also, i never got my peanuts.
Urgh, I could give a detailed account of my weekend, but who needs that. Here is the abbreviated version:
Thursday
Left office 2pm. At airport in plenty of time for leisurely check-in and actual meal before boarding. Board on time. Sit at gate for 4+ hours. Miss not only own connection but all subsequent connections. Resign self to spending night in New Jersey (if flight ever takes off at all). Fortunately able to speak to parents before they board London-bound plane in Newark, and get them to do my Friday errands for me. Do eventually get to NJ, meet up with brother and sister-in-law -- also delayed, originally rescheduled on same flight following day, which wouldn't get them to London until Saturday morning, but through much perseverence and insisting that someone in DC had given me what they were asking for ("We can't do that, sir -- it's just not possible." "But I don't understand why you keep saying that, because it is possible, or they couldn't have done it for my sister." repeat ad lib./inf./naus.), managed to get onto Friday morning flight reaching London Friday night -- have some dinner at like midnight, grab four hours of sleep. None of us has luggage, by the way, because it was checked through to London and thus not tagged for release to us at Newark, and it's too late at night for anyone to be able to go get it for us.
Friday
Get to airport soon after 6am. Check in, track down luggage, adore people who put it in our hands so we can be sure it gets checked in for real, fly to London. Meet parents. Get to hotel. Go to sleep.
Saturday (two years to the day, incidentally, since I left the US in the first place)
Breakfast. Bus to Oxford. Couple of errands, but no chance of meeting people I'd intended to see (sorry, foulds! :-(). Lunch. College, sign register, pictures pictures pictures, ceremony. Turns out that receiving degrees at that ceremony were about a dozen people taking the D.Phil., a whole bunch taking the M.Sc., a small army taking the BA, four taking the M.St., and me, the only person in the room taking the M.Phil. This is relevant because all candidates for the same degree are called up at the same time to supplicate and so on, so it's normally x students and the relevant deans, and then for the second bit x students led in by one bedel. In my case, x=1. Quite literally sui generis. It was petrifying for 30 seconds approx. and then kind of cool. Dinner. Bus back to London. Sleep.
Sunday (two years to the day since I originally arrived in Oxford)
Breakfast. Airport. Flight to Newark. Flight to DC, on which (see above) I never got my peanuts. Home. V. tired.
Bought some books in the airport; I read Everyone Worth Knowing, the second novel from the girl who wrote The Devil Wears Prada, and it was v. similar; a little less autobiographical, and it felt like it, which I appreciated, but still kind of self-consciously stuck in a particular time. But the characters were more like characters and less like caricatures, so. Also picked up Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld. The writing isn't bad, although some of the editing is kind of doubtful -- there are places where she has exposition of things that were major plot points fifty pages earlier, as though she'd moved things around from one draft to the next and not kept up with her deleting, or originally written the novel as a series of short stories and not knit them together as thoroughly as she should -- but what's really got me is a couple of things. One, there are places where the protagonist's first-person narrative sounds so much like ellen_fremedon (in content, I mean, not in tone) that it's really all the way to startling. And two, here's a place where the heroine is fighting with her father, and I think we're supposed to see that he's right and the boarding school has changed her in negative ways and she's wrong to be embarrassed by him; and while I don't find her and the boarding-school setting completely sympathetic, I don't agree that the father is right, and in fact I was right with her on being embarrassed by him, because there are situations in which some things are Not Done, aren't there? I didn't go to boarding school, but I did go to private school, and I have a hard time being sorry that I feel like there are different ways to comport ourselves in different surroundings. I do agree that the protagonist doesn't handle her embarrassment with her father as she should; but I don't agree that she's wrong to feel it in the first place. And similarly, he's not precisely wrong to be unhappy with her, but he also handles it very, very badly. It's a conflict that occurs at the midpoint, both of the girl's education and of the book itself, so I suppose it's right that I should feel conflicted about it. It's just that I'm not accustomed to being so immediately affected by things I read -- I usually read from more of a distance, I think -- especially things that are more or less fluff pieces. (It's not a bubble-gum novel, but it's not going to win the Pulitzer, know what I mean?)
And then I'm thinking other things, like, it really bothers me that the word consistency means both the degree of firmness or viscosity of a thing and the quality of being consistent. Drives me nuts. :-) There was something else that bugged me, too, but I don't remember what it is at the moment.
