Possibilities

Merry Christmas!

This is the time of year when we look ahead to the promise of new things coming. Whether it's the arrival of baby Jesus, the clean slate of a new year, or just the slow return of daylight, it's around now that people tend to think about what's coming next. That's certainly the case for me.

After handing in my dissertation (and after a week's trip to Scotland), I was right back at work to produce a conference paper. It was very much a show-and-tell of my early digging around, but it went over well in London, Ontario -- after I took a week to check out Iceland because, well, I could. (Iceland Air allows free stopovers on your way across the Atlantic.) I saw the northern lights for the first time and soaked in geothermal hot pools next to a semi-frozen lake. Most importantly, I met some fun people who made the week a jaunty adventure rather than seven days of reading in coffee shops. (Though that would have been alright.)

The conference was for the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), and it's a big 'un. The last time I attended was at the start of my second year, and it was maybe my second conference ever. I didn't know anyone. It was awkward and uncomfortable. What a difference it makes to have academic acquaintances to bump into, and friends with whom to nosh on hors d'oeuvres at the opening reception and then slip away for dinner. I had a lot of fun. Dare I say it? I felt like I belonged. The problem with academia, of course, is that such a belonging may be cut short by the economic necessity of taking a job that is available now instead of hypothetically-maybe in a few years, if the wind blows south-southwest on a blue moon Tuesday as two albino magpies cross your path. I'm very fortunate in that I'm enjoying the editing I'm doing on the side right now, and I actually feel valued. It's good to remember that I have skills! So I try to look ahead without too much anxiety.

May the future be as surprisingly pleasant as a sunny
October day in Scotland.

When I was living in my first-ever non-student apartment during the two years following graduation, I used to stay up late scrolling through the Oxford and Cambridge websites, fantasizing about getting to England for grad school. I did get there, and I spent many hours sitting in a library in the agony of trying to write something, and then 500 more somethings -- and despite that, it has been a dream come true. Now I find myself scrolling through job postings and imagining places I could live and projects I could chase through yet more libraries. The brutal truth is that academia is an impossible career to try for these days, even if you've ticked all the right boxes. But we can always dream, right? And what is Christmas if not a time to dream of possibilities?

It's in!

Despite what everyone said,
I did not find this part anti-climactic.

Sorry to leave you hanging for so long, fair readers. In short, the dissertation is in!

I got the comments back from my friends, and by the end I was desensitized enough that I could just run through them and make necessary changes. I held my breath while the miraculous referencing system called Zotero created my bibliography; I fought long and hard with the college printer to get the final version onto paper the day before it was due; I took the two copies to Staples that night for binding; and I submitted them at 12:30pm on September 30. I had lunch with my friends at the pub, and then, contrary to what everyone expected of me, I got right back to work -- but on something entirely different.

You see, I somehow managed to stumble my way into a job as a technical editor for a company back home, so I just might be able to support myself again, rather than being in debt! But I'd been more or less neglecting it during the finishing-up process. So, it was time to catch up.

Not too long afterward, though, my friend Emily came to visit from home, and we took a week to travel in the northern regions of Britain: a cold, gray afternoon in York, followed by several glorious days in Edinburgh and the highlands, and a final treat in the Lake District, where we were glad to have our waterproofs along during one of our walks, because the heavens opened for the first time on the whole trip. It was the perfect vacation, really.

And now? I've been back in the library, taking pictures of how people have represented Anglo-Saxon text in printed books. This is in service of a conference I'll be attending in a few weeks. So, as usual, I'm keeping myself busy. But it's a fun kind of busy, and I'm not at all tired of telling people that I've handed in.  It is a sweet, sweet thing.

Letting other people see

It's coming to be that time when I show my chapters to other people so they can proofread them, and it's a strange sensation. Like all writers, I'm protective of my baby, but I'm also curious what impression it will make on friends who have heard me talk about it for so long. I feel a bit like James Spedding did when he had written a biography of Cromwell; he wrote to Tennyson remarking on what he wanted from critics:

"Is it likely that a man, who has written a serious book about anything in the world, should not know more about that thing than one who merely reads his book for the purpose of reviewing it? [...] What I want to know is whether men and women and children who care nothing about me, but take an intelligent interest in the subject, find the book readable. What its other merits are nobody knows so well as I."

