Yes, I know it's been two weeks since I posted. My apologies! Things suddenly picked up here as I started having basketball games, formal events, and visitors on top of the usual reading and essays. But let's start back at the second half of the week I had off a few weeks ago.
I saw Kyle off on Sunday night, did some resting and reading on Monday and Tuesday, and left for London to see Laura Getz on Tuesday afternoon! There is a bus called the "Oxford Tube" that leaves Oxford every 12 minutes, picking you up at any one of five or so stops. You just buy a general ticket, and then you can get on at any stop you'd like in Oxford and off at one of five stops in London. It takes about an hour and 40 minutes, which is longer than it takes on the train, but you get the added convenience of being able to leave when you're ready and getting on and off in a number of places. I was a little nervous about taking the bus by myself the first time I went to London, but the ride turned out to be uneventful, aside from me checking my bus map and my London map about every third minute. Hopefully I will be comfortable enough with London and with the transportation system by the end of the year that I won't need to do any paranoid map-checking anymore.
I got off the bus at the Victoria stop around 4:30, so my first views of London were in the near-dark. Luckily, the bus stop was on a busy street and near lots of tourist attractions, so things were well lit and I didn't feel unsafe at all being by myself. I got turned around a little bit when I got off the bus and started walking in the wrong direction, but I used my map skills and got going the right way pretty quickly. I had two hours or so until I was supposed to meet Laura at the Royal Theatre Drury Lane in the West End, so I figured I would give myself a little walking tour. Buckingham Palace was the first stop, and that was easy to find - all I needed to do to get there was walk straight up the road on which I got off the bus. The Palace is beautiful at night. In the pictures I've seen of it during the day time, there are always lots of people crowded around it, but at this time of the evening, there were only a few people around. There is a huge monument to Queen Victoria in front of it and both the Palace and the monuments were all lit up with spotlights. Everything glowed as it started to rain lightly. I was glad I was there by myself - there's a large square blocked off to cars in front of the Palace, so I just stood in front of it for awhile, drinking in the sights and sounds of a new city.
When I was ready to move on, I crossed the street with the intention of heading down to the houses of Parliament to see them and Big Ben. There are several streets which fork out from the plaza in front of the Palace, so I wasn't sure which one to take. I knew in any event that I needed to cross the street, but there aren't any crosswalks from the plaza directly across the street. I didn't see where any were, and in the dark by myself, I didn't want to risk wandering around too much to find them, especially if it meant I would look like I didn't know where I was going - which is fine in the day time and in groups, but not at night by yourself. So I decided to wait for a break in traffic and run across the street, which surprisingly didn't require too much waiting at all. I got safely across the street and on the sidewalk and figured I'd better look at my map to make sure I knew where I was going. But when I reached in my pocket, my map wasn't there. I looked back across the street frantically and saw my map lying in the middle of the road, being run over by car tires. I knew I needed it - I had no idea how to get to where I was supposed to meet Laura without it. I tried to think of ways I could easily get another map or make do without it, but I determined pretty quickly that I needed that map. So I made a mad dash back across the street to get it. It wasn't the smartest thing to do, and my map was sort of wet and smushed, but it was a map, and the inside part, the part I needed, was untouched. Victory! I ended up walking up the mall instead of going down to the houses of Parliament, ending up in Trafalgar Square. The fountains were all lit up with purple lights and there were still many, many people out and about - very different from in front of the Palace. I wandered toward the theatre where our show was, passing lots of the theatres on the West End. I think I need to see about six or seven more shows now, including Avenue Q and Les Mis, which aren't on Broadway anymore.
I got turned around again once I made it to the general vicinity of Drury Lane. I'm used to American cities set up on grid patterns with good signage - it's pretty much impossible to get lost in Philadelphia, if you ask me. But London isn't like that at all, of course. It's a European city with twisty streets, none of which are well-marked. The street signs don't hang from the traffic lights or sit on top of poles on corners - they are attached to the sides of buildings (and not every street is marked). But thankfully, I had my map and cell phone, and Laura had her map and cell phone, so we eventually found each other. (Later, Laura showed me her book that includes an index of all the streets in London with maps; apparently even Londoners don't know where everything is. That made me feel better about getting a little lost.) Laura was with her friend Becca from church in London, so the three of us went to Covent Garden and found a nice little Italian restaurant. I was so happy to get off my feet and come in from the cold and wet! We had a very nice dinner, then we took the short walk to the theatre to see Oliver! (the exclamation point is part of the title of the show). I love Oliver!, and this was a really fun production. Fagin was played by a man named Omid Djalili; people kept asking me when I told them I was going to see Oliver! if he was going to be in it when I saw it. I had no idea who he was, but it turns out he's been in a bunch of movies, including the third Pirates of the Carribbean. He was very entertaining, playing games with the audience and drawing out his scenes with funny asides and little musical interludes. Sally was also played by someone relatively famous, though she's famous for winning a television competition to get the part, I believe. The kids in the show were great, especially this one very small boy who imitated everything that Fagin did and almost stole a few of the scenes. The Royal Theatre Drury Lane is very old, and the stage is very deep, so they did a lot of cool perspective things with the set, especially for the street scenes. It was so interesting to be in London and see a show that's set in London - to think about how a city sees its own past. All in all, it was a great night!
Laura and I went back to the apartment she's staying in and chatted for awhile and made our plans for the next day. She showed me all of the guide books she's bought from her favorite places - I think she could start her own library about the history, art and architecture of England! On Wednesday morning, we went to see the Handel house. G.F. Handel lived in London in a nice little town house for a pretty long time toward the end of his life. There's now a society for the preservation of the house, and you can pay a few pounds to take a tour of it and learn about his life. Did you know that Handel went blind? There are volunteers in every room of the house to answer questions, and the woman in the first room likes to surprise visitors with that fun fact, apparently. Laura and I learned all about Handel's time in London, and I can now say that I've stood in the room where the Messiah was composed! Handel finished what is probably the greatest choral work of all time in only 23 days. The house itself isn't exciting architecturally or anything, but there was lots of good information, and Laura and I really enjoyed it. After we finished, we went back to Laura's apartment, had some lunch, got our things together, and got on the bus back to Oxford.
Highlights of our visit in Oxford and much more to come!
