Divided By a Common Language, Part I

One of the things I've realized I have not blogged about is the divide in vocabulary between America and the UK. Now that I've been here for almost a year (!!), I've become familiar -- if not always well-integrated -- with the many strange British-isms around me on a daily basis, some of which are endless sources of amusement. Here are a couple:

• "Loo," "toilet," "water closet": It's considered very American to say "bathroom" or "restroom," and people don't always understand what you're saying, so I've taken to carefully considering my words, then asking someone where the toilet is. It still feels unnatural to me, but I can't bring myself to say "water closet" -- and, heaven forbid, the to-me-still-quite-parodic "loo."

• "Ring up": No, no, I want to say, you don't ring someone up. That makes me think of a 1950s movie with those spin-dial phones. You call that person, si?

• "Nibbles": The British word for hors d'oeuvres or any other snacks/appetizers served at a party. It's fun and cutesy, and always slightly ridiculous to see well-dressed (especially older) men in tuxedos talk about their "nibbles." Admittedly makes this American think of a group of bunny rabbits.

• "Quite": This word is quite prevalent. Since yes, yes, quite, you are quite right. Except "quite good" does not mean what you, my American friends, might think it means. (Inexplicably, "quite good" seems to mean its opposite -- that is, quite average or even horrendous.)

• "Not bad": Self-explanatory and widespread instance of British understatement. How are you? Oh, not bad, old sport. (Whoops, see what I did there?)

• "Keen": As in, I am keen to do XYZ. I am eager, I am on board to do it, I am looking forward to it, count me in. But with a different British nuance, since the Brits would never admit to being "eager" -- it's the Americans who are the Eager Beavers. "Keen" always comes with the danger of being "too keen," which would be appallingly un-British. I suspect I am often too keen, but nevertheless the word "keen" has integrated itself into my vocabulary. (This is one of the words I love.)

• "Whilst": I smirk every time I see this instead of "while."

• "Kit" or "stash": As in, sports wear or team/club attire, I guess? I imagine members of a club or team stashing/hoarding away their "kit" like pack rats whenever I read this.

• "At University" or "At Uni": Since you never, never say "college" here, since (outside of the Oxford college system) a "college" in the UK is very different, more like a vocational school or community college, than in the US. I keep referring to "when I was in college" and getting strange glances until I realize my mistake and say, "Ahem, when I was at university."

• "Pants": Underpants. The proper term is trousers, my dear, but I can't seem to correct myself of this habit and stop walking around in public spaces talking about my new pants.

• "Queue": Both a noun and a verb. I still cannot bring myself to say, "Please queue up now." Even if the queuing ability I witness on a daily basis is rather laudatory. People in other countries certainly do not respect the queue nearly as much as the British!

That covers some of the more obvious ones; more coming soon, chaps!

A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Gardens

It gave me chills last night: there I was, sitting outside on haybales on a lovely spring evening in the manicured gardens of St. John's, watching a rollicking student-run production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which was so well-choreographed and engaging that it kept the audience enthralled and laughing at the Bard's words, over four hundred years after he wrote them.

Sometimes Oxford is about taking time to think, enjoy the gardens on a beautiful clear evening, and sit outside with friends watching Shakespeare come suddenly, magically to life. (And yes, it was easy for me to follow this production, due to talking with one of the student directors beforehand and reading along with the script of a play I know very well.) I'm feeling very fortunate to be here, and am counting more outdoor performances of Shakespeare as a must.

