A perfect ending is still an ending

This is Phil.  Phil was one of the first friends I made in Trinity Hall, being a year ahead of me in the English PhD.  He had a rough time in the run-up to submitting, as you may recall.  However, he recovered his peace of mind in the following weeks, and yesterday he passed his viva (defense), as we all knew he would.  Celebrations were in order.

Over the course of the evening, many friends came and went, sharing their congratulations and joy over a pint or a whisky.  We made our way from the Castle down to the Maypole and finally made a quick stop at the ADC (theatre) bar, whence we departed in search of greasy food and at last collapsed into chairs in the MCR sometime between 3:00 and 4:00 in the morning.  When we realized we were all essentially falling asleep, we called it a night (or a morning?).  This morning, I helped Phil schlep his luggage to the taxi and sent him off with one last hug.

Since then I've just been poking around in a glorious, golden afternoon, waiting for Boat Club Dinner tonight and feeling a bit melancholy.  It's a funny feeling, that sedate little sadness, because it's not entirely sadness.  I'm so, so happy for my friend and proud of him both for writing a superb dissertation and for pulling through a difficult time.  I'm grateful that I was able to be there to support him when he needed his friends, and I'm touched by his earnest admonition that I call on him for the same kind of help if I ever need it, any time of day or night.  I had a wonderful time celebrating; it was the perfect end to his time at Cambridge.  But a perfect ending is still an ending.  As a fellow Tit Haller put it, "Phil is the MCR; I can't imagine it without him."  The beauty of the feeble amber light in the sky and the hush of college now that term is over just added to the perfection of a day that marked a chapter's closing.

10,000 ways not to make a lightbulb

Supposedly, after trying hundreds upon hundreds of materials that might make a bright yet durable filament for incandescent lightbulbs, Thomas Edison said something to the effect that if he tried 10,000 things that didn't work, he had not failed, he had proved that those 10,000 didn't work.  The quotation has morphed with repeated telling to this pithy version: "I didn't fail, I found 10,000 ways not to make a lightbulb."

Recently, I was talking to a friend who is going to defend his dissertation soon (the same one who was so stressed before submitting -- see earlier post).  It struck me that there are many ways to write a PhD on any given topic, and part of why the process is so frustrating is that you are faced with 10,000 narrow, faded footpaths trailing off into the woods and you have to pick which dissertation you're going to write.  This involves venturing down a lot of dead ends and falling down the occasional rabbit hole before you settle on a solution.  It's a process of discovering and/or choosing all the ways not to write your dissertation.  Even then, you may be haunted by the ghosts of the 9,999 dissertations you didn't write.

I suppose a better analogy is Robert Frost's poem 'The Road Not Taken,' which is so often abused and oversimplified.  The point is that "both [roads] that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black"; one path isn't better than another, but no matter which one I choose, "I shall be telling this with a sigh, / Somewhere ages and ages hence."  In my friend's case, he wishes he had included more of certain primary and theoretical works on his topic.  Me, I wonder whether I did the right thing by slicing thinly (one-word examples) across a massive corpus of poetry.

Singing evensong in Queens' chapel

However, I'm feeling much more optimistic this weekend than I have since -- well, since the summer, really.  The summer months were consumed by two articles I was putting together, and ever since I've been slogging through the Slough of Doctoral Despond.  I could not figure out a way to bridge from lists of tiny examples to a narrative or argument -- and that's still a concern, one which looks to be resolved by means of an appendix.  But more importantly, in the process of trying, I produced a chapter-sized blob of text that my supervisor actually liked.  Gasp!  Say what?

I'm honestly still confused about what was different this time, especially given that much of the text was unrevised stuff he'd seen before.  Still, it's incredibly gratifying to hear him say that this now seems like a project that won't just "get through" but could be something really strong.  Huh?  And then there was one paragraph I had written about an idea that I liked but couldn't think of any way to expand; he thought this little thing was thoroughly original and should be an article in a major journal.  Come again?

My task now is to draw up a schema of everything that remains to be done.  *Deep breath*  What a difference this good feedback has made, though.  I celebrated that evening by making the most of a special joint evensong with Queens' College choir in their chapel, followed by formal (dinner) and drinks in the bar... and the Tit Hall MCR... and sleeping luxuriously late the next morning.  There may be 10,000 ways to write a dissertation, but it seems I'm finding mine.

Look it up

As my brother will be happy to tell you, I spent much of my childhood sitting lengthwise on the loveseat, reading.  Consequently, my mom's household tasks were often punctuated by hollered conversations such as:

Sarah: What does 'bough' mean?
Mom: Spell it?
Sarah: B-O-U-G-H
Mom: A large tree branch.
Sarah: Ooooh, ok.  Thanks.

