The cars were just lumps on the snow

Okay, listen up, Britain: THIS IS WHAT I MEAN BY A LOT OF SNOW.

This is 48 cm (19 inches) of snow & counting; it's still snowing, too. I'm supposed to be flying back to Glasgow tomorrow night, so this will get interesting. At least if I get stranded again, I'm near home...

life during wartime

I got some groceries, some peanut butter to last a couple of days

but we are 78% water, even our pumping hearts

While the rest of the world seems convinced that the world has ended due to last week's 5 inches of snow over six days and yesterday's sudden onslaught of a proper New England-style snowfall for about 3 hours, prompting the university to strongly urge me to "not venture out of university buildings" (verbatim quote) and not one but two snow days in the past few days, I am generally unfazed, and therefore the only one in the office so far this morning. In fact I'm relieved that things are back to normal.

Come have a cup of tea with me, as we're out of coffee, and I have about 6 more cups of tea to drink throughout the day to stay awake anyway.

pot kettle black

For a while there, we had coffee in the office. Then some sort of bureaucratic restructuring occurred and then we no longer had departmental coffee. I suppose that's fair, they do make everyone buy their own tea. So I am trying to switch over to tea! At least in the office. This means I drink about 7 cups of tea a day and alternate between doing work and going to the bathroom every hour or so.

As we all know I love coffee more than most things, so this was a bit heartbreaking. But at the same time it makes me feel really Scottish.

a day in the life

Every week or so I go over to Glasgow University. Glasgow University is sort of like the BU or NYU of Glasgow, whereas Strathclyde, which is my school, is more like MIT. Glasgow Uni is this amazing, magical, campusy place (complete with trees!). They've got an English language/linguistics department and a literature department, and their library is amazing, whereas Strathclyde is in the middle of the city centre and much less humanities-oriented. (Basically I have a giant crush on Glasgow University.)




Today I listened to a lecture about relative pronouns in the morning and spent my afternoon reading original texts from the 1600s. While this is not the book I actually read (predictably, the special archives collection won't let me take take pictures); I was actually reading about Early Modern English Women's social roles. Last week I was granted access by Oxford to download their full-text Old English and Middle English databases; which means now I have the entire written (documented) early English corpus on my computer. Also today I met with one of the big people in corpus linguistics and a few weeks ago I met with someone who headed the Oxford English Dictionary's recently-published Historical Thesaurus project, both at Glasgow University.

YOU GUYS HOW IS THIS MY LIFE I DON'T EVEN KNOW

today in adventures in grocery shopping

YOU GUYS LOOK WHAT I FOUND. This really is A Thing here!
--
In the United Kingdom, most people go out for lunch, getting a sandwich/snack/drink combo for about £3, but for whatever reason, the UK is insistent that mayo must go on everything and that vegetables are a sort of rare event. I wholeheartedly disagree with this sentiment, so I bring a vegetable-filled mayo-free sandwich for lunch to my office instead. Since I essentially sit and read all day, I try to go for a walk around lunchtime down The Death Hill, just for a change of scenery. I usually just go to one of the corner grocery stores and pick up a yogurt. (UK food has a reputation for being pretty terrible - this is only 85% true; it took me about three weeks to find a vegetable that wasn't a potato here and I almost cried with happiness the first time I found a bag of spinach in a grocery store - but god damn this country can do yogurt well.) I am pleased to report that in this particular Sainsbury's, spotted dick lives comfortably next to the yogurt. I think this could be a fairly terrible accidental purchase.

Help, I'm Alive!: A One-Month Retrospective

[editor's note: Two years ago in late July, I was in Edinburgh, Scotland for a weekend, with food poisoning. Today I am back there on a hike with some Germans, hopefully without food poisoning. Through the magic of the internet and auto-posting, I present the following.]

