Not the planet Barcelona

Which is to say, I'm probably gonna post more now, because now it doesn't have to be prose.

I sent an email to CERN when we got to Switzerland the other day, asking about tours. I addressed it "Dear CERN or Madam."

This may explain why I have not heard back.

Tomorrow I'm going to Barcelona. Don't get up.


Song starts at 1:20.

I think I'm going to be giving up this travel blogging thing, because typing up my journal really takes much longer than I expected. So I say au revoir (with a really revolting French accent, but Jenny is tutoring me) with a couple lists.

Favorite names for Underground stops:

• Elephant & Castle
• Tooting Broadway
• Cutty Sark
• Cockfosters
• Barking
• Ickenham
• Bounds Green
• Swiss Cottage
• Wembley Park
• Canada Water
• Heron Quays
• Shepherd's Bush
• Mile End
• Stepney Green
• Burnt Oak
• Chalk Farm

Favorite names of varieties of roses in Regent's Park, as indicated by little signs next to thoroughly dead twigs in the ground:

• Perestroika
• Top Marks
• Yesterday
• Buff Beauty
• Golden Celebrations
• Wife of Bath
• Vidal Sassoon
• Eye Paint
• Eye Opener
• The Times
• Razzle Dazzle
• Bruce
• Summerfield Miranda
• Tiddles
• Conspicuous
• Dr. Eckener
• Narrow Waters
• Tall Story
• Falstaff
• Cardinal Richelou
• Mayor of Casterbridge

Bon voyage! (you mean bon voya-guh)

"You're going to Cardiff? Why?"

The Doctor and Rose Tyler walk down a snowy Victorian street. Rose is gleeful, but the Doctor glances sullenly at a newspaper.

Doctor: I got the flight a bit wrong.
Rose: I don't care!
Doctor: It's not 1860, it's 1869.
Rose: I don't care!
Doctor: And we're not in Naples.
Rose: I don't care!
Doctor: We're in Cardiff.
Rose: ....right.

Caerdydd! Home of Doctor Who, the Millennium Centre, and, um, a castle. Rather lovely, rather dull. Perfect place for a day trip, if you do it right. Which I did not. I was in Cardiff for a total of 23 hours, but only eight of them were at all viable.

My train got in at 3 pm, and after checking in at the (really nice, highly recommended) NosDa hostel, I walked down the river to the bay. Predictably, I started at the Doctor Who exhibition, but... it was a bit unthrilling. Just costumes and flashing lights and the occasional panel with an episode summary - like anyone visiting a DW exhibit would need such a thing - and some animatronic Daleks. Even the gift shop was pretty lame. So the most obvious stage of my Doctor Who pilgrimage was a bust.

But outside was the Millennium Centre, which really is impressive in its own right. Welsh is a beautiful and absurd-looking language, so a massive carved wall of Welsh really does make for an interesting and worthy city icon. From there I started a walking tour I'd printed from the BBC website, which was theoretically supposed to take four hours. It actually took 20 minutes. There's just not all that much to see. Roald Dahl Pass is just some pass named after Roald Dahl. And there's, like, a church. Meh.

But I turned on the little boardwalk around the bay, and lo! There was the entrance to the Torchwood hub! I was very impressed to find that the geography of the hub's area, as shown both on Torchwood and the parent show, is consistent with the real world (ie, Jack was running from the right direction in LOTL, etc). The hub's door is covered by a rusty grille, with some old newspapers tacked up behind it. I took a closer look. "New Mayor, New Cardiff" announces a headline, under a photo of Margaret Blaine, nee Slitheen. Squee! Enormous squee! I guess it's just been chilling there since they filmed Boomtown in 2005. You can keep your animatronic Cybermen and life-size talking Daleks - this is the sort of thing that fills my heart with fannish glee. I was grinning like mad for a good ten minutes.

There was one other happy fan moment of note - spotting 10 and Captain Jack waiting for a bus. If you're gonna do cosplay, boy, wandering around Cardiff dressed like Jack Harkness is the way to do it. Plus there are few images more hilarious than the Doctor boarding a public bus.

Alas, after having exhausted all the outdoor sightseeing, I suddenly discovered that it was 5:30, and EVERYTHING had closed. The restaurants and bars were open, but that's of no use to a solo traveler. Also, everyone appeared to be in high school.

