Yoel · Writes · Things

I took myself on a date to see New Moon yesterday. While I don’t have any particular problem with seeing movies alone, this time it was in part because I couldn’t convince anyone to come see it with me, and in part because the experience of watching any of the Twilight films is very different when you’re surrounded by people who are vocally swooning over Robert Pattinson (as has happened every time I’ve seen Twilight, drunk or sober). A few assorted thoughts:

New Moon was marked by three principal characteristics: bad writing, bad acting, and a slightly less attractive than usual Robert Pattinson. Of these, only two (the acting and R-Pat) are actually the movie’s fault. New Moon (the novel) is a lot like the middle chunk of the seventh Harry Potter in the sense that abso-fucking-lutely nothing happens. It’s like,

Chapter 1: Bella has a birthday.
Chapter 2: Edward leaves Bella.
Chapters 3-25: Bella is depressed.
…concurrently: Jacob is in love with Bella, also a werewolf.
…concurrently: Bella is an insufferable, awful, manipulative human being.
Chapter 26: Edward undresses in public.
Chapter 27: Bella fears marriage.

Stephanie Meyer even goes so far as to leave three chapters of the book totally blank. That’s how little is going on. So you might think that spinning the camera around a morose-looking Bella in a seriously unattractive sweater is bad filmmaking — but really, it’s making the best of some incredibly awful source material.

This isn’t to say that the other two problems are insignificant. First of all, I’ve always been of the opinion that stupid dopey-eyed buck-toothed never-met-a-straightening-iron-she-didn’t-like Kristen fucking Stewart is the worst actress of all time. And New Moon was absolutely no exception. The only scene in which she was even remotely tolerable — and possibly the only scene of any particular value in the whole film — was in the movie theatre with Jacob and Mike. Yes, the armrest tango is a cliche, but it’s also hideously amusing whenever it’s happening to someone who isn’t you. It’s fitting that the only time I liked her was in a scene when, by definition, she couldn’t be talking.

And then there’s R-Pat. Let me state, for the record, that even though I’m firmly on Team Edward (not that it matters, o dimwitted fangirls c/o Entertainment Weekly, because the novels have already been written, and, SPOILER ALERT!!!!, she chooses Edward), he wasn’t looking his best in New Moon. While my personal preferences lie somewhere more in the direction of pale and skinny, rather than Taylor Lautner adonis, I have to agree with the general consensus that pegs Robert Pattinson as looking particularly (and occasionally unpleasantly) emaciated in this movie. Also, the weird patchy chest hair and visible pubes? Kind of gross.

All this considered, Robert Pattinson is still probably the most attractive (and least hygienic) man in Hollywood. But New Moon did him a disservice. Especially after looking at pictures of him during his Cedric Diggory days last night (you forget how unbelievably hot he was in that role, after so many months of Edward-mania), I’ve reached the conclusion that the way he was made to look in this particular movie was sub-par. Again, it makes slightly more sense in the context of the book, where his depression re: leaving Bella is explained with something that could be called clarity if it weren’t Stephanie Meyer’s godawful writing, but in the movie, it just comes off as strange. The ultimate brooding sex symbol has somehow become too brooding.

But in the end, with a movie like New Moon, you know what you’re in for when you buy the ticket. Ogling Robert Pattinson aside, the entire Twilight series is the literary/cinematic equivalent of junk food: you scarf it down, enjoying it all the while, and then walk away feeling a little bit sick to your stomach. New Moon was no exception. And considering how horribly self-indulgent Stephanie Meyer was in the book versions of Eclipse and Breaking Dawn — this Amazon review is particularly eloquent re: the latter — I can only imagine that it’s going to go downhill from here.

Although I can’t fucking wait to see how they handle the sex scene and its aftermath in Eclipse. Seeing Kristen Stewart covered in bruises will be worth the price of admission for me.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

A couple of days after I submitted my last column to my editors at The Phoenix, I found out that I got one of my facts a bit wrong. I wrote, based on something a friend told me but I neglected to verify, that Wadham had painted over the swastika I found in the bathroom — this turned out not to be true. Mea culpa on the failure of fact-checking.

But in a way, this is even more shocking. The person who told me that Wadham had painted over the swastika told me that he had spoken with the president of the Wadham Middle Common Room, who ostensibly has the job of dealing with incidents like this. After more than three weeks, he still has failed to do anything about it. I’m not sure whether dealing with bathroom graffiti just ranks low on the list of Wadham priorities, or if it just slipped the MCR president’s mind, but either way, it’s kind of appalling that the student leadership of a college can be so neglectful towards major issues of student welfare.

In any event, here are some pictures of the worst of the graffiti, not all of which is Jew/Israel related. The colors look a bit off because I tried to make the text more readable.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

Note: This column will appear in the November 19 issue of The Phoenix.

When emerging from beneath the progressive security blanket of Swarthmore College, even fairly minor changes in the level of religious, sexual, and cultural toleration can be startling. Which is why, when I found swastikas drawn all over the walls of a bathroom stall in my college last week, I was all the more shocked. But before I get to that, some background about Wadham College…

This week at Wadham is Queer Week. At Swarthmore, this wouldn’t necessarily be regarded as a big deal. Between the Sager Symposium each spring and the fourteen different groups serving each tiny slice of the queer population on campus, being gay is a pretty intrinsic part of how Swarthmore operates. But at Oxford, that’s very much not the case. With all but eight of Oxford’s constituent colleges having been founded before the 20th century (and some dating back to the 13th century), progressivism isn’t central to the university’s culture. Most of Oxford’s colleges didn’t admit women until the 1920s. Even in August of this year, The Guardian found that women with equal credentials are still less likely (by a factor of 1.5) to be admitted to Oxford than men. “Traditional” is synonymous with “straight white male privilege” here — and tradition is a big part of how the Oxford educational system operates.

Which is why Queer Week (and the QueerFest bacchanalia that follows it) is such a big deal. Progressivism, in the way that we think of it at Swarthmore, isn’t as common at Oxford — not because the students are any less enlightened than their liberal Swattie counterparts, but because the historical legacy of this institution doesn’t allow them to be. Wadham, as I discovered shortly after arriving here, is widely regarded as the exception to this rule. Despite being founded in 1610, it’s seen as the most progressive college at Oxford, and accordingly, it’s the one that should feel the most like Swarthmore.

