notes on an arrival
Sep. 2nd, 2010 11:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenIt's a humid thirty-three degrees in Ithaca tonight. I, foolishly, live in an apartment which has thick carpets, soft furnishings, brick walls, and no air conditioning. I say this to set the scene; I am draped over a sofa feeling rather like a languishing whale.
It's also September. I said I wouldn't write, until September. I had that eerie experience of talking on the phone to someone, in September, when I was August, and I have been here three weeks, and maybe I can sit still long enough to write this. Three weeks! It feels rather like I've never lived anywhere else. Oxford is a long-ago, rain-soaked dream. I hated Pattern Recognition, William Gibson's last novel, but it had one insight I liked: air travel moves you too fast. When you reach the new place, you're washed out and translucent because you've left bits of yourself behind, and you have to wait until they catch up.
There's more to it than that, though. If you're in a place where no one knows you, it all falls apart rather - you tell the people you left behind, I'll be there in spirit, and in the meantime all the people you meet say, what's your name where're you from, and you tell them, and you both know about the years of detail, the solidity of who a person is, that you can't convey except with time, and you've lived in this place three weeks. It makes people into ghosts, or rather, into outlines, waiting to be filled in. I called Shim at ten o'clock at night, in a supermarket - where else? - and told him this, a little tearfully in an aisle marked "British and Irish food". He said, you like pink wine, and you never met a cat you didn't like. It helped.
I'm in my second week of classes, and have a brief respite over Labor Day weekend. The class registration process was initially a nightmare and got easier with time, and now I am registered for two law school classes, one colloquium, and one cross-listed political theory seminar. The constitutional theory colloquium is fabulous; it's got six students and two faculty members in it, and cheerfully degenerates every time into baseball metaphors and people being angry about Dworkin. It's sharp, and keeps my interest. So does conflict of laws, which is like obscure legal theory writ large and litigious. It makes my brain hurt, but in the good way. The others... I am not so sure of yet, one because I think I don't like it and the other because it's a on a break for two weeks.
In some ways, my background serves me very well - having been through both the Oxford political philosophy papers, specifically, and the tutorial system more generally, the so-called Socratic method is not a shock to my system. I'm also comfortable with theory, with how to think philosophically, in a way the JD students aren't, because of having had Balliol's idiosyncracies ground into my head when I was eighteen. But at the same time... I am not used to so many classes, so much formal assessment, so much written policy, response papers what the hell are they, final exams, what. I guess I'll get used to it. In the meantime, I try not to talk.
What next? Culture shock. It's a shock. Everyone told me, Britain and America may seem similar on TV but they're really not, I smiled and nodded and didn't quite believe - I believe you now. I do. Food shopping notwithstanding, there are two flavours of it, and the first one is just life. Life, in this brave new world where I can't drive, write a cheque, post a letter, flag down a bus. I can't pick up social cues; I can't read accents and pin down region/background, I'm not sure when I'm being snubbed. Other people take me seriously when I'm trying to be funny. After a bit I gave up trying to be funny and am now cultivating an arch humourlessness.
(My cohort help with this, because they're mostly international students. One of them told me this morning about an encounter she'd had with a stranger at a bus stop. "You speak very good English," said this person, "for someone from South Africa.")
The second flavour of culture shock is professional. American law began diverging from English common law about three hundred years ago. Yes, I know you knew that. But it can be rocking along, just the same - then someone says something about faith and full credit, and I'm lost. Precedents are incredibly recent; I keep forgetting that "judicial review" does not mean what I think it means; and most ridiculous of all, in the US they appear to pronounce the "v" in Marbury v. Madison. I meanwhile have no appreciation for the adversarial nature of good honest American litigation. I mean. Small things. And yet. And yet.
The short version: I am a long way from home and culture-shocked, I'll get over it.
Here are some things I like:
-My apartment. It's a small, one-bed apartment in Cornell's north campus. It has a teeny-tiny kitchen, teeny-tiny living room, teeny-tiny bathroom, a quite-comfortable bed, a hideously ugly sofa. I have my pictures and postcards up, and a wilting sunflower in a pot on the table. I love it very much; I think sometimes that maybe I should have chosen to live with other people, but mostly I come through my door and think, ahhh, this is nice. My upstairs neighbours are three Indian guys who are clearly waiting for someone to come along and make a sitcom about them; they lie around on the grass reading thousand-page engineering textbooks and adore each other homoerotically. When my smoke alarm goes off for no reason at all, they come patiently downstairs and fiddle with it for me. It's good.
