The End - The Doors

This is the end/my only friend the end

of our elaborate plans/the end

of everything that stands/the end

no safety or surprise/the end

Well, it's almost the end. The end of classes, at least. I'm not complaining in either direction: not to have more classes, and not that the classes I've had have been burdensome. Really, I'm just determined to enjoy the transition. No more classes doesn't mean no more work. Au contraire. It means that I now have more time to devote to writing my term papers and researching my dissertation topic; scheduling archive and library visits, making progress reports to my supervisor, and possibly even doing interviews and museum visits. Really, I insist on the museum visits, as my topic revolves quite heavily around being able to consult paintings and prints and sculptures.

And what is my topic? On what subject am I to wax eloquent for 16,000 words over the next 5 months? Hair styles. Whose hair? Women's hair. When were these women alive? The Georgian period in England when what we now call neo-classicism was at its height. Way to go Reynolds, Hamilton, and Walpole. Way to go. Anyway, why do I care about the way women in Georgian England wore their hair? Honestly? I have absolutely no idea. I partially blame the impressive James T. Powell for this. His classes back at Wake got me back into Greek and Roman myth in a big way...this paper is an excuse to indulge some of that interest without having to learn Greek or Latin! Plus, I confess that I've always been a nerd, not just for Greco-Roman literature and mythology, but for the wonderful Age of Sail. Nelson and Napoleon, Wellington and Farragut and Lake Hudson and the Nile. (Aubrey and Sharpe and Hornblower on the fictitious side of things.) Much as I love Napoleon and all the massive amount of stuff that his legend spawned, not only is he "the well-beaten path" (or perhaps the horse beaten to death, historiographically speaking), but my sum total of thirty words of French isn't enough to let me research all the primary sources I'd need for an undertaking of 16,000 words. However, journals kept in English, and pictures and sculptures that require no linguistic literacy at all are just up my alley.

Of course, the real "end" as such comes along with a beginning: the beginning of married life. Once Sebastian and I are married, the apartment hunting (hopefully!) stops, the wedding planning ceases, and all I have to occupy me (besides assembling ikea furniture and making dinner) is my precious Georgian beauties and the implements of their coiffures. I wonder just what slightly stomach-turning practises I'll unearth when figuring out just how hairdressing worked back then. It should be interesting. I mean, let's face it: I've already discovered the incredibly off-putting fact that Charles II had a wig made from (I kid you not) the pubic hair of his favourite mistress. I think this is a case where you say it with Hallmark, not with hair. Ew.

I think, on that disturbing note, it is now the end of this post. This will officially become my forum for any more entertaining, disturbing, and downright kinky facts I happen to find in my research on the art of hairdressing in eighteenth-century England.

The Musee Imaginaire, Napoleon, and Wedding Invitations

So I've been listening lately to all the back episodes of the National Gallery's podcast. I highly recommend it. Today on the way to the university health centre, I listened to an episode from early 2009 that mentioned a concept called the Musee Imaginaire. Basically, it the veritable "museum" of images and sounds and stories that you have in your mind that you prize highly. It can range from stuff like Titian's Man With A Glove (which I remember seeing for the first time in the National Gallery of Art in D.C.) to a really pretty candy wrapper that you can't bear to throw out.

I'm now officially toying with the idea of creating a blog dedicated to my own Imaginary Museum. If nothing else, I could keep track of a lot of the things I find from day to day that interest me while practising my descriptive writing skills for my dissertation. It's a strong temptation. Not to mention, it's a great exercise for proving that you really *do* use all of the "nonsense" you learned in school in your daily life. Of course, I'll give it a better name than the imaginary museum before I get started.

In other news, after a rousing stint at the gym today (I kept my eyes firmly shut when stretching to avoid the sight of Tiny-Asian-with-Tiny-Shorts's legs. Seriously - be considerate!) I'm now back to "home-turf" in my historical studies: yup, another paper about Napoleon. This makes goodness only knows how many...at least four by my count, including my undergraduate thesis. Of course, in my new-found love of something vaguely resembling (read: stealing from) art history, I'm looking at portraits of Napoleon rather than the very Old-Boys'-Club approach to just listing his battles and important legislation while refusing to dispute his importance to history. (Yes, my Historical Methods module is leaving me well-informed and cynical about my chosen field of study, but that's another rant for another time.)

