Níl a fhios agam

Sport is an emotional opiate. Watching it on television is, at least.

Occasionally, watching sport produces intense emotional highs -- memory-searing moments that stay with us all our lives. The moment that Wales won the Six Nations, and the whole of the Maltsers Arms seemed to be in midair in an explosion of celebration, the way I could feel the whole city screaming, that's a moment I won't forget. But those moments are rare.

Generally, to watch sport on television means a few happy hours of emotional detachment that you simply can't get from watching, say, a film. This is why men prefer watching sport. We can sit there comfortable in the knowledge that at no point will there be some cute and quirky female character who we will fall in love with, only to watch her die or make some ass-hat life decision. At no point will we have to wrestle with moral issues. At no point will we have to watch a fella kiss another fella and pretend it doesn't make us uncomfortable.

Watching 11 blokes run around with 11 other blokes, all of them occasionally pretending to be injured and struggling to kick a ball into an area the size of a small bus, requires nothing of a man. This is why I am already looking forward to watching Tuesday's Champions League match. I am worn out, yo.

What's wearing me out is the fact that exams are fast approaching and I am wholly unprepared. Each night I toss and turn with the fear that I am lying in bed doing nothing -- Nothing, damn me! Sleep?! What is that about?! Laziness! Sloth! I should be up and studying! -- as my own academic version the Battle of Karánsebes (a) lies in wait.

The first exam facing me, and the one I'm fearing most, is my spoken Irish exam on 7 May. I think I could only be more unprepared for this exam if I had never actually set foot in any of the lectures. Indeed, if that were the case my impending failure might be a little more honourable. As is, I've never missed a lecture but have somehow managed to not learn a thing.

So I am now in the mode of desperately trying to teach myself Irish. Famously, I pulled this trick with Welsh, but in that case I had a little more than three weeks to learn everything. Indeed, it wasn't until six years into The Welsh Experience that anyone tested me on it.

And the online resources for teaching oneself Welsh are surprisingly better than those available to Irish learners. So far, the two best Irish sites I've found are those offered by non-Irish entities: the BBC and Des Bishop. Neither offer a great deal, and the BBC's site (logically) teaches the Ulster dialect, which isn't what I'm being tested on.

For those of you playing along at home, the concept of dialect in a minority language is a bit different than anything in our experience. Part of the reason for that, of course, is that American English is, in itself, a dialect. And within the American English dialect rarely are the differences in pronunciation, grammar, etc. so varied that one person genuinely struggles to understand another. Yes, those of us who grew up in Texas or the South can immediately think of people we have met, or are related to, who are somewhat unintelligible. But in truth that person doesn't speak all that differently.

Indeed, the differences between all English speakers are not so great. More or less, the widest gap one can really come up with is that between the English spoken by Alexyss K. Tylor and the English spoken by Billy Connolly.

But the gap can be much greater in a minority language, to the extent that people from Cork, where my Irish teacher is from, will claim to not even comprehend an Ulster speaker.

So, I don't know Irish, the Irish I'm attempting to learn is the wrong kind, and my exam is two and a half weeks away. Liverpool v. Chelsea -- I can't wait.

-----
(a) Funniest. Military. Blunder. Ever. Well, as funny as 10,000 dead guys can be.

The Ghostly Ice Cream Van

I have fallen out of habit of directing to my columns, but I am still writing them. Here's my latest one, which I am sort of pleased with simply because of the imagery, e.g., "dairy-treat-bearing land shark."

To that end, I'm pretty sure that Bomb Pops to the Malevolent is a good name for a band.

Cardiff is for lovers

There is more to the story of English Major.

I finished my overpriced tea and walked over to the library for a bit of tedious Welsh-language post-modernism. It is a genre that annoys me in the Welsh medium. I think that is because it didn't arrive until the late 80s, which is about when most people elsewhere were starting to think that postmodernism was dead. Welsh-language culture has a bad habit of jumping on the band wagon only after the wagon has actually stopped and been abandoned. Grunge is scheduled to take the Welsh music scene by storm next year.

The library and the humanities building are within a stone's throw of each other, separated by a small green area with trees and shrubs and a wee hill that seems to be the exclusive domain of cute girls when the weather is nice. In the library, I found a study area near a window and was able to look down and see that English Major was still out there with his Chinese yo-yo: swinging it around his leg, popping it into the air, dropping it and having to chase after it into packs of passing students.

