[glorianas]

[oxpatriate]

Same person here! Just curious: as a graduate student here, what are your thoughts on Princeton's undergraduate culture? Like it? Hate it? Don't care and indifferent? Would you have wanted to attend undergrad here? Why or why not? Feel free to mention things beyond my questions. Sorry if I'm coming across as intrusive; it's just that I rarely get opportunities as an undergrad to talk to grad students outside of precept lol and their experiences as a grad student

Hey there again! Disclaimer first! As a graduate student, you tend not to engage too much with undergraduate culture. I’m at least five years older than all of them, married, and live in a house outside of Princeton. This also means that I don’t engage too strongly with the graduate culture here either, as I prefer to think of Princeton as my ‘day job’ that gets left behind when I leave the library. That said, as someone who’s been a SIFP mentor all year, and who has taken two undergraduate language classes, I do probably engage with more undergrads than the average grad student.

My take on the undergrad culture here is probably coloured a lot by my experiences at Oxford. It’s surprisingly similar in terms of the people; highly driven, very academic individuals with strong extra-curricular interests and busy social lives all rubbing along together with varying degrees of success. The ‘res college’ system mimics the Oxford system very strongly, so college culture seems pretty normal to me. I am not a ‘club’ person, so the ‘street’ and frats and sororities would never have appealed to me as an undergrad, and honestly, I find the concept alien. The massive enthusiasm for societies and sports teams and other things like that is also a little weird to me; people at Oxford sometimes fell into that camp, but for the most part, we were all nerdy academics stuck in the library all day, every day. I was there to learn primarily, and my hobbies were just that - side activities to do at the end of the day, rather than something that some people seem to make a career in itself.

Some things are however very different. I find the privilege gap between certain types of Princeton students staggering. Don’t get me wrong; there were rich and aristocratic types at Oxford, some of whom were my good friends, because ultimately all of that matters very little. However, the wealth and privilege of some individuals here is a full order of magnitude above what I ever experienced at Oxford, and that can be a little difficult to stomach at first. The SIFP kids have been just incredible to work with - so humble, so real, so human, so motivated, so normal! With both these things said, most of the undergrads I see and interact with are just normal kids, albeit with unusual intellects.

There are some parts of Princeton that I just... don’t do. I absolutely fail to see the point and appeal of Reunions. Like, at all. OK, so they’re important to the University to get donations for fundraising, but is it really fun to pay extortionate amounts of money to wear hideous colour combinations and go hang out with people you diverged from twenty years ago? Really!?

Other thoughts I have about Princeton and my experiences here: I sometimes regret not having looked outside of the UK for my undergraduate studies, but the truth is that as a low-income girl from a single-parent family who had never left the country for more than ten consecutive days, I was definitely not ready to move to another country for my undergraduate years. Struggles with my mental health throughout my undergraduate career would also have made being on a different continent and even in a different time zone extremely difficult, not to mention the added stresses of immigration and health care. Oxford was a big enough city for me, and it’s miniscule, so Princeton would never have felt suffocating to me, as some people complain it is. Village living for the win!

Overall, I think if I had had the wherewithal to apply and come to Princeton, I would have been moulded by the experience just as I was by Oxford, and I probably would have had a pretty good time. I could never regret my time at Oxford, and wouldn’t change it for the world, and certainly think that doing my undergrad in the UK was better for me on a personal level. I do however wish my world had always been a little larger, though, and maybe studying in the US, even for a semester, might have done that for me. 

[oxpatriate]

Hello, Princeton student here! I'm currently a sophomore (class of 2020) and a prospective English major, and I think your blog is pretty cool! Love the theme! You're so cool and smart...ahhh...!!!

Hi there! Totally missed this message for ages! Happy to answer any and all Princeton questions you might have!

[oxpatriate]

How long did you know your now-husband before you got engaged to him? Was it truly 'love at first sight'?

My husband and I met in late February 2017, and I knew immediately that it was him, and told my Mum as much that same week. It wasn’t so much ‘love at first sight’ as an immediate and profound sense of having found something I’d been looking for since before I could remember, and without consciously knowing I was looking for it. It was an all-encompassing version of the feeling you get when you’re desperately searching for someone you know at a party where you’re all alone and know nobody, and you suddenly see your best friend. We were engaged the day after I moved to the States to be with him, on 4th July, and we were legally married in early October 2017. So, 4 months from meeting to being engaged, and 3 more to married! Unconventional? Sure, but we’ve never been happier.