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
Saturday, November 14, 2009
First Half of a Week Off
Today is a great day to stay inside and not venture out into the elements. Usually if it's raining here, it just rains kind of lightly and straight down; today we're having something more like a rain storm, so there's plenty of wind to accompany the rain. Fortunately, I need the motivation to stay inside today because I have lots of reading to do - finishing Shakespeare's second version of King Lear and reading a bunch of criticism so I can write an essay for Monday. I've been mixing a lot of fun with work this past week, so now it's time to hunker down and churn out some school work. I didn't have any tutorials this week as my tutor was away, so I got to do some visiting and being visited.
First, Kyle, one of my friends from Penn, came over from his study abroad program in Spain to visit. He got in very early in the morning last Friday (and by early, I mean approximately 4 am). He dropped his phone in the airport on the way over and it wasn't working right, so we had to find each other in the middle of the night without the ability to communicate. I went and stood out on the street in front of Pembroke, hoping that I would see him and getting funny looks from the people who were still eating at the food cart that parks outside of college in the evenings. When I hadn't seen him after about 20 minutes, I went inside to see if he had maybe emailed me or something to tell me that his plans had changed, but I didn't have anything from him - so I went back out. This time, I saw someone standing on the side of the road just down from Pembroke and called out "Kyle!" just in case it was him, which it was, thank goodness. He told me he was thinking about stretching out on the park bench near where he was standing in the next few minutes if he didn't seem me. Good thing we found each other!
After I had basketball practice on Friday morning, we had a regular Penn reunion. It turns out that our friend from the Penn Band, Katie Palusci, was also in Oxford that day. She's studying abroad in Milan but was, like Kyle, traveling for the weekend. So we met up with Katie, as well as with my friend Naomi, who is at Oxford Brookes for the term, for lunch at a really good Thai restaurant. My friends at Oxford and I like to go out for ethnic food when we can, since we eat so many meat-and-potatoes meals in our dining hall. After we finished, Kyle, Katie and I went to meet Zhana, another student from Penn at Oxford, and her boyfriend to go punting on the River Cherwell, which feeds into the Thames. You can rent punts - flat, wooden boats - on the river by the hour, so we decided to try our hand. This is how punting works: up to four people can sit in the boat, while one person stands at the back with a long pole. The pole is long enough to reach to the bottom of the river, and the boat takes its momentum from using the pole to push off the river bed, kind of like a gondola. One of the people sitting also has a little oar that's used as a rudder to help steer the boat. Punting is a very simple concept, but it isn't so simple in execution, as we discovered. It's really hard to keep the punt moving straight ahead, and we ended up getting turned around a couple of times and also bumping into the bank of the river. But by the end of our hour and our little loop around a big island in the river, we pretty much had the hang of it. We had a really good time trying to figure out how to maneuver the punt, and we enjoyed the scenery of Oxford and the fall foliage, even though it was a gray day and by the time we were finished, it was getting rainy. After our punting adventure, we took some time to warm up and run errands, then met again for dinner. We just went out to a pub, but it was so nice to just sit and chat with friends and share a meal with no time restrictions or really anything else to worry about. We saw Katie off then everyone came back to my room to talk and hang out.
Saturday morning I sang in a wedding in our college chapel. Apparently it's becoming more and more common for alumni and staff of the college to get married in college. There were 8 of us from the larger choir in the wedding choir, 2 on each voice part; we sang Josh Groban's "You Raise Me Up" as well as an arrangement of Amazing Grace. Each of us got paid 45 pounds for about 2 hours work - not a bad hourly wage! The wedding was short and sweet, we sang well, and everyone seemed like they were having a good time. I think the groom works at Pembroke - the couple didn't seem like they were too much older than me, which scares me every time I think about it. In the afternoon, Kyle and I had a walk around Christ Church meadow and did some general hanging about Oxford. For dinner, we went to hall at Christ Church! They filmed the dining hall scenes of Harry Potter there, and since Pembroke's hall isn't open on Saturdays, we are invited to their hall for dinner. Actually, Christ Church's hall doesn't look too different from Pembroke's, though they do have gilded ceilings and more portraits on the walls of their famous alumni. But it was fun to say we'd been there, and it was a good opportunity to introduce Kyle to my Oxford friends. When we were done with dinner we took it easy and went to Len's for awhile to meet everyone who was hanging out there and have a cheap drink.
Sunday is sort of a day of craziness for me, with Christian Union breakfast, church, and then chapel choir all afternoon, but I actually got to enjoy it all last Sunday as I didn't have the usual essay due Monday to worry about. I felt a little bad that I had to leave Kyle mostly to his own devices during the day, but he came to evensong, choir drinks, and dinner with me in the evening. Evensong turned out to be a very somber affair - it was Remembrance Sunday, which is kind of like Veteran's day in the U.S. We sang an atmospheric anthem by Herbert Howells, and there was a moment of silence for remembering the troops. After the moment of silence, there was supposed to be a trumpet call, but we didn't have a trumpeter, so instead we sang a setting of a poem with music by our very own organ scholar, Sam Baker. I can now say that I have sung in the UK premiere of a brand new choral work! It was very well done, and all the music made for a very special, if heavy, service. After drinks and dinner, during which we mostly talked to a grad student in the choir who is studying the bioengineering of spider silk, Kyle and I came back to my room for some skype chats. First, we talked to my mom and brother, then Zhana came over and the three of us talked to Landon, John, and Stephen back at Penn. It was so cool to all talk at once - it felt like we were in the same room. This of course was home-sickness inducing, but what can you do?
Kyle's bus left Oxford at 1 am, so we stayed up chatting, then some of the girls from my hall walked with me to take him to the station so I wouldn't have to walk back alone. I slept in Monday, got some reading done, went to basketball practice, generally had a lazy sort of day. Tuesday I did schoolwork in the morning, then in the afternoon I hopped on a bus and went to visit Laura Getz, my dear friend from Central PA! More on that later, in the interest of keeping this post of a manageable length.
First, Kyle, one of my friends from Penn, came over from his study abroad program in Spain to visit. He got in very early in the morning last Friday (and by early, I mean approximately 4 am). He dropped his phone in the airport on the way over and it wasn't working right, so we had to find each other in the middle of the night without the ability to communicate. I went and stood out on the street in front of Pembroke, hoping that I would see him and getting funny looks from the people who were still eating at the food cart that parks outside of college in the evenings. When I hadn't seen him after about 20 minutes, I went inside to see if he had maybe emailed me or something to tell me that his plans had changed, but I didn't have anything from him - so I went back out. This time, I saw someone standing on the side of the road just down from Pembroke and called out "Kyle!" just in case it was him, which it was, thank goodness. He told me he was thinking about stretching out on the park bench near where he was standing in the next few minutes if he didn't seem me. Good thing we found each other!
