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.