The reasons all have run away, but the feeling never did...

I have been shamefully remiss in my blogging duties! Life's just been insane lately. I've been waging a brave war against what they refer to as Fresher's Flu here, but the cold medicine in this country is mildly effective at best, so I've spent the last week and a halfish sniffling and coughing up a storm. It's kind of baffling, to tell the truth. They sell codiene over the counter here, but Nyquil is illegal.

My workload remains intense. For lit I had to read the majority of Le Morte D'Arthur (I got to skip the parts about Sir Tristam) and read secondary sources so I could write a paper on the role of individuality in the book. I'm about to email that one in to my tutor so he can tell me I'm full of crap tomorrow. And psych. Oh boy. It is most certainly not a joke. For Thursday morning I have to go through all of last week's reading, which was full of scientific gobbledygook, make a list of things I don't understand in it, write a 4 page, size 11 font, paper on it, then read 5 articles and make a powerpoint presentation explaining each of them with 4-5 slides. I feel sort of like I did when I got to Sarah Lawrence. People told me it was a lot of work. Logically, I knew it was a lot of work. But I couldn't really comprehend what a lot of work was until I actually had to do it. I knew Oxford was going to be hard. I mean, even describing the workload is kind of intimidating. But I didn't truly get it until I had to do it. Which is not to say that I don't enjoy it. I do. It's just HARD.

On a far more positive note, Thom Yorke of Radiohead fame lives in Oxford, and we totally saw him in a pub last night. We're pretty sure he lives in our neighborhood because my flatmate also saw him out running one morning. But, yeah, he was just sitting in the pub, reading a book. Celebrity encounters are always fun, even when you have to pretend like you don't know who the person is, even though it's totally obvious. It was a really nice pub, too. I think we're going to make it our local haunt, and not just because of its Thom Yorke sighting potential.

Really, today's been an incredibly productive day. I read like 3 secondary sources, took notes on them, made an outline, and wrote a 7 page paper, which I'm going to email to my tutor in the next twenty minutes. Then I'm going to do some psych work. It's always nice to feel productive!