Tonight There Is A Full Moon, Allegedly.

The thing about being an astronomy student in England is that you can't do any of your assignments because it NEVER STOPS RAINING. Seriously, I've had this observational assignment for the last two weeks and there has been maybe one night where I could see some stars through the wisps of clouds, but not the entire constellation I needed. I'm thinking of turning it in without the diagram or calculations, but including in my observational log that I couldn't complete the assignments because my local view conditions are I am in England and stars are only a rumor here.

So Close Yet So Far

Good news, you guys! My dissertation has been marked. Bad news: No one can tell me what my mark is. The professors at my university are participating in a marking boycott. They were actually marked before the boycott began but not finalized by the committee, which did not meet when they were supposed to because, again, marking boycott. When someone in my class asked if we could at least have a look at the preliminary marks, we were told that because dissertations are classed as exams he couldn't tell us.

It's not as big of a problem for me because I have never had any intention of doing something with my degree in terms of a career or more advanced study - mostly I was just planning to shout "GENDER STUDIES!" every time I make a horrible misogynist joke and obnoxiously correct people who confuse biology with gender. But a number of my classmates were meant to go on and study more things, and a lack of any grades to show the coordinators of the programs they want to study means they can't get accepted to said programs. It's a real pickle.

Anycrap, I'm still waiting to find out whether I can write on an academic level or if years of blogging have lead to my being unable to write a coherent sentence without swearing or sarcasm in it.

Triumphant Return

Oh hello there internets. I apologize for abandoning you and assure you it was, in fact, temporary. As I mentioned in August, I didn't have much time to blog whilst writing my dissertation. I finished that, ten days before it was actually due no less, in order that I would not have to work on it/worry about it while I was back in America for my brother's wedding - having to wear a dress and and sandals gave me more than enough to worry about on that front. We got back a month ago, so by all rights, I should have resumed blogging, but there is no way for me to describe to you the amount of not wanting to be anywhere NEAR my laptop post-dissertation and so I stuck it in a corner, disappeared from Facebook and Twitter and failed to blog for the entirety of October despite not actually being too busy for any of those things all month long.

But now it's November! And November is NaBloPoMo, and I love the challenge of NaBloPoMo, so today and then for 29 more days in a row there will be something here to read. I don't promise there will be anything GOOD to read, but I will endeavor to do my best.

For those who are interested, the final title of my dissertation was The Mainstreaming of BDSM?: Examining mainstream acceptance of BDSM culture through Fifty Shades of Grey and Secretary and it will be a surprise to precisely NO ONE that what I concluded is E.L. James is a first class asshole who understands BDSM about as well as an eel understands tap dancing. Of course I explained it it much greater detail and in the "clear, precise academic language" I was specifically instructed to use, meaning I tried not to be be funny and liberally sprinkled it with words like "engendered"and "heteronormative", which StereoNinja thought was hilarious. As far as I know it hasn't been marked yet.

Ok, then. Let the NaBloPoMoing begin!

Not Dead (I Think)

With my dissertation coming due in less than a month now and me typically far behind my own personal (and to be fair, probably overly ambitious) schedule, it's going to be a while before I can get back to doing some quality posts. Which is unfortunate because I have some interesting and terrifying boat stories (they are not necessarily the same stories) due to the fact that StereoNinja has bought a boat. It is StereoNinja's boat and decidedly not mine, as evidenced by the fact that he won't let me buy the new Borg cube glowing refrigerator on thinkgeek for it despite both its awesomeness and the 12V adapter it comes with which is exactly what you need for a boat based refrigerator meaning it was obviously MEANT TO BE. But it will have to wait, as I am currently deeply immersed in trying to stay on the actual topic of my paper and not wander off on tangents about how shitty E.L. James is at all the things that are NOT kink related. But you guys. It will all be over SO SOON. I just have to get through the next month.

Cultural Differences

American classmate: What is that thing?

British classmate: It's for your face. It sprays mist, for when it's hot outside.

AC: That's so cool! I've never seen anything like that!

BC: They're hard to find here. I got this in France. I'm surprised you don't have them in America though.

AC: Well in America we have air conditioning.

Note: This conversation occurred when it was 72 degrees outside.

