I do not laugh.

"Oh come on Callie, we both know you like pain"

I know what happens next. There are 7 or so of us standing in a circle chatting.  The coach that's supposed to whisk us off to a brewery tour hasn't appeared, and September is treating us to one of the UK's rare perfect days. I haven't worn a t-shirt in weeks, and I can feel my arms burning in the sun.

What happens next is that I laugh, giving the group permission to titter awkwardly at the idea of quiet, socially inept, Mormon-raised me, in some kind of tryst with the speaker, John, a suave older man who's just wrapping up his PhD, discovering pleasure and guilt in some long-repressed desire to be dominated and hurt.

There's social currency here.  For both of us. I have the chance to reject any idea that I might be a 'prude', to demonstrate that I am 'game' and 'modern' to a group of people whom I will ostensibly spend a good chunk of the next three years with. John gets to make a joke that asserts his sexual identity and prowess.  I get to be 'fun;' he gets to be funny. I acquiesce. Become the 'other' in a narrative I never asked to join.  What happens when I laugh is that I give the tacit, expected, permission for a statement about my body, my sexuality, my interests to become the butt of an uncomfortable joke. What happens next is that I laugh, and all of us standing in the September sun waiting for the coach to arrive, move from that moment to the next.  I laugh, and the conversation can then drift away from the joke and it's underlying narrative about power and desire and agency and control. That underlying expectation of availability. Of interest. Of submission.  I laugh and the very idea of my sexual interests become part and parcel to someone else's story. My sexuality becomes an object of amusement in order to boost someone else’s sexual self esteem, and build their sexual narrative.

I know what happens next. But I do not laugh.  I simply stare, with the breeze coming off the lake and rifling its fingers through my forever-stray hair.

Yes.  Sexuality is funny. And charming, and awkward, and wonderful, and sometimes dark, and goofy and seductive and overwhelming and fulfilling.  Yes, sometimes sex jokes are the best jokes. But this is not a social currency I am currently willing to trade, my dignity for your pride. We walk in the same social circles, John and I, but we are not those sorts of friends. Where I trust beyond the shadow of a doubt that the human inside me is visible and real and valued. Where we laugh at escapades and share secrets. Where jokes about sex or desire or love are used to wonder at the improbable nature of it all, leaving neither person exposed, alone or used.

Yes. Sexuality is funny. Everything is wonderfully funny. But I never offered my interests up to a sacrificial altar so someone else could use a joke to prop their own internal story into view. I never offered my desires up as a stepping stool.

So I did not laugh. I did not let the conversation drift away from that joke or that narrative.  I let us stand, suddenly silent, suddenly awkward.

"Oh come on" says John, his smile tightening just a bit, "you know what I mean."

I live in a world where what I desire extends beyond what is desired of me. I am not an character actor, flitting from the story of one protagonist to the next. I am my own. Whole and complete. Whether or not any of these people now fidgeting in the sun see me as 'fun' or as a 'prude' is not important. Your joke is not worth my discomfort.

"Nope." I say. Staring back. My gaze unflinching as steel. The shining golden sun ripping through the leaves at the edge of the parking lot, making them as red-gold as my hair, as dappled as my freckles.  And so we stand. Silently, uncomfortably. Because I do not give my permission. I refuse to laugh.

Kim Davis divorced or dogmatic?: What We Should Really Be Focusing On.

Since Kim Davis first refused to offer marriage licenses to same sex couples after same sex marriage became legal across the United States on June 26th 2015, a mini media storm has been brewing.  Lauded by some as a protector of 'traditional' marriage, Davis--and as a result Rowan County Kentucky--has held her ground.  Claiming that she is acting under "God's Authority", Davis has continued to violate federal law, and deny couples marriage licenses, for almost three months waiting for a ruling on whether or not she as an individual could be compelled to follow federal law.

As the case trickled forward, so too did her internet fame, breaking into a full fledged twitter storm in the last few weeks when a U.S. District Court Judge affirmed that yes, she did have to follow federal law as a federal employee. Davis continued to refuse.  Within hours she hailed as a hero and hissed at as a villain.  By today, whens he was held in contempt of court, the case had gone international. One person's bigotry had become the talk of the nation.

Then our attention shifted. Rather than discuss how and why Davis has been able to allow her bigotry to control a Kentucky County, or to have a national debate about what we can do to make sure elected officials follow the federal laws they are appointed and elected to serve, we have instead fixated on the fact that Kim Davis has been married four times.  Oh, and she's 'fat'.

Yup.  It's not enough for us that Davis holds bigoted views and that those bigoted views are hurting law-abiding Americans.  It's not enough for us that Davis is contributing to a culture of hatred, or that her views are directly impacting American couples wanting to become American families.  Nope.  That's not important to the twitter feed.  The twitter feed is joking about making Kim Davis halloween costumes out of large blue t-shirts.

