A Big Furry Hood

Yay, I've graduated!

Graduation was fun, and definitely quite full of pomp and ceremony. After a fantastic alcohol-filled graduation dinner and post-dinner party, the next morning you blearily figure out how to wear the big furry hood (fake fur, we are kind to the rabbits nowadays). Then everyone from your college walks in a bit of a parade towards Senate House, where we graduate in a lovely ceremony involving lots of latin and silly hats and holding of people's fingers. And then we take far too many photos. Tada!

London for under six quid

Have come down to London for a few days as the sheer blobbiness of Cambridge was getting a bit much. After way too much TV watching I decided I had better make the most of this scorching afternoon in my favourite city. But how do you spend an afternoon in London without lots of money? (Been shopping recently, therefore feeling guilty.)

1. Tube journey to Westminster -- 1.50
2. Tate Britain. I was thinking about the Constable exhibition they have on, but decided to be cheap and just wander around the main galleries instead.. by the time I'd got through them, even though they weren't large, I was tired and didn't really have the energy to look at the Constables. A pity but it saved me eight pounds, heh. But the free stuff was lovely. My favourites included the Turner gallery, a few Stubbs paintings (including one of a fuzzy English water spaniel), and a gorgeous rather geometric one of the English channel with the light playing on the water (Brett I think), which reminded me how much I love the sea and how much I'm looking forward to diving in August, albeit not in the English channel. I skipped the entire half of the gallery with modern art, to me if often simply seems angry and grotesque. Perhaps that is a valid point, but not a particularly pleasant one!
3. A long walk back along the Thames and up Whitehall. Walking past the houses of parliament with their imposing architecture and weight of history, what should I see but a whole herd of butt naked cyclists speeding by. It was hilarious and not a bad stunt I think, to protest the dependence on oil and the difficulty of cycling in London. I guess normally that difficulty doesn't include "getting your knob sun burnt" as another bemused passerby mentioned.
4. At Trafalgar Square, slightly more dubious street entertainment in the form of many, many football fans cavorting in the fountains in various states of undress, though not quite to naked cyclist protest level. The police looked a bit disgruntled. All in good fun, but as Radio 4 pointed out this morning, if we've stopped all the hooligans from heading to Germany, that means they're still here! All that celebration for an own goal. Hah!
5. By this time, very tired, so bowed to corporate evil and bought a caramel coffee frappuccino from Starbucks. Actually a very posh Starbucks on St Martin's Lane with this black looked-like-gilt-lacquer storefront. The air conditioning was a blast, but in combination with the frap soon drove me out into the streets of summer London again... 2.90!
6. To Chinatown. Buying supplies for a steamboat I'm having tomorrow. This expenditure not counted.
7. Home on the tube, another 1.50, accompanied all the way by another band of young white men in jerseys singing very badly. Only the beginning.

Blobbiness

Exams ended on Saturday. My last exams ever ever ever, thank goodness for never having to write an essay in an hour again ever ever ever, now I just need to write a phd thesis and defend it in front of a committee of experts, should be a piece of cake eh.

After the initial shock of having nothing to feel guilty about I am getting used to the new exhausting routine of sitting on a series of punts and grassy patches sunbathing over the day. I am feeling increasingly like a blob. But next week things start happening, the diary looks busier and far more exciting than it has for a month (wherein it has mainly consisted of: Tuesday - chapters 1-5 Behavioural Ecology).

Yay!

Capitulation

I gave in today: microwaveable pasta for dinner. So terribly unsatisfying, despite Marks and Sparks' best efforts, but I haven't really the energy to contemplate cooking much. In a way it will be a welcome break standing around in Sainsbury's (M+S was a random departure from the norm) trying to concoct minimal fuss meals. In my first year I managed it by dint of seriously cheap microwaveable fisherman's pie type things and ham with veggies I could throw together into a salad. It was quite fun actually, my twice daily trip to sainsbury's (once to buy soup for lunch, and once to buy dinner -- one must maximise the time in the fresh air).

After over a month of pretending to work in my room but in reality falling asleep on the sofa and playing some seriously mindless and addictive computer games, I have finally in the last week before exams gained the will-power to plonk myself in the departmental library for the better part of the day (er, only 2 days so far, but I am hoping for a few more!). Followed often by a stint in caffe nero after an early dinner so it is not a totally rigorous scheme (it's not just me! there's this other girl who has done exactly the same work hours in the cafe the past two nights, we even both get a latte and a muffin to stimulate the brain cells, she must be a kindred spirit), I am quite incapable of the sort of dogged hermeticism some others have. But anyway finally I am putting in some hours that I consider vaguely respectable -- less than a week to exams! What great advances I can make in my zoological knowledge in another 5 days is highly dubious, and I am honestly worried because I really did waste time for about a month in a seriously grades-destructive manner, but there is no point regretting not working before the opportunity to work is fully past. The worst bit is comparing my pitiful work over the past few weeks to the last two years' exam prep -- but, again, that is pointless worrying, even if like most pointless worrying it is impossible to stop doing it.

I wish my mummy were here to cook me nutritious brainy food. :) But I suppose in light of actually being 21 I must give up such thoughts and content myself with the ready-to-eat section of the supermarket. Mum did send me twelve whole bottles of brand's essence of chicken though. Screw three years of diligent (?!) study, it is the essence of chicken that will get me my first!