And so, at a loss for what else to do on a Tuesday night in Cardiff, I went to the movies. And by "went" I mean "accidentally snuck into." And by "accidentally snuck into," I really do mean "accidentally snuck into." I think they use an honor system or something? Whatever. I was on an escalator, and next thing I knew I was in a cinema, and a movie was about to start. So I sat down to watch it.

It was "Twilight."

Okay, so, I really enjoyed it! Which is to say, I really enjoyed it in the way that I didn't enjoy the Dirty Dancing musical. Here was some awfulness that you could really sink your teeth into! Fangs, rather. ::rimshot::

I'd sort of gathered from the zeitgeist of Twilight-hate that the most objectionable element was the pro-abstinence shilling, but that is so very much the least of its problems (and not at all present in the first movie). Rather, in the very established tradition of classic vampire stories (cf, Dracula), Twilight is a rape fantasy. And a stalking fantasy. That huge creeper in bio lab is not a huge creeper if he has dreamy eyebrows. Being stalked is not only okay, but desirable! As is ditching your friends, family, and life for a guy. And ignoring all warning signs, of the flashing neon variety as well as menacing folktales from your token Magic Red Man, that the guy is a huge creeper. Who watches you while you sleep. And follows you around town. Oh my god I feel dirty just thinking about it.

Twilight actually made me cry. I cried from frustration, and anger, and sadness that in 2009 I was watching this movie in a theater full of 10-year-olds and their mothers. It was the sexuality, gender, and genre issues that were tackled by Buffy, but with all the nuance, awareness, and problematizing thrown out the window. Poor, poor Joss. He tried, he really did.

After that exercise in frustration, I hung out at the hostel bar for a few hours with a sargeant in the American army who just finished a ten month tour in Afghanistan, and a street magician on his way to a magic convention in Blackpool who currently lives in Spain but migrates with the tourist season. I didn't tell them a thing about myself, because jeez did I lose on the interestingness count in this crowd.

In the morning I visited the Cardiff Castle, which despite being many centuries old was entirely gutted in the 1890s, so that was also a bit unimpressive. Mostly I liked the pen of falconry birds, who were there not to put on a show for the tourists, but to keep pigeons and squirrels out of the castle. I was particularly enthralled by the bold orange eyes of the eagle owl, though I don't know if I found him terrifying or wanted to give him a cuddle. And then I wandered through the very nice city center till my train back to London, and discovered that Cardiff has great shopping, if only you're there during daylight.


So for anyone planning a trip to Cardiff: Travel at night. Bring a friend for the bars. And dress like Captain Jack.

Cambridge, UK-flavour

Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge. I just returned from a weekend in Cambridge, and oh my. It is just so excessively, ridiculously beautiful and ancient.

When you see Harvard for the first time after seeing other colleges, you may find yourself thinking "Oh, so that's what they're trying to do." And then you see Cambridge. And no, no - THAT's what they're trying to do. I think this may even be an appropriate situation to get a bit Platonic, vis a vis C.S. Lewis. Harvard is the Shadowlands of Cambridge. It's nice enough in its own right, but Cambridge is the real thing.

However, the first thing I did in Cambridge was to... see a lecture by one of my old Harvard professors. About Harvard. I was visiting my wonderful friend Con, who is a Harvard-Cambridge fellow, and he and the other fellows were attending a lecture by the Reverend Peter J. Gomes, Professor of Christian Morals and all around enjoyable fellow. It was the tenth anniversary of something or other (possibly the tenth anniversary of the 300th anniversary of something else?) and so Gomes was invited to speak.

The Harvard fellows and I were the only people at the lecture who were 1) not in academic gowns, and 2) not white old men. Gomes himself excepted on the latter, of course. His lecture was on the historical connection between Harvard and Emmanuel College, and though the topic was more interesting in Gomes's hands than it would have been in anyone else's, it still got a bit dull. I did perk up at an unexpected Radcliffe Choral Society shout-out, though! We performed at the tricentennial of something or other, apparently. Guess the Glee Club has somewhere more exciting to be for that one.

After the lecture, Con and I explored. Con hadn't explored most of the Cambridge colleges, and he takes very seriously the rules about not walking on the grass and not wandering past fences marked "private". I, however, remember fondly a very silly evening exploring Jesus College with Jenny and Kavita and a video camera, and additionally have a personal mission of helping my more rule-laden friends to unburden themselves of these issues, so explore we did. We even walked on the grass. A little.

