Preparing for England, More Jane Austen, and Religion

In a few weeks I hop on a plane to start teacher training in England. In the meantime my mother has been barging into my room about five times a day screaming about some errand we need to run before September. Everything is an emergency to her, like she has no concept of time or of importance: "DO YOU HAVE ENOUGH SOCKS FOR ENGLAND?! YOU NEED SOCKS! WE NEED TO GET SOCKS TODAY!" I tell her that I have a lot of socks, but I could get some more in the next couple of weeks. "YOU REALLY NEED TO GET THIS DONE!" Okay, I tell her, but even if I completely forget it's not like they don't sell socks in England. Then my mom calms down for about five minutes, after which she flings open my door and starts screaming her concerns over whether I have enough underwear.

Ah, to be 13 again

It's kind of reassuring to me that, even across the pond, gravity still pulls us downward, the sky is still above us, and 13 year old boys are still complete perverts. I am greatly comforted by the fact that the 13 year old boy's unique composition has the same kind of obvious international presence as McDonald's. Except instead of ubiquitous Big Macs it's this ubiquitous struggle of feeling extremely frightened and confused (like the male version of "Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret") while also trying to project total confidence (“Although I only figured out what my penis was for just yesterday, I have now decided that I am Casanova/the God of Sex/Gene Simmons.”).

Call me strange, but this is what I find so wonderful about 13 year olds—the girls have sprinted ahead in the puberty race by this point and from an outsider perspective seem to have quite suddenly woken up one morning with a bad case of the boobs, and the guys have to pretend that they’ve caught up. No, the guys have to pretend that they were never behind, and so they resort to wildly inventing stories and experiences that they can boast about to their similarly pre-pubescent guy friends (within earshot of the girls, who by this point are so far advanced in their development that some have actually started menopause), but the wonderful thing about a lot of these boasts is that they don’t ring true to the ears of someone with actual experience or to the ears of anyone in possession of female anatomy. But, most of the time, this doesn’t apply to 13 year old boys—I mean, there can’t possibly be too many of them with female anatomy. ...