In the course of procrastinating on work last night -- to be fair, I was feeling rather under the weather and could hardly find the energy to focus on my Facebook newsfeed, never mind readings about the Jagiellonians -- I stumbled upon the absolute gem of an article from the Cherwell, a student newspaper at Oxford, entitled "How to do sub-fusc in style."  Sub-fusc, for those not in the know, is the name given to academic dress at Oxford; please see this post on matriculation for photographic evidence that I did not make this up, and, if you find yourself particularly keen on learning more, Oxford has kindly published the full litany of regulations governing academic dress on its website. 

This article is hilarious from start to finish, and it is especially germane, given I am planning on relegating sub-fusc to Halloween costume status this year.  I shall stop myself from reproducing it in full, but I really do insist on quoting from it extensively.  My favourite part is bolded, with all due respect to those who read English:

Well, personally, I think the question should really be turned around: can you ever not sex up a subfusc? My goodness, those outfits are easily the kinkiest things to have happened to Oxford since the Earl of Rochester went to Wadham and developed a taste for debauchery, as anyone does after crossing Wadham's filthy threshold.

...I most certainly did not see the subfusc as sexy, but that might have had to do with the fact that I last wore mine in 1999 and therefore had 90s hair. No one looked sexy with 90s hair...

But ultimately, it is a question of attitude. Boys, think "Byronic" - hell, Rochesterian. This doesn't mean you should go around proclaiming "Much wine had passed, with grave discourse / Of who fucks who, and who does worse", unless you are an English student in which case you absolutely should quote that because it is, like, work. It means you should wear your subfusc with drama and flair, flicking that little cape around as you turn corners or, even better, letting it fly behind you as you cycle down the high street. For the ladies, I say "Maggie Gyllenhaal in the film Secretary" and I say no more.  Although perhaps don't crawl into the exam hall with your pens in your mouth. I don't think that will work as well on the examiners as it did on James Spader.

(Just for the record, before any readers become too curious, I will not be taking this columnist's advice; after all, it's sub-fusc, not slut-fusc.)

Though I currently spend the vast majority of my day cooped up in either my antisocial single or the library, I am occasionally cognisant of events that happen outside of my academic bubble.  In fact, the following two occurrences are so unbelievable that it would have been impossible to not notice them.  They are also good demonstrations of the fact that the world of higher education is indeed a strange one.

A bad break-up: Any pair of exes can bicker and spar away; to do so on television is a rather different matter.  Georgetown was apparently host to some panel of some up-and-coming conservatives, and it was in such a forum that, in the words of Wonkette, a snarktastic blog on all things dishy in the District, "conservative nerd blasts conservative nerd x-on C-SPAN."  Their exchange veers from the political to the personal in a supremely awkward manner and concludes with one of them asking, "Is all this going on C-SPAN?"  Yes, dear -- and the whole of the internets to boot.  This little incident even made it into this week's instalment of NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!", which should tell you all you need to know about it.

Putting one's education to good use: This past weekend, "Georgetown University" was a trending topic on Twitter.  Was this because my distinguished institution of learning had won a national college basketball championship, brought another controversial former head of state on as a faculty member, or sent an alum to the White House?  Alas, a far more pedestrian reason lay at the root of our sudden fame: a "drug lab" was discovered in one of our freshman dormitories (the one I lived in three years ago, incidentally), resulting in the evacuation of said dorm at around 6:30am.  For reasons beyond rational understanding, this attracted national attention. This write-up in the Washington Post, for example, was the most read and e-mailed story when it first broke, and my mother called me later that evening because she had heard something on the evening news about Georgetown and drugs.  As is often the case, the entire affair is slightly less sensational than portrayed -- the "lab" was staffed by two first-year students who were clearly too incompetent to not be caught, and, although authorities initially suspected that they were producing meth, it was eventually determined that they were manufacturing some hallucinogen called DMT (which I am going to assume is less dangerous than meth) -- but I imagine that it isn't everyday that this sort of thing happens.

