Library

Today I got to do more adventuring. This morning, for my class "Intellectual History from Antiquity to the Renaissance" (pompous points +10!), I had to visit the library to get the necessary books for my next lecture, which is on Aristotle (pompous points +3!). Now, I have visited the University of Edinburgh Main Library once so far this year, but it was mostly to confirm that it did indeed have a coffee shop inside of it. Today I had a chance really check it out, and oh, the joy of it all! The building has most of its books primarily on one floor. That's right, a full size college library, on one floor. Oh the Stacks! It was a thing of beauty. One could, if one wanted to, walk from Library of Congress subclass AC - collected works, to ZA50 - Government Information. And that's awesome.

So, I have a confession to make. I am a nerd. And not like a "lets bust out our Star Fleet uniforms, Vulcan Ears and Klingon-to-English dictionary and go see Leornard Nimoy at a Trekkie Con". I am, at least what I would consider, a nerd in the more classical sense. Now don't get me wrong, I know my Yuuzhan-Vong from my Troydarians, I know which chapters betrayed the Imperium during the Horus Heresy, I grasp the depth of the sadness from the Kinslaying, I know who planned the Kwisatz Haderach, and I am practically a card-carrying member of the Browncoats. But where my real nerdiness (spellcheck tells me this is not a word, nerdiocity then perhaps?) comes out, and splays its cephalapod tentacles, is in libraries and books. I am probably not this guy:

 But, give me the chance like today, to grab some books, and I nerd out totally. Rare book collections? Sign me up? Ancient Manuscript section? Show me the way? Microfilm? Yes, please! Of course, the irony is that I am not really all that well read. I've never read War and Peace, I can't really stand Dickens, Shakespeare is kinda a bother to me, the Iliad I find really kinda boring, don't even get me started on the Bronte Sisters, and there are entire sections, genres even, that I avoid like the plague. Like for example, almost everything written by Germans. Nothing against them, its just some things get lost in translation (like the ability to have any idea what they are talking about).

But, I like books. Alot. So today, exploring the library was such a treat. The University of Edinburgh library has like 8 floors, several devoted purely to reading. And while they do have the obligatory wooden 1930's era desk and chairs designed by a guy who hated Chiropractors, they also have a whole room filled with this comfy chairs that have a built in mini-desk and laptop charger build into them, swiveling around and all lined facing the southwest wall, which is all windowed and gives one an awesome view of the city. When I finally found the books I was looking for, I ended walking out with two classic tomes by Aristotle, his Politics and Nicomachean Ethics. Both of the books are over 100 years old. Not just the copyright. Like, these books were printed during the days of monocles and when men could get away with names like Allistor Willingham III, and the library has kept the books ever since, rebinding them every couple of decades. That gives me goosebumps of awesomeness just thinking about it.

Even the librarians were cool. While they are not the dream librarians of every nerds dreams (not one bookish girl with horned-rim-glasses in sight), they were the next best thing, which is ancient Scottish men who could tell you all about where to find books about David Hume (personal friend of the family you know laddie) or the Second World War, because you know, THEY LIVED THROUGH IT!

Anyway, I will wrap up this long post with one last thing. While today I visited the Main Library of the University, one can visit the old library, known as the Playfair library, which now just holds mostly the spill-over from the School of Divinity Library. It looks like this:

Thats right. It is lined with busts! Busts! Like something out of Laura Croft's house. I must visit this place.

Perfect Day

So, today had all the possibility to be a really horrible day. The morons (the most polite word I can think of, although brainless, immature, selfish, ignorant gits would probably be a more accurate and culturally appropriate title) next door decided that they were going to party it up, because the weekend totally starts on Thursday. Now, I understand the idea of the weekend being a much more flexible state of mind period of time in college. I go to GWU, a place where among much of the student body the "work week", "classes", "academic progress" and "any semblence of anything anywhere close to responsibility" is at best a highly debatable phantasm that hasn't not been seen since Roosevelt (the first one!) took office, and whose existence is the debated in our hallowed halls of scholarship (that is, if they actually did go to any of our hallowed halls of scholarship), and at worse a horrible terror only to be spoke of in hushed tones, similar to how one speaks about Voldemort, or Dick Cheney.