Heh heh. If only superstitions were true.

Bondage and Laughter

It has been one of those really unsatisfying days of work, but you really don't want to hear me moan about how boring yet frightening the whole exam situation is, so I will spare the world, and it is a good deed I say.

Despite ostensibly being at work all day (okay, more like all afternoon and then early part of the night, me being incapable of the 9 to 5 routine), I have managed to see two pieces of theatre as supposedly well-deserved breaks, though I'm not convinced I did deserve them.

Deborah Colker (a Brazilian contemporary choreographer) with her new show at the Barbican was amazing and if not particularly uplifting, at least it was entertaining, gasp-inducing and really rather sexy. The show was called 'Knots' and is quite rightly called the first ever bondage ballet. Lots of very lithe muscular dancers tying each other up, counterbalancing each other at impossible angles while attached by rope, bodily picking up trussed up companions to fling around in the air like so much lustful meat. It was acrobatic and terribly exciting to watch. Near the end of the first half a rope-less duet for two women amongst a forest of rope strands hanging down onto stage was one of the most beautiful moments in the whole show, following which two men and two women threw themselves into various piled up heaps, entangling and disentangling limbs and torsos only to entangle again. Set to Ravel, it was sexy rather than vulgar. In the second half the ropes disappeared, to be replaced by a huge Perspex box in and out of which dancers climbed like so many intent sexy monkeys. Much pressing against the perspex and dancing crazily around inside it.

In all it was a show which took innovative ideas and pushed right to the end with them in terms of the physical and visual boundaries of what you could possibly do, and the dancers were uniformly amazingly athletic, bendy, beautiful and bang on with every step. My two friends came away gushing and it certainly was an awesome sight, but I did feel there was something slightly missing which I couldn't quite pin down for a while. When I came home I read the reviews and they crystallised it for me -- it was a certain lack of innovative choreography, real new ways to move and new shapes to create that don't involve having to tie someone up first. I suppose it depends on whether you are looking for good dance, or good entertainment. I haven't anything to say against the latter (or I'd be far too snobbish for my own comfort), but the show did fall rather into the latter category. I've always been something of a purist as far as dance goes, and props while terribly exciting do cause you to neglect the actual dancing. Then again, Deborah Colker's shows are all prop driven (giant hamster wheels, stages littered with vases) I gather, so it is simply what she does, and she does it very well indeed, and I'd recommend anybody else to go see it if it turns up in your city.

Last night I went to see Simon Callow in Noel Coward's Present Laughter at the Arts Theatre. I'd not watched/read any Coward before, so I thought I would remedy the situation and rather thought I'd enjoy it -- and I did, tremendously! The plot is inconsequential really, it was all about perfect diction, sly innuendo, silk dressing gowns, flamboyant overacting, dashing arrogance you can't help loving, a neverending stream of one liners, and quite everybody falling in love with the protagonist. Loved it. Would love to see more Coward. It is a kind of entertainment that I sometimes feel a little premature in enjoying (my friend and I were sure we'd single handedly brought down the average age in the audience by a significant number of years), but I think I might as well resign myself already. (I listen to Radio 2, after all: jazz and showtunes, if that ain't old people music I don't know what is.) I've just skipped the whole drunken partying age and gone straight on to sparkling sophistication and maturity, ha ha!

need/want/love

Mostly want, actually, and then not even with any great conviction.

It being the month of my birthday here is a list of frivolity that I would like. I don't expect to get any of this. I'm just bored with revision! Waiting for the work related dreams to start -- when studying for A levels I think there was something subliminal about Giant Bouncing Phenols. Thank goodness it can only be about bird sex this time.

1. A first for my finals. Isn't it annoying when something you want can only be gotten through your own sheer hard work? You're so in control of the situation you only have yourself to blame if you don't get it.
2. Dive equipment - regulator system and BCD!
3. A sheep from market square (fluffy and wooden for the uninitiated, not actually bleating and edible). Not the hot pink one called Barbie.
4. Any DVD of a Mats Ek production. Actually any ballet/contemp dance DVD. Cloudgate theatre?
5. Tickets to the Royal Ballet's June 75th anniversary event, heh.
6. Errr.... er...
7. Man I am bad at wanting things ;)
8. Classical music CDs. No 'Ultimate cool classical compilation No. 2' PLEASE. Something solid. Some Brahms perhaps. Mozart/Puccini operas would probably also go down well. Anything goes, I own nothing but The Planets and Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet, I am pathetic. I am also partial to cello and piano music. I think.
9. A new dance poster?
10. Books, if you want to be boring but still appreciated! Maybe Ian McEwan (not Atonement or Saturday), or Jonathan Safran Foer's short story collection. I will read most things if they are not inspirational or nonfiction.
11. Pretty girly things will not be sneered at.

I think that is good enough, I am having lots of trouble with this! I am sorry the list turned out to be really rather useless in doing anything but reminding everybody that it's my birthday soon. ;) I tried. Ah, me and my unmaterialistic view of life. Love, contentment, and lots of parma ham is all I really want. Hah!

Oh, the Guilt.

