We Break for Easter

In American Universities, we get one week off in the Spring and the Fall, a month for Christmas and roughly three months in the Summer. I thought that was excessive, and often times revel to my corporate friends about how much time I get off, especially when I was paid for it (which was some time ago). Here, the British really know how to take a break. Easter break, or Spring break as the secular people call it, has been going on for a week and a half now. My normally bustling house has been strangely quiet as just me and my Irish housemate have been knocking around in this open space for all this time. Recently, his girlfriend has come around, so now I find myself with even more time alone.

Couple that with my supervisor's abrupt vacation, I find myself with nothing but time on my hands. Luckily, I work four days a week, three of which for five hours at a time, otherwise, I am certain I would have gone on a killing spree using a pillowcase full of doorknobs, just to give myself something to do.

With all this time, I have needed to find something to do. I thought that my collection of DVDs (two 144 disc binders full of DVDs) would have lasted me a good chunk of this time, but I have watched almost all of them. The other day, on Easter no less, I watched Hotel Rwanda. Nothing celebrates Spring like the senseless genocide of nearly 1,000,000 Tutsi Rwandans. Some of my more favorite movies I have watched several times, including Iron-Man and the X-Men trilogy of movies. I watched Squidbillies (season 1 and 2), Metalocolypse (season 1 and 2), The Venture Bros. (season 1, 2, and 3), Heroes (season 1 and 2), Frisky Dingo (season 1 and 2) and Robot Chicken (season 1, 2, and 3). There are two movie theaters in Aberystwyth, and between the two of them, there are two screens. Total. I saw the movie at the Commodore, which leaves Alice in Wonderland. That is my exciting trip out on Thursday.

I read the four novels I bought and most of my comic collection. I started taking books from the library to read, and right now am making my way through The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Steig Larson (which, though it is not my cup of tea, I find that I don't hate it). I have yet to turn on the stacks of criticism books that I need to get through, but I have thought long and hard about it recently. Come Friday, when no one is in the house, and I don't work, I might resort to reading dense tomes about literary theory.

All in all, I am running out of things to pass the time.

This sudden influx of free time would seemingly give me more time to explore the Aberystwyth, and certainly I would do that if two things were not true: 1) I work during the daylight hours four days of the week, 2) it has rained every day for the last two weeks or so. I want to make my way up Pen Dinas, the southern hill on the border of Aberystwyth, and possibly walk over to the science college, just to walk in-land a ways. There has not been a single day, though, since mid-March where it has been dry enough to venture outside for an extended period of time. Come this weekend, hell or high water, I am walking somewhere I can take pictures.

In the last few days, as my housemate is kept busy by his girlfriend, I have had to look for ways to occupy my time late at night and into the wee hours of the morning. My housemate had idly suggested that I check out the BBC's Wonders of the Solar System on the BBC i-player. To this point, because of a sternly worded letter threatening me with judicial punishment, I have avoided watching any TV because I don't own the very expensive TV license. The letter included the BBC i-player, but my housemates have assured me that no one will know if I do it. Desperate for some noise, I tuned into the Wonders of the Solar System and have not be disappointed.

Brian Cox, an English physicist with a penchant for well-worn Henley shirts, goes around and tries to find evidence for what it must be like in space or on other planets. So far, he has talked about the wonders of our sun, which is five billion years old and has another five billions years left before it expands and devours us all in a hellish firestorm of rapidly expanding super hot gases; and the likelihood of "life" on other planets.

I put life in quotes, because this is not complex lifeforms like you or I. Or even like any organisms that you or I can see on a regular basis with the naked eye. He was positing situations in which there might be bacteria on other planets, particularly in the caves on Mars and on the ice-moon Europa which orbits Jupiter (oddly enough, in the Universe's love for symmetry, counter to Europa, a completely frozen ball of water with 100 times as much liquid water on its surface as the surface of Earth, possibly teeming with life, is a completely volcanic moon, Io, that shoots plumes of hot magma 190 miles into the air).

Life, it seems, can exist with three conditions: 1) a collection of elements (humans are 40 elements); 2) a power source (for this solar system, most organisms get their juice from the sun); 3) somewhere to exist (here, and elsewhere, Cox suggests, this requires water). Water seems to be the one source lacking from other planets (save Europa, which is technically a moon, but is covered with water, surrounded by a smooth, shifting shell, like an enormous Gobbstopper orbiting the largest planet in the solar system). Mars, judging by the surface, was once covered with water, but since the planet died and the atmosphere dissipated, it all flew off into space. Cox then suggests that some water might be frozen in the caves, safe from the solar winds that are ripping the planet to shreds. On Earth, there are some species of bacteria that can exist in ice, secreting something to melt a tiny water bubble a few microns across in which to exist, so maybe there is something similar in the caves on Mars.

But that is how most good space-horror movies start. People go into the caves on the surface of some new planet and experience horrors unknown to Earth. Largely because of this fear, the caves remain unexplored by the dozens of electronic rovers that dot the surface of the planet.

So, 3000 miles away from home, with nothing but time on my hands, I find myself transported light years away from where I actually am, proving that, though I cannot leave (due to poor planning and lack of funds), I can still journey to far off places on my holiday. Just in a slightly lamer way.