I did write a post last Sunday, I just didn’t actually post it because… I don’t know, I wasn’t ready to recognize the fact that it would be my second-to-last post in Oxford.

And now I am writing my last post in Oxford. But I am ready to recognize that?

A week from now, I will be home in San Francisco, and that thought makes me really happy. It also really hurts.

On Friday night (the 19th), I started saying goodbye to the rest of my friends here, and on Saturday all of my friends except for my roommate left. That day was probably the hardest energy/emotional crash I have experienced while being here. From about 10pm Friday night until 10pm Saturday night I am pretty sure I didn’t make it through more than about 2 hours straight without crying. We had the brilliant idea on Friday night of buying up tons of chocolate from the vending machines with the rest of the money on our Bod cards (student cards), pushing the two beds in the room together to make one SuperBed, and curling up together and watching Parent Trap (the whole England-America double life thing… surprisingly relevant…).

So I cried during that. (When Lindsey Lohan/Halley gets to see her mom, Natasha Richardson, for the first time… oh man, it gets me so bad)

We finished around 2:30am, and I tried to sleep and failed, so I put on some depressing music and cried some more, slept a little, got myself out of bed at 9:30am to help carry suitcases down the staircase and walk my friends outside… and spent the rest of the day curled up in my room watching Elementary (it’s kind of my comfort show– I empathize with Joan Watson/Lucy Lui so hard).

I did manage to pull myself together enough to go to Blackwell’s and read about 30 pages of Ulysses, and then walked through the Holywell cemetery again and cried some more.

It’s weird, because I’ve barely cried while I’ve been here, and I guess my body just decided to get it all out in one day. I couldn’t even have pinpointed an exact reason for it. It has to do with leaving, and having to detach from all the people I’ve grown to care about, and just… knowing it is never going to be like this again. And just kind of letting myself mourn that.

My roommate and I went to bed early that night (after a major moment of culture shock: we heard what sounded like gunshots right outside our window, which was open, and both dropped to the floor and covered our heads and moved away from the windows before realizing that we were in England, and the likelihood of a school shooting was next to zero. In fact, they were fireworks to celebrate the end of term).

When I woke up this morning, I felt a lot better, and I went for a run and finished Ulysses (yay!!!) and bought some nail polish. 😀

Without everyone here, and with my last tutorial and my roommate leaving on Tuesday, it’s going to be a quiet last week, but I think that will be good. I will go for long walks and spend as much time as possible reading in Blackwell’s (oh, how I’m going to miss it!) and trying all of the food I haven’t tried yet.

Since I missed last week, a quick update on the things I’ve been up to with the last of my time here:

– seeing Traces, the performance by the circus troupe Les 7 Doigts de la Main (7 Fingers), in London:

– listening to a talk by Neil Gaiman and David Mitchell at Union Chapel (London again)

– attending a book launch for novelist Sarah Leipciger, led by Mark Haddon (author of Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and other books)

– writing and turning in my final short story for Creative Writing, titled “They (Singular)”

– checking out this awesome dude at the Pitt Rivers Museum (which I somehow had not been to before??!?!?! It was freaking awesome!??!?):

– laughing, crying, having loud dance parties in the room, complaining about the weather

– talking to my family over Skype, and feeling so excited to see all of them again, and especially feeling thankful today (Father’s day) for my dad, who listens to me rant about literature nonstop, who has encouraged me in my creative writing pursuits for my entire life, and provided the most inspiring model of someone who made a life doing the creative work he loves. Thank you, Dad, for feeding my curiosity, for asking the big questions with me and admitting it’s okay not to have answers, for all of our adventures past and the many more to come. I miss you and love you a lot, and my mom, and my Sister Bear, and all of my wonderful family and loved ones, those who I will see soon back in the Bay Area and at Spirit Lake, those in Arizona, and those abroad all over the world.

If home is where the heart is, then I have a great many homes.

Wow. I feel like a lot happened this week, and I am kind of exhausted, and everything these last couple weeks is going by so fast!

I am starting to actually process the fact that I’m leaving in– 20 days exactly, wow.

I am saying wow a lot, aren’t I…

(Speaking of which, can’t say “wow” now without thinking of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlLMlJ2tDkg

Darn you Owen Wilson and your annoying wow.)

I haven’t talked about leaving yet, because I wasn’t really ready to recognize that it was happening, but I am finally feeling ready to head back home. I love it here, but I’m starting to get that feeling that like… even when I leave, I won’t be totally gone, and I have this sense that I will be back someday? Maybe for graduate school, or maybe just to visit (probably not to live– I miss my city too much). And that is comforting. And I can’t wait to see my parents and my sister, and go grab food on Haight street, and hang out with old friends in the Bay Area, and go to the ocean– oh, I’ve missed the ocean…

Speaking of missing my city… I went to Oxford Pride this weekend! After having participated in Pride in SF the last couple years, Oxford was… quite different. On Pride weekend in San Francisco, the entire city pretty much breaks out into a party. On the day of the march, you can’t get much of anywhere on public transportation without seeing people all dressed up with rainbow colors everywhere.