[jamienojaem]

When we choose growth over perfection, we immediately increase our shame resilience. Improvement is a far more realistic goal than perfection. Merely letting go of unattainable goals makes us less susceptible to shame. When we believe “we must be this” we ignore who or what we actually are, our capacity and our limitations. We start from the image of perfection, and of course, from perfection there is nowhere to go but down.

Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me (but it isn’t): Making the Journey from “What Will People Think?” to “I Am Enough”  (via kuanios)

[oxpatriate]

Queen of the Chickens

It’s been a while since I last sat down to write a blog post.The myriad joys of married life, plus a relatively full PhD schedule, and seemingly endless opportunities to play board and and card games with friends, see new family, and visit cute new little towns in Jersey and beyond mean that sitting down to tap out a blog has been very low on the priority list. The other thing is that when I look back over the past year of writing, it’s so clear to me that much of it was fuelled by needing desperately to fill my remaining time in the UK with something. The fact of the matter is, I write most freely when I’m unhappy, and the past five months have been the happiest of my life. So, my apologies to the one remaining reader of my blog.

Today, I’d like to write about the chickens that have accidentally-on-purpose become mine and The Husband’s sixteen beloved pets. The chickens are the result of a two-year long project on the part of Husband to introduce the girls at the school he teaches at to efficiently managing a coop - from the perspective of the welfare and health of the animals, and the profit their eggs can bring. It’s an extension of economics, really, although there were other allurements to getting the coop installed.

Chickens are weird little remnants of the dinosaurs. I never used to and still don’t put much stock by those who said that chickens were ‘basically tiny feathery velociraptors’. To me at least, they are charmingly unintelligent birds that aimlessly wander around their coop, occasionally absently pecking at food. There are four flavours of chicken in the coop: four Rhode Island Reds, amongst which is the Chicken Queen, a vicious animal with a huge comb that has risen to the top of the pecking order (a highly literal term, by the way) through her excessive bullying of the others, four black Australorps, which are nervy as all hell, four white and black speckled Colombian Wyendottes, easily the most intelligent of the lot, in that they were the first to grasp the idea that coop = bed, feeders = food, and water feeder = water, and last but not least, the chill and mellow (as far as a chicken can be said to be so) Buff Orpingtons, which for the life of me I can’t disassociate from the idea of the name of a weird market town in the south of England.

The chickens arrived about four weeks ago now in the post - literally. They arrived, four to a USPS box with CAUTION - LIVE ANIMALS stencilled on the side. The Husband said that ‘you wouldn’t believe the noise in the back of the car on the way back from the post office.’ The thing is, that’s not the weirdest thing that the arrival of the chickens has ushered in, not by far. There have been the nightly visits to the school to make sure that the chickens have managed to make it in to their fancy, solar-powered coop with automatically closing door. There have been the hundreds of irreverent and often pun-tastic names suggested for the chickens by the girls at the school, including Nugget, Extra Crispy, Margaret Hatcher, Princess Layer, Hen Solo, and Saint Philippine du-Hen (a shout-out to the school’s patron saint). There has been the absolutely deathly and ungodly stench of cleaning them out, and the frustration and jubilation at teaching them, with varying degrees of success, what a roost and nesting box are for. Most recently, there has been the joy of waking up at 4am to set the twinkle lights which might or might not encourage them to actually lay throughout the winter, as the nights draw in and they get less and less sunlight.

But we love the chickens something fierce. Having a cuddle with these surprisingly light, surprisingly warm, surprisingly silky-soft birds is a unique little joy, even if you are looking at their oddly reptilian feet and wondering precisely how much poop they have stepped in that morning. And all of this is while they re essentially useless animals, having produced not one single egg between them for the entirety of their residency at the school. It seems that at the end of the day, there is still something to be said for the simple life, even in 2017.

[oxpatriate]

Throwback to summer!

[oxpatriate]

Sometimes people get married, and it's perfect.

[oxpatriate]

Wedding bells

I am an avid user of websites that tell you how many days it is until something. I have obsessively counted up and down towards and away from important events for my whole life, wishing the summer holidays away because I was always so eager to get back to school, looking forward to Christmas when my family would be together, aching for the beginning of the University term, or, most recently, wishing days away so that I could finally be with the love of my life, always.

