If you cut me, I bleed green

But not because I've suddenly become Irish, or an alien: the green in question refers to Girl Scout green, since the past week or so seems to have been rather consumed by various GS-related events and activities. Or rather, various GS-related events and activities seem to have consumed me in the past week.

It started innocently enough, with the first troop meeting of the year. We now have 10 girls instead of 5, and I think paradoxically it's a great improvement; the girls are less wild, because it's harder to egg everyone on when the group is larger, so I'm happy. Also we have two moms helping out with meetings, and one of them in particular has a very calm, soothing voice, slightly mesmerizing actually, so I look forward to working with her more.

Then we had the leaders' meeting (and remember this comes after a week where I'd already spent a total of almost 9 hours in various GS-related training sessions), which somehow took three hours, what with organising the coming year, and putting the finishing touches on the camping schedule. Then later in the week more last-minute scrambling to get essential camping supplies such as balloons and rope and make name badges.

Thankfully one evening was spared by the madness and we escaped to Philly for a Regina Spektor gig. It was really nice - although she doesn't go in much for audience interaction (apart from having to apologise the two times she forgot her lyrics), or indeed showiness (she was wearing a sort of black shirt-dress, nice but very low-key) - the woman can sing! (and play the piano) It was really very beautiful and fun and good, even if the venue was overridden with girls that looked about 16 and were all dressed up and screamed at an incredible pitch for every little thing. I suppose it's good that there is some youth who go in for sensible demure singer-songwriters who write fun and clever lyrics rather than Britneys and Miley Cyruses (did you know that she sings too? They keep playing her song on the radio, it's terrible), but it was a little overwhelming.

And then, finally, the big event that all this had been leading to: the camping weekend! This took place at a campsite about half an hour from here, and about 12 troops of all ages were there, some just for the day activities, other staying overnight for one or two nights. Apart from a couple of days at a festival a few years ago, I hadn't been camping since I was 15 or so, so I was looking forward to and dreading it in equal measures. Maybe a bit more of the latter actually, once I spotted the 'How to stay safe in bear country' page in our camping booklet.

The campsite was beautiful. It's Scouts only and is run by a very fun, energetic couple who are really into it. I got there before K. and the rest of my troop and had some very peaceful moments just being away from everything, in the quiet-that-isn't-really-quiet of foresty places, and felt nicely set up for the weekend. Over the course of which, we did lots of fun things: a bumpy nighttime ride on the back of a haywagon (a great way to see a forest at night without getting too freaked out), archery (yes, I suck), marshmallow roasting :-), the girls did boating and lots of running around, singalongs, etc.

There were also some difficult moments of course, ranging from trying to get 7, 9, and 10 year olds to get along, to getting anyone to listen to us, having to frantically contact parents of girls who have changed their mind at the last minute about staying overnight, and, of course, waking up in the night to the sound of rain and the slow dripping of cold water on your face and/or sleeping bag. The rain really annoyed us actually, it started raining the evening of Saturday, which meant a rush in the semi-darkness to store everything properly, and went on through the night (hence the damp awakening) and all Sunday morning as we were trying to pack up and clear everything away - not ideal, and it meant we were deprived of our lovely campfire on one of the evenings.

But! On Sunday morning we had a special guest, one Anna Goodale of the US Olympic rowing team, who won gold in Beijing as well as a slew of other world championships. The idea was that she would come and give a talk to the girls and be inspiring, but she went well over that. She turned up before 8am (she lives in Princeton as US Rowing is based here), hung around where the girls were making breakfast, helped out, chatted to them, asked them lots of questions - she was so charming and so nice and so good with them! I was in awe. Her talk was great too - pitched just at the right level and with such a good narrative arc, the woman didn't start rowing until she went to college and a couple of years later she was on the national team!! It's refreshing to hear of Olympic champions who have achieved greatness without having necessarily had to sacrifice their whole childhood to it. Not that she doesn't have to work hard now - training twice a day, 6/7 days a week...Anyway, her talk was great, she also had a video of the Olympics race where they won gold, which she played for us and sort of commented along which was cool - and she brought her gold medal along, which was big and heavy, and let all the girls touch it, and signed autographs for them, and was generally really down to earth and friendly - we were all completely bowled over.

On a more reflective note, I am constantly impressed by the skills and maturity some of these girls display - and not just my own, but many of the ones throughout the troops. They organise activities for the younger ones, get them excited about owl pellets, teach them about outdoor cooking in a really engaging manner - it's fun to be around them, and sometimes you get distracted by how grown up they seem and start to think you can treat them like mini-adults...until their next attack of petulance. Oh well - better than nothing...