I could say so much about how great my parents were at encouraging reading, but that's a rhapsody for another time.  Today, I'm pondering one branch (bough?) of the phenomenon, the result of Mom starting to say, "Look it up."  You see, our household was among the last generation to have bought a full set of World Book Encyclopedias -- gilded paper edges and all -- and from a door-to-door salesman, no less, if memory serves!  This set included a two-volume dictionary, and as I got older I was increasingly referred to the bottom shelf of the bookcase to answer my own questions.

As a PhD student, I'm perpetually driven by the need to "look it up," but at the same time, that long-trusted process is supposed to be only the first step.  My supervisor is always pushing me to go beyond quoting other critics and disagree with them or at least assert something new.  This is what I struggle with just now.  I feel most confident in the "newness" of certain kinds of research, which in fact is just more looking it up.

For example, in one of his college-age notebooks, Tennyson made a little glossary of words from Old and Middle English.  I've transcribed it and am doing some detective work to create a list of his sources.  I'm then checking a concordance to see which little gems from his treasury he dropped into his poems.  Meanwhile, as I read through his Arthurian poems, the Idylls of the King, I collected samples of archaic words he used to give them a medieval flavor.  This is stuff I'm fairly confident has not been done.  But in the end, it's just information gathering.  What I then say about how that should influence our understanding of Tennyson's poetry is... shall we say... under development?  Or just underdeveloped.  Still, nothing solves blockage like a deadline, so I hope I will have something resembling a rough draft by the time I go home for Christmas.  Then commences ALL THE EDITING.

Academic anxieties

This is what you get for taking
a cat nap near your friends.

Fear not, dear readers, I'm not in a panic about anything at the moment.  But I know some people who are.  Their PhDs are due imminently, and they don't feel ready.  One in particular has gone off the deep end, and it pains me to see it.  Actually, a more accurate metaphor would be that scene in "Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves" when Little John thinks he's drowning and Robin just says, "Put your feet down."  Turns out he's in about three feet of water.  Those who have rallied around my friend are trying to get him to put his feet down and discover the shallow depths of his problems, but in his mind-numbing dread, every molehill becomes Mount Everest.  Finding a moment when a critic he has roundly panned briefly agrees with his own conclusions does not, in fact, mean that his entire thesis will come unravelled.  I've read two of his chapters, and let me tell you: if I manage to tell a story with half as much clarity, precision, ingenuity, shrewdness, and beautiful turns of phrase as he has, I will count it a victory.  Unfortunately, by definition, you can't reason with irrationality.  All we can do is be firm and practical and give him hugs and tea.  By this time tomorrow, I hope all will be well -- assuming we've managed to wrench the thing from his trembling fingers.

Will I be this way when it comes time for me to submit?  All I can say is I hope not.  My closest academic friend/colleague here is a guy named Ian, who's at my college and doing a related topic.  I said to him the other day, "When it's our turn, we'll have to --"

"-- have a suicide pact?" he completed.  Uh, no.  I was going to say "keep each other sane", but you know, failing that...

So in the spirit of airing one's anxieties rather than letting them ferment and foment, I thought I'd lay out some of my concerns as I stare down the straightaway to "finishing" (i.e. giving up on) my dissertation.  Things that are particularly worrying given that it's my fourth year include (but are not limited to) the following:

The Anxieties

• I still haven't read volume 3 of Tennyson's poems, and I definitely need to re-read vol. 2 in great detail.  As a result...
• I still don't know which poems to talk about in detail.  I have amassed a large number of tiny examples sprinkled across many, many poems.  How do I avoid just listing them?
• A lot of the most interesting stuff seems to happen in poems that he either didn't publish, fixed up before he did (thereby deleting the interesting things), or that generally weren't big hits.  Partly to counteract that, I've got a "greatest hits" chapter, meaning...
• I'm going to have to talk about In Memoriam, about which there are a lot of books, some of which already have chapters about philology.
• While the biographical and thematic connection of philology to Tennyson and poetry in general is pretty easy to prove, I'm struggling to say anything about his actual work that is different from what you'd say about any poet.  Poets like to play with language; that's why they're poets.  It catches your notice when, say, T. turns a noun into a verb, but when he writes of "the blackness round the tombing sod", is that because of the idea that nouns are the most solid part of speech?  And even if the answer is yes, you don't need to be an amateur philologist to think that.

I think that's all the big stuff.
What has struck me as I talk to people about their work is how we each have our own methods of producing the same basic thing.  Even though their approaches don't generally affect how I proceed, I always come away inspired to get back to work.  For example, a chat with Ian about the anxieties above sparked some ideas about how to acknowledge them in the introduction.  Here it is, a glimpse of what a very early proto-draft looks like for me.

