Nancy Caroline: A Timeline, 2007-2008, or A Slower, Meandering Stroll Down Memory Lane Through the Lens of Academia

Oh man, you guys. It's been a crazy week. The freaking CUBS are in the WORLD SERIES, and

here I am, living in Chicago. Baseball games take up a good bit of time, my friends. Also, I'm

slowing down a bit and lingering a moment with the details on these last few because I'm

actually processing some of the experience as we speak. Isn't that exciting? So, we continue

with my time as an American citizen with a work visa in London, UK.

What I didn't learn from actually receiving care from the NHS, I learned by working in an NHS facility. I worked in a small three room office area with a bunch of women, half registered nurses and half “nursery” nurses who ate avocados and passion fruit and gossiped as I filed paperwork or entered data onto the local as well as the larger NHS server.

Every time a baby was born in our neighborhood, the hospital would send a new paper file and a fun book for the nurses to give to the new mothers on their visit. Each nurse would schedule a visit with new parents to discuss baby proofing and, in general, what the family would need. The NHS would provide baby gates, plug guards, anything you can think of to make the home safe for wiggling newborns who would swiftly grow into crawlers, walkers, and then little humans. They even gave away cloth diapers and fashionable liners for the diapers. There was a laundering service for the diapers too, included with, you know, citizenship.

Every week, at different locations within the neighborhood, new parents were invited to come to a baby clinic to have their child weighed (my job), inoculated (not my job), and to speak with a nurse about any concerns they may be having. It was an opportunity for struggling and frightened parents to ask lame, run-of-the-mill questions while the registered nurses stealthily looked for signs of postpartum depression. 

Baby clinics were paid for by taxes that everyone (everyone) pays in England….just as all health care in the country was paid for by taxes that every pays.

It was hard for me to hang out with a bunch of newborn babies as a woman in my late twenties with powerful hormones. I watched nursing mothers, smiling down at their children, glowing like Madonnas. I wanted a baby, but I also didn’t want a baby, you know? I just wanted to breastfeed...one day.  

The city of London was a beast. She was immense, ancient, gray, and often very lonely. I experienced a decent amount of anxiety knowing that my work visa would run out in six months, and if I didn’t get married, I would have to leave without even seeing half of her. I saw a lot, though, the Tate Modern (free), the British Museum (free), the British Library (where they keep the Magna Carta-free), Borough Market, a street food market where I ate ostrich, smelled a truffle in a jar, and was able to prove to my English friends that America made a few small brewery beers (not just Bud).

We also left London, took trains to Manchester (for Christmas!), York (kind of like Gatlinburg, TN, but English, and way less seedy, much more quaint), and . We spent a weekend in Cork, Ireland with a graduate school friend of his that was studying some kind of geology there, and we spent a long weekend in Sardinia, Italy, rented a car, and explored the rocky coast of the island. We travelled to Carlisle back in England to see Carlisle United play a riveting football match with some other team I can’t remember and to visit my boyfriend’s grandmother, who lived there and hated America and everything she stands for. She loved the Romans, though, and she drove us to see Hadrian’s wall in one of the most picturesque drives/walks on which I’ve ever been in my life. I saw pastoral in person. It smelled like sheep manure.

I had a romance with the London Underground that started out like most loves do, as a spinning, terrifying happiness. The tube was deep, dark, bright, and bustling, and it coursed through the veins of the city like lifeblood. It's always a good idea to take it slow when entering the world of the London Underground, at first, but I quickly graduated from standing on the right-hand side of the escalators to walking them two steps at a time on the left like the rest of the Londoners who were almost late for work but determined to make the best time.
We had our bad times. Some days I climbed deep down under the city and felt a sickening anger at all the bodies squeezed together on the platform, trying to fit into the next train, no one making eye contact. Sometimes I wanted to speak my mind, like people that get on trains and talk a lot, then ask for money, but I wanted to comment on how ridiculous everyone was in the spirit of bitterness that was already seething from every Londoner on the train that day.

I wanted to laugh and make sarcastic comments about the futility of the rat-race, but I didn’t dare. My accent would have given me away as an American, but I grew accustomed to the nuances underground. The first time I felt like I belonged in London, I was in the Underground, breezing through the tunnels, oblivious to the crowd, listening to Regina Spektor (probably), and for the first time, I didn’t stop to check the map to make sure I was going down the correct tunnel or to have a mild panic. I just kept going.

On the way to the Tube every morning I received a free paper telling me what Amy Winehouse had done the night before and a free paper in the evening telling me what Amy Winehouse had done that day. It was charming. Especially the one about her going to the corner store to get an “iced lollie.” Fucking precious. The paparazzi.