And I just don't get it. Why does it matter what Kim Davis looks like or who she has married? We have some damn good reasons to criticize Kim Davis, and those reasons have nothing to do with whether or not her jeans have elastic in the waistband or which husband fathered her kids.

None of this matter.

And if Kim Davis were a 50 year old man with pepper-grey hair, a P90X workout habit that made Scott Walker sweat with envy, and a high-school girlfriend turned wife who stayed home and raised their two blond kids, it still wouldn't matter.

Because Kim Davis' personal life, looks and history aren't what matters.  What matters is Davis' bigotry.  And that bigotry exists all across the United States.  It lives in trailer parks and 5th avenue penthouses, and when we fixate on Davis divorces, rather than on her views we reinforce the idea that only people we don't like, only people we can hate, only *other* people are bigoted.

We distance ourselves from Davis by holding her hypocrisy up to the world on a giant shiny banner, when we should be asking ourselves if we, like Davis, contribute to hate.  We should be fixating on how on earth bigotry is allowed to stand in a government office, and what we can do fight it in whatever form it takes.  Davis' personal life isn't the problem. And Davis' personal life isn't what should piss us off.  The problem is that bigotry is alive and well in the 21st century in a myriad of forms, and that's what should piss us off.

We don't *NEED* to be angry at Davis' for her looks, and her clothes and her husbands.  We have plenty to be angry about.  She broke federal law in order to deny people civil rights.  Who she is, how she looks and how she behaves doesn't matter.  We don't need to hate Davis for any of that.  It's enough that she was bigoted.  We don't need another reason to criticize her, and when we look for one, we undermine the severity of what she did--she denied the humanity of the people she ostensibly serves.   What Kim Davis has done in allowing her personal bigotry to continue to exist, and to impact her ability to serve effectively as an elected official is more than enough of a reason for us as a society to criticize her. When we refocus on the hypocrisy, her looks or her life, we lose out on what really matters. What really matters is that she let hate define her behavior, and that is unacceptable.

WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE IN A GIANT EARTHQUAKE

Since early 2006 when I rode out my first "sizable" earthquake (6.9) I have lived under the impression that, being from a city in the Pacific Northwest that is practically making sweet sweet love to the Cascadia Subduction Zone fault in terms of personal geographic proximity, we are ALL GOING TO DIE IN A GIANT EARTHQUAKE.  Of which I have been reminded by the New Yorkers' lovely new article on how everyone living in the Pacific Northwest is simply living with the fact that we are ALL GOING TO DIE IN A GIANT EARTHQUAKE.

Spending 2ish years of my adult life between Central America and California didn't help.  Where I experienced a further four or so 5.something quakes and a 7.2 that knocked my dresser onto my bed and demolished the neighbors wall shortly before a volcano filled the capitol city with ash, grounding planes and giving my xenophobic ex-pat neighbor another reason to think the world was ending, and me to think that WE WERE ALL GOING TO DIE IN A GIANT EARTHQUAKE.  Far from calmly sitting in my plastic chair sipping tea through the first glimmers of any quake as do some seasoned Northwest veterans, I am scanning every room of every building I ever enter for "triangles of life" and have practiced slamming on my breaks, shutting off my engine and rolling out of my car to lie next to the engine block as quickly as I possibly can so many times that good friends have just stopped asking about the road burn on my shoulders.  Just in case, you know, I happen to be on the I5 Bridge during when the GIANT EARTHQUAKE IN WHICH WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE hits and I must rely on the relative unsquishableness of said engine block to keep me from becoming a people-pancake as the highway falls straight into the sludge we call the Willamette River.

The Discovery Channel hasn't helped either.  I can,  however, say with near certainty that I have watched every earthquake special they have ever aired.  Even the ones about earthquakes that haven't happened yet, and apart from learning that we ARE ALL GOING TO DIE IN A GIANT EARTHQUAKE, I have compiled some useful tips on being the poor cad who gets interviewed about the GIANT EARTHQUAKE IN WHICH WE ALMOST ALL DIED, 10-20 years after it happens.

I know that surviving the first four minutes of any major earthquake boils down to essentially luck.  In a parking garage?  No worries, it'll be quick, but we'll miss you.  Outside in a park?  You lucky bastard.  Old brick building?  Find that triangle of life and probably some form of faith.  On the beach?  You'll survive the earthquake, but probably get washed out to sea with basically every object, natural or man-made, on the Oregon coast when the Tsunami hits.  At home? Let's hope it's a wood-frame.  

Once the earthquake stops, and my beloved Rose City lies in ruins, survival gets easier for those of us who didn’t ALL DIE IN A GIANT EARTHQUAKE.  Stay away from old brick buildings and bridges since they'll likely fall down during aftershocks.  Which can hit for weeks or even months after the fact.  Remember that the Red Cross Supply Warehouses are on the East Side of the river, and that if you and home are on opposite sides, it may be time to resettle.

