Speaking of ‘Precious’

I have said before that my life, which people who aren’t me seem to think should be some sort of action-packed romp around the Continent, doesn’t exactly resemble the sort of thing that Hemingway and Fitzgerald wrote about. Normally this is a point of some consternation for me. The other day, as I wept into my mid-afternoon martini about the sheer unglamorousness of being me, I recalled this quotation from Hemingway that is just So My Life. (That’s a slight exaggeration. It was a Pims and Lemonade.)

Several days later I have mustered enough get-up-and-go to locate the quotation. Which is written in a notebook. A notebook that is sitting on my desk. The desk where I spend copious amounts of time every day.

Not that I’m doing anything productive during the time I’m sitting at my desk. You see, I am a young procrastinator. I am full of ideas and inspiration and good intentions, I just happen to be terminally lazy. That notebook I mentioned with the quotation written in it? It’s basically full of sketches and outlines of a year’s worth of harebrained schemes. Of all these things I want to write about.

Do you know what I should be writing about right now? I should be writing inquiry letters and cover letters to potential employers about how awesome and motivated I am. I should be writing my dissertation on museum education for students with Autistic Spectrum Disorders. What am I actually writing? This blog. A review of Oreo cookies for no useful reason whatsoever. Instant messages. Because I will leave the things that I should be writing and should be doing until the last possible moment, until right before it’s too late to share them.

Which reminds me…the quotation:

You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see. You hang around cafes.

-The Sun Also Rises

I really didn’t intend for this entry to sound so nihilistic and, well, precious. The stuff that needs to get done will get done. Eventually. In the meantime I have some drinking in cafes to attend to.

Eew, the WordPress dashboard has an ugly new look.

Here is a glimpse into my exciting and glamorous life in Europe: I visit cool places, become even more extremely poor than I am now, and then return ‘home’ to my dorm room in Leicester. I never update about my travels because life aside from those travels is so mundanely boring. No one wants to hear about your Continental frolics unless you also have something exciting coming up in your schedule, as in “Last night Zelda and I dined at the Ritz, and tomorrow we will head off for a week in St Kitts.” Notice how my example contained zero references to the Continent, although I guess the Ritz is probably everywhere by now.

Let’s give it a try, shall we?

Last week I went inside a 5,000 year old tomb, and today I am sitting at my desk, listening to the hail outside, and updating my blog. Next I will either go read a book or watch the BBC. Yawn.

So that’s why I haven’t filled anyone in on my travels, which were to Prague and Ireland by the way. I loved Prague but frankly didn’t care for Dublin, though I don’t have anything especially pithy and disparaging to say about it. It was just ugly and expensive.

And the future? Until mid-June I will be completely unscheduled, lazing about and then banging out a dissertation at what is likely to be the 11th hour. I am going to take up Exercise, Drink, and Writing Things That Aren’t Blogs (But Are Unlikely to be My Dissertation Either). I’m mostly kidding about the drink. Then I’m home in NY for a week and a half before moving to London for my summer placement.

Past the end of August my life is basically a Mystery. I will be moving to wherever the jobs are, kind of like those tramps from the Great Depression. Yay recession! Hopefully I will be able to afford to travel on the inside of trains. And hopefully the work that awaits me will not be agricultural.

Wahunsonacock wore WHAT?!?

The title of this entry is the title I wish I could give my first essay of grad school. Unfortunately in England, or perhaps just in the University of Leicester Department of Museum Studies, we have to title our essays with the question that was set. Thus my title will be: ‘Choose one object now in a museum. Describe, analyse and critically discuss the object’s biography and social life since its production.’

Somehow it just lacks snazz in comparison.

The object I’m doing is this little beauty, aka ‘Powhatan’s Mantle’, an object that is so exquisitely documented that it is referred to with quotation marks in half of the official literature. I saw it in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford and became kind of obsessed with it, mostly because I’d never heard of it before and the way it’s presented in the museum is as if it’s 100% real, no doubt about it, Powhatan sooo totally wore this like OMG. I was originally doing an essay where I was grappling with the big questions like ‘What is material culture?’, but then I saw that I could do this and immediately reverted back to academic type. I get to write an essay about cabinets of curiosity and cultural imperialism and Jamestown. If only I could have worked Catch-22 in there somewhere (I admit, that would have been a long-shot) we might have hit all the essay g-spots.

