How I have not changed since a child

 "When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me"- St. Paul

yours truly

Lately, I've been revisiting how I thought and examined things as a child, and how that has shifted as I've grown. 

But I've not put all my childish ways behind me. Here is a list of how I have NOT changed since I was wee: 

1. I still find that one of the chiefest pleasures is waking up early, and lying in bed, reading to my heart's content, until I want to rise. That or staying awake at night, captivated by such a thrilling plot, one loses all sense of time. I still constantly read.

2. I still like my favorite childhood foods: boiled peanuts, peanut brittle, chicken and yellow rice, lemonade, and watermelon. My ideal lunch is still granny smith apples and (American) peanut butter.

3.  I am still afraid of some of the same things. I am still petrified of snakes, and my ideal pet is still a mongoose because it kills snakes. I am still afraid that Fidget will come in my open window at night. I am still afraid of people dressed in mascot-costumes, especially Chuck E Cheese.  I still dislike being the center of attention or walking into a room full of stranger.  

4.   I have an undiminished fascination with animals. My pet (or farm animal) list ever grows.

5.  I still dislike getting dressed in the mornings. Such an unnecessary necessity. 

6. I still like to make food in the kitchen. 

7.  I still love being outside. I wish classrooms could always be held outside in the sunshine.

8.  I still like active things: camping, hiking, boating, lawn games, traveling.

9.  I still adore giving gifts. It's how I say "I love you" best.

10.  I still love making things with my hands. I'm so bad at most things I try, but how I enjoy it! 

11.  I still like to write.  While I write less now than I did, it's still something that has stuck and refused to unburr.

12. The greatest bane of my existence is to make decisions. So many decisions: big ones, small ones, irrelevant ones.  It comes from a puritanical sense of perfection, that one thing must be the very best, better than all others, and I must, must find it! It's awful.  Because of this, I will always somewhat dislike shopping. Or choosing which books to buy or not to buy. Or figuring out what to cook for dinner.

September

view of Granada from the Alhambra, July 2009. 

I can hardly believe it's September.  Only now have Indy and Felix really begun to shed their winter coats and I can consistently wear shorts. It feels like summer has just opened her arms in full glory here.   Most schools start today.  It's wonderful to start on such a warm note, and I'm beginning to itch to get back into an academic city.  One of the luxuries of Durham is beginning the first week of October. October! That's like a 9-week semester, compared to the leviathan of 16-week terms at UNC that never.seemed.to.end.

I've been thinking a lot about Spain and tapas. If I have an itch, it's to go there. Just for one day. One day in Granada.   The memories or emotions involved with the memories cling like morning mist:  rooftops and sangria and reading aloud. That's the best picture I took in Granada. How is that possible? What was I doing? But then again, it's like I lived my whole life in those three days and I keep wondering what have I done since then and what am I doing now. Life seems so circular and not at all linear. I keep thinking, haven't I been here before? Like a perpetual sense of de ja vous.

But lately. What's been up? Music and car rides. That's what. That's how we get home.

London Regatta, 2012

Each year, the village of Bursledon has a regatta, and this year's theme was "London through the Ages."  There are many competitions, and each year, the Goodisons decorate one of their boats in a competition for the best decorated float on the theme.  Fran's brother, Will, and his girlfriend, Megan, came up with the idea of the Great Fire of London. They did the bulk of the work, stenciling and drawing the outline of London's skyline on some plywood.

We all helped in painting the outline. 

And we also came up with themed costumes, perfected  a la glue gun. 

The girls had these great dresses and head pieces. 

On the day of the regatta, they rolled out the mirror (their boat) now with the plywood attached. 

And hitched it up to the car's trailer. 

The entire waterfront was completely decorated with London-themed structures, amidst many of the races. 

These next three pictures are taken from Hamble Interactive.  This is "Blazing Squad 1666" coming out for the parade, complete with costume and, I think the best feature, our smoke bombs.

Here is some of the competition: the London zoo.

And three other floats of buses and London-themed costumes.

 

The evening ended with a tremendous firework display in which a boat was set on fire and a man nearly hit when he attempted to put it out. 

All in all, rather exciting. We came second in our float, Fran came second in the swimming contest, and their crew of four came first in the paddle-less boat competition! Impressive wins.

This week, I've been gearing up for a new school year, and my head has been swimming, filling out forms and excel spread sheets, arranging dates ordering books, and I feel like my head is water-logged and I can't quite see straight. Better go fix that!

This Week

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1-5. On the way home from one of Fran's interview's, a sign read "Jane Austen's House" and this is the sort of thing that makes England so very exciting. Things of greatness are just around the corner and one doesn't have to look very hard, or at all, to find something worth while.  Such a great amount of history concentrated in such a small(ish) amount of land.  So we stopped and looked, even though it was closed, we peeked at the garden, and found neither of us had a desire to go inside.

6. A night with friends.

7-12. A birthday in Kent. We camped outside in the spectacular weather.  The hosts threw an amazing cook-out of mackerel they had caught themselves. Just wow. We played badminton, herded their free-range chickens, and pitched tents.  Later that night, we went on a walk in the dark through fields to the local pub.  Little did we know that the fields we walked through were full of horses, and they galloped up to us in the inky night and surveyed us from their fence.  Startled, but then delighted, we fed them grass and looked upon their magnificence and found ourselves slightly awed.  It was one of those rare nights with a clear sky full of stars.  I discovered the big dipper is called "the plough" here. The north star still points north, even in a different country, and I walked home full of thoughts of Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railway, and what it must be like to walk in the dark all the time without light pollution.  We walked and whistled, and once back, built a bonfire, a great big one of all the discarded limbs of ash trees. 

