Jessi Insulting People (at a football match and the Durham Lumiere Festival) — Saturday 19 November

The title was inspired by this video:

I started off my day by printing the e-ticket for the football match, which I got in october. After something of a debacle with the people handing out the real tickets, due to our large and unwieldy group of nine (it took about three counts for them to get all of us), we got our real tickets and split up into normally sized groups. I stuck with Jessi, since I know her, and she stuck with Felicity, who tends to act like she knows what she's doing. It was her idea to storm the castle, by the way. I made a new friend in Lauren from australia, who stuck with us for the rest of the day.
We took the bus to the Stadium of Light, the brand new pretty football stadium that sunderland just built. We all got excited and Jessi took a lot of pictures. I took one, too.

Outside the stadium.

 When we couldn't find the turnstiles listed on our tickets, Jessi performed her first insult of the day by accident. She has this habit, which is starting to get on my nerves (1. w-curve. I should be getting fed up with everything pretty soon, not just the university itself. 2. We are not the most compatible of people. It could be way worse, but it could definitely be better. I refer you to the end of the edinburgh post. This is not a repeat of the rant.) of saying "for God's sakes!" in this really angry tone when she's confused, frustrated, or just angry, and even when she's in a good mood. In any case, the numbering system for the turnstiles is pretty weird. She vocalised this by asking if they couldn't count here, "for God's sakes!" when we were standing right behind a stadium worker.
Oops. He laughed it off, but it wasn't the best foot to start off on.
Getting in was exciting, followed by being disappointing. We were over an hour early, due to intelligence that the stadium would be bedlam, but no one was there. Our search for food led us to "food kiosks" that sold no chips (in the french fry sense of the word) at all. We reflected that perhaps we ought to have gotten food beforehand. I would just like to say that gesa stadium's concessions are way better than the stadium of light's. I suspect that it's becuase of the fact that SoL is still recovering from being hideously expensive, but I feel that chips would be a good start.
We waited forever for the match to start, and I forget how we amused ourselves. Our seats were up in nowhere, but we still had a pretty good view of the field.
As a group, which included Flo and Lisa and a few other germans as well as some people that some people know, you know, we lost interest pretty quickly. Flo and Jürgen, who sat on opposite ends of the "lauren felicity jessi me" group, kept yelling over us in german. Jessi later explained that they'd been commenting on how much better they were at football than the teams. Unsurprising, somehow. Felicity instituted a pretend drinking game to keep herself busy: drink every time people clap when we don't know why, every time someone falls, and twice when random people come onto the field. She lost count pretty quickly.

Way up in nowhere seats.

Mascots. I think they're the black cats or something.

Players coming out onto the field

The asian (not sure whether japanese or korean) who kept being in the way.

Getting ready to kick off...

And kicked off.

 As halftime approached, we made plans to outside to the food vendors we saw, eat, and come back in. We made extra sure we had our tickets, and asked a stadium worker if we could go outside and come back in.
No.
Okay... we tried another guy.
No.
Hmm. We tried the guy at the door.
No.
Jessi tried another tactic: reasoning. She's not very good at accepting defeat. Unfortunately, she started off on a very, very bad foot. It was more of an elbow as far as feet go. She asked if we couldn't go outside, say to get food or something, and then come back in? I mean, what if someone forgot something in their car?
If I learned one thing from concessions work, it's that herds of children with change are the worst. But I also learned that most of a stadium's income is concessions. Gesa stadium doesn't allow outside food for this reason. I'm actually not sure if you're allowed to go out and come back in, now that I think about it.
We knew, as soon as she mentioned food, that the answer would be no, even if it could have been yes. Which it couldn't have been; they use a turnstile that scans ticket barcodes, so they can't really just flip a switch, I'm thinking.
We returned to the game rather peevishly. Something exciting happened while we were in the entryway to our seating area, but the score was still 0-0 when we got in. When the game went into overtime, we all decided to head out, even if there was no way we'd beat any crowds at all.