In typical Con fashion, he got himself a concussion last week, so he couldn't drink and forgot the odd English word here and there. At dinner, he said something like "I'm glad I had food, my poor concussed brain needs the primary sources." I looked at him, puzzled. "Oh, wait, I mean... raw materials! Needs the raw materials." I found this a fascinating slip. I, and many people, would replace a forgotten phrase with something that sounds similar, or something of like context. Con's brain used a phrase that was conceptually equivalent in a completely different frame of reference. I have smart friends.

On Saturday, Con and I took a walk to what he'd called a magical discount shopping heaven, which turned out to be... T.K. Maxx. Like T.J. Maxx but, umm, with a K for some reason. Only difference seems to be that at the UK version, they sell Dalek voice-changer helmets at the checkout line. I am both pleased and disoriented to be in a land where my obscure, esoteric obsession is the stuff of discount center checkout queue doodads.

We spent rather a long time at the grocery, because we like groceries, and had a lunch of random items from teh deli counter, each of which turning out to be another unappetizing variation on greyish meat wrapped in dough. Oh, Britain! Then we went to a JCR-type thing back at Trinity and cooked... casado! Well, actually, gallo pinto. Rice and beans. (this is because the last time I saw Con was when I stayed with him during Costa Rica tour, after having spent the previous three weeks eating nothing but rice and beans). We had a lovely Valentine's dinner party for all the Cambridge Harvard lonely-hearts.

And then Sunday we were supposed to go punting, but the punt rental companies disagreed due to some bothersome rain. So we went with our plan B of walking over the meadows to Grandchester. Rain and snow meltage had turned the meadows to marsh and the path to mud, but we decided to sacrifice our shoes and sludge ahead. It felt very authentically British, slogging a half hour through mud on a grey day to reach a tea place. Sunshine would have been lovely but wrong. And anyway, Sylvia Plath used to do this walk regularly (along with a litany of other literary figures, as the brochure at the tea place was quick to note), and she never would have stood for sunshine. And it was still quite beautiful, if squishy. Over tea in Grandchester, we decided that the only person worthy/capable of sustaining a relationship with Peter Gomes would be Garrison Keilor. They could orate anecdotes at each other from across a very long breakfast table.

Then a sludge back to Cambridge, and a lovely choral evensong at Trinity Chapel, and more exploring and hanging out. Cambridge is a wonderful place, and it sounds like students there are held to amazingly higher standards than at Harvard, and actually receive, like, educations worthy of the institution's reputation (whoa, novel idea), and basically I am jealous and want to stay.

In other news, Jelly Babies are surprisingly good.

London, day 1

12 February 2009, 16:30

Today is the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin, and I am sitting in Westminster Abbey, waiting for a ceremony in his honor. I think this is nine kinds of awesome. But it is bloody COLD.

My hostel in London is just down the block from Southwark Cathedral, home of the John Harvard Chapel and a particularly sparsely attended RCS tour concert in 2006. After arriving from the airport and checking in, I popped in to Southwark to see if there were any visiting choirs I could go support, but sadly, there are none. Unless their pubmen are slacking. I gave a hello to the Harvard chapel and got trapped in a noonday prayer. At least I didn't get trapped in the dressing room this time...

I walked along the bank of the Thames for the next few hours. I love listening to people talk as they walk past - there's so much variety in British accents! Even within the London accent. I can't place the accents, of course, though I'd like to pull a Higgins and write out speech patterns in IPA, but at least it is in my ear well enough now that I can hear the variance.

I spent a couple hours at the Tate Modern, which is my favorite modern art museum. Granted, I'm only comparing it to MOMA, but I can only enjoy MOMA ironically. Outside, a street musician was playing Bolero on a steel drum, and if you bear in mind that Bolero's sole reason for existence is as an exercise in orchestration, you'll gather the silliness of the arrangement for solo steel drum.

After a couple hours at the Tate (favorite piece: Roy Lichtenstein's vamp on Monet's haystacks), I continued down the embankment till I hit the London Eye, the big ferris wheel. Now, I'd meant to do my Doctor Who tourism all in one set, but hey, there I was. So I ran across the bridge to the Parliament side and stood by the Royal Air Force memorial and imagined that the blue-ish smudges on the pavement were from the TARDIS. ::shame::

13 Feb 2009, 15:00

Evensong was lovely, and afterwards we huddled around Darwin's grave for a wreath-laying and some words. From there, I was expecting a public forum on Darwin and (vs.) God, so I made my way through the cloister to the event.