You guys, I have been in Glasgow for a month! I can't believe it's been a month already. Things are going so, so well - this blog has sort of shown the ups and downs of the first few weeks of moving to a new country by myself, but I definitely feel like each day is better than the last. There's a lot of things that I am still working out - like what side of the street and which side of the stairs to walk on. (This is more complicated than you'd expect.) Sometimes I still have difficulties figuring out where I would go to buy things - we don't have Wal-Mart or Target or CVS here - but this is getting better. Some days I wake up and just really want to see something instantly recognizably American, like peanut butter and jelly or the word "eggplant", and some days I want be able to talk to someone from home and not have to wait for 7pm to be able to do so. But moving to a new place by yourself is an emotional rollercoaster, let alone a new country or a new continent! I think I am doing very well. I have tentative friends! It's all very exciting.

It's an amazing opportunity to be here, and even more of an amazing opportunity to be working with the man who invented my field in addition to meeting all these other important linguists and literary people across three institutions (Strathclyde, Glasgow University, the University of Edinburgh). I am very, very lucky. There's no second-guessing crossing an ocean to do something and the more I am getting into what I am actually doing the more I am absolutely certain this is was absolutely 100% the right choice for me. I love all the work I am doing, and the people around me are so passionate about their work, so deeply involved that I can't imagine them doing anything else. I've been in contact with all these important linguistics people - the other day I met the woman who headed the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. (No big deal or anything...only one of my life goals achieved! She was so interested in what I had done and what I am doing here.) Glasgow Uni and Strathclyde are already both aggressively courting me for their PhD program next year; I just want to tell them to cool off a little bit!

I can't believe this is my life. I am so, so lucky.

I definitely still feel like I have a giant American flag tattooed on my forehead, but with every day I feel more integrated into Scottish life. Maybe soon I will start talking with a Scottish accent. (Or at least write a blog post about it, as I keep meaning to.) Or maybe that will just have to wait for month two...

people told me slow my roll, i'm screaming out "fuck that!"

One of the first things I was told when I arrived here was "slow down." I was also told not to worry about "breakneck American speed", whatever that was.

I am beginning to understand what is meant by "breakneck American speed".

Basically, if you know anybody in graduate school in the States, you know that they keep 15-20 hour days, are often wearing clothes from three days ago and look pretty ragged. Being a graduate student in the US is far from a glamorous thing - you'll often get looks of pity from other people when you tell them you're in graduate school! This is what I was expecting from graduate school in the UK - and was asking advice of people whom I had viewed as successful graduate students on surviving the journey. I had assumed that graduate school was a universal experience of intellectual masochism.

This is simply not how higher education works here. I was gearing up for 15-20 hour days of work only to find out that nobody would EVER do that! The postgrads I share an office with nearly fell out of their chairs when they heard that American grad students would work that much. In ONE DAY? they asked. They said that if I worked for six to eight hours a day "that would be a beautifully productive day" and that "I should go to the pub immediately". SIX TO EIGHT HOURS, you guys. (They do make a valid point, though - after a while, doesn't the quality of the work you produce go down? Well, yes...) Later I inquired about gaining access to the office over the weekend, and everyone stared at me. "Why would you come in over the weekend unless you had a giant deadline hanging over your head?" they asked. Because I have work to do? I don't know when they get anything done.

I try to show up at my office around 10 or 11 Monday through Friday and work until about 7 or 8 pm unless I have seminars to attend or meetings with people. When I go home I stop working. Not only is this unheard of in American-style grad school - or any American education system really, I am still being told I work too much! As it is, I am already pulling "ridiculous hours at the office"; I am almost always the first person to arrive. The other grad students think I am crazy for even attempting this.

It is arguably harder to slow down than it is to speed up. Given pressure, I think you can definitely learn how to do more work. (You might not like it, however.) But being told to do less work? I'm having such a hard time figuring out what i should DO with myself! I have a book that I have been working through slowly for one of my professors and could be working harder at, and I have other readings that I could be working on too. But no, I decided, I should take the weekend off. Or at least as much of it as I could bear. If you knew me in college, you know that I would do schoolwork every day except for Friday (I would sleep on Friday.)

