Things learned from the royal wedding

No, I was not up at 4am central time to witness the beginning of someone's married life. I was up at 6:30 am, however, to go teach about drugs to a bunch of unruly high school freshmen. When I got back to my room at 10, I still had an hour and a half before my first class, so of course I watched choice selections from the wedding on TheRoyalChannel on YouTube (it exists, really.) They had 2-6 minute clips of "highlights" from the wedding and also an hour-long video of the ceremony itself. I watched a bunch of the clips and then skipped around in the ceremony video. Between these videos and some Googling, I feel like I basically got all the royal wedding stuff needed and also some sleep. Win.

I had a lot of thoughts on the royal wedding. Some are encapsulated below:

• Westminster Abbey looks a lot like UChicago--or, should, I say, it's the other way around
• Our Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, however, doesn't have trees (?!?) in it
• Anglican wedding ceremonies are remarkably boring
• That was a very nice-looking dress, but the train was a bit much
• The maid of honor almost looked better than Kate did
• William is not that attractive. Neither is his brother.
• Charles was, is, and will always be old. Just old. (I remember when I was young I used to think that Charles was married to Elizabeth, instead of being her son....)
• Elizabeth also seems eternally old. Professional dress-suits for the win?
• Okay, British, you win when it comes to hats.
• Walking all the way to the altar in Westminster Abbey is probably good exercise
• That music was pretty good, especially the fanfare troop
• Little kid attendants at a royal wedding, lulz
• Royals seriously need shorter names. William Arthur Philip Louis. And then Catherine Elizabeth. Haha name disparity.
• Again, yeah, this Anglican business is kind of boring
• Ring almost didn't go on finger oooooooh almost drama. (According to my male RH: "If you get married, put the finger through the ring, not the ring on the finger." We'll keep that in mind, thanks.)
• Carriage rides and car rides lololololol
• Apparently Today had a "countdown to the kiss" clock onscreen for a few minutes? Crazy.
• Speaking of kisses, that one was kind of lame. Come on, William, give us something to look at!
• Speaking further of kisses--greatest picture ever:

Catherine and Prince William in 2011.

 Perhaps unsurprisingly, many pictures of the kiss from around the web crop out the damsel in distress in the lower left hand corner. I think the human factor of the entire spectacle is drastically improved by having her in the shot, however. But yeah, not such a fan of that kiss. It's not bad at all, just kind of a let down from whatever expectations I think people had. Then again, William's parents had a far more interesting time of it.

Diana Spencer and Prince Charles in 1981

Thirty years ago Charles wasn't old; who'da thunk it? I think Charles looks better than his son does in their respective wedding day photos. But then again, Charles and Diana weren't exactly a paragon of wedded bliss, now, were they? Interesting side note: my only memory of the existence of Diana is the day she died. I was playing with my brand new beanie baby knockoff toy (an orange fish) when I heard that a princess, of sorts, had died. Cheers to being born in 1991?

Congrats to William and Kate--may their marriage be far happier and more successful than his parents' was.

Maundy, maundy, can't trust that day

Note: This is a pretty long post about my personal history with religion, one of the random spurts of introspection I am occasionally prone to.

 Today is, in the Christian world, Maundy Thursday, a commemoration of the Last Supper--or, as one of my very Catholic Facebook friends put this morning as his status, "And so it is that Thursday that changed the world." That makes tomorrow Good Friday (the commemoration of the crucifixion of Jesus), Saturday Easter Vigil, and Sunday itself Easter Sunday, the resurrection.

As my "about me" states, I was raised in a barely-observant mixed Catholic-Protestant (UCC) household. I saw my father in church of any kind but rarely. My mother I guess gets more out of religion than either my father or I, and growing up she was still tied somewhat to Catholicism, even though I know the constant shenanigans that go on with the Catholic Church truly wore her out. Thus I spent about once a week from the age of five or six until the age of eleven in some sort of religious affair, be it religious ed classes at the local Catholic church, actually going to mass, or something similar. Although my mother's connection to Catholicism was rarely overbearing on me as a child, my mother's parents were quite strong Catholics, and so I guess there was some generational pressure to raise the latest kid to grow up in God. Interestingly, my father actually comes from the overtly religious family (his father is a UCC minister), and yet I rarely if ever discussed religion with my paternal grandparents (or my father myself, for that matter) growing up.