Should you be fortunate enough to be on the right side of the river to cycle or hike home (remember, the roads and bridges are totes gone by now, knocked over by the GIANT EARTHQUAKE IN WHICH WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE), make good friends with that one neighbor who owns a water filter and NOAA radio, no matter how obnoxious he is. The old lady with the giant garden who sneaks into your yard to kill moles so they won't make it to her gardenias and carrots?  Your new best friend.  Get used to canned beans.  And jokes about canned beans.  Those chickens you let your four year old name?  Now is not the time to get personally attached.  DIY and "Locally Grown" are gonna have whole new meanings since every major city in the Pacific Northwest will basically be rebuilding from scratch, and those of us who love Portland too much to move, and didn’t ALL DIE IN A GIANT EARTHQUAKE, will have essentially signed on as extras in a Portlandia Hippy-Farm sketch with no budget and less-than-union-pay for the entire foreseeable future.

Short term survival aside, I own no less than 4 earthquake survival kits to get me through those first few hours and days after the big one.  One for my car, one for my bike bag, one for my office and one for my apartment.  The manager of the Personal Storage company where Literally-Everything-I-Own-That-Can't-Fit-Into-Two-Check-In-Bags-And-A-Carry-On resides, should be set when the ground underneath the ocean decides that it is time for us to ALL DIE IN A GIANT EARTHQUAKE.  Just in case you are, as I frequently do, scouring the internet for earthquake survival info in light of the recent Nation Magazine article on the GIANT EARTHQUAKE IN WHICH WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE, I have included itemized lists for all three of my kits:

Kit 1 (the car kit):

The car kit assumes that I am out on An Adventure.  As a bus/cyclist to work, the car comes out in the winter, or to take me to Fun-Exciting-Places (FEPs for short).  Thus I assume that should the earthquake hit while I am in possession of my car kit, I am in an FEP far from home and need the following:

A water filter.

A compressed 5 gallon water jug to fill with water using the water filter.  Because water = good.  Just ask California.

Dried food rations for 7 days.  Assuming I eat 3x a day.  Which I do.  

A first aid kit.  Because no one likes bleeding.

A costco-sized bottle of Excedrin. Do you really need an explanation?

A costco-sized bottle of vitamins.  Because they make me feel more secure.  Not because they are actually helpful.

An emergency blanket.  Essentially a 5x5 sheet of tinfoil.

A camping lantern, crank powered.  Light attracks bugs.  Which may one day seem like protein.

A hammock.

A NOAA emergency weather radio.  So that you know when it’s going to rain.

Leatherman

VERY LOUD WHISTLE.  Life is not complete without one.

A File with copies of Important Documents including family contact info.  So that my identity could be stolen while I try to eke out a living an post-apocalyptic wasteland of the city of my dreams.

Matches, Fire-starters and a phone book (good fire-starter material, often free and dropped off at your door every year or so).

LOTS of good tampons and a 4-pack of TP.  Did I mention making friends with your neighbors?

A tooth brush and toothpaste.  Because you never know.

All of this is packed into a handy lidded five gallon bucket.  Because those are good for all sort of things.

Kit 2 (the bike bag kit):

The bike bag kit assumes I am nearish home, and could get there if the bridges haven't fallen into the river yet.  It also assumes that since work was on one side of the river, and home the other, I have access to one or more of my larger kits and just need to get by for a day or so.

A Leatherman

A compressed 1 liter water jug to fill asap after the earthquake and a pack of iodine pills to clean water with for one week. Because water = good.  Just ask California.

A mini first-aid kit.

An emergency blanket.  Essentially a 5x5 sheet of tinfoil.

Matches

VERY LOUD WHISTLE. Life is not complete without one.

A tooth brush and toothpaste.  Because you never know.

Kit 3 (the office kit):

Nothing is more exciting than getting stuck with your co-workers for days in prehistoric conditions as the city of your dreams burns around you. This kit is a replica of the car kit, because I'd hopefully only be stuck at the office a few days, and five gallon buckets fit neatly under cubicle desks.

A co-worker and I may or may not have been considering the purchase of a rubber life raft and paddle.  Just to get across the river if things went south in our weeks-to-months long office camp-out in the parking lot.

Kit 4 (the home kit):

The home kit included everything the car kit includes with these exciting extras:

Canned food to eat for a month.

Backpacking Stove + Pan & Extra Fuel for said stove.  Because canned beans are better warm.

2 way Radio set.

Oodles more TP & loads more tampons.

Work Gloves & Plastic Gloves

Shovel

A giant tarp.

And no, despite the fact that this is prep for the GIANT EARTHQUAKE IN WHICH WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE, the last three items aren't for disposing of a body.  They are for digging a new loo and building a tent to share with Mole-Woman and NOAA-Radio-Guy.  Because those two peeps?  They, in your new post-Cascadia-Subduction-Zone-Apocalypse, are your new best friends.

