THE READING/LONDON ROUND-UP, ONE YEAR LATER (Part Two)

Erstwhile housemate Rob found this prime specimen at Jackson's Corner in Reading when returning from London on March 6th.

My pal Parker and I somehow became blood-giving buddies at the beginning of last year, when we realized we had a mutual love for platelet donation and the inevitably subsequent tea and prepackaged cookies. On March 8th, Parker informed me that a blood drive was once again taking place in the Reading SportsPark (i.e. BG Mecca), so I gladly accompanied him. Upon our arrival, however, the blood-people told us that the drive was fully booked, so we walked dejectedly back to the middle of campus... but not before I saw yet another weary soul nearing the end of its pilgrimage.

The next day, Daniel's brother (who'd been in London helping him with his exhibition) came to Reading. I'd been in the library, and I met them outside the Palmer building so we could go to my house together and make a truckload of spaghetti. (Said spaghetti leftovers overstayed their welcome in my fridge after I forgot about them, and even thinking about them now, all slick and turquoise and oily, makes me feel a little queasy.) Outside the union building, they pounced on a glove.

EDIT: I miss this.

I don't seem to have found any more gloves until April 10th, which is odd, but I'll trawl my phone to see if there've been any pictures I forgot about. On the 10th, Daniel and I were at the Reading Homebase trying to find a suitable houseplant. He finally settled on a maidenhair fern that he named Ferris (Ferris died about a month later). The BG and "BG" (it was too fortuitous to pass up) that I found were both right outside, near the Bel and Dragon pub:

EDIT: I miss this too.

Nobody's really going to read this, are they? It's scary and all that I'm about to catapult my angst into cyberspace and onto the screens of whomever might be muddling through this at some point in the far future, but what hasn't been said by a bajillion other people already? Breakups suck. They truly do. It's like making a grilled cheese sandwich and then being forced to peel apart the two pieces of bread that have been so carefully toasted, and then there are crumbs and stringy strands of melted cheddar (or gouda, or feta*, or Muenster or what have you) scattered all over the place and it's just so damned messy and unappetizing.

*I KNOW you'd never make a grilled cheese with feta. I know my cheese. It was just a dumb analogy.

The Dugong

Azar and I spent most of the day in the library doing nothing related to our respective dissertations. Actually, I think she did a fair amount, but I kept watching videos of dugongs on YouTube. I caught sight of this sodden specimen in the grass to the side of the Biological Sciences building as we walked to her house via the Coop for dinner:

Being completely dark outside and downpouring to boot, it looked more like something out of Poltergeist than the world's greatest sight, so Azar and I deemed it necessary to pluck it from its resting place and artfully drape it over a nearby, well-lit rail:

Voilà!

The Art Historian

As if I hadn't had enough of a glove-filled few hours, I returned to campus for a meeting with my dissertation* supervisor and found what may be the most EPIC (and I don't use that word lightly) of glove locations: underneath some sort of classical cherub by the History of Art and Architecture department in HumSS. I heard a veritable stampede of footsteps approaching as I fumbled with my camera and managed to get two decent pictures just as a whole horde of prospective students led by a tour guide burst through the doors at the end of the corridor. I slunk sheepishly by them- honestly, if a few of them decide not to go to Reading solely out of fear of the creepy girl lurking and taking photographs of seemingly nothing, I wouldn't be surprised. 

At any rate (sorry about the first one, I had to do some funky stuff with the brightness and contrast to make the glove visible, although I turned the figure into some sort of glowing transcendental Buddha in the meantime):

*BLAH, which I'm supposed to be working on right now. I can't believe I'm updating the BGP in the library... procrastination in its highest form.

The Never-Ending Slew of Gloves on the Path by the SportsPark

Will they NEVER STOP!?!?  First, walking back from an anti-Valentine's Day party in the wee hours of the 12th, I spotted this lil' darling with Sophie (she does not actually look like this in real life. Apparently there is nothing more unromantic and anti-Valentine's than an emo):
Then, on the 17th, with the previous glove still moldering away by a fence, I spotted these two within about a minute of each other:

Seriously, IT IS A VORTEX.