Maybe it's just because I'm still quite relatively young, but I do remember my very early thoughts about church and God and whatnot well. I went along with it as a very young kid, the same way any kid in a culturally Christian area goes along with Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and similar. Religious ed and my mother made sure that I knew that Christmas and Easter were supposed to be about more than just the presents and the general surprise/excitement (which I truly loved, even more than the presents), but I never read much of the Bible at all in any context, be it religiously, for a literature class, or otherwise. I remember being four or five (maybe a bit older) and asking my mom if God really was an old man who sat in the clouds and looked down at everyone, and if so, how he did it. My mother tried to explain that that wasn't it, that God was more like a force, but I think that only slightly enraged and confused me--I have never liked being lied to, and even the realization that the common childhood conception of God wasn't accurate was upsetting and off-putting. (Besides, the budding storyteller in me kind of liked the idea of there really being a bearded guy up in the sky.)

After that I continued to go along with the God = force idea, although my mental conception could never quite change (all the Father, God, Son, Children language in Christianity does not help). I did first communion and first confession and all that when I was in second grade with the rest of the Catholic kids in town; although I was a tomboy and hated wearing dresses, I really did enjoy the pageantry of communion and the pageantry of church in general. It thrilled with the part of me that did then, and does still now, love world-building and cultures and stories. I had nothing to say for my first confession and, I believe, actively made up some lie about pulling my cat's tail. I learned the prayers for the rosary (which I can still recite) and the Nicene Creed (of which I cannot remember a thing now) and all the rest. My mother would go through spurts of trying to make me say Hail Marys or similar before bed, and when I stayed with her parents, my grandmother led me through the classic "Now I lay me down to sleep" prayers. I suppose they must have made some impression on me at the time, but as I grew older, I began to wonder what it actually felt like to be touched by a god and began to doubt that I had ever actually truly felt my forefathers' religion in my own bones.

I guess it was trying to figure this out, trying to feel this religion, that led me to allow my mother to make me an altar girl, starting when I was 9 or so. This, uncoincidentally, coincided quite closely with the death of my maternal grandmother from lung cancer in 1999, when I was 8, so I went at religion in the new millennium with gusto. In retrospect, it was a juvenile form of fake-it-till-you-make-it; if I wore the white overrobes, and learned the sections of the mass well, and touched holy water and oil and collections baskets and all the rest, the wonderful pageantry was alive and crackling in me, and I did believe then that this was Godly and spiritual and moving and all the rest. At some point in those early 2000s years, at the same time that I finally gave up Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, I tried Catholicism for real, as best as a Biblically-ignorant young girl could do, giving up things for Lent and not eating meat on Fridays during Lent and trying to feel extreme sorrow over Jesus dying by watching the Stations of the Cross and going to Good Friday mass one year. (My mother's hatred of crowds meant that we usually never went to church on actual holidays, but this was an exception.) I vividly remember doodling INRI and crosses in my sixth grade planner at Eastertime, as though the writing out of it could prove to myself that I deeply loved God and Jesus and all the rest.


I have not thought about the depth with which I went at Catholicism in my middle school years for quite some time now, but I think I understand why it has all come rushing back so clearly this past week. Several of my closest friends here in Chicago are actually very religious Catholics, something I did not realize until I already knew and liked them well. It's one thing to go to Catholic school (I know many people who have done this), but the realization that these were people who had gone to Catholic school and actually liked it and actually been made religious because of it was mindblowing to me; all the stories I knew of Catholic school from people my age came from people who had been entirely turned off of religion because of it. Here are people who go to mass every Sunday (something I had never done even as an altar girl), who feel bad if they miss mass, who go to confession fairly regularly, who give up things for Lent with real serious and abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent, who have rosaries and Bibles in their rooms, and all the rest. Here are people who seem to have managed to really take to the spirit of Catholicism far better than I, who loved the pageantry but could never get beyond it, did. At home, in high school, most of my friends were at the very least apathetic to religion, and several were pretty openly agnostic/atheist and scornful of religion. Even those who did go to church with some regularity never really spoke of religion outside of church. Maybe it's just because I never really lived with friends in high school the way I live with friends now in college, maybe it's just because Chicago is a far cry from the hinterlands of New England, but here in college I've met far more openly, seriously religious people than I ever knew even when I went to religious ed with the rest of the Catholic kiddie goobers in elementary school.


Hanging around people who read the Bible and have rosaries and go to mass and confession thus brings back all my own pre-teen attempts at Catholicism with great clarity. I remember Good Friday mass--the interminable length, the veneration of the cross, the prostration before the cross, and all the rest. I remember trying to eat fish instead of meat on Fridays for a few years; I remember spending one Good Friday off from school doing a walk for Habitat for Humanity--learning to be good and charitable. I remember even earlier events, the yearning to try communion and then the inevitable disillusion I had when it turned out that communion wafers tasted bland. Really, that disillusionment with communion is a fairly apt summary of Catholicism and I in general, of childhood in general for so many people--growing up and realizing that the body of Christ tastes a lot like a subpar cracker, realizing that there never was or could be a fat man in a red and white suit who brings presents, realizing that there never was or could be a bearded man in the clouds.


