Nancy Caroline, a Timeline: 2006 - 2007 (slowin it down a bit)

Apparently...we look like we are "straight up gay" in this picture.

I started Grad School in 2005, drank like a fish, spent New Years in New York after both of my grandmothers died within a month of one another. I tried to date, but everything promising terrified me to the point of self destruction. I did lots of self-destructive things my first two semesters in graduate school. I had never rebelled as a young thang. I was steadfast and loyal....good. Oh how I tried so desperately to be good.

Then the summer came and my best friend and I lived like we were kings....that drank a lot, loved the boys, belched and farted like no other woman has or should, woke up hungover...most days, and laughed...because it was the only true remedy to the hell of real life. We shut down the Hi-Tone (the original Hi-Tone on Poplar Ave) on a weekly basis, broke into apartment complexes with pools and jacuzzis, befriended booth owners at the Memphis International BBQ festival, danced at the Lindy Hop, danced, drunk as hayle at Ernestine and Hazel's, and ate McGriddles....so many McGriddles. We had a love affair with Midtown Memphis. We were partners in crime. She turned to me one night and told me that it was a time we were having and that it would have to end at some point, and she was right. I taught English in the Czech Republic, but not before stopping over in London to visit my college roommate who happened to be there attending art school. We went with an Englishman friend of mine (that I kissed a bunch outside of The Buccaneer in Memphis while a bluegrass band played inside and then months later again in a churchyard in Prague after getting totally wasted at a nightclub on dollar beers) to a club called The End where the DJ Erol Alkan hosted a party, Trash, which he ended every night by playing The Smith’s classic “There is a Light that Never Goes Out,” while the English boys smashed their beer glasses on the floor, and everyone, everyone, EVERYONE sang along like the night would never end and we would never grow old. My local tour guide (and worldwide makeout buddy extraordinaire) also introduced me to my next boyfriend that night, a fella from Manchester that was studying Diatoms to predict climate change (I think) in grad school. We talked about England’s recent loss in the World Cup, to Portugal, and he struggled to describe how it felt to know he had to wait four years for another chance. I helped him by reminding him that presidents in the U.S. serve four year terms. He laughed at my cleverness. He turned to me at the end of the night, pointed up to indicate the song everyone was singing, and yelled over the pulsing crowd, “THIS IS A TCHUNE!” I took a class on Emerson the semester after that summer, and fate’s hand dipped its fingers back into my stew. The instructor, on the first day, informed the class that we would just be reading a lot of Emerson and if anyone wanted to drop the class, that was fine with him. No one dropped, and we entered into a philosophical journey that led me to my research obsession, how to apply Emerson’s transcendental tenets to women in a world that did not allow women the freedom to “transcend.” The instructor introduced me to Margaret Fuller and her essays, letters, journals, and activism began to guide my life in directions I had never imagined. I spent the next two years, travelling with my English gentleman and reading about Fuller, buried in printouts from JStore, academic articles examining Fuller’s relationship to her mentors like Emerson and Hawthorne, her admirers like Poe and Whitman, and her relationship to herself, the most torrid, the most confused, as she wrestled with society’s expectations and her own nature. She was a beast of an intellect, obsessed with learning as much as she could and sharing that knowledge, but her fervor was lost on the men in her life. They did not know what to do with the feelings they had for her that she pressed them to explore in the name of life and liberty. They would fall short, literary giants, lost for words in the company of a woman that did not fit the mold. How curious it is that her history is known by so few…

Beautiful Bar"th"elona

Before I finally put pen to paper to write and eventually defend my Master’s Thesis, We travelled to Spain, Valencia and Barcelona, road bicycles out into the countryside and ate Paiaya and locally grown almonds on the beach of the mediterranean sea as the sun set. Then we fell asleep listening to the echoes of night owl footsteps along the stone streets below us. We fought. We went to food markets and bought avocados that we ate on fresh bread spread with Marmite and bananas. It was weird. We visited art museums and read the labels for each piece, took naps in the park, and fought. We made it to Prague a few days before we were to begin teaching in Pilsen, and we explored her medieval streets until our whole bodies ached, and we fought. Then, we taught English for three weeks in West Bohemia, drank with teachers and students from all over the world but mostly Memphians and Czechs. We smoked Hookah in a tea lounge off a quiet street in the center of the city, drank liqueur that put hair on my chest, and ate beef knuckles and Goulash, slept on beaches in the shade, and road trolleys everywhere.  And we drank beer, rushing under the city from the source, pure and fresh, our nourishment, for in the Czech Republic, beer is food.