After I had basketball practice on Friday morning, we had a regular Penn reunion. It turns out that our friend from the Penn Band, Katie Palusci, was also in Oxford that day. She's studying abroad in Milan but was, like Kyle, traveling for the weekend. So we met up with Katie, as well as with my friend Naomi, who is at Oxford Brookes for the term, for lunch at a really good Thai restaurant. My friends at Oxford and I like to go out for ethnic food when we can, since we eat so many meat-and-potatoes meals in our dining hall. After we finished, Kyle, Katie and I went to meet Zhana, another student from Penn at Oxford, and her boyfriend to go punting on the River Cherwell, which feeds into the Thames. You can rent punts - flat, wooden boats - on the river by the hour, so we decided to try our hand. This is how punting works: up to four people can sit in the boat, while one person stands at the back with a long pole. The pole is long enough to reach to the bottom of the river, and the boat takes its momentum from using the pole to push off the river bed, kind of like a gondola. One of the people sitting also has a little oar that's used as a rudder to help steer the boat. Punting is a very simple concept, but it isn't so simple in execution, as we discovered. It's really hard to keep the punt moving straight ahead, and we ended up getting turned around a couple of times and also bumping into the bank of the river. But by the end of our hour and our little loop around a big island in the river, we pretty much had the hang of it. We had a really good time trying to figure out how to maneuver the punt, and we enjoyed the scenery of Oxford and the fall foliage, even though it was a gray day and by the time we were finished, it was getting rainy. After our punting adventure, we took some time to warm up and run errands, then met again for dinner. We just went out to a pub, but it was so nice to just sit and chat with friends and share a meal with no time restrictions or really anything else to worry about. We saw Katie off then everyone came back to my room to talk and hang out.
Saturday morning I sang in a wedding in our college chapel. Apparently it's becoming more and more common for alumni and staff of the college to get married in college. There were 8 of us from the larger choir in the wedding choir, 2 on each voice part; we sang Josh Groban's "You Raise Me Up" as well as an arrangement of Amazing Grace. Each of us got paid 45 pounds for about 2 hours work - not a bad hourly wage! The wedding was short and sweet, we sang well, and everyone seemed like they were having a good time. I think the groom works at Pembroke - the couple didn't seem like they were too much older than me, which scares me every time I think about it. In the afternoon, Kyle and I had a walk around Christ Church meadow and did some general hanging about Oxford. For dinner, we went to hall at Christ Church! They filmed the dining hall scenes of Harry Potter there, and since Pembroke's hall isn't open on Saturdays, we are invited to their hall for dinner. Actually, Christ Church's hall doesn't look too different from Pembroke's, though they do have gilded ceilings and more portraits on the walls of their famous alumni. But it was fun to say we'd been there, and it was a good opportunity to introduce Kyle to my Oxford friends. When we were done with dinner we took it easy and went to Len's for awhile to meet everyone who was hanging out there and have a cheap drink.
Sunday is sort of a day of craziness for me, with Christian Union breakfast, church, and then chapel choir all afternoon, but I actually got to enjoy it all last Sunday as I didn't have the usual essay due Monday to worry about. I felt a little bad that I had to leave Kyle mostly to his own devices during the day, but he came to evensong, choir drinks, and dinner with me in the evening. Evensong turned out to be a very somber affair - it was Remembrance Sunday, which is kind of like Veteran's day in the U.S. We sang an atmospheric anthem by Herbert Howells, and there was a moment of silence for remembering the troops. After the moment of silence, there was supposed to be a trumpet call, but we didn't have a trumpeter, so instead we sang a setting of a poem with music by our very own organ scholar, Sam Baker. I can now say that I have sung in the UK premiere of a brand new choral work! It was very well done, and all the music made for a very special, if heavy, service. After drinks and dinner, during which we mostly talked to a grad student in the choir who is studying the bioengineering of spider silk, Kyle and I came back to my room for some skype chats. First, we talked to my mom and brother, then Zhana came over and the three of us talked to Landon, John, and Stephen back at Penn. It was so cool to all talk at once - it felt like we were in the same room. This of course was home-sickness inducing, but what can you do?
Kyle's bus left Oxford at 1 am, so we stayed up chatting, then some of the girls from my hall walked with me to take him to the station so I wouldn't have to walk back alone. I slept in Monday, got some reading done, went to basketball practice, generally had a lazy sort of day. Tuesday I did schoolwork in the morning, then in the afternoon I hopped on a bus and went to visit Laura Getz, my dear friend from Central PA! More on that later, in the interest of keeping this post of a manageable length.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Fall in Oxford
I WILL get back on a more regular posting schedule, I promise.
Staying busy around here hasn't been a problem, that's for sure. Some highlights, in no particular order:
The weather around here has been totally bizarre in the past week or so. Tuesday, for example, it was beautiful and sunny when I woke up. When we left for lunch and lecture around 11am, it had started to drizzle. By the time we had finished lunch it was pouring, but when we left the English building after our lecture the sun was almost blinding. Within an hour it was raining hard again, but when I went outside later there was not a cloud in the sky! Very strange, but we've managed to make the most of the nice days, or nice hours within not-so-nice days. For example, on Saturday, Rachel, Robin, Bryan and I went out for a Thai lunch and then to the Oxford Univeristy botanical gardens. Entry is free for students, so we figured, why not? It turned out to be a very nice afternoon, and the gardens were beautiful. The gardens are a nice size, small enough to walk around in an hour. There are plenty of blooming plants to see, even in late fall, and the big old trees they have in the garden were showing absolutely gorgeous colors. The four of us had fun just sort of wandering around, taking silly pictures, and generally enjoying being outside. Our favorite part was either watching people trying to punt on the river or exploring the greenhouse, which has all sorts of exotic plants - I don't think I ever realized that pineapples grow in the ground. On a similar note, I wandered around Christchurch Meadow for the first time last week, on a brillaint fall day. I had just finished a paper and needed to get out of my room, so I went for a walk around the big loop. Christchurch is the college right across the street, and they have their own meadow right next to the college, complete with river views and cows. Yes, cows, living in the middle of the city of Oxford. Anwyay, there's a nice dirt trail you can walk or jog around the perimeter of the meadow - I think the trail's about a mile long. There were lots of people out, some picnicking, some just sitting on benches enjoying the sunshine. You don't have to be a Christchurch student, or even an Oxford student, to enter the meadow during the day, so I ran into all sorts of tourists, people taking pictures, and a large group of French schoolchildren. I wish I'd had my camera, because it would have been great to get some pictures of all the fall foliage on a sunny day.
