Protentions and Retentions

Phenomenologist Edmund Husserl thought that our lives were lived in moments of protentions and retentions. That is, in the present, the mind is either looking back to make sense of what has happened, or looking forward guessing what is going to come next. Or both. He built this from centuries of time theory, including St. Augustine, Plato and Aristotle. Derrida ran with this, suggesting that, with the advent of archives, and cheap archiving technology like camcorders and photography, the mind no longer looks backward, but instead conceptualizes the present as a future memory. In other words, we take pictures imagining how this moment will be remembered later. We are, in essence, living our lives in a series of future memories.

The one holiday that jars the mind from the present and forces these protentions, retentions and archival tendencies to the front of consciousness is New Year's Eve. Here, people quite literally turn the page from one chapter to the next. People use this holiday as a time to make changes, reflect on what has happened, and start to imagine what the future holds.

A lot has happened this year. For those familiar with my relationship to Erika, New Year's Eve was a particularly important milestone in our relationship. It was on that day that we both decided to give the relationship a try. A year later, and she broke off the engagement, and no longer speaks to me (which, as she told me, was for my benefit; an idea that I take a lot of issue with).

As the initial shock of the moment is wearing off, my mind has taken to making sense of the series of moments that lead to this, and frankly, I should have seen this coming. Erika was immediately on board with the plan that we laid out early in our relationship. In fact, within a few weeks of deciding to give our relationship a chance, she started thinking about how she could get over to Wales. This is not the first major life plan she has made, though. There were other ventures (independent sources of income, a house, etc.) that she started, and then later backed out of. My Mom told me that she even backed out of most of her responsibilities for my 30th Birthday Party, which was her idea. All the great ideas were either dropped last minute, or passed off onto my sister (who came through like a champ). I don't know why I thought my relationship with her would be different.

But. It is important, here, to remember that my life with her was not horrible. I genuinely loved her, very deeply, and I was ready to commit to her. We had a lot of fun either staying home or going out. She gelled with my family very well, and I with her's. There were a lot of tender moments, between us, and when she wanted to be, she could be very sweet. If I remember her as just the recent actions, it paints me in a bad light. After all, if she was this irresponsible and flaky, why did I ask her to marry me? Truth be told: things with her were really great. Or at least I thought they were. All the things I had to do to make the relationship work did not seem like work, or problems. I was happy to do them because I genuinely liked to make Erika happy.

And that, there, is what hurts the most: I would do anything to make her happy, and she wouldn't.

But #2. There has been a lot of looking back. What New Year's Eve also allows is for looking forward. Resolutions to be made and so forth. While I am not a big fan of saying what I will and will not do in the next year, I have thought about what the next year will hold. Honestly, it's a little dizzying. The changes in my life are made even more prominent by the fact that I in one location, and will be going to a different one. I am quite literally leaving all of this behind me. Some of that come tinging in sadness: I leave behind my family, and a lot of good friends. But more exciting, and terrifying, is that I don't really know what comes next for me. I could come home for the whole summer, stay at my Mom's house, traveling around to see my friends. Or I could stay in Aberystwyth, finding cheap lodging, flying home for Buddy's wedding in June and possibly Comic-Con.

Then after the summer...

There are a lot of exciting things that I could be doing for the next few years. Once I am done, I have even more options: I could take a few post-doc assignments in English speaking programs. One in Helsinki I saw earlier looks pretty sexy. I could look for temporary or permanent positions in English speaking countries: America, Canada, UK or Australia, as well as English departments in larger cities like Berlin, Paris and so forth. I could push the editorial angle, looking for work with some comic publishers (or any publishers, really). Really, there are a lot of pretty exciting things to look forward to.

And, hopefully, a new love interest, which is also exciting. Someone who was as much fun, if not more so, than Erika, but with the ability to follow through on her decisions. Really, the future looks bright, terrifyingly so, but bright nonetheless.

From the Mouth of Babes

On my way to my Uncle's brother's wake, I was crammed in the back of my sister's van with her two older kids. We were close to the funeral home, so I thought I would level with the kids quickly:
"Now remember, guys, people are going to be very sad here, so they are going to want lots of hugs," I said. "But only serious hugs; not joking hugs."
Emily thought about this for a minute.
"Is that because we are going to the wake?"
"Yeah. So Uncle Richard probably doesn't want you to push him or anything. Just give him a big hug."
She thought about this again.
"Are you sad?" she asked me.
I thought about this. It was a complicated question, and I was full of different types of sadness. I didn't want to lie to the kid, nor do I think that kids need oversimplification of complicated emotions. Kids have these same complicated feelings, and they need to know that adults do as well.
"Yes," I said. "A little bit."
Without thinking, Emily just lunged and wrapped her arms around me (as much of me as she can, being only 5). She nuzzled her head in and squeezed tight.

I won't lie: I welled up a bit. That was exactly what I needed. Now, I don't want to make it seem like my family is not a close family, but we certainly are not a huggy family, particularly my immediate family. Well, I guess to be completely honest about the situation, I love to hug my family because of how uncomfortable it makes them. My sister Brianne runs away from me, my brother Kiernan will jab at me to keep me at a distance.

It all started when my Dad started to get sick. For one reason or another, I asked, jokingly, if he wanted a hug before I left. He acted like I asked if he wanted me to punch him in the face with a fist wrapped in razor wire, so I tossed my arms around him. It was like hugging a coat tree. But, a tradition was born that eventually leaked onto the rest of my family. The more the resisted the hugs the more hugs they got.

So hugging me has become a bit of an in-joke between my family and I, which is how I gauged the severity of a tragic moment. When my Dad died, we hugged each other a lot. At one particularly difficult moment for me, my brother Kiernan and I, working as pallbearers scooped me up in his arms when I lost the ability to stand. When Erika called off our engagement, my sister Brianne sent me a message over Facebook: "I'm really sorry about all this. Next time I see you, I'll let you hug me. And I won't even wince."

Back to Emily: when we got to the funeral home, Emily took her job very seriously. She tossed her jacket to her Mom, and started scanning the crowd. She locked onto my Aunt Mary, deep in conversation with someone from Richard's family, and walked right over. She stood there, waiting for my Aunt to notice, then wrapped her arms around her. Once that hug was given, she found my Uncle Richard, also in conversation with someone from his family. She sat and waited for that conversation to finish, then, when he turned, she wrapped her arms around him and squeezed tightly.

If you've never been hugged by a child at a particularly sensitive moment in your life, I suggest doing so. I don't have any facts or research to support this theory, but I am fairly certain there must be some medicinal benefits. True to her promise, Emily made sure to give everyone that needed one a big hug, as did her brother, my nephew Nate. As we paid our respects at the casket, we expressed our sympathies to Richard's sister-in-law. Nate, who generally is shy around strangers, gave her a really big hug, as did Emily. For just that brief moment, even though Richard's sister-in-law didn't know either of them, her life was made momentarily brighter. And that, really, is all that anyone can ask for.

Death and Christmas

I went to pay my respects at my Uncle's Brother's wake (and tomorrow, the funeral). While I didn't really know the deceased, I know and respect his brother very much. If Don was half the man that Richard is, then the world is slightly less bright tonight.

At the wake, there was a brief service where the priest talked about death as a stage in life. Wakes are a contemplative time, and I generally get an ache in the part of my heart that my Dad occupied. But, with Christmas around the corner, and my engagement recently called off, I found myself in a dark way. The priest talked about our lives as stories, which as a literary critic I found this to be an interesting metaphor. Don's story was over, or at least the Earthly volume; this, in turn, give us time to think about where our stories are taking us.

In the movie Stranger than Fiction, Will Farrell's character, Harold Krick, finds himself to be the main character in a novel that someone is writing. He hears voices in his head the narrate the moments of his life. In order to understand these voices and make some sense of his life, he approaches a professor of literature, played by the awesome Dustin Hoffman, who explains the basic plots of all stories: if it ends in a wedding, it's a comedy; if it ends with a death, it's a tragedy. At one point, Harold is putting the moments of his life in two piles: moments of tragedy and moments of comedy. At one particularly low point, he turns to the female character he is pursuing (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and says, "This may sound like jibberish to you, but I think I'm in a tragedy."

Ironically, I was watching this movie, at that particularly section, when Erika called to break up with me. There is a kinship between Harold and I: we both feel that we are part of a story that we have no control over. Harold eventually realizes that he plays a part in a larger narrative, and that author, in killing him, gives his life (and his story) meaning. In the end, the narrator rewrote the story to a less meaningful version, giving Harold the control over his life that he wanted (and his chance with Maggie Gyllenhaal).

Hoffman and the author have a conversation at the end, discussing the ending of Harold's story. Hoffman is slightly disappointed that Harold lives, claiming the original was one of the most important pieces of fiction in the canon written to that point. The version where he doesn't die was understandable, but not all that great. So, the choice the narrator had was between an important and interesting ending, or a happy ending.

People spoke at the wake, retelling stories of Don's life, and I was really moved by how he was remembered. Again, I only knew his brother Richard, who has impacted my life in meaningful ways, so really my experiences with Don are limited to these vicarious retellings, filtered through my relationship with Richard. These stories were reductive, of course, glossing over the horrible times. But that's not really important. There were enough genuinely warm moments that the two eulogies were extremely touching, particularly from Don's daughter. She told a story about a humble, spiritual man who clearly loved his family, and lived his life as if it were a celebration of the happy moments of every day.