As for my own life, I struggle to find anything to say other than it continues apace.  I'm operating under conditions of near constant stress and sleep deprivation, which is more or less par for the course.  There are some Very Big Things on the horizon -- namely, those dreadful things known as postgrad applications -- that serve more to cow and intimidate rather than uplift and inspire.  It is difficult to imagine that, this time last year, I was at Oxford eating full English breakfasts at Combibos and admiring cows in Christ Church Meadow; existence here seems terribly drab by comparison, but I think it is supposed to.

In lieu of any substantial update, have some visual prettiness!  I took these while watching Disneyland's "World of Color [sic]" show back in August.  Photography under such poor lighting conditions is very challenging, and, given my very un-ideal vantage point, I was having a decent amount of trouble taking satisfactory pictures.  At a certain point, I gave up on the latter, switched the focus on my camera from automatic to manual, and the entire exercise suddenly became much more fun.

Bonus musical accompaniment:

♪ Jónsi -- Kolniður

The -- shall we say -- quality of my music choice is inversely proportional with my overall state of exhaustion: as I become increasingly tired, I turn increasingly to three- to four-minute clips of pop/electronic goodness (or should that be "badness"?).  I have been swamped in midterm exams and all associated efforts at revision for most of the last two weeks, which meant that it was a perfect time to create another "If I Had a Dance Party, It Would Sound Like This" playlist (the history of this project can be found here).

This one is a little more shameless than usual -- only under circumstances such as these does Britney Spears make it into my musical rotation -- but I imagine it would be impossible for anyone to listen to classical music, twee indie pop, and whatever other obscure things can typically be found in my iTunes library all the time.

1. David Guetta -- Sexy Bitch (featuring Akon)
2. Hot Chip -- I Feel Better
3. Yolanda Be Cool & DCUP -- We No Speak Americano
4. LCD Soundsystem -- Disco Infiltrator
5. Daft Punk -- Face To Face
6. Far East Movement -- Like A G6 (featuring The Cataracs and Dev)
7. Britney Spears -- Circus
8. Lady Gaga -- Monster
9. The Killers -- Mr. Brightside
10. Phoenix -- Consolation Prizes
11. Black Eyed Peas -- I Gotta Feeling
12. Frou Frou -- Breathe In (Royal Sapien Remix)

Beyond Economics and, occasionally, Literature, the annual awarding of Nobel prizes usually passes by me without notice.  When it was announced that one of China's most prominent dissidents, Liu Xiaobo, was this year's recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, I was invariably compelled to pay attention.

It's strange, but I am, on the whole, quite reticent to comment on the rather troubling relationship the current Chinese regime has regarding human rights; that I am reticent about a subject that ought to spark immediate outrage makes me feel as if I am complicit in supporting a government whose various abuses need no elaboration (Amnesty International has a very thorough compilation of them).  At its core, this is a very personal issue for me -- when the vast majority of my relations live in China and the vicissitudes of historical fortune have affected all of them, when China is a significant constituent component of the odd construction that I know of as "home," it can't not be personal, as much as I know that this skews my perspective.

Before I had been exposed to the thorny complexities of historical legacy and contemporary politics, my upbringing in the West, flushed as it was with the post-Cold War triumphalism of the 1990s, assimilated in me the vague idea that Communism (and communism too, for that matter, but that point is hardly germane) was a bad thing and that people who lived under Communism were not free.   My visits to China during my childhood and early adolescence served to convince me that, while such statements might be true in the abstract, they did not seem to hold when it came to everyday life in China.  I did not see any evidence of any of my relatives being un-free.  They were able to travel, work, and go about their business without evident interference or oppression.  Their lives did not seem so different from my American life, at least in this regard.  If Big Brother kept an eye on Chinese society, he was so imperceptible as to be invisible or otherwise indifferent to the course of individual lives.

