When we meet new people and Chelsea tells them all about her school, and I tell them no I'm not studying and no I'm not working because I couldn't get a work visa yet, these are the sorts of questions I get pretty much every time. If you're wondering too, the answers are Lots of stuff, by doing all that Lots of stuff that I do all day, No, and No not now that I have internet.
People do seem to be curious as to what I do all day while Chelsea's at the library though, so I figured I would go through a general day in the life of Seth the House Husband.
Generally, I wake up, make us some cereal for breakfast while Chelsea's getting ready, and pack Chelsea a sandwich, apple, and yogurt bar for lunch. Then we have breakfast together. Then I walk Chelsea the 10 minute walk to Willesden Junction, so she can go to the center of town for whatever sort of school-related thing she has going on that day.
Then I walk back and shower and take care of all that, since I was busy with the food while Chelsea was getting ready. Then, my day can go a number of different ways depending on my mood. But there are a few different activities that I've been doing pretty consistently most days.
One thing I've been spending a lot of time on is editing photos from the honeymoon. I'm hoping to earn some money through photography starting next year once I have my work visa, so I'm trying to finish up a fairly bulky portfolio, and from there I'll set up a website to get my business going. So, the first step in that is polishing up all of the photos I took on the honeymoon that might add something to my portfolio - mostly landscapes and artistic shots, which are quite different from most of the more journalistic photos that already make up the bulk of my portfolio. So that's taking quite a bit of time. I shot 1,773 frames on our honeymoon, so it's quite labor intensive to sort through all of those, weed out the bad ones, and then crop, rotate and tone the keepers. I generally do three rounds of edits on my photos: the first round, I simply go through and cut out the ones that I'll obviously never use, whether they're out of focus, boring, or simply a duplicate of another photo. The next round I go through the ones I've decided to keep, do basic brightness, color temperature, saturation, and contrast adjustments, and convert and save them from a bulky and cumbersome RAW file to a more compact and easy-to-work with jpeg. The third round, I use Photoshop to fine tune all those same toning properties I edited in the second round, and also crop them to my liking. So far, I'm about halfway through the second round, and have 792 frames ready to be polished up in Photoshop. So that's a few hours spent most days.
I've also been writing a novel, for those of you that don't know. Sadly, I'm horrible at summarizing it. I've finished outlining the story in its entirety, and I'm over halfway finished fleshing it out into an actual written work, but I still am not able to come up with a satisfying or succinct summary for it. Hopefully once I've finished, Chelsea can read the whole thing and summarize it for me. I also have yet to come up with a satisfactory title for it, but I'm a bit closer to figuring that out than I am the summary. I'm much better at coming up with titles, but titles are also very important to me, so I've put quite a lot of pressure on myself that the title be absolutely perfect. So that's still taking some time. But since I've teased you so horribly with all this, I will try to go ahead and describe the novel, quite generally, without giving anything away.
Chelsea always calls it a scifi, which makes me cringe, but in many ways that is sort of accurate. There are no spaceships or aliens or laser guns, so it's certainly not scifi in that sense, but in a broader sense, it is concerned with both science fiction and, perhaps more interestingly to me, the fictions of science. It is indeed set sometime in the near future, though nothing specific - some time in the next 30 to 50 years. There are elements of time travel, though again not in any traditional sense (think biological rather than mechanical), and I have tried to represent the technology of the future in one way I think it could possibly actually and realistically develop. So nothing too fantastical. No flying cars, etc. It is very concerned with the biological though, and might contain a few more elements of the fantastical in relation to the human body. In that way it also has hints of fantasy woven into it, drawing on sort of medieval conceptions and notions of mystery concerning the human body. But I won't go any further into that at the risk of giving anything away.
Thematically, it is very much concerned with addiction. There's is also a sort of extended allegory to the spiritual realm and the early Christian church which is deeply entwined with the protagonist's addiction. That is what is really valuable and important about the novel to me, and is likely what will be missed or ignored by most readers.
And on top of all that, there's the fear of a 1984ish government, a love story, and an experimental rock band that tries to demonstrate and explain their artistic treatise and it's importance to the world (another part of the novel that is quite important to me). So there's certainly a lot going on, but hopefully it will all make sense and come together into a cohesive whole as you read it. Because I'm sure if it ever gets published you all will be the first ones running out the door to go buy your copy and you'll read the whole thing in one sitting the day you pick it up. I can dream.
So that's quite a bit of my day as well. I'm nearing 50,000 words on it so far, and I'm writing between 1000-2000 words a day, so the first complete draft should be finished by the end of October (novels typically run between 70,000 to 100,000 words).
