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.

Hark Upon the Gale

He may have crushed my computer in a freak body-slam accident, but there’s no way that Nichol deserved this.

Freaking Lucius Malfoy and the school governors, pushing out the beloved Albus Dumbledore… (Isn’t it a shame that this is where my mind goes? Like, directly?)

Go Gene, Hark upon the Gale. 

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!

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!

Pardon me, do you mind if I exploit your tragedy?

This has not been a good day, either personally (a kid urinated on me) or nationally (“Virginia Tech Shooting Kills at Least 33″). Join me in marveling over how disparate those two events are.

Now I did not go to Virginia Tech; I do not even know many people who went to Tech. But I went to another public university in Virginia, the College of William & Mary, so I know many people who know many people who went to Tech. And so, untouched, I am still affected. I don’t yet know which of my friends are hurting right now, but some of them could be, and for that reason I am hurting. My thoughts and prayers go out to everyone affected by this truly disturbing and upsetting event.

It is amazing to me (now and after every tragedy in recent memory) how quickly we all turn each happening into another check-mark in the great column of Why We Are Right, how quickly each disaster is exploited by everyone with a point to prove. (I am not trying to set myself above the guilty parties here. I’m sure this entry evinces some sort of bias, and I’m sure someone will quite happily point it out to me.) If the tragedy wasn’t so great it might even be amusing to see how the gun lobby and anti-gun activists have both seized on the same event to talk about how inherently correct they are. My own politics aside, this event is not about gun control. It is not a testament to how all college students should be packing heat so they’re not sitting ducks in case a madman decides to open fire. It is not unequivocal proof that banning all guns will prevent future incidents like this. Yes, it’s a nice talking point for both sides, but this is about the Virginia Tech community and about a human tragedy. To quote Democratic Conversation (I’m sure you can guess their stance):

This fact is the epicenter from which all the spin will radiate. With all of that, here is the worst part: the students, teachers, and staff of Virginia Tech will be drowned within the vortex of this spin.

Do the world a favor (I’m looking at you blogosphere! I promise that someone–where by someone I mean the mainstream media–will still be spinning this even if you refrain for a few days) and forget the politics for a minute and remember the people. Think about thepirateroyal’s description of college, “It’s a home. It’s comfortable and safe. It’s like walking into the place you grew up in, only the hallways happen to be outside and your “parents” happen to be people with multiple PhDs and more brainpower than anyone you’ve met previously,” and remember the people for whom that safety, that second home, was forever ruined.

Quick edit for clarification 16 April 2007 at 11:11pm: I in no way intend to imply that this situation shouln’t be looked at in terms of gun control. Surely there’s a lesson or an example in here somewhere, and I recognize that partisan bickering and bipartisan dialogue share many common elements, the most important of which is the free exchange of ideas and opinions. My point is that we should mourn first, debate later. Now, not even 24 hours later, it is a time for mourning.