Eventually he grew tired of really only being able to do two tricks, packed the yo-yo into his bag (if you guessed olive green over-the-shoulder bag, you guessed correctly!) and started to head off. But a group of girls called down to him from the first floor (FTYPAH: "second floor") and clearly asked him to perform for them. Man of my own heart, he set down his bag and started at it again, this time trying to pop the yo-yo up as high as the girls' window.

Appropriate to my earning-a-Welsh-degree nature, I felt a twinge of jealousy toward English Major. I wished I had some kind of talent that would cause girls to lean out a window and call to me. Damn it, why did I never learn how to Chinese yo-yo, or play harmonica, or do anything impressive? The closest thing I have to a talent is my ability to (poorly) imitate James Hetfield.

Pop into the air, around the leg, around the leg, pop, pop, around the other leg. The girls clapped and then closed the window, turning their attention to the class inside.

They had stopped English Major directly in front of a bench, the occupant of which was a red-haired girl who had been poring over a book that looked overly large and boring even from 50 feet away. She smiled at him and laughed at some little joke and he decided to keep at it with his Chinese yo-yo.

I went back to my reading. Occasionally I would look out the window and see that English Major and the red-haired girl were still there. She tilted her head and smiled at him.

If you look out for it, you see this sort of thing a lot on a university campus. All the stages of love play out in front of you in looks and glances and smiles and hands held and hugs and kisses. A university campus is filled with that, and so many of its occupants bumbling madly foolishly through it. Love is so desperately fragile, and yet so often we run at it with lumbering intensity, as if we are riding a piano down a flight of stairs: Love me! Crash! Thud!

Here, though was the gentle stupid beginning wrapped in the golden late-winter sun. It was like watching a film.

English Major and the red-haired girl talked for about 50 minutes. She laughed. She played with her hair. She held up her boring book and said with body language, at least, that she would much rather be talking to him. He kept at his Chinese yo-yo. The greatest challenge of talking to a girl is knowing what to do with your hands.

Eventually it was time to move on. He put the yo-yo back in his bag, gave that silly floppy-hand wave that is more an excited and nervous "thank you" than "goodbye," then turned and walked away at high speed, trying not to look back. Looking back would be uncool. He walked in the wrong direction -- opposite of where he had been headed before talking to the red-haired girl.

She put her book in her bag, got up, looked back in the direction English Major had gone, and then started walking toward the library. As she passed under my little library window vantage point I could see her face clearly. She was grinning.

OK, that's more like it...

As if to make up for the intelligent kids of last week, standing outside the humanities building Tuesday was a bloke with one of those Chinese yo-yos that are the staple of a music festival, renaissance faire, cannabis legalization rally, or any other event where long hair and a goatee are the look de riguer.

This bloke was relatively clean cut, though, wearing the internationally recognised uniform of the English major. I'm not really sure what an English major is called in the UK; they don't tend to use the word "major" when referring to university courses of study. But you probably know the look: sport coat or velvet jacket, T-shirt or untucked frumpy dress shirt, corduroy trousers and trainers (FTYPAH: "sneakers"). Often the look is accentuated with an oversized scarf worn in such a way as to not actually be all that warm.

This is video of a bloke doing Chinese yo-yo tricks. English Major wasn't nearly that good, although he had mastered the around-the-leg trick seen 14 seconds in. Perhaps the chap in the video is an English grad student.

English Major was stood just outside the main entrance of the humanities building, sort of half-performing for the steady stream of students moving to and from their late-afternoon classes. His being there struck as a statement on what a degree in English is actually worth. Doing a bit of Chinese yo-yo was a CV-enhancing activity.

As someone earning a degree in Welsh, I appropriately stood just to his right, quietly sipping my tea and wearing a look of disdain as I thought: "Typical arrogant bastard -- showin' off like tha'."

I Need Miss Texas' Help

My latest column is out. It contains an edit that makes no sense to me.

In talking about my university experience it says: "Consequently, I am struggling. Despite my ability to start a sentence with la-dee-da words like 'consequently,' I feel I'm just not good enough to be here."

But "consequently" is not the word I had there. Originally I had "hitherto."

"Hitherto" means "up to this point," whereas "consequently" means "as a result of;" so the meaning of the sentence is changed and it makes me seem like a person who thinks "consequently" is an obscure word.

Ah, well. I'm not arsed.

