Blogs are supposed to be angsty, so...

I finally met with my assigned adviser this afternoon. She's nice, and she does kind of religious institutiony type things, so she's a great person to talk to for advice on that kind of thing. And her basic reaction to the discussion of what I'm interested in and think I want to pursue for my thesis and potentially beyond was something along the lines of "wow that's really interesting. but you know you can't really do that in the States, right?" Her take on the fact that pretty much EVERY SINGLE PROFESSOR in the US focuses on the Mediterranean/Spain/Italy is that it isn't cool/politically correct to focus on England. Too much WASP animosity. The modern trend is to decrease association with English heritage and to instead embrace other identities like Irish, Italian, whatever. Plus history is an easy department to force to be multicultural by employing people who study "minority" kinds of areas. And there's no student demand for courses on England. Which I actually disagree with. I think there is a lot of frustration amongst college kids about the lack of courses on Western Europe. That was true at BU and its been true at all of the schools people here went to for undergrad. I think there is actually a void that universities are neglecting to fill, its just that there is no incentive to fill that void by hiring another medievalist. Ok, end rant. Sorry.

So basically her suggestion was to either do a PhD here and get a job here or find a really great adviser in the States and go really broad comparative. She did a PhD here and had planned to go back to the States to teach but was basically laughed at when she said what she focused on. So her options were to come here or to reinvent her academic interests and focus areas.

All of which is, you know, super fantastic. I'm so excited to not have employment options. Grar. So I'm supposed to think about doing a thematic comparative study of religious institutions across England/France/Sicily and perhaps Spain. Not that there's anything wrong with that in particular, I just have basically no background in Sicily or Spain. Although, Frederick II is basically my favorite historical person EVER and he was sort of Sicilian. Try wikipedia-ing him, he's pretty much awesome. Crazy, but awesome.

And I can't stay here, if only because my stomach rebels every time I eat pretty much anything that isn't bread, crackers, Nutrigrain bars, yogurt, rice or cereal. So basically prepackaged boxed items. PB+J has been ok, lunch meat and cheese sandwiches are not. Ditto grilled cheese, so I know its not the lunch meat. Actually, pretty much anything involving cheese is not. I think I just can't handle crazy British cheddar cheese or something. Except that I can eat the chips with cheese from the place down the street. Ok, so make that anything involving cheese from the local grocery store. Now I realize that you can have an adjustment period for food and whatnot in a foreign country, but it has been almost a month at this point, so I don't know. On the upside, only eating like 1.5 meals a day and walking around everywhere/ up 3 flights of stairs to my room means my jeans are at the point where I need to obtain a belt. Or just shrink them in the dryer that is apparently notorious for running hotter than it says it is and therefore shrinking all your clothes.

So basically this amounts to I have a year to kind of re-evaluate what I want to work on and then apply for grad schools for entrance 2011. Of course that also means I'll have to find a job for that year. And apparently I shouldn't go with the woman at BC because I really need to try to move away from political/legal stuff around the Conquest because that won't let me go broad-based comparative. Which is kind of disappointing because BC does pretty intensive "professor training" (teaching you how to develop a curriculum, how to lecture, basics for courses you're likely to have to teach like Western Civ) and they do tuition remainders and a pretty nice stipend for all their grad students. Plus it is sort of in Boston, which I already know and am familiar with. So now I have like no plan for my future and my stomach hurts. Great day. Now I'm going to watch tv and avoid reading. I've got tomorrow off; I'll do it then.

Also, I am officially allergic to dish soap. All kinds of dish soap. It makes my hands very not happy with me.

First Full Week of Classes

Congratulations to me, first week of classes is done. Since classes are now in full swing, this is pretty much how I spend most of my time. Reading articles/books/etc in my spiffy new York sweatshirt on the bed because if I sit at my desk under the eaves I smack my head into the stupid cross beam every time I stand up.