Trying to trace what led to my rejection of Catholicism is difficult. In some ways, I think coming out as a nonbeliever, even to people who are not very religious or who describe themselves as "spiritual" rather than religious, is the religious world's analogy to coming out sexually as something besides ramrod-straight. I did not know anybody, growing up, who did not believe in some sort of God or something out there, just as I knew very few openly gay people. It was not until I myself realized that I was not religious and started telling people this that I realized that some people I had always known were actually in a similar position, faking religiosity while their hearts firmly disbelieved in all the trappings of faith. When you're a young teen in white suburbia telling people that you don't believe in a conception of God that matches Christianity's, no one really believes you; every teen is rebellious, and it's really easy to dismiss it as just another teenage phase, like too-tight jeans or all-black clothes or something. Telling yourself that you don't believe in the Christian God, when you know literally no one else with similar beliefs, is just as hard; maybe it is just a phase, you think, or maybe there's something seriously wrong with you. And yet in many ways the lack of true attraction to church, the lack of emotional connection, has been there for a long time, possibly forever. Does everyone feel that way and simply fake it until they make it? Is all religion, are all religious people just going with the flow in the same way that you've always been? Are you normal, or are you weird, or are you something else?


With all these questions whirling around, it's no great surprise that, like any questioning teen, I turned to experimentation of sorts. If a God in the sky was complete crap, at least the earth was solid and real, and beautiful to boot. Paganism had been around for millennia before Christianity; I felt bad for it for being run over by Christians; there was a certain romance and exhilaration to polytheism for me, thanks to my over-reading of fantasy and Greco-Roman-era books during this period. I think the only remotely-pagan thing I ever actually did was to try to call Halloween "Samhain" and May Day "Beltane" and the like and put out food for the dead on Halloween night since the veil between the worlds is supposed to be at its thinnest then. It was still kind of fulfilling in a pageantry way, and emotionally the vague connection it gave me to the earth and other living things was inspiring in a way that Catholicism had never ever been. It wasn't real religion, however; it ultimately didn't work the way I had always been told that religion should work.


So where do you turn from neo-paganism and rebellious polytheism to active and mature agnosticism and atheism? For me it began with the religious conservative's ultimate conspiracy-theory dream (or second, in any case, only to Harry Potter): Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, which I read as an eighth grader. Like with many books, there was a shiver down my spine throughout my reading of The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, and The Amber Spyglass. It was quite well-written. The mental imagery was gorgeous. The idea of my soul in animal form as my greatest lifelong companion was the realization of a dream I'd never realized I'd ever had. And there in its pages was a real person, a real human being, a writer, a published author who did not believe in the Christian God, who called the idea of it and the bureaucracy that fueled it destructive and foul and an antithesis to love itself. The world of Philip Pullman believed in the goodness and beauty of this life, not a future life, believed in actions and love and living every day to the fullest. It believed in stories as synonymous with life. I had never read or heard any philosophy like this before in my life, and this was what made my heart sing, made me feel both profoundly sad for death and yet so happy to be alive, made me feel (ironically) like I had been touched by something eternal and godlike and yet better than godlike because it was human, it was actually within my power to be and do and love.


I have never given up my love of pageantry, of details of dress and hair and rituals and songs and chants; I have never given up my idealistic love of love for everyone, even though I am in many ways the ultimate never-been-kissed, never-loved late teenage nerd girl. Not believing in a personal God, or a power above humans that actually cares at all about what humans do, or an existence beyond our existence now--believing, in essence, in the wonderful primacy and importance of this life, this here and now, this presence--has matured me, and matured in me, since I was the gawky and angsty thirteen-year-old reading His Dark Materials. To me the idea that now is as good as it gets is vestigially frightening, certainly, in the same way that I scream when I bump into someone in the dark; it's automatic to fear the end of self, of ego, of consciousness, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. The endless, lurking sense of death that haunted me last summer when I flirted with depression made me cry like I have not cried in years and froze me, mind and body, like nothing else I have ever experienced. The idea that now is as good as it gets has also, however, forced me to grow and love others with as much strength and confidence as any other human ever has, with no God standing over my shoulder to ensure that I do it. My love of pageantry has left the idea that "It is that Thursday that changed the world," however, behind. In the depths of time and the vast expanse of the universe, there does not seem to be any one day that has changed the world any more than any other day has, even without looking at the logical absurdity of men rising from the dead and using that as proof of a God who loves us and cares about what happens to us. It's the Easter season, but it's also a very lovely day in April in the northern hemisphere, a day in which I and many others are alive and healthy, a day in which the earth continues to tolerate humans, and that matters to me and to many others far more than any Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Vigil, or Easter Sunday ever could.