I'm sure that I should expand my horizons somewhat, but I've known for ages that the French and American Revolutions and the general time period in Europe and America surrounding them has been my favourite bit of history. The battles still seemed to have some element of glamour amongst all the carnage and violence and cold brutality, but I didn't have to learn Latin or remember how many different Crusades were made to take the Holy Land until Christendom just stopped trying. There's still pageantry in the painting of the long Eighteenth Century - it still feels like a historical era, that is to say, remote from my reality - but there's enough of modernity in it that it doesn't feel completely alien. It's easier to wonder what Emma Hamilton or Antoine-Jean Gros or Joshua Reynolds or the men of the Armee d'Italie thought of their world than the try and fathom the likes of King Baldwin IV of Jerusalem or the entertaining hermaphrodite we read about during the Spanish Inquisition. (For the record, she was a woman who claimed to push out a penis along with her baby during childbirth. So she lived like a man for a while, married another woman, and eventually "saw the error of her ways" and tried to have her "penis" surgically removed. One impressive yarn, if I do say so myself.) Anyway, hermaphrodite Inquisition victim aside, the time of Revere, Jefferson, Nelson, and Napoleon is where my interest lies. (So there, Paul Simon, I *do* know where my interest lies. This references a song I don't know that I entirely recommend despite my love for Simon and Garfunkel.)

Finally: wedding invitations.

Yup, that's not quite how I feel, but it's close enough. The end is so near, and yet so far. I've been cutting out tiny squares of cardstock for ages now - I think I'll be a permanently hunched little old woman if I dutifully bend over that paper guillotine for another hour like Penelope at her loom in the Odyssey. I do love my invitations - they're turning out lovely - but I will love them much more once they are in the mail and speeding (or crawling since the post is so slow) away from me and towards the mailboxes of those few, those chosen few, who have been invited. Okay, so the vague literary reference aside, I don't have nearly the degree of conceit required to talk about my wedding with such pomp and gravitas. Really, I just want the time to breeze past until it's all over and I can relax somewhere in the Alps with Sebastian and lots of snacks.

I'm being good and eating healthier and exercising more. Both just in general and so that I look really good in my wedding dress. However, much as I love my exercise and my healthy eating, I look at junk food sometimes with an air of longing - especially if I'm Shopping While Hungry. (No!) I ate an entire bag of Doritos by myself in two days, and polished off a pint of milk (skim, to my credit) and two Krispy Kreme doughnuts this afternoon. Like Keats, I could now write an Ode to an inanimate object. Not to a Grecian Urn, but to a Chick-fil-a Salad or a carton of Take One Chinese's Beef Lo-Mein and Sesame Chicken. Alas, Provo has no decent Chinese take away places, but Christmas with my parents this year means I can indulge my Chick-fil-a craving at long last. Hurry, wedding! Hurry and get here so I can spend a week being lazy and eating junk food in the Alps!

Location-Specific Music and Other Oddities

Who here remembers the lovely '90s phenomenon that was the Dentist's Office Saxophone? I know you know what I mean. That charmingly cheesy, reedy crooning a la Kenny G (whose brother, incidentally, teaches in the music department at Wake Forest). The sort of thing that, I kid you not, *always* played in the dentist's office when you were waiting for a cleaning or an x-ray because the receptionists were under strict orders that the "Light FM" stations were the best child-friendly adult-aimed radio to put on. I mean, let's face it: if they'd chosen something like the classic rock station, every Baby Boomer who came in would attempt to sing along to songs like "Don't Fear the Reaper" and "Carry On Wayward Son" in the midst of their root canals and the dentists would throw up their hands in frustration. I'm sure it's bad enough for the dentist that he has to have his hands and face in your mouth to correct the consequences of your negligence of oral health and hygiene, but does he *really* have to suffer through your tone-deaf renditions of Paul Simon and Bob Seger as well?