I'm also still writing poetry, and I've just finished a collection of poems entitled Standardized, which was inspired and influenced by my time at the Georgia Center for Assessment rating standardized test essays from 5th and 8th graders. I'm also still working on another collection of poems entitled The Alarm, which is a sort of successor or continuation of my undergraduate thesis The Skeleton Keyhole. That one has been in the works since I finished The Skeleton Keyhole last November, but I don't yet see myself concluding that collection any time soon. So I work in that area occasionally, and am also spending a bit of time trying to find homes in magazines and journals for all of that work. For those who don't know, two of my mp3 collaborations from The Skeleton Keyhole have been published in online journals.
One with my friend Tuna:
And one with Chelsea:
So that's pretty awesome. Hopefully I can continue to get some more considered in the coming months.
I've also been preparing to make another go at graduate school. I think I'll have satisfied my urge to live in the UK after this year, so this time around I'm applying to American schools. At the moment, I'm considering CU Boulder and Maryland for their masters programs, and UPenn and UNC Chapel Hill for their doctoral programs. There is full funding available at all four of those through grants, fellowships and teaching assistantships, which is why those have made the list. I've also considered SUNY Buffalo and UC Santa Cruz, but funding is less readily available at those institutions, and the professors which originally drew me to them have recently retired. So those are less appealing to me now. I would also much prefer Boulder or Maryland than the other two, since I am not really sure at all that I am ready to commit 5 or 6 years to live in one place and complete a doctorate, as would be the case at Penn and UNC. Maryland might also be a good place for Chelsea to pursue a doctoral program as well, so that's our top choice at the moment. However, Chelsea has convinced me for the time being to keep my mind open to the two Ph.D. programs as well.
That's quite a bit of research and keeps me busy as well. But, that also means I have to take the GRE, which is like a glorified SAT for prospective grad students. So I've downloaded a study program for that, and will be spending quite a bit of time studying for that the next few weeks as well. I'll be taking that at the end of October. The only thing that makes me nervous about that so far is how similar the scoring rubrics for the writing portion are to the rubrics we used when scoring the essays for 5th and 8th graders. I know how fickle scoring can be with those rubrics, and I know that good writing doesn't necessarily mean a good score. So that makes me uncomfortable. But, thankfully I have seen it from the inside, so maybe I can use that to my advantage.
Those are the main projects that have been keeping me busy. I've also been reading quite a lot from our local library. Since we've moved in, I've read Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which I enjoyed but didn't think it quite lived up to the massive praise it has received, Tolkien's Children of Hurin, which I loved and which made me consider giving The Silmarillion another chance, Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, which Chelsea mentioned in another post, and which I was very impressed by, and two books of poetry, The Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney, and Chinese Whispers by John Ashbery, both of which I really got a lot out of and at times even enjoyed (though I love poetry, I don't often find "enjoy" to be the proper term to describe my feelings toward it). I've also been reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which I've found to be very well written and even difficult to put down at times, though I find Rand's argument for Objectivism in it to be quite weak and at times even self-defeating. It was quite difficult finding The Fountainhead as well, as the only library I could find it available in was the British Library itself. The biggest library in the world. So, I really wanted to get in there. Getting a reader card there is kind of intense and difficult, and they really don't like to unless you have a really good reason (like a student, like Chelsea). I came up with a list of rare books that I do want to read in preparation for grad school though, and showed it to them. Since I can't find those books anywhere else, I think that sufficed as a good enough reason for them to give me a card. So that's pretty awesome, I get to research in the British Library (or the BL, as all the in-the-know people in Chelsea's program call it). It's pretty intense in there. You have to put all your belongings in a clear plastic bag when you go in the reading rooms so they can see everything you have, and needless to say you cannot check books out there. No pens are aloud in the reading rooms at all, and obviously no food or drink. I also learned the hard way that when it rains, you can't even wear your wet rain jacket into the reading room.
I've spent a couple days there reading The Fountainhead as well. It's an hour trip one way on the tube and costs a few pounds, so whenever I do go, I devote an entire day to it so I can get good use of my time. I only go on days when Chelsea has to go to the BL anyway so we can spend the day together. So far I've read about a third of that massive novel, and it'll take me 3 or 4 more trips to finish it the rest of the way.