She ended her eulogy with a quote from e e cummings' "I Carry Your Heart With Me":

i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)

This poem is immense, and paints a picture of the selflessness that is necessary for a functioning relationship. And this is really the heart of the matter: I want someone to think of this poem when they think of me. I want to find someone with whom I can spend my life, and carry her heart in mine.

Sorry that this is so sad-sacky. Christmas is a particularly cuddly time of year, and my puppy Leo, while quite cuddly, is not quite adequate.

British Buildings and the Calendar

In America, where is the first floor? That's right, reader: the floor that is at ground level. After all, it is the first floor that you walk into, so one would expect that. To clarify for buildings that are built into hills, the first floor will also be called the ground floor, marked in elevators with a "G", but the other floors are then numbers as if "G" = 1. That makes logistical sense.

In England, as in Germany and other European countries, the first floor you walk into is the ground floor. The next floor up is 1, and so on. The difference is subtle, but can cause major issues. For example, our bathroom light has not been fixed for a while. This is really annoying considering I've called twice to get the first floor bathroom light changed out. Turns out, they have changed the light outside of the bathroom next to my room, which is on the first floor above the ground.

What the Europeans are doing is actually mathematically smarter. They start counting by zero. Had all cultures done this with all counting measurements, there would have been a lot less confusion. For example: the millennium. In the year 2000, everyone was all excited to be celebrating the change of the millennium. Major parties were being thrown, and the world waited with baited breath for the computers of the world to crash and send airplanes careening around like Frisbees. But really, everyone was year early. How is that? We started counting with year 1, so the first year of the calendar went from year 1 to year 2. Year two ended with the first day of calendar year 3, and so on. To do the Math, you have to add 2000 to the first number of the calendar (which is 1), so the second millennium passed in year 2001 [2000 years since 1]. (It should be noted that this example and most of my understanding about the importance of the number zero comes from Charles Seiffe's book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea. A good read, and really interesting.)

I've taken to thinking that "floor" means, "area of the house above the ground," which makes sense. If you think about it, the floor meaning level of house, is probably how they talked about the levels that came after the ground floor. After all, the floor of early houses was actually the ground. So the artificial ground below your feet when on a different level would need to be designated as something different. Thus buildings were measured by how many floors were built above the ground.

Really, though, it's one more set of codes that I have to get good at switching as I travel back and forth between the States and the UK. On that note: I'll see you all soon. Get the kettle on.

Winter Wonderland

The halls of Aberglasney and other University were humming with the whispers of snow. The sky, it seemed, let loose with a fury of Romantic wonderment. Or, rather, for about twenty minutes it spit out tiny white flakes that dissolved before hitting the ground. Nonetheless, several events were canceled on the hill, and I was told by one cancellation to "Be very careful, but to enjoy the snow." Unless there was a car parked outside that hasn't moved or had too many people walk by, one might not have noticed that it snowed. Still, though, there was excitement to be had.

Chicago is not one of the more wintry cities in the world. Juno, St. Paul, Duluth, even Milwaukee probably looks at the few feet a year we get and laugh. In parts of Duluth, which is on the border between Canada and Minnesota, they regularly measure their snow in yards per winter. Chicago, though, does get its fair share of the fluffy white stuff, and it was not unusual in my time as an Illinoisan to wake up and see the world literally enveloped in a thick later of white stuff. Snow would pile on any stationary object: cars, trees, mailboxes, etc. It was magical. So I found it hard to get excited about snow that melts before anyone gets a chance to measure it's depth. The salt trucks would have gone out during the slow times and plastered the highways, and most people would have muttered under their breath about how annoying and unnecessary it was, ruining the paint jobs on cars.

I'm always amazed at how places are completely unready for snow. In Maryland, when it snowed they closed the highways. When the blizzard hit DC last year, no one knew what to do. Things we closed for weeks. Carbondale was like that. At the beginning of the year, when SIU was encased in ice, the maintenance crews would diligently get out and spread the salt around. Then, in late January, when the sky was still letting lose a hell-storm of ice, there would be no more salt, so instead, the crew would spread burnt coal everywhere. This would not only make the snow more slippery, but then would coat everything in a fine, black film that was impossible to get out of the cuffs of pants. It happened every year: they would close the free parking lot, spread coal everywhere, and then wait until February when the weather got slightly warmer. Then there would be hip-deep puddles of sooty water covered in a thin layer of ice just waiting for benighted, well dressed grad students to fall into them.

Aberystwyth is sort of the same way. Its December, so everyone should expect two things: 1) cold weather; 2) precipitation. Now, I have written blogs before about water and the Celsius scale, which is popular over here, so the British should be aware of what low temperatures and water make. Still, the hill was remarkably treacherous as I made my way down, particularly because it had rained eight hours ago, and the sky had cleared by the time I was making my way down the hill. I would have expected all precautions to have been made, particularly on the massive hill that most people in Aberystwyth have to use at some point in the day.

I was sadly mistaken, and found that out in the most unpleasant way possible: with a backpack full of mostly glass Christmas presents. The ice was not very thick, but as anyone who has ever gone outside in the winter knows, it doesn't need to be very thick or very deep to still be slippery. In fact, a thin coating of damp ice is more dangerous that deeply frozen ice, a few inches thick.

By this afternoon, the ice had melted and refrozen into a thin, highly polished danger zone, turning the walk down the hill into a down-hill ski race in my sneakers. I've never tried walking across an ice-arena tilted at a forty-five degree angle wearing special boots of greased ball bearings, but I imagine it would be similar to walking down the hill in this afternoon's conditions. Every time I slipped, and there were several times, I reached out into the air around me, willing myself to find stability in the loose collection of gaseous molecules circulating around me. Which, let me tell you, looks smooth. There is no way to not look cool flailing on what looks to be slightly damp concrete.

And I'll say this about snow in Aberystwyth: seeing the beach covered in snow is an odd experience. Maybe it's because my family and I go to Virginia fairly regularly that I have come to associate sandy beaches with warmth and sunshine, but seeing small little snowy piles on sandy beaches is disconcerting. My friend Jamie said it was like living in a post-apocalyptic war zone, and those are really just piles of ash. Honestly, that makes more sense to me than snow on beaches. I am more comfortable believing that a nuclear bomb went off, showering the world in a thin layer of choking ash than I am to believe that frozen water drops collected on where I used to lay in my bathing suit.

In short: don't live in Illinois - it does strange things to your sense of perception.

Thanksgiving

In America, Thanskgiving has sort of transformed into the first day of Christmas, which is unfortunate. Thanksgiving is free of most controversy and abject materialism, though there is some controversy surrounding the origin, and of course the touchy subject of celebrating a meeting of cultures when one culture was later subjugated and driven from their ancestral land. None the less, it's a nice chance to get together with family or friends and just be happy together - to enjoy each other's company.

My family, thankfully, has never been much on emotional outpourings, and we tend to avoid going around the table and telling everyone, individually, how much we love them. Instead, as my sister Beth is always quick to point out, we say I love you with biting sarcasm and prodding questions. That said, there are several things that I am happy about since this last year has passed, and now is as good as any to list them:

First, it has to be Erika. Though it has not always been easy, things between Erika and I have been considerably better than any other relationship I have been in to date, and over the summer I decided it was better than any I could ever hope to find in the future. I am thankful that I managed to find her (or re-find, as the case be).

But with her has come the unexpected benefit of a fantastic family. Generally, my family has welcomed my significant others with open, loving arms. In some cases, they don't want to let go (in others, they are more than happy to let go). This, however, has not been the case for me. Several times, there has been open enmity between my girlfriends and their family. One particular girlfriend's mother and sister, at times, openly hated me. In contrast to that, I spent the summer living with Erika and her sister, and things went really well. Erika's parents have been particularly excellent, and I find myself talking about literature and translation theory with her father, and gardening and cooking (shut up; I am very much a man) with her mother. While certainly not the reason why I love Erika, it was an unexpected and super-awesome benefit.

Secondly, I am grateful for my family, who I know will read this (because, really, they are the only ones who read this - which, in turn, is something else to be grateful for). I know that this move was not the most popular decision I have ever made (though it was certainly not the least popular; that was a mopey, overly emotional mistake I brought around with me one summer). My Mom was particularly upset, namely because she didn't have anyone she could guilt into mowing the lawn or flipping the thirty pound turkey on Thanksgiving. I moved back in with my Mom during the summers, and between shared cooking responsibilities, going to see a lot of movies, babysitting my sister's kids, and traveling the country on vacations, we had grown a lot closer. Despite disagreeing with this decision with every fiber of her being, she drove me to the airport the day I left (the first day, that is).

Like my Mom, my family has been the biggest cheering section I have had while being here. Again, because this was not the most popular decision, I have to really respect them for taking such an interest in my education. When my supervisor decided to resign earlier in the year, my family rallied, and for a few days I had a huge outpouring of support from all of my internet savvy family members. Even those without Skype have managed, whenever possible, to let me now how much they miss me, and how proud they are of me. Honestly, I am not sure I would have made it this far without my family. Everything I am today is directly tied to my family.

And with that, of course, comes a shout-out to my Grandma, who has not been feeling well, but manages to prove to everyone that she is unbeatable. I wrote a blog a while back about how my family resembles a solar system, and my Grandma is the sun at the center, pulling us all together, casting us in light and giving us the gravitational kick to continue moving. So really, because of her I am who I am today.