With the years I've come to fear losing any flow of thought, given that they're so rare!  Consequently, I put in place-holders and highlight them in yellow so I can't possibly forget to fix them later.  Things I'm thinking of deleting I highlight in gray. I confess, it kind of amuses me to see what amounts to an academic MadLib; I wonder whether it would still work if, like when we were children, I filled in every blank with "toilet".  Something to keep in mind as a last resort when I'm in a panic at the last minute.

Illusions

This is a topic that has been coming up a lot lately in everything from online videos to social research to opinion pieces, but to restate the case: social media create environments in which it's very easy to see the glossy surfaces of other people's (apparently) near-perfect lives.  As a net result, researchers tell us, things like facebook actually make us feel sadder, more alone, and less accomplished.  I'd like to point out that it's not entirely because people consciously construct a braggy version of their lives to show off.  In a very good online essay (see here), someone drew a Venn diagram* about facebook posts.  One circle was things that matter to the poster and one was things that benefit the reader (a funny link, etc.).  An ideal post covers both, whereas purely selfish posts -- either too positive or too negative -- are annoying.  Consequently, we try to strike a happy balance; something good happened, but be self-depricating about it; or you're having a rotten day, but express it in slightly cartoonish terms of dismay.

*Did you know Venn was a Cambridge alumnus and compiled a massive list of all known alumni from the beginning of the university to his own time?  He was at the college next door, Gonville and Caius.

Our folders are pretty on the front
and completely impractical to use
in performance.  I may donate money
someday just to get functional ones.

This self-evident truth -- that we're broadcasting curated, polished versions of our lives -- was brought home to me when I was catching up with hometown friends in August.  When I expressed some anxiety about being behind on certain landmarks of adulthood (they're mostly getting married and/or buying houses), they pointed out that based on my online presence, my life is the envy of everyone back home, friends who are perhaps working uninspiring jobs, who have precious few occasions to wear black tie, much less eat a formal dinner twice a week.  It came as rather a shock to them when I said that I'd been miserable most of last year.  Because I didn't post pictures of myself sobbing on my co-captain's shoulder (literally) or the nasty note someone wrote on my dinner program out of childish spite.  Why would I?  Let's just say that it was very therapeutic to delete hundreds of emails this summer and distance myself from the stressful year they represented.  No one who had a conversation with me during the last 12 months escaped hearing the truth of my situation, but those who only viewed from a distance had no clue.

In short, I hope that I haven't been too happy-slappy on this blog, but to the extent that I have given a false impression of my 'perfect and fabulous life', I apologize.  On the other hand, my mom reads these posts (hi, Mom!), so I can't say I'll be unleashing the full force of suckage when things are going badly.  But I'll try to be honest about the ups and downs.

One major up recently was the chapel choir's tour to Brittany in northwestern France during the last week of August.  One enterprising member of choir created a Twitter feed for the occasion; it's @TrinHallCC if you're into that kind of thing.  It will continue to be our feed as the year progresses, and even non-Twitter folks can follow it here: https://twitter.com/TrinHallCC/

Trinity Hall chapel

The trip was great for group bonding, and I found it pretty exciting musically.  You see, we normally sing in the smallest chapel in Cambridge (or Oxford, for that matter).  It's a "dry" space, meaning basically no echo.  It's a bit like singing in a closet.  I actually love our chapel, but suddenly we were singing into big, stone churches where the sound lasted for many seconds after we stopped singing, and our voices blended into a whole new thing.  It's incredible what our director accomplishes with twenty-odd people, none of whom have perfect pitch!



I've put together a little video to go with a recording of one song from our first concert.  It's beautifully heartrending, yearning music.  Here are the words:

Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts.
Shut not, shut not thy merciful ears unto our prayer,
But spare us, Lord.  Spare us, Lord most holy.
Oh God!  Oh God most mighty,
Oh holy and most merciful savior,
Thou most worthy judge eternal,
Suffer us not, suffer not at our last hour
For any pains of death, for any pains of death
To fall, to fall from thee.  Amen.

The Ideal

I've read exactly two works by Plato.  One is Cratylus, which is a debate about whether words are arbitrary sounds that we all agree to assign to objects or whether they have some inherent correctness in naming the things they represent.  It has lots of yummy quotable bits about how language works, and it's great for my dissertation.  The other work, which honestly was a struggle back in college, was Phaedrus. In it, Plato spends lots of time explaining that every physical object in the real world is just a spin-off of an ultimate, pure form or idea that exists... somewhere (I never grasped where).