This happened every day until the story broke of the Austrian man who kept his daughter locked in a secret underground “apartment” he had fashioned so that he could rape her and father a few kids by her while only letting a couple of the kids live upstairs in the real world...for 24 years.

Yeah. That is something that happened. I’m not going to go into it more than to say that it is something that actually happened, and I had to read about it every morning and every evening on the Underground. You can read about it here on Wikipedia.

Needless to say, I dove deep into a depression. My boyfriend didn’t know what to do. I didn't know what to tell him. It was everywhere, this story of a monster, destroying the life of his daughter. I couldn’t understand why. Why did it happen? How could it happen? Is this real life? 

I don’t think the story made it over here in the U.S. I think there is a certain level of filtering along with a general apathy for anyone else that isn’t us. Yet, here I was in BBC land, where everyone knows everything about everywhere like a bunch of elitist nerds, having to read tabloid coverage of this...discovery? Event? Horror?

The man refused to admit he had done anything wrong until he watched her testimony, and then suddenly, he shifted, plead guilty.

We broke up. I think I never got over the advice I received from a coworker I had for a short time when I worked as a receptionist for an investment bank. She was from Peru, gorgeous, patient, confident, and comfortable in her own skin. The day we met, as she was training me for the position, she asked me about myself and, within an hour of hearing how I happened to be in London, asked if my boyfriend had any intention of living in the States if I wanted to go back one day. We'd had this discussion, he and I, and I he'd told me, no. I was on the fence, but not really. Her immediate response was "you need to be with someone that wants to be where you want to be," and she was right. It took me about nine years to figure it out, but I figured it out.

I had a drink with her close to the end of both of our tenures in London. She was heading back to Peru to be with her family while she and her husband raised their daughter, who put a kink in their plans to move to Australia and travel more, but she was not sad. She said she relished the strength and courage she felt in having conquered a city like London. I felt the same way. We parted on the Tube platform on trains going in opposite directions. I remember her on the train, waving goodbye and smiling, shouting at me to come to Peru. Still need to do that. 

I had some crazy romances between then and now. Kissed my boyfriend like we would never see each other again at two different airports after we broke up (yep, two). I fell madly in love again, and I cried some real tears as I tumbled out of it.

I just kept moving, desperate to find a way to transform my passion into my action, the missing link that Margaret Fuller found in Ralph Waldo Emerson's new school of thought, Transcendentalism. Emerson said the world is all confusion and madness because man is disunited with nature. If man were to go back to the natural world and live in communion with her, he would transcend to a higher level of humanity. 

Fuller responded that he was close but left out a word. Man is disunited with nature, yes, but, more importantly, man is disunited with his nature. The world, society, tells man that he is "masculine," and society defines that word for him just as it tells women that they are "feminine" and define feminine as less than masculine (exact same concept for race). 

Masculinity is defined as strength, power, and femininity is weaker, more delicate. Margaret would argue that nobody really knew what it meant to be a woman because women were denied the very right to know themselves freely, to own their own lives. Even women my mother's age lived in a prison of limited options, but they angrily held their tongues for lack of another choice. As roads begin to open for women, as more women fight to stay alive where most women die, we see a million new pictures of what it means to be a woman, and the more we know, the more we can share.

Fuller said they are parts of a whole, the masculine and the feminine, that we all share in every aspect of them, but, for the sake of civilization, we deny those parts of ourselves that do not coincide with our respective genders. Did I lose you? Girls wear pink and boys wear blue because that's what stores sell for boys and girls, but we are all colors. We are all passion and strength. We are all emotion and electricity. It's time to embrace it. Fuller said that in the 1840s.

We've now passed the time to embrace it. It's time to catch up.

And time to move on to the last 8 years of my majestic and fascinating life.

Go Cubs.

Us.

Nancy Caroline, A Timeline: 2007-2008

I took wellbutrin to get through writing my Master's thesis. I went from scattered and emotional to jittery and ultra focused. I wanted to get out of the states, get back to my man, get back to a country that valued...well, humans. So I dove in while my thesis advisor was facing his own struggle with politics at the university. His notes were always charming. Like a monkey throwing poop at me. Charming. I taught classes at the university during the day and sat in front of a computer at night. Then I defended it, and they passed me with the caveat that I continue the research.

