I met a girl today who had only been in this country fro 17 days. She was Chinese I think, and she turned to me at a bus stop, and said :"Excuse me, but what does 'take a right' mean?"

Her accent was heavy, and she said a few other things too and it took me a few minutes to understand that she had asked a question about American phrasing and she wanted to know if I could answer it.

I held out my two hands when I finally understood. "You know left and right?" I asked indicating the corresponding hand with the word. "Take a right is slang...it means 'to go right'" and I moved my right hand away in that direction.

Back in the day, when I was learning Pasqual in High School, there was a programming term called 'endless loop'. It meant that once that line of code was read, the computer would cycle through the data it was attached to ceaselessly. In my mind, I often use this term to describe my thoughts.

The Loop: Classes, Grades, Getting into Grad/Professional School, doubts, doubts, doubts, feeling that I am not quite up to snuff, the weight of the future crushing me into the earth.

Picture a place, where there is no electricity. Not a sound can be heard but the breath in your own body, and all that can be seen before you is a black night filled with restless stars.

Above, the black velvet sky is strewn with stars so bright, and the air is so very clear, that you think you are looking at some jewler's board scattered with diamond shards.

Below, the earth is alive with moving, bobbing light. Fireflies wink on an off and endlessly float upon the dark.

Settling back into 'normal life' after England must be similar to how a child's toy ball feels when it slowly deflates to death after too much fun. Jet lag let me sleep eight solid hours a few nights in a row (unusual for me) and had me in bed early and at a normal hour in the morning. Jet lag was officially off as of last night, as I have now falling back into my usual cycle of erratic sleeping hours punctuated by a day or two of insomnia. I go to bed later and later and then, one day can't sleep at all, and then i'm back to bed at a more decent hour and the cycle repeats itself.

August 3 2006

After writing 3017 words and submitting my paper for International Law, I went to London with friends Casey, Corey and Mike. We went to see Antony and Cleopatra at the Globe Theatre. The production was very good, and the Globe, a replica of the original Shakespearean theatre, was a lot of fun to watch the play in. I was close to the stage and I got grape seeds spat on me by one of the actors and then Julius Caesar fell and dumped his 'wine' all over my trousers during the drinking scene. I had forgotten the Globe was interactive, especially if you were lucky enough to be one of the rabble on the floor. The woman who played Cleopatra was also the nurse in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. So many Hollywood types!

August 2, 2006

Tonight I traveled to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Patrick Stewart (as Prospero) in Shakespeare’s The Tempest performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Swan Theatre. The production, being my first Shakespeare play, was very entertaining and novel. I had no idea how far theatre had come incorporating sophisticated special effects. All of the actors were excellent, Ariel was extremely creepy, and the scene between Caliban and the two drunkards very amusing. I was also extremely psyched to see Finbar Lynch as Alonso. Lynch is an extremely talented and interesting actor. He has a very quiet, dark, brooding intensity about him. He would play an excellent Mr. Rochester. I was really excited to see him in the play because I had last seen Lynch on the Season 2 of House M.D., where he did something rather stunning. What’s more, I was nearly overwhelmed to discover that IAN MCCLELLAN (!!!!!!!!!!) is returning to the stage after fifteen years to play the lead in King Lear!! I might have to plan a trip back to see that. It would be spectacular, and he being one of my favorite contemporary actors would make it even more extraordinary. Tickets for next year go on sale this September. I’m hoping Lear will keep running into the summer so I can come back here and watch it (and do other things also, of course, silly to just pop over to England to just watch a play…).

July 28 2006

Today I got up and spent the entire day in London with my friend Felicia, with a small side trip to Egham to visit the University of London’s Royal Halloway campus. Royal Halloway is pretty spectacular, and is considered to be one of the UK’s leading colleges. We ate at a pub called ‘The Crown’ and were the only Americans there, so it was fun. Good food, and I got to feed my addiction to chips and vinegar. I have found increasingly that one must flee from Oxford proper in order to get any real sense of what Engla nd and its people are like.

July 25, 2006

Today it has arrived. The thing we have all been waiting for. The one thing that will change all of our lives.

Forever.

THE COMPLETE COLLECTION OF BLACKADDER on DVD!!!

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

I was appalled to realize, in talking to my peers, that there was an uncalled-for amount of ignorance regarding such series as Blackadder, A Bit of Fry & Laurie, Monty Python’s Flying Circus and so on. Hoping to save my friends from a cheerless, uncultured existence, (and having my own selfish aims in mind, as well as saving them from my own representations of key scenes—yes, I actually spent an evening verbally enacting some of the more amusing parts of the series mentioned above—)I went on amazon.co.uk and bought the mega collection of Blackadder. Yes, it’s region two, but no worries. It looks splendid and I can’t wait to watch all 13 hours and 55 minutes.

