Austin ~ Austen

When I read this novel first, I disliked it because of Margaret Hale. When characters of my namesake, it’s harder for me to forgive stupidity (and in her case, complete oblivion and prejudice against her soul mate). But now I see her as a much stronger character than before.

“I was quite sorry Miss Thornton came to take me to the other end of the room, saying she was sure I should be uncomfortable at being the only lady among so many gentlemen. I had never thought about it, I was so busy listening; and the ladies were so dull, papa—oh, so dull!”
Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, page 167

Maybe now I can watch the BBC miniseries, once I finish the book of course.

Ever since third week, I’d been hearing rumors of a sort of unplanned Oxford tradition: the fifth week blues.  Apparently, this hits the student body during the fifth week of every term.  After the halfway mark of fourth week, everyone gets tired of working all the time, of reading and writing taking up a majority of every week, and of how even when we go out to have fun, we know there are pages and pages of words to read and words to write waiting for us back at college.  I was determined for this not to be a bad week.  Because the two essays and being ill during fourth week had stressed me out so much, I was determined not to lose another one of my weeks here to anxiety and over-thinking.

At first, I wasn’t very successful.  As I said in my last post, I spent Sunday of last week at the second day of the Oxford Playhouse’s Writers’ Weekend, workshopping my latest play project with the help of some local actors.  In many ways, this was an incredible opportunity.  While I have had a play produced, I have never given myself the chance to interact with actors or a production team that are working with one of my original scripts.  When I left, I had so many ideas of where to go next with my current play project, which is great since I had finished a rough draft of the first act upon arriving at Oxford and had no idea where the second act should start—or where it should end.  On the downside, all the feedback overwhelmed me.  It was a pretty intimidating situation to be in: there I was, one of the youngest writers in the room, the only American/foreigner, and I was holding the least polished four pages out of anyone else there.  But everyone was really nice.  They acknowledged that my pages definitely were the roughest of the bunch, but nobody said it was bad writing; in fact, everyone seemed really intrigued by my idea for the play and kept telling me that I would probably get the most out of the workshop because, with a piece at such an early stage of the writing process, I had more of an open mind and would get more out of the reading.  So I left the day feeling encouraged about my playwriting—but then had to immediately put my four pages at the bottom of one of my desk drawers and plunge into Victorian Literature once again.

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It’s crazy and sad to think that I’m already half way through my time here at Oxford.  It has already been one month.  On the other hand, as this week has shown me, I have done quite a lot in the span of this one month and that I still have a lot more to look forward to in the coming one.  And more importantly, I need to slow down to enjoy all of it.

I started off the week on a great note.  After finishing my paper Sunday morning at yet another café (Morton’s, which had a yummy hazelnut cappuccino), I had the rest of the day free to celebrate Halloween.  So many people had warned me that Halloween here is not as crazy as it is in the States.  I don’t know if it’s because I’m not so interested in the creepy or because two of the big Rice Halloween celebrations include being naked, but I’ve never been a huge fan of the holiday and I wasn’t too bummed about missing out on the “American” version.  I thought I was just going to skip the whole thing, go back to my room, and finish editing my paper, but my Hertford friends had other plans.  They made sure that not only did I go to formal hall that night, but that I accompanied them to the Halloween BOP afterwards.  And I must say, it was one of the best Halloweens I’ve ever had.

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For some reason, third week has passed by really quickly.  I guess getting into a routine here has helped.  I’m not so conscious of the long, lonely hours spent working.  On the other hand, I’m starting to get really tired.  There’s just so much to do all the time!  I told my tutor on Thursday morning that I was tired.  She said to beware being tired so early in the term because apparently everyone becomes mentally exhausted during the “fifth week blues.”  Thankfully I was referring to being physically exhausted, seeing that I’d already been to an erging session that morning, had power-walked from my flat at the Graduate Centre to her office at St. Hilda’s College, and was still out of breath from climbing the eight flights of stairs up to her office (I might be exaggerating a little on the stairs, but the other visiting students that have Jenny McAuley will back me up; it’s a long hike to get up to her tiny room on the top floor).

I like that it’s finally started raining here.  Now, I know that in a few weeks, this will fail to cause any excitement, but for now, I’m enjoying the change in scenery.  I can get sunshine in Texas for almost the entire year.  In fact, we’ve had so much recently that the state is in the throes of a horrible drought.  Here, it’s supposed to rain.  It’s a joke printed on t-shirts and mentioned in novels and popular culture.  And yet at first it seemed like I brought all the sunshine with me.  While I did enjoy rowing better in the sunshine than the spitting rain, I didn’t feel like it was properly English until gray clouds covered the sky and I left the library to find rain pattering down softly in the Hertford Old Building Quad.  That being said, feel free to mock me when I complain of the dreary, cold weather later in the term.

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