Of course, my friends are hardly likely to be painfully critical. But Martin is a proper historian, so letting him see my historically-oriented first chapter makes me nervous that he won't find it rigorous enough. And Ian is a proper ASNC scholar, so he'll detect the places where I've fudged my Anglo-Saxon literary generalizations. Phil writes absolutely gorgeous prose, so when I send him what I think is my best chapter, I'm still aware of all the awkward phrases and stilted transitions that I just can't seem to make better.

Yet for all that, I know I've packed in a lot of original material. One of my favorite things in my PhD is a single footnote. No one else would have been in a position to write it, and it brought a wonderful punch to the point I was trying to make. Naturally, it's about Kemble.

If you recall, two years ago I met up with fellow Kemble enthusiast Simon Keynes over at Trinity. He showed me a pamphlet Kemble had given to his friend Arthur Hallam. Now, in one of my chapters I make the point that Kemble's friends couldn't avoid hearing him ramble on about his latest projects. Apparently, there was a typo in this pamphlet, because there's a funny letter from Hallam to Kemble assuring his friend that he will "cheerfully […] make with pencil or pen that important alteration of swylce for swylke on which the destinies of mankind may be reasonably supposed to depend." So... did Hallam actually make the correction in his copy? I emailed the eminent Dr Keynes, he sent me a photo, and yes! He did! (Or Kemble did before he sent it.) See, look:

(If you're paying close attention, you'll notice that Hallam was slightly confused. Kemble was correcting an earlier scholar's transcription from swyke to swylce, but the printers goofed and swapped the y and the l. That's what needed correcting.)

None of this has any real impact on my argument, but it's just so darn cool.

The downs and ups

I said in a previous post that I would try to be honest about the downs as well as the ups of this PhD roller coaster, and so I must admit that last week I was feeling very, very down. I'd burned myself out in a race to get a full draft in to my supervisor, then taken a week to go to France with the chapel choir.  When I returned, I discovered that the supervisor and I had seriously misunderstood each other as to what kind of draft he was expecting from me. For two days, I was miserable. I felt betrayed, abandoned. It seemed I would either have to forge ahead with only my own judgment for justification, or slink home, having missed my four-year deadline and been kicked out of the university and the country accordingly. To my unspeakable relief, however, our meeting went very well; it's now up to me to finish the damn thing and submit it by the end of the month. Wow.

One of the plaques thanking Ste Anne for her help

So now that I've climbed out of that pit of despair, I can report that the choir trip to Brittany was a much-needed, crêpe-filled holiday, though it didn't look like your typical holiday. We had all day free until 3:00pm, but staying in the village of Sainte-Anne-d'Auray, there wasn't much to do with that time. One day trip to neighboring Auray broke things up, though it was haunted by our concern over catching a bus back in time for rehearsal.

Each day, after some afternoon rehearsing and a dinner break, we spent our evenings making our legs and feet very sore by standing for long stretches to record our first-ever CD(!!!). When it is released (hopefully on a *real* label in *real* stores!), you should buy it, because it's going to be stunning. Andy demanded the best we could give, and it turns out we had a lot to give into the echoing wells of sound in every nook and cranny of side chapels, shrines, and carved stone. When you listen to Bairstow's "Lamentation", know that it was a grueling night of takes and sub-takes, after which we could only sit round with our wine and stare at each other, exhausted. When you listen to Wood's Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, know that we had sung them so often this past year that we could have done it in our sleep, and so it was an easy joy to let it loose.

And what a release it will be to hand in this dissertation! I can't even remember writing most of it anymore, it's just perpetually with me. I wonder if I've become institutionalized to it, like the prisoners in "The Shawshank Redemption". I'm going to assume that, no, it will be a real pleasure to have the chance to work on something different.