At the risk of being obnoxious, if the Platonic ideal of the academic life exists, I may be living it right now.  The tourists have mostly gone away from Cambridge, and I have the month of September mostly to myself, with literally nothing scheduled all day but to get on with work.  Much of the time I'm accompanied by my best buddy here, Martin.  Here's a picture from when we went hiking in his hometown in July.  There are a few fourth-year PhDs who are quietly panicking in the lead-up to submitting in a few weeks, but otherwise it's very peaceful.  Perhaps too peaceful -- I'm not getting much done, to be truthful.  But it's nice to be able to sit in the stillness for a bit longer.

In order to stave off panic, I've drawn out a calendar on a single sheet of paper that lays out everything between now and winter break.  It makes it seem possible that I'll get a full draft of this unwieldy thing by December.  I'd just feel better if I were making more hay while the sun shines.  That's a purely metaphorical sun, by the way, because about a week ago, someone upstairs flipped a switch and gave us mid-October after beautiful shorts weather.  Sigh.  Still, even rain on the river is pleasant in the private silence of having a floor of the library to myself.  Except that my tummy is squawking right now, so I think I'll join the MCR tea & cake gathering that's starting in a few minutes.

Stay tuned for my next installment, in which I make up for the 'image crafting' to which this blog contributes and give you a pretty piece of music.

Summertime, and the livin' is -- easy?

Well, the livin' has been regulated and fairly relaxed, anyway.

I'm back in England after a month at home.  During that time, I found a very pleasant routine within which to work on the clump of items all due very soon.  I worked at my desk, reading and writing by the light of my courtyard-facing window, I did something to exercise around five o'clock, and then I'd have fun in the evening.  I also spent a week visiting my brother's family in Boise, during which I was more or less the official entertainer of my three-year-old nephew Jack while my parents helped with five-week-old niece Grace.  What can I say?  They're adorable, and I adore them.  And kids are tiring and demand all your attention.  I wasn't too sad to get back to my own affairs, but a mere three days saw me back on the plane to London.

So here I am under the British clouds once again.  It's a drizzly day, which I don't mind in itself -- in fact, it makes it a rather cozy job to scuttle around the library chasing citations.  It's still warm, and it's actually quite lovely autumnal weather.  But it's AUGUST.  This is not okay.  But, well, I'm not sick of it yet, so I'll shrug and bear it for now.

Having moved from the university library to the deserted college library -- seriously, I could sing at the top of my lungs, no problem -- I now find myself in a curious predicament.  I really don't want to slog through adding more text to my Sherlock Holmes paper or edit my summary of Victorian philology into something resembling a narrative with shape and structure.  So instead, I've become uncharacteristically productive at other things.  My school email inbox will soon fit onto one page for the first time in about three years; I've ordered a new raincoat and a copy of the choir photo from June; I've read most of the articles in the links my mom sends me; I'm mostly caught up on friends' blogs.

I also came up with an idea for a conference paper, which has the potential to turn into a much bigger project, post-PhD.  In my efforts to avoid my current papers, I reviewed the call for papers for the annual conference of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA).  The conference theme is 'senses', and I want to investigate the function of the tongue twister in Victorian times.  I'll spare you all the reasons this could be a really cool idea, but it's also intriguing that I can't find anything on the history of tongue twisters, much less Victorian ones, and I know from my doctoral research that they fit into some very interesting intellectual movements at that time.  This is the first project I've come up with that I can imagine having real legs, apart from a biography of my favorite Anglo-Saxonist, J.M. Kemble -- and that's a tougher sell to postdoc committees, though I still intend to do it at some point.

Unfortunately, none of this will help me meet a deadline.  Back to the grindstone.

That's cricket

I love the expression "that's not cricket."  The closest equivalent expressions in American English would be "that's not kosher" or "that's not cool" -- but that's not cricket has a particular emphasis on the injustice or ungentlemanly/underhanded nature of doing something a certain way, even if it's not technically against the rules.  Good sportsmanship of the old school variety is the key here.

Why this little phraseology lesson?  Because in fact I've been doing something that is cricket -- namely, I've been playing cricket in the gorgeous summer weather during the last couple weeks.  Having had no time for it during my captaincy, I decided to improve my skills through increased experience this summer.  So, I got myself put on a bunch of email lists and have ended up playing with some teams that consist of grad students and/or fellows of Jesus College and Trinity College.  Especially in the case of the latter, I take extra pleasure in knowing that I'm playing with some people who are extremely eminent in their fields but whose biggest concern for those 3-5 hours is where to position the fielders.  I'm happy to report that while I'm not exactly a superstar (okay, I'm always the weakest link), my teammates respect my energy and find me more competent than they probably expected from someone raised across the Pond.

