Sunday, 30 January 2011

Paideia

The idiot and I have been in eachother's company now for a week. She got back into the country on January 21st, but I didn't see her until the morning of the 22nd when Karen and Amelia (host famille) dropped her off at Sequoia. She gave me a hug, which was bizarre because neither us really approve of public affection.

You would be correct in thinking that Reed College students have too much holiday, and that January 22nd would be a timely date to go back to school. This is what I had inferred from the idiot's arrival day - that I would have her to deal with for the weekend and the weekend only, and then she would be busy back to classes by Monday. But as it turns out there's this thing called Paideia (cue wikipedia), thinly veiled under the description 'festival of learning', which affords these tiresome 'reedies' a further 9 days of frivolity. It's basically just a free-for-all opportunity for any aspiring teachers to teach whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want ...wherever this hell might take them. She dragged me along to something on the apocalypse on Monday afternoon, led by a Reed alumni who had done his thesis on apocalyptic texts from a denomination I can't remember. He heralded each newcomer to the classroom with the words: 'Hey! Are you looking for the end of the world?' I glowered at him as if I really was looking for the end of the world. And at the end (of the class, not world - although by that time I was wishing for armageddon) I was sure to shoot him a penetrating gaze that clearly stated: 'You may be wearing a smoker's jacket, but that's not going to save you and your jolly self when the monster with a trillion heads comes gambolling down Woodstock Blvd'. The idiot told me to stop being so contrary. On Tuesday we attended 'alcohol desserts' briefly, but the ingredients never showed up so we defected to baklava-making in the next door dorms. For someone who claims to love cookery, the idiot did a remarkable job in safeguarding the recipe from possible ambush, and supping gin from a plastic cup, and alerting the others to dropped pistachio nuts. On Wednesday there was an adorable anglophile convention at the Doctor Who paideia (teacher = student in a fez and a bow tie), and then at night she and Aurore competed in the 'Homer's Hut cook-off' from 11pm-12.30am, getting placed third out of five teams with their (judge quote) 'actually quite delicious but not sophisticated enough for a competition of this calibre' knickerbockerglory. Homer's Hut, by the way, is the campus late-night food outlet, mainly selling E number snacks, and the concomitant pharmaceutical solutions to deal with said E numbers. Accordingly, the people's favourite entry (placed last) was the 'pepto-cano': an open jar of pepto-bismol, spilling wiggly jelly worms, encased in a squidge of chocolate cake and a creamy substance of unknown origin, scattered elegantly with fruit loops. The knickerbockerglory assemblage bridged the division between the 26th and the 27th of January, giving the idiot a pretty good start to her birthday. On Thursday (birthday) I put my foot down and refused to attend the 'comicsocalypse' with her in the afternoon, and the same went for that 6 hour calligraphy class on Friday, but she returned from both with sudden and unnerving pretensions to artyness. Gross.

The rest of this 'learning' love-in week mainly took place in Portland, which I must admit is turning into quite the town. It even warrants its own comedy show on IFC. Over break the idiot's mum read an article in The Times about Oregon being the new foodie destination, with particular showcasing of Portland. The food cart list is proving to be, perhaps, too ambitious, but we're going to try our hardest to get through as many as we can before May. I'm not going to want to leave here. Neither's she. On Monday night of Paideia we went to see this wonderful animation in the NW Film Center (My Dog Tulip), about J. R. Ackerley's love affair with his alsation bitch, followed by a buffet meal in Whole Foods (nom). Thursday, as I've mentioned, was the first birthday the idiot has spent away from the parental realm. There were no tears (she can be a bit of a sop), but instead a blush at receving the comments on her ironic treatise from last semester, a further blush at the sight of homemade scones courtesy of Aurore - cream and jam inclusive - and finally a sweat and a snot from the Miang Kham at Whiskey Soda Lounge in the evening. Then back to the Spanish House for S'mores.

(GLOSSARY PARENTHESIS: S'MORE = a sandwich of honey graham crackers and Hershey's chocolate and marshmallow, cooked in a microwave.)