Thirdly, I got really lucky with this year's accommodation. Last year was spent with a bunch of first year undergraduates who had both a different perspective on life, and a different set of priorities. This year, I live with twice as many people, but all of them are in about the same walk of life that I find myself. I was deeply afraid that I would be ostracized again, but within a few days I had a new circle of friends. Again, when my supervisor resigned, leaving me with a lot of questions to deal with, my housemates banded together, helping me completely disregard my responsibilities for a weekend while I tried to get my legs underneath me again. For the first time since I left Monmouth, I have a circle of friends that I can share a meal with, and that has become an enormous release point for me with all the stresses throughout the day.

And finally, I am grateful that I get to do what I want to do. I listen to a lot of my people complain about how unhappy and unfulfilled they are with their life or work. Every day, I put my pants on and realize exactly how lucky I am. Sure, I will never make a ton of money reading comics all day long, but I never am upset with what I do. There have been a series of videos circulating the internet recently that feature arguments for or against the study of humanities at the graduate level. These videos tend to either be deeply sarcastic and pessimistic attacks of the uselessness of such and endeavor while the other side tends to sanctimoniously assert some sort of higher truth or calling that is being undertaken. The truth of the matter, as it usually does, lies somewhere between. Certainly, when compared to the doctors or scientist making this world markedly better with their research, reading comic books pales in comparison. But I am a firm believer that good art needs to be appreciated. Teaching people how to appreciate a story, opening minds up to the possibility of various interpretations to art, is a valuable aspiration. Is the life of the mind some sort of higher calling that only the most gifted and messianic people should strive for? No. I am not doing anything special with my life; I am just more tenacious than most.

So, hopefully you'll excuse me for the navel-gazing exercise here, but I wanted those involved in my life to know how important they are. So thanks everyone, and I'll see you all in the trenches.

Late Night Cravings

I am a late night person, and I often find myself hungry, out of my house and out late. Usually, my friends and I would hit a late night diner, or a Steak 'n' Shake for a cheap burger, so fries and/or a shake. Recently, fast food restaurants like McDonalds and Taco Bell have made a killing by being open late, or 24-Hours even, catering to the staggering, zombie-like crowds that roam the streets when decent people have done the decent thing and gone to bed.

My habits, while slightly adjusted, have not changed much while being here in Aberystwyth. I'm not out as late as I used to be, but I still find myself thinking about food after being out with my friends on a Friday or Saturday. The British, though, don't offer the panoply of options that Chicago offers, but the late night food here is starting to grow on me.

Particularly chips (or fries). Generally, after about 9:00, the man source of late-night munchies is the kabab hut, which, in Aberystwyth, there are several. My favorite, and the one closest to my house, is run by a bunch of Turkish guys, and they make probably the best late night craving satisfier: chips and cheese.

Cheese fries are nothing new. Steak 'n' Shake serves up a heaping plate of thin cut fries drowned in plastic-looking, and slightly plastic-tasting, orange cheese (processed from dairy-like substances). Denny's serves the same thing with bacon bits. The cheese fries are a staple for the 2:00 am crowd, but at the Turkish kabab hut, called both Sam's Fried Chicken and Istanbul Kabab House, they serve their chips and cheese with genuine mozzarella and cheddar cheese. There really is something to be said for real cheese on warm chips. They seal the package, and within moments, the cheese melts into the chips, mixing with the salt and malt vinegar for the most deliciously, salty and sweet treat one can get for two pounds.

Today, after playing pool at the local pool hall, my friend Jamie and I hit a place that serves their chips with a sauce. The range of available sauces is not something that one can find in the States. Arby's has three, and certain British style pubs will occasionally leave a bottle of malt vinegar on the table. Generally, the sole option is ketchup. Here, at Lip Lickin', one can get ketchup, mustard, garlic sauce, BBQ, or chili sauce (which is quite hot). I have tried the chili sauce and my poor midwestern white-boy stomach immediately regretted that decision. It had the type of heat that feels like it comes on double sided tape. Each inch of my mouth it touched burned for hours, as the chilies bore through the soft tissue. Tonight, looking to avoid prior mistakes, I went with the BBQ sauce, which was quite enjoyable: smokey, a little peppery, delicious.

When at home, my friends and I would constantly frequent these late night diners, terrorizing the poor waitstaff that had to deal with six to ten rowdy dudes drinking their weight in free refills and chasing off other quieter staff. Especially when I was in high school, Steak 'n' Shake was a great place to hang out: it was warm, realtively unpopulated, came with food and cheap coffee (with a generous free refill policy), and until about my senior year, a smoking section (note for my Grandma: I never smoked, but my friends did; I swear, don't be disappointed). Baker's Square came with the added benefit of pie...tasty, sugary pie.

Most of the kebab houses here lack a seating section, so with our chips in hand, Jamie and I wandered the streets talking about how new planets should be named after Star Wars planets. Eventually, people might come to mistake Star Wars as nonfiction. We reached a small square that is lined with benches, and, despite the weather, sat there eating our chips and imagining a future where people refer to the great American heroes of the past: Luke and Leia Skywalker. This was a surprisingly nice way to enjoy the food. It was a little chillier than I would have liked, but the food keeps you warm, and other people would come and sit around us, hunched over their own Styrofoam containers of chips, burgers, wings or fried chicken pieces.

The one thing I think I miss, though, is a place to get something sweet after hours. The British are not generally sweet eating people, and most table-service restaurants tend not to have the mass of desserts that your average restaurant in America has. There is no Death By Chocolate Cake to be found for miles. And ice-cream seems to be completely relegated to the day time, which is unfortunately. Nothing is more delicious than a milkshake at 2:00 in the morning. If I end up staying here for long, I might open a proper American style diner, serving breakfast 24-hours a day, with pancakes the size of dinner plates and crispy, thick cut bacon that comes with a heart attack standard, along side several ethnic favorites, burgers, fries and shakes. Then the British can experience the joy of ordering a plate of hashbrowns, a gyro, a large chocolate shake and a brownie the size of your fist.

The Weather

I have always been fascinated by the weather. When I attended Southern Illinois University - Carbondale, I used to drive my Mother crazy marveling about the massively disparate weather that one side of the state had compared to the other. When I would be walking home from class in just a sweater mid-February, while my family further north was shoveling out from three feet of snow, I would laugh and laugh. Until, of course, I stayed the whole summer in Carbondale. The humidity, which I thought I had a tolerance for, became stifling. Then, my Mother enjoying the milder, slightly less humid Chicago summers would better enjoy our conversation.

Still, though, the shift that 300 miles in a southern direction could bring was amazing to me. One winter when I drove home from Christmas break it was -30 in the city and just above 25 in De Soto. Of course, the sun had come out a little more, but still: 50 degree temperature difference between two places relatively close to each other on the map.

Now, in Chicago, the joke has always been that if you don't like the weather, you just have to wait. Within the space of a few hours it might go from windy and rainy to sunny and glorious. Generally, though, I have found this to be untrue. Because there is only minimal interference to the weather from the lake and the trade winds seem to behave in fairly predictable ways, the weather in Chicago tends to move in waves, with the temperature gradually moving up and down. The cloud cover and precipitation also tends to follow clearly mapped out behavioral patterns.

Here on the coast of Wales, this is just not the case, and I am having a devil of a time figuring out what to wear each day.

Last week Friday, I looked outside and there was the persistent drizzle that marks the coming of the Welsh winter, but it didn't feel too cold out. My computer suggested it would be about 60 degrees, so I went out in just a t-shirt and took off up the hill toward campus. I immediately regretted this decision. The air was warm, but the rain, despite being very light, was frigid. By the time I decided it would have been a good idea to wear a jacket, though, I was too far up the hill.

I decided then that I was not going to be fooled by weather readings: it was November, I should dress for November. The following Monday, the Monday if this past week, I looked out and saw the sky was covered in a dense layer of thick, gray, foreboding clouds. Again, my computer suggested that it might be around 60, but because the clouds suggested rain, I put on my winter coat and made my way up the hill. Within moments, I regretted this decision. The air was nearly humid, and definitely very warm. As I was climbing the hill, the sun came out, adding its warmth to the already warm air. Suffice it to say, I was a sweaty mess by the top of the hill, which made me look desperate during a meeting in which I needed to not look desperate and sweaty.

In short, the weather here is completely unpredictable. From the windows in the Arts Center, the entire town spreads out at the bottom of the hill, and the sea is easily seen. One need only sit there any day of the week between October and March to see the full panoply of weather sweep by. Today, for instance, it has rained, the wind kicked up a bit, the air temperature has fluctuated between comfortable and cold, and the clouds after alternately swept across the sky, bunched up into his dense masses, and then blown in-land never having dropped one ounce of rain.

The joke about Carbondale was that it was the town where Allergists went to die. Never in my life has I sneezed due to seasonal allergies until I moved to SIU. Having left there, I am similarly unafflicted. If there were a profession that came to die along the Cambrian Coast, it would be meteorologist. The weather for any one day is as unpredictable as, well...there is nothing that acts as chaotically as the weather here. Aberystwyth could be the new cliche for unpredictability.

The Miami Heat and the Midterm Elections

The Miami Heat, through ruthless off-season maneuvering, acquired the three top free agents, and arguably two of the best players in history: resigning Dwayne Wade and signing both Chris Bosh and Basketball Jesus LeBron James. The PR around this oscillated between the nightmarish (LeBron James' less than exciting hour-long ESPN special to publicly dump on Cleveland, which is should be remembered was filmed in front of a live audience who was silent during the obviously stunned fans) to the outlandish (the mawkish Welcoming Party that the three received in Miami). The arrogance was palpable. It was as if Miami, before the first ball was tipped-off, was claiming to the world that the won the Championship. Listen to the smug way that the three answer softball questions at the Welcome Party. The smugness is suffocating, choking out the rationality and asphyxiating history.