Just Where The Hell I Have Been

I turned in both of my papers yesterday. It was much easier for me this time than it was the last time I had two papers due on the same day, less because I had done it before than because I cared about them differently than last time. I say "differently" because last term I had the weird experience of having one class that I thought was brilliant - I had strong opinions which were typically diametrically opposed to everyone else in the class and a massive crush on my teacher, and the other class that I spent every single moment of wishing "class" was something you could stab in the face. So when it was paper time, I was riled up and excited to write a paper on the UK's extreme pornography ban and why it is a load of complete and utter bullshit, and the other paper...well, I just gave no fuck whatsoever about that paper, so I just filled it with buzzwords like "discourse" and "paradigm" and my person favorite "lived experience" and turned it in. I had done the exact same thing on the annotated bibliography I'd had to write for the class earlier in the term and received a merit for it so I figured, you know, fuck it.

I now need to begin work on my dissertation, a task that would be much easier if I had ANY IDEA AT ALL what to write it on. My first instinct was, of course, Fifty Shades seeing as I am apparently one of the world's leading experts on how bad it sucks. But "Fifty Shades of Grey: No Seriously, What the Fuck?" is not an appropriate or even reasonably narrow topic and also the main piece of advice on picking a dissertation topic seems to be "pick something you like because you're going to eat, sleep and breathe that fucking subject for the next six months" and I think we've pretty well established that Fifty Shades of Grey is decidedly NOT something I like. I like being semi-internet famous for creative swearing and pushed to the top of reddit lists, but that is not likely to factor into dissertation research so much. So anyway, about three weeks from now I need to turn in a dissertation proposal roughly the length of a module essay on something to do with "gender" or "sexuality" and I have precisely ZERO thoughts on what that topic should be. SO I;ve got that going for me.

Now, since it's been so long, let me switch topics on you entirely and go back to complaining about my adopted country. Which I LOVE by the way - I know I complain about how homesick I am and how everything is too "not-America", but I do genuinely love it here (the sheep across the river had some lambs and I can hear them from my bedroom and the lambs run around all cute and small and then randomly jump up in the air for NO REASON and it is fantastic; in related nature news, the two gay ducks (we think they are gay because they are both boys and are never, ever more than about three feet from one another so they are obviously a couple) that hang out in our marina have taken to coming right up to the kitchen door begging from bread and one of them will eat it right out of your hand). Having said that, I would now like to complain bitterly about Easter and daytime television.

As Easter approached, I asked StereoNinja why the stores had put out all of the Easter basket stuff yet and was greeted with a blank stare followed by "what is an Easter basket?" Because Easter baskets are NOT A THING. You know what you get here? A chocolate egg. One. THAT IS IT. And unlike a chocolate bunny, that egg is hollow, my friends. It probably has less total chocolate volume than a regular candy bar. In Chicago I made StereoNinja buy real Easter baskets with real Easter basket stuff for his children because I found the situation so unacceptable. But wait, there's more! Even worse than that atrocity is the fact the coloring Easter eggs is ALSO NOT A THING. I just...I don't even...WHY DON'T YOU WANT YOUR CHILDREN TO HAVE ANY FUN, ENGLAND? So I bought the Paas color cups when we were in Chicago so as to show StereoNinja & Spawn (TM) what they were missing. And then immediately ran into another problem: all the eggs are brown. Finding a white chicken egg in this country is harder than finding a burrito. I eventually figured out that Whole Foods in Kensington was selling them, but not until AFTER they had already sold out. StereoNinja went and got some white duck eggs from somewhere, which I discovered don't really work as they are quite translucent and not nearly as permeable. Plus then you have a house full of duck eggs which I'm not sure what you're supposed to do with. So apart from the fantastic ham I made, Easter was a kind of a disaster.

Now then: being a full time graduate student and not having a job means that I spend a lot of time at home during the day with the television on in the background for some noise so I don't go crazy and I have to say, there is NOTHING ON TELEVISION DURING THE DAY. Seriously, nothing worth watching unless you count Top Gear reruns I've seen a thousand times. Mainly all there seems to be are episodes of Charmed and an Australian soap opera call Neighbours. Everyone else at home in the day must be bored too, because what I really wanted to complain about is the sheer volume of commercials for a. online casinos and b. predatory loan companies. It is pretty much ALL they advertise during the day, one right after another. I can't help feeling like these things are related, and that they are preying on the weak as I would assume a significant percentage of the daytime television audience is made up of people who are out of work. Frankly, I think that's pretty shitty and I'm not sure why that's being allowed but watching BDSM torture porn on the internet in your own home is is not.