In short, I have been thinking about the GIANT EARTHQUAKE IN WHICH WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE for years, if not decades.  Please do enjoy the internet fad of articles about it, and read the New Yorker piece.  It’s nicely done.  But don’t forget six months from now, that even though it’s no longer a trending topic on twitter, a giant earthquake is coming.  So stock up on TP, just in case you are one of the lucky ones who rides it out.

English Things I Don't Get: Make-up in Sports

England is full of things I just don't understand.

I can go to the doctor.  For free.  Whenever I want.  For whatever I want.

Hot and cold water come from two different taps, on opposites sides of the sink.

People have an automatic instinct to  queue....regardless of whether or not there is anything at the end of the  queue, they just form one and wait.  No questions asked, no fusses fussed.

But what struck me today....and I don't know why this bothers me so very much...is the amount of make-up worn by people playing sports.  I've seen it on tennis fields, football pitches, rowing boats, frisbee starts and (today) in a rugby match.  People (primarily women, but not always) arriving to a sporting event as players, who have gone to all the trouble to put on make-up.

And by "make-up" I don't mean that you threw on a little eyeliner and then reached into a bucket of paint and smeared your team colors across your face such that your enemies quaked in fear as you approached.  No.  I mean the "this-took-over-an-hour" and "I-used-products-whose-total-cost-is-in-the-hundreds-of-dollars-range" kinda make-up.  The amount of make-up that starts with an exfoliating cleanser and moves on through lotion, a liquid base, powder base and primer before you even apply what-ever color palate number your skin is going to be today kinda make-up and all that comes before blusher, bronzer, the "eye set", lips and highlights.  The sort of make-up that I imagine models apply before someone photo-shops it all off and redoes the coloring kinda make-up.

And don't get me wrong.  It looks damn good.  Given that when I engage in the one-sport I've kept up in this country (rowing) I usually enter the boat looking as pale and attractive as a pithed-frog, and climb out of it 2 hours later, covered in sweat, bright red, resembling a dying blobfish that just got stuck in a net and wondering if my heart can keep up that rate for another minute before my shaking legs collapse, I can't say that a little #287 bronzer wouldn't do me some good.  That is, if it didn't run off my face during the outings first piece, further polluting the no-where-near-clean River Cam and making my eyes burn as badly as my legs during a full-course (2ishK) piece from bridge to bridge.

But I just don't understand it.  Maybe that's because I (like everyone else) engages to some degree in body-image policing, and make-up just doesn't mesh with my normative view of sports (which I--of course--feel compelled to impose onto others).  Or maybe it's just that I've never considered make-up when I engage in a sport, because I know I'll just sweat it off, since I can't play at anything less than "I-Think-I'll-Die-During-This-Bout" intensity level.  Maybe it has to do with an expectation of what sport is.  For person A) it's a mostly social activity, with some effort, or me (person be) an all out battle to the death because on some level as an oldest-kid raised in America, I know that I only matter if I win and win hard.

Either way, I've added this full-on makeup while engaging in "sport" to my list of strange British things I just don't understand.

Right underneath the fact that strikes are organised such to not disrupt work, and directly over KinderEggs.  Because it  makes total sense to give a child a small plastic toy encased in candy and expect them not to swallow the toy.

Sobbing Into My Copy of Title IX

Having grown up in the United States, there are some things that you just take for granted.  Driving on the right side of the road, being universally hated by human rights activists and hitting “shift 2” to produce the @ symbol on a keyboard are among the more banal normalities of everyday life back home that you just miss when live across the pond.

One thing, that I also miss, is Title IX.  

Trying to explain the legal ins and outs of Title IX is about as easy as trying to get Tolstoy’s ‘War and Peace’ (unabridged) tattooed onto your body.  

A subsection of the United States Education Amendment Act of 1972, Title IX--among other things--stated,

“No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

Controversial from day one, it would be years before Congress would draft and pass all of the clarifications and addendums that have since become the backbone for the sports programs of educational institutions from Kindergarten through NCAA Div. I championship games.  It was in 1979 that the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, imposed a three part assessment to assess the compliance of various educational institutions with Title IX.  Asking all institutions that received Federal Funding of any kind for educational programs to ask the following questions about their sports funding, aid, programming and assistance;   

• "All such assistance should be available on a substantially proportional basis to the number of male and female participants in the institution's athletic program."
• "Male and female athletes should receive equivalent treatment, benefits, and opportunities" regarding facilities.
• "The athletic interests and abilities of male and female students must be equally effectively accommodated.

Within a decade Title IX and it’s internal standards meant that US schools, from Kindergarten to college, were suddenly required to provide for equal numbers of male and female athletes, and spend more or less the same amount of money on athletic programs for each gender.  Gone were the days of women’s teams scraping together pennies from dues while their male counterparts were fully funded by Universities.

Title IX is perhaps one of the most impactful pieces of legislation ever passed in the United States.  It so shifted the way that US schools and educational institutions ran their athletics and sports programs that it changed the way people engaged in sports throughout their entire lives.  Title IX spawned a generation that revolutionized the access women had to sport, and then to high level international sport.  It has become such a stalwart of the American landscape that I imagine many Americans would find themselves in the same position I have; not even noticing the full breadth of Title IX’s ongoing impact, until suddenly it’s gone.

