my hotel room working on a talk I was about to give in 90 minutes to 3500 college students. The phone rang.

“Are you watching the TV?” asked the voice on the phone. I had a moment of panic. Was I late? Why was she asking such a crazy question? I was the guest speaker for the week of Spiritual Renewal at Taylor University. The woman on the phone worked for my host, the Dean of the Chapel.

“No, why?”

She started crying. “Just turn it on and see what’s happening. Richard will call you back in a few minutes.”

The set came to life just two or three minutes before the cameras caught the plane crashing into the second tower. Like everyone else who tries to describe that morning, the numb feeling that “this can’t be real” soon gave way to a flood of emotion that words cannot capture. But that only lasted a few minutes.

I’m a pastor. When emergencies come, we’ve learned how to put our own emotions on the back burner so we can to tend to the emotions of others. I knotted my tie, grabbed my Bible and left my room.

Within minutes, I was meeting with the University President and several other senior staff and faculty. Chapel started in half an hour. Obviously my carefully planned series of talks was history. The University president would speak first, followed by Richard Allen Farmer, the beloved Dean of the Chapel.

Good, I thought. I’m off the hook. I have no idea what to say at a time like this.

“Then, we’ll hear from Ed. I’m glad you’re here with us at a time like this.” As the words were coming out of the President’s mouth, I was looking around the circle wondering who he was talking to.

“Me?” I asked

“Absolutely. You’re a pastor. And who among us doesn’t need a pastor on a day like this?”

This week, I’ve gone back through my sermon files, my journal, everywhere, looking for my notes from that dark time. What was my text for that morning? What did I say? I wondered. Or that evening? Or the morning and evening of the next day?

I have no idea. I had no manuscript, carefully footnoted and double saved for later review or re-use. I had some scribbles on a piece of notebook paper, which were not preserved for posterity.

I remember speaking as if I were outside myself, watching, listening. Every eye was locked on my face. I remember every service being packed, kids on the floor because there were no more seats. I remember praying with a girl whose father worked at the Pentagon. Another whose father had flown to New York on business that morning.

I was worried about my family at home without me. I wanted to be with them, but there was no getting home right now. A few phone calls was all I could give them. It wasn’t enough. But here I was, and here was where I would do what I could to be the presence of Christ.

For the rest of that week, all I remember is the intensity of every spoken word, every prayer, every hug. Classes continued and professors were conscripted into pastoral ministry. When the last service was over around midnight on Wednesday, I realized I had to figure out how to get home. The airlines were still closed down. Someone found me a rental car, the last one in a neighboring town. I drove the 8 hours back home to Franklin, TN, too tired to process that week.

Like too many events in my life, I never did get around to processing my own emotions, because when I got back to our home church, it was more of the same. For weeks, I had conversations of deep significance with person after person. I remember helping one man profess faith in Christ.

And then, in about six weeks, what we swore would never happen, happened. We all pretty much went back to “normal”. That season of deep intensity and spiritual yearning was gone. That is the saddest part about the whole thing to me, and I still haven’t fully grieved that loss either.

_________________

Meagan Rowell: On September 11, 2001, I walked into my third grade classroom to find the TV on. This was unusual as we only used the TV for the morning announcements and Bill Nye videos. The footage was of two tall skyscrapers. One of those buildings was on fire. As my classmates and I filed in, the teacher continued to watch the broadcast. We asked what was going on. She told us that an airplane had hit the World Trade Center in some kind of accident. I asked her if they would be able to rebuild the tower, and she assured me that they would. Somehow the fact that people were in the burning tower never occurred to me. She turned off the TV and we started our lesson.

When I got home, mom was crying. I still didn't understand what the World Trade Center was, or how it concerned all of the adults in my life. It took me several weeks to piece together what a 'terrorist attack' was and that people died in the towers. It took me a long time just to find out that both towers had been hit and both collapsed. This week I've been looking at photo archives about 9/11 and the following years. The full force of the attack hit me 10 years later. For the first time, I realized that terrorists attacked the World Trade Centers because they were a symbol of American affluence. For the first time, I saw pictures of people jumping out of the buildings to escape a fiery death. For the first time, I sobbed about that day.

_________________

Marie Moon: I was home cleaning the kitchen when the phone rang. It was Dennis and all he said was, "Do you have your TV on?" Immediately I wanted to know what was going on. He told me briefly that a plane had flown into one of the towers in New York. But, of course, at that time that was about all anybody knew. When I turned on TV, it was hard to realize that it wasn't a movie or some kind of stunt. But it didn't take but a minute to realize that what I was looking at was "for real." And when the 2nd plane flew into the tower right before my eyes, it was almost beyond belief. Cleaning the kitchen was forgotten, and I spent the rest of the day glued to the TV. When the plane hit the Pentagon and when the 4th plane crashed in the field, I began to wonder, "Who did this and Why?" and "What else is going to happen?"

_________________

Bill Moon: I've forgotten most of the details of my reactions when it happened and my impressions on the developing events for the next month or so. Like so many disasters of world changing proportion, one can't get a rational response when so many people are involved; when loss of assets are impossible to calculate; and when it happens to people or things we feel acquainted with as though we had been there and done that. Major disasters tend to make us feel that we had a relationship with the people affected as if they were family.
Someone called us that day (I think it was Dennis) and told us to turn on the TV. I saw one of the towers on fire and black smoke coming out the windows of the tower. At that time there was no information to let us know what had happened. The news media knew that a plane had hit one tower, and firemen carrying hoses and other equipment were converging on the tower by the hundreds. I have been to the top and I wondered how that many firemen could climb that many stairs carrying that much equipment. I had been told that approximately 10,000 people lived or worked in each tower. How could anyone get out without panicking on the stairs with fire and smoke every where. Fortunately, there were much fewer people in the tower than 10,000.

Suddenly the TV announcer said that another plane was headed that way and within seconds it came into view. I watched as the second plane crashed into the second tower. Soon after that, the towers collapsed. I thought how dreadful for people to s urvive the plane crashes only to be killed by the towers' wreckage.

To this day, I really can't get a mental picture because it is too much to comprehend.

Houses and Homes

2011-09-02T20:27:00.000-06:00

About a year ago, my parents started throwing around the idea of selling our house once Meagan left for college. I didn’t really think they’d do it, but otherwise I didn’t have any kind of reaction to this brainstorming. At the beginning of this summer, we got rid of a ton of stuff, hired in a stager to arbitrarily declare that arranging the furniture this way and that would guarantee a buyer, and put the For Sale sign in the front yard. Other than being annoyed at the inconvenience of the whole ordeal, I still didn’t care. But last week, my parents called to tell me that they had received and offer and signed a contract, and I burst into tears. My poor father, on the other end of the line, was stunned at such a dramatic reaction, and I blubbered an explanation: “I won’t have a home!”

“It’s just a house!” he replied. “I would hope that wherever your mom and I are would be your home.”

“It’s not the same!” I wailed. “I’ll never get to come home! I’ll always just be a guest in my parents’ house!”

As embarrassing as it is to admit, I cried myself to sleep that night. The next morning my mom sent me an email detailing all the reasons they had for selling the house, but even thinking about it for more than ten seconds made my lower lip start to quiver.

I still don’t know why I had such a strong reaction to this news, and it makes even less sense when you consider the fact that yesterday, I moved here:

The older sister of a Jewell friend just bought this house in Mission, Kansas, and the three of us have moved in. It’s the next big step in my becoming an adult. I’m paying rent. I picked out all new bedding. I bought my own toilet paper for the first time in my life. I had to kill a spider the size of my head in the shower this morning. Last week I was talking to Abby on the phone, trying to orchestrate some moving-in details, and when I asked if something was okay to bring, she gently said, “Remember, this is your home, too.” Again, I felt my bottom lip start to quiver, and again, I couldn’t figure out why these irrational emotions were bubbling up.

I’ve lived a more transient life than most. Our first move was shortly after my first birthday, from Kansas City to Phoenix. Sixteen months later we moved to a small town in Arizona called Snowflake, where I attended kindergarten. On the last day of school we moved to a suburb of Chicago, where I spent first through third grade. Right after I turned nine we moved to Franklin, Tennessee, and then eleven days before my fourteenth birthday we moved to Monument, Colorado. There my family has stayed, but I’ve been to Jewell, to Oxford, across Europe, and back. I think I’ve clung to our Monument house because for once, it felt permanent. Like I had just been dating other houses and locations and this was my one-true-love house.

Visiting my parents will now always require a suitcase. Their house will be their house, and my house will be my house, but Abby and my dad were right—both will be my home.

Books I Remember Liking.

2011-08-26T23:27:00.004-06:00

This week, I wanted to stay away from the more somber tone the past couple of weeks have taken on. I want to write about something I love. Having recently finished reading The Help and finding myself enamored with it, I thought about writing a review of the novel. But then I started thinking more broadly, and thought about writing a post about multiple books I love. As I starting jotting down titles, it occurred to me that I don’t remember much about the contents of the books—merely the sensation of having once loved them. So with that, I present a brief history of my love affair with books. This list is by no means exclusive, nor am I guaranteeing that you’ll like these books too.

Goodnight Moon, by Margaret Wise Brown: My favorite book as a baby. My mom would lay on the floor with me and hold it over our heads to read. She says my legs would kick with delight and my eyes would grow wide with joy. By the time I could talk I had it memorized.

The Little House on the Prairie Books, by Laura Ingalls Wilder: Laura Ingalls Wilder taught me how to read. My mom and I would spend whole days snuggling in the over-sized recliner, and she’d read to me the autobiographies of Laura and her family. One day, I asked her to use her finger to follow along with the words she was speaking. Words were a code, and I cracked it before entering kindergarten. Visiting the home of Laura and Almanzo in Mansfield, Missouri was like Mecca for me. My parents bought me a bonnet, and I wore it more often than was cool… that is, more than once.

The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis: These books taught me lots of big words in early elementary school, like “centaur” and “vaguely”, which, I quickly learned, was not pronounced “va-joo-lee”. My second biggest regret in life is putting them down in the middle of the The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I got bored when the kid started turning into a dragon.

Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott: I attended fourth grade at Moore Elementary School in Franklin, Tennessee, and it heavily emphasized the Accelerated Reader program. By age 9, I had the reading level of a high school sophomore, and I began checking out the books with the highest number of possible points. Little Women was worth 42. The book moved me so much that I wistfully told my mom, “I wish I had a friend who I could talk to about books.”

Harry Potter books, by J.K. Rowling: I read the first book in fourth grade. I got the last book at midnight, the summer before I went to Jewell. I finished it by 4 pm the next day. I will always love these books.

To Kill A Mockingbird, by Harper Lee: I’d seen the movie a few times, and Boo Radley always scared the weewaddens out of me. I read the book in 7^th grade, and it was the first time I recognized that I was Reading An Important Book. I can practically guarantee that at least one of my children will be named accordingly.

The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald: Someone once told me that Fitzgerald didn’t waste a single word in this whole novel, that not one word was unnecessary or out of place. I think he’s right.

Pride & Prejudice, by Jane Austen: When I was assigned this book for my AP Literature class as a senior, I was expecting a boring period drama with convoluted sentence structure and pages of descriptions of carpets and mantelpieces and four-poster beds. Instead, I found myself lost in a witty social commentary brought alive by keen character descriptions and delightful quick repartee between Elizabeth and the other characters. And, naturally, Mr. Darcy made me swoon.

The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy: Still one of my favorite books from college. It is beautiful, honest, haunting, and not for the faint of heart.

Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare: Here’s the obligatory Shakespeare entry. I’ve read roughly two-thirds of his plays, and this is my favorite—closely followed by Much Ado About Nothing. Julius Caesar, even while still on the page, kept me riveted, and I may have gasped aloud once or twice at certain revelations. I’d terribly like to see it performed.

Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis: Refreshing. Provocative. Made me wonder if 75% of Christians who “love” Lewis have read this.

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett: I had to include this because it revived a love I didn’t know I could feel again. After being completely burned out on literature, thanks to the past four years, I still read a lot this summer. But this is the first book in years that I couldn’t put down, that I found myself aching to get back to. I read almost 300 pages in the first sitting. Read. This. Book. Stockett’s command of dialect and dialogue is astounding. Even more impressive is the fact that she’s developed a controversial, necessary story without being flowery, over-earnest, or demanding.

Honorable Mentions:

These are a few of the books that stand out from my stack this summer.

Bel Canto, Ann Patchett: A beautifully-written novel about Stockholm Syndrome at its most romantic.

What is the What, Dave Eggers: An Important, yet exhausting, account of Valentino Achak Deng—one of the many Lost Boys of Sudan who settled in the States.

The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins: A surprisingly well-written, gripping Young Adult trilogy. Sort of a post-apocalyptic dystopia, as revealed through a macabre reality show. I read the first two in one day.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows: A delightful novel-in-letters about a small town during the German occupation of the Channel Islands in World War II.

Portrait of a Sister as a Freshman

2011-08-19T20:44:00.001-06:00

On Thursday, my six-year-old sister moved into her dorm at Baylor University.

She’s actually eighteen, but I have her permanently freeze-framed in elementary school.

Somehow, she went off to college without me bestowing upon her all the wisdom I collected over the past four years. I am a despicable older sister.

I started thinking about what advice I’d give her, and I wondered what I wished I had known in August of 2007. I remember my biggest fear was how I was going to make friends. An older friend told me, “Look, everyone else is just as scared as you are, so for, like, the first six weeks, everyone is really receptive to being friends with everyone. They want to be friends with you.” That certainly calmed my nerves, but I still wasn’t prepared for the emotional roller coaster that would inevitably come in the first semester, and I saw countless others who weren’t ready, either. The desperation to make friends and keep them drives a lot of people to a certain type of possessive insanity. You’ve found one person that you enjoy being around, and that person enjoys being around you, and suddenly, your identities are fused. We’ve all been there, to some extent, and if you went to college and are reading this, you’re immediately thinking of the pairs on your campus that demonstrated this creepy codependence. You’re probably also remembering when it happened to you, and you’re shaking your head a little bit, wondering what you were ever thinking.

So yes, Meagan, be receptive to making friends. The friends I made in the first few months of college are still some of my closest and dearest friends. But others of my closest and dearest friends arrived on the scene later, and I’m grateful I didn’t limit myself to only a few exclusive relationships.