Objects of envy

For some reason, I've been reminded lately of various things I used to covet when I was a child.  Things I saw other people had and yearned for myself, while resigning myself to never having them.  They included:

• A treehouse
• Those red-and-yellow plastic cars you could peddle around
• A scooter (the kind you push, not motorized)
• The board game Clue
• The game Battleship (we eventually acquired it)
• Video game consul -- an uncle actually provided us with a Sega, which was HUGE.
• Salami sandwiches for lunch
• A microwave (got one later)
• Cable (read: Nickelodeon).  That was one of the treats of visiting Grandma Weaver.  We got it when I was in high school.
• A CD player.  It was mega-big when I got a Diskman for a teenage birthday.

Looking back at these, I'm still keen on most of them -- so at least I wasn't a massive victim of '80s/'90s fads, right?  Oh wait, now I'm remembering trolls...

Standards and envy are entirely relative, of course.  Recently, I was explaining to a friend that my nuclear family tends to cling to technologies -- that is, we are late adopters.  Our household phones were rotary types, and all our home movies -- through our late-1990s trips to national parks! -- were filmed on a silent Super-8 camera.  I'd gotten this far in the explanation when my friend cut in to say that it was actually pretty advanced for us to have home movies at all.  He's a full 6 years younger than me, and there are NO moving images of him as a child.  Seriously?

Anyway, while I had a pretty awesome childhood, I don't regret growing up, because look at all the freedom you have!  You can decide exactly what you do, where you go and how you get there, and you can buy the object of your desire if your bank account will allow it.  Fortunately, I'm not prone to overspending, but I still got a thrill today out of buying some plastic storage containers to organize my stuff better.  It's more controllable than the editing, after all.  One week before the draft goes to my supervisor!

In search of completeness

Sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, I break the internet.  Google tries its best to suggest what it thinks I really mean, but sometimes it stares back at me blankly as if to say, "Seriously, wtf are you even saying to me?"  This was part of finishing off the tedious process of verifying the words in a glossary Tennyson made in one of his notebooks, then checking a concordance to find out whether he used these words in his poetry.  It's but one example of some ways I've pursued my research over the past four years that were extremely time-consuming and probably unnecessary.  But I wanted to be thorough.

I could credit/blame my engineer father for this fastidiousness, but it also comes from a base level of suspicion I have for how a lot of literary critics go about making their claims.  All too often, they seem to "prove" their points with a representative example or two, and we more or less take their word for it that a general pattern is being described.  For my PhD, I didn't want to operate off my own personal impression of In Memoriam's alliteration.  So I made descriptive categories and I counted them.  It took weeks and some outside assistance manipulating Excel to form graphs.  GRAPHS.  In an ENGLISH dissertation.  Was I insane?  All this for maybe a page of discussion.  Definitely insane.  But as my friend Ian said the other day, the degree must be partly about proving you've done enough work.  That, at least, should not be an issue.

My new workspace

The title of this post has another meaning, too.  I'm ready for this PhD to be done.  It's good to feel so familiar with a topic, but I find it hard to look at it anymore.  It's time to move on to something new and full of potential.  And, let's face it, there are days when I'd really like to go home.  I'd like to sleep in my own bed, spend the morning tidying up, the afternoon sewing at my parent's house, and the evening seeing a double feature at the Stanford Theatre.  But for all its stress, my daily pattern is relatively pleasant -- and I've just moved into a cozy room in a real house, right by the river in a very peaceful neighborhood.  Onward!

Glimpsing a moment of real life

As part of the final push toward the end of my PhD (gulp), I've been reading through the book Tennyson's son put together as a sort of biography -- really a collection of letters and memories he gathered from the poet's horde and those of his friends.  Certain excerpts from this book tend to crop up a lot in Tennyson scholarship, and it's high time I read through it to find a few fresh items.  In the process,  I've enjoyed finding passages that give you a recognizable insight into the real, everyday life of young men in the middle of the nineteenth century.

I was struck, for example, by the way his friend Arthur Hallam described feeling out-of-date at Cambridge, just a few years after graduating (1832):
"New customs, new topics, new slang phrases have come into vogue since MY day, which yet was but yesterday. I don't think I could reside again at Cambridge with any pleasure.  I should feel like a melancholy Pterodactyl winging his lonely flight among the linnets, eagles, and flying fishes of our degenerate post-Adamic world."