Welcome to the United Kingdom, circa 2015.  I, a pretty typical west-coast US inhabitant, have played some form of sport for most of my life.  Soccer (aka football), softball, Tae Kwon Do, in college I rowed for my university.  I grew up with afternoon practices and coaches that promised it wasn’t about winning or losing but only bought you ice cream if you won. and pointedly did not if you lost.  Born in the mid 1980’s I had no concept of Title IX.  My brothers, sisters and I all got dropped off for practice in the afternoon, and were all forced to sit through each other’s games, and drive across the state for championships.

I cared about being assigned as the second base in softball.  Not about whether my family could afford my team fees.

When I rowed at a university I never would have imagined that the men’s team would have access to races and facilities that we didn’t.  We were a team, they rowed in their divisions, we rowed in ours….but at the end of the day we all rowed in the same caliber of races that cost the University the same amount of money.  Women didn’t inherit the men’s old boats.  New gear was equally distributed.  Because in US athletics, there is legally no other way.

In short, I lived in an environment that, while not perfect, provided me the same access to athletics and outdoor education that my brothers had.  The question was not, “where can we find a club for the girls to play in” it was instead “how long is your practice again?”  A question whose groundbreaking potential I never realized until I moved to the United Kingdom and learned that access and equality are slippier concepts than they ought to be, and that “development” is not synonymous with “equality.”

Moving to Cambridge to begin graduate work in the fall of 2013 I was floored to find that many of the British women I was getting to know had not participated in sports before secondary school, and in many cases before university.  Or if they had, their parents had enrolled them in private clubs and paid out the nose to provide them with those opportunities.  I learned that it was semi-common for primary schools to fund a boys soccer (football) club, and not a girls club, and that this was perfectly legal.

As I’ve gotten into the habit, one of the first things I did at the University of Cambridge, was start looking around for sports I could get involved in, teams I could try out for or join, and as I’ve spent an ungodly number of hours sitting in a boat, rowing caught my fancy pretty fast.

I could not have found a better example of sexism in sport at Cambridge if I’d tried.  While I will never row at the University Level, I was floored to learn that it wasn’t until 2010 that the women’s blues team was not given access to the University Boat House.  And even then, it was only at the insistence of the team sponsors....a US investment firm.  At the college level women are consistently fighting for the right to participate in rowing to the same level as men.  For the termly “Bumps” races there are always extra divisions for male rowers.  Anecdotally, I know a half a dozen female rowers whose teams get “new boats” when they inherit the used boats that the mens teams give up when their *actually new* boat comes in every few years.  There are more “Blues” sports for men at the University Level and as a general rule, finding sponsorship for sports at the All Women’s colleges of Newnham, Murray Edwards and Lucy Cavendish, seems all but impossible.

I have to admit, it’s not that there aren’t amazing opportunities for women in sport in the UK, and it’s not as though women here don’t play sport. It’s simply that something seemingly normal, I now see as the luxury of growing up in an environment where equality in access was something everyone strove for---whether they liked it or not.  

Britain has some astounding female athletes, and I am very much looking forward to each of the Varsity Matches between the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford as the “blues battle it out,” but I do think that maybe it’s time that these ancient universities take the lead, and re-assess what access to sport means.  After all, a generation ago, Mia Hamm would have struggled to find a football (soccer) team to take her on, and today she is the top-scoring player of all time.

In the meantime, anytime anyone mentions University Sport, I’ll be quietly sitting in the corner.  Sobbing into my copy of Title IX.

Cambridge Colleges: Corpus Christi

Corpus Christi College, more properly "The College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary," founded in 1352 is the sixth oldest of the current Cambridge Colleges and remains the only of Cambridge's 32 colleges founded by Cambridge townspeople (also known as "Townies" in University slang).  Originally a very poor college, with no money to construct a chapel, and a library of only 55 books (all donated) Corpus has grown to become one of Cambridge's wealthiest colleges today, with assets valued in excess of £85 million in 2014.  Corpus also possess the largest silver collection of any college in Cambridge which augments the college's enviable position in the down-town of old-Cambridge within eye-line of the famous Kings College Chapel.


Today around 500 undergrads, grads and fellows are hosted by Corpus Christi at any given time, making it among the smaller of the "Old" Cambridge colleges, even today, as at it's founding, with simply the college master and two fellows, it was easily the smallest.   Corpus is also known for doing well annually on the semi-infamous Cambridge Tompkins Table.