Does anyone remember when the Lakers, tired of losing in the playoffs, signed Karl Malone and Gary Payton to join Kobe Bryant and Shaq? It was not in the all too distant past that those four superstars, players in various stages of the career, came together in an effort to win championships. What happened? They won a decent amount of games (56-26), but lost to a team of unknown nobodies in the Championship, the Detroit Pistons, whose starting five featured Chauncey Billups, Rip Hamilton, Ben Wallace, and Teyshaun Prince. Sure, Detroit had Rasheed Wallace, but at that point in his career, who would have thought that the malcontent from Portland would ever amount to anything other than headaches, particularly with that bunch of young, untested players.

What Detroit proved that year, and what many teams immediately recognized, was that talent could not carry a team, but strong sense of team work, a good defense and solid coaching could.

Of course, when the Celtics picked up Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen and immediately started winning games, including one Championship, people sat up and started wondering about their "Big Three". Everyone wanted to have three huge names that would lead their team to a championship. Teams, like Miami, tired of losing and desperate to win back fans, gambled the future of the organization on three shoulders that already support swollen, egotistical heads.

Let's return to Miami for a second, a city that has had it's share of broken dreams. Anyone remember Harold Miner? Harold "Baby Jordan" Minor, whose outstanding ability to dunk lead the city into a fever of excitement? After leaving USC as their highest score in recorded history, Miner went on to play three unexciting low scoring seasons for Miami, and finished his career with a twelve minute scoreless appearance for the Cavs in 1996. Or remember when Miami won the Championship in 2006, only to have Wade seriously injure himself the following year? Or when they signed Shaq, and everyone figured they were a lock in the typically weak Eastern Division? Miami does. Miami clearly remembers. So when the opportunity came to sign three of the top players in the game, the hope that move generated was electric.

And what happened? They lost their first game to a much tighter Celtic team that showed they could play well together, played strong defense and were well coached. And it wasn't even close. Boston took the lead, and held it. Miami didn't come within less than five points the entire second half. Even the biggest doubters of Miami were shocked to see how easily this team rolled over to a more disciplined and cohesive team. Boston looked like Detroit in 2003 - a band of close-knit nobodies that dominated will and determination (though, it needs to be remembered that this team is not a team of nobodies, and could contend for the championship again). Even the next game's win against Philadelphia was nothing to write home about. Sure, there are only two games in the books, but these three alone should be better than 25th overall in points per game, 22nd overall in rebounds per game, and 27th overall in assists per game. The only top five stat they have is in points allowed per game, coming in 4th.

There was a noted silence among my friends on Facebook, normally pretty loud when it comes to sports matters, after Miami lost. It was hard to think of something to say in light of that entirely underwhelming performance. Again, even those that wished ill of the New York Yankees of basketball were stunned that these three could be this bad right out of the gate. Hell LeBron, on more than one occassion, has scored more than 50 points in a single game. So has Wade. What about all that hope? What about all that grandstanding and arrogance? Where was all that clout? This season might just kill a few Miami fans who are holding their breath for the hope of another championship.

But is this a fair reaction? Is Miami really under-performing or was there just too much hype to live up to? A look at the way Democrats are reacting to this Midterm election might shed light on this question.

In 2008, after Obama won the Presidential Election, there was a buzz among Democrats. I was in Carbondale, literally sitting on the edge of my couch, watching the election results come in (though it should be noted that my futon was not the most comfortable, and the edge, ironically had the most padding). Over the next few weeks, people spoke like the recently converted - excited talk about the future and its brightness. There was a fervor to young people that felt like this was the moment the country climbed out from underneath the strange and conflicted years of the Bush administration. It felt, as a young Democrat, that we could accomplish anything. The hope was overwhelming.

Now, nearly two years later, and that hope has faltered. In light of the recent bipartisan bickering, the split house sandbagging each other's attempts to get anything done, Democrats are starting to question the claims that the Obama people made. Can any change actually happen? Is it possible to do what he said he was going to do?

The highly discussed failure for a public health option, the long extraction from Iraq that was less of an extraction than expected, the continued fighting in Afghanistan, and the less than remarkable results of the economic stimulus plan which most Republicans harp on have led to some apathetic opposition from the Democrats. The Onion made a particularly pointed comment here in this satirical article which shows the Democrats hiding, running even, from their accomplishments. It might be that the Democratic politicians have lost faith in their own party. Or it might be that the Democrats have never been strong fighters, willing to tout their accomplishments and expose the weaknesses of the others. Maybe, amid all the muckraking of this midterm election following a grueling two year term, the Democrats have lost the will to fight against the willfully ignorant that see them as failures.

Maybe the Democrats and the Heat can learn something from each other. Firstly, it's never good to overhype something, as nothing ever lives up to fantastical expectations. Secondly, even though both have fallen short of their hype, that does not mean that either has been saddled with total failure. Like the Democrats, the Heat need to beef up on defense, come together as a team, and remember that they can achieve anything if the just try hard and play together.

Why I Hate Halloween

I really dislike Halloween, and for a man my age, an American and all, that is a rare thing to hear. For most adults, Halloween is awesome: a chance to dress up and party, looking like someone else. The creative among us will try and find the best, most relevant costume possible to attract the quiet admiration of those around us. Sounds like fun, sure.

But, I hate Halloween for the same reason I hate Valentine's Day: it's a day where people decide they can do something, and they are totally validated in that decision, and can refrain from doing that thing throughout the rest of the year.

Valentine's day is horrible; it's forced affection. Now, that alone, forcing us to love one another, is not a terrible thing in and of itself. The more love we can get in this world, the better. The problem here is that the love should not just be shown on the 14th of February. We should love each other all the time. Every day. I don't like the idea that someone can show me affection on one day, and that will be the extent of the affection shown. I want to be treated tenderly from my significant other every day of my life.

Plus, I don't like feeling that if I fail to materialistically fawn upon my loved one that I am a failure. I am a very generous person, often buying things I see for the people I care about. Just because I happen to or fail to on that one specific day does not make me a bad person. Really, what is so special about the 14th of February that deserves to be honored by presents? Nothing. Unless you count the slaughter of seven gang members in Chicago a worthy occasion.

Halloween is a similar case, but with less happy feelings associated. Halloween is an opportunity for women to wear their underwear outside. With the rise of the Sexy costume, wherein the wearer looks like a sexy version of anything - Sexy Cop, Sexy Nun, Sexy Snow White, even Sexy Picacchu (which, after Comic Con, I have seen enough of for my life) - women, particularly, are wearing less and less outside. Some will go as far as to wear lingerie, a set of cloth wings, and go as a fairy/angel/person in underwear and wings. And no one seems to raise much of an objection.

Now, wear one of these costumes to, say, the grocery store in August, and you will get some looks. People will talk. Mothers will avert their children's eyes. You may be asked to leave a family establishment so people can enjoy their food without looking at your underwear. But, for a few hours on Halloween, it's okay.

This is not a costume: this is an advertisement, and one that might not accurately represent the wearer. The clothing that we wear sends a signal to everyone around us. Clothing is a densely packed rhetorical act that speaks clearly of our likes, associations, interests, social class, and general attitudes towards the world. See a kid decked in black, long dark trench coat in the summer, and you are looking at a kid that wants to put distance between him- or herself and the world - someone who feels out-casted, othered. See a guy wearing a priestly garb, you assume he's a priest, he has a certain spirituality; or, if you are so inclined, you might see someone associated with child molestation.

So, what sort of message is Sexy Pikachu sending? A problematic one. Wearing a sexy version of a child's cartoon character is full of issues: sexualizing childhood, sexualizing innocent icons, perhaps sexualizing children.

But Halloween has demanded that of women. Women who don't dress in sexy versions of costumes are seen as prudish, or a femanazi, or some other sort of derogatory term. When really, said woman might not want to flaunt her goods, sending out inappropriate messages. If you want to leave little to the imagination, walking around on a typically cold night in October wearing your underwear as a costume, that's fine. But I don't feel people should have to do that just because the social norm seems to be leaning that way.

Plus, and this is just between you and me, I've had my heart broken on Halloween. In eighth grade, at the H.H. Humphrey school dance, I dressed as the Invisible Man. I thought it was great: classic idea, one of the great movie thrillers, pretty well known, and a complicated, but exciting costume. I bought like three rolls of surgical gauze, a pair of black sunglasses, borrowed my Great Uncle Bob's fedora and trench coat. I wore a suit underneath, like in the movies. I figured I was a shoe in for the contest. I proudly strut my costume in the parade of sorts they had for the judging. There was a set of three kids who dressed as street dancers. Suddenly, the busted out this synchronized dance, which involved some flipping and standing leap frogs. Suffice it to say, I lost. My intricate costume was no match for three kids who could break dance.

I felt this was unfair, as the ability to dance is not an inherent quality of a good costume. But thrilling dance moves garner attention, and this was more a popularity contest than an aesthetic contest. The injustice of it stings me, though, to this day.