And so, going back to the swastikas in a Wadham bathroom, I had to ask myself: what the fuck is going on? Isn’t this supposed to be the liberal college? And more than that, I had to ask myself whether this bathroom stall was an isolated instance of hatred, or if the problem runs deeper in British society. The answer remains elusive.

Earlier this week, the British blog CiF Watch published a series of unlabeled quotes taken either from moderated comments on The Guardian’s website (The Guardian being a rather progressive paper, by any standard) or from Stormfront, a forum for neo-Nazis. The task for readers was to try to determine which comments were from which site. The results were shocking: a comment referring to Israel supporters as “ZioNazis” was from The Guardian, as was one calling Jews “the real Holocaust deniers.” Well over 80 percent of readers identified a comment referring to Jews who speak out on the subject of Israel as “the Zionist thought-police” as originating in The Guardian — even though it was actually posted on Stormfront.

The problem here isn’t that people post hateful things on the internet (although, undoubtedly, internet hate speech is problematic in its own right). The real issue is that the line between neo-Nazi hatred and moderated, presumably hate-free comments on a mainstream progressive British newspaper’s website has been blurred to the point where thousands of people are quite literally unable to tell them apart. Comments that would be regarded as grounds for a no-holds-barred panic attack on the part of Jewish groups at Swarthmore are unexceptional in discourse on Judaism and Israel in the UK.

In 2008, the Community Security Trust, an organization devoted to combatting antisemitism throughout England, announced that just under 550 incidents of antisemitism had been reported on British college campuses, of which 163 were violent or destructive to property. None of this was headline news. Even finding local media coverage of a Leeds University incident in which “Kill the Jews” was repeatedly written in a bathroom was an adventure in futility. This isn’t to say that the British at large are necessarily more antisemitic than Americans (although the sheer number of British antisemitic or anti-Zionist blogs that are in popular circulation here seems to suggest this), or that Wadham didn’t take the swastika I found seriously (it was painted over a few days later) — it’s just reinforcement of the reality that, culturally, the UK is a brave new world.

Fundamentally, there’s a disparity between the severity of incidents as I perceive them and the extent to which they register as serious issues at British universities outside of their Jewish communities. From the perspective of a Jew who grew up in Boca Raton, Florida (the most Jewish place imaginable, outside of Jerusalem or New York) and then attended Swarthmore, this was (and still is) appalling.

The take-away for students considering studying abroad isn’t that it’s unsafe, unpleasant, or not worth doing. Instead, it’s essential to approach diversity abroad with the mentality that things are going to be very, very different from what you’ve become accustomed to at Swarthmore. Being Jewish or queer or a woman in the rest of the world is a vast departure from what it’s like within the bubble, and in a sense being here requires being more vigilant and outspoken on these issues than at Swarthmore. It’s easy to be comfortably Jewish or comfortably gay at Swarthmore. In England, at least, identity politics is a much less passive enterprise.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

Even though I hate internet drama more than just about anything (other than slow walkers; those people are by far the worst), yesterday’s post and the ensuing insanity in the comments has been pretty revelatory.

For a while, I was considering un-publishing the post. This has nothing to do with my position on the subject or the outpouring of support I received (in some instances, from people and places I would have never expected), but rather with the realization that, for all their hate and ignorance, fighting children is unfair. However objectionable I find what they’re saying — and don’t mistake my placidity for a lack of caring — these sorts of things have potential to affect their lives in ways that, at age 17, they can’t possibly imagine. The people making college admissions decisions for these kids know how to use Google. The people who will be giving (or not giving) them internships in college know how to use Google. And I’m absolutely certain that the human resources staff who will be running background checks on them when they apply for jobs know how to use Google.

While there are still people in this country who condone (or even applaud) hate speech, there’s going to come a day when calling someone a faggot is taken as seriously as it ought to be. And that’s going to be the day when calling someone a faggot on Facebook comes back to haunt John Manov.

But this isn’t, as someone suggested, an issue of me exacting revenge, and that’s why I’m not taking down the post. I think that there are much bigger issues here — issues of how queerness is approached in high school — that make this particular problem relevant.

I had a nightmare last night about a situation in which one of these kids’ parents, having more foresight than their progeny, try to get me to take down my post, classifying it as libel against their children. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility. Moreover, even though I’m an adult, I’m certain that my parents would, at some point, become involved, a horrific scenario in which my mother — already worried about the swastikas I saw in a Wadham College bathroom this week — would tear her hair out over the thought of someone making fun of her gay son.

If this were about me and John Manov (who, I now remember, I got in trouble for calling me a faggot, even then), or me and the Atlantic High School debate team (who apparently I let down in a colossal way by having the audacity to be occupied with other things than coaching my senior year), I wouldn’t be bothered with it. But it’s shit like this that makes it so impossibly difficult to be gay in high school, and that’s where the real issue is.

I came out my freshman year of high school to everyone but my family. As such, I had a lot of time to develop a thick skin about my homosexuality. Thick skin or not, though, a number of my greatest regrets in life pertain to not being willing to stand up for my own rights in high school. That’s what this post serves to combat.

People like John Manov aren’t malicious in their own right. I think no one should be subjected to verbal harassment on the grounds of their sexual orientation, but: sticks and stones. What is damaging about people like him, though, is that they try to scare people away from saying and doing what is right. Figuring out one’s sexuality is difficult enough; coming out is doubly more challenging, especially when there’s vitriolic homophobes waiting to make you miserable as soon as you do. Moreover, having the courage to fight back against these people in an environment that’s largely unreceptive to attempts to do so is harder still.

So, in the name of queer high schoolers everywhere: John Manov is a homophobe. His friends who laugh at his jokes are homophobes. They deserve their fates. And every time someone visits this blog, they’re helping give it to them.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

Every once in a while, I feel optimistic about America. Today, the House passed a bill enacting, along with some terrible riders, healthcare reform on a level this country hasn’t seen before. It’s things like that, and things like the fact that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is approaching the end of its miserable existence that make me proud to hold an American passport.

Other times, though, I’m less proud.