GAME OF THRONES premiere

To my great surprise, I was able to find episode one ("Winter is Coming") of Game of Thrones online last night only a few hours after the premiere time--kudos to whoever did that. No obnoxious and virus-y surveys attached, either. For those of you using the internet, you should be able to find it on any of the usual sites; if you need a recommendation for a site to watch, let me know in the comments and I will find a way to send you the info. I will not list sites here, as I would like to keep specific sites on the down-low.

A word on watching TV online: yes, it is illegal, even if you just watch it streaming and don't download (which is rife with virus problems in any case). It is not my preferred method of watching. If I had a TV, I would be willing to subscribe to HBO for the duration of the run of Game of Thrones in order to watch it legally. I do not have a TV, however, and HBO as yet does not have a way to watch its TV shows online legally/in a sanctioned manner. I found copies of the first episode, only a few hours after the premiere, in no fewer than 5 different places online. I would be willing to bet that in the next few days and weeks, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, most of them my age or similar, will watch Game of Thrones online in such a manner. Watching TV or even feature films on compilation websites is an exceedingly common thing for college students and young professionals, just as listening to music uploaded to YouTube is very common, whether it is sanctioned by record companies or not. The most interesting thing of all is that my watching and listening to media for free, online, does not actually preclude my buying said programming later. If I really enjoy Game of Thrones, I will probably buy the DVDs. Similarly, I have bought several albums on iTunes after listening to different tracks, and really getting to know them, on YouTube. The trend nowadays is simply to only buy things you already know you like--by getting to know them first for free, online.

Now onto my impressions of the premiere. The rest of this post is spoilers--if you do not want to know the plot of either the book or the TV series, do not read any further.

This episode covers the events from, roughly, the prologue to "The things I do for love." I quite liked it, overall. Production value really is gorgeous, and the cast is very talented. There are many added or modified scenes as compared to the book, but I fully understand that television is a different medium from books and that changes in this way are often necessary. Very few of these changes bothered me--the only one that does with any regularity is the change of Cat from book to screen, which seems in many ways more of a whimsical character change than some of the other changes. In the book, Ned is the one who does not want to become Hand, guessing (correctly) that it is a dirty job with no thanks and believing (correctly) that he belongs in the wild north, not playing court games. Cat pushes him to accept, wanting (as always) to raise the position of her family in the eyes of the kingdom and to do her duty; her birth house's motto is "Family, Duty, Honor," and Cat fits that, in many ways, to a tee. It's only after Bran "falls" (read: is hurled from a window after discovering the twincest) that she suddenly understands the danger that the Lannisters pose and tries to convince Ned to stay. In the TV series Cat is, from the first five minutes, dead-set against Bran witnessing the execution and ferociously against Ned traveling south to become Hand.

Most other things were fine. I disliked Peter Dinklage's accent as Tyrion; he's American, and it shows. Just when you get used to it, it comes jarring back, straining the suspension of disbelief a bit. Otherwise, however, Dinklage makes a wonderfully Impish Tyrion, and from what I've read, he only gets better as Tyrion's role expands in later episodes. I do wonder how well newbies can keep up with characters and whatnot; it's quite a lot, in many instances, and I feel like some relationships are not quite fully explained in any sense, or are a bit clumsily explained by Arya in the king-meeting-Starks scene, which does not feel quite natural. These are all relatively small nit-picks, however, and now that some of the messy exposition has gotten out of the way, I will be interested in seeing how the series progresses in relation to the book and if it can remain as gripping and intense as the book is.

Dunes

Where were we camping, you might ask? Why, Chesterton, Indiana. Obviously.

Indiana Dunes State Park is quite a lovely place, about an hour and fifteen minutes from Chicago by train. The entire thing was beyond crazy, however, so let's see how well I can narrate it. To begin with, we were supposed to be taking a bus to the train stop at 57th Street at 3:40 on Friday to catch a 4:16 south/east bound train to Indiana. I had Italian until 3:20. I ran home, literally, threw all my school stuff out of my bag, and then threw the camping stuff (which I had stacked up the night before) in the bag. It didn't all fit, so I put my towel, an extra jacket, and my quilt in a huge Borders bag. Of course, I was still one of the first people done and, to make a long story very short, we missed the 3:40 bus and caught the 3:50 bus instead....which died about two blocks from the train station. Just when we thought we would have to get out and schlep all our stuff, the bus was resurrected and we got off, ran up the stairs to the train platform, and caught the NICTD South Shore line, which was so crowded with commuters that we couldn't sit near one another.