College is a weird place. Never before and never again will you live in such close proximity with your friends and colleagues. Because of this, it’s a crucible for your own identity. I promise that in 2015, you will not be the same girl you are now. You’re going to find yourself in dozens of difficult situations that require difficult decisions, and those decisions are going to shape who you are. Yes, you’re going to make some silly mistakes. You will inevitably encounter drama, sleepless nights, bad grades, self-doubt, difficult people, and heretofore unknown temptations—sometimes all in one day.

With that, I arrive at the most important piece of advice I can give you: Be who you want to be. Don’t be confused—this isn’t a trite adage like Be true to yourself or Haterz gon’ hate.

The next four years are about figuring out the kind of woman you desire to be. You have no prior obligations to your high school self, and you don’t need to figure out what you want to do, where you want to live, or which specific person you want to marry. Develop a vision of the character you want to have, of the values you want to be known for, and use those to influence all of your decisions, from the academic to the social to the spiritual. Consider your time in college as a four-year investment in yourself—think about your gifts, talents, aptitudes, and preferences, and do everything you can to hone them. It’s not selfish—it’s responsible. By being intentional with your investment, I have every confidence that you’ll graduate as a self-assured, consistent, admirable young woman with the know-how to back it up.

For Now

2011-08-12T18:33:00.000-06:00

I’ve seen that one clip from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade more than I’ve seen all of the movies combined. If you don’t know which one I’m talking about, drop in on any given youth group or Sunday School class in the nation and there’s approximately a 90% chance you can catch it. In it, Indy is standing on the edge of a cliff, in desperate need of a way to cross a seemingly bottomless chasm to get to the other side. Just when it seems hopeless, he holds his breath and takes a step. But instead of plummeting to his death, he discovers he’s found a cleverly disguised bridge connecting the edges of the canyon—and it can only be found by taking a leap of faith.

Let me tell you, that illustration couldn’t be less apt in my life right now. I’m certainly standing on the edge of a cliff, and on Sunday I’ll have been standing on it for exactly three months. The path I took to get here was pretty obvious and well-planned, but on May 14^th, all that came to a halt. From here, I can’t even see what the other side of the chasm is, so even if I wanted to take a leap of faith, I wouldn’t know where to put my foot.

I’m in the state of For Now. Originally, “now” was going to just be the summer. I planned to work in Kansas City, and in the fall I would move on to the next awesome part in my life. Well, fall is practically here, and I still haven’t a clue of what to do next.

Even worse is that I don’t even know what I should be doing to get ready to do what I want to do. I still dream, and I regularly browse job websites and postings by companies and organizations I admire. Every now and then I come across an “entry-level” position with a job description that sounds like it was made for me. Inevitably, the requirements ask for a candidate with anywhere from 2-5 years of experience. Tell me, where am I supposed to be getting experience for an entry-level job? Isn’t that what a Bachelor’s degree from the Harvard of the Midwest is for?

I think the hardest part—the part that is both humbling and demoralizing me—is that I’ve never dealt with rejection before. I’ve always been a fairly large fish in a fairly small pond. I never worried about getting into college, or even about getting into Oxbridge. I know I’m a bright girl with good relational skills, but now I’m in an ocean of people with the same kinds of credentials and temperament. I’ve already had two rounds of rejection this summer, from programs that could have made all my dreams come true. I knew going into the application process that they were complete shots in the dark, but I still couldn’t keep my hopes from rising.

Here is where I’m finding hope, though—while it may feel like purgatory, it is still just For Now. There is an other side, so For Now I’m going to make a tidy little home on this cliff. I’ve found a place to live, I have a job that pays, I’ve joined a gym, and I’m surrounded by lots of people that I really like. And For Now, I’ll keep throwing pebbles across the chasm until I find a bridge.

Meggy & the Meerkat

2011-08-05T19:27:00.000-06:00

Her mother had barely put the minivan in park before Meggy was unbuckling and clamoring to get out of the childlocked doors. It was Meggy’s birthday, and thus, the family’s annual trip to the zoo. But this year, the cake, presents, and balloons weren’t what had Meggy in a tizzy. This year, Meggy was prepared. As the family arrived, she had finished reading the last page of Doctor Dolittle.

As her parents paid for the tickets, Meggy hopped from one foot to another, waiting for the moment when she’d be set free to conduct her experiment. After what seemed like a-whole-nother year, the short gate swung open, and Meggy took off sprinting, her pigtails flapping wildly in the wind.

Meggy arrived at the giraffes on the shaded, wooden platform, panting for air. She saw a giraffe poking its head over the guardrail, eagerly accepting crackers and lettuce from a passel of small children. “HEY!” she screamed, dashing to the group. “HEY YOU!” The children looked at her with wide eyes, paralyzed with terror. But Meggy wasn’t talking to them. She was talking to the giraffe. “TALK TO ME!” she yelled. The giraffe batted his long eyelashes and chewed his cud, mulling over the possibilities for handling this brazen imp. After a few seconds, he turned and plodded away.

Meggy was furious. This was supposed to work! She made a mental note to find John Dolittle and sue him for false advertising.

But Meggy was a tenacious little whippersnapper, and she ran from exhibit to exhibit, vehemently demanding that each animal engage in conversation with her.

By the time she got to the meerkats, she was exhausted, and she was livid. She pressed her nose to the plexiglass and pounded it with her fist. “TALK—TO—ME,” she bellowed, using her fist to emphasize each word. The meerkats paid her no attention whatsoever; they continued their designated activities.

Meggy had had enough. She plopped down on the sidewalk, banged her forehead against the plexiglass, and shrieked.

“EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!”

At that, all the meerkats stopped what they were doing and looked at her. A couple of the young pups darted into their holes. And suddenly, Meggy was making eye contact with a pudgy meerkat with his nose pressed against the plexiglass, staring at her.

“Would you please stop that infernal screeching?” he said quietly.

Meggy didn’t know what to say, so she merely stared back, her mouth hanging open.

“What on earth possessed you to reach that decibel and frequency?” he asked. Meggy was pretty sure he had his little paws on his hips. Was his foot tapping, too?

“I’m sorry,” she finally managed to say. “I just wanted to be able to talk to animals, like Dr. Dolittle.”

“Well,” the meerkat replied, “I don’t know who this Dr. Dolittle is, but his methods are highly ineffective. And I can assure you that the rest of the animals in this zoo won’t tolerate this behavior as diplomatically as we have.”

Meggy looked at the rest of the meerkats gathered behind him, and noted that they were all nodding their heads in agreement. “I’m sorry,” she said, standing up. “It won’t happen again.”

“I would certainly hope not,” the meerkat said, crossing his paws over his chest. “Good day.”

Dazed, Meggy wandered back to find her parents. She had been most unimpressed with her first conversation in the animal kingdom, and a vague sense of annoyance began to settle over her. She shrugged and kicked a rock. “Who cares what some stinky little rats have to say, anyways?” she muttered to no one in particular.

The History of Advertising

2011-07-29T05:54:00.001-06:00

I was going to start this post with a joke about scientists discovering cave-painting billboards advertising the biggest, heaviest, clubbiest club guaranteed to kill a wooly mammoth in seven bludgeons flat.

Then I looked it up, and scientists have actually found cave-painting advertisements dating back to 4000 BC. Advertising what, I don’t know—but I’m sure I can’t be too far off the mark.

Essentially, since people have existed, and things have existed, and people have needed things, people who have those things have developed ways to let people know that there is a place to find those things they need.

You still with me?

Purportedly, the initial function of advertising was merely to proclaim to others that you could provide a necessary good or service. In the Middle Ages, the vast majority of people were illiterate, so shops had pictures over their doors to display their respective offerings. In the first half of the 19^th century, advertisements in newspapers came on the scene in France. As more businesses took this route, the more people were needed to manage it. By 1900, advertising was considered a legitimate profession.

Then came World War I and a man named Edward Bernays.

You’ve heard of World War I, but chances are, you haven’t heard of Edward Bernays.

Have you heard of Sigmund Freud?

Edward Louis Bernays (1891 - 1995)

Of course you have. Meet Edward Bernays, nephew of Sigmund Freud, the revolutionary psychoanalyst.

During World War I, Bernays was employed by the US Government on the Committee of Public Information. He was so good at his job that President Wilson invited him along to the Paris Peace Conference. Bernays was amazing at the way the European populace embraced Wilson as a hero—the American rhetoric of “making the world safe for democracy” had worked. Bernays was struck—if propaganda could be this effective in war time, then surely it could be just as effective during peace.

Upon returning to America, Bernays began thinking about how governments and businesses could manipulate the masses, and he opened up his own firm to help them do just this. Since propaganda had taken on a negative connotation, he crafted his own term: public relations.

Uncle Freud had long been saying that people were driven by subconscious desires, and Bernays realized that companies could play to these desires with enormous benefit. The Century of the Self, a BBC documentary about Bernays, puts his realization this way: “You can get people to act irrationally by linking products to their desires and feelings.” That is, you don’t say, “Buy this car because it gets the best gas mileage and will get you to and from work efficiently.” Instead, you create an ad that hints, “If you buy this car, you will feel free and independent and as though you are in charge of your own life.”

Bernays’s PR firm was extraordinarily successful, and I was shocked to discover how many run-of-the-mill advertising strategies came from him. He fundamentally changed what people viewed the primary motivator of consumerism to be.

You know what they say—harness people’s irrational, subconscious desires, and you harness their wallets.

__________________

Special thanks to Ally Tschannen for suggesting I watch The Century of the Self. The whole thing is free on YouTube—I recommend watching at least the first twenty minutes. It’s fascinating.

I also referenced Wikipedia. Judge away.

As always, I’d love to write what you’d love to read. Keep it coming.

Man Chat

2011-07-22T18:46:00.000-06:00

This week I am invoking what I call The My Blog, My Rules Clause.

I’ve had some people ask me how I go about choosing a topic each week. Here’s my high-tech system:

I write all the suggestions I get onto little slips of paper and stick them in a cup that features Rapunzel, Disney’s latest princess. So earlier this week, I drew out a slip that read, “The history of advertising.” I’d been looking forward to this one, since it was something I knew absolutely nothing about. I googled books on the history of advertising, and then on Monday I stopped by Barnes & Noble to see if they had the books. They had one, so I left and made plans to come back on Wednesday and dig into the research. Remember, I promised you more than just regurgitating Wikipedia.

But on Wednesday, my plans were foiled. I got to Barnes & Noble, set up shop in a corner, and cracked open the book.

It was completely useless. I frantically scanned the rest of the shelves in the business section, but it was filled with how-to books and individual biographies of successful business.

What was I going to do? I briefly considered making something up, but figured my business-minded friends would catch on. I then thought about reading Wikipedia and whipping something out, but I couldn’t bring myself to settle. Finally, I thought about what I would want my theoretical high school English students to do when faced with a similar situation. I’d want them to ask me for help. So I asked me for help, and I told myself, “Write about something else this week, and keep researching advertising for next week.”

My Blog, My Rules, right? Today I will use the rest of my 500-something words to answer a question that has been plaguing four young men who attend Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford.

For next week—does anyone have books on advertising I could borrow? And, as always, you can leave challenges/ideas/questions/suggestions in the comments box.

And now, without further ado, Man Chat’s controversial debate:

Cuddle, Marry, Tranquilize, Dress up like Little Bo-Peep. William Barns-Graham, Ross Jones-Morris, Oliver Sheerin and Oli Watson. Choices and why.

These guys were some of my best friends during my year in Oxford. They’re some of the funniest people I’ve ever known, even when their cutting remarks are aimed at me and my accent. For reasons still unclear to me, they dubbed me an honorary member of Man Chat. Every so often, we’d go to the pub around the corner, drink Guinness, and chat. It was an uproarious good time.

Cuddle: Ollie Sheerin.

Reasons: He’s tall. He has good banter. He owns snuggly sweaters/jumpers.

Marry: Oli Watson.

Reasons: I want to live on a farm, with nine ginger children hanging about my person as I try to carry on the day’s work.

Tranquilize: Ross Jones-Morris.

Reasons: He can’t ask for his shirt back if he’s unconscious.

Dress up like Little Bo Peep: William Barns-Graham.

Reasons: It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve seen Beej dressed as a woman, and I suspect his nails may already be prepared for the occasion.

Want more Man Chat? I highly recommend TheModernCultureBlog—written by more than one of the founding members of Man Chat—where you can read their fantastically written reviews of, well, modern culture.

Beej and Ollie

Rojo and Oli

A Heartache Waiting to Happen

2011-07-15T21:40:00.001-06:00

The worst day of my life was a long time in the making. By some counts it was twelve years, by others it was six months, still others may argue it was only one day. By my count, it was twenty-one years.

Ever since I could connect the concepts of “want” and “dog”, they were a permanent fixture in my hopes, daydreams, drawings, and scribbled stories. Shortly after my ninth birthday, we took home a little Blue Heeler puppy we named Shania.

After a failed attempt to herd an uncooperative, oncoming motorcycle, she was a three-legged wonder dog, and when you added her ever-sweet personality and impressive catch-the-rubber-steak-off-her-nose trick, she became even more of a celebrity in our circle.

By the time I entered college she was entering her twilight years, becoming more interested in taking naps than in traffic control. Every time I left for school I knelt to pet her, memorize her beautiful face, and say goodbye—well aware that it could be our last moment together.

Soon after arriving in England, I spoke to my sister.

“Today, I was upstairs,” she said. “Shania came hopping up and went straight into your room. She just looked in and started whining.”

A few months later, I was talking to my dad on the phone.

“I just want to give you the heads up,” he said. “Shania’s not doing very well. She hasn’t been eating much, and she doesn’t have any energy.”

She rallied that time, but on a Tuesday in October I was sitting at Sonic with a friend when my phone rang. I answered it mid-laugh and was greeted by my dad’s shaky voice.

“Hey,” he started, then paused to clear his throat. “Um, Shania took a turn for the worst last night. Her nose won’t stop bleeding, and her eye is so swollen she can’t close it. I think tonight is the night.”

I put my head in my hands, but no tears would come. I spent the rest of the day in a daze, unable to shed more than a couple tears, and feeling all the worse for it.

