all of my life, packed away in a bag

In one day exactly, the time will be 2:30PM. I will quite possibly be lost, because I will have been in Oxford for perhaps two hours. I'd have a photo to accompany this post--perhaps of my larger-than-should-be-legal suitcase sitting on the scale in the foyer--but my camera is in one bag and my photo-uploader is in another, so you'll have to survive sans picture for a little while longer. 


This past week has been busy, busy, busy. Packing and cleaning, cleaning and packing--and then on Saturday I got to head to Macon for a ridiculously awesome going-away party, the likes of which only Matt Roche could provide. There was a piñata. And did you know that they make alcohol-infused dark chocolate whipped cream? It was pretty much the best party ever.


Then Corbs and I drove separately to Savannah--yuck!--so that we could leave his car there. After just a day in Savannah, we drove all the way back to Peachtree on Monday, and we've been here since Monday evening, packing our carry-ons and weighing our gigantic suitcases. Last night we went out to Thai Spice with my family, and I got to see both Russell and Savi for brief stints. Oh, and we watched the Glee season premier, which wasn't as unrelentingly brilliant as I'd hoped but was still good. 


Today is go time. Our flight's at 5:45, and I have a few things to do between now and then. And by that I mean that, every time I was on the verge of falling asleep last night, I thought of some other small thing that hadn't yet made its way to my suitcase, so I had to turn on the light and write it down. So now I get to follow my list! And then, before I know it, we'll be on our way to Hartsfield, paralyzed with that particular fear of having forgotten something absolutely crucial. Here's to hoping I didn't.

cupcakes & packing

You see before you a celebration, in sucrose form, of my having successfully obtained a visa. That's right: it's a visa cupcake. My mommy brought home three of these little guys yesterday and we had a mini visa-related party; if you've read my previous post, you may have some inkling as to why this even deserves such celebration.

Six days from right now, I will be on a plane that is somewhere over the Atlantic ocean. I still can't quite fathom leaving so soon. All summer, people have asked me when I was leaving and I've said, "Oh, not until September 22nd" in a flippant sort of and-isn't-that-ages-away? sort of tone.

Earlier this month, I had to emend the way I said it. Because suddenly I realized, hey, that's only three weeks away! Well looky there. And now I'm here to tell you: there's nothing that makes you realize how soon you're leaving the country than having to pack a gigantic suitcase full of everything you plan on owning for the next year. I have a running anal-retentive-type list on MS Word for exactly what's in my suitcase, what it's packed with (as I have a bunch of 2.5 gallon Ziploc bags with the air pushed out of them), and what it will match. I know, it's crazy, but I only have fifty pounds for it all, and that includes several anthology textbooks.

At any rate, we can safely say that freakout mode is engaged. But at the moment, I'm getting through it by slowly working through my packing regimen, leaving the house at strategic points so I don't go stir crazy, and liberally adding TotalFark Discussion into the mix. And cupcakes. Can't forget the cupcakes.