Still struggling to go back that far in your consciousness to recall just what songs contained the infamous Dentist's Office Saxophone? Fear not: I just found one in my iTunes:

Every Time I Close My Eyes - Babyface with Mariah Carey.

Other songs that would fit the bill of dentist's office listening with or without saxophone?

absolutely any song that Celine Dion ever recorded.

Secret Garden - Bruce Springsteen

Crash Into Me - Dave Matthews Band

The One - Elton John

You Were Meant for Me - Jewel

Amazed - Lonestar

God Must Have Spent (a Little More Time on You) - *NSYNC

As Long As You Love Me - Backstreet Boys

The other location-specific music style I was reminded of by this was the Grocery Store Guitar. You know exactly what I mean. Again: the soft rock, light FM style of music. Soothing background sounds. And then, there's a finger-plucked acoustic guitar riffing a melody line for a bridge in a way that feels vaguely Latin.

Prime example? To The Moon and Back - Savage Garden.

What I will first confess is that, oh yeah, *all* of these songs are in my iTunes collection. And yet, there's a certain pleasant nostalgia that their dated natures evoke. For instance, the guitar riff in the bridge of To The Moon and Back always reminds me of the Mars Supermarket that was just down the street from our neighbourhood. It lived just off Ritchie Highway - the road that ran a nearly straight line through the entire county - and across Furnace Branch Road from the Taco Bell my dad used to manage. There was a giant car park that sprawled out in front of the Mars, which stood at right angles, separated by a few tiny stores (a Sally's Beauty Supply, a Dollar Store, a dry cleaner), to the K-Mart. Of course, K-Mart lasted in its many incarnations for ages, and almost every Saturday once the weather turned back towards spring's higher temperatures, there were father-son remote control car rallies. They had several small marquees and would set up a large Indy 500-esque track while pot-bellied mechanics, car sales men, and retail managers raced their toy cars in circles to the hyperactive delight of their little boys.

All it takes is a single instrument in a song to recall the tacky dark wood-panelling of my dentist's office - where I once, after receiving Novocaine for the first time in my life, proceeded to pretend I had a stroke for my mother's amusement. I held my right arm at that awkward angle that reminds me now of Marcus Brigstocke talking about chavs and Olivier's Richard III. I then limped across the reception room, dragging my foot behind me. Surprisingly, Mom seemed to find it entertaining. The dentist, however, wasn't amused.

Likewise, the seemingly semi-conscious ramblings of anyone resembling a Light FM DJ call to mind images of our orthodontist's receptionist, Nancy. She was one of those receptionists who could work with children well, but you could tell that she was heading out at her lunch break for a smoke and a less-than-reputable tabloid. Like many a mom or 30-50-year-old woman in the part of Maryland where I grew up, she'd done the Short Mom Hair: highlighted and bleached to great effect, and styled in the morning so that if the 'do was too fresh, she resembled a pineapple. There were little wrinkles around her eyes and the corners of her mouth - you could tell the latter were from puckering her lips to take a drag - and though they did nothing to make her look haggard or old, they definitely weren't concealed by the thick foundation or the obvious effects of many a Saturday afternoon in a tanning bed. Her nails, acrylic of course, were always perfectly polished and squared off; more often than not, coordinated vaguely to her scrubs of choice. They made a very satisfying "clack clack" sound whenever she typed up the form for your next appointment. And best of all, Nancy always remembered your name and what you were doing in school. She took an interest, maybe not in her job, but in the families she worked with. She was a good lady.

All of this is to say: it's worth rejoicing in the abject cheesiness of such phenomena as the Dentist's Office Saxophone and the Grocery Store Guitar. Their dated wheezings and twangs can recall wonderful childhood moments and places, as well as containing that very hipster-esque enjoyment derived from enjoying something you readily admit as absolute rubbish. I think it's now time for a little Ricky Martin...