Thursday
Left office 2pm. At airport in plenty of time for leisurely check-in and actual meal before boarding. Board on time. Sit at gate for 4+ hours. Miss not only own connection but all subsequent connections. Resign self to spending night in New Jersey (if flight ever takes off at all). Fortunately able to speak to parents before they board London-bound plane in Newark, and get them to do my Friday errands for me. Do eventually get to NJ, meet up with brother and sister-in-law -- also delayed, originally rescheduled on same flight following day, which wouldn't get them to London until Saturday morning, but through much perseverence and insisting that someone in DC had given me what they were asking for ("We can't do that, sir -- it's just not possible." "But I don't understand why you keep saying that, because it is possible, or they couldn't have done it for my sister." repeat ad lib./inf./naus.), managed to get onto Friday morning flight reaching London Friday night -- have some dinner at like midnight, grab four hours of sleep. None of us has luggage, by the way, because it was checked through to London and thus not tagged for release to us at Newark, and it's too late at night for anyone to be able to go get it for us.
Friday
Get to airport soon after 6am. Check in, track down luggage, adore people who put it in our hands so we can be sure it gets checked in for real, fly to London. Meet parents. Get to hotel. Go to sleep.
Saturday (two years to the day, incidentally, since I left the US in the first place)
Breakfast. Bus to Oxford. Couple of errands, but no chance of meeting people I'd intended to see (sorry, foulds! :-(). Lunch. College, sign register, pictures pictures pictures, ceremony. Turns out that receiving degrees at that ceremony were about a dozen people taking the D.Phil., a whole bunch taking the M.Sc., a small army taking the BA, four taking the M.St., and me, the only person in the room taking the M.Phil. This is relevant because all candidates for the same degree are called up at the same time to supplicate and so on, so it's normally x students and the relevant deans, and then for the second bit x students led in by one bedel. In my case, x=1. Quite literally sui generis. It was petrifying for 30 seconds approx. and then kind of cool. Dinner. Bus back to London. Sleep.
Sunday (two years to the day since I originally arrived in Oxford)
Breakfast. Airport. Flight to Newark. Flight to DC, on which (see above) I never got my peanuts. Home. V. tired.
Bought some books in the airport; I read Everyone Worth Knowing, the second novel from the girl who wrote The Devil Wears Prada, and it was v. similar; a little less autobiographical, and it felt like it, which I appreciated, but still kind of self-consciously stuck in a particular time. But the characters were more like characters and less like caricatures, so. Also picked up Prep, by Curtis Sittenfeld. The writing isn't bad, although some of the editing is kind of doubtful -- there are places where she has exposition of things that were major plot points fifty pages earlier, as though she'd moved things around from one draft to the next and not kept up with her deleting, or originally written the novel as a series of short stories and not knit them together as thoroughly as she should -- but what's really got me is a couple of things. One, there are places where the protagonist's first-person narrative sounds so much like ellen_fremedon (in content, I mean, not in tone) that it's really all the way to startling. And two, here's a place where the heroine is fighting with her father, and I think we're supposed to see that he's right and the boarding school has changed her in negative ways and she's wrong to be embarrassed by him; and while I don't find her and the boarding-school setting completely sympathetic, I don't agree that the father is right, and in fact I was right with her on being embarrassed by him, because there are situations in which some things are Not Done, aren't there? I didn't go to boarding school, but I did go to private school, and I have a hard time being sorry that I feel like there are different ways to comport ourselves in different surroundings. I do agree that the protagonist doesn't handle her embarrassment with her father as she should; but I don't agree that she's wrong to feel it in the first place. And similarly, he's not precisely wrong to be unhappy with her, but he also handles it very, very badly. It's a conflict that occurs at the midpoint, both of the girl's education and of the book itself, so I suppose it's right that I should feel conflicted about it. It's just that I'm not accustomed to being so immediately affected by things I read -- I usually read from more of a distance, I think -- especially things that are more or less fluff pieces. (It's not a bubble-gum novel, but it's not going to win the Pulitzer, know what I mean?)
And then I'm thinking other things, like, it really bothers me that the word consistency means both the degree of firmness or viscosity of a thing and the quality of being consistent. Drives me nuts. :-) There was something else that bugged me, too, but I don't remember what it is at the moment.