"Daring to Differ" at the Global Scholars' Symposium

What a weekend. Amidst gorgeous spring temperatures and blue skies in Oxford, this past weekend I attended the annual Global Scholars' Symposium (GSS) conference, held this year at Rhodes House. Over a hundred delegates from nine different scholarships (Rhodes, Marshall, Gates, Clarendon, Commonwealth, Fulbright, etc.) and many different universities across the UK (Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, LSE, and many more) congregated to listen to engaging speakers, participate in panel discussions and small group activities, and have engaging conversations centering around the theme "Dare to Differ." How can we each find the courage to pursue our personal goals to effect change and do good in the world, even when this means challenging the status quo or being different ourselves? How can we make a positive difference in our communities? What does community mean, and which causes matter to us? How can we work within our personal contexts or personal privileges, and also within the larger structural context of the world we live in, to manage risk and take action to promote change? We spent the entire weekend wrestling with these and other related questions, and it was invigorating to meet some new faces and engage in dialogue with some brilliant young people from all over the world. Photo from GSS:

The weekend started with registration and welcome drinks on Thursday night, then continued through three VERY full but very rewarding days on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. After presenting at my master's strand conference on Wednesday (and frantically working on my dissertation before that), it's been a busy couple of days! Off to bed...

More Rhodes Ball Aftermath

Just had to post a couple more photos from Rhodes Ball this past weekend. Photo credit goes to Bernie Galewski.

Ah, Trinity term, Oxford's season of balls...

Rhodes Ball 2014: The Ritz Blitz

Phew! After months of planning, more emails than I care to count (or think about), and hours of organization and crafts and assembly and setup, last night was the 2014 rendition of Rhodes House's annual Rhodes Ball. I was on the ball committee with some pretty amazing people, since I figured it'd be a fun way to get my personal streak of OCD out while taking on a new event planning challenge and meeting new friends in the Rhodes community. We settled on a roaring twenties theme for our "Ritz Blitz," and I helped handle decor organization/planning, which involved (among other things):

• Figuring out how many items we needed for each of our table centerpieces -- which taught me that it is possible to buy feathers in bulk, that Amazon really does sell everything, and that expenses for even small items add up very quickly

• Tracking down where to get a giant Eiffel Tower replica for a reasonable price

• Looking up vintage book covers/quotes when we (I mean, mostly I -- book nerd here) decided that each of the dinner tables would be a classic piece of literature written in the twenties, I admit probably one of the most fun parts of the entire shindig!

• Making a giant flashing light display for dinner, which read "Paris is a moveable feast" (source of the quote?: obvious, in my opinion, even though a few people asked -- HELLO look up your lit references)

• Crafting a giant pair of the eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, which did watch the dancers quite intently all night from the far end of the marquee/dance floor

• Brushing up on my twenties slang and purchasing vintage casino and alcohol advertisements

In short, I have learned that there is nothing too ridiculous for a Google search, and that working with other similarly organization-obsessed people can be great fun. I will also never take the design details of any party, social function, or event for granted ever again. Even the color of the art-deco wallpaper we used for the table runners took a lot of time!

And the ball itself? A roaring success, as I might put it, and one of the most memorable nights of my entire year at Oxford. We entered the speakeasy, sipped champagne and took photos with vintage cars, then were chased by the prohibition police inside for dinner, where we feasted in Parisian style, then swung back out to the dance floor when Mr. Gatsby (aka one of the Rhodes House porters) made his spectacular entrance, and then danced the rest of the night away. Here's me and a few of my friends in our ball-gown getup:

After cleaning up this morning, cross that one off the list! What a great way to mark my first ball at Oxford. (Even if Bill Clinton did not come... he had been in town along with Hillary to see Chelsea's Oxford graduation ceremony for her DPhil, and had been sighted by a few of my friends, but despite receiving an invitation from Rhodes House he decided to spend his evening doing other things, alas.)

Return to Riding: OURC Cuppers 2014

I haven't ridden a horse since the beginning of this past January, when I got to spend winter break with my mare Scarlett. In the last few months, since the car accident in France, I haven't been doing all that much physically, and I've been missing riding and horses more terribly than I can say. It's been a part of me for so long that I don't feel entirely like myself when horses are not a regular aspect of my life. Today, though, I finally made it back into the saddle -- after my longest riding hiatus since I started riding seriously at age 12!