And as I'm starting to think about the logistics of moving from my room of four years to a smaller space, I was amused to find Tennyson commenting on the exact same issue:
"I have been engaged in packing books.  I have a good many.  I am afraid I shall be obliged to sell them, for I really do not know where to stow them and the [new] house [...] is too small."

Sunset view from the Jerwood library

In making these observations, it occurs to me that many of you (are there many of you?) probably can't picture how I'm doing this "finish the PhD" thing.  Allow me to describe it for you.  I am sitting Owl-like and solitary in my rooms (nothing between me and the stars but a stratum of tiles) the hoof of the steed, the roll of the wheel the shouts of drunken Gown and drunken Town come up from below with a sea-like murmur. No, wait, that's Tennyson again, writing his aunt in the spring of his first year at Cambridge.  However, most days I am perched in the upper floors of the college library.  The shouts of summer-camp teenagers and tourists drift up from below.  I'm wrestling my raw writing for each chapter into something with structure and argument (I hope!) by staring at print-outs, drawing all over them, and then rearranging the computer document.  In addition, I make little trips to other libraries to chase down things I've put off, like finding the original of a second-hand quotation.  It's all coming along, but slowly, and sadly there's no time for 'slowly'.  Deep breaths and friends at the same table keep me calm.

The not-end

Once again I've passed though the two weeks of the year that are completely confusing.  It's a mad rush to the end, and then suddenly the pace of life changes.  This time last year, the strangeness was compounded by my trying to process the end-of-captaining confusion.  This year, it was strange because it's the last time I'll do a lot of this stuff -- at least as a real student -- but it's not really a farewell because I'll be staying in Cambridge for the summer and autumn.  As such, I'm feeling at once sentimental and still-entrenched.  Probably the biggest representation of this duality is the fact that come August I will move out of my room of four years and into a room in a house right by the river.  I was very lucky to find a place with an amazing location and a wonderful landlady/housemate (touch wood!).  So, I'm excited.  But there's a strong pang of regret to leave my home-away-from-home.

Where's the rest of Kemble?

There has been plenty of fun, to be sure: Boat Club Dinner, the Trinity Hall June Event, garden parties, cricket, and silly rowing under golden sunsets (between thunderstorms).  And remember my favorite Victorian, John Mitchell Kemble?  I encountered him unexpectedly in London, where I'd gone to see an exhibit on Vikings at the British Museum.  Walking through the theatre district, I suddenly spotted an old pub called Kemble's Head, undoubtedly in honor of JMK's father, a famous Shakespearean actor.  The place is now a Greek restaurant, and the food is quite tasty.  (You know I had to go in, right?)

Now summer days stretch out before me, and I have miles of dissertation to go before I sleep.  I'm now very, very familiar with my topic, and I must disappointedly admit that a lot of what I'm saying is ripped from a handful of book chapters and articles I read in my first year.  I've synthesized them to form my own product, and I've definitely added new material.  However, the ideas that I find exciting and interesting about my project have been said more than once -- in fact, I dare to say that they're generally acknowledged already.  I'm saying them in more detail, which I guess is nice.  Well, at least I like where it's all going, it's just annoying how most things have already been said!  Time to work on someone less famous?  But first, we finish.

Good things

In the spirit of feeling incredibly cheerful lately, I'm giving you a quick survey of some Good Things from the term so far.

Choir stalls at Peterborough Cathedral

Right at the beginning of term, the Trinity Hall Chapel Choir sang evensong at Peterborough Cathedral.  This big, beautiful, historic place -- oh hello, Katharine of Aragon's tomb -- was a far cry from our usual digs.  We put in a lot of rehearsal time to blend our voices into the kind of sound that should hang in the air between 800-year-old arches.  The results were good.  And being early evening on a Wednesday, there were maybe 8 people there to appreciate it.  Oh, well.  In Tit Hall, that would have seemed a healthy crowd.

Bursts of summer weather.  A few weekends ago, it was absolutely gorgeous!  While our rowing outings were sadly cancelled due to races on the river, I took the free time to walk to Fen Ditton, an unbelievable picturesque little village just down the river.  My destination was The Plough, a pub with a beer garden right on the river.  I row past it all the time, and that day I could sit and observe the various crews racing past while trying to mitigate my ridiculous sock tan.  The following day, the MCR had a barbecue.  Since then, the weather has only gotten better, and today I could easily imagine that I'm back home.