In 2006, I posted about some novice debaters I was coaching who got on my nerves. One crossed a bit of line by calling me a faggot, which got his entire conversation published on my LiveJournal. A few days ago, I checked Google Analytics and saw that that particular post was receiving an inordinate amount of traffic for something I wrote in 2006. I played it off to total coincidence, until I was sent the following screenshot of a Facebook status:

Ordinarily, I censor out names when I publish screenshots from Facebook on my blog. But in this instance, the people involved, two of whom I’ve never met or heard of before in my life — John Manov, Ben Taplin, Luis Suarez, and Zachary Zlatev (the younger brother of a friend of mine from high school) — deserve to be shamed. They deserve to know that while they aren’t worthy of me addressing them directly, they singlehandedly are enough to make me fear for the future of my country. It’s horrifying to think that people who attend Atlantic, who go through the same International Baccalaureate program I graduated from, and who, presumably, are the best and brightest South Florida has to offer, can be so thoroughly ignorant.

John Manov found his way to my blog again today and commented. I don’t know what, exactly, motivates his kind of virulent hatred other than latent homosexuality (especially because I haven’t seen the kid in something like five years, and have no recollection of anything about him, other than that he’s homophobic), nor do I want to. But what I do want to put out there is: while homophobes like him make me worry about the direction Western liberal society is moving in, it’s not anything that particularly fazes me. There comes a point, I think, when after you graduate from high school, being called a “fag” is no longer an insult. He’s a pimply, hormonal high schooler, and I’m an Oxford student. All I can really think to respond to his comment with is: yes, and?

I’m gay. You’re an ignorant motherfucker. Let’s all move the fuck on. And that’s all I have to say about that.

But, for all my lack of caring, these people do deserve to have this post and their intolerance be forever associated with their names in a Google search. At the very least, the internet affords me the right to that.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

The illustrations accompanying my columns in The Phoenix have been pretty consistently awesome, so it’s probably worth reposting them here. The most recent two:

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

I’m posting a lot about cooking lately, but considering I’ve taken to procrastinating my actual work by preparing meals that I don’t need, I figure it’s at least worth mentioning. Anyway, here’s the somewhat disastrous tale of my meat sauce:

After going to the big supermarket nearest Oxford (Sainsbury’s) on Sunday and finally finding ground turkey, something I thought didn’t exist in the UK, I decided to spend Monday afternoon cooking meat sauce. So, I chopped an onion, peeled and chopped some garlic, put on some cooking music, started sauteeing… and then realized that the turkey was still in the freezer.

Once I opened the package, I encountered my first problem: the frozen turkey had a piece of paper stuck to the bottom of it that, no matter how hard I tried, wasn’t coming off. So, being a fairly intuitive individual, I ran the turkey under some scaldingly hot water, which caused the paper to come loose. Crisis averted! But, the turkey was still completely frozen, and by this point, my onions and garlic were beginning to burn.

I now realize that I should have put the turkey in the microwave for a few minutes to defrost it, and then cut it up and put it in the pot with the onions and garlic as normal. My brain, however, wasn’t operating on that level of culinary prowess, so I put a huge frozen brick of turkey in the pot and let it sizzle. After a few seconds, I saw that the outer layer of the turkey could be scraped off. So, over about 20 minutes, I alternated sides of the turkey, scraping off tiny layers of meat each time and trying to break up this huge clod of ground meat.

Which was all well and good until the wooden spoon I was using to finesse the turkey snapped. I broke a spoon with my ineptitude.

Fortunately, we had a replacement so the cooking went on, and ultimately, the sauce came out really well (I had one of my flatmates taste it to confirm). But it was a traumatic process, as well as one that further reduced the stock of available cookware in my kitchen.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

I think I’ve developed the dubiously positive habit of stress cooking.

This past cycle of tutorials, I’ve been feeling particularly overwhelmed because of an upcoming group trip to Bath that the Sarah Lawrence program is taking us on. Ordinarily, my paper-writing routine goes something like this:

Monday: Political theory tutorial; researching film essay
Tuesday: Researching and writing film essay
Wednesday: Finishing and submitting film essay
Thursday: Film tutorial
Friday: Researching political theory essay
Saturday: Writing political theory essay
Sunday: Proofreading political theory essay; researching film essay

The trip to Bath, in and of itself, isn’t a huge issue, except that I wasn’t nearly productive enough last week. As a result, I didn’t have time to even begin working on my film research until today. Which means that I’ll still be researching for most of tomorrow, which means that my essay won’t be written in time to submit it before I leave for Bath on Wednesday morning. I’m awaiting a response from my tutor to the rather frantic e-mail I sent him this afternoon, but in the mean time…

…I’ve been cooking basically nonstop. I’ve made baked eggplant, a turkey-based meat sauce (many stories of cooking catastrophe associated with that one), some roasted potatoes, a bunch of tuna salad, more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches than I know what to do with, rice and lentils, and, in the oven now, baked apples.

I have absolutely no use for all this food! I’m not even actually hungry, and the fridge is so full of my roommates’ stuff that there’s no room for all the leftovers that my mania is generating. At the very least, though, I’m going to have an easy time, food-wise, for the next week, because between what I’ve purchased and what I’ve managed to cook, there’s a pretty incredible quantity of stuff waiting to be eaten.

Time to check on my apples to make sure they’re not detonating (we lack a corer, so I’m skeptical about whether they’ll actually be successful)…

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

About five minutes into my shower this morning, I noticed that the shower drain was clogged and the water from the shower was overflowing in a pretty significant way out of the shower and into my bathroom. This joins a number of other maintenance issues on the list of Shit That’s Wrong With My Apartment:

• The lock on the front door no longer locks
• The toilet in one of the bathrooms requires a certain level of persistence re: flushing
• The door on the other bathroom either doesn’t lock, or locks you in
• The door to my balcony doesn’t stay closed
• The light in one of the bathrooms only works intermittently
• One of the refrigerators has a puddle of water inside it that reforms no matter how often you wipe it up
• The kitchen sink will occasionally decline to produce hot water
• The bathroom showers will occasionally decline to produce hot water
• Two of the burners on the stove are broken
• The handle of one of the pots snapped in half yesterday, rendering the pot more or less useless
• The wireless router needs to be reset every two or so days or the Oxford VPN stops working

And these are just the issues in D4. There are six flats in this building of the complex, each with five rooms and each with a litany of problems.

