I was walking along a street in Milan last Monday, heading to the bar with colleagues for our usual post-lunch coffee. There’s scaffolding on one of the buildings along the way, which was dripping water onto the sidewalk as the weekend’s snow melted. So I stepped under the scaffolding to avoid getting wet. And, exiting the scaffolding at the end, walked right into a horizontal gray steel bar that I completely failed to see, right at forehead level. I hit it so hard my head snapped back and I then banged my nose on the same bar. (I’m sure this looked very funny, but my colleagues were kind enough not to laugh at the time.)
I didn’t pass out or have any other immediate symptoms (not even amnesia, such as I experienced that time I fell off a horse onto my head), though I felt slightly dazed. But I’ve had a bad headache most of every day since then. Now I read:
“Delayed signs and symptoms [of concussion] may include:
Irritability
Headaches
Depression
Sleep disturbances, including insomnia or difficulty waking
Fatigue
Poor concentration
Trouble with memory
Getting lost or becoming easily confused
Increased sensitivity to sounds, lights and distractions
Loss of sense of taste or smell
Difficulty with gait or in coordinating use of limbs”
Well, that describes (and explains) most of this week…
Growing up near the equator in Bangkok, I was not exposed to seasonal lengthening and shortening of days. The sun rose sometime before I woke up, and set around dinnertime (6 or 6:30 pm), with no noticeable change throughout the year.
I eventually learned that other parts of the world go through this weird annual cycle in which days get longer in summer and shorter in winter, but I was never far enough from the equator to see this in action until the summer of 1984, when I made an unexpected trip to London (from Indonesia – long story, some other time!).
I wrote my friend Barbara for help finding cheap accomodations. She got me a sub-let in a classic bed-sit flat, and offered advice appropriate for a young woman alone in London. "How late at night can I safely be out alone?" I asked. "Til around two hours after dark," she replied. I was disappointed – not that I was a party animal, but this would mean coming home awfully early, I thought.
The trip from Jakarta to London was very, very long. At the end of it, I had to get a heavy suitcase from Heathrow to Shepherd’s Bush by train and tube and on foot. Finally, having found the place, I had to drag the suitcase up four flights of stairs (or was it five?). I was finally in the flat and settled sometime in the early afternoon. Completely done in, I went to sleep.
I woke knowing that I had slept a long time. But the sun was still in the sky. I was very confused. Had I actually slept the rest of the day, through the night, and well into the next day? That didn’t seem possible. My watch was still set to Indonesia time and I was too sleepy to calculate what that must mean in London time. Finally I located a clock and found that it was around 8 pm. And there was still plenty of daylight. The sky did not darken til around 10 pm: two hours after dark wasn’t an early curfew at all!
Now I live in Italy, far enough north that the change in the length of days is noticeable, and, after fifteen years, I have yet to get used to it. When daylight savings time went off in the fall, I was plunged into gloom, literally and emotionally. At least now we’re heading in the other direction: it’s still full dark when I wake up at 7 am, but the sun is rising by the time we go to catch the bus at 7:30.
top: The very medieval scholar’s robe. I suppose the bag-like sleeves were originally intended for carrying around one’s scholarly scrolls.
2:57 min – video shot June 10, 2005
I went to London to collect my MBA from the Open University. Attending the ceremony was not obligatory, but I’d missed my BA graduation, and thought it would be fun to do the cap and gown thing.
The ceremony was held at the Royal Festival Hall, where we were supposed to arrive early to collect our (rented) gowns and have official photos taken. The Open University holds around 20 such ceremonies every year, giving graduates a broad choice of places and times to attend. Several hundred people were present that day to collect degrees from BAs to PhDs in every conceivable subject, accompanied by their beaming families.
We were a representative slice of what is probably the world’s most diverse student body. The Open University was founded (in 1967) to open up education to people who otherwise had not had and might never have the opportunity to pursue a university degree. The institution has succeeded wonderfully at this. Few of the graduates were the usual college age; the oldest I saw looked to be well into her 70s, and she wasn’t the only grandma in the group. Many were non-white, with a large contingent from Africa (Somalia and/or Ethiopia, I think), where the OU has been operating for years.
Most of us graduates didn’t know each other, but each had a small cheering section of family, in my case my dad and his wife Ruth, but it was more common for graduates to be attended by their spouses, children, and even grandchildren!
At first we clapped and cheered everybody, but that got tiring. Ruth told me later that she settled on a strategy of applauding the oldest, the least-advantaged, and the handicapped. Judging by the volume, much of the audience made the same choice. An elderly black lady with gray hair got a huge ovation, startling the Dean of Students who was performing handshake-and-congratulations duties. He asked her something, then turned to the audience with a huge grin and shouted: “Five grandchildren!”
About That Gown
Like everyone else, I rented the gown and hood, and was carefully allocated the items pertaining to my newly-attained qualification. The pale blue robes are for Masters (Bachelors wear dark blue, Doctors shiny electric blue).
Note the carefully-arranged hood, proving to anyone who understands the arcane codes of these things (it depends on the colors and even the width of the trim) that I have an MBA from the Open University. I now have the right to wear this get-up at any future academic “congregation” I attend, until and unless I earn a still higher degree. Of course, I would have to actually buy the thing for any such occasion…
If you’d like to learn more about the Open University, there’s a new site (2014) for students outside the UK and Ireland.
My very proud Dad.
Licensed to…
Dec 10, 2004
er, do business? I learned this week that I’ve passed the exam for the last course in my MBA from the UK’s Open University. So I can now put “MBA” after my name on my visiting cards, as is the custom in some parts of Europe. (I’m not sure it will do me much good in Italy, where few people know what an MBA is.)
Some of my recent articles have caused some readers to wonder why I have it in for Catholicism. Actually, I am even-handed in my dislike of religion: I don’t like any of them. But, due to family history, I have un dente avvelenato in particular for Catholicism, and for the American Southern Baptist church. My father’s mother was a devout Catholic, my grandfather a born-again Baptist. Why they married in the first place was never clear to me, but the decades-long war that ensued left the rest of the family with an unpleasant taste in the mouth about both their religions (none of their descendants is now Catholic OR Baptist).
While I was visiting my dad in England in March, we started what will doubtless be a very long project: getting his life, and all his stories, on video. One of my questions was: “Why did Mamaw and Pawpaw get married?” Here are his thoughts on that, and on what happened afterwards.
