In lieu of a title, please picture me languidly waving

Well folks, today was that momentous and long-awaited day, the memory of which we shall pass on to our children, and our children's children, never forgetting the scope, the sheer magnitude of international importance conveyed by the blessed and august proceedings. That's right: the Royal Wedding.

Or, as Scotland has chosen to identify it:

You can't see it, but the subtitle reads "HRH Prince William and Kate Middleton's 4 day bender." Ahhh, Scotland. You scamps.

Many people here have made it unequivocally clear that they hold no truck with the royals. Republicans (it means something different in Britain), disgruntled Jacobites, super-cool Americans who think royalty is pointless but manage somehow to support professional hockey...all professed their intention to avoid the metropolitan shenanigans as they would a plague. A plague of semi-balding, over-bitten locusts. With publicly-funded charge accounts.

Anyway.

My reaction in the days leading up to THE EVENT OF THE CENTURY was a bit different. In my mind, the day took on a significance rather like the Hollywood Oscars (which when you think about it, really isn't all that different from royalty...the favorites always come out on top, the losers are immediately taken backstage and guillotined, and the nominees for best sound-mixing are forced to eat stewed horse meat while everyone else gets gilded breast of peacock. I might be confusing some of my history, but basically I think that's how it works). I wanted to watch the wedding for the pageantry, the dresses and, most importantly, the HATS.

AHAAA, what?! This looks like a cross-section of the female reproductive system. Uteruses down, my favorite of the day.

And on that note the wedding (or, rather, the procession to the wedding) did not disappoint. What I had neglected to consider was that this procession was headed for a church. An Anglican church. Inside of which was going to be held an Anglican church service. THAT I WAS GOING TO BE STUCK WATCHING AT 11AM ON A FRIDAY MORNING HOLY MOTHER OF GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Luckily, I was in a pub.

This is just a shitty picture. No, it had nothing to do with the state of my motor skills at the time.

Lemme tell ya, after a few mid-morning brewskies, it becomes a lot funnier that the American revolutionaries totally ripped off the English national anthem and threw it back as a paean to liberty and democracy. What up, original parody song?

So there it is, my intimate participation in the royal wedding. I honestly and wholeheartedly wish Wills and Kate--atherine the best of luck, because they are probably going to need it. Also, I'm a little bit hormonal right now.

White rabbits and a very Jewish Easter

So by normal people standards, very little was accomplished this weekend. However, by my low and increasingly lower student expectations, the last two days have been a positive whirlwind of activity. What this means is that I had one thing planned, in advance, that would get me out of my pajamas each day. Whew. I am exhausted.

On Saturday a friend and I took advantage of the fact that everyone else has low expectations of students, too. In the world of performing arts, these doubts as to the worth of certain studious young people has led to the development of the rush ticket, aka God's gift to the perpetual academic. In most towns, what rushing means is that students can show up to buy performance tickets a couple hours before curtain and get the best available seats for a set price--usually around $10/£10. A better term for this practice might be "the best flippin' deal on the planet." I have seen at least half a dozen different performances by rushing, and all of those together cost me less than a normal-price ticket to one of those performances would have run me.

So we rushed for "Alice," a new ballet commissioned by the Scottish National Ballet and based on Lewis Carroll's books.

It was...interesting. My take-away impression was that the staging was really inventive and the costumes were incredible, but that the zaniness of the storyline was (unfortunately) taken as a license for less than adequate choreography.This seemed to be reinforced by the fact that the really uncoordinated parts were the corps dances, when the entire cast was onstage. Overall, though, it was a very intriguing performance with lots of very, very nice partnering. And the above paragraph is an example of why I will never be hired to write dance reviews. Here are some pictures I stole, so you can get a sense of the costumes:

Alice, the Cheshire Cat and the White Rabbit

Cheshire, Alice, Mad Hatter and Humpty Dumpty

Queen and King of Hearts, and the Jabberwock (who was fabulous)

Tweedle-Dee and Tweedle-Dum

Then today was Easter! I am a long-time heathen baby, as my parents have affectionately (?) termed me, and so I made absolutely no effort to go to church. Instead I got a little bit drunk! Some friends and I made an Easter brunch of bagels and lox, fruit salad and mimosas. As there was more prosecco than anything else, well...you can't waste that shit!

Oh, also, we had crumpets...I mean, we are in Britain.

The stereotypical Jewishness of the meal only occurred to us afterward, but overall I'd say it's better to eat lox on Easter than lamb, which my family routinely does, and the irony of which never fails to amuse me.

Delicious with mint jelly.

After that, I had a bit of a lie-about in the sun and called it a day. Stay tuned for the future adventures of...the STUDENT: She eats, she sleeps, she sponges off of society!

Reflections on Friday night

In case anyone out side of six degrees is reading this blog, here are two things you should know about me. One, I do not get dressed to go out. This was already apparent back in the States, where my weekend, paint-the-town-red outfit was either whatever I had stumbled into work wearing that morning (ie, the closest I could get to sweatpants without actually having anything written across my bum), or actual sweatpants. True story. Then I crash-landed into a long-distance relationship, the upside of which is that now I really don't have to give a shit about my appearance ever. I know, I know--I could take some personal pride in myself. But ultimately it's a hell of a lot easier to just throw on some mom jeans and a pair of beat-to-hell sneakers and expect people to close their eyes if they are offended.

Two, I rarely get drunk. Oh, there have been times...times that I do not care to remember, which is good because some of them I can't. But most of the time, when I go out it is to have a few drinks, get a bit tippy and come home to bed well before anywhere close to closing time. The dawn stumble has never appealed to me.