One of those write-off days as far as work is concerned, so I'm just completely giving up now. I could, of course, be dutifully consolidating my very confused view of parent offspring conflict and the battle of the sexes, in glorified graphed out optimality model / Evolutionarily Stable Strategy format, but you know. Literary stardom calls. Hnah.

There isn't much to write about in the usual attempt to wring something interesting out of my life, as revision is wobbling along rather fitfully between long bouts of procrastination and guilt (I do not so much take breaks from revising as study between my main occupation of breaks) so randomness follows.

I was sitting in Caffe Nero today, pretending to work; two distinguished looking old men at another table chatting over coffee and muffins. Got to thinking, one rarely separates 'distinguished' and 'old man' here in Cambridge. They all look like they have headed entire departments and are chatting not about their pensions, but about the next Nobel Prize and which of their friends might win it. (This doesn't really apply to old women here so much, but that is a whole other morass which I won't jump into, I'm not entirely sure what brand of feminism I subscribe to, anyway -- so probably the confused brand.) It is something I suppose you find in any academic institution and because the whole of Cambridge essentially is an academic instution (take that, townies), it is perhaps more noticeable. I like it, quite a lot really. When I am 60 I want to be having coffee and croissants and discussing the new wave of thinking about fish behaviour. They never stop, these people, never seem to stop being excited; thinking about things isn't something that you stop doing at 65 when people decide to stop paying you to sit at a desk every day -- so much the better, therefore, if thinking about things is what you do for a living. This drives me a lot more than thoughts of retiring in wealth and going to the ballet every evening, really it does. Perhaps 5 years into my academic career, poor and tiring of the fish (no!), I will wish I had just gotten a real job like everyone else. But hopefully not.

Not particularly original thoughts, but I must do all I can to convince myself dull academia isn't dull after all!

By the way, anybody still out there? ;)

Cake blisters

Spent a few days in London doing very little work indeed. But 'twas fun, I re-read two Pratchett books in four days -- a sorely needed break from Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man which I am wading through oh so slowly, I really can't deal with more than four continuous pages about Hell and Stephen's rather annoying internal battles with his sin, his heinous sin, blahblahblah. And also spent over five continuous hours doing absolutely nothing but cooking.

I haven't the photos but we made my second sister a going away feast as she is moving to the Big Apple. It consisted of all the most labour intensive recipes we could find, by accident rather than any sort of masochistic urge. We made:
1. Lamb and turnip stew (an Indian one). This spent about 3 hours on the stove. :)
2. Okra stuffed with spiced finely chopped onions. These did turn out nice, but I'm really not convinced they're worth the effort. I spent literally hours sitting there stuffing these damn things and started having all sorts of thoughts about stuffing, viz. is somebody employed to stuff fishball mixture into all those stuffed okras and chillis we get for yong tau foo, and are there machines that stuff those rambutans you get with cubes of pineapple in them? (When I was very very little I once asked an unsuspecting family how they got rambutans to grow with pineapple cubes in them... what, it was a valid question okay.)
3. Lentils and spinach. A scant hour to make!
4. Kulfi (Indian ice cream). Made from first principles, meaning hours of the milk reducing on the stove. Seriously yummy stuff, and quite healthy -- no cream in Indian ice cream! With almonds and pistachios. And some melon balls. I didn't know there were such devices as 'melon ballers', but you learn something new everyday.
4. Choc'lit cake! Yummy, yummy choc'lit cake with only about 12 oz sugar and quarter of a kilo of butter and 200 g chocolate and we're only talking cake here, nevermind the chocolate butter ganache and the mounds of icing that went piled on top of it. I got shortlived cake blisters on my right hand from all the attempts to get a whole bowl of coarse sugar and butter 'light and fluffy', but it was all worth it! We put white royal icing around it and piped on little green dots and a good luck clover (which was hilariously wonky). It turned out to be huge, and my other sister is also off on holiday, so I had to bring the remains back to Cambridge. I have been feeding chunks of it to friends to prevent myself from eating it all.

I think I think about food too much. ;)

Oh yes, I've decided to stay on in Cambridge. This news is a little stale now but I think I did tell all the most important people immediately so I didn't bother to write about it. This dear little town has grown on me, but most importantly, I wanted to stay so that I could work on my beloved fish back home in Malaysia (my supervisor did his own PhD on the same system and has a lot of contacts). It's something I know I would love to do, and I thought why take a gamble on the unknown when I can have what I want now. Maybe it's playing it safe, but I'm happy with my decision ultimately -- there is a lot of personal peace in it.

Meanwhile it's back to the work. I am now trying to write an essay plan about why females often copulate with more than one male. Doing behavioural ecology does funny things to your view of the world. Did you know that in reed buntings which appear on the surface to be monogamous, 86% of a male's reproductive success comes from extra marital affairs? And that in dunnocks (a little brown bird), females do this wonderful balancing act where they shag two males just enough so that both males help to look after their chicks, but they make sure to shag the alpha male more so that the chicks are of better genetic quality -- the beta male often ends up helping to raise offspring which just aren't his. Ah, the joy of internal fertilization... (beats spewing eggs into the sea any day, surely). Ahem.