Holding on for Reading Week

About a week ago, Cardiff experienced a series of days that were brilliantly sunny and unseasonably temperate. People flooded from their dreary brick confines to just sort of linger in the spring-like warmth. In this country, it takes at least a week to get anything done (I am still waiting for my student loan cheque to be converted to pounds sterling -- I endorsed it on 11 January), but people respond to good weather instantly. As soon as the pavements (FTYPAH: sidewalks) are dry they are milling about, with at least a handful of the chavs doing their best to pretend that they are, in fact, in Magaluf -- stomping around in shorts and T-shirts. It speaks to the priorities of the British peoples, I think:
- Good weather = important.
- Getting things done in a timely fashion = not so important.

Anyway, I was sitting outside the humanities building last week, sipping a cup of overpriced tea, when I noticed a group of students who had found a choice spot in the sun and were lazily drawing on the pavement with chalk. Then, in eavesdropping I heard one of the guys mention pi. I looked at the chalk drawings and realised that they were equations. These students weren't drawing pictures of doggies or cars or breasts, as I would have done, they were in the midst of high-minded discussion. In their free time, on a brilliant spring-like day, they were doing equations.

"Holy shit," I thought. "It's like I'm on a proper university campus."

It was almost as crazy as when Llŷr and Steffan started working on poetry in the pub. This thing of intelligent people actually being intelligent and doing intelligent things not because they are being tested or building toward some mind-numbing career but because they simply enjoy using their brains -- that's weird, dude. It's foreign. It's kind of scary. It's yet another sign that I am totally out of my depth here.

By now the weather has gotten cold again and the forecast calls for a big front of depressing and crappy to move in as the week wears on. It helps in terms of concentrating on the lectures that I am trying to assimilate, but I still feel woefully behind. I am only four weeks into the spring semester and drowning.

And that's why I haven't blogged in a week.

Not the best start

Here's an academic tip from your good ol' Uncle Chris: Know what day to show up.

Up until about 11 p.m. Monday night, I was under the impression that not until next week did the spring semester get under way. To that point I had been feeling happy with myself.

"I've got everything pretty much nailed down," I was thinking. "I expect it will be a challenging semester, but by Monday I should be ready."

Then I saw I had missed a day of classes. My immediate response was to swear profusely. Then I thought about it for a bit more -- how stupid a person has to be to spend a whole fucking month on academic break and never once really check the university calendar -- and decided the best course of action would be to stomp around the house, alternating between growling profanities and occasionally screeching them out in high-pitch bursts.

Then I got locked in that thing of being really really really angry. I was irate that I would have to write to professors and explain that I am too stupid to use a calendar and could I please pick up any handouts that were given on the first day. And over the weekend I was telling Jen how I'm thinking of trying for a master's degree? Right.

I got angry at the fact that I was so angry I couldn't calm down. I sat there and tried to think peaceful thoughts but any attempts to mentally place myself on a lake of serenity were disrupted by the heavy shelling of self-directed rage. I got so angry that, unthinkingly, I reared back and punched myself as hard as I could in the head. Yep, I have the emotional maturity of a 6-year-old. The punch was shockingly painful and I dropped to a knee, which, of course, only made me angrier. What kind of wuss am I that I can't even take one of my own punches? Then, I just sort of stood in the living room, walking in circles, so angry that I couldn't think of how to express my anger.

None of this, unfortunately, moved me any closer to being prepared for this week. Things were thrown together Tuesday morning and I am now in a harried state of not really knowing what I'm doing; trying to sort out old work as new work piles in.

Yep, this semester's gonna be swell.

He was also selling a Buick

I tried to take a picture of this but it wouldn't turn out. I saw this on a table in the library today, written as below:

I like to
eat
FLUFFY pussy CATS

You know, it's none of your business who is maith liom

Here's a strange but generally true fact about Americans: We don't like it when you ask us who we're voting for.

"That can't possibly be true," you're saying. Americans post signs in their front yards, they slap bumper stickers on their cars, they wear T-shirts and badges and hats with the name of their chosen candidate gaudily emblazoned on them. They spend hour after hour after hour consuming incessant political coverage and writing MISPELED ALL CAPZ RANTING on internet message boards.

But, see, no one's asking them to do that.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Americans like to think that we are somehow above the political fray. So it is traditionally bad form to ask an American point blank who he or she will vote for. You are asking him or her to pick sides. You are asking him or her to no longer be an American but a certain kind of American. It's part of that "all men are created equal" thing. Our sentimental attachment to ideology. Our ridiculous beliefhope that we can actually live up to the stuff we promised ourselves 232 years ago.

Give us three minutes in a conversation and we will happily place ourselves in countless little defining boxes, but ask us who we're voting for and it makes us uncomfortable.

