A Parting Thought

From The Fault in Our Stars: 

"You don't get to choose if you get hurt in this life, old man, but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices. I hope she likes hers."

I like my choices.

I hope you like yours. 

Yikse (yes, that's spelled correctly)

I'm kind of an essentialist when it comes to a lot of things, including what I want out of life. I realized not too long ago that maybe that's not as good a thing as I thought it was--that maybe my dreams were too small.

As I type, I'm looking at scholarship opportunities in the UK. Again.

That turnaround was quick.

The Road Goes Ever On and On

The Road goes ever on and on,
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet. 
And whither then? I cannot say. 

We literally just returned from our week of wandering through Spain and Switzerland. Stephen and Aidan are still in transit, but Kalie and Sean and I just stumbled through the door of 29 Faulkner Street, and--after saying a quick hello to Janice, who is downstairs packing up our house--promptly collapsed. I'm drowsily sprawled on my creaky mattress in my room. Odd to think that I am the last OOSC student who will be sleeping in this room. Odder still to think that soon it won't be my room anymore.

It's empty and sun-drenched, the way it was when I first moved in about three months ago. So strange.

I think we're going to use the house as a home base for the next few days, until it's time to overnight in London for our flight out of Heathrow. In the meantime we want to do a bit of travelling: Canterbury, Bath, Stonehenge, another day or two in London. A jam-packed final week in England.

I'm glad we're ending it here. I really like Europe, but England has begun... no, not even that. England feels like home. It is another home. What is it that Bilbo says to Gandalf about Frodo? "In his heart he's still in love with the Shire. The woods, the fields, the little rivers." I know how he feels now, having lived in Oxfordshire. It's hard to pull myself away.

But there is another adventure behind this one. The road curves behind a hill, and there lies a new beginning. And there are friends who will take that curve with me, and friends I will meet again on the other side of it, and friends I haven't even met yet who will come into my life when we least expect it.

All semester, I've been caught up in the worry of what is beyond that curve. What will I do after Oxford? After graduation? Right now, though, I don't care. I know that the road goes on, that the pursuing of it and--maybe more importantly--the enjoyment of it is a choice... and right now, I think that's good enough for me.

Till We Have Faces

"...The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me; as if I could wander away, wander for ever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other to the world's end."

~C. S. Lewis
Till We Have Faces

In Which I Procrastinate with Absolutely No Shame

There comes a point in every semester when you reach the stage Kalie likes to call "burnout." Your brain is saturated with information and you can't process it all, and in order to write your papers you have to wring it out like a sponge and look helplessly at the mess you have to sift through. (I probably could not have picked a more gross analogy. Sorry, guys.) Alas, I have hit that point. I have two papers left, one of which is due tomorrow, and I just lay back on my bed in my empty house and wailed, "NOOOOOOOOO, I DON'T WANT TO DO IT!"

I have had a gloriously fun time procrastinating today, though. Kalie and I decided that the kitchen needed a thorough scouring, and we cleaned while singing--at the top of our lungs--Disney songs playing on her computer. (We did this for an hour at least. The neighbors probably hate us.) And after that was done, we sat with Stephen talking to Sean's two visiting friends, Jeremy and Andrew, who--as Kalie and I were discussing earlier--are a hilarious Laurel-and-Hardy duo, more entertaining than anything on TV. Now, however, everyone has gone to the Covered Market to retrieve birds for tomorrow's Thanksgiving feast, and if I plan on making a pie at all, I need to get working.

But, as I've said, I've hit that point.

I used to think that there wasn't a point. I've been told by multiple sources (okay, almost everyone I know) that I'm way too hard on myself. So I kind of expected myself to just be perfectly fine with churning out essay after essay. I'm an English major, right? I find writing essays so much fun! (Please, please pick up on the sarcasm there.) Therefore, when I find myself falling a little flat, I put it down to a character flaw. This is a really, really dumb thing to do, and I only ever attribute it to myself: I never think that other people getting burned out aren't justified for it.

Somehow I never really let it sink in how much work we've had to do at Oxford. Last night I went to a C.S. Lewis Society meeting at The Eagle and Child and had a nice talk with some of the other students. There was a very nice girl, Nicole, who is working toward her second BA in theology here at Oxford, and she was talking about how rigorous the course load is. Somehow I assumed that she was taking a more rigorous path of study, but during the conversation I realized: she's doing as much as I am. Two tutorials, one every week and one every other week, a paper due for each of them. Which means that, in the past month and a half (since the Oxford term didn't start until early October), I've written ten essays. Ten individual essays, each incorporating several complete texts of reading, all of which had to be read in a week so that I could write the paper over a few days. And that's a lot of work.

But I can't say that I haven't enjoyed it. I've turned out some good work that I'm actually proud of and might submit to conferences and journals after I clean it up some when I get back, and I've been able to read a lot of great stuff. Even this week, for this essay I don't want to write, I loved my reading material, and I'm really looking forward to my topic for next week. Academically, Oxford has been really good for that aspect of my growth.

All the same, we're all hitting that burnout point, if we haven't hit it already. But we have creative ways of combating it. One can always leave the house during the fleeting hours of daylight to take a walk around the meadow or up Cornmarket Street to clear your mind. Sarah, one of the girls in the program who came from another school, has introduced to me the wonderful activity of "procrastibaking," which is as delicious as it is fun. (Stephen does this too, to wonderful effect, but Sarah came up with the name.) When Kalie and I are writing papers at the same time, which happens fairly frequently since our tutorials are on the same day, we closet ourselves in her room and work with a reward system: we get to watch things every time we finish a paragraph or a page. In this way we worked through the last three seasons of How I Met Your Mother, and when we ran out of episodes we started watching movies online. (The most recent conquest: The Emperor's New Groove. You know you're jealous.) And sometimes I blog to put off my papers.