how to get a UK visa: a somewhat biased public service announcement

1. Go to http://www.ukvisas.gov.uk/en/ and spend an hour attempting to navigate the page. You will not be successful; this step is just to familiarize yourself with the insanity that is the UK Border Agency.
2. Fill out a massive application. Have at the ready information like your social security number, your driver's license number, all bank statement information, the name of your first pet, a brief essay on the relative merits of your personal favo(u)rite pop singer, the hexadecimal code for the color colour of your eyes, your preference re: boxers or briefs.
3. Pay the $330 application fee. This money has no discernible purpose or reasoning other than "because we can." Just do it.
4. Spend three days getting all of your paperwork together. It is not good enough; spend another day. The morning of your big biometric data appointment, race around the house in your pajamas for at least three hours. Call your dad six times to pester him at work over small but highly significant portions of your application. Print out any e-mail sent or received with the words "Oxford," "visa," or "UK" in them, just to be safe. 
5. Go for your biometric data appointment. Don't be fooled by any and all information contained on official Web sites, in e-mails and on your printed application: they lie. You should know this by now. The purpose of this meeting is to stand in a line queue in which you are the only English-speaker and then get your fingers unceremoniously mashed against a fancy-pants machine. The amount of time you spend in line will equal approximately 1000% of the time you spend with said machine.
6. Despite all assertions to the contrary and the fact that you paid a ludicrous amount for postage, these people will not mail anything for you. Carry your paperwork back home.
7. Since you've got the time again, go through your paperwork a final time. Send it off. Know that something will be wrong, but hope that it will be okay. 
8. Wait.
9. Wait more.
10. Stress out about the fact that you still haven't heard back, and that these people have your original birth certificate as well as your passport. They may be laughing at you from behind their deceptively pleasant accents, or hijacking your identity, or deliberately thwarting you because they have deemed you unqualified to study Victorian poetry. Despair slightly.
11. Wait a little bit more.
12. Receive back a curt, uninformative, and stressful e-mail from the unnamed and unreachable bureaucrats in Chicago. They will inform you that one of your documents--as you suspected--is the wrong document, and that you need to replace it. Oh, and you have three business days. 
13. Call your loan people. Get shunted from department to department. If you really want to follow my process, talk to Melanie at Federal Student Aid, Janet at State Licensing, Josh at Federal Student Aid, Lisa at Direct Loans, Roslyn at Application Services, Danielle at Direct Loans, then Chris at Application Services. None of these people will actually have a solution for you, even Chris, though he was very nice. Be prepared: Melanie and Roslyn were both rude and stupid. Yes, I wrote down all of their names.
14. Wake up the following morning at 3AM so that you can reach the UK at the beginning of the business day. You may think you will get back to sleep, but you will not. Prepare mentally for this eventuality. Station yourself far enough away from a comfortable surface (preferably standing) so that you will not just give up on your visa, England, and the whole university system and go back to bed. Trust me, it's tempting.
15. Spend a fortune on international phone calls. Get shunted once more from department to department, all the while glancing nervously at your watch and wondering just how much AT&T is going to charge you for all of this. 
16. Find the person with the least possible power who still knows something about your problem: that's the best advice I can possibly offer for dealing with bureaucratic nonsense. Get that person to overnight something to you. 
17. Wait three long days, as it is Labor Day weekend and there's no mail post on Sundays. 
18. Come Tuesday, wait anxiously for your letter to arrive. When it does, resist the urge to pee your pants in excitement; that reaction is childish and will result in a ten-minute delay in you getting to the UPS place.
19. Go to the UPS store. Overnight this document to Chicago. 
20. Think to yourself all the next day, "my document should be there by now. Shouldn't it?" Do not allow yourself to hope that this is actually the document they are looking for, as it may not be.
21. The next day, receive the most exciting one-sentence-long e-mail you have possibly ever gotten: "Your application has been approved and the visa has been issued."
22. Do a happy dance.

See? In 22 easy steps, you too can be the proud owner of a shiny, slanted yellow sticker in your passport. For the record, it's the most breathtakingly beautiful shiny, slanted yellow sticker I've ever seen.

t minus one month

So I leave for England in exactly a month. Things that I know:

• where I will be living (funny story, that's changed: I'm now living in graduate student housing)
• where my classes will be
• what I should be reading

Things that I do not know:

• that I will definitely have a visa
• if Corbin will get a visa
• what to do about a bank account
• what to do about my cell phone
• what my classes will be like
• that I won't fail out
• where I will live the week before I can move into my dorm
• where Corbin will live
• where Corbin will work
• how much time I will have for a social life
• how I am going to afford any of this.

La well. Life wouldn't be fun if we knew all the answers, right?

what do you mean, preparatory?

The following constitutes the "preparatory reading list" that I received via e-mail yesterday morning. Go ahead. Peruse.

PREPARATORY READING

1.  An Introduction to Ideas of ‘Period’. Wordsworth, The Prelude.  1805 version  with comparison with 1850 first published text, most easily done with the Norton Critical Edition.  Anthologies:  F. Palgrave (ed) The Golden Treasury, L.Trilling and H. Bloom (eds), Romantic Poetry and Prose.  Jerome McGann (ed.) The New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse. Duncan Wu (ed.) Romanticism. F.O’Gorman (ed.) Victorian Poetry.  C. Ricks (ed.) The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse.  I. Armstrong and J. Bristow (eds), Nineteenth-Century Women Poets.