Margaret Fuller challenged every notion of woman. She called it as she saw it, faced off with some of the greatest thinkers of her time, or any time. She travelled, single, with the permission of her family, as an adult, and she left everything to work for a newspaper in New York. She was a literary critic, transcendental disciple, and foreign correspondent. I cried when I wrote the last few paragraphs of the paper, when I wrote about her death. She was full, even then, at too young an age.

My dad drove me to the airport in Atlanta on the day before Thanksgiving. I had two large suitcases and a Klonopin. I bought a huge Captain Morgan's Spice Rum at the duty free...to remind me of home....

Then I cooked Thanksgiving Dinner for my new housemates in Turnpike Lane (North London) and they all remarked how clever it is to have a holiday entirely devoted to eating. The English love food. they eat food at the table. I never ate a meal with people that wasn't at the table in England. At my boyfriend's parents' home, we ate most meals in the kitchen and special meals in the dining room. We had wine with every dinner, and the English use both hands to eat. I love it. I used to practice eating with both hands when no one was home when I first noticed the distinction. It might look really simple, but it is not.

I spent a majority of my social time in England sitting around tables and discussing the legitimacy of homeopathy (home-ee-op-athy), world news, or differences between American English and English English. Once, the core group of friends (my boyfriends' friends), sat around a table and discussed the fact that none of us had done crack and whether or not we should try it. The consensus was no.

There were always pints. The boys drank cider, and when I made fun of them for drinking what we would call a "bitch beer" in the U.S., they retorted that cider was a, "man's drink," due mostly to the high alcohol content of most English Ciders. I always drank Bitter. It was creamy and foamy. I liked that.

You can't buy Fritos in England. There is no equivalent. In fact, most U.S. junk food can be found only at a novelty store in China Town that sells primarily American sweets. Chips and salsa aren't free, and authentic Mexican food is really and truly non-existent. And that's important, access to Mexican food, to comfort food.

I worked as a receptionist for a bank then as a PA for the CFO of a charity organization who was also a "Dame," like Judy Dench. I scheduled luncheons for her with duchesses and the like, and when I asked where she would like to luncheon, she simply replied, as if I should have known, "the palace." I contracted the Norovirus and wept like a baby while I projectile vomited along with the rest of the nation that had recently been instructed by the BBC to stay away from Hospital if you begin to experience symptoms of the virus. Then I finished out my tenure working with baby nurses for the NHS, which, although it has its drawbacks, is quite the organization.

I had a doctor whose office was about a two minute walk from my house. To make an appointment, I simply registered at the office once and never filled out paperwork again. Then, when I needed to see the doctor, I simply called the office and chose, from the myriad of options, when I wanted to come in for an appointment. When I came in from my appointment, I signed in, sat down, and waited for them to call my name in ten minutes. Then, I sat in the Doctor's office, face to face with him, and discussed my issues. He gave me as much information as he could, sent a prescription to the pharmacy next door, and I was done. Then, I left the office and picked up my prescription for 7 pounds ($14). That's all the money I spent. It was HORRIBLE. If I had questions, there were hours during the day that I could call and speak with a nurse, and getting an appointment was never, ever an issue.

What I didn't learn from actually receiving care from the NHS, I learned by working in an NHS facility.

I don't have a ton of pictures from England, so here's a picture of me eating a bus in Rome:

Tune in tomorrow for the next installment. If you want to delve further into my life after moving to England, you can go to the very beginning of my blog and start with this one: Ghost Town.

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.

Helvellyn

I visited the lake district with Liam the summer of 2007. His America-hating Rome-loving grandmother drove us to our campsite after we spent a couple of nights at her home in Carlisle. I read the last Harry Potter book in the warm grass of her garden, and Liam took me to my first very local football match where he told me about the lyrics "panic on the streets of Carlisle" in regards to the old Smith's song. We walked home, boozy from the pints through a cow pasture as quietly and calmly as possible, but the cows still took note and slowly began to follow us to the "kissing gate" that separated them from the dirt road.

On our way to the glacial hills of the district, as I gaped at the breathtaking scenery, Liam's grandmother asked me, "is there any place you can go walking in America?" I glanced into the backseat at Liam who smiled and rolled his eyes.

"Of course," I responded, "Lots of places. It just depends on what you're looking for and how far you're willing to travel."

We camped just beyond a large pasture of sheep who kept me up at night with their less than comforting "baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahs." The tent was small, and the wind raged the first night; thus, between the bleating of the sheep, the flapping of the tent fabric, and my boyfriend's farting (I had met my match), I slept very little.

I started my period the next morning, and we headed out from the campsite to scale Helvellyn.

