Roots, Meyers Briggs and a Distrust of Both

“Have you ever done Myers Briggs?” My friend texted me earlier today. I bring out the random in people.

“No.” …Yes.

“I’m ENTJ,” was her answer. “Chief.” I googled ENTJ. It means she’s someone who is going to go out into the corporate world with a strong fist and a fierce energy, and just dominate.

“Sure you’ve never done it? I’m curious.” She texted again, practicing her going-out-into-the-world-and-achieving-goals skill set.

“Maybe. Fine. Yes. Yes yes yes.” I was – and am – ENFJ. The Giver. It means I’m all about people and the future, all friendly and loving, affectionate and interactive. I define my days around what others want, and apparently my values according to those of my friends.

Ages ago, back when I was at Creighton and a lil fish in a much littler sea, I took a similar type of exam.

“You. Are. WOO.” It announced. “WOOER.” Woo stands for ‘Winning Others Over.’ I was a Winning Others Over’er, meaning I could wander my way into a crowd and charm the (literal?) socks off them.

No socks, just shoes

I found it funny. “Woo! Woohoo! WOO! HOO!” The guy I was dating at the time, however, did not.

“It means you’re flaky, you know. That you have lots of people in your life but that it never goes very deep.” He was a ray of sunshine.

To some extent, he was right. I’ve always been good at meeting people, and a bit better at forgetting them. I blame my gypsy blood, my hippy parents, my life of growing up in state after state and city after city.

Cambridge from chez moi

And yet…

And yet here at Cambridge, I’ve started to put down serious roots. Roots. The word terrifies me. Suddenly and surprisingly, there are people that make me want to stay. I’ve found a city where I can see myself living for more than just a few months.

I’ve found folks that make me reconsider my wandering, wooing ways.

“How have you changed since coming to Cam?” Again, we’re back to the question that the woman from the Davies-Jackson Committee asked me the other day. How have I changed? I’ve learned to move beyond WOO and into the real, embracing the lil ENFJ that’s in me through the most amazing people possible.

Folks like the ENTJ girl.

Folks like the Pentathletes, with whom I’m spending tonight enacting a Murder Mystery. It’s called the “Sour Grapes of Wrath” and was available for free online. We’re staying classy.

detective and D'Aldy

Folks like the astounding academics and professors that are changing the world through this very university, or businesses and international travelers that are changing the world through their moves, gestures, efforts. It’s a place of transition and excitement, adventure and development.

It’s the sort of environment where a Giver can prosper and a WOO’er can woo… or at least dress up in different costumes, surround herself with the dearest of friends, think about Big Ideas and celebrate the small joys in life.

Now excuse me while I go and answer more random texts.

Getting into MORE SCHOOL

I was accepted into Cambridge for the 1+3 MPhil, where I’ll be doing a course called: “Modern Society and Global Transformations,” focusing on the uses and effects of romance novels.

That’s right.

I’d be studying love.

Did you know that romance novels are the largest sector of the consumer book market? That they are the fastest growing segment of the eReader population? That they portray a very defined and very particular interaction between men and women?

Thought so.

I think it’s research that could really MakeADifference. Hopefully. Now it’s just a matter of funding, and a matter of What I Want To Do With My Life.

There are some pretty cool jobs available in London (…disregarding the whole visa-American-immigrant thing that’s going on right now, another post for another time).

Anyways.

Got into Cambridge Round two. Ish.

CUOTC Dinners, Big Ideas and Bad Buses

I was at a dinner last night, one of those grandiose three-hour affairs with wine and port and food, somewhere food, but mostly wine and port. To my left sat a Lieutenant Colonel who commanded a portion of the troops in Iraq. In front of me was my cycle-loving, boat hating friend Z. And off to the side was another decorated military official. It was the Officer Traning Corps annual meal.

Barracks Black Tie

I was lucky enough to be invited.

Everyone sparkled in uniforms, in crisp golden brocade and glinting metals. Heavy pewter and silver pitchers lined the table.

When I went to sit down, the man beside me pulled out my chair. There’s something to be said about military gentility.

Colonel Seb Pollington, Alex W-T and Gus. Goose.

The food was stellar: asparagus starter, a sorbet middle (“Why is the sorbet NOW?!” exclaimed one distressed man), tofu and beans as the main, some kind of delicate little dessert with delicate little cups of coffee.

The company was even better.

