2 more weeks! I don't really want to think about how it's 7th week already. First because I simply don't believe it and second because I've already started to block memories of stressful times earlier in the term. It has been an eventful term.
Since my last post, I've been quite a few places:
Amsterdam, Delft, Karlsruhe and various Black Forest locations, Luxembourg, Brussels, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Dublin.
It was really gratifying to tick off so many countries on my facebook 'Where I've Been' map. Now I'm pretty much addicted to travel. One of the things I'll miss most about living here is the whole discount airline business. Bye bye, Ryanair. I'll miss you, EasyJet. I'm also considering framing my InterRail pass and hanging it up in my room. But looking at it all the time might be too depressing.
This term ...
I applied for (and unfortunately failed to win) a very competitive graduate scholarship. Although I didn't win, it was an honor to be nominated by SLC and it forced me to really think about my plans for the future.
I did sociological research all on my own. I set up, received ethics approval for, and ultimately conducted qualitative interviews with women at Wadham who use Mooncups. It will be part of my larger senior thesis next year and I hope that once I get everything transcribed and analyzed, I can publish my findings somewhere.
I turned 21. It was kind of a shock, actually. I refused to believe it at first. I even threw an 8th birthday party, where we watched the Power Rangers movie and listened to the top 100 hits of 1995.
Now that it's June I'm very sad about leaving Oxford, yet at the same time I really want to go home. I want to see my friends again (though Adrienne, Colleen, and Lauren all visited here). I want to walk down South street eating a gelati from Rita's. I even want to see my family.
I realize that I'll hate being home the moment I get there. No a/c, nothing to eat but peanut butter, Mom hounding me for cash all the time... ah, home life. But I'm determined to make it work. I know how to cook, sort of. I have an internship in Chester helping underprivileged high school students get into college. I have a county SEPTA pass, so I can hop on the bus, trolley, or train whenever I want or need to. I have the GRE to study for, which will take my mind off of things and keep me from complete boredom. And I'll have the memory of Oxford and the experience of a world traveler. That will make all the difference.
last stretch
age wuz here
Adrienne, who goes to Penn State Delco -- excuse me, Penn State Brandywine -- is on spring break this week. Instead of lazing about at home like a normal person, she decided to take a class. A class about London... in London. Woo! So I got to see her on Monday. The coach seemed to take so much more time than usual because it was raining so hard and super windy. I got there eventually and we met up at the Russell Square tube stop, near where she's staying. She had this list of silly tourist things to do for class credit, so we picked one of them to do.
We decided on the British Museum because it was close, free, and pretty cool. The museum is SO BIG. We mostly looked at three things: Egyptian stuff, Greek stuff, and Roman stuff. Afterwards, we wandered around for a bit. I took Age to Camden town, which was probably not the best idea in the world. I apologized in advance for all of the money she would want to spend. Of course she immediately found a Placebo cd to buy. We left pretty quickly because she wanted to buy too many other things. I left around 6 or 7 to head back to Oxford. It was the first time that I had traveled to or from London by myself. I felt all grown up and independent navigating my way through the Underground and finding my bus at Victoria. Good times. I'm really glad I got to see her. If she hadn't come, I wouldn't have seen her until late June. My other friends, Colleen and Lauren, are also coming to England. They'll be staying with me in Oxford for a week in May, after school's over. The week before my birthday, actually, so that should be fun. In 9th grade we all listened jealously as Greg told us about his family's trip to England. Who would have thought back then that the rest of us would go there too?
end of term blah
Well, Hilary term is officially over. It was so intense! Not only did I attempt a new subject, Literature, but my History of Science tutorial also morphed into something much more technical and time-consuming. Literature was rough. My tutor kept telling me to "squeeze" in my analysis of the texts, but I never figured out what that was supposed to mean. I read some really good things - Gulliver's Travels, In Memoriam... even Middlemarch was kind of cool. I enjoyed the reading bit. Not so much with the whole literary analysis thing. Literature is just not my thing, I guess. I'm expecting a B at best. In my other tutorial, we shifted our focus to technology and experimentalism. I pretty much had to teach myself basic concepts of physics and chemistry before I could even attempt to recount the histories of my topics. I've come to realize that my knowledge of the physical sciences is appalling; I've resolved to take more science courses in my senior year.
Yesterday was Wow!How? at the museum. I had a stall of my own. It was pretty simple - poster-sized pictures of different habitats, with laminated animal cut-outs that the kids could stick up on the appropriate places. In the morning I was really enthusiastic and tried to teach them lessons about adaptation. The early morning kids were definitely the best and their parents were really into my spiel. It was pretty gratifying knowing that I could maintain an 8-year-old's interest in camouflage or fur thickness... and they actually asked questions! Zoology for the win! I was the only person at my stall though, so I got tired quickly. Around 2, another girl came over and helped me. By then I had been there for 5 hours and I just sort of sat there and occasionally blurted out a fact until the event was over.