Our friends in the Home Nations, though, tend not to get this. People keep asking me who I plan to vote for. That information is readily available in this journal, on my Facebook profile, and in the way I will say things like: "I like candidates who want to set actual carbon emissions targets, rather than being sort of vague and asking people to take a totally ridiculous and non-binding pledge to reduce global warming, or simply ignoring the issue entirely." But I don't feel comfortable sharing that information with someone who asks. Yes, I'm being duplicitous. I don't care.

With around 9.5 months to go before the election, and a good seven months before I actually know who I will vote for (I know who I want to vote for now, but the outcomes of the summer conventions may change my options) I am already having to deal with the trick of constantly answering a question that is to me uncomfortable.

Generally, I am choosing to give people a tedious explanation of American etiquette rather than uttering a three-syllable surname. But Monday I found myself forced to answer the question, under the strangest of circumstances: an Irish exam.

Actually, the exam managed to squeeze in two questions that I find uncomfortable.
The second question is one that asks my opinion of George W. Bush. I'm probably in a minority on this one, but I am of some ancient mentality that the U.S. president deserves some level of automatic respect. Plus he's a fellow Texan. And I tend to mentally separate the seemingly likeable man and his insanely stupid policies. So when faced with the question: "What do you think of George W. Bush?" I usually try to answer with something along the lines of: "Well, he is the fairly elected president of the United States. And whatever I might feel for the individual, I respect the system he represents."

But I don't know how to say these things in Irish. So, when I heard Bushy's name wrapped in a string of soft consonants I knew the question that was being asked but not how to answer it.

"Well..." I sighed.

Then I realised that failure to answer the question would convey not a desire to maintain a facade of political ambiguity, but a lack of language comprehension. And I thought about the fact that my Irish teacher had said that if the examiners strayed from the set list of questions we were given to study, it was a sign things were going well and the examiners were trying to convince themselves to give the highest mark. With this kicking I my brain I forced myself to spit out an embarrassingly simple answer:

"Ní mhaith liom George Bush" (I do not like George Bush)

"Damn it," I thought. "I've sold my integrity for a high mark. I have no shame. I hate this. I just want to get out of here."

But then the other examiner, my Irish teacher, hit me with one last question. I was already in the mode of mentally shutting down, so I understood only two words. The question sounded like this: "Lafafa fahahafaha Clinton nó faha wahafa Obama?"

I answered the question, thanked the examiners and then left the room knowing that I had simultaneously passed a course and let my country down.

My Post-Quarter-Life Crisis

My latest column is out. And contains a sentiment that I will save for when I'm famous and asked to speak at high school graduations: Older people are not superior, they've simply had more time to formulate arguments that they are.

I am a magpie. I am that bloke off 'Final Fight'

It feels like winter in Yr Hen Ddinas, which means that it is wet and windy and miserable. It's not all that cold, admittedly; by Minnesota standards it is spring-like. But the conditions make you want to stay inside, wrapped in a blanket and refusing to move, unless to shuffle to the kitchen for more port. This is Christmas in Cardiff.

We are supposed to get 80 mph wind gusts overnight, but already the tree in our garden is dancing a strange sort of solitary mosh in the wind. On top of the house across the garden, there is a magpie clinging to a TV aerial (FTYPAH: "antenna"). He looks absolutely miserable and it strikes me as a particularly odd place for him to attempt to station himself. Surely birds instinctively understand things like wind and know better than to position themselves in less blatantly exposed locations.

I feel a bit like that magpie at the moment -- hanging on desperately, and almost certainly failing to identify simple steps that could be taken to make things less stressful. I am hoping that things will improve from next Thursday, when my Christmas breaks starts.

I have several things to do over the break, but at least the work won't keep piling on. I have so much trouble keeping up in my courses not because I'm not interested or not doing the work, but because they keep happening. Week after week. I could probably keep up if I had a week of lectures followed by a week to debrief. But as is, I find myself pushing to the end of the semester feeling as if I am playing one of those arcade fighting games, and I'm looking at that little meter that tells you how much strength you've got left and I'm thinking: "Fuck, there's no way I'm getting past this level."

In an effort to push time forward I am listening to Christmas music almost nonstop these days. Strangely, that hasn't driven me mad yet. Or, maybe it has and I'm not aware of it. Either way, I am doing my best to get into the spirit of the season.

For those of you playing along at home, getting into the spirit of things is a lot easier on this side of the world. It's the booze, you see. Christmas + Britain = Booze. On Friday I was in Marks & Spencer and they had three different areas in the store where people were giving away generously-sized free samples of port and mulled wine.