The last president to inspire The Fear of Work in GWU students

Actually, that's not true. At GW we love to yell about how much we hate Dick Cheney. Anyway, the point is, GW has exposed me to how much of the ignorant college masses my esteemed peers behave, which is partying as much as physically possible at anytime or place, day of the week notwithstanding, until you either collapse from exhaustion or die. (To soon ?)

That said, I have never been subjected to next door neighbors who have literally become nocturnal. Their parties start at midnight, and continue until early in the morning. And I don't mean like "oh man its almost 4, we're super rad for partying this late". I mean early like, at 6:30 this morning, when the sun was rising, the morning song birds were chirping, and Edinburgh was beginning to wake up, these buffoons were still playing their music and yelling their heads off. I got absolutely zero sleep last night, as even my most pacifying Chopin preludes and Debussy concertos could not ward off their incessant noise.

To really top it off, I had a 9 o'clock lecture this morning, which was across town. And, the promised Edinburgh weather finally kicked in. Which means 50 degrees, windy, grey as slate and drizzling enough just to make you damp and miserable.  But the glorious thing is this: I am now sitting in my new favorite coffee shop (one of the 1, 748,597 within 4 feet of the University), the aptly titled "Black Medecine Coffee Company". They have a definte British Columbia vibe going on (complete with pacific northwest totem pole decor), but play only motown music inside, and the baristas all sound like the wife of William Wallace. And their coffee is amazing. The day is now amazing! I love a country where this perfect balm could be allowed to exist.

The Scenic North Sea

Today I had a really interesting experience. I got to do something that I really did not think I would get to do until I got back to the USA: I went on a beach picnic. Now, I am aware that Great Britain is infact an island country (well, really an island and a half), and that the water has played an important historical role in the development of the culture and history of Great Britain. Everything from seafood to the Royal Navy bears the mark of the large bodies of water around the UK. But all that said, being from Florida, I guess I have a specific mental idea of what a picnic on the beach is.

It looks sorta like this:
Not this:


But that's what I got. But it was a blast anyway. I got to meet some really cool people, hang with cool people I already knew, and eat another free meal. Perhaps growing up in Florida makes on a little spoiled to what the beach is like.

Supposedly people all over the world pretty much have only the above as their experiences with the ocean. I think that is really sad, but it does make me appreciate why the British were so keen on settling (ruthlessly conquering) the Caribbean. I bet Port Royal Jamaica must have looked like paradise compared to this.

The really cool thing though is how still this definitely home to all the Scottish students I meet. They will defend this beach as their spot to go hang out until the day they die. It gets a mind thinking, specifically about what it means to be home, to have a home, and the concept of "my space". Maybe in a couple days I will blog some more about this idea.

Auld Lang Syne...

Things I did this weekend:

1. Attended a full-blown bonna-fide ceilidh (pronounced kayleh). Think of it as a Scottish hootenanny.

2. Discovered that my beard trimmer had died on me. Which is a big deal for me. So I went on a cross-city-beard-trimmer-acquisition-quest. This lead me to discover an interesting cultural phenomena; the bargain store.

3. Searched for a Church. Kinda fun, kinda funny.

But I promise this will not be "dear diary", so here is so color commentary on my first ceilidh (a baptism by haggis if you will).