Now I don't have anything to do until the end of April, when Trinity term starts. In a few weeks I'm going to Amsterdam and the Black Forest with a few friends, but that's still a while off. I really need to think of something productive to do until then. If not, I'll go a little (or a lot) crazy. I think I'll spend the first week sleeping. I need it.
book stats
As I'm sure you've noticed, I have an anobii bookshelf on the left sidebar of my blog. <--- See? I have it set to list what I'm currently reading. My bookshelf on anobii is a years-long record of nearly everything I've read in school and out. I was just on their main site, wandering around all bored-like, when I stumbled across something cool. On their statistics page, they have a little box listing their most popular users, according to page views. And I'm on there! See? I think that's pretty sweet. Of course, this is only a UK popularity contest. I'm viewing the British version of the site. The world version doesn't have me being remotely popular. But, hey, I'm cool with being big in the UK! Now if only anobii had a feature to record all of the scholarly articles you've read.... then I'd be totally set on the self-congratulatory web gadget front.
houyhnhnm
Yesterday I turned in a lit paper about Gulliver's Travels. I focused on the second half of the book and wrote about Swift making fun of scientists and some stuff about utopian societies. Here we have to read our essays aloud to our tutors, which was difficult at first, but has gotten much easier with time. I stumbled a bit when I came to talking about the race of intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnm. So of course, he pronounced it for me and I tried to myself, but it wasn't working. I laughed and couldn't reproduce the neigh sound. Then I tried to continue and read something about Gulliver altering his voice to sound more like a horse and neighing, he stopped me. He was like, "but isn't it donkeys who neigh? Horses bray and whinny." Then I was really confused because I had never heard either of those terms and I was pretty sure that donkeys don't neigh. I told him about how I was taught in preschool that cows go "moo" and horses go "neigh". At this point, he got up from his char, went into another room, and brought out a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary (and then a second). According to the dictionary, all three terms were used for horse noises until a couple hundred years ago, when neigh and whinny because the primary words. It's also worth mentioning that while he was flipping through the pages, he was making horse noises to to himself, probably to test out which pronunciation sounded better. Wow. The whole thing reminded me of the SNL Celebrity Jeopardy skit, where the contestants are asked "What sound does a doggy make?"
wikipedia, on the internet, with the answers
Yesterday was Gwen's birthday. We went out for high tea over the weekend. Or I should say, we blindfolded Gwen, marched her all the way up Iffley road and High street, where we lead her to the Grand Cafe for tea. We got some pretty hilarious looks from people passing us walking and on the bus. Good times. I bought her Cluedo, which is what these strange people over here call Clue. That extra syllable really drove me crazy, so I finally looked it up on wikipedia.
In Canada and the U.S., the game is known as Clue. It was retitled because the traditional British board game Ludo, on which the name is based, was less well known there than its American variant Parcheesi.[1] There are also localised versions for Japan and China.
The North American versions of Clue replace the character "Reverend Green" from the original Cluedo with "Mr. Green". This is the only country to continue to make such a change. However, modern editions of the games now call him Reverend Green.
Also, Mr. Boddy is called Mr. Black in British-speak, which actually makes a lot more sense with the whole color thing going on. AND they give detailed character histories on the game's instructions, which I'm not too sure I've seen before in the American version. It might be there, but I never own a copy myself and have no clue what comes in the box at home. It all makes sense now. Thanks, Wikipedia.
I love Wikipedia. It scares me, with the whole wikiality thing and the "battle for information" that goes on with the anonymous editing, but it is amazing.
them dems
First of all, I'm trying my hardest to be a politically apathetic Brit until June. I'm trying not to get too excited about the primaries because I'd get frustrated about being so far away from the action and unable to volunteer for a candidate. With that, I'd just like to say that I'm REALLY, REALLY EXCITED about this year in politics. I'm so excited for November, when there will probably be a massive turnout of youth and minority voters. My aunt recently tried to convince me to re-register as a Republican ("that's just what people DO in Delaware county"), but this year I'm so happy to be a part of the Democratic party. I really like both Obama and Clinton. I understand the criticisms of both candidates, but they don't bother me too much. I hate this whole head-to-head campaign combat thing between them in the media. I hope that by the time I get back in the country, the nominee's campaign will have long since gotten past that and moved on to bigger things. Yay hope!