-New Yorkers, and how weird they are about Wegmans. A late-night scene on the last city bus to the south: me, reading quietly in the back of the bus, three girls, probably undergrads, somewhere near the front. At length it becomes clear that while they are all three freshmen, one of them is an Ithaca native, another is from somewhere else in New York state, and the third has had the temerity to be from Virginia, and therefore her two friends are taking her to Wegmans to show her what she's been missing all her life.
"Don't try and compare it to your, like, non-Wegmans grocery stores," said the Ithaca native authoritatively. "Just don't, okay?"
At which point I gave up and started laughing hysterically. Bear in mind that this was a Saturday night, the last bus out, they are freshmen, and this is freshers' week. I mean. "I have this strange feeling I'm in a bizarre one-act play," I said, very quietly, and then the Virginia girl looked up and said, "Are you from South Africa?" and this was the same night I cried on Shim in front of shelves of Dairy Milk and Colman's mustard.
-Collegetown Bagels. It's the only eating establishment of any note in Collegetown, and it has the same place in Cornell's collective consciousness as G&Ds does in Oxford's. Cream-cheese with raspberry-jalapeno-jam bagel. Sounds revolting. I think I've had four, this week. They also have, oh, amazing sandwiches, and they cater all the law school's events so I'm intimately familiar with their pumpkin cream slices. Also, they pronounce my name right. Small things.
-Deer. A mother and three foals live outside my apartment. By which I mean, I could reach out and touch them. They gambol about in the moonlight, and flutter their eyelashes flirtatiously at me when I'm waiting for the bus in the morning. Not in Kansas any more, yeah.
-Netflix. Where has this been all my life. (Okay, yes, right here.) My subconscious immediately latched onto Buffy as comfort-watching - I'd have thought QI, or Doctor Who, or Jeeves and Wooster, or something, but then it came to me that Giles is my favourite and that choice suddenly made a lot more sense. Next up is 84 Charing Cross Road. Are you getting the theme? I'm getting the theme.
In a fortnight I'm going to NYC to see![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
macadamanaity, gamesiplay and the_acrobat. I'm looking forward to it so much; it will be such a comfort to be with people who've known me half my life. And in two months Shim visits, and by then I want to have places to take him, things to show him, people to introduce him to. I'm doing okay, I'm still here.
It's also September. I said I wouldn't write, until September. I had that eerie experience of talking on the phone to someone, in September, when I was August, and I have been here three weeks, and maybe I can sit still long enough to write this. Three weeks! It feels rather like I've never lived anywhere else. Oxford is a long-ago, rain-soaked dream. I hated Pattern Recognition, William Gibson's last novel, but it had one insight I liked: air travel moves you too fast. When you reach the new place, you're washed out and translucent because you've left bits of yourself behind, and you have to wait until they catch up.
There's more to it than that, though. If you're in a place where no one knows you, it all falls apart rather - you tell the people you left behind, I'll be there in spirit, and in the meantime all the people you meet say, what's your name where're you from, and you tell them, and you both know about the years of detail, the solidity of who a person is, that you can't convey except with time, and you've lived in this place three weeks. It makes people into ghosts, or rather, into outlines, waiting to be filled in. I called Shim at ten o'clock at night, in a supermarket - where else? - and told him this, a little tearfully in an aisle marked "British and Irish food". He said, you like pink wine, and you never met a cat you didn't like. It helped.
I'm in my second week of classes, and have a brief respite over Labor Day weekend. The class registration process was initially a nightmare and got easier with time, and now I am registered for two law school classes, one colloquium, and one cross-listed political theory seminar. The constitutional theory colloquium is fabulous; it's got six students and two faculty members in it, and cheerfully degenerates every time into baseball metaphors and people being angry about Dworkin. It's sharp, and keeps my interest. So does conflict of laws, which is like obscure legal theory writ large and litigious. It makes my brain hurt, but in the good way. The others... I am not so sure of yet, one because I think I don't like it and the other because it's a on a break for two weeks.
In some ways, my background serves me very well - having been through both the Oxford political philosophy papers, specifically, and the tutorial system more generally, the so-called Socratic method is not a shock to my system. I'm also comfortable with theory, with how to think philosophically, in a way the JD students aren't, because of having had Balliol's idiosyncracies ground into my head when I was eighteen. But at the same time... I am not used to so many classes, so much formal assessment, so much written policy, response papers what the hell are they, final exams, what. I guess I'll get used to it. In the meantime, I try not to talk.
