Nonsense, Drivel, and Balderdash

Well, this year thanksgiving was not spent with a family of any sort. While friday some of us american students made some food, this year, the last thursday of november was spent turkeyless. I was resigned to spend the evening alone, thankless, and in the library researching classical rhetoric or some other nonsense when my friend Kate called and said that it wasnt right to be cooped up, without food or drink or merryment of any sort on thanksgiving night. Looking around me at the pasty faced nerds that were with me in the library at 9 PM, I realized that indeed I needed to get out of that scurvy place. So I packed up my books and headed outdoors, where the blistering british wind buffetted my body like the abusive parent I never had. After introducing the wind to the social services that was my scarf I headed over to the Kings Arms pub to meet up with Kate. There are quite a few Kings Arms pubs in England. No, they are not franchised, they all just have the same name. The name comes f...

The new Sigur Ros draws mixed feelings from me. In many ways it is like Woody Allen's later movies, they are still better than 99% of what Hollywood spits out, but compared to some of his older ones they just don't cut it. Yet perhaps that is a bit harsh. This is a very good CD. Very good. Sigur Ros does what it does best by capturing pieces of rising and falling emotion, minimalistic sounds and epic, orchestral swells. Otherworldly vocals move over fantastic musical arrangements.... But something is missing. Each track in itself is complete and whole, perfect. Yet the album as a whole does not have that same flow as () or Agaetis Byjurn . The latter of the two previous albums creates an intangible and indescribable mood, a flow, a musical emotion that starts of whimsically and progresses with bombastic enthusiasm only to finally settle down into a drowsy sleep, protesting out of principle yet not putting up a fight as it smiles into its finish. () is another kind of mood alt...

So I'm sitting in the library, when suddenly I think my time has come. The smell of burning sulfur fills the air, smoke obscures my senses and I am sure that ye ole devil is going to appear at any moment to eat my soul. But he didn't. I just sat there, confused and sniffing smoke. "From whence cometh this foul stench?" I wondered to myself (most of my reflexive questions are in archaic English). That is when I stopped looking around me and simply looked down at the desk where I was sitting. Smoke sizzled up from the back part of my computer. "This looketh like trouble, methinks." Turning the computer around I was relieved to find that it was not the computer itself, but the power cord. The cord in question has seen some abuse in its lifetime, and this older design has been known to break easily. So I unplugged the infernal cable and the hellfire stopped. But now I am left with a powerless computer. Alas, though it is off for now (I write from the library one...

A couple of nights ago I was dressed up in my tuxedo, waiting outside of Magdalene College's Theatre, in the dark, in the cold. I was in a line, yet I was not waiting for tickets or to get to my seat, I was waiting for my queue to walk in behind the rest of my jazz group. Yes, we had what I consider our first real concert (after a small gig for charity and a set we sang for a college banquet). We sang a total of 9 songs, mostly jazz standards and a couple jazzed up popular songs, which considering that we had only first met each other 4-5 weeks ago... is not half bad. Our show was only half good however, for we messed up bits and pieces and we were not tight. That was a shame really, because, as tends to happen in these things, we had sounded pretty good in various different rehearsals. But I know that time heals all wounds, and when that time goes towards extra practicing it heals the musical gashes that we have at this particular moment. It was still fun though. I am getting to ...

In her book, Women, Men and Language, Jennifer Coates points out that men and women have two different kinds of conversational styles. Women speak in a collaborative style while men speak in an adversarial one. This means that the speaker in a collaborative conversation is much more likely to switch back and forth in turns, with many more interruptions and intercalated comments delivered by various different members of the group. The “rule of one person-at-a-time does not apply,” it is a “jam session” of words where “the speakers co-construct utterances” and “that the speakers talk at the same time.” Men, on the other hand adhere to a adversarial method of speaking. This takes different shapes, such as the monologue and the verbal sparring. In the first method, one person holds the floor about a subject as if he had some expertise on the subject while others listen. These monologues are often brought on by direct questions seeking information, a kind of questioning that women tend to s...

I have recently had a strange idea. Do you know the movie Groundhog Day? In it, Bill Murray finds himself trapped in one recurring day, doomed to repeat the same day every morning when he wakes up until he gets it right. The other day I imagined that the same sort of thing happened to me, only in a different way. I wondered what it would be like if instead of a day I had to repeat my gordon years over again. 3 consecutive years played over and over again. What would I do differently, what risks would I take knowing that I could start over again once they were up or I were dead? I must say that I didnt really play it out as if it were a permanent thing or even such a lasting event as the one Bill Murray had to endure. Just give me a couple chances, 2 or 3 times, to go through Gordon again and try different things. Knowing what I know now, who would I not bother investing my time into and who would I try to get to know much earlier than I actually did? I mean, everyone has had people in ...

Since I've been here I've tried to take advantage of my environment as much as possible. And I mean this in the non academic way. During my free time I really do all the stereotypical things that people do here. I dont know if I am doing them consciously or not either. I dont know if it is because they are things I would normally do or because I am merely here. There are some that I would do normally anyway, such as going to Pubs. I am amazed that more of the Gordonites here do not do it. Its not that they dont drink, there is one group that has wine with their meals, other people have a beer or something on poker nights, and of course you have your binge drinkers. But few go to the pubs. I understand that if you are a binge drinker looking to get smashed then the pub method isn't a financially feasible way of doing so. At first I thought that if you didnt like beer then you probably wouldnt go to pubs, but all the girls that do go with me usually get a glass of wine. So ...

This morning I woke up pretty impressed with myself. You see, last night I invented great things, in my dreams that is. It is one of those things that people rarely think of but that nonetheless is true: You are the one that comes up with everything you dream. So just think back upon your craziest, most original and outlandish dream and realize that it was your imagination that came up with the idea. Don't you feel sort of proud of yourself? The reason I was impressed with myself is that I invented a kind of food in my dream and then when I woke up I really wanted it. In my dream I went to the supermarket to get things for my flight and I was looking at the teddy grahams and I saw that they had a new kind. It was called "caramel snicker-doodle." In my dream I was surprised because I had never seen that kind before but was instantly interested (obviously, I mean, I came up with it!). But when I woke up I realized that it would be a very tasty flavor for teddy grahams that ...

I spent quite a while reading in the library today. Or so I would like to tell myself. I have had a love/hate relationship with the libraries here. The famous Bodleian library is off limits to the Gordon students during most of the day because of our affiliate student status. Our hours begin around dinnertime. During the past couple of weeks, many of us occupied our days in the Faculty Libraries (faculty being the British term for Department). I technically did not have access to it either, but they did not have anyone checking the doors, and I did not see anything saying I could not just go in and read without trying to check books out. Then the directors of the program found out and decided to damn our souls to the everlasting fires of hell for our unforgivable sin of not respecting bureaucracy. Today they told us that they had not realized that the rules had changed, and that "oh wait," we could indeed use those libraries as reference libraries. Go figure. So anyway, toda...

Life has the sweetest ironies ever.