July 4 Is Not a Holiday

Apologies in the delay for following up the last one – it was a busy week.

So – Stonehenge. Yes, at 3 in the morning we were clustered around a little screened-off fire, we met some American guys our age who are in London doing an internship in aviation insurance, and we were talking. Two British witches came up to us. (I don’t call them this in a disparaging way, I just knew immediately that they were witches because that’s what they looked like. They were wearing long dresses and flowers around their heads.)

“Well,” said one of them, “who do you want for your next president, then?” She was smoking a joint and shaking pretty hard, which leant intensity to the question.

Obama, we said.

“No!” she said. “Obama’s going to invade Iran. And he’s a friend of Israel.”

“No,” said Alex, one of the aviation insurers, “I think you’re thinking of McCain.”

“Did you hear his speech?” said the witch. “His speech to that – AIESEC – or AIEPAC – AIPAC -”

We shook our heads.

“Well, I did,” she said darkly.

“But look at the options,” said Alex. “Even if you don’t like Obama, would you rather have McCain?”

The witch shook her head ambiguously and laughed. “McCain’s just an idiot. He’s just an idiot.”

Yeah, we said, so…

“But Obama’s just a puppet,” she went on, taking an impressive drag on the joint. “I wouldn’t vote for Obama.”

“A puppet?” said Alex. “I don’t think so…”

“The one you want,” said the witch, “is Ron Paul.”

The chances look slim for that, we said.

“It’s Ron Paul,” she said. “Trust me.” Which is an instruction I don’t generally follow when it’s given to me by someone clearly stoned out of her mind, but whatev.

At that point another British woman with long dreadlocks turned around and addressed the two witches. “Were you two part of the ceremony? Did I see you dancing at the beginning?” she asked.

The other witch, the one who hadn’t spoken, nodded, and the smoking witch said, “We were, but we got bored. It’s the druids that run the ceremonies. We’re not druids, we’re Wiccans.”

The dreadlocked woman asked what the difference was between a druid and a Wiccan.

“Well, we’d like to know, wouldn’t we?” said the witch. “We asked a druid and he didn’t know. Uuuuuuuh, he says, I’ll have to look it up, uuuuuh.” She rolled her eyes. “It’s all about hierarchy with the druids. That idiot calls himself Sir Arthur – it’s not what we’re about.”

At this point it had really gotten light, though of course there wasn’t much of a sunrise to see because it was still raining. Lissa and I decided to head straight to the buses – we figured Sarah, Conor, and Liz could find us later. We were wet. And we were closer to the bus pickup than we’d've been if we’d gone back to look for them. We trudged back across the fields, we calmed down an anxious guy (I think he was Swedish or something) who didn’t know where to find the buses, and we got one of the first ones out at 5:15. We rode back to the Salisbury train station and spent a few minutes puzzling over where our platform was – number 6, the sign said, was “accessible by subway”. Subway turned out to be literal – a way that was sub, an underground concrete walk. So we ran because it was 5:44 by this time and the train left at 5:45, we got there, we hammered on the doors but they wouldn’t open, and the train pulled away. Bummer. Of course, the tickets you buy are good for whenever, so we just waited for the 6:20 and took it back with the other three, who had gotten there by this time. There is online now a photograph of me slumped over in a train seat, Nicholas Nickleby on the table in front of me. We slept all the way back to London, we sleepwalked through the Waterloo station and onto the Tube that took us back to King’s Cross, we almost got hit by a car crossing the street, we got back to our dorm at 8 or 8:30. I took a warm shower, put on my
pajamas, and slept till three. It was nice. Worth it. We did reflect that it might have been nicer to have had a slightly quieter solstice experience – without the dancing and the shouting – but it was fun. Who knows what the originals were really like? Possibly raucous too.

Sooo – this week has been crazy-craze. Two essays due, one on Tuesday and one of Thursday, and I finished them both pretty handily, without having to stay up excessively late. Still no word on how I actually did on them, but one thing at a time. Finished Nickleby as well – loved it – and now on to David Copperfield, which is purportedly better. Slept 14 hours last night, for reals. At 8 I said, hey, I’m kinda tired, I’m going to take a nap until 9. At 10 Sarah and Lissa knocked on my door to ask if I wanted to go out with them and I realized – as you never do until you wake up – that I’d been sleeping the whole time, and they laughed and told me to go back to bed, which I did. And then I woke up this morning at ten. I am a champion. A CHAMPION.

I don’t know what’s in the offing for this weekend – I think maybe tomorrow, weather permitting, I’ll just take a bus toward the Thames and walk along the river, see Westminster and Parliament and all that. (I think that’s near the river. Possibly I am wrong. I will consult a map.) Buses are cheaper than the Tube by a lot, and you get to see the city. Today, actually, it’s pouring rain for the first time since I’ve been here – luckily I escaped getting drenched during my run, it just started – so I guess I’ll do some serious Copperfielding. There’s been talk of inviting the Stonehenge boys to do the pub thing with us. We’re trying to branch out, meet people outside the program. A couple weeks ago, on an early pub foray, some girls made friends with Sean, a good-natured bartending student from Ireland who was very eager to get to know them and sounds as if they got him from central casting, as witnessed by emails that say things like “late night, head like a bodhran today”. Later analysis has revealed that perhaps Sean is younger than was originally thought – he invited some people out to celebrate his finishing certain exams, which a British acquaintance said are generally taken when one is 16 or 17, and said he planned to put a picture taken with some of the Yale-in-London girls up “on the bulletin board of [his] wild summer,” which sounded kind of high school-ish. Hayley and Erin were disappointed and insisted that maybe he was taking law school tests or something. Conor thought it was funny.

I actually had my own somewhat awkward friend-making encounter on the subway – I was looking at the map and this nice guy started talking to me about how it was confusing, and I said yeah, and he said he’d heard the New York system was very easy, and I said maybe, but it’s kind of horrible, and then he asked if I was Canadian. So then we started talking about why I was in London, and why I’d been in Trafalgar Square (the National Gallery) and how he’d just been there too – we must’ve missed each other! (No kidding? Zillions and zillions of people and I didn’t see you?) And how I was writing a paper on Gainsborough, and he’d always wondered what Mrs. Andrews was supposed to be holding in that picture. A question I was able to shed some light on, which I think impressed him. Anyway, he introduced himself very enthusiastically and clearly wanted to be friends or something, and we were taking the same subway as it turned out (NO, he was not sketchily following me, he told me which one he was taking before he knew mine), but I felt kind of awky-awkward (he was probably like in his late twenties) and I had to change at Leicester Square for another line so whatevs. Somewhere in London there is a nice guy named Ian wandering around thinking I am anti-social. Whatevs.

Oh, the sun’s coming out. Hey, I had this bizarre dream last night during my 14-hour sleep that incorporated basically all my friends from back home. Message me if you want to know what you were doing.

Oh, and here’s another thing for you to listen to, now that you’re done reading this. It’s my new anthem, this one. Tinny recording also, but that doesn’t cut the amazingness. And if you listen to this you’ll be ahead of my mother, because I send her these things and she sends back mean answers like, Blah blah blah, all her songs sound the same. Which is NOT true at all, but even if it were I don’t care because it would be one good-sounding song on repeat, I could totally listen to Regina do one song over and over again. Actually, scratch the hypothetical, I do that all the time.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=AycXWmaG_HM