In basketball news, there isn't really any news. We still haven't had another game, mostly due to scheduling troubles - the university really doesn't like to give us court time! We've still been having practice twice a week, which is getting more and more enjoyable as I get to know the team and get in better shape. I finally feel like I'm playing more at the level I want to play, not just struggling to get up and down the court for lack of air. We're getting antsy to have a game though. It's hard to just practice and practice and practice all the time and never test our skills against an opponent, which always helps a team (and its players) understand what it needs to work on.
Something I've been meaning to explain for a long time and haven't: Pembroke has its own college grace, which is to be read before every formal meal. Apparently, the students used to say it together, but instead of having everybody learn it now, one person reads it. For this year, that person is me! The chaplain asked for a volunteer in choir on the first Sunday, and I raised my hand without really thinking about it. He told me that no one would care how I said it, so I just use my Latin training mixed with years of singing church Latin to come up with my own pronunciation. My reward is that I'm reimbursed for all the meals at which I say grace, which is every Tuesday and Thursday, since I eat in a separate room with the choir on Sundays. Not a bad deal, and how many people can say they read Latin grace in front of their whole class at college on a regular basis?
That being said, I would like to prove that not everything is old-school at Oxford. Last Monday we went to a concert with the band Passion Pit at a club on the other side of Oxford. Lots of loud guitars, thumping bass, screaming teenagers, annoyed adults, people smashed together... all the things a pop/rock concert should be. The first opening band was good, being the suppliers of the loud guitars. The second opening act was... interesting. The performer was sort of a dj, remixing other people's pop songs into funky techno beats, but singing the lyrics himself and doing ridiculous dances. A couple times I wondered if the audience was enjoying the music, or enjoying making fun of him. His last song was the song that the children sing during the party in the Sound of Music ("There's a sad sort of ringing from the clock in the hall..."). He introduced it as a song for anyone in the room wearing knee socks, and invited anyone who knew the words to sing along. So I sang along, though I wasn't wearing knee socks, but really, it was just strange. Passion Pit, the main act, was pretty good - I know a couple of their songs from listening to XPN - but they were having technical difficulties all through the night, which began with it taking an hour for them to get their stuff set up after the previous act. All in all, we had a good time.
Ok, that's enough for now. This weekend Kyle is coming from Spain to visit me, and I'm singing in a wedding with the choir on Saturday. Next week is an off week, since my tutor will be away - I can't wait for a break from mad essay writing (I have one due today that is just bad, but sometimes you just hit a wall, you know?).
Staying busy around here hasn't been a problem, that's for sure. Some highlights, in no particular order:
The weather around here has been totally bizarre in the past week or so. Tuesday, for example, it was beautiful and sunny when I woke up. When we left for lunch and lecture around 11am, it had started to drizzle. By the time we had finished lunch it was pouring, but when we left the English building after our lecture the sun was almost blinding. Within an hour it was raining hard again, but when I went outside later there was not a cloud in the sky! Very strange, but we've managed to make the most of the nice days, or nice hours within not-so-nice days. For example, on Saturday, Rachel, Robin, Bryan and I went out for a Thai lunch and then to the Oxford Univeristy botanical gardens. Entry is free for students, so we figured, why not? It turned out to be a very nice afternoon, and the gardens were beautiful. The gardens are a nice size, small enough to walk around in an hour. There are plenty of blooming plants to see, even in late fall, and the big old trees they have in the garden were showing absolutely gorgeous colors. The four of us had fun just sort of wandering around, taking silly pictures, and generally enjoying being outside. Our favorite part was either watching people trying to punt on the river or exploring the greenhouse, which has all sorts of exotic plants - I don't think I ever realized that pineapples grow in the ground. On a similar note, I wandered around Christchurch Meadow for the first time last week, on a brillaint fall day. I had just finished a paper and needed to get out of my room, so I went for a walk around the big loop. Christchurch is the college right across the street, and they have their own meadow right next to the college, complete with river views and cows. Yes, cows, living in the middle of the city of Oxford. Anwyay, there's a nice dirt trail you can walk or jog around the perimeter of the meadow - I think the trail's about a mile long. There were lots of people out, some picnicking, some just sitting on benches enjoying the sunshine. You don't have to be a Christchurch student, or even an Oxford student, to enter the meadow during the day, so I ran into all sorts of tourists, people taking pictures, and a large group of French schoolchildren. I wish I'd had my camera, because it would have been great to get some pictures of all the fall foliage on a sunny day.
In basketball news, there isn't really any news. We still haven't had another game, mostly due to scheduling troubles - the university really doesn't like to give us court time! We've still been having practice twice a week, which is getting more and more enjoyable as I get to know the team and get in better shape. I finally feel like I'm playing more at the level I want to play, not just struggling to get up and down the court for lack of air. We're getting antsy to have a game though. It's hard to just practice and practice and practice all the time and never test our skills against an opponent, which always helps a team (and its players) understand what it needs to work on.
Something I've been meaning to explain for a long time and haven't: Pembroke has its own college grace, which is to be read before every formal meal. Apparently, the students used to say it together, but instead of having everybody learn it now, one person reads it. For this year, that person is me! The chaplain asked for a volunteer in choir on the first Sunday, and I raised my hand without really thinking about it. He told me that no one would care how I said it, so I just use my Latin training mixed with years of singing church Latin to come up with my own pronunciation. My reward is that I'm reimbursed for all the meals at which I say grace, which is every Tuesday and Thursday, since I eat in a separate room with the choir on Sundays. Not a bad deal, and how many people can say they read Latin grace in front of their whole class at college on a regular basis?
That being said, I would like to prove that not everything is old-school at Oxford. Last Monday we went to a concert with the band Passion Pit at a club on the other side of Oxford. Lots of loud guitars, thumping bass, screaming teenagers, annoyed adults, people smashed together... all the things a pop/rock concert should be. The first opening band was good, being the suppliers of the loud guitars. The second opening act was... interesting. The performer was sort of a dj, remixing other people's pop songs into funky techno beats, but singing the lyrics himself and doing ridiculous dances. A couple times I wondered if the audience was enjoying the music, or enjoying making fun of him. His last song was the song that the children sing during the party in the Sound of Music ("There's a sad sort of ringing from the clock in the hall..."). He introduced it as a song for anyone in the room wearing knee socks, and invited anyone who knew the words to sing along. So I sang along, though I wasn't wearing knee socks, but really, it was just strange. Passion Pit, the main act, was pretty good - I know a couple of their songs from listening to XPN - but they were having technical difficulties all through the night, which began with it taking an hour for them to get their stuff set up after the previous act. All in all, we had a good time.
