Celebratory Blake

I am finished!
My final final (exam, that is) was this morning: English Literature 1740-1830. The exam was held in a large room with rows of desks lined up military-style, each desk possessing an exam and an answer booklet with the student’s candidate number written on it. Of course, like all procedures at Sussex, this procedure was unnecessarily complicated and had not been explained to me ahead of time. Thus, unaware that I would need my candidate number, I had to rush off and find out what it was (although, as it turns out, it was written on my student ID card all along) in order that I could take the exam. This mini-crisis notwithstanding, I finished my three essays in a record time of 2½ hours and was the first student to walk out of the exam room. Hopefully that was a good sign, as I have never been the first to finish an exam in all of the time I have studied at Rochester.

In honor of finishing this course—and because I can now happily forget all of the names and dates I memorized “just in case” I needed them for an essay—I will include some of my favorite quotes from the coursework. I particularly liked William Blake’s poetry, because he used it to examine the morals and beliefs of the time period. In one particular poem, “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Blake suggests that Heaven may actually be a “hell of rationality and rules,” whereas Hell may actually be a “heaven of sensuality.” His poetry builds throughout the piece to argue that Heaven coincides with energy, and anything thwarting that energy is bad. The following excerpts are taken from a subset of this poem, The Proverbs of Hell, (from which I quoted once before, in an earlier post):

Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.

He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence.

The busy bee has no time for sorrow.

The pride of the peacock is the glory of God./The lust of the goat is the bounty of God./The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God./The nakedness of woman is the work of God.

To create a little flower is the labour of ages.

Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.

Other Blake quotes that are worth pondering:

The vision of Christ that thou dost see/is my vision’s greatest enemy.

Every night and every morn/Some to misery are born;/Every morn and every night/Some are born to sweet delight./Some are born to sweet delight,/Some are born to endless night.

Trip to Uni

Unbelievable that I ever complained about walking to high school. I suppose it was training for what was in store. Here's my trek to Uni, as mapped out on MapMyRun.com: http://www.mapmyrun.com/run/united-kingdom/hove/344502416 .

Walking in the sunshine

I took a walk around Brighton today. It was 30 degrees Celcius (74 Farenheit), sunny, and packed with people. Perfect for observing my little nook of England.

The best description of English fashion was one I received before I arrived. A girl who had studied at Sussex last term told me that English people dress as if they had rolled out of bed, thrown on a mish-mash of whatever was lying about, and come out looking fashionable. With a little more color-coordination and some imaginary ironing, this is exactly how they look. Also, they may have even more of an obsession with tanning than Americans do. Already, I have seen several Brits who have darker tans than I acquired during all of last summer.

Over the span of less than four months, I have seen more dreadlocks than I ever did in all four years of high school at Woodland Hills. Yet, England (or at least this area of it) does not have a very large African-American population. All of these dreads are on white people. They remind me of what I imagine hippies looking like, had I lived in that era, particularly because I usually find them cross-legged in parks, riding bicycles in sandals, or swishing patchwork skirts to the beats of basquers on Sussex’s campus.

After my travels to London and various locations in Spain, basquers no longer surprise me. I’ve found duets of fourteen-year-old flautists performing in front of charity shops in Hove just as common as grubby old Hispanic men playing their alto saxophones in Metro stations. The one group who did surprise me, however, was the trio of Native Americans in Churchill Square. I was walking past the neon-colored signs of HSBC bank and H&M when I spotted them, all dressed in what would appear to be traditional Native American garb (leather-like attire with beading, feathered headdresses, painted faces, etc.) playing long wooden tube-like instruments, their sounds magnified with electrical amps. All this on the street corner of the busiest shopping hub in Brighton—right outside the mall. And my initial reaction? What are American Indians doing way over here?

On my walk, I passed two elderly gentleman sitting on a curbside bench. One man was reaching into a cellophane package and withdrawing a small, square-ish, brown bun. The bun was topped with two perpendicular white stripes. Smaller darkish dots speckling its crust suggested that it had been made with raisins. As the man offered it to his partner, I recognized the bun—it is distinctly un-American. These two men were sitting on a bench, sharing hot cross buns.

Abuse for Knowledge

I am reading a scholarly, scientific article, “Mapping From Motor Cortex to Biceps and Triceps Altered by Elbow Angle,” by Graziano et. al. It’s for a paper I am writing that will count for 70% of my Sensory and Motor Perception grade. I am researching what has been found to be anatomically different in the brain between reaching and withdrawal behavior, particularly concerning these areas’ visual and tactile receptive fields.