The Ashes urn is one small trophy

Meanwhile, the world of professional cricket has been abuzz with the ongoing drama of the Ashes.  This is a showdown between England and Australia.  It's named the Ashes because the first time that Australia beat England on their home turf in what should have been an easy win, a newspaper quipped that English cricket was dead and the ashes were being sent to Australia.  The captain of the England team commented, as they headed down under shortly thereafter, that they were going to bring the ashes back.  In reference to that, his future wife gave him a little urn (just a few inches high) with some ashes inside -- and that's what they play for.  You gotta love the wonderful absurdity of tradition in sports: Stanford and Cal play for an axe blade; England and Australia play for a Victorian perfume bottle.

Spot the heat spot

Just as with baseball, the Ashes is (are?) played as a sequence of matches.  England won the first one, but just barely, after blowing a pretty good lead.  It also depended on a video review that used a heat signature to prove that the ball just barely tipped the bat before being caught -- therefore getting the batsman out.  Talk about a close shave!

And did I mention the weather has been amazing?  It seriously feels like I'm in California -- in fact, the numbers show that it has been warmer than home this week.  I'll be able to test that comparison myself in a few days, but I decided to stay in Cambridge for most of July in order to make a big push on my dissertation.  I did manage to get a revised Chapter 1 to my supervisor, and I got plenty of feedback on it...  It's interesting speaking to other Trinity Hall PhD students who started when I did, because we're all coming onto the straightaway, and we're all starting to feel a bit bored with our projects, very ready to just get them done  and out of our lives.  But meanwhile, summer evenings are for savoring, and I can't think of any better way to spend one than out in a field catching a ball.

Back to work (well...)

Cambridge students have a slight problem in terms of their online presence.  All that's really visible to the outside world -- our facebook friends, family, blog readers -- are depictions of us in black tie, hobnobbing like high-class toffs.  In our defense, that's the kind of stuff you want pictures of.  Hunching over one's laptop in the library doesn't tend to scream "Kodak moment" to most people.  (As an aside, do you think that expression will live on now that film is not the primary means of taking snapshots for most people, or will I just keep using it in isolation, the way my father still calls the refrigerator the icebox?)  In any event, there has been the usual array of such events to document in the past couple weeks.  Here's a snapshot version of them:

• Choir dinner.  Not nearly as much fining as last year, which is a good thing given I've been up to embarrassing shenanigans...
• MCR farewell dinner.  I laid off the alcohol but enjoyed seeing my friends celebrate the end of the year.  It was also following the one good day of bumps, so I was feeling good.
• Boat Club Dinner.  Pretty self-explanatory.  Lots and lots of attempted or real boat club incest to watch happening at the after-party.
• Downing May Ball.  Finally a may ball that lived up to its reputation!  A good group of friends, plenty to do, see, eat, and drink.  Happy!
• Trinity Hall June Event.  This remains the best event of the year, in my opinion.  Between the college grounds being so cozy and knowing such a high percentage of people, I can just wander carelessly until I bump into people I know, chat with them, go see some music or dance at the silent disco, or whatever, and then move on again.  Love it so much.

In the midst of not sleeping very much, I also threw together a paper for a conference on Sherlock Holmes.  It was an interesting and convivial gathering.  Almost no one -- even the "proper academics" -- was a specialist in Holmes, but all were fans of some ilk.  Some, indeed, joined us from the online fan community, and it was refreshing to have their razor-sharp knowledge of the canon and unabashed passion at hand to inform discussions.  And for all that, they didn't wield their knowledge to take the rest of us down a peg, as they might have done.  As you know by now, my research has nothing to do with Sherlock Holmes, but I thought it would be a nice distraction / chance to branch out.  And in reading through the stories, I actually did come across a throwaway comment by the great detective that I may work into my dissertation.  My paper was on a personal hobby horse of mine: "How Smart Is Watson? or, The Role of the Sidekick".  I ended up arguing that Watson is an intelligent person hamstrung by his author, who needs him to fulfill a certain narrative role.  I hope I didn't stray into surrealist theatre, but the answer to the title question really seems to depend on whether you look at the doctor from inside the fictional world or outside of it.  They're planning to publish some of the papers in a book, so fingers crossed!

And now it's back to the grind, if I can reacquaint myself with where I left my PhD.  Today I avoided the madness of graduation day (much love to my undergrad friends who are moving on...) by staying in my room trying to produce words.  Y'see, my supervisor and I came up with a schedule that should theoretically produce a full draft by Christmas.  The problem?  I could manage the volume if all I had to do was write.  Unfortunately, there's still a lot of hunting around to do.  Throughout the PhD, I've been much more comfortable dealing with the stuff that gives context for the fascination of philology (language history).  I'm really struggling to identify exactly where that influences Tennyson's poetry, as opposed to him just knowing and liking old-fashioned poetic words from, say, Milton.  Fortunately, the first chapter is all about setting the stage, so I can indulge in the "easy" stuff for a while longer.