That night, I drove to the Apple store to get my laptop fixed. On the way, my dad called. The vet was on his way. I could hear my mom and sister sobbing in the background.

The man helping me at the store commented on my wallpaper—a picture of Shania—saying, “Now that’s a good-looking pooch.” I tried to maintain composure as I told him what was happening instantaneously with our conversation. With compassion in his eyes, he told me Apple would cover the hundreds of dollars necessary to fix my computer.

As I exited the store, my sister texted me: “It was awful. He had to keep giving her more and more. It was like she didn’t want to leave us. I carried her body to the vet’s car. I couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else doing it.”

Buckling my seatbelt, reality dealt me a crushing blow, and suddenly I was gasping for air, tears flowing down my cheeks and steadily dripping off my jaw. Back in my dorm room, I curled in the fetal position in a chair, sobbing until I thought I was going to throw up. Head, eyes, jaw, throat, heart—everything hurt.

While on a visit home about a month later, I came home from church one Sunday morning. When I opened the front door I was stunned by the absence of jingling dog tags I instinctively expected to announce my return. It was the silence that hurt the worst.

On Discipline. Or, why I'm posting this entry an hour before the deadline passes.

2011-07-08T23:01:00.001-06:00

The challenge I drew out of the fishbowl this week comes from my dad. It read, “Big girl things you want to learn, how to cook specific stuff, race car driving, etc.” I’m going to rephrase the question slightly.

What do I need to learn before I can consider myself an adult?

This was the question I mulled over all week. I thought about typical things adults do that I should probably learn, like cooking, writing thank you notes, calling my grandparents on a more regular basis.

And then I had this scary thought: I’ll never stick with it, anyway.

I say that thought was scary, because I immediately tried to think of things that I’ve tried and have stuck with. Nothing came to mind. I’ve piddled around with various hobbies-- knitting, drawing, the guitar, reading the entire Bible in a summer, the ukulele, learning another language, running. Still, when people ask me what I’m interested in or what my hobbies are, I usually hem and haw for a few seconds for saying, “Uh, I really like to read.” Or when people ask me what I want to do with my life and I say I want to write, they ask if I wrote for the school paper, or they ask what kinds of things I like to write. Once again, I falter, offering lame excuses and vague theories.

The solution isn’t to begin yet another project or pick up yet another trendy hobby. The solution is a lifestyle of discipline-- a lifestyle that leaves no space for procrastination or excuses. I could give you a whole list of reasons why I’m posting this blog so late on Friday, but it comes down to this: I lack discipline.

Even today, it was the prodding and pestering of my family and my boyfriend that got me to finally sit down and type out these embarrassing admissions. It wasn’t my own inherent drive to stick to a deadline I have set for myself for every Friday for an indefinite period of time. Sure, I was going to be slightly ashamed that I missed a deadline only one week after making a big deal about getting serious about writing, but I was already formulating a pithy excuse to post alongside the link to this blog whenever I got around to putting it up. Instead, I’m slightly embarrassed that this entry is substandard, but I’m also slightly proud that I’m posting it on the day I’ve committed to.

There’s a theory that it takes two weeks to form a habit. I can tell you that last year, I ran on a consistent schedule for 9 weeks, only to drop the habit when I inevitably found other things to occupy my time. To be an adult, I need to learn discipline, and no formula or prescription is going to make that happen overnight. And to be honest, I don’t know what it’ll take to permanently change, but I think this blog will be a small lesson every week-- either forcing me to grow and develop in a disciplined life, or reminding me of how far I still have to go.
_____________________________________________________

As always, I’d love to hear your ideas and challenges for future topics on this blog, and this week, I’d also be interested in hearing how discipline plays a role in your life. How did you learn it? In what areas of your life have you seen the benefits of discipline?

The Concept.

2011-07-01T12:33:00.001-06:00

A few years ago I read Stephen King’s On Writing, which I recommend to anyone with any passing interest in writing. King’s basic advice is this: If you want to be a good writer, you have to read a lot, and you have to write a lot.

Since then, I’ve certainly done a lot of both reading and writing—but almost entirely for the sake of academia. When dreaming about my future, I’ve always wondered how writing will play a part. Will it be my job? Hobby? Claim to fame? Some day I’d love to teach high school English, and I’ve had fantasies about what my syllabus would look like. But my ultimate lesson plan was this: The Friday 500. Every week, my students would turn in 500 words of original writing on anything they wanted. Naturally, certain parameters would keep the smart-alecks from turning in 500 words of, “I’m looking at a tree. Now at a desk. Am I at 500 words yet?” They’d need a topic, or at least a cohesive theme, and I would outlaw the word “very”. Other than that, it could be fiction or non-fiction; it could be an individual product each week or part of an all-encompassing work. For kids struggling to come up with something to write, I’d have a fishbowl filled with paper slips of ideas.

As you’ll find below and in the Archive to the right side, I kept a blog while in Oxford but quit upon returning to the States. To start again, I need some kind of purpose or challenge, one that will stretch me as a writer, but that will also be enjoyable for my readers. If I’m serious about wanting to be a writer, I need to get serious about writing.

The idea: Why don’t I be my own writing student? If theoretical 16-year-olds could turn in 500 words every week, so could I.

The catch: I need a fishbowl of ideas. I want people to enjoy reading my blog, and what better way to do that than to ask you what you want to read? I’m asking you to send me your challenge for the Friday 500. It could be a topic you want to know more about—I’ll do the necessary research and come up with 500 words on the basics of the topic. You could ask me my opinion on something (current event, book, movie, fashion fad), and I’ll give it to you. You could challenge me to a short story or personal anecdote.

Whatever you want to read, I’ll write. I promise you at least 500 words every Friday.

Leave your challenge in the comments section, or get in touch with me at melodyrowell [at] gmail.com or on Facebook. You could send this link to a few people who could have good material to throw at me. But even if I don’t hear from anyone, I’ll continue to write 500 words every week—your help will just make this much more interesting for everyone.

You can find King’s On Writing here.

The Beginning of the End

2010-06-02T17:56:00.002-06:00

I was on the Quad the other day and ran into a friend I hadn’t seen all term. We had a nice little chat, and he asked me if I’d updated my blog lately. “No,” I said. “I’ve gotten so behind—it’s too daunting to deal with right now!” “Too busy living life to write about, huh?” he said.

So that’s my excuse.

We’re going to leave the traveling stories for now; maybe I’ll make that a summer project. Briefly: After Prague, Annie and I went on to Salzburg, which is by far my favorite city of all I’ve visited. I then flew back to London on my own, and my family came in the next day! We had a wonderful week together, even if some of the circumstances were less than ideal. After they left, I went to Paris by train and met Annie and some other kids from OOSC. I ended up doing most of Paris on my own, as I had a much tighter timeframe than everyone else. It wasn’t my favorite city ever, but I did run into Kelsey McGuire in front of the Musee d’Orsey — definitely the highlight. From Paris I went to Amsterdam, and Megan met me there the next morning. Amsterdam is beautiful, and the Dutch people are absolutely lovely. After Amsterdam the two of us went to Berlin and had a history-rich couple of days there. Megan then went home to Oxford, and I took a day-long train ride to Krakow, Poland on my own. I spent a day at Auschwitz and another exploring Krakow before going home to Oxford. The next couple weeks were all about catching up on sleep, fending for myself in the kitchen, listening to plenty of This American Life, laying in the Parks for hours, watching all the American TV I had neglected during Hilary term, and just a little bit of reading.

Now it’s Wednesday of 6^th week of Trinity term, and the end is rapidly drawing near. This term has been joyfully hectic. The chaos began on May Day, really. For the sake of Oxford tradition, we stayed up all night and were at Magdalen College by 5:30 am to hear their choir sing and welcome Spring. A full English breakfast afterwards made it all worth it, as did the six hours of sleep I managed to get after that.

The following week was absolute academic hell. My tutorials this term are Modern poetry for eight weeks, and C.S. Lewis for four. I adore both of them, but 2^nd week was utter misery. I had C.S. Lewis due on Tuesday, Modern due Thursday, and then, due to both tutors needing reschedules, another essay for each due for the following Tuesday! That’s four essays in a week. Four Oxford-quality essays in one week. The first C.S. Lewis one went well, but I underestimated how much work the Modern essay would take. It was meant to be a running commentary of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and for various reasons I didn’t get to start working on it until Wednesday afternoon. Since it didn’t involve formulating an argument, I couldn’t just throw something together—I had to elucidate the whole entire poem. It took me the whole night. Literally. I finished writing around 7 am, went home to shower and change clothes, bought a breakfast baguette at Green’s, and then made my way to tutorial at 10. No sleep. My first ever all-nighter for work. Besides nodding off at my tutor’s house while he made tea, I managed to hold it together for our discussion. Still, I never want to repeat that experience. Ever. The next C.S. Lewis essay was embarrassing, but my tutor admitted it was a difficult topic that she probably shouldn’t have assigned.

After both tutorials were done on Tuesday of 3^rd week, I thought I might actually catch up on sleep… but I thought wrong. We had lucked out on rowing only in the afternoons up until this point, but Wednesday of 3^rd week the early morning outings began. Here’s the rowing rundown of the past few weeks, starting with 3^rd. We rowed Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, then in 4^th week, Monday, Wednesday afternoon, Thursday morning, Friday morning, then in 5th Monday, Tuesday, and then Summer VIIIs began! I’ll come back to that, though.

My amazing friend Jessi came and visited me in 4^th week. We’ve been friends longer than I’ve known most of the people in my life, and she’s practically family. We had a fast and busy week together, with two quick trips to London (saw Billy Elliot which is FABULOUS), punting down the Thames, visits to Magdalen, Christ Church, and the Bod, afternoon tea, a trip to the Perch, and Formal Hall. I so love when the worlds collide.

While on a train from Amsterdam to Berlin, Megan leant me A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller. The point of the book is that we could learn how to live better just by paying attention to the ways good stories are constructed. No one would read a book in which the main character just faffed around for 800 pages—why are we content with faffing away our actual lives? How can we live a better story? I definitely suggest you read it for the full impact, but the ideas he put forth would not get out of my head. I’ve wanted to be so many things I’m not… why have I never pursued them? The main thing that was on my mind was that I’ve always wanted to be a sporty person, or at the very least in good shape. I’ve played various sports in my life, even varsity lacrosse in high school, but the past couple years have been seriously lacking. Why was I okay with not being who I wanted to be? With this on the brain, I got an e-mail from a girl at Regent’s asking if anyone wanted to run a 5k with her in London in June—9 weeks away. I immediately looked up the Couch-to-5k running plan online and discovered it’s a 9-week plan. Perfect. I started running three days a week in addition to rowing, and it has been amazing. The 5k in London is no longer happening, but I’m looking to do one in Oxford the week before I leave. Regardless of whether or not I actually do a race, I’m now up to running 25 minutes without stopping, and I like it. This has never, ever happened before. I’ve also been more conscious about not eating eighty biscuits at every Brew, and I’ve limited myself to one dessert a day. With just these changes I’ve dropped almost ten pounds and have a set of pretty nicely defined legs. I’m not ready to call myself a “runner” yet, but it actually feels like I could one day.

Back to Regent’s Park—There’s a tradition of doing a play in Trinity on the Quad, and this year my friend Marchella directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I was Titania, the Fairy Queen. It was great fun—we performed this past Sunday, and there’s video footage on Facebook if you look around for it. I’ll see if I can post a snippet here later. My love interest was played by my friend BG, and we completely hammed it up together. The weather was perfect for us, and everyone who came said they really enjoyed it.

I feel like I should mention that I do really like my tutorials. They’ve been hard work, but enjoyable hard work. I’ve discovered that I’m really good at analyzing and writing about poetry, which is probably the most useless aspect of an English degree, but it makes for fun work. Most of the time I feel like I’m cracking a code, and my tutor and I always have great chats. I did come here for the academia, right?

Okay. Let’s talk about Summer VIIIs now. It’s the gigantic boat race every Trinity term, and from what I’ve heard, it tends to get more press coverage than the Oxford-Cambridge boat race. Here are the basics of bumps racing. There are six (I think) divisions for both the men and women, the better boats being the smaller numbers. Bigger colleges have more than one crew, and so it’s a kind of Varisty/JV type division. But because we’re so small, we only have one crew for men and one for women. Incidentally, we also only have one boat. More on that later. When it’s your division’s time to race, you paddle up the river to the starting line, which is staggered along the bank, and you take your place according to either your finishing place the year before or according to your time in Rowing On. When the starting gun is fired, you take off rowing as hard as you can until you bump or get bumped—that is, until you crash into the boat in front of you or you get crashed into by the boat behind you. When bumping happens, both boats are done with the race; you move over to the side while everyone else races past you.

Bumping = good.

Getting bumped = bad.

The third option is called “rowing over,” which means you don’t do either and you end up having to row the whole length of the course. It’s not as great as bumping, but it’s definitely better than getting bumped.

Okay. Are you prepared for all the rowing chat about to hit you at full pressure?

On Wednesday, we only had one boat behind us, called the sandwich boat. It was a crew from the division below us, and literally the only reason they are there is to bump us. If we were to get bumped, we would become the sandwich boat and would have to row in other races as well—not to mention, we would lose our spot in the division for next year and would have to row on just to qualify for Summer VIIIs 2011.

We were not feeling very confident as we got into the boat Wednesday. The boys had raced right before us, and there was a bit of commotion getting them to the dock, getting them out, switching our blades, wrestling rogue footplates into place, getting us in, and taking off for the starting line. We’d done the proper carbo-loading and all that, but we just had no idea where we stood. We didn’t know how we were going to compare to the other boats in Division IV. We were with other colleges’ second and third crews, but that really could mean anything.

The gun sounded and we had a brilliant start. It felt perfect. Our cox was screaming that we were about to catch the boat in front of us, but I thought she was just being motivational. Then, all of a sudden, CRASH. We bumped only twenty or thirty strokes into the race! Absolutely not what we were expecting at all. Bex, who sits in front of me, cried, and I might have gotten a little teary-eyed.

On Thursday we got to move up a place in the starting line, so we now had two boats behind us. When we took off, they immediately bumped out, and we were hot on the heels of Merton II. They were fitter than us, though, and they were able to lose us and bump the boat in front of them. That meant we had no choice but to row over. That was some serious pain. Lunch was haunting me, and my right hamstring felt like it might snap and go pinging out of my leg and down the river at any moment. After a bump the day before, rowing over felt kind of disappointing, but it certainly wasn’t anything to be ashamed of.

