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?