It's a well known range in the lake district, I would later discover at a bar in Dahlonega, GA. I had just moved to town, was dipping my toes in the bar scene, and had chosen a seat next to a gentleman with an English accent. The topic of conversation eventually got around to places I'd visited in England and finally to Helvellyn. He seemed quite impressed that I had hiked the mountain, especially via striding edge, but I, of course, downplayed my adventure by explaining, in detail, the number of tears I shed in front of all of the United Kingdom that day as I climbed the rock face to the final peak of the trail.

I had cramps for the first five hours of our six and a half hour hike. I couldn't walk them off. Despite the pain, I enjoyed the views, the sheep and goats along the way, and the companionship of Liam, who had taught me so much about taking the time to soak up the world around me...by walking.

I believe this little glacial "pond" is called Red Tarn

All the while, I knew striding edge was coming up, and though I tried to convince myself it would not be as bad as it looked from far away (it looked like people were walking a tightrope), I knew it was going to be pretty hard.

Liam described the landscape to me, how it had formed, and what makes a glacial lake. We ate fruit and prosciutto while livestock watched and waited for scraps. We passed Englishman after Englishman clad in waterproof walking gear, rosy cheeks and all.


I would explain to you how it all works, the science of it, but that has never been my forte. Instead, I'll just keep to what I know best: the emotional roller coaster on which I was forced by the breathtaking landscape and difficulty level "high" climbs.

The beginning of Striding Edge 

It's called Striding Edge because...well...."walking" it is like striding the edge of the mountain. I bent down a few times to hold on as I made my way across the narrow path leading to the final summit. I had a headache like you wouldn't believe, and I was sweating bullets and freezing, but I stood up at one point and looked out to my left to behold nothing but lakes and peaks as far as I could see. I'm not sure if I was actually looking west, but I imagined I was, and I pictured home and all my friends waving to me from the eastern coast of the United States.

I had Liam take a picture of my lovely mug at the end of Striding Edge

As soon as we finished striding the edge of the damn mountain, we faced the final ascent to the top of Helvellyn. The trail eventually ended, and there was nothing but rock, straight up, all the way to the top. So I started crying like a baby.

Through hiccups and tears, I asked Liam if he could please encourage me and not laugh at me as he climbed behind me. I also asked him to hold my butt in case I lost my footing. He was a little uncomfortable, to say the least, having to climb behind a weeping American with his hand groping her butt, but he obliged like a champ as what seemed like hoards of spry Brits climbed down past us with looks of bemused pity. I was a snotty wreck. I HAD CRAMPS. AND A HEADACHE.

Plus, nobody told me that I was going to have to do this. I hate being surprised, and I hate it even more when the surprise leaves me underprepared. I'm sure if I had known what was coming, I would have been able to bolster my emotions and my strength. I'm sure I wouldn't have made a fool of myself by crying like an infant on what most "locals" would call a "walk," but, then again, I'll never really know if that would have been the case. I had to take the trail as it came to me.

Oh the life parallels. They just keep grabbing me by the butt.

When we finally got to the top, and I, with a boost from behind, pulled myself up over the edge (it probably wasn't that drastic, but it sure felt like it at the end of five hours of walking and climbing), Liam immediately spun me around and warned me not to read the stone that memorialized the first climbers, I think because one of them had fallen to his death.

It was cold and windy, and my head still hurt like nothing I'd felt before, but I was done climbing up, it felt amazing, and I laughed almost all the way down the mountain.

We went "down tha pub" for dinner, and I rewarded myself with a roast and potatoes covered in gravy as well as a side of Yorkshire pudding, which I also covered in gravy. The tent was going to be warm with farts that night.

Walking back to the campsite, my legs wobbly from the hike and the pints, my belly warm with gravy and potatoes, I saw a lamb bounding and flopping about around its mother. I had never seen a lamb before outside of pictures, and it was precious, excited by the prospects of its own legs.

That's how I felt, all of a sudden. I was excited by the prospect of what else I could do. My legs had just helped me up and down one of the most difficult hikes in England. Sure, I cried like a baby, kicking and screaming as it is forced into the world from the warm comfort of the womb, and sometimes I still cry like that, but that's life, isn't it? Nobody can really tell you how hard it will be. Adults can shake their heads and sigh when a twenty-something says "I'm invincible," but they cannot prepare him or her for the struggles that lie ahead.

It's good to be excited by the prospects and certainly better than being terrified of them.

So, life, I see your struggles, and I raise you the strength of my own legs. Keep in mind I know nothing about poker, but I've climbed some peaks in my lifetime, and I know that I always get to laugh down the other side....and eat mashed potatoes.