So I just got back from the beach, and I am resolved to have a Week of Productivity this week so that starts now, with BLOG. I have little to say about last week, which was not so good on the mental health front but which I survived intact and without any lasting psychological damage. My second biggest woe at the moment is definitely culture shock, which is compounded by the fact that I tend to spend a lot of time with Americans or seasoned US residents who don't quite seem to clock that America can cause culture shock... one of the fellows I went to the beach with apparently did an exchange at Oxford a while back (followed by a B.Phil, clever bastard) and was given a leaflet on cultural things including the instruction "Do not assume that British people all want to be American. They are happy being British". Which is amusing but also sums up the unconscious assumption that actually what goes on here IS better, that the way Americans speak is correct, that not having drive through banks is a reflection on the backwardness of the country without and not the quirkiness of the one with (car culture is not normal. The overwhelming majority of people on this planet do not live in a car culture. They are capable of walking to a cash machine.) I like this place, I would happily come here to do a masters or a PhD, but it's unapologetically strange (as opposed to China which is self-consciously strange) and it bothers me more than I think I've ever been bothered by a place before. It's all just very uncanny valley I guess. Which means I am reacting to America in a way analagous to how I would react to a human corpse. Mmmm.
But yes, aside from the inevitable mental wrangling, I had a fabulous time at the beach. We went camping, which has now given me a lust for "real" camping- the kind where you actually do go and hang out in a forest indefinitely and bring torches and camping food and maybe do a walk or something. Perhaps I'll bugger off to Wales for a bit when I get home, then I can take some pictures whilst I'm there and discredit the whole "BRITAIN HAS NOOOO NICE BEACHES" assumption. If I go to a beach, that is. Anyway, it was nice to camp except for one reason and another I couldn't shower and ended up absolutely revolting and covered in salt and sand and moaning endlessly about how disgusting I was which went down well (although to their credit there are some very good knee-jerk "NO YOU LOOK FINE" reactions out here. I am impressed and amused.) Also, the beach was in Delaware.
Buuut nobody I was with knew the reference. Also nobody I was with had ever seen the film "A Clockwork Orange". Do you understand where I am going with this culture shock thing now?
Beach itself... what is there to say about a beach? It involved being in a bikini which is sort of OK for a while but then you realise that whilst there are a lot of very big people around none of them are as young or pale as you (one pregnant woman had suntanned a smiley face into her baby bump, presumably using a cunning application of suntan lotion. I'm not kidding.) and also bikini lines let's not elaborate on that but they are a pain. The sea was awesome even if the waves were enormous, and we did some general chilling. The sand was incredibly hot and there were a fair few gay people around.
The evening involved eating a bison burger and then going on an immensely unsuccessful bar crawl. The guy in charge of our trip, Dan, had been told by a 40-something that the beach was awesome in the 80s and what seems to have happened is that the same people have kept returning since then, meaning we felt a bit young and also one bar was frankly disgusting and the other did not have good enough dancing music and was completely lit up as if you'd want to see the faces of the people dancing next to you. We then went to make our own fun by bringing the grape juice of the very old grapes (or "J-VOG". That is now a word. Use it all the time.) to a railway track to look at the stars. The stars were not as good as we'd hoped, but the conversation was good. I did not like sitting on a railway track at all, being as I am from the East Coast Main Line, but nothing came in 90 minutes so I guess that was fine.
Most of these folk are leaving next week. I will miss many of them terribly. And I will have a couple of big, big regrets. Such is life.
Talking about last week is less interesting. I saw Inception, which I enjoyed but which frustrated me artistically because I didn't really like the way they revealed the world, and it did feel like they kept changing their own rules when it suited them (SPOILERRRR: introducing "you can't die in dreams" almost immediately, and then following that up with "oh but we CAN die in this dream cause we'll lose our minds and that will be as bad" and then following THAT up with "oh but people have died and we brought them back sane despite what we said would happen happening" just wound me up no end). I really liked the ending though, I thought that was very clever indeed. I do think he was in the real world though. What can I say, I like seeing happy endings even if I never intend to write one. I also started working on mah thesis which it seems will actually happen, which is definitely a good thing even if it's gonna be stressful to squeeze most of the work on it into the bit of summer I'm going to have left when I get back. I'm just looking forward to having a lot less additional stuff to do next year so I think I'll be OK.
There is little else to say. Three and a bit more weeks, a historical re-enactment, a couple of interviews, a lot of goodbyes, a puppet show and a possible trip to North Carolina await me, and then I will be home again and ready to throw myself into a final year of fun. This is a good thing.
0 comments:
Post a Comment