I think the biggest difference between undergraduate and graduate classes (and I think my fellow grad students will agree) is the amount of reading. We have to read A LOT for every class. It is also different because there's not list of course books that you are expected to go out and buy. In the UK (apparently this is true for both undergrad and graduate courses), they don't expect you to purchase pretty much any books (with the exception of language grammars and dictionaries). Instead, the expectation is that you will get everything from the library. This would be great if I wasn't a 40 minute walk away from the big campus library. King's Manor does have its own library with some stuff in it, but they a) don't have everything that the main library does, and b) only have 1 copy if they have it, so unless you are super aggressive about checking out books before everyone else in your class, no such luck.

All of my classes are once a week seminars, which means that every week I get to track down new loads of books and articles from either the main library, the Minster library, KM library, or the internet. This has led me to question whether it really is more convenient to live in city centre near my classes since I have to trek up to campus for the library all the time or to visit history professors' office hours. I think it is a toss up- whether you live on campus or in city centre, you get to do a lot of walking back and forth. Unless you are made of money and take the bus a lot.

Speaking of money, I have some! I can pay my tuition! Huzzah! Course, according to the online currency converter, my $15,000 USD should have been just over 9000 BPDs, but it came out to 8800 which kind of puzzles me, but at least I have money and will not be kicked out of college.

Here's a brief rundown of what I'm learning about this term.
1) Medieval Latin. The Latin placement test put me into Beginners Plus, which kind of made me sad because I thought I knew more than someone just barely better than someone who knows zero Latin. But after the first class, I heartily agree with that placement. Beginners Plus is ACTUALLY basically Intermediate but with a quick review of all of the grammar structures. I think this works out well because the amount of Latin I remember from the last time I took it is, well, not super (it was better before I went to Italy last spring break. That got Italian all stuck in my head and now I'm thoroughly confused about what is Latin and what is Italian), and because I've only ever worked with classical Latin, so this gives me a chance to run through some of the ways the language changed in the medieval period and in some of the vocabulary that was invented, particularly to describe church related things that classical Latin just didn't have words for. Medieval Latin is a bit nicer because the sentence structures more closely resemble modern English structuring, but they get tricky and do things like write an "ae" ending as just "e." And lets not even go into the abbreviations they used in manuscripts. But I actually like the class, which is good. The teacher is this cute older English woman who's very no nonsense and figures that we can't help our ignorance because teachers today were often taught in the 40's and they didn't care about things like grammar back then. She's pretty funny.

2) Paleography. For you non-medievalists, this is the study of manuscripts, writing, and books basically. We learn how to read different scripts so that we can make sense out of primary resources and actually read all the medieval manuscripts still around. We also learn about standards in form and technique for various types of documents (i.e. a charter is usually written on parchment with specific dimensions, etc.) Right now we're basically just doing an introduction to the field, but later we break into groups to study in depth the documents and scripts used in a specific time period or document type (for example, books are often written in different scripts than documents, which were typically written for the king/court where speed of production was necessary.) The class is taught by an American/Canadian- someone told me she was American, but she went to school in Canada so I'm not sure- who has managed to develop a tinge of English accent. With the exception of one professor who still sounds very American, most of the North American professors have developed a strange hybrid accent. I'm going to come home and not know how to speak properly! I'll be calling things shops instead of stores, and weekENDs instead of WEEKends.

3) Old English. Taught by a PhD student who lives in my house (makes for a handy resource when stumped by homework!), so far all we've worked on is pronunciation. Because with the exception of a few words, it is not anything like modern English. Well, to be precise, we're learning West Saxon, but that was the dominant dialect of Old English in literature/documents after Alfred the Great.

Stolen from Ellen:
Alfred is Good
Alfred is Great
To read his Life
I just can't wait.