Other than all that, I've just got all the housework to do. We found an old vacuum in a box in one of our wardrobes, so I tried doing that once. It was kind of broken and didn't work very well, and was covered in this nasty greasy substance of some sort...hair wax maybe? I don't like to think about it. But needless to say, that was not very fun, and hopefully we can just keep our floor clean and do that as infrequently as possible. I try to clean the bathroom every once in a while, and I have to do dishes by hand every day (no dishwasher). I do a load of laundry about once a week, and that all has to dry on a folding rack (no dryer). And I usually go meet Chelsea at the station to walk her home when she gets back, and then I make us dinner. We've had a few kinds of pasta, beef stew, pork chops, pork and beans, grilled cheese and tomato soup, and frozen pizza. So I've learned a fair amount of cooking, and actually haven't burnt anything yet.
Well, almost. There was the mincemeat incident. Also known as the Great Saga of the Mincemeat.
Mincemeat? What's that, you say? Mincemeat?
I'll tell you. Only the most diabolical of all British foods.
They were on offer (how to say "on sale" in British) at Tesco, buy one get one free, at a good price already. Mincemeat pies. I thought they would be somewhat akin to the meat pies we have known and loved in pubs. Meat is in the name. They call ground beef "minced beef." It should have been a pie filled with ground beef and gravy. So we bought two boxes. Oh, it should have had meat.
One day we decided to try them. When I pulled them out of the oven, I knew something was wrong. What is that, little granules of sugar on the top? Why would there be sugar sprinkled on top? And what is that shape, a Christmas tree?
Then I stuck a fork in and tasted it, and thus followed one of the most bewildering taste experiences of my life. It was kind of sweet, and caramel colored. It wasn't meat at all.
Over the next half hour or so, Chelsea and I forced ourselves to eat one of the most disgusting things we have ever eaten. The filling inside does not have one bit of meat in them, and I think they are actually intended as a dessert item, not as a meal (though I can't imagine anyone eating such defile things for the pleasure of it). The filling, the mincemeat itself, is essentially random fruit covered in some awful BBQ sauce derivative that has absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It was one of the worst things we've ever eaten. But we bought two whole boxes of them, and stubborn as I am, I was not going to let them go to waste. I convinced Chelsea that they might not be so bad if we bought some cream and poured lots of sugar on them. So we tried that.
(Yes, the only pictures you get in this post are of awful mincemeat. Sorry. Just be thankful you didn't have to eat it).
She ate another one like that, but then firmly declared that she would not touch another mincemeat pie no matter what I said, and that if I was too stubborn to throw them away, then I would have to eat them myself. So I did.
The cream did help, and it was bearable for the most part, and at times, times when the bite on my fork consisted only of cream, sugar, and pie crust, it was even enjoyable. But, my subconscious did get the better of me on two separate occasions, and twice I have forgotten about the pie I had thrown in the oven and burnt it into a black crisp of nastiness.
I am pleased to say, however, that I have indeed finished them all, having thrown away only the two burnt ones, and we will never be buying mincemeat ever again.
So that's a typical day in my life here. Sometimes I also go to the lovely Roundwood Park to jog or eat lunch, which is only a 3 or 4 minute walk from our front door, and is really wonderful. But I've taken some pictures there as well, so in another post soon I'll talk more about the park and show you what it looks like.
We've also found a church here now that we are quite happy with, Community Church Harlesden. It's a house church, made up of mostly middle-class white people, 20 to 30 somethings, and lots of young married couples. There are about 25 steady members. So we fit in quite nicely there, and feel really comfortable there and already like a part of the family. Really the only thing I am cautious about the church: is it possible to feel too comfortable in a church? Maybe. Sometimes I think it is good for us to choose a church for reasons other than our own comfort and personal preference and or happiness, and it can be very spiritually productive to move outside our comfort zones. But I don't think this is one of those times for Chelsea and I. I think God has provided this church, where we fit in so perfectly, for us in a neighborhood where we had never hoped to fit in at all. I think we could only find such a church here in this area only by the Lord's guidance, and that He's provided it for us as a place of rest and recovery from all of the difficult times we have been through these past few months. And I think eventually it will serve as a home base, a launching point, from which we can go out and interact with and minister to all the diverse community that does live in our neighborhood, which may at times be intimidating to us, be outside our comfort zone. So we're really excited about that, and we've already begun building up wonderful relationships with people in the church.
But this post is already insanely long (I really hope no one thinks I don't have anything to keep myself busy with anymore) so I'll save the rest of all that for the next post or two. Until then, I've got some writing, photography, studying, cleaning, and cooking to do.
Keep the dishes clean, the clothes picked-up; tell Chelsea that you love her and show her every chance you get. Remember that she is your BRIDE treat her that way now and forever, and she will laugh with you.
ReplyDeleteMay GOD bless and keep you until we can fellowship together.
Love you both.