I still maintain that, for the typical 老百姓 (that would be the Chinese equivalent of "average Joe," or, if you prefer, "Joe Six-Pack"), life in the PRC has, on the whole, never been better.  As an institution no less than the World Bank notes, China's record of poverty reduction over the last three decades has been par excellence, and I see the statistics reflected not merely in my relatives' accumulation of material possession (apartment, cars, etc.) but also -- and far more importantly -- in the absence of overall deprivation that characterised everyday life in the not-so-distant past.  My family history, like so many others, is littered with tales of such hardship, and it is truly a miracle, to think that, say, a grandmother who has lived through the Second World War, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution can now take an evening stroll through her quiet neighbourhood with neither fear nor hunger in her thoughts.  This is  a kind of freedom too.

The Chinese people, if it is fair of me to generalise across a country of 1.3 billion, exist in an unspoken bargain with their government: the latter gives them comfortable livelihoods free of the witch hunt-esque atmosphere that plagued an earlier time, and, in turn, the people are encouraged to turn inward, to get rich, and to shun the explicitly political altogether.  Is this a fair compromise?  Many seem to think so.  The twentysomethings that would have spearheaded dissident movements in the late 1980s have now been reduced to fretting about far more mundane matters like finding a job after university -- not unlike their Western counterparts, when I think about it (thus, the privileges of progress!).  Yet this arrangement has a decidedly Faustian edge.  With the apparent majority of Chinese citizens generally leading lives without incident, the plight of those who do not, like Liu Xiaobo, becomes increasingly anomalous, prominent, and urgent.  China is endowed with economic prosperity but haunted by a civic poverty that threatens to render progress hollow, almost purposeless.

I was going through my Google Reader earlier today when I stumbled upon a statement that Liu Xiaobao made at his trial in December 2009, where he was convicted of "inciting subversion of state power."  Entitled "I have no enemies: my final statement," it is one of the most poignant pieces I have read in a very long time (the translation reads surprisingly fluently, and the original Chinese can be found here).  I encourage everyone to read it in its entirety -- in either or both of the languages -- and, if you cannot spare the time to do that, at least spare a moment for this excerpt:

But I still want to tell the regime that deprives me of my freedom, I stand by the belief I expressed twenty years ago in my "June Second hunger strike declaration" -- I have no enemies, and no hatred. None of the police who monitored, arrested and interrogated me, the prosecutors who prosecuted me, or the judges who sentence me, are my enemies. While I’m unable to accept your surveillance, arrest, prosecution or sentencing, I respect your professions and personalities. This includes Zhang Rongge and Pan Xueqing who act for the prosecution at present: I was aware of your respect and sincerity in your interrogation of me on 3 December.

For hatred is corrosive of a person's wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation's spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society's tolerance and humanity, and block a nation's progress to freedom and democracy. I hope therefore to be able to transcend my personal vicissitudes in understanding the development of the state and changes in society, to counter the hostility of the regime with the best of intentions, and defuse hate with love.

When I think of the U.S. lambasting China for its lack of respect for human rights, my instinct is to become a little defensive.  This is usually because, when the U.S. is lambasting China for its lack of human rights, the people doing the lambasting always seem to be politicians in the middle of some full-throated jingoistic diatribe.  In our collective preaching, we Americans, via our elected officials, turn human rights into a policy issue, a trump card to be deployed in the realm of international security and economic affairs (see: Iraq, war in).  The White House has already begun to use the Nobel Peace Prize as a means of placing pressure on China to accelerate political reform, and many other officials in the West have done the same, while China has reacted with customary prickliness. 

This kind of debate, and the language that accompanies it, has never sat well with me, but I could never quite pinpoint the reason for this until I found it in the magnanimity and courage of Liu Xiaobo.  There is no state, no nation, and no people that possesses a monopoly on liberty.  Freedom can only be freedom when it is divorced from politics.  The politicisation of freedom is ultimately the debasement of freedom, reducing it from what it aspires to be.  Freedom is not about the United States or China or Communism but the infinitely varied fabric of lives lived in tandem.  I do not know how the Chinese people will secure the freedom of which Liu Xiaobo so eloquently speaks, but I cannot imagine that such a change, if and when it arrives, cannot be the result of external pressure but, rather, the self-actualisation of steadfast millions.  And it would be quite a sight to behold, I think.

