Stuff my students write

In a pop quiz, I asked the students to summarize the plot of the Second Shepherd's Play in no more than two sentences. Here's some corkers:

--Two shepherds have their goat stolen ...

--3 shephards are traveling and one of their sheep is stolen by an evil sheep herder. They go on a quest/journey to find the missing sheep & meet new characters & discover new themes & ideas on their journey.

--Kurt Russell in a Ford White Bronco speeding down the highway towards the Canadian border with the highway patrol from 9 different states on his tail and his love on the line.

--The first shepherd was so bad at his job that a second shepherd was hired to replace him. Then the second shepherd wrote a play recounting his experience as a shepherd in the second degree.

--The second shepherd's play is about religion in a different time.

Miles from Nowhere, continued

If you haven't already read the first installment of this blog post, I suggest you do that first. I'm narrating my epic month of moving to Los Angeles...

But after that, it went a bit like this: 

(You can make these bigger by right clicking and choosing "view image")

why these pictures won't line up I don't know.

   

And now, today, it's a month since I left London. ONLY A MONTH. I can't even remember London, but when I do cast my mind back, it usually recoils with a stab of melancholy, despite the fact that getting here had exactly the effect I knew it would: 
The effect of inspiring me with everything that's exciting about this new chapter that I was having trouble getting excited about while I was still bidding farewell to the last few chapters of my life.  NOW though I am ready for the liminal stage to come to an end! After being tantalized with the possibility that my apartment could be readied before the Oct 1 move in date, it's looking like that was just a tease and I'll have to wait it all the way out, meaning an Oct 1 move in (around a teaching meeting UCLA that day) and an Oct 3 first day of teaching. I've been feeling so impatient and excited to get my stuff back-- that is, to get it out of storage at the moving company. To get my boxes from London off the ocean. To get the suitcases and random boxes out of my car. To start nesting. To feel like this adventure is finally, truly begun.
....

National Talk Like a Pirate Day

I have been reminded that it is national talk like a pirate day. In honor of this, I will tell you the story of National Talk Like a Pirate Day 2006. It was early in my first semester at Brown and in my undergrad-level Anthropology of Japan class I was wearing an outfit I really like. It consists of tight black and grey striped trousers and a very old tuxedo shirt meant for a very big man-- maybe 18" neck? Because it is a real tuxedo shirt, it requires shirt studs to close--there aren't any buttons. So I wear it over a tank top and use a big black hipslung belt to keep it closed.  I feel extremely Patti Smith in this outfit, probably with ankle boots of some variety.
And, sitting next to the two adorable freshmen who were my seat buddies in that class. One was like, 'Oh are you dressed for National Talk Like a Pirate Day?' and I was like, "What?"
And then, poor thing, she was really embarrassed but I thought it was awesome.  And also I learned about the existence of National Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Miles from Nowhere

It's still not yet a month since I left London, which is one of the most surreal realisations I think I've ever had. Because so much. So so much has happened and is happening. I left 22 Campbell Road on the morning of August 25 and took a taxi to Gatwick airport.

Much much more --- after the jump

however

So, to counterbalance my previous post, I have been compiling a list of things that I will not miss about London and things to look forward to in LA.

1. I will not miss the noise of the Somali orphanage upstairs. Ok, so it's probably not a Somali orphanage, but it IS a Somali family who seem to babysit or something, because sometimes many many children are there and they are really amazingly loud, running, yelling, falling down, getting yelled at, crying, etc.

2. I will not miss the people who constantly ring my doorbell looking for someone else. I used to think that the woman who did it a few hours after promising she would never do it again was the worst, but that was before the man who rang my [blaring, horrible sounding] bell twice at 4:45am the night I had just come home from the whole month of July away.

3.

Sinks like this. How am I supposed to wash and rinse dishes like this? Who thought of this? People who waste whole basins of water to rinse every little thing? People who have servants? People who in fact don't use water? I don't get it.

