Sex, Drugs and Venereal Disease...

...is apparently all you get for going to house parties in America, according to the lastest offering from the union. 'Virtual House Party', which, mercifully I didn't attend, 'acted' out by all the R.A.'s is essentially a load of people congregating in Sandburg and pretending to be drunk/raped/smoking etc etc. So let that be a lesson to you all, dont drink, don't do drugs, and DON'T GET VD!


Anyway, onto lighter things, went to da club (618 on Water Street) with Catrina and Charlene on Friday, was loadsa fun, even if we do dance like gawky white girls! AND I only spent $18, which was a bit of a bargain.




In other news, I'm off to see N*E*R*D* on Thursday, which should be fun fun fun.



Classes are fine, people keep asking about them, they're like classes in England only with less work and you having to talk less, which is a good thing all round, all things considered.


I'm missing England a little bit, well, not England itself but the people, Lizzie, Sarah, Joe, Starship, me Mam, Nan, grandad and of course JOCK! Apparently nan says she's gonna ship him over for me, which will be lovely :o). Christmas, like last Christmas, is inevitably gonna be mental, thinking of Flex-ing it up on Christmas Eve again this year - such a good way to start Christmas Day, drunk and dancing away to George Michael, it was the stuff I dreamed about in Year 10.

In between now and then I'm having a proper American Halloween, complete with 'candy' and costumes no doubt, and I'm spending Thanksgiving with Catrina and Charlene's family (including a spirit who is also called Emma). Oh, and I'll hopefully make it to both the beach and to Chicago before we get snowed in.

Hope you're all well, most of you will be back at uni now and enjoying the madness that is Fresher's I expect, so have fun with that one.

Good-night and good luck,

Ems.x

And now for something completely different...

I had to study this poem for my Eng305 class last week, it reminds me of small-town England, and especially how returning to Nuneaton often feels now that we've been out into the 'real world'.


Wessex Heights

There are some heights in Wessex, shaped as if by a kindly hand
For thinking, dreaming, dying on, and at crises when I stand,
Say, on Ingpen Beacon eastward, or on Wylls-Neck westwardly,
I seem where I was before my birth, and after death may be.

In the lowlands I have no comrade, not even the lone man's friend -
Her who suffereth long and is kind; accepts what he is too weak to mend:
Down there they are dubious and askance; there nobody thinks as I,
But mind-chains do not clank where one's next neighbour is the sky.

In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways -
Shadows of beings who fellowed with myself of earlier days:
They hang about at places, and they say harsh heavy things -
Men with a wintry sneer, and women with tart disparagings.

Down there I seem to be false to myself, my simple self that was,
And is not now, and I see him watching, wondering what crass cause
Can have merged him into such a strange continuator as this,
Who yet has something in common with himself, my chrysalis.

I cannot go to the great grey Plain; there's a figure against the moon,
Nobody sees it but I, and it makes my breast beat out of tune;
I cannot go to the tall-spired town, being barred by the forms now passed
For everybody but me, in whose long vision they stand there fast.

There's a ghost at Yell'ham Bottom chiding loud at the fall of the night,
There's a ghost in Froom-side Vale, thin-lipped and vague, in a shroud of white,
There is one in the railway train whenever I do not want it near,
I see its profile against the pane, saying what I would not hear.

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.

So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.


Source: Hardy, Thomas. The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy. Edited by James Gibson. London: Macmillan, 1976. pp. 319-320.

It's always sunny in Philadelphia

Which is nice, if you live in Philadelphia; unfortunately for me, it went from blistering heat (32 degrees plus) to pissing it down pretty much constantly for the last two days. Nothing like a good bit of rain to make you think of blighty eh?

Apart from that, things have been pretty good, my classes all seem cool; heres the rundown (if you care):

Eng150: Multicultural America. Basically I've been made to do this by my Living-Learning Community in my Residence Hall; seems pretty fun though, we're learning all about other American cultures through non-conventional means, so basically we get to spend loads of time listening to hip-hop and debating how the 'gangstaaa' element adds/detracts from the community in which it was created. Oh and we get to do some volunteery-mutually-beneficial type stuff at a local after school thingy for middle and high school students that are what we'd term 'underpriviledged' when it comes to education etc. And its essentially based around all the inequality and burecratic bullshit people have to deal with just to get access to services some take for granted, espcecially in Milwaukee because its the 2nd most segregated city in America. I'm sure I'll be able to give a better rundown than this that doesn't sound quite so ignorant and ineloquent once I get going on this one :)

Eng305: Survey of English Literature 1900-present. War poetry, modernism, Englishness. TS Eliot, Heart of Darkness, Larkin. Yummy.

Eng370: Folk Literature. This ones a corker; we're exploring all aspects of folklore and custom (in America mainly) like stuffing vs dressing on Thanksgiving, as well as loads of ghost stories and urban legends etc.

Eng451: Chaucer. The Man. The Legend. The Godfather of English Literature.

Eng461: Beat Writers and SF Renaissance Poets. Taught by and Irish guy with and English accent who used to get his morning paper from the same place as Charles Manson. Oh and he knew Ginsberg a bit as well, which is kinda a big deal. No Bukowski tho. Damn.

Eng465: Asian-American Women Writers. Now I'll be honest here, I know nothing about American people, I know even less about Asian-American women, so this might be a bit of a challenge, but I'm taking it in the 'horizon-broadening' spirit. Thankfully.

Well thats pretty much all I'm going to be doing for the next three months; the master plan is that all this cross-cultural stuff I'm learning about is gonna help me when/if I actually get a job on the force in communicating with others and understanding that theres more to the world than the middle-class white families from the Midlands that seem to have (essentially) ruled my life for the past 20 years.

Philosophical? Yes.
Too much to handle? Maybe
Optimistic bullshit that I'll never actually achieve? Quite possibly.

But hey, I met a guy with a full-on Karl Marx beard, which made me chuckle, so things aren't quite as serious as they seem.