So in an effort to slow down, on my first weekend after the semester started, I:
read a book for fun,
went to a farmer's market,
saw three bands play a gig,
went grocery shopping at two separate stores,
visited three art galleries,
scoped out a couple other art galleries,
looked into seeing some plays,
tried to hunt down some books I need for a class I joined,
walked to a new part of the city and back,
sent some emails,
typed up some drafts for future posts,
and read two articles and wrote a 500 word response
...all before 6pm on Sunday night. (Last weekend was quite similar.)

So much for slowing down! It's so strange to be told to relax. I've been working on it, though but I feel like I'm not not doing anything ever! As it is, I don't really have anything "due" at any specific date; I just sit and read and produce ideas. (I should point out that I don't really have classes that have things due - as an MRes student, I'm essentially a PhD student, but without the title.) I don't know what to do with all this free time. I suppose I should cultivate a hobby or seven.

I don't mind the weather, I've got scarves and caps and sweaters

I just wish I understood it.

The other day someone turned to me and said, "Oh, we're having a lovely fall!" It is sixty degrees and raining. Fall? I've been spoiled by beautiful New England autumns for the past 22 years. Living in a city often means "no trees", though. But as for the weather...


(image from thefuckingweather dot com)This is what my weather report has been telling me for the past week. Actually, this is all my weather report will tell me. (I imagine I could use a better weather website, but that takes the fun out of things.) Unfortunately, this is not the most helpful advice.

I've desperately been trying to figure out what Scotland's weather is like. Well, I mean, of course it rains; we are in the United Kingdom. But a lot of it is not intuitive. I also have rapidly figured out that I always need to have an umbrella on me - even if it has been sunny and beautiful all day, it is bound to rain at some point. It is also not uncommon for rain to happen while it is perfectly sunny - clear skies and rain (this happened repeatedly last week.)

A larger problem is that they insist on using Celsius here, which means that sometimes someone will say "It's so hot out - 22 degrees!" and I have a little heart attack for a second. (My idea of "hot" is American style 80+ F with humidity.) That said, we've been having a great few weeks in what I believe is the mid to high 60s. I have been informed that this is a "heat wave". Unfortunately this also means that sometimes it will be around 35-40 (F) and I will find people wearing just a t-shirt. I know I am not one to speak - I have questionable tastes of what is counts as hot vs cold - but even I know that 30 degrees is unreasonable for t-shirt weather.

I've also been told that winter here is "miserable", which to my New England brain translates to "wet, snowy, and cold as fucking hell." My office is on this gigantic mega-hill (as seen below, though I assure you, google maps will not do it justice, increase the incline by about 45% more. Today I saw three cars stall out while trying to park).
I asked the English department if I will need to buy ice picks for wintertime. They assured me that no, I will not need to do this. I don't see how this is possible.

HI FROM MY OFFICE

I brought my laptop to the office recently to try and see if I can avoid using our ancient brick machines and use my mac instead. Thus far it has been unsuccessful - I apparently have to call the IT people and ask for a new IP address before I can get online. (Have I mentioned how much I hate the Internet here?)

Either way, this is where I spend a majority of my time, in case you were curious. I face a window that gives me a perfect view of Glasgow - it's distractingly beautiful. I'll try to get a picture of that soon.

Things are going really well so far by the way, guys. I'm getting into a routine and I'm starting to get comfortable. It's still scary, but it's definitely getting better!

Things I Do Not Have, Redux

1. My computer
Beverly is back! Well, kind of.

As I predicted, she had few problems with her logic board. On macs at least, the video card is part of the logic board. (I might not know everything about computers, like how to program them and build them, but I can recognize what parts are attached to other parts.) Basically the cost of an entirely new logic board + new hard drive as previously installed + LABOR = 1 new computer.

Since computers age in fruit fly years, Beverly was approximately 46821 years old (rough estimate. a fruit fly lifepsan is 10 human days, but then there was division and multiplication, so I made up a number). Rather than pay all that money for repair work on an ancient machine we bought a new computer. Beverly came back to me, a sad pile of metal and wires, soon to be retired forever. RIP Beverly! Have fun crashing in Mac Heaven!

2. My Visa
I mentioned that I needed to get my transcript from UNH to New York City in 7 days in my last post. Remember that I am a generally calm person.

