I am back.

Welcome to another essay post-op, in which I talk about all manner of thing in an attempt to ‘write off some steam’ after having spent the last nine hours (the past week and a half, really) finishing up some assignment required of me by my excellent course here at Bradford. In this case, that assignment being my dissertation proposal. It is 2:30 a.m., so certainly not as bad as it could have been. I say that, but I don’t want you to get the impression that I’m alright with this sort of behavior. Having to finish an essay in the wee hours of the deadline day constitutes a failure of sorts for me, or at least it is an indication that something has gone wrong. That said, from about noon yesterday there was really no doubt in my mind that I’d get it done in fairly good time (again, the meaning of ‘good time’ having been revised relative to the time remaining), the only question was one of quality. On that count, I’m not sure. I’ve never submitted a dissertation proposal before. I don’t think it was very good, but I also don’t think it was very, very bad. Ultimately it’s rather inconsequential as it only counts for 15% of the overall dissertation mark, so all I need is a decent mark, and more importantly I allegedly still have a lot of leeway to change my question and even my topic should I so desire. Which I will, I’m sure of it. In the end, I was forced to write this proposal more to what I’d read (which was far-reaching at the expense of depth) rather than to what I precisely wanted. Which would have been difficult in any case because I could not for the life of my figure out what I wanted to write about!

(I should warn you, since I haven’t done these in a while, that they tend to be fairly messy, even messier than my other posts on this site; partially because of the hour, more because I’m letting out an excess. But I write them because I like reading them later, and again much later.)

This assignment was a real challenge because it was a collision of often conflicting desires. It is the first step of the long-revered dissertation; it is a big deal. I want to do something sensational, though the rational voice in my head, and most lecturers advise against such fantasies. I at least want to do something interesting to read by someone who knows a lot and reads a lot and generally doesn’t expect much from undergraduate dissertations. So that puts pressure on myself, as I generally do, only this time it’s more.

It’s also hard because Bradford, or the Peace Studies Department rather, is quite alternative. Alternative, and broad. We have studied so much; I have studied so much in my first two years. To try to do something encapsulating all of that would be impossible; to do something representing a lot of that would also be impossible; I must resign myself to not covering some, even many, things that I am very interested in and somewhat knowledgeable about. 

Probably due to the alternative nature of the course, towards the end of my second year I was leaning towards doing a dissertation on peacebuilding and reconstruction. But then I went away to France and got a decent, if decidedly more mainstream, year of education. Which put me more onto politics and mainstream international relations, and getting into American talk shows certainly didn’t hurt that (probably because it was an election year). So I came back from France in a more mainstream frame of mind, and now I find myself doing a dissertation proposal about US diplomacy and recent wars in the Middle East.

But I hate feeling like I’m being mainstream, or safe, or boring. So I’m trying to wrench a mainstream topic in an unconventional direction, which is a bad thing to do on the night before the proposal is due. To be honest I wouldn’t be able to say exactly where the proposal I handed in, or will hand in in some hours would fall on the spectrum, nor can I say where my final dissertation will fall. We’ll see.

So there were a lot of warring desires that went into my preparation for this dissertation proposal, and it didn’t help that everything I read became my new big interest – there came a point where I just had to force myself to stop reading and start writing, which doesn’t mean my knowledge was good enough to start writing, only that time constraints demanded it.

Never mind. I did alright, I think, and it’ll be interesting to see what I get for it. Take tomorrow- er, today, off, then refocus and do more reading while I don’t have to be writing much.

Take today off, that is, until 3 pm. I’ll hand in the two copies well before then, prepare myself for my radio show, go on at 3, rock out (jazz out) till 5, then send an email to my Security module group about meeting the following day, then make my presentation about my year abroad, also for the following day. Easy stuff, though. And then when I give my presentation I receive my awards for submissions in the study abroad competitions, so I can finally buy some proper football kit and maybe some more thin ties.

It’s funny, I don’t get to dress up very much and yet when I have some money to spend on clothing, what I want to spend it on most is formal wear. So I have to compromise and find something that can double as casual wear without looking too pretentious. I do need some new shoes as well. I sound awfully first world right now.

Yes, I have a radio show! You can listen to it, wherever you are in the world, if you have an internet connection, which, if you’re reading this, I assume you do. Gotcha! Just go to ramair.co.uk and click listen at whatever the equivalent of 3-5 pm GMT on Tuesdays is for you. I do jazz. All manner of jazz. It is seriously a great way to chill out from studying, an activity tomorrow’s show will embody perfectly. Since I didn’t have time this week to prepare a representative selection from a certain era, as I’ve been promising I’ll do, that plan will be delayed at least one week, but I think you’ll enjoy my fusion. I love me some jazz fusion.