Crowds.

More crowds.

We actually ended up walking all the way back to clanny, hungry and cold, but happily planning dinner and Durham, which would involve being all bundled up in winter clothes and real gloves and scarves and hats and warm socks. Oh, yeah. It was going to be friggin' sweet. And warm.

Durham's Lumiere festival (click here for much better pictures) was awesome. The group ended up being Lauren, Felicity, Adam, Jessi, and me. We took a cab, deciding against a return booking because we weren't sure when we'd want to head back (depending on how awesome or terrible it was), but we were pretty confident about our ability to not spend too much money on fare.
When we got there, we decided that maybe we should have, you know, looked more closely at the website before getting there. We had no idea where to go or what there was to see; we'd kind of expected to just follow people around until we saw all the cool stuff.

Following people. Lots of them.

Giant blue glowing thing!

That statue is there all the time. It was there when Jessi and I went to Durham, at least.

Snowglobe!

We had acquired a pamphlet with a map of all the cool stuff, and were headed for the rainbow bridge and lit-up cathedral when we were informed repeatedly that we couldn't go the way we were heading; we would need to turn around and go over the bridge from hell, which we had already crossed and deemed not fun. I say repeatedly because we stopped where we were standing when he first said that we couldn't go, which was just past where he was standing, and tried to deliberate. Taking our complete and total lack of motion for insurrection, he told us that we couldn't go that way for our safety five or six times in about a minute. And he wasn't just talking to the people behind us, he was looking straight at us. As a rule, I felt bad for the event security/police (not sure if one, other, or both), who had to stand there all night and repeat themselves to over-excited and occasionally belligerent crowds over and over and over, but this guy was less than informative. Okay, first in our minds was the huge, mob-like crowd on that bridge. That was not fun, and I, at least, got a lot of elbows to the shoulder. So, we looped around. Upon reaching the entrance of the rainbow bridge, which had acquired something of a mythical status in our minds (this thing was turning into the friggin' bifröst), we were informed by a portly security/police man that the whole thing was one-way.
Oh. That would have been good to know. Jessi performed her third insult of the day by saying "Are you f***ing kidding me?" loudly and angrily as soon as he said that we couldn't go across (in her defence, we had been walking for a while). He replied that he was not "f***ing kidding" (which made me feel kind of bad for him; poor guy had probably been dealing with this sort of thing for two days already), which did not bode well for our trip across. Way to endear yourself to the security guard so that he doesn't think that we're going to sneak around him.
The entrance to the bifröst was guarded by two security/police men; one of them was the portly one that Jessi insulted. The skinny one kept vanishing. It is perhaps for this reason that we decided that we could sneak past him, no problem; we also saw several people doing the same thing. We stood in a little huddle for a few minutes, waiting for the right time. Finally, Jessi made her move. He saw her, and made a little "Oi!" noise, but she was actually running by this point, and he probably decided that one person was better than leaving the entrance and having all of us get across. We all got across anyway, as soon as his back was turned all the way. My camera didn't really capture all the awesome, but it was awesome.

This was the brochure picture. It didn't quite look like this, but it was still awesome. 

So pretty...

So close...

Even closer!

On the bridge! We win!

The awesome was increased by Felicity's immense sense of self-satisfaction at our successful rebellion; this was increased every time she noticed that we were going against the crowd.
We saw a bunch of human figures (made out of some kind of white stuff) suspended above the street, and took pictures of them in between being kept out of various attractions, like the "ring of FIRE! thing that we glimpsed (jessi made it past one guard but was repulsed by a second while the rest of us were stopped by the first), and the lit-up cathedral.

First

This guy was sitting down.

I think this one was floating down on his back.

Lady.

Sitting on top of a building

Flying

Zooming down the street, if he'd been moving.

We also saw this lovely addition to the festival.

This one was my favourite.

The cathedral was really, really cool. Unfortunately, my camera didn't take any good pictures (the earlier link for much better pictures has some really nice ones).