Unfortunately, this particular article has disrupted my research, today. I was happily (or at least diligently) plodding along, deciphering what was meant by “We hypothesized that the effect of cortical stimulation would vary depending on joint angle in a manner consistent with pulling the joint toward a goal angle” (395)—which means that they thought by zapping some neurons in the brain, a monkey would either flex or extend its elbow depending upon how the elbow was initially angled—when I started stumbling over the experimental procedures. And by stumbling, I mean became increasingly horrified.

• “The monkey sat in a Lexan primate chair with the head restrained by the head bolt…. An acrylic skull cap was fixed to the skull with bone screws…. A steel guide cannulus (18-gauge syringe needle) was lowered through the hole in the skull.” (396)
  
• “During the experimental session, the monkey was given an injection of ketamine (10 mg/kg im). Within 10 min of injection the animal was fully sedated, that is, no longer emitting spontaneous behavior and no longer reactive to touch…. On five testing days, the monkey was allowed to awaken from the initial ketamine dosage during the following 4- to 5-h experimental session, such that the effects of stimulation could be tested in the awake condition.” (396)
  
• “One monkey was killed with an overdose of sodium pentobarbitol and perfused through the heart with 4% paraformaldehyde…. The second monkey is still in use in experiments.” (398)
  

This article was published in 2004. That was only three short years ago, not back in the dark ages, when animal torture was perfectly acceptable for scientific advancement. I have never read about this sort of treatment of animals for scientific research before. It truly makes me want to write about this, and not reaching or withdrawal or receptive fields, at all. How can I care what part of the brain scientists think I use to pick up my glass of water when they are drilling into the skulls of monkeys and forcing them to sit, sedated, for hours a day with metal helmets on just to find that information out? Monkeys are living creatures. No one would dream of drilling a metal skullcap onto a human baby. Behaviorally, there isn’t much difference between a monkey and a baby; in fact, a monkey is probably more advanced. You might even argue that it is more cognitively advanced, as well. So where lies the justification?

More Weird Athletic Observations

Despite my ordinarily overactive powers of observation, I failed to notice some very important attributes of British athletics last week. This Friday, as I ran around the gymnasium with the U. Sussex women’s basketball team, I couldn’t stop looking at the floor. Something was very wrong with it. Every time I wanted to make sure I was outside the key—to avoid a three-second call or to line for a shot in case I received the ball—I kept looking down and finding the black line just slightly past my feet. I swear, it was like an optical illusion! Finally, as I stood at the baseline in order to pass the ball inbounds, I realized what the problem was: the key was not rectangular. Instead, the lines forming its sides were slanted outward from the foul line at forty-five (okay, maybe slightly smaller) degree angles until they met with baseline. I was flabbergasted.

My first inclination was that this was a setup for some other sport and that another marking on the court—perhaps one less obvious to they—must have been the key. These courts had so many lines for so many sports—basketball, volleyball, netball, and who knows what else—that it was quite possible I was mistaking the key markings for some sort of bizarre netball goal boundary or other such thing. However, upon asking one girl what those lines were for, she gave me an Are you stupid? look and said, “Those are they key.” I said I knew that, but were they for sure for basketball, and why were they slanted? After a big more back-and-forth, she finally explained that the key is different in America—the lines forming it are straight (i.e. parallel). She also pointed out that our three-point line is different: in America, the three point line meets the half-semicircle crowning the top of the key. However, on the British court, there is a gap between the three-point line and the top of the key. I couldn’t believe I had played an hour-and-a-half of basketball with these girls last week and never noticed.

At 8pm, it was on to volleyball. There, I discovered another deviation from American sports: the net was definitely lower. Last week, I had noticed that my hitting seemed marginally more successful than in that past. However, I attributed that to having taken a break from volleyball and a bit of luck. However, this week my percentage of successful hits remained consistent, and I even managed to block another girl’s hit all by myself. Now, I couldn’t help but be suspicious.

At home, if I stand next to the net and raise my arm extended straight above my head, the tips of my fingers barely reach the top of the net. In fact, if an observer were to stand behind me, he/she may claim that I cannot actually reach the very top of the net. Last night, however, I raised my arm and found my fingers extending almost a knuckle over the net.

So much for miraculously gaining volleyball skills on my flight overseas.

Sussex Athletics

Why is it that being American, I am so disgusted by the lack of athleticism here in Britain?

I attended my first Sussex women’s basketball practice tonight. While I was extremely invigorated by the fact that I was on the court with a ball in my hands for the first time in goodness knows how long, I found the level of play astonishingly low. Frankly, these girls would barely make the second team of a high school varsity squad, never mind any sort of college team. And one of them had to leave early because she needed to get up early the next day for some sort of national tryouts. National?