On Friday we once more had two boats behind us, and when we took off the one directly behind us was making quick work of catching up to us. We were chasing Balliol II who Merton II had caught the day before, and we were expecting to bump them pretty far down the river, if at all. All of a sudden, our cox started yelling, “Hold it up! Hold it up! Okay Regent’s, I need you to keep listening to me. Do exactly what I tell you. Heads in the boat. Keep it here.” I was convinced someone had jumped into the river, or there was a massive pile-up in front of us we were trying to avoid. Bex yelled, “’Chella! What happened?”

“We BUMPED!”

“Oh!” With the exception of the girls in the very back of the boat, none of us had a clue that we had bumped! It had taken longer than the first day, but it still wasn’t a long chase at all. So now we had two bumps and one rowing over—not bad for a motley Regent’s crew!

On Saturday, the weather didn’t cooperate. It was chilly and rainy in the morning, but it stayed dry for our race. Once again, we had a massive frenzy getting into the boat when the boys got out. I don’t know how it happened, but we got to the starting line (with three boats behind us) just as the one-minute warning gun went off. We didn’t get a proper warm-up in, and the stress was almost tangible. At the start, we made some gains on St. Catz, but they pulled away from us. The two boats behind us bumped out, but the sandwich boat at the end was still behind us. The next minutes were literally some of the hardest of my entire life. I was in all kinds of pain—imagine being forced to sprint as fast as you can for eight-plus minutes. And then it all went to pot. We had some technical issues that massively slowed us down and then we really struggled to regain momentum. As we neared the end, the sandwich boat pulled strength out of who-knows-where and bumped us. Right in front of our own boathouse, where everyone was watching. As we came to a stop, I couldn’t decide if I was going to cry or throw up. Because the boat that bumped us was a sandwich boat, we lost our spot in the division. Next year’s team will have to row on to qualify. Heartbreak.

The end of rowing was the beginning of The End. I’m starting to freak out about going home. A week or two ago my friend Rosie said, “Melody, you’re going to go home to America, and you just won’t be funny any more! You’ve had to completely adapt to our sense of humor.” I know she was joking, but I really do have these fears in the back of my head. Have I changed? Am I still going to be relevant in my circle of friends? Am I going to be able to keep in touch with my English friends? Will I ever see them again?

I won’t get too sentimental until the actual end is here, but I will say this much. Abbie and I had a sleepover Saturday night, and it hit me—I told her, “When we’re all in a group, I feel like I was always meant to know you.” I can’t imagine my life without these amazing nine months, but it just as easily never could have happened.

I’m ready to go home, but I’m not ready to leave.

Czech-ing out Prague.

2010-04-19T15:11:00.000-06:00

I left for Prague directly from the end-of-term bop. I mean, we danced our little essay-less hearts out, I washed off my facepaint, and I was off with my REI backpack at 12:30 am on Sunday, March 14^th. Annie and I had a bus to catch at the ungodly hour of 1 am, for the horrendous three-hour ride to the airport, all so we could sit and wait for our flight at 7:15. With a fresh box of doner and chips in hand, I made my way to the High Street stop, only to run into Annie on Cornmarket Street.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“To High Street?” I said. “Where are you going?”

“Our bus leaves from Gloucester Green, you dork,” she said.

Huge crisis averted there.

Managed to get a couple hours of sleep with my cheek smashed up against the cold bus window, and once we were on the plane I was out. I wasn’t even conscious for takeoff. Annie was fast asleep too, and we both woke up as they announced our descent into Prague. Annie sat up fast, looking around her wildly. “Are we turning around?” she asked.

“What?” I said. “No, we’re getting to land.”

“Why aren’t we moving?” she asked, with more than a little note of hysteria in her voice. “Annie, we’re getting ready to land,” I said. “We’re moving. It’s fine.”

When we exited the airport, we caught a bus to the main part of the city… and we didn’t pay for a ticket. We couldn’t figure out how or where, so we just didn’t. Found out later that it could have caused us an 80 euro fine… another huge crisis we managed to escape, thankfully.

We got to the hostel without any problems, but our room wasn’t ready for hours. We went to lunch at a sandwich shop called the Bageterie Boulevard, and the menu was only in Czech. We ended up just pointing at pictures to indicated what we (thought we) wanted, and it turned out to be pretty good. Weird, unidentifiable, but good. With happy tummies, we wandered to the main train station, which is super creepy. Probably a fantastic place for a murder mystery. We had planned on buying our tickets to Salzburg, but there wasn’t a single ticket counter in sight, much less anyone who looked like they worked there. To get back to Wenceslas Square we had to go through a serious of under-the-street tunnels that all smelled like pee. We were convinced we were going to stumble upon a dead body and would be forced to call in Booth and Brennan.

Back at the hostel, our room still wasn’t ready. Still feeling fuzzy-headed due to lack of sleep, we decided to kill time in the lobby by drinking tea, playing Phase 10, planning the days ahead, and using the free Internet. Our room was finally ready around 4, and we got to settle in and freshen up. We also got to meet our roommate—a middle-aged man from Turkey. He will henceforth known as Turkish Delight. He tried talking to us, but I think he spoke much less English than he thought, because after a sentence or two he just stood there smiling at us.

We set out wandering to orient ourselves and to kill some time before dinner. We wound up at the river, near Charles Bridge, and got a beautiful view of the Castle.

Feeling a little more like we were in a foreign city, we went to our restaurant. It was Rick-recommended, of course, and we were definitely the only tourists in the joint. We had three courses and a drink for the equivalent of $15. We started with Old Czech potato soup, which was broth-based and absolutely delicious. For the main course, I had one of the house specials—a kind of beef stew (that they call goulash) served with bread-and-bacon dumplings. Somehow we both had room for dessert—Scotch pancakes with jam, whipped cream, and cinnamon. Everything was incredible, especially for such a good price. We’ve really come to appreciate any kind of break from British prices.

We kept wandering as it got dark and found ourselves in Old Town Square, and between that and dinner, we finally, finally felt like we were in a foreign city—a really cool foreign city.

Back in the hostel, Annie showered while I wrote in my journal. It was only 9:15, but Turkish Delight was laying on his bed sighing and groaning, like we were completely blocking him from going to bed. But as soon as I got out of the shower and we both crawled in our beds at 9:45, put had his coat and hat on and left. No idea what time he came back. Such a weirdo.

After ten luscious hours of sleep, I felt like a new woman. We got ready speedily and bought breakfast in Wenceslas Square before going to Old Town Square to meet our tour group. Quick plug—if you’re doing a European adventure, I heartily recommend New Europe tours. The guides work on a tips-only basis, so at the end of the tour, you just give them whatever you think it was worth—or whatever you can afford. They’re well-trained and hilarious. I’ve been on six of their tours (Edinburgh, Prague, London, Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin), and enjoyed every single one.

Commercial over. It snowed during our tour, but we still learned all about Prague’s freaking sweet history (look up the Prague Uprising, Jan Palach, the Velvet Revolution).

Post-tour we took a break in a pub and chatted with a couple Canadians, a guy and a girl, who were in our tour group. He was clearly in love with her; she was clearly oblivious. After regaining the feeling in our limbs (remember the snow?) we began the trek to Charles Bridge and the Castle neighborhood. This part of town was gorgeous, but after climbing 207 stairs, we were disappointed to discover that all the Castle sights were closed. We got to wander the giant complex, but we couldn’t go inside St. Vitus’ Cathedral.

To end Monday, I’ll provide an excerpt from my travel journal: "Wandered home to the hostel and found Turkish Delight laying in bed. Awkward. Used the computer, had tea, played a couple hands of Phase 10. Annie's in the shower now and I'm in the room alone with TD. Awkward."

And Tuesday begins: “More awkwardness with Turkish Delight this morning. Ick.” It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you’re sleeping in a room with other people and they wake you up, you should pretend they didn’t, roll over, and go back to sleep. But apparently, in Turkey it’s custom to prop yourself up on your elbow and intently watch the young women sharing your room get ready.

We spent the morning in the Museum of Communism. It was powerful, but somehow managed to stay away from any kind of moralizing or judgment—just an honest representation of what Czech life under Communism was like. We watched video footage of riots in Wenceslas Square, where we’d spent quite a bit of time. It was surreal.

After a much-needed bacon cheeseburger and fries at Bohemia Bagel, we went into St. James’s Church. It houses an old, shriveled, black arm, which was (according to legend) hacked off of a thief trying to steal jewels off the statue of Mary at the altar. She grabbed his arm and wouldn’t let go until the priest had to lop it off with a sword. The arm now hangs above the door as a warning…

We once again took the long trek back to the Castle and got to see St. Vitus’ Cathedral, which is just a stunning hunk of Gothic-ness. The stain glass windows were unlike any I’ve seen before or since—and I like to think I know my way around a European cathedral now. There are so many old things inside, too, like the tomb of the Hapsburg Emperor, a wood carving relief of Prague dating to 1630, and the tombs of St. James and King Wenceslas (yes, of Christmas carol fame).

For such a hike in the cold we rewarded ourselves with more hot chocolate, and then went on the hunt for Lennon’s wall. During the Communist era, this giant wall became a place for the oppressed public to release some of their emotions graffiti-style. Each day, they would paint Beatles lyrics, peace signs, and messages of hope, and each night, the Communist police would whitewash the wall. The cycle went on for years. Now, it’s chock full of brilliant colors making up all the famous lyrics you can think of, and half a dozen portraits of John Lennon.

We started walking back to the other side of the bridge, and made it to Old Town Square just in time to see the Astrological Clock go off. Dating back to the early 15^th century, the clock’s technology was so advanced that the Prague government blinded the creator so he couldn’t build a similar clock for any other city. In retaliation, the clockmaker had a friend take him up into the tower, where he felt around and yanked out a small but vital piece of the clock. It stopped, and since he was the only one who could fix it, the clock was out of commission for over 100 years before someone else could figure it out.

By this time, we were completely exhausted from so much walking, so we took a break in the hostel before going to dinner. We ate at a place called The Rope-Maker’s Wife, but in Czech, which has a legend involving a jealous rope-maker and his unfaithful wife, naturally. Apparently, touching her portrait brings good luck to one’s love life, but we forgot to touch it. There go our shots at happiness. Dinner was fantastic, though, and cheap! Eastern Europe is really the place to go when you’re on a budget.

Or in my opinion, the place to go, period.

Pictures here.

Conceding defeat

2010-03-28T17:03:00.000-06:00

I'm coming to terms with the fact that I will never, ever be on top of this blog, chronologically speaking, and I apologize. I love writing, but so much of my life in term-time is centered on this fact that when I'm not working, I have to turn my brain off. But I'm constantly turning words over in my brain, figuring out their precise placement in the sentences I want to use to describe what's before my eyes. I just never get those words down.

Here's a quick summary of things I still plan on covering once my life slows down.
- I wrapped up my second term at Oxford. Academically, uninspiring. Socially, brilliant.
- I went to Prague.
- I went to Salzburg.
- My family came to visit.

That underwhelming vagueness will have to suffice for now-- I'm leaving for Paris, Amsterdam, Berlin, and Krakow in the morning. I'll be back eventually, with even more stories than I've already collected, and I'm hoping to use the rest of my vacation to actually put them to paper. Er, screen.

Merrily, merrily

2010-03-01T05:53:00.000-07:00

It’s the beginning of 7^th week, Hilary term, and I’ve just realized I’ve only blogged about Christmas break trips and asinine events on my walks home.

So I can ease my guilty conscience, and further avoid beginning this week’s massive reading list, I’ll begin posting some categorized updates on what I’ve gotten up to this term.

If you remember correctly, I hated rowing last term. Loathed. Abhorred. Would rather have shards of glass in my eyes. Our coach was the best combination of expletives I can produce, we had two early morning outings and an afternoon every week, and I was really, really rubbish at the whole thing.

Oh, how things change.

Prepared to quit, I attended the first meeting with our new captain, Rosie. We’re already good friends, so I at least wanted to hear her out before I dropped the bomb. She emphasized that she wanted, more than anything, for us to have fun, to have an enjoyable experience since last term was so crap. On top of that, there was the guilt I’d live with if I dropped out—they’d be a girl short in the boat. Besides, they were on the hunt for a new coach, and they promised that the one they found was absolutely lovely.

I agreed to stick with it, but threatened to quit if anyone made me run in a pack.

Also, most importantly—no more morning outings.

We spent the first couple sessions in the tank and on the ergs. Alex, our new coach, was just as lovely as they promised. Whereas the former coach would just explain the same obscure rowing technique in the same esoteric rowing jargon over and over again, Alex was able to break down the process of rowing in small, logical moves. In just a couple of sessions I actually had the proper rowing form down. Even if I couldn’t do it perfectly every time, I could now feel when it was and wasn’t spot on.

Our sessions on the river were brilliant. More times than not we had gorgeous weather. One week, we had sunshine every time we were on the water. We slowly worked our way up to rowing all eights, and our timing and rhythm came together. We’re still not perfect, but we are miles beyond where we were last term. I actually left outings thoroughly knackered—I was actually getting a full-body work-out three to four times a week. I was even looking forward to getting on the water. The one time it rained on us, I didn’t even care.

With all the improvement, there had to be some setbacks. It started when Charlotte messed up her ankle. I’m still unclear as to what happened, but I think it involved football, and the poor girl was on crutches for weeks. Then, Bex got hit by a car while she was on her bike, and she broke her wrist. In training, Ellie aggravated an old sailing back injury, and Natalie pulled a calf muscle. Then Jenny failed her swim test and wasn’t allowed on the river.

This left us grasping for subs. Two third-year girls graciously stepped in, and we recruited some boys to help us out on the odd outing when not everyone could make it.

All this training was leading towards Torpids, the race in 7^th week. Last Friday was our qualifying time trial, called “rowing on”. By Thursday night, we were still one girl short. No one could be persuaded to help us out. No subs could be sorted. As I slaved away on an essay in the library, Rosie sat down next to me, almost in tears, and said we were going to have to pull out of rowing on. All of our hard work, not to mention a huge chunk of the boat club’s money, would be for nothing.