Sorry, medievalists humor. This is what happens when you put us in a house together... Anyhoo, it is definitely interesting. I actually think my Italian background is helpful here, which is strange since Italian is a romance language and OE is West Germanic, but I'm used to enunciating all vowels in a word. I don't know if I'll ever get the different "th" sounds, but its only the first week. And after this class I might be able to read through some of Beowulf in the original. Pretty snazzy.

4) Core Module. This is a class all Med. Studies MA students have to take. But, they break it down into various groups, so it isn't like a big lecture class full of all 20 of us or anything. The first few weeks, everyone is either taking Approaches to Archaeology, Intro to Art History, or Reading Published Medieval Texts. This is designed to introduce us to a discipline we don't have much background in. I'm taking Reading Published Medieval Texts, which is sort of a hybrid literature/history thing. I haven't done much with medieval literature, so I figured it'd be a good section to take. In a couple of weeks, everyone will be switching to one of three case studies which we will then look at through various interdisciplinary approaches. This is all designed to help us think and work with multiple disciplines, since that's kind of the point of doing an interdisciplinary masters program.

5) Saints and Sanctity. This class looks at early Medieval religious developments- specifically looking at the rise and development of saints cults. It is definitely interesting. But we kind of got tsk tsked by the professor after the first session. Apparently class was slow and he felt he led discussion too much. I didn't think it was particularly slow, and I don't know how we were supposed to do anything about him leading discussion, since the whole class was basically him posing questions, us discussing them, then him posing some other ones. I'm sure we would have been happy to pose our own questions if he hadn't been clearly leading discussion. But whatever. I'm sure it'll straighten itself out over the next couple weeks.

So yeah, that's what I do. Fun stuff.

Frolicking in the Country and Other Adventures

Sorry, I've been bad about updating when I say I'm going to update. But in my defense, I've become way busier in the last few days. So in no particular order, here's some of what I've been up to.

The Quest for Eddie Izzard Tickets

This all began when either Ellen, one of my housemates, or I quoted Eddie Izzard in conversation, had a mutual "You like Eddie Izzard?!?" moment, and I remembered that Eddie Izzard was on tour in the UK this October & November. Thus we decided that we should go. Brad, another Med. Studies person also expressed glee/interest, so we figured we could get a group together to take the train to one of his shows (he's not coming to York proper unfortunately. Mostly because there isn't really a large venue he could come to.) However, purchasing tickets proved problematic. We couldn't seem to get all of us in the same place at the same time, so Ellen and I just decided to buy tickets ourselves so at least we could go.

For his show in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on Thursday the 29th, there were three seats available on Ticketweb in the second section back from the stage. Like, ridiculously good seats to be on sale this close to the date. Catch was, you had to buy the group of three; they wouldn't sell just two of them. But literally while we were looking at them and comparing available seats for the Friday show, they disappeared. We figured we'd missed our chance. So we turned to that dreaded evil, Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster, however, will only mail your purchased tickets to your billing address. Neither of us had changed our billing address to the UK. So rather than have the tickets sent back to the states, we decided we'd walk down to the local Tourist Info center which is also a ticketmaster retailer. So we go down, standing in line while the woman working there made hotel reservations for various people, etc. Finally the computer frees up so she can look at tickets for us. Except that their ticketmaster access password was declined. And so was the one at the TI down at the train station. They were going to try to get that fixed yesterday (our ticket adventure was on Saturday), but we didn't want to chance waiting that long. So we grabbed ice cream from the truck across the street- full fat cream makes for WAY better ice cream- and trudged back home and up the three flights of stairs to our rooms. But as luck would have it, the three seats were back on ticketweb! So we deliberated for all of 10 seconds and just bought the three. We figured we'd sell one to Brad or somebody.

