Hard Drive, Kilt, and Employment

My fellows, I have been so long absent from you! Dreadful happenings last week - dreadful!

If you have ever lost a computer to hard drive failure, you will already anticipate the grief and horror of the tale I shall shortly spin. It all began Tuesday, a day like any other - but what terror was in store, I hardly knew then! Just before my art history lecture I checked my email with Apple's 'Mail' application, where I've synced all three of my email accounts together. To my sudden shock, it displayed no emails and asked me to proceed through 'set up' so that I could 'get started using Mail.' As I had already been using Mail since 2008, I felt this message ominous. I tried to set it all back up, but the more I tried, the more the program lagged, and soon I knew that some evil was brewing deep in my macbook.

By Wednesday the computer screen would suddenly go gray and declare: "YOU MUST SHUT DOWN YOUR MACBOOK NOW," giving me no say at all in the matter, and forever blasting 500 words or so of an essay into the ether, never again to be reclaimed by mine or Microsoft Word's memory. So I called AppleCare in the US and after telling them I can't understand their jargon, the guy plays it straight with me and basically said: "Imagine your computer is a human, and every time you have to restart it is like a stroke, and you can keep reviving it by restarting, but every time it comes back to life it's a little more brain damaged." So that sounded bad.

Luckily a friend who had a computer problem earlier recommended an independent PC/Mac repair shop, and four days later my macbook is fixed, my hard drive brand new, all of my information restored, and my operating system upgraded to Snow Leopard from just plain old Leopard (whatever that means).

But how did the absence of my beloved electronic ball-and-chain affect me from Thursday to Monday? Well, for one thing, it induced a lot of drinking - not from despair, but rather from lack of other things to do. Now, before you say, "But you're abroad, go! travel! experience Scotland," I will remind of my various adventures, and also that I am quite capable of entertaining myself for most any amount of time with a Stevenson novel or Shakespearean play. But after going to classes and reading all day, what was to fill the nights but raucous carousal bereft of any intellectual benefit?

Thursday, after all, was the Kickboxing Ball. The team had rented out a nightclub and prepared a three-course meal, a Ceilidh band (traditional scottish folk band) you do kinds of line-dances to, and a DJ for afterwards. It was very formal - black tie, &c - and I was going to rent a tux when it hit me: Breezy, you are in Scotland! Duh, you NEED to hire a kilt ('To hire,' by the way, means 'to rent' over here). So I got measured for the kilt and fancy jacket and everything last week, and picked it up Tuesday. As a brief aside, I must relate that, to my great surprise, I somehow managed to get BANNED from a men's formalwear store. In summary, I didn't want to buy the $20 bow tie from the kilt hiring place, so I went comparison shopping. After no luck at all, the last place I checked finally had a black formal bow tie like the kind I needed, but this one was $30! Weary and dismayed, I asked the guy if he was serious that the little black tie was actually $30, and he threw it at the wall and told me to "Get the f*** out!" Amazed that I had elicited such a response from this man, I just turned around and began to walk out. He then yelled after me into the street that I was "barred" from ever coming back, ever. Who gets banned from a bow tie store?

I tell you, I am thoroughly surprised at the extent to which Americans perceive kilts as a silly cultural stereotype. They are, in fact, quite in fashion and very publicly acceptable. It is no cause for surprise if you sight a man walking down the street in his tartan and high socks. Don't get it into your head that everyone dresses like this - hardly one out of a hundred men on the street, probably less - but when you see a man in a kilt it is no occasion for gawking or eyebrow-raising.

That said, I was excited to wear mine; and what an experience! I have to say, I couldn't keep a straight face for about thirty minutes after I put it all on, but in the end I quite approved! It comes with a little dagger you stick in your sock (just ceremonial, but I was told it's to stab people with who call the kilt a skirt), little ribbony things called 'flashes' that go on your socks, and a kind of handbag (the manliest kind possible - mine was made of sealskin) called a 'sporran' - because where are you supposed to put your keys and wallet? The kilt is good for dancing - well ventilated, of course, and allowing for ample bandy-legged movement to and fro the dance floor.

As you may imagine, I needed a number of gin and tonics in order to take myself seriously, and it was a smashing night all around!

Fridays I have no class, so I slept in and, having no laptop with which to work on my essays, just did some reading. At 6pm I had a phone interview with Northfield Mount Hermon - a private boarding school in Western Massachusetts - about a job teaching there this summer, and after thirty-five minutes I was offered the job on the phone! Taft and Choate Rosemary Hall, with which I interviewed over a month ago, have yet to get back to me, but assure me that "My candidacy is still viable." So I'll most likely accept the NMH position, teaching Academic Writing and College Prep Public Speaking, if I don't hear from Taft or Choate by tomorrow, just to weigh my options. Regardless, I'm very excited. I'll be teaching alongside a professional teaching in the AM, and totally on my own in the PM - both frightening and compelling.

Come 8:30, I cracked open the Bombay and Schweppes once more to begin another great night out. Pub crawled for a while and ended up at an underground club with seven levels called Espionage, where I was mistaken for a man named David from Bristol by a very pretty girl until, to my dismay, she informed me of her error in recognition.

Saturday was slightly cultural, as I attended a performance of King Richard III at Edinburgh's King's Theater. I must say, however, that I'm unsure of what exactly I should make of the interpretation. The little princes' heads were displayed in a glass jar on stage, Buckingham got murdered with a chainsaw, King Edward made everyone drink blood after vomiting all over an attendant, there was a monologue after the intermission sung like a punk song to a minstrel with an electric guitar, and there were all these nameless characters wearing gas-masks on stage for most of the play, saying nothing and doing little, sometimes walking through the audience - very creepy.

Saturday night was back to the pubs and clubs. Met a bunch of Irish guys who were challenging everyone to pint-chugging (I didn't indulge, as they were three times my size). Met some people from Aberdeen who go to Napier (another Uni in Edinburgh), and slept for most of Sunday.

Today was good. Got the computer back, heard a lecture on T.S. Eliot and then another on Erotic Art in the Italian Renaissance (lot's of Venus' and Marys in weird positions...). I bought a book Saturday by an Oxford scholar John Carey. All about how a lot of canonized authors at the turn of the 20th Century - H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot, George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound - were all very influenced by Nietzsche and about the gulf that formed between the literary-intellectual elite and the only partially educated, lower-working class 'Mass.' A lot of these celebrated authors had written extensively on how to deal with, and often how to 'get rid of' or 'dispose of' the Masses. I haven't gotten to the end yet, but apparently a lot of their ideas were carried out during WWII, during and after which they all realized that disposing of masses of people was a pretty bad idea. Very interesting to see the struggle between the 'intellectuals' and the 'masses,' especially from the point of view of a student studying these authors. Probably sounds horribly dry to 90% of you reading this.

Well I'm going to turn in. Got an early day tomorrow....I have one class, at 5pm - 6pm. It's only because my usual 2pm - 4pm class was cancelled. So I have the day to read, write, and maybe just walk around the city.

This weekend I'm going to the Argyll Forest for three days/two nights through a trip planned by my exchange program. The hostel we are staying in a Castle, literally. A weekend of hiking, canoeing, &c &c. Pictures and stories to follow, I'm sure.