Out of curiosity, I looked up today how many days it will be before The American and I are legally married - for complicated reasons, we’re doing the legal parts of the marriage here, and the pomp and ceremony of the Chapel and big dress back in the UK. It came out as 44 days, which is really no time at all, when you think about it in the grand scheme of things. 

I have been musing on shifts in personal perspective as a result of this for quite some time, and the re-evaluations that it causes within the frame of one’s own life, ambitions, and priorities. In joining myself to The American, I will lose nothing of myself, but I will change as a result, and whilst the prospect of that always used to scare me witless, it’s now the most exciting thing in the world to me. I get to build a life with this man. I get to have a home, and fill it with wonderful things and memories. I get to have children and a family of my own one day, something I’ve never considered before. Every day on that journey will change me, and us both, adding layers to us like those on a pearl. And the best part is that today is always going to be the very first day, the absolute minimum of memory and happiness. 

[oxpatriate]

The slow process of acculturation

So, here I am, precisely one month in to my time in America. It’s been a busy one, occupied by setting up house and home, travelling around the north east, starting classes and learning two languages at once, making lots of new friends and acquaintances, and this past week, beginning to plan our wedding. The result is that I haven’t actually allowed myself to have vast amounts of time to spare to think about how I’m actually coping with the move, apart from the odd moments when my mind is unbusy, like when I’m running in the mornings, or walking to and from places.

The fact of the matter is that I’m coping a heck of a lot better than I expected to. I thought that the first few months would be full of sleepless nights, an inability to adjust to the climate and small social and environmental changes, and a constant feeling of hollowness in my stomach lamenting the absence of England. That’s not to say that I don’t miss my family, my country, and all the little acoutrements of being in one’s birth nation - it’s just that my process of adaptation has been strangely fast and strangely natural, to the extent that sometimes I actually forget, or at least fail to comprehend, that I’m actually living on a different continent. My mental globe still points quite firmly to the south of England, and it takes a conscious effort to remind myself that my longitude and latitude are actually quite different now.

In this respect, it really is quite shocking how adaptable humans are. From having never spent more than two weeks outside the UK to having moved thousands of miles away on a permanent basis should really give one whiplash, but after a bizarrely short amount of time, one does accept it. However, there are some points of incongruity that remind me daily that I am somewhere that is still essentially unfamiliar - like this not-so-little fellow that I met while running this morning. Butterflies in America are tropically huge, probably three to four inches from wingtip to wingtip. In the evening, fireflies softly glow around the garden. Thunder and lighting storms are twenty times more dramatic than back in England. But these little differences don’t make me feel like an alien any more. They remind me that this is new, and an adventure, and I like that.

[oxpatriate]

Sometimes, true love happens overnight.

[oxpatriate]

To the anon who asked me a four-part question about a week ago:

Please send me an email at [email protected] and I’ll reply comprehensively and privately to your questions and concerns!

[oxpatriate]

If you were coming in the fall I'd brush the summer by With half a smile and half a spurn As housewives do a fly

Emily Dickinson, If you were coming in the fall

[oxpatriate]

Take me out to the ball game

Two nights ago, The American and I went to our first baseball game together. This was my first ever taste of the great American pastime, and despite some initial skepticism based on my track record of enthusiasm for team-based stadium sports, I have to admit that I enjoyed it a lot. To be brutally honest, despite The American’s best efforts, I’m still not 100% sure on the rules of the game, but by the end of the seventh inning stretch, I was able to identify what was a ball and what wasn’t.

What I particularly like about America, and what I have always liked about it, is what a friendly, community and particularly family oriented place it is. Baseball seems to be an epitomization of this aspect of the US. The game started at seven, and the stadium was full of families with children, even babies. The innings were peppered with charming little easter eggs, like players walking out to their own hand-picked songs, one of which was ‘Barbie Girl’. There were mascot races, T-shirt slingshots, giant puzzle games and family game-shows on the pitch, and when the stadium’s big-screen camera panned onto people in the crowd, there was only smiling, waving, and kissing of family members. I even sat next to a dear old lady there with her adult son who helped me take my cardigan off when I was struggling with it. There was no real gender divide in terms of attendees - maybe a little heavier on the male side, but overall an extremely balanced crowd. It was a really nice, positive atmosphere, often fun and whimsical, and completely unironically enthusiastic.

