Sing It, Grandma

I looked at my bank statement today and realized that I've spent over $200 since Friday. Whoops! I think I'm finally done stockpiling dishes, kitchen supplies, office supplies, and toiletries for the year, though.

The upside is that my suite looks, well, sweet. I'm in a two-room suite at the top of a fifteenth century turret, with carpet and a leather-topped desk and a floral-print armchair and sofa and a little, possibly non-functional tiled fireplace. And best of all, it's got enough shelves and empty walls for me to display all the junk I've brought back from around the world without looking like the pawn shop of Babylon. (I've got Moroccan dishes, Filipino masks, Malaysian prints, postcards from Switzerland, and a Slovenian vase on display. It looks suspiciously like a flower child's version of Pier 1.)

It's all just stuffy and tasteful enough that it could pass for my grandmother's apartment. Hopefully, this kind of grandmother:



(I shamelessly stole that from Bob.)

In Which I Drink the Wine of the Grapes of Wrath

Being the dork that I am, I skipped the first half of President's Drinks tonight to watch the streaming coverage of the federal government taking the economy behind the woodshed and emptying a shotgun into it. I thought about going to stockpile canned goods, but I've got a half a box of All Bran, a couple of plums and apples, a half-loaf of bread, rice cakes, and some jam, so I'm all set for, what, two days? Maybe?

Regardless, I went to the Turf instead. Sarah and Nikki are back to turn in their dissertations before they go the way of Abby, Debs, Abby L, Ambika, Tanmay, Remi, Dwayne, Dave, Darcy, Bernadette, and leave Oxford like pretty much EVERYONE ELSE in my social universe from last year. (We've got a motley crew of hardened survivors - Erika, R. Dave, Jamie, myself - but the field has definitely been culled.) I love that when my grandkids are like, "what did you do on Black Monday?" I'll be like, "oh, you know, rearranged my furniture, bought a pair of trainers, killed a pint of cider with a couple of friends." I also went to RBS to see if they could refund a couple of bogus charges to my account, but I might just stop asking because they probably need the money more than I do. (I should point out that the shoes are wicked cute, though.)

At the Turf, somebody cracked a joke about PETA asking Ben and Jerry's to use breast milk in its ice cream, which was admittedly one of the odder stories of this week. But then I thought about it, and maybe we've just reached the same point that Rosasharn does in the Grapes of Wrath when she up and breastfeeds the old man in the barn. Except the only lesson we learned over the past eighty years is how to mix it with tiny chocolate fish and name it after a rock band.

Better Luck Next Time

On September 27, 2007, I arrived at Heathrow jet-lagged and overwhelmed after taking the red-eye from DC with 30 other students. As we went through immigration, the joyless woman at the counter was like, 'what are you studying?' and when I told her it was anthropology, she furrowed her brow and was like, 'and what is that?' And I wanted to sigh and say, 'lady, your guess is as good as mine,' but instead I mumbled and rambled until she just stamped my passport and let me through.

As everyone else trickled through to the baggage carousel, I remember going to the ATM and withdrawing a bunch of pounds, and then walking over to AMT for a cup of coffee. I looked like absolute hell, and when I finally got to the front of this huge line, the barista didn't even look up from the register as I ordered a cup of coffee.

'Black or white?' she asked.
I stammered and blinked. 'Sorry, what?'
She exhaled, loudly. 'Do you want a black coffee, or a white coffee?'
I shrugged. 'Um, maybe a black coffee with a little bit of milk?'
She rolled her eyes and was like, 'So that'd be a white coffee.'
And I was like I CAN'T DO THIS.

The bus dropped Brian and I off in Oxford in front of the Grad Centre, where they didn't have our keys. So they sent us back to the College with all of our worldly possessions in tow, picked up a ring of keys, and made the twenty minute trek back down to the Grad Centre. When we got there, it was freezing cold and I hadn't thought to bring a coat. My heater wasn't working and I had no sheets, so I laid down on the bare mattress and slept all afternoon covered haphazardly in a pile of towels. I met up with all the other scholars for dinner outside of KFC, and we walked to a fluorescently-lit fish and chips place where I got a veggie burger that seemed to involve a bag of Green Giant diced vegetables packed in a mashed potato patty and deep-fried. It was sort of tragic and sad. And then I slept in my nest of towels.

On September 26, 2008, I arrived at Heathrow similarly jetlagged, but by myself and with a much, much better idea of what I was doing. When the woman at immigration asked what anthropology involves, I knew to say that it's like sociology and give a ten second synopsis of what I study. I hauled my bags up onto a cart and went to the ATM (by which I mean cash point), strode over to AMT and got in the line (by which I mean queue), and ordered a white coffee and biscotti that I balanced on the cart as I maneuvered it one-handedly to the Central Bus Terminal for the umpteenth time. I slept on the bus, and when I got off at Oxford, it wasn't unseasonably chilly, it was just frigid the way that Oxford is always sort of frigid. I'd brought a scarf.

It was almost magic, compared to a year ago. I got off on the High Street instead of riding the bus all the way to Gloucester Green, beelined for the Lodge and got my keys, and was all moved into my suite in less than an hour. I popped down to get my mail and promptly found Erika, and we chatted, and then chatted an hour later over soup. I was still sort of jetlagged, but I tried to stay up to get into a regular sleep pattern, so instead I picked up all my boxes, unpacked, and went out for pizza at Strada and drinks at Sugar Brown's with friends before crashing for, oh, twelve hours.

If this year continues to be about 2% as stressful as last year, it's going to be positively magical.