This seemed doable. Okay! TIMELINE TIME.
FRIDAY 08/06 Notification arrives! Request 2 transcripts from UNH; one for my records and one for the British consulate. Remember that the weekend is coming up and the Registrar will probably not deal with it until Monday.
MONDAY 08/09 They have seen my request. If the registrar prints them and puts them in the mail today, they will arrive by Wednesday! It only takes two days for mail to get from MA > NH and NH > MA. Perfect!
WEDNESDAY 08/11 NO TRANSCRIPTS IN THE MAIL; commence panicking (see below). Anticipate the mail being hours late on Thursday, and then still not receiving transcripts. Anticipate not being able to fulfill British Government's demands. Request transcripts for pickup through Blackboard for Thursday.
THURSDAY 08/12: Nervously check the mail every 15 minutes from 9 am onward. (Feel like Dad.) Prepare to drive up to UNH if mail does not arrive by 11 am. Mail arrives at 10:55, with my transcripts; calm the fuck down. Sign envelope, write my application # on it, bring to UPS store to have it overnighted to NYC by Friday 08/13 as requested. Stop worrying! Call off impromptu trip to NH, go to Wheaton to work on research project.
FRIDAY 08/13 Resume panicking! No sign of delivery from UPS. Call UPS, find out they have no idea where my transcript is. They lost track of it somewhere after Shrewsbury, MA. Find out all of this at 4:30 PM! Offices close at 5! UPS guy says he will call back within the hour, as he is going to call ALL OF THE NEW YORK CITY DRIVERS UNTIL HE FINDS IT. UPS guy calls back - it is found but not yet delivered! Hastily e-mail the consulate explaining situation at hand and how it is not my fault.
MONDAY 08/16 UPS promises to have my transcript at British Consulate General by 9 am.

OK! I think we see a problem here. Namely that Monday August 16th is not Friday August 13th. So now I am back to worrying about my visa, because WHAT IF THEY TURN ME DOWN BECAUSE I DID NOT SEND THEM ENOUGH PAPER IN THE FIRST PLACE OH MY GOD. And by the way, it is their fault that I did not send my visa application in earlier. Oh, The Bureaucracy Parade, you are lots of fun!

3. Plane Tickets
As I think you have figured out by now, I still do not have plane tickets, as I am not allowed to buy those without a visa. If I try to do move to Scotland without one, I will eventually become an illegal alien in the UK, and that is generally frowned upon. I am only leaving in FIVE WEEKS. (Plane tickets are already expensive...they are going to be way more expensive than necessary at the rate we are going!)

Dear Linguistics, YOUR LOVE IS MY DRUG

1. So I went on that job interview. And I didn't fuck it up ... until they very end!
I talked to the ladies who currently are Administrative Assistants-slash-Grammatical Editors; they gave me a cup of coffee, an article to edit, and a red pen. It's like my dream job interview! And apparently nobody's ever done that well on their practice document before, so they were a little bit floored. Basically, they were like "We really like you, we'll let you know by Friday. Is there anything else you want us to know?"

And I was all, "Well, I'm sorry that you didn't get back to me earlier in the summer when I had full availability; I can only do this part-time right now - I've been working (will be starting to work, ahem, whatever) with a professor at BU and then I'm moving to Scotland for grad school."

Lady: (jaw drop)"Well, thanks for taking the time to come in."

And then I walked out. I haven't felt that badass in a while.


2. SPEAKING OF BADASS (this is relative, perhaps if you are not me, you will not feel the same way)
I heard back from another professor I e-mailed recently. He's been busy wrapping up this project which is essentially a corpus of Old English Poetics and language "to detect relationships between, and structures within, poetic texts in [the] Old English [corpus]". He had been away for a week, which means he just got my e-mail and apologized if he missed out on having me on board due to this fact.
But he also warned me that
a) they had run out of funding
b) they were nearly finished with it
c) I AM ACTUALLY OVERQUALIFIED TO DO THIS.


3. Oh, and Sarah Palin called herself Shakespeare and I wrote about it.

YOU GUYS, THIS IS AWESOME.