Google Analytics

I never took stats in college. My math requirement was fulfilled by other more abstract classes like Calculus and Non-Euclidean Geometry. No really: I took a course on non-linear geometries, and though none of it has been useful in my life since the class finished, I still remember, vaguely, the axioms for the three line, three point space:
There are two points that exist in space.
There is a line that connects these two points.
There is a third spot on on this line.
Any two points must be connected by a line.
If I were sitting a few leagues under the sea and needed to sink a boat some miles off, I might find this proof useful, but I write about comics. To date, there has been no useable application for non-Euclidean geometry.

Back to my original point: I know nothing about useful math like statistics or economics. God help me when I have money to invest. Of course, it could be argued that my chosen career path will never present me with that problem. After all, I could invest my imaginary money any way I want to, buying unicorns off the penny stocks, or tracking the value of happiness trading. The rest of my life concerns the imagined, why shouldn't my finances?

So, this lack of pragmatic math makes my addiction to Google Analytics akin to a toddlers amusement with bright shiney objects: I don't know what I am looking at, but it looks really cool. See, I have been interested in knowing what sort of readership I have been getting from this page, and the lack of comments lead me, initially, to believe no one was reading. That I was dropping my words into the vacuum of the internet making neither a ripple nor a splash.

Once I installed the tracking code onto the page, I was amazed to find out I was getting a pretty steady increase in readership. I tend to get more readers around the time of publication, which makes sense, but I also tend to get random hits on my page (I think) between publications. Recently, on days of publication, I have been getting double digits hits, sometimes in the 40s and 50s. I feel like my child won class president in his Kindergarten class: certainly cool, but only relative to my narrow sphere of existence.

Of course, like most people in my field, numbers make little sense to me, so most of the information I have gleened from the page comes from starring at the charts and graphs that Google shows me. I am assuming when the chart spikes, that people are visiting my site, which is what I want to know: that someone clicked on my site. Google Analytics, though, wants to tell me if I have had visitors, repeat visitors, page visits, site hits, and so on. I'm not really sure what the difference is, so I tend to ignore that and make conclusions based purely on the pictures. This is how I can make claims about when people visit my site: there seems to be a spike around a certain day.

For example, when I click "page views" there is a significant spike around my birthday, which I attribute to people stopping by my Facebook page, seeing the link and clicking. That sort of connection makes sense to me. What is confusing, though, is that when I click visitors for that same day, it tells me I have only three visitors, all completely unique to the sight (those two numbers were the same; I put three and three together and got three). Without really understanding the data I am looking at, or how a statistician would interpret these numbers, I am left confused. Did three people look at 44 of the pages? Did 3 people come page to my page 44 times? It's just not clear what I am actually being told with these numbers.

So I tend not to try and link any of the charts, and instead I make conclusion based on each one individually. Here are some of the neat things I have found out by rummaging through the analytics:

1) From the Map Overlay, I have learned that from the time I installed the tracker (June 8th) until now I have had 182 visits to the page from 13 different countries. Obviously, knowing people in America and the UK, I wasn't surprised by that. Also, I have a friend in German (What up Sebastian) that follows this on RSS feed. What was more surprising where the three visits from Finland, and the single visits from Brazil, Russia, Lithuania, Sweden, the Netherlands and France. My Lithuanian visitor spent 15 minutes on the page, reading 10 different entries (if I am understanding the numbers correctly).

It also allows me to go deeper, examining the specific cities that visit my page the most. The winner in this category, I am making an assumption here, would be my brother-in-law Jason, who has visited my sight 52 times, almost twice that of the next closest visitor, the collected people of Chicago who have gone to my sight 28 times.

Another statistical oddity is that I have recieved three visits from Farmville, which to this point I was assuming existed only on Facebook, where people grow and harvest internet plants, spending hours at a time managing a virtual life, and in some cases, managing the virtual space far more effectively than the real space that encapsulates the virtual sphere.

One visitor from Berlin spent an hour on my site. This is remarkable only because said Berliner visited only once. He or she must have been impressed by what was there, which makes me wonder how what he saw that kept his attention for so long. If you read this again, let me know and I will try to cater to that request.

2) Beside showing me where people come from, Google also let's me know the primary language of the users, and not surprisingly, most people speak English, either American or British. I've also recieved visitors that spoke Finnish, German, Italian and something Google calls "pt-br".

3) While I recieved a lot of traffick on my birthday, September 22nd was the day I had the most unique visitors, or what I am assuming are computer signatures that have not come to my page previously. On that day, on Facebook, I advertised for this blog, and apparently some seventeen new people were interested in what I had to say.

I think this speaks to the power of Facebook as an advertisement tool. Considering I have just over 300 friends on Facebook (let me dust off my shoulders here), this is a 5% return on my investment (if I did my math right, and I am understanding the graph correctly). This is pretty amazing. Imagine if I were something more popular, like an electric car or a presidental candidate, something with a friends list in the hundred of thousands. Any messages conveyed there could reach a significantly higher audience than messages conveyed through other medias.

Of course, these are some bold claims to be making from a loose understanding of the graphs presented in from of me, but nonetheless, I feel there is something worth serious investigation here.

4) I have a fairly loyal readership. Granted, most of my visitors, 85 of them, have come once and never returned. 19 visitors, though, have returned between 9 and 14 times over the last couple of months. One visitor has come here more than 200 times. I feel I owe this person something, but there is no way I could tell who that is (though, again, if I am understanding the other numbers correctly, it's probably Jason).

5) Most visits to my page tage about 10 seconds or less time. Which makes sense. I imagine a lot of traffick I get from other countries is accidental, especially because I quote a song in the title. After that, the next highest collection of visit lengths ranges between ten and thirty minutes.

From this, it can be inferred that I get two types of visits: momentary or accidental visits, and actual readership. That feels good. I wish the actual readership would equal or exceed the accidental or passing readers, but one cannot be so lucky.


All in all, I find I waste a lot of free time clicking through all these images trying to imagine who you, the reader, are. I have a good indication, since some of my friends let me know. If you are a first time visitor, and this is your first time here, let me know. I would be interested to hear from new, strange readers.

The Biggest Little City in England

I have a lot of CDs, and in this day and age, I have burned them all onto my computer so that I could take most of them with me anywhere I went on my iPod. Because I walk a lot, travel a lot, and write a lot, I like to have the majority of my music with me at all time, and the iPod has been a godsend in that respect.

Until it stopped working. Those familiar with Apple know that the company prides itself on things not breaking down, and my iPod has not disappointed, working like a horse for the past three years. I tried my damnedest to get the machine working again, so that my walks through Aberystwyth, which are frequent, would have a soundtrack again. Something to distract me from the exhaustion I face walking up and down the hills. Sadly, there was nothing I could do. I needed the help of an Apple Genius.

The nearest Apple store as the crow flies would probably be Cardiff. Unfortunately the only way to get to Cardiff from here is a twice daily bus that requires a lot of attention paid to the watch, or going into England, to head back south and west into Wales. The easiest store to get to is in Birmingham, the second largest city in the UK behind London.

To put things in perspective for my American readers, London has about 12 million people in the city center and surrounding area. This would make it about the size of LA, without all the other surrounding towns in the LA area. Birmingham, as the second largest city, comes in just over 1 million people in the center and surrounding areas, making it about the size of Dallas, minus about 200,000 people. Birmingham would be just shy of the top ten largest cities in America.

That said, Birmingham was very surprising.

There are two train stations off the line I came in on; one conveniently goes to the airport, the other drops the riders at a heavily trafficked station in the center of the city. From there, I was able to walk across the street to a really huge shopping mall, in which was contained the Apple Store at which I had an appointment. It might be that the centralized nature of Birmingham that allows for one Apple store to service the entire population, or it might be that little lies between the Midlands (Birmingham and the surrounding area) and London, requiring fewer large shopping malls; regardless of the reason, the Bull Ring shopping mall was the most packed place I have ever been to, including the nearly 30 years I have spent in the Chicagoland area, the couple years I spent in the city and my trips to London, Paris and Frankfurt. There are times I see pictures of people milling about Tokyo or Beijing, I wonder how anyone could choose to live stacked up on top of each other like crates in a factory or fish about to be plucked from the sea, surrounded by an ever-shrinking net.

I have found that I lose my patients for large crowds as I get older. When I was younger, I used to love going to the Taste of Chicago, getting smashed into large crowds all enjoying a singular experience. I would press into the compact mass of people at the front of a stage to see Green Day or Godsmack. I lived like puppies with my brothers growing up. In short, space never much mattered to me. Until I lived in Monmouth, then Carbondale and DeSoto. There, I lived with space. I could drive down the main drag in Monmouth some mornings, and see one, maybe two cars total. On some later trips between Galesburg and Monmouth, my headlights might be the only ones blazing down the highway.

DeSoto was probably the ultimate in reclusive living. The town itself had 300 people, most of which were elderly, living in small two bedroom slab houses. My part of DeSoto was relatively newer, and set back from the main roads. In the little subdivision, my apartment was one of maybe thirty houses, all small families or quiet renters. At night, I would take my dog for a walk and not see another person. When the ice-storm hit and froze people into their houses, I walked the icy streets with my dog, enjoying the quiet of the streets.

Suffice to say, my experience at Bull Ring was anxious, at best. As I crested the escalator to the third floor, I tried to stop and see if the Apple Store was behind me (which it was) but was carried by the foot traffic into a different corridor. The hallways were filled wall to wall with consumers milling about listlessly between the stores. Luckily, the British are polite to a fault, so even when I was clearly aimlessly wandering around, no one shivved me.

