Brace yourself

Those of my readers who enjoy coherent thought processes and reasonably sensible points that deserve to be heard may want to leave the internet for the present time, because this post is being attempted without any theme or organizing idea. I know--you thought that's what I did every time. Ohhhhhoooo no, friends, those posts are the result of HOURS of concept-mapping and an elaborately colored thought-blocking methodology. I bleed into my keyboard to come up with those pithy nuggets. MY FINGERS BLEED ELOQUENCE, DAMMIT.

This post, not so much.

Things have been very much same old, same old in the last week. I am still in Scotland. I am still underwhelmed by the intellectual offerings of this semester. I am still beset by the pedant king. I did get my grades back and will not be required to return early and sans diploma, which is reassuring in a way that contemplating trying to get a job with a masters in intellectual history is not ("And tell us, Ms. Hart, how are you qualified for this normal person job?" "Well sir, I can trace the development of natural law from its conception in 17th century German theology through to the late skepticism of Hume's philosophical solipsism." FAIL). So...mixed blessing?

I spend a lot of my time wishing away the next couple months. By the time April comes around, it should be warmer, and lighter, and I'll be engaged in writing my essays and thinking about my dissertation, which remains intimidatingly nebulous. Now that I understand just how unimportant my classes are for anything except bettering myself and expanding my mind (but the grade-whoring! What about the grade-whoring?!), I find myself doing more sleeping than reading, and filling in the blanks with whatever shit action movie happens to be on BBC iplayer. Also, Point Break? Classy film.

The Bella and Edward of yore. YORE, damn it.

What I seem to be suggesting is that grad school is making me dumber. This is concerning. Well lucky for me, I came home a leetle bit tipsy from my post-pedant tipple, and promptly emailed a favored professor asking him to meet with me and shoulder some of the responsibility for choosing my life path. If that's not a good way to solve all of my problems, well I don't know what is.

This might not be a good way to solve all of my problems.

Comforting things

In my last post, I desperately asked my readers for suggestions on how to break out of the funk I've been in recently. Because everyone hates me, I received only ONE suggestion, and am thus still mired in the deep blue of a pampered depression (that's mostly just me prosifying, but still). THANKS A LOT, PEOPLE.

However. That one suggestion was that I try cocaine fried up in some bacon fat. WELL. THAT'S A DAMN GOOD IDEA. Except that the only trouble I've ever gotten into in my entire life was in the third grade when I stole some Teddy Grahams from the snack cupboard and got my name written up on the blackboard! for the afternoon, and that basically scared me straight, and so now I have no idea where to find cocaine. Especially in Scotland, though I imagine Glasgow would be a good place to start. (Sidenote--can you imagine if, instead of the Teddy Graham incident frightening me into being the law-abiding person I am today, it instead kicked off a lifetime of crime and addiction? And I would go on Oprah someday after writing a best-selling memoir about my drug- and prostitution-addled life and tell the world that It was the Teddy Grahams, dammit! If only I had avoided the Grahams! I bet that would not help the toddler snack industry: graham crackers as gateway drug).

Ok, so the point was that I don't know where or how to buy cocaine. BUT I DO KNOW HOW TO BUY BACON! Actually, it's kinda hard here because the Scots, owing to their obsession with both meat and fat, have like eight different kinds of bacon available, so you have to know whether you need streaky bacon, or rasher bacon, or lardons, or joint of gammon, and then multiply that by permutations of smoked or unsmoked. So it's hard--but I can do it! And when you've been told by a friend to fix you life's problems with bacon, and also told by your mother in no uncertain terms that if you don't gain the weight back then, damn it, she's coming over with foie gras and a spoon to force-feed you back to normal, then there's really only one meal you can make: CARBONARA!

 
Aka, bacon pasta. Actually, that's unfair and stints the other ingredients, which are just as amazing: garlic, cream, eggs and Parmesan cheese. Oh, and pasta. Whatever. It was soooo good. Especially when the leftover sauce had cooled a little bit and you could scoop it out with a finger. I mean, GROSS. HOW COMPLETELY EXCESSIVE.

But the night was not just about the bacon pasta. Oho no. Because life is a sensory experience, and man cannot live by taste and smell alone. There's ears to be addressed. And thus, our fine meal was accompanied by the auditory version of crack:

It's like a middle school dance up in here.

The above is the music that I couldn't allow myself to like when it was current (I WAS TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL, MAN. And by "too cool for school," I mean that I went to a dork school. But I was too cool for the Backstreet Boys. Except for in my heart). Now that all of these songs are ten years old, liking them officially counts as "ironic," which makes them safe. Whew. Wouldn't want to risk my reputation on such a little thing as joy.

So, cocaine aside, the evening was quite a success. Hooray! How often do you hear anyone say that?

