A Day Off

The best thing about taking a day off from dissertation writing? It's hard to say. Watching the old 6 episodes of Seattle Grace: On Call was pretty fun. Not having to change out of pyjamas until I go to see my trainer at the gym is enjoyable, if only because I never do it. Downloading lots of music that I've been meaning to catch up on is always nice. I got to do the vacuuming without using it as a study break. How lame of a study break is that?

That said, I have been looking up potential jobs and internships. Not something I especially enjoy. Looking for a job is always the annoying part. The part that gives you an ulcer and a migraine. The lovely catch 22 of it all is that everywhere wants you to have experience in their field, but no one's hiring people without experience! Explain to me please, museums, how I'm supposed to get more experience than my 4-month internship in DC 3 years ago if you won't hire me! Won't even take me on without paying me! Seriously. That last option clearly doesn't strain your budgets. I feel like in order to get a job in this sector, I just need to wait for someone to die. Then their very high-up position gets filled, and we fill the gap of the person who left to take the dead man's job, and hopefully, this is all done in-house so that the trickle down effect leaves me with an internship opening to exploit. (Or even better: a paid entry-level job.)

For now, it's back to downloading songs so I can get ready to dash to the gym. Can't be late!

Milestones

At the one-month mark of marriage, here's what I've learned:

• In spite of my general laziness, I *can* cook. Who knew?
• I'm actually quite good at the whole homemaking thing. I clean, I wash, I vacuum, I plan. I thought I'd dislike it, but it's actually not bad.
• As I figured when I worked in DC for a semester - all desire to be productive ceases around 4-5pm. This is why I spend every evening watching Napoleonic Era military dramas with my husband.
• I need to be around people. Sitting in the house all day to clean and write my dissertation does strain my sanity sometimes. Even if I don't talk to other people (at the gym) I need to be around them to stop feeling like I Am Legend.
• Left to my own devices I *will* sleep for far too long, making me more tired than if I'd just dragged myself out of bed to go running with Sebastian.
• I get annoyed when people who send me business emails call me "Ms." and not "Mrs." It's like a PhD; if I earned it and put in the work for it, I want to be called "Dr."!
• Leaving wet clothes in the washer/dryer and expecting the dryer function to kick in is silly. The clothes will still be *very* damp, and not even warm 2 hours later.
• Just because you're married and both know how to cook does not mean that older married couples won't assume that you need to be fed. Especially if they're at least as old as your parents. No: to them, the pair of you together are still as helpless as you were on your own in your first years of college. You need good home cooking at every available opportunity. (Never mind that you've started to master that whole "home cooking" thing on your own...)
• When you roll around fitfully in your sleep, there *is* someone else in the bed for you to hit. They do not take kindly to being woken up in this way...especially if you're still asleep and wrestling with the duvet.
• Just because you're married, doesn't mean you should stop going on dates. Date frequently...if only to get out of the house and remember that there is more in your life now than loading the dishwasher before bed.

Volley'd and Thunder'd

I may not have cannon to right of me, cannon to left of me, cannon behind me doing all of that volleying and thundering, but stunt plane engines do the job just as well.

The Farnborough Air Show comes up in a couple of weeks, and already the air is filled with the ear-splitting thunder of pilots making practise runs of the stunts they'll be performing. It's really quite distracting to hear, not to mention to see clearly from the window all of the barrel rolls and corkscrews and loops that the pilots go through each afternoon. So distracting, in fact, that I've taken time to blog about it when I ought to be writing my dissertation. I can't even console myself with the memory of a working lunch before this, because Sebastian came home for lunch and after several episodes of David Mitchell's Soapbox, we watched one of the stunt pilots in his practise.

The conclusion we've drawn is that, so long as we live in this flat, we never need to buy tickets for the air show. We have a great view from our living room windows! That said, if the view proves as good during the air show as it was today, we may need to have a little soirée that provides a view of the action combined with comfy seating and tasty nibbles.

Meanwhile, it's back to work for me as I try desperately to stop singing the two songs that comprise the Top Gun soundtrack....

The Many Mysteries of Hair-Dressing (part II)

It's time for more lovely random facts as I scour the libraries, archives, and internet for more information to use in my dissertation. I found the following particularly entertaining:

In his 1885 address to a medical convention, John Daniel Cunningham - speaking of the hair - related the following two anecdotes:

"According to Suidas, who lived in the tenth century, the Athenian ladies became very sensitive to their inferiority to man in this respect [not having facial hair], and tried hard to cultivate hair on the cheek and chin. In many cases they went so far as to wear false beards."

"In London, in 1858, a young woman of twenty had considerable difficulty in persuading a clergyman to perform the marriage ceremony in consequence of her possessing a bushy beard four inches long."

I ask myself here; who was the man willing to take this bearded beauty to the altar? I know I've mentioned Victorians and their "great big bushy beards", to put it as Inspector Frank Butterman did in Hot Fuzz, but still: I can't imagine any Victorian man with his belief that his facial hair confirmed his own virility wanting a wife whose stubbly growth could rival his! Perhaps if more suffragettes had sported sizeable soup-strainers, men would have assumed that women weren't so different after all as to not deserve the vote. Alas, the world will never know. The only use to which bearded women were put (aside from our above bushy bride-to-be who, presumably, cooked her husband a fine meal every night once she'd come back to the church with a close shave) was as a freak side-show act in circuses.

Change of Pace

I just got messages from several of my college friends. One is living in beautiful Charleston, SC to do her Master's while going back and forth to Nashville to see her boyfriend. Another is spending time in Washington DC listening to reports in the State Department. It made me think back to the semester I lived in DC and worked for the Naval History Museum. (If I'm going to be a stickler, as my boss always used to be, then it's the National Museum of the United States Navy.) My roommate, Severine, and I would go out some nights to an awesome Thai restaurant I had found, or out with the guys from a few floors up to Georgetown, or one night wandering Barracks Row when we made friends with an entire art gallery of people - mostly I was a home-body and stayed in.