I managed to get into the Apple store on my second time through the mall, but I found not respite from the crowds there. It was literally difficult to impossible when trying to walk around the store. It was not Apple's fault as they arranged their tables in to parallel rows that were perpendicular to the wall. One should have been able to run full speed from the door to the cashiers without stopping to slow down. Unfortunately with the people milling about as they were, walking for more than a step was near impossible, let alone finding someone to help me. Again, though, because the British are considerate people, there was little fighting. I've been to the mall at Christmas time, and in similar situations, Americans are less friendly.

Once I got my iPod, I was ready to get on the train, leaving a trail of burning destruction in the rubble of Birmingham. I was tired of the people, the experience, the expensive consumer goods for which I had no money (£55 for a vest!). I saw daylight and made a break for it, finding that I had exited the mall on the opposite side I entered, leaving a long walk to the train. This was serendipitous, though, as I saw one of the neatest sights ever: an old church surrounded by this gleaming mass of modern architecture. Smack between the mall and an open air market sat a Gothic-style, red rock church, complete with steeple and buttresses. That's one of the neat things about England, a country with more than two-hundred years of history: one often finds modernity juxtaposed with tradition. Here was a church from the early 1900's smack in the middle of a more modern, church of capitalism.

In the open air, I felt less claustophobic and decided to amble about for a while. I had purchased a map book from the train station, and had a few hours before I needed to leave. I took off in a Northerly direction. This was a good choice, as I stumbled in the city center, which was rife with history and cool looking buildings.

The Birmingham town hall is modeled after the Pathenon, sitting on the Western edge of the picturesque Victoria Square. On the Northern edge sat the original Council House, which is still in use today, though partly as an Art Gallery and History Museum. Walking into Victoria Square was a lot like what it looks like when people walk into generic European squares in Europe. The places was dotted with statues and monuments, tourists and locals sat about the stairs and benches, eating or taking pictures, and people meandered about.

Interestingly, Victoria Square has sat there for some time, the intersection of New Street, Colmore Row and Paradise Street. The Square was made official in 1901 after the death of Queen Victoria, removing a church that had sat there for some time. In 1993, Diana, Princess of Wales rehabbed the whole bit, commissioning several new statues. This site is considered the center of Birmingham, and most of the street signs point towards it in some capacity.

After I walked around the square for a while, I wandered down the very ritzy shops of New Street, before I had dinner at a charming little Italian joint. Here again, though, I was struck by the mass of crowds, as this must have been one of the few places with open restaurants in the area. Every place was filled to brimming, including the pubs which leaked out onto the streets. After a short wait of 15 minutes or so, I was seated and enjoyed a nice meal of garlic cheese bread sticks and a mushroom risotto.

After that, I had to head back to catch the last train out of the city at 8:30 pm. Had I missed that, I would have been stuck in Birmingham for the night. By that point in the day, though, I had had enough, and was looking for the solitude of Aberystwyth.

For My Grandma

I was in Chicago for most of the summer, and because of this, I didn't write many blog entries. Really, the world was not too entirely disrupted. My blog has a limited readership, and there are plenty of more savvy writers out there to fill the Internet.

Or so I thought. When I saw my Grandma for the 4th of July, a large party that drew a lot of second cousins and distant relatives from all over Chicago and other places, we talked quietly about my experiences here in Wales. It got quiet for a minute, and she said, "You don't write those letters anymore."
"My blog, Gram? Oh that. Yeah. Well, I'm here now. There's not much to say."
"I know. I just miss hearing about your life and all."
See, I have a limited number of email addresses I can have this blog automatically sent to, and my Aunt's is one. She had been dutifully printing off the entries about my exploits in a foreign country and reading them to my grandma, and evidently she liked it. And because I had been writing regularly, she had gotten used to hearing from me.

My Aunt pulled me aside later at the same party.
"You don't write much anymore," she told me, which I knew.
"Yeah, well, the blog was about my experiences abroad, and I'm not having those right now. So...I think I'm on break for the summer."
She nodded at me as if I had answered the question "What is two plus two?" by explaining the signing of the Magna Carta.
"Yeah. But your Grandma was asking if you would write. She really liked hearing from you."

It had seemed, as is always the case, that your biggest fan is usually the quietest one. My humble little journal gets read from time to time, usually by my friends off Facebook, or Erika because I demand her to. Occasionally, people tell me that it's interesting or funny, but rarely do people ask when I am going to write again. However, silently, my Grandma was wishing I would so that she could hear about my life.

Which is not to say that my life is interesting, and my Grandma likes to read compelling narratives. It's not like I am scaling mountains, detailing my fights with my Sherpa and thin air. I wrote an entire entry about shopping for pants, for Christ's sake. But here's my Grandma, asking for more.

And here is what makes my Grandma special: it doesn't matter if I just cured cancer or found a well-fitting pair of Chinos, to her it is immensely interesting. When we were kids, my Grandma sat at the head of the family, though not at the head of the table. In my parent's house, there was a high, wing-backed purple chair, and I don't know anyone who sat in it more regularly than my Grandma, and that includes my family that lived with the chair. It always seemed to important a chair to sit in. My Grandma, though, fit in it perfectly.

In the solar system, all the planets revolve around the sun whose gravity spins the planets and whose sunshine gives, at least Earth, the warmth needed to sustain life. In much the same way, my father, aunts and uncles revolved around my Grandma, and all my brothers, sisters and cousins revolved around them like satellites and moons. Everything that I am today is because of her, directly or indirectly. She shone her light on my father, making him the man that he was, and in turn I was bathed in her reflected light to act as I am today.

So, here's one just for you Grandma. I hope that you can hear it at some point, knowing that almost everything I do is in hopes that I won't disappoint you.

Standards and Measurements

As with any move, some of the translations have little to do with language. For example, how many milliliters make up an ounce? How many cups in a liter (or litre)? I was struck by my complete lack of ability to translate between the metric measuring system and the standards based measuring system when I went to buy a measuring cup today.

Granted: most of my cooking is done with relative measurements. If I am cooking for one person, I assume one chicken breast is enough. Or a certain measurement of pasta is fitting for a certain amount of water, and both are relative to the number of people eating. Even for most things that require measurements, I needed just to know what one unit would look like, and then I could take a relative measurement: to make a roux I needed to mix equal portions flour and butter. If those portions are tablespoons, hogshead or milliliters, it didn't matter. They just simply needed to be the same.

It only became problematic when I wanted to make risotto. Risotto is not the easiest thing to cook, and requires a lot of ratios and stirring. That said, it's not really all that difficult to make either. With practice, and few crunchy risotto dishes, anyone can make it. Most risottos require a three to one ration of risotto to cooking liquid. So, if one were to make a cup of risotto, they would need three combined cups of liquid, be that liquid stock, wine, water, squid ink, etc. I find two parts chicken stock and one part wine to one part arborio rice works the best; white wine gives it a lighter flavor good for chicken or vegetable risottos (like pumpkin or butternut squash; now that I am saying it, though, I bet a little apple cider would be nice to for the rooty, autumnal vegetables), and red wine works well for beef or mushroom risottos and give the dish a nice purpley-pink color.

It would seem like that the measuring cup I used would not be a problem, and for the most part that was true. The issue arises when I combine the fact that I cook for myself with the tricky issue of the exact specifications for making risotto. Usually, when I cook for myself, I use a half cup of rice. Now, in Wales, quality arborio rice is not cheap. I didn't want to make more than I could eat, but I needed a good sized portion to act as my dinner. So I needed something that had American cups as a standard, not the smaller British cups or the unfathomable metric measurement.

It's not that I have anything against metric. For cooking, especially, the measuring system makes sense since it is based off water: the zero of the system is when water turns to ice, and the 100 measure is where water turns to steam; thus most measurements are based off where water ceases to be water, or where water changes it's physical state (Wikipedia tells us that by contemporary standards, the Celsius unit is based off of the difference between absolute zero and the freezing point of some specially prepared water; more on absolute zero later). This makes a lot more sense than Fahrenheit, which is based in God knows what. In Fahrenheit, as any junior high science teacher will tell you, water freezes at 32 and boils at 212. This, if America really thought about it, made no sense. What matter changes physical properties at 0 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit? Nothing that the average cook uses (the answer, again according to Wikipedia, is a brine made of water, ice, ammonium chloride and salt which freezes at zero Fahrenheit; of course, we all come in contact with this substance routinely, so using that as a standard for a system of measurement makes sense...).

That said, I have used the completely ridiculous Standard Measuring System, developed, mind you, by the Brits, for my whole life. I know that four cups make a quart and that four quarts make a gallon. 16 ounces make a cups. Great. I know that potatoes bake at 400 degrees above which point a random brine solution freezes. I know that I use 1/2 cup of dry rice to make risotto, and I had no idea how many milliliters that might be (236.588, roughly).

The whole problem with Celsius and Fahrenheit rears its ugly head when I look to see what the temperature is outside. The Weather Channel's UK sister site, I found, will list the temperature in Fahrenheit for me, but I didn't see that right away. Nor is this readily available when I am away from my computer. Of course, I could remember that C = 5(F -32)/9. Then, it's just some simple math, which my American education, heavy on the calculator, has deprived me the ability of performing in my head. Either way, when the British say that it should be nice because it will be nearly 25 degrees out, I silently wonder what sadist finds 25 degrees Fahrenheit comfortable. 25 Celsius is actually a quite comfortable 77 degrees Fahrenheit (F = 9C/5 + 32). Now in Chicago, when temperatures get below 0, I start to worry about frostbite, where here, below zero puts it in the thirties, a mild winter by some Northern Illinois standards.