At the door, a vicar was checking names on a list. Odd. My name wasn't on any list, but he let me in anyway. At the next door I was handed a glass of wine. Also odd. With a little investigation I determined that this was actually a book launch, invite only, and the debate I had in mind was actually in May. Ah well, might as well enjoy a book launch!

I had a lovely chat with an archivist of Darwin's letters. The whole evolution/creationism divide that stirs up so many emotions in the States is, apparently, quite unknown in the UK. The book being launched, "Darwin and God", was the first on the subject to be printed in the UK. She asked me why the fuss that's risen at home in the last few decades, and I could only guess at the causes. Reaction to increasing secularization of public life? Political rise of the Christian right? An exceedingly potent production of Inherit the Wind? Or perhaps Americans really are, on this as well as a host of other issues, rather a bit stupid.

A waiter came around intermittently, re-filling wine glasses, and I had to actually keep a close count this time, as I had the rare occasion to invoke my "# of drinks < # of hours slept out of previous 48" rule. A good rule, and a rule that should probably go without saying, but on such occasions it can be quite necessary.

However, the rule only works to prevent disaster - it is not an efficient safeguard against standard issue poor-decision-making. And, oh, did I make a poor decision.

You see, I accidentally went to a musical. How does one accidentally see a musical? Let me tell you how one accidentally sees a musical. One accidentally sees a musical by walking through the theater district. Alone. At 7:30. With nowhere else to be. Tipsy. That's how you accidentally see a musical.

It was Dirty Dancing: The Musical.

I have seen some pretty bad theater in my time. I don't mind bad theater - I mean, I DO, in that it is a frustrating loss of time and money, but often you can learn as much from seeing it done wrong as from seeing it done right. And Dirty Dancing really is a promising candidate for musicalization, whatever your feelings on the film itself. Cult following + strong clear emotions + intrinsincally theatrical subject matter + period setting = musical.

However. Dirty Dancing: The Musical was not a musical.

There were no original songs. But it wasn't a jukebox musical either. Convention would be to put contemporary popular tunes into the mouths of the characters, but Baby and Johnnie never sang. So they danced their emotions, right? Well, they did dance... to the songs in the movie soundtrack... but they never danced outside the "we're practicing for a performance" context. And yet, it had a musical book. This was a libretto that someone wrote before finding a composer and lyricist, and then decided that composers and lyricsists are totes overrated, and staged it without 'em. Dirty Dancing : The Musical is a musical. Just someone forgot to write the songs.

I left shortly after intermission.

A Much Better Start

21:00

Oh my god. I am NEVER FLYING COACH AGAIN.

We've all walked through business class on our way to the not-so-cheap seats, and marveled at the absurdly spacious armchairs, and at the same time wondering at the suckers who would pay through the nose just for a nice chair. Well, let me tell you. I am now finishing my first hour on the other side of the curtain, and as God as my witness, I am never going back.

I am here through the grace of my cousin Jeffrey, who works for Delta and hooked me up with stand-by tickets. And stand-by, aside from being much cheaper than regular rates, also comes with a very high chance of being put in business class. Because really, who the hell is going to actually *pay* for these seats?

Ah, the seat. It has eleven different configurations, as well as a reading lamp, a real pillow and duvet, and personal viewing screens. I've only ever had a personal screen on one flight before - also a red-eye on which I was supposed to sleep, but instead watched the entire Godfather trilogy.

But best of all, I had not one but two mimosas in me before we even reached the runway. And lord almighty did I need them (cf: passport drama).

After take-off, we were also offered today's NY Times (I guess it will be yesterday's London Times upon arrival?), and hot towels, and a goody bag containing such useful bits of awesome as an eye mask, ear plugs, mouthwash, hand cream, toothbrush, lip balm, and hospital socks. I LOVE HOSPITAL SOCKS. And while I wrote that last sentence, I was delivered a plate of salted nuts (I guess people with allergies aren't allowed in business class) and a glass of red wine.

My plan: see if my private telly has got any Doctor Who. Eat and drink everything put in front of me. Get thoroughly tanked. Repeat until London.