Ok, that's enough for now. This weekend Kyle is coming from Spain to visit me, and I'm singing in a wedding with the choir on Saturday. Next week is an off week, since my tutor will be away - I can't wait for a break from mad essay writing (I have one due today that is just bad, but sometimes you just hit a wall, you know?).
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
In and Out of Oxford
Sorry I haven't posted in awhile. I'm getting "stuck in," as they say, and I keep running out of time to write a post. Ok, no more excuses, just action-packed adventure:
It's been a busy week and a half since I last posted. I turned in two essays on Monday, and I have another one due tomorrow. That's a lot of writing in one week. In non-academic news, I've been spending a lot of time in the Master's Lodgings recently. The Master and his wife have a house in college, so they often have students over for events. Last week, they had all of the visiting students over for drinks and canapes. The Bursar and some other important college people also came, so it was a good opportunity to put faces and personalities with names. I had some lovely conversations. The Master asked a lot of questions about how we were finding Pembroke and what we thought about all the tradition. We all agreed that we really like formal halls and things of that nature. Yes, it takes an hour of your night three times a week, but you really get to know the other members of your class. And it's nice to sit down together and have a good meal on a regular basis, instead of eating and running or heating and eating in your room, or whatever. Obviously, my class at Penn is much bigger than my class here, but I wish we could all get together like that on a regular basis. After NSO, we really don't do any activities together as a whole class (or when we try, it's a disaster - see waiting outside for an hour for Sophomore Skimmer and not even getting in) until we have alumni day and class reunions. Back to Pembroke, we also went to the Master's last night for a recital. Twice a term, the Master hosts a student musical recital - anyone can sign up to participate, and anyone is welcome to come and hear. I didn't perform last night, since I didn't bring any music with me and didn't really have time to find any, but all the performances were very good. We had a few people sing, someone played the cello, someone sang and played his guitar, etc. A few highlights: one of the fellows played a recorder arrangement of a Handel piece that he did himself in his university days; Sam Baker, one of our organ scholars, played a suite of dances for piano that he composed; and Manos, one of our music performance majors, played a Chopin Ballad that was absolutely stunning. I can't wait to sing or play in the next recital!
On Saturday, the Tufts office in London ran a bus to Stratford upon Avon for a day of Shakespeare. "Non-Tufts friends" were cordially invited, so I went along. The bus left from London and picked us up in Oxford on the way there. Saturday morning was raining and not looking very promising for a nice day. I was tired on the bus, and we got stuck in some heinous traffic on the way there - it took us an hour to go the last ten miles. But by the time we got there, the weather was clearing up and I was in a much better mood. First we went to Shakespeare's wife's cottage. Her name was Anne Hathaway, and her family lived outside of town in a 12 room cottage that was actually considered a good-sized house at the time. It still has a thatched roof and all the original walls, made of timbers filled in with some sort of organic material. The house is filled with Elizabethan furniture, including the ACTUAL SETTLE where Anne and William courted. That's one of the funny things about Stratford - we don't actually know that much about Shakespeare's life, so everything that we can prove to be his is a big deal. The tour guide kind of reminded me of the old historian in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who gets mowed down when the Medieval knights ride through the filming of his documentary. He liked to give the linguistic roots of some of the phrases we use today, like "turning the tables" (one side of the table top was polished and for display only, the other side was rough and used for doing everything else). After we finished at Anne Hathaway's, we went to Shakespeare's birthplace, back in town. There's a sort of museum leading up to it with a series of videos explaining Shakespeare's life and his importance to our culture - very cheesy. They have a signet ring on display with the initials WS, which MAY be a ring worn by the bard himself, since it was found outside the parish church in Stratford (and as if no other man in town had the initals WS). The house itself is pretty similar to Anne Hathaway's house, but has the addition of a glove-making workshop where Shakespeare's father worked. One of the coolest things about it was that so many famous authors, performers, and personalities have walked through the house at some point - one of the rooms of the house is devoted to all the people who have visited over the years. After we left "the birthplace," we wandered around Stratford to find something to eat, since it was almost 2:30 by this time. So many things in the town are named after Shakespeare or his plays: Much Ado About Toys, the As You Like It Cafe, etc. It turned out to be a beautiful afternoon, so after we ate (during which we had an intense discussion about whether Shakespeare actually wrote his own plays or not), we walked down to the river just to be outside. There's a monument to Shakespeare with statues of some of his most famous characters, so we made funny faces standing next to them and took pictures. Then we got back on the bus to come home, but instead of getting stuck in traffic on the highway again, we took the scenic route through the Cotswolds. The sun was shining, the trees were beautiful, and the villages we drove through were adorable. All in all, it was good to get out of town and out of college and do something a little different.
No set plans for the weekend yet, but I'm sure we'll find something to do. We haven't gotten the opportunity to do a lot of the touristy things in Oxford yet, so maybe we'll visit the castle or something. Hopefully I'll get back onto a more regular posting schedule.
It's been a busy week and a half since I last posted. I turned in two essays on Monday, and I have another one due tomorrow. That's a lot of writing in one week. In non-academic news, I've been spending a lot of time in the Master's Lodgings recently. The Master and his wife have a house in college, so they often have students over for events. Last week, they had all of the visiting students over for drinks and canapes. The Bursar and some other important college people also came, so it was a good opportunity to put faces and personalities with names. I had some lovely conversations. The Master asked a lot of questions about how we were finding Pembroke and what we thought about all the tradition. We all agreed that we really like formal halls and things of that nature. Yes, it takes an hour of your night three times a week, but you really get to know the other members of your class. And it's nice to sit down together and have a good meal on a regular basis, instead of eating and running or heating and eating in your room, or whatever. Obviously, my class at Penn is much bigger than my class here, but I wish we could all get together like that on a regular basis. After NSO, we really don't do any activities together as a whole class (or when we try, it's a disaster - see waiting outside for an hour for Sophomore Skimmer and not even getting in) until we have alumni day and class reunions. Back to Pembroke, we also went to the Master's last night for a recital. Twice a term, the Master hosts a student musical recital - anyone can sign up to participate, and anyone is welcome to come and hear. I didn't perform last night, since I didn't bring any music with me and didn't really have time to find any, but all the performances were very good. We had a few people sing, someone played the cello, someone sang and played his guitar, etc. A few highlights: one of the fellows played a recorder arrangement of a Handel piece that he did himself in his university days; Sam Baker, one of our organ scholars, played a suite of dances for piano that he composed; and Manos, one of our music performance majors, played a Chopin Ballad that was absolutely stunning. I can't wait to sing or play in the next recital!