A ceilidh is, in a word, a phenomena. Folk dancing, kilts, bands consisting of fiddles and pipers, the whole shebang. It was a truly bizarre, very non-American experience. It was also alot of fun. Dancing, when not about "getting low", or about how ironic you can be, is actually a really fun thing to do. A ceilidh is also designed, and I am sure cultural anthropologists and other cultural hoighty-toighty types would disagree, to make absolute fools of everyone involved. Think about it: guys in skirts dancing with girls in skirts, dancing to what is essentially Scottish polka music played primarily on the fiddle and flute, two beautiful but squeaky instruments. The music is is too fast to really keep up with adequately and thus designed to make you tired, red-faced and sweaty, and is combined with dance steps that always seem to end up in spinning your partner fast enough to lift her off the ground and send her careening into a collision course with Jupiter, (which actually saves you some embarrassment, because you can barf your dizzy guts up while she is reentering the atmosphere on the completion of her orbital flight). Oh, did I mention that you end the evening with the yelling of a traditional folk song at the top of your lungs while holding hands in a giant circle, charging headfirst at eachother at every chorus to create a giant scrum of sweaty screaming tartan clad revelers? Combine that with the raging youthful hormones of the lusty sons of Scotland attempting to woo yon fair lasses, overwatched by the stodgy presbyters of their local kirk, and you have the fun-yet-freaky bizarro-world sheeps-gut eating cousin of a high-school prom.

People Watching

Something I enjoy doing is people watching. As someone who is quite content to sit alone and stare at people, giving the activity an official and more socially acceptable name is great for me. As it turns out, Edinburgh is an absolute gem for this sort of thing. Any city that prides itself in its giant inflatable purple cow it produces once a year to use as a stage for drama productions is bound to have some interesting people in it. An added bonus is that being an American, everyone here is all the more interesting just for their British-ness or at the very least European-ness. Originally, this was going to be the topic of this post, I had it written out and everything, but upon reading it, I found alot of my observations, while actual occurances, sounded more like racial stereotypes. I suppose the stereotypes have to come from somewhere, but to avoid offending people though, I will refain from giving any examples.

I will however, say that I do indeed love British people. The Scots and the English and the Northern Irish (and I would assume the Welsh, but I have never met someone from Wales) are all walking illustrations on how the coolness scale works. Most of them fall on dorky end of the spectrum. Alot of them are just plain funny looking people. The American approach to the spectrum is to push people towards the cool end, with people getting progressively less dorky as they get cooler. The British approach is to do the opposite. If they want to get cooler, they get dorkier, going around backwards on the spectrum, finally arriving at a place where they are so dorky, they are cool and hip. However, this momentum doesn't seem to stop, as alot of my peers here at University seem to push the limits past cool and into tragically hip, and thus back to dorky. The best example of this is the Beatles. How did they go from the guys whering the funny suits in Hamburg to the epitome of rock coolness (especially Paul and John)? By going backwards. Its great fun watching and hanging out with my new British friends, and makes me thoroughly enjoy the differences in culturs. (Cool thing about my metaphor with the Beatles, it holds true! Look at John in his late yoko-worshiping phase, he went back out of cool into painfully hip and dorky territory).

Hoping this isn't just my mom reading this...

So, I decided to join the 21st century today, and create a weblog. Not because I have anything terribly important to say, or that I have some great insight into the world, or even that I think my personal opinion is worth more of your time than anything else that is competing for your attention. I have just, in recent months especially, been faced with the fact that I have an increasing number of people whom I have snagged into becoming interested in my life, and these people (you!) are becoming increasingly geographically spread apart.

Since personal visits are a cost prohibitive (yet the decidedly more fun way) for keeping people in the loop, and personal handwritten letters can also be a real bother (having to get personal addresses, having to buy stamps, having to figure out how to mail things to other continents, forcing people to read my handwriting...), my only option seems to be to use the inter-web-net-thing and write a blog.

So, here it goes. Maybe no one will read this or maybe it'll just be my grandparents (yes they are that cool), but I figure I will post anyway. Atleast, I'll be able to, with a clear conscious, every night know be able to fall asleep confident in the fact that people can check up on me every couple of days and make sure I am still alive.