And really, it's a question of relativity. I have associated certain circumstances with a number. Unfortunately, my number is relative to a liquid that I have no regular contact, and thus is meaningless outside of my experience. Though, it should be said that even the very rational Celsius is not perfect. After all, change the atmospheric settings, and water boils and freezes at different temperatures. And since some places don't exist at the requisite 1 atmosphere of pressure (I'm looking at you Colorado), this system is as meaningless as Fahrenheit is. There needs to be a more objective system of measurement, right?

And there is: absolute zero, the theoretical point at which all matter has lost it's energy. Or in simpler terms: space. The vacuum of space is as close as we are going to get to absolute zero. And this unchanging and harsh circumstance is the perfect standard for Earthly measurements. The Kelvin and Rankine systems are designed to shift the two standard measurements to absolute zero, which happens to be 273 degrees below 0 Celsius. Our future generations should be taught one of those temperature systems so later they can think to themselves, how many degrees warmer than the vacuum of space do I need to set the oven to boil water? 573 degrees Kelvin, of course.

Plus baking a potato at 860 degree Rankine makes it seem like cooking is a far more dangerous process than it actually is. And, in the end, that's what we all want: to sound like we risked life and limb for a delicious meal.

The Return of the American

Though I am more aware of what living in Aberystwyth is like, returning has still required some adjustment. It's not unlike driving a new car: you know what happens when you press the gas and the brake pedals, but things react differently than you might expect. Over time, though, you adjust to the new car, learning to ease or slam on the brakes as the case may be. The same can be said of returning to Aberystwyth. Now that it is no longer a completely foreign experience, I am more aware of a recalibration than an adjustment.

For instance, the phrase "meant to" is commonly used to replace the American "supposed to." For example, if one were to meet another and the first said he would call the second before arrival, but then didn't, the second would say, if American, "You were supposed to call before coming over." In Britain, the second person might reply, "You were meant to call before coming over." I find myself using the phrase "meant to" more and more, even in my internal monologue. Huh, my iPod is meant to charge when it's plugged in but it didn't. That's odd.

The same can be said for the word "sorted" which replaces the phrase "figured out." For example, a friend of mine has recently moved into her new flat and was going over all that she had done: "I've signed lease, moved up the furniture and unpacked. I'm sorted now." Likewise, when I got a new phone for my birthday, from said friend, my PhD supervisor said to me, "When you have the cellphone sorted, let me know the number." Much like the phrase "meant to," "sorted" has started to work its way into my day-to-day lexicon: I've got to get the tuition sorted so I can sort out the wiring. I hope my Mom has sorted out the transfer paper work.

And there are countless other words and phrases that, slowly, are working their way back into my vocabulary. This will create some amusing moments when I return to Chicago in December, much like it did when I returned in May.

A few days after I had arrived, Erika and I were discussing dinner.
"Do you want me to cook?"
"No. Let's go out."
"Okay, where do you want to go?"
"Well, I don't want to be out all night. So somewhere quick."
"Maybe we can go get some take-away."
Pause.
"What?"
"Take-away. You know, like some Chinese take-away. We could watch a movie and eat fried rice."
"You mean carry-out?"
Pause.
"You know, I think I do..."

I have to say, though, readjusting to a place has been far easier than first acclimating. I can walk into a store now and know what I am meant to do while there. I can sort out my library fines. I can even, if I fancy it, get some take-away to enjoy while watching the telly.

The Second Coming of Keegan; or, It's the Destination that Matters, Not How Difficult it is to Get There

If we are all really honest with ourselves, we can agree that traveling is never fun, particularly by plane. There is something to be said about driving somewhere, controlling your own destiny as it is. But even then, there are other drivers, weather conditions and the such to contend with. Quite simply: moving from A to B is never enjoyable. Once there, though, fun can be had, which is why people will deal with such horrible circumstances to get there.

Take Tahiti for instance. Erika has talked about going to the tropical island in the middle of the Pacific for our honeymoon, and while spending a week on an isolated island surrounded by water and sand is not my cup of tea, and is closer to my own personal center of hell, I agreed because I have a hard time saying no to her. When I looked up places to go in Tahiti what I found was paradise. The place was so beautiful that I would not be surprised if there was the ultimate tree of knowledge and a devious snake at the middle of it. Getting to paradise, though, was proving to be quite troublesome. The nice part about visiting large landmasses is the ease of accessibility. Small islands have no room for all their lush beauty and an airport. Secondly, not everyone can physically make it to Tahiti at a cost that made sense, so thus there is only one place in America that flies there (and, not surprisingly, O'Hare was not that airport). Thirdly, it was ungodly expensive. Again, isolated, remote beauty is only isolated and remote by being exactly that: hard to get to. Chicago, accessible by train, plane or boat is much easier to get to, but certainly lacks the exotic wonderment of Tahiti. All in all, Tahiti is more cumbersome to get to than is worth the experience. All the complications that come with the travel outweigh the benefit.

Now, as you may remember my loyal readers, I had not the easiest of travels here in January. Between being crammed in the middle of the middle aisle, my luggage (and good there in) falling to pieces and the subway ride during rush hour, only to arrive earlier than expected, forcing me to wait while exhausted and anxious for two hours, I had a less than pleasurable experience getting to what turned out to be a quite lovely little part of the world. This time, was not nearly as horrible, but again, I was forced to consider whether the experiences I have here are worth the troublesome travels.

I left from O'Hare, as I had done before, but this time was flying KLM Royal Dutch Airlines (a flight Delta sold to KLM) to Amsterdam, catching another KLM flight (operated by KLM for KLM) to Birmingham. This route, while more difficult to find, removed the Tube ride during rush hour and a train transfer in Birmingham, which I had hoped would make my life easier.

It's important to note that I was flying what I was told and purchased as a Delta flight. It seemed odd that a national and struggling airline would fly to Amsterdam several times a day, but I didn't want to raise any questions to the ferryman. Why is it important to note this? Terminal Assignment. See, when I flew United, I left from Terminal 1 at O'Hare. A centrally located terminal right off the highway. O'Hare has three terminals for intercontinental travel, and Delta's flights leave from Terminal 2. Terminal 5 is for international flights to exotic places on airlines like Aer Lingus, Royal Jordinian and Etihad. If your wondering, Terminal 4 is for freight.

When flying Luftansa, Germany's excellent airline, you leave from the United hub, because the two airlines are partnered for international travel. Delta, while they owned the ticket, used KLM Royal Airlines to operate their international travel, but figuring they operated like United, I figured Erika should drop me at the Delta terminal.

This is generally not a big problem. Though there is no way to walk from Terminals 1, 2 and 3 to Terminal 5, there is a direct-line monorail to bring you there. One needs merely to walk from the mistaken terminal, over the highway via the walkway to the train station, take the shuttle, and one would arrive safely. I know this because I was informed that I had to do that. Erika had foreseen this problem and suggested she wait until I knew that Terminal 2 was the place to be, but, fearing the wrath of the Airport Security, which is not unlike the wrath of any underpaid, underappreciated and overworked government employee, save these carry guns, I turned down her offer and sent her off. Plus, she was not particularly happy to see me off (happy to do it, but not happy to have to do it), so I didn't want to draw out the process any more than it need be.

Even having to take the shuttle, this should not be an issue. For me, though it was a bit of a struggle. Fearing that my luggage would again rip open, exposing my underwear to the world and the weather, I bought a decent duffel and a stronger, bigger rolling suitcase. I then checked the weight restrictions and packed both bags to the limits, fully expecting to pay the overweight bag fee. What this left me with was two stout, overpacked and extremely cumbersome bags that needed to be hauled from one location to the other, as opposed to given directly to the stewards at Terminal 2. Even with wheels, getting to Terminal 5 was a chore that left my arms and shoulder sore.

Once there, I was faced with another problem: weight. I understood that my bag was too heavy for the 50 pound limit that was free. You could take more than 50 pounds, but a fee would be charged. What I was unaware of was the maximum limit. Even having paid the fee, KLM would only allow 30 kilograms, or roughly 70 pounds. My bags, on the bathroom scale at home, averaged between 60 and 70 pounds when I weighed it. Apparently, this was not an accurate weight, and my bags came in at 32 kilograms. I needed to lose 2 kilograms before they would take my bag. My second bag, coincidentally, had already been checked, so I needed to lose 2 kilos and carry those with me in my already stuffed carry-on.

Being American, I have no conception of what 2 kilograms looks like. Tell me two pounds, and I can start to picture what two pounds of luggage would look like. When I was in school, learning the metric system like one learns a foreign language, I was told that a gram weighed about as much as a standard paperclip. So, readers, how many books equal the weight of 2,000 paperclips? The answer: four, if one is hard cover and the books average 200 pages in length. By using the baggage scale, I took out on book at a time until I reached the necessary weight, and by trial and error, I found the four smallest heaviest books in my larger suitcase. All while an angry line began to form behind me, probably wondering why I was suggesting reading material to the woman printing my boarding passes.

Security, while long, was nothing terrible, and for the first time ever I was not random selected for further screening (read: a rough frisking by a large, unhappy man). I have given up on trying to keep my appearances up since I have been randomly selected each time at the airport regardless of how I looked. This time, unshaven, with a hat pulled down low, I cleared security without any issues. This was true both in America and when I landed in Amsterdam and getting through customs. Maybe, as I push thirty, I no longer look like trouble.