But I think I've procrastinated long enough by writing this post about procrastination. Now I have to go back to work, or else these pies won't get cooked, and that, my friends, would be a tragedy. I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving tomorrow!

In Which I Show Myself to be a Foodie (which we all knew already)

I realize that my blog hasn't been exactly culturally revelatory for my readers. What with infrequent posts and random vignettes and updates about my (oh so fascinating) life, I've given you little to no idea what it's like to live over here. So here is a little snippet to fill in the gaps I have left in my narrative.

We've been feeding ourselves here in Oxford, which has been good for all of our wallets in addition to being delicious, because we've got some really good cooks in our houses. Teaching myself to cook British dishes like steak and ale pie, bangers and mash, and jacket potatoes has been one of this semester's big adventures, and I've been very happy with my progress. I mentioned in my last post that we usually buy our groceries from the covered market, which has the cheapest fruits and veggies and the best meat, but often we also have to run to the local grocery store, Sainsbury's.

British grocery stores are a little befuddling for an American. Usually in stores back home everything is located in the same general area, even between different chains. The grocery stores here are organized differently than the ones back at home--I mean, I know they make sense to the Brits, but our first few times in Sainsbury's were disorienting. It's not too bad, of course: the fruits are grouped together, the vegetables are grouped together, and the bread is grouped together. Not too hard to figure out. But trying to find canned stuff or jam or honey can be a bit of an adventure, and once we spent nearly fifteen minutes hunting through Sainsbury's for eggs. Turns out that the British keep them, unrefridgerated, right next to the cereal.

I know. I don't get it either.

Today threw me for a bit of a loop again. You see, the fifteen Americans who are here as part of the OOSC program are throwing a Thanksgiving feast for ourselves on Thursday, to keep us all from missing our families too much and also, honestly, because we all really like to eat. I've been assigned mashed potatoes (as a compliment to my cooking, Sean has deemed me "The Potato Mistress," which I was really happy about until he verbalised it to one of his friends and I realized how silly it sounds) and pumpkin pie. I have never made pumpkin pie before, so I have been looking forward to learning.

We bought pumpkins on Halloween to carve into jack-o-lanterns, and we'd intended on using those pumpkins for the Thanksgiving pie. So after we gutted them and separated the seeds, I put the pulp in a bowl and stuck it in the freezer, thinking I would boil it and blend it until I got pumpkin pie filling. After a few days of sitting out in the English weather, we threw the jack-o-lanterns away.

So up until a few days ago, I thought I was golden in the pumpkin pie area. Until, that is, I called my grandmother, who informed me that you're supposed to make the pie out of the rind, and that the guts are pretty useless. So, I have no pumpkin for the pie.

No big, I think. I'll just go to the store and get some canned pumpkin. Earlier today I walked on up to Sainsbury's and perused the canned goods aisle. Unable to find what I'm looking for and thinking that this is because I'm a silly American, I ask an attendant for help.

Me: Excuse me, but do you guys carry canned pumpkin?

Well-meaning Sainsbury's employee: Do we carry... what?

Me: Canned pumpkin. You know, for pumpkin pies.

Well-meaning Sainsbury's employee: I, er, don't think so. Honestly, I've never even seen that before.

Hm. Well, this posed a challenge. I supposed that maybe British stores just don't carry canned pumpkin because they expect you to make your pumpkin pie literally from scratch, like a real domestic Wonder Woman. But I was holding out hope that I might still be able to find something so I wouldn't have to boil down and carve a pumpkin. Later, as I was paying for an apple at the grocery store at the head of Cornmarket Street to break my 20-pound bill for bus fare, I asked if they carried canned pumpkin.

"Sorry, no," said the girl behind the counter, smiling as she passed me my change. "I suppose that's an American thing."

"I guess so." I explained to her that I was baking a pie for a big dinner coming up, and she seemed very interested.

"Oh, I've never even seen one of those," she said brightly. "If you manage it, would you bring it by so I can look at it."

Whoa. Hold on now. Never SEEN pumpkin pie? Like, never TASTED pumpkin pie? I was honestly astonished. Maybe I thought our ancestors brought pumpkin pie over on the Mayflower in their "Ye Olde Booke of Cookinge" or something, but it had never crossed my mind that people over here didn't eat pumpkin pie. Sure, Britain had a lot of things I'd never heard of before, much less eaten. But... pumpkin pie? It's like there's a whole realm of heaven to which they've been denied access.

I assured her that if I managed to find a pumpkin, I would definitely bring her a piece of pie for her to try, and I left Sainsbury's a little wiser, if a little more astonished.

I know this isn't a very deep post, or very poignant or anything like that, but it just goes to show that the quirks of different countries never cease to surprise me, and even when you start feeling pretty well at home, the new culture you're in reminds you that you still have a lot to learn. Even if it's something as simple as the food you eat.

Words Worth Pondering

"Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden; it is easier to say "My tooth is aching" than to say "My heart is broken". Yet if the cause is accepted and faced, the conflict will strengthen and purify the character and in time the pain will usually pass. Sometimes, however, it persists and the effect is devastating; if the cause is not faced or not recognised, it produces the dreary state of the chronic neurotic. But some by heroism overcome even chronic mental pain. They often produce brilliant work and strengthen, harden, and sharpen their characters till they become like tempered steel." ~C.S. Lewis
The Problem of Pain