A field outside St Ives (Cambridgeshire)

Taking advantage of the warmth, a friend and I asked George, my favorite porter, where we could go on a day trip.  He recommended St Ives -- not the famous one in Cornwall, the village in Cambridgeshire.  We reached said spot after a half-hour ride on the guided busway -- a bizarre transformation of an old rail line into a dedicated bus path, distinctly lacking in charm or much of a view.  We saw one of the few statues of Cromwell that are around (he was local to the area), though it dated from the early 20th century.  We also poked inside an unusual chapel built mid-bridge over the river Ouse (pronounced "ooze").  But as usual with these kinds of things, the best part was unplanned; having spied people walking across a neighboring field during lunch, we decided to have a wander and ended up sitting by the river listening to the birds go crazy in the humid air.  Sigh.

Meanwhile, W1 has gelled nicely in terms of rowing together.  There are still enough adverse circumstances that I don't think we'll do well in bumps (sigh), but the outings are a real pleasure, in terms of both the sunshine and the feel of the boat.  And when I manage to make it to cricket practice, my atrocious bowling has become mostly passable now!  We just got our new kit, adding yet more sporty clothes to my swelling collection.

Here's hoping the upward trend continues for another week and a half, so I can get my final chapter in shape by the deadline I gave my supervisor.  He said in so many words that I can't miss any more of them, and it should be possible.  Fingers crossed that it will be another Good Thing for this magical month.

Precise words

I started mulling over the theme of this post during the NVSA conference a few weeks ago.  As with most conferences, the presenters had approached the theme ("Victorian Senses") from an impressive diversity of directions.  Sometimes, to be honest, their highly articulate vocabulary had the effect of making me feel thick-headed.  If you don't regularly work on phenomenology and can barely even remember what the term means, if the word haptic is new to you, if you have difficulty absorbing by ear a densely theoretical essay about a work of literature you've never read -- well, there were moments of NVSA when the universe gave you an opportunity to make peace with your littleness.  Don't get me wrong, I'm sure much of the material I couldn't soak up was brilliant.  But if nothing else, it demonstrated the sheer number of words in academese which I simply don't have in the rotating drum of my word-hoard.  (Incidentally, word-hoard is a term I lifted from Beowulf to become the theme of one of my chapters.)

At the same time, I found myself jotting down words that might be useful someday: perhaps something is germane to my argument; perhaps I could call Tennyson's group of college friends a coterie; and I really should look up what it means to deracinate something.  [It means 'to pluck or tear up by the roots, to eradicate, exterminate'.  Just try to imagine the daleks crying, 'Deracinate!  Deracinate!']  It's just so satisfying to fit exactly the right word to something.  Like the old skill of building dry-stone walls, you find the contours that fit snugly together, and temporarily collapse the gap between thought and speech.  I think it's part of what people love about Shakespeare: he can describe common emotions with such eloquence.

Then there's the fun of happening upon something in my research reading that corresponds eerily well with what's going on in my life at that moment.  The day after I'd sent a very incomplete chapter to my supervisor, I read a letter from Tennyson saying that he had given up his latest book draft to the editor with many remaining flaws and he was very annoyed about it.  The last day of April featured a glorious spring afternoon in Cambridge, during which I was reading some of In Memoriam and found the lines,

          Can trouble live in April days,
          Or sadness in the summer moons?

Fortunately, the answer seems to be "no".  Work must proceed, preferably faster than it has been, but spring is banishing sadness and trouble -- at least for those who don't have exams.  The iridescent leaves, the trilling birds, and the strolling Sweaver thrill to the returning scent of life in the air.  If only I could think of better words to fit the shape of what I mean by that.