Body Politics

Universal truth #1: exercise is easier when committed to in groups. Not that 30 people trying to hit the gym in an unholy mob is easier than scampering off by yourself, but having someone else to hold you accountable for *not* taking that 5-mile run (or to do said 5-mile run *with* you) makes life so much easier. The work seems lighter, the time goes faster, and it's that much more difficult to squirm out of your commitment to improve yourself because you're having a lazy day.

That said, the joint decision that Sebastian and I made to exercise more this year has been suffering a bit of late. We were quite good for a few weeks about getting out on Saturday mornings to do a run together: now it seems like we feel constantly sleep-deprived, pass out early, and sleep in late (where school and work allow). We definitely need to up the ante and get back to good, if only to get that lovely peace of mind that comes from being fit and healthy.

I definitely work better when I have a goal. Granted, my goal is nothing so ambitious and amazing as my friend Nina. She's been training for ages now to get ready for a figure competition (I highly recommend her blog) and is apparently quite incredible about it. Here's where I lament the fact that I *used* to put in that kind of time at the gym when I was back at Wake. I was there 5, sometimes 6 days a week - on the StairMaster, lifting weights, doing the occasional Ab Attack class. Thinking back on how much weight I lost and how fit I was by the time graduation rolled around last year, I'm really impressed with myself. Part of it was a huge goal: I was going to look my best for graduation and my friend's wedding (I was one of her bridesmaids).

Apparently, weddings are becoming a theme in my fitness goals, because now I'm hitting the gym in earnest to prepare for my *own* wedding! I have the most gorgeous dress - the sort that, like a precision car, hugs the curves in all the right places. Aside from the feeling that I'm atoning a bit for the slippage in my routine that occurred after coming back to England (I did lots of running and hiking and gyming in Utah), I've decided that if ever there was a time in my life that I wanted to kick off with a commitment to looking and feeling my best physically, it was starting my life as a married woman. Let's face it: what other event is commemorated for *the rest of your life* with such a plethora of photos? Not to mention, I'll be finishing my Master's in history at the same time, and with a 16,000-word dissertation to write, I can use the alert and capable frame of mind that a good exercise routine gives me.

Let Them Eat Cake

Went to a cake tasting last night to try and figure out exactly what on earth we're going to do about the whole thing. I was surprised to realise once we started talking that I really didn't have a good clear idea about what I wanted. I had collections of pictures where I thought to myself, "that looks nice" and I could articulate why it looked nice, most of the time, but I hadn't really said anything more specific than "something black and white with square tiers." Hmm.

Luckily, the woman we talked to was, as Sebastian put it, able to take our vaguest ideas and translate them into something that made sense. She looked at all my pictures and my invitation pieces and was able to come up with several different ideas that all appealed to some aspect of the vague chimera of a cake that has been floating around in my mind since I first started planning the wedding. The cake samples we got to munch on during the consultation tasted great as well. After weeks of fleeting thoughts about coconut and vanilla and fruit and other Victoria-sponge-like concoctions, I think I fell most in love with the carrot cake and this lovely, thick, fudgey chocolate cake. We may have to do a combination of the two - have the cake feature layers of each. Yum.

It's funny, because as much as I plan and we put together invitations and do research online and chat with our parents, I feel the most like a bride-to-be when Sebastian and I go out to places like Moss Bros or the cake bakers and talk to people who don't know us at all that we need to engage their services for our wedding. There's something about going into a place of business armed with my notebooks and contracts and artwork that carries more weight than just an email of enquiry. It feels more official and immediate.

