A field guide to growing up without growing apart
So, in case anyone forgot, I am currently pursuing my doctorate at a very big name school in the UK—you know, the one with all the medieval buildings with walls like castles… And this year, I have even gotten the chance to teach a group […]
Dudes, you want to know something scary? I have started to think about… jobs. It’s a terrifying word, I know. I’ve still got some time but I feel the scariness of job-hunting breathing down my neck; soon it will catch up with me. I […]
So, as you have all heard, Cinderslut has become a teacher. She’s passed all of her classes, done her student teaching, and landed herself a new teaching job this fall. Many congrats to her! However, this post is about me. It turns out that two of the naughty princesses will be teachers this year. My life got turned upside down about a month ago when—out of the blue—a professor I know emailed and offered me a teaching job. Now, in America being a Teaching Assistant is an integral part of most PhD programs. However, in the UK teaching experience can be hard to come by and teaching an entire course is definitely not a given. So basically: I had to take the job. Although I am both flattered and excited, I have to admit: the prospect of teaching this class is pretty scary to me. As I did my undergraduate in the US, I am not super familiar with the systems employed for undergraduates at my university. Almost everything is different than what I am used to: classes, lectures, and tutorials are all separate things, and students aren’t given exams and their papers don’t have scores—instead their entire grade is calculated after two weeks of exams that happen at the end of their final year. My undergraduate experience was nothing like that! The other scary thing is that practically no assistance has been given me in crafting this class. There is no established structure or routine; instead, all I keep hearing is ‘everyone does things differently. Figure out what you like!’ Now on some fronts, this is empowering. I can teach however I like; I can structure the class to emphasize what I think is important; I even get to decided when and how often we meet. Empowering for sure, but also… terrifying. Especially as a first time teacher, I wouldn’t mind having more structure given me. I am worried about making the wrong choices, worried my class will be less good than those given by other teachers who have had a few years to iron out wrinkles. I feel a bit like I have been tossed into the water—it’s sink or swim. Hopefully I will be swimming like a dolphin sometime soon (or at least flopping around like a jellyfish).
Hey! So it’s that time of the month again! Our favorite time, the Condition of the Month! Well this month the princesses were given the task of all writing a piece of poetry for the blog. This was supposed to be about the season […]
Cue the pomp and circumstance—I finished my Master’s degree. Student teaching and my final course as a Master’s student wrapped up in the first week of May, and…that’s it! I was done. I started this program nearly two years ago, and have been taking classes […]
Hey there blogging world! It’s been a long time! I feel bad to have left you all hanging so long there’s just been lots of stuff happening! First, Sleeping Booty was here visiting me—for the first time ever—and we were basically having a great time and getting up to all sorts of mischief. Since then, however, it’s been back to work and trying to get this next chapter of my dissertation sorted before the end of term (also, sorted here is euphemism for ‘have-anything-about-it-figured-out-at-all’). Now probably to a lot of you this sounds tedious (ugh, school work!). But really, it’s pretty epic.
Basically, for the last 2 months I have been reading about Old English charms—and let me tell, that’s some weird stuff. First, there are elves–Every nerd’s dream, right? But sadly I have to tell you that these creatures probably have very little in common with Arwen and Galadriel. We are talking here about disease causing beings here… you probably don’t want to run into one.
Also, there are magic words. You know ‘abracadabra’ ? Well, I always thought that stuff was made up, but apparently abracadabra is common in medieval Jewish remedies for fever! And even found it’s way into Anglo-Saxon England. Yesterday I read this phrase: ‘Abra Alabara Galabra’. Sound familiar? There are also other magical-type formulas like abracadabra with other repeating nonsense sounds. Who knew?
The other thing that is cool about these charms is that they often contain text from several languages including Old English (of course), Latin, Greek, and Old Irish. Sometimes they even have corrupted Hebrew words. This means that when scholars are trying to figure out what these sometimes very obscure texts say, hypotheses run from verb forms in Old Saxon to the names of angles in gnostic texts in Coptic. Really it’s anyone’s guess and often no really knows for sure.
But yeah… so this is how I have been spending my time recently. Reading these crazy texts that are sometimes beyond confusing but whose very insolvability makes them interesting. And then, the next step beyond that, is thinking about the world that made them and what context they fit in there. How did Hebrew phrases like Abracadabra find their way into England? Given the intellectual structures in Anglo-Saxon England they probably were written down by a monk or a cleric—was that the type of person who was practicing them? Would these ‘charms’ that nine times out of ten include prayers and mention the names of the Biblical figures or saints have been considered witchcraft by the church?
When I am able to answer a few of these questions I’ll finally have a chapter outline. But for now, I just want to say that being a graduate student is the best: relaxing in the library… reading weird stuff… thinking about elves…
Is there something that really has been bugging you lately? Like something in your life that just doesn’t seem right? Well, for me that thing is the late Middle Ages. I mean, they hog all the glory for themselves! When people talk about the Middle Ages today, I feel like […]
So. It’s over. I took: The Test. Dwarfing the SAT, sending the ACT to go cower in and corner, and putting the GRE to shame. Yes, you’ve got it. I am talking about the All Souls Exam at Oxford. If you don’t know what I […]
Lately, several people have mentioned to me that I need to ‘get involved’ with different activities, and it has really started to bug me. To give just one example, about a week ago, another graduate student I know was pressuring me 
to join the organizing committee for this yearly conference. She had the idea that she could train me this coming year and then, when she was no longer at Oxford, I could take over. I said no. I mean, I did appreciate the conference (I even presented there this year), but I just wasn’t willing to give over that many hours of my time—they are too precious to me.
I was complaining to this to one of good friends here, about how I felt guilty for saying no but that it really wasn’t something I wanted to do. Her response was, ‘well it’s fine that you don’t want to do this conference—but you really should get more involved, just find something fun.’ Now, I know my friend meant well, but for some reason, this advice really irritated me. I feel like people are constantly trying to get me to take part in and have responsibility for things that I really couldn’t care less about. There seems to be this pervasive idea in our society that to be fulfilled you have to know a lot of people and attend a lot of events, and that if you do these two things you will be happy. Someone who doesn’t is just, well, weird and they have no life.
Don’t get me wrong, I like having friends as much as anyone. My friendship with the naughty princesses for one has been nothing but rewarding. But somehow I think there is a difference between true friends, those that you are close to and share your life with, and having a lot of people who know you and maybe go the same events. Really, I don’t feel like I need any more of the second type. Instead of cultivating a wide social circle, I would rather put more time into the friends I have, making them better, deeper ones
I guess what bothers me so much in this whole question of being ‘involved’ is that it sets up these things: making friends and knowing people, as inherently more important than your solitary activities. It is almost as though people forget that at Oxford we are here to be students, and really, to 
do good academic-level scholarship it takes a lot of time. But yes, even when all the research has been done, of course still one has some free time. But for me, I cherish that time. In Roman times they had a word “otium.” Otium is kind of hard to translate literally–it means ‘free time’ but not at all in the sense of time that does not matter. Instead, otium was leisure time: a time free from labour, where one could do more important things like think and read. For me, that is the time where I work on my German, or read, or journal. It is time for examining my ideas and my philosophies. I think that time is so important, so necessary and refining, that it really bothers me to see people treat it like it is nothing—as though its existence is a sign of some fault in your life, that your life is not full enough. People are different, I am not denying that and I am not telling anyone how to live their life, but sometimes I just want to say, please, please, just let me and my otium be: we are happy how we are.