“Tell me about journalists,” I prodded the decorated man to my right, laughing because I could and because the port. “What were they like, these journalists?”

I had heard rumor that he was the man that, whenever the BBC needed a military quote regarding Iraq or Afghanistan, was put in the spotlight.

“I knew one who caught Cholera once.” He explained, quietly solemn but with a lurking humour, as though to imply that it was awful and funny all at the same time. “Half my men did. I did.”

And the dinner continued, growing more festive as candles drooped and cups flowed. Notes, written on the back of name cards, were passed up the tables.

“They’re to cause fines,” someone told me. “You know, ‘I fine Mike a drink for doing this stupid thing.’” Only I didn’t hear a single fine the entire night. I imagine someone just quietly kept pocketing all the notes; I wish I had been that clever.

A brass band emerged at one point, wandering up and down the long isles of John’s hall, playing tune after tune. “This one’s Les Mis!” I exclaimed and the men stared.

I love revolutionary musicals.

After dinner we went back to the OTC Barracks for more mingling and wine. There were busses to transport us from John’s to the gated place far, far away.

Z and I somehow missed the bus.

“RUUUUUN!” She shouted as the bus took off, three of them, three of them rolling down the street, while we hitched up our skirts and wobbled in our heels. Z’s always been a faster runner than me. She would’ve caught the bus probably, had she not stayed back to catch the slow American.

I stood on the backs of John’s and pumped my fist in the sky.

“Avast! The buses escape.”

“…slow ‘mericans.”

Fortunately there are taxis. So the night, like the show, went on.

A group of cabaret girls dressed in black with flowers in their hair sang throughout the night: “He’s the boogie woogie bugle boy from company B,” and “Goodnight, Sweetheart, goodnight.”

Throughout the evening I kept thinking back to my essay-topic-o’-the-week: Should states provide for our needs? I wanted to ask anyone, everyone. I wanted to know what these military types thought about states and whether it made sense, whether any of it made sense. But instead we talked about horses and schools, Algeria and travel.

A woman from the Davies-Jackson committee asked me the other day how I had changed since coming to Cambridge.

“I like cold weather more?” Was my flippant response, because humour is so often easiest.

A more accurate one might have been to say that I have finally grown comfortable with big ideas and small situations, with glinting dinners and forks and knives, with the juxtaposition between what can be and what is.

And I have learned to handle a lot, and a lot, of wine.

Inappropriate search terms

One of the wonders of wordpress is that you can see what people search to find your blog.

Even when they really, really should not be finding your blog.

These ones were just too good to keep to myself. I’m not selfish, after all:

students poisoned by landlady at oxford	1
which oxbridge college eat swan

…Really. Reaaally. Those poor Googlers. They must have been so disappointed by CookingInCambridge. Good thing I can sit back and take great humor from their search-engine difficulties.

Cambridge Crazies – The Sports Edition

As exams approach, most people are retreating. They are entering hermit-academic-mode, where they hide in their rooms like little moles and emerge occasionally for meals, sometimes, but only if these meals can be eaten in under fifteen minutes and with minimal communication.

I’ve started doing it too. Fewer dinners, more quality time with me and my laptop, me and a bunch of old dead men. These men talk about equality and liberty when all I really want is sleep. Or big doses of genius. Unfortunately I really don’t receive either.

Yet there’s a whole segment of Cambridge Student that keeps on truckin’. A group of folks who stay active, stay involved, and stay showered: athletes. While 90% of the student body tucks away like bears hibernating for the winter, these crazies continue to compete and converse. It’s pretty astounding.

They’re a bit insane.

Example one:

“Guys. Sorry I’m late! So sorry I’m late.” Exclaimed the blonde-haired bundle-of-energy athlete, D, as she rushed into the room. “I had hockey training, and before that exams, and I just got here.”

She did just get there.

“And I can only stay for fifteen minutes. I have go to lamb tonight. All these lambs everywhere. I’ve got to keep my phone by me, because I’m worried someone might call.”

“Why would they call?” I do not understand the life of vet students.

“A distressed call, you know? Saying ‘oh my gosh! Lambs EVERYWHERE! Lambs abound!”

It was Valentine’s Day.

Photo from the Hawks Club, a sports club in Cam

Example two:

A friend of mine is off to the States in a couple days. She’ll be gone for a week… playing for the National England Lacrosse Team.

“I’m flying back that Saturday, right? From the States. After competing all week. And then the next day, we have Varsity for Cambridge Lacrosse.”