I cranked the light fill all the way up. The cathedral is not usually red.

Jessi got in her fourth insult by saying that the guy in the white hat was ruining her picture, but he heard and turned around. It's kind of true; the white really stands out in the picture.
After the show, we decided not to go through the cathedral because of the really impressive queue. We ended up going back around through the cathedral yard to stand in line because the rings of fire were that way.
There was a cool display, which Jessi declared to be "just like Harry Potter!" and it was pretty magical. They had suspended candles that were in white shirts all through the nave, and there was a guy making eerie, monk-y music all by himself with a lot of microphones and a guitar.

The pictures make them look even more mysterious and floaty.

It was really cool sitting in the middle of this. Even with hundreds of people crowding around, it was oddly peaceful and quiet.

From below

I don't know why they used shirts.

One man monk choir

After taking a while to sit, rest our feet, take pictures, and admire the lights, we set out for the rings of fire.
We found them.

We hadn't seen this before. It was in the courtyard of the cathedral.

A fire fountain?

Fire! It was everywhere.

We decided to look for what appeared to be a lit-up dance floor, but ended up going to a completely different display. On the way, we saw this:

We felt that this should stay up all the time.

The display where we ended was cool too, and there's a picture on someone else's camera of me looking incorporeal. Mine was out of memory.
After this, we were hungry, so we looked for a pub with little luck. We saw this on the way, and figured that we should have seen this one before the everything will be alright one.

"the future will be confusing"
This was accompanied by a mixed-up alphabet. We don't know why.

We also saw this pretty waterfall thing on the way to food:

I've heard it described as the waterfall fountain. It's off a bridge, I think.

The one we did find with seats available only had toasties (like grilled sandwiches, I think), and they didn't have those, either. We moved on to a takeaway pizza place, where we all got the same pizza (margarita, or cheese) by accident. After this, we decided to look for a van cab (since they're the only ones that will seat five). Jessi wanted to call the one we took to get to Durham, but we figured we could find one that was only a few pounds more expensive. We ended up paying a lot more than we should haveThis was a cause of bitterness that I will gloss over, because the night was really awesome and we really did have a lot of fun.
After all, we crossed the bifröst! Without permission! And we stormed a castle yesterday. We're unstoppable.

The Sick Week — Monday 10 October to Thursday 13 October

So I spent the whole weekend inside because I had a cold. I drank about thirty cups of tea and watched way too much TV. I still have a bit of a cold, but I think it's getting better.

Monday I explored the Murray Library (the city campus library, and the main library for the university) and discovered that it employs the most irritating, convoluted, and confusing organisational system known to man. It has three levels- ground, upper, and lower- with mostly informational kiosks and short-term loan (three hour) books on the ground floor. The subject I wanted was on the upper floor, but the book from that subject that I ended up with was actually on the lower floor. It took me about an hour to find it, and my search included three different catalogue searches and a total of three trips up and down both flights of stairs.
I didn't even like the book.
Today also marked the first time I've seen the metro inspectors, who were up to this point something of a mythical threat to encourage people to buy tickets. There's a £20 fee for riding without valid fare, which costs £1.50 for the average trip.
A lot of students buy the £40 year pass for our zone, which is worthwhile if you take the metro more than 27 times. Probably more students just kind of ride without fare, for reasons like a lack of change or time to pay or simply an unwillingness to pay.
English Literature 1700-1789 was as boring as last time. We discussed a rather dry not-a-novel (it would seem that we're entering the age of the novel, but Journal of the Plague Year is really not very novel-y. It's more like a fictional autobiography, a category that drives me slightly up the wall. I'm not a huge fan of Daniel Defoe, but I guess he's not too bad. I did enjoy what I read of Journal, and Robinson Crusoe wouldn't be so popular if there was nothing good about it— I just remembered Twilight. Never mind.
Thomas was actually there this time, and so available to defend me against serial killers and rapists that could have been lurking in the shadows as I walked to the bus stop. He did just get off crutches from knee surgery, so he was less useful than he might have been, but I feel that the fact that he's at least 2 metres (over 6 feet) tall and fairly athletic should deter all but the most intrepid serial killer. Also, I haven't heard of any serial killers or rapists lurking about the main campus of the University of Sunderland, so Mom, Dad, it's okay.

