Classes (and the weeks, for that matter) have been whizzing by, and we are already in "reading week" -- the halfway point for first term. Can it be, I am already one sixth through my course?!
My classmates are all even cooler than I first realized, as even the ones I suspected of being pretentious have turned out to be nice. We're a pretty international crew. In the crowd that I hang out with, there are a handful of Americans besides myself -- four boys named Chase, Cameron, Miles, and Dan. Funnily enough, four out of five of us are Southerners! Represent! (Even odder, Miles is also from Atlanta, hailing from Buckhead. But I think he's lived in the UK before.)
Other than us Yanks, there's a sort of edgy Canadian girl named Caitlin; "Big" Paul from Liverpool (who is, I think, John Earle's British doppleganger); "Little" Paul who is also British and, counter-intuitively, older than Big Paul; crazy Patch from Cork, Ireland; Dave from somewhere in England (I forget); footballer Amy, who I think is originally from Glasgow; Scottish Lauren, who has pretty red hair; and this hilarious woman Joanne, who just so happens to be Lauren's stepmother. Of course, there are a bunch of other people, but these are the ones with whom I most often interact, and form the real backbone of my class experience.
The professors seem pretty diverse. My favorite so far, if I can risk going on record with this, is Elizabeth, who leads my Craft & Experimentation course. She talks at about 800 miles an hour, but she clearly knows her stuff, doesn't look down on the students, and is really easy to get along with. (Luckily for me, Elizabeth is my tutor, with whom I have occasional one-on-one meetings. Some people weren't so lucky.) Michael, who does Editing & Publication, is also nice, but his lectures can sometimes be a bit dry -- less due to his personality than the subject matter, perhaps.
Even though we have so much time between our actual class sessions, I feel fairly busy trying to get through all the coursework in the interim. In the rare times when I have no pressing coursework, I haven't been doing as much writing as I probably should be -- it's a different forum and a different sort of writing than I usually do, so sometimes I really have to talk myself into doing it, unfortunately. But it'll probably make me more of a well-rounded writer, so I'll keep plugging away!
What takes up a lot of the time is the reading for C&Ex, which is usually a whole book between classes. So far we've read:
1) "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee
(which I'd read before in junior high, and enjoyed decently)
2) "Three Lives" by Gertrude Stein
(which may be the single most boring piece of literature that I've ever read)
3) "The Old Man and the Sea" by Ernest Hemingway
(which has been my absolute favorite so far -- his delicate and beautiful descriptions are not to be matched)
4) "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe" by Carson McCullers
(my second favorite so far, with a very natural style that pulled me along quickly and built suspense well)
5) "Ceremony" by Leslie Marmon Silko
(which was beautifully written, but had the pacing of an old rock)
And next we're reading Muriel Spark's "In the Driver's Seat," but I've only finished the first chapter, so my notes from the peanut gallery are as of yet inconclusive.
Outside of class, we students occasionally go to a pub, or me and Ryan hang out with his family. Emma had us over to hers one night, where we played Balderdash, watched X Factor, and ate some awesome curry made from scratch by Caitlin. (X Factor is the original Brit version of American Idol, complete with Simon Cowell on the judges panel. Emma watches it religiously, and I mean religiously. We've been watching it every week since I got here, so now I've become sort of invested...I'm pulling for Matt Cardle! His voice is so beautiful! Hearts~!)
We had another little family party last night, actually; Kieran and Fiona have finally moved into their new house, and had the whole gang over for drinks and games. (The "games" being Wii Sports, which Kieran dominated with an unbroken 10-game winning streak. His two advantages? Practice, and being the only sober one at the party.) It was a nice time, though I, Caitlin, and Fiona drank a questionable amount of wine between the three of us.
Otherwise, everything is going fairly well. It's gotten pretty cold here recently, though; the time has come for layering! Ryan and I have been watching a lot of "The Mentalist" in the evenings, because I went and got him properly hooked on it. We've just finished season two, and are set to start watching season three online. We haven't made much progress finding a flat yet, unfortunately, because there is a certain amount of bureaucracy standing in our way. So feel free to send us some good karma on that front!
