KK’s Blog

After a 6-hour layover in Charlotte, and then an hour delay on my flight, I got home last Monday night around midnight. I had a wonderful dinner made by Kyle, then fell asleep. Then we headed to Campbellsville to see my mom and have another great dinner made by my Aunt Janet. Then went to Kelley Ridge, and I woke up the next morning and got sick and stayed sick and ruined Kyle’s spring break and our plans for heading to TN. But we watched lots of basketball. Now I’m feeling better, and have to get started on working for the next two weeks before I head back over the ocean.

I got up an hour early today and got to church an hour early for the Mass I was wanting to go to and a half-hour late for the Latin Mass that I ended up attending. It took me a while to realize what was going on because it was in Latin and I thought maybe there was just some adoration of the Eucharist going on before the 9:30 Mass. Then we had Communion, and I decided that the Church just didn’t realize that today we were supposed to spring forward in time. Then I came back and decided to look up on the internet what time it really was in Britain. It all said an hour earlier than I thought. So I looked up Daylight Savings Time, and sure enough, it doesn’t start until March 25 instead of March 11. So good news is I’m an hour ahead of what I thought I was. Bad news is I didn’t get very much sleep last night, and I didn’t understand any of the Mass I went to today. Oh well.

Now I’m trying to lift my bags and see if I can tell if they’re under 22 kg or not. I have to decide how many and which books I am taking home. I’m hoping that maybe Sarah will have a scale at her house. I’m also supposed to write this review of my econ tutor, and I’m going to have to ask someone else to take it by his college for me. Although I just realized I might not have a way of printing it off. I wish I could just e-mail it, but he wants it to be anonymous.

I went to see Brendan in London, and it was very nice. Good to see family. And I got to talk with Dr. Hadaway about this term and how I need to stop being duty-bound (ie. going to lectures that aren’t that helpful) and start being more efficient (ie. figuring out how to skim and read less but still learn). He also told me not to kill myself trying to do better next term now that I feel like I’ve been a disappointment. I’m just afraid I’m going to kill myself working harder and then end up not doing any better. Maybe I’ll figure out how to be efficient some day. Then we had the bop last night, which was actually a lot of fun. I danced, and I just decided that I didn’t care what other people thought because they were dancing and not caring what everyone else thought and probably not even looking at me. I had read an entry of Jennifer’s blog about the difference between American and European dancing, and she’s so right. It’s different, and I just decided I was going to make a fool of myself and not care and have fun. I guess I haven’t written in here in while, so maybe I’ll have time to do more detailed updates later, though Brendan says I write too much anyway, but it’s my escape and my therapy. However, right now I need to finish packing and decide when I’m heading to Sarah’s.

I feel like jumping up and down or dancing or just going crazy. But then that’s not really my thing. Instead, I’m going to lie in bed and write in my blog. I’m already in my pajama pants and it’s only 8 in the evening. I turned in my last thing I had to hand in for this term about an hour and a half ago. My presentation on monetary policy with an e-mail explaining why I don’t think it’s very good and telling him he’ll need to help me out during the presentation because I don’t really understand it all. But that’s okay. It’s turned in, and I don’t have to worry about it until Friday afternoon.

Tuesday, I had my last politics tutorial and got my 1-page summaries of IR theories back. He had quite a few comments, but he said they were pretty good. I didn’t do terribly well in the tutorial. Since I didn’t have an essay, I didn’t have quite as much to talk about and I seemed to focus on the wrong stuff in the little reading I had time to do. And I found out I’m going to have him as a tutor again next Michaelmas. He’s a good tutor, but sometimes I feel like he just thinks I’m stupid. But oh well. Hopefully by then I’ll be better at the tutorial thing.

Today, I got up at 5:30 and worked all day on my presentation, so I’m starting to feel the exhaustion. I have trouble staying up past 10 lately, if I get that far. Usually I’m falling asleep by 8:30 or 9. But tomorrow I get to sleep in!! And not do anything, which will be very strange. I have a lecture and I have to meet with Suke for my reports for my tutorial, but other than that, I’m just heading to London to see Brendan, which will be great. Oh and also, I found out I did get a vacation grant approved for the three days before we’re allowed to move in. So I’ll be staying with Sarah before that and then be able to come back to Regent’s and not have to pay. So that’s it. Good day. I still have a tutorial to go through, but I feel like it’s all finished, and I’m not going to worry about it until the bus ride home from London.

