My uni basically shut down yesterday and today due to the apparently excessive, and even record, amounts of snow. I love it. The snow, that is. Lectures, on the other hand, I quite enjoy. This year is assessed purely on essays, which are set pretty much from the start of each semester, so lectures don’t incur any more work and are quite interesting – why would I be studying this topic if I didn’t find it interesting? And yet there seem to be so many people in that leaky boat.
Plus, lectures are a chance to see people; without them I tend to stay in my room and do things like post mundane thoughts online for a severely limited number of people to read. Needless to say, today was an antisocial day. And with it being Christmas and me feeling the need to celebrate by constantly having things at hand to munch on, I haven’t had a proper meal since breakfast. These factors and one more, the fact that it practically gets dark at noon at this time of year in this part of the world, resulted in me spending today in a relatively changeless state of sitting in front of my computer alone in my room, munching, surfing, and feeling like I should be doing something better with my time.
But I’m boring you. This is my exciting Christmas series! So on to what I actually DID accomplish.
Like I’ve said, food is a big part of the Yule festivities for me, and remembering the delicious treats my mother used to make (and perhaps is even as I write this – no, probably not, it’s early morning in Japan) I recently asked her if she could email over some recipes. She graciously did. I’m ambitious, so I’ll be reporting back on my cooking achievements when they avail themselves. In the meantime, I went shopping yesterday and, in addition to making the terribly bad decision of downing an entire Yule log in just a few hours, purchased a bag of monkey nuts, some caramel biscuits, and a Quality Street box to keep me company. With the gym closed due to ‘adverse weather conditions’, as I trekked all the way over there (a whole five-minute walk!) this morning to find out, this is a very literal recipe for disaster. And the knowledge of that won’t stop me.
Yep, it's bad.
Another absolute necessity for Christmas cheer is music. Some people hate Christmas music, I happen to be a huge fan. Now that we’re completely into December there’s no reason for every radio station and store everywhere to not be playing carols, new and old. I’d even forgive them pushing a bit of November. It’s a staple of the spirit, and nowhere more so than in my room.
But I had a problem, I could not access the main source of my tunes, Pandora, here on campus. Pandora is the greatest kind of online radio I’ve found yet, with channels created around artists and songs you like that play similar material – positively cracking for finding good new music – but it’s only available in the United States. Now in Japan I was able to get around this with a VPN, Hotspot Shield, the best, as far as I know, of programs that disguise your IP address. If you don’t know what all that means: You can get all the region-restricted sites you couldn’t before, and what’s more, you can use it to get around Megavideo’s time limit. Download it. It’s the bomb. Unfortunately it doesn’t work here on campus for some reason.
Here’s where that hopefully useful tangent connects to Christmas; I was in need of a new source of BGM. I have some songs on iTunes but I knew those would get old quick, even Relient K’s fantastic stuff, so I went exploring, based on various recommendations I’d heard over time. Last.fm and Spotify came out as winners. Last.fm seems to be online radio in the classic sense, without as much control over the stations as Pandora, while Spotify is like the whole world’s iTunes in one window. I searched ‘Christmas’ and dumped every single result into a playlist, pressed play, and have been deleting and skipping the ones I’m keen on ever since. It’s lovely. Only thing is I may run into the alleged twenty-hour limit soon.
But I have my tunes back, that’s all that matters. Got the traditional crackly recording Frank Sinatra, and the hip syncopated David Archuleta. And some country rubbish in between. Oh, and Pokemon, which was quick to go (my sentimental attachment is to the Japanese, not American).
Food, check, music, check. We may not be snowed in with the power down, but with the toaster and microwave having simultaneously chosen to stop working and the uni being closed with no staff around to go crying too, it’s not too far a stretch to conjure up the cosy atmosphere of having nowhere to go and almost everything that matters inside. Except I still have two essays hanging over my head.
Thanks for reading, if you’ve made it this far, and I hope all of you are equally well stocked in Christmas cheer. Tell me what you do to stoke up the spirit of the season. And tomorrow I’ll report on my planning for the headline event, going to London.
Cheers,
-Brad
I say this again and again, but I can't get over Britain's clouds.
Inspiration's Waiting Room 