My Words Trickle Down

O My Readers, I've neglected you again. It's been ages since I've written, and even longer since I've written anything I've been really proud to share with you. I've just looked, and it's all ramblings about bees and eyelashes and the Apocalypse. Yeesh. (Though despite all the mentions of The Apocalypse, The Revolution, etc, please never think that I've become a Christian, or a Marxist.)

There were so many entries I was going to make, over the past couple of weeks. I could say that I've been busy, and it would be true. It usually is. But most of the time I still manage to write here, anyway. It's not as though I haven't had a spare moment to sit down at the computer and type it out, it's more that, for the past few weeks I haven't felt capable of writing. Several entries are wallowing, half-written in Word documents. Others never even made it out of my head. There was the whimsical one, about the creepy Facebook advertisements selling me weddings when I got 'Engaged' and vitamin supplements when my 'Activities' included 'naked yoga'. There was the lonesome one about how my cousin Leigh got married in Charleston; about how I miss my family. How I miss my Home, or at least the one invented by nostalgia. I never shared my ruminations on America, nor the poem I wrote to that effect. Well, that at least I can do:

I wrote my own myth of America:
in chilly August nights, with shivered sighs,
remembered frog songs in the humid pines
creaking with the lyrical cicada
shrieking love-songs to the bawdy skies
and hazy stars behind electric lines.
The myth does not include the orange lights
obscuring stars on hot October nights.
No giant cities loom, nor suburbs sprawl
across imagined forests’ purple dusk,
where laughing children catching fireflies
are not racist, and there is no highway wall,
just miles of vines that sprawl on leafy trunks,
blanketing the hillsides in a march of lies.

So I guess at least my creative energy is going somewhere, if only to poorly-composed sonnets. I've been worrying a lot lately about wasting my time, my potential, my energy. I feel like a lot of my life has slipped by without me really noticing. Maybe it's just that I'll be, to the eyes of much of the world, a Proper Adult^TM tomorrow. And yet still, no one will listen to me, "they" won't listen to me, because I am so young.

But even now, I've come to a point in my life where the possibilities no longer seem limitless; where I can see the paths that are shut down for me, perhaps forever. I'm referring, of course, to this entry, in which I explain how I always wanted to be a pioneering research zoologist like my childhood hero, Jane Goodall, and bemoaned my decision to study Philosophy instead of sticking to science.

Well, last week I got an early birthday present from my dad. It was a book by Jane Goodall (who had spoken at a Montessori conference he'd attended), and it was signed with the caption 'Follow your dream'. Which kind of shook me, since I had never particularly complained to my dad about my broken dreams. It felt like a fated spur to action.

But... what action? There is not actually a way for me to obtain a degree in zoology in time for me to start the career I'd always dreamed of. But then, according to her book, Jane Goodall didn't have a degree either. Maybe I should start looking into non-degree-specific work in Conservation and Ecology, which are as much to my taste as the actual science -- and which will expose me to a lot of the science, anyway. I just need to stay positive. I've been so negative lately, so pessimistic. It's not as though I haven't followed any of my dreams. I'm here, am I not? I got the hell out of America, and that was a big one. I have, at various points since coming to university, felt a strong sense of direction, a sense of purpose. I've just got to get that back, somehow. For now, the cheesy signoff:

There'll be new dreams, maybe better dreams, in plenty
before the last revolving year is through.

I've just eaten an orange. It was a seedless orange, sweet and convenient. That may sound unremarkable, but its very unremarkableness is what struck me about it.

I remember the first time I heard about seedless oranges, maybe 12 or 15 years ago. At the time they sounded strange and marvelous, a great triumph of agriculture and breeding. These days, they're so common that I'm a little surprised when I do find seeds in oranges.