Tuesday involved my really cute pair of red wedge heels and not much else. I did walk to the rowland's (down the road from Clanny House) to get cough drops (pastilles, which are squishy and last about an hour, and lozenges which are hard and last about five minutes — I looked up the definitions to find the pronunciations, which have long eluded me). It turns out that Throaties are the best thing ever, although it took me a bit to get over the licorice taste.

Pastilles all seem to come in these little bubble packages.

Lozenges just come in bags. These taste like menthol-y blackcurrant (tastes kind of like purple fruit, sort of like blackberry; is a huge deal here, like grape, cherry, and orange in candy; strawberry in jams and jellies; and apple, cranberry, and grape in juice) candy.

They clear out my nose and throat so well that it's worth it. I think I drank lots of tea as well. Not much happened tuesday, really.

Wednesday, I discovered that my pastilles are basically cough medicine mixed with old-fashioned candy... and beeswax. I don't let it get to me; they're still really awesome. I can get them for way cheaper at green's than at rowland's, but green's doesn't have cheap nighttime cold medicine, so I'm out of cash and can't get Throaties. It's time to make a move on the cash machine in the library, which is swamped with people as I write this during my lunch break thursday.
I decided to take the evening off, so I snuggled up in my bed with Gulliver's Travels for my lit class, my computer, my Throaties, and some menthol-infused kleenexes that Jessi gave me.
Gulliver's Travels is the most blatantly political book that's ever been labeled a children's book. It's so transparent. I ended up getting a lot done on the blog because I couldn't keep reading. Oh, my. Apparently, Swift is mocking Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, with his odd attention to detail. I didn't really find Defoe's detail obsession irritating in Journal of the Plague Year, but Swift drove me crazy. Do not like. I eased my mind by blogging, and then by reading hyperbole and a half for about an hour after I looked up the "clean all the things" picture for the Clanny House post.

Thursday started out pretty well. I woke up on time, remembered my wallet, caught the bus, and made it to class early. This was an improvement over last week, when I woke up early but forgot my wallet, missed the bus, and only just made it to class on time by speed-walking all the way to campus in about ten minutes. So this week, I started my day tired, sick, and grumpy but not exhausted, overheated, and soaking wet.
Then we got into real science instead of quality control crap. It was a little irritating because the lecturer was the lady who talks like we're in kindergarten again, but I still like her better than the impossible little frenchman.
I was overjoyed when we started using equations. We derived a bit of a monster, but I'd seen the variables before and it was strictly algebraic. I can't imagine what this group would do if faced with calculus.
There I was, sitting in a stuff lecture theatre with a bunch of tittering morons trying to figure out "where k2 went" (it was there all along, didn't they see the bit where Vmax = k2[E0]? The equals sign means that they're the same thing, guys...), and all I could think of was how beautiful the derivation and equation were. I was actually in awe of it. I'm still kind of in awe half an hour later, to be honest. It's incredible, beautiful, awe-inspiring, and people think it could have happened just by chance.
**Also, Andrew, brother mine, mathematical adept: When did you learn to expand bracketed expressions? I can't remember the exact phrase that I learned the concept under, but it means that A(B+C) = AB + AC. I feel certain that I'd learned it by 9th grade (geometry for me), but I can't remember exactly because it's so idiotically simple that I feel like I've always known it. So please try to remember when you learned it and let me know in comments or by texting my google voice number. Comments might be more efficient. Mom and Dad have my number, and it might also be on the blog or on facebook in one of my posts. If you don't answer this within the week, I'll post this question on your facebook wall, possibly to the point of spamming you, and then I'll start bombarding your mobile with texts about it.
I'm wondering about when I learned that A(B+C) = AB + AC because the algebraic morons in my class (oh, yes, they've been upgraded from idiots to morons) could not for the life of them figure that out. Luckily, the kid sitting next to me, who I believe is british (unrelatedly, he has a neckbeard that could rival that of George Whitworth), was as in awe of their inability to get this fairly simple concept as I was. There is hope for the british educational system, maybe!
Also, I drew a picture of a pastille.