But the next morning, we had an e-mail in our inboxes saying that rowing on was going ahead. Lottie, our incredible cox, had sorted a sub at the eleventh hour, and we were going to be able to race.

Friday afternoon was sunny, but the wind was unlike any other I’ve experienced in England. There was a strong current, and my heart rate picked up just looking at the water. We climbed in the boat and did our warm-up down stream to the waiting area before the starting line. As we worked up to all eights and feather blades, we were moving fairly fast and keeping the boat impressively steady, and we passed our old coach on the bank. I gave him the ol’ stink-eye as we passed, and I could see him staring at us. My heart swelled with pride as I watched our blades rise out of the water and catch at the same time. He had to be impressed, and he had to know it had nothing to do with him. When we got to the haystacks to spin, the wind was so strong that we had a pretty serious altercation with a tree for a while. Lottie kept her cool and navigated us out of there.

Finally, it was our turn to race. We started slowly, then worked up to race pace in a three-stroke burst right before the starting line. Then we rowed hard. Each burst through my legs felt like it had to be my last, but somehow, somewhere I kept finding more energy to crank out another one. The river was still moving swiftly, and towards the end I felt as though I were sliding uphill. At the finish line, we were sweaty and out of breath, but we were exhilarated. Our time was one of the best we’d ever done, and the feeling of accomplishment was dizzying. We had had everything working against us—injury, wind, swim tests—but we had made it past our goal.

Unfortunately, we didn’t qualify for Torpids, but we beat out ten other teams—including the team that will be chasing us come Summer VIIIs next term. Most importantly, we’re still enthusiastic to continue on. When I woke up this morning and saw a completely clear sky and a warm sun, I actually wished we would be in the boat today. I never thought it would happen, but it seems that I’ve become a rower.

Weirdest.

2010-02-14T16:16:00.000-07:00

Okay, forgive the two posts in one day-- I wouldn't normally indulge in such narcissism. But I HAD to share what I learned tonight. First, let's recap a few of the language barriers I've had to get over:

pants vs. trousers
cookies vs. biscuits
stroller vs. pram
movie vs. film

etc.

Tonight, we had a rowing get-together, and I brought along some sugar cookies I'd baked and a can of funfetti frosting, imported from the US. The frosting was pink, and the lid held some Valentine's sprinkles. I got everything out and put it on a desk, and someone asked me what was in the lid.
"Sprinkles," I said.
She looked at me.
"Oh, geez," I said. "Don't tell me you have a different name for these, too."
"Those are hundreds of thousands," she said.
"I'm sorry-- what??"
"Hundreds of thousands!" She then proceeded to show the lid around the room and take a poll on the proper name for the little sugary bits. It was unanimous-- hundreds of thousands all around.

By far the WEIRDEST phrase yet.

Valentine's Day

2010-02-14T07:28:00.000-07:00

Today is Valentine's Day. Even though I've never had a Valentine to celebrate with, I don't mind this holiday. Say what you will about it being a Hallmark holiday, a commercial opportunity to milk over-achieving, approval-seeking, wife-appeasing men for all they're worth, but I actually kind of like it.

Bearing that in mind, please know that what I'm about to tell you doesn't come from a place of bitterness, cynicism, depression, or angst. It comes from Fact.

Today, this Valentine's Day, I stepped in dog poop on my way home.

Some kind of sign?

Mid-way Mark

2010-02-10T10:44:00.000-07:00

Today marks the halfway point of my life in Oxford. Some days I forget I already have two years of uni behind me. I forget this isn't permanent. I forget that my days in the happiest library on earth are numbered. I forget that I'm not actually going to be able to pop over to my friends' houses next year, that I have no idea who I'll be living with or where I'll be living. I kind of feel like I'm on hold-- this year is a brief interruption in my normally boring life. I've been homesick, I've been in love with this place, I've hated the weather, I've reveled in it, I've never wanted to read another word again, I've made mental lists of all the books I can't wait to get my hands on. I've tried new foods, new friends, new sports, new TV shows, new ways of thinking, new ways of living. I've grown so much more comfortable in being me. I've gained confidence in my interactions with others-- both students and tutors. I like me.

All this in the first half... what's next for the rest?

Back in the UK

2010-02-08T14:53:00.000-07:00

I’m slowly but surely going to catch up.

I left the blue skies of Monument on the 6^th of January. By the time we hit Castle Rock, the fog was thick and the flurries were coming. Cleared up a little by the time we got to Denver, but I did get the surprise of not seeing my flight to Edmonton, Alberta anywhere on the screens. Talked to the people at the desk to discover it’d been delayed by three hours, meaning I’d miss my connection to Heathrow. After a long wait and a really nice man’s help, I had to dash to catch my flight to Houston. Houston was completely non-event. The plane to Heathrow, though, was AMAZING. I ended up getting switched to a Continental flight, and they have got the hook-up. Each seat has a touch screen TV with 300 FREE films to choose from, plus who knows how many TV shows. I watched Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Good Will Hunting, and The Bourne Ultimatum, plus three episodes of Arrested Development. PLUS I had a nice chat with the girl next to me, who’s technically American but goes to a British boarding school. She was cool, and we’re now Facebook friends. Weird to think that I made a friend my sister’s age… I’ll try not to read too much into that. The man on the other side of me was British and friendly. I think he thought we were pretty silly, but whatevs. Needless to say, I only slept for about thirty minutes.

At one point I went to the back to stretch my legs and use the bathroom, and there was a guy nursing a drink and… lurking. He was about 5’6”, potbellied, curly dark hair, stubble, approximate age: 39. He was listening to his iPod and bobbling his head about. When I walked up he gave me the ol’ once-over, and then took his free hand and tipped it to his mouth, miming taking a drink. He accompanied this gesture with a little waggle of the eyebrows and a head-nod in my direction.

“Huh?” I asked.

“Drink?” he said.

“Oh, uh, no. I’m fine, thanks.”

“Why not?” he asked. Eyebrow waggle.

“I’m underage.”

He looked briefly terrified. “Oh really? How old?”

“Twenty.”

“Well, you know, it’s, uh, law of the sea.”

“This is an American plane. It’s American law. I’m underage.”

“No! No! It’s law of the sea. We’re going to England, and it’s legal there.”

“Whatever.”

He took a lingering look at my chest region, which was displaying the Regent’s Park crest, and asked, “So, uh, where do you go to school?”

“Oxford.” When, oh WHEN, would the bathroom be open? What was taking the occupant so long? How was I going to escape?

“Oxford, huh? They got a good debate team?”

“I don’t know. Probably.”

“Probably?”

“Uh, it’s Oxford.” I tried to let the elitism just drip off my vocal cords.

“Yeah. Well, law of the sea. Look it up.”

“Whatever.” I jiggled the door to the bathroom and it sprang open. Cool. I’d been chatted up for no reason other than blog fodder.

* * *

Once at Heathrow, I found the perfect spot at baggage claim and held my ground. I absolutely hate baggage claim. It’s some of the worst human behavior on display. You have every man on the plane standing three inches from the conveyor belt, crouching in a basketball defensive stance, ready to pounce on his suitcase as soon as it comes in sight. Not only pounce, but block every other person from even seeing what bags are coming around.

The place I picked was about two feet back on the opposite side of the chute. I was on my own for a while, then a man came and stood a couple feet to my right. We watched the bags go ‘round and ‘round, and then out of nowhere a chubby little man pushes his luggage trolley between us and parks it in front of me. Legit, I thought, if he’s just grabbing his suitcase. No. He was just parking. He stood right next to me, and I could tell he had greatly underestimated the space between me and the other guy, but I wasn’t about to budge. I earned this spot. You can move your stupid trolley. Finally, it dawned on him. “Oh!” he exclaimed. “Uh, sorry!” And he and his trolley rolled away. Victory.

After an hour my bag still hadn’t arrived. I was left with about seven people at the conveyor belt, and I suddenly realized that approximately eight thousand bags were piled against the walls. No. Please. I cannot wade through all of those and haul out my 61-pound suitcase. Absolutely not.

I wandered back over to the conveyor belt, and after another thirty minutes or so, the bags FINALLY came. I was so relieved, until I remembered how much it weighed. Then I kind of wished it had gotten misplaced and they’d have to deliver it to me later. Oh well.

* * *

On the bus to Oxford I used the free wireless to check my e-mail and saw that Megan had sent one saying it had snowed even more, and that I should probably call Rowena to see if she could come pick me up. Problem—my phone had no money on it. Also, it was dead. So I sent her a Facebook message and crossed my fingers.

When the bus dropped me off on High Street, she hadn’t responded, so I began the trek. Sixty-one-pound suitcase. Twenty-pound backpack. Ten-pound bag. Snow. No friction for the suitcase wheels. Effectively dragging a dead body behind me.

It’s a mile and a half to my house from High Street.

7,920 feet.

About three-fifths of the way there I was ready to quit. I had no phone, no cash for a taxi. No friends along the way. And my arms were completely numb. And my feet were wet and cold. I stopped next to a wall and dropped everything, trying to catch my breath. I mumbled some combination of prayers and obscenities, my mind absolutely fried.

Out of nowhere, a young man popped up in front of me. “You need help?” he asked in a thick accent, gesturing towards my suitcase.

“Huh?” I asked. This couldn’t be happening. Desperate, half-crazed prayers don’t actually get answered. Especially not mine.

“I carry your bag?” he said, still motioning.

“Oh, uh, are you going that way?” I said, weakly lifting my arm in the northerly direction.

“Yes, yes!” he said nodding with great vigor. “I go to Summertown for grocery store. I carry your bag!”

“That would be amazing!” I said, laughing in a burst of relief. I picked up my other bags and we set off. We tried carrying on a conversation, but everything was pretty much lost in translation. He asked me the same question several times, and I wasn’t sure if he wasn’t understanding my answers or if I was misunderstanding his questions. From what I could gather, he was from Bangladesh, and was getting his MBA in London. His purpose in Oxford is still unclear.

We finally got to my house and stopped at the gate. Unsure of the next step, I took off my mitten and shook his hand and thanked him as genuinely as I could. He wouldn’t let go of my hand, though, and kept saying it was so nice to meet me and he just loves helping people and that’s just the kind of guy he is. I eventually wrenched my hand away, and he said, “I can have your telephone number?”

“Oh,” I said, taken aback. “Um, okay.” So, long story short, I gave him my number, he took me out to dinner a few times, proposed shortly thereafter, and we’re getting married in the spring.

Kidding.

I gave him a fake number.

Then realized he now knows where I live.

We’ve never encountered each other again.

* * *

That night, I went back to High Street to pick up my darling friend Teresa. We’ve been friends since we were sophomores in high school (it’s a really romantic story- I’ll share it some day), and she’s studying in Italy for the year and decided to pop over to my land. I can’t explain how it felt to have such a beautifully familiar face in front of me in Oxford.

We ate dinner with some Jewell friends at the Red Lion, and then spoiled ourselves at G&D’s. At my house, we stayed up for a while talking, but by 11 I was falling asleep mid-sentence. Teresa graciously allowed me to sleep until noon, and we spent the rest of Friday roaming Oxford—cookies in the Covered Market, Blackwell’s, Eagle & Child, etc. At home we watched Lars and the Real Girl, and stayed up until 2. Whoops.

By 6:45, we were at the Oxford train station, ready to catch our train to York, which would take us on to Edinburgh. On the platform, the screen counted down until the train’s arrival, and then it suddenly said CANCELED. We panicked. It wasn’t anywhere on any screen. We went to the ticket booth, and the man informed us that we had picked the absolute worst day to travel—blizzards in the north were shutting down stations left and right. Through some kind of magic, though, he figured out that we could go to Birmingham and find a train out of there.

So that’s what we did. In Birmingham we had time to kill, so we wandered an amazing mall called the Bull Ring. Back at the station, we were flabbergasted to see that once again, our train to Edinburgh was canceled. The ticket people told us we had to catch a train to Wolverhampton—a train that was leaving in three minutes. We ran and found it, and as we went, the snow started. Flakes the size of quarters. But somehow in Wolverhampton we still got on a train to Edinburgh, and the scenery in between was mind-boggling. The hills looked as though someone had laid a white fleece blanket over them—everything was perfectly smooth, save for the few wrinkles in between the separate hills. But we also experienced stunning sunshine and fog and sheep—which, I understand, are not a form of weather, but they are equally fascinating. We napped and played Phase 10, and we finally reached Edinburgh around 3. We had no map, so we wandered the city for ages until I got the bright idea to call the hostel. We finally walked in there around 4—it was already getting dark. After checking in, we went to the National Museum for a bit because it’s free and really cool, but it closed at 5. So really we just played in the kids’ section and saw Dolly the Sheep. Her stuffed body is a key feature.

Upon leaving the museum we hiked up Calton Hill, which overlooks the entire city. The city lights reflected off the low clouds, making the sky orange, and I’ve never seen anything quite like the snowy mountains that stood up against it. We were the only ones on the hill, and it was perfectly silent, and it started to snow. We wandered around it, and as we started to cross through the middle, a fox ran across our path about 20 yards in front of us. Magical.

We got dinner at a cozy little pub called The Auld Hundred. There was a small area downstairs for drinks, and a bigger eating area upstairs. It was warm, and the waitress was really friendly and had an amazing accent. We ordered haggis fritters for a starter, and they were good. Then I had steak pie, and it was definitely one of those comfort foods you want to crawl inside. I was so full. And so happy. We wandered the city some more before collapsing in our hostel bunk beds and falling fast asleep fast.

* * *

Sunday was amazing. We got a cheap, but filling, breakfast at the hostel, and then we set off to find the Starbucks where we were supposed to meet our tour group. We had decided to do the New Edinburgh tour after someone recommended it. The tours are free—you just tip the guide whatever you can afford.

We found the Starbucks early and decided to explore the vicinity. Since it was a Sunday, most of the shops were closed, so we just peeked in windows. While looking in a stationary shop, a guy walked up behind us and proclaimed, “Happy New Year!” in a thick accent (sensing a theme?). He had his sunglasses sitting on his eyebrows and was peering at us from underneath them. He had really sticky-out cheekbones, and I would estimate his eyelashes to be at least an inch long. Probably early 20s, but all-around creepy. We said “Happy New Year” in return, and then he kept asking us questions, like why we were in Edinburgh and if we were from America and why we were in Edinburgh and also, why are we in Edinburgh? It was 10:30 am and I’m pretty sure he was drunk. He finally wandered away and we went to meet our group.