One of the drills was very creative, demanding that three of us dribble the ball with one hand while passing a tennis ball between ourselves and performing a three-man-weave. This made complete sense to me, since it forces each player’s attention away from dribbling and toward the other players on the court, which is usually the goal of dribbling exercises. However, later on in the practice, the coach decided that his girls needed to learn to be more aggressive. Therefore, he was going to explain a new game that was totally different from basketball but would make them aggressive.

In this “game,” the object was to get the ball over the endline. Each play could consist of only one forward pass, and players could run with the ball. The defending team could stop the ball only by tagging the player holding the ball. The offense had three chances to get the ball over the endline for five points but could opt to shoot a three-pointer for three points.

Is this starting to sound like a familiar game to anyone?

And the coach thought he was being SO innovative. The sad part was, most of the girls were actually learning these rules for the first time. Oh American football, what a snob you have made of me.

Lancing College Adventure

Well, I had this grand description of my entire adventure to this new location—Lancing College pool, in Shoreham, outside of Brighton—all written up for this blog site. I clicked “post,” and what shows up on the site? Nothing more than the lovely title, “Lancing College Adventure.” Sometimes I despise computers. Thus, I am reduced to re-summarizing my adventure once again.

Since I have arrived, I have endeavored to find a swim club here in Brighton—no easy task when you consider that competitive sports are nearly obsolete in England. Merely by accident, when I was in King Alfred Leisure Center, trying out the pool I had located (a convenient half mile, or whatever that is in km, from my residence), I saw a notice announcing a swim meet that weekend hosted by the Shivers. I inquired about it and collected the name and phone number of the assistant coach from the woman at the front desk.

After that, I attended one practice that was held at King Alfred Leisure Center. However the “team” (i.e. random collection of swimmers ranging from 10 years to 75 years of age, but all reasonably fast) practices more often at a place called Lancing College. I determined to attend a practice there. However, despite my requests for directions to this location, I received no advice for how to get there via bus or any other method of transportation. My only consolation was that if I managed to arrive on Wednesday night, a woman who was a tri-athlete from South Africa would drive me home.

After studying Google maps and intently reviewing the bus routes listed online and inside my paper bus schedule, I determined which line would take me closest to my destination. I figured I would have to walk a little bit, judging from the map, but I was determined to try and make it there. At this point, I had labeled this my “adventure.” I had no idea what an adventure this would turn out to be.

First off, the bus I took ended up not taking me as close as I had expected. I needed to be dropped off at the Red Lion Pub, and the #2 bus only went to the Southlands Hospital, which was located approximately 2 miles away; the 2A went to the Red Lion. Fortunately, another bus was waiting ahead of our bus as it pulled up, and my driver suggested that I ask whether it was going to the Red Lion. I did; it was; so I hopped on. Unfortunately, I did not know what the Red Lion looked like, so I nearly missed my stop. Luckily, that bus driver asked me, “Didn’t I want to get off?” when we reached the pub, so I disembarked and went on my way.

Instead of relying on the directions I had mapped out for myself on Google, I went inside the Red Lion and, once I found the bartender, which took a good while amidst all the windy staircases and bar chairs, I asked for directions to Lancing College. She took me out the back door and directed me: down a path through some bushes, across an iced-over wooden bridge in the dark, across an unlit parking lot, across four lanes of traffic, around the side of a hotel, and up the long college drive which wound through fields of grass, to the top where there loomed a majestic-looking cathedral. The trek was dark, cold, and long, but I made it up to that massive, lit-up church. Once I got there, I spied a catholic grade-school-looking gymnasium down to the right, so I wandered down there. Lo and behold! There was the pool. The doors were unlocked, and right inside were the dressing rooms. My mission was complete. Now, only two hours of swimming at £3.50 to go. Cheers.

First efforts from Sussex Library

These will be the first "words of wisdom," posted from the University of Sussex library, or "uni" as the students here call it. Most annoying is that every time I want to type the quotation marks key, I keep typing the @ symbol instead, because they rearrange their keyboards here--don't ask me why. Obviously they need the £ key, but other than that, why they need to remove the # symbol and the @ and " symbols also is beyond me.

(I'm not sure if I need to use HTML to write this, so I'll try and see if the commands show up or not.)

What an experiment! I much prefer letters, but I keep repeating myself to my friends, so I figure this might be a better way to keep everyone informed, no? Plus, it will be like a live journal, and I have plenty of thoughts about my stay here in the UK, so it will be a fun way to put them out for the world to read. For example, the reason for the title of my blog: "having a think" is the way they say "think about ___(topic/issue)" here. I absolutely love the differences in language, which I am trying to compile and will post sporadically, as I come across them.

Well, class calls. Hopefully I will not fall asleep. I will e-mail this address to everyone as soon as I can.