2.  Epic ambitions. Wordsworth, The Prelude. Byron, Don Juan.  Keats, Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion. Tennyson, Morte d’Arthur; Ulysses. Yeats, Cuchulain’s Fight with the Sea.

3.  The ‘Condition of England’.  Austen, Persuasion. Dickens, Bleak House. Gaskell, North and South. Eliot, Middlemarch.

4.  Elegy and the elegiac.  Wordsworth, Elegiac Stanzas . . . Peele Castle.  Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg.  Shelley, Adonais. Tennyson, Break, break, break.  In Memoriam. Crossing the Bar. Hemans, The Grave of a Poetess. Landon, Stanzas on the Death of Mrs Hemans.  Barrett Browning, Stanzas Addressed to Mrs Landon, LEL’s Last Question. Arnold, Haworth Churchyard. Thyrsis. Memorial Verses. C. Rossetti, Remember. When I am dead my Dearest. Housman, A Shropshire Lad.  Hardy, Poems, 1912-1913.

5.  Poetry and the Spiritual Quest. Wordsworth, Lines . . . Tintern Abbey, Ode: Intimations of Immortality. Coleridge, This Lime Tree Bower My Prison, Hymn in the Vale of Chamounix.  Shelley, Mont Blanc.  Tennyson, In Memoriam.  Brontë, No Coward Soul is Mine. Newman, Lead Kindly Light. Firmly I believe and truly.   Bode, O Jesus I have promised. Arnold, Dover Beach, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, The Youth of Nature, The Youth of Man, The Scholar Gypsy. C. Rossetti, In the Bleak Midwinter. Caswall, See Amid the Winter Snow.  Hopkins, Sonnets, The Wreck of the Deutschland.  Hardy, The Oxen, The Impercipient.

6.  Becoming a Heroine.  Austen, Emma, Persuasion.  Eliot, The Mill on the Floss.  Thackeray, Vanity Fair. James, The Portrait of a Lady. Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles.     

7.  The Marriage Plot.  Austen, Pride and Prejudice. C. Bronte, Jane Eyre. Eliot, Middlemarch.  Hardy, The Woodlanders, Jude the Obscure.  Wells, Ann Veronica. Forster, Howards End. Shaw, Mrs Warren’s Profession. Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest.

8.  The Forms of Gothic.  Shelley, Frankenstein.  Hogg, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner.  Brontë, Wuthering Heights. Brontë, Jane Eyre. Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations.  Stevenson, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  James, The Turn of the Screw.






as good old Doctor Ten might say: what? What? WHAT?

homeless no more!

As of yesterday, I will officially not be homeless in England. Though that would save me a fair amount of money, I suppose.

I got an e-mail yesterday from one warden Michael Mowat of Commonwealth House, who does not know how happy he has made me. Commonwealth House is an international house for students, run by St. Aldate's church and located toward the centre (note the English spelling) of town. The application as well as the CH's website stipulates that priority will be given to students from developing countries, students who do not speak much English, etc. Therefore, I applied on a pretty serious long shot, thinking only of how cool it would be to live with all the international students. And then I got accepted! Hurrah!

Now to find Corbin a place to live, which is proving even more difficult.

american mysteries

As much as I'm not the most patriotic person alive, I love the fourth of July. It amazes me that, year after year, entire sleepy towns wake up to parades and fireworks and cookouts and general jubilation at being in and of this country, at the fact that, over three hundred years ago, men whose names they can't remember liberated us from a government whose faults they can't quite name. Mild sarcasm aside, it's really spectacular. A city full of golf carts comes alive this one day a year for this one parade.

Anyway, Robby and Savi and parents and I had fun at the parade. And then Savi and I paddled our kayaks out to the middle of Lake Peachtree for the fireworks. It's pretty neat to be right in the lake, to hear the blast ricochet off the trees before it gets to us. And, of course, to dip our toes in the water. Nothing, after all, is quite so American as a good, old-fashioned, wastefully expensive display of pyrotechnics.

All in all, a good Fourth (well, third, but a good party today too). I know that I'll quite probably be back in the country by this time next year, but it doesn't feel like it. I'll miss crazy American celebrations that arise from nothing more than the fact that we're American.