Illustrated culinary adventures

Some recent things that have come out of my very own little gyp room (kitchenette). It is not to be sniffed at and remarkably well equipped for being small enough that only one person can actually stand in it. And it has been helped by the likes of Gary Rhodes, my Mum, many years of eating, and the team that wrote something called the Food of China.

1. Salmon with a tomato and herb salad (and some potatoes thrown in for carb value)


2. Roast chicken with sauteed potatoes (and A LOT of salad thanks to K). I forgot to take a photo of the bird so here it is in the process of being mutilated by Daniel. So we aren't very good at carving...


3. Panfried pork fillet, with home made chips, lemon herb sauce and random green bits.


4. Roast pork with crackling, home made chips and spinach/tomato salad. Also made an apple sauce as well as the trusty Bisto gravy. No photo because I was too busy eating.

5. Hainan Ji Fan!! Okay so I've never seen Hainan Ji Fan served with a beautifully arranged ring of cucumber before but I was feeling decorative... not, of course, anything like Nam Heong but it's actually recognisably tasting of what it is supposed to taste like.

Oh, the beauty

Saw Kenneth Macmillan's Romeo and Juliet at the Royal Opera House on Thursday. Alina Cojocaru and Johann Kobborg. Forced myself out of bed at the unheard of time of 9am to queue briefly for day tickets -- got one in the stalls circle, so a sideways on view but close to the stage. Turned out to be a gorgeous place to sit, as Macmillan's ballets call for acting as well as perfect pirouettes, and from that close the acting is visible -- and what acting it was. Not that they are mutually exclusive: his steps are always an illustration of a personal emotion. Whether Lady Capulet's soul-shattering grief, clenched fists beating the ground over Tybalt; or Romeo's sheer joy (perhaps with a tinge of macho showing off?) at the beginning of the balcony scene, turns in attitude and exuberant tours jetes; or Juliet's stiffness as she dances with Paris after her lover has left with the morning sun.

It has been a while since a ballet has affected me so deeply, not since Cranko's Onegin several years ago, also with Alina. (Mayerling was for me a bit too much; syphilictic madness I can't relate to as much I can love..) Alina is so small she is totally believable as Juliet, but not just in the girlish first scenes -- she grows so much with the ballet, it is apparent already as she begs Romeo not to leave; as she sits for that interminable time on her bed gathering her courage to run to Friar Lawrence; and it is truly heartrending when she awakes to find Romeo dead, kisses his lifeless lips. Kobborg's Romeo was interesting, heroic but with a careless side, a dark side; his dancing was clean and perfect. The marketplace scenes had so much little detail for each corps dancer you never tired of picking out new vignettes happening in a corner of the stage. The sheer power of the balcony scene, lifted by Prokofiev's soaring music, confirmed it for me as my favourite piece of ballet ever. And in Act III as the tragedy wound its way to its conclusion, I thought that the power of ballet to tell a story and to move audiences surely must be at its pinnacle here. It was not Shakespeare made pretty and put en pointe; it was Shakespeare itself, dance proving a more than able replacement for words -- and perhaps more global.

An encounter with geese

The tree outside my window is covered with new leaves and I am just about to put the winter coat into the closet: sure signs that spring is upon us. So I went to pay a visit to my favourite "isn't Cambridge just gorgeous" spot, Jesus Lock, and took some pictures -- of geese rather than ducks or swans this time, in my bid to photograph a diverse mix of Cambridge waterfowl. Just the moorhens to go now.

And on the way home I met a pair of doggies and their owner.

The simple things.

I am feeling expansive and warm; my linguine bolognese (I prefer linguine to spaghetti just because it cooks faster!) dinner was one of those surprisingly satisfying ones (every so often my cooking astounds me and sadly it is always by pure luck) followed by a healthy 'king of crunch' Braeburn, leaving me feeling particularly smug about my well balanced and very cheap student meal. Go me. Also I am looking forward to the 5 week holiday that I've just embarked upon in gastronomic terms, having just bought Gary Rhodes' 'keeping it simple'. Lots of pretty pictures and very usefully laid out. As a student I really cannot be bothered to make things which take 4 hours and about 30 ingredients to make, and am much more concerned with learning to roast the perfect chicken than how to dress it in the celebrity chef's equivalent of McCartney and Manolo -- usually involving spices which I can just about spell but don't have a faintest idea about the taste!

Forced myself to the library this morning to meet a friend for something after 6 hours of sleep (Yahoo! arcade games are too damn addictive), then sat fairly productively there for about 4-5 hours with a lunchbreak at my beloved German cafe. It was a pain struggling very slowly through all these papers, what does intragenomic conflict have to do with behavioural ecology anyway, blahdeblah, but I persevered with the help of a 35p mug of coffee from the tearoom when I found myself watching the bloke next to me falling asleep over Albert's The Cell more than my paper (and no, he wasn't a very interesting sight either). Ah, we scientists. So sacrificial. So damn keen. Another friend came into the library which was being used as a holding room for PhD interviews and looked so bored I found Dr. Seuss' The Lorax for her to read (it is on our overnight loan shelves -- recommended Conservation Biology Module reading!), unfortunately then her interviewer came to get her while she was reading Dr. Seuss, I hope I am not the cause of a bad impression!! Oops. She was trying to read the current issue of Nature before Dr. Seuss I think; obviously it failed as stimulating pre-interview reading material.

