Fish 'n Chips 'n Puke 'n Stonehenge

The brief blog haitus wasn't due to a lack of writing, but an excess of it.

A flurry of scholarship deadlines, essays, and presentations came tsunami-style, so I was busy buttressing the fort with sandbags of sentences, poems, papers and preparations.

The storm is weathered.  For now.

Although it feels so good to get it done with that I never want to think of it again lest I puke all over my keyboard, I'd like to revisit the semi-truck pulling contest that was last week's Medieval Drama paper.   It was 2,000 words.  Not even half a piece of cake, I thought.   Still, I was worried.  The thing about essays here is that a lot more chips are on the table.  The stakes are amplified.  Medieval Drama is 30 modules, which translates to about 8 credit hours at Illinois.  Which is the equivalent of a little more than 2 courses.  Which means the single grade for this class makes a big splash. 

Even better/worse, despite being so heavily weighted, you only hand in two papers, and this was the first.  There's no room for a warm-up.   So as I compiled research and crafted arguments for a measley 2,000 word paper that, by US standards, I would crank out in 10 hours or so,  I did all I could to get a favorable roll of the dice.  

Despite the informality of many of the classes, the paper turn-in process is paradoxically structured.  There are three different cover sheets you have to fill out in BLOCK CAPITALS which took a good half-hour considering the course name, "Tradition and Innovation in Pre-Shakespearean Drama," is an essay in and of itself for the pixelated 21st century college student.

Add onto that the time spent dealing with widespread technical incompetence.  When I went to print, printers were down across campus, of course, and no one was in any rush to fix them.  Luckily, I'd given myself three hours to get everything turned in -- enough time to locate a working printer and get the darn thing stamped, signed, put in an airtight vaporlock chamber at the turn-in station, cross-referenced with a sample of my blood, then whisked away in an armored van.

Or so I saw.  I was a bit sleep-deprived.

Speaking of seeing things: Stonehenge.  An ancient wonder of the world.  I went on a trip through the Bristol International Student Center.  The BISC team runs a very good show.  They have tea and cakes for #1 on Monday, all-you-can-eat soup for #2 on Wednesdays and Fridays, and always good company.  That's free.

Stonehenge was fun in that it was fun to make fun of, but otherwise it is a tired-looking monument -- if that's the word -- that, in seeing, I regrettably demystified from the glossy pages of National Geographic.  For part of the walking tour, you're much closer to the road where cars fly by than the structure.  There's nothing that can pull you out of a historical illusion like a stream of cars.  

I walked around Stonehenge twice before the bus moved on to Salisbury Cathedral, the tallest church in England.  It was impressive and imposing, and I got to see one of the four original Magna Cartas.  I tried fish 'n chips for lunch.  Again, like Stonehenge, an English treat better left in the romantic cultural imagination.  Still, many agreed that both are somethings you have to partake in, and I'll subscribe to that.  If only to be puzzled once again why mediocre things are lauded and great things (the English pint, for instance, or pub food) are demeaned.

The highlight of the daytrip was sitting next to a German law student on the way home and discussing how aspiring lawyers sell their souls for big law firm money.  A common enemy and our enlightened non-materialistic selves established, we got along well.