At first, I thought putting all the Americans in the building with all the defects was just the British way of saying, “Thank you for declaring your independence!” But after talking to a friend who lives in another building in the complex about his persistent hot water issues, I’ve come to realize that these problems are a bit more widespread than just the D-block.

The apartment manager, Lindsay, has an interesting repair strategy when it comes to maintenance problems. Namely, he reverses whatever problem you report to him. When our front door wouldn’t unlock, he came, banged on it for a few minutes, and then declared the problem solved — and indeed, our original issue was; the front door no longer stays locked, but nor does it do anything but stay unlocked anymore. When my flatmate Madeline’s window wouldn’t open, he corrected that issue and she now has an open window… that won’t close. The un-flushing toilet (disgusting), overflowing shower (disgusting), broken bathroom door (irritating), and leaky refrigerator (wet) are, presumably, all on the list to be inverted (into a toilet that won’t stop flushing, a shower that doesn’t work at all, a bathroom door that doesn’t exist, and a refrigerator that isn’t cold), but we haven’t heard any updates on them yet.

Every once in a while, the manager will reply to an e-mail you send reporting some maintenance problem with the observation that the Americans in the D building send about four times as many complaints as the British students living in every other building in the complex. What I’m trying to figure out now is: is that because American college students don’t have the keep-calm-and-carry-on mentality of our British counterparts, or because we really did get the dud apartments?

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

Sorry, again, for the prolonged silence; it’s been a busy week or so. My latest Phoenix column is going up here, but expect more blog-exclusive stories soon.

Note: This column will appear in the November 5 issue of The Phoenix.

If history serves as any example, this past weekend Swarthmore was overrun by the annual Halloween party. I’ve always put a lot of weight on Halloween at Swarthmore because, ignoring the Hootenannies and Disorientations our Greek friends put on each year in the hopes of sleeping with the freshmen while they’re still fresh, it’s the first big party of the semester. And for first-year students, it’s the first time in their experience that a vast majority of the campus is brought together in the singleminded pursuit of getting crunk.

Moreover, if the Daily Gazette is to be trusted, I’ve heard that the party was, blessedly, moved out of Mertz Marsh and back into Upper Tarble, a change that continues the administration’s tradition of struggling to figure out where the least number of people will get injured at this infernal party. While the mud of Mertz Marsh has obvious appeal with its magical ability to eat shoes and turn your entire life into a colossal load of dirty laundry, I guess the administration and SAC decided that Upper Tarble’s convenient steep staircase was somehow less dangerous. To that, all I have to say is: tell it to the three people who fell down the stairs my freshman year. You know, the ones who were screaming really loudly about wanting to go home right around the time when the Party Associates barricaded the doors and wouldn’t let anyone leave the building because, supposedly, the Swarthmore town police were preparing to send in SWAT teams to bust underage drinkers, which I maintain was a colossal joke Peter Gardner ’08 played on the student body as a way of saying, “Thanks for making me class president! Punk’d!”

For me, anyway, Halloween was a big deal my freshman year because it represented the first time I went to an event at Swarthmore that wasn’t academic or organized by the Orientation Committee. At the urging of my Mary Lyon hallmates, I went as Waldo of childhood puzzle favorite Where’s Waldo?, wearing a red beanie, dark-rimmed glasses, a striped sweatshirt, and a nametag reading, “Hi! You found me!” What I also found that night was the understanding that attending any large party at Swarthmore inevitably means carrying around nightmares of it for the rest of your life. As every columnist in The Phoenix’s Living and Arts section has noted in the past twenty or so years, partying at Swarthmore is a horrific experience.

Coming to Oxford, I wasn’t sure what to expect from the party scene. It seems somehow improper to envision debauchery on the order of a Paces par-tastrophe in the setting of a university founded in the 11th century. My all time worst Paces experience — witnessing a line of gyrating men at least ten people long, one of whom I had class with two days later, grinding in sync to Rihanna’s “SOS” — seemed like the sort of thing that just couldn’t exist here. Even now, looking around the Bodleian Library, the people studying near me just don’t seem like the make-love-in-this-club type. How wrong I turned out to be.

During orientation, the Sarah Lawrence at Oxford program director, Deborah, made a point of telling us that the way British students approach drinking is very different from what we, as Americans, might be used to. With a drinking age of 18, university students presumably have worked out their youthful indiscretions with regards to alcohol by the time they arrive on campus, and, as it was put to us, “Brits enjoy alcohol. They don’t drink to get drunk.” And, the moral of the only slightly condescending story was, neither should you.

Well, Debbie, tell that to Felicity (or as she calls herself, Fliss, an abbreviation I can’t even begin to process and only wish I was making up), a Wadham College second-year and bona fide Briton, who, the night of the second big party of the semester, threw up all over a friend of mine. British students, it turns out, are exactly the same brand of sloppy drinkers as Americans. The only difference is: in the UK, you have to pay a pretty significant amount of money for the privilege of drinking mediocre alcohol, whereas you get it for free at Paces with Tri-Co ID.

(In Fliss’s defense, she did inter-college mail my friend a bracelet as a token of apology the next day; but honestly, I don’t know if even an infinite quantity of kitschy homemade jewelry could make me get over being vomited on. Maybe I’m just heartless.)

Organizationally speaking, parties at Oxford are a much bigger deal than your run-of-the-mill night out at Swarthmore. For one, being an Oxford student means you can’t call a party a “party,” a word reserved for townies and ignorant Americans; instead, a party is known as a “bop,” a word that is as uncomfortable to say in public as it is to read. Moreover, these bops all have exceedingly complicated premises that require — not just suggest, but actually require — “fancy dress,” a British phrase that, improbably, translates to “dress like a complete and utter fool in accordance with an ill-conceived theme developed by the party organizers to make people unhappy.”

Bop themes thus far this term have included “back to school” (I’m embarrassed to admit that I dressed as a schoolboy having an affair with his teacher; I’ve never felt so dirty in my life) and the London Underground, while some more colorful examples from previous years include “golf pros and tennis hos” (I swear I’m not making this up) and “P is for…” a theme that leaves open such exciting avenues for costumes as “porn star,” “Presbyterian,” and “pumpkin.”