I'm a (Homebound) Liar

I lied, my layover is actually in Abu Dhabi and not Dubai. Whoops! To be perfectly honest, I'm only halfway conscious of my surroundings, and I could just as easily be in Detroit. The important thing is that I'm almost home, but also that I finally saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on the plane, and it is insane. It's like George Lucas did free association (El Dorado! Cate Blanchett! Aliens! Red Scare!) and then tricked someone into giving him like tens of millions of dollars to commit it to film. I also watched the musical episode of Scrubs with Stephanie D'Abruzzo, an episode of Frasier, and an episode of the Office, plus Smart People, which has a stupendous cast but was sort of obnoxious. We get it - sometimes smart people are also neurotic and lonely. So are dumb people, actually. This is not groundbreaking; Woody Allen has shown us this about once per year for the past three decades. Sarah Jessica Parker was likable in it, though, so I guess that's a cinematic achievement. By contrast, Dennis Quaid is still the least sympathetic person in any movie, ever.

...So who wants to take bets on whether the crippling airport glitch that swept the UK tonight will strand me in the Middle East? Before you do, a word of caution: I may or may not be the unluckiest person alive. The odds are very good that I will be stranded, my bags will be lost, the bus will break down on the way to Oxford, and I will run out of money somewhere by the Thornhill Park and Ride and have to become a 19th century urchin. Okay, place your bets.

Sing-a-ma-pore!

I've been crap at blogging for the past week, because I had a madcap last night (slash last morning, since it ended when I arrived back at my guesthouse at 6am, waved to that underage sex worker who works on my block, and took a quick nap) in Manila, then flew to Singapore, where Tiffany and I promptly tromped around Malaysia for two days and then walked the entirety of Singapore. We did what we do best, which is sitting in cafes, going to zoos, and wandering aimlessly while devouring whatever gets in our way.

So that was awesome, even if the fact that Tiffany bore the brunt of being the first close friend I've hung out with in two months. (A sample conversation: "I'm worried that nothing motivates me anymore.") I got back from Singapore this afternoon (and then tomorrow I fly from Manila to Dubai, and then I fly from Dubai to London and arrive on Friday), and I'm way too wiped to narrate the past week. But I have pictures (although no picture of Tiffany and I together, so you're just going to have to take it on blind faith that this isn't just an elaborate, totally pointless ruse), and those are worth like a bajillion words.

Yay, Jonker Street! Tiffany watched patiently as I stopped at every stall, multiple times. I bought a Chinese chess set and was stoked about it, until we realized that neither Tiffany nor I know how to play Chinese chess. (And you can't just fake it and play checkers, because geometry gets the best of you. It usually does.)
And then we walked back to our traumatically sketchy hostel, which a) only admits Westerners, b) wouldn't let Tiffany's cousin enter because she wasn't a guest, and c) seems to be geared exclusively at students and vagrants, so we had to be very evasive about the fact that Tiffany was job-hunting. (Apparently, being temporarily unemployed doesn't suffice, you have to be like permanently unemployed, and also poor.) The problem was that the owner has a very rigid concept of the place as a "traveler's home," which he kept pressing upon us with increasingly ill-conceived illustrations like, "it's like an old folks home, JUST FOR THE OLD." And I was like, similarly, I won't be remotely surprised if we get bedsores and you become verbally abusive when our family drives off into the distance. At we ate our complimentary breakfast (bread AND jam!), I was also attacked by a bunny. Probably a killer bunny.
And this was a temple in Singapore.
And this was the temple with Buddha's tooth in a reliquary, which was awesome. Mostly because it was beautiful (like, orchids and 10,000 Buddhas on the roof kind of beautiful), but also because there was tea.
Epic!
And after Chinatown, we roamed around Little India for a bit. It was Deepavali, which explains the many, many Deepavali signs in this picture.
We ate things like this, which involved rose syrup, cane sugar, corn, red beans, jellies, and a yellow syrup that we couldn't identify. When I eat something in spite of a mysterious yellow liquid, you know it's transcendent.
And then we went on the Night Safari, because errybody knows that Tiffany and I are fucking AMAZING at zoos. We saw lions and tigers and (sloth) bears, and this tragically ugly rhino-type monster and a giraffe and a zebra and bats, and we did not just see bats, we WALKED THROUGH A BAT TUNNEL, hunched over, making high-pitched squealing noises as they dive bombed at face level. In retrospect, high-pitched squealing noises probably aren't helpful in a bat tunnel. Anyway, we conquered it, keeping the score at Ryan and Tiffany: 2, Zoos of the World: 0.

All Day I Dream About Poultry Infrastructure

I have less than 48 hours until I leave for Singapore. Want to know what my big mission was this evening? I ate a barbecued chicken foot. The slang is adidas, which is cute enough that you sort of forget what you're about to ingest. And you eat them by sucking off the toes and then chewing the cartilage that holds them together and popping the joints apart, and periodically spitting out tiny toe knuckles. They're not bad until you reflect on them, and then I went out and panic-bought graham crackers.

Even My Triumphant Finale is a Joke

So two hours after I triumphantly decided that I was done with my fieldwork and patted myself on the back for a job well-done, I got a text from a woman I'd contacted yesterday about doing just a couple more interviews in her neighborhood. And she said yes, and I got excited. (See, I've gotten 30 interviews in my sample neighborhood, but given the estimated number of LGBT residents in that area, a statistically significant sample is 32. So this is thrilling.)

Anyway, my schedule tomorrow still involves tanning and reading "On the Road," taking myself out for lunch, and maybe shopping for jewelry (because there was a ring I really liked that I opted not to buy because I decided it's sort of weird to buy yourself a ring, but to make it up to myself I've started looking at bracelets). And then I'll briefly - but only briefly! - get a couple of interviews, and then I'm going to the rescheduled party with my interviewees, which will hopefully be just as magical as if I'd gone in the first place instead of wheezing to a halt. So for all intents and purposes, the freak-out portion of fieldwork is over, and it's just the housekeeping.