The Triumphant Mitten

After over a month of freaking out and dashing to and fro and gathering transcripts and rewriting CVs and coordinating references and trying to figure out some exciting beginning to a personal statement, I had finally submitted my application to do an MA in Material and Visual Culture at UCL. I mentioned the BGP in my personal statement (it's pretty much the epitome of material and visual culture, no?), so if any admissions officers are reading this: Hello, please accept me. 

I left the library in a state of giddy elation. Not two minutes later, I spied this mitten in the parking lot by Whiteknights House. I don't consider myself superstitious, but I hope this is some form of sign... although since it's a mitten, who knows what it could signify? Perhaps I won't get accepted at UCL, but some equally exciting opportunity will come along. After all, I always wear mittens, not gloves.

The One-Woman Show of Ursula Martinez

Becky and I were walking back from the library, I did my customary squeal-jump-point-and-shoot, and we continued on. This was lying near a ticket from the Barbican, dated the day before, for an event entitled "Ursula Martinez: My Stories, Your Emails." I couldn't really fit the ticket in the picture without compromising the glove's entirety or Becky's patience, but obviously I had to go home and Google who Ursula was and why she was at the Barbican. Perhaps the glove and its owner were in the audience. 

The Shell

My new phone was introduced to the wonders of glove documentation with this lovely though slightly angry-looking fellow, whom I found scowling on a ledge outside the Black Horse House on Whiteknights campus. Is it too much of a stretch to say that this one resembles one of the shells in the University of Reading's crest? Why the shells, anyway? And what kind of flower is that? 

The Contortionist

I asked my housemate Athamos where he spotted this intriguing, four-fingered friend and he mumbled through a mouthful of bread, "I think I just found it walking... murfphh. Campus... ugmgm, bridge." 

THE POINT AT WHICH I REALIZE I AM SLOWLY GOING INSANE!!!!!

I found two gloves within twenty feet outside of the Palmer building and took a video of them. I do not know why I felt compelled to do this. My voice in the video sounds extremely nervous and neurotic; I am giggling like a mofo; I made Becky walk next to me so I didn't appear to be filming the ground and chattering to myself. Is this an addiction? Somehow I don't think there's a chapter of Black Glovers Anonymous in the Reading area.

I also got a still shot of each glove for maximum analysis:

1.

2.

The Eugenie Danglars

Oh, my goodness, I want to reread The Count of Monte Cristo so ridiculously badly right now. This is the world's stupidest name (because the glove's dangling, get it?) but it's also the world's worst picture, so I'm hoping they'll cancel each other out for the most part. It's been hanging outside HumSS for at least a week now. Maybe people are afraid to disturb it, considering it to be some form of conceptual art.

The One That "Made Us Late"

I don't know how to convince my pal Becky that this project isn't pretentious. She can't understand it, and I think her distaste was cemented as she stood beside me, hopping with impatience, as I unearthed my phone from my bag to take this photo early on a Wednesday morning. 

"We're already running late for our seminar!" she yelped. "When you put this on your blog or whatever, you'd better call it 'The One that Made Us Late!'"

Oh, Becky, it's the least I can do. I'm hoping you'll experience some sort of revelation, as right now you equate the BGP with clapping your hands if you believe in fairies.

(Also: this is navy blue and a mitten. My fervency is making me increasingly lax in my regulations. Very early on the following Sunday, as my housemates and I were walking back from a party, I ran ahead of them, tore it from its precarious post, hid behind some bushes and threw it at them. Ever since then, I keep seeing it in different spots in the vicinity of Wessex Hall.)

The Repeat Offenders

Remember our friends from the inside of HUMMS all the way back from last year? Maybe, if you're a ridiculous diehard. If not, suffice it to say that the ledge of the window inside the English-wing entrance of HUMMS is another vortex for black gloves. 

The Walk to Daniel's House

Sunday, January 17:

I'm at the library working on my dissertation. Nobody cares, I know, but listening to the Beach Boys, drinking tea (with milk and 1 brown sugar), and annotating endless poems by e.e. cummings is the closest thing to Nirvana I've experienced in a long time - not that I'd really know what Nirvana feels like. 