Coming up: Things I did in Chicago, as soon as I can remember what those things are.

Placeholder Post

Once again I find myself frantically writing two papers at the same time for graduate school and no time to blog. Additionally, I was in Chicago for a week which added lots of things to blog about but was detrimental to my having time to actually do it. Real posts forthcoming in about two weeks. Until then here's the short version:

• StereoNinja saw his first Blackhawks game and nearly left his jaw in Chicago where he dropped it in the United Center. He now totally gets why I thought the Slough Jets and their "arena" were fucking hilarious.
• I WENT ON A SUBMARINE. A SUBMARINE YOU GUYS. (It was not in the water.)
• FYI, if you have an hour and 45 minute layover in Dublin on your way to Chicago, it will not be nearly enough time to get through U.S. immigration pre-clearance and security between flights. This won't be a problem, however, because literally HALF of the people on your flight will be in that same line and they will delay the flight for twenty minutes because my country's obsession with security theater is insane. 

I will now go bury myself in anti-pornography literature and try to critique it rationally without shouting "BITCH YOU DON'T KNOW MY LIFE!" to an empty room.

Drownin' In The Rain, We're Drownin' In The Rain

Remember when I said the water was receding? Well it's now worse than it was when it crested the last time. Lake Titicacao is indistinguishable from the river and it's all flowing so fast that we've been watching ducks go by backwards since they aren't strong enough to swim upstream or even stay in one place. Also rain is forecast in my town for at least the next five days. The only road out of the island is impassable by anything other than a monster truck, and conversations with other islanders about what we can do about it amounted to "Yeah, you're pretty much screwed." Being as my car is roughly the size of half a semi-truck tire, I'm effectively stranded in my house, conveniently (?) during reading week, meaning I don't have to swim to the station to catch a train to London for class, so I've got that going for me. StereoNinja bought us both waders today, which I put on to try them for size and am now still wearing them. I told StereoNinja it was for safety:

me: I'm leaving these on.
StereoNinja: You're going to just wear them around the house?
me: Well, in a couple of hours the water might be in the house.

But really it's just because I'm pretending to be a fisherman. I'm trapped, don't judge my methods of entertaining myself.

I'd like to point out that the last time it rained this much in England, my country didn't even exist yet. Speaking of my country, sorry about all the snow there most of you, and for those of you in California, if you can figure out a way to get this water over to you, you're more than welcome to have it.

Answers That Aren't 42 And Also A Thing About My Birthday

MIXED NEWS, EVERYONE! I have finished and turned in both of my papers (yay!) which I am pretty sure are both complete garbage (boo). But I'm back for now and I'm going to write some blog posts, starting with answering the questions you guys left for me in the comments:

exoticchemist said...

I'm curious as to what exactly triggers you to feel homesick. Is it just randomly wishing you were back in the US? Missing family and friends? Or is it specifically the differences between the US and UK? Maybe this is a dumb question...

It's not a dumb question, but it is a hard one to articulate. For one thing, I am now having a completely different cultural experience from the rest of my countrymen. While I don't miss snow (AT ALL), and I certainly don't want to be living in temperatures that can kill you in minutes, the whole polar vortex episode was hard on me because I felt...I don't know, left out. I still like to imagine that I am from Chicago and Chicago is my home and everyone at home was having this shitty but nevertheless collective experience and I wasn't there. And what made it worse was the UK was having a different collective experience with seriously damaging flooding seemingly everywhere, which is the experience I had, but it was the wrong one. And by the way, I'm crying right now. Sure I miss my family and my friends, but I can talk to them because the internet is magic. What I can't do is go back in time to when everyone was at the terrifying weather party and show up this time and be in on the jokes and know the stories.