It seems odd, when you think about it, that we've managed to breed a fruit with such a seemingly unadaptive trait as seedlessness. How are oranges grown, anyway? Seeing as my second year of biology in school was basically just botany, soil science, and general agricultural studies, you'd think they'd have taught me this, but no. Are oranges grafted, like apples or peaches? Or are they grown from seeds? The latter seems wholly incompatible with breeding seedless varieties. If it's grafted, then guess it can be kept up as long as enough trees are kept alive, spreading its genes laterally rather than through generations.

Even so, I wonder if they still need to be pollinated every year. Because if so, they're fucked, just like the rest of agriculture. Yes, most crops are royally fucked. Why? Because the honeybees are dying. THE BEES ARE DYING. If they can't be saved, it is the end of civilisation as we know it.

Okay okay okay. I'll tell you all about it. Really, now. I've even got my wee diary full of notes, lest the events slip from my mind before I recount them. Happy now? Here goes:

On the night of 23 January, 2008, Kalea and I took the overnight National Express bus down to London. We'd both done our fair share of overnight MegaBusses, so we were positively delighted by the level of comfort in the National Express bus. The seats were a good four or five times the size of the MegaBus seats, and there were footrests and even armrests between the seats! Yeah, we started off pretty damn positive.

We met Harry at the bus station, then headed out to Seven Sisters, where we spent the morning with Jesse, breakfasting over coffee and conversation both earthily heady and high-mindedly abstract. I may have had a bit too little sleep on the bus--on all of the busses, actually--and spent the majority of the trip in a deep state of contemplation. Be warned.

Kalea and Harry and I took the tube back into central London for the afternoon, laughing at the adverts (Inseminar: a seminar for women considering artificial insemination--and advertised by the worlds ugliest babies!). We went to Tate Britain, where Harry made earnest and endearingly nerdy complaints about the Turner exhibit. We walked along the Thames, where Kalea saw a postcard happen, a double decker bus crossing in front of Big Ben in the bright sunlight. And we wandered along, generally enjoying the sunlight and the river, lamenting its imminent rise and consumtion of the city. Kalea and I bought our Eurolines passes and booked our first trip: Amsterdam.

Jesse has some friends there whom she said we could stay with, so in the morning, off we went. And we did, and it was amazing. I mean, really. We were staying at Pretoriusstraat 28, a long-standing squatted flat and, in its downstairs capacity as a café/bar, a community centre. The people there were nice, and cool, and we came away friends, but what was astounding to me was the whole culture of it. It was amazing to be in a place where you could have Anarchy in the open. Where through sheer numbers, and a few legal loopholes, the 'counterculture' can actually overwhelm the police. Where there are, maybe, more anarchists than cops.

Squatting, for instance, is as dubiously legal there as anywhere else. But unlike elsewhere, where it is done in at least nominal secrecy, in Amsterdam there is a proud tradition of squatting out in the open. On Sunday we joined some of the squatters for a 'squatting action'. A group of about 25 crusty-looking activists--apparently a dissapointingly small turnout!--gathered in a squat bar. The organisers described the legal ownership situation of the house to be squatted, emphasising that it had been empty for over a year. They seemed to know a lot about it, though our friend who'd brought us seemed unimpressed by their level of organisation. Then we all walked out to the house, along with the family who were set to move into it--complete with their two little kids and even their dog.

We milled around in front of the door while a couple of people broke the lock. They left as soon as they'd finished, high-fiving each other as they sauntered away from the scene. A few people went inside to make sure there was no 'stuff' left from the owner, while the rest of us kept up our clump in front of the door. Someone rolled a joint, and out of politeness went across the street to smoke it. About then the cops rolled up: two cars, a motorcycle, and a van lurking off in the background. The squatters formed into a solid block in front of the door, all facing the street. My Anglo-American nerves and sensibilities were all a-tingle, but actually there was almost no tension in the air; the dog was the only one who seemed stressed at all. The activists laughed and joked at the cops, comparing their common red politics (the Amsterdam police were preparing to strike over pay). When the group indoors gave word for it, the activists parted to allow two cops inside the house. Apparently this was not a legal requirement, but something that's always done so that the cops can write in their reports that they saw the house and saw that it was, in fact, empty when it was squatted. There was a lot of cooperation between the cops and squatters, which I suppose must be necessary if it's all to be done so openly.