The occasion was the annual "cuppers" for the Oxford Riding Club, a fun day of friendly college versus college competition, for which I represented my own college, St. John's. The format was very similar to the collegiate riding I did at Stanford, at least in IDA (dressage) mode: draw an unfamiliar horse, have a few minutes to warm up, then perform a dressage test before a judge. I wasn't in a competitive mindset at all -- I was just thrilled to be back on a horse, to feel that familiar movement beneath me, so much so that I kept feeling recurring surges of strong emotion. As much as I love Oxford otherwise, this -- this -- has been absent. The horse I drew was a bit tricky to balance and get round, but we figured each other out well enough to go into the ring and put down the best ride of the day, thus securing the win for St. John's (and some champion individual rider honors for myself). Not bad for not riding for almost five months!

I got to meet some interesting new horsey people today, and at the end of the day a few members of Oxford's varsity team asked me to consider trying out next fall. I think I might do just that. Honestly, days full of horses and like-minded horsey people are so needed here and there. Already can't wait to ride again, and am so happy and so thankful I'm once again physically capable of doing so.

I Had the Strangest Moment the Other Day...

...for an American deaf person, that is. A friend of a friend (who is currently a British student at Oxford) recently got in touch via email and said she was interested in learning British Sign Language. Well, I don't know BSL, I said, but sure, let's meet up. So when we got coffee this past week, I talked a bit about sign language and deaf education and deaf culture, as well as the basic differences between ASL and BSL. And then, hardly knowing what I was doing, I said, "Would you like to learn the BSL alphabet?"

She said yes. Okay, I better remember this. I launched into it, this strange two-handed alphabet that makes me feel clumsy and foreign whenever I use it, not like my usual facility with ASL. She watched intently and we worked through it, despite my own doubts about my lack of credibility in BSL. What an international moment: me, living abroad in a country not my own, with a sign language not my own, trying to cross the gap between cultures and individuals and the deaf/hearing worlds. We had a nice conversation, and I walked away feeling, once again, that I should learn more BSL. Especially now that I will be here for three more years! I need to work on finding a deaf person around Oxford to teach me. That way maybe next time when I'm asked about BSL by a British person, I'll feel a little more well-versed in the local sign language, even though it'll always be from an American perspective.

In related news, friends here continue to learn ASL and to get increasingly better at it. Teaching them has been great fun, and I keep hoping that more and more will join in and reach some level of semi-conversational fluency. It's an ongoing process and learning experience. Every chance I have to increase deaf awareness with the people here, I try to take. I'm becoming better at it, and I can only hope that this knowledge about signing and lipreading and clear communication will have some sort of ripple effect through the hearing world. So, here's to learning and communicating a little better, on my own part as well!

When London is Sunny, It is Glorious

The title of this post says it all. How beautiful London is on a sunny spring day the first weekend of May, when the skies are blue and the grass in the parks is a blinding verdant green (I knew all that rain was good for something), and people come out and stroll and lie on picnic blankets and, yes, play cricket. The dogs run back and forth after balls and many varieties of ducks and geese dart through the waters. Elsewhere in London, the crowds take off their coats and break out their sunglasses on the streets and stand outside of restaurants and pubs having a drink and soaking up all the Vitamin D they can. Perhaps because of the months of bad weather that precede it, I think there is nothing quite like a bright and sunny day in this green land. The entire city seems to rejoice and open up into an alternate version of itself.

I headed to London this past weekend to spend some time with my friend Reagan, who has just returned from the US and a pretty long recovery following the car accident in France in January. It was wonderful to see her again and welcome her back to the UK! We visited Regent's Park, walked around, ate ice cream and drank tea, ate, and chatted with a few of her friends at her flat. All in all, a very cheerful weekend, and most gratifying after the last few months.

This week I've got a full plate leading up to the Rhodes Ball going on this coming weekend in Oxford, for which I'm on the planning committee. Schoolwork has got to happen in there somewhere, but spirits are high and the social calendar is busy as Oxford's Trinity term rolls into spring. Fingers crossed it will be just as beautiful that day as it was this past weekend!

