That's it.

I'm ready to be done. I'm ready to come home. I'm ready for no more papers and eating normal food and Christmas movies and my giant comfy bed and snuggling with my cat and being back in the same time zone as 98% of the people I love.





But also. It would just be nice if apparition was a thing.

10 things that Happened in November

1. I went back to London twice and to Edinburgh once. Things I did include: tour the Tower of London, eat a lot of cheese samples at Borough market, visit the Tate Modern, hear a lot of bagpipes, hike half of Arthur's Seat, run around the Edinburgh zoo like a five-year-old, and become a regular at the Elephant House.

First visit to Elephant House!

Sippin' cocoa like a boss. A sleepy,
post-six-hour-train-ride boss.

Arthur's Seat.

       














2. I fell in love with Kit Smart and his poems, because they gave me comfort that other people's minds work in similar ways to mine. I then discovered he did most of his writing in an insane asylum.

3. I wrote a play! Not the 50 page play I have to submit in under two weeks, a different one. 25 pages that I wrote in under two days, then spent about a week editing. I'm really proud of it. I think it's one of the best things, if not the best thing, I've ever written.

4. I wondered (and am still wondering) how I can write a 25-page play so easily, yet when it comes to things I actually have to turn in I can't seem to get anywhere.

5. I saw an opera called The Yellow Sofa, and fell madly in love with the pianist. Because 1) we all know I have a thing for pianists (we don't? now we do!), and 2) he had so much joy on his face during the entire performance. He never stopped smiling. He was completely alive and engaged and had so much passion for what he was doing, and I want to do something like that. I also saw the most incredible piece of student theatre at UEA, and last week saw The Importance of Being Earnest for the first time.

6. I discovered quite a liking for butternut squash.

7. I lost a glove.

8. I realized how much I'm ready to go home, and how much I'm not ready to leave.

9. I started looking at Creative Writing MFA programs. Because clearly the best way to procrastinate on writing one play and two essays is to start freaking out about the future.

10. I typed up this blog post in another attempt to procrastinate. So here you go, a very brief version of the month of November.

I am Thankful.

Yep, that's right. Thankful with a capital T.

It's been an interesting experience celebrating Thanksgiving away from home for the first time, not to mention in a country that doesn't even observe Thanksgiving as a holiday. I missed the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade for possibly the first time in my life. I missed everyone going around with "Happy Thanksgiving!" on their tongue. I missed the giant Thanksgiving dinner of turkey, stuffing, potatoes, rolls, green beans and pumpkin pie. I missed being home.

But. It's been a wonderful Thanksgiving nonetheless, and I have so much to be thankful for today.

I'm thankful I'm in England! This is an opportunity that I'm so blessed to have had, and while it's been a little rough at times, it's an experience that blesses me every day. I'm thankful for beautiful, sunny weather that defies everyone's expectations. I'm thankful that Norwich finally feels like home. I'm thankful my three hour seminar was cancelled. I'm thankful for the puppy-lovin' I got this morning playing with a 12-week-old beagle. I'm thankful that my Creative Writing adviser is now completely confident in my play. I'm thankful for spontaneous tea-time with Katie.  I'm thankful for all the friends I've made here, and all the friends I have back home. I'm thankful for a night filled with Christmas lights and fireworks. I'm thankful for a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner of burgers and curly fries with my flatmates. I'm thankful for the technology that allows me to be with my family even when they are thousands of miles away. I am thankful that I got to see my grandparents tonight, and that my grandma witnessed a "miracle." I'm thankful that in nineteen short hours I will be back in London with some of my best friends in the whole world. I am thankful for so, so many things, so many blessings that God and this life have given me.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! Sending you so much love this fine Turkey Day. :)

Return to Oxford!

For those of you who don't know, I spent a month in Oxford when I was fifteen as a part of the Oxbridge Academic Programs. I can trace so much of who I am today back to that month. Without a doubt, it was one of the best experiences of my life. So five years later upon my return to England, Oxford was first on my list of Places of Absolute Necessity to Visit.

The Pelican Sundial at Corpus Christi College
(where I studied 5 years ago).