Perhaps in this, as in all things, I should lower my expectations.

Okay, so, look--I'm not proud of my recent negligence on the blog front. I don't have any excuses, except perhaps that I don't have any exciting or interesting news, and I seem to remember vowing to blog no more forever until I had something to say. Clearly, though, I need to set my sights on lower expectations--blogging less, about less important things. Boy, that sounds like a great way to gain readers, doesn't it?

I think part of the problem is that I have reached a comfort level here where I know the city, I know my classes, I feel reasonably certain that I know what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis and, really, there is no story in that. On the other hand, I could not feel less certain at any given moment that I have made the right choices, am in the right place, doing the right thing for a future that is still undecided. So I spend my time vacillating between smug stagnancy and manic, gut-wrenching insecurity, and by the time I settle back into a relative indifference during which I'm capable of even writing anything down, I feel fairly certain that no one wants to hear it.

Part of the reason for my unease is that I have yet to receive any feedback about my work last semester, and it's a little hard to put together a five-year plan when you have no clue about what avenues are going to be opened or closed to you. I would really like to talk to a few of my professors about what directions I should pursue in terms of PhD programs or career choices, but I'm reluctant to walk into an office feeling all, "Well, of course, Haavahhd," only to find out that my options are more IHOP. Not knowing how I've been doing is making it a little difficult to get started up again, and I'm doing too much sleeping and not enough reading (part of that is not entirely my fault, I would like to point out, as making a good-faith effort to do my law reading ends, inevitably, in sleeping. It's like textual tsetse). All in all, I spend a good percentage of my time feeling sleepy and underinformed. Great.

What I need is a boost. Short of a) getting back amazing marks or b) cocaine, I'm at a bit of a loss. Suggestions?

Please don't give up on me, gentle readers! If nothing else, Burns Night is coming up, and there will be all sorts of haggisy shenanigans to address!

And so I'm back.

Wow. What an...interesting...last few weeks. I write this from my room in Edinburgh, back in the land o' kilts and haggis, stricken with what is either the plague or bronchitis, and with more disastrous air travel under my belt than Amelia Earhart. The flights back actually went fairly smoothly, though I was worried UK border control would turn me away as a health risk; I held my breath and my coughing as much as possible during my interview, which may have made me come off as a bit of a weirdo, but not an immediate threat to public safety. Yay!

It was very strange travelling back from the Edinburgh airport this second time. Last September, I had left behind everyone I knew and loved, everything I knew and depended on, for a complete unknown. This time, I knew more of the incidentals--the city, the people I would be seeing later in the evening, where to go to get food--but I don't feel any more secure in my knowledge of the bigger things. I still don't know if I've made the right long-term choice in coming here, or how I'm going to do in the course of this program and my (supposed) future path, or what I even want to pass by and pass up on that path. In a way, it has been more discomfiting to realize that I still don't have the intimations of answers to these questions now than before; it seems inappropriate, somehow, and simultaneously self-serving and sacrificing not to have figured it out by now. I do know that I am happier now than I was before, but I wonder if maybe that is just the temporary contentment of pampering, if I'm not engaging in a sort of intellectual spa treatment before returning to my real and, ultimately, unavoidably dissatisfying life.

Still, it's good to be back in the mud-wrap of academia. My first class of the semester was auspiciously cancelled (auspicious both sarcastically and sincerely, because this class is taught through the law department and I am terrified of failing, in some broad and as-yet undefined way), and my second class "taught" by the king of the pedants, the aforementioned bane of my scholarly existence. That's unfair. I don't actually take him seriously enough for him to be a bane. Appropriately, he has apparently decided to take the same approach to me, and I realized over the course of the class that his new method of dealing with my unsuppressed disdain will be to let me say my piece and then immediately change the subject. We'll just see about that.

Now I have 600 pages of reading to do over the next thirty hours, and (seemingly) thirty hours of jet-lag for which to compensate. The realities of this equation have already begun to manifest themselves, as, in the last five hours, I've managed to read twenty pages without remembering any of it, take a four hour nap and eat a sandwich. This seems...less than commendable.

Here ends the blog post. I do solemnly swear to be better about 1) posting in general and 2) posting things that will be of greater interest to people who aren't me. After this one.

Bear with me

So I had very, very good intentions to keep blogging while  home/out West over the holidays, and those have all come to exactly naught. Part of me is justifying my failure with the explanation that, technically, this is a blog about my time in Scotland, and therefore this week doesn't count. Still, there's that lingering sense of guilt that I know so well...

Right now I'm a little focused on trying to squeeze in as much time with my friends and family as possible in my shortened stay. I guess I'd just like to ask all my faithful readers to bear with me, and I'll provide more of an update in a few days.

Happy New Year to all!