Some DPhil News

You know how I mentioned I was considering which program to do next year under the continued funding of the Rhodes scholarship? Well, time has passed, May has rolled around, and I've had time to mull it over -- as well as talk endlessly to friends and family about the pros and cons of this decision, so if you're one of those people and if you are currently reading this, thank you for your attention and support and patience!

Though I think the master's programs in education and history would have been exciting for me in different ways, I've decided to do the D.Phil in English starting this fall. (Alas, if only it were possible to be a career dabbler in different areas of the academic world, doing one degree after another indefinitely! Yes, potential career student right here.) The D.Phil, again, is Oxford's equivalent of a Ph.D., and will take around three more years in the UK. The program is very centered around independent work and research, and will be more unstructured than what I am currently doing for my M.St., but the fun part will be getting to spend a few years reading and writing about topics that are interesting to me, while covered by scholarship and living abroad at that. I'm excited to be working with my supervisor and staying in the department here, and am of course excited to be staying in Oxford. It's such a different place for me than Stanford ever was -- so different that the two can be difficult to compare, but I'm looking forward to exploring more of this strange new land in the next few years. It also feels jarring for me to think that I will be one of the very first members of my entire extended family to get a doctorate, something that I want for myself the more I spend time thinking about it. This is a big step indeed, even if I know it'll bring its share of fresh challenges and life lessons.

Enough on that for now. You American friends and readers of this blog, you'd better come visit! A couch and a cup of tea always await you here in Oxford.

May Day!

Staying up all night partying and dancing and celebrating the arrival of summer (or close enough), then staggering over to Magdalen Tower in Oxford at 6am to join the crowds of other revelers in listening to the bells ring and the choir sing, then pushing your way down the High Street afterwards for an early breakfast and even more dancing and revelry... Sounds like a good start to May 1st, aka May Day, right?

Minus the all-nighter (this grad student opted to go to bed at 10pm last night and got up at 5am), I was one of the masses out this morning for Oxford's celebrated tradition of May morning, in which -- as I mentioned -- thousands of students and local civilians and other Brits gather outside Magdalen College at the crack of dawn to bid farewell to the winter and welcome in the brighter days of summer. (Or so they think, anyway. Today has been pretty miserably rainy, so May thus far isn't looking much better than the last few months.) Thanks to a friend and other Rhodes scholar who is a Junior Dean (aka RA) at Magdalen, we got to file into the college grounds (and stand on the hallowed grass!!) and see the tower and listen to the choir sing, rather than standing with the crush of people outside the college on the High Street. It was a little unearthly, and one of those moments where it hit me: I am at Oxford, and this is such a magical and strange and confusing and wonderful place sometimes. After the choir had finished singing, we made our way through the massive crowds and the music and bells and squares of Oxford, to one of the many restaurants open for breakfast this morning.

All of this is part of a very old and very longstanding tradition. May Day, quite befuddlingly to this American, is an ancient spring festival that is also a bank holiday in the UK in the modern era, and traditionally involves such rites as dancing around maypoles, crowning a May Day king or queen, and other group rituals celebrating planting, spring, and the arrival of the warmer months. It derives from pre-Christian European pagan cultures, and indeed there were many pagan dancers out this morning wearing feathered hats and bells and flowers and vines, while playing bagpipes and fiddles and other instruments all through Oxford... all at six in the morning with more people out on the streets than I had ever seen out at the hour of 6am before in my life... what is this place?? The energy, even ebullience, was palpable even from those who had stayed up the entire night, and I felt like I had been transported into another, more distant time. Into timelessness, even. I really don't have anything else to say about it than how strange it was. Yet it was so lighthearted and fun to participate in that ritualized celebration.

Hello, summer! I can see you approaching. Welcome to this very quirky northern island.