Legit wonderland

Apparently I have entered a productivity trough. The upside is that the blog suddenly appears to be a capital way of avoiding my work, much better than a third shower or another nap, and so new entries may abound as I gradually lose all hope of improving my schoolwork. Yay!

It has been snowing like crazy here since last night, probably five inches worth all told. I think, as long as I live, I'll rush to the window to see the snow falling outside. This morning a bunch of us walked through town to the castle, as it was supposed to be open for free because of St. Andrew's Day, but what did we find when we got there? That it was closed due to "extreme weather"! WHAT?! That's absurd! It's a freaking castle...it was built to withstand cannonfire, for chrissake, and it can't handle a little snow? I think this is a blatant attempt by the notoriously thrifty Scots to thwart those visitors who thought they could get around paying £10 to see Edinburgh's most famous site. Bejabbers.

St. Andrew...he looks like a party animal, doesn't he?

So instead we went to the city's German Christmas Market (what does that say about humanity--extreme weather may close down historical and cultural inquiry, but will never dampen the sale of mass produced trinkets. No, stop it...there's not to be any cynicism over Christmas. Goodwill toward men starts now). It was really, really fun, with the snow falling, all the lights, mulled wine...mmmmmmmmmmmm.



Now I am home and seriously considering that third shower, anything to avoid my work just a little longer...just a little bit longer...just...a little...

Edinburgh Thanksgiving!

Whew! Just now recovering from hosting Thanksgiving at the flat last night...I am thankful that it was a potluck, otherwise I don't think I would have made it. As it was, my flatmate and I drank our way through the preparations, we compromised with three ready-prepared rotisserie chickens instead of a turkey because none of us know how to cook whole poultries and we barely had enough food for the horde that showed up. Of course, I mean horde in the best possible way. A horde of friends.

Dinner was sooooo good, everything turned out really well, including my totally invented haggis stuffing. THAT'S RIGHT. I put HAGGIS in the STUFFING. It was delicious! A new classic is born; my father should be very proud.

About middway through dinner, the snow that's been predicted all week started to fall. So of course we totally bailed on cleaning up anything (sorry flatmates) and rushed out to walk in the stuff. Love snow. LOVE IT.



Anyway, this post is a little half-assed. I apologize. Hopefully the slideshow will adequately convey the madness.

And now it's okay to listen to Christmas music! Ps, Haley and I created a Christmas song playlist for while we were cooking, but I knew we were in trouble when she was searching for the best of Destiny's Child holiday albums, and I was hunting for Band Aid. Oh, those diff'rent strokes.

First time for everything

Today marks my first ever orphan Thanksgiving. I am feeling just a little bit sorry for myself, even though I had a very enjoyable evening, full of friends and scalloped potatoes.



Still, I am drunk on self-pity and mulled wine, and this post must needs be short and full of misty sighs. I miss my family tonight.

Also, if you Google "orphan Thanksgiving," you get this:

More than once.

Please, faithful readers, pour out some gravy for your intrepid blogger, so far from home.

Not that kind of wizard stick

So after what would be termed in the local vernacular "an absolute shite weekend" (the "shite" is pronounced like kite. If it helps to sing to yourself, "Let's go fly a shite," that is an acceptable pneumonic device), I needed some comforting. I needed to salve my broken spirit. Short of a ticket for one free re-entrance to the mythical womb, I needed to go somewhere warm and dark and slightly unnervingly sticky.

I needed, in short, a movie theater.

Lucky for me, they have those in Scotland! I know, right, quel surprise! And before you ask, no--the movie is not shown on a projection screen made by stacking sheep 10x12 like a Connect Four board. Jeez, people. Travel a little, why not.

And, doubly lucky, what happened to be showing in this totally modern, first world entertainment venue? ONLY THE CINEMATIC EVENT OF OUR TIME---

Not seen in this picture: the bacon sandwich that I ate in lieu of popcorn inside the theater.I told you I needed comforting.

It was, in a word, epic. And maaaaaybe a little bit like the world's longest, most awkward wilderness first date. But that's not the point. I cannot WAIT for next July!

Now it's back to the grindstone, producing papers and presentations at warp speed in a vain attempt to finally discover the proper ratio of panic-stricken haste toacceptable quality of work. Eep.

Update #1: My father has apparently read this newest entry and informs me that "'pnuemonic' I believe, is a phobia about catching pneumonia or something (which you probably have). 'Mnemonic' however, is the word you were looking for to describe a memory aid. Just letting you know that I'm paying attention." To which I reply, my brain is a FONT of creative ENERGY, and not a goddam dictionary.

Update #2: Walking home from the library, I came across a passle of men playing football--American football, helmets and all. This was apparently too much for the natives, many of whom stood around, pointing and taking pictures. Scotland--really? Just because it's called "American football," for lack of a more convenient singular name, does not mean it should be unknown outside of that country...or does it? In light of looming national holiday, please discuss.