There were probably about 25 of us, and our guide’s name was Seth. The tour was amazing. It was just over 3 hours long, but Seth was hilarious and we saw cool things and heard cool stories and were astonished at the lack of Edinburgh-based Hollywood blockbusters. The place has some crazy history. Most importantly, we saw George Heriot’s School, which is rumored to be the place that inspired Hogwarts. If you’re not up on your Harry Potter history, Rowling lived in Edinburgh while she wrote the first few books. More on that in a bit.

At the end of the tour we each tipped Seth ten pounds, and it was well worth it. We raved about it for hours afterward. I don’t know if I’ve ever been that cold in my life, though. I couldn’t feel anything any more, so we went into The Elephant House—the café/coffeeshop where Rowling wrote the first two books! I could taste the genius in the air.

We got tea and cakes and just sat until we could wiggle our toes and noses once more. After that, we went back to the National Museum so we could see it properly, and we luckily caught the last day of a photo exhibit that featured famous Scots. Very cool. When we got kicked out of there, we did some shopping. Post cards, Iron Bru, Magnum ice cream bars, etc. Apparently I have family history in the Graham clan of Scotland, so I bought a little book on the clan’s history. We had to eat the Magnums in a Christmas shop because we weren’t brave enough to eat them outdoors. Commitment. We wandered some more until we found a restaurant I’d seen on TripAdvisor… Wannaburger. Judge if you want, but it was incredible. I had a BBQ Bacon Cheeseburger, and I could have cried at its deliciousness. Another trip to The Elephant House followed dinner, and we got fancy hot chocolates and played Phase 10. I won.

We played more cards at the hostel (I won) while we drank our Iron Bru. It’s the national soft drink of Scotland, and it kind of tastes like Dreamsicle soda. I really liked it. Seth the tour guide called it a cross between cream soda and crack.

We were exhausted from walking and shivering all day, and I’m positive I didn’t roll over, or even breathe, from falling asleep to waking up.

In the morning we packed up, ate breakfast, and were practically the first people at the Castle. Since the Castle is on top of a giant hill, the wind hits it from every side and it was SO COLD. Absolutely bitter. The Castle was really cool, though. There are a bunch of little museums inside, and the oldest building dates back to the 12^th century. Unbelievable. When we went to see the crown jewels, one of the head docents took a special interest in us and told us all kinds of stories about how amazing the Scots are. He knew a lot. He was also slightly crazy, but it was a great experience. The jewels themselves were so cool and ANCIENT. As is the Stone of Destiny. Old old old.

After three hours, we left and got ourselves to the train station. We got food, and started the long ride to Birmingham. This ride was captivating. We went down the east coast, whereas we’d come up on the west, and for a while the only thing out the window was the sea. Green, rolling hills covered in fat sheep. Right next to the sea. I was in love. Once in Brummieland, we only had twenty minutes to find the bus station to ride back to Oxford. Miracle of miracles, we did not get lost. We did not miss the bus. We actually got to Oxford in one piece.

Next up… our day in London. Pictures here.

Part Three: Venice

2010-01-28T10:26:00.002-07:00

Venice had the most potential to go horribly wrong, but it was the smoothest part of our trip. There’s not much to do other than wander, and we had seen just about all of the art our little eyeballs could handle.

We got off the train and were relieved to see Maura waiting for us on the platform. We caught the shuttle train to the island, and then we had to master the art of vaporettos. Basically, Venice is a fish-shaped island that has a Grand Canal going down the middle of it. There are no cars on the island, so to get anywhere you either have to walk or catch a vaporetto—the public transportation boats. Thankfully, this segment of the journey went perfectly. We got off at the right stop, and our hostel was right on the water.

We checked in, had minor drama with some woman sleeping in my bed and her stuff sleeping in Annie’s, but luckily they had some beds to spare. After getting our things all settled, Annie and I went to the bar next door—the only place to get any food nearby. I had the best grilled ham and cheese of my entire life.

Moods drastically improved, we just lounged around the common area of the hostel, keeping Maura company while she tried to figure out her travel details for her Amsterdam trip. We sent our parents e-mails, assuring them of our continued existence, and then went to bed.

When Annie and I woke up around 8, Maura was already long gone for the airport. The two of us had breakfast and then snuck a vaporetto ride to the main part of the island… don’t tell anyone. St. Mark’s Square was practically deserted, save for a woman or two who insisted on using their bodies as pigeon feeders. Disgusting.

More under the jump.

We decided to tour the Doge’s Palace, which had some cool history and was immense and completely unfathomable as a dwelling place. After that, we just set off wandering. As I’ve mentioned several times before, Annie is a goddess with a map. We picked a random direction and took off. We each had items in mind we wanted to buy—I wanted nativity sets and Annie really wanted a knock-off bag. We started at the Rialto Bridge, which is a series of shops on, well, a bridge. That alone made us pretty hungry, and we somehow came across a cute little restaurant where we had amazing food for really cheap! My chicken sandwich almost made me feel like I was at Chick-fil-a… almost.

Then it was time to hunt for Annie’s bag.

We had barely seen any knock-off purse sellers, when we’d heard rumors that they’d just be lining the sidewalks. As we started walking along the canal, we saw two giant men laden with purses peering out at us from an alleyway. Our prolonged eye contact brought them out of hiding, and they held out their arms so we could see what they had to offer. Annie hemmed and hawed, and finally asked one if they had any Louis Vuitton purses that looked more legit.

One of the guys whips out his cell phone and motions for us to follow him at a distance. He’s screaming some African language into the phone without a breath, and then hangs up and assures us his friend is coming. He then makes another call and another, and his cronies come in droves. At this point we were standing on a bridge, and they were all around us. I was completely paranoid and kept looking around for cops or knock-off-purse patrolmen, convinced we were doing something illegal. Annie was brave, though, and she stuck to her guns. One guy held out a bag to her that looked exactly like a real Louis Vuitton. It had the LV logo, it had the leather tags—EVERYTHING.

“You like?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said. “How much?”

“One-twenty euro,” he said, shifting his eyes around, probably on the same watch I was.

“I only have thirty euro,” she replied.

“Okay, okay, sixty!” he said, obviously too preoccupied with avoiding arrest to pay attention to her bartering skills.

“I only have thirty!” she said again.

“Okay, okay, fifty!” he said.

Annie opened her wallet. “Okay,” she said. “I have forty, and that’s IT. I don’t have any more money, and I’m leaving.”

“Fine, fine,” he said. He stuffed the bag into a plastic shopping sack, thrust it at Annie, and took her forty euro. The ringleader came back over and offered her a Coco Chanel knockoff for “only twenty,” but we threw up our hands, said we were broke, and took off.

Upon further inspection of the bag, it may be a factory reject, as it’s missing the lining. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure they nicked it.

After further shopping, we decided to make the trek to GROM, a gelato place recommended to us by multiple people. Including Rick. It took us forever to get there, but the gelato was unbelievable. I had chocolate and hazelnut, and I don’t think I’ll ever get to taste anything like that again in my life. Delicious. Absolutely.

More shopping, more wandering, more sight-seeing. I bought a sweet watch right off St. Mark’s Square, and I’ve worn it almost every day since. I feel like a snot, though, any time someone compliments it and I said, “Thanks! I got it in Venice.” Comes with the territory, I guess.

By 4:30 it was getting dark and we had completely run ourselves into the ground, so we went back to the hostel for a rest break. We picked a place for dinner, which didn’t turn out to exist, of course, but the place we wound up at was phenomenal. It was tucked way back in a corner of the island, and Annie once again worked her magic and got us there with only the rough Rick Steves map to guide us. We were the only two in the restaurant, and it was a little classier than our fleece jackets and my ripped jeans. I ordered some kind of pasta with some kind of crab sauce and it was perfect. Plus they gave us free bread. Perfect last supper in Italy.

The next morning we were awakened by some middle-aged, overweight foreign women with no sense of volume control. It wasn’t even 8am and they were talking and laughing at unbelievable levels. Annie “shh!”d them more than once, but it was lost in translation. So rude.

We packed up, ate breakfast, and hit the town with our backpacks. We did some more wandering and stumbled upon a fantastic square where we may have been the only non-Italians. We sat on a bench, soaking up the sunshine and people-watching, and we bought lunch at a little pizza shop—pizzettes for one euro! We sat in the square and ate one, then bought another to smuggle onto the plane. After that goodness, we decided the only way to say farewell to Italy would be to eat at Grom again. So we did. Even though it was so, so cold.

We got ourselves sorted and to the bus station, and I ended up paying forty-one euro to use a public toilet. Don’t ask. It’s still a sore subject. Rode the bus to the airport, got on a plane, got off a plane, got to a bus stop, and Annie discovered her camera was missing. Maura and I had been giving her crap all week for not having had made a big mistake like we had, and here it was. Right at the tail end. While I waited for our bus, Annie made a mad dash inside, but the people at the counter couldn’t get ahold of the people on the plane, so they told her she’d have to call the airline first thing in the morning. Problem was, she was leaving for America first thing in the morning.

When she returned to the bus stop, understandably upset, a bus labeled OXFORD pulled up. We got our things together and made our way to the bus, looking expectantly at the driver, who completely ignored us and continued chatting to a couple who’d just gotten off. Trying to be helpful, we put our bags underneath and stood by the door. When he FINALLY stopped talking, he smiled at us, shut the compartments on the side, and came towards us. We handed him our tickets and he frowned and started waving his hands. “I’m nah goin’ ta Oxforrrd!” he proclaimed.

“Are you serious?” I asked, gesturing towards the banner that clearly said OXFORD on the side of the bus.

“You got ta wrong bus.” He started climbing aboard.

“Well,” I said. “Our stuff is under the bus.”

He made an absolutely disgusted face at me and said, “Oh, smart move.” And stomped down the steps and flung open the undercarriage compartment. Annie forcibly grabbed her backpack from him, her face still tear-stained.

“What’s your problem?” he asked her, clearly a gentleman of the first order.

She spun around and said, “I just lost my camera!”

“Wot?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said curtly as I took my backpack.

“Well, it’s got nowwat to do wit’ me!” he said, backing towards the coach. “And as a gen’ral rule ya shouldn’ be puttin’ stuff unda the coach wit’out the driva knows!”

He really was a gem.

Thankfully, the right bus did come, we got home to Oxford, Annie eventually got her camera back, and our week-long Italian adventure came to an end.

Part Two: Florence

2010-01-19T07:52:00.002-07:00

Wednesday morning we got up early to catch a train to Florence. The ride ended up being about four hours long, since we bought the cheapest tickets possible, and there wasn’t much we could do besides sleep and watch the beautiful Tuscan scenery go by.

Once in Florence, we meandered our way through the city to our hostel, aided only by our keen sense of direction and a rough map Rick provided. While our hostel in Rome wasn’t disgusting by any means, this hostel seemed like a palace. We’ve since learned it’s a more typical hostel—real front desk, real kitchen, Internet access, clean towels, etc. When we check in they informed us that they upgraded us to a four-person room—meaning a private room just for us. Once again we were spoiled and free to leave our stuff all over the room—no need to lock it up.

We went on an excursion to find a restaurant for lunch, and thanks to Rick, we found a place that was so delicious and so cheap. It felt like a big family dining room—red checkered table cloths, benches, little English spoken. I had some minestrone soup that was unlike any I’d had before, and the bread was fresh and perfect.

When we emerged with happy tummies, we were delighted by the beautiful weather. Absolutely clear skies, and a bright, bright sun making us squint and sweat. In the weeks of overcast Oxford I had forgotten how shocking the sun can be. We wandered our way over to the Uffizi Gallery and walked right in. Apparently lines to enter in the summer can be over two hours long. Like the Vatican, the Uffizi is a beautified cattle chute—once you’re in, you can’t leave. But unlike the Vatican, we all stayed together and the crowds weren’t bad at all.

The days of AP Euro came soaring back to my memory as I gazed upon Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and an Oxford lecture from only a few weeks before made me sound like an expert on his Primavera. We stayed in the Botticelli room for a long, long time, resting our aching feet and gazing on the works hanging all around the room. He’s by far one of my favorite painters, and his style and subjects are so diverse. These two in particular seemed even more significant in real life, and they were enormous. Nothing like the 2x3 image in a textbook.
More under the jump!

When we finally emerged from the exit, hours later, we were in desperate need of a gelato revival. I got peanut butter next to coffee chocolate chip, and I’m pretty sure that’s all they serve in heaven. My mouth is watering just remembering it.

We took some down time back at the hostel. The stress of trains and the overwhelming art was starting to get to us. While we sat in our room with the door open, another guest felt compelled to come talk to us. She was probably mid-40s, thin, frizzy ginger hair, from Michigan or Wisconsin or Minnesota. Or maybe Oregon. I can’t remember. She stood in the doorway.

“Wow, you girls have really made yourselves at home,” she said, motioning to clothes and shoes strewn across the floor.

“Oh, uh, yeah,” I said. “It’s just us three, so why not?”

She laughed haltingly. “So where are you from?” she asked.

Annie said, “We all go to school in Missouri, but we’re studying at Oxford this year. I’m from Kansas.”

“Cool, cool,” she replied, nodding her head enthusiastically. “I’m from [wherever].”

“Cool,” we echoed. “Nice to meet you.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said, still nodding. Still looking at us.

“Well,” I ventured. “Guess we’ll see you around?”

“Sure, sure,” she said. Nod nod. Finally, she walked away.

Annie and I looked at each other and shrugged. We’d been deprived of such experiences in the Rome hostel—surely this had to be part of the hostel life.

Not more than thirty seconds later she was back.

“You know how all the rooms have names?” she asked.

“Yeah,” we said.

“Well, yours is ‘Pazzi’.”

“Yep.”

“Do you know what ‘Pazzi’ means?”

“Nope.”

“It means ‘the crazies.’ Like, the plural form of the noun. And I like how you all are really working to make that a reality here,” she said, accompanied with a look that clearly meant I’m in with the hip American college crowd… Y’all are here to par-tay!