After the cops left, the activists trickled away. We went with a small group to another squat café, which had been inhabited for so long that it had gained legal status. This was pretty much the exciting part of our trip to Amsterdam. We also went to an action where people had climbed up in some urban trees to stop them being knocked down, but the rest was spent just hanging around people, in the flat or in squat bars. Y'know, just chillin'. One day Kalea and I wandered around the city centre, and on another day I biked out on my own while she and Jan went on some sort of geeky musical odyssey, but with the exception of a few photographs we didn't really tourist it up.

Rome was another story. On our first day we went to the Vatican. The Vatican museum was incredible, amazing, beautiful. I was awed by the floors, the walls, the ceilings, all painted and gilded with too much for the eye to even take in. Kalea was impressed by the acoustics of the space, and hummed Hildegaard von Bingen compositions quietly as we walked along the corridors. There were globes in there that showed the night sky, as viewed from the outside. That is, the entire sky projected down onto a globe, not mapped out as you might normally see now-a-days, so that moving left to right you saw Gemini-Taurus-Orion, not Orion-Taurus-Gemini as you'd see in the real night sky. The ceiling of the Sistine chapel turned out not to be as impressive as everyone says it is, but the walls were amazing. They were painted and then overlaid with gold so that it looked like gold curtains stood rippling around the whole room.

We also toured St Peter's Basilica and the tombs of the popes. It was a bit strange, as irreligious as I've become, to be reminded of the fervour with which religion grips some people. We passed several people on their knees in prayer at various saint crevices. Before the tomb of John Paul II, a group of nuns and children were gathered and staring reverently. Beside them, in front of a display devoted to the Virgin Mary, a middle-aged man in an athletic jacket was kneeling upright, hands clasped in prayer, bug-eyed and quivering in his intensity. I found it strangely disquieting.

The next day we saw the Colisseum (from the outside--it cost eleven frickin' euros to go inside; everything between there and the main train station was exploitatively expensive), and the free parts of the vast complex of ruins around the Colisseum. We went into the Capitoline Museums and oohed and ahhed at the statues. There was a lot to see, but not much to tell, really. In my head I had a running monologue about Ancient Rome and the roots of 'modern civilisation', the ennabling of current political ideas, the roots of the nation-state, the mythology of democracy, and all that jazz, but it wasn't anything like coherent enough to post here.

Throughout the trip, but mostly in Rome, we were taking silly tourist photos of a little plush duck we'd found on the street in Amsterdam. It looked exactly like our friend Niko's travelling duck, Sir Koko, only much smaller and with a little bow on its neck, so we took it in. I cleaned it up, sewed its tears and washed it as best I could, and Kalea named it Kokette in honour of Sir Koko.

The day after the Colisseum, Kalea, Kokette and I had had enough of Rome, so we hopped the bus for Barcelona. Barcelona was amazing and beautiful, sunny and clean, like a breath of fresh air after Rome (and those 24 hours on the bus!) Rome was covered in graffiti, which was kind of cool (the metro trains were postively artful!), but the whole place was also kind of...grimy. Everywhere. Barcelona was an incredible contrast, with broad, gleaming streets and shining clean buildings. We spent our first afternoon wandering around, following our feet. I managed to negotiate the purchase of sandwiches, coffee, and even a ball of wool in Spanish, which pleased me since I'm generally not very confident. That night we met Kalea's friend Anna and went out for dinner and drinks with her in the Gothic district, a labyrinth of winding alleyways and really cool cafés, bars and shops, all open until quite late at night.

We spent the next night at Anna's, and the next day went to museums. Kalea went to the Picasso museum, and on a very stupid whim (not having time to see both), I went to a Dalí exhibit instead. It turned out to be interesting, but quite small. The Picasso museum, by contrast, was apparently excellent. Oh, well. All it means is that I have a good excuse to go back to Barcelona. And that's not the only reason. I left on Wednesday for home, but Kalea met up with our friend Jan from Amsterdam and spent the next few days in Can Masdeu, a squatted villa just outside the city with extensive permaculture gardens. I only got a quick tour and meet & greet before having to leave to catch my bus.