Free booze for shoppers. Yes! That sort of thing would be against the law in Minnesota. And it's a damn shame in economic terms, because a wee tipple has a certain way of loosening the wallet. Once, after spending an afternoon drinking with my brother, I went with the child bride to Target, where I wandered off with the cart ("trolley" for our friends in the Home Nations) while she looked at clothes. When she finally caught up with me, the cart was loaded with myriad items that I insisted we buy for her.

I wasn't quite in that state on Friday, but in a good mood and eager to run about city centre. When I finally got on the train home I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment, a feeling that is rare in these days of always playing catch-up in academics. Nothing is ever done in university, I simply run out of time to focus on it any longer and turn in whatever shit I've come up with so far.

"Look at me," I thought. "Look at all the stuff I got. I have actually done something"

When I wrapped it all up and put it under the tree, it looked far less impressive, but I am still excited. Especially so because Astrid will be here celebrating with us. I don't know what kind of horrible things must have happened in her life that she has fallen so far down she is now stuck spending Christmas with the Copes, but there you go. If I gain from others' misfortune, who am I to complain?

I am especially excited because there will be another alcohol drinker in the house. The child bride is a teetotaller, which would normally leave only me to consume all the booze-laden Christmas goodies. Unfortunately, I prefer these things in quantities too small to validate their purchase.

Indeed, on the whole, I refuse to drink anything stronger than beer. Higher-octane stuff has a bad habit of sneaking up on me. One minute I'm having a witty conversation, the next minute I'm not wearing a shirt and demanding to go on a road trip and weeping.

But it's Christmas, see. And I am really eager to enjoy all these brandy-infused things and port and mulled wine and so on. And with Astrid coming, I now feel that it won't be a waste to buy all this stuff. So, my Christmas plans involve getting a Dutch girl drunk and stuffing her full of mince pies. That sounds like the sort of thing you'd pay premium rates to see on the internet, but you get what I mean.

Tossing My Brain Overboard

My latest column is out, complete with family-friendly edit. My editor (who loves the Longhorns, by the way) felt that I would be less likely to receive grumpy e-mails if he changed, "I was singularly focused on getting her to take off her shirt," to, "... singularly focused on getting her alone."

It defeats the point of the joke, which was to finish off a navel-gazing statement about my sub-conscious with a crass reference to sex, but almost certainly Adam is right. American news consumers are desperate to be offended and a reference to my fondness for certain parts of the female anatomy would give them too easy a target.

Amusingly, I had already self-censored an entire paragraph.

It is said that when Custer got his ass handed to him at Little Bighorn, some of his men went into such an idiotic panic that they simply fired straight into the air, unable to control their fear enough to aim at anything. I was going to point out that I respond to stress similarly, and likely would have run out of ammo before ever actually spotting a Lakota. But I scrapped the line because I could imagine someone getting so angry with my reference to a 131-year-old military blunder that they would write to me IN A FIT OF MISPELED CAPSLOCK HISTEREA.

The fear-the-reader nature of modern American news media means I can't really accumulate too many complaint letters. Managers in the fine company that hosts my column wouldn't have any problem dropping the thing if any of the complaints were to appear on their radar. So Adam is simply protecting my ass because I am too dumb to protect it on my own.

Although, obviously, he's not protecting my ass, because that, too, would be offensive -- both for its language and homosexual connotations. But it would be typical of the kind of thing we've come to expect from the liberal media: a Jew watching out for his sex-deviant European pal.

Wishing for Hard Labor

My latest column is out Actually, it's been out since Tuesday, but I haven't really had time to get at the computer until today.

I am busy reading Welsh-language novels. There appears to be an unwritten rule that in every single fucking Welsh-language novel the English must be nefarious, arrogant and ignorant/spiteful of the Welsh language.

I'm a bit disappointed in this week's column because I wasn't able to come up with a way to directly reference the Triple Lindy.

Swimming

I don't really have a nifty segue into this, but I was amused by this video, which was brought to my attention by Gin.

Life's been like that lately -- I don't have the mental energy/time for segues. I'm not really able to craft anything, which is why the blog has gone a bit dead. Any writing energy I have at the moment is going into my column for bARN, because they pay me, or my column for IB, because they give me a large audience. Well, a potentially large audience. In truth, the audience is probably no larger than that of this blog, which has yet to deliver those big advertising dollars (a).