Once on the KLM airplane, I thought I must have been blessed by God for being a good person. My seat, 28F was not on either aisle side of the four seat row, but row 28 was a front row, in that a bathroom was in front of the seats, not another row. On international flights, this is akin to winning the lottery and being given a puppy all at the same time. The row has extra leg room, no one in your lap, and no one to randomly shift the TV screens as your tracking the plane on the satellite maps. On my trip home to America, someone spilled their water bottle on the floor all over my carry-on, unbeknown to both of us, which has left a large stain on it. In this row, such an occurrence was not possible.

My neighbors to the left were an elderly Dutch couple who smiled too openly, made direct eye contact and kept looking at me. Maybe I am a bad person, but when I am traveling for several hours on a cramped plane through the night, the last thing I want to do is make friends and small chit-chat with people, especially when their English is not amazing. I managed to stave off most conversation by simply not looking back at them when they stared at me.

They settled in early, and both made for passable seat partners. Fantastic, I thought to myself, this is going to be the best flight over. Then, my neighbor to the right showed up.

Let me stop here briefly, and ask you what the worst thing to sit next to on an airplane would be. Someone that smelled? Possibly. The human body has the ability to become accustomed to odors over time, so given the length of the journey, a smelly person would be bad, but not terrible. A talker? Sure. But with movies, headphones, iPods and sleep, there are several ways to avoid talkers. Maybe someone who listened to their iPod or movie too loud? That would be annoying, but with your headphones on, you might not even notice.

No. I contend the worst thing to sit next to is an extremely fat person; and just such a person came waddling down the aisle, looking for 28G. This woman had the unfortunate circumstance to carry her weight in the middle, while also not being very tall. These combined for a lot of extra personage that needed to find space in the one place an airplane really lacks space: between the arm rests. Like most things that leak over a container space, her excess physicality hung over the armrests. This had to be horrible for both of us. When I needed to use my tray table, which I needed to do often during a flight that comes with two meals and a snack, I had to ask her to lean over or stand up so that I could get into the arm rest and free my tray table. When she dropped things, I needed to pick them up for her because she couldn't bend enough at the waist to get them (something that became annoying when dealing with the TV screens that stowed in the bottom of the armrests). Also, because of her size, I was forced to either cuddle up with her, or abandon my right arm rest. Pushed to my far left, then, the old man next to me was provided with the perfect pillow on which to fall asleep.

Despite this, I would not have traded the seat for one with less legroom. As a leggy man, that made the trip all the more bearable.

On the flight over, I watch Prince of Persia starring Jake Gyllenhall and Sir Ben Kingsley and Leap Year starring Amy Smart and some Irish people. Neither was very good, but Prince of Persia was downright horrible. Avoid that movie if at all possible. Both, though being subpar movies, passed the time well. Between them, and my excellent book, Zeitoun, the flight passed quickly. We also had a nice tail wind and landed almost a half hour early. All in all, it was nice to get off that plane, freeing myself from under the folds of that woman.

In Amsterdam, I was struck by how gray everything seemed. The airport seemed really isolated and I couldn't really make out any houses or buildings. In reality, the Schliphol airport is quite near the city. My confusion stemmed from the very dense fog that enveloped the city, reducing visibility to less than a half mile. That phrase, reduced visibility, is the death knell for air travel. When driving, you can creep along in the fog or rain or snow. Even through ice. But for air travel to work, the vehicle needs to reach a certain speed. And speed is not something possible with reduced visibility.

The fog was thick, but being near the ocean, not surprising. The more I took in my surroundings, though, the more I started to become alarmed. I landed around 8:00 am, which means the sun had certainly come above the horizon. It was not particularly cold, nor had it been cold, so the air temperature didn't seem to be prolonging the issue. Nor was it particularly humid. Whatever created this fog, then was immune to sun, temperature and humidity. In short, we were in for a long haul.

Fog is tricky, and thus predicting delay times is also tricky. Initially, despite the fog, my flight was scheduled to leave on time at 9:50. When I went back near 9:30, the flight had been delayed until 12:00. At 12:00, it was delayed until 12:45. By 12:45, the fog had cleared, and I was able to board. In the interim, I wandered the airport. Having spent the last several hours folded into an airplane, my legs were beginning to cramp. I took the delay as an opportunity to stretch out and see what the airport has to offer. As the only international airport in the Netherlands, Schliphol is graced with a huge shopping center and food court. Also, knowing that travelers are often coming from long distances, and several changing time zones, they offered a section of chairs that resembled those found pool side at fancy hotels. These, I found, were perfect for napping. Though, napping when traveling alone is a dicey deal. I found that I could only sleep comfortably if I wrapped the strap of my carry-on around my arms, essentially holding my heavy, lump bag to my chest. When one is tired, though, one can sleep amazingly well.

The rest of the journey was unremarkable. Once on the plane to Birmingham, I slept soundly for the entire duration (though, I was hungry, having missed both a snack and a drink). The plane was not full, so my seat mates moved, and I was afforded some extra leg room. Birmingham airport was nice, and I changed my money over, clear customs and found my way to the train that leads directly to Aberystwyth with no serious trouble save the extreme weight. There was, though, someone I felt more sorry for. Another American was making his way from my same flight through the airport carrying four wheeled suitcases and two strapped bags, all of which were marked by KLM as being heavy. I felt a tinge of sympathy as he struggled to maneuver this train of baggage through the airport, until I remembered having to do so with my underwear falling out.

An added benefit of flying in Birmingham is that the train runs directly to Aberystwyth, and takes about an hour and a half less than the train from London (which, not surprisingly, leaves from further away and goes through Birmingham). I got on the train, stowed my luggage, found a comfortable seat and made it to Aberystwyth with no problem.

Once there, I realized I didn't know where I was going. Well, more accurately, I didn't know where my friend I was staying with lived. Outside the train, though, is a pub with free WiFi. I quickly logged on there and found the cross streets. Once in the taxi, the driver got me nearby, and I directed him the rest of the way. Jamie had just arrived as I pulled up and my journey ended without any serious kinks. Having been spared the horrors of the last trip, I feel safe saying that I would rather be crammed under a fat person for six hours than having every stage of a four stage journey go awry.

Now, all I need is my room from the University and I am set to enjoy this place I have traveled so far to get to.

The Cost of Looking Forward

As I walked through Meijer's the other day, looking for milk, I ran across candy clearly marketed towards the Halloween crowd. This angered me greatly. Here it was, September 7th, and already the store suggested that we spend our time thinking about the last day of October. Of course, after Halloween, America turns it's attention toward Christmas (briefly glancing at the less marketable holiday Thanksgiving) before it gets ready for a quick stop at New Years and then on to Valentines Day. In this way, we don't ever notice today; instead, we spend our present trying to line up our ideal vision of the next holiday with the actual reality of how the holiday is shaping up. We buy candy in September, costumes in early October: time and effort is spend not on today, but on making the future tomorrow excellent. In this way, then, the present is lost.

I have been reading about how time is understood by mankind, and the theorist call this the presentification of the future, or protentions. We look forward to the future and anticipate what it will look like; then, this anticipation in hand, we try to make sure our lives line up with what we hope to remember in the future. We imagine the stories that we will tell about future events and occurrences, then spend our efforts to line up reality with these anticipations. In this way, our present is merely a speed bump on the way to the future which we imagine as having already happened.

This is all leading up to my engagement. In this event, I have cast a net far into the future, and will spend the next eleven months trying to make my imagined wedding come true. Of course, I have to consider what Erika wants, and incorporate those imaginings into mine, but nonetheless, very little of what I do in the now is going to be remembered. Essentially, my life will consist of trying to make the future happen. Which, of course, it will; but it might not happen in the right way. And that, readers, will lead to disappointment.

So I am stuck with a conundrum: do I imagine the best wedding I possibly can, which will, more than likely, lead to disappointment; or do I set my sights low so that later the reality of the situation is bound to exceed my expectations? No one wants to approach their wedding with a lackadaisical attitude, nor would I earn any special brownie points with the future-missus if I too a lackluster approach to the planning.

Already, though, I have had to renegotiate my anticipated future wedding memories. See, I have been to several hotel weddings, and in the end I generally leave satisfied. I can eat, party and hang out as late as I want, then stumble up to the room and fall asleep. Sometimes, even, the hotel will return the tux for me. Double bonus. The rooms are standard looking of course, but do what I want them to: hold people, a dance floor, and food.

This, however, is not what Erika wants. She imagines a unique space, one that people can buzz about: That wedding was so cool. Did you see where it was? It looked amazing! All those flowers and arches... and so on and so on. Consider the Chateau Bu Sche. Gorgeous. But small, and can't hold all that many people. Such a venue will also require outside caterers, which might cost more. Then our guests will have to get from the reception to the hotel, which could be dangerous, considering how much some of my friends like to drink.

Thus, the first issue arises: whose anticipated memory is going to be disappointed. In the end, it seems like mine. I can see Erika really wants to have this special location, and I want her to be happy. In order to keep my future memory on course, though, it will have to be a place that Erika and I can afford to bring all my friends. A wedding without my friends and family is like a wasted day, as far as I am concerned. I want the reception to be a good party where my friends can come, hangout, enjoy themselves and go home with some real memories to cherish.

This is just the first hiccup that we hit, and I am sure that there will be more. In fact, most days are going to be spent negotiating a compromise between what I want, and what she wants. It will remain to be seen who will be disappointed in the end, or if we can take our collected anticipations and make a wedding that exceeds all of them. Only time will tell, and my time is going to be spent obsessing over it.