Then back to London, another brief visit with Jesse, and back to Edinburgh, thence to St Andrews. A pleasant enough journey, just long. I think I picked up a cold on the bus, though, which I've been in denial about ever since. Meanwhile, it's taken root and grown steadily worse, which is why I've taken so long to get this posted. Sorry for the delay. I have man-flu (which is apparently what it's called if you complain about your cold. Especially if you compare your sinuses to plumbing.)

Friends, Comrades. Another year gone. Another year, another year, another year, spinning on and on in the constant, subtle decay of the Earth's orbit, slowly slowly dwindling out on a scale so huge that to any being on its surface it seems infinite.

In this cosmological spirit I decided--around the time of the Autumnal Equinox, when I was buying my tickets home for the end of this year--that I ought to stay in Scotland for the Winter Solstice. My friend was planning a party, and I haven't properly celebrated a solstice in years. So I came to be in that frozen darkness, admiring the frost-sparkling ground and the intoxicated, sparkling company. Left at 7 am with a sleepy Daniel, and (at 8:46) finished watching the sun rise in magnificent, magnanimous red splendour from the window of the train, rushing off to Edinburgh to fly into those pinkening clouds.

Where, after wheeling through the new-morning-wet, Sunday-empty little grey city, trying and failing to find an open cafe and feeling a bit ridiculous dragging a floppy, wheeled duffel bag, florid inner monologue turned to panicked terror upon reading the departures screen: BD57 to Heathrow, Cancelled. A heavy Scrooge of a fog had settled over the city of London, and planes were having trouble landing; all flights either delayed or cancelled.

( How I got home. Cut for length and frustration. )

My one solace throughout all of this was my book, read openly in the hours-long queues and endless waiting in terminals: The Monkey Wrench Gang, a novel by rockstar-mountain-man eco-Anarchist Edward Abbey about a small troupe of dynamite jockeys harrying industrial "progress" in the American Southwest. I took great comfort, through all the indignity of the airport, the bag searches, the stroking and groping of the Female Security Officer, the shouting and shoving and the disorderly queues, that somewhere, somewhere out there, there might be (there are) people, flesh-and-blood-and-heart people, fighting the good fight, clawing the machine for all they're worth, getting in under the skin of the great complex organism of industry.

I thought about this a lot, because when you're alone for that long, surrounded by strangers, you have a lot of time to think. I thought about beaurocracy, and the breakdown of The System. (The trouble with Heathrow is mostly that it's poorly organised, but also that it's simply too damn big. And they want to expand that monstrosity?) Watching men and boys die at Branagh's Agincourt, I thought about war and technology and futility, the skewed priorities of men, that fierce loyalty which is so admirable and yet so damning; those poor noble fools. 'The Shawshank Redemption'? I thought about Anarchy. That great Ideal. But how are we ever to get there? I've always thought it was one of those things that people could handle just fine if they were raised in it--never bought those bullshit 'human nature' arguments claiming it's impossible--but, of course, we're not raised in it. We are born, we live, we die in the prison of the state. We are all 'institutionalised men'. And if we get out, what then? Will we die like Brooks, despairing and alone, in a brutal world of all against all, or will we gang together, supportive, and feel "the excitement only a free man can feel, a free man at the start of a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain"?

Roll on, 2008.

Celo Community is a hippie land trust in rural Western North Carolina. Like most hippie communities, its inhabitants are mostly transplants from elsewhere in the state, the country, the world. It's also home to a summer camp and a boarding school, so it has a lot of temporary foreign inhabitants. As such it has a tendency to define itself as separate from--and, often enough, in opposition to--the 'locals'.