There’s plenty else I could say, about how I haven’t made a YouTube video in ages and really need to get back on that but this year is busier than I expected, or about another deadline I have next week that won’t be easy either, or about how much I enjoyed watching Ender’s Game and kind of cried through the end of it, and how I want to explain its brilliance to all who don’t understand, and then use it as part of my series on why I am probably a dictator at heart (it’s not a light piece), but I will leave all that for another day. Against my better judgment, I am going to break into my celebratory caramel dip (and delicious quadruple chocolate cookies, a birthday present from a friend) tonight, not tomorrow, while watching an episode of Suits. Tempted to watch a full-blown movie, but that’d be a bit much. I do, after all, need to wake up to turn in my assignment. Not quite off the hook yet.

I hope you all have had as wonderful a night as I, though hopefully a more restful one, and that you are always diligent in what you know you should do, and that you keep thinking critically about things, and that you write me every once in a while.

Good night. Sorry if there are any typos in this.

Letter Home (SHINE Competition Entry)

[This is something I whipped up for some international student competition a few months ago I wasn’t planning on entering but at the last minute decided to have a go at. Didn’t win anything in the end, but it was fun to write. Thanks to all of you who tell me my stories are entertaining, whether they actually are or not.]

 

Dear Mum and Dad,

Life in the UK is good (oh, I learned the difference between ‘England’, ‘Britain’, and ‘the UK’, by the way). More than good; it’s fantastic. My main source of information on Britain having been childhood literature like Robin Hood and Harry Potter, I had some pretty fanciful perceptions which I fully expected to be disappointed. They were not.

Sure, there aren’t wizards flying around on broomsticks (that I know of), but history and culture is positively oozing from every building I see. Before I left Japan, when I would tell people I was going to Bradford, aside from never once failing to have the link between my name and that of my destination pointed out, I certainly received a number of surprised looks from those who’d heard anything more about the city. However, the slight worry that began to stir in me was unfounded. It’s lovely here. As you saw, I couldn’t help but snap loads of pictures as soon as I arrived, and not just because of ingrained Japanese tourist tendencies.

I quickly took the opportunity to do a bit of traveling around West Yorkshire, which only served to confirm my amazement. In addition to modern city features such as malls and museums in Bradford and the nearby Leeds, there’s also wide countryside, rustic villages, massive ruins, the whole gamut. It might just be the faery-tale lenses on my eyes, but I think colours are more vivid here. The sky definitely is; it’s certainly not dreary grey as often as I was led to believe.

Speaking of added colour, since coming here I’ve expanded my vocabulary with words such as ‘rather’, ‘smashing’, ‘cheers’, and ‘yoright’, which basically means, “What’s up?”. I’ve also learned to spell properly, but it seems that I don’t pronounce things quite correctly.

On that front, however, I have had a kind of success. Like many others, before coming, I was guilty of assuming there to be a sort of ‘standard’ accent, like there is in Japan and, to a certain extent, the US. There doesn’t seem to be, or if there is, it’s certainly not to be found in Yorkshire, much less this uni. To the contrary, I’ve been surrounded by a mad swirl of different pronunciations since arriving, but am slowly starting to match accents to regions and cities. Fortunately, I picked up early on that no matter how curious I am to see whether my fledgling instincts are correct, I must never ask, “Is your accent Scottish or Irish?”.

Even though I had very little idea what I’d be studying in my chosen course, “peace studies”, this too has turned out to be excellent. I’m learning so much about, well, everything, and because we’re given a range of essay questions to choose from, I basically get to study what I want. One day I read all about the Chilean coup of 1973, the next day I went from knowing nothing about the British political system to having a much better understanding of it than either the American or Japanese ones. This culminated in getting to sit in on a Parliamentary session in Westminster, which most people would probably find boring but for me was, like all else, enchanting. It was a bit of a struggle towards the end of term to finish all my essays, but I was able to pull through and emerge into the sunlight of five glorious weeks of break.

I had the most amazing Christmas and New Year’s experience because I chose to spend a chunk of that break in London, the mecca of my magical expectations for this island. For twenty days straight I walked the streets, took in the sights, visited museums, and stayed at strangers’ houses thanks to a wonderful travel website called Couchsurfing. Between that, trying out hostels for the first time, and Megabus, I was able to have this entire adventure for quite cheaply; in fact, with my remaining few days of break I did the same with Edinburgh and was blown away, again. I’m absolutely chuffed to be making friends not only at uni but ‘all throughout the land’.

People ask me what my favourite thing in London was, and I suspect they wouldn’t be entirely satisfied with ‘standing amidst broad, old, tall, new buildings with my senses wide open, soaking in the the very spirit of the city itself’. But that’s the truest answer and also a pretty fitting description of my experience in Great Britain in general. It’s exceeded my expectations in virtually every aspect, and often I feel it’s almost unfair that my life should be so good.