“Ha… ha…” I said. Said—not laughed. What was this woman on? We weren’t wearing make-up, we hadn’t showered, and we were bundled up to our chins. What part of us screamed “The Crazies”?

She finally wandered off, and we collected ourselves and set off for dinner. Let me tell you right now—Annie Papineau is a goddess with a map. We called her Columbus, and we weren’t really joking. We had picked a restaurant on the other side of town, which isn’t really saying much, but not only did Annie get us there, she got us there going the back streets. It’s amazing. If you ever get a chance to watch her in action, I recommend it.

The restaurant we went to was called Il Pirata—the Pirate—and we chose it for its unlimited BUFFET. All the food was sitting on a table, and it did have to be microwaved, but we could eat as much as we wanted, and it was GOOD. Thanks again, Rick. The white tiles on the walls of the restaurant were covered in signatures, cartoons, quotes, and promises to return from satisfied customers. We left our mark in a corner, saying, “We came because Rick Steves told us to, but we came back for seconds because it was THAT good!” So if you’re ever in Florence, go to Il Pirata and check it out.

Full and happy (have you caught onto this theme yet?), we set out to wander. We turned a corner and whoa—there was the Duomo. Unexpected. Unlike the outside of any building I’ve seen before or since. Gorgeous and gothic and gargantuan. We walked all the way around it, exploring the streets branching out from it, looking for a gelato place called Grom.

We gave up and sat down at a place right on the square that served waffles with their gelato. They smelled amazing, but Annie and I stuck to paper cups. Maura took the leap, though. The guy behind the counter, Beni, took to her immediately, especially after she mispronounced “vaniglia”. My turn was coming, though—I ordered chocolate and banana, and he mimicked the way I say “banana,” following it up with, “Ohhh myyyy Godddd,” the typical phrase for those who want to mock dumb American girls as seen on The Hills, etc. As we sat eating, Beni came over and asked us how it all was, saying “banana” in a nasaly, girly voice again. Cool. He then invited us to go to a student nightclub with him when he got off work. Maura took the lead on this one and said, “Oh, um, we have to go to bed early… yeah…” Nonetheless, he gave Maura his business card and told her to friend him on Facebook. When we went to the counter to pay, he gave Maura a significant discount on her waffle concoction. But when Annie followed behind her, he just said, “No discount for you,” and charged her and me both the full price.

Cool, Beni.

The next morning we packed up our bags, ate breakfast at a nearby “discount” place (where I accidentally ordered hot, foamy milk and had to drink it and pretend like it was what I wanted), and set out to see the rest of the city. We went back to the Duomo, and Maura watched our bags while Annie and I went in to look around. It was beautiful on the inside, too, and I bought my mom a snow globe—While You Were Sleeping, anyone?

We then spent a long time strolling the San Lorenzo market. Annie and I made a new friend from India, after telling him we were British, and he gave us matching friendship bracelets and offered us a discount on anything in his booth. Too bad it was all ugly.

I bought my sister some earrings and a giant wool scarf for myself. Lots of banter from the booth-keepers, and one guy kept yelling “Long live Palestine!” at us. Possibly because of Annie’s houndstooth scarf, but we’ll never know. The same guy offered us wine and discounts, but we politely refused.

After another gelato stop (pistachio and almond) we arrived at the Accademia Gallery. Again, there was absolutely no line, but they weren’t too happy with our giant backpacks and Maura’s rolling duffle. We left and found a nearby McDonald’s. Maura planted herself in a corner and watched all of our stuff so Annie and I could go back to the Accademia.

We got through without any problems this time, and started our visit in a temporary exhibit of Mapplethorpe, an American photographer from the 70s who idolized Michelangelo and strived to photograph humans so they looked like statues. After that exhibit, we turned into a couple rooms of paintings, which were pretty much the same kind of stuff we had seen over the past couple of days. We went through another doorway, and I looked to my left to see a bunch of half-finished statues.

Then Annie jammed her elbow into my ribs and said, “Look!”

I whipped my head to the right, and there he was.

DAVID.

In all my AP Euro and art education, I’d seen dozens of pictures of Michelangelo’s David. NONE of them captured what I was seeing in front of me. First of all, he’s seventeen feet tall—not life-sized, like I had always thought.

Second, I had only seen pictures from the front, which meant his face was always turned away from me, rendering his expression, well, boring. I’d always thought he was a bit overrated, to be honest.

But now, he was in front of me, in 360 degrees of marble glory. I slowly walked around him, mouth open in utter awe. I could see the joints in his toes, the veins in his elbows, the slight indention the slingshot was making in his shoulder.

When I came to a place where I could see him face-to-face, though, is when I fell in love. No wonder I hadn’t ever seen his expression before—it’s beautiful subtle. Unlike other representations of David and Goliath at the time, Michelangelo’s David isn’t standing with his foot on Goliath’s head, celebrating his victory. He’s gazing off into the distance, trying to calculate his aim and the difficulty and the wind and the noises of battle and the consequences of a defeat. He’s seeing the giant’s head appearing above the hills, he’s counting the seconds until he can release the fatal stone from his slingshot, he’s wondering why this impossible job has been left to him. He’s disconcerted, confident, and steady.

Annie and I found chairs against a wall that would allow us to just stare for a while. I felt as though my eyes weren’t big enough to take him all in at once. I half expected him to start breathing at any moment.

David was magnificent.

The rest of the museum was a letdown, but it didn’t really matter. It had a different floor plan than the others we had visited, so we’d go look at some paintings and sculptures and then ultimately return to stare at David a little longer.

After reuniting with Maura and a quick lunch at McDonald’s, we made our way to the train station to purchase our tickets and wait for the train to Venice. Annie and I struck up a conversation with the NYU kid sitting next to us while Maura searched frantically for an ATM that would accept her card, but his group found him and Maura returned unsuccessful.

We had positioned ourselves to see the information screen, and we were waiting for our platform number to be posted. Our train appeared… but no platform number. With eight minutes until departure, it appeared—Platform 9.

“Alright,” I said. “Let’s go.” Annie and I hefted our backpacks onto our shoulders, snapped the snaps, buckled the buckles.

Maura gasped. “I can’t find my ticket,” she said.

We stared at her for a moment while she began tearing through her bags.

“Is that a joke?” I asked (upon reflection, completely insensitively).

“No!” she said, her voice growing more frantic. “I thought a couple minutes ago, ‘Oh, I don’t know where my ticket is,’ so I found it and looked at it, and now I have no idea what I did with it!”

Annie and I took off our backpacks and looked through them, to make sure we hadn’t picked it up by mistake. Nothing.

I looked at the information board—our train was leaving in four minutes.

“Maura,” I said. “You have to go buy another ticket. Our train is going to leave!”

“Okay, okay,” she said, still furiously searching through her bags.

“MAURA!” I shouted. “GO BUY ANOTHER TICKET RIGHT NOW!”

“Okay!” she shouted back, and she ran to the ticket booth. Annie and I took the bags over to the platform and stood in front of the train. I had my eyes glued to the clock—every second that ticked marked an increase in my blood pressure. The adrenaline was pumping so swiftly that I couldn’t even keep still. I jumped from one foot to the other, unsure if I should burst into tears or incoherent screaming.

Maura emerged from the office, sprinting to the platform, waving her new ticket.

“Get it validated!” we yelled, pointing to the yellow box on a nearby column.

The machine, of course, wouldn’t cooperate, and it took Maura and Annie to wrestle the ticket inside and get the appropriate stamp. We looked at the clock.

One minute.

Annie and I were in coach 9—the very last one. We took off. With an internal frame hiking backpack bouncing on my shoulders, I ran faster than I have in a long, long time. I think I was on par to beat Usain Bolt’s record.

Maura disappeared into her coach behind us, and Annie and I clambered aboard ours, panting heavily. Amidst the stares, we found two seats and collapsed in them. The lady across from us assured us we were on the right train, and we breathed a sigh of relief. It took me the whole two-hour train ride to recover.

Part One: Rome

2010-01-14T03:13:00.000-07:00

I've been feeling guilty for a month now, due to my absolute inability to put words to screen in regards to my Christmas break. I have words on paper; I kept a detailed journal, but I just struggled to find time to get it on here. So I'm going to give you what I have, and promise you the rest is on its way. I wrote the following section on Christmas break while I was still actually at home, which just goes to show that this has been a work in progress. Read about Rome after the jump.

I've been home the night of the 14^th, and I’m going back on the 6^th. It’s been a glorious break of little brain activity and a lot of sunshine. I’ve baked a ton of cookies, watched movies and caught up on TV, played games, scrambled the rocks in Garden of the Gods, eaten as much Mexican food as possible, reunited with friends, enjoyed a visit from my grandparents, and generally forgotten that I should be reading Paradise Lost or some Oscar Wilde to prepare for next term. Oh well.

I did read one book for fun: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I heartily recommend it to everyone. Gladwell takes classic examples of success (i.e. the Beatles, Bill Gates, Asians who are good at math, etc.) and picks apart our preconceived notions of what makes someone successful. I’ll give you a hint—it has little to do with the individual. It’s a short read, about 285 pages, and Gladwell is a fantastic writer. I’ve forgotten how good it feels to stay up late reading because I want to—not because I have an assignment due in a matter of hours.

Anyways, I leave the Denver airport around 11am on the 6^th, spend a few hours in Canada (eh), and then land in Heathrow around 9am on the 7^th. On the afternoon of the 8^th, Teresa, one of my best friends from high school who is spending the year studying in Italy, is coming into Oxford. And the early on the morning of the 9^th, we’re going to Edinburgh, Scotland! We’re going to see some castle-seeing, and we’re hoping to meet up with a girl who’s friends with my friend Jessi. It should be a lot more relaxed trip than Italy was—definitely more vacation-y, and I’m really looking forward to it!

In any event, I’ll be back at the grindstone too soon, so I’ll give you the lowdown on Italy while it’s still freshish in my mind. Luckily I kept a journal, so hopefully I won’t miss anything too important. It’s under the jump!

It began in the wee hours of Sunday, December 6^th. Annie, Maura, and I caught a 1am bus to Stansted, and we arrived at the airport around 4. Surprisingly, we slept most of the way. At the airport, Annie and Maura decided they wanted some breakfast, and we had a little time to kill before our boarding gate was announced, so we found a table and they ate while we sat in full view of the flight screen. At about 5:15, the gate number appeared and we set off. No need to rush—we had plenty of time. But suddenly, we turned the corner and a new screen said Ciampino: FINAL CALL.

“Crap!” we yelled, and we hauled the rest of the way to the gate, scenarios racing through our minds of missing the flight, chasing the plane down the runway, and resorting to hitchhiking all the way to Rome.

But when we got to the gate, everyone was just standing around in a couple of lines. We got a place in one, purchased some bus tickets from the Ciampino airport to Termini station, and waited. And waited. And realized we were standing in the wrong line. And got in the very back of the right line. And waited. Finally, we boarded, and I was asleep before takeoff. I vaguely remember trying to fold my legs up in front of me after a snack cart crashed into them, and I kept hearing the stewardess walk up and down the aisle saying, “Ravashanties?” In my slumber, I remembered that this was another weird British word meaning “snacks,” but when I woke up I remembered that it’s not a word at all. It took me over a week, though, to realize she was saying, “Rubbish? Empties?”

I woke up right about the time we passed over the coast of Italy. The views out the windows left me with my mouth open and briefly wishing I hadn’t demanded an aisle seat. To the left, the majestic Italian Alps towered, snow-capped, over a sea of thick, swirling white fog. To the right, the sun was reflecting off clusters of little villages of white houses. After a few minutes, the landscape became more urban, and we soared over the Colosseum—our first view of Roma.

The bus ride from the airport to the station was also gorgeous—clear sky, bright morning sun, random ruins scattered among the green hills. When we got to the station, we had only about a five-minute walk to our hostel, Casa Olmata. It’s in a tall and skinny house dating back to the 16^th century, I believe, and a married couple runs it. We were pretty much the only people we ever saw.

After dropping off our luggage, we got some lunch at a nearby grocery store, faking our way through an Italian phrasebook, and then we went back to the hostel and napped. When we woke up we were ready to set out on an adventure, so we handed Annie, our genius navigator, the map and took off. We stopped at a corner, and Annie said, “Oh, we turn left here.” And when we did, the Colosseum was just staring us in the face! One second we’re going along a modern Roman road, and the next we’re in the middle of ruins.

The Colosseum was unbelievable. It’s about as big as a modern football stadium, but it was all built by hand. The floor has since rotted, but the walls creating the series of halls below are still in tact. Staring at this maze I couldn’t help but imagine it full of slaves and gladiators and lions preparing to meet either glory or death. There was even an elevator-like system to transfer the beasts from below to the floor. The lone gladiator would be standing in the middle of the floor with absolutely no idea which door to face—the attack could come from anywhere. We also learned that they had, in some cases, flooded the whole arena in order to reenact naval battles. I mean, these people knew how to entertain.

From the Colosseum we did a little wandering, trying to follow a self-guided tour in our Rick Steves’ book, but we got to the Forum and Palatine Hill right after closing. We decided to keep wandering, and we went past Capitol Hill, which is mind-bogglingly massive, and then we ended up at the Pantheon. It’s a massive, perfectly circular place of worship which has beautiful, intricate detailing not only all along the walls and columns, but also on the CEILING. Most of my shock during this whole trip was just trying to wrap my head around the fact that these gorgeous buildings were all created by hand, without modern equipment to even design them, much less construct them.

After leaving the Pantheon we were starving, so we found the nearest restaurant and each ate a whole margherita pizza. We were sitting outside on a patio area on a fairly busy street, so we were readily available to various street vendors. One in particular was a tall African man who kept trying to sell us carved giraffes and elephants… not exactly the kind of souvenir I was planning on bringing back from Italy. Anyways, after each destroying a whole pizza, we still had room, so we went to what is apparently the best gelato shop in the nation. It was absolutely packed full of people, and it took us a little while to figure out the ordering system, but we managed it and walked out of there eating some of the best gelato we’d have all week. Starting at that level gave us pretty high expectations, that’s for sure. With bellies full, we wandered back to the hostel through a shopping center, and we were in bed asleep by 10:30.