“So that’s why you’re flying back? To compete in more matches?”

“Sure! Why not! It’ll be great. 2pm, come cheer me on.”

“I don’t think I can do that. I’m going to be a hermit. And seeing you be so sporty will make me keel over vicariously.”

Example three:

I’m planning a trip this summer with some friends on a yacht. We’re going to sail around beautiful islands, flop about in the sun and generally bask in general beautiful weather. After organizing logistics, I called a buddy of mine, Z, to celebrate details and share knowledge.

“But what about my cycle training?” Was her response.

“We’re going to be on a boat, Z.”

“Exactly. I need to cycle train. I’m doing this 10-day cycle where Oxford chases you in August. It’s going to be wild. So I need to train.”

“You can still train. Swimming is training.”

“I need. To. Train.” She sounded unamused, while my boat bubble slowly burst.

“You could train when we dock? Put the bike in a little boat. Row it to shore. Cycle through Greece.”

“Greek streets aren’t the best for cycling.” Really? …Reeeaallly?

I couldn’t even respond to that one.

Example four:

“I’m going canoeing,” said my friend J, all big and sporty, sitting across from me at a cafe. As this kid spent a summer very happily wandering around a glacier, and several months crawling through the mountains of India, I felt no surprise.

“Of course you are.”

“For about a week. With just one other person. All day. Every day. Apparently you go a bit mad, but I thought it would be fun.”

“…that is not fun. Greek islands are fun.”

Example five:

A recently recruited, genteel Pentathlete was tossed off the horse last Friday. His arm was torn up and his hip injured.

“Were you ok?” I asked after he recounted how Fettle, the horse, had rammed him against the fence a couple cheeky times.

“Sure, yes. In pain, but… I went for the run afterwards-” Pentathletes do an afternoon run on Fridays “-thinking it would be nice and easy. It wasn’t nice and easy. It was 8k led by B.” B is one of our GB Pentathletes. He slowly jogs at the same pace of my fastest sprint.

“It hurt a bit,” Explained the friend.

He said all of this while we were running. Again. Just one day later, on a Saturday morning at 8a.m.

Because nothing shouts recovery like a fun round of shooting and running practice.

Pentathlon - makes you strong

It’s a bit disturbing to realize I can think of multiple friends off the top of my head who are doing equally insane things: the girl who is cycling to Paris in 24 hours, the guy who realized he had been playing sport for two weeks with a broken wrist, the three grads who threw on wetsuits and swam for hours up the Cam river. And they do all this WHILE being a Cambridge student.

Cambridge itself discourages such behaviour. There is no official University Sports Centre, no unified place where athletes from all colleges can grunt and sweat and strengthen. “Students should focus on academics,” has often been the response to requests for change.

Yet Cambridge students can focus on both, as so many have proved. They are just crazy enough to pull it off.

Even while in Greece.

Drugs, Swans and Oxbridge

This weekend an elderly gent named Thur tried to drug me. As I was in Oxford, I almost let him.

Oxford does weird things to one’s judgement.

Photo courtesy of Christopher Wagner, resident photographer

Then again, Thur is persuasive.  He is greying, mysterious, apparently rich, the sort of man who invented something once upon a time and now lurks jovially around college, wearing a gown and drinking many glasses of stinking vermouth.

Magdalene Chapel

In my defense, Thur caught me at a weak moment.

I had spent the evening leading 42 Johnians in festivities at Balliol, John’s sister college in Oxford. While Oxford may be tainted (with poison and crushed souls), Balliol is acceptable. I have traveled the world with kids from Balliol. I imagine Balliol kids even secretly hum themselves to sleep at night with happy Johnian-loving songs.

Hall at Balliol

Aha, but you may say. Who doesn’t spend the evening humming Johnian-loving songs? Touche, my dear fellow. Touche.

After an evening of socializing with the Darker Blue, morning came on fast and painfully hard.

“Does anyone have asprin? Paracetamol? A hammer?” I moaned. Because we were in Oxford, aka the-land-of-barren-soils-and-deserted-seas, all were bereft. I flopped onto a couch.

“I have some of those!” Thur popped up, holding a book of all Balliol students from the 1940′s (“My landlord from London went here. Find his name. It’s HABABAIFMISFIEAJFIESALFSAKLFEAS!” He told me. I did not find the name.) “I have many of those.”

Photo from Christopher Wagner

“Oh Thur you are my hero.”