With some buildings dating back to the college founding in the 1350's (and walls that may be older), Corpus Christi has (over the years) been mobbed by townspeople, set on fire, defended itself during the War of the Roses from a "tempestuous riot" several iterations of European plagues and  the chaos of the reformation.  During the reformation era, Corpus Christi was home to a newly constructed college chapel at the time, and an incredible library donated to the college by Matthew Parker, who (afraid manuscripts deemed "Catholic" might be destroyed) stipulated that should significant portions of the  collection be lost or damaged, ownership would then pass to Gonville and Caius College.  Over the years Corpus Christi has been built, repaired and rebuilt.  Meaning that the architecture of the college is a mish-mash of eras, styles and designs.  Significant portions of the colleges' current buildings, including the chapel, date from the mid 18th century, and by the early 20th century the college began to expand beyond it's original site with the construction of a sports field in West Cambridge.  By this time Corpus Christi's focus on the training of clergy had broadened to include a variety of academics studying in many fields.  By the mid 1960's Corpus opened a new site, Leckhampton court, to house it's growing population of Graduates and fellows.  It wasn't until 1983 that women were admitted for the first time as students to Corpus Christi College.  

The Parker Library at Corpus Christi College contains what is considered a particularly fine collection of over 600 medieval manuscripts, including the Canterbury Gospels.  Corpus Christi also owns the Eagle Pub (run by an outside company), and the Corpus Christi Playroom, a popular venue for student drama, comedy and music in Cambridge.  

Corpus has a long list of well known alum, including Scottish Reformer, George Wishart, Thomas Tenison, Archbishop of Canterbury, Robin Coombes an immunologist, and author Helen Oyeyemi.  Most famous of all is playwright Christopher Marlowe.  Corpus Christi also, allegedly, plays host to a duck and ducklings each spring, working with St. Catherine's College across the road to shepherd the baby ducks towards the river each and every spring.

Currently Corpus Christi's most well-known feature is the "Chronophage," an imposing clock mounted in the outside wall of the college at the corner of Trumpington street and Bene't street.  The name means "Time Eater" in Greek.  Publicly unveiled in 2008, the clock only reflects an accurate time stamp once every five minutes, and features a locust forever leaping forward on top of a giant 24 carat gold clock face.  The locust "eats" the seconds of life away, and every hour is marked by the dropping of a link of chain into a wooden coffin located behind the clock.  Despite it being one of the most famous modern works of art on display in Cambridge (and certainly the most expensive) the Chronophage (also known as Rosalind) is one of my least favorite aspects of the town and haunts my dreams when deadlines are approaching.

Winter Snow in Cambridge

           On Sunday, January 25th, the BBC weather service was promising something called "Thunder Snow" across the southeast of England.  For almost a week photos had been trickling in from "The North" showing mini-snow falls, and lovely pictures of fat snowflakes drifting past windows in places like St. Andrews and Edinburgh.  To state that I was green with envy of "The North" for it's snow, would be akin to calling a lion stalking the Savannah a "kitty hunting a mouse."
           For a little clarification, in my rather limited perception of the world "winter" isn't really it's own season without at least one snow day.  It is instead a long, miserable, extension of the wet soggy British fall.  Days of rain and temperatures cold enough to make you wear a coat, but mild enough for you to leave it halfway open, cursing the rain as you and your bicycle wind your way back and forth from point A to point B in a city where cycle safety is an afterthought.  If that.
           "Winter" in my mind is the winter that I remember from when I was a kid.  You could feel it sneaking up on you starting in September, with air that got drier and colder as the nights grew longer and longer, until they were so cold that taking in a breath too deeply or quickly meant stinging your lungs with the cold.  Winter is that time when the ground goes hard with a frost that won't let go for months on end.  Digging it's claws further and further into the ground as icicles start to grow off the eaves of roofs and any water pipe left on begins to crack in the cold.  Winter is unforgiving in it's bite, and the snow comes in tiny perfect dry flakes.  The kind that take a moment to melt after they've settled on the end of your nose.  Flakes that form fluffy white snow that lasts for days and days and days, coating frozen river banks and lining all the roads.  Snow that dusts up into the air when you kick it, and creates crashpads for sleds careening down hills.
           Winter, as I remember it, goes on and on and on and on.  The only thing colder than a night full of swirling snowflakes endlessly meandering from sky to earth, is the sunny morning after.  The only sound the cracking of the trees as they freeze.
           That is winter. 
           These long grey rainy days.  The ones I've had both in Portland and now in Cambridge, don't feel like winter.  Air temperatures between 42 f and 51 f just doesn't feel the same, and there is a distinct difference between crunching across frozen ground, and trudging through mud that's just barely cold enough to make life miserable.
           But on Monday, February 2nd, despite the BBC promising "conditions clear enough to view the stars" Cambridge got a tiny little taste of winter.  Miniature light snowflakes that dusted through the air to form an overnight blanket of snow.  Not much, an inch here and there, less in most places.              
           But it was one frozen night.
           One little taste of winter.
           And while it doesn't necessarily feel like enough, I guess it'll have to do.