So with these personality traits in mind, can I just tell you how much I FREAKING LOVE watching all the Scottish lassies going out on Friday nights here? It is like the circus. Their heels are so high and their skirts are so short and they are so completely covered in powder and/or bronzer...when they walk by in packs it's a bit like watching the lady centaurs from Fantasia.

But at least at the beginning of the night shit is mostly under control. Sure, there's the odd header on a stroppy cobblestone, and last night I saw a girl whose skirt was so short the crotch of her tights was visible as she walked. But, you know, on balance things are going ok. And then the bars close...

Last night on my way home I saw two women going at it (um, fighting) in the park. Both were screaming obscenities at each other at the top of their soused lungs, and one particularly erudite young lady managed to conjugate "fuck" as an adverb, which I didn't even realize was possible. Finally, as I watched, Louboutins attached Jimmy Choo, with the intention of scratching her "whoring little eyes out." Unfortunately, the added height from her monster heels seemed to have allowed her to overlook the (admittedly rather squatty) wastebin that stood between her and her nemesis. I watched in complete schadenfreuded glee as she gathered steam...

You know that epic football tackle when the guy with the ball jumps up to avoid a defender and then someone hits him in the knees and he flips completely over while in the air and lands flat on his back and then they rush onto the field with a stretcher? This was better. Girl went ass over teakettle over trashcan like she'd been shot out of a cannon. The best part is, I don't think she would have made it over without the added height from her heels. No, wait, the real best part is the way she immediately popped back up, clearly too drunk to notice that her shins had recently been sheared in half, and offered her frenemy a cig.

I love Friday night.

You'd think these people haven't seen the sun in eight months, or something. Oh, wait...

You know, pre-Copernican Europeans could be forgiven for thinking that the Sun could not possibly be the center of the solar system. I mean, if some loony star-gazer came over and told you that the Sun, which you hadn't seen around these parts in months, was actually the center of the known universe, you'd probably think he was a heretic, too. Come on, how can something that only deigns to show itself two months a year be the focus point of the heavens? What is this, the astrological wizard of freakin' Oz?

This nonsensical rant brought to you by wildly fluctuating levels of vitamin D coursing through my veins.

Anyway, what I am attempting to say is that, until yesterday, it had been a while since I'd seen the sun. And so when I woke up to light streaming through my windows, light that was not immediately obscured by giant rain clouds, I had two simultaneous thoughts: I now understand the Inquisition, and I'd better spend the day outside (What a day, what a day for an auto da fé? Preferably not).

So outside I went! Out and UP, taking the opportunity presented by clear skies to climb Arthur's Seat, the (other) volcanic protuberance that has occupied so much of my attention since arriving in Edinburgh. It was a gorgeous walk, surrounded by gorse and soft grass and rocky ex-lava flows.

When I got home, I looked up the history of the hill and its name, and...you know what? It's not all that interesting. Basically, an extinct volcano that may or may not have some association with a/the King Arthur. Call me when you find Excalibur up there. The best part of my research was learning that Arthur's Seat is one of several geographical features categorized as "breast-shaped hills," and reading through that list. Some people have an extremely liberal understanding of the breast.

Anyway, we had a good day out and about in the countryside, getting endlessly passed by German tourists, eating a picnic lunch and napping in the sun. I burned the shit out of my nose, but as this brings out the blue in my eyes, I've decided to view it as an improvement. The day ended with ice cream, which is a good way to end most things (and an extremely common ending in Scotland, which may love ice cream more than any place else on earth). Now we're back to overcast skies and drizzle, once again forcing me to sympathize with those establishment Pythagoreans who castigated heliocentrism and placed Galileo under permanent house arrest. Maybe they were just disappointed after the promise of a sunny day; if I'd been promised a heliocentric universe that did nothing to improve the weather, I would want to burn people at the stake, too, if only to keep warm. The lesson is, don't trust science.

I am not dead, nor was I sold into white slavery

Right, so, oops, I guess? As I am sure all of my loyal readers have tearfully, moaningly noticed, I kinda disappeared there for a while. I could try to excuse it--I have been telling all of my professors and aquantainces back in ole Caledonia that I was out of the country and in a place without Internet access (as if such a place exists; I think even the moon must have dial-up)--but the reality is I just checked out for a while. I am not going to pretend to feel bad about it. Maybe if this blog was part of a successful personal "brand" I would feel sorry for letting it languish, but then, in that scenario I would also probably have a personal assistant to write entries for me as well.

So yeah, I went back to Portland for a couple weeks, and it was wonderful, up there with some of the best days of my life. That's making it all the more difficult to adjust to being back in Scotland, and I might be unaccountably and inappropriately resentful of this place for a few days. I hope to have slept through most of it, as I was unconscious for twenty out of the last 24 hours. Up high! And I have some fun times to come and to share with my dear readers--trips to France and Denmark, visits from friends and family from home, the Fringe and other festivals. There are also some not fun times to share, namely the researching and writing of my dissertation. I wonder if I could just submit this blog?

So there it is. Today's task (and tomorrow's, and the next, I suspect) is to readjust to being here, and to remind myself that it is not Scotland's fault that I chose to move here just as I was falling in love with someone five thousand miles away. Because it wasn't Scotland's fault. It was the economy's. And, even if being here hurts right now, I am looking forward to all of the cultural experiences left for me to discover:

There. I feel better already.