Happy Easter, everyone

After a week of wonderfully sunny, warmish weather, England remembered that it was England, and the rain rolled in for Easter Sunday.  I sampled what an Easter eucharist is like in King's College chapel, returning home for the remains of an MCR brunch and then a quiet afternoon and evening enjoying the cozy gray day.  Here's what it sounded like outside my window:

A short spring run-around

Have you ever had someone casually ask you a question that pulled you up short and made you think?  Well, about a month ago, someone asked me what I will take away when I leave Cambridge, and I was so spoiled for choice that I had to think carefully about how to answer succinctly.  I reviewed the last 3.5 years: moving abroad, learning to row, the captaining year, being on the MCR committee, becoming a college personality known as "Sweaver", discovering what I'm like when I drink, presenting at conferences in front of eminent people, spending candle-lit evenings with a small but talented chapel choir, making friends with the porters, consuming far too much tea, becoming addicted to the lunchtime crossword, and talking about Tennyson to anyone who will sit still long enough.  If I had to summarize it, I'd say I've learned just how much I can do and thus gained the confidence to plunge into new endeavors knowing that my initial ignorance won't stop me succeeding.

My most recent endeavor was to show my buddy Martin the wonders of northern California.  Consequently, I spent the first week of spring break re-acquainting myself with the beauties of my state, in between rain showers that seemed determined to belie our reputation for golden weather.  It was a tiring week, to be sure, but I certainly enjoyed putting my own stamp on things.  A tour book could direct you to the Golden Gate Bridge (check) or Yosemite (check), but it won't take you past La Maison Française at Stanford, insist that you ride the Giant Dipper in Santa Cruz no matter the weather, or suggest you stop for pie at Duarte's Tavern in Pescadero after pausing at the iconic Pigeon Point Lighthouse.  And let's not forget the hospitality at the childhood home of one Sarah A. Weaver, future PhD (cantab).

Only a few days after that adventure calmed down, I was off to Disney World "on the way" to the conference of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association in Stony Brook, NY.  I told you about proposing the topic in an old post, and the time had finally come to deliver it.  The conference paper was a major source of stress right up until I gave it on the last morning.  It was highly fragmentary only nine hours before my panel, and goodness knows how I managed to rearrange and glue it together in time, along with accompanying slideshow.  The rush made me very nervous, but it was very well received, and because I performed a few tongue twister examples -- without flubbing them -- I got a round of applause in the middle of the paper!  That was amazing!  Something to think of when I need a boost in future.

Emotional waves

Well, bumps went slightly better than expected.  We got bumped quickly the first two days, had a very good rowover on the third, and a heartbreaking near-rowover on the last day (see picture), in which we got caught literally 20 strokes from the finish line.  Until then, I'd never cried after a bumps race, but that commitment deserved a better result.  Still, very proud of the new girls for their fighting spirit and the fact that they are determined to come back with a vengeance next term!

The week was capped by Boat Club Dinner, of course, a truly festive event in Trinity Hall's newly-renovated hall.  It looks superb now, and we had plenty of "heavies" (alumni) back to appreciate it.  I had lots of fun catching up with people, hugging, dancing, taking pictures, hugging some more...  And then it was time to go home.  And something happened that has started happening with unnerving regularity this year: I got disproportionately sad on the walk home.  Partly it was because everyone had scattered and I was left alone -- a sharp contrast to the sociality of the night.  By the time I got to my room, it was partly because my leather shoes had made my toes very sore.  But really, I was way too upset for such trivial things to have been more than a mild inconvenience.  Why was I suddenly so distraught?

My friend Martin shrewdly answered that question the next day: it's because I'm sad that the whole Cambridge thing is ending soon -- so each miniature ending magnifies emotions that are already running close to the surface.  I hope I don't finish off every party night in tears or spend the whole next day feeling melancholy, but staring down the straightaway toward completion stirs up the froth in one's psyche.  Fortunately, in this case, even the sad mini-ending took a happy turn.  I managed to catch up to a friend who'd left for home before me, and with hugs administered, my worldview became rosier again.

Rowing, again

It's that time of year again.  If you're Facebook friends with me, you'll have noticed that my cover photo has changed to the now-traditional THBC crest, as seen here in all its glory.  This can only mean that Lent Bumps is around the corner.