Fish: The Perfect Pet

Those parting moments between fish and aquarium keeper are neither particularly pleasant, nor particularly refined.  Watching a dear friend slip and swirl into the eternal void is never easy---even less so when you say your goodbye's kneeling in front of the fabled porcelain god.  But such is life, or so you think.  That is until it becomes obvious you'll have to plunge.  

This is the beginning of a really bad day, as well as the end of a two and a half week long emotional roller coaster ride, one that taxes your strength mentally, a struggle for life--a fight against that eternal wheel of fate, a battle that you lost against the inevitable.  Two and half dollars down the drain, well, in reality, on the bathroom floor.  You're not going to count the fifty three dollars and eighty cents that you spent on medication, tank supplies and supplements or the phone consultation with an 'expert'.  All that mattered was that stupid goldfish.  Yeah, the one that's now in the trash can wrapped in a series of paper towels.  You start to mop up the bathroom floor--Sydney, the cat, seems overly interested in the trash can and it takes you a few precious seconds too long to realize why.  Well, you think as you slam the back door behind the cat, nursing the three deep scratches on your left arm, at least Sydney's happy.  Sadly, you'll never know where to look for that stupid fish.  But that's not what gets to you, what gets to you is that it won't be the first.  

You, like every other amateur aquarium keeper, have dealt with days and weeks like this time and time again.  You repeat this same process, over and over--expecting a different result each time.   Fish are supposed to be fun, a family pet, those tanks are supposed to add dimension to a room, the endless undulating motion of the fish relaxing.  Instead fish are torture.  The only dimension that's been added to your living room is hell and the painful darting and spasmic death rattles that your fish seem to go through on far too regular a basis are anything but relaxing.  Yet still you persist.  

The tank was specially chosen--you read book after book, web page after web page, on what you needed to do, and how to do it.  You had the perfect beginner's tank.  Ten gallons--neither too big, nor too small.  You then meticulously picked through pet store after pet store until you had the perfect gravel, the perfect heater, the perfect lamp.  Your next step was to purchase a plethora of chemicals and medications to test your tap water for 'fish friendliness' and then alter it if necessary.  Next you let that ten gallon tank with ideal chemically altered water sit in your living room and grow algae for a month and a half--just to ensure the safety of your first six fish--zebra danios that lasted less than half an hour.  Maybe your mistake was in the fish, so you try guppies--they're supposed to be pretty hardy right?  Wrong.   As far as you can tell  they ate each other, since most of them disappeared that first night.   And even the guppies weren't as bad as the  neon tetras.  You discovered, far too late, that they were small enough to get sucked into the filter--they died first, but still the overall impression gave your four year old nightmares for a week.  So much for family fun.  

The tank sat empty after that for almost two weeks, until a friend suggested aquatic plants.  They weren't fish, true, but they were a lot easier to care for and if the filter could be turned up really high, the leaves and stems would undulate relaxingly in that crystal clear water--that is if you can keep the water 'crystal clear'.  If you add fertilizer your plants grow beautifully--but then so does the algae coating the tank walls.  Not a problem until you discover that scraping off that algae and cleaning the tank kills your plants.  So you're back to square one: fish.  At least they don't dissipate when they die-- not if you find them in the first couple of days anyway.  

This time though, it was going to be different.  You were getting goldfish.   After all, they were nearly immortal, right?  Your mother kept two of them alive in your kitchen sink for three months after you won them at a school science fair when you were seven.  If she could do it, you could do it--and at your disposal, you had far better equipment than a kitchen sink. 

Two flushes later, you're taping a paper sign to the toilet--warning your children not to use it, and wondering if this is some sort of postmortem vengeance on the part of the goldfish?  

You double bagged it on the way home--just to be sure it didn't go the way the miniature cat fish had.  Then the transition to your newly cleansed and balanced tank was slow.  A teaspoon of water from the bag into the sink, a teaspoon of water from the tank into the bag.  Twenty four hours later your fish was still alive.  A first.  Unfortunately it had developed small white spots on all of its fins and its tail.  A phone call to your aunt--a woman with a beautiful fifty gallon tank--garnered you this advice, "It's a fish, honey.  Flush it."  Instead you drove twenty miles back into town to consult with the owner of the pet store.  You came home with no advice and roughly fifty dollars worth of medication--most of which required you to immediately contact poison control should it ever touch your skin.  Strangely enough the medication did nothing but prolong the spasmodic suffering of your fish--the probable cause of your clogged toilet.  

For two and a half weeks it languished in the back of your tank.  Staring dolefully at you every time you entered the room, that last day it had gotten so bad that you refused to go through your living room and instead sent the nine year old to sign for the FedEx.  Then you woke up one morning, and it was gone,  Gone with it all the responsibility for its life, liberty and well being, leaving you with an empty fish tank, fifty three dollars and eighty cents short on rent, a sick cat and a clogged toilet.  

Maybe you'll try feeder fish next--after all, they're only ten cents each and your house can hardly be the worst place for a fish already slated for something's dinner, to end up.  