Also, I enjoyed the opportunity to spend some time with the other leaders. In fact, I have to say that getting to know these women better, and learning from them, is for me one of the biggest perks of my volunteering. I think it's hard for people my age to come across really inspiring role models who are not their mothers - what we need is people who are a few steps ahead of us, but not too far away generationally - say 10/15 years older maybe - to give us a sense of what the next few years of our life might be like, and what challenges and balancing acts we are likely to encounter. Anyway, it's hard to find these people sometimes. I've been extremely lucky in the past couple of years in having had one such person land in my lap with whom I share not just a field of research but also a sense of...uhm, I don't know what word to use, (in)appropriateness? basically the point is that I can talk about anything without feeling awkward or embarassed or like I'm being judged! Although said person will always remain my biggest inspiration, I feel I have a lot to learn from these other women I am getting to know, too. They may not be my role models in every sense - I am rather disinclined to produce a seemingly endless supply of offspring, for instance - but they have so much energy, so much ability to multitask, to have lots of amazing projects on the run at the same time, and keep a family together, and make sure all their multiple children are having lots of great experiences, and in many cases have really cool jobs too - I definitely look up to them in that respect, and I feel ashamed that at my slightly younger, more unencumbered age, I often lack the willpower to even finish revising a measly article.

So ends the account of the past few days. I think I am still recovering from the camping in some ways, but I am pleased that I did it, and really it wasn't so bad: apparently all those years of Girl Scout camp have somehow left their mark, and I still have it in me...

Shame-faced update

Uhm, ok, so, when was the last time I wrote? Quite a while ago it seems....sorry. It's not that things haven't been busy or interesting - just not all of it is appropriate blog material. I had a nice Labor Day weekend, where among other things I went to my friend-through-GirlScouts Karen's house for a bbq. I seem to have been ending up at her house a lot recently, I like her and her family very much and it's kinda nice to be absorbed into a 'real' family, even if it is so different from my own, what with having 3 small children and all.

Then Nick got here two weeks ago, which is great, of course - we seem to have found a satisfactory arrangement for things like desk space, drawers, etc so that is a relief :-)

At the end of his rather hectic first week here, we drove down to Cape May, basically the southernmost tip of NJ, for the wedding of an ex-housemate of mine. Cape May is very pretty, if slightly twee - I'm not sure one could stay there for more than 3 days without being overcome by violent feelings towards flowered wallpaper and the Ye Olde Seaside Towne 'vibe' - and the wedding was so so lovely and happy and generally wonderful to be a part of, despite the somewhat heavy influx of London lawyer types there.

The past week has been busy with Girl Scout stuff; I am now trained to have the girls sell nuts and magazines (though, thankfully, not 'Nuts' magazine), as well as being certified in Adult, Child, and Infant CPR and First Aid and defibrillator use. It was a little tiring to sit through 3 hours of the latter for two nights after work, and getting home closer to 10 than 9, but it is useful to have these skills I suppose (as well as being required!) and it is interesting in a way to chat more to the various Girl Scout leaders/moms, and get to know them better.

Also we have been revelling in the joys of NJ farms, picking blackberries and apples and enjoying one of the farms' 'Apple Days' today which, though admittedly would have been most exciting for children, wasn't so bad for us either - apple picking, a corn maze, farm animals to coo over, roast pork sandwiches, wagons, pumpkin patches...I think the farms around here, and the great ways they find to let you interact with them, are one of my favouritest thing of NJ.

That, and going to the shore to play extremely violent videogames :-)

Whizzing through the colonies

Having soon shelved our ambitious plans of travel to Alaska and Nova Scotia, due to excessive work and tiredness, the parents and I resized our holiday schedule to a rather more modest set of 3 long weekends where I only took the Friday off, which is a half day anyway so it's not as bad. In said long weekends we aimed for place within our reach, namely NYC, Washington DC, and Pennsylvania, which also happen to be among the original colonies, but that has nothing to do with it - geographical proximity was our main concern.

You've all heard me rave about how much I love NYC more than enough. And every time I go I fall in love all over again. I can't see the dirtiness, or the chaos - I just see amazing architecture, and electrifying energy running through everything, and it makes it the perfect antidote to Princeton suburbanness. I felt quietly smug when my parents had to admit that it was a lot nicer than they remembered it from 20 years ago, and really enjoyed their time there. I am overcome by the urge to live there for a while - it just makes me so happy to be there.

We did all sorts of things - saw West Side Story on Broadway, which is one of my favourite musicals, and it was great; had the chance to spend some proper quality time with both my cousins, which my parents also greatly appreciated; went to the newly-opened High Line, which is a park on a disused elevated train line downtown, and has amazing views out onto the water (yes, even if it is 'only' NJ), and glorious sunsets; went to the Met which had an exhibit on Afghan artifacts with some truly stunning objects - you can see some of them here, my personal favourite was the folding crown, for easy transport :-) . Genius.