Maya's comment was spot fucking on, and I really just wanted to post it and write "THIS ------>" next to it, but I'll elaborate instead. Maya said this: " I think, for me anyway, it was the fact that most things in the UK are so similar to North America that the differences, even the little ones, felt like a personal affront." I would say especially the little ones; the kind of things you never notice until they are different. In America, almost invariably, when you go inside a public building you just walk into it without breaking stride because the door is going to shut behind you. But in England where many of the buildings are older than my country, you walk into the building and you have to remember to shut the door behind you or it will just swing in the wind until the person at the desk gets up and closes it while glaring at you. There are no screens in the windows because there aren't that many bugs; you go shopping several times a week because the bread and the vegetables haven't been engineered to last for 2 months; the toilet doesn't flush the same way. I cannot fucking find wax paper at the store - grease proof baking paper is the closest thing. I know these things all sound dumb and petty because they are, but they add up into this sick feeling that this is not your home, no matter how much you want it to be.

Ok, that was sad. Let's do a different one:

Anonymous said...

44 degrees celcius here in Australia today, nature is bi-polar (and yeah that whole global warming thing). my question - did you ever choose a stripper name? or did I miss the big reveal in one of your posts?

Well anonymous, I'm pretty sure all of North America hates you right now, despite the fact that if it were 44 degrees there (111 F) they would be complaining that it was too hot. I did choose a stripper name and I did write a (half-assed) post about it. For the show I went with Phoebe Moon because I am a nerd. Now that I am in the UK however, I'll be using Poppy Cox because it's better and people get that joke here.

S said...

What have you learned about Brits/Britain by living here that you didn't learn by visiting?

Many many things, actually. I've learned that the words "noodle" and "pasta" are in no way interchangeable. In related news, I've learned that I'll need to bring a shit ton of Ramen back with me when I visit the states because the equivalents here are yucky in comparison. I've learned that people will fall over laughing if you pronounce squirrel as "skwerl". I've learned that driving students aren't allowed on the motorway, which means that when people get their first driving license, they have not learned to drive on one, which seems kind of dumb. Just last week I learned that when I say "look at those cans" no one realizes I'm talking about boobs. I've learned what stollen is, and that I hate it (raisins. why must everybody ruin perfectly good bakery with raisins? Knock it off already). I've learned that Christmas tree skirts aren't a thing here. I've learned that StereoNinja can't say prosciutto correctly. One thing that I already knew, but can't seem to get used to is being greeted with the phrase "You all right?". The American equivalent would be "How are you?". "You all right?" is what you would ask if someone just fell down the stairs or slipped on some black ice and landed on their head or just was walking around looking all sad. So whenever I'm asked that I immediately am confused about why they think I might not be all right. Gets me every time.

Thank you all for your questions. I like answering questions, so send more if you like and ask about whatever you want: stuff about me or why do Americans do that weird thing or where can I buy dildos or what is it about Patrick Stewart that makes him so sexy or Chris Christie, seriously, wtf is with that guy - whatever you want.

I'm not going to do a birthday wrap up post because it was overshadowed by paper writing and homesickness, but I did want to mention that StereoNinja bought me a telescope. HE BOUGHT ME A TELESCOPE. A FUCKING TELESCOPE. This feeling that I'm feeling is I think what it would be like for a normal person if their partner bought them a surprise Ferrari or a diamond as big as their hand. I HAVE A TELESCOPE YOU GUYS, and I live somewhere that I can actually use it. If it ever stops being shitty weather, that is.

It Can't Always Be About Raping Zebras

StereoNinja, reviewing my paper on masculinities in boylesque: (reads a passage out loud in a mocking tone of voice)...hahaha you sound so academic.

Me: It's an academic paper. It's not going to read like Bizzybiz.

A Question Deserves An Answer

Anonymous said... 

Where for art thou Amberance? 

10:49 PM 

Very good question, anonymous. It's been a rough couple of months. Moving to a new country, even one that you love, is emotionally more difficult than it is possible to prepare for. Christmas, which is normally my FAVORITE THING IN THE WHOLE FUCKING WORLD, was mostly a nightmare, and my birthday, which is Sunday and which I would normally have been reminding you all about on a daily basis for the last six weeks is only being observed at all this year to appease StereoNinja, who has made it very clear that my strategy of hiding in the bedroom ignoring him (and everyone else) while failing to engage in any of my beloved hobbies (blogging, my birthday, gratuitous nudity) is no longer acceptable. Having now spoken to a number of people who have already done this, I've had to severely lower my expectations for the foreseeable future, as the collective wisdom of those who have gone before me is that I will continue to burst into tears at completely random intervals due to vicious and overwhelming homesickness for at least 18 months. I don't even want to talk about how miserable I was on New Years, though at least I managed to leave Devon the day before it disappeared into the sea.

