The Skittle Observation

I've decided to take this blog in a slightly different direction. While I am still having occasional adventures, mostly what I do every day of every week involves sitting in a library, leaving me little to post here of castle ruins or trips to continental cities (yay grad school!). Then I realized that simply being at Oxford is its own adventure. The fascinating and delightful discoveries I make usually come from the people here, not the architecture. So I am going to start recording some snippets of the people who make up the Oxford experience.

Lewis Carroll, a mathematician at Christ Church College who wrote Alice in Wonderland, based several elements of his book on people and things in Oxford. In no other place have I found this quotation more true: 'You're mad, bonkers, completely off your head. But I'll tell you a secret: all the best people are.' And at Oxford, we're all mad here.*

My first confirmation that I had found my people came to me as I was sitting in the college bar one day in my first months here. It came in the form of Skittles. The bar, you see, sells a small variety of chips (crisps) and candy in addition to a sizable variety of alcoholic beverages (more on unhealthy academic coping mechanisms later). How do you eat Skittles? Most of the people I know back home take a small handful, pop them all in their mouth, and chew. Repeat.

Not at Oxford. As I sat there scanning the room, I noticed that every single person who had purchased Skittles had a different and very precise sorting method. The most commonly preferred method is to sort them out by color, line each color up in single-file parallel lines along the desk, eat off the extras until you have the same number of each color, and then consume them in groups of five (one of each color, but only one color at a time in your mouth) from red to purple in the order of the visible light spectrum. That obsession with detail, that need to sort and classify, is not something that we can turn on for schoolwork or research and turn off when going about our daily lives; it's how our brains process the things around us -- even the little things. It's not a 'oh, there's that one person who weirdly over-sorts their Skittles'. Here, we all are the kids who got teased at school for sorting our Skittles.






*This is an ableist statement, but I hope you'll forgive me. Mental health in Oxford is an important topic that I cannot hope to cover in a single blog post.