On Saturday, the Tufts office in London ran a bus to Stratford upon Avon for a day of Shakespeare. "Non-Tufts friends" were cordially invited, so I went along. The bus left from London and picked us up in Oxford on the way there. Saturday morning was raining and not looking very promising for a nice day. I was tired on the bus, and we got stuck in some heinous traffic on the way there - it took us an hour to go the last ten miles. But by the time we got there, the weather was clearing up and I was in a much better mood. First we went to Shakespeare's wife's cottage. Her name was Anne Hathaway, and her family lived outside of town in a 12 room cottage that was actually considered a good-sized house at the time. It still has a thatched roof and all the original walls, made of timbers filled in with some sort of organic material. The house is filled with Elizabethan furniture, including the ACTUAL SETTLE where Anne and William courted. That's one of the funny things about Stratford - we don't actually know that much about Shakespeare's life, so everything that we can prove to be his is a big deal. The tour guide kind of reminded me of the old historian in Monty Python and the Holy Grail who gets mowed down when the Medieval knights ride through the filming of his documentary. He liked to give the linguistic roots of some of the phrases we use today, like "turning the tables" (one side of the table top was polished and for display only, the other side was rough and used for doing everything else). After we finished at Anne Hathaway's, we went to Shakespeare's birthplace, back in town. There's a sort of museum leading up to it with a series of videos explaining Shakespeare's life and his importance to our culture - very cheesy. They have a signet ring on display with the initials WS, which MAY be a ring worn by the bard himself, since it was found outside the parish church in Stratford (and as if no other man in town had the initals WS). The house itself is pretty similar to Anne Hathaway's house, but has the addition of a glove-making workshop where Shakespeare's father worked. One of the coolest things about it was that so many famous authors, performers, and personalities have walked through the house at some point - one of the rooms of the house is devoted to all the people who have visited over the years. After we left "the birthplace," we wandered around Stratford to find something to eat, since it was almost 2:30 by this time. So many things in the town are named after Shakespeare or his plays: Much Ado About Toys, the As You Like It Cafe, etc. It turned out to be a beautiful afternoon, so after we ate (during which we had an intense discussion about whether Shakespeare actually wrote his own plays or not), we walked down to the river just to be outside. There's a monument to Shakespeare with statues of some of his most famous characters, so we made funny faces standing next to them and took pictures. Then we got back on the bus to come home, but instead of getting stuck in traffic on the highway again, we took the scenic route through the Cotswolds. The sun was shining, the trees were beautiful, and the villages we drove through were adorable. All in all, it was good to get out of town and out of college and do something a little different.
No set plans for the weekend yet, but I'm sure we'll find something to do. We haven't gotten the opportunity to do a lot of the touristy things in Oxford yet, so maybe we'll visit the castle or something. Hopefully I'll get back onto a more regular posting schedule.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Stress-busting and pub-hopping
I had my second Shakespeare tutorial today, which meant my first essay on Shakespeare was due. I was sort of struggling to write it, but in the process of writing my first two essays, I think I've learned a lot about how to study here. For my Milton essay, I hardly employed any critical help at all - it was hard enough just trying to narrow down something to say about Paradise Lost, since it's such a deep and complex text. By the time I was about half way through my essay, I felt like I was fishing around for information and evidence, and sort of floundered. For my Shakespeare essay, I wanted to correct that mistake by reading and using plenty of criticism. My professor gave me a reading list of things that she thought would be helpful, but it was a pretty big list. Really, I could read about Hamlet and Othello for the rest of my life and still not have read everything there is to read about those plays. At some point, you just have to stop reading and start writing. Finding that line can be tricky, but it's always better to stop sooner than you think you should, or else you'll keep saying, "well, if I just read a few more pages of this, maybe a thesis will pop into my head; maybe if I just get that book out of the extremely complicated and hard to navigate library system it will say something that sparks my interest." But obviously, you'd never write a paper then. Moral of the story: use criticism, but cut yourself off. You can't be afraid to just write!
On that note, I also realized today that I'm not getting a grade on every essay that I write. At Penn, one essay for a course could be worth 25% (or more) of my grade for the whole course. So I'm used to perfecting every sentence of my essays because of their incredible worth in terms of my overall grade. But here, I will write 6 essays for my Shakespeare class just this term. And as my Shakespeare buddy pointed out, the essays are really and opportunity to work out your thoughts. Oxford students don't get graded on their essays, they get graded on the huge exams they take at the end of the term. My grades are mostly dependent on my essay writing, but I still won't get a number grade on every essay. I'll get a lot of feedback and advice instead. And tutorials are an opportunity to ask as many questions as you possibly can and have the best discussion you possibly can with your tutor. So they're not really stressful either - they're the best opportunity I've ever had to build up a rapport with a professor. Yes, these past two paragraphs have been me explaining how I've gotten over the stress I've been feeling the past couple of days (and maybe partially explaining it away), but I feel like they're important realizations to have come to.
On a lighter note, this weekend was a lot of fun. I gave the Latin grace for the first time at formal hall on Thursday and I didn't get ridiculed for it! A bunch of people actually came up to me and told me that they thought it was really cool, so I'm really excited to do it for the rest of the year. Thursday and Friday nights were both fairly quiet - we mostly hung out in the college bar and went to bed early. "Len's" is the college bar; it's right next to our hall and it's just a little room with a bar, 2 long tables and a juke box. But everybody sort of congregates there in the evenings, so it's always fun to go and socialize. Saturday was our "fresher's photo," as you can see from the picture below. All the undergraduate and graduate freshers, as well as visiting students, met on Chapel Quad for a huge group picture. Then we ran around for probably and hour afterward finding all our friends and taking pictures, dressed all up in our full sub fuscs. After the photo extravaganza, I went to the Eagle and Child pub with the rest of the Penn people at Oxford. We hadn't seen each other yet because we're all at different colleges. For the record, the Eagle and Child is the pub where C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their literary society, the Inklings, met every week! They have a bunch of Lewis and Tolkien paraphernalia on the walls now. I almost died and went to heaven, I think. To that end, there is so much stuff to see and do around here, and I feel like I haven't had time to be a proper tourist. Maybe I'll have to work on that in the next few weeks. Sunday was full of church and essay writing. I went to a different church this Sunday - more traditional service, but it was entirely students, which I'm not sure I like. I find so much comfort in seeing people of all ages at church. I'm having a lot of fun with evensong at the chapel, not surprising given my love of singing and all. Hopefully I'll be able to continue balancing going to church in the morning and in the evening.