Fast forward to getting off the train. As it turns out, the campsite is about a mile from the train station, so we had to walk through random parts of Indiana. For about an hour because we got lost. With a heavy bag on my back, my overflow bag in one hand, and my sleeping bag in the other. When we finally got to the overnight part of the campground, we found that my male RH, who had driven a car down with the one-year-old and all our food, had chosen a spot very far away from the entrance to the campground. We eventually got there, pitched three tents, started a fire, ate dinner by dark or so, which consisted of (for me) two burnt hot dogs and s'mores. Most everyone else had fish tacos, since it's a Friday in Lent and apparently real Catholics (aka not my mother's side of the family) actually don't eat meat on Fridays in Lent, but frozen whiting (yeah that's apparently a type of lake fish) is just not particularly edible to me, someone who grew up with fresh haddock as a conception of what "fish" is. It was raining on and off, it was pretty cold, the one-year-old was cranky, I was cranky, etc.

When we eventually went to bed, I was so tired that I collapsed into my sleeping bag and basically fell asleep right then and there. The next day was more fun, with card games and much better food and hiking to the lakeshore, which was so windy that the waves were enormous and the wind blew us all off our feet. It did look a lot like the ocean, which was cool, only without that key ocean-y feel and smell, where your hair gets matted and tangly and salty even without getting it wet. The sand from the dunes was blowing around everywhere, so that I sort of felt like I was walking on Mars or something, and afterwards when we reached the beach house, out of the wind, it felt a bit like we were survivors of an apocalypse. Once we got back, I went to take a shower in the bathhouse, which turned out to be an excellent life decision because it enabled me to dry off nearly every article of clothing I had under the hand dryers. I spent about an hour in there drying off clothes and watching my female RH, the five-year-old, and my RA take equally long and hot showers.

Things went downhill after that, however. It turned out that 4pm was a great time to take a shower, as that was when it was snowing--yes, snowing--outside. By the time I returned to the fireside the snow was replaced by consistent 40 mph wind and bitter cold, so cold that even after I put on three pairs of pants and four layers of shirts and sweatshirts I was still unbearably cold. The food was slow to cook, we were all frozen, the wind was blowing acrid fire-smoke into our eyes and nostrils and mouths no matter where we stood near the fire (and it was too cold to not stand near the fire), the one-year-old screamed for probably half-an-hour without stopping; we finally just admitted, out loud, that things were "sucky" and "pretty awful" (in far more colorful language), and of course after that the food started to finish, so that the first bites of biscuit-dumplings we passed around the fire were pretty much the best bites of food I have ever had in my life.

After that the wind went down to only about 20 mph, which was bearable, and the food and hot chocolate was all really warm and nice. We considered sleeping all seven of us students in one tent but eventually just divided it up into two tents instead of three, with the 4 girls in one and the 3 boys in the other. Before bed we all huddled together in the impromptu girls' tent talking, lying on one another, and trying to keep warm, until the boys eventually left. I thought the tent was going to come down on us several times, as the gusts were back up in probably the 30-40mph range at night, but at least it was fairly warm in the tent with four bodies in it. (In the morning our female RH informed us that the previous night had seen a record low for the northern Indiana area.) In the morning it was cool but not so cold, and the sun was finally out, just in time for us to strike camp after breakfast and come back to the city, where I am now only wearing the usual one pair of pants, long-sleeved shirt, and sweatshirt and am not bone-achingly cold and covered in campfire smoke.

Despite all that, it really was a fun trip, just sleeping and shivering with one another and eating campfire foods and reveling in simple things like showers. You get to know even people you already know well just that much better when you are stinky, cold, tired, and yet somehow still happy at the same time and sharing the same cramped living spaces. Now I get to sleep in a real bed again and take a real shower (which I should get on, after I put away my all-too-real disgusting laundry from this past weekend), and do quite a bit of real homework.

Sounds like real fun.

Drowning in things

This week (since Sunday night), I have done the following things:
--read 500 pages of a Victorian novel (well, 500 minus the 90 pages I still have left to read)
--interviewed 8 candidates for our house RA next year (our current RA is graduating)
--wrestled with the housing office
--ordered and picked up prescriptions
--played IM inner tube water polo for my house
--gone to the gym three times
--read a couple hundred pages of Freud
--taught a health workshop on the far southwest side with someone I don't know and without the necessary materials
--taken notes on three of the densest psych studies I've seen in a while
--done various busywork for Italian

Tonight we have 5 more RA candidates to interview, which will take approximately four hours (no joke: 7 to 11 pm). Tomorrow I am teaching again, this time closer to home, at 8:45 in the morning (hopefully with materials?), then going to three hours of class, and then running back home, packing a bag, and going camping in Indiana until Sunday afternoon. When I return I will probably have several hundred pages of reading and an Italian writing assignment to do. Oh yeah, and Game of Thrones premieres Sunday night, but my hopes of finding it online before Monday or Tuesday are not great. I guess it's not like I really have time anyway. I'm kind of just still just surprised at how quickly this supposed-to-still-be-innocuous 3rd week of the quarter turned into an angry blur of too much homework and not enough time.