A word from the captain

First Mays colours at last!

It's over.

Things I accomplished as THBC women's captain

• Putting together a full crew early in Lent and Easter terms, which stayed almost entirely consistent.
• Getting three women who had quit and sworn they'd never row again to come back -- and enjoy it!
• One of them is now going to trial for the university boat.  I'm taking credit if she ends up being a rowing super-star.
• Taking a full VIII to training camp in Henley
• Avoided getting spoons in both sets of bumps (just barely...)

You can know all these things and yet...  I also know that the women's second boat essentially didn't exist and was a joke in both sets of bumps, and that we're now dangerously close to falling out of the first division of bumps if next year doesn't do better.

Upon finishing my duties, I expected to feel thrilled, happy, released, or even just relieved.  I feel none of these things.  I mean, I did have an odd realization while checking my phone on Sunday that there was no possible way for it to contain a crisis I would have to fix; that was cool.  But on the whole, I just feel drained.  It's not that I'm sad not to be captain anymore; I'm sad that it's over without my having gotten any success to show for it.  There are any number of reasons and excuses for it, most of which I couldn't help.  But still, I wish my legacy had been more than going down three places in bumps both times and not much of any other racing to speak of.  Last year's captain and Martin the boatman have made it very clear what they think of my leadership and the results I brought about.  They are what make me angriest, because they have undermined my efforts in a number of ways and then been judgmental about the consequences.

Honestly, the biggest difference I made was also probably the least noticed in certain quarters: it was a shift in the atmosphere.  Under the previous captain, despite her very healthy opinion of herself, almost no one was happy.  Very few women wanted to be in the first boat, and all of the novices who started last year quit.  Every single one.  This left me with almost no one to build a crew out of.  Now, I don't want to be just a club that turns up for laughs; I want us to be competitive.  But no one is going to choose to spend 14 hours a week doing something that makes them miserable -- certainly they're not going to continue doing it for two more years.  So I've tried my damnedest to get the good vibes flowing again.

As I've been disgorging my woe to everyone lately, the same comments tend to come up repeatedly.  First, I probably learned a lot from this experience.  Maybe that's true, but I certainly didn't learn how to be firm or disciplinary or especially persuasive (which would've helped), nor did I learn to distance myself emotionally from the situation.  I did learn to ask people even when you think the answer will be no, because sometimes you'll be pleasantly surprised.  Second, they say what a great thing captaining will be on my CV.  I think that would be very true if the person reading it had any idea just how much work it was.  I'm not convinced anyone who hasn't done it themselves could possibly understand what it took.  Finally, I'm told I've done a great job in difficult circumstances.  That's nice as far as it goes, but I can honestly say I hope never to have to receive that dubious compliment again.

I have a strong sense of the history of the club, which is part of why I want to contribute to its glory, not some 'inevitable' ebb in its success.  So for my speech at Boat Club Dinner on Saturday, I focused on what makes me proud personally as a rower, and what I hope is also a point of pride for the girls in my boat who are new to rowing this year.  Women only started rowing bumps in 1974, and then it was in IVs.  I went through the crew lists and counted how many different women had earned first-boat colours (i.e. the crescent on my pocket, like a varsity letter) in May Bumps.  (And yes, I'm spelling 'colours' Britishly because it's a British concept/tradition.)  To date, only 165 women have gained that honor in the history of the club.  Six of them did it for the first time last week.  One of them was me.  My name will be on the honour boards that go up in the boathouse, and when rowers are looking up at them during core exercises 200 years from now, they won't know anything about the results or the tears or the petty jabs.  Hopefully they'll be inspired to be part of the big picture, too.

Countdown

I'm sorry it's been so long.  It has been a busy couple months, but at last I'm on the straightaway for ending an academic year that has been -- well, let's go with stressful.

When last term ended, I stayed in Cambridge for an extra week for some bonus choir rehearsals with a French school choir we'll be visiting in August.  Then I had a very hurried two-week visit home, during which I worked on a conference paper for the Northeast Victorian Studies Association in Boston.  That conference was really the best experience I've yet had.  I was in the only panel on the first day, which was followed by drinks and dinner, so people knew who I was and had an instant topic of conversation.  I met some really fun fellow Victorianists, and the theme -- simply the year 1874 -- brought out a wonderfully eclectic mix of paper topics.  Plus, I've gone to enough conferences now that I'm starting to recognize some people, and vice versa.