Sorry about the blurriness. There's an arrow pointing to the roundish blob inside the splashy squiggle, and the words underneath are "unadulterated awesomeness". The roundish thing is a pastille. 

A real pastille to show you what it actually looks like. That's a terrible picture.

Now I'm sitting in the library, which just kicked me off its reading list page when I was trying to print the list of books I need to read for my presentation in history. These hour-long breaks are kind of annoying- not really enough time to go home, too much time to sit around without a long book or a computer. However, I think that having to lug my computer around is a fair price to pay to make thursdays less sucky.
Lab turned out to be pretty good. I've joined up with a group of people who may or may not be drunk and/or high at any given point, but they don't giggle and they didn't reject me when I was forcibly placed with them. This makes me seem like I have really low self esteem, which is not necessarily true, but it kind of is when I'm trying to join a group. I still get nervous when I'm with close friends; imagine total strangers! My first impressions of my lab group were less than favourable, but they're nice enough, and not just to the slightly awkward american, that I'm becoming rather attached to them as a lab group. I rather doubt that I'll spend any time with them outside of lab, but this is a good start for me.
Mike looks like Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers (with messier hair than in that wikipedia picture), and Adam (not the fount of all knowledge from my flat, although he's pretty good a biochem lab procedures) resembles Wade, the TA from Plant Bio. Joe is lab partners and, apparently, good friends with Mike, "Jedward", whose real name I learned last week and promptly forgot (it might be Edward, but it might also be Richard), partners with Adam, and Robyn, who is slightly intimidating but good natured enough to forgive my head cold-induced deafness, was partners with me. Last week, we were all kind of a large globby group who stole each others results because Adam and Robyn got in late.
After lab, I barely caught the bus and got off at Green's, where I triumphantly purchased two packages of Throaties (blackcurrant and original- we'll see how the blackcurrant compares to the awesomeness that is the original) before heading home.

I believe this bag is from the pharmacy suppliers, also known as chemists. It tickles me to be told to go to the chemist's, although the signs are all for "pharmacy"

*Cue angelic choir*

I ended up exploring. There's a huge methodist church across the street from the catholic church on the street that runs by the hospital, and there's practically nothing further down the street that Clanny's on. There is, however, plenty down the street just after Clanny. I didn't have the time or money to act on my explorations, but I did buy a personal pizza to justify wandering aimlessly around a grocery store.
Update- I burnt my pizza by forgetting about it. But it was still really delicious.
Then, I did, like, all the dishes. Because I'm awesome.
I suspect that my blog for today will keep being more and more hyperbolic (in the literary sense, not the geometric sense).
Also, I figured out why today was less awful than last week: I wore rainbow socks.

The source of my power. Awesome socks, awesome day.
Also, terrible shot of my leg. It's just perspective making my calf look bigger than my shoe.

The day ended with Jessi and I taking in Bob Diddyfish, the goldfishfish that we're technically not allowed to keep in the flat and who belongs to Josie, the australian girl. She's going to London to take her brother sightseeing for a few days, and then going to germany to see her mom and family for most of a week, so we're fish-sitting Bob for a week until Conor, the guy who lives on the same floor as Josie and who took care of Bob last time she was away, gets back. 

The post didn't get more hyperbolic, I just noticed. Sorry. I picked it back up after four or five hours, and look what happened.

After settling Bob in on my dresser, Jessi and I talked for about two hours. We also fixed the heater.

Because we're AWESOME.