Doing several hours of work -- after multiple botched attempts on previous days when I got up about lunchtime and then didn't get to the dept so did no work whatsoever -- made me feel positively angelic so I wandered around in Borders and bought myself Mr. Rhodes (whom I shall always know as the perfect poached egg man having first seen him on telly making one) and also Ian McEwan's Saturday. Read a few pages before dinner, there is something incredibly emotionally and intellectually satisfying and pleasurable about sinking into a great book. Like many other authors whom I enjoy he is a master at the detail of a life (extra)ordinary, I don't pretend to understand why the sentence "The overfull litter baskets suggest abundance rather than squalor; the vacant benches set around the circular gardens look benignly expectant of their daily traffic - cheerful lunchtime office crowds, the solemn, studious boys from the Indian hostel, lovers in quiet raptures or crisis, the crepuscular drug dealers, the ruined old lady with her wild, haunting calls." can make me smile, pause to think, enjoy -- but enjoy I do. The simple things: food, books, the lack of study related guilt.

Spring is being very reluctant to arrive and I dearly hope it changes soon. I want to sit out by the Cam with my book and feed the duckies and feast on the sight of the daffodils in bloom across the bank. I am aware now I think that my time in Cambridge may well be fast drawing to a close (I am leaning ever more perceptibly towards Princeton, for a new start) and I suppose like everybody else I want my fill of this beautiful town before I uproot myself to another one.

Oh yes, thanks for the comments everyone. :)

Ah, tradition

Is a gorgeous thing when it involves fancy schmancy dinners consisting of:

Melon and Parma Ham w/ Pflanzreben Riesling Rolly-Gassmann 1998 (white wine)
Scotch Fillet Steak, Red Wine and Shallot Sauce, Herb Scented Potatoes, Tomatoes and Mushrooms w/ Domaine Marcous Chateauneuf du Pape 1998 (red wine)
Individual Chocolate and Hazelnut Mousse with Coffee Sauce w/ Domain de la Rectorie Benyuls 2001 (dessert wine)
Cheese w/ Warre 1983 (port)
Coffee
Amaretti Biscuits

Which is why I am very very pleasantly full now and also very slightly woozy! College Commem Feast was gorgeous as I suppose it must always be, and I think I had a far more convivial time this year -- less time to be stressed out about talking to Nobel Laureates and also I am probably far better at dealing with those four confusing glasses of alcohol and all the cutlery and all the standing up and sitting down and looking at ease with pomp and ceremony and laughing politely during speeches and making small talk with important old men. I chatted rather pleasantly to Profs Handley and Davidson (whose place names I have stolen as a memento!!) on my right and left about conservation, fish and fluid dynamics, China, archaeology, US vs UK PhDs, the number of years they have been to commemm feasts (40! have yet to beat Aaron Klug from last year), Darwin, David Attenborough, bilingualism, women in academia, how to name species in Latin, Malaysia, classics, etc. etc. etc. I think my social skills are far more attuned to retired professors than Brits my age -- perhaps not quite so bad a thing?! I was lucky enough to be sitting at high table again where you get to exercise such rarified skills as talking about the world in general rather than Cambridge drinking holes and what one is doing over the next holidays, and also can now claim to have sat only 3 places away from the Master himself. (Although my sister chatted to Sir Michael Atiyah so I can't quite beat that!)

Also at the feast:
Toasts to the queen, the college benfactors, the master, etc.
The choir singing God Save The Queen, Pastime with good company (written by dear old Henry VIII himself, our founder), John Brown's Body -- I did not know they sing the same songs every year!
Speeches by the Rt Hon Oliver Letwin (son in law of the nice old bloke sitting next to me) -- tolerably funny, and the Master -- not so funny.

I came back from London just in time for the dinner, after a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful week with the Boyfriend mostly here in Cambridge ostensibly finishing off my term (I have had my last ever examinable lecture EVER, woo!) but really just spending many happy hours, well, being in love. I am such a sickening sap. But I know you will read this when you get home so what the hell. :)

Huh.

So today was absolutely beautiful, still is. I woke sometime after noon, lazed around, talked to the boyfriend, refused to do my essay.

Thought I would go pay a visit to the duckies, I have missed them dearly, haven't been to see them properly since term started. (Also I had several pieces of stale bread in my room which I had to get rid of.) The walk there was peaceful, through the late afternoon shopping crowd, then down Portugal Place and across Jesus Green. Families playing football and collies fetching. Everything green and crisp and it seemed for a while that the Met Office mayn't have been quite so utterly stupid with deciding spring has already arrived. I love this town and it is so difficult to consider whether to be gung ho and young and must-see-more-of-this-world and uproot myself to America (albeit New England, so it is not as if I am going to Texas; I'm not sure any force could make me spend 5 years in Texas actually), or just stay here in lovely old decrepit England with the ducks et al.

The ducks didn't want any of my stale bread! :| I watched them a while, but not long before coming back. Rejection from poultry is hard to take.

Academia vs Actually Getting a Job

The woes of being a finalist, AKA the complicated affairs of my potential career which has taken over my life for the past few days (or really the past year). I've taken liberties with the chronological order of things as the real order is just mind boggling, really.