And if that wasn't gluttony enough, she discovered some delicious carrot cupcakes on her desk at 1 in the morning. Special mention goes to the now-departed-quite-by-surprise roommate, Stefie: baking expert, dubstep expert, and all round quite cool Reed drop-out. Although the idiot is of course sad about the empty half of the double room, she's also certain that Stefie would not resent the inauguration of a film club - some point soon, just to fill the gap.

Saturday night was joint party night, held at Annie's house on 34th. In the morning the idiot discovered her lip piercing was still open after a year of non-occupation, and was quite tempted to put her coronation crown brooch in there. It would have added an interesting, if speech impedimenting, aspect to her Queen Elizabeth II tribute. The theme for the party was icons: Annie was Grace Jones, Holly was Princess Di, George was a cursor, Justine was the statue of liberty, Matt was the absence of iconograhpy, Erin was emoticons, Dorothy was Campbell's soup, Stu was Jimi Hendrix, Rachel was the Virgin Mary, and Vicky was Dolly Parton. It made for some unprecedented pairings. Annie really did everything, and the idiot sort of trailed in her wake and made arbitrary cucumber sandwiches. At midnight or so the party decamped to the S.U for cheesey dancing, and then further decamped to the Spanish House until 3 in the morning.

But seriously kids, go back to school already.

Consette x

Sunday, 16 January 2011

Reedgloss

Here is a long and boring glossary of stuffs at Reed College, which I have been meaning to post since last September:

THE CANYON: We need bridges to cross it (one is bouncy, one is blue), there is water, there are trees, it divides the campus in two, it is therefore a CANYON.

THE REACTOR: The only nuclear reactor monitored by undergrads in the whole of the world, or something. It looks pretty and blue when you turn the lights off.

FELLATIO RODRIQUEZ: Reed's improv comedy group. Consette could do better, but the idiot has so far prevented me from auditioning.

ELIOT: Eliot Hall is a nice old-school school building. It has tiny alcoves for water fountains, indented along all the walls.

CSOs: The Community Safety Officers keep everything ticking over. They ride segways. Only once have we felt in danger - when someone set alight to a car on the other side of The Grove dorms and we all had to evacuate. But the CSOs segwayed in calming circles, and everything was okay.

DOGS: Dogs are everywhere. There is one called 'woof' (I think) who sleeps under the desk during the idiot's poetry conference.

MLLL: The famous comic book library, requiring a secret password.

SCROUNGE: Can be either a verb 'to scrounge', or a noun denoting the activity of 'the scrounge', or the table given to scrounging is 'the scrounge', or the person who practices the scrounge is 'a scrounge' or 'a scrounger'. It basically means eating everyone's leftover food in Commons and to contract/spread disease.

SEQUOIA: Our posh dormitory in The Grove. There are rocking chairs in all the rooms.

GRAFFITI: Everywhere.

TOILET DEBATES: On the walls of any given bog.

BLUE LIKE JAZZ: Pending movie on Reed, for Christians.

GRADES: There are none. Or, at least, the idiot can't see them unless she asks nicely and signs a request form and gives good reason for wanting to know her academic achievements or failures. Halfway through the semester the students receive a note in their pigeonholes stating either 'satisfactory' or 'unsatisfactory' work, so if you're failing you shall definitely know about it.

CONFERENCE: Seminars are called conferences here. The idiot is a conference parasite, in that she doesn't really think for herself, but is actually one of those hideous sorts who jumps on the end of others' originality and adds something of no use whatsoever, before retreating once again back to gormlessness. She once equated her conference style to defecating in the middle of the floor, and leaving everyone else to clear it up.

DEADBEATS: There is a strong tradition of beatness at Reed, and The Deadbeats are the spoken-word/poetry/random performance group who meet on Wednesday nights in the SU. Much howling, some of it pleasant.

ANGEL DAVID RIVERA: Runs the International Society. A hero.

THESIS TOWER: What is the plural of thesis? Theses? Thesises? Anyway, they're all in the tower.

FREESTYLE FRIDAY: Rich kids rapping in Sallyport every Friday night. Not 'authentic': they don't have gun wounds, says Annie.