I think it’s time for a new Nerdgasms banner. I’m sure I only think this because I need something else to do to procrastinate now that I’ve written this entry. Still, stay tuned. Or just come back in a month, which seems like a more efficient use of your time.

Edit: Or you could just look now, as apparently I felt compelled to change it immediately. It’s a bit dreary, but yay cabinets of curiosity!

Two Exciting New Games For You All!

I write to you this Saturday morning from my dorm (hall/flat/whatever). It’s extremely nice, which surprised me very much. I’ve spent this past week participating in what may be the lamest student orientation in existence, though fortunately I got free lunch out of it. I come with two exciting new games for you, so be thrilled!

The first is called Predict When the Two 40 Year Old Indian Gentlemen With Whom You Share a Bathroom Are Going to be Showering. It’s not a very fun game, though it is suspenseful. I’m afraid you can’t play along at home but you’re most welcome to visit me and give it a go.

The second is called Real Englishman or Merely a Delightful Name I Made Up? Today’s contestants are:

1. Alfred James Hipkins
2. Edwin Horatio Fedarb
3. Wenceslaus Hollar
4. Sir Dingle Mackintosh Foot

No cheating! The answers will be posted soon. And I mean soon in the real sense, not soon as in “relative to the rest of this blog’s chronology.”

By the by, England is very much living up to the cliche of being cold and wet. All the time. If you love me, send tweed.

Face all aglow to leave from here, to pack up and go.

So you guys? I leave for England on Thursday morning. I get there 20:00GMT, (that time thing is going to take some getting used to. I don’t do mental math!) so lugging my two 70lb. suitcases through the streets of London in the dark is going to be interesting. I can barely move one of them at a time, so two? And on the Tube? On stairs? Oh man.

And before you mock me for over-packing, being able to condense my belongings into a mere two suitcases, albeit ones as heavy as small boulders, is something of a glorious victory. I used to fill an entire SUV to go to college. I own over 70 pairs of shoes. Also, remember, I have a mother who would prefer I pack for every weather eventuality known to man. Glorious. Victory.

There’s already some stuff that’s not going according to plan, mostly financial stuff, but a friend gave me some good advice yesterday. Paraphrased as near as I can recall she said “You’re not going over there to be comfortable. You’re going over there for the experience of it. And it’s the times when you missed your train and are wandering lost in a strange city with everything you own on your back that you know you’re growing as a person.”

I hope I can approach this entire experience the Desiree Suo way, because I know I have a tendency to gripe. Mostly I gripe because it’s funnier and it doesn’t mean I’m not enjoying myself, but I don’t want the record (the record being my assorted blogs) to reflect only discontent. Joy! Rapture! Edwardian plumbing! (Couldn’t resist.)

I can’t decide whether I should make posts about these same subjects on Flying and/or wmk06. I know readership isn’t identical but I feel redundant cross-posting things to my own blogs. Oh, the trials of digital over-extension…

The next time you hear from me I’ll be in England. Or just on another blog. I leave you with some lyrics from my favorite song:

He said “I left my home where the dead never rose
for the streets of gold I’ve yet to find.
And at the end of the day all you can do is pray.
Without hope, well you might as well be blind.
Yea be blind. Tomorrow comes a day too soon.”

Wherein I Commit Internet Blasphemy

Now I know that this is a positively dreadful thing to do, but I am updating this blog… to point you in the direction of my other blog.

It’s newer! It’s shinier! It’s…well, newer about covers it really.

