After a quick morning run down to Grantchester with Sir Andy (that's just what I'm going to call the guy), I packed myself off to a full day of classes that were made more excruciatingly painful by the harsh realization that I have my final exam for psycholinguistics in a week, and I still have to think kind of hard about the difference between a morpheme and a phoneme.
Our professor finally got the attendance charts (halfway through the course, good on, admin!) and so spent the entire 75-minute seminar going around the table and literally picking apart our family histories by our names and pronunciations thereof. It was just one of those very long "you can't be serious" moments when he spoke with a student from Shanghai who had come to UCLA for school and concluded that she must be a spy because her American accent was too good for having only been in California for two years, but at the same time he pointed out the final devoicing she presented in words like "good" and "hard" that was absent in American English. I sat there wondering if this was what John Watson felt like on a daily basis. For another student, he deduced she was descended from the Parsi (and then gave us a history of the Parsi) based on her last name, despite her Yiddish-derived Hebrew first name.
Because Cambridge.
In the evening, I had the second of my Seminars for Scholarship Kids (not the actual name of the series, but you get the idea). Stefan Halper gave a little talk on the global issue of water and international security. Again, it should have been mind-numbingly dull, but of course it wasn't.
Because Cambridge.
There were only about ten of us in the Old Parlour at Pembroke, and a relatively diverse group we were--Americans were in the the minority, for once. Some students from Singapore talked about how water has always been a major political issue in their country since World War II, given that it is an island nation with virtually no natural resources of its own, therefore relying primarily on Malaysia for its water. I talked about living in Southern California and my work with the LADWP, and I also posed a question that'd been itching away all evening:
If the United Nations is incapable of effectively dealing with even these issues [of water], what, personally, do you think should or could be the role of the UN in the international community?
He laughed and sighed.
Again, it was more about The Idea of A Thing rather than the Actual Thing itself. The UN, in essence, is powerless. It has no means (or right, really) to enforce its decisions. It can send in peacekeepers to protect a population, but it can't take this population out of danger. It can provide humanitarian aid to refugees, but it can't force other countries to take them in. What it can do, Dr. Halper said, is make proclamations such as the one issued earlier today on China's rights in the South China Sea. Of course, the UN has no way of enforcing its ruling, but this is a proclamation that indicates the glimmering existence of an international consensus.
That might not seem like something big, but it's an idea.
The seminar ran incredibly late, but I found I didn't mind so much and was almost sorry to dart out the door to Kelsey Kerridge for a bit of climbing. Of course, it being eight o'clock on a weeknight, the place was packed, but I did manage to send a few routes that had sent me spinning hopelessly through the air last week, including a rather interesting roof. There was another one I started working on with a massive dyno in the middle, and given about maybe a foot in vertical height, I might have managed it, but it was all good fun to go leaping haphazardly about and generally looking like an idiot whilst Sir Andy laughed his head off at the door, sensible badminton racket in hand.
It's Wednesday morning now, and my shoulders (and neck--that whiplash, man) are in pain, but I wouldn't give up climbing for the world.
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