Unfortunately, some caramel snacks and the cake samples weren't enough to stop us from the dreaded phenomenon of "hungry grocery shopping" and evil against which I have been warned by my mother throughout my life. Shopping when hungry, as we've affirmed on several occasions, just leads to a shopping trolley full of crisps and cookies and other salty, greasy, sugary, or otherwise fattening pre-packaged foods. Ingredients for good, wholesome, healthy dishes don't suffice when Shopping While Hungry (SWH). Crisps and oven chips supplant potatoes, peas, and carrots; chicken tenders and meat-fest pizzas are far more enticing than the components for a home-cooked chicken pot pie. When the £1 bags of Doritos started to increase in their appeal by the second, I knew I should have showed less restraint in fully testing the range of cake samples on our little plate. Needless to say, we came back and bemoaned our failure not to shop when hungry - especially when we'd known it was a distinct possibility beforehand. Ah well, we'll be better prepared next time.

Soapbox Observations

In the interest of saying things that I notice day-in and day-out and not forgetting them in the shuffle of explanations and exposition, I'm making a list of things that I've noticed over the past week or so in all sorts of bits of my life.

1. The gym is the one place where inappropriate bodily exposure somehow becomes appropriate to the collective. My case in point, aside from the scores of bare chests that flash through your peripheral vision in the locker room, is Tiny-Asian-in-Tiny-Shorts. He's positively indecent. To start from the ground up, my first issue is the ghastly white tube socks. From there, scanty, thin, little black leg hairs pop up in awkward patches along the sides and backs of his calves. From there on up it's smooth sailing - and for quite a long way. There must be at least 3.5 hand-breadths of bare skin before those tiny black shorts begin. Here I shudder and repress the urge to be physically ill when I recall the disconcerting nature of this view when *I'm* on a mat doing crunches and *he* feels the need to stand right in my line of sight to stretch his calves against the wall. I shut my eyes and tried to find a happy place.

2. I hate mess, but a mess left by a craft project is okay. Normally, ever since I broke out of my untidy-but-organised phase in my teenage years, I've been much more at peace when my room was clean and orderly. I could work more productively, I was happier, and found it much easier to relax when I didn't have to engage in a staring contest with the pile of clothes on my chair. That said, with my clothes now living in uncramped luxury on their hangers and shelves (I have no roommate and thus my stuff, like any gaseous substance, can expand to fit its container), I've developed another mess: crafting supplies. My room has become the factory from which all of our wedding invitations will be assembled. I look at all the little scraps and squares of paper lying in their piles on my floor and try not to think of the early 20th century Ford Motors factory, where all the little components are just waiting to be pastiche'd together to make a car. You'd think, with such a small amount of space, I'd try to keep it as tidy as possible, just to maximise living area, but the piles of cardstock, double-sided-tape backings, and the box of half-assembled invitation pieces still sits out in front of the dresser, changing its appearance from day to day as I reach new stages of completion. I have absolutely no plans to put it away until another roommate comes along to claim my precious extra space. In the mean time, the piles of invitation supplies remind me that I *am* and *should* be doing something constructive every day beyond reading about Delaroche, and Michelet, and Ranke, and Soviet rally races. It's an oddly energising mess, and I embrace it wholeheartedly.

Onwards and Upwards

I watched "Julie & Julia" with one of my flatmates the other evening and was struck by the dedication someone can give to a blog. Not to mention finding something constructive to do around it. If you haven't seen the movie, I'd recommend it. A woman (Julie) cooks her way through Julia Child's French cooking cookbook in a year and blogs about it every day. We came up with the conclusion that this also apparently helps your married love life greatly, and so I have promised to get him the Julia Child cookbook as a wedding present pre-emptively. But as far as movie inspiration goes, not only should I probably keep up with my blog more, but I certainly don't turn up my nose at the chance to learn new recipes. Sebastian and I tend to subsist on the same five meals that I cook on a regular basis.

1. Pasta of some description or other.

2. Meat of choice (usually sausage or chicken kievs) with pan-roasted potatoes and veg.

3. Chicken curry with rice and naan. (Half of the time I cheat for this and just pick up the ready-made stuff at Waitrose or Somerfield)

4. Chili and rice (occasionally with biscuits or cornbread if I'm up to it)

5. Soup and croissants or breakfast food.

Really, I need some more new and interesting ideas. We also made a New Year's resolution to cook at least 2 new recipes each month. I think we did in January, but last month was definitely at half mast. We *did* make my mom's paprika chicken, though, which turned out beautifully. The only difference was that because of the paprika I had it was spicier than Mom's usual. Time to get back to it, I think. We'll have to find something dinner-like to try out as most of our recipes have been desserts. Pumpkin muffins, white chocolate cheesecake, Mars Bar cake, apple pie and ice cream, pumpkin pie...you can see where our priorities are. Of course, my current craving is for some speculaas cookies, so that may have to be the next endeavour.