Rolling the dice

It had to come eventually: making decisions.

The day I was accepted into the Rome study abroad program, I knew two things immediately. The first was that I had to go and would be a fool to refuse, and so I didn't. The second was that I was very likely going to have to pull myself away from my house, since UChicago can't get its head on straight regarding undergraduate housing and study abroad. On the one hand, the college loves you to go abroad and tell everyone how great it was when you get back. On the other hand, the college loves to try to keep third- and fourth-years in the housing system, since the vast majority move off campus, since there IS no housing for everyone, try as UChicago might to say otherwise. So you would think that the college would jump at the chance to make it easy for students to both go abroad and stay comfortably in the housing system, regardless of when students choose to go abroad.

No, no, and no again.

When you return from abroad, the college guarantees you housing the same way that it guarantees housing for all who want it--but it does not let you choose. They can't let rooms sit empty for a quarter waiting for you, so you go where there is a space. As far as I can see now (unless someone drops out of school after autumn quarter next year), there will be no space for me in my house beginning winter quarter 2012. In my dorm, maybe, although that's a bit of a stretch. But more than likely not in my house.

It's conflicting because I really do love my house, in many ways. It's not just a dorm or a room to live; it's also many of my friends, two of my elder-sibling-I-never-had substitutes in my resident heads (house heads), my job for the past year in working for our resident masters (dorm heads), and a lot of happiness a thousand miles away from home. This means quite a bit to someone who grew up painfully shy and oftentimes (comfortably) alone, as only children so frequently are. It's basically my family out here, in many ways, and while relationships aren't strictly dependent on where you are, physically, in the world, there's a reason why the people you are closest with are often those who also live near you. Ease of access and frequency of contact give you both the impetus and the need to make relationships work.

It is entirely one thing to move out of housing because you're ready to move on, because you want to pay rent and cook meals for yourself and start pretending to be a real person. I could do that eventually, and I probably will by the time I'm a fourth-year. It's another thing, however, to realize that you don't really have a choice, that your choice is either a) go live and learn for seventy-some-odd days on another continent, or b) stay where you are and keep living with the people you love. How can anyone ever possibly pass up the opportunity to live for a bit in another country? And yet it is so hard, harder than I want it to be, to think of letting go of this vibrant community I've helped make for the past two years, to know that when I come back it won't be waiting for me. The price I pay for international studying is the community I've been a part of back here, domestically.

Of course I can and will visit this old home regardless of where I live next winter quarter and of course I can and will be changed, emotionally and socially, by spending seventy-some-odd days living in an apartment in Rome. In so many ways my house is changing anyway; our resident heads are finally leaving to go, beautifully and yet a bit painfully, be real people who own a house, and our RA is graduating and going to New Mexico to work. But many of the students, my compadres, the meat and bones of the housing community, from this year are staying, and it's just that much harder to swing by the lounge and play Mario Kart or watch stupid TV or bemoan homework when I live somewhere else, blocks away, instead of simply four floors above.

Tonight the randomized seniority list for room pick came out, and I got a great position. One I can't take, of course, because I am barred from participating in the spring lottery due to my not being physically on campus in the fall. (The sweet, sweet laughability of it all.) The first-years and my own yearmates besides are, as I type this, beginning the long process of scheming and trying to figure out what rooms they want to set their sights on. This is a month-long diplomatic (and sometimes just dramatic) affair that is both amusing and yet highly annoying, in that wearying way that over-eager and over-emotional drama can become. It's especially bitter this year because I feel forced out of it. At least three of my yearmates are also studying abroad and staying in housing. But because they are not going abroad fall quarter (because it didn't please them to go to Rome, for instance, or other fall programs), they will have no problems whatsoever living where they want to in the house. The one girl who is also going abroad fall will be okay because she has an arrangement with a girl going abroad winter and a girl going abroad spring, to rotate in and out of a double as each goes abroad.

It's an arrangement I would gladly have participated in, and yet it was not offered to me, something that does make me feel awful in a vague and impersonal way. I know it was simply chance, really, an instance of the other girl probably being around when this bright idea first occurred to the other two, while I simply wasn't in the room. And yet it does make me feel rather left out, not least because although I love my other fall-study-abroader in many ways, I simply feel like, in many ways, I would make a better roommate than she would; I'm far neater and quieter than she is, and the other two girls are also quite quiet and relatively neat. Mostly the entire proceeding just took me by surprise, caught me in a painful presumption that I had something with these other two girls that turned out not to be and left me to fend for myself. I'm not angry at any of them, particularly, just upset in general at being left out by what I can only hope and presume (although look at what presumption brought me!) was simply chance. If I had been in that room when that decision was made, if I had somehow seen it and made my own case, if only if only if only--well, life would be a bit easier for next year, that's all.