1. So since all that fishy watching seemed to be going so well, I thought okay, let's watch fish for the rest of my life, it is pretty good fun, I've been very lucky with my undergrad research efforts and may turn out not to suck at it, people will think I am very clever and it will make my parents happy.
2. I apply for PhD positions at Cambridge and Princeton. Much stress.
3. I GET PhD positions at Cambridge (if funding appears) and Princeton (with funding). Much happiness. On balance, after a lot of faffing, I decide the Princeton PhD is probably a better one.
4. I start to have doubts about whether or not watching fish (or zebras or red winged blackbirds or whatever) is the way to go. What about the real world? I've never really given anything else a go. Ooh, exciting, could actually get a job which might possibly involve some creativity, designs and words (I swear scientific articles aren't really writing in any sense of the way I love it), a real product you can hold in your hands, living in a vibrant city that breathes with things that happen, actually get paid more than a pittance, and generally be a part of the Real World. On the other hand the Real World could suck and I might hate it. The point really is, I don't know which.
5. Exploring the Real World requires taking a year off, knocking on many many doors, getting rejected almost as many times (hopefully only almost!), having the tenacity of... of... a queen termite, but in the end being rewarded by definitely a better understanding of what the Real World and Real Jobs are like, probably a better idea of what I like and don't like, and possibly a newfound passionate interest in making magazines or advertisements or whatever it may be.
6. So, can the PhD wait (to be taken up after a year, or not)?
7. Princeton's blunt answer is no, and also I will lose this funny fellowship thing they have decided to give me, and in doing this I will piss the department off (apparently they can't give it to anyone else so the dept will lose the fellowship money which comes from the university), and possibly bias my chances should I decide to re-apply. I mean, people are human, I don't blame them (much).
8. Cambridge looks (so far) like it will let me defer; also should I decide to go back into academia I could always apply to other universities, of which many excellent ones do exist, I know it in my heart ;)
9. Lots of people tell me I am young, I should take the year off, it leaves my options open
10. Princeton faculty try to persuade me that should I go there I will be brilliantly motivated, I will do a great PhD with a department that they seem to think I will fit very well into, etc. (but of course they do) And I believe them, I don't think it's in any way a bad option, I think it could be the start of a brilliant career - but is it one I want?!
11. I am Confoozled.
12. I decide I am going to talk to as many people as possible about their experience in the non-academic industries I am vaguely interested in -- if it still excites me, perhaps it is worth closing the Princeton door.

There we go. Still generally Confoozled although I would dearly like to be less Confoozled at least within the next few weeks, mainly because being Confoozled is psychologically tiring and takes up a lot of time that could be better spent in trying to pass my final exams, or actually feeding ducks. Any thoughts much appreciated, although the situation only seems to get more complex by the day, and I don't think many of you actually still read this blog ;)

Possibilities

What do you do on a Saturday evening in when you don't feel like being in the least productive because you've managed to wring an essay out of your braincells over several piously hardworking hours being the sole sad person in the Zoology library? And you feel much better both physically and emotionally after the rollercoaster of the first half of term? And you haven't caught up with most of your friends for aeons? Reach out, of course. But none of them are obligingly online at this moment so I am filling in some of the big gaping holes in this little blog'o'mine.

My dance show was a lovely success but then it is every year; producing it really is simply a matter of making sure it happens, and then in some kind of amazing artistic emergent properties kind of phenomenon it just grows wings and turns into a really exciting and visceral thing which sells all the seats in the theatre towards the end of the 5 night run. Much crazy printing of programmes in the Trinity computer room (which my co-producer and I colonised for several hours over several days) in order to save money. Much dramatic dancery horror in my toe bleeding all over stage (two nights in a row before I clued in and bandaged it to within an inch of its life), although apparently the audience couldn't tell and in true professional fashion I couldn't either till I got down to the dressing room (I caused my stage manager much anguish because her health and safety record needs to be squeaky clean for her satisfaction). Much interesting talk in the dressing rooms viz. whether or not one wears underwear under tights, and whether or not this is disgusting. Some comment on how ubiquitous costume item appears to be "girl boxers" from topshop -- not sure if topshop knows it is a lifesaver for dancers who require big pants to protect their modesty. Much laughter last night when one of our dear dancers simply didn't make it onto stage for a short 40 second interlude; the remaining two of us simply danced it without her in a very bemused "what the fuck?" fashion; and dear E didn't realise till we came downstairs afterwards to find her standing and ready to go on. Many, many, many boxes of chocolates (yet to get through them). And of course bucketloads of beautiful, virtuoso, exciting and original dance.