And all this while writing two 2000-plus word essays per week, attending lectures, eating, sleeping, and trying to maintain some semblance of hygiene using British showers that alternate at will between scaldingly hot and unbearably cold. It’s amazing that Oxford students don’t explode from the excitement of it all. At Swarthmore, it seems like the operating philosophy is “work hard, party harder.” Spending days locked in the basement of McCabe can be rationalized by the anticipation of screaming a drink order at a surly Deshi member tending bar and getting stuck to the floor in Paces. At Oxford, the hard work is there, as is the drinking; but when it comes to the primal gratification of partying, at least for now, it’s all just a bit too weird for me.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

During a Skype conversation with my mother yesterday, I got the distinct impression that she wanted to rend her garments in agony after hearing what I’ve been eating lately. However, she operates under the belief that it’s not possible to get protein unless you’re eating meat multiple times per week, so I’m tempted to take her critique of my eating habits with a grain of salt. But here’s a bit of an update on food in England:

• Supermarkets are a mess. The concept of a Genuardi’s or Publix or Food Lion doesn’t really exist here. Instead, there are a series of smaller supermarkets (such as the Co-operative or Mark and Spencer’s) that sell some food, but inevitably not what you’re actually looking for.
• Prices of food can fluctuate wildly with no apparent explanation, either between stores or within particular stores on different days. Also, food frequently goes on sale here for no particular reason (expiration date sales have their own special stickers), which at first raised questions as to its quality, until I realized that cheap food is still food and should be bought without question.
• Certain foodstuffs that are extremely common in the United States (for instance, lunch meats that aren’t pig-based or ground turkey) seem not to exist at all in England. This put a huge wrench in my plans to make sandwiches to take with me to college every day and save money on buying lunch. Also, it means that easy and quick protein-rich dishes, like turkey-based meat sauce, are out of the question.
• Moreover, certain staple items (like popcorn, corn in general, or broccoli) that are available are prohibitively expensive. On the other hand, less functional foods like arugula, watercress, and Nutella are basically free.
• While I expected that cooking would come to be a relaxation activity for me, it turns out that my attitudes haven’t changed very much since arriving in England. Making a meal does not, under any circumstance, become an opportunity for me to spend time with my thoughts in the kitchen while leisurely stirring a pot; time is of the essence, and sacrifices can and will be made as a result.
• Easy and cheap meals quickly enter heavy rotation. For instance, rice and lentils, a meal that requires about £1 in ingredients and 20 minutes of time to prepare, has become my primary foodstuff.
• Sautéing vegetables and eating that as a main course has become and will remain totally acceptable.
• British bagels, as my attempt at a “nice Jewish breakfast” this morning demonstrates, are weird and borderline disgusting. The lox, on the other hand, is just fine.
• Kitchen supplies, at least in my apartment complex, are hard to come by. The disjointed series of pots and pans my flat came equipped with features a number of defective members with problems including: no lids, caked on dirt that no amount of cleaning can fix, no handles, and useless sizing. Also, we have two complete sets of silverware and one good knife — that’s it. I don’t know whether this is because our flat for five came woefully under-equipped or if, as I suspect is the case, people from other apartments have been stopping by to “borrow” silverware, plates, and bowls with no intention of returning them.

But in the big scheme of things, I’m not starving. And I’ve found a series of good, fairly inexpensive lunch restaurants near Wadham where I can have a decent meal in the middle of the day. That, at least, compensates for the sauteed vegetable/lentil/PB&J sandwich dinners that have been going on for the last few weeks.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

I found out, in casual conversation with an Oriel College student today, that Wadham has the reputation at Oxford of being “the gay college.” The exchange went something like this:

Him: So, did you choose Wadham?
Me: Kind of. It’s the college that my university in the United States has an affiliation with, which makes it easier for me to get credit.
Him: Oh. Because, you know, it’s known as the gay college.
Me: Really? I thought it was just very progressive.
Him: … yeah… very.

This very suddenly makes a lot of things about the Sarah Lawrence at Wadham program make more sense. Of course Swarthmore would shunt its students (who, by and large, are either queer, thinking about being queer, thinking about other people being queer, or so close to queer that it’s an irrelevant distinction) in the direction of a program at “the gay college.” Moreover, this explains why, on a tour of the college grounds, my guide referred to the Wadham garden (which is beautiful, incidentally) as “the garden for homosexual liaisons.”

I guess it’s time for me to reprogram myself to stop thinking of every Wadham male I see as either (a) too European to actually be gay or (b) too hipster to actually be gay, and start thinking of them as (c) actually gay, because WHAT THE FUCK THEY GO TO THE GAY COLLEGE.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

Note: This column will appear in the October 22 issue of The Phoenix.

This morning, I was standing on my balcony drinking a cup of coffee and marveling at the serenity of Oxford at 8:00 a.m. when the fire alarm went off, causing me to drop my mug onto the grass twenty feet below and scramble to figure out what could possibly be going on that could make such an ungodly noise so early in the morning.

And that’s a lot like how the last three weeks have been — moments when everything seems to be working out just fine, followed by bursts of cataclysmic, earth-shattering realization that nothing is as it seems. Looking back on my last column, where I was scared that I wouldn’t have anything to talk about with British university students, I’m now left wondering: what the hell was I thinking? I haven’t had a spare minute to find a British university student to strike up a conversation with, because every single moment of my day is spent struggling to keep my head above the rising tide of British-ness that threatens my very existence.

But when I actually sit down and think about it, the experience of being totally disoriented doesn’t make much sense, because, superficially, nothing is all that different. Sure, British electrical plugs are the size of a fist and look like medieval torture devices, and sure, transacting in cash in the UK necessitates the use of an array of coins that appear to have no rhyme or reason guiding their diameter, color, shape, or thickness and range in value from 1 cent to £2— but really, those are all details in the grand scheme of things.

(To go back to the coin issue for a second: When you think about it, a £2 coin is worth close to $4. Once I got over the shock of coins being useful for more than laundry, that realization left me wondering, What kind of podunk economy actually uses a coin worth $4? The Sacajawea Dollar, the laughingstock of American currency, was bad enough! And now, I can buy a drink from Starbucks with a single coin that, conveniently, is about the size of a dinner plate. Have you no self-respect, Bank of England? Print some bills and be done with it.)