But with life swirling around me, I am doing my best to still take notice of it. I'm not sure whether it's my notoriously poor memory or climatologic fact, but this autumn seems more autumnal than last year's. I don't remember golden sunsets and changing leaves and crisp nights.

Autumn is my favourite season, if not simply because it means I can start wearing long sleeves again. I have always preferred to wear long-sleeve shirts because they helped to hide the bruises from when Daddy would push me down the stairs.

No, I'm lying. My dad reads this blog and he's a very nice fellow who won't appreciate that joke at all. I like wearing long sleeves because I am a wiry chap and additional clothing gives me a bit of girth.

I think that last year I was wearing long sleeves by this point but feeling uncomfortable in them. I felt uncomfortable in my own skin last year -- that is my predominant memory of the period. Around this time last year, my large but shockingly unstable ego had crumbled to dust amid the challenge of what I had thrown myself into. I was so out of my league. With the BBC cameras following me around, I felt as if I was in some sort of ridiculous reality show -- a crueller, unending version of "Faking It."

It is fair and perhaps bordering on too kind to say that I was drowning last year. I kept waiting, and, in a way, almost hoping, for the day that I would get called into my advisor's office and he would say: "OK, look, let's be honest. This was all a bit of a mistake, wasn't it? Perhaps we didn't assess you correctly, perhaps you sold yourself a little too well, but I think we can agree now that you simply don't belong here. This is a university, and, really, you should be... well, somewhere else."

Things felt very claustrophobic. To carry on with the water analogy, it was like when Landeros and I would go to the beach on rough days (b). The waves would crest over our heads and pull us into them as they broke, spinning us, tossing us around and slamming us against the sandy grit of ocean floor. Amid that experience, one loses perspective. You focus only on getting your head above water and trying to turn and face the next wave. All other things disappear. I would be standing just a few feet away from Landeros and he would be shouting something at me, and I would be completely unaware.

My memories of last year are rarely of things that existed more than a foot away from me. I remember feeling that I looked stupid, I felt I sounded stupid when I spoke, I worried that I smelled bad, I lived in paralyzing fear that people could just look at me and see how ignorant I was.

But somehow I stumbled through and I'm back in it. Remember that episode of "Scrubs" when J.D.'s conscience manifested itself as an opera tenor who bellowed: "MISTAAAAKE"?

Occasionally that guy will still show up in my world and announce: "YOU'RE AN AAAASS," but, on the whole, things are improved from last year. My ignorance is still immense (c), but I feel slightly better able to deal with it.

So, I am occasionally able to look up and think: "Wow. Were the sunsets this pleasant, this life-affirming last year? Were the female students this pretty? Did the weather feel like this? Was all this happening around me?"

It probably was, to a large extent, and I just wasn't seeing it.

(a)Since I sold my soul and put advertising on this blog back in December 2006, the blog has pulled in a whopping $74, which, when converted to a currency that isn't plummeting, is just about enough for a packet of shortbread at Somerfield.

(b) Jim "Landeros" Landrith and I worked together on the morning shift at KUSI in San Diego. After work, we would grab several cans of Fosters and go to the beach.

(c) I'm not being charmingly self-effacing here; there are shit loads of things that I simply do not know -- the history of Wales, Welsh literature, Welsh culture, etc. Just about everything is new to me. Add to this the fact that I tend to struggle when it comes to interpreting poetry and my university experience is almost unbearably humbling.

Cheesecake 97

I think I've mentioned before that one of the more amusing elements of British university-campus fashion is their strange love of random Americana on T-shirts and sweatshirts ("hooded jumpers," for international viewers). For example, I often see faux-worn-out clothing promoting Minnesota kayaking clubs or non-existent Wisconsin colleges.

Thus far my favourite of these had been the shirt that simply said: "CENTERFIELDER." But today I saw one even better: a girl wearing a sweatshirt that said:

CHEESECAKE
97

I want to believe that it was an ironic shirt, that someone somewhere spotted this ridiculous trend and decided to take it to its ridiculous extreme. But it's so hard to tell sometimes.

It goes to 11

It's a simple fact that some peoples are naturally cooler than others. Black people for example: on the whole, blacks (and especially in the United States) are so cool that it is almost a super power. They can make anything cool. Remember that fashion of pushing up one's trouser leg for no particular reason? That was ridiculous. In a strictly controlled environment, jacking up the leg of your trousers is a sign that you haven't figured out how to wear clothes.

But black people made it cool.