And yet right now, when everyone else has some sense of security and I do not (not yet, anyway), it's hard to see this as simply a complication; it feels a lot more like a serious blow, one that I keep coming back to with every end-of-the-year ritual, which will only come more and more frequently as the year rolls on towards its end. It feels personal, even though I know it likely isn't, and it puts me at the mercy of chance, moreso than other people, something inevitable in life that I still have to figure out how to take in stride. I guess that makes this all a somber and rather bitter lesson, at the moment--but a lesson nonetheless.

Poison

"Jon Arryn was a man of peace. Why kill him?"
"He started asking questions."



"I know the truth Jon Arryn died for."

And so will we, beginning next Sunday at 9/8 central. Some great shots here: Dany coated in blood, Varys, Littlefinger, Lysa Tully Arryn, Dothraki orgies, and more. 8 days until the premiere!

UDaR on meeting numero uno

Una Donna a Roma has been updated with details, most notably pertaining to visas and plans for other Europe excursions, from the first pre-departure program meeting yesterday afternoon. Enjoy!

Schedules 'n things

Many people who read this blog actually care very little about A Song of Ice and Fire or HBO's Game of Thrones, shockingly. So as to keep this from simply becoming a repository of fan-girling over the latest and greatest in Westeros, here's some news that has everything to do with the real world and nothing to do with George R.R. Martin or HBO, namely: what I'm doing this quarter.

A week in, it's safe to say this is the solidified version of my schedule from now through June. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays I have Modern Love in Victorian Poetry and Prose from 11:30-12:20 and then Italian from 1:30-2:20. On Wednesdays I also have my lector (conversation) session for Italian from 10:30-11:20, and on Fridays I have another hour of Italian right after the normal hour, from 2:30-3:20. On Tuesdays and Thursdays I have the third quarter of sosc from 1:30-2:50 and The Social Brain and Empathy, a psych class with the renowned empathy pioneer Jean Decety, from 3:00-4:20. (All times central, of course.) All that time on TTh mornings is usually spent getting ready for the gym, from which I actually just returned, while I'm at the gym from 3:15ish to 4:15ish on MW and later than that on Fridays.

The English class is pretty good, although there are actually quite a lot of people in it for a discussion-based class, probably about 25 or so. I'm not crazy about the Victorians, but it fulfills a period requirement for the English major and is kind of hilarious, in both ironic and non-ironic ways, so it's overall good.  Italian is, well, Italian, although it is really quite awkward this quarter since only two people (another girl and I) are in the class; the rest are in the 11:30 section that I used to be in but had to switch out of so that I could take this English class. Our teacher is also kind of awkward, although it's gotten less awkward as time has gone by, so it's okay now. Sosc is sosc, basically the same as ever, although so far it's been a little more interesting this quarter than the last two quarters; we're currently reading Freud, and then we're reading Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Memmi, and some other Freud. Empathy (or, should I say, ze ehm-pat-EE) is pretty entertaining; Decety has probably the thickest French accent I've ever heard, which makes lecture that much more interesting. He's also really nice, which I guess is sort of surprising considering what a bigwig in the field he is, but it's definitely appreciated.

Besides classes, not too much interesting is going on yet. Went to Chinatown on Saturday and had some really delicious food with some housemates. Our house is doing a camping trip at the Indiana Dunes in a week and a half, assuming all the planning comes out okay, which is really exciting. It's spring and the prospies are out everywhere; there's an admitted students overnight this Thursday and next Thursday, so we'll be swamped with eager and awkward high school seniors. The weather's been pretty okay; it was legitimately hot on Sunday, and although it's still very sunny, the temperatures are back down into the 40s and 50s. I think it's supposed to stay there for the next few days, but I guess we'll just end up seeing what happens.

UDaR: in which I can't smile

A new Una Donna a Roma post about the bizarre process of having six pictures of me taken for mysterious study-abroad purposes is up and rockin'.

Jace of Televisionary gets in on the action

One of the better-known internet-based TV/film critics is Jace Lacob of The Daily Beast, Televisionary, etc. His review of what he's seen of Game of Thrones so far (the first 6 episodes that HBO sent to critics) is officially up and viewable here. He has read the books but watched the screeners with his wife, who has never read a word of Martin and was allegedly "entranced" by the visual ride HBO takes us on.

He summarizes the show thusly:

Based on the novel series "A Song of Ice and Fire" by George R.R. Martin, Game of Thrones arrives with its brutality and vision very much intact. Adapted by executive producers David Benioff and Dan Weiss, this is a staggering adaptation of a monumental literary achievement, a densely-plotted fusion of fantasy and potboiler political thriller with a deeply cinematic scope. 