I got in around 8:30pm and met my friend Alexandra (confusing, I know. but she prefers Xandra, so I'll shorten it for the rest of the time to make it a little more obvious I'm not talking about myself in the third person) at the train station. Walking back to her apartment in absolute darkness was so disorienting. I literally could not recognize anything we were walking by! She had booked dinner for us at Atomic Burger, a tiny little burger joint that is space/comic book themed. Sadly, I have no pictures, but believe me when I say it was the coolest. After eating a delicious burger called the Frito Bandito (first meat since London! Minus the day in Great Yarmouth, but I'm a little skeptical about the bacon. and the sausage. and the fish cake.), we got ice cream at G&D's before watching a late night showing of Ghostbusters at a small, one-screen cinema. Probably the best part was the 20-30 other college students in the cinema who were dressed up for Halloween and very very drunk and so excited to watch the film! One of them kept turning around to apologise for how much she loves Ghostbusters. But it definitely made the experience more entertaining!

We found this blue wig outside Exeter's great hall
the next morning...

Saturday after brunch and delicious delicious hot chocolate (possibly the chocolatiest I've ever had!), I wandered back to Corpus Christi college for a long awaited reunion.

There were some new things:

This funky greenhouse filled with stuff.

A Pacific Boxer statue?

And many, many familiar things:

The Fraenkel Room! Where my Literature and the Fantastic
class took place.

The little "door" that inspired my L&F
final project.

And of course, the Alice in Wonderland tree.

Eventually I met up with Zoe and some of her friends from BADA at the Pitt Rivers Museum, one of many (I discovered) places I never got around to visiting during OxPrep.The rest of the day was spent touring Christ Church, popping back over to Corpus Christi, wandering about the neighboring park, and then going to Turf's Tavern for dinner and mulled wine.

Zoe et moi in the Great Hall of Christ Church.

Sunday led to more wandering and a lot of time at Blackwell's. I bought a few books (I have no resistance when it comes to 3 for 2 deals), then decided to go check out the Dicken's exhibit at the Bodleian. Earlier that week I'd checked the Bodleian website for tours, and the website had said none were taking place that weekend. But lo and behold, I walked in and they had one spot left on the last extended tour of the day - happening in a half hour! So I bought my ticket, spent 30 minutes gaping over first editions of Dickens, then started my tour.

Basically, the Bodleian is the most beautiful place. Duke Humfrey's reading room is like heaven.

After the Bodleian, I went to the Museum of the History of Science, another museum I didn't visit during OxPrep. Pretty much it's a museum filled with all my favorite scientific things.

 

 

And really, apart from eating more food and wandering more about the streets, that was Oxford! Sorry if all this feels a little summarized, but I'm so behind with posts I'm trying to just whip 'em out as quick as I can. 

It was possibly the nicest weekend I've had while abroad. I felt very much at peace with myself in Oxford. I didn't feel the pressures of needing to do something or be somewhere, I was simply there. And that was all I needed to be. 

Four more years!!!

Ok, I'm still working on my Oxford post, got distracted by some coursework and silly things and such. But I wanted to interrupt with a current post, because I am so happy about so many things today.

1. OBAMA WON!!! I wasn't worried at all until about a week ago, when I started seeing reports that the election was going to be neck and neck. Because it didn't even cross my mind that Romney might actually stand a chance at winning. And yes, when we took that Liberal/Conservative placement test in AP Gov I ranked as pretty freaking liberal as you can go (you and me, Brian Bradley, what's up!), so I don't understand the appeal of Romney in any way, shape or form...but I thought the rest of the country was at least on the corner of my page. It was interesting how many Americans I talked to last night/this morning felt the same way. Just dumbfounded that Romney might be able to win the election, unable to fathom what we would do if Romney won.

Oh, fun fact. Whoever was typing the subtitles during the election coverage was TERRIBLE. Mitt Romney was on multiple occasions Mister Ronnie. Obama was once Prama. There were a lot of lovely moments about fat and magic.

But Obama won. And I was able to get three very peaceful hours of sleep.