Oxford was quite a bit more tame, but it was still fun to do. I got to go with one of my actual British friends (someone I met at the first Entz party, and continued to run into at different feminist events throughout the past couple terms until we finally started actually talking to each other), and it was the first time she was really able to march in a Pride parade, so that was very exciting. We walked through Cornmarket (one of the main streets in Oxford and tourist central), down Queens Lane and made our way to Oxford Castle, which is a part of Oxford I hadn’t actually seen yet!

Later in the evening we went out to Plush, a club in Oxford, danced until it was light and walked back to St Catz and watched the sunrise in the meadow…

Oxford is, of course, as magical as always. Apart from partying till dawn and going to concerts, I actually do spend pretty much all of my time working. I got into a good pattern this past week of spending a good 3-5 solid hours in the RadCam (Radcliffe Camera Library) to get the majority of my work done for the day, and then finishing the rest of it on trains and buses and in my room, whenever I can. I have 4 assignments left: 2 more Ulysses essays, and 2 creative writing assignments. I’m so close!

To close, I want to share this priceless video I caught of a dog we ran into on one of our evening walks the other night:

Little Doggie Big Stick

Gotta love Oxford: magic, academic, and fun, all in one.

Late blog post because I was in Manchester this weekend, attending the Grillstock festival and seeing an awesome UK band called The Heavy! (They did the song Short Change Hero, which was used as the Borderlands 2 themesong, and later became my personal themesong for the first season of The Walking Dead video game)

Grillstock was quick an experience. We arrived the day before the festival so that we wouldn’t have to wake up at the crack of dawn to catch the train to Manchester, which gave us an evening to explore the city. Manchester isn’t exactly the most exciting place in the universe, but we did manage to find several awesome comic book stores, as well as a tasty pub for dinner. Our hostel was relatively nice, although the windows did not insulate well against the sound of clubs outside going until the wee hours of the morning… Also, I found the picture in our room bewildering:

Incase you can’t read it, the quote reads: “and sometimes when you walk down a street in iceland at the end of the street will be the arctic sea with whales in it.”

… we were in Manchester, England, just to clarify. Not Iceland.

And I’m not even sure this would make sense if we were in Iceland??

Anywhoo, woke up the next morning, had a quick free breakfast at the hostel, and then made our way over to Albert Square for the festival, which lasted from 11am-6pm. They had booths with burgers, hot dogs, ribs, barbeque, sauces, churros, beer, whiskey, and more burgers. The churros with chocolate were delicious, and I actually was able to find a veggie burger to eat that was pretty darn good, as well.

There were food eating contests, starting with chicken wings, moving onto hot dogs, and culminating in hot chili peppers. I have to say, I think the U.S. would put U.K. contestants to shame in eating contests… Although those hot chilis looked pretty intense.

There was a cooking contest, and sadly we weren’t allowed to taste the entries, but the judges seemed to enjoy the different takes on the burger (including a burger sandwiched between donuts… yikes).

And, of course, there was a huge variety of music throughout the day, from Big Joe Bone:

Big Joe Bone

to The Computers, whose lead singer (who said he had woken up at 5 after going to bed at 4 and acted like that was the case) climbed the scaffolding of the stage, threw his guitar a good 3 meters to the security guard below, held the mic stand entirely upside down, and also seemed to enjoy jumping up on top of the railing between the stage and the audience despite the fact he struggled to balance without assistance, as in this clip:

The Computers

And, finally, The Heavy, the band we came to see, who I would ABSOLUTELY see in concert again because they were fantastic, and soo great at engaging with the audience:

Same Ol

The Heavy was by far the highlight of the day, and totally worth it, even worth staying the whole set and sprinting the entire way to the train station so that we could catch the train back home. Going out to Manchester Grillstock made me remember how much I looove getting to see live music and performances– I’m going to make that a goal for the rest of my time here. I already am planning on seeing the Oxford Orchestra in concert this Wednesday, which should provide a nice counterpoint to The Heavy’s alt rock. 😉

In my last couple weeks at Oxford, I want to focus as much as I can on experiencing the place I am in, and while I will continue to work hard, it’s really those moments when I am jumping up and down to one of my favorite bands, savoring a hot chocolate Milano in Blackwell’s, or strolling through the beautiful University Parks that I am going to miss when I am back stateside.

Oh, and here is a link to one of the song that got me into The Heavy, which is also the song that they started off their set with (too perfect):