This week has been one of just working away and preparing for the Regatta this weekend. The theme is "London through the Ages" and while I can't yet disclose the float's design, it looks phenomenal. More to come soon.

Favorite Things

The sun slinks lower earlier now and I unconsciously wish for the Scottish latitude to possess those few extra moments of dalyight.  We head on a walk with the dog, the misquitos now only murmuring and the bats flit overhead, while the dog gallops off to the center of the common to patrol the day's visitors.  Fran asks what I want to do that evening and I tell him. With a wry smile he says, what, are we like a couple from the 1940s or something.  I contemplated this, and activities I find so lovely are so often sacrificed to the easy, the accessible, in an attempt to lasso the hurdling locomotive of the day's end, to the tv and the frozen pizza, in order to rest.  I thought on things I liked to do and don't, out of fear, or vanity, or all-consuming time. So while idealistic and perhaps not embraced as often as willed, like the moments of summer's sunshine, furtively abundant and never blazing, this list of favorite things is a small aspiration to something better.

Favorite Things:

- live music
- being able to walk places
- a good phrase of poetry
- making things with my hands
- books that makes me cry
- watching a fire
- gardens in bloom
- a glimpse of mountains after a bend in the road
- bubble baths
- seeing familiar faces
- piping cups of tea
- wild fields
- homegrown vegetables
- lawn games
- mocassins
- dogs and rabbits and hedgehogs
- family recipes
- aching muscles after a long day
- waking up and realizing I have nothing to do today

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What are some of your favorite things??

Dealing with Hydras

click for source

Reading just makes me more conscious of all the other books I need to read.  I'm reading through a book my advisor wrote, and she's simply unbelievable. Each page is filled with footnotes of other sources she acquired in her long research, and each time I come away from a stint of reading it, I have at least three new books I need to buy and another dozen or so I need to find at the library.  It's like getting into a fight with a hydra-- when you cut off one head at least two more take it's place.  Except this is perhaps worse, simply as whenever I read twenty pages, I have about 20 more books I ought to read. The odds are not in my favor.

The other thing is I think I am rather slow at reading.  For an hour's sessions in a difficult work, I can only get about twenty pages read. Twenty! So my pace seems to absolutely crawl.  This is rather hard to swallow as when I read less mind-intensive works, I can absolutely devour them. Well, at least I thought so.

I've mentioned reading War and Peace. It is taking flipping forever. Maybe it's because I'm reading in on my kindle and I can't see how far I've got left.  In this instance, I'm almost grateful for the kindle, as reading that tome in bed at night would be suicide to my sprained wrist. But it does make me question whether I am a fast reader or not.

But then here's another thing. When I finish my daily quota of reading for academic work, I'm tired of sitting. I want to take the dog for a walk, concoct something in the kitchen, learn to bowl in cricket. I don't really want to sit down and read again. In fact, I don't want to sit down, period.

I feel like the tortoise in the race of the tortoise and the hare: plod, plod, plod.

Happy Friday! We're off on Saturday for a birthday so it's travelling again over the weekend, but very much looking forward to seeing familiar faces. Enjoy yours!!

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So, how do you do it? After graduate school or work, do you want to come home to sit down again? How do you manage your leisure reading with the weights of a job or school? Are you like me, and now catch the ten minutes before bed?

Thoughts on Teachings and Readings

Wall painting in a Roman villa in either the Etruscan or Palantine Museum, Rome. From my travels in 2009.

I recently emailed, by far, my favorite professor at UNC for some advice on teaching and his response is one of the best emails I have ever read.  I have been rather apathetic lately, towards my readings, towards other academic work.  This in a way was a hounding call, the "Yes, yes! That's why I wanted to do this in the first place" rousing me from my stupor and eagerly attacking my work. I'm half-tempted to let you peek at the entire email here, it so thrilled me to my core. On the other hand, I almost don't want to share it as it's so special and I want it to be savored. To compromise, here is a glimpse at some of his suggestions.

- In your class at least one person is your superior. Never over-simplify or dismiss what someone says, but listen attentively.
- Stick close to the human element in discussions,  especially in philosophy. 
- Assume that the text has something valuable to teach you.  Do not dismiss it and say, "Well that's what the Greek or Romans did," but seek to understand why they have chosen to relay this information to you. Usually this is on more that one level.
- Give the author the benefit of the doubt. Do not say assume that you know more than the author with "well that was a thousand years ago and now we know better." These texts say something important about the human condition.  Seek to understand what that is and why it is important.

Attached was a glorious reading list.  Wonderful texts, haunting texts, that a hundred or even fifty years ago, established a core curriculum to any University diploma.  It makes my heart ache that they are so often not read. It made me want to read all of them.

There are few moments when one's heart simply bursts out of the rib cage with wonder. Fran, seeing my excitement, surveyed the reading list, and said, "Let's read them. One a fortnight." Usually I find it rather inappropriate to gush about one's boyfriend on one's blog, but perhaps this moment calls for an exception-- Ya'll, what a man! Francis thinks we should start a book club, but I'm far too shy and embarrassed. What do you think?

Also, what do you think makes a good teacher? How should one approach one's students? The texts? What advice can you give a budding tutor? Can't tell you enough how much I'm going to need it!