On the wedding front, I just got back the printed components of our invitations from Mail Boxes Etc. I highly recommend them: the girl behind the counter was quite patient with all of my intricate and slightly anal instructions on how many of each .pdf to print off and on what sort of card stock it was acceptable. Really, I was thrilled when I saw how they turned out. I think this is the first time that I've pulled out the paper-guillotine with anything like enthusiasm. Normally, I do it as a time-filler: something that's not studying, but is still productive. This time, I've been gleefully cutting out RSVP cards, monograms, and inserts and there are piles of massacred card stock clippings all over my floor. Much as I thrive in a clean room, there's something great about the energy implied in a room that's been taken over by one of my frantic craft projects. Hopefully, it'll inspire me to keep being productive throughout the day. It's now off to the Wallace Collection to try and scrounge up some dissertation inspiration.

Here Comes the Sun

It feels like this weekend, and now the start of this week, have yielded the first truly unblemished sunny days of the year. In spite of the cold, it was brilliant to go for a run through Hyde Park this afternoon. The sun was shining and there wasn't a cloud in the sky. I think it counts as one of the days that Alexandre Dumas described as "one of those rare and beautiful days in winter when England remembers that there is a sun." The fact that it's now almost 6 and still not bitterly dark yet is also a marked improvement over the past few months.

Attempting to shrug off the weird pain of this weekend, I've been decently productive today. Though, before engaging in a boring chronicle of my activities, I ought to justify the ambiguous "weird pain."

I'm not sure if the exercise was getting to me, or if this was just one of those times when my body decides it likes to play tricks on me, but I kept having random shooting pains throughout the weekend. Mostly on the left side of my back, but sometimes in my shins, or my knee, or (most recently) my forearm. It's bizarre, and I'd ignore it entirely if it wasn't absolutely caning half of the time. I'm determined to wait it out. I have a very laissez faire policy when it comes to my health: unless I break a bone, lose consciousness, or haemorrhage uncontrollably, I generally ignore it until it goes away. Or, as the case may be, ignore it until it puts me in enough pain to impede my normal routine. Probably not the smartest tack in the world.

In more amusing news, with T-minus 4 months to go until The Big Day, I've finally cracked open my first bridal magazine. Thanks for it go to my flatmate who brought it home from work with him. He's an accountant and apparently was working with the publishers of said magazine that day, and thought I might find it interesting/useful. The former? certainly. The latter? not entirely. Though I'm grateful for the average budget breakdown, the to-do calendar countdown, and various other images and articles, the majority of it reads like a wedding-themed fashion magazine: full of lots of pretty pictures, with the occasional bit of reason thrown in. As you expect with a fashion magazine (a high-end one, at any rate) it was almost 52% adverts and 48% content, with about 2% of that content being "promotions" (read: disguised adverts masquerading as articles) and another 8-10% as coupons and lists of local vendors one might find useful (see above: "promotions"). Again: not surprising, just entertaining.

I was pleased to see our chosen honeymoon destination (nestled away in the French Alps) listed as this month's go-to romantic retreat. I then laughed to counter the incredulity at how much more expensive they made the location appear (and all for the addition of some ski passes, facials, and massages...oh, and time at a gym/pool/sauna). Still, at least the many photos can prove fodder for my next enterprise of Reception Space Decorating. (Cue the dramatic music, Mr. Zimmer.) I agree fully with my future sister-in-law: the best part of being engaged isn't planning the wedding...it's getting your new place to live all figured out! Now if only my dissertation seemed so easy...