I was following an amazing page on facebook called "90 Days, 90 Reasons." I did not read as many as I should have or would have liked. But Nick Flynn wrote reason 95, and that one really stuck with me. He said, "Obama is wise and flawed and compromised and trying, like everyone else I know. For all that hasn’t happened these past four years, I no longer wake up each morning feeling like I’m caught in a bad, unending play. I no longer feel that every single one of the things that make up what I think of as meaningful (children, health, air, tolerance, etc.) is being trivialized, marginalized, and crushed under the wheels of a fleet of black limos. I feel like I now wake up in the real world, the world we all live in. It can be better, of course, but it is real.

I will vote for Obama—that was decided thirty years ago. There was never a chance I’d vote for an empty deathhead like Romney. I know it’s hard, I know we aren’t exactly living the revolutionary change we might have (naively) expected, but it’s time to do what we can to prevent four or eight or a hundred years of these smarmy thugs parading around our brains. That play is over, it sucked every single night of its run, and now we are walking home. While we were huddling in the dark, the world got torn apart, and lots of neighborhoods now are either dying from neglect or dead from money. I simply try to avoid the ones that are dead from money, but the ones dying from neglect deserve another shot. Let’s go home. Everything will be all right. Let’s go home."

I mentioned to a friend last night, I hadn't realized how unconcerned I had been the last four years. I didn't worry much about the fate of our country. And maybe I should have, maybe this is coming from a very politically naive 20-year-old (and I'll be the first to admit how little I know when it comes to politics), but I felt secure with Obama. Looking back, I was always a little nervous under Bush. Even when I was eight and all I knew was my mom voted Democrat and my dad was stubborn. When I was twelve and furious at all the hateful bumper stickers that suddenly adorned every car. When I was sixteen and opened the Democratic side of the APUSH/APGOV debate the day of the election, not knowing the weight that would be lifted from my shoulders that night. Not even knowing I had that weight until yesterday. 

And so today I am happy. I am happy that our country decided to keep hoping. In his re-election speech, Obama said, "And tonight, despite all the hardship we've been through, despite all the frustrations of Washington, I've never been more hopeful about our future. I have never been more hopeful about America. And I ask you to sustain that hope. I'm not talking about blind optimism, the kind of hope that just ignores the enormity of the tasks ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. I'm not talking about the wishful idealism that allows us to just sit on the sidelines or shirk from a fight.

I have always believed that hope is that stubborn thing inside us that insists, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us so long as we have the courage to keep reaching, to keep working, to keep fighting."

It was beautiful to sit in a room packed full of people from all over the world, who cared so much about the fate of America. To see all the people willing to stay up until 4:30am because they knew they wouldn't be able to sleep without knowing. To experience the excitement as Obama passed Romney and inched closer and closer to 270. To experience the complete and absolute joy that filled the room when Obama won Ohio and the election.

So I am happy. No matter what else happens today, I am so, so happy.

(Warning: from here on, the things that make me happy are much more simple and frivolous.)

2. I woke up at 8:30am, after barely 3 hours of sleep. But already the sun was up and the sky was blue and I was humming Beatles' songs through class. And it has stayed such a beautiful November day since.

3. I got my VegBox today!! And, in honor of Obama's re-election, I decided to make a feast. An egg scramble, including: red pepper, broccoli, mushrooms, potato, onion, and BACON. Also a freshly baked baguette, it was still warm when I bought it. And some white wine, because I am CELEBRATING. 

4. I submitted my first essay! 

5. In just over a half hour I will be watching Skyfall.

6. Maintenance finally fixed my window, so now it is closed! They told me I could open it again if I wanted, but there's no way I'm risking it.

7. Obama won. He won.

8. White wine makes me very happy.

9. After my I finish my presentation for Early English Drama tomorrow, all I have to worry about for the next couple weeks is finishing a first draft of my play for Creative Writing.

10. Four days until London, EIGHT DAYS UNTIL EDINBURGH AND KIMBERLEE BUSH!

11. I've only had three hours of sleep, remember? So being deliriously happy is kind-of unavoidable at this point. :)

Grumbles

If we're going chronologically, we'll have to cover my Dark Days before we get to Oxford. If you're looking for the happy, fluffy study abroad stuff, go ahead and skip this post. Go read about Oxford!