Din-dins

So, remember that Harry Potter pub quiz I was so excited to go to? So excited that I actually changed OUT of my pajamas and LEFT MY ROOM, and convinced two other friends to meet me for a night of fantastic (hehe) trivia and chocolate and we had already decided our team name was the Blast-Ended Skrewts?

Well, I neglected to realize that the quiz was on Monday. On Wednesday.

By way of apology to the girl I so cruelly dragged into the cold with false promises of Rowling-bits, I invited myself over to her house so she could cook me dinner. I'm just that cool a person.

And it was yummy! Gnucchi, bacon bits (largons, if you're classy), mushrooms and spinach in a cream sauce, plus rose wine and cookies for dessert.

Makin' gnucchiesss...

Everything on this plate was cooked in bacon fat.

To wash down the bacon fat...gout, here I come.

Ah eated it all up.

(I don't have any pictures of the cookies because...well...if someone puts a plate of cookies in front of you, are you going to waste time taking a picture of them? I rest my case.)

Then came home, made a half-hearted effort at a paper, and watched cartoons. A good night. And, by my standards, positively wild and crazy (I'm lame). Must dash, off to confront someone about my railroading. I think I am going to use this as a visual aid to convey my distress:

Hearts and giggles,
Katie

Okay, now I'm just angry

So, I'm taking this class. It's the worst class on the planet. This used to be kinda funny--I'd show up, sit like a human lumpkin in front of some new and useless Powerpoint the professor had prepared on how to use a search engine, roll my eyes and make funny faces with my classmates. Sometimes we would go out for drinks after and calculate how much money we were wasting for each class we attended (£32); we speculated that these funds were being used to keep the professor in half-zip pullovers and hair gel. Haha.

But now? Now I'm mad. It turns out that the paper we are to write for this class, the only form of assessment that will be used for our final grade, which grade determines our ability to continue on to write a dissertation, without which this entire program is a giant failure...this paper needs to be written using the tools learned throughout the class, which were never imparted to us, and so now I find myself being instructed to write a paper using methods I haven't been taught, which will be used to assess how well I have learned those methods.

Friends, I believe the term for this situation is "railroading."

Aside from the inevitable failure that must result from such a situation, I am especially peeved because the research I did before I realized I was being asked to do the impossible would make a really, really good paper. This shit would be great. And now it's buried under some ridiculous synopsis of scholarship over the last forty years, because THAT'S so interesting it just makes me want to crawl under my bed and die. Like a possum. I just want to die under a rock like an animal.

This is not what I'm here for.

Wheeeewwww...

So, I spent most of Saturday being talked down off of the panic ledge...you know the place, where you've built the skyscraper of doubts and fears and possibility after possibility in your mind and then you step out to the edge of it and this is what you see:

Those cars down there? Those are the cars of failure.

Yeah. That's where I've been, only not in brogues. And in my mind.

But thanks to my certified board of American complaint handlers (not re-routed to India, thank you very much) I was able to take a few steps back, calm down, watch some cartoons...maybe this wasn't "dealing with the panic" so much as "regressing to childhood because of panic." Freud would know.

Anyway, got through the night, woke up, ate some eggs and POUNDED THE SHIT out of a rough draft of a paper. I mean, don't get me wrong, it's really, really rough, but it feels SO GOOD to just get it out of my brain.

As a reward, I would like to give myself the night off and watch a movie (I'm thinking The Exorcist; ever since that demonic possession lecture I've been wanting to see Linda Blair's head spin round, plus me and the romantic comedy are not on good terms these days), but I have 150 pages of republic motherhood stuff to read. Republican effing motherhood. Can you even imagine anything less pertinent to my interests? I like dead white men. That's what I like. Call me oppressed, tell me I'm not in touch with my inner goddess, I don't care. I like 'em dead, I like 'em white, and most of all I like 'em male.

Um, historically speaking.

So I'm a little peeved about that, but I can't quite bring myself not to do the reading at all. Maybe I'll skim it and then coast on the fact that I am a woman, and if the professor challenges me on my lack of familiarity with the assigned texts, I'll just spout off about female oppression. Or start talking about menstruation. That usually shuts people up.

Apparently, feeling succesful in my endeavors translates to blatant and unwarrented aggression on my part. Good to know.

I should have more interesting posts to come later this week because it's HARRY POTTER WEEK! In my mind this is like Rex Manning Day, but longer and with less sideburns.

Imagine with a wand.

So if you're a Harry Potter fan--and if you're not, I really don't know why we're friendly enough for you to know about this blog in the first place--more fun times to come!