The only thing I can compare baseball to back in the UK is football, which can be (A) anti-social, if not (B) violent, (C) very adult-oriented, and (D) particularly male-oriented, and (E) often entirely inappropriate for children, given the particularly nasty and profane football chants that one can often hear at a match.

These are some of the reasons why I like the US on principle, and why one day it will be such a lovely place to bring up children of my own. I’ll never worry about taking them out to a ball game for the reasons I would be concerned about football in the UK. And who can fault a giant T-shirt slingshot?

[oxpatriate]

Small points of difference: American gardens.

Yesterday afternoon, the American and I spent a couple of hours sorting out the weedy interludes between the legitimate plants in our front garden. (As a side note, I refuse to ever call a garden a “yard”.) Some of them, namely the forget-me-notes and little daisies, were almost too pretty to pull up, so we mercifully left them to continue blooming, though acquiring a couple for the kitchen windowsill.

Before this, we had travelled out to a garden centre to find some new friends. There were the classic flowers that filled the garden of my childhood - petunias, begonias, antirrhinums, dog roses, butterfly bush, violas - but there were some new and gorgeous faces that I had never seen before in person. I was knocked sideways to see sunshine yellow, hot pink, and scandal-red hibiscus flowers the size of my whole hand. I was even more surprised to see what I later found out was a Tiger Swallowtail butterfly at least four times the size of the average English red admiral or cabbage white land on some flowers near me. Of an evening, fireflies that float about in the darkness, occasionally lighting up in an almost unbelievably bright neon yellow. The American told me how most kids growing up here catch a few, put them in a jar with some holes poked in the lid for air, and keep them on their bedside table as a lamp. All these small miracles, and all in a garden!

[oxpatriate]

Laura’s first Independence Day.

It’s a little odd celebrating a national holiday specifically directed at saying a muted ‘screw you’ to your home country, but with the way things are in Britain these days, it wasn’t too hard to get into the spirit. I went down to the town of Narberth for the day, which is the archetypal American small town. Less than five thousand people live there, and yet they have their own town “anthem”, ‘Narberth is a big little town’, and their fourth of July celebrations are something fearsome to behold. I spent the day doing practicing being a Patriot, going to a diner for breakfast, throwing my first baseball (at the eye-watering speed of 25mph), and trying my strength out, before seeing kids run sneaker races and then watching, aghast, as twenty children and adults ingested more than a thousand calories in about two minutes in the pie-eating competition. I also met some Pensylvania Dutch Amish people, who were there selling their amazing home-cooked foods, and had an old-fashioned game of ‘corn-hole’ followed by a barbecue and the most memorable fireworks of my life. It was a great way to kick off my time in the USA, and that’s an understatement on a similar scale to Narberth’s attention to this particular national holiday. 

[oxpatriate]

Ways to say goodbye to your country, no. 50: actually say goodbye.

It’s a little ironic that throughout this long project of doing all the things I particularly enjoyed doing in England, they were but sweet little topographical bumpps in a much more significant landscape, in which I lived with my mum, sister, and dog. They aren’t mentioned by name in the list, but they are the things that I will (and already do) miss about my country so much. They are the constant, unquestioned presence that underlay all of my life in England - no matter where we all were in relation to each other. Although in many ways, moving to Princeton was like going to Oxford for the first time - leaving home for a significant period, and going way beyond my comfort zone in pursuit of something bigger - I’m finding it far more difficult to accept that this time, I’m not going to be heading back to Wantage any time soon, and far from being a peripatetic student, I am now rooted somewhere very far from where I began. My sister sent me a video of a hedgehog that’s been haunting our garden for a few weeks now, and just hearing her voice made my insides do all kinds of unpleasant flips, knowing that all the quotidian comforts of two of the people I love most in the world are conspicuously absent. This period of adjustment is joyous, frightening, bittersweet, and exciting, but at times, my most prevailing feeling is one of a strange lack of two people that I do not yet know how to live without. And yet - I will continue to map out this life, which I already instinctively love, though it is strange a new - and I shall be brave, because they’re still there, and they’re still rooting for me.