So why does everything feel so completely unfamiliar when, ostensibly, it should be a pretty minor adjustment? I’m starting to think that I’ve fallen into the Uncanny Valley of International Travel. And what’s that? Well…

In 1970, a Japanese robotics researcher named Masahiro Mori wrote about a phenomenon he called the “uncanny valley.” His hypothesis was: as humanoid robots become increasingly “human” in their movements and appearance, they become correspondingly familiar to the people watching them — to a point. There’s a level of similarity just shy of verisimilitude where things that are really, really close to human become incredibly creepy. For example, The Polar Express is widely regarded as one of the most disturbing movies ever made, not because Christmas is inherently that frightening, but because the computer-generated people fall into the uncanny valley and look “off.” There’s nothing technically wrong with them — and in fact, the CGI work in the film is, by the books, fantastic — but viewers invariably hate watching the movie. By contrast, a much more stylized animated film like The Incredibles is fine, because it’s far enough away from the valley that we don’t find Mr. Incredible threatening to our humanity.

And I think that international travel works basically the same way. I came to the UK expecting to find superficial cultural differences but a society that, logistically speaking, functioned mostly in the same way as the United States. I wasn’t prepared for an adjustment on the order of spending a semester in Nepal, because, logically, it shouldn’t be as challenging to become acclimated to the (fairly posh, suburban, and tame) Oxford as it would be to find my way in Kathmandu. But as these first few weeks have shown, it’s my assumptions about the similarities between England and the States that makes living here so disconcerting. Things just don’t work as expected.

For instance, while my patch of gray hair doubled in size my first day in England when none of the electric outlets in my room seemed to work, the cause was as simple as neglecting to turn on the switch above every socket. Obvious, but unintuitive (from an American perspective) and ultimately, hugely frustrating.

Laundry, too, has been a challenge. Not only is it a good deal more expensive than at Swarthmore — the next time you want to complain about 75¢ for a washing machine, remember that I have to pay £1.20 (about $2) per load, washer or dryer, and that they’re prissy little British washing machines that hold, at most, one pair of jeans and a sock before they squeal in discomfort and refuse to clean anything — but the names and varieties of detergent available are completely nonsensical. Liquid laundry detergent as such seems not to exist. But you’d never know that, because fabric softener has totally illogical names like “conditioner” and “cleanser” that dupe you into buying huge bottles of lavender-scented liquid that does absolutely nothing re: cleaning dirty clothing.

Moreover, apparently England has “hard water,” a concept that no one here is able to cogently explain to me, which causes even older, color-stable clothing to bleed unless exactly the right type of detergent is used. And of course, since the idea of a store that carries all the useful shit you need for your everyday life in one place (say, Target or WalMart) hasn’t arrived on this side of the Atlantic yet, finding that correct detergent requires trips to four different grocery stores and a half-dozen convenience stores that are anything but with names like Boots or Boswell’s that carry, inexplicably, hair straighteners and tangerines but eschew far more frivolous items like umbrellas or color-safe hard water laundry detergent.

And we haven’t even touched on the fact that the fairly small city of Oxford contains two completely separate and competing bus companies that operate frustratingly similar routes but allow absolutely no interchange. Oh, and bus passes are purchased in the home goods section of the Oxford department store, Debenham’s, behind the wet-dry vacuums and next to the Calvin Klein bedding. Obviously.

It reaches a point where, even though I can read all the signs and understand what all the people are saying, I feel like a majority of what’s taking place around me is going totally over my head. England, it turns out, is familiar enough to put you at ease, right up until the moment where your non-hard-water-safe fabric softener fucks up a load of laundry and you realize that you have no idea what the hell you’re doing. That’s the point where, at least for me, I learned that if I’m going to survive here, I have to stop thinking of the UK as a slightly quirkier US and start treating it like the completely alien territory that it is. Once I started to embrace that idea, everything started to become a good deal easier. Or at the very least, a little less frustrating.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

Today has been a series of unmitigated disasters.

Walking to Wadham this morning for my “induction” into the college library, I made a number of rather foolish decisions. First, I left my apartment without an umbrella. This was mostly because I couldn’t find the umbrella I was certain I packed, but also because, when I looked out my window, it didn’t really look like it was raining. Of course, by the time I crossed the first intersection leading towards campus, I was already well on my way to being drenched.

Now, I’m no stranger to living somewhere where it rains a lot, and so I wasn’t that fazed. A wet sweatshirt is annoying for about two hours, but ultimately, it’s not a huge deal. What is a huge deal, though, is when a car speeds through an enormous puddle by the side of the road and sprays a massive arc of water onto you. In the span of about two seconds, I went from slightly moist to completely soaked.

Staggering into the library wet but alive, I was oriented with Oxford’s exceedingly complex and acronym-ridden system for finding, requesting, and checking out books and periodicals. Somewhere between the hundred or so libraries, the OLIS, OULS, and OxLIB+ databases, and my Bodleian card I should now, in principle, be able to obtain books. So I did the next reasonable thing: seek out the first book I need for my tutorial in modern political theory, The Prince by Machiavelli.

At first, I just rushed upstairs to the third floor of the Wadham library to try to find it in the politics section. I say “rushed” because in hot pursuit was the other person in my political theory tutorial, a girl from Brandeis. Both of us wanted the same copy of that book. And, after a while of searching, neither of us could find it, and I concluded that it simply didn’t exist in the Wadham collection.

Not knowing how to use the Wadham College library or the OULS search system, I managed to arrive at what seemed like the least painful way to read The Prince: requesting that the book be delivered by a series of underground conveyor belts to the Radcliffe Camera, which is a huge and intimidating building full of knowledge. The problem therein is, I can’t check out the book to use it anywhere other than in Rad Cam; at Oxford, you can only check out books from the lower tiers of libraries (namely, your college libraries or individual subject libraries). But I had packed my computer and some snacks, so I was fully prepared to spend my afternoon in town studying.

But not wanting to give up entirely on checking out the book, I gave it one more search, and found that there were 110 other editions of The Prince available throughout the Oxford library system, one of which was available for check-out at the Wadham library. Meanwhile, though, the other person in my tutorial was hovering over my shoulder, waiting to see the results of the search. Once I found that the book actually was available for check-out, I tried to be as discrete as possible and slip away to the third floor to get it.

Her: So, where is it?
Me: Umm.. somewhere on the third floor..
Her: Where on the third floor?
Me: I’m.. not really sure.
Her: Where on the third floor?
Me: It’s in section M9.
Her: Thank you.