I can't tell you how many times I've seen black guys wearing silly hats and managing to pull it off. I'll think to myself: "Hey, I like silly hats. I wish I could wear a hat like that." But I know I can't -- not unless I want to get punched in the face.

That's life. I like to think that karma is somehow involved -- blacks have had to spend hundreds of years getting the short end of the stick (uhm, that's putting it mildly), so God gives them extra cool. Yes, I realise I've just mixed Buddhism and Christianity, but you get my point.

In race terms, white people rank pretty low in coolness. Within that group, of course, there are sub-groups and some white people are just naturally cooler than others. In the subsection of the British Islands, then, I think we can agree that the Irish are at the top, with the Welsh, unfortunately, left to take up the slack.

I'm sorry. I know my Welsh friends won't be happy to hear that, but it's true. The Welsh are a likeable and admirable people in all sorts of ways, but coolness isn't one of those ways. A country that posits Meic Stevens as a musical genius is not cool. End of discussion.

Since I'm also not cool, this is something that has never really bothered me. But now I'm learning Gaeilge (Irish) and the coolness of the guy teaching the course is off-putting. I'm not saying he could walk into the classroom sporting an Afro pick, but he at least has a Coolness Factor of 11, which is to say that he is cooler than the 11 of us taking his course.

This makes it difficult for us to learn his language because when we try to repeat what he says to us, it comes out all wrong and we feel stupid and totally lame for trying to mimic him. Then we go all quiet and think: "Oh cripes, I hope he doesn't eviscerate me with his notorious Irish wit. They're famous for that, these wily Irish. They can think of funny, brilliant and cutting things to say really quickly."

Well, at least, I think that. I don't know why the rest of the class is mumbling.

Over The Falls In A Barrel

My latest column is out. Despite its headline, it is not about Britney Spears' career. However, it does contain a line that I'm sure Elisa can relate to: "Facebook is my chocolate pie."

Cambridge, Oxford, Cardiff?

I am now fully registered, and on Monday I return to classes for my second year of university. It feels a bit momentous because despite years and years of previous university experience I've never been this directly focused, this likely to actually end up getting a degree.

That, the experiences of last year, and the fact that I need to do better than last year* has me feeling a certain amount of sickness at the moment. And I am brought back to the old feeling that at any minute someone is going to pull me aside and say: "Look, we're sorry for messing you about, but there's been a terrible mistake. We got you confused with JC Cope. Obviously, as even you must have figured out by now, you don't belong here at all."

And I feel even more pressure knowing that I am attending the British equivalent of an Ivy League school. Well, according to Wikipedia.

For our international viewers, U.S. colleges are broken into all kinds of groupings that are mostly used in sport. For example, the child bride's alma mater, University of Minnesota, is a Big Ten university. Very strangely, Big Ten has 11 members. The "Ivy League" is another one of those athletic conferences but the term is also (and perhaps more commonly) used to denote some of the traditionally best universities in the United States, e.g, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale.

According to Wikipedia, the Russell Group of universities "is sometimes referred to as the British equivalent of the Ivy League." And Cardiff University is among them. What the hell am I doing here?

Of course, University of Southampton is also amid that "elite" group, and Southampton will accept anybody.

But I still can't shake that nagging feeling that I am out of my depth and that someone should pull me from the game before I get hurt.

*I passed and since the first year is pass-fail, I shouldn't really spend too much time fussing over particulars. But they don't send geniuses to summer refresher courses, which indicates that there's quite a bit of room for improvement. This is a key issue for me because I have visions of carrying on and earning a master's degree. But to do so, according to the literature, I need to meet a grade minimum of 2.1. For those of you playing along at home, that's not grade point average. The British university grading system doesn't really translate to U.S. terms; there are four levels above passing: 1st degree, 2.1 degree, 2.2 degree and 3rd degree.

Nant Gwrtheyrn

I've got three good names for bands that I need to mention straight away:
Heroic Doses (from Eric)
Aural Small Print (from Mr. Phin)
Absent American (from Chris)

The last of those is inspired by the fact that once again I will be missing a blogger meet-up in London this weekend. I am genuinely upset about it, but I suppose that on the plus side, I won't yet have to pay up on my bet with Huw that he couldn't create a Chris Cope fan club on Facebook that would have more than 50 members. Currently there are 83 members, which I find both delightful and disturbing.

Instead of drinking in London, I will be travelling off to Nant Gwrtheyrn as part of Cwrs Meistroli.