Photos http://www.grisby.org/Photos/335/index.html and http://www.cantabphotos.com/view.php?album=claude/060124202125

The next few weeks went by in a cloud really and I'm not very sure where they went. I spent two weekends in London with Mum and sisters doing lovely exciting things like having Chinese New Year dinner (general steamboat yumminess), watching Mary Poppins the musical (excellent, I'd recommend it to anyone), and walking the doggie. The weeks in between I tried to do some work and also spent much time stressing about my interview at Princeton, which was this weekend just past. The interview itself (or rather the 6 interviews) went okayish, one can't really tell with all this American friendliness. Got caught in the huge snowstorm -- whilst seeing two feet of snow dumped on unsuspecting Princeton was beautiful (you couldn't actually see the porch steps of my host's house when I left), it wasn't so pleasant for me as I'd just at that point spent over 12 hours in bed feverish, aching and listless and then had to spent almost another 12 hours in the airport (drugged up on Tylenol, alternately reading Brokeback Mountain and Cosmopolitan, just what every sick person needs for the airport really, a short story about gay cowboys and a magazine filled with half naked blokes), and on the plane. It had been parked well away from the terminal building so they had to snowplough it out, resulting in something like 5 hours of delay, followed by another 2 hours while they tried to pump water back into the plane (it'd all been removed for fear of it freezing over), only to find the pump was blocked by ice -- or that is as much as I caught from the apologetic captain while dozing fitfully under my blanket in my little cattle class space as we sat on the runway. At least my illness helped me sleep the entire flight away, but I can't say I was overly impressed by my New England send off!

Far better now, just catching up with work (much more to do this weekend really) and speculating feverishly about what to do if I suddenly go utterly bonkers, decide not to do a PhD and dedicate my little life to the greater pursuit of knowledge about fishies for no pay, and actually join the real world upon graduation (or at least after a few months of gallivanting around watching fish for pleasure). It is quite exciting really because having a degree in Zoology doesn't really point you towards any job alternatives from watching fish, so everything is open. Having once again convinced myself that I simply fail to be interested in the jobs that will make me lots of money (they are mostly about making lots of money, which, strangely enough, doesn't fascinate me), I have been flirting with ideas of perhaps going into science communication (science writing, editing, broadcasting, etc.) -- very much an in thing to do for disillusioned scientists, it sounds so exciting, doesn't it? But I am first waiting to see whether this never before heard of urge to actually get a Real Job is only a temporary insanity or not -- perhaps a PhD offer will come in and I will be back to my geeky world of libraries, endless arcane papers with crazy equations, and little beady eyed fish. I have only had this new craziness start for a few days (spending entire days in Princeton trying to sound like science is my all consuming lifelong passion has had a reverse effect), so don't worry, I haven't done anything drastic -- yet! Will try to keep you updated on where the whims of my fickle mind take me. Back to where the Clever People sit in tearooms discussing the niceties of zebra social society models, my parents will urge me. Ah well.

Being young and full of potential is usually a good thing; when it makes you feel like you could do anything, when it's all exciting, when you could jump off a cliff and never crash. At other times it is frighteningly open and stressful. I suppose it is all a matter of knowing the glass is half full and that it is up to you to fill it -- you might as well go about it with a verve. K observed to me today that it is the next 5 years of our lives that will really be the exciting ones, as we all make decisions and start to carve out our adult spaces (before we all get married have kids and become utterly boring). Tonight I'm feeling pretty good about that.

I'm alive -- barely

Been away for far too long, just thought I would post a couple of lines to let everyone know I'm still around... Got very caught up with the dance show, not doing enough work mainly because mum visited (yay!) so spent a couple of weekends in London, and then the weekend just past flew to New Jersey for an interview. It was a shockingly tiring weekend particularly with some 2 feet of snow resulting in a 7 hour flight delay (in some senses it has been a shockingly tiring month), I am now down with some kind of truly evil flu kind of thing (apparently it is too severe to be just a cold, according to the medical student ;)). Need desperately to get better to I can get my act together and start sorting out my work and last minute PhD funding applications -- but having spent literally all of today in bed (other than dragging myself to a morning lecture) doesn't bode well.

But anyway I shall not wallow in self pity -- off to a dance rehearsal where I will sit and watch because yesterday I made the mistake of actually dancing, which resulted later in a coughing fit that felt rather like I was coughing my insides out (like sea cucumbers!), so it may not be such a good idea really... Here is wishing my immune system perseverance.

I hope you are all well and in far better health than me :)

Late night nostalgia

Sometimes I think I was at my best when I was about 15, and it's all been a casual slide downhill since then. This is, of course, only the ought-to-have-been-expected result of being thrown into the real world (insofar of course as this venerable university can in any way be considered real at all), where popularity is not defined by grades and you no longer have to fold (not roll) your socks down such that the width of the fold is at least 1.5cm. Ankle socks with frogs on are now allowed, thank goodness. (I don't actually own any ankle socks with frogs on, although a debating coach when I was 15 did, and we loved her for it.)

But then again, that is too pessimistic a view. So here we go, a little of the good and bad (in all honesty, cross my heart etc.) approximately five years on. (I think I lost some years in between, mostly to exam fever and non-salaried copywriting drudgery, but nevermind that.)

THE BAD (because I am a sucker for happy endings)
1. When did it cease to be easy, socially? I never expected to even have to think about it. People are lovely when you get to know them -- underwater, next to sheep poo, in dance class -- but I have yet to get the hang of the whole making friends over a pint business. This does very little for one's self-esteem, which does little for small talk abilities, which makes it one big vicious circle (on the plus side, I have now developed very thick antisocial skin).