Like rabbits

Ohmygodohmygodohmygod, I think they're starting to procreate when I'm out of the room...

Help me.

Moral superiority

I just realized that I have not ridden in a car or watched television in two months. I am officially better than everyone.

Remember, remember...

I had every intention of making this post extremely timely and topical by actually posting it last Friday, but that has clearly not happened. I blame education.

Why Friday, you ask? Because Friday was Guy Fawkes day here in Ye Olde Britaine! For anyone who hasn't seen V for Vendetta, Guy Fawkes was a member of a conspiracy to blow up Parliament in like the 1600s; he was also a Catholic (right? I actually have no idea, you should Wikipedia this). I do know the poem!

Remember, remember,
The Fifth of November,
The gunpower, treason and plot
I know of no reason
Why the gunpower treason
Should ever be forgot

Actually, the poem keeps going for several lines after that, but if no one remembers that part of it, it's clearly unimportant. As an aside, I am going to make a swell historian.

So to celebrate the lack of the lack of a parliament building, people light bonfires and shoot off fireworks, I guess to remind themselves of how much fun it would have been back in 1605 if Guy Fawkes hadn't been so FREAKING OBVIOUS about things ("What powder kegs? I don't see any...these things I'm leaning against? They're...they're full of apples. Yeah. Apples."). I walked with some friends to see the fireworks and hopefully catch an effigy burning or two.

Here's the thing about Guy Fawkes night. It's in November. In Scotland. At night. This all equals being blasted with the cold and mighty firehose of an angry God. So there were no bonfires. And fireworks alone cannot warm one's frozen toes.

This is what the celebration might have looked like, if the poem ran, "Remember, remember the 5th of September" (PS, I stole all these photos from the internet, but Guy Fawkes was going to BLOW UP PARLIAMENT, so let's have some PERSPECTIVE here, people):

If it's wrong to love effigy burning, I don't want to be right.

Post-Fawkes, there was beer, and the drying of hair. Then I spent the rest of the weekend ensconced in my room, reading about the wilderness and British Jacobins. Word. I did leave to get doner kebab, which, if anyone wants to know what to get me for Christmas, a handheld electric meat shaver would be very nice.

Oh hells yeah.

Now it's back to the ole grindstone. Keep checking in; I promise, eventually something interesting will happen. It has to. It...it just has to.

I learned about demonic possession! And made a new friend! Um...not related.

As if I have time to be learning anything outside of the papers I'm supposed to be writing, I went to a lecture last night on the topic of demonic possession. That's one helluva sexy topic, am I right, people? If you walk into the American History Association and by way of introduction say, "Hello, I'm John Doe, and I work mainly on demonic possession," well a. you just completely shut down the game of that guy studying the relationship between Northern European weather patterns and tribal migration in the Iron Age, and b. you win the conference. You....you just WIN.

So I had some high expectations of the lecturer. And dammit if he wasn't the biggest glop of weirdsauce on the planet. His whole point (an hour later and couched in every single postrstructuralist keyword ever invented, with one glaring, though reasonable exception: liminality) was that maybe when historians are studying someone who claims to be possessed, they should treat that person as being, in point of fact, possessed. Um, thanks. I do take his point, though, that historians, despite the overwhelming move toward social/cultural histories, are the last people to accept that eventually, if enough people believe something, it becomes functionally, if not actually, true.

Anyway, the best part of the lecture was his monotone description of the symptoms of demonic possession. Did you know that one of the signs is vomiting hair and/or needles? I did not! Also, I just tried google imaging some of the symptoms but...I couldn't handle it. You've all seen The Exorcist, I'm sure. Just picture poor little Linda Blair puking the devil's tresses.

After the lecture I went and got a drink with one of the girls from my American Revolution class. We'd sort of been circling round each other for the last couple weeks, before finally asking each other out, and she's awesome! So excited to meet a new person (whose knowledge of French, both language and revolutions, I may incidentally be able to shamelessly exploit...everyone wins! Mostly me).

So a good night, aside from the inevitable hacking and coughing and phlegming that accompanied me everywhere I went. Really must get rid of the flu-stricken hunchbacked butler I've been keeping around.



Unrelated:
This is mostly funny because of the Britsh accent. Most things are. Ever so slightly NSFW.

There's something about Scotland...

...that is conspiring to keep me in ill health the entire time that I am here. Thanks. Thanks, Scotland.

Update: I talked to my mother about six hours after I wrote this. Apparently I am no longer allowed to allude to health scares, threats to physical safety, mental instability or general unhappiness in this space without full explanation and assurances that I AM aware that the sun'll come out tomorrow. I therefore hereby acknowledge that, while temporarily laid up with a common (oh, tragically common!) cold and a bit of a paper-related panic attack, I do recognize the validity and value of my time here.

Geez.