Then....I sold my stuff, and I moved to England with the intention of not coming back for a long time.

Anyone can Master's Degree

I was thinking the other day, an activity in which I often indulge, about the process of writing a paper, or a thesis...if you will. I find myself most days getting carried away when I find a work, such as a film or a play, that lends itself to numerous topics of discussion/research/basic delving. And the truth is, anyone can write a research paper on absolutely anything that suits his or her fancy. Freshmen college students have trouble with it because no one has ever given them the power of choice before, but once we all get a little bit older and more...attached to our belief systems...we often have less trouble making decisions and running with them. Thus...the thesis of this blog will be:

You can write a master's thesis!

Picture it: One day, you're lying around on your sofa watching sports...ball, and you keep seeing commercials for Bud Light, and you're like "Why is everyone in these commercials so happy with their beer? Bud Light is gross. In fact, the majority of Bud Light drinkers appear to me to be Bros...and Ho..s." Then, maybe you giggle or chortle at the thought...but upon further thinking...this topic becomes a little more...urgent. "No, but seriously...why?" I'm sure anyone and everyone could end the thought right there by chocking it up to bad breeding, lack of adventure, money...health? But not you. Not now. You've got to get to the bottom of it.

If I learned anything in Grad school, it was that I needed to eventually make a solid choice to say something that had never been said AND backed up with research. SURE, most people joke about the Bud Light demographic...but very few people, nay, no one has really gone out on a limb to research this phenomenon. Why not you? Seriously. Anyone can do this.

So you start googling. Maybe you find a few articles here and there, but you don't really find the mother load until you spend the better part of three months pouring over J-Store. It's this awesomful website where researchers in the liberal arts have access to an ass-ton of scholarly articles on all sorts of topics.

AN ASS-TON.

Then you get excited! Things are moving along! You are inspired, and that inspiration is driving you. So what if you spend most of your time locked in a small room, staring at your computer screen, surrounded by mountains of printed J-Store articles in piles that kind of resemble organization. You can no longer be bothered with parties and bar hopping. You are on a journey...NO! A QUEST!

And maybe your friends call you, and beg you to get out of the house. And maybe you do hit up a party or two wearing a giant sweatshirt. And maybe your friends notice that you can't stop blinking (probably because you've been drowning in computer screen). And maybe you start to think that this blinking thing is more than just the screens...like...maybe you have turrets syndrome...it's POSSIBLE.

And then one day you share what you've written so far with one of your friends that you KNOW is smarter than you are, but she returns it to you with the note "This is terrible writing. You may want to take a class on writing because this is impossible to follow." And maybe you get a little angry, and crouch down on the floor of your room, screaming into a pillow. Then, ripping up all the draft papers into shreds, you begin to throw them around the room in a raging frenzy, and when you run out of paper, you collapse into a ball of tears and anger on the floor.

And maybe a few days later you notice that you've begun to break out in hives, and you tell your mom, and she says that maybe it's not hives, maybe you have meningitis, and you're like "WHY THE HELL WOULD IT BE MENINGITIS?!?" But then maybe it is meningitis and you'll be dead in a few days and who really cares about Bud Light anyway because it's A STUPID GROSS BEER FOR LAME PEOPLE THAT DON'T LIKE LIFE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seriously. Academia doesn't belong solely to the elitists.

Then, finally, you are done. The paper is complete. And, after a panel of your most trusted and respected friends ask questions about your findings, they all shake your hand, including the friend that told you that your writing was atrocious. She even apologizes for not taking into account that you had clearly given her a draft that you would eventually re-work into a glorious achievement in research.