What's interesting to me is that even the kids grew up in that community see themselves as separate from the non-Celo, non-hippie local people. A friend of mine was born not far outside of Celo, as local as they come; but she was adopted by hippie transplant parents from Up North, lost her accent (mostly), and refers to people from outside of Celo as 'local', thereby seeming to distinguish herself from them, despite having lived in the county her entire life.

Similarly, the 'Triangle' area of central North Carolina, where I grew up, has major identity issues simply from the fact that the majority of its population only moved there recently. This is from the software boom, the East Coast epicentre of which is in that area. The Silicon Valley of the South. My Daddy was born and raised in Raleigh, and so was his mother, and his family is from North Carolina way back forever. But my mother's family moved there from New England in the 1970s, part of the very first IBM wave. Still, even they have been there for ages compared to most; from the year I was born to the year I left for school, the area doubled in population, and it's continuing its astronomical population growth (with vastly inadequate urban planning!)

My point is, the true locals in Wake County have been basically eclipsed, and even though I actually am (or at least was) local to that area, I never felt like it. I suspect this had a lot to do with never going to the public schools. My parents ran and taught at a Montessori school, so I went there, where even for that area I think we had a disproportionately high number of 'outsiders', especially among the staff.

So I am puzzled when I hear my sister reminisce about our 'Southern' upbringing, which to listen to her was just a collection of stereotypes. Oh, we were located in the South, and as I said our Dad's family is very Southern. But it was all tempered by our mother's family, who are all so very New England, especially her parents. Furthermore, we pretty much lived at the school, and nearly all of our socialising was through the school. We were not really of the South.

I think it was the school, mostly, that brought this about. It was self-consciously in opposition to the local norm. My parents were, too, at least to a degree. Celo parents are even more so, even those who really are fully integrated into (or of!) the local community. They are the hippies, the counter-culture. We are the second generation of the counter-culture, I and most of my friends from home. Because we were born of those who set up their own identities in opposition to the norm, we never really did fit in to the geographical communities we were born into. I suppose this is why I spend so much time in this journal agonising over geographical identity: because, when it comes right down to it, I don't really feel one. My familial identity, and political, come first and have always, though I only realised it quite recently. I am a citizen of the Left.

First off, don't get me wrong: I don't dislike spiders. In fact, I rather like them. I wish them all the best. I just don't want to be near them. I certainly don't like seeing them in my living space. They creep me the fuck out.

I wasn't always afraid of spiders. As a kid, I was wary of them, mostly because I sensed it was expected of me. Besides, some spiders are dangerous, so it's not a good idea to get all buddy-buddy with them. Of course, the same could be said of snakes, but as long as I know it's harmless I'm perfectly happy to cuddle one. When I was about ten, my friend Dan had captured a wolf spider and was keeping it as a pet. He'd let it crawl about on his hands, and asked me if I wanted to hold it. I said yes, and he held his hand next to mine, so that the spider could crawl across onto my palm. Whereupon it immediately bit me.

Now, I'm not gonna go all psycho-analytic (yet) and claim that a fear of spiders was borne upon that pet's fangs. Because I spent a large portion of my childhood chasing and catching various small vertebrates, many of which bit me at some point, and I've yet to develop an irrational fear of any of those. I suspect that my fear of spiders actually stems from a disgust with and irrational fear of something entirely different (and considering food chains, somewhat ironic): millipedes.

Yes, millipedes. When I was a kid [here's where I get all amateur psychoanalytic; buckle your seatbelts], I spent a lot of time at school--since my mother was the director, I usually left a lot later than everyone else; I practically lived there. I spent most of my free time reading, usually sat on the floor against the wall. There is a certain type of millipede that has a habit of invading buildings and going off to die in corners and along walls. I have no idea why, but its death-musk (also the smell it produces when provoked) is the worst smell in the world. It is sickly-sweet, cloying, but also musky and almost tuna-like. It doesn't just smell bad, the way sewage or rot smells bad; it smells evil. It fills me with disgust; a disgust which turned to fear, and hatred of those little millipedes. Of all millipedes. Of all creatures with too many legs.