A girl could get used to this...

22:00

Another glass of red wine down, and the future seems a good deal more cheery.

I just had a first course of Moroccan crab salad, cream of asparagus soup, and a Greek salad, while listening to an excellent recording of Beethoven's 7th on fancy noise-canceling headphones, and all is well with the world.

Next up: beef and Mussorgsky.

23:00

Dinner: Grilled fillet of beef (very good!) with bearnaise sauce, accompanied by potato gratin and broccolini with hazelnuts. The planned Mussorgsky was replaced by Madonna (same difference?), and I could hardly touch my dessert platter of fruit and cheese.

When the plates were cleared, I curled up under the duvet with my third (fourth? who knows) glass of wine and watched The Fires of Pompeii, which is much more marvelous than I remembered, and daydreamed about how cool it must be to be James Moran and get to watch your own episode on airplanes. By the end of the episode, all that wine had done its job; I was knackered. And though I would love to continue enjoying the television sampler, sleep is now necessary. Sad!

09:00 (London time)

I slept till the end of the flight. Right through breakfast, I'm afraid to say. The bloody flight was just not long enough. And how often do you get to say *that*?

10:30

On the Picadilly line, en route to central London, and I miss my flight already. It was looking yesterday like I'd miss my flight in the more conventional sense of the expression, but I daresay I prefer this sort of missing...

An Inauspicious Start

(I'm gonna backdate (backtime?) entries that I write by hand to reflect when they were actually written)

For two hours this afternoon, I could not find my passport.

It had been in plain sight for, oh, six months. It was my primary id in November, when I lost my wallet. It spent several months atop a pile of stuff in the den. It came to Florida, quite unnecessarily, just a few weeks ago.

Question was - did it come home?

For two sickening hours, I thought the answer was no. Or rather, for one hour I thought that Mom had stuffed my passport in a drawer in a cleaning fit and forgotten about it. And then for another hour I was convinced I'd left it in Epcot and that was the closest I was ever gonna get to Europe this year.

I was nauseus, I was panicked, I was deer-in-headlights'd, I was plotting how I could go into hiding for the next few weeks so I wouldn't have to tell everyone what happened.

And then I pulled the den couch forward, and burst into tears. Thank fucking god.

Back to packing...

What's the best thing to do when your economy has gone to hell? Go spend money in someone else's!

This blog is going temporarily travel-style. Tonight I fly to Heathrow to begin a whirlwind European tour, featuring... London! Cambridge! Cardiff! Tours! Geneva! Sevilla! Granada!* Barcelona!** ***

I intend to update from each city. Say hi if you're checking on me, so that I bother spending a euro at the internet cafe.

Time to pack!!!

*Or maybe Madrid instead of Granada? Opinions welcome.
**The city Barcelona, not the planet Barcelona.
***Don't get up.

Most re-watched tv moments

Considering how much I care about the few shows I do watch, I watch very little television. I'm currently following two programs (the ones with the word "house" in their titles), and that's a lot for me.

I am, however, a re-watcher. But I don't re-watch entire series. I rarely even re-watch entire episodes. I just watch scenes. And some scenes I watch more than others. a LOT more than others. Particularly the short ones that are under 3 minutes. Like, some scenes I just put on the way I would put on a song. Is that weird?

On the train today, I made a list of my most-watched tv moments. Because I like making lists. Shut up. And I noticed something very interesting.

None of them had dialog.

Or minimal dialog, whatever. The dialog wasn't the important part. They were all visual moments with very strong music cues. Which works nicely with my scenes-as-songs analogy. But conventional wisdom places television closer on the spectrum to theater than film, in that its primary language aural, not visual. But the fact that my go-to list of tv moments are about images and not words is a helluva reminder that it is a visual medium after all. And that a good song cue is key.

Anyway, here's my list. And this is not my list of my favorite moments, or the best moments. Just the ones I have bookmarked on youtube, because I watch them that frequently.

The beginning of Life on Mars

Also the party scene from the first season finale, and the rooftop scene from the second season finale. These are all the same scene, of course. And yet collectively they out-pace everything else on this list by a mile.

The Master's Scissor Sisters dance break

At first I thought the trend in the list was going to be "things that star John Simm."