I suppose this is what all those hours of teaching English last year really were for. And the complexity of getting academic transcripts and bank statements from both Japan and the US. And the scholarship essays. And the risk of committing three years to a place I’d only seen the website for. Well worth it.

So that’s been my first few months trying to convince the natives how great their country is, and I’m looking forward to what the next semester, and next few years, will unveil.

Love you much, and yes, I’ll try to be on Skype more regularly this year.

-Bradley

I Get Close To Finished (Another Essay Post-Op)

But then my perfectionist nature retorts, “But you’ve got an entire night ahead of you of empty hours, surely you can make your essay better than that.”

And I comply, and stay awake, and trudge through, and produce another what-my-sleepy-surreal-semi-consciousness-deems-a-masterpiece.

You don’t have to tune in for the battle, you just get to enjoy the fruits: another dark-of-the-night post-essay blog entry. I do so enjoy these.

Even though I put it off and put it off, I probably get more than the average person’s share of fulfilment out of completing an essay. To me, almost regardless of the topic, it’s a work of art – words are clay to be crafted into a sturdy yet attractive sculpture that is not too weak at any point and yet not ugly in any way either (blog posts, on the other hand, are rarely more than the spewing ground for disjointed thoughts).

Bradford’s essay submission process (at least the Peace Studies Department’s) consists of an online Turnitin submission, then a paper submission of two copies of the essay (plus official filled-in cover page) to the undergraduate office. Not wanting to risk the library printing queues I’ve heard horror stories about but never actually seen, I took a four-in-the-morning trip to the library to get my two copies.

(Here’s a hugely entertaining video about four in the morning. Watch it. It’s great. )

Oh, and before I redressed- er, re-dressed…and left my room, as I was filling in the cover page, I realised that it was 3:33 a.m. on 3/3/11. Cool. What to wish for? Well, I thanked God that He was nice enough to get me through another one, and, well, my clock wishes (11:11, 22:22, and whatnot) are always the same, so I didn’t take much time on that. It’s funny, though…

And I set out. The cool quiet feels great. Clear. And the birds chirping…wait what? Don’t birds only chirp in the daytime? Stupid Bradford birds. But have you seen the rats…oh my oh my. This actually scares me. I live here.

I quite enjoy going to the library in the middle of the night, though I don’t do it much. I love that it’s open all night on week nights. In addition to the security guard, there’s always at least a few people there. I bet every night there’s at least one person pulling an all-nighter, or at least close to it. We should do a library sleepover sometime. Ha ha!

Tonight was no exception, and there were even two guys from Peace Studies there working on their essays. I couldn’t do that. I’ve found that I have to get out of my room, to the library, in advance of deadlines so that I don’t get distracted by the Internet, but when it comes down to the final stretch, I need to be in my room with ample snackage, break-time entertainment, and music on tap. It’s a fine-tuned science that the perfectionist voice in my head puts me through. I do intend to do better for the next deadlines, just like I intended to for this one. But this one wasn’t actually as bad as the last one, which was two essays. But I wrote about that; you can read about it.

After struggling with the technology a bit I extracted my eighteen pages (two copies), had a short chat, returned home. Home. Something like that.

Hey, I say it’s home if you walk in, press play, and have the opening notes to ‘Fireflies’ waft comfortingly out of the speakers (the aggressive notes of Slash’s solo on Daughtry’s ‘What I Want’ are ‘wafting’ out of it right now. Yes).

So I rest in the music. Not feeling much like sleep after the victory and the stroll in the crisp last-vestiges-of-winter air. I use hyphens too much. But I do use them properly…I would give you a link to explain that comment, but I can’t remember the name of the article. No matter.

You know, I think Planet Earth does turn slowly. And though it is hard to say I’d rather stay awake when I’m asleep, on nights like these it’s easy to say I’d rather be awake than asleep. For a while.

But he’s right, of course – nothing is ever as it seems.

Sometimes I like to revel in lines. Something you’ve heard a hundred times can bound up in new meaning on nights like these.

Because my dreams are bursting at the seams.

(Let’s pretend I ended with that line, and that everything below was actually somewhere above it, ate?)

I’m going to Nottingham tomorrow! Er, today. In twelve hours. Oo. I should sleep if I want to work out, do laundry, pack, and go to seminar.

Yeah, Robin Hood, bla bla bla. Going to see a friend from Japan. Will be the first person from outside the UK sphere for me to meet since coming here.

I guess I’ll go to bed now. I don’t wanna be one of those unfulfilled-life people who operate by feeling. Wake up tomorrow at…say…9:30ish, gym. Yay!

Oh, and I get to shave tomorrow (‘get to’ shave? Going to shave. And be all soo-waaave). Double yay!

I only say yay at four in the morning.