It’s not often I say such things to men.

“I also have Co… Coco…” Thur tapped his brow, frowning. “It’s a fizzy drink. Little pick me up. A PICK ME UP.” He winked at me. “Coco…”

“Codine?”

“Codine! Just a lil pick me up. I’ll get you some of those, set you right as rain.”

“No, Thur. We’re in the-land-that-shall-not-be-named. Nothing outside a wizard and a phoenix will set me right again.”

Thur stared.

“Or a broomstick?” I encouraged.

What did make things better was wandering around Oxford, which, while not quite as small-town charming as Cambridge, was still beautiful. Friends and I visited pretty colleges and pretty heights.

We even saw pretty deer.

“You know they eat those?” Prompted a pal of mine as we wandered around Magdalene Gardens, looking at the sitting, quite anticlimatic deer. “Just like Johnians eat swans.”

“We do not eat swans.”

“…speak for yourself.” My friend grinned at me, flapping his hands.

That’s when I knew we had to leave Balliol. Elderly gentlemen were doling out “lil pick-me-ups” and the outsiders were turning native.

Moral of the story? Oxford turns people into dealers and carnivores. Dangerous place, that one. …even if Balliol is pretty stinking fantastic.

Eccentric or Crazy? Cambridge kids…

What happens when you stick hundreds of intellectuals in an 800-year-old institution, throw in some robes, mix in a couple candles, and drizzle on the spice of old musty books?

You get a whole lot of ‘eccentric,’ elsewhere known as ‘sort of crazy.’

Example one:

“My housemate is weird,” said a friend over coffee. Not an uncommon statement, I raised an eyebrow.

“Just because he doesn’t emerge for hours on end, and just because he stacked ALL HIS FURNITURE in a cave against his door, it doesn’t mean he’s weird,” I reprimanded.

“No. Really weird. I tried to turn off his lights the other day when he was out. And you know what? The switch didn’t work. So I looked. And bam, there was a wire. A WIRE. Hanging from the lights to his computer.

“He had engineered his light switch to respond to his computer, which would respond to his phone. So that way he can TEXT his lights off and on.”

“Better watch what he’ll do to your toaster.”

St. John's College

Example two:

“So you want to be a medic?” I leaned against the kitchen counter, peering across at one of the friendlier strangers sharing my house. “Why?”

“No. Not a medic. A forensic scientist.” This kid was top of his class. He scored so well in exams that a college paid him to stay on. “I don’t want to work with people.

“I’d prefer to work with dead bodies,” he explained.

So did Hannibal Lecter.

“They don’t talk.”

…I better watch what he’ll do with the toaster, I thought.

Example Three:

There was an Engineering student who went to the States on a school trip and was put in an asylum.

“He was just really bizarre,” said my friend J. “Quirky. So they didn’t know what to do with him. Thought he was crazy.”

“Was he?”

“Not in the Cambridge sense,” J grinned and winked a bit, as though sharing some sort of secret joke.  ”The prof had to go down and get him out.”

“The Cambridge sense?” I questioned.

“Yup! The boy probably just wanted some tea.” Cambridge students really, really like tea.

And these are just the instances I can think of off the top of my head. There are more. There are hundreds and hundreds more.

It’s gotten to the point now where I’ve stopped being surprised at just all the peculiar things people do. I don’t notice when a friend, intoxicated at 3a.m., commences playing a masterpiece on the cello. I don’t notice because odds are, another friend will commence writing the next great novel while tap dancing by himself, emerging from his room after several weeks, blinky-eyed like a mole to the sun.

That’s just the way things happen here. People are eccentric. They’re smart and gifted and a little bit crazy.

Example four:

“I was in London the other day,” explained PhD-at-Cambridge, Law Degree-at-Yale friend. “Interviewing for a law firm.”

“I read some books.”

“And at this interview,” he continued, “they spoke to me in four languages. Which is fine since I speak six.”

“I read THREE BOOKS.”

“Fluently.” And he was once an underwear model, because sometimes life isn’t fair.

Strange sights occur daily. I am constantly dodging students who walk while reading. Sometimes people pass next to the graduate study space singing a hymn with the voices of angels. Men in top hats and gowns aren’t peculiar. It’s like Harry Potter mixed with Harvard mixed with crazyland.

And I absolutely, completely love it, Cambridge with all its eccentricities.

…even if I’m not letting anyone near my light switch. Or my toaster.