Now you're ready to get back to working for a living because you have to pay the government upwards of $30,000 for supporting you whilst you were researching the significance of social stratification/social construction and its influence on beer choice.

I'm just sayin.

I have a Master's Degree and so can you.

Going back to the Start

I realize, before I say anything, that I am very well off, and lucky, and all that, but I might do a little bit of whining in this blog...but only a little bit.

SO. Everyone knows about my computer/makeup/bike mishaps. One week it was the car break-in, the next week it was the bike stealing, and this week it is my car breaking down on me. Tuesday night, on my way home from school, my car began kind of shuddering, skipping, and lurching a bit. My check engine light flashed at me as if to say, "Why are you making me do this? Can't you see, I'm sick?" I shifted very quickly into panic mode once I realized that I did not have my phone with me, and my panic turned to terror when the sky opened up and a bizarre torrent of rain exploded all around, mocking me. I made it home, and quickly relaxed, until Wednesday (when I SHOULD have gotten to stay home) when I drove to Southwest with the same horrifying shuddering and lurching. I almost lost my mind. I called my dad, in my disgruntledness, and blamed him for everything, said a lot of bad words, and then cried out loud while alone in my car after abruptly getting off the phone with him. MY DAD....who bought me a new computer when mine was stolen. I am horrible. He told me to shove the spark plugs into their, I don't know, spark plug holes, and the other end of the wires into, I guess, the wire box thingy. So...did that, and made it home without any flashing of the engine light, and lurching of the car. However, I am still afraid to drive it, worried that it will die, and I will never be able to revive it again.

All of this, bad luck (I suppose), has prompted me to think about ways to improve my way of life now that I don't have access to all the luxuries that I used to have access to. For instance, yesterday, I was staring at my horrendous hang nails, which I have been chewing on for pretty much most of my life, and I thought, "perhaps, now is the time to stop this nonsense. My fingers look terrifying." And they do. They are terrifying. Then I thought today, "but I've been doing it so long. What if I stop, and there's this giant hole in my life?" Smokers have a million options to help them quit smoking, but nobody thinks of those of us that are addicted to chewing on our hangnails. What do we get? Some bad tasting crap to paint on there? I've chewed threw that stuff before. I'm going to need something stronger.

Okay. I'm kind of kidding about improving my life through kicking my hangnail chewing habit. I'm also just a little bored because I'm ahead in my lesson planning, I don't have any papers to grade yet, and I don't have any money to run around spending.

Also, I was driving down Humphrey's Blvd today on my way to get my mom's car to her, and I noticed one of those giant, telephone(?), electric (?) poles that's made to look like a really big tree. Those are so weird. I mean...they kinda look like trees, but at the same time, they are just so totally not trees. It kind of freaks me out a little bit. I have trouble concentrating on driving when those things are around.

Seriously. I have NO conclusions.

Pod World

I have...FINALLY...discovered the wonderful world of Podcasts. I had heard people speak of this world on many occasions, but I had never truly experienced it myself. I recently discovered that NPR.org has an extensive list of fantastic podcasts available to be devoured by my ipod. You can search by title or by subject. I know, I know, I am so behind the times. I get it. Remember, I just finished an entire semester of "Modern English Grammar." I'm way up on the grammar times. Which leads me to one of my most favorite findings this afternoon: A six minute weekly program from Minnesota public radio boasting to discuss all things grammar and the English language. It's called "Grammar Grater," and I think we are going to be really good friends. I am also subscribed to "Crash Course in Islam" because I feel like being able to understand things that I don't quite yet understand.

I'm serious. This might be one of the best things I have ever discovered on my own through many other people mentioning it to me as if I knew exactly what they were talking about. I only recently discovered that I could manually update my ipod. No more lost or triplicated music!

This is a good Christmas gift to myself. Free, too!

I'm not going to tell you exactly why, but sometimes, if you let things go and stop worrying about them (aka...money), they take care of themselves. SOMETIMES.

I think the sun'll come out tomorrow. Seriously.