Once all that was done, with an extra day to visit a couple Cambridge friends now at Harvard, I returned to England for a week of rowing training camp in Henley!  In case you don't know, that's the site of one of the most famous regattas in the UK if not the world.  Here's a scene from the film 'The Social Network' that's set at Henley Royal Regatta.  The training camp was a major accomplishment, because a series of obstacles crept up, which I had to sort over email with a time difference as I was trying to prep and do the conference.  It looked dead in the water several times over, so I'm very proud that it happened.  There's a picture of us on the last day, after slogging through the unceasing headwind for the last time, and having pre-dinner drinks in Leander club, home to a lot of Olympians and generally amazing rowers.

I left straight from Henley to London, where I stayed just long enough to see the band Fun in concert (awesome!) and catch a few hours' sleep before flying to a conference in West Virginia.  Yes, I had miscalculated the timing when I applied to that one, but it turned out to be really good for connecting with some people.

Since then I've been navigating Easter term with a surprising amount of free time every day that nonetheless hasn't been terribly productive.  I blame the undergrads, who are crammed into the college library, making it very tempting to try and "work" in the MCR.  You can guess how effective that is...

In any case, there are just under two weeks until Bumps start.  Four days after that, I will be a free woman.  So all I have to do is make it through 16 more days of captaining and I will be able to step back and recover my love of the sport and humanity.  Sorry if that sounds melodramatic.  It's been a bumpy ride.

The benefits of a hidey-hole

People sometimes say that (as far as they can tell) I don't get angry.  This is an untruth.  Earlier this year, I've been so impotently angry about rowing things that hot tears have flowed many a time.  Last week, I was angry at myself for getting into a bad situation with a friend of mine -- angry for letting it happen and for the fact that I couldn't do anything but face the music.  (No, I'm not going to go into specifics.  I half-promised something that I couldn't deliver on, and I hurt feelings in the process.)  Times like this, it's absolutely essential to have two things: a hidey-hole and some really good friends outside the situation.  By hidey-hole, I mean someplace small, dark, and remote such that you feel no one will ever find you.  A place where you disappear off the map.  Someplace that approximates the hole in the ground that is so often proverbially wished for.  I had one when I worked at Stanford for when people pissed me off, and I have found one in Cambridge.  It's very important, that hole.  It's a pocket outside the universe when I need it to be.  I'm not going to tell you where it is.

The other item is friends outside the situation.  This is not necessarily because I want to talk to them about it or get an 'obejective' opinion.  Sometimes, on the contrary, I want to hang out with people who have no idea about the snafu/cock-up/drama.  Their very obliviousness re-submerges me in a world where X didn't happen, which is a welcome reprieve.

I'm happy to report that the particular situation in question seems to be on its way to healing (touch wood!).  Meanwhile, I had a good weekend.  After a less-than-stellar bumps campaign, my crew went to London to row the Women's Head of the River Race (WeHoRR).  Here's a photo of us taken by someone on one of the bridges.  It's a long way to go (6.8K, ~5 miles), but it's not as bad as you think it will be, since you're going with the stream, and the venue is so epically big compared to the tiny Cam.  Everyone had a good time.

The next day, the chapel choir sang Fauré's Requiem for evensong, which was a special treat in honor of our director's having been at Trinity Hall for five years.  We'd put a bunch of extra rehearsal time into it, and we performed it well to a packed house.  Afterward, we all got very drunk.  While it was a fun night, it sounds like the rooms of the two organ scholars were left in a state that could set up another rendition of 'The Hangover'.  Here's part of the email sent by the senior organ scholar to all of us the next day:

"My laptop keyboard is covered in nutella.
My sofa is covered in gin.
My floor is covered in biscuit.
My tie is covered in wine.
My JOS's door is sad."  [Apparently someone put his foot through it.]

Hilarity for all.  But it seems I also may have left some of my dignity behind in the carnage, and tonight's rehearsal will be an interesting test of how much I will have the piss taken out of me [= be mocked mercilessly] for the rest of the year.  Trinity Hall is a very small place, in ways both good and bad.  I don't think it's that good for undergraduates, because there is absolutely no escape from any eyebrow-raising behavior.  The chapel choir is even smaller, and you have to have good armor around your embarrassment bone if you dare do anything foolish around them -- or even if you don't, they do love imagining a good story into things that might actually be innocuous.  Sigh.  It may be time for that hidey-hole again...but hopefully not.

The other side of aspiration

As a student, maybe even as a human being generally, you tend to spend a lot of your time looking up at other people.  Without being overly humble, I think it's safe to say that most people are aware of being inferior in ability or passion to someone in any given activity.  This year, I've been trying to come to terms with the flip side of aspiration -- that is, being the supposed expert at (some) things academic, social, and athletic.