2. Goodbye hobbies. I spend more time sitting cynically with coffee and Stephen Fry (or Begon, Townsend and Harper's Ecology when all else fails) then industriously charcoal-ing or harping on about sunsets and apples. So perhaps I was never destined to be Whistler or Wordsworth, and it happens to everyone, but still there is a bit of a loss.

THE GOOD (it was a pleasant surprise that that didn't last long)
1. Scientific geekdom is a pleasant place to be antisocial or not in, as one wishes, particularly when you have the prospect of doing most of it underwater in the Indo West Pacific. Fish never expect you to be clever, witty and sexy (or maybe they do, but you don't particularly mind disappointing them). And they can be reliably depended upon to do interesting things (swim, feed, have sex, lay eggs, fan air over nests, brood young in mouths whilst starving, etc.), unlike some human specimens. You just need to have the right frame of mind.

2. 20 poems. (I'm only ever cryptic about You Know Who, no not the scary evil wizard, yes I know that's a bad joke.)

3. So yes, I've lived a little in some other country out of SE Asia and not from mummy's lap, as I was itching to do when I was 15. Some of it has been breathtakingly beautiful, most of it has been grey, much of it has been peaceful in a solitary kind of way. The thick skin developing and the delayed teenage angst has been largely dealt with. So now I can feed my duckies and do my own laundry in peace (huh, where did that combination of riveting activites come from?). On balance, it's been nice. And I'm far from done -- the HDB towers will not take me yet! (As I've tried to explain to many people, Singapore simply doesn't strike me as a place to be, well, young.)

4. Old friends are truly wonderful beings. I was silly to half-expect to move on entirely, and I'm very very glad that I haven't.

There we go, more goods than bads without even trying. It is too late, I will be sleepy tomorrow morning, I hope this entry doesn't sound awfully cryptic and self-serving tomorrow such that I will be tempted to delete it. Happy Chinese New Year everyone if I don't get round to another entry before then!

The Big Apple

Just a redirect to a group blog at http://christmasnyc.blogspot.com: me and four 4/1 friends in New York over Christmas and New Year's; be warned that you may understand very little of it!

Back in Cambridge now and absolutely loving it. Ah, the comfort of my room, the heavy English coins, the nonstop drizzle, the 4pm loss of what daylight dared to poke its face through the clouds. It feels like home. Back on the show production job; academic work shall soon raise its guilt-inducing and frankly quite terrifying head.

Fish and the Big Freeze

It is Cold. Every ten years or so a particularly hard winter comes along. Or it is yet another manifestation of climate change and the intensification of extreme weather. Or the Gulf Stream has reversed (although I fail to see very badly CGed wolves running around our frozen streets a la The Day After Tomorrow). Or whatever. At any rate, it is Cold, it has been Cold for two weeks now and it is only getting Colder. Yesterday Cambridge saw its first flakes of snow, while lots of people had to abandon their cars on some moor somewhere else in England which got rather more snow. Pretty, but it needs to snow a hell of a lot more before it is worth this Cold!

I went into the lab today to do a couple of hours of fishy work (it's back to the spiky sticklebacks!) and discovered that I made a mistake on Friday, so I have to re-do another couple of hours of videoing, so I am going back into the lab early tomorrow morning (Sunday!) to do it. All I could think at the point was, I have too much scientific integrity for my own good. At least I was in a good mood today and therefore didn't swear at the fish concerned (which I did do on Monday although I thought I never would, the stress of final year work and PhD applications and all is making me go slightly insane, and why wouldn't these bloody fish eat the bloody bloodworms I was charmingly pippetting right onto their noses), but rather just amusedly thought myself a bit of a git.

Went for dinner tonight with CL and neither of our cards got accepted, so he very charmingly legged it out into the Cold to get money from an ATM (which turned out to have run out of cash so he had to nick some off a passing friend) while I sat in the restaurant and deleted old messages on my phone and pretended that I do in fact have good credit. Haha. Odd really, card's never been rejected before.

Might have had to do with rather large deposit for an Operation Wallacea expedition I am trying to go on next summer. Operation Wallacea is a group of several hundred UK scientists and students who have established field sites in Indonesia, Honduras, Egypt and Cuba, to which they go every summer for 10 weeks to survey biodiversity, plan, implement and monitor conservation schemes, and generally study reef and forest systems. I am planning to go to the Indonesian marine site (the island of Hoga off Sulawesi), to act as a Research Assistant. I hope also to get my Dive Master qualification, and subsequently provide DM cover for hard coral and reef fish survey teams and students doing dissertations on cleaner wrasse behaviour, which I would also be interested in investigating myself. This is all very pertinent to my future career as I am hoping to do a PhD working on coral reef fish behaviour, linking it to population structure and conservation implications. The expedition will cost me GBP1750 and I am going to be actively fundraising so that I can go on it -- if I don't raise a significant portion of this money I'm simply not going to be able to afford to go, although I would love to! As a small portion of my personal fundraising effort I am hereby announcing a Present Amnesty: for Christmas this year and my 21st birthday next May, do NOT give me presents if you were going to -- contribute to my Operation Wallacea fund instead! Any little is really appreciated.

Submitting the Princeton application tonight if I have the guts (and my credit is no longer shot). Fingers crossed. May they invite me to interview in the midst of the New England winter, I can chat to them about the Meaning of Cold.