Jace is clearly a super-fan, not only of the books but of the show. His language to describe the adaptation includes the words "insanely fantastic":

The first six episodes of Game of Thrones, provided to press in advance, are insanely fantastic, a groundbreaking work of television that's both visually engaging and thematically insightful. This is high fantasy done right, offering a wild and unrelenting plot about the games people play, the thirst for power, the ends men (and women) are willing to go in fulfillment of their own desires, and the things that we do for love. These six installments represent a crowning achievement for serialized television, its taut narrative the launchpad for dynamic conflict, copious bloodshed, and, yes, even a reflection of the mercenary times we live in.

He finishes it off with a sentence that will probably make every A Song of Ice and Fire fan's heart beat just that much more quickly:

This is the type of series that comes around but once in a lifetime, a groundbreaking and absorbing drama that is utterly unlike anything else on television today.

Gore, sex, love, lust, ambition, pride, children, adults, humor, "monsters," dwarves, booze, family, honor, duty, tomfoolery, and, yes, even heart-rending sorrow. Sounds about like the series we all know and love.

14:03 of GAME OF THRONES

It's here. The "exclusive sneak peek" of Game of Thrones premiered about two hours ago on HBO, and it's online for your viewing pleasure. This covers the very beginning, from the wilds beyond the Wall to Winterfell, roughly the prologue and Bran I from the book (minus the direwolves, fellow ASoIaF fans, sorry--that scene is probably right after the cut off).

Warning: This, and all of Game of Thrones, includes direct depiction of intense violence and bloodshed. HBO rates it as Mature Adult, and for quite good reason.





The production value is breathtaking. Looks so much more like film than TV. Also, the bits and pieces of the Stark children are wonderful; the added in bit with Arya (Maisie Williams) is the most impressive and true-to-the-spirit not-from-source-material-but-well-placed bit I've seen in an adaptation in a while. Starting off with a bang and following through; definitely addicting.

Two weeks until the premiere. April 17th, 9pm ET/8pm CT, HBO.

First real mainstream GoT review up

A few bloggers have been giving their impressions of Game of Thrones, but most of them are fantasy-niche and/or fans of the book series already. The Hollywood Reporter is neither niche nor previously familiar with the books, so far as I can tell, but their review (found here) is very positive and makes it sounds like GoT has definitely found the ability to attract the general public. Their remarks on how the immense complexity of ASoIaF translates to a miniseries are especially interesting:

...That kind of start to the 10-part series was essential because Game of Thrones is a complicated story with numerous characters and a dense, interwoven back-story. Though it demands attention, Thrones never once bogs down. It’s the kind of drama where, when the first episode ends, you wish the nine others were immediately available. And that validates HBO’s notion that television is the perfect medium for a fantasy series done right. Getting Martin’s Thrones, the gold-standard, could end up landing HBO its next franchise...What that means, essentially, is that there’s a tight grip on the storytelling and a real understanding of who each person is – traits that make the complexity easier to bear....What we have here is the successful pairing of an acclaimed collection of fantasy books with a television series that illuminates and expands what’s on the page. Worth the wait? Absolutely. And even if you have no idea what all the fuss is about, you should get in from the start absorb Martin’s fantastical tale.

Sounds like this is going to be good. Whether or not you're familiar with the books, definitely give this one a chance, and if you like to read and haven't checked out the books yet, what are you waiting for? Get your hands on the first book, A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, and start reading now--it's a long journey, but one that rewards its readers a thousandfold for the initial investment you make. The other three published books in the series, in order, are A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords, and A Feast for Crows, and book five (of a predicted seven), called A Dance with Dragons, hits stores July 12th--now is the best time in ages to get involved.

GoT reminder: Sneak peak tomorrow

Just a reminder on the Game of Thrones/A Song of Ice and Fire front that tomorrow, Sunday 4/3, is the date that HBO shows the first 15 minutes of the first episode, directly before the continuation of their current miniseries Mildred Pierce. This sneak peak airs at 9pm eastern/8pm central, and according to HBO it will be made available online "immediately afterward" for those of us who are sans HBO/sans TV in general, presumably to try to get those who can to sign onto HBO. If you're a big ASoIaF fan or just a fantasy/medieval fan in general, I'd recommend getting HBO if you can, just for the next few months (the first season should end sometime in June) to watch the show, as all early reviews from critics (both those familiar and unfamiliar with the books) indicate that it will be splendid watching, and tell HBO why you're subscribing. Those of us who cannot subscribe to HBO (hey, fellow college kids/people sans TV!) can't monetarily support the show, and although we will find ways of watching, some explicit support is always helpful from those of you who can in order to keep HBO invested in continuing to produce the show.