I have two papers due in a week, so as I said in November, let me get those written and turned in, and then check back here as I plan to reward myself by writing the next Fifty Shades review and/or going to Prague (oh yeah, I've decided I want to spend a weekend in Prague though I have absolutely no idea what is actually in Prague or why I want to go there - my main motivation seems to be the ability to say "When I was in Prague over the weekend..." - so advice on what I should actually DO in Prague would be lovely). I've been ready to write it for a while actually, but have been putting it off because I felt that I was upset about the wrong things and was trying to adjust my rage to match my logic. It hasn't worked, so I'm just going to write it the way I'm feeling it and then pack my bags for my journey to Hades since I am a terrible person.

Where I am at this very minute is sitting in my living room looking out at the sea. While all you guys in the U.S. have been at the travelling Antarctica Experience exhibition this week (the first time I saw someone write "Chiberia" made me laugh much harder than was probably warranted), the U.K. has been dealing with its own disastrous weather since roughly Christmas, mostly in the form of massive rainstorms combined with extremely high tides and a recent habit of building homes on floodplains. In typical British fashion, this was described on the news in the most hilariously understated way possible as "unusual weather". Living on an island in the Thames as I do, it is impossible not to notice. The field directly across the river from us which is typically filled with sheep first became a lake (which I named Lake Titicacao because tits! and chocolate! and I'm a massive child!) and then a few days ago even that was swallowed up and now the whole thing is just part of the river. Our marina is entirely flooded, the water covering not only the gangway that goes around the outside of the marina but also the first two steps leading up to our garden It is an inch from covering the third, which would leave only two more stairs before we go from living on riverfront property to living in the actual river. There are two roads leading into the island, but only one road that leads away from it, and that road is also flooded, meaning I actually drove my car through the Thames twice this morning. I was lucky I made it through - on my way back, there were two cars stranded on the road who had tried to drive through the river but were too low profile to get through and were now stranded in non-working cars waiting for rescue. If the river doesn't crest today I may be stranded here all weekend. Every once in a while, a helicopter flies over and I imagine them looking down at us and saying "Yep, still flooded." I think I should write a really rude message for them or draw some tits so their day will be more interesting.

Anyway, give me a week to finish my papers and I will write you guys a scathing review about how E.L. James has apparently never been to a bank and being threatened with rape is super romantic. 

P.S. I have enjoyed answering this question. Feel free to send me more questions you would like answers to and I'll answer them in a future blog post. It will be like a conversation!

I'm Already Pretty Good At This, Actually

I am really busy writing a paper for class this week. (I am also really busy freaking out about it because I don't remember how to write a fucking paper without swearing or sarcasm. See?) So my NaBloPoMo posts this week are going to be pretty shitty, at least until Friday. In the meantime, please enjoy the new Reverend Horton Heat Video, which stars my dance teacher Michelle L'Amour and some of the Chicago Starlets, two of whom are friends from my student show class who I am very proud of:

Reverend Horton Heat - Let Me Teach You How to Eat

Cake or Death

I made cupcakes and cookies for my class on Thursday, which was in no way an attempt to impress people with my baking skills or distract anyone from the my crappy presentation/uncontrollable shaking. My friend ate five of them and wrote a nice compliment on my notes for my presentation:

Now if I could just change how my professor feels about me talking in class I'd be all set.

My Second Worst Nightmare

So tonight I learned that if you do a presentation in class because it's required which took you all day to psyche yourself up for because you are terrified of speaking in public, your professor will corner you later on and tell you that with such an interesting take on the subject, you are going to have to start participating in class. Now all I need is for all my classmates to turn out to be giant spiders in disguise and I can die in the worst way imaginable! I need to go lay in bed wide awake and stare at the ceiling wondering if I'm having a heart attack for a while.