The next day, Monday, was one of the most epic days of the trip. I woke up at the crack of 7:30 in total mom-vacation mode—We’re getting up early, we’re eating breakfast on the road, we have to catch the metro at this time so we can be the first ones in line at the Vatican. We had plans to meet our friend Rebecca at 3 in front of the Castel St. Angelo, so I wanted plenty of time to enjoy the Vatican museum so we didn’t feel rushed going to meet her.

Well.

The first sign the day was going to go way differently than planned was when we had already been standing in line for an hour. We finally got to the Vatican—er, the line to get into the Vatican, at about 9:40. We avoided hordes of tour guides trying to wrangle us into skipping the line for a guided tour, but we were mountains that would not be moved. We even pretended like we didn’t speak English, and we ignored one particularly insistent guy for so long that he blurted out, “What the heck, do you guys speak, like, Japanese or something?” We managed to hold it together until he was out of earshot before we started laughing.

In line, we tried to keep ourselves entertained with the kinds of games parents employ on road trips to keep cranky five-year-olds happy—names as many countries as you can think of, alphabet celebrity games, etc. Then I took out Rick and decided to read about the Vatican, so we’d have a better understand of what we were going into.

Oops. His first tip—don’t go in the morning. In the afternoons you’ll miss all the crowds of guided groups.

His second tip—don’t go on Mondays. Period.

We were there on a Monday morning.

He also said a quick visit takes about two hours—to really enjoy the museum takes about four. What we didn’t understand is that the museum is basically one long hallway. Once you’re in, you can’t get out.

Well, we finally got in around noon. We took our sweet time going to the bathroom and getting our bearings, and we decided to start with a little side gallery so we didn’t have to walk all the way back after seeing the Sistine Chapel. When we got through with that, Maura wasn’t feeling well, so we got her settled in the pizzeria, and Annie and I set off to find the Sistine Chapel. It took us forever to figure out the one-long-hallway ordeal, so by the time we really got on our way, it was about 1:15. Rick wasn’t joking—we were blazing through these halls, finally ignoring every piece on the ceiling, and it was still taking forever. We saw Raphael’s School of Athens, which I learned about in AP Euro in high school, so I had a major geek attack.

But finally, finally we made it to the Sistine Chapel. Due to its recent restoration and a deal with the company that did it, no photography is allowed inside. That sure doesn’t keep people from trying, and the signs requesting reverent silence didn’t keep people from talking, either. We pushed our way in to the sounds of guards yelling, “No photo! No photo! Silence! Sh!” We found a spot in the middle of the floor and craned our necks. Creation of Adam, check. Last Judgment, wow. Five minutes, and we were gone.

After hustling through some modern art galleries, we were finally outside. It was 3:15. No sign of Maura. I took the map and set off to find the Castel St. Angelo, where we were supposed to meet Rebecca at 3. I got turned around immediately, and I didn’t find the castle until 4. Understandably, Rebecca had already left. I sat down on a wall to try to get my head on straight—I hadn’t eaten and was cranky and frustrated and, oh, by myself in Rome. I looked to my left, and St. Peter’s Basilica was RIGHT THERE. Geography lesson: The Vatican City is its own country, and it’s home to the Vatican Museum, the Pope’s house, and St. Peter’s Basilica. The whole thing is surrounded by a wall. I walked towards St. Peter’s, followed the wall up, and was back to the museum exit in 15 minutes. Meaning my meandering around the area looking for the castle was pointless. Cool.

When I found Annie again, she had just found Maura, whose phone had died. She had ended up going to an Internet café, finding one of Annie’s Oxford friends online, asking her to call Annie, and finding her that way. Thank the Lord Almighty for technology.

Reunited, we focused on finding food first and foremost, since we had a tendency to get snippier the hungrier we got. After dinner followed gelato, of course, and some shopping, and we found an Internet café that was only a euro per hour. It was nice to just wander for a while; we hadn’t realized how stressed we’d been since the trip began.

On Wednesday morning, I woke up early and went to St. Peter’s Basilica by myself. I got to catch a Roman sunrise, which served as an incredible backdrop to the walls comprising the courtyard of St. Peter’s. I got there at about 8:40, and the line was practically non-existent. And when I got inside, I was walking into a church—a holy place—not another tourist mill.

Rick told us, “To call St. Peter’s vast is like calling Einstein smart.” It’s all kinds of football fields long and high, and it’s home to Michelangelo’s Pieta, which is one of the most beautiful and heart-breaking pieces of art in all of history, if you ask me.

St. Peter’s was a powerful place. In addition to its relative emptiness and its enormity, there was a mass going on in one corner, so the congregation’s singing filled the building with a tangible, eerie holiness. The art on the walls, if not sculpture, is entirely mosaics—often replicas of famous paintings. The tiles are so small that from far away, it looks like a painting. Obviously, I was speechless, since I had no one to speak to, but I also felt thoughtless. I didn’t even know where to begin processing all that I was looking at. To think that my God couldn’t even fit in this huge and beautiful place actually made my heart pound a little faster. To think that this glorious feat of art and architecture, designed and constructed completely by hand, was intended to be a form of worship, to be a reflection of the beauty of God—and to know that it still doesn’t even scratch the surface—absolutely wrecked my mind. It was by far the most beautiful manmade thing I have ever seen, and probably ever will see, and it still isn’t enough.

When I had pored over every inch of the inside, I paid to climb inside the dome and inspect the ceiling up close and personal, all the while trying not to think about how high off the ground I was. Then I climbed up onto the top of the basilica, which overlooks all of Rome—nothing is allowed to be taller than it. I could also see the grounds inside the Vatican, home to some of the most luscious gardens I’ve seen—and it was the middle of December.

I got back to the hostel around 10, woke up Annie and Maura, and we ate breakfast and hit the road. We made it to the Forum, which is now just a field of ruins, but the platform where the Empire’s greatest leaders spoke is still there. That is the podium where Julius Caesar refused the laurel crown from Marc Antony. I stood staring at the platform and the crumbling pillars and willed my imagination to superimpose gleaming white marble buildings looming in front of me, hundreds of people wandering about, smells of summer sweat and dust from carriages. Whose footsteps was I standing in? It was too significant to grasp.

We spent the day crawling over every inch of the Forum and Palatine Hill, the hill where all the emperors would build their palaces. Its almost entirely ruins as well, but we went from wall to wall discussing floors plans, we descended stairs and theorized who or what was kept down there, we described scenes of ancient Roman pool parties and thrilling sporting events, and we wondered aloud who would one day be wondering aloud about us.

After lunch and a nap, we went to the National Museum. It mostly housed sculpture, and it was funny how each bust managed to take on its own personality in a room lined with similar works. And who knew how much historians relied on hairstyles to identify these people? A couple of the statues had motion sensor alarms that we accidentally set off a couple times. Docents immediately came to us and began to follow us from room to room. We tried to prove we were actually responsible young women who had just wanted a closer look.

We ate dinner at a Rick-recommended place called La Gallina Bianca, and while it was good, I’m still not sure it warranted nine and a half euros. Annie and I got gelato afterwards, and we ate it outside an Internet café while Maura checked her email and bank account. We got admiring looks and cat calls like you wouldn’t believe. Nothing like Italian men to boost the ol’ self-esteem.

Coming attractions

2009-12-15T22:11:00.001-07:00

I am currently sitting in my living room in Monument, Colorado. It's so great to be home. When I regain my strength and normal brain function capacity, I'll tell you all about the end of the term and my week-long trek across Italy.

Until then, enjoy these albums:

Here for the Christmas bop
And here for Italy

From the archives...

2009-12-02T11:02:00.002-07:00

Today I really miss Jewell. It's Hanging of the Green in Chapel, which means Christmastime at Jewell has officially begun.

I used to be a part of a collaborative blog that has since fizzled, but click here to read the post I wrote after my first Christmas experience at Jewell two years ago.
______________________

Tonight, in honor of Hanging of the Green, I tried to go to a carol service in the Sheldonian Theater. I had to go straight from tutorial, and entered the building by myself. I scanned the sea of faces for anyone familiar, but to no avail. I made my way to a seat, awkwardly perched in between two large groups of friends, and willed myself to be invisible. The band started playing, the smiles grew brighter, and the excitement tangibly filled the room.

But I grabbed my backpack and left. The thought of singing joyful carols amidst strangers, without the ones I love, didn't seem right. Didn't seem a promising way of beginning the Christmas holidays.

When I entered the library, I saw that someone had brought four packages of goodies and had left them on the middle shelf, with an encouraging note that was signed, "Christmas love, xx." No name, no need for attention, just a simple gift intended to make the Oxford work load a little more festive, a little more hopeful. And that, I think, is the perfect way to begin.

The Magic Formula

2009-11-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

I had trouble concentrating all day. I sat in the English Faculty Library for most of it, taking notes on esoteric postcolonial theory and willing my eyes to stay open just a few minutes more.

I took an hour-long nap this afternoon, which is short for me. With dinner, I drank a Diet Coke, and I bought one an hour or so later in the JCR bar.

The combination has been something fierce.

It is ten 'til five in the morning. I have yet to go to bed. I am alert, high-functioning, and feeling more productive than I have in several weeks. Why waste the energy?

Ballin'

2009-11-29T17:50:00.000-07:00

Where has the term gone? I’m inexplicably heading into 8^th week… and then I’m off to Italy for a week, and then I’m home for Christmas! Didn’t I just get here? I’m definitely looking forward to a break, but I’m so glad I get to come back to this place afterwards.

This past week was an absolute whirlwind, mostly revolving around the RAG ball on Thursday night. I spent my days reading Hamlet and King Lear furiously, trying to get my work done ahead of time so it wouldn’t be hanging over my head during the ball. I also spent too much time looking for a new dress, and decided in the end to wear the one I brought with me. So in the end, I only paid £11.50 to get my dress cleaned and to buy new tights, a headband, and a bracelet. Much better decision.

Thursday itself was a great day, even through all the stress of essay-writing. Since our rowing outing got canceled, we had a little team breakfast in the JCR, comprised only of CRUMPETS. Crumpets are a British phenomenon, whose closest American comparison would be an English muffin. Rosie and Fran were kind enough to buy them and toast them and teach us how to drench them in butter and smear them with jam… glorious. Perfect start to the day.

Thursday night the Americans gathered for Thanksgiving dinner at the Spencer House, where the Columbus State kids live. FOOD. EVERYWHERE. I haven’t eaten that much since… well, probably last Thanksgiving. Everything was so delicious—even the corn casserole Megan and I concocted. We had a Paula Deen recipe, but creamed corn and cornbread mix don’t exist in the UK, so we had to improvise. We used all regular corn and something called Rock Cake mix and some interesting kind of cheese and an oven that has its temperatures listed in Celsius. In spite of all this, Liz, the corn casserole aficionado, gave us an A+.

After stuffing myself, I had to get myself into my dress, put on some makeup, and Julia and I went down to the Town Hall for the RAG ball. RAG stands for Raise and Give—they’re an Oxford organization that raises and distributes money to different charities, and the ball was one of their big fundraisers. There were a TON of Regent’s kids there, and everybody looked gorgeous—girls in pretty dresses, boys in tuxedos.

As we walked up the giant staircase, a female a capella group called In the Pink serenaded us, and as we entered the Hall, we were greeted with a free glass of champagne. There were jugglers, musicians, ballroom dancers, and free food as far as the eye could see—Krispy Kremes, cookies, G&D’s ice cream, waiters circulating trays of sausages and quiche. Sadly, I was SO FULL that I couldn’t eat ANY of it! I was so disappointed, but I really felt like curling in the fetal position in the corner as it was.

A University jazz group played, and they were fantastic—definitely the highlight of the night. Two other bands played later in the night—the first was okay, the second I only stayed for a couple of songs, but they were good.

Here's the album for the night.

Friday morning came way too early, and I still had an essay to finish for my tutorial at noon. I have yet to write a paper I’m satisfied with, and this week was no exception. My tutor is absolutely fantastic, though, and we spent our hour working through a close reading of Hamlet, so I could get more of an idea of the approach I should be taking in my papers. Hopefully this week will be better.

Friday afternoon we had a tank session with our delightful rowing coach, and get this—it was almost enjoyable. It was surprisingly helpful, and we even got a compliment! After rowing for a bit, he said, “Easy there. Hm. That was actually pretty good.” Then the world ended. I finally feel like I’m getting the hang of it, and the season is over. Figures.

Last night the Regent’s Park gospel choir, of which I am a member, sang at Formal Hall and it was SO MUCH FUN. We sang two African spirituals from the balcony, and then after the starter we sang “Down to the River to Pray” and “Salve Regina” from Sister Act.

Once I got my food, I had to scarf it down, because we had Cuppers! It’s a theater festival featuring thirty-minute performances from all the colleges. It’s been going on since Tuesday, and ours was the last to perform. It went so well, and we had a packed house of Regent’s supporters. It was fantastic.

Saturday was so low-key. Slept til noon and felt like a new woman, then went to the Ashmolean Museum with Megan and Annie, and after two hours we hadn’t even seen half of it. I’m excited to go back eventually. Italy planning followed the museum, and we have almost all of the details nailed down! I can’t believe this is my life. I’ll be in ROME in a WEEK!

Today I cleaned, and as I left my house for our football game, I got a text saying it was canceled due to a waterlogged pitch. We rescheduled for a kickabout in the parks, and we ended up playing four-on-four in the mud and rain. It was awesome. My trainers are absolutely disgusting, and I spent my fair share of time sliding to the ground. Oh, vocabulary lesson time! Forget sweatpants—they’re called tracky-bums. The spelling is questionable. But work that into your next conversation.

After we played, we went to the Turf Tavern for lunch, since they agreed to sponsor us! They’re donating a bunch of money to help fund warm-up suits and the like. And they hinted that if we hold enough socials there, they’ll start giving us details.

By the time I got home, I was in the throes of hypothermia. I was soaking wet and freezing cold, and only a hot shower saved my life. I went to college for tea time, intending to do work, and instead watched Love Actually, which was fabulous, and ate pizza and sat around.

I’ve done ZERO work this weekend… and I have two essays still ahead. Oh dear.

Think you don't know Shakespeare?

2009-11-25T08:24:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Wikipedia, I just learned that The Lion King is basically Hamlet with some hyenas, meerkats, and wart hogs thrown in.

But if I remember correctly, Nala doesn't die... Simba doesn't die... Timon and Pumba don't die...