a string of farewells

Yesterday I bumped into Kevin, my very very lovely Popular Romanticism tutor from last term, on my way home from town. He was listening to his iPod and shuffling along the street just like any other random middle-aged man, and I almost walked right past him, but then I saw a widening grin on his face as he waved at me and took his headphones out. And I couldn’t help this huge smile creeping up on me too.

We paused for a short chat; I told him about my dissertation and he told me about the undergrads he was taking this term for the Romantics module, we discussed the merits of Red Chilli (”easily the best Chinese in town,” he says, I’m inclined to agree), he asked if I was going anywhere for reading week before we both laughingly recalled the fact that reading week is somewhat irrelevant when one doesn’t have lessons any more to start with.

And then he wished me well for the rest of the term, I thanked him, and we waved farewell with the parting sentiment that hopefully we’ll run into each other again sometime. Walking our different ways, I thought of so many other things I’d wanted to ask and say - like how was your Easter break, did you like Paris and was it warm when you went, is your family doing well, and thank you for the good grade you gave me on my essay last term.

But by then we were many many footsteps apart. And so I walked on, back towards home, mulling over our little by-the-wayside conversation in my head - thinking, wondering, when I’d next get to see him, or my other muchly loved professors - Bill and John especially - and slowly slowly realising, maybe this is the beginning of the end, when I don’t see any of them very much anymore. Maybe it’s the start of letting go, of saying goodbye, of your life here winding to a close, when you wonder if this will be the last run-in you ever have with your favourite prof, and you start relentlessly dwelling on all the things you could have said to him…

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dreaming as the summers die

Long had paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

This is so frighteningly haunting. I don’t really know why, and I can’t put my finger on it; it’s the last stanza especially, something about the word phantomwise, the thought of Alice moving unseen, in his dreams, under skies, lingering at the forefront of Carroll’s mind, haunting haunting him - perhaps it’s the new understanding I’ve acquired of their relationship, the knowledge that they suddenly broke everything off before Wonderland was published and that he hardly saw her after that, that when they did meet, it was cold and distant - it’s tragic, and terrifying, and I haven’t been able to get the last stanza out of my head since I read it again a few days ago. I can’t imagine living with that sort of pain, with a ghostly phantom in your life, a remnant of your past which you know is never, ever going to go away… it just - sends all these chills down my spine.

These books are creepy. Terry Pratchett has said before that he hates them, that they scared him as a child and made him uncomfortable, and the more I work with them the more I understand why…

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sleepwalking on a tightrope

The past week has been: coffee with Jake, coffee with Nicole, plenty of thought-provoking talk about school, post-school, life and living resulting; a frantic romp through Alice and assorted criticism to cull quotations; a slow start on Artemis Fowl and the Lost Colony which I have been quite dying to read for a while; the YTR marketing department winning the much-coveted Achievement in Marketing Award at the Theatre Management Association Awards on Thursday, which made me all glowy even though all I do is pop in once a week to do menial odd jobs; Cluedo party at April’s! where I was Miss Scarlet and got to wear a pretty red dress; planning and finally booking a short trip to Spain in June: so looking forward to Alicante, where the hotel has a swimming pool and the beach close by - it doesn’t take a great deal to make my day these days.

So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland, though she knew she had but to open them again, and all would change to dull reality - the grass would be only rustling in the wind, and the pool rippling to the waving of the reeds - the rattling teacups would change to tinkling sheep-bells, and the Queen’s shrill cries to the voice of the shepherd-boy - and the sneeze of the baby, the shriek of the Gryphon, and all the other queer noises, would change (she knew) to the confused clamour of the busy farm-yard - while the lowing of the cattle in the distance would take the place of the Mock Turtle’s heavy sobs.

It’s not much longer, now, till all this ends; people keep saying September is so far away, but it scares me how quickly nearly five months of this year have flown by and before we know it it’s going to be June and then half the year, half the year, will have gone - where? I don’t want to waste it, I don’t want to lose it, and be harshly jolted back to reality, like Alice, by someone brushing the falling leaves off my sleeping face - realising after all that Wonderland was a dream - but was it?

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tori karaage

tori karaage - picture from bento.com

Tori karaage is one of my favourite Japanese dishes. It’s one of my favourite dishes, full stop, actually; there’s just something about the taste of the chicken that renders me a salivating mess every time a plate of it appears in front of me. Thus it is - naturally enough - a dish I have been trying to replicate in my kitchen forever, with varying levels of success.