Academic-wise, people starting their grad work see that I'm a third-year PhD and assume I've got everything sorted out.  Compared to where I started, that's actually kind of true, but there's still a lot to sort out.  My supervisor (did I mention I got a new one?) wants me to outline exactly what chunks are left to fill in, but it's tricky because I haven't been writing each chapter in sequence -- rather, I add incrementally to all of them as I go.  Added to that, I need to go back to The Poems of Tennyson (~650 pages x 3 volumes) and read through them again now that I know what I'm looking for.  When do I have time to do that, exactly?  Oh, and I need to publish to have any hope of a job, but there's no time for that, either... Sigh.  But at least the dissertation does have a shape, and I do know more or less what I'm looking for now.  As for social things, I kind of get how things run in college and the faculty now, so I occasionally doll out advice.

But what really has been on my mind is the baffling position of being an advanced person in athletics.  I came to Cambridge never having rowed, and to be honest I was pretty gimpy at it for a while.  Now, because of how quickly the population turns over in our small college, I'm in a position of some authority.  I never dreamed I would actually be the women's captain.  My first year, the club did amazingly well in bumps, and I regarded those above me (W1, the captains) with awe and admiration.  Yet simply by continually turning up for two years, here I am.  I've become a relative (relative!) expert in our club in terms of technique and, more importantly, mental attitude.

The crew I chose for W1 this term is mostly pretty inexperienced; given how recently most of them learned, we've come along well -- but they don't seem to understand that first boat means grim determination.  True grit.  Give it everything, and then give a bit more because the cox tells you to.  I'm accustomed to working my guts out and then still getting moved down a boat because there are others who are bigger/stronger/better.  Now when I talk to Martin (our coach), he talks about me as one of the few who are really good.  That feels good in one way, but also somewhat worrying.  My general approach in most areas is, "If I can do it, anyone can" -- but I have to remind myself that in fact I'm not the appropriate gauge for beginners anymore.  :)

Thirty years and maybe a little wisdom

Earlier this week, I celebrated my thirtieth birthday.  I confess I had sort of lost track of its approach, despite having ambitions last term to turn it into a big whoop-de-doo.  Last year was possibly my best birthday party ever because I got all my MCR friends together for dinner and proceeded to cocktail night afterward, where we got drunk and silly together and generally had a grand old time.  This year, I took my cue from that to plan a night with friends.

The evening was considerably calmer this time, but it was still a winner.  Dinner with some folks, a stop at a couple pubs with others, and then back home -- where a small group raided kitchens for wine and we sat talking until 5am in the dim lights of the common room with rain falling into the garden outside.  I got almost no sleep, because I had to be up for training the next day; as Gilbert & Sullivan put it, "Duty, duty must be done, the rule applies to everyone; and painful though that duty be, to shirk the task were fiddle-de-dee."  But it was totally worth it.

"So," people keep asking me, "how does it feel?  What wisdom do you have to share?"  I more or less laughed off these questions, because the difference from one day to another is not that substantial, and therefore January 30th felt very much like January 29th, and age 30 thus far is not strikingly different from age 29.  However, lately I've been thinking that somewhere along the way I've acquired some wisdom after all.  Without going into detail, a close friend (a current undergrad) is having something of a crisis in her personal life, and since I was peripherally involved in the situation she and I have been talking about it a lot in the past few days.  Although it's a thorny and uncomfortable situation, I find that at this age I know -- not just intellectually but in my bones -- that things like this happen, that it's part of the complicated mess of trying to muddle through life with the best intentions, and that it will all work out one way or another as long as everyone means well.  Understanding that, and the corollary that we have to empathize with people in their tight spots, feels like wisdom worth having.  And I'm so much more confident and comfortable in my own skin now than I was at 20 that I'd say the decade bodes well.

New Year's Resolutions

I've never really participated in the tradition of New Year's resolutions.  For one thing, I think you should make resolutions at any time you think you need them.  For another, the societal expectation is that you'll fail at them, so perversely it seems to be actually a list of things you half-heartedly wish you would do better but know you won't.  Nonetheless, I do have a few items this year.

WHEREAS I am in the third year of my PhD, and

WHEREAS extensive delay in completion of my degree would be detrimental to both my professional progress and my financial situation, and

WHEREAS I participate in an unusually high number of activities, which situation requires efficiency of effort for me to continue in them all,

THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED

• that I will submit my dissertation within the calendar year 2013;
• that I will reply to emails promptly, even if the situation is delicate and/or I am afraid of a negative response to my message;
• that I will not torture myself about situations beyond my control, be they personal relationships or rowing arrangements.

In keeping with these resolutions, I will save my report on Christmas/New Year's for another post.  But here's a picture of where I spent New Year's Day(!!!)