Following Katie's birthday, I was plagued with a very serious case of writer's block. Which left me with a lot of time to sit and think and be frustrated. And all my sitting and thinking and frustration led me to this conclusion:

I am not happy with the academics here.

I'm not getting what I want academically from this program. Which was hard for me to come to terms with, because one of the reasons I chose UEA was that it was supposed to be an excellent university for English Lit and Creative Writing students. To be fair, I believe that this is probably true if you're a full time student planning on attending UEA for all three to four years of the degree. I also think part of it has to do with luck. Maybe I just didn't get a good sampler of the courses available, and I most definitely was unlucky with my seminar placement for 18th Century Writing. My seminar (one of four) is led by a recent post-graduate who does not have a lot of experience teaching, and unfortunately is not too skilled in facilitating discussion. So for two hours every Friday I sit in a room with nineteen other people who don't really know what to say about the texts we've been reading, with a seminar leader who doesn't really know how to spark us into conversation. And the lectures have been getting less and less thought-provoking and inspiring each week.

Early English Drama is surprisingly not so disappointing as 18th Century Writing. Creative Writing is a whole other story that you really don't want me to get started on. (Trust me.) But I don't feel like I'm getting anything from the courses here that I couldn't get at any other school, and would probably have a better educational experience in the same/similar courses at Whitman.

One thing I love about Whitman is that in all my courses, even the ones I've disliked and trudged through, I experienced some sort of personal growth or discovery. Even Calc. II and Global Media & Revolution! And I think that's an important and necessary part of the educational process. As of now, I've learned the most from reading Rilke and Pinter, which has been entirely in my spare time and vastly unrelated to my courses. (With Pinter, at least I'm being exposed to playwriting, which is helpful since I'm writing a play for my Creative Writing dissertation. So slightly related.)

So maybe there are more important things than academics. And maybe that's ok. (And maybe some of you have been telling me this for a while.) This has been somewhat of an unfolding realization for me over the past year or so, but I was hoping for something a bit more from UEA. Again, it was a large part of why I chose UEA in the first place. I was hoping to at least enjoy my courses on some level.

After dealing with all this for a week, my trip to Oxford came at the perfect time.

SNEAK PEEK OF MY DARLING CITY!

A Birthday and Great Yarmouth

For my flatmate Katie's birthday, we had a whole day of celebrations planned out. First we woke up at 8am to barge into her room with nose makers and confetti. Well, Danielle and I woke up. Alex and Henry were still a little hungover/asleep. Eventually we did all get up, and after giving Katie her gift we went out to breakfast at Wetherspoon's. A proper English breakfast, including: toast, egg, sausage, "bacon" (?), tomato (??), and beans (???).

I miss American breakfasts. I miss all the breakfast places in Walla Walla. All I want is a frontier skillet from Maple Counter, some pumpkin pancakes from Clarette's, and really anything they want to feed me at Bacon and Eggs.

ANYWAY.

After breakfast we took the train to Great Yarmouth, a cute town on the coast that reminded me a bit of some Oregon's coastal towns. I had my first fish and chips, we played frisbee on the beach, and I also played DDR for the first time!

My restaurant! 

The have the best names for things in England, I've discovered.

Katie, Alex and Henry.

THE BEACH! Very very flat. Quite different from Oregon beaches.

Henry and Alex, lovers for life.

Katie and me! 

There are a ton of arcades in Great Yarmouth. Giant, gigantic, ginormous arcades.

We got back to Norwich around six and the sunset looked like this:

I was supposed to meet up with some other friends that night, so I skipped pizza dinner with the flat and instead embarked on a great bus misadventure, where I ended up on the bus for approximately 80 minutes for what I would later discover is a 25 minute walk in an entirely straight line from Mary Chapman. But Katie (non-flatmate Katie) and Josh took me to a pub called the Fat Cat, which is possibly the most quintessentially "British" pub I've been to. It's the only, or one of the only, pubs in England that still serves only ale, no food, whereas I guess the majority of pubs can only maintain their business through serving food.

Once I got back to Mary Chapman, we spent the rest of the night celebrating with cake, music and, yes, alcohol. For the record, I believe I will have a very high appreciation for American cake once I return to the states, after experiencing the British version...