I made it so I could expound, at great length, on every 12th century stone I will trod on, every storied Victorian-era pub I will imbibe in, and every bureaucratic roadblock I will run into while I earn my MA in England. That is to say, it might veer tragically towards the narrative. It’s also so my mom can keep track of me, and to save me from the social faux-pas that would surely accompany any mass-emailing attempts. I would probably accidentally leave off far too many people, and would (again accidentally) include people whose dearest wish was to never hear from me again. Besides, emailing is far too much like keeping in touch and we all know that’s something I hardy do.

So now it’s up to them/you. I shirk emotional maturity and social responsibility; I blog, fool!

Oh right, the link: Flying (By the Seat of My Pants)

The World Series of Ketchup

When I was but a wee lass I thought that there really was a game called Ketchup. It was what adults played when they had fallen behind. As someone who is ostensibly an adult (I have all of the parts, at any rate) and who has fallen behind rather hideously, I think it is time for a little first-class sporting action in the recently renamed Heinz Arena.

Please bear with me as I try to tie up all the loose ends I have left in previous entries. This could get ugly!

•  Hullo Interweb! and Artery Clogging Sausage Stuffing don’t really have any loose ends. The stuffing is still delicious and lethal, and the only question that might arise from the first entry is that of which person I am in the photograph. The answer is, of course, the attractive one. Or the one on the left. Whichever.

• Why I Can’t Be Arsed To Come Up With a Witty Headline asks the age old question of “what the heck is this blog about?” Like most cosmic queries, it has proven unanswerable. So sorry. I still love the New York Public Library as much as I did when I made this entry, though I have not looked at the available Rosetta Stone software even once. What can I say; I am a lazy American and my monolingualism is imprinted on my DNA.

• Next up was my pièce de résistance, Not So Live Satire Blogging, also known as the only entry of mine ever read by more than a dozen people. Well whaddaya know! Apparently The 1/2 Hour News Hour was picked up by the Fox News Channel, which has been airing it ever since. (Thanks Wikipedia!) I couldn’t be bothered to sit through it again, not to mention that it airs in the same time slot as The Tudors, and I can think of very few television shows that take precedence over Jonathan Rhys Meyers frolicking shirtless and being Machiavellian. Also, um, all that history.

• A Soul Crushing Work of Staggering Idiocy. Where to begin? I’m still pretty idiotic. However, I did finish my personal statements, did hear back from my recommenders, and have been accepted by my top three Museum Studies programs. Oops, programmes. I will most likely be accepting a place at the University of Leicester for the 2007-2008 MA course. Now of course I must stress over finances, visas, health, housing, fitting my copious belongings into one suitcase, etc. I never did make a follow-up entry on the International Spy Museum, but suffice it to say that I got to crawl through an air duct. It kind of shames the museum dork in me, but that was probably the most satisfying experience I have ever had in a museum, and I could have done something similar in a local junkyard. There was probably less of a tetanus risk in the museum though. (Really that’s just me being facetious. I’m a big advocate of making museums more interactive, though that line between Disney World and Learning is a little blurry and hard to pin down. I’m not going to even pretend to start on this topic… I’m supposed to be tying up loose ends not raising more questions!)

• I was such a huge cock-tease in Peaceable Kingdom. What kind of person promises sensationally titled entries like “Fisticuffs with Jesus: 5 People Who Want to Sucker-punch the Lord” and then doesn’t deliver? A real bastard, that’s who.

• Have I mentioned that I managed to finish my personal statement? Because I have. It doesn’t have anything to do with The Universal Curatorial Impulse, though I’m still trying to work out how to build my Master’s thesis around this (completely made-up) concept. You wouldn’t know it from this particular blog, but I am a great fan of making up concepts. If I were a great philosophical genius (or just a genius) I could take these crackpot ideas and turn them into accepted scholarship, but instead I am a passably intelligent crackpot, so I turn them into blog posts.

• I am not even going to attempt to re-type the title of this entry, but know that in the interim my grandmother has attempted to set me up with (among others) distant relatives, parents of my mother’s students, and 40 year old men. There is some overlap in these categories, particularly the “40 year old men” one.