I'm doing my very best to temper all the good things people are telling me about Nant Gwtheyrn. The Welsh have a certain knack for overselling things: five defeats and one win against England is a successful rugby season; a dozen people are a good showing at a protest; third-rate talent shows are revered cultural events.

It's a side-effect of national pride, this kind of thinking. As a Texan, I can relate -- you can produce all kinds of evidence to the contrary, but I believe to my very core that Schlitterbahn is the greatest place on Earth, that the Houston Rodeo cannot be outdone and that Shiner Bock is the trump card in any "good beer that you can actually drink" discussion (and as a half-Minnesotan I also believe that societies lacking a Dairy Queen are far more likely to fail*).

Nant Gwrtheyrn is a sort of re-education village for Welsh learners. Or so it feels from what people say about it. They tell you that it is beautiful and inspirational and life-changing and on and on until you start to wonder when they're going to hand you a glass of Kool-Aid.

In reality, it is an abandoned quarrying village in North Wales that was turned into an immersion learning centre. Everyone and his uncle will tell you that the slings and arrows of immersion are the best way to get up to speed in a language. But that is difficult in the Welsh language, where English is always a fall-back option. In Nant Gwtheyrn they've apparently established little rules for themselves where everything is done through the medium of Welsh. The village is isolated from the rest of the world to the extent that TV, radio and phone signal are unreliable, so it exists there on the Llyn Peninsula as an Epcotian dream of the Wales that nationalists are always telling themselves still exists.

Obviously I am being aggressively sceptical about it. One of the best ways to ensure that I won't enjoy something is to tell me how great it is. My problem is that I actually believe people, but my definition of what is great often doesn't match that of others and I have a powerful imagination that creates difficult-to-fulfil hopes and expectations. So, I try to beat down my visions of things before experiencing them. This is especially true when it comes to things in Wales. There have been a handful of staggering disappointments in the last year.

I'll be up in Nant Gwrtheyrn for a week, so intermittent blogging will be reduced to no blogging at all.

Despite my efforts, I am looking forward to it. I'll apparently have time and space to wonder around, and there is a reportedly a pub within walking distance. That's pretty much all I need.

*Thankfully, DQ is planning to begin expansion to the European market in the next five years.

And suddenly it gets busy

I have three different people asking me to write articles by the end of the week. I'm not complaining. I want to be a writer, and having people press me to write is certainly better than sitting around wishing I had an outlet.

My only problem is that I am unsure whether I will meet these deadlines. Because at the same time as I am supposed to be writing I am also immersed in my Welsh Cult Experience. A few days after I ungratefully accepted a position on a Welsh course for the month of July, I got a call from one of my professors informing me that I was, in fact, being offered a place on a higher-level course, Cwrs Meistroli.

I was much happier about accepting a place on this course, if not simply because it involves a weeklong trip to a secluded area of North Wales. So, I get to go on holiday and hopefully walk away with the ability to survive my degree. Brilliant. Another positive of the course was highlighted on the first day by one of my professors, who said* in Welsh: "Ooh, look Chris. Six girls in your course. That should make you happy."

The only drawback is that I have effectively sold my soul to Canolfan Dysgu Cymraeg. The course runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. There are also evening activities, trips to various locales, and the weeklong venture up north. And homework. I feel as if I have joined some kind of cult -- like I'm going through Scientology training and soon Rhys Ifans will be denouncing anyone in my family who doesn't love Wales, Welsh, and Welsh things.

So I am left with little time to focus on doing things like writing, or reading, or working out, or keeping the house clean. Thankfully, though, there is still time to watch "Last Man Standing," which is the best show ever.

The credits suggest that it was produced in part for Discovery Channel, so those of you playing along at home may get a chance to see it, but probably without the swearing and topless women. You may want to just fly to Britain to catch the rest of the series.

The idea is that they take a load of guys around the world and have them face all sorts of ridiculous indigenous challenges. The show's tagline is: "There's only one rule: Try not to die." Last week they were wrestling tribesmen in the Amazon, this week they were Zulu stick fighting. Next week they run 51 kilometres in high altitude. I am so addicted to this show.

Brad is my hero. He won last week and should have won this week, but was defeated by his own greatness. This week's winner was chosen by a Zulu war chief who based his decision on the quality of the contestants' fighting skill. Brad won his fight by basically storming in and scaring the shit out of his opponent, who gave up after three seconds. So there wasn't opportunity to display skill.

Crap. It's almost midnight and I've got homework to do.

*Because she may read my blog, I should point out that not only am I translating what my professor said, but paraphrasing it, as well. "That should make you happy," was said with body language.