The tickets are still being sent back home to Virginia, but we called them and they said that we should call back three days before the event and they could put a set for will call at the arena box office. Score. Except that over the weekend Brad came down with swine flu. So we might have to find some other Eddie aficionado to come with us. But YAY! He's totally my favorite comedian like ever. And this show, Stripped, is supposed to be a two hour, "stripped" down version of the entire history of the world. Should be good fun. If any of you Americans are interested, he is taking the show on a 6 city tour in the US in January. I know he'll be in Boston, Chicago, NY, and I think LA, but I'm not sure what the other two cities are. 'Course, tickets are like $70 which is way (EDIT: more! apparently I wasn't paying attention and accidentally put less) than I paid!

Frolicking in the English Countryside. Kind of.


On Friday, me & two housemates walked the 40 minutes to campus for a mandatory fire safety briefing. Typical don't burn stuff down and don't walk along the River Ouse in the city centre if you're blithering drunk talk. While it is kind of bothersome trekking out to campus (alternatively spending 2.50 to ride the bus there and back), campus is pretty.

There's a big man- made lake that everything is built around, so there's bridges connecting various portions and providing shortcuts. There's also lots of cute ducks, not so cute geese, and some kind of funky looking black swans. Supposedly they're the last pair of black swans in England. Plus, lots of pretty willow trees. Anyway, on the way back, we decided to try an intriguing path that led through a field. Didn't really know where it led, but we figured we'd go see. It was a nice afternoon. So we walked along Walmgate Stray as it is called, back towards the city. Walmgate Stray is literally just a small paved walk/bike way through some fields and past some cows. I mean literally past some cows. Like, there is no fence separating you from the cows.

See? Of course, when you come out of the field, you walk through an infantry base. It's kind of bizarre, you literally step out of a field and into a very military-looking zone. Big concrete buildings with chainlink fences and barbed wire.

Then you walk along the river for a while and eventually come out in town and then back at my house. They run a couple different YorkBoat cruises down the river that look really cool. There's the daytime one with historical commentary, and evening one with music & captain's banter and various meal cruises as well, but a) I don't think that's the kind of thing you can really do by yourself without being weird, and b) I have to hoard my money until I finally get more!

The Epic Saga of How the UK Refuses to Take My Money
Long story short, it makes the most sense to pay my housing and tuition fees from a UK bank account. Long story short, after much harassment, I finally have a UK bank account. Here's where the story gets long again.

To wire money to my account, I get charged like $60 from both my US and my UK banks. This obviously sucks. The UK bank, Lloyds, which is incidentally the ONLY bank in the UK that won't charge International students 5-8 pounds per month for the privilege of having an account, told me I could write a check no problem, it would be processed in 6-8 days, and I'd only get charged their 30 pound currency conversion fee. So I write them a check for an ungodly amount of money (goodbye, college fund...) and figure I'm all set because now I'll be able to do a direct debit to pay for my school fees. Well, not exactly. Yesterday, I received a phone call from the bank. Turns out it will take them 6-8 WEEKS to get me my money. Do I still want to go ahead with it or shall they send the check back to me? Yeah, no, that won't work at all, since my fees are due on the 30th. Accommodation was supposed to be due the 24th but I called the fees office and got an extension since the bank was being difficult. Now of course, this was not my favorite thing to hear, so I promptly decided that it was a chips/gravy/cheese for dinner night.

So now I'm back to wiring money. Of course, my US bank requires me to fill out a paper form, sign it and send it to them to initiate a wire transfer. Oh, and since my dad is listed as a joint account owner, he has to sign it too. Which means that I had to fill it out, sign it, send it to my dad so he can sign it and send it to the bank. Ahhhh. Dad somehow worked it so that I could sign it, scan it and email it to him, have him sign it and get the process going quicker, and then the original paper copy would get there as soon as various mail deliveries were made. Sounds good, right? Well, that leads me to...

The Quest for the Holy Scanner (it is like the Holy Grail, only more technologically advanced.)