I should be preparing for my politics tutorial, but I’ve been reading econ all morning, and I need a little break. And I just got an e-mail from Sarah, saying that it will be no problem for me to stay with them during the break. I don’t remember if I’ve written about my problems with this. I applied for a vacation grant to stay at Regent’s for the two weeks before term starts after my mom, aunt, and uncle have left. First, I got a reply that the school is completely closed for the first week, so there’s no way I can stay, and then for the three days that I could stay, they didn’t give me a vacation grant, so it would cost about the same as staying in a hotel to stay here, and I would have to be buying food too. So I asked Jennifer if I could maybe sleep on her floor for part of the time, which she said is fine, but once other people start moving back in, I was afraid David would find out and I would get in trouble or have to pay or something. So Sarah had said I might be able to stay there part of the time too since some of her housemates might not be there the whole time. I e-mailed her with the new developments and asked if she knew when people wouldn’t be there. And she just wrote back and said it would be no problem for me to stay. The last couple nights, I might be sleeping on a couch instead of a bed, but that’s find by me. I still might stay with Jennifer some too, but it would be nice to have a bed. So I’m still not completely sure what I’ll be doing, but I do know I will have some place to stay in Oxford during that time, so I can still work on my thesis proposal and have access to the libraries. Jennifer also said it would be no problem for me to leave some stuff in her room over the break, so I can get to them when I get back and not have to find a way to store them at Regent’s and get to them before I’ve moved back in. I’m so glad I have good friends. Really. I don’t know what I would do without them. And that includes all the people back home that I’ve bummed beds from over summers while I’m working at internships in cities where I don’t live. I really do rely on the generosity of others, and some day I hope I’ll be able to pay people back in some form or other.

So Brendan got to London today. Sent an e-mail that he is here safe and sound. Hopefully we’ll get to see each other before I head home. I was talking to Ian a while back, and we said it was weird because if you hear what each of us is doing now, our lives seem really glamorous. Or at least I think they do. Brendan just moved to London because he can, working from anywhere with an internet connection for a web design company based in New York. Ian is living in New York, also working from anywhere with an internet connection, doing web design things for a diamond company based in California. And I’m in England attending Oxford University for my second BA in PPE. And my mom is still in Kentucky. But Ian said we’re just conquering the world in her name. Soon she won’t have to work, and she can just spend all her time visiting us all over the world. Haha. Crazy stuff these glamorous lives and dreams of ours.

Here are some rowing pictures of our rowing on, the one race thing we got to do this term. We’re in division two, starting with the second picture. Our guys are in division three, starting with the first picture. You can copy and paste the link below.

http://www.rowphoto.co.uk/events.php?event=torpids_2007&club=All%20Clubs

I think our pictures were taken right after we finished our race, but the guys’ are actually during their race, so they’ve got some more action shots than the girls. We were just too fast, so the cameras couldn’t get us until we had stopped. Haha, right?

I wish the end of a term meant that things got a little more relaxed, but that can never be true. Wednesday I had my tutorial for econ, and I got a good mark on my essay even though he said I didn’t really answer the question. But I knew that. You can ask Kyle. I messaged him on gmail 15 minutes before I was supposed to turn the essay in and said, I’ve written this whole essay but it doesn’t answer the question. I didn’t know what to do, so I put in a couple sentences in the introduction and conclusion saying this is what I’m going to prove and this is what i just proved, but my essay didn’t really prove it. It was something to do with the long run and the short run, which I completely missed but apparently Joe and Simon talked a lot about how to answer the question. I just didn’t get invited. I give up trying there. This will probably be my last tutorial with any of the Regent’s guys, I think, so no more trying to get into their little circle. I’ll just study for finals on my own.

My econ tutor also really liked my works cited page. I’ve decided I am the expert on works cited. You can ask Melissa and Whitney. Our Art Appreciation bibiography definitely got us our 100 on our final project. Haha. I think I’ve been paranoid about referencing things ever since one time in middle school when my mom, as my teacher, saw me copying definitions from my friend Alex’s paper. I claimed it was the same as looking them up in the dictionary, which I still believe, but we both got in trouble, and I think that has made me paranoid about referencing ever since. And in the US, it is a pretty big deal. Here, not so much, or at least the students don’t think so. Some bibliographies that I’ve seen, if they even have one, just give the author and the name of the book, nothing else. It’s so different than what is required in the States. But anyway, my tutor asked me if I used Endnote, this software he had told us about, to do my works cited. And I said, no, I just typed it up.

So that was my Wednesday. I also thought I had lost my return bus ticket for the airport, or actually I thought I had ripped it up and thrown it away, but I didn’t, so that was good. Now I’m getting through the rest of my work. Yesterday I had 4 things to get done by Wednesday. Now it’s down to 3, though one is actually due Monday and another Tuesday, and the third by Wednesday. Time to waste my weekend away in work.