• I came in last place in all my NCAA pools, much as I predicted I would. Also, I still find the kid who plays Harry Potter to be disconcertingly attractive. I console myself with the fact that his haircut in the upcoming Order of the Phoenix movie was a regrettable choice that causes his head to somewhat resemble a penis.

• I never actually experienced Saturday, Computerless Saturday, as I unsurprisingly chickened out and checked the weather online. It was all downhill from there. It was in this entry that I mentioned my “upcoming trip to Costa Rica.” I went and I had a great time. As you might have noticed from the entry previous to this one, there were monkeys there. There were AN OBSCENE NUMBER OF MONKEYS there. This might require more significant follow-up than I can provide in this bulleted list. No promises, of course.

• Unsurprisingly, the majority of Americans do not think the solution to school shootings such as the tragedy at Virginia Tech is to arm students to the teeth so that they can return fire. After those involved had time to mourn, I am pleased that public opinion blew in this direction.

Just so everyone is aware, there is some large and scary bug flying around my room right now. I thought you might like to be informed. Also this entry has not been proofread. At all. I didn’t even intend to write it right now… I wanted to go to bed!

How has your month+ been?

It has been so long since I looked at Nerdgasms that the addresses for the blogs I frequent from my blogroll are not in my browser’s cache anymore.

Somehow I manage to spend hours and hours doing nothing at all on the internet, and I don’t even have this blog to show for it! Nothing much has happened with me; I’ve been accepted to the grad school program I wanted, but I still feel like that’s very up in the air for a variety of reasons, most of which come down to sheer pessimism. I will let you know how that goes.

Or not.

Here’s a picture of Costa Rica, because that is the way it goes with me. Yes, so I traveled the world, got into the Museum Studies program of my dreams, etc etc but that’s not important. DID YOU KNOW I ATE TUNA FOR LUNCH?!?!?! Here is an entire post about my sandwich.

What a precious monkey.

Saturday, Computerless Saturday

The fact that somebody found this blog by Google-ing (Googling? Googleing?) the lyrics to “Camptown Races” entertains me greatly.

So guess what Internet? I am going to try to live without you aaaaallllll day Saturday. I might fail as I’ll possibly need to Fandango, am still trying to get tons of grad school stuff accomplished, and really am sort of flying by the seat of my pants for my upcoming trip to Costa Rica. Shut Down Day amuses me though, because it’s just seeing if you can turn off your personal computer for a day. Sure, I can probably live with that and you likely can too. But can you live without computers period? Maybe if you sleep all day. Better not switch on your lights unless you know your electric company does not have their switchboards computerized. Don’t you dare get sick and need to go to the doctor, where they will certainly use a computer to check if you are insured, and potentially to call up your records as well! Better not drive either, because those traffic lights? Synced with the help of our friend the computer. In answer to their Big Question, “if they disappeared for just one day, would we be able to cope?” I posit no.

See, this entry is a great example of why I am so much better at Livejournal: I don’t think out posts before I make them. I just write my uninformed opinions the second I form them. Forethought? Afterthought? Proofreading? Puh-leaze.

The Universal Curatorial Impulse: An Excercise in Futility

I am trying trying trying to write my personal statement for grad school. I only have about 120 words. The problems? Well, laziness and procrastination spring to mind, but there are actually two main ones:

1) You might not be able to tell from this blog, but I don’t like talking about myself. I can blog because I have a highly developed tendency towards self-deprecation; I can talk about myself if I am talking shit. I can’t brag, except if I am being sarcastic and giving myself left-handed compliments. I really don’t think I am lacking anything in the self-esteem department, but writing 1000 words about how awesome I am and how I plan to revolutionize the field of museum studies? Not my forte.

2) I WANT TO TALK ABOUT THE UNIVERSAL CURATORIAL IMPULSE. This is my current theory on life, the universe, and everything. It is nebulous at best, but it is my pet theory and I want to talk about it. I don’t want to talk about my internships and classes and where I see myself in 10 years, I want to spew BS! I want to write an essay, not a personal statement!

All that said, Jesus is going to have to wait for his sucker punch. Sorry, James Cameron.