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!