In the evening I ate dinner again with Anna (redhead, Vegan) and the other lady whose name still eludes me, I am embarrassed to say. After that we took a walk in the city, and an interesting dialogue came up between us. I think it was sparked off at dinner, as Anna, being Vegan, has to have the kitchen staff prepare her meal separately from the usual fare, because the usual fare is all animal products. She was saying she felt bad for asking. This led into me asking how she had become a Vegan. She told me that she had been completely turned off eating animals or animal products because of videos she had seen and learning about how the animals lived and were killed. I have seen some of these videos myself, and I am familiar with the slaughtering process (although I have not witnessed it first hand for anything except poultry). Anna was very passionate about, in light of all this information, why you should become a Vegan. She used the points many of my other vegetarian and Vegan friends have, about the suffering and pain that we put our food animals through. She knew that I was thinking about becoming a vet, and said that becoming a Vegan was bound to happen (paraphrasing here on my memory of the convo). Vegans use up less arable land than meat eaters do, it’s healthier, kinder, and as far as we know, a pain free way to eat for all involved. I have heard these arguments before, and said so, and she asked me why then was I still an omnivore. I replied that in the animal world, animals are omnivores, carnivores, and herbivores. Biologically speaking, humans evolved to be omnivores. Also, when animals kill, it a lot less pretty than our current slaughtering practices. Anna replied to this by saying that humans, as a conscious species, are allowed to shape how they live. We are higher than the animals, and therefore can choose not to act like them. We can choose a more peaceful way of existence. A more moral one.

July 19 2006

Today it was a scorcher, and I began to feel crappy again so I drank a pint of water and felt a lot better. I forgot to mention that yesterday, there was a formal dinner, and at this dinner I made the acquaintance of Mrs. Arudta Ash. She is a very nice lady, originally from Poland, who is married to a Stanford Professor and has two sons. I and two other girls were talking to her during the formal dinner, and we made such an impression on her that she invited us over to her house for tea the following day. As we had been complaining about the fact we hadn’t met any British people she wanted to introduce us to her son, who was studying here at Oxford and had grown up in the city as well.

July 18 2006

Today I met a man on the street who could play the violin so beautifully it tugged at my soul and made me want to weep. He was in his sixties, with an unsmiling and fierce face, his brow furrowed as he concentrated on playing, an open violin case by his feet. I learned from someone else on the seminar that he was a professional street player, and made his money by playing to the crowds and passerbys. I wondered why he was not in some concert hall somewhere, but then thought that this was really how music should be, a sweetly sad melody wafting up upon the breeze to catch you unawares, in the midst of your harassed travels to God knows where. Music to make you feel in your blind rush of hurry.

17 July 2006

Devoted Readers,

As in every great saga, there will come a day when our intrepid adventurer has a misadventure. I had been considering, two days ago at dinner, that I had not been drinking enough water. I should have listened more firmly to that small niggling idea; for sure enough today it came back and bit me in the ass.

I was sitting in class (International Law) sort of feeling gross but soldiering on, when I noticed something peculiar. The room, which had been about 90 degrees when I had come in, now felt like it was 40. I was cold and sweating, and life became increasingly uncomfortable from there to the point where I had to excuse myself, fearing that I would make a scene by passing out in front of my fellow students. The instructor granted my request, adding that I did look a bit peaky.

16 July 2006

Hello Devoted Readers,

Another day of reading. Yes, I’m sure you’re all thrilled I am so disciplined! Then I went out to a pub. So much for discipline. Went to ‘The Turf’ again with a bunch of people. Tried something called ‘White Knight Valiant’ which was an ok lighter beer.

Sort of odd day today. One of the Junior Deans was staring at me with an odd expression on her face while we were in the Dining Hall. This of course piqued my curiosity, so I asked her what was up. She told me this:

July 15 2006

Hello Devoted Readers, I know I have not been keeping up with entries that steadily of late. With a few more rainy days, or days when I stayed in and read, or gotten grumpy from tourists, or watched a man escape from a straight jacket on Cornmarket Street, or bought the highly addictive Oh My! Apple Pie Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, or the day I did not go to Bath, or worked on my book, or spent terrible sums of money planning a weekend stay in the Great Cesspool and a trip to Scotland, I figured that those events were not very exciting and so I would not bother you with them. Today, however, I have finally done something of note, for I have finally visited the Great Cesspool.

This blog is about personal introspection, so you might not want to read it, lol.

Sometimes writing excercises (yes, excercises, because the damn things won't take a hint) my demons, helps me deal.

Ahem.

I have a problem. It is either a selfish, whiny one or something a little darker. Either way, I want it gone. Realization is the first step to a cure, be it disease or a behavior that needs correcting.