Unintentional Hiatus FAQ

Were you kidnapped and killed at the 50 Shades meet up?

No, no one has been kidnapped and nobody died. Unless you mean OF LAUGHTER. We had an absolutely awesome time, once we completely abandoned the 50 Shades party game, which sucked horse cadaver balls, and switched to Cards Against Humanity (which is also when we found out that we are all terrible people). I am excited about the real post when I will actually tell you about it.

In that case, where the hell have you been?

All over the place, both mentally and figuratively. I was in England and in France for a good while, during which I was somehow remarkably busy, and then I came back to Chicago to an unbelievable amount of crap going on. I have so much to do that sometimes I get overwhelmed and I call up StereoNinja and cry at him. Not to him. AT him.

What kind of crap?

Oh well, let's see...there's the part where I'm losing my job at the end of this month and I'm frantically putting together notes for the handover to the people who are going to start doing my job and also my boss is panicking and making me INSANE and also BrownsFan is already gone and I CANNOT COPE WITHOUT HER. There's also the thing where I spent Sunday to Wednesday of this week systematically calling everyone in my family and telling them that a) I am leaving forever in a few months, and b) I have been hiding information and/or lying to them for MONTHS now, for a very good reason but lying nonetheless, which fortunately they were all really, really, REALLY understanding and very nice about. And let's not forget the part where I'm making up a dance and a costume and a new name so I can get on stage in less than three months and take my clothes of to music, which reminds me...in related news, I seem to have become involved with a group of very nice people who spend their Tuesday nights drawing pictures of a naked person for two hours. (The naked person is me.)

What ever happened to that thing where you claimed you were moving to England?

Well, that's actually the thing that is taking up all of my time and energy and preventing me from blogging. I can tell you now that I have been accepted into my first choice of graduate school, which is in London, and will be starting my program in October. Which means that in between now and then I have to get rid of 95% of my earthly belongings, sort out shipping and/or storage for the other 5%, gather all the cash up front that I will need for both tuition and living expenses and then prove to both the school and the British government that I have it just sitting there in cash and that they won't have to support my freeloading American ass through social services, apply for a visa, go to an interview for said visa, buy a plane ticket, and literally dozens of other tasks both big and small that come with the decision to move to a different country.

Are you ever going to blog again?

YES OH MY GOD YES. I miss it so, so much, I can't even describe it. But seriously, I am completely wiped out right now. I think if you guys can just give me til the end of April, I can get back to more regular posting and shenanigans. I'll still have all this moving and dance stuff to do, but I won't have a job anymore starting May 1, so that should free up some time, stress, and brain space for the shit I actually LIKE doing.
Don't get me wrong - everything is GREAT right now and I am happier than I have ever been in my entire life. It's just that there's TONS of work involved with my life being this great, and a looming deadline to get all of that work done. I'm trying really hard to get back here, I really miss you guys.

No, Seriously, I Have A Real Excuse

OK, so I'm being a terrible blogger - I have a book review to finish by the end of this month and I haven't made a video since my birthday - but I do actually have a reason for once.

That reason is that my timetable for the life-rearranging I have been hinting at for months has been pushed up significantly, and I am scrambling to update my CV and also assemble paperwork and fill out applications for graduate programs with looming deadlines and write statements of varying lengths about how much I heart learning and why I specifically want to learn these particular things, and I can't devote my full attention to that and also make up new swears for you guys and expect to actually succeed at my ultimate goal, which I am happy to report, I can now state fairly openly (in as far as I don't think any of the people I haven't spoken to yet read this regularly, and if they do, hi, and sorry you're finding out this way), is to move to the UK.

That was an incredibly long sentence and is not indicative of the quality of sentences I am using in my position statements on any of these applications, I assure you.

Point being, my absence is legit for once, and that I haven't stopped writing; I'm just writing something else at the moment, and it is important. And also that I will return to normal very, very soon since I have to finish the book review by the end of February so I can give the stupid book back to its owner.

In the meantime, in an attempt to make this up to you, I took the liberty of googling "weird knitting projects" for you guys. The image search results are here. I am particularly impressed with the knitted turd about 9 rows down and this fucking insane corpse:

You're welcome.