Centipedes have always scared me. The way they're shaped, and reading about the various sorts that can kill you with a glance, just freaked me out. But millipedes are not so different, and so in my mind they became the many-legged creatures of phobia. Spiders, too, somehow got themselves added. It's not all spiders, though, just certain body shapes. Anything with a body shape like a black widow or brown recluse scares the fuck out of me, but I maintain that this is an entirely rational fear. But really fangly spiders also scare me. And by 'fangly' I mean 'possessing very large palps'. And I know palps are not actually fangs, but they look like it, damn it! They also look a lot like extra legs, bringing the leg-count up to ten, which is just more than I can tolerate.

Also frightening, of course, are the really fucking BIG spiders. Which my house has been crawling with. It doesn't seem quite fair that Britain--mild, harmless Britain--should be the place with really fucking big spiders. In Southeastern North America, there are two species of spider that are capable of killing with their bites. But we don't have these big fangly leggy bastards menacing our walls. To be fair, we do have wolf spiders, which can get pretty fucking big (once when I was 7 I reached into my boot to check for a sock, and instead pulled out a wolf spider the size of my hand). But they are ground spiders. You know where to expect them, and that is on the ground or floor (or, as mentioned, in things you've left on the floor). They don't crawl up the fucking walls. They wouldn't sit beside your doorknob, or surprise you by scuttling in from behind the curtain. These house spiders are HUGE, and love to do these things.

The other night I was complaining to Nick about this, and he was chiding me for it. 'They're harmless', he said (I know), 'and they eat flies' (I know that, too). But his fantastical analogy was, in fact, helpful. 'Just think of them as fly prisons', he said, 'little, mobile fly prisons'. Which is such an absurd and amusing image that it actually takes away the fear of them. When the big, curtain-scuttling spider was still on the curtain (the curtain! Where it can neither be killed nor captured!) the next day, I made my peace with it. I decided to purge the word 'spider' from my vocabulary, and replace it with 'fly prison'. It works pretty well.

...Until the fly prison starts to move, and is suddenly fearsome again. But, y'know, it's a step.

It has been a beautiful weekend. I went with some friends to their friend's house, where I met many nice and interesting people. To get there we walked through a narrow strip of old-growth forest beside a river, which was absolutely beautiful. As it always seems to, being so rare for me nowadays, being surrounded by trees made me immeasurably happy. I felt like I could breathe again.

The house was a beautiful old country manor, and brimming with ancient and interesting books. The family has some sort of wetland restoration project going, complete with a small population of reintroduced beavers. I lived beside a North American swamp for six years, so beavers themselves, and their various constructions, are not especially exciting to me. But beaver dams and lodges in Scotland, where they have been extinct for hundreds of years, were an incredible sight. The beaver ponds are within a large enclosure of wild boars, one of which came to investigate us a few times while we were watching for beavers. Scary stuff! This morning we saw some of the babies (kept at the farm because they'd lost their mother), and even they were rambunctious, bitey little creatures, a lot like puppies but stronger and wilder.

This afternoon I returned to find that I still have internet! I must question Steph or Helena about this, but in the meantime I shall enjoy it, perhaps by proceeding into another excessively-long post--mostly cut, of course:

While I don't believe in Astrology, I still find it fascinating. Along with Tarot, Numerology, Phrenology, palm-reading and other such nonsense, I don't believe a word of it yet find myself greatly attracted to the concepts, to the point that I have studied some of them (though, perhaps because I have Mercury in Gemini, never in any depth). Recently iamunicorngirl posted a link and description in her journal that she said was the most accurate Astrological description she had yet encountered online. Intrigued, I looked up my own chart. Following her example, I have struck out the inaccurate bits. However, since a lot of it (as such things tend to do) provokes a sort of 'eh, I guess that sort of describes me' type of reaction, I've also italicised the bits that struck me as especially descriptive of my personality:

( Generated by Starbud 2.0b )
I don't know about you, but I see an awful lot of strikeout in there. If it were "accurate", I would expect to only see a few bits struck out, especially given how general it all is. It occurs to me that many of these things would apply to most people, and the specific ones (and even many of the general ones) are only sometimes accurate.