I could also include Sarah Jane Smith finding the TARDIS in School Reunion. 10 in the wardrobe in the Christmas Invasion. 9 and Rose dancing. And the part of Doomsday before Bad Wolf Bay (the hugging the wall bit). No wonder I'm a Doctor Who fan. That show is MADE for watching only the many isolated moments of brilliance while disregarding the crap around it.

Josh Lyman breaks down during Yo Yo Ma

Nothing beats this. I don't care how the editing put awkward repeats and cuts into the piece. (I do care about the awkward repeats and cuts in the piece) Still.

Dana & Casey's first kiss

Only schmoopy romantic one on here!

Once More With Feeling is disqualified. Because I really do watch that as songs. Because they are.

The Firefly theme song. Yes.

Whatever man, it's a great opening sequence. It's all about that shot at the end of the Serenity zipping over the horses.

Not everything is about you, Mulder

The only one with no music cue on the list. Viva la MASHEO.

as Napoleon never said...

Jenny and I were having a very serious discussion about the class system in England and the USA… as relates to Bertie Wooster.

Jenny: I love that Bertie never has money problems. It just makes him so innocent and free to have relation-induced mishaps

Liz: I love that class of British people who just have income without doing anything, like the Darcys. We don't have that in America. Even the absurdly rich, their money comes from somewhere. Generally some scrappy great-grandfather who invested in trains or somesuch.

Jenny: Whereas in England, money coming from somewhere is a low-class idea.

Liz: Right.

Jenny: Money, like wine, gets better with age.

Well, that is a fine aphorism, is it not?

Liz: Did you just make that up?

Jenny: I think so

Liz: You should embroider it on something, or start using it as an aphorism and see if it gets picked up.

Jenny: You mean I should just drop it into conversations?

Liz: Yes.

Jenny: All those conversations I have about old versus new money?

Liz: No, just irrelevantly. And, introduce it with "as they say.”

Jenny: See if it gets picked up as conventional wisdom.

Liz: Or give a different citation every time! Like, “as the Good Book says, money like wine gets better with age.”

Jenny: Or "as the Bard tells us..."

And then we got a little carried away…

Liz: As we’ve seen with President Obama...

Jenny: As I learned from Sesame Street...

Liz: as my grand-pappy Old Reliable used to say...

Jenny: as the Eskimos teach us...

Liz: as can be inferred from a close reading of Durkheim...

Jenny: as it says on Mount Rushmore...

Liz: as Ben Franklin, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and the Marquis de Sade all said at one point or another...

Jenny: as I learned on my first day at Hahvahd...

Liz: as my years in the circus taught me,

Jenny: according to the great clown himself...

Liz: as the prophet speaketh to me...

Jenny: as you yourself have noted...

Liz: as the ancient runes translate...

as is scribbled on this cocktail napkin that I'm waving in your face...

Jenny: as Dumbledore said to Harry on page 519 of the Half-Blood Prince, 12.2 lines from the top...

Liz: As Justice Brandeis noted in the fourth footnote of the Carolene decision...

Jenny: As Joan of Arc herself was about to say...

Liz: as Napoleon never said...

as was viciously mauled in the substandard translation of Hugo's Miserables...

Jenny: as Madame de Pompadour probably said, before everyone forgot why she was famous...

Liz: fanTAStic gardener.

(that will be funny after you watch Doctor Who)

as my alphabet soup spelled last night...

as Jim Marvin once said while demonstrating the proper distance between Mars and Spain...

Jenny: as it probably says in Doctor Who, but I couldn't tell you because I still haven't watched it even though I have this friend, see, who makes references to it all the time, and I think I'm going to have to watch it soon or she's going to come after me with a broadsword in my sleep, and maybe like cut off my ANKLES, or something, or possibly my entire lower half, and anyway, I think there was an aphorism in here somewhere...

Liz: as the negative infractions of the patient's pituitary gland suggest...

as it says on the manufacturer's label, which you really shouldn't have removed, really, that was a bad idea...

Jenny: as the surgeon general might warn you...

Liz: as she said....

You get the idea. And that’s right, folks - this is the duo that’s spending two weeks together in Europe. By the end of which we will either have begun speaking entirely in an incomprehensible invented language of inside jokes and Buffy references, or will have jumped off the train somewhere in Spain and run screaming in opposite directions across the plain. In the rain. Mainly.

Liz: Jenny, why are we SO AWESOME?

Jenny: I don't know, Liz, but I think we just can't help it. It is our burden to bear.