Until today, when I had the most amazing homemade tori karaage ever, I am not even kidding. And it is SO simple - all you need is light soy sauce, ginger, and some kind of cooking wine (I used shao hsing jiu, which makes an acceptable replacement for sake when you’re a poor student in a pinch). The recipe I used was this one, from Just Hungry, a wonderful food site which I will definitely be patronising much more often in future.

I wanted to take a photo of my tori karaage, but it was so good that I literally completely forgot about it once the first piece came off the pan and I gobbled it up like the greedy karaage-loving monster I am. I just wanted to eat more. It isn’t often that I find an online recipe so good I have to blog about it and share the foodie love and goodness with everyone else… this one is a keeper for sure. Try it!

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on comfort zones

Following a brief chat the other day about York’s recent drop in UK university rankings (we’re now 11th overall in the Good University Guide - traditionally we’ve always been within the top 10, though fortunately we’re still 6th in the English ranking), it occurred to me that, upon thinking about it, a disproportionate number of my fellow English grad students have expressed dissatisfaction with the uni in some respect or other at some point of time during my conversations with them. Most of said complaints arise because of the library - which I frankly never thought of as that bad - but quite a few other issues that have come up seem to stem from the fundamental fact that York is not wherever they did their undergrad… and people are slow to adjust to differences.

Taking for example something as simple as teaching - I think after all these years, I’ve been eminently adapted to York’s system of mostly independent reading and seminars being more about freestyle discussion than actual teaching sessions. So I was surprised, and somewhat at a loss for a witty rebuttal, when I spoke with coursemates who said the lack of proper teaching rankled and they came here not to learn from other students but from professors who are experts in their fields. It’s a fair enough point, but I always find myself bristling with impatience now when I’m stuck in a class where the prof talks a lot and I just work my right hand to the bone scribbling notes furiously; I never thought I’d say this ever, but I want to talk, I want to hear what the others have to say, I want a rapid-fire idea exchange, I’m not here to listen to a lecture - ! Yet it seems that that is precisely what other people are here for, and this is because their undergraduate unis were like that (I’ve found it especially prevalent among students from continental Europe). So how do we strike a middle ground to keep all students happy?

We’re strong in all areas; our research quality has been 5* forever and ever and our entry standards are high. The only category in which we’re noticeably lapsed from the rest of the top 10 in English is student satisfaction (3.77/5, the next lowest is 3.90 and most of them are above 4) - and what is student satisfaction? Such a nebulous concept… but there must be something we’re not getting right, since graduate students in other universities are quite happy to average scores of >4 for student satisfaction. Perhaps the problem really is with our facilities? But again, maybe it’s just about what you’re used to, what you aren’t; because I’ve been here for three years already I am more than happy to work with what our library has plus what journals we can get online (which, in all fairness, is a decently sized database - ATHENS gives you access to a lot of things). I don’t feel constricted by my 20 book borrowing limit or by the fact that students can take books out for entire durations of holidays regardless of requests for said books - but I’ve found that my coursemates are. And again… I don’t know that there really is that big of a problem with our library per se. One just has to realise that this is a whole different ballpark, get used to it, and roll with it, right? Or am I just being too smallminded because I’ve been playing in the same ballpark all this while…?

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slow dancing on the boulevard

So today the bunch of us ex-Rafflesians met up with the lovely lady from the International Office to talk about and plan what we were going to do during the upcoming RJ visit to York. And along the way, she dropped the yummy nugget of information that the teacher coming with them would be Mr. Purvis. And my heart just - leapt.

Sure, last time it was Mr. McConnell who came, and he’d taught me for S-paper and he did remember me and it was nice chatting with him, but he did only teach me for a year at a once-a-week class where I was practically invisible because I was silent throughout… not that I talked very much during Purvis’s classes, but his lessons, his obvious love for literature, whatever little bits of conversation I had with him out of class - they were all such a big part of why I chose this subject in uni, how it finally dawned on me that lit was my thing, how I came to see it as so much more than a dry, analytical sifting through dusty old words.

I’m so bizarrely weirdly excited, and happy, that he’s coming to York. I don’t even know if he remembers me (it’s been ages and he probably doesn’t since I have been very remiss in visiting RJ - the new campus is so cold and distant), but… yeah. This is another blast from my past that really means a lot to me. I’m stoked. ♥

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a little housekeeping

It is truly shocking how much time I can bring myself to waste tricking out my site when I have something new and shiny to play with. Wordpress 2.5.x is such a big step up from WP 2.2 and earlier (which I stubbornly stuck with for the longest time ever because I was too lazy to upgrade) that it’s like stumbling into your favourite toystore and discovering they’ve added another floor of fascinating gadgets - built-in comment avatar support, smiley customisation, improved metadata handling - And I’m still at that stage of new layout love where I can stare at it all day and egotistically admire my handiwork. Not good for the dissertation…

Anyway, I have a couple of fantastic songs up in the etc. section now, so check it out! And I should get back to work.