At which point she took the stairs three at a time and checked out the book before I knew what the fuck had hit me.

Clearly, there are certain mercenary principles that operate at the core of schooling at Oxford. And this is entirely new to me: I’m used to going to school somewhere where students all love each other, share books, and operate in a sphere of complete non-competition. But at Oxford, the girl from Brandeis quite literally steamrolled me in the pursuit of getting The Prince (the irony of which doesn’t at all escape me) — and in the end, she’ll be the better for it.

The moral of the story is: the happy-go-lucky days of my undergraduate education are over. It’s every person for himself here, and I either need to accept it and scheme my way to success, or give up and go back to Swarthmore where the books are readily available and the study of Machiavelli is more about theory than practice.

Rude awakenings indeed.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

7:30 p.m., Laptop Standard Time, somewhere over the coast of Florida
Around the seventeenth time the flight manager Patty refers to my fellow passengers as “ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” I look out my window and see the Union Jack painted on the plane’s wing. Per my status as a foreign study student, I immediately take out my iPhone and take pictures, to be uploaded to Twitter immediately upon landing.

Meanwhile, I meet my first certifiably eccentric British person. A plump Indian woman in a purple dress, she, like me, jumped out of her seat the moment the fasten seatbelt sign was turned off and started hunting for a better place to spend nine hours. Parking herself across the three seats in the center of the plane, she smiled up at me and said, “I got the good seats. Not like those two blokes who were arguing back there. I came right up to this section and staked my claim. I need to sleep.”

Needing to sleep, apparently, is a huge concern of hers, as she says it following almost every sentence. “Shit!” she sat up and exclaimed about ten seconds after shutting her eyes, “I left my bag back at my other seat. I need that! But someone will steal this row. And I need to sleep!” When the gentleman sitting in the row in front of me offers to protect her vacant seats from the onslaught of other, less civilized Virgin Atlantic passengers, she blinks and says, “Ahh, but then you’ll just take it. How do I know you’re being honest? I need to sleep.”

9:25 p.m., Laptop Standard Time, passing New York
My new British friend, it turns out, is a sloppy drunk. After ordering straight vodka on the rocks with her dinner, she proceeded to hit on the man in the seat across the aisle from her until, improbably, he joined her in the center seats. This was all a scheme designed at facilitating a more comfortable flight (see also: “I need to sleep” above), because after two hours of chit-chat, I saw her lie down, rest her head in his lap, and pass out. Love at first flight.

10:23 p.m., Laptop Standard Time, who even knows where the fuck I am anymore
I clearly made a strategic mistake in opting for a pair of side seats rather than a full-out row of three in the center. It is, I’ve discovered, completely impossible to achieve any kind of comfortable horizontal position over the span of two seats. I become increasingly envious of my new friend, who is canoodling with the gentleman from across the aisle.

Having run out of episodes of Glee to watch, I sit back and try to amuse myself by watching Star Trek. Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the U.S.A.,” perhaps the least appropriate soundtrack for a trip to England, is stuck in my head. Very suddenly, I’m struck with the thought that I forgot to bring an iPhone SIM tray ejection tool with me, a realization that has me beating myself up internally while I try to think of a McGyvered way to put a British SIM card in my phone. In the end, I decide that the pin portion of a Johnny Cupcakes button on my messenger bag will do the trick.

10:26 p.m., Laptop Standard Time, see above
Trouble in paradise! Across the aisle, my friend sits up just moments after I see her new companion’s hand travel suspiciously close to her ass. But it turns out she just wanted to get a blanket and has now returned to sleep. I return to watching Star Trek and adjusting the placement of the pillow behind my back. Only 4 hours and 45 minutes remaining.

12:36 a.m., tomorrow, Laptop Standard Time, over the Atlantic Ocean
Somewhere in the middle of Star Trek, I find myself suddenly feeling very alone. I realize that I’m now about three hours from landing in a country that is not only unfamiliar, but also home to no one I know. I can’t help but wonder now, when it’s too late to change my mind, whether I’m making the right decision by going to Oxford, after all. For all Swarthmore’s flaws, at least I had my routine, my friends, and my life there.

I decide that I’m only getting emotional because I’m tired and worried about ejecting my iPhone’s SIM tray. To placate myself, I practice ejecting the SIM tray in-flight. It goes smashingly.

1:53 a.m., tomorrow, Laptop Standard Time, still over the Atlantic Ocean
Maybe thirty minutes after I finally manage to fall asleep curled into some impossible to replicate position using three pillows, the window, an armrest, and the seat in front of me, the captain turns on the fasten seatbelt sign for no particular reason, which immediately sends the cabin crew into a frenzy. Lights are turned on, seatbelt compliance is verified, and droves of groggy children sitting near me gradually stir to life and start babbling all at once. In typical style, by the time the seatbelt check arrives at my row, the captain has turned the seatbelt sign back off, rendering the entire exercise pointless.

At this point, though, going back to sleep is completely impossible and the crew damn well knows it. Breakfast — consisting of coffee, orange juice, and an entirely inedible bagel-cheese-omelette concoction — is served. The person sitting in front of me becomes restless and keeps shoving his seat backwards, right into the display of my laptop. I begin to lose hope.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

Note: This column will appear in the October 1 issue of The Phoenix.

Last semester, I took a course in the Film and Media Studies department entitled “From Broadcast to Podcast: TV and New Media.” In addition to further validating my suspicion that no Swarthmore course is acceptable unless it contains a colon somewhere in the name, it also gave me the distinct pleasure of being able to tell my roommate, “Why yes, I am watching I Love Lucy for credit. How’s that biology major treating you?”

(Relatedly, the biology department is preparing to announce this week that they’re renaming the infamous and as yet colon-free Bio 1 to “Introductory Biology: Pass/Fail This Shit Before You Have A Nervous Breakdown.”)

Somewhere in the middle of a box set of the first season of The Golden Girls (my midterm project), I had the somewhat banal realization that beyond just entertaining us, television also inculcates us with specific (often stereotyped) images of various groups. For example, The Golden Girls taught us that the elderly fall into one of three categories: sexually active and proud of it, snarky and overbearing, or clueless and confused.