I've had an odd relationship with rowing this year.  In my first year, I was trying to learn and improve.  My second year, I was striving to become as good as most of the W1 rowers who remained, so I pushed myself really hard.  Last year, I poured a great deal of energy into trying to bring up my boat's power and skill from the disadvantage of having promoted four novices (out of eight total crew members).  This year, well...  I'm the lone old hand amongst a whole women's club that otherwise consists of first- and second-year undergrads.  The girls in W1 are lovely, and they're slowly realizing that I'm not an alien creature and that they can talk to me.  But for the first time, my purpose in rowing is a vaguely social experience and bit of exercise.  I'm not pushing myself as hard as I used to, and we have no chance of winning anything right now.  It's disappointing to a certain extent, but what with trying to finish the PhD and such, there's also a certain relief to having the pressure off.

Meanwhile, the weather has undeniably been creeping toward the springlike, with more sunny days and a definite moisture in the air, encouraging the earliest flowers to appear along the backs.  It makes it much easier to face each day of tinkering.  Also helpful are:

• having a good fourth-year review, confirming that my project as currently organized makes sense and will be a dissertation
• going shopping for a new dress and finding the perfect item
• a bunch of friends from my first year gathering for a reunion/birthday party just like old times

And so I enter a hectic week that begins the run-up to the end of term and what will be a truly manic spring break.  Would we have it any other way?

Flooding, metaphorical and literal

Okay, I have to admit it.  I'm starting to panic.  I cannot seem to get any work done, and so each day slips by in what would be a moderately pleasant manner except that OH-MY-GOD-I-WILL-NEVER-FINISH-AT-THIS-RATE.

I haven't so completely lost perspective that I think I've done nothing valuable.  However, I mostly seem to be scraping together some scraps of ideas to patch into some kind of whole.  At this point, I don't even care that much, I just want to give up and get it over with.  Unfortunately, there's a lot to do before I can even think about submitting, and I don't see how I'm going to do it.  One thing I've found very useful to remember is that, according to my friends, I've been saying "I didn't do any work this week" nearly every week of the three-and-a-half years I've been here.  Yet evidently things have gotten done somewhere along the way.

It also helps when people like Phil come back and visit for the day, as he did yesterday.  Everyone else can say encouraging things, but he understands The Fear better than most.  This year, most of the people who were my social ties have either left or are drifting away, or else they're in writing-up caves somewhere.  Consequently, I find it hard to get excited about much of anything.  It was really good to regain the old sense of vitality for a day.  And you simply have to listen to your very clever friends when they say you have a compelling argument.

In other news, the river has been incredibly swollen from some recent rain, though I swear there hasn't been enough of it to cause this kind of flooding.  We were already having to wade out in our bare feet or wellies to get the boat out, and over the weekend no one was allowed to row at all.  On Sunday, we had to pick our way to the boathouse from some backstreets, because the water had reached right up to the front of several other boathouses.  Here's what it looked like at ours: a couple feet shy of the staircase.  From the upstairs window, it looked like we were in an ark, but we consoled ourselves that at least we were in a building full of boats if worse came to worst.  Let's hope that's also the case for my metaphorical river of stress, which is also overflowing.  I must have a research scull around here somewhere...

A phlegmy birthday week

When I was a child, I wasn't thrilled with having a January birthday.  It wasn't warm enough to do anything nice outside, though I had a few ice-skating parties, and come high school the occasion usually coincided with first-semester finals (wow, those are hard to remember).  But as a general principle, I love my birthday.  I genuinely don't understand why people feel anything but delighted about them.

Sadly, this year I wasn't in a state to enjoy 'my' day, because I fell victim to a nasty cold (or flu?  How do you tell the difference?).  So my week looked something like this:

Sunday: Cox the men's outing for two hours in the freezing rain.  Immediately followed by rowing in the women's outing (thankfully no longer raining).
Monday: Everything's fine, la la la...  Go to bed.  Oh crap, that's a sore throat.  Try to sleep... mostly fail.
Tuesday: 6:30am alarm for morning outing.  Row.  Come back to note from neighbor implying that I let my alarm go on for too long and it disturbed her in the wee hours.  Rage.  That night: wake up repeatedly, paranoid that I've missed my alarm.
Wednesday (birthday): 6:30am alarm for morning outing.  Row.  Try to nap all afternoon.  Dinner/drinks with friends at the pub.  So nice to see them, even if I couldn't speak very much.  Sleep like the dead.