First Milton tutorial is tomorrow at 9 o'clock - wish me luck!
On that note, I also realized today that I'm not getting a grade on every essay that I write. At Penn, one essay for a course could be worth 25% (or more) of my grade for the whole course. So I'm used to perfecting every sentence of my essays because of their incredible worth in terms of my overall grade. But here, I will write 6 essays for my Shakespeare class just this term. And as my Shakespeare buddy pointed out, the essays are really and opportunity to work out your thoughts. Oxford students don't get graded on their essays, they get graded on the huge exams they take at the end of the term. My grades are mostly dependent on my essay writing, but I still won't get a number grade on every essay. I'll get a lot of feedback and advice instead. And tutorials are an opportunity to ask as many questions as you possibly can and have the best discussion you possibly can with your tutor. So they're not really stressful either - they're the best opportunity I've ever had to build up a rapport with a professor. Yes, these past two paragraphs have been me explaining how I've gotten over the stress I've been feeling the past couple of days (and maybe partially explaining it away), but I feel like they're important realizations to have come to.
On a lighter note, this weekend was a lot of fun. I gave the Latin grace for the first time at formal hall on Thursday and I didn't get ridiculed for it! A bunch of people actually came up to me and told me that they thought it was really cool, so I'm really excited to do it for the rest of the year. Thursday and Friday nights were both fairly quiet - we mostly hung out in the college bar and went to bed early. "Len's" is the college bar; it's right next to our hall and it's just a little room with a bar, 2 long tables and a juke box. But everybody sort of congregates there in the evenings, so it's always fun to go and socialize. Saturday was our "fresher's photo," as you can see from the picture below. All the undergraduate and graduate freshers, as well as visiting students, met on Chapel Quad for a huge group picture. Then we ran around for probably and hour afterward finding all our friends and taking pictures, dressed all up in our full sub fuscs. After the photo extravaganza, I went to the Eagle and Child pub with the rest of the Penn people at Oxford. We hadn't seen each other yet because we're all at different colleges. For the record, the Eagle and Child is the pub where C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their literary society, the Inklings, met every week! They have a bunch of Lewis and Tolkien paraphernalia on the walls now. I almost died and went to heaven, I think. To that end, there is so much stuff to see and do around here, and I feel like I haven't had time to be a proper tourist. Maybe I'll have to work on that in the next few weeks. Sunday was full of church and essay writing. I went to a different church this Sunday - more traditional service, but it was entirely students, which I'm not sure I like. I find so much comfort in seeing people of all ages at church. I'm having a lot of fun with evensong at the chapel, not surprising given my love of singing and all. Hopefully I'll be able to continue balancing going to church in the morning and in the evening.
First Milton tutorial is tomorrow at 9 o'clock - wish me luck!
Saturday, October 17, 2009
Sub-fusc
For those not on facebook, here is a picture of me in my full sub-fusc: gown, ribbon tie, and all. Today we had our "Fresher's photograph," in which we all dressed up in our official academic attire and stood together for a class picture. Very Oxford.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Week One
I am spending today relaxing because it has been quite a week already! I think I mentioned that I spent most of Monday reading and focusing on schoolwork. My tutorial partner for Shakespeare, Will, wanted to work on Hamlet and Othello because he had a busy weekend leading up to our tutorial on Monday and he already knew those plays fairly well already. I read Hamlet in high school (well, sort of) but I'd never read Othello before. So I spent Sunday night after choir and hall reading Othello and Monday morning rereading Hamlet. At 2pm I had tutorial (professor, one other student, and me in a room, discussing the reading), and we spent the whole hour talking about Hamlet. I really appreciated this: in high school, we often spent our time arguing over the tragic flaw of the hero or just trying to get our heads around Shakespeare's language. But in tutorial, we got past all of that stuff to talk about more in-depth things, such as the layers of Hamlet's personality and his ability or inability to control himself and makes choices for himself. Parts of it were a little awkward, like when Madeleine, our tutor, would ask us to find an example of a something and we would sheepishly flip through our pages in silence until someone spoke up. But I feel like Will and I worked together pretty well - taking turns breaking the silence, etc - and Madeleine is really good at what she does. She's small and soft-spoken but great at asking that well-placed question that pulls the discussion in a new direction.
Tuesday I spent the day rereading books one to four of Paradise Lost for my tutorial today. I read all of PL over the summer, but I wanted to read for detail so I could start work on my essay that was due today. Yes, I had an essay on PL due today before I ever had a class about it, and without any lead-up from Milton's other works! I told Landon that it was kind of like throwing us into the ocean to be eaten by Leviathan (a reference that Milton makes in PL when describing Satan). By Tuesday night I was feeling pretty stressed about it. Madeleine gave us a list of approaches we could use to begin discussing/writing about the poem, but Milton so jam-packed his epic poem with references and big questions that those didn't really help narrow things down in terms of essay topics. I finally decided to just stop thinking about it and go to bed, and I actually woke up with a fairly decent topic floating on the top of my brain. But then I got down to writing my essay and got really frustrated. I just didn't feel that it was up to my personal standard, and if wasn't up to my standard, how was it going to be up to my tutor's standards? Thankfully I had a good opportunity to get away from it and think about something else - my basketball team had a game in Birmingham, an hour and a half away, at 4 pm.
