Word: edinburgh
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...began my first letter writing campaigns during my freshman year at the University of Edinburgh. There I had plenty of time on my hands. So much time that even drinking from lunch without stopping until three in the morning got boring. I wrote home. I wrote home lots. When you're oceans away, it's a logical thing to do. But I did it obsessively, sending and receiving 10-15 letters and postcards a week. I was closer to my friends when I was in another hemisphere than we are when we're in compatible timezones...
...left Edinburgh because I had too much time with too little to do--a now enviable conundrum. Yet my letter writing has not ceased with my return. Every once in a while, when the stress of Harvard keeps me from sleeping and I find myself with a few unaccounted for hours in the wee morning, I return to my old habit. I face down a blank screen and churn out a letter. I have productive insomnia. I have victims...
Last summer when I returned to Edinburgh for a visit, American Airlines did me the favor of running an inflight aerobics video so we wouldn't get cramped by eight hours of cattle class seating. How considerate. And how perfectly horrible. There is never a good time to be reminded that physical conditioning should be an integral part of your daily routine. No time is less appropriate than when your eardrums have popped and you're breathing only 30% recycled...
...with all such stories, everything can be explained about Stevenson except genius. He was born in 1850 in Edinburgh, the precocious, cosseted only child of wealthy parents. R.L.S. got the attention that would have served a dozen siblings, and the enormous coziness and safety of an indulged small boy in an upper-middle-class Victorian household was what he evoked years later in the poems of A Child's Garden of Verses. His father Thomas was a mighty builder of lighthouses and breakwaters, and the future author of Treasure Island and Kidnapped saw more of the sea than most Scottish...
...reacting to parental strictness (his father fined him a penny for each slang word he uttered) by rarely showing up for classes. When law exams loomed, he persuaded a friendly doctor to say he was too ill to face them and should be sent off on vacation. In both Edinburgh and London he prowled the seedier neighborhoods late at night, sometimes dressed as a gentleman, sometimes as a ruffian, noting the differences in how he was treated. He appears to have had at least one serious affair with a prostitute, probably broken off by parental pressure...