Can it?             

Christmas Letter Guide

As a single person who is frighteningly close to 30, I get a *lot* of Christmas Letters each year, but almost never send one. I just haven't really figured out how to approach them, what to write--why to write it. So I went looking on the internet and discovered a dearth of "how-to-write-a-Christmas-letter" articles. I thought I could help.

How To Write a Christmas Letter:

Greeting:  1-2 paragraphs on how it’s Christmas.  Assume we have NO IDEA WHAT THAT MEANS.  Seriously.  Just gush on and on about how quickly the year has gone by and blah blah blah about how each year is better than the next, then joke about Santa.  Insert something here about how charming the weather is where you live, or how you can’t possibly believe that another WHOLE YEAR is just GONE!  Vague sentences about how well “everyone” is doing (except Grandma who kicked the bucket in March, or The Challenging Teen whose goal in life seems to be to struggle) and how excited you are for next year are appropriate in this space!  Details can include prizes, top grades, new cars.  The works.  Lie if you need too.

The Adorable Child(ren): This section is where we can all oooh and ahhhh over your child aged 3-10.  Quotes are good, as are sweet parental notes about what a good singer, or listener, or etc. your child is.  Favorite foods can be included.  Notes sent home by the teacher about bullying behaviour should be avoided, but if you must address this try something like “Henri(etta) has developed a great ability to assert herself with other children!”  When you are doing your family photograph do remember that blonde children are preferred.

The Challenging Teen: WE LOVE THEM SO MUCH DESPITE HOW HORRIBLE THEY ARE is basically the gist of this bit.  You will brush over the hours you have spent screaming at your teenager, and ignore the pot you found in their bedroom and the watered down Whiskey you and your spouse have been sipping on the last few weeks to cope with the kidnapping of Elf on the Shelf which has traumatized The Adorable Child(ren) and made the Santa-lie harder to maintain.  In this section your teenager, while still a teenager, is charming and really enjoys volunteering at that Animal Shelter!  Even if it does happen to be court mandated community service.

The College Kid!: You are probably wiping a tear away as you tell us about another year on honors for your little adult (squee!!!!).  Who knew a 19 year old could still gain an inch!  And that mission to trip to Africa that just *changed* Eric(a)’s life forever.  It’s Nobel Prize Material here, and Eric(a) will now be studying Ancient English Literature (switching from French Art) so that s/he can get a job working for an aid agency rocking orphaned children to sleep someday for a solid middle class income, travel benefits and health insurance. Add a note about some anticipated graduation date, and a suspected significant other.  Remember you are SO looking forward to meeting the “special friend” of your young adult--and really, who cares if they swear they’re “just friends,” you know better.

Pets: Fido is probably technically younger than everyone besides The Adorable Child(ren), however as having accomplished a higher percentage of his life span, he can go last in the “children” section.  In this space you can plug in a sentence or two about how lucky you are to still have your geriatric dog or cat.  We all know he shits on the carpet, bit a neighbor kid and can’t keep food down.  But what we really don’t know is how grey his adorable little whiskers are.  Include that.  If Fido is a fish, lie.

Spouse: If you are under 35, we all know (from last year) that a promotion has got to be on the way soon here!  Mention how much fun (insert hobby here) is, and spin marital discord as “diverse interests.”  If over 35 and employed refer to work as “stable and great” and if unemployed, refer to life as a an “adventure” and say spouse is “trying new things.”  If divorced, make some sad attempt at a witty comment before slinking off to the watered down whiskey to feel lonely by yourself.

Self--If pregnant talk about how exciting baby bump is, and how much fun sleepless nights sometime in February are going to be.  Joke jovially about the 15 pounds you have gained as a result of the pregnancy.  Hahaha what a surprise! If not pregnant make a nice note about perfect family size being exactly the number of children you have.  Refer to work as “fun” and family life/housework as “rewarding.”  Avoid detail.  Avoid mentioning the 15 pounds you have gained.

Travel: No matter where you went in the last twelve months it was AMAZING.  Camping for 9 hours in the rain?  Best trip of your life.  An overnight in the Wal-Mart parking lot because Spouse forgot to change the oil in the minivan and it quit running en-route to the in-laws?  As a family you have never felt so close. Migraine in Hawaii for four days with a screaming Adorable Child(ren) with The Challenging Teen gone missing?  You have never been happier.  Were you in Europe?  You met the pope!  Who has heard of The College Kid and would like to preemptively congratulate them on discovering poverty in Africa!  What a trip!

Conclusion: And finally, wrap this puppy up with some trite quote about how blessed life can be and how much you are looking forward to school starting again so that your little darlings can go back to earning perfect marks far, far away from you for ⅔ of the day.  Observe that each year is better than the last (don’t mention your aching back, pot belly and wrinkles) and make sure you scrawl something unintelligible in the corner of the paper so your 792 relatives and close friends know you thought about them specially.

And don’t forget to mention Jesus.