The game was good! We didn't win, but we hung in until the last 3 or 4 minutes, when we started to get tired and make stupid mistakes. We played pretty well for only one practice together, I thought. I actually started the game, being the tallest girl who could make it, but I got taken out after a couple of minutes for making a stupid foul. I was in and out for the rest of the game. I felt ok about the game personally, but I realized that I need a lot of practice. Intellectually, I know how to run a zone defense, but I haven't actually run one for probably 2 or 3 years, and as usual, theory and practice are two different things. We have practice tomorrow morning, and I'm looking forward to really working on my skills so that I can get my body, as well as the quick-thinking part of my brain, back in the game. I thought the funniest thing about the game was its location - all the basketball games I've been to in the past two years have been at the Palestra, "cathedral of basketball," at Penn. This game was in a poorly lit gym with another game going on in the court right next to us, which meant lots of confusing whistles. There were about the same number of fans at this game as there would be at a women's basketball game at Penn, though, i.e. 10-12. The bus ride home was a good chance to chill out and not think too much about anything, and we drove past some lovely countryside and a fair number of sheep and cows.
When we got back to Oxford after the game, at about 8 pm, I walked back from the gym, where we got off the bus, to Pembroke by myself (most of the girls on the team have bikes). I mentioned something to the other girls on the team about not wanting to walk home in the dark by myself, but in the words of one of my teammates, Oxford is "ridiculously safe." I keep forgetting that I'm not in the big city where bad things actually happen after dark. I stopped to get a burrito (not as good as in the States, for the record), then came home to work on my essay. Once I started working on it, I felt a lot better about it than I did when I left it for basketball; I realized that I actually had decent ideas, I just needed to add a few sentences here and there to pull them together. At about 11 o'clock, I decided to just go to bed and get up this morning to work on it - my secret strategy, since I always think much better in the morning.
I woke up this morning with an email from Madeleine saying that she was sick and we wouldn't be having tutorial today. I was frankly glad to just finish up my essay and email it to her; it took the pressure off, at least a little. Sam and Zoe, two of the girls on my hall have been eating breakfast together every morning at 8:15 - great motivation to get out of bed. I joined them this morning, which, along with tutorial being postponed, set a really good tone for the day. I promised myself I would relax today, since I was so stressed Tuesday and yesterday, and I did so by running a significant number of errands. I needed: a sweatshirt to wear to basketball practice, so I got a Pembroke college hoodie; a water bottle for basketball; groceries, etc. I also did laundry and a lot of cleaning up around my room, including washing all the dishes and mugs that I got at the JCR's jumbo drop the first day I got here. Tomorrow I have basketball at 8:30 am, so I'll be up and ready to get some good work done, whereas I would normally just bum around on a Friday. I have my first paper for Shakespeare due Monday, so I want to reread Othello and try to get some critical reading done. That way I can finish my research Saturday and write my paper Sunday and Monday morning. Hold me to it, ok?
Tuesday I spent the day rereading books one to four of Paradise Lost for my tutorial today. I read all of PL over the summer, but I wanted to read for detail so I could start work on my essay that was due today. Yes, I had an essay on PL due today before I ever had a class about it, and without any lead-up from Milton's other works! I told Landon that it was kind of like throwing us into the ocean to be eaten by Leviathan (a reference that Milton makes in PL when describing Satan). By Tuesday night I was feeling pretty stressed about it. Madeleine gave us a list of approaches we could use to begin discussing/writing about the poem, but Milton so jam-packed his epic poem with references and big questions that those didn't really help narrow things down in terms of essay topics. I finally decided to just stop thinking about it and go to bed, and I actually woke up with a fairly decent topic floating on the top of my brain. But then I got down to writing my essay and got really frustrated. I just didn't feel that it was up to my personal standard, and if wasn't up to my standard, how was it going to be up to my tutor's standards? Thankfully I had a good opportunity to get away from it and think about something else - my basketball team had a game in Birmingham, an hour and a half away, at 4 pm.
The game was good! We didn't win, but we hung in until the last 3 or 4 minutes, when we started to get tired and make stupid mistakes. We played pretty well for only one practice together, I thought. I actually started the game, being the tallest girl who could make it, but I got taken out after a couple of minutes for making a stupid foul. I was in and out for the rest of the game. I felt ok about the game personally, but I realized that I need a lot of practice. Intellectually, I know how to run a zone defense, but I haven't actually run one for probably 2 or 3 years, and as usual, theory and practice are two different things. We have practice tomorrow morning, and I'm looking forward to really working on my skills so that I can get my body, as well as the quick-thinking part of my brain, back in the game. I thought the funniest thing about the game was its location - all the basketball games I've been to in the past two years have been at the Palestra, "cathedral of basketball," at Penn. This game was in a poorly lit gym with another game going on in the court right next to us, which meant lots of confusing whistles. There were about the same number of fans at this game as there would be at a women's basketball game at Penn, though, i.e. 10-12. The bus ride home was a good chance to chill out and not think too much about anything, and we drove past some lovely countryside and a fair number of sheep and cows.
When we got back to Oxford after the game, at about 8 pm, I walked back from the gym, where we got off the bus, to Pembroke by myself (most of the girls on the team have bikes). I mentioned something to the other girls on the team about not wanting to walk home in the dark by myself, but in the words of one of my teammates, Oxford is "ridiculously safe." I keep forgetting that I'm not in the big city where bad things actually happen after dark. I stopped to get a burrito (not as good as in the States, for the record), then came home to work on my essay. Once I started working on it, I felt a lot better about it than I did when I left it for basketball; I realized that I actually had decent ideas, I just needed to add a few sentences here and there to pull them together. At about 11 o'clock, I decided to just go to bed and get up this morning to work on it - my secret strategy, since I always think much better in the morning.
I woke up this morning with an email from Madeleine saying that she was sick and we wouldn't be having tutorial today. I was frankly glad to just finish up my essay and email it to her; it took the pressure off, at least a little. Sam and Zoe, two of the girls on my hall have been eating breakfast together every morning at 8:15 - great motivation to get out of bed. I joined them this morning, which, along with tutorial being postponed, set a really good tone for the day. I promised myself I would relax today, since I was so stressed Tuesday and yesterday, and I did so by running a significant number of errands. I needed: a sweatshirt to wear to basketball practice, so I got a Pembroke college hoodie; a water bottle for basketball; groceries, etc. I also did laundry and a lot of cleaning up around my room, including washing all the dishes and mugs that I got at the JCR's jumbo drop the first day I got here. Tomorrow I have basketball at 8:30 am, so I'll be up and ready to get some good work done, whereas I would normally just bum around on a Friday. I have my first paper for Shakespeare due Monday, so I want to reread Othello and try to get some critical reading done. That way I can finish my research Saturday and write my paper Sunday and Monday morning. Hold me to it, ok?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