Another weekend saw us in Washington DC, which is about a 3hr drive from here. I'd been once before - when I was 12 and my cousin was graduating from Georgetown - but I didn't remember much. Two things stand out there, in my opinion - the amazing museums and the amazingly monumental public architecture. We only managed two museums, and opted for 'local' ones, ie things we would be less likely to find, say, in Europe - so the American History and the American Indian museums. And despite spending many, many hours in each, we still had to operate selectively and miss out some of the things on show.

The most interesting thing of them, I think - and this goes with the observations on the monumentalism of the public architecture - is this underlying current of trying to fashion some sort of History for the country, making sure everything is recorded and possibly glorified and triumphantly displayed.



I guess I can sort of understand the big monuments - most capital cities tend to go in for this kind of thing, after all - though it is a bit overwhelming to walk down the Mall or similar and be assaulted by memorial after memorial, giant white column after giant white column. But in the museum, the careful display of Chelsea Clinton's ballet shoes, or Abraham Lincoln's pocket watch, or some random president's pyjamas - that I find harder to get my head around. It's like there is a need to make up for the missing centuries of History, and so everything has to be clawed back and used to fashion some.

I'm not trying to be critical - there is no judgement involved, just slight puzzlement. After all, it is true that this country took in a vast amount of people, and tried to get everyone settled somehow, and that is astounding. And I guess it's not much different from the ancient Romans et al coming up with suitably awe-inspiring stories of who founded what and how special they were. But it's oddly fascinating to see it applied in the relatively recent past.

Other than that, the DC weekend was also marked by the very pleasant reunion with a family we were friends with in Germany, and hadn't seen since we'd left - and we'd managed to track each other down again via FB :-) It was really nice to see them again after 17 years (!!) and try and catch up on everything that had happened in between. We also dropped by in Baltimore to see another family friend, and so got a a glimpse of the city's waterfront, which is very pretty.

Finally, we spent two days in Lancaster County in Pennsylvania to see the countryside and the Amish way of life. That, too, was fascinating in its way. We didn't go on any 'guided tours' but we did drive around the countryside loads and went to various museums and bookshops and obviously saw a lot of Amish people around and tried to get a sense of what everyday life is like. I have to say I have mixed feelings about it all, but I think it may be inappropriate to vent my doubts in public, so I'll keep them to myself, and you can ask me about it if you really want to know more.

And with that, ends the account of my 'summer holidays', though Nick and I have a couple of weekends away planned while he's here, so there is plenty to look forward to!

Oxford is a state of mind

As proof that this blog does not forget its roots (aka its title), I interrupt the scheduled summary of my holidays with a few scattered thoughts that have been going through my head recently, things that I have been mulling over far more than is good for me, and which have led to a shocking epiphany (albeit one that had been building up for a while). It's happened. I got over it. I don't care that I'm not in Oxford any more. I don't feel like I am in exile here, or just in a kind of suspended status until some unlikely return. I live here, my life is here, it's not a bad place to live, and I can just get on with it.

Shocking, I know. And about time. I'm not sure quite what did it. I guess partly it was, inevitably, the passing of time, and with it the increasing feelings of familiarity with my surroundings, the people here, the places to go and the roads to get lost on.

Also something (the umbilical cord?) sort of snapped when I was last in the UK in July, and I was only in Oxford very fleetingly - and it didn't hurt. Unlike the other times. I didn't mind that I wasn't there for longer. I could acknowledge that though it was an enormous part of my life, and the home of some of the people I love most, it was no longer *my* home, and I just had to deal with it. And it felt weird, but also a little liberating.

I guess this last part also has a lot to do with it - who is or isn't there. I think it may not be a coincidence that these revelations have been building up over the span of a few weeks when first Rob, then Nick, have moved out of Oxford, and if they ever return, it won't be as students. It's not quite that my years there acquire meaning only via boyfriends - that would be a bit excessive even for me. But, ultimately, a lot of said years were shared with them, and memories, and growing up both academically and as people, in the good and the bad.

Seeing Rob leave (well, metaphorically, since I wasn't there of course) really hit home, as the last link to all the Catz years and of course a strong emotional tie to the place - there is really no denying now that we are grown up and done and moving on to whatever comes next.

And now Nick is leaving too, and it's like I'm leaving all over again, since so much of my current/more recent life is so tightly bound with his. And it's sad - it really was the last thread hanging - but it doesn't hurt, and that for me is a big achievement.

And of course I still care about the people who are in Oxf, and want to know the exciting things that happen to them, and want to be there to lend a friendly ear/shoulder when needed, but the fact that I won't necessarily know about everything that happens every day, the little things - I don't mind. That is what happens when you move away. It does not change the underlying strength of the friendship. My friends will always be my friends, wherever we are, and in whatever way we manage to communicate.

Oxford is a state of mind now: most of the people who made it what it has been for me have left too. I've had a year here to develop friendships and networks and interests and love for Princeton, and it's about time I started nurturing these rather than feeding off the past...