Now, I had planned ahead and brought one paper copy of the wire transfer form with me. So I had filled that out already. But Dad wanted me to send him multiple signed forms so that if I have to transfer money again, we can cut out one leg of the mail delivery wait. Which makes sense, but is easier said than done. Off to campus I went today in search of a printer and scanner. So first I went to the library to print out a clean copy of the form, fill it out, make copies, and sign it. This of course necessitated paying for print quota and then buying a copy card. Wooooo. Then it was off to one of the PC Classrooms scattered around campus in search of a scanner. Two rooms have them. One in Langwith, and one in Alcuin. (York is on the residential college system, which means that each college is made up of 4-5 buildings linked by covered pathways around a central courtyard and provides dorm rooms, as well as office/classroom space. Departments are also housed in various colleges.)

I figured I'd try my luck in Langwith because they were supposed to have 2 scanners, while Alcuin just has one. So I made my way over to Langwith and promptly got very lost. The room was listed as Langwith 117, but when I went up to the first floor, the numbers only went up to 112. I went back downstairs and asked the porter. He directed me through a set of double doors, across a courtyard, and into the next building and up the stairs there. After making a brief confused detour through the cafe which was also through a set of double doors, I found the room. No scanner. But according to a poster on a bulletin board there, there was ANOTHER PC room in Langwith and that was where I needed to be. Fantastic. Of course, 138 was not on that floor. I thought, well, numbers seem to go up the further away from the central building you get... So I tried the next building over and sure enough, found it.

Problem. Each scanner is hooked up to ONE computer. One was not being used, so I tried that. Except that it won't accept logins. The guy on the next computer over was all "Yeah, that one doesn't seem to be working properly." The other computer was being used. The girl using it said she was almost done and then I could have it, so I used another computer while I waited. Score! Finally! Scanned and emailed. Victory. Of course, the program to scan text wasn't working, but I got it scanned using a Corel graphics program, so all is well that ends well.

So those are some of my recent adventures, not including class and Lords of Misrule, which I'm still kind of on the fence about. While it seems like it would be lots of fun, and the people are all really great, I just don't know that I want to commit the time to it. They're running Beowulf for three nights plus a dress rehearsal during the last week of term, i.e. when final essays are due. And I know that I'll procrastinate no matter what, and I just don't think that it would be wise for me to commit to not having any time in the evening that whole week to work on things. So I'm kind of thinking that I'll volunteer to work on props, but not actually be in the production/have to show up all the time.

I've also been trying to plan for after this year. I've come to the conclusion that I really just can't go straight into a PhD program when I finish here. My dissertation is due September 25th, and American programs all start end of August/early September, so I just don't think it will be feasible. Plus, most want 3 recommendations, and I can't ask professors that I've only known for 2 weeks at this point to write a rec for a December or early January deadline. So, I'm thinking that I'll take a year off and work and try to take a couple language classes. That way I can concentrate on applications after I finish my masters and have ~3 months to get those done. I've also been searching for a program/adviser that would be a good match.

I've run into the problem of having to chose between a really well-recognized program and an adviser with interests similar to my own. Notre Dame has probably the best Medieval program going on right now, with a bunch of California Schools- UCLA, USC, UC Santa Cruz, UC Berkeley- also offering a really good program with a lot of success in placing graduates in jobs. This is good. However, none of the professors at  these schools are really doing the British Isles / France in the period I'm looking at. If they study the British Isles, they tend to do super early Medieval period. Not what I'm interested in. If they do my time period, they work on the Mediterranean or Muslim/Christian/Jewish interactions and Crusades. I can't win.

But in some other schools, I've been able to find a few scattered professors that are generally interested in social/religious history of the High Middle Ages, which is at least the area and time period I want. I did find one person at BC that does Ango-Saxon/Anglo-Norman stuff, is interested in history/archaeology as sources, and does some stuff with religion. She's far and away the closest match I've found interest-wise, but I don't know if I'd be better off studying under her or at one of the bigger/better/shiny-er programs. But hey, I've got a year to figure it out, right?