More to the point, though, I see TV and movies as directly responsible for the one phenomenon that every student studying abroad inevitably blogs about: culture shock. And with the kind of nonsense we’re learning from Hollywood portrayals of life in other countries, how could we not?

For instance, from Love Actually I learned that in England, it’s considered entirely acceptable for the Prime Minister to have an affair with a member of his domestic staff, which here in the United States is a little thing we call “sexual fucking harassment.” Then again, it seems that the Americans in the movie are also a little unclear on what does or does not constitute workplace malpractice, considering the President of the United States (played by Billy Bob Thornton, of course) cops a feel of the same woman the British PM was already trying to seduce (when in Rome, I guess). Talk about tawdry.

From Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me I learned that all British people have awful teeth. I also learned that a proper British morning routine includes looking at yourself in the mirror and shouting, “You’re a sexy bitch! Yeah baby yeah!” a practice I anticipate will win me numerous friends amongst my soon-to-be flatmates.

And these are just two examples that I came up with while flipping through my DVD collection one afternoon. With five days remaining before my departure (although by the time you read this, I’ll already be in England, which I can assure you will result in less contrived columns), I can’t help but think that I’m essentially going into the whole experience blind. My entire impression of the country consists of fragments of British culture that have filtered down to me through Mike Myers, The Economist, and e-mails from Virgin Atlantic, my airline, that all begin with the salutation “Hello gorgeous!”

As an experiment in acclimating myself to British culture without actually being in Britain, I decided to spend a week getting all my news and current events exclusively from British sources. I substituted The Guardian for The New York Times as my all-purpose newspaper, and The Daily Mail for The New York Post and the other assorted gossip websites I’m embarrassed to admit I follow. The findings were surprising, to say the least.

For one thing, the British definition of “news” is loose, even by American standards. For instance, while The New York Times was covering stories like President Obama’s speech before the United Nations and the struggles of gay middle-schoolers, The Guardian had other ideas about what was important in the world. Above the fold on the web was a story about Colonel Gaddafi, the eccentric leader of Libya, asking the United Nations General Assembly who killed JFK. Just below it was a headline that read: “My wife and I haven’t been to the supermarket together for eight years.” Leaving “news” for the Life and Style section, I found such gems as “Happy birthday to the Billy bookcase,” an ode to flat-packed Ikea furniture, and “Lost in showbiz: the love affair that threatened Madonna’s muscle tone.”

Moreover, with the exception of Madonna, who has universal appeal, I found little to no overlap in who British and American papers were writing about. Perennial American tabloid fodder Lady GaGa, whose three Video Music Awards outfits kept blogs busy for at least two weeks determining what percentage of the time her vagina was visible, barely warrants a mention on British sites. And with the exceptions of Victoria Beckham and Sharon Osbourne (is she really still relevant?), in the week I read The Daily Mail I didn’t recognize a single celebrity they were writing about.

All things considered, this has me extremely worried. In nearly 21 years, I’ve never been in a situation where I haven’t been culturally literate. Not knowing what music to listen to, what TV shows to watch, or which celebrities to scrutinize is a terrifying concept.

Every moment of every day, twenty-somethings are expected to have a handle on several dozen constantly fluctuating pop culture references. Failing to do so results in a social faux pas on the order of my parents’ Israeli friends not totally following along with a rapidly-moving English conversation and then interjecting something wildly inappropriate: you realize, somewhere during the uncomfortable silence that follows, that you now look like an idiot, and there’s nothing you can ever do to take it back.

With the threat of looking like an inept foreigner looming over my head, how can I possibly expect to hold a substantive conversation with British college students? The answer is: for now, I can’t. All I can do at this point is keep reading the TV & Showbiz section of The Daily Mail and hope for the best.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.

A friend’s little brother has recently started down the long and winding road that is high school speech and debate. As the resident veteran debater child of my parents’ social circle, this immediately turns me into the obligatory mentor, to be called upon to dispense advice about how best to aspire to my level of debate success (which peaked with a few silver bowls from Harvard and a trophy that’s taller than I am). In the process, though, I’ve been looking back on my student congress career, and in retrospect, a surprising amount of it is totally ridiculous.

For instance, freshman year, I hadn’t yet mastered the concept of a suit, so I spent an entire year debating while wearing a tweed jacket. While I can now attribute this to allowing my mother to dress me, I suspect that judges interpreted it as me trying to emulate a college professor and scored me up because of it. Looking through my old ballots, I found one that, among other comments, read, “Nice jacket.” Indeed.

My sophomore year, I decided that I would never speak in support of a single piece of legislation at any local debate tournament ever again. Considering the quality of topics for debate one typically finds at a Palm Beach County debate tournament, I came out against such diverse issues as: raising salaries for teachers, giving money to starving people in third-world countries, condemning India’s actions in Kashmir, supporting India’s nuclear program, requiring seatbelts in airplane bathrooms, establishing a flat tax, and a requirement that the United States “explicitly follow the Geneva Convention,” which I think means we’re supposed to obey it but curse really loudly in the process. And, five years later, I can proudly say that I never did speak in affirmation of any bill or resolution at a local tournament again.

Junior year, I judged a local debate tournament and received a distraught phone call from the coach of another school telling me off for using too many different colored pens on the ballots of one novice debater. Apparently my obsessive-compulsive tendency to experiment with the full range of Pilot G2 ballpoint pens was a bit much for this particular student, who complained that he couldn’t tell the good comments from the bad ones because the colors made everything too confusing.

Senior year, while at a tournament at Harvard, I got a call at 10:00 at night from my debate coach, Kia, who proceeded to yell at me for a solid five minutes for disrespecting the adult chaperone who was in Boston with the team. Having done nothing disrespectful, I could only let her keep yelling, until finally, when I managed to ask her what I had done, she told me that I “ran away” from the rest of the team and disappeared. I was, at the time, sitting in the lobby of our hotel with a friend, an activity I had cleared in advance with the chaperone and confirmed with several other adults half an hour prior. It was at this moment, in February of my senior year, that I realized I couldn’t stand another second of high school and needed college to arrive about seven months sooner.

But, all things considered, I suspect that debate is what ended up getting me into college. Beyond my SAT and AP scores, I didn’t have too much else going for me in high school. So I guess it all ended up being worth it.

Originally published at yoyoel.com. You can comment here or there.