Anyway.

Walking to Daniel's house along the usual route (through campus and past the SportsPark area) led me right past three beauties:

WHY THE HECK IS THIS FONT BLUE

I do not care enough to change it

...

okay, actually I do.

Honestly, this parking lot has harvested more black gloves for me than any other area on the university campus, let alone the rest of the world. It's like some sort of Mecca (don't really know what's going on with all the religious references) to which the gloves, crawling like the Thing from the Addams Family, make a ritual pilgrimage. This one was sweetly and considerately shoved onto a stake. I was listening to "Avant La Bagarre" by France Gall when I took the picture, and now it and the song are inextricably linked in my mind.

Walking along again, I run into a friend who's on his way to the library. Unbeknownst to him, it shuts in five minutes, and I have to deliver the bad news. He rockets off. I then do something kind of disgusting that I hope all four of you readers won't judge me for: I see a perfectly intact white mug beneath a bush, a little muddy and leafy but none the worse for wear, and snatch it up like a hobo. Somebody would've undoubtedly thrown it away were it not for me. Gingerly clutching this talisman

THIS IS TURNING INTO A BAD NOVEL!!!!

, I look down and see, lo and behold, another glove.

It hasn't even been three minutes since I found the last one. This one must have been making its way toward the Bermuda Triangle of that parking lot.

I turn onto Christchurch and walk for about ten minutes, maybe a bit less. The mug's starting to numb my hand by this point, as I'm ironically not wearing any gloves. Right before I turn onto Daniel's road, I see a black blob on some sort of drainpipe in the street. Thinking I'm going crazy, I stop and squint and almost don't take a picture, but it's another glove; no contest.

Oh, great, now the font's black again. Black on here, anyway; I'm assuming it'll show up white on the blog page. WHAT?

Thus, I was diverted many a time on my journey. Very Brothers Grimm, I suppose. Sorry for the horrible quality of these pictures; it was getting pretty dark by that point. 

The Creation

Students' Union, Sistine Chapel - same thing.

The Best Weekend Ever

I went to London intending to return the same night and stayed there for three days. During this time, I:
-developed an addiction to Müller Rice
-was permanently rain-soaked
-found 5 BGs (two of which are on my as-yet-undeveloped disposable camera), which
-must have made quite an odd impression on the people I was with, most of whom were awesome, Greek, and five to ten years my senior.

After a few hours of waffling over whether it was worth it to miss my 2 PM seminar on Monday for more fun and frivolity (retrospectively: I was half an hour late anyway, it was 2 hours' worth of Holocaust poetry, I smelled like a dog - it definitely would have been worth it), I hopped on the train back to Reading and promptly found two more gloves.

This was one of two gloves (or perhaps the same one trampled into relocation) I found on Carnaby Street. A group of boys who must have been a bit younger than me were watching as I crouched and snapped a picture of it, and then imitated the cheesy shutter noise of my phone. Oh, joy! 

Also Carnaby Street.

Notting Hill Road, after a thoroughly revolting hot apple cider. 

Chameleoned outside the RUSU building upon my return to dear old Reading.

Alas, someone shucked them off to add cream to their coffee in the HUMSS café and forgot about them. 

The Usual

November 25-
It's not a trip to the SportsPark without at least one black glove along a half-mile stretch of sidewalk! I think I'm getting the hang of the whole slowing-of-the-pace, dawdling-off-to-the-side, pretending-to-receive-a-text, deliberating-and-pretending-to-respond-while-actually-doubling-back-and-taking-a-photo-of-the-loot trick.

The Campus Crusader

Tuesday, November 17-
This obscured all trace of what had previously been a horrendous morning.

The Spunky Aardvarks

October 21, 2009: 

The inaugural specimen(s), balled up on the office floor of a certain controversial publication.

The Italian Humanitarian Philosophical Sociologists

Late March once more:

Outside Humms, a lovely duo! By this time, Noah has the gleeful contemplation look down pat. 

The Intellectuals

Wednesday, 2/18:

These bad boys have been in HUMMS 244 for a few weeks now.