As always, my dear friend Praise is able to reach into her vast reservoir of witticisms to pull out another gem as I continue grapple with questions like: (1) What does it mean to live a worthwhile and fulfilling life?, (2) Is every person endowed with a "calling," and, if so, should it pursued, regardless of the price?, and (3) What the hell am I supposed to be doing once I am booted out of the undergraduate ivory tower?

Me: I would sacrifice at least two limbs and a facial feature to be good at econometrics.

Praise: If Quasimodo had a choice, he would rather be a beautiful person than be good at econometrics.

Perhaps there is indeed life beyond my desperate wish for some divine being to magically transform me into a maths genius, but, on most days, that life can be very difficult to find.

As I noted on Facebook yesterday, this weekend marks a year to the day I boarded my first ever flight to London Heathrow and set foot in the city of Oxford.  I suppose that one is free to muse on any day about how one's life in the present differs from how it once was, distantly ago, but I cannot ever imagine a time when the first weekend of October will not hold a heightened significance for me.  If I may make a terribly nerdy and melodramatic reference, I am reminded of the scene in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in which, having ushered in the Fourth Age of Sauron-less peace & prosperity, our dear protagonist Frodo still remains troubled by the wound he received on Weathertop at the very outset of his quest to destroy the One Ring.  The shards of the poisonous blade have long since been removed, but he has never quite fully healed.  (This is not to compare my time at Oxford to a near-fatal blow struck by some undead creature cloaked in robes of menacing black, though, sometimes, essay crises and my econometrics tutorial certainly made it feel that way.)

Looking back on the last 365 days or thereabouts, it is staggering to think about how much things have changed, how much I have changed, and how much I still miss Oxford.  My year at Georgetown has thus far been instability -- personal, academic, and professional -- epitomised; the very ideal of "study abroad" implies something transient, a coming and going, but Oxford is proving to be curiously permanent.  When I selected these pictures for this post, I realised that I could still remember the exact circumstances under which they were all taken, and, to every one of them, I could attach a brief anecdote or some throwaway detail (example: I blew off reading Lenin's What Is to be Done? in favour of learning how to play croquet, a skill that would, in fact, come in handy at a tutor's garden party in the eighth week of Trinity Term).  As for the city -- the university -- in general, my initial observations about the place ring with as much truth now as they did when they first formed in my mind:

Perhaps it is the architecture, those dreaming spires, iron gates, and stone arches; perhaps it is the mere fact that this is a university town, and the ultimate purpose of the university is to strive toward a more perfect & complete human knowledge; or perhaps it is the little touches of everyday life -- British schoolboys in skewed ties and navy blue blazers ambling along the pavement like ducklings, an entire shelf of development economics texts in Blackwell's Norrington Room, a graduate student sitting on his windowsill with a book and a cup of tea -- but there is something magical about this place, I think.

Something magical indeed.

September, alas, found me in very poor blogging form, but, nevertheless, here are the five posts that readers frequented the most over the past thirty days:

1. "i disagree with you, but i'm pretty sure you're not hitler."
2. because, sometimes, the internet is not SRS BSNS.
3. oh, the obloquy that i direct towards the educational testing service.
4. the things that are different.
5. 亲爱的爷爷.

My mind is actually positively overflowing with things that I want to write about and share with you all, but -- and I know I've deployed this excuse on many on occasion, but that does not make it any less true! -- university truly has managed to take over my life at the moment.  I am hoping that, now that this rather difficult month of re-adjustment is over, I will be able to push back against this encroachment at least a little and reclaim some time for my own pursuits.

Presently, it is back to scribbling out an outline for an impending essay on Chinese currency policy.  Without the hellish pressure of the essay crisis, though, this endeavour feels strangely meaningless!