It's also hugely contradictory. I pointed out above that I'm supposedly impatient despite the fact that patience is one of my biggest virtues. But I had a look at the bigger chart thing (Starbud being only a 'bud'), and see little besides contradictions. I'm apparently reserved and hard to figure out, but have a warm, outgoing personality, and am apparently very charismatic. I am actually so, so far from charismatic, and as introverted as they come. Well, maybe not so much anymore, but I am in no way outgoing. Oh, and it's advised me into various careers, mostly requiring contradictory strengths, many of them hugely inappropriate for me. Apparently I'm good with money, very frugal and perhaps stingy (because I am a Taurus, I am greedy, selfish and ungenerous), but Sagittarius in the second house says that I am very generous.

The descriptions based on the placement of the Sun were so wrong as to be almost comical. I've read enough descriptions of my Sun sign (Taurus) to know that I fit half of the aspects very well, and the other half hardly at all. But the Sun in the 7th house began with "This placement denotes a public personality"--enough said. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Most, though, were neither particularly accurate nor particularly incorrect. The one that struck me as the most accurate was the description of the effects of the placement of Mercury. I'll let you judge the strike-out vs. italicised balance for yourself:

( Mercury in Gemini and 7th House )
Of course, two almost-all-accurate descriptions out of 42 is not exactly convincing. So does this mean that Astrology is bunk? No, of course not. The fact that Astrology assumes that the position of various celestial bodies at the moment of birth can somehow influence a person's personality or predict their fate is what makes it bunk. But it's still interesting.

I'm finally getting over this damn plague cold... just in time for spring allergies to kick in. FANTASTIC. Yesterday, walking to and from lectures, I kept getting strange looks. When I got back to my room and glanced in the mirror, I realised that my eyes were so puffed up I looked like I was about to cry. I should go back to North Carolina. I'm allergic to these cold places.

But the flowers are lovely. Azaleas are blooming by Uni Hall, crocuses are everywhere, and I saw morning glories on Wardlaw Gardens.

I slept through all the daylight today. Damn it. It was dusk when I got up (about 3:45), and raining. Damn these dark winters. Still, I'm glad it's December. Or rather, I'm glad it's no longer November; November is the worst month. I think it's just that it gets so dark in November. I mean December is darker, of course, but November is the month when the day-length seems to decrease rapidly.

This was never a problem back home in NC (Latitude: 35° 52' N), where the sunlight didn't vary so much. I think it got to me a bit in Iowa (41° 38' N), but then, November is the most stressful month at Scattergood anyway, regardless of the sunlight. But St Andrews, at 56° 38' N, gets really freaking dark in the winter. It makes me depressed, makes me want to just hibernate until about mid-February. When the crocuses emerge, so shall I.

Anyway, to let y'all know what's happened since the last post (since I know you all follow my life so closely, couldn't bear to be without updates :-P):

I did not in fact manage to make myself get my essay done during the week before it was due. In fact, I finished it about half an hour before the deadline.

My friend Harry was telling me recently about this thing he read criticising people for saying that they were too busy for things. It said that no one is ever actually "too busy" to do anything, it's just that we choose to prioritise certain things over others. When we do, it said, we should take responsibility for our choice of priorities, not blame the things we chose to prioritise.

So, having blown off my essay all week, on Thursday I chose to prioritise the St Andrew's Day Ceilidh over writing my essay. It was a lot of fun. See photos on Facebook. Get Facebook if you don't have it already. This choice meant that I was up until well past 4 am writing, frantically writing all the next day, and my essay was shit, but I still don't regret going to the ceilidh. What I do regret is choosing to prioritise Facebook, LJ, emails, and every other form of procrastination over my essay for the entire week previously.