What next? Culture shock. It's a shock. Everyone told me, Britain and America may seem similar on TV but they're really not, I smiled and nodded and didn't quite believe - I believe you now. I do. Food shopping notwithstanding, there are two flavours of it, and the first one is just life. Life, in this brave new world where I can't drive, write a cheque, post a letter, flag down a bus. I can't pick up social cues; I can't read accents and pin down region/background, I'm not sure when I'm being snubbed. Other people take me seriously when I'm trying to be funny. After a bit I gave up trying to be funny and am now cultivating an arch humourlessness.
(My cohort help with this, because they're mostly international students. One of them told me this morning about an encounter she'd had with a stranger at a bus stop. "You speak very good English," said this person, "for someone from South Africa.")
The second flavour of culture shock is professional. American law began diverging from English common law about three hundred years ago. Yes, I know you knew that. But it can be rocking along, just the same - then someone says something about faith and full credit, and I'm lost. Precedents are incredibly recent; I keep forgetting that "judicial review" does not mean what I think it means; and most ridiculous of all, in the US they appear to pronounce the "v" in Marbury v. Madison. I meanwhile have no appreciation for the adversarial nature of good honest American litigation. I mean. Small things. And yet. And yet.
The short version: I am a long way from home and culture-shocked, I'll get over it.
Here are some things I like:
-My apartment. It's a small, one-bed apartment in Cornell's north campus. It has a teeny-tiny kitchen, teeny-tiny living room, teeny-tiny bathroom, a quite-comfortable bed, a hideously ugly sofa. I have my pictures and postcards up, and a wilting sunflower in a pot on the table. I love it very much; I think sometimes that maybe I should have chosen to live with other people, but mostly I come through my door and think, ahhh, this is nice. My upstairs neighbours are three Indian guys who are clearly waiting for someone to come along and make a sitcom about them; they lie around on the grass reading thousand-page engineering textbooks and adore each other homoerotically. When my smoke alarm goes off for no reason at all, they come patiently downstairs and fiddle with it for me. It's good.
-New Yorkers, and how weird they are about Wegmans. A late-night scene on the last city bus to the south: me, reading quietly in the back of the bus, three girls, probably undergrads, somewhere near the front. At length it becomes clear that while they are all three freshmen, one of them is an Ithaca native, another is from somewhere else in New York state, and the third has had the temerity to be from Virginia, and therefore her two friends are taking her to Wegmans to show her what she's been missing all her life.
"Don't try and compare it to your, like, non-Wegmans grocery stores," said the Ithaca native authoritatively. "Just don't, okay?"
At which point I gave up and started laughing hysterically. Bear in mind that this was a Saturday night, the last bus out, they are freshmen, and this is freshers' week. I mean. "I have this strange feeling I'm in a bizarre one-act play," I said, very quietly, and then the Virginia girl looked up and said, "Are you from South Africa?" and this was the same night I cried on Shim in front of shelves of Dairy Milk and Colman's mustard.
-Collegetown Bagels. It's the only eating establishment of any note in Collegetown, and it has the same place in Cornell's collective consciousness as G&Ds does in Oxford's. Cream-cheese with raspberry-jalapeno-jam bagel. Sounds revolting. I think I've had four, this week. They also have, oh, amazing sandwiches, and they cater all the law school's events so I'm intimately familiar with their pumpkin cream slices. Also, they pronounce my name right. Small things.
-Deer. A mother and three foals live outside my apartment. By which I mean, I could reach out and touch them. They gambol about in the moonlight, and flutter their eyelashes flirtatiously at me when I'm waiting for the bus in the morning. Not in Kansas any more, yeah.
-Netflix. Where has this been all my life. (Okay, yes, right here.) My subconscious immediately latched onto Buffy as comfort-watching - I'd have thought QI, or Doctor Who, or Jeeves and Wooster, or something, but then it came to me that Giles is my favourite and that choice suddenly made a lot more sense. Next up is 84 Charing Cross Road. Are you getting the theme? I'm getting the theme.
In a fortnight I'm going to NYC to see
macadamanaity, gamesiplay and the_acrobat. I'm looking forward to it so much; it will be such a comfort to be with people who've known me half my life. And in two months Shim visits, and by then I want to have places to take him, things to show him, people to introduce him to. I'm doing okay, I'm still here.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
on 2010-09-04 10:24 am (UTC)Also, you are almost never being snubbed. American universities don't invest their energies in institutionalized hierarchies and divisions amongst the students, the policing of arbitrary boundaries and privileges, and relentless self-mythologizing to anything like the degree the English universities do. Especially at the graduate level. While administrative staff are no more helpful at American universities than elsewhere, actual rudeness to the students is not generally tolerated. It's a lot easier on a stranger.
no subject
on 2010-09-04 03:24 pm (UTC)