4. Paying utilities, etc to keep two flats in two countries afloat.

5. No screens in windows, and the concomitant big ol' bugs that sometimes come in to visit.

There are more. I'll post this for now... more will be added

one week

It's a quiet day here by myself in my flat in London. Probably the last quiet day here because in one week I will be departing here, flying out for Providence by way of Reykjavik and Boston and Heathrow (not in that order). Many plans have been made about this move and the madness of the weeks coming up. The flat itself though doesn't yet look like much is changing. A hard but silent rain has just come and gone, leaving a chorus of drops tinkling from the black iron of the back stairs beyond my kitchen window. The sky is a uniform bright white-- even the color of the cloud cover barely heralded the arrival of a sudden rain shower. The glorious British summer we've all been gushing about here ended a few days ago. On the day I traveled back from Germany to London and since then it's been much cooler and unpredictable-- sunny one minute, windy, suddenly cold, none of those weather features seeming to have any effect on each other.
Just now even-- the window has grown a warmer bright sunshiny color, belying the raindrops still clinging to the panes.
This is it. I have been cooking up the food in the pantry-- I made a delicious barszcz (if I do say so myself) fortified with the last of the dried porcinis. I am trying to get up the fortitude to start writing up the ads for the kitchen and house items I'm planning to sell. I should probably pull out another box and pack up some books. I have to click over into the mindset of relentlessly dismantling this little nest I've been building up over the year. The invisible moving preparations were hard enough to do-- the visible ones for some reason really distress me. Every time my efficiency disease kicks in and I try to leave all that to the last possible second I can keep everything as it is and then pack pack pack-- but invariably I underestimate how much time all this will take. I should have sold things earlier, I should have done without a few more days...

Maybe this is a symptom of this other problem I have right now: I don't want to leave. Obviously I'll be back, obviously big awesome new adventures are right around the corner, obviously things are great. But obviously... I don't want to go.

Observations from IFTR Day 0

I am at the University of Warwick in a dorm called "Bluebell." U Warwick is in Coventry, sort of. Mostly it is outside the city by 4 miles and there are trees and countryside surrounding the sprawling campus.
Observations:
1. Unlike London, there are no food shops inside or outside the station. It left me no option but to trust that there would be something to eat at the other end on the campus.
2. It is incredibly easy to identify the other people on their way to the IFTR conference. Because they are the gawky Europeans with sheaves of papers who keep asking the bus driver the same question every two minutes. They laugh when the bus's jolting knocks them around and over their rollaboard suitcases.
3. It seems that IFTR is sharing the campus with a national teen football (meaning soccer) camp this week. Our registration did not involve a queue of parents and teenage boys snaking all the way around the center hall of the student union in a spiral. Thank goodness.
4. I met a Finn. We were looking for the bus at the same time and ended up walking together from the wrong bus stop (with the right bus declaring "via Univ of Watwick" on its destination) to the right bus stop, then ran into each other again getting off the bus (also with the aforementioned French people who, by virtue of having a working smart phone, I ended up leading in a sort of ragtag procession from the bus at the correct stop then into the registration building). Then again I saw him at conference (as opposed to accommodation) registration, so that by the time he walked out of the balcony of the campus pub where I was waiting for my dinner, it seemed the time to say, hello, why don't you sit down here.  I did that, then almost immediately realised how complicated this would be: he turned out to be Finnish, and although we had made eye contact with each other innumerable times over the previous hour and even spoke, he lived up to our joking notions of the Finns as incredibly taciturn. It was awkward, even if we were disposed to be friendly.  Frankly I could mostly not even hear him when he did speak, which slowed down our conversations considerably. He seemed to warm up a bit over time, but I did feel a bit angsty about having forced both of us to make friendly for so long and I excused myself with my unwritten conference paper as the reason when I'd finished eating. Oh Finns!
5. There is much much more, but not now.