Went out on Friday despite lack of sleep. Started off with Callum's 18th birthday pub crawl. Was going to stop by Perdita's 21st between the Criterion and the Gin House, but got distracted by Vicky, Rob and Katie in the Criterion and by Ruth, Marianne, Debbie, Nicky and Hannah at Perdita's, so lost the pub crawl but caught up with them in the Union. Afterwards, went to Norah's 20th, which was fun. Had Socialism vs Anarchism discussions with Jonni et al. in the kitchen, while apparently the head of the St Andrews Conservative Society was in their living room (Jonni: "The WHAT of the WHAT is where?"). Good times.

Saturday was also a night of three different social functions I was meant to attend, but I didn't feel like going out so I watched movies in the TV room all night instead. Then came back and talked to Melissa on phone for nearly 2 hours, finally getting to bed sometime around 3. Hence sleeping through all the sunlight today.

The US is a weird place. In some ways, it really lacks a sense of identity as a culture--and seems to make up for this in other ways, like a person with low self esteem and an enormous ego. In some ways our culture is really cohesive. Steinbeck wrote that an American anywhere in the country is more similar to another American from a completely different part of the country than a British person is to someone from another part of Britain, even though they may be much more distant geographically. My observation seems to support this, to a certain extent.

I think this may partially stem from the fact that British culture grew up before all these advances in transportation made the spread of culture so possible and prevalent, leaving them with many more local cultural differences. The US, on the other hand, developed as these advances were taking place, so we as a people seem much more homogeneous. This is probably why there seem to be many more differences in culture and accent between the northern and southern US East Coast than there are between the East Coast and the Midwest. (I've never been out west, but I've heard it's pretty similar. Steinbeck says so, too.)

But for all our cultural continuity and even our new-found patriotism (seen, of course, in the display of flags and yellow ribbons rather than an actual involvement in the political process), we remain vividly aware of the fact that most of our ancestors came from Somewhere Else. Not that this awareness leads to a concern for Native rights... but that's another issue. (Related, yes, but not quite the point here.) Probably a majority of Americans identify not simply as Americans, but as __________-Americans. I don't just mean 'minorities'; most white people, if asked (or, more often, even if not asked), will proudly identify themselves as "Italian", "Irish", "Scottish", "Scotch-Irish" or "German". Now, if these people actually had a parent or even a grandparent who had recently immigrated to this country, I could understand their identity with their chosen "country of ancestry". Or even, maybe, if all of a person's ancestors actually came from one single country, they might have retained something, but even then it would be tempered with the fact that they'd been living in the US for the last however many years.

What gets me is the way people seem to seize on just one part of their ancestry and claim that as their identity. Because, of course, most Americans' ancestors come from a variety of countries. I happen to know that various ancestors of mine emigrated from France, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and England, with some Iroquois mixed in as well. It would be absolutely ridiculous for me to claim any one of these and call myself _______-American, particularly since the most recent emigree in my family came to this country more than 150 years ago. My maternal grandmother and her family are from Maine, but I don't claim to be "of Maine descent".

And yet, for all that I scorn it, I do sort of understand the sentiment. Because, examining my own prejudices, I find cause for this sort of grasping for roots. For instance, although several of my friends growing up were born in Raleigh, as I was, I inwardly considered myself to be somehow more "from here" because my father and grandmother had also grown up in Raleigh (even though I myself had grown up in Wake County's few remaining rural pockets), and my father's family has been in North Carolina for hundreds of years, whereas their families had moved to the area more recently, with the software companies. Because when one grows up in one place, but one's family is from somewhere else, one lacks a certain rooted feeling which comes from the stability of having grown up in the same place as one's parents and grandparents. Even I had this, to a certain extent, since my Mum and her family are all damn yankees, even though they moved to Raleigh when she was about 12, with the first wave of software folks for IBM.

I think the United States feels this on a country-wide level. This is what I mean about lack of identity; lack of roots. It's just that it seems like after 400 years, we'd be pretty much From Here. The wild horses and honeybees have acclimated, why can't we?