It's just made me think what a change of pace married life has brought. I'm not taking the Metro out to PG County to do my grocery shopping or hopping the Tube down to Strand before I'm late to class. I'm not out at frat parties or walking to the Lincoln Memorial because it's 1am and I can't sleep or wandering Trafalgar Square and Soho at 10:30 for a friend's birthday celebrations. Much though I'm still a graduate student, my life is very different.

I live in what can legitimately be called a village. There's a village notice board on the street where I go to the chemist's; where we found the store that we bought our bed from. I drive to do the grocery shopping instead of walking down Edgware Road to Waitrose or waiting for my lovely roomie to come back from band rehearsal to go to Lowes Foods. No more living off Pit food and Subway sandwiches - I actually cook dinner every night (with varying degrees of laziness) and eat, not in front of the TV with my plate on my lap, not at my desk writing a paper, but at a table! At my own dining room table with my husband and about 5 empty chairs. I spent all of yesterday writing my dissertation, vacuuming, doing laundry, and tidying our bedroom.

I have turned a corner. I no longer live in a college town or a face-paced capitol city, but in a slightly urbanised English village. No one comes into my dorm or flat to do the cleaning - I tidy the house myself. Instead of going to the Pit or getting take away, I cook decent-looking meals in all the shiny new cookware I got from generous friends and family from the registries and eat off dishes of the same pattern that my mother has, and that I remember from my childhood. I'm still a student, but I'm also a housewife. Weird to put it that way, I must confess, but as I'm not trying to be employed until these 16,000 words are out of my hands and being marked by my professor, I spend my days in the home. It drives me crazy sometimes, but mostly it's nice. At least when it's time to job hunt in earnest, I'll be ready and willing to find something to do that gets me out of the house!

The More Things Change...

Oh yeah, it's trite old adage time. "The more things change, the more they stay the same." A contradiction in terms worse than "military intelligence" or "Christian Science." And yet, I'm finding this contradiction in terms to be surprisingly accurate.

Being married doesn't feel different. *Getting* married may be a whole other kettle of fish, but *being* married. I still cook him dinner as I've done for the past 10 months (except on honeymoon where Sebastian did most of the cooking, to my delight). We still eat together, do the washing up, and watch a movie or read together. The only difference here is that we are now civilised enough to eat at our dining table rather than on the bed whilst watching a film. We've made it a rule to save the TV for firmly after dinner on all nights but Fridays. We get to go to bed together, which is new and wonderful and lovely and makes me in my selfish joy very pleased that we don't have to see each other off at the end of the night for a long and boring cycle ride or Tube journey. And yet, it's not unwieldy in its newness. It's just a natural continuation of our relationship from before. We were already doing the shopping together, going to the temple together, sitting in church together when Sebastian's duties assisting the Bishop didn't detain him...it's all lovely but in a way that doesn't feel noticeably different from before.

In other news, however, we *did* get our new bed delivered just a few minutes ago. Our big fancy bed to go with our super swish new bedroom set which makes me indecently excited because it means that I now own my own *real* furniture. It's things like that that make me feel like a grown up in spite of my own cognitive dissonance and my professor very politely and sweetly saying to me yesterday, "Oh! You're quite young to get married, then!" (To be fair, she meant no offence by it, and we *did* spend 2/3 of my meeting with her, not discussing my dissertation topic proposal, but ogling my wedding photos. She's a woman after my own heart.)

It's always funny to me that things can feel both strange and normal at the same time. I keep expecting to have more difficulty adjusting to being home *and* being married. To being home without my family staying with us - which was the state of affairs when last I left our lovely flat in Farnborough. To remembering that this actually *is* my home, and not just a dorm or my parents' house, or a temporary place with friends. I remind myself of these facts, and some corner of my brain must say to myself, "of course. I should wonder about these things more, but I simply don't."

I think it's like when people would ask the ever popular question of a blushing bride-to-be: "Are you so excited!?" I'm getting married. I'm 23 and I'm getting married. In England. To the love of my life, who - incidentally - has become my very best friend...nah. I'm totally not excited. Clearly, I have no soul and am unphased by this entire process. Of course I'm excited! :-) But "excited" doesn't have to equate to: 1) telling everyone, incessantly, all the time, every single detail, 2) jumping up and down and squealing in a register fit to excite panic in the neighbourhood dogs, 3) grinning constantly from ear to ear like Blushing Bride Barbie (or her healthily tanned compatriot, Theresa), 4) Spending hours Googling dresses and flowers and pictures of other peoples' weddings, or 5) leaving sickening Facebook status updates like, "Going to pick out a wedding cake baker with my honey!" or "5 day 'til I marry the love of my life!" Excuse me. There's now some sick I must clean up. The point of that tirade is that I adapt to change quite well. I don't need a public freak-out moment to bring myself in-line with the reality that I'm married. The thing is, I'm self-analysing enough to wonder *why* I can be excited without losing my mind or appreciate the fun and newness of living with my husband while still feeling very at-ease with this suddenly new way of life.

So yes, trite as it undoubtedly is, I can agree: the more things change the more they stay the same. At least as far as marriage is concerned. I make no promises about my impressive ability to acclimate when I eventually start to expand like I could birth a baby elephant...or the Hindenburg. *That* one, I need some time to get used to the idea of before embarking upon. ;-)

My Lovely English Wedding

I devote this post entirely to wedding photos for those who have yet to see them. That's the thing about your own wedding...you have to rely on everyone else's pictures.