5 | +1?

using ideas as my maps

Spiffing new domain, spiffing new layout, and you will not believe what went into coding this… I don’t even really want to think about it now that it’s done. I’m particularly proud of having successfully negotiated both horizontal and vertical centering and then relatively-positioning a text block within that div layer. I’ve also cleaned up a whole lot of old code by doing this up from scratch instead of appropriating and adapting an older layout, which is kind of the digital equivalent of cleaning out the dusty cupboard. And and and, the comment layouts have been revamped! (But you’ll have to leave a comment to see that.) /geek

It’s kind of empty right now though because I have literally spent near on eight hours just working on this layout, wrangling PHP and CSS, tweaking colours, tweaking code, doing things with block elements that I’ve never done before, &c and I am too braindead to think of how to fill up my etc. section. I was going to upload some music, but I’m afraid you all will have to wait to hear the dulcet tones of The Byrds (whose cover of Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” inspired this layout).

*

I was stumped for something to write to make this a noteworthy first post for my shiny new (hopefully permanent) space, and then I remembered I had yet to post about the Matchbox Twenty concert.

L to R: kyle, rob ♥, brian, paul

As you can see from this photo, Jia Min, Jenny and I were in the unfortunate position of being stuck in the upper circle with many people’s heads and a lot of space between us and the stage. Sadly they’d decided to make the stalls standing room only, and as much as I love MB20 I wasn’t about to gladly sacrifice my feet for them.

But distance aside, the concert was wonderful. They did so many of their old songs - “Hang”, “3 AM”, “Long Day” all way back from their first album - and nearly all of my favourites - “Real World”, “Disease”, “Push”, “Downfall”, “Bright Lights”, “Unwell”, “Hand Me Down” - all songs that I’ve listened to over and over again, so so many times, songs that are so in my system that I could sing along to them in my sleep. Rob played piano on “Bright Lights” and I have such a weakness for my favourite musicians on the piano - so that was good. Undoubtedly (for me, at least) the high point of their performances for the night was “Bent”, which is probably fitting as it’s the title most people would name if you asked them to name an MB20 song off the top of their head. “Real World” and “Downfall” lacked a teensy bit of oomph - perhaps it was just that their live backing music was different from the CD backing tracks and I’m too used to the latter - but “Bent” was explosively powerful. I’m not actually such a big fan of the newer songs, I think the music isn’t as catchy as the Mad Season/More Than You Think You Are era and the lyrics aren’t as simple and honest either, but as always with a good band, hearing the songs live made me like them more.

The best thing about the show, as Rob himself said, was how many people were just so into it; he said the thing about being in the UK was that reporters always asked them what it’s like being here because they’re a band that’s so much bigger in the States, but then they do shows like this and they’re blown away by the realisation that there are so many people in the UK who’ll pay to come see them (the Manchester Apollo’s not a small venue at all, and it was absolutely packed). And it’s just… so true. I remember back in first year when my seminar group were having drinks at a pub and Beth and I were discussing the sex god that is Rob Thomas, and everyone else had never heard of him, and I’d always thought I’d never get to see them here because they just aren’t that famous in the UK. But everyone at the concert were clearly fans, everyone was singing along, so loudly that you could hear the audience as a collective voice singing their hearts out along with Rob. The girl sitting in front of me couldn’t have been more than 10. She was wearing an MB20 T-shirt, and she and her mom were clearly having a ball of a time, and her mom knew every word to every song.

rob at the piano

in all fairness, MB20 isn’t the best live act I’ve seen in my concert experience (that would be Michael Buble). But for some reason, some inexplicable reason that I can’t put my finger on, they’re a band that mean a lot to me; I remember the heartbreak I felt when Adam Gaynor left and it came back fleetingly, wrenchingly, when the band took to the stage and there was only 4 of them and not 5, I remember singing out loud in my room to Mad Season late at night when it was just me and my CD player and a last-minute assignment, I remember all these individual songs that spoke to me at different periods of my life - “Bent” and “The Burn” in secondary school, “Bright Lights” and “Unwell” in JC, “Mad Season” and “Real World” in university - so many times, I’ve just been listening casually to my iPod and suddenly the lyrics of an MB20 song would hit me with that yes yes yes feeling. I feel like if there’s any band I can say I grew up with, it would be them, they’re the one band from my teenage days that I haven’t grown out of and who’ve followed me all this way here to York. And seeing them live was such a big thing for me… I almost feel that I’ve come, in an odd way, full circle.

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