Since then, I've been resting assiduously and working my way through Doctor Who.  I'd only had a passing knowledge of the new series, catching the odd episode here and there, but they really did a stellar job with the actors they picked.  Thinking back to the original series doctors, I suddenly had a vivid flash of memory: leaning up against my dad on the living room floor as the swirling visuals flew by to that distinctive theme song.  Good times.  And with the last of the junk making its way out of my body, I should be back in good form in a day or two.  Thank goodness!

Two homes

Jerwood reading room, Tit Hall

Bender Room, Stanford

This is my fourth year as a PhD student at Cambridge.  I feel very much at home in the UK now, and you might think that fact would make me feel that I'd outgrown my familiar places in California.  However, I seem to have divided my homely feelings equally.  This is very confusing.  The whole idea of "you can't go home again" is utter nonsense.  But you can expand the places you count as home.

I admit that I haven't gotten out of Cambridge much, but I love living in England.  I'll stay if they'll let me, though immigration crackdowns aren't making that a likely scenario.  A fellow American asked me recently what I like so much about England, and I found it difficult to articulate.  I'll try anyway, though.

Tea.   The English have a core belief in the power of tea to mend all wounds.  And here's the funny thing -- it does.  It perks you up mid-afternoon, clears a stuffy nose, and settles a queasy stomach.  It's also a ritual of friendliness, compassion, and stability.  So ingrained is it that when "Lawrence of Arabia" airs on TV over the holidays, there's a spike in electricity use during the scene when Omar Sharif appears on the horizon and rides slowly toward the camera.  Why?  Because everyone in the country boils the kettle during that scene!  Hilarious.

Pubs.  An Old English teacher of mine once posited that the pub is the descendent of the Anglo-Saxon mead hall, and I think he was on to something.  Bars don't do much for me -- too artificial and (usually) expensive.  But a pub is all about talking and good company.  AND they have...

Cider.  I've never cared for beer.  Oddly, given that I like my tea black, I find beer too bitter for me. But at a British establishment, there will always be cider.  And it's far better than anything from a bottle back home.  Scrumpy cider has an intensely apple-y taste and is less fizzy, but beware -- it packs a punch.

Choral tradition.  Enough said.

A tendency to be reasonable.  The number of times in a day that I hear the phrase "to be fair" is remarkable.  America, for better or worse, was largely founded by religious radicals, and our sense of fairness is to let everyone live their crazy to the full.  The English as an averaged whole seem more interested in living and letting live.
(Oddly, our governmental styles are flipped: parliament makes a show of insulting the prime minister during question time, loudly cheering, etc., whereas congress(wo)men always pretend they're perfectly calm and reasonable.)

Perhaps most importantly, and most simply:

It's different.  I don't mean that home was so bad that I had to escape!  I love being from California.  But living somewhere that's different enough to keep you on your toes -- like the constant, small translations calculating in my head -- makes you more aware of yourself and the life you're living.

Happy New Year

You may recall from last year that I don't especially care for making New Year's resolutions.  I certainly didn't get my dissertation submitted in 2013, which was one of the few goals I set for that calendar year.  However, any chance to pause and reflect is a good thing in this frenzied world.  And I had a hell of a year to reflect on.

The first half of 2013 was crammed with crises, crying, and hard-won minor captaining victories.  But somewhere along the way I also discovered that I'd found a true friend in my buddy Martin, and having that kind of support on that side of the ocean has been an unexpected blessing.  Then there was a quiet summer, choir tour, a September of late nights in the library, a fall term of feeling that I was spinning my academic wheels, and finally the breakthrough of a good meeting with my supervisor.  I capped off 2013 the way I rang it in: dancing down Colorado Boulevard in the Rose Parade with the Stanford band, and cheering on the team at the subsequent game.  Sadly, this one reminded me far too much of the way the team used to play when I was an undergraduate.

I'm back in Cambridge now, after one of those long day-night-day travel slogs that make time seem a confused fantasy.  I'm told the UK has been experiencing massive storms while I was away, but tonight the air is calm and damp, the city quiet and expectant.  Here's to another new start.