SALLYPORT: Archway passage running through the ODB (Old Dorm Building). On Freestyle Fridays, ODB = Old Dirty Bastard.

SLUR: Every other week. Sing Loudly Unto Reed. What it says on the tin.

GRAY FUND: Puts on cool things for students, thanks to Betty Gray who gave a whole load of money to the college when she died. The best last semester was the Night Kite Revival spoken word group. They opened with Anis Mojgani, draining us of cynicism like a catheter to the analytical vein (a relief in worky mid-November). We also went to see Howl, opening the LGBT film festival Portland, and ate a gourmet meal at Bluehour. Sissyboy was actually kind of moving, and Billy Collins grin-ful.

FOUCAULT: One of the professors here says he had sex with Michel Foucault in the 80s. This is Reed lore. Is he aware that Foucault died of aids?

R. KNAPP'S OFFICE: Books: breeding, towering, building little subsiduary houses of books.

JARS: Hipsters brew their own tea and drink it out of jam jars. A hazard, one would think, for that American Apparel rucksack?

PRETTY BOYS: So many, even Consette is admiring. Reed students bifurcate neatly into two separate groups: either you are so beautiful you can barely move, or you are so awkward you can barely move. In both cases, this paralysis benefits hard studying and academia. Coolness is a bit more complicated: to salivate over Harry Potter movies, eg, is very very (unironically) cool.

MADNESS: Occasionally we encounter someone with borderline schizophrenia, but we turn a blind eye and hope for the best.

TAI CHI ON THE FRONT LAWN: The idiot's P.E. credit last semester was in Tai Chi. Before the British weather hit Portland, the class had all their lessons outside, soundtracked on Wednesdays by heavy DnB pulsating from the student radio window (seemingly the only broadcasting medium through which the 'radio' transmits).

PORTLAND: The city in which we live, but never see.

BUT, SERIOUSLY, PORTLAND: It looks like Sim City, has amazing food, and a bookshop called Powell's which is so pleasurable you might blind if you spend too much time in there.

HOST FAMILY: The idiot is fortunate enough to have Karen, Kevin and Amelia as her allocated family whilst in Portland. Amelia is ten years old with bouncy ringlets and a precocious vocabulary. A delight.

THE SIMPSONS: Matt Groening is from Portand. An English Professor at Reed (incidentally a prospective prof for the idiot's next semester) was, they say, the inspiration for Lisa Simpson.

GAPS IN BETWEEN THE TOILET CUBICLES: What is with this? You can be seen.

PARADOXES: Two cafés on campus (the old Paradox, and the new one), where all the pretty boys slouch. Generally very nice coffee. Also, sellers of some tea latte kind of drink called a 'London Fog'. Ask for a London Fog in a British accent, and get slightly close to a flirt with a pretty barista.

THE HONOR PRINCIPLE: These lot are experts, and I tend to say something dishonourable when I try to explain. It's amazing, though, that mid-terms and final exams can be taken away and done in your free time. Every single Reed student who we've spoken to so far has baulked at the suggestion of cheating, or going over the time limit. Whatever this Honor Principle is, most people get quite into it.

PUB (AT THE END OF THE UNIVERSE): 'Pub' at the end of 28th street. Or in the middle of. Pub at the end of my tether anyway - makes me, for a split second, miss England.

TWINKA: Twinka from Imogen and Twinka. Her wikipedia says she used to live with Henry Miller. Now a checkout lady in the Reed dining hall. Still got it.

Consette x

Friday, 14 January 2011

Finals

Can one die of tired? Caffeine certainly. Prudent, I thought, to stay out of her way during Finals Week in December, observing things from a safe distance. Reed was supposed to turn her into a more competent, efficient human being, but the fact is she dealt with the increase in word counts (or page counts) by simply sleeping less, not working faster. Gum and coffee reacted in undesirable ways, and for some reason she thought it would be safe to dilute all her hot drinks with the 'French vanilla' latte from that grotesque machine in Commons. Heart burn reigneth. And beware of sorbitol in sugarfree gum.

This problematic relationship with coffee extended beyond digestion; on the Sunday before the shit hit the proverbial fan, the idiot knocked some syrupy concoction all over her Dell keyboard (more than anything a caveat against adding sugar, thank you Baz), and the P, B, M and space bar keys were at once unusable. This occurred just hours after completing that irony paper for Knapp. For at least 15 degrading minutes the idiot scrabbled at the keyboard in an attempt to type her Windows password (containing two out of the three redundent letters), eventually surprising everyone (me and her) with success. But from this point on, the computer opted for flight over fight, trailing incoherency in its wake: bdlsjdgjdpppdssfppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppppfuckerppppppppppppppppdsaljfbsfmmndppp. So after a deft USB rescue-job, she was forced to spend the entirety of Finals week camped out at the ETC (the computer center) on the other side of campus.

Even in the early stages of the week, the library was too sweaty and strained to deal with: Eye of the Tiger playing in the foyer once an hour, 6am glazed looks in passing, and the rapidly atrophying 'stim' table - raisins, energy pills, spaghetti, cereal, regular pills, tobacco, nutella, the smell of small animals dying. The ETC, on the other hand, just a few steps to the East, was a bed of calm. She stayed there Monday through Thursday morning, sleeping intermittently on that sofa in front of the fire, the one everyone sleeps on, and only once or twice returning to dorms for a wash. On Tuesday night we saw a tiny hummingbird in the 7/11, sucking syrup from the syrup dispensers at the coffee counter.

You know it's the last week of school when the News Feed on facebook becomes more active than usual, as competitive idiots all over the world - not merely mine - vie for the most stressful work situation. My idiot, for example, wasted a lot of time translating the Reed system of page counts into the equivalent UEA word count, just so she could stick out her negligible chest in gloatation at having to write 7000 words on one essay. She sent that one off to Knapp on Sunday night, so there were then three whole days in which she could write something barely passable on James and Derrida. Most of that time was spent in panic, not understanding 'Form and Meaning', and not understanding The Sacred Fount, and then trying to combine these obdurate blocks of bemusement into a 10 page paper. By the early hours of Thursday morning, it was done.

Reed looked beautiful at 8am, all in fog and sunlight. We walked around for a bit. Then a celebratory breakfast in Commons with the last of the semester's board points, then daytime sleep and packing and, in the evening, our first sighting of a corona moon. She said something about an overwhelming sense of achievement. I didn't make fun.

Consette x

Thursday, 13 January 2011

Break

I spent my Christmas Day in the company of the boys at the 7/11, where we ate corndogs and chicken buckets with Minute Maid cranapple on the side. I have been left all alone at Reed; she flew back to England on the 17th December. So my holiday season has been pretty lonely, but I suppose that's what I wanted. Distance makes the heart grow fonder and all that. The last time I saw her, she was being humiliated by the United airlines check-in officer at PDX airport for having a suitcase 12lbs over the weight limit. From there, anything could have happened. She hasn't been in touch. For all I know, her plane from Vancouver to Heathrow might have been redirected to Paris, and for all I know, she could have been stranded there for three days, with only her quilt cover for warmth, and FOR ALL I KNOW, her baggage could still be lost somewhere in the purgatory of the Charles de Gaulle luggage network.

And why haven't I been writing? With so much free time on my hands, you would think I'd take this idiot-less opportunity to write a blog post a day and finally catch up with everything I meant to say 5 months ago. But the thing is - the crippling, disabling thing - is that I'm too like her to do anything of the sort. Procrastination is her way, and thus tis mine. I spend my days writing lists of intent, and adding things of no consequence just in order to cross them off. Yesterday, for example, I walked down to the canyon and failed to make a fish hook from the shell of a Mountain Dew can. I then wrote 'survey fresh food situation' at the bottom of my list, and crossed it off.

But now I have a week before she gets back, and I'm going to get this done, messily and illiterately, with too many adverbs, with too many commas, whether the rest of you (8 of you) like it or not. Post by post. After this post, and a cup of tea.

Consette x