Austin ~ Austen

Hello everyone!  I’m posting from my new apartment in Houston, Texas.  I am partially moved in.  I’m still waiting on a bed and my parents are bringing the rest of my things this weekend.  Being back at Rice is great in some ways because I love going to class again, I love seeing my friends here, and I’m excited to return to the Rice Players and other extracurriculars.  On the other hand, it’s weird not living on campus.  Martel is still home, but I have to leave every night.  I can’t just walk over to my friends’ rooms and hang out with them; I have to plan time to see them.  It makes coming back from abroad even more of an adjustment, but I’m trying to remember how I coped last semester.  I lived fifteen minutes away from Hertford College, but I ended up spending a majority of my time there instead of at my flat.

Since I have been back, many many many people have been asking me how my study abroad semester went.  I tried to tell them to go look at this blog but most of them said that I wrote way too much.  Some of my friends told me I should make my posts shorter even before I left for the UK, but I couldn’t help it.  Now that I’m back in the US and having adventures that are a little less exciting, I am actually going to make the effort to make snappier posts.  It’s not a New Year’s Resolution.  I don’t like the concept of New Year’s Resolutions because I feel like most people break them.  Plus I believe New Year’s is an arbitrary moment to choose as a threshold or a transition.  I think people change when it’s right, not just because one or two numbers change on the calendar.  And finally, I hate the date change because I swear it makes me write the wrong number at the top of every assignment for at least a month.

To all my friends going back to Hertford in the next few days, I’m so jealous.  I didn’t know how much I would miss you all until I got back here.  And Hertford College Boat Club, I miss your workouts.  Using the erg machine by myself is not the same.

(I apologize for all the alliteration in the titles—and the assonance in this sentence—but I couldn’t help myself)

Seventh week was one of the most fun, most life-changing, and most stressful weeks for me here in Oxford.  It was a bundle of emotions that turned my normal Oxford week upside down.  I still think I’m learning from my experiences during this week.  But, in many ways, that’s what makes it the best week that I’ve had here.

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I said that I wasn’t going to post again until the end of the term, but I can’t help it.  I’m going to make time to write because, after not blogging for a week, I can literally feel the difference; there’s a void in my life because I’m not posting!  I think sharing my experiences with everyone reading this from back in the US is part of what makes them so special to me.  Plus, so much has happened to me over the past few weeks that if I don’t write it all down, I might be going into emotional-overload very very soon.

Anyways, sixth week.  Truthfully, not much exciting happened during the actual week.  My essay on Siegfried Sassoon went over pretty well.  We did have an interesting conversation though because my tutor thought I had purposefully touched upon the topic of propaganda in my paper, when in actuality I had stumbled upon it in the writing process without actually exploring the concept or how it applies a lot to my reading of Memories of an Infantry-Officer.  Other than that, it was just a nice third tutorial, unfortunately my second to last World War I tutorial of the semester.  And for eighth week I funnily enough decided to revisit poetry.  It’s funny; I had previously planned on avoiding more poetry at all costs, but instead I found myself asking to read more World War I poetry.  I guess that’s the cool part about being in tutorials—I have begun to appreciate and look at pieces of literature that I might not have chosen to read on my own.

As for the primary tutorial, it was my first week with George Eliot- so scary!  Sort of like with the World War I poetry, I had previously planned to avoid reading her.  I had heard so many intimidating things about Middlemarch that I didn’t think I would be able to handle one of her novels during this term.  But, since our discussions of Elizabeth Gaskell seemed to lead perfectly into comparisons with Eliot, I assented to my tutor’s wishes and embarked upon my first George Eliot novel, Adam Bede.  And it was much better to read than I expected.  Her direct narration surprised me and the long descriptions of the landscape annoyed me at first, but after discussing the novel with my tutor I appreciated it so much more.  And even from the first read I was impressed with the depth of the characters.  On the other hand, I found writing an essay on George Eliot a much bigger challenge.  My essay was okay, but my tutor had lots of criticism about the way in which I chose to engage with the text.  And that’s why we both decided I should focus on Eliot for a second week.  As it turns out, I needed more time to mull over Eliot.

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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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I have now officially been at Oxford for a week and now that I have a start for my first essay, I can finally provide myself time to share my adventures here with the rest of the world.

It’s surreal finally being here.  I couldn’t even take it in that I was staring at the Thames when I looked out my bedroom window or that when I stare straight out of the main entrance to Hertford College, I’m looking directly at the Bodleian Library.  It took so much for me to get here, both literally and figuratively, that I couldn’t believe that these weren’t more of my best dreams.  I can see why so many people see Hogwarts when they walk around the city.  The old buildings, the green meadows, the banks of the Thames, the cute shops, and the people walking around in black robes all contribute to this idea of the fantasy school.  I try not to walk around with my camera out all the time because the tourists can get really annoying, but it’s hard not to want to capture every moment.

(The view out of my window.  Over to the right, the river continues and that’